Yo I've got a very specific question for anyone else with visual snow and/or pattern glare--
My question is, do you struggle to look at old screens? Old computer monitors. Old televisions. Old handheld game consoles like the DS or a 3DS.
I've tried googling this, but the search results just get inundated with info on eyestrain, rather than addressing my specific question about the quality of the monitors and how someone with differing vision might be affected by them.
Whenever I look at old screens, they irritate my eyes. I have trouble focusing on them, and I get this like rippling, flickering, banding effect that is similar to looking at certain striped patterns.
I can get a similar effect if I look REALLY closely at even my current monitor, but on old screens this effect is just Glaring. It makes it really hard to play my old handheld consoles, because it feels like as soon as my eyes have adjusted to the new, improved quality of a modern screen, they see all of the imperfections in the old ones much more plainly.
The worst offender is old box computers. I remember even in high school, when my pattern glare first started, I could barely even look at a box computer because it was JUST rippling effects all over the screen.
Idk how well I've described this, but anyone experiences something similar to this with older screens?
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This is an attempt at drawing how “pattern glare” (and visual snow) make certain patterns appear to my eyes.Â
I can’t even tell how good of a job I did representing this because of the pattern glare. :’)Â
Any repeating pattern can mess with my eyes easily, but close-knit black and white stripes are the biggest offenders. Unfortunately this means that zebras tend to look shitty to me. The white of their pattern is very overwhelming and it sort of bleeds into the black. It makes this sort of “shimmering” effect and it seem almost like the black has a shimmery outline. It’s not unlike when people put red and blue lines around things to get a 3D effect, only it’s more like sort of yellowy or just luminous. It can also sort of makes things look moving, wavering, or indistinct.Â
The effect occurs with a lot of other things: parallel lines (like drawing sword blades or long tails), long straight lines against things (like the edges of this post against the bright blue background), high contrast colours against each other, and TEXT– text is a big one. Text is always sort of flickering and fucky for me, and sometimes it makes words blend together or parts of them seem like they disappear for a split second. Dark mode for sites does NOT help this since dark mode gives me really bad after-images and doesn’t play well with my visual snow. It’s way worse.Â
Everything of this together can give me bad anxiety when I focus on it, and that anxiety is sadly what made me slow does artwork really badly a few years ago (doing a visual thing with visual triggers for anxiety really got to me, and sometimes still does). I didn’t always have pattern glare or visual snow, or even the WORDS for them, and just… yeah. Anxiety town when it all started up.Â
I’m doing better now, but sometimes it’s still rough, especially when I get eye strain or start to disassociate. To my knowledge pattern glare is most commonly related with migraines (which I do get), visual snow (which I ofc have), and epilepsy. People that wear those black and white shirts with thin lines: DNI. Image reference.
Heyo! i saw you mentioned that your visual snow makes stripes hard to look at, and I wanted to say that there's a separate name for that! it's called pattern glare. I also experience it with visual snow, actually
... Holy hell.
I’ve NEVER heard of this. I always just ASSUMED it must be the visual snow. Like I reasoned “oh, the dots are darting over the stripes, causing the shimmer”. Especially since it started around the same time as the snow.
This has honestly helped some of my anxiety, knowing that there is a solid explanation for what is occurring, and that it has a name.
It’s always made me very anxious that things like close stripes, grids, and straight parallel lines can shimmer, warp, and wave. Especially since I know they often use grids to diagnose eye diseases. So even though I’ve had clean exams from the eye doc since this glare began-- the anxiety was still there.
Man I'm having so many frustrating thoughts about my jaw lately and I want to SCREAM!!!
Like ah, here is a long fucking rant.
Over a decade ago, pretty much overnight, my quality of life did a 180 with a host of symptoms starting up. Tinnitus, visual snow, pattern glare, light sensitivity, ocular migraines, an increase in headaches, some vertigo, brain fog, and just this like complete inability to focus my eyes like I used to be able to.
