Mandela Effect Flip/Flops: My Flintstones/Flinstones Story Experienced Similarly by Another

[papageorge1]

By now the crowd here is mostly familiar with the Mandela Effect.

One type of Mandela Effect is called a flip/flop where something (like a spelling) changes and then changes back to the alternate version. One of the most commonly claimed flip/flop is Flintstones flip/flopping to Flinstones.

I had a worldview shaking experience with this that I have shared on this forum multiple times. For those of you not familiar with my story, here it is:

Quote

 

On Aug 2, 2017 at about 16:40 EST, I was on reddit discussing the Flinstones/Flintstones flip on another thread. My position was that it is and always was the Flintstones. The guy sent me a reply saying at the time it was the Flinstones you could look at Wikipedia, and all official TV show and vitamin sites and it was always Flintstones; he used the word Flintstones in all four examples given.

I said 'I Know' you are confirming my point that it was always Flintstones.

Then when I was done with my reply and I looked up at his original post all four 'Flintstones' had changed on my static display to 'Flinstones'. Did I just see it wrong?? I looked away and came back and it was 'Flintstones' again. I would just look away, blink, change my focus look back and it would flip again. I was able to do this 6 or 7 times in under five minutes each time looking slowly and cautiously for this controversial 't' IN ALL FOUR PLACES. Essentially impossible to me that I made a mistake slowly and cautiously each time. I felt something was trying to wake me up.

 

Now this is an experience not everyone will accept my honesty and competency for. If it wasn't me I wouldn't necessarily disbelieve but I would reserve doubt. If it's not just one person it becomes more interesting. Here is a story from some random person I read today that my excitement forces me to share.

