https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42571845
DonHopkins 6 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still ev...
Then you would have loved the HyperCard Smut Stack, the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released! I've begged Chuck to dig around to see if he has an old copy of the floppy lying around and upload it, but so far I don't know of a copy online you can run. Its bold pioneering balance of art and slease deserves preservation, and the story behind it is hilarious.
Edit: OMG I've just found the Geraldo episode with Chuck online, auspiciously titled "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From Computer Porn to Fax Foxes", which shows an example of Smut Stack (demo starts at 2:00 but worth watching the whole thing just for Chuck's continuous smirk):
https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285675
DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham?
SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on Geraldo, and sued by Playboy.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-...
>Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of Chuck's Weird World fame.
>How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple.
>It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks available at the show.
https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorl...
Page 69 of https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990
>Famham's Choice
>This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this up.
>Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.”
>On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.” This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a disappearing bikini.
https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputer... [taken down]
Page 18 of https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110 [taken down]
>“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, was also a hit.
Thanks, Don.
Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror (1985) (usc.edu)
https://scalar.usc.edu/works/timothy-leary-software/index
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32578683
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oabRxvjf9k
I extracted all the text and data from the Apple ][ floppy disk:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37486524
https://donhopkins.com/home/mind-mirror.txt
https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...
No surprise that, in keeping with the hacker spirit, Bill wanted to democratize information that is otherwise accessible only to "high" priests.
What surprises me the most is that we have accepted sugar, alcohol, cigarettes and a ton of mass manufactured food which are harming us. I am struggling with high blood glucose for 12 years. Yet, the substance which I can grow in my* own backyard and may actually not be as harmful is just brainwashed out of my limits.
edits: you to me
It is often argued that some of generally illegal substances like marijuana is only toxic to comparable extents as legal substances, but there are observations that it seem to trigger some types of megalomaniac schizophrenia, so the fence probably has reasons to be there, I think.
No. I feel QUITE certain that the distinction is based on whether or not the substance has a history of a few generations of widespread use among western Europeans ("white people").
In the time since, my views have changed dramatically on these substances, and I'd like to try more of them. However, my personal moral compass prevents me from using substances outside of a legally permissible setting, at least at present - and that's something I'm fine with.
Ultimately, the taboo side of things is something the individual has to grapple with on their own. I can only commiserate with your frustrations, not help overcome them unfortunately. My only other advice would be to use any substance only to amplify good vibes, never to cope with bad ones.
If all you do is chase a lost feeling, you're missing out on what's in front of you now.
> However, my personal moral compass prevents me from using substances outside of a legally permissible setting, at least at present - and that's something I'm fine with.
What on Earth do laws have to do with morals?
Some people’s conception of “normal people” is people at a church ice cream social.
Different perspectives, I think.
Years back, my friend’s parents asked me to stage an intervention for him after they found out he regularly took LSD. He was 19 at the time.
with this stupidity, maybe you should try eating list of 20 deadly plants and see how it goes?
"ownership" means "edible/nose-able"... maybe you should try eating your car?
It's not always the best use, but that's definitely allowed. It's one of the main uses of herbs.
> with this stupidity, maybe you should try eating list of 20 deadly plants and see how it goes?
If you're eating an amount that doesn't hurt anyone, what's the problem?
And the reason to possibly intervene would be someone stockpiling dangerous amounts. Not for enjoying plants wrong.
> maybe you should try eating your car?
It would be ridiculous to make that illegal, wouldn't it?
That God fella sure is strange.
The 5HT2A tolerance is acute such that you need exponential dosing on consecutive days to achieve equivalent effects.
Some psychedelics like NBOMe are such strong agonists the tolerance duration is 1-2 weeks.
For "standard" psychedelics it's closer to 3-4 days.
Even at the height of my psychedelic-head phase I was using twice a week, and not by choice.
(From the photo caption) "Bill ... with his iphone prototype"
Nope. That's a Sony Magic Link, built by Bill (and others, myself included) during his time at General Magic. I feel General Magic is another one of Bill's endeavors that isn't widely understood or appreciated.
Yes, he carried it everywhere. Yes, he used it during his job interview. Yes, it helped.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838332
Not to be confused with General Magic, which wasn't a money grubbing fraud from day one, which didn't put on the most ridiculous obnoxious unenlightening cocaine addled TedX talk in the history of the universe, which didn't post fraudulent obviously impossibly fake demos to youtube falsely claiming "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap", which didn't have a toxic nepotistic bro culture that excluded and belittled women, that didn't settle a huge lawsuit for sex discrimination against the one woman they hired to fix the "pink/blue problem" but then rebuffed and ignored, that didn't burn through billions of investment dollars producing nothing of value, which didn't blatantly rip off many people's original ideas in their unoriginal invalid fraudulent patent applications, which didn't publish an astounding but physically impossible video of a whale leaping out the gym floor and splashing down while hundreds of children not wearing AR headsets were somehow magically able to perceive it and clap and cheer and say "WOOOAAAHH!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbpqwUUfMAQ
https://x.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457
Magic Leap gave magic a bad name (and was the biggest disgrace of the entire AR industry, even spectacularly worse than a certain Google Glasshole publishing a nude selfie of himself in the shower), while General Magic truly was the good kind of magic.
