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Vibe: Psychedelic Chillout playlist

If you have Spotify, here is an almost endless playlist of: “Unsane psychedelic, psychonautic sails forming tunes that fuel your imagination and give your mind wings to help you tune in, turn on and drop out into the One Cosmic Love 🙂 <3 … Feat. psydub, psybient, ambient, a pinch of glitch and lots of weirdness.” Bands include Mir, Bonobo, Air, the Great Mundane, etc.

Cover image by Yukaman.

TV: Woody becomes Leary

Reportedly, Woody Harrelson has signed on to play Timothy Leary in an adaptation of The Most Dangerous Man in America. No network is attached yet, but with the well-known source material and a big star, it seems likely to happen. Vice tells more.

For those who don’t know Leary, here is the quick: he was a Harvard psychology professor who co-led the ethically problematic Harvard Psilocybin Project with Richard Albert (who later became self-help guru Ram Dass). Both Leary and Alpert were fired from Harvard and Leary went on to live an orgiastic debaucherous lifestyle in a Massachusetts mansion, in Mexico, the Bay Area and jail. He was famously sexist and homophobic, he coined the phrases “set and setting” and “tune in and drop out”, he was a psychedelic evangelist to the 10th degree and his ego-fueled cultural stardom is retrospectively considered a significant factor in the federal scheduling of LSD and henceforth a roadblock in the legal approval road of contemporary psychedelic research.

Guided: Michael Pollan shrooming

UCal Professor and food journalist Michael Pollan writes in the New York Times about his first mushroom trip experience, with an underground professional guide:

I WOULD HAVE preferred to have my own guided psilocybin session aboveground in the reassuring confines of a medical institution, but the teams at Hopkins and N.Y.U. weren’t currently working with so-called healthy normals (do I flatter myself?) — and I could lay claim to none of the serious mental problems they were studying. I wasn’t trying to fix anything big — not that there wasn’t room for improvement. Like many people in late middle age, I had developed a set of fairly dependable mental algorithms for navigating whatever life threw at me, and while these are undeniably useful tools for coping with everyday life and getting things done, they leave little space for surprise or wonder or change. After interviewing several dozen people who had undergone psychedelic therapy, I envied the radical new perspectives they had achieved. I also wasn’t sure I’d ever had a spiritual experience, and time was growing short. The idea of “shaking the snow globe” of my mental life, as one psychedelic researcher put it, had come to seem appealing.

Michael Pollan

Costumes: A Love Story

Via BoingBoing, Verasphere is a vibrant and adorable 20 minute documentary about costuming, romance and community.
“We had a terrible burrito, but it was great.”
“It’s always Ms. It’s Mrs. Vera. She’s had a history.”
“The only thing that’s required is the interest to do it… it’s not normal to want to look that strange… but it’s really fun.”
“Our collaboration saved his life.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpy_yCo2U7s

[It] follows two San Francisco artists, David Faulk and Michael Johnstone, who fall in love at the height of the AIDS epidemic. While most of their community is overcome with grief and rage, David and Michael discover an unlikely joy through the creation of Mrs. Vera, an outrageous costumed character made from found materials. What began as an intimate art project and a way to pass the time while they faced an inevitable death, soon took on a life of its own. Now 25 years later, a large and diverse community has evolved around Mrs. Vera, all centered around one day of costumed celebration in the San Francisco Pride Parade.

Offbeat: Games for the Soul


COCOA MOSS

Looking for a game that invokes nostalgia or melts your heart at the end of a hard day? Cocoa Moss is a collaboration of indie game developers that’s resulted in 12 free whimsical games (and counting). From puzzle adventures to atmospheric wanderings, at least one of these games will brighten up your day. Stay up to date via Twitter.

cocoa moss. goodnight meowmie.

THE ROOM

The Room is a BAFTA-winning, immersive 3D puzzle game sure to delight those who enjoy a “mind-bending” mