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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-02 19:33 [#02501180]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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LAZY_TITLE
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-02 22:52 [#02501191]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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http://www.ricedoutyugo.com/view.php?post=3987
but, more topical, if i had to sloganize the man, it would go as thus: terrence mckenna: i want to believe but i'm not quite that daft. he had lots of lovely ideas that were clever in brilliant mixed in with vastly more ideas that were poorly-thought out bullshit. i figure we'd have gotten along famously
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-02 22:53 [#02501192]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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i reversed the polarity on the power couplings.
carry this disarming dad joke to star systems more distan...
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-02 23:36 [#02501219]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02501191
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he is so entertaining you can sort of forgive more of his muddled ideas, he is great for provoking idea and thats what is really great about him
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-03 00:30 [#02501242]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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charlatan
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steve mcqueen
from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-03 21:34 [#02501279]
Points: 6514 Status: Lurker
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i think he calls charlatans 'squirls' or squirelly or something like it. There's one where he talks about doing a gig at UFO conference and taking the piss out of the UFO crowd : "you want reproducible proof, smoke DMT, you'll have it up the kazoo!". The hermetic tradition ones and voynich manuscript talk on youtube are wkd non-druggy ones. cud listen to him talk all day. colossal dude.
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steve mcqueen
from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-03 21:41 [#02501281]
Points: 6514 Status: Lurker
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IIRC he reckons the Voynich manuscript is interesting *because* its totally unparsable, its a book that is impossible to understand. OOh yeah and his Finnegans Wake talk too!!
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steve mcqueen
from caerdydd (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-03 22:20 [#02501285]
Points: 6514 Status: Lurker
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using computers as a metaphor for nervous system,never useful IMO
like your English teacher in school seeing you reading comics and saying, "you like computers, its Garbage In Garbage Out, you must know that acronym"., and looking all wise n shit. loldafuq. If all language is metaphor then you might as well pick your mother tongue to explain things instead of computer ones, which are 50ish years old at most. Fuckin <3 riceoutyugo
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 06:50 [#02501305]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular | Followup to steve mcqueen: #02501279
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colossal dude, could be a track name on snares' next album.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 06:52 [#02501306]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular | Followup to steve mcqueen: #02501285
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it's all a rippling feedback loop where metaphor and meaning bounce off each other to create more of the same.
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-04 13:46 [#02501328]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker | Followup to steve mcqueen: #02501281
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i find the Voynich manuscript but i must confess it does look like it was written by someone without their full compliment of marbles, but all the best stuff ls like that
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 18:11 [#02501332]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular | Followup to Hyperflake: #02501328
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nostradamus more like notredumbass
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fleetmouse
from Horny for Truth on 2016-08-04 19:07 [#02501348]
Points: 18042 Status: Lurker
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God help us that this guy is considered wise and deep. I fast forwarded to where he started to get to a point and learned that language is important, something something drugs, and the patriarchy is why people don't know about history. Which is horseshit. Adult Swim + weed is why people don't know about history.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 19:40 [#02501363]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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i like adult swim + weed. my work has a similar autistic fart vibe; i figure maybe once they've drained the relevant demographics of deeper thought i could have some job opportunities as one of the last men (under)standing
anyways, i think we're in agreement about terrence mckenna. i prefer the written word, i should note. i've never had the patience for his "lectures" either. i read things that he's written or had transcribed, then apply a grain of salt the size of new jersey. after the resulting chemical reaction, a pile of things i regard as genuinely clever and insightful are left, and it's actually a pretty sizable pile. i also fully understand why anyone would skim his corpus and think he's crap, and that there are plenty of times where he was deliberately being crap to fuck with the heads etc
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 19:44 [#02501364]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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the idea that shrooms are interstellar travellers. in these foul-tasting buggers is the blueprint for a hyperdrive, also language and art. that shrooms are in a parasymbiotic feedback loop with marginally intellegent civilizations. planet X drops shroops, builds hyperdrive, carriers shrooms to other star systems.