But what do you mean about the whale? I know they hypnotized the kids with some Magic, but the whale really did Leap out of the gym floor. That's where they got the company name! I saw it with my own eyes, in that YouTube video.
And don't expect me to believe that Rony Abovitz is not a real astronaut, and those were not real apes, and that was not a real space fudge monolith. I can taste right now, in my virtual mind!
About the shower glass guy... I knew him when he was a camera salesman at LZ Premiums in San Jose. I used to go there when I lived nearby, just to eye the merchandise and compare prices.
Eventually I bought something there - a huge Manfrotto tripod with a fluid head. I can still see the smile on Robert's face when he brought it out: "this guy finally bought something!"
PS: Hello fellow Jaunter! Was it big and strong enough to support a Jaunt VR camera? Did you manage to nick one before they shut down? ;)
Few seem to have put it so succinctly. Although your text recovers completely after being fully compressed to "from day one" ;)
Magic Leap gave Nova a bad name and Ft. Lauderdale a worse name but visitors should know better than to be sold their own dream.
Exactly the thing I was advising yachtsmen against when I was a teenager.
Back in the Everglades there never were that many legitimate sources of income so different cultures had long developed different ways to survive in that type of climate :\
Small-town resort coup on SV that one.
http://www.datarover.com/SEKRIT/general-magic-org-chart-1994...
Josh Siegel worked in Magic Cap Core Technology with Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld (both "on loan"). At Sun he rewrote the PostScript interpreter in X11/NeWS from James Gosling's original messy design, and we worked on an X11 window manager written in PostScript. And at Los Alamos National Labs he wrote MMPORG simulations of World War III for the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a beautiful interactive NeWS front-end. (Sun was lucky to steal him away from LANL to work on NeWS instead of WWIII.)
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/owm.ps.txt
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-window...
Don Woods worked in Communicating Applications. He and Will Crowther created Colossal Cave Adventure, and we worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) together. His workstation was named "colossal" and when you logged in, its /etc/motd said "Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?" to the peril of anyone who typed "yes" to the csh prompt. Don wrote the "Spider" card game in PostScript for NeWS, after having previously implemented it at SAIL (Stanford AI Lab) and for XDE (at Xerox PARC).
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/spider/spi...
After having worked on NeWS (the network extensible PostScript window system) and written a lot of PostScript code at Sun, Telescript was obviously the right approach. Today the same approach is called "AJAX".
I wonder what "SEKRET" means? ;)
http://www.datarover.com/SEKRIT
Must have something to do with Magic Cap for Windows '95, which may be the killer app of e-mail...
I must sample their handles for videogame character names.
Bit like asking where all the beer drinkers are! People who are into psychedelics come from all walks of life and we're everywhere :) Start talking about fringe stuff with people and eventually you'll stumble upon others.
If your bubble has people in it who have access to psychedelics, then great. If one's people doesn't have that, "just talk to people" is profoundly unhelpful. That's a very odd and specific conversation to bring up within some circles.
Go hang out on TripSit IRC. Go to music shows that draw that sort of crowd, like Phish and Co or EDM shows.
Check out any of the psychedelics subreddits.
Some cities have public psychedelics meetups. This was huge in the Denver/Boulder area of Colorado.
There are lots of places if you try looking a little.
You’re opening yourself up to blackmail by hundreds of different parties.
It is blatantly irresponsible to host such communities on Discord. Possession and use are federal felonies.
2: people don't really care that much
3: It's so easy to protect your identity
4: you can talk about things without incriminating yourself
Most of the world is not so paranoid. Particularly psychedelic users who don't see the substances as a problem.
I personally have never taken DMT though from everything I've read and heard on podcasts it's not something to be taken lightly. I think having a sort of "DMT Clinic" that you can go to would be the best middle ground of allowing the public access to these substances while also ensuring that there is a trained professional there to guide you through the process.
Saying "trained professional" in this context feels wired because this stuff has been underground for so long but I think it's starting to bubble up into the mainstream enough that we need to start bringing all that "into the light". Lets have training programs that teach people how to administer this stuff properly, how to deal with the negative side effects, etc.
One of the things that while I find understandable is ridiculous is the fact that Bill had to use a pseudonym in the community. I feel like if were at the point where you have C-suite types at Apple taking this stuff, it's time to think about making it available to the broader public.
Well, Ayahuasca (with DMT as the active ingredient) retreats seem more and more common and are for some reasons tolerated more and more in europe. Technically it is illegal, but I can still book them online.
But I won't, as I don't trust the competence of the average new age "shaman".
Ayahuasca trips seem to be like edging with poison. But maybe the documentary I saw was biased.
Seems like it.
I did it one time and there was no vomitting and feeling great the day after.
But that maybe was, because the plant that was used was apparently not so strong. So yes, it is from natural plants, that can have very different concentrations. I suppose this is what the documentary means with life threatening poisening? Getting a plant that had a unusual high concentration?