Admittedly, this has been discussed ad nauseum on this sub and others, but for good reason...its real. I'm not going to tell you you're crazy, because you're not. I sure as hell can't produce any 'real-time evidence.' I'm not even sure what that would look like, tbh. But, like so many others, I can share my story. It was mid-late 2019 for me, prolly around August. I had just stumbled upon the ME rabbit hole in January of that year, which turned my world/perception of reality upside down for several months, dealing with the examples I was most strikingly affected by: FOTL, "Chic"-fil-a, 'Objects in Mirror,' the VW logo, "Kit-Kat" and 'Lion and Lamb.' In my time since on the forums, I had read about the Flint-Flin-Flint flip-flop, but as someone who was still relatively new to the phenomenon, as bat**** as the ME already had me feeling, I just considered flip-flops way too "over the top," and dismissed such posts as legit false memory/confirmation bias. Anywho, I'm browsing this sub around 8 ish this night in August 2019, and I see a post about how its changed from Flint-Flin. At first, I dismiss it, but then, I get curious. So I start googling. And sure enough, everywhere its being marketed or sold, its definitively "Flin." I couldn't believe it. I grew up taking those vitamins and watching the cartoon. Also, there was the obvious fact that "Flin" just didn't make any sense, considering the play on "Bedrock," "Rubble," "Slate," etc. I was def rattled, but, trying to remain rational, considered maybe it was part of some government psy-op or something, so I wanted to see something for myself, in-person, and not simply trust the interwebs. Where I was living at the time, there was a Walgreen's and a CVS about a block away from me, across the street from each other. So, I decide to take a ride, convinced I'll lay my hands on physical merchandise, and brush the whole thing off as a mass internet trolling. ... ..... Wrong. I go to Walgreen's first, and there it is, plain as day, right in front of my eyes. I pick up several boxes in disbelief. Every box is indeed "Flin." Now in somewhat of a surreal existential panic I run across the road to CVS. Same thing. Again, everywhere..."Flin." I'm literally speechless. I get in my car, and just sit there for a while thinking what most of us here have thought many times. "What the **** is this??" "What the hell is even real??!" Finally, per usual I conclude theres nothing I can do about it, and I even start to concede just maaaaaybe I did simply imagine it to be "Flint" all these years BECAUSE it made sense that way (I was 33 at the time.) So, I begin to drive home, still kinda in shock. I call my wife, who was out of town visiting her parents that weekend, just to have someone to vent to about the absurdity of the whole thing. I had turned her on to the ME many months before, and even though she freely admits shes also affected, she just doesn't see it as a big of a deal as I do (I still can't fathom why, but I digress.) I get her on the phone, give her the rundown of whats just happened, and shes intrigued, so she looks it up for herself while we're on the phone. She then gets audibly nervous, like shes about to break some bad news to me, and proceeds to tell me everything shes seeing is clearly "Flint." This stresses me out at first, but then I recall that I've read that people seem to be shifting at different times. Regardless, I slam on brakes, whip the car around, and go back to the same Walgreen's, determined to take a picture of the definitive FLINstones vitamins I had just witnessed, to send to her to prove, at least in my neck of the woods, reality had changed. You can probably figure out where this is going... Much to my shock, and dismay, even though I had been there not 30 mins prior, every box/bottle on that shelf was back to "Flint." I called my wife back, and after trying every which way to wrap my head around it, concluded that there are just some things in this life, whatever it is, that we will likely never fully understand. So, I head home, thinking I can at least chime in on the thread to say its switched back to "Flint," but of course, as others here have mentioned, the thread is also mysteriously gone. I know what I physically witnessed. Even though I was 90% on the ME already, witnessing this flip-flop in real time was what cemented my belief that there are things afoot that we just can't comprehend. I would have a similar experience with 'Houston, we have/we've had' a problem a couple months later, and just a neat little fact, though my entire family clearly remembers "Chic"-fil-a, all of us have now seen it as "Chick" for years now, except my aunt, my dad's sister. She still claims to see the logo as "Chic" when we're riding by one with several family members in the car, and she thinks we're trolling her. This lady is also one of the most 'unconnected,' people I know, having no cell phone, no internet, watching minimal tv, etc., so I can't help but wonder if theres something to that. Idk wtf is going on. I now frequently question the nature of reality, and what it all means. As fascinating as it is, its also frustrating, b/c I fear we'll never truly get truth/closure on the issue. I'm trying to lay off this sub and Retconned a bit, simply to avoid driving myself crazy b/c there truly is nothing I can do about it. However, I'm glad I logged in today, and glad I chimed in, when I so rarely do, 'cuz everyone deserves to know they're not alone. I'd be happy to discuss my experience(s) with anyone thats interested, and thanks for reading. May everyone find peace and purpose in their journies. Peace.

 

This suggests to me the concept raised by one of my woo-woo new agey sources as 'holographic overlays'. Nothing actually changed on my screen but a 'holographic overlay' was being added and removed as a learning experience for me.

Now the next rabbit hole I need to consider is the woman in the story who still sees Chic-fil-a (which I clearly remembered too)  at the very time others are seeing Chick-fil-a driving by the very same sign is a brand new and fascinating twist to all this. It suggests the possibility that holographic overlays can exist individually for each person and why some can experience a Mandela Effect with such certainty while another has no recollection of any change whatsoever.

Anyone want to talk about rabbit holes or why you think everything can still be all explained as known mental errors

 

Edited May 20, 2022 by papageorge1

[XenoFish]

Deja vu.

[papageorge1]

3 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

Deja vu.

Thank you. Actually, that's kind of my point. I'm reading a thread on another forum with many experiencers of this flip/flop but the story I put in the OP stands out and echos (deja vu) mine. 

 

[XenoFish]

My esp has kicked in and I predict this will go the exact same way your last mandela thread went. Anyone want popcorn for the show?

[papageorge1]

1 minute ago, XenoFish said:

My esp has kicked in and I predict this will go the exact same way your last mandela thread went. Anyone want popcorn for the show?

I don't need your esp to know what to expect here. But a few will be edified to have more information. I'm a public servant in my eyes.

[acute]

"Flinstones" makes no sense, because "Flintstones" is "stones" after "Flint".

What exactly is a "Flin"? 