when i first read that, i thought: wow. that is a hell of an idea. seductive. i really wish i were dumb enough to take it seriously, because that would be a lot of fun.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 19:50 [#02501366]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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mckenna is also pretty much responsible for the 2012 crap. i think he'd developed brain tumors at that point... or was it a troll? hard to say. if 2012 was actually something other than hype, i'd say it was a moment of transition. the end of one phase and the start of the next. perhaps mckenna thought it was the end because that was where the mathematics of his trip collapsed and his inner sight ended. i could dig up any number of quotes from the matrix for this but i'll spare you
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-04 22:31 [#02501397]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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i like the idea that shrooms are the key to hyperspace, cos dune is one of my fave books and that a pretty similar idea, it certainly fucks with your perception and that is to a large degree your own construction of reality.
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larn
from PLANET E (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-05 01:53 [#02501409]
Points: 5473 Status: Regular | Show recordbag
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i heard that he had never done psychedelics before and he was just very educated and cashing in, he had only smoked afghan hash on a train journey once and was sick
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wavephace
from off the chain on 2016-08-05 01:57 [#02501410]
Points: 3098 Status: Lurker
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hes kool 2 listen but also a crazy guy. u shouldnt take him seriously cuz drugs are messed up and if u take them u are also messed. his "deepness" appeal is 2 joe rogan level thinkers.....not true high intellect thinkers such as my self
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wavephace
from off the chain on 2016-08-05 01:58 [#02501411]
Points: 3098 Status: Lurker
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his album with spacetime continuum album is the best
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-05 03:22 [#02501417]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular | Followup to Hyperflake: #02501397
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shrooms are the key to hyperspace
now there's a bumper sticker sure to get you pulled over by the cops.
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-05 06:08 [#02501423]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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^ loooool
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-05 06:15 [#02501424]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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if im wearing my normal rational mode of thinking mantle there is no way i can take this guy seriously in 90% of what he says , if i was younger i would immediately write him off as a fruitcake and take no further heed. Since ive lightened up a bit now; i cant really articulate what it is that appeals to me about what he is saying, i think its probably because it is a mode of thinking that is traditionally far removed from how i approach things.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-05 08:30 [#02501425]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day; no illusions there. things would be a lot less crap in the US if the left and the right took a moment to consider each others' ideas. they would still argue about almost everything, but a few bits of common sense would reveal themselves as such, and actually stand a chance of getting implemented. improve things, you know? no, they don't. it's like asking guys on wrestlemania to talk it out.
there are all sorts of things i've found, like magick, that seem somewhere between crap and useful. i'm skeptical, but it's good enough that i can't immediately bin it. if you go back to medieval medicine and galen's four humors, you have ground zero for what doctors call "differential diagnosis." it's essentially a lookup table based on crusty old nonsense like black juice and how full your bladder is. it immediately seems like crap; real doctors think it's crap. but that galen guy was really trying... even though the underlying rationale is complete bullshit, the chart of bile and cholera would land you on the right answer enough that it was a useful tool. modern medicine has made it irrelevant and i never felt it made sense to try diagnosing myself with galen's table.
but i did try magick for a year or two, and i'm glad i did. it's the same shit: there is a bit of science based on thought and experimentation, then it loses the plot and wanders off to have lunch with galen; astral spheres are disrupting your bile chakra; burn some incense, draw abstract symbols on paper, then eat them. chew them thoroughly. this aligns your chi
i patiently followed along with the bullshit for a while because i wasn't sure which parts were bullshit and which weren't. gradually i sorted out the contents of magick into bullshit and not-bullshit columns, then i grabbed the not-bullshit list and left. this is how you do with mckenna as well, i figure.