But I never heard of those horror stories from people who do it regulary. (Vomitting is quite normal, though) Otherwise I have limited knowledge in that area, but I do know with mushrooms for example, you can use different ones of the same species to mix them to average out concentration differences. I assume the same can be done with Ayuahasca. But like I said, I would not recommend the commercial retreats anyway.
(I did it when I was invited into a ceremony in a remote place by people who were not frauds)
Also the vast majority of people are done purging within a few hours...not "days"
(Source: work at retreat center and have drank hundreds of times)
> substantially longer duration of the former
So... this clinic was not entirely unlike what you're proposing w/ DMT.
FWIW, the results were incredible. I was effectively "cured." But unfortunately my insurance changed, and it became no longer covered, and I couldn't afford the $2000 every six weeks for the treatment anymore. And it's not super convenient to take two hours off from work to go to the trip-sitter's to get the treatments.
I hope that they figure out what it is in psychadelics that make them effective at treating stuff like depression and PTSD and make it more accessible because it seems like there's so much potential there.
(Also: fuck Elon Musk for making Ketamine a punchline)
How does it work? Is the half-life of it shorter when administered IV?
It was $600 (discounted) for the first infusion.
You go through a pre-evaluation with the doctor, where they determine a dosage for you based on prior experience and bodyweight.
My clinic also offered to co-administer IV benzos to prevent panic attacks or negative experiences, which was a HUGE plus for me.
During the experience you're given a button, which you can press to call them and have the drip turned off or turned down.
If it wasn't so expensive or covered by my insurance, I would've certainly repeated it.
Highly recommend.
This is, of course, way more risky and pretty much illegal I guess, but it should probably be cheaper?
Not necessarily "condoning" the behavior, so much as sharing harm-minimization info here:
For safe/sterile injection, you need three things, all cheaply + easily available on the internet.
1) Bacteriostatic water - https://www.amazon.com/bacteriostatic-water/s?k=bacteriostat...
2) Sealed, sterile vials for preparation of the solution - https://www.amazon.com/Sterile-Vial/s?k=Sterile+Vial
3) Insulin syringes. 29g 0.5" work well. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=29g+1cc+1%2F2+inch+insulin+syring...
See my comment in this thread about IM administration of 4-AcO-DMT for more info:
But that doesn't make replacing every instance of ketamine with "horse tranquilizer" any less funny.
Just go buy $100 in street ketamine (still marked up 100x, fwiw, also because laws) from someone reputable, test it for fentanyl, and blow lines of it. Same deal, $1900 less cost. Breaking some dumb rules is far preferable to living with untreated depression.
You get to decide whether you want racemic or S-Ketamine, and your money is held in escrow until you've got the product and release the funds to the vendor.
https://www.oregon.gov/oha/ph/preventionwellness/pages/psilo...
"A client may only access psilocybin at a licensed service center during an administration session in the presence of a trained, licensed facilitator."
The point is that western civilization values rationality, order, and progress in a self-justifying way. The values that our culture provides to us form a feedback cycle of myth and virtue. Every argument that assumes this basis, reinforces its truth.
"Order is obviously preferable to chaos", is one of many subjective perspectives. Why should it hold more truth than "Plurality of perspectives are obviously preferable to the fragility of one perspective for the sake of objectivity"? The apparatuses of the state[1] all rely on the same cultural myth and promote it in a way that crowds out all possible alternatives. Thus the myth of necessary order has become synonymous with reality.
Like all deeply rooted cultural myths, this is something that's going to appear obviously true which coincidentally serves as a way of shielding it from honest critique. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that questioning foundational myths feels like a cultural violation. René Girard’s theory holds; when a community is anxious or unstable, it lashes out most viciously at people who somehow threaten its central, but unspoken, truths or anxieties. The greater the received response that a cultural axiom obviously true; the more certain I am that it reflects a core cultural myth than any semblance of reality.
1. See Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970.
Put differently, while an idea being established and self-justifying doesn't necessarily mean it's exclusive in these traits and should be bolted in, sure, an idea being fringe also doesn't necessarily mean it's unjustly fringe at all, or that it's being unfairly discriminated against. To claim so without evidence is little more than conspiratorial thinking and self-victimization.
It further sounds really quite self-serving to paint e.g. me as some misguided sheep part of some malicious cabal for this. It's a little more than just a variation on the all too common ill faith ways of argumentation; mixing in the semantic specifics of psychedelic experiences, name dropping people, movements, and quotes, and deferring to a "specific" culture's particularities serves at most as a distraction from this.
It's actually quite the opposite. True-believers overwhelmingly disseminate cultural myths. It's the police officer who believes they can positively affect the enforcement of order, educators who base values in the rational order of the mind. It's journalists and pundits who frame news as a tension between order (good, stable) and chaos (bad, dangerous). Where deviance is newsworthy primarily as a threat to order. See news cycles on crime, protests, economic instability, all in terms of order must be "restored."
Look at the modern workplace, for instance, obsessed with order, predictability, and process (think: KPIs, best practices, Six Sigma). And corporate culture manuals and onboarding training reinforcing norms of punctuality, control, and rational planning.
