etiolation's recent activity

  1. Comment on Hacker took over Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Drake, Lil Nas X, Harry Styles, Michael Jackson, The Weekend, and Eminem's YouTube channels, uploading bizarre videos to millions of subscribers in ~tech

    etiolation
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    Announced at 3:37 am. Don't ever change, hacker bros.

    Announced at 3:37 am. Don't ever change, hacker bros.

    5 votes

  2. Comment on I gave psilocybin a try in ~talk

    etiolation
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    Thanks for the insight. I think it's a question of temperament, but even benign little reruns would disturb me. The threat of having the show play for years without stop really pushes me away from...

    Thanks for the insight. I think it's a question of temperament, but even benign little reruns would disturb me. The threat of having the show play for years without stop really pushes me away from trying.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on I gave psilocybin a try in ~talk

    etiolation
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    Perhaps this should start a new topic, but I hesitate at the thought of spreading mushrooms all over Tildes. On the verge of embarking on a trial I read some disturbing content that is frightening...

    Perhaps this should start a new topic, but I hesitate at the thought of spreading mushrooms all over Tildes.

    On the verge of embarking on a trial I read some disturbing content that is frightening me away from psychedelics. The fear is of "Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder," which apparently can permanently alter a user's vision, leaving an aftertaste of visual snow, outlines, patterns, what-have-you, overlaid on the world. Like a visual tinnitus, it sometimes never improves. I looked at medical papers and an online forum to try to get a feel for its prevalence. One of the possible answers for a mushroom forum poll asking how many people have this was, "No, but I wish I did!" This is in no way a representative sample, but many respondents reported dealing with this side effect (most embracing it positively).

    I just... I need to feel relatively secure going in that a low dose won't do this to me, for goodness sake.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on Hi, how are you? Mental health support and discussion thread (February 2022) in ~health.mental

    etiolation
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    You would like to think you've built up a store of goodwill, but when the ostraka rain down, they seem to unbalance any mass of merit. Perfection is an inhumanly hard expectation that online...

    You would like to think you've built up a store of goodwill, but when the ostraka rain down, they seem to unbalance any mass of merit. Perfection is an inhumanly hard expectation that online spaces somehow make appear reasonable. I'm sorry. My Tuesday was full of clumsy mistakes and homesickness, but also sunshine.

    7 votes

  6. Comment on October Tildes Writing Club in ~creative

    etiolation
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    Feel free to post your results here. Consider sharing even if it's something you want to expand over November. Happy Halloween!

    Feel free to post your results here. Consider sharing even if it's something you want to expand over November. Happy Halloween!

    2 votes

  7. Comment on I want to give psilocybin a try in ~health

    etiolation
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    I totally would... take the shrooms back to a more comfortable setting and prepare a low dose. It's a shame that my conditions are a barrier in this regard (orbiting party people will be a...

    I totally would... take the shrooms back to a more comfortable setting and prepare a low dose. It's a shame that my conditions are a barrier in this regard (orbiting party people will be a significant challenge), but I take your encouragement to do it on my own (with a sitter), outside the clinical structure, if I can.

    5 votes

  8. Comment on I want to give psilocybin a try in ~health

    etiolation
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    I'm honored, thank you. Cheers to your friend for recognizing the potential.

    I'm honored, thank you.

    Cheers to your friend for recognizing the potential.

    4 votes

  9. Comment on I want to give psilocybin a try in ~health

    etiolation
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Duly cautioned. I'm sorry she's had a similar experience to mine, then had a promising start take a bad turn. I'm happy for Oregonians to have the chance to benefit.

    Duly cautioned. I'm sorry she's had a similar experience to mine, then had a promising start take a bad turn.

    I'm happy for Oregonians to have the chance to benefit.

    4 votes

  10. I want to give psilocybin a try

    ~health Ask
    Insight once came to me after I was prepped for a surgical procedure. As my body's weight began to evaporate, a pain I had never recognized, but which must have always been sounding in the...

    Insight once came to me after I was prepped for a surgical procedure. As my body's weight began to evaporate, a pain I had never recognized, but which must have always been sounding in the background noise of my being, vanished. The superadhesive worry--which sometimes frightened others as much as myself, that in order to socialize, I had learned to sometimes twist into a temporary shape resembling charm--came unstuck and peeled away. Then followed a great thought, a mandate for how I should spend the remainder of my life. Also, I needed to poop. But more than that, I needed to get out of this semi-public hospital bed and to a private space immediately, so I could allow this cosmic insight a moment to fully bloom. Time was against me. Anesthetized, I knew I was slipping toward, maybe even over, the falls past which I would forget everything of this experience until a groggy post-procedure awakening brought dull daylight and its senseless aches back to me. I had to somehow save the thought. I searched, but the bathroom gave up no markers, no specimen cup labels to write on. I wondered about tearing toilet paper into little letters, hiding them above the cabinet. But would I remember to return to read the message? With an increasingly calm desperation, I dug my nails into the flesh of my hand and repeated again and again the life-saving insight delivered during communion with the world that lay beyond pain. Please remember, please remember this thought.

