A Glitch in the Matrix

A Glitch in the Matrix, by Liam Sweeny.

Sometimes a thing is crazy. A picture a white dress that’s blue if you were born in September, a magic burrito that never seems to get all the way eaten no matter how much you try, but the coolest stuff, in my humble opinion, is the freaky stuff that happens that is explained by ordinary things that themselves are freaky. And this is just such a case.

Writer and comedian Tess Coates was trying on a wedding dress. Not sure if her getting married is freaky, but we’ll say not. She takes a picture of herself in front of two mirrors, you know, the kind that are angled so you can get a full view. She does this with her iPhone (which is important) and looks to discover that she’s got her hands up in one mirror, but her hands down at her sides in the other mirror.

Freaky, right? Where did they get that mirror? They compared it to the show Black Mirror, and that would be about right. But, intrepid sleuth that she was, she went to her nearest Apple store to figure it out. Me, I would’ve gone to my nearest witch doctor, but to each their own.

She started showing people in blue shirts that she thought were geniuses the picture, and they freaked. She made her way to the actual geniuses, who were likewise freaked, until she found Roger, the hero of our story, maybe the buzzkill, who told there that the iPhone is not actually a camera, but a computer. Duh. But when it takes pictures, it does it in slices, with the help of AI, and she must have raised her arms for a split second when the camera was doing it’s thing. The AI basically kept the slice with her arms raised and used that for the other mirror.

I think the reason this intrigues me is that we take pictures with our phones everyday. How many weird ass shots were the result of an AI burp? Think about how many pictures there are of UFOs that could just be a bug in the system?

Maybe I’m saying that I’ll catch you at the antique camera section of Goodwill.

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