 

Edited May 21, 2022 by acute
Gramma

[HandsomeGorilla]

In my opinion, and I've been vulnerable to this effect in the past to the point where I honestly thought Mandela died in prison, but I think cases like this are simply an artifact of how you were raised, dialect if raised in an English speaking household. People's brains fill things in when they may not make much sense. 

Flintstones is 'Flinstones' because we're lazy and like to shorten things, especially language. It's also regional and I realize how much of an ass I'm being... 

 

[papageorge1]

23 minutes ago, acute said:

"Flinstones" makes no sense, because "Flintstones" is "stones" after "Flint".

What exactly is a "Flin"? 

 

That’s the point. It makes no sense but the flip happens anyway. 
 

Here’s a conjecture. It symbolizes pushing mankind to flip from Stone Age thinking to future thinking?

[papageorge1]

1 minute ago, HandsomeGorilla said:

In my opinion, and I've been vulnerable to this effect in the past to the point where I honestly thought Mandela died in prison, but I think cases like this are simply an artifact of how you were raised, dialect if raised in an English speaking household. People's brains fill things in when they may not make much sense. 

Flintstones is 'Flinstones' because we're lazy and like to shorten things, especially language. It's also regional and I realize how much of an ass I'm being... 

 

That may be but it doesn’t address the experiences as in the OP where we knew the correct spelling but it changed on us anyway.

 

[Trelane]

I'm not concerned about toilet paper or baby formula now.

I now see the real shortage will be tinfoil.

Edited May 21, 2022 by Trelane

[Davros of Skaro]

If only people realised how fallible the mind is.

But what's the fun in that? 

[eight bits]

Well, if we're all giving personal testimony, then listen up. As many people notice, a big proportion of my posts are edited. Why? Because I make a lot of typo errors. I spell things wrong; a lot. Plus, even after I've edited a post, dismally often there will still be a spelling error or two. [How do I know? Because if I read a post a long time afterward, then I can then see the typo which I couldn't at the time ... that's a flip/flop, no?]

Do I make a lot of spelling mistakes because I don't know proper American spellings? Not really, otherwise I would be unable to correct the misspellings (I hope I spelled that right, lol) or recognze them afterward. (I spelled recognize incorrectly just then ... did you catch it?)

I didn't deliberately omit the i from recognize. I just did it somehow, and moved on to finish typing the sentence. It didn't bother me that I'd spelled the word wrong because it looked correct to me as I read it. At least during the first glancing once-over.

End of personal testimony; on to unwarranted generalization. My typing is so bad that it warps the space-time continuum. Could be. Then again, maybe I remember seeing recognze as looking correct because I did see recognze in the visual sense, but "saw" recognize in the fully processed reading sense.

Chick-fil-A and Chic-fil-A? They look the same and are equally meaningful (whatever genius substituted fil-A for filet could equally play chic against chick). Flintstones and Flinstones? Despite the meaningful-meaningless contrast, a dropped t is well within my well-documented typo capability. If I added just a bit of suggestion (also known as gas light) that some people think it really was Flin- then I just might be baffled enough to "really see" the wrong spelling when looking at the right one.

Bottom line: we don't perceive anything "directly," we experience heavily processed reality thanks to our soon-to-be obsolete meat-based neural networks. Reading slathers on even more processing than simply seeing. We don't remember anything "directly" either, at least not after a few seconds. More meat work.

What could possibly go wrong? It couldn't be us; it must be a defect in the structure of reality itself.

Edited May 21, 2022 by eight bits
Did I mention there's a reason why I so often edit my posts?

[Essan]

Exctly!  Becase we know how the word should look, we subconciously add the mising letter and read it as we know it should be.   Later we look back and noice it was mispelld.   And assume somthing has chnged.

[XenoFish]

1 hour ago, Essan said:

Exctly!  Becase we know how the word should look, we subconciously add the mising letter and read it as we know it should be.   Later we look back and noice it was mispelld.   And assume somthing has chnged.

Even when someone intentionally leaves out letters we "fill in the blanks". 