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-06 10:15 [#02501491]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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^ ah paragraphs! i think accepting the irrational aspects of life is really good for creative endeavors, if nothing else
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-06 19:11 [#02501508]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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i should really cough it up and admit that i owe a huge amount to the late Robert Anton Wilson. he's most known for the Illuminatus! trilogy, but he also wrote a bunch of... i dunno. quirky acidhead self-help books? prometheus rising was the best of 'em, quantum psychology was also great. he goes into all this heavily. magick, brain (re)programming. the layers of conditioning you have to peel back before you can really get anywhere.
pretty much, he spends a good bit of time in one of those books arguing that aleister crowley was actually reasonably scientific about what he did. i won't even try to recap that because i don't remember it well enough, but it seemed more or less spot on. so i got a guided tour of the origins of magick from a man who's spent his whole life playing with peoples' minds. the phrase he preferred was "guerrilla ontologist." pops out of the woods, lobs off something that blows up your worldview, then creeps back into the bushes and has a giggle about it.
then there's the bruce lee quotes, "use only that which works, and take it from whereever you can find it," "do not deny the old ways simply because they are old, because you will just create another pattern to trap yourself in" and of course "do not obey a command unless it also comes from within." do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
all of this spoke right to the core of my personality. i was pretty young when i first noticed many of the things i was told didn't completely jive with other things i was told, or the way people acted. being kept in during recess and deciding i was going to throw out how school had taught me to write letters; devise a style that was my own. that was what i did instead of throwing rocks or lighting things on fire -- tear down mental structures i felt were controlling or wrong and replace them with something of my own design.
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-06 19:15 [#02501509]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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^ KLF reference the illuminatus trilogy quite a bit, is it worth reading?
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 10:09 [#02501537]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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legend has it that wilson and hubbard made a bet: which one of them could create the most popular religion. boom, discordianism and scientology. i would say hubbard won. the illuminatus trilogy is fantastic. yes, read it.
i thought of something that's a pretty good example of all this: state-dependant memory. the wikipedia article launches right into babble about psychoactive substances; typical internet. when i first heard of it, it was casually described thus: "whatever you learn is most accessable when you're in the state you're in when you learned it." i heard this line before college, but when a psych class covered it, the same line came up. then, pandering to his audience, the professor went internet and tangented into psychoactive substances: "you shouldn't study drunk, but if you study while drunk, you would actually do better on the exam if you showed up drunk as well." then another three disclaimers to cover his ass.
i'd already thought about this and started finding it all over years before that class, after the first time i heard it somewhere long ago. it's pretty much the same thing as a smell bringing back an old memory. a song on the radio reminds you of someone you broke up with and alters your mood. an album you listened to tripping occasionally gives you a few micrograms for free, listening to it years later. especially if you're stoned.
tack over to magick. all those rituals. burning incense... and i said: hey, i bet that's about using triggers to deliberately enter a particular state of mind. it seems like magic -- no k -- until you realize it's not much different from a song on the radio triggering memories and immediately flipping your emotional state around.
crowley was before this concept was floating about, but he was definitely circling around it.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 10:19 [#02501538]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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so how does one program the brain to recognize the tuple (incense, dim lights, mumbled faux latin) as "magick time" and promptly enter some sort of transhuman metaconscious... thing? i will leave this as an exercise to the reader.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 11:07 [#02501539]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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did you know? aleister crowley also invented the world's first wifi hotspot. but no one bought it. he wasn't with the christians, so they concluded it was a radio to the devil and refused to buy it. concurrently, his fans were offended that it could be rationally explained, and refused to buy it.
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:09 [#02501540]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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"'d already thought about this and started finding it all over years before that class, after the first time i heard it somewhere long ago. it's pretty much the same thing as a
smell bringing back an old memory. a song on the radio reminds you of someone you broke up with and alters your mood. an album you listened to tripping occasionally gives you a few micrograms for free, listening to it years later.
especially if you're stoned."
