June 3.

2021-06-03T15:50:04Z

June 3. Right after making Monday's post, I took my annual early summer LSD trip. My supply is low enough that I'm only doing it once a year now, but this time I decided to try a tab and a half. The only difference I noticed was that it came on a lot faster. I've still never hallucinated on any substance -- I see what everyone else sees, but differently.

I should also say, LSD is serious, and the younger you are, the bigger the risk. If you're over fifty, your brain is a rusty old engine, and psychedelics are like whacking it with a pipe to loosen it up. You wouldn't whack a cat with a pipe, and that cat is your sixteen year old brain. And unlike cannabis, LSD can bend your brain so it can't be bent back. Anyway, if you're going to do it, my advice is to stock up on fresh fruit, and go walk around outside.

First I took a walk downtown. I've never liked the metaphor that people are asleep, and should wake up. Metaphors should be based on something that makes sense literally, and literal sleep is wonderful. What I saw on my walk, is that humans are not so much asleep, as we are deeply unalive. I mean, we're getting better. But still, what a delicate balance, to be alive enough to set a good example for others, but not so alive that they kill you.

Then, as I always do, I walked up the river trail out of town. I was reminded of the Wallace Stevens line, "We live in an old chaos of the sun," and the Steven Wright line, "God is a huge amplifier and life is just feedback." Nature is not a temple. Nature is a filthy nectar-dripping riot, and human hedonism is pinched and clunky in comparison.

I don't want to be too ungrateful to be human. We can do a lot of things that no other animal can. We can go deep into our own imaginations and take others along. We can tell stories about the stars. And we can listen to, and create, a huge variety of beautiful sounds.

The next day I went back and filmed a new video. It's for one of Big Blood's trippiest and most challenging songs: Sequins. The structure of the song is nine similar sections of 80 beats, so I took the best bit I filmed, and looped it to sync nine times. So far I haven't used Windows Movie Maker, just Windows Video Editor. The birds are cliff swallows.

June 2.

2021-06-02T14:40:18Z

June 2. The new Firefox update (89) does at least two things I hate. Here's how to fix them.

When you try to search in the search box on the Firefox home page, it moves your search to the address bar. To keep it in the search box: 1) Type about:config into the address bar, and accept the danger. 2) In the search bar that comes up, type handoff. 3) Double-click "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar" to false. "improvesearch"? "Awesomebar"? What is this bullshit?

The other thing is it massively pads my bookmarks. This can't be fixed from about:config. You have to make a userChrome.css file. 1) Find your profile folder using these instructions. 2) Create a userChrome.css file using these instructions. 3) With a text editor (I recommend Notepad++), open your userChrome.css file and copy the code suggested here, but with fewer pixels. I've set all the numbers to 1, and I'm considering 0.

Taking a step back, this is all part of technological collapse. Things that could be simple are made increasingly complex, under the guise of "upgrades", so that engineers can justify their jobs. This complexity makes the practical level of our world less accessible to ordinary users. Stuff that used to be out in the open, is put into black boxes that are hard to get your hands in.

Everything is getting slicker on the surface and more kafkaesque at the core, and we all feel more powerless, and justifiably anxious about things going wrong that we can't fix. When enough things go wrong at once, whole subsystems fall to the highest technological level that people still understand, which might be quite low.

Ran Prieur

June 3.

June 2.