It's present in engineers, scientists, architects, IT managers - professions often celebrated as the apex of rational, orderly progress and as solutions to messy[chaotic] problems. Even here, it's easy to gain karma dunking on the liberal arts, all because science is assumed more value because it more closely aligns with necessary order.
None of these roles form a secret cabal. Still, they enforce and perpetuate the cultural value system whose results are judged on the basis of order.
No one is saying that chaos is good or order is bad. It’s that the binary itself is a function of our cultural mythmaking. When psychedelics make that myth visible, the reaction isn't to consider the critique, but to defend the myth as "reality."
Respectfully, this is nonsense. Ask anyone who lived in Libya under Gaddafi and then in the years since, or who lived under any other despotic regime and compare it to the chaos that ensued when the despot is removed.
Civilization’s association with order is not random (or a function of “cultural myth making”); chaos _sucks_.
You didn't literally write that of course. Instead, you said these:
- "the proponents of "Big Reality" really really really fight against its disruption"
- "the post-Enlightenment project of "rational" adulthood"
- "Western civilization has a deep myth"
- "[list of values] must either be accepted (...) or face rejection"
- "western civilization values (...) [list of values] in a self-justifying way"
- etc.
All of them painting "Big Reality" as a group that:
- exists
- is just following myths
- unjustly represses the exploration of alternatives
- is western for some reason?
I hope we can agree that this is not a positive or even a neutral characterization, and that it suggests coordination. Hence, malicious cabal.
> It's present in engineers
I mean yeah, hi. Every time I'm able to work with something tangible, something measurable, it's always an intrinsically better experience, both on a personal level as well as socially. And every time I run into the opposite, the end result is confusion and misery. To paint this as just cultural doesn't feel even remotely right. Especially since I really don't see culture having come first, or since there are neurodivergent people who have a particular fascination with exactly these concepts (counting, hard logic, etc), suggesting the existence of biological biases and drivers towards these.
> Even here, it's easy to gain karma dunking on the liberal arts, all because science is assumed more value
Art is incredibly technical, actually, especially the better stuff. And when you engage that technical side, you get incredible richness in return, much more levers you can push on with much more intentionality. These wouldn't be recognized things if people didn't try to see a "method to the madness" and instead just kept on going by vibes.
I cannot know what threads you've been visiting that gave you this impression, and I'm sure that there are people here who do what you describe. But as far as my anecdotal experience goes, I cannot confirm having experienced this (people taking cheapshots at liberal arts here) by the way.
> When psychedelics make that myth visible
But you don't need psychedelics to appreciate that the vast majority of the things we experience and reason about have an excessive serving of manmade components. Even something trivial as chairs or names are just artificial constructs. What this requires is a philosophically intrigued mind, not necessarily a drug-addled one. If your idea is more that "okay, but these are more tangible and readily apparent while on drugs", sure, maybe that's true. That's really not the position you've been portraying though - but that this is some exclusive perspective, that only arises when you let your mind magically throw everything else away temporarily via chemical means.
> the reaction isn't to consider the critique, but to defend the myth as "reality."
Doesn't help if you set up the rhetorical framework that way... Mind you, every belief is like this. It's not just those inherited from culture.
The resistance is real, systematic, and rational (from the perspective of maintaining current power arrangements). Not a joke.
For example, someone might have insights about the interconnectedness of all life and wants to transition to regenerative agriculture or communal land use, but face zoning laws that enforce individual property ownership. Or someone might experience ego dissolution and wants to create more egalitarian workplace structures, but runs into rigid corporate hierarchies.
Individual insight doesn't map to institutional action. Systems can't integrate experiences they can't measure or systematize.
I do think that there are some truths to government desire for narrative management, too. It is unwise to be a hugger in a knife fight, and you don't want the populace to get high, see God, and deteriorate national security.
All in all though, it all boils down to life being complicated. The resistance isn't adversarial - it's structural. Which makes it both less intentionally evil and harder to overcome.
Realistically an entire new agency (DEA) was chartered to enforce the new regulations, and the greatest threats were those thought to disrupt an "ordained" vision of reality that was not to include the kind of experimentation which made clinical evaluation possible.
Rapidly, before the most thorough experiments could be conducted which would have more accurately informed the established pharma regulation process.
Rather it was superstition that was included in the new regulations, and the enforcement agency was mustered to fight to preserve more superstition than should ever be allowed.
This really really stands the test of time, and if kelsey did not personally observe this phenomenon, it's even more amazing than it appears on the surface.
In the SF bay area – & plenty of other regions around the world – the criminal enforcement against hallucinogens is, de facto, a very low priority as long as you're not flagrantly endangering or inconveniencing others.
the normal dose is 5-10mg, but LD50 in sheep is about 100mg, it might be as low as 30mg in humans.
