He may not have been the “best” Bond, but he was my Bond, the one I grew up with.

My parents used to take me to his movies regularly, and it was always a thrill. The iconic, deadly cool theme music, the risque opening in which you could kind-of-and-kind-of-not see naked women, and then the whole camp fantasy of being a handsome and unflappable spy– it was all immensely appealing to a boy on the cusp of puberty.

Kind of like a Wes Anderson film, the Bond movies starring Roger Moore were a child’s vision of the adult world — a comic book fantasia made manifest, but one that promised to be safe, free from the dreary weight of all the unimaginable day-to-day realities that lay ahead.

I was 13 when Moonraker came out. Jaws, a lurching behemoth with steel fangs, was the primary villain, and he was awesome. At the end of the film, after Bond had coasted to victory and Jaws was pulling himself out of the rubble of some foiled plan, a tiny blonde– busty, pigtailed and bespectacled– appeared to help him. Jaws turns and smiles, his metal teeth glinting, and she smiles back. It’s love at first sight, and they then exit into some charming and eccentric future together.

What I remember, and what everybody I have asked remembers about this scene, is that the woman ( Dolly) had braces. This was what connected the two. In spite of their size difference, they were soul mates in braces. It was the sort of thing a 13 year-old kid, the type of kid who might actually have had braces, and that the movie was trying to appeal to, instantly related to. All of us watching, in the midst of our tortured, monstrous throes of puberty, hoped to find a Dolly, too. It was something that resonated deeply and stayed with us.

Anyhow, in returning to the YouTube clip of the scene, I saw that it was clear that Dolly did not have braces.

I mean, I had been fucking positive she had braces.

This braces-less reality seemed utterly impossible to me, like discovering I was a Replicant and not a human at all, but there it was.

No braces.

Anyhow, if like me, you remember Hannibal Lecter saying, “Hello, Clarice,” or Darth Vader intoning, “Luke, I am your father,” or Sally Field shouting, “You like me, you really like me!” while accepting an Oscar, then you have apparently experienced what I have just discovered is known as the Mandela Effect.

Now what the Mandela Effect is, is complicated, Internet complicated, and it’s layered in the sort of conspiratorial proofs that only online culture can provide.

Dive deep, if you wish:

Without tunnelling into the rabbit holes surrounding this phenomena, I will simply say that what clearly emerges from all this is that our memory, be it individual or collective, is incredibly unreliable. Sometimes, what we believe to be true, what we know in our bones to be true, what even our tribe agrees is true, is not true. Memory is mysterious, a product of our consciousness that is constantly being constructed and revised, existing as a work in progress rather than some immutable photograph we can reference at will. Everything is in flux, and the truth, as unpalatable as it is, is that we know nothing for sure, and are very, very easily manipulated. In the furious age of Trump, it’s wise to keep this in mind before launching a scorched earth assault on anything that might contradict our world view. We would all benefit from a little less certainty and a little more kindness, I think.

I recently sent him some Medieval manuscript images that I found online and asked him to explain them to me. These are the results:

You should think of the images of the illuminated manuscripts of the 8^th to the 15^th century as the Instagram of the day. In this particular “post” we see a Medieval version of the Kardashian sisters as they conjure magical spells while encircling a tree. These young women are almost certainly witches, and when the community uncovered their black magic, they would have surely been tied to wild horses and torn apart while the townsfolk cheered and threw potatoes. (Note the surgically enhanced breasts. The cosmetic surgeons of the day used to insert clay molds beneath the skin in order to achieve the desired shape. Mortality rates were very high with this procedure. )

This is a highly skilled depiction of some very put-out dogs standing in a field. One of the dogs, the white one with the regal collar around its neck and the small erection, looks slightly ashamed. He likely offended the commoner dogs (note the mottled colours and blunt expressions that characterize the serf animals) by questioning their religious values and then attempting to rape them. Think of this panel as one that prefigures Cute Overload.

Monks did more than just illuminate manuscripts. For recreation they played other monasteries in a Medieval version of Ultimate. Of course, a frisbee had not yet been invented, so the monks used a scapula, also known as a human shoulder blade. These were festive occasions for the monks, characterized by excessive drinking (They brewed beer, too) and the ribald singing of team songs. This image of the bat is the team crest of the Carthusian Bats, a formidable franchise known for their vows of silence and ferocity on the field.

This is the equivalent of a Medieval paparazzi shot or stolen cell phone photo. It captures the King and Queen in an unguarded and intimate moment as they enjoy a hot tub. The Queen, obviously spent after intercourse in the hot water, catches her breath, while the robust King, carrying his Holy Ejaculate Saucer, heads off to enjoy the pleasures of his many concubines. This image should be thought of as one you might find on 4chan.

The beatified and sacred have gathered in this image for an annual event in which awards are given out to the holy. It happened once a year, was very secretive, and is vaguely analogous to the Academy Awards. The holy would each have a vote, which they cast in private, on such categories as, “Best Performance While Living Atop A Pillar,” or “Most Holy Self-Flagelator Of The Year.” It was very much looked forward to by the participants, and they all hoped to win, even if they took a public stance of humility and abasement—just look at the attention they paid to their wardrobe for this event.

I wanted to see the pictures, even though I clearly understood that they were stolen property. My desire to see Jennifer Lawrence nude was greater than my moral aversion to invading and violating her privacy. The Internet, as it always does, enabled my reptile brain, and in a way in which it’s very likely that I won’t suffer any consequences for my transgressions.

I don’t think twice about watching pirated TV shows or movies, have no qualms about downloading music without paying for it, and even though I work as a writer, I don’t pay for any subscriptions and get irritated whenever I’m asked to jump through a few hoops in order to get access to content. I guess I feel entitled, and instead of viewing things as private property, I see the online world as communal, shared property, imaging a friend loaning me something like it was a book or an album. My relationship to this material is ephemeral and abstract, and instead of taking solid form and becoming a part of my physical landscape, it passes through me and then drifts back into the fog from whence it came, having more in common with memory than actuality.

When it comes to the stolen nude photos I think I told myself that there was an element of performance to them and that they were the quasi-intentional outcropping of the exhibitionism that is celebrity and were part of continuing seduction, and that they kind of wanted them to be seen, even if this was clearly false.

The truth is that I see celebrities as a brand or corporation—an entity that sells rather than a person that actually lives. They exist as a kind of avatar, a very conscious construct, something symbolic, like a myth, and although our attention is constantly drawn to them, we will never know them. They’re projections, both of our longing and our resentments, and this created persona absorbs all of our vitriol and love, until the actual person at the core of it is destroyed and a new star has to emerge for public adulation and sacrifice.

The Internet accelerates this process. The celebrity is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and our appetite for them has never been so ferocious and predatory. We want all of them, all the time, and every once in awhile the real person behind the curtain gets revealed—vulnerable, flawed, even pedestrian or banal– and we all have to step back and ask ourselves what exactly it is we’re looking at, and what exactly the cost of that might be.