I've always been really sensitive to stimuli, but ever since this happened it's been cranked up to 100. I get disoriented extremely easily, with really no good way to avoid it. Like if the lighting changes in my room, I get disoriented and feel exhausted. If I go somewhere with fluorescent lights and walk around, I get exhausted. If I look at repetitive patterns I get fucking exhausted and confused and I hate it.
I kind of snapped honestly. And I let my anxiety take over my life. I convinced myself I had a tumor in my head or something, and I was so scared to look into it that when I got an MRI order for a brain scan I just ignored it.
And I just kind of lived like that for a long time, constantly worried there was something fucked up in my head that I was ignoring.
And I know that's a shit way to deal with concerning health problems, but I was scared, and I have OCD and it was just sort of a Mess. And arguably still am.
I've been trying to figure things out now, finally getting over my anxiety. I got that brain scan-- nothing. Didn't realize how much anxiety that was giving me, for a decade, until I did it.
But I still didn't have Answers for why I feel like shit all the time. I literally just spend most of my time on a computer, and have for years, because looking at a stationary screen is a lot easier for my shit focusless vision to handle-- and even then, I STILL wind up exhausted and confused if I have too much stimuli on a page. (And I'm sure the eye strain from the computer doesn't help in ways, but I cannot stress enough that being on the computer is like the only thing that keeps me sane and focused)
But the thing is, at the start of all of this I was having jaw issues. Like really severe jaw popping on my right side and a lot of pain. And I did look into my jaw Years ago, and found out through an MRI (of the jaw, not the brain, so it didn't scare me to get at the time), that the right condyle of my jaw is literally deformed. Like your condyle is supposed to be rounded at the top, but my right condyle is shaped like a lopsided heart, and it's surrounded by scar tissue.
And at the time I like was given a jaw splint to sleep with and told I'd probably need surgery to correct it, but the pain was bearable so I never looked into surgery. And I've just sort of lived with the constant jaw ache since then since I figured it was just a bum jaw and I could handle it so it wasn't worth looking into more.
And now I'm actually doing research on all of the havoc that TMJ can cause. And I'm just kind of feeling like something of an idiot, because it looks like I had my answer a decade ago and I ignored it. And now I'm just a miserable 30 year old who's struggling to just be a person because I can't focus, and I'm in pain, and I'm tired and confused and at this point I can only assume my deformed jaw I've ignored for years is the root of it.
And now I've gotta like get in contact with my dentist to ask about those old MRIs I had, and I gotta figure out going to a TMJ specialist through my current insurance and just--
Ugh.
I'm so frustrated. I'm so tired. And I feel like I've wasted so much time and I've been trying so hard to do better and get better but it's a fucking mess.
And like my family is expecting me to snap out of the funk I'm in and be a functional person since that brain MRI o had came out clean, and it's just like-- I still feel like shit all the time??
Nevermind when my family says my screen time causes all of this, when I literally started having heavy screen time BECAUSE of these symptoms that made it difficult to enjoy anything outside of a flat screen
Man I hate adjusting to a new screen of any kind. With my visual snow and pattern glare and whatnot, it’s such a chore to make my eyes like the color settings/brightness/etc of any new screen I accustom myself to.
I got a new phone today (a Google Pixel 5a-- I had an Iphone 6 plus before) and the colours are just soooo different. They’re more saturated, even in the “natural” setting, and the white backgrounds have a more yellowed, duller look. Reading feels more difficult on the new phone, like it’s messing with my pattern glare more. The text just sits better on the more neutral white that my Iphone has for backgrounds. Feels like I’m noticing my pattern glare while reading text more with this screen.
The aspect ratio is also much different from my old phone. The Pixel doesn’t load un-clicked images on Tumblr as cleanly as it did on my Iphone. It’s fine once you click on them, but they’re compressed much worse before clicking them separately.
I know I’ll get used to it-- and I Have to get used to it-- but rn this adjustment period fucking sucks.
On the plus side, I now have a functional camera and it’s a DAMN good one.
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