    When I regained consciousness, it was waiting for me like a friend who had lost patience, and now seemed much less attractive. What I had somehow stolen from the gods, secreted in my closed palm through a swim across the river Lethe, was this message: “Do Drugs.”

    I had realized that analysis, working on the problem of myself both mentally and verbally, had won me no appreciable gains. Insight, I had. But relief, happiness, an improved outlook? Nothing I had done had really helped me feel better. Anesthesia instantly had. These aren’t the words of an addict coming on-line. I was a reluctant user of any substance. However, in the years following I forced myself to again undertake drug trials with my psychiatrists. Methodically, I worked through every class, waltzed backward through the eras of drugs, danced off-label with each oddball wallflower, ingested every twisted molecule to ever win over the FDA with a promise of psychiatric benefit and maybe some that merely had intrigued one of my more historically-curious doctors. When Eddie Haskell, MD wanted to resurrect a drug of the bad old days just to see what it’d do to a person, I was the patient with his hand out.

    I overslept and didn’t sleep. I gained and lost a third of my body weight. My head felt like a styrofoam block, then like the slate of a blackboard being scraped with tableware. I was more or less charged, sweaty, sensitive to light, and shaky. Some drugs make you feel like Benjamin Braddock in his birthday diving suit. Others make you feel like an amnesiac idiot in Benjamin Braddock’s birthday diving suit. A common theme emerges. These substances could help me feel slower, distant from the world, claustrophobic, clammy, sensorily distorted. Sometimes, they dulled my anxiety, or dried my hair-trigger tear ducts, but they accomplished this through impairment, and very clumsily. I have never been drunk, but I think it’s like a drunk traffic cop: success in psych meds comes about by the stopping of certain avenues, slowing up of traffic, blocking lawful turns. And it’s sometimes noted in the overall impact that fewer crashes have occurred. To me this is not success. Impairment so far hasn't been healing for me. I want my turn at quoting the line, "I feel like myself again."

    And so, my heart sinks at every day's new headline about psychedelics. If you follow health news at all, you know they are a hot topic, showing a ridiculous amount of promise. Despite fitting the diagnostic profile, my former home was far from anywhere with signups for studies. I reached out to several "clinics" offering psychedelic-assisted therapy. They struck me as resembling many legal weed shops--loads of young bros polishing their presentation and sanitizing an extortionate drug deal in hopes of financing a Tesla. With fees starting at 8x the plane ticket to administer and contextualize a drug that costs less than $20 a dose, I wouldn't credit their soft patter as containing much idealism.

    And here I am--for other reasons besides. Yes, a part of me thought living here would put legal psychedelics within my reach, but I'm not seeing any opportunities. Now I'm kicking myself for never having tried to cultivate mushroom spores, never having ventured to ask acquaintances for a hand. I'm marooned here and psilocybin is about blow up in the States.

    20 votes

  11. Comment on October Tildes Writing Club in ~creative

    etiolation
    Link Parent
    I like this perspective! Yeah, let's post them here. I'll engage with every submission.

    I like this perspective! Yeah, let's post them here. I'll engage with every submission.

    5 votes

  12. October Tildes Writing Club

    ~creative Text 444 words
    My further apologies to anyone who has looked forward to another Writing Club while I was busy running from a cruel summer. Finally stationary, I send this from a bewitched region. I've wandered...

    My further apologies to anyone who has looked forward to another Writing Club while I was busy running from a cruel summer. Finally stationary, I send this from a bewitched region.

    I've wandered into a church of horrors recently, at 10 pm, completely ignorant of the liturgical occasion for it standing open and illuminated at that time of night. An elfin woman in a sweatshirt spotted me and my wife as we took in a St. Sebastian statue.

    "Come take your photos of this!" she said, and drew us toward a glowing pit under the tabernacle. Besides a priest scribbling behind a cracked door we were the only souls stirring. I kept him in view as we climbed the steps to the high altar.

    "Is this OK... are we OK here?" asked my wife, in sparse Castilian.

    "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes," replied the churchwoman. I'm learning that such verbal generosity is typical here.

    What she led us to was the sacred center of the church, the relic over which swarmed a hundred angel heads, pewter candelabras, attendant saints and golden aureole. But they were above ground. Beneath the floor it stood, lit extremely: a worn, worn, sea-washed stone, about the size of a cocooned 10-year old child. Coins rested in a depression at its crown. It bore a jumble of an inscription in a font you could count on James Cameron to pick if he had to display an "ancient curse." What or whom the monolith hallowed was beyond our powers to decipher or the churchwoman's to explain. But it seemed older than the cross barely scratched into it. Somehow I knew it had stood apart for millennia. It was the sick feeling it provoked in me, the reflexive reverence it forced from someone. Down the aisle a Mater Dolorosa wept tears like glue beads into her properly black Spanish dress. St. Lucy served her eyeballs on a platter. An underlighted St. Iago trampled moors unlucky enough to have been caught inside the glass case with him and his white charger. The viscera of belief.

