Ran Prieur

July 6.

2026-07-06T18:20:29Z

July 6. Scientific article, The neurophenomenology of a self-induced transcendental visionary state. Basically there's a woman who can enter altered states of consciousness, and they hooked up stuff to watch what her brain does.

Meet The Mushroom That Makes People Have The Exact Same Hallucination: "tiny elflike people".

New study explores the link between mystical psychedelic trips and a reduced fear of dying. They say the mechanism is unclear, but if you've used psychedelics it's pretty clear that your sense of self expands beyond this momentary human identity.

Related: a Reddit post, A Very Brief Outline Of The Evidence For The Afterlife

July 2.

2026-07-02T14:40:08Z

July 2. A personal note. There's a classic young adult book called Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan, in which kids at a spooky boarding school channel the spirits of dead geniuses, and it's not good for them. That's basically my relationship with cannabis. It makes me more motivated, more creative, and more cheerful, but I can feel it wearing down my body, probably by messing with my sleep. I've tried using smaller doses earlier in the day, and it didn't work. So now I've cut back from almost every day to once or twice a week, and because I depend on it for inspiration, I will probably be writing less.

Tomorrow is Bandcamp Friday, and I'm going early into the weekend with some music. The Endless Orbit of Spacemen 3 contains no mention of Hawkwind, but it's a nice article about the second best English space rock band, with lots of links to the Bandcamp pages of artists that they influenced.

Green Lung are a fun doom rock band, I recommend starting with their Free The Witch EP, but this is their latest video, Necropolitan Line.

Living in Seattle in the 90s, I never saw Nirvana, but I saw multiple great bands that never made it big, and one of them was The Model Rockets. One of their songs would have been perfect for my next AI slideshow video, but it turns out someone has already made a fan video, 17 years ago out of video clips: She's On The Cover

July 31, 2025.

2026-07-31T19:30:13Z

July 31, 2025. My novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, is now in beta. I'm good at worldbuilding and bad at exposition, so I want to do more polishing to make it readable, and you should probably wait. But I'm satisfied that I've done what I set out to do: write the novel I wanted to read, that nobody else was writing.