For the longest time I thought I was just terrible with names - I was decent at remembering faces, but I’m just constantly in situations where people come up to me like “hey, [kontextmaschine]!” and I’m like “uh, hey… you!”

Eventually I realized I was pretty decent with people I’d met online, or even people I knew in meatspace but had seen on Facebook (as I’ve mentioned, when I joined fb there were maybe 6000 users and a thousand of them might conceivably come into my field of view on any given day). I thought through that and realized I store names in my memory as text, not sound.

(So that’s one thing nametags are useful for - it’s less that I won’t remember your name if it’s not always staring me in the face than that having your name visible when we first meet helps me to put it in memory to begin with.)

I guess that visual-over-auditory thing is part of my character in general. If I know a lot of random shit relating to any given situation it’s because I read very quickly and I’ve spent from 6 to 16 hours a day reading basically every day since I was 5. By contrast music is a lot less important to my life than a lot of people I know, I mostly use it as background noise, and usually favor less lyrical stuff - classical on KUSC, ambient, the same happy hardcore mixtapes I’ve listened to for going on 15 years now, where the lyrics were never very complicated or important even when I was listening for the first time.

I guess standing against that is my fondness for Taylor Swift and country/pop-country in general, which is very much about the words.