    We left without understanding, and the lady promptly shut the doors to us and the night.

    The stone might have moored a ship purported to have carried St. Iago. Its letters might signify a dedication to Neptune. It may have come from a flooded temple.

    Surely these are elements for an eerie tale, but this was merely my birthday on a full-moon night.

    And now I would really like to read some Halloween writing. Please plan on sharing some short, tense, spooky, autumn-scented, decay-touched words with the writing club. Due on October 31.

    10 votes

  13. Comment on Zoom to pay $85M for lying about encryption and sending data to Facebook and Google in ~tech

    etiolation
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    Good on you for evangelizing the better option! This was such an obvious outcome: 15-25 class-action dollars in exchange for your private or professional secrets. And there are still doctors...

    Good on you for evangelizing the better option! This was such an obvious outcome: 15-25 class-action dollars in exchange for your private or professional secrets. And there are still doctors calling patients via Zoom.

    6 votes

  14. Comment on Writing Club #3—"Madness" (Submissions) in ~creative

    etiolation
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    Thanks for checking in. I'd love to resurrect this. Interest plummeted. Folks may have been busy with re-opening and summer. I might have a blindspot, but I think the guidelines were about as open...

    Thanks for checking in. I'd love to resurrect this.

    Interest plummeted. Folks may have been busy with re-opening and summer. I might have a blindspot, but I think the guidelines were about as open as could be: prose or poetry on any theme (not exclusive to the inspiration), less than 7,000 words. Maybe there are other ways to make it easier.

    Another reason could be that I crept away under a blanket of depression, so the enterprise may have suffered from lack of a cheerleader. But count me in.

    4 votes

  15. Comment on How Foucault was shielded from scandal by French reverence for intellectuals in ~humanities.history

    etiolation
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    No revelation could surprise me less. Sadism stained his writings, in which philosophical critique barely conceals the impulse to indulge medieval fantasy.

    No revelation could surprise me less. Sadism stained his writings, in which philosophical critique barely conceals the impulse to indulge medieval fantasy.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on How has the pandemic changed you? in ~talk

    etiolation
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    I lost 20 lbs. I maybe shouldn't have. When the pandemic seemed like it was about to end then didn't, I lost interest in food, have settled in to constant pain, spend every day waiting on some...

    I lost 20 lbs. I maybe shouldn't have. When the pandemic seemed like it was about to end then didn't, I lost interest in food, have settled in to constant pain, spend every day waiting on some thing that used to materialize with alacrity.

    Soon I will change homes. I have consecrated the rest of my life to art, but lack time and tools in the present transition phase. Moving is a month of Judgment Days. Non-stop, you tell your things, "You never brought me joy as a planter box, be consigned to flames," and meanwhile reckon the weight of your own sin when six highlighter markers surface from a junk drawer still in their packaging. But, here I mock what is actually such a stressful process that I find myself pausing in doorways, supporting my standing frame there while gathering the will to endure more of it.

    I wait for life to begin.

    8 votes

  17. Comment on Thoughts on SSRIs? in ~health.mental

    etiolation
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    This is a fascinating perspective. Do you have studies or readings to link where I could learn more?

    On a more down note, this is why anti-depressants can increase the risk of suicide, as the depressed individual finally gains enough energy to put a plan into action.

    This is a fascinating perspective. Do you have studies or readings to link where I could learn more?

    5 votes

  18. Comment on Uffizi is suing Pornhub after it turns masterpieces into live porn in ~arts

    etiolation
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    I'll take a polemic stance. Would the old masters be outraged by porn videos contrived to bear a passing resemblance to their works? I don't really give a flying fig leaf if they would. Treating...

    I'll take a polemic stance. Would the old masters be outraged by porn videos contrived to bear a passing resemblance to their works? I don't really give a flying fig leaf if they would. Treating centuries-old paintings, art which belongs to the world, like some IP to be defended by a museum against reflection, derivation, parody, or crass burlesque, is anti-culture, and should not stand in court. What do you think?

    18 votes

  20. Comment on ‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late’: Alabama doctor on treating unvaccinated, dying COVID patients in ~health

    etiolation
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    This would be an easier answer if deniers harmed only themselves. Surely you would agree that if anyone has to suffer the consequences of COVID, it would be preferable for it not to be the...

    This would be an easier answer if deniers harmed only themselves. Surely you would agree that if anyone has to suffer the consequences of COVID, it would be preferable for it not to be the careful, the considerate, and the rational rather than the reckless, the selfish, and the stupid. There are vulnerabilities in each category, but when the latter group is actively making life more dangerous for the former, can't you see apportioning sympathy and resources accordingly? I may not wish death on those responsible for killing our loved ones, but when the champagne of their ignorance (benefits they were enjoying such as cheap air travel and wedding venues) turns to piss, I'm not going to rush to suck it out of their mouths.

    I agree with you very much in advocating for a society that mitigates my own stupidity. No, these people don't deserve to die, but I understand the anger of those who suffer after doing everything right.

    17 votes