Or maybe men my age regularly buy boxer shorts and remote control light bulbs together a statistically significant amount of times.

It might have to be. It's not like I'm secret service or anything but I'd rather my phone not be sending me suggestions related to sensitive stuff discussed around me.

Maybe men of a certain age and algorithmic dataset start being interested in kayaking around the month of the conversation but mood lightbulbs after a conversation about mood lighting and lightbulbs? I call shenanigans.

This is the most egregious example I've encountered since the time I was reminiscing about kayaking around a little man-made lake in Nottingham with my uncle and I suddenly started getting (google I think) adverts for Kayaks a few days later and I could maybe explain that away coincidence

Though it doesn't seem to have picked up on my "Yeah well I'm going for a shower and I'm not in the mood to slip and die" mood

I can fairly confidently insist that didn't happen since her response when I told her the bathroom light was being weird was "Yeah I kind of like it, it's like mood lighting" which is slightly more damning given how the suggestions are all "pick a colour and tone"

I should add that not once in my life have I assembled a model without dropping a piece and getting on my hands and knees to search under my desk at midnight so I can't even infer that my phone thought "Oooh he's in the dark" and told Amazon I needed bulbs via business synergy.

I just picked a bulb from the box and silently replaced the old one. I haven't touched my phone since except to turn on the flashlight to search for a tiny bit of warhammer I dropped on the floor.
Do not even dare tell me our phones aren't listening to us.

"Yes James, you're the victim. You're still the victim in all this. Yes she got terminally ill to push your buttons just fucking get out of my postal district"

In hindsight, I think the default ending was the town realising that he was such a massive piece of shit that no amount of metaphor designed to trigger a nanosecond of introspection was ever going to work on the prick but also he was really handy with a plank so it just cut him loose.

No, but I see there's an episode about remembering your dreams which I have only managed a few dozen times in my life so there could be all kinds of shit going on in there leaving impressions and doing things with neuroplasticity.

Man I *really* want to visit the dimension it came from because it was absolutely lovely.
Which should have been a sign of a false memory because it smelled nice.

I'm just waiting for someone to come along with a photo of me in the shop for some real Mandela effect fuckery.

Oh I meant Lord Edward St but it was late and I'd had an incredibly long day even before discovering part of my brain had gaslit the other bit. Definitely not Mark's Models because they were well off any route I could do in a lunch hour and were always closed by the time any commute took me nearby.

I rember Third Place well - I played L5R in there a bunch of times, I think it's the only gaming store I ever actually played stuff in and it's definitely not what I was "remembering" because the route I rember walking would have brought me to here and I suspect this was here before the pandemic.

It must be a composite memory of that cafe near Stephen's Green that had a thousand varieties of tea I can't remember the name of right now and the kind of gaming store I would have loved to own given infinite funds and zero responsibilities.
Anyway, HUGELY disappointed.

I tried to go there. I walked a path I'd walked before but it wasn't there and it never was. That is some next level bastard shit from a brain I had hitherto trusted as borderline reliable for basic activities like 'remembering a shop I've been in'

Barring a malicious urban developer tapping into my memories and deciding to fuck with me there is no way that shop could ever have existed since it occupied a space that the front area of Dublin Castle has occupied for at least ten years.

I remember reminiscing about it during the lockdowns as one of my happy places I'd like to get back to so IMAGINE MY SHOCK when I tried to go there today when I had time to kill due to shitty dublin bussery only to discover it had only ever existed IN MY FUCKING DREAMS.