Yeah, a saw what you did.

[Davros of Skaro]

1 hour ago, eight bits said:

Well, if we're all giving personal testimony, then listen up. As many people notice, a big proportion of my posts are edited. Why? Because I make a lot of typo errors. I spell things wrong; a lot. Plus, even after I've edited a post, dismally often there will still be a spelling error or two. [How do I know? Because if I read a post a long time afterward, then I can then see the typo which I couldn't at the time ... that's a flip/flop, no?]

Do I make a lot of spelling mistakes because I don't know proper American spellings? Not really, otherwise I would be unable to correct the misspellings (I hope I spelled that right, lol) or recognze them afterward. (I spelled recognize incorrectly just then ... did you catch it?)

I didn't deliberately omit the i from recognize. I just did it somehow, and moved on to finish typing the sentence. It didn't bother me that I'd spelled the word wrong because it looked correct to me as I read it. At least during the first glancing once-over.

End of personal testimony; on to unwarranted generalization. My typing is so bad that it warps the space-time continuum. Could be. Then again, maybe I remember seeing recognze as looking correct because I did see recognze in the visual sense, but "saw" recognize in the fully processed reading sense.

Chick-fil-A and Chic-fil-A? They look the same and are equally meaningful (whatever genius substituted fil-A for filet could equally play chic against chick). Flintstones and Flinstones? Despite the meaningful-meaningless contrast, a dropped t is well within my well-documented typo capability. If I added just a bit of suggestion (also known as gas light) that some people think it really was Flin- then I just might be baffled enough to "really see" the wrong spelling when looking at the right one.

Bottom line: we don't perceive anything "directly," we experience heavily processed reality thanks to our soon-to-be obsolete meat-based neural networks. Reading slathers on even more processing than simply seeing. We don't remember anything "directly" either, at least not after a few seconds. More meat work.

What could possibly go wrong? It couldn't be us; it must be a defect in the structure of reality itself.

I think I became a worse speller by using spell check, and that led me to doubt which made me using it even more.

I happen to be thinking about a memory lapse about two weeks ago. I thought how people would chalk it up to the Mandella Effect, but I know how falible the mind is. Now I cannot remember what it was. 

I made myself not use spell check for this (like now is SP one word, or two?). Darn Meat Matrix....

 

[papageorge1]

12 hours ago, Davros of Skaro said:

If only people realised how fallible the mind is.

But what's the fun in that? 

Every Mandela Effect believer believes in the fallibility of the mind. But after reading a hundred stories on a quirk with some trivial detail with people specifically concerned with that detail (as in the OP stories) it might just be time to look further.

[papageorge1]

6 hours ago, eight bits said:

Well, if we're all giving personal testimony, then listen up. As many people notice, a big proportion of my posts are edited. Why? Because I make a lot of typo errors. I spell things wrong; a lot. Plus, even after I've edited a post, dismally often there will still be a spelling error or two. [How do I know? Because if I read a post a long time afterward, then I can then see the typo which I couldn't at the time ... that's a flip/flop, no?]

Do I make a lot of spelling mistakes because I don't know proper American spellings? Not really, otherwise I would be unable to correct the misspellings (I hope I spelled that right, lol) or recognze them afterward. (I spelled recognize incorrectly just then ... did you catch it?)

I didn't deliberately omit the i from recognize. I just did it somehow, and moved on to finish typing the sentence. It didn't bother me that I'd spelled the word wrong because it looked correct to me as I read it. At least during the first glancing once-over.

End of personal testimony; on to unwarranted generalization. My typing is so bad that it warps the space-time continuum. Could be. Then again, maybe I remember seeing recognze as looking correct because I did see recognze in the visual sense, but "saw" recognize in the fully processed reading sense.

Chick-fil-A and Chic-fil-A? They look the same and are equally meaningful (whatever genius substituted fil-A for filet could equally play chic against chick). Flintstones and Flinstones? Despite the meaningful-meaningless contrast, a dropped t is well within my well-documented typo capability. If I added just a bit of suggestion (also known as gas light) that some people think it really was Flin- then I just might be baffled enough to "really see" the wrong spelling when looking at the right one.

