Ran Prieur

January 7.

2022-01-07T19:50:55Z

January 7. Fun stuff for the weekend. First I want to recommend the new Netflix movie, Don't Look Up. Don't watch the trailer -- it has too many spoilers. All you need to know is that it's about a comet heading for the earth, and all the dumb things people do in response to it. Maybe the most interesting thing about the movie is Mark Rylance's performance as a billionaire tech guru. The character is absolutely a villain, but he's unlike any movie villain I've ever seen, and yet totally believable.

Thread on the Psychonaut subreddit, What if people on psychedelics aren't actually hallucinating? I was expecting dumb stuff about the machine elves being physically real, but it actually has a lot of thoughtful comments about how psychedelic mental states can be better than our default mental state.

By the way, a couple weeks ago I made tea out of seven dry grams of psilocybe cubensis and liberty cap, and the high was totally lame. The launch was a mildly unpleasant delirium, and on the plateau I went for a walk on a beautiful winter day and it wasn't any different from being sober, except that I was mentally foggy. Seriously, I've had better results from a 20th of a gram of weed -- except that two days after a mushroom trip, I always feel like the cobwebs have been cleaned out of my brain. But I can get that from one gram, so I think I'm done with large doses.

From yesterday, an Ask Reddit thread, People who used to not believe in the paranormal but do now - What experience changed your mind? It's mostly about ghosts. And it makes me wonder, suppose there are actually millions of ghosts floating around, and it's only a tiny fraction who make themselves known to the living.

Finally, I don't think I've ever posted NFL highlights, but this video is exceptional: Every One of Joe Burrow's 15 Touchdown passes of 30 yards or more. Burrow may turn out to be the most accurate passer of all time, and right now Ja'Marr Chase is the most dangerous receiver.

January 5.

2022-01-05T17:30:22Z

January 5. Again with the new year, I want to check in with the ongoing collapse. It's going pretty fast lately -- if you were to take the rate of change and breakdown over the last five years, and keep it going for a hundred years, it would be way more than in any hundred year period of the decline of Rome.

Maybe the rate of collapse will slow, but it can't turn around. The nonrenewable resources are almost gone, the climate is sliding into chaos, and our institutions are bloated and ossified. The skillbase is shrinking, to continue the world as we know it, as that world's needs increase.

But it would be a mistake to take a general forecast of decline, and project it on every place and every person. I have a hypothesis that a falling society is more granular than a rising society. If you go from town to town in the 2050's, or from neighbor to neighbor, you'll see bigger differences in how people are living, and how happy they are, than you would have seen in the 1950's. Already, during Covid lockdown, some people were having the worst time of their lives while other people were having the best.

One thing that would shift the whole bell curve toward worse, is if people are going hungry. But wherever there's enough food, I'm optimistic that human ingenuity will come up with some cool stuff. In the best places, they won't even tell the story of having gone through a crash, but of figuring out better ways to do things while the old ways died out.

It's fun to imagine what the world might look like in a few hundred years. Some things we could never guess, but I expect the population will have fallen, and because of that, there will be a lot of ghost towns and abandoned urban sprawl. The economy will not be based on exponential growth, unless it's hurrying toward another collapse. Will they be digging up our landfills for scraps, and reading our mouldering books for ancient wisdom, or will they have moved on to a way of life that doesn't need us?

January 2, 2022.

2022-01-02T14:00:46Z

January 2, 2022. The turnover of the year is a nice motivational tool to make changes, and there are different kinds of changes. When people talk about New Year's resolutions, they're usually talking about changing habits, or default behaviors. The main thing I want to work on this year is being more physically present in every moment. I'm making it a game, where I break my actions down to small things: open dishwasher, put spoon in, close dishwasher; and I count how many things I can do in a row before I mess up and have to do something twice. This includes typing without having to hit backspace all the time.

Another kind of change you can make is in your priorities for living. The last couple years I've been thinking more about death, which generally feels like a relief. But the closer I get to understanding it, the more I see that I really don't want to die -- I want to continue living with no responsibilities. So that's my number one priority from here on: to minimize the number of things I have to do. Part of this is that I'll probably be blogging less, especially on hot-button subjects. Or, as I wrote last month in this thread: I used to want to be Gandalf, the famous wizard who saves the world. Now I want to be Radagast, the obscure wizard who hangs out with trees.

One thing I did in 2021 was get better at playing piano. I just follow whatever is fun to do with the keys, and I've ended up putting at least 50 hours into polyrhythms, before putting one hour into chord changes. My usual style is to park my fingers on the same keys for an entire piece and improvise. I have my favorite chords that I come back to, and over time I develop melodies and patterns that I come back to.

Over the holidays, I had a brief housesit at a house with a real piano. It's a bit out of tune, some of the keys are half-dead, and my recording system is super lo-fi, but it still sounds better than MIDI on my digital keyboard. So I recorded some stuff and ended up with three decent tracks. I call them Faewater, Jam in F, and Sunburst.