yeah i think this is how it probably works as well, sometimes remembering something is close to a psychedelic experience but really attenuated
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:11 [#02501541]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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also when i slip into that hypnagogic state i can generate really intricate fractal patterns in my minds eye, yet i cant do it when awake, must be to do with chemicals being released as i sleep
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 11:21 [#02501543]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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i have immense trouble sleeping because my brain won't shut up. i'll code for eight or twelve hours, and i can tell it's over. i'm losing my place in the sentence and making all sorts of mistakes i don't make unless it's over. but i am dug in. i don't. want. to. stop. if i immediately go and lie down, i will not sleep, even if i've been up for two days... because my brain is still repeatedly darting back into what i was working on. even without a compiler to yell at me, i can tell i'm not exactly going to solve much of anything like this. but i keep going back to it, like an irish drunk chained to streetlamp. i've learned the thing to do at this point is listen to music for an hour or so, and it's like using a plunger on a clogged toilet. music hits me deep enough to fend off the compulsive picking, and after a sufficient period of time it drifts off and i can go to sleep.
or not, as i start thinking about forum posts or next week's schedule or whatever. at this point, it's less an irish drunk and more a child that cannot sit still. this becomes far less of a problem after i've been awake around 24 hours, unlike coding or writing, which will hound me until i clear it out, once i get sufficiently deep into it.
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:24 [#02501544]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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do you have flux on your computer screen, it helps me remind me naturally when i should start getting ready to go to sleep
also a glass of wine or two a couple of hours before bedtime can be a great help, not that i advocate relying on booze
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:25 [#02501545]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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every night i have an hours period when im lying in bed in the pitch black willing myself to sleep without success, its so bloody boring
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:26 [#02501546]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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truth be told im not exhausting myself enough physically, there was a period when i was a building a massive 60 foot long garden wall and it was so tiring when i came in i had trouble from keeping myself awake
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 11:32 [#02501547]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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when it actually comes to sleep, well, i rarely remember my dreams. i've never had a fully lucid dream. two or three times i've realized i was dreaming, and i promptly woke up. i fret about this a bit after all aphex has said, SAW II, and so on. the few times i've dreamed a bit of melody, remembered it, and managed to program it into the machines, it was intense. but that's where i step off fretting: i'll maybe remember a handful of dreams every month, and those ones are the crazy weird intense ones that are important for me to figure out. the way i see it, i've been rooting around in my subconscious like a church lady at a tag sale for my whole life while awake; by the time i get to dreaming there's not much left for it to confuse me with.
hypnogogia is a bit more familiar. any sort of night-time cold/flu combo med like nyquil that has pseudoephedrine will promptly lead me into that, and the picking at code or whatever often will too without any chemical aid. so many weird things have happened, there. the one most relevant to xlt is the time where i felt like i was using cubase. i had three audio tracks and i was slicing, copying, pasting, rearranging. sensation of being able to click play and hear it, edit a bit, play again, just like on the computer. then i sort of woke up and it was gone... except for a final screenshot. an image of my three audio tracks and all the cut-up segments that i could see clearly. but i absolutely couldn't remember what they sounded like. drat.
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:40 [#02501548]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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most nights i never remember dreaming at all, i only ever had one or two lucid dreams and it was very strange, it was very much like being awake i remember holding my hands in front of my face telling myself i was dreaming, walking down a gravel drive way, very strange. Most of the time i dont remember anything unless im awoken up mid dream
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 11:41 [#02501549]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular | Followup to Hyperflake: #02501544
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also a glass of wine or two a couple of hours before bedtime
can be a great help, not that i advocate relying on booze
this is quite literally what eventually led to me having a problem with alcohol. i discovered booze, and i liked it. that wasn't a problem. then i discovered there was none of this lying in bed for three and a half hours, noticing every forty-five minutes that i'd spent another forty-five minutes talking to myself; getting cross. stop this immediately. sleep. i'd clear my mind. five seconds later, i'm at it again. five shots of vodka and i was out like a kitten in the sunlight. when you're up against 3.5 hours of hating yourself, you like drinking, and drinking really does get you to sleep at a reasonable time, it gets super tempting to drink every night. this worked for five or seven years. towards the end of that, i was in a relationship with someone who drank loads -- more than i did before, anyways -- and then it's the dr. drew shit, a co-dependant relationship and it seems normal because we see each other drinking our asses off. at first i knew it was too far and didn't care, then i began fucking shit up, and i cared. i'd taken long breaks from booze before and decided it was time for another and for the first time i had trouble with it. after a lot of bad noise i began to exercise 2-4 hours a day and that largely has filled the hole. after a year i could drink casually again; i have a wee bit of quality scotch right now. but the old troubles with sleep are still there, and i can no longer drown them with booze. again, drat. at least the excercise helps with that a little.