It absolutely should not be legal, at least to anyone. Perhaps require training in dealing with drugs with a low therapeutic index
1–5 mg/kg IV
1–2 mg/kg SC
85 mg/kg O
In mice:
75–115 mg/kg IP
48 mg/kg IV
113 mg/kg SC
278 mg/kg O
They were administering over 30mg to humans in trials. (Metzner (2013); Shulgin and Shulgin (1997); Ott (2001); Davis et al. (2018); Uthaug et al. (2020a))
Sheep are susceptible to toxicity from certain tryptamine alkaloids because of their physiology.
These alkaloids, especially those that are N,N-dimethylated, can trigger neurological symptoms in sheep, such as convulsions, spasticity, and gait issues. The alkaloids are suspected to affect the brain and spinal cord by interacting with serotonin receptors.
5-MeO-DMT is an N,N-dimethylated compound. Its full chemical name is 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine. That indicates the presence of two methyl groups attached to the nitrogen atom of the tryptamine backbone.
Stay safe, everyone!
You can't use animal models for dose, you have to convert to hED (Human-Equivalent Dosage). You can estimate this generally with allometric scaling:
https://drughunter.com/practical-pk-calculators
Also, animal physiology varies.
Beta-adrenergic agonists like clenbuterol make mice wildly muscular, which unfortunately is not the case in humans, for example.
That seems quite unlikely given that there are many 30mg dose trip reports, going as far back as TiHKAL.
"why, there's no magazine called 'Weird' is there?" [0]
Example that just came across my news feed: "psilocin, a byproduct of consuming psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, extended the cellular lifespan of human skin and lung cells by more than 50%."
https://neurosciencenews.com/psilocybin-longevity-aging-2942...
Timothy Leary might've drawn a parallel on the psychological impact of computers (I have no idea on the exact quote or it's context), which is enormous, but computers are just not psychedelic.
It's active intranasally and well as buccally/sublingually.
Effects-wise, it feels roughly identical to DMT but with a longer duration.
I made this mistake exactly once, with 4-AcO-DMT.
That was the last time I ever did such a thing.
(If you do this, make sure you inject the upper-outer quadrant. The closer to your midline you go, the further the risk of you hitting a nerve.)
If you're very experienced and want to do it for novelty's sake, go for it; I'd warn you, but anyone considering this should know what they're likely in for.
Nearly immediately after injection, I became so filled with vibrating, psychedelic energy I thought my soul was going to be ripped from my body. I had to clutch the edge of the sink, trying not to vomit while staring at the exploding fractals swirling in the metallic reflection.
It only lasts about 2 hours. I'd not particularly rate the experience as "good".
For 5-meo I generally do 6-8mg prepared as above. That seems subjectively close to 15-20mg vaped (powder in a glass pipe not in a “juice” vape).
But either of those are definitely a commitment to the ride, lol. I do like the mixed jaguar vape cartridges for micro dosing though (like Bill prepares them in the article). Very easy to control your dosage that way with the ability to start slow and add more with additional puffs.
But 4-AcO has much less body load and no nausea from the organic matter that'd usually be sitting in your stomach, I think it's better than "organic" shrooms.
5-MeO is a lot stronger mg-for-mg, you're quite brave at those doses IMO!
Truth be told, I was more of a fan of the lighter headspace phenethylamines, like 2C-B or even 25i/25b-NBOMe.
I would describe 5-meo as a trip that gives you an immediate understanding of how life and the universe “works” at a very fundamental level. Your perception changes from analytical type thinking to all of a sudden just knowing how everything fits together and how you can control reality around you. A bit like pulling the curtain back and seeing the source code of realty but then also intuitively knowing how to manipulate and rewrite it and seeing the effects of that in real time.
I wish I could explain it better.
In terms of ROA between vaping and IM get the same type of knowing but from a different perspective. Injected feels like your personal programming code gets rewritten and you have a reality shift to having administrator privileges while vaped feels like the person that wrote the code is a co-pilot in your head explaining how the code is written and how it executes to present as reality to you.
There’s definitely a lot of overlap between each roa type though.
What I describe above is also my experience after dozens of trips with 5-Meo. The first few were definitely more confusing and at times overwhelming as the perspective shift can be severe. Once you get experienced though it’s a fun way to cruise around in “reality”
https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html
Still very sad that HyperCard got sidelined and that even its successor, Livecode abandoned the idea of being available to everyone --- though it looks as if folks are still working that:
>Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media.
Understanding the risks of buying potentially adulterated or counterfeit products is another thing entirely, which would be helped greatly by increased commodification and legalization.
I myself have had bad / hell like experiences a small percentage of the time, despite literal hundreds of good experiences prior.
Becoming a father many years ago significantly altered my trip experience.
Dosage also plays a strong role..
These things are generally less toxic than alcohol and it is criminal to punish someone for having them or using them.. But they are also extremely powerful, and despite potential amazing experiences, do carry risks.
And they are definitely not for everyone.
One of my first times after, in my experience, I literally went to hell. I was convinced I was on the outskirts, all the people at the party around me were demons, I was about to be tortured forever, and I was never going to see my son again and he was going to grow up without me..
I convinced myself I was in that position because I had wrecked and killed someone, and my punishment was forever replaying the experiencing of a life where I would grow up to have a son, only to have him ripped away from me, reminded of what I did, and then tortured for some nearly eternal amount of time....
