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         |  Hyperflake
             from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-02 19:33 [#02501180] Points: 31541 Status: Lurker
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 | LAZY_TITLE 
 
 
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         |  EpicMegatrax
             from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-02 22:52 [#02501191] Points: 25604 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: 25604 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: 31541 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: 25604 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: 6639 Status: Regular
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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: 6639 Status: Regular
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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: 6639 Status: Regular
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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: 25604 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: 25604 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: 31541 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: 25604 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: 25604 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: 25604 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: 25604 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: 31541 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: 5476 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: 25604 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: 31541 Status: Lurker
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 | ^ loooool 
 
 
 
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         |  Hyperflake
             from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-08-05 06:15 [#02501424] Points: 31541 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: 25604 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: 31541 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: 25604 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: 31541 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: 25604 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: 25604 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: 25604 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: 31541 Status: Lurker
 | 
| 
     
 
 | "'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: 31541 Status: Lurker
 | 
| 
     
 
 | 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: 25604 Status: Regular
 | 
| 
     
 
 | 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: 31541 Status: Lurker
 | 
| 
     
 
 | 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: 31541 Status: Lurker
 | 
| 
     
 
 | 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: 31541 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: 25604 Status: Regular
 | 
| 
     
 
 | 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: 31541 Status: Lurker
 | 
| 
     
 
 | 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: 25604 Status: Regular | Followup to Hyperflake: #02501544
 | 
| 
     
 
 | 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: 31541 Status: Lurker
 | 
| 
     
 
 | 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: 31541 Status: Lurker
 | 
| 
     
 
 | 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
 
 
 
 | 
        
         |   | 
        
         |  EpicMegatrax
             from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 12:20 [#02501552] Points: 25604 Status: Regular
 | 
| 
     
 
 | 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: 25604 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: 31541 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: 25604 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: 31541 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: 25604 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: 25604 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: 25604 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: 25604 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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