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:53 [#02501550]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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yes my dad was a functioning alcoholic, he literally drank half a bottle of whisky a night, i never asked him but i assume he must have had problems sleeping. Im pretty much tee total, but i do recognise the times i have drank in moderation in the past ive had the best nights sleep
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 11:54 [#02501551]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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the tiredest ive ever been is when i come in after doing manual labour, making cement in cement mixers all day or stacking bricks, absolutely knackering you snore so heavily but you wake up next day in the blink of an eye its great, no creeping anxiety in the dark of the night
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 12:20 [#02501552]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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yes, excercise is king. i hit a stretch where i was sick of coding, sober enough to persue an agenda, and beginning to get super into exercise. so i found a job for an A/V company; essentially one step above construction. knocking holes in walls and lugging ladders through mud in the rain. the rainy days were shit, but even those i didn't mind too much.
what did me in was everyone else working for the company. the guy i spent all day with was a heroin addict prone to yelling FUCK! SHIT! if he so much as dropped a nail he was trying to hammer in. the owner of the company was a former cocaine addict and complete asshole who had run his body into the ground; slowly dying. i suspect he was also on opiates, but pills. i never got confirmation there like i did with my workmate in the field; a few months after they canned me, they canned him because he nodded off behind the wheel and crashed the work van. then hired him back. i figure the owner had a moment of grim admission that his company was fucking fucked up and consequently he needed to employ fuck-ups.
everything was like middle school, there. day one: where do i park my whip, guys? over there. ok. days four: you can't park there, park over there. ok. day five: no, you can't park there either. ok. day six: heroin man yells at me to park somewhere asshole boss told me never to park. i try to explain that the owner of the company said to not do that. unsurprisingly, he screams at me. this finally pisses me off, and i park where the boss told me to park. he's all "I SHOULD SEND YOU HOME FOR THAT SHIT" but he doesn't. the next day i show up early and pin the owner down (i had to; he was slippery) and chat: this guy is screaming at me to park where you told me never to park. please, for the love of god, tell me where to park, and tell him about it. never in my life have i been through that level of bullshit for parking arrangements. the pay was also shit. but i slept like a rock every night.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 12:23 [#02501553]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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tldr version of #02501552 -- i could go on a vigorous eight-hour hike every day and i would sleep just fine, but it's sort of tough to arrange your life around that.
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 12:30 [#02501554]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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yes its not practical to do that, especially if you have other interests, i sort of envy you living in the US the amazing expansive hiking you can do, you could probably go somewhere and not see someone for a couple of weeks
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 12:43 [#02501555]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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i see a prime opportunity to vaguely wander back into the topic this thread has derailed into: when i had trouble not drinking for the first time in my life, i had to figure out how to handle this. then it's just like magick: there is so much out there on alcoholism. some of it is bullshit and some of it is truth. most of it is in between. i told myself that if i couldn't stop, i would have to go to AA, and my contempt for AA was enough to get me to stop drinking. my addiction is outside on those twelve-steps doing push-ups, man. oh, fuck off. then dr. drew is all this is a disease. again, i say: fuck off. this is a bad habit that's gone too far. i stopped picking my nose when i was fourteen, and i can stop this. it is not a hardware problem slash disease, it is a software problem. meanwhile, both AA and dr. drew have successfully cleaned people up, so clearly something in there is working, even AA smells like christian soccer moms and dr. drew smells like the fossil ward of a community college. i went through and combed it for data. some of it was obviously bullshit and i blammed it. some of it seemed valid and i kept it. some of it i couldn't tell, so i took it seriously for a bit until i could. eventually i felt like i knew pretty clearly why which bits worked and which didn't. then i picked up the not-bullshit list and left.