Any conversations people had with me at the time, I heard the words they were saying but completely twisted the meaning of the words to fit whatever crazy narrative was going on in my head.
This has happened 4 or 5 times. Despite being familiar with the experience, in my mind it just reinforces that I am in a "loop" at the time, about to be tortured again..
It's happened with LSD, Mushrooms, and surprisingly even ketamine. *edit it also happened during an intense changa experience with a shaman in Tijuana, which was my most intense experience with anything to date..
You'd think I would not take this stuff anymore =p I have at least slowed down considerably...
I tell people: I had both the best day of my life, and the worst day of my life on psychedelics.
As an atheist with no supernatural beliefs (that I know of), I wonder if a trip on LSD for me would just be boring, or if these supernatural things become real during a trip even if you don't truly believe in them.
Regardless of your beliefs, whatever your experience, I highly doubt you would find it "boring".
I can't even imagine that really, it would take a very boring person.
I've heard a lot of acid stories, but never "I was just kind of bored"
We often attract certain types of people, and have a wealth of experience with that type.
We probably all take this as obvious knowledge. But only when I uncomfortably enter a group of people unlike me -- and feel totally alienated not just by their norms and assumptions, but their misunderstandings of my own -- only then do I truly confront the implications in a visceral, non-academic sense :)
Citing Sam Harris:
“Ingesting a powerful dose of a psychedelic drug is like strapping oneself to a rocket without a guidance system. One might wind up somewhere worth going, and, depending on the compound and one’s “set and setting,” certain trajectories are more likely than others. But however methodically one prepares for the voyage, one can still be hurled into states of mind so painful and confusing as to be indistinguishable from psychosis.”
“This is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. As I will make clear below, these drugs pose certain dangers. Undoubtedly, some people cannot afford to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug.”
If they are safe to be around and are able to hold a job or have children, then there's societal benefits gained. One could consider the treatment costs as investments.
If that person was untreated and they did something unpleasant or bad in public, or ended up in prison, that also has a cost to society though it might be more complex to quantify.
motorcycles...? in... my eyes?
What wizardry is this? First "computers in my brain", now this. I'll have the singularity that you're smoking pls :)
EDIT: was at first genuinely confused, and then tickled by my own misunderstanding
From personal experience, this is de-facto true regardless of what anyone thinks the law says.
I guess we could do something like:
<normal coverage> - <adjustment for risky behavior> + <adjustment for pro-social outcomes>
Motorcycle cops are an obvious subset of people who ride motorcycles. It isn’t an extension at all to include them in your logic.
ATVs might be more of an extension. But, I bet if we wanted to we could find all sorts of jobs that are more dangerous than motorcycle riding.
(Edit: just to be specific, you say we have to draw the line somewhere. Well, then where?)
I'd say it is worth looking at redrawing that based on the maximum effect achieved. Drugs would be at the top of this list, followed by motor vehicle use and unhealthy foods. There is probably not enough justification to go beyond the 3.
I guess I’ve been beating around the bush, but my point is that targeting drugs specifically for this sort of thing would seem kind of, I dunno, puritanical to me (as someone who doesn’t partake). I’d rather just insure everybody and hope they don’t hurt themselves, just out of their own self interest.
The problem isnt that this still is casually available. Drugs have been casually available since forever.
The problem is that pushing drug usage to the fringes makes it less safe for people who haven’t done their homework. Ironically the exact opposite of that you claimed.
The only way in the US is to have a powerful lobby that can fight to ensure broad waivers stand up in court, like the NRA: you can buy a gun and literally shoot yourself in the foot.
But if transaction, money, service, profession are all removed, then under a co-op / non profit this might work. Of course, those structures are also vulnerable to well-funded legal opponents.
Some European countries do provide a framework for this but it's more from a public health perspective and to eliminate the raison-d'être of criminal drug organizations.
I was getting ads for MindMed's clinical trials of their LSD analogue a few months back and was considering signing up for it, as I'm totally down with more scientific research on these compounds. However, the idea that a corporation with a patent on an analogue that is lobbying to make it so their version is the one that is approved is kinda the worst. We already have LSD, it's cheap and it's amazing, yet here we are marching down the road of some patented version being the one that's approved for use. I get that these companies want to fund research, but this isn't the way.
https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/european-cough-medicine-...
Is that actually the common thing to do amongst recreational psychadelics users (i.e. is there research backing this up)?
And how do these folks "understand the substance(s)"? We (humanity) know very little about how the brain works comparatively as far as I'm aware, and psychadelics research is further relatively lacking due to regulatory and funding constraints. Most resources I hear of just seem to be compilations of anecdata, frequently muddled with subjective remarks.
We were able to clarify it and we're both being decent sports about the topic, but you can imagine how well this might go over in less careful and open minded situations. Or even desperate ones.
If I go buy some psychedelic, chances are it is diluted or laced, so I would have to know how to test that what they sell me is what I asked for.
Of course you have to find such a shop (hint: try Canada), and it's still a lot of hassle for something that should be perfectly legal, and is, in many places.
