Sweet Nothing
If you wanna a documentary of me on acid. Check out more of the director’s work here.
Author: Aella
A Mild Solipsism Party
A common way of thinking about the self is something like the following: “My consciousness comes from a brain, and that brain is a product of evolutionary pressures. I am a small creature inside an expansive reality. I cannot perceive reality directly – I make constructions that I hope correspond to it – but it […]
The Body of Isolation
I recently liked a boy who didn’t like me in the way I wanted to be liked. He liked another girl, and it hurt. I was more raw than usual, sandpapered down by a few recent intimacy losses. The looming pattern of it made me despondent. I thought I would spend the rest of my […]
My Eight Stages
I was reading about stages of jhana today. I don’t know very much about them, and I don’t know which of my experiences map onto which stages. I felt as though I’ve gone through some progression of ‘stages’ in myself, and I thought maybe describing them would be helpful for the people who’ve expressed curiosity […]
So Says Crazybrain
You are in a room built out of your framework of the world. The beliefs you can describe make up the walls, and the beliefs you can’t make up the floor. The ceiling is a mishmash of memory, patterned like dreams. In the chair in front of you sits Crazybrain. It looks just like you. […]
Finding The Void 101
I don’t know a lot about spiritual traditions. I haven’t read any Buddhist books (minus the Tao te Ching), I don’t meditate regularly, and most of my knowledge about chakras comes from Naruto. But I do have ‘episodes,’ which I’ve mentioned briefly elsewhere on this blog. I don’t know what these episodes are, if other people […]
Luna Answers
For those who didn’t know, I’m working with Luna, a blockchain-based dating app. Scott Alexander recently wrote a post about our project, which – along with the comment section – brought up some questions we don’t currently have good published answers for. So here’s some published answers! This is written assuming you have a basic […]
Getting Smaller and Quieter
Once, when I was lying on the floor in a hotbox of a room, one of my friends was leaving, and she said “Goodbye! I’m going to get smaller and quieter now!” This was surprising to me at the time, but years later ended up being a great example of the sort of translation I […]
Permanent Mental Effects from LSD
These are permanent changes I’ve noticed after doing a fuckton of LSD. It’s been about 3 years since I ‘quit’ (though I still dose about twice a year), and these are the effects that still seem to linger. Please don’t worry any of these will happen to you if you take LSD once in a […]
Dating: Accordions Vs. Sitars
The accordion is much easier than it looks. Each left handed button is an entire chord, and it’s arranged in an easy-to-memorize pattern. You pick it up, press down, and it booms with harmony. The instrument is constructed that you only need to engage with it minimally to get the song you want out of […]