A review of a book about mescaline and the cacti from which comes, and it’s ancient and recent history.
I think it’s pretty interesting that we got a book about mescaline in 2020. I remember being fascinated by Hunter S. Thompson’s descriptions of the drug in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; nowadays, adoration and abuse of psychedelics seems almost quaint, and the world is full of things that are worse for your mind while holding little or no stigma. Mescaline seems like a wild predator that may have frightened our primitive ancestors but that is entirely irrelevant to a modern city-dweller.
No clue how exactly I ended up on this tab. But I’m fascinated by Chinese music scenes. Global music culture is still mostly US-centric. But there are 1.5 billion Chinese people on earth, living within a culture that is both thousands of years old and evolving more rapidly than ever before, which most westerns know absolutely nothing about. Which is to say, there is probably some pretty cool music in China that we’ve never heard of.
I’m pretty interested in reading this book! That’s why I had the tab open. I can’t just add it to my Amazon wish list or whatever, I have to have the tab open. I found the audiobook on Hoopla, so maybe I’ll listen to it.
I actually have a number of polysci-type books sitting on my shelves, which I haven’t gotten to. I don’t know when I’m going to get to them. I can’t even get to closing my browser tabs, you expect me to read a book.
I cheated a little bit on this one. I had a PDF of this story open in my browser, but not the same we domain. The original seems to have disappeared. So I googled the name of the story that I pulled from the original URL and found “And of Clay Are We Created” by Isabel Allande.
I can’t remember why I was interested in this. If I had more time, I’d read it. It’s pretty short. But, I don’t have time. Maybe I’ll come back to this. The first paragraph is pretty intriguing:
It’s no mystery why I opened this tab–I’ll read about anything that offers a peek into the mind of Salman Rushdie!
Of the four books he mentioned, I’ve only read Candide, which as a great influence on me as well. I will have to read the others. Add them to the list. In all honesty I have not even ready most of Rushdie’s novels, despite him being one of my favorite authors. There’s just so much to read and I don’t have time. I don’t have time to read a short article in the New Yorker, clearly, let alone a wholeass novel. But maybe just spend less time generating those tabs in the first place. Partially, I see this 500 tabs exercise as penance for spreading my attention so thin. It’s well known that everything the devil does to us we do to ourselves. It’s a relevant observation given that Rushdie’s most famous book is about Satan, right?
A while back, I got big into synths. Nowadays, you can download virtual instruments and they sound like just about whatever you want, so in a way hardware synths are obsolete. But, I still think they’re cool. The Grandmother, they only “fancy” hardware synth I own, is analog, which means the sound comes from an electrical circuit, not a computer program; and modular–you can plug other synths into it so they can play together in various ways. This is a good way to force yourself to buy more synths. So far I’ve been pretty successful at avoiding that, but we’ll see what the future holds.
Oh boy. Let me tell you about the deoxyribonucleic hyperdimension. Back when the web was still fresh and shiny and new, deoxy.org was the place to go for an expansive yet idiosyncratic curation of knowledge about drugs, consciousness, politics, culture, and more. Imagine if the 60s were not viewed with nostalgia but rather as the root for some unknown alternate future that we can still realize any time we wake up and decide to do so. The original website is down but thankfully some kind souls have worked to preserve it for posterity.
I asked Google Gemini, which seems to be one of the better free LLM chatbot offerings, whether Claude can be trusted with private information. Because of course I can’t ask Claude. Gemini gave an in-depth answer but not the yes/no I was looking for. Which probably means o should trust Gemini more, but I still don’t.
I searched for gated reverb because I heard it used in reference to one of my favorite musicians right now, mk.gee. I won’t go into what gated reverb is because you can just follow the link. But basically, think Phil Collins’ drums.
On the subject of Phil Collins, I’m always fascinated when people in successful but lesser-known bands, like Genesis, go on to become big stars. Nowadays we don’t really have bands anymore. Do young people even play in bands? Where do musicians cut their teeth? TikTok and YouTube, I guess, right? I dunno how I feel about missing out on Genesis and skipping straight to the Peter Gabriel’s and Phil Collinses.
Drafts is the simple-yet remarkably complicated writing app that I’m using at this very moment to draft this post.
Essentially you open drafts and start writing. Once you’re done writing the options are basically unlimited. You can tag your drafts, export them to other apps or to cloud folders, even write your own code to handle them–if I bothered to figure it all out I could probably post directly to this blog from Drafts.
I learned about the WHOOP fitness tracker from one of my internet friends who is generally skeptical about tech but, like the rest of us, struggling against the inevitable grinding by time of the body into dust. I mean that’s the point of these fitness devices, right? To assuage our fears of death, or at very least profit off of them? The WHOOP is priced such that I’m not sure anyone under 35 would take a second glance. But maybe fear of mortality is hitting younger these days?
For a while I was very into maxxing out my productivity using LLMs. I still am, a little, but not so much. Still, I’m very intrigued by LLMs like Claude and what you can do with them.
A skill is essentially a standardized set of specific instructions for Claude. In this way it’s a bit like a program. Except, where most coded programs are deterministic–i.e., for a given set of inputs, they’ll return the exact same output every time, a Claude skill, like LLM prompts in general, are non-deterministic. This makes them pretty useless for tasks where accuracy and consistency are required.
I googled Laufey because a friend said I might be into her music. She’s ok. I think with most Scandinavian singer-songwriters, I can appreciate the quality of their art but can never quite connect with it. The exception being Ace of Bass, of course, but it wouldn’t be fair to Laufey to turn a post about her into praise for Ace of Bass, who after all may be nazis.
I’ll be honest–I don’t entirely remember why I even opened this tab. Did I get a credit card offer from Citi? Sometimes they send you good stuff. I was never one of those points churners. There are people who make a very good living gaming the system, taking advantage of credit card points and other rewards programs, mastering arcade games (or finding the broken skee ball machine that gives you 100 tickets every time), etc. I feel like life isn’t about gaming the system. If you haven’t come about what you have honestly, how are you supposed to enjoy it? I’m not trying to be on a high horse or anything. For one thing, some people do work pretty hard finding these loopholes and so maybe it is honest work. For another, I probably wasted my time doomscrolling when I could have been keeping my mind sharp and reaping the rewards of gaming the system. But I still don’t want to. That’s just me.