Teens will always get their hands on things so it’s up to parents to teach kids how to be safe around drugs and alcohol, but I know I personally will be really trying to communicate to my kids that they need to wait until they’re 18 to really start exploring all this stuff. I know they will before that, but as long as it’s a little experimentation here and there and not regular use I’ll consider it a success.
Once you’re past 18 or so, it needs to be all about education and general availability for most substances. Safe usage and community protections (such as not driving while intoxicated) should be the #1 goal.
I'm curious in what demographic/location context you're in to say that. As a teen I wasn't aware of anyone in my social circles experimenting with drugs and would estimate usage to be <10% and from very particular kinds of people.
> By the time they’re in 12th grade, 46.6% of teens have tried illicit drugs.
I guess that speaks a bit to the culture and availability of both things here in the States.
Bringing it into the light under thoughtful consideration and openly discussing and encouraging harm prevention is the only way to make this safe. Everyone should have the right to to exploring this if they want to, and there should be plenty of open discussion, research, and education. I really appreciate the open-source approach here, the spirit of this movement feels like the right thing for humanity.
I strongly disagree. Your circles might be different, but in my experience, wanting to do your homework makes it less accessible, because it tends to put you at odds with the people who are otherwise eager to grant you access. They want people with a certain mindset and an up-front faith in the process. They want people who aren't careful about ingesting psychoactive substances, are eager to put their mental health in the hands of some guy they barely know, and are going to blame their own baggage or spiritual shortcomings if it doesn't go well.
These drugs, and many others, are already pretty accessible if you are willing to take that heedless approach.
In contrast, the approach described in the article is expressly tailored for people who want to be careful and do their homework. It's for people who have access to the drug and implicitly already have access to cruder ways of using it, but who want to put in extra effort for a more controlled experience.
I agree this is important, which is why psychedelics should be legalized so there is at least some sort of control instead of the current approach where 14 year olds can easier get their hands on it.
However you said that your not knowledgeable and I guess that you doesn't have access to a milligrams scale, so your better to stay away and learn the theory first. A lot of psilocybin analog (alpha-MethylTryptamine was one of my favorite and it's still available) from Thikal are still legal in Canada so that book is a good place to start learning.
"Big Reality" was either terrified of everyone becoming drooling monkeys, or people seeing behind the curtain of society, depending on who you ask.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...
Personally, I'd rather have a proper doctor prescribe me said medicine than take it myself.
Furthermore, I've had mixed experiences with health professionals. It took me 10 years across multiple clinics and states to get diagnosed with gout that I've had since at least my late teens. Laughed out of multiple doctor's offices because I'm a "healthy young male" even though each day and night was filled with excruciating pain and drastically reduced mobility. "Full test panels" that specifically did not test my uric acid, because no healthy young male has gout.
No mention of gout ever to me, of course. I had to self diagnose as the disease progressed due to lack of treatment. Got my diagnosis confirmed by a physician's assistant, because both doctors at that clinic were on vacation at the same time for like the third time that quarter. He ordered a uric acid test, and was surprised that I'd never been offered one.
Both doctors had literally laughed me out of the office over the previous months. But I was persistent and it turns out the physician's assistant there was both more thorough and more knowledgeable than either doctor, helping me finally begin a path to treatment. I was damn near about to kill myself from a decade of extraordinary pain. From my discussions with older, typical gout sufferers, my case is extraordinarily bad and most of them only experience mild pain.
It's equally as silly to place 100% trust in doctors as it is to place 0% trust in them.
It took me years to be diagnosed with PTSD, a problem I knew I had. Because I am not a vet, I had to go through every other diagnosis first -- schizo, bipolar, borderline -- each with a new set of pills to take. Some of the shrinks who diagnosed me wouldn't do anything but open my file, make some remarks, and fill out a prescription, with nary any eye contact.
Finally got a very expensive doctor who wasn't under the thumb of insurance companies. Her first question, upon hearing my issues, was "how is your sleep?" "I don't, really" was my reply. Screened me for PTSD and I clocked 76/80 pts. She set me up with the proper therapy, and within a year, I was screening at 30/80 pts. All it took was asking me one question that wasn't loaded towards the doctors favorite diagnosis & prescription.
If you don't know what's wrong with you, then a doctor is absolutely the way to go. But if you already have a diagnosis, you can go spend time researching it, the doctor isn't going to do that.
The medical community is concerned with physical health, mental health, ect.
The Psychedelic community is more like a religion; it is "vast" and there is a lot of "shared knowledge" if you go looking. The thing is, western medicine's purpose really isn't to do the kind of thing that psychedelics are for.
It's probably better not to conflate the two communities, because they use drugs for very different purposes.
A different way to say it: Don't confuse the pharmacy and the liquor store.
That medical doctor doesn't even know how most of the medications work, or why!
If it was just about "health" a lot of things with our modern medical care would be different.
And a bunchhhhh of other things.