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Hyperflake
from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-07 12:51 [#02501556]
Points: 31006 Status: Lurker
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from what i understand if you are an alcoholic and you stop drinking you go cold turkey and generally feel horrible and anxious, so thats what makes it intolerable i understand why some people drink themselves in to a stupor, its how they make it through the day.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 13:11 [#02501557]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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i guess it's important to note that i am a compulsive control freak and the moment i felt like alcohol had some leverage i flipped a shit. pretty much, if it goes far enough, dr. drew starts to be more correct with the it's-a-disease shit. i never drank enough for the DTs, cold sweats, shakes, whatever. i almost never felt hungover, but that was probably because i'd been at it so long i knew how to take care of myself (always have a glass of water next to your glass of booze if you're aiming to drink too much). nothing dramatic happened. i didn't crash my car, i didn't get arrested. i worked at home and i could have drank on the clock; i didn't even do that. what i did do was clock out early so i could start drinking. eight hours later a liter or two of wine was gone. i fucked up in lots of small ways during those eight hours; mostly making an ass of myself or eating lots of junk food. alright, time for a short break. that lasted a few days before i bought another pod of wine; back to square one. i didn't start to worry until this happened another three times. it was not a physical, get-withdrawal addiction, and i hadn't fucked my life up so far that i had nothing to come back to. quite the opposite. i was furious with myself for wasting so much time.
from there, the gist of it is that i discovered i could play FTL endlessly, and when i was having trouble, that's what i did. once i was clearer i knew i needed something other than FTL to replace booze; that's where exercise came in. i was able to hold off after that... but, if i start drinking past a point, those old bad patterns begin to come back. like water that has carved deep channels in a mountainside. analogy is that booze has become a black hole for me. i can sip expensive whiskey without getting sucked in; it's too nice to guzzle. the event horizin is box wine, and i don't buy that any more.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 14:20 [#02501558]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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anyways, if you're looking to quit booze and not having an easy time, please don't use my carefully metered stalemate as an excuse to go out and buy a bottle of expensive whiskey.
that was one of those things AA/Dr-Drew had dead on -- a mention of alcohol triggers the idea to buy alcohol. like picking your nose, it's a matter of catching yourself in the act a million or so times, and lowering your index finger away from your nostril. hard at first, easier at times, eventually an automatic habit.
a closely related but separate habit is coming up with an excuse to buy booze. like, hey, this dude on the internet does that, so it'll probably be ok if i do as well. it's a step removed and a bit harder to catch, but same deal.
when i said my contempt for AA got me to quit, i meant i used that as a threat to myself: if i can't do this soon, i have to go to AA. it was a good motivator. i was also not kidding. i really would have dragged myself there if it went that far, and that's part of why it didn't.
the rest was science. whare are the mechanisms at work? habits, triggers. what are the solutions? discipline, addiction swap for video games/exercise. after i began to have a handle on it, i tried buying box wine. it disappeared quickly, so i avoided it for a few weeks. tried it again; same deal. a month later, i try again, and it sucks me back in. three boxes of wine later, i hole up and play FTL. haven't bought any since. i knew there would be a line in there somewhere. life-long abstinence seemed too harsh; i was right. i had to fuck up a few times to know where "too far" was. neither dr. drew nor AA would ever accept this as a valid approach, and for many people, it would be.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 14:21 [#02501559]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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er, wouldn't be.
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EpicMegatrax
from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 14:28 [#02501560]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular
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i finished my two fingers of scotch three hours ago and then made a coffee. that will do nicely, yes sir. now i'm contemplating my addiction to writing long trains of blather that only hyperflake and mohamed will read. then mohamed will only under 40/60% of what i'm saying; the rest is too technical
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