Bottom line: we don't perceive anything "directly," we experience heavily processed reality thanks to our soon-to-be obsolete meat-based neural networks. Reading slathers on even more processing than simply seeing. We don't remember anything "directly" either, at least not after a few seconds. More meat work.

What could possibly go wrong? It couldn't be us; it must be a defect in the structure of reality itself.

Typos are well known and done by all but I don't see how that addresses the OP stories where someone is particularly focused on one letter. 

[papageorge1]

5 hours ago, Essan said:

Exctly!  Becase we know how the word should look, we subconciously add the mising letter and read it as we know it should be.   Later we look back and noice it was mispelld.   And assume somthing has chnged.

Oh, those things happen but are insufficient to explain the OP stories where someone's only interest is noticing the existence of one letter. And it's happened to many people. Time to start coming up with new theories for that one.

[Golden Duck]

18 hours ago, acute said:

"Flinstones" makes no sense, because "Flintstones" is "stones" after "Flint".

What exactly is a "Flin"? 

 

Apparently it's related to the Welsh word "blin" meaning tiresome.

Barney Ruble - is that a fight over Russian money?

[Essan]

3 hours ago, papageorge1 said:

Oh, those things happen but are insufficient to explain the OP stories where someone's only interest is noticing the existence of one letter. And it's happened to many people. Time to start coming up with new theories for that one.

But it hasn't happened to "many" people.  Only a handful who share their false memories and errors amongst themselves.   

Many would mean hundreds of thousands at the least - all reporting it seperately without ever being aware anyone else had done so  (and even that means hardly no-one globally)

Indeed, that's one of the noticeable aspects aboout the ME false memory viral meme - no-one ever notices it until someone else mentions it  

[papageorge1]

3 minutes ago, Essan said:

But it hasn't happened to "many" people.  Only a handful who share their false memories and errors amongst themselves.   

Many would mean hundreds of thousands at the least - all reporting it seperately without ever being aware anyone else had done so  (and even that means hardly no-one globally)

Indeed, that's one of the noticeable aspects aboout the ME false memory viral meme - no-one ever notices it until someone else mentions it  

I bet Berenstein and the cornucopia are in the millions each. No way to test people without mentioning the subject in the first place, I guess. These are minor things on the surface that no one is going to independently document for prosperity.

But this particular thread is about people having the experience while at the same time fully aware of what they are looking for. Casual observation can easily create errors. But I do not think normal functioning people would not be able to note the 't' in Flintstones if that is what they are slowly and cautiously looking for. That's the new evidence I want to discuss in this new thread. Perhaps re-read the OP.

 

[eight bits]

1 hour ago, papageorge1 said:

But this particular thread is about people having the experience while at the same time fully aware of what they are looking for. Casual observation can easily create errors. But I do not think normal functioning people would not be able to note the 't' in Flintstones if that is what they are slowly and cautiously looking for. That's the new evidence I want to discuss in this new thread. Perhaps re-read the OP.

So you don't believe that normally functioning people who wear eyeglasses ever go on a fruitless search for the glasses that are actually resting on their head? Or nobody finds their missing keys in the same place where they've already looked twice for them?

Missing socks on laundry day must be a religious experience for you.

 

[papageorge1]

22 minutes ago, eight bits said:

So you don't believe that normally functioning people who wear eyeglasses ever go on a fruitless search for the glasses that are actually resting on their head? Or nobody finds their missing keys in the same place where they've already looked twice for them?

Yes, I believe in those things but they are different to the OP stories.

[XenoFish]

32 minutes ago, eight bits said:

Missing socks on laundry day must be a religious experience for you.

One day they'll find this massive mountain of socks on one of Saturn's moons.

[jmccr8]

11 hours ago, papageorge1 said:

Every Mandela Effect believer believes in the fallibility of the mind.

Hi Papa

Yes in everyone else and not themselves.