Did a few deck attempts today with my custom double 
's and 
's only deck. I tried a little variation on one run to try a pseudo PAO that I’ll describe too (Spoiler alert: I didn’t like it.) Here’s a few takeaways from today:
I’ve always struggled when I have to visualize scenes with multiple “people” images in a row. Back with standard Shadow and using variable loci stacking, I’d dread having to link up multiple people and I would have a much harder time recalling them than a scene with a bunch of object links. I could visualize a crazy cause/effect Rube Goldbergian contraption to link objects, but had no such luck with people.
I’d usually recall the first person fine, but then the second was fuzzy. I’m weak at creating memorable interactions between two people images, I think because the action I think of for the first person doesn’t naturally provide any hint of who that second person is.
For example, today I had a loci where my images were a guy in a rubber FeTiSH suit (no judgement, please! lol) and the lead singer of the band SeVeNdust. The scene I formulated was the rubber suit dude was playfully whipping the sevendust guy. In the moment it was really easy to visualize, but then later on recall all I could get was the rubber suit guy was whipping someone else. I couldn’t recall that specific person. I think the reason is that I didn’t put any kind of memorable detail into the scene that would cause me to remember sevendust. All my focus was on person 1 and how he would interact with the next image.
So, what I decided I’d try was if I had a loci that drew two “people” pairs, I’d have person 1 impersonate person 2. This simplifies the scene tremendously. Person 1 can act like person 2 and interact directly with the loci.
The next deck run I had a loci with two people, Eeyore (the donkey from winnie the pooh) and old school comedian Andrew Dice Clay (I vividly remember his clothes and cigarette smoking haha). The loci was the recycle bin in my garage. Usually I would create a scene like “Eeyore sits on Dice Clay, squishing him.” Easy to visualize, quick to create… difficult to remember! Eeyore squishing SOMEBODY would be easy to recall, but WHO WAS HE SQUISHING?!?
INSTEAD, this time I used the impersonation technique and imagined Eeyore dressed in a spikey jacket and smoking a cigarette doing stand up comedy. He flicked his cigarette into the bin and it lit on fire. I had zero hesitation or difficulty recalling this scene, and no concern about swapping the characters either. It was clearly Eeyore first and Dice second.
I also played around with being an active agent in scenes that were object-first. After some discussion with @Mike4 about the ideas of being agent/observer in scenes, I realized that I was almost exclusively an observer in mine. I tried to make a point of taking on an agent role and it definitely made some scenes easier to remember. I’ll be incorporating that technique regularly now!
Last note today, I tried one deck run where I placed 5 cards per loci, linking my two card pairs with a single card action that I’m still fairly fluent in from back in my PAO days. This essentially created a 2x1x2 “PAO” scene even though it could really be PAO or PAP or OAP or OAO depending on the pairs drawn. I did NOT like memorizing with this approach. It was KINDA cool to only use 10 scenes/loci, but the un-naturalness of some of the scenes and the rigidity of having to use the action I drew turned me off quickly to it. So, unlikely to pursue a PAO-style card technique again. I’m sold on the freedom of interaction between P’s and O’s. No predetermined A’s needed.
Other than that, progress continues on the new images for the 
/ 
set.
I’m also definitely getting faster determining if a pair represents a person or an object! This is the main skill needed in order to make this system work, and its working!
Good stuff this week so far.
Onward!
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