Compounding the issue is the eye-rolling hypocrisy that in the so-called "Land of the Free", a healthcare system controlled by the gatekeepers of big pharma and for-profit companies gets a blind pass... but putting certain plants (that you can grow yourself) into your own body is considered a serious felony...?
There's at least a sliver of daylight here that mean YMMV (which I'm sure you and I would agree on) - but if you lack the freedom to choose anyways, then it doesn't matter. And the people who decide for you are clearly part of a system that is compromised by regulatory capture, political polarization, and the insatiable greed of American healthcare.
What I had my friend made. Bought some root, had to use naptha to separate it in a fridge then put it (powder) on top of something flammable and smoke it like weed.
Further thoughts:
On a side note/comparison, weed for me it's like. Day to day you're driven by a known process/system. You have to get to work at 9 AM, go to this, then that. Smoking weed you stop and are in the moment, suddenly focused on how vibrant this red shrub is that you normally ignore. I don't smoke weed anymore because it makes me super paranoid like afraid cops are going to arrest me or I can't interact with people as I already have social anxiety. The other thing is it would enforce my delusions thinking some idea was great/fixate on some design (I was trying to use it to come up with ideas to make money).
DMT is like losing steady state/reality, solid things start to move. The colors were not solid for me, it's like when you push your eyes (while closed) and you see flashes of light. This was a long time ago I did it so might not be remembering as well, it was intense though and brief.
I have not done acid or shrooms as I have bad repressed childhood memories and I don't want to get stuck in that for hours.
Did K one time, I just sat on a couch throughout a party doing nothing/sipping on a cup of water.
K2/Salvia that stuff was whack, I felt like I was sinking into a couch when I smoked it in a shed with a buddy and I felt dumb like I couldn't talk correctly.
C and Addy, amazing. I mean if you could operate life like that all the time you'd probably die just because you'd do crazy things like do a jump that you normally wouldn't just because of the overconfidence. But yeah the ability to sit down/cram 12 hrs of work and pass a test, amazing or nail every note on a guitar. The weight loss is great but I found my p would shrink so much it was crazy. At one point started to defecate blood (was just a fissure) so yeah that was a problem. I would use A for times when I couldn't get sleep and would just do these overnighters at a data-entry job.
Also did M before (fake addy) and yeah, that's great for drinking, you can just pound beers/liquor and not feel it. The bad thing is the come downs, you are drained of happiness, can't do anything and it is hard to recover. A way to recover is to jerk off a lot. But yeah I don't do that anymore just because the sadness is crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-MeO-DMT#Effects
https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/07/01/5-meo-dmt-vs-nn-dmt-t...
My other drug of choice is adrenaline from driving fast my car currently tops out just under 160mph and I'd go even faster if I could but maybe thankfully I can't. Fear is funny too, I don't fear this but I fear talking to people ha.
I'm trying to stop this because the tickets part, I only screw around on highways when I'm alone and day time, I don't do swimming/cutting people off but yeah.
The speed thing is easy get an old ZR1 it can go 200 but going in a straight line can be boring. It's the acceleration. Recently been watching this guy drive an Elise down roads in Switzerland that's pretty fun and not that fast. I know you can track too but idk.
It's entirely natural, easy to do, has no side effects, costs next to nothing, and can even be "fun". As usual, the media will not talk about this discovery, as it is too much of a game-changer for our current systems.
[0] https://neurosciencenews.com/psilocybin-longevity-aging-2942...
If we assume that the effect is the same for all types of cells, it follows that the life is extended by 50% (when keeping "all other factors" constant, as usual).
I wouldn't say a word if it weren't nth article about psychedelics that appears on HN frontpage. I was quiet the last n-1 times.
If you google psilocybin right now, you can see articles that state how it "slows ageing" and "cures depression". There probably is some truth to it, but only in very specific sense and specific circumstances. Most people will NOT benefit from taking the drug (as with any drug).
So it hurts my soul when I see words like "legalize" being thrown in this context. We know very very little about effect of such drugs. And the goal should not be to legalize, but rather to expand our knowledge on how it works, and create safe medicine that actually helps people.
Rant is over now. Thank you.
An article just came out showing that psilocybin extends life in aged mice, so that’s why you’re seeing it a lot. Yet we have no idea what causes this lifespan increase. Is it a result of “hallucination” experience itself , a purely chemical effect, or something in between? (aka will a ‘bad trip’ give the same effect on lifespan?)
> Most people will NOT benefit from taking the drug (as with any drug)
Now you’re just making things up.
That seems like exactly when we should legalize it. The default is legal, and without definite knowledge of serious harm, that should be the status.
The burden of proof should be on the people who want it to be legal, and by your comment, their case seems pretty weak.
One of the commenters of your post says "If we legalize it we can better research it". Allow me to be rude -- this is BS. If we follow this logic we should legalize pretty much everything!
I think it is polite to be rude to such dangerous thoughts. Downvote me as you see fit.
Governments should not be in the business of banning things unless there's a clear and present danger. Citizens should have the autonomy to do risky things if they want to.
Acetaminophen is the one that still mysterious, there are credible theories but they don't explain everything the substance does. The latest one I know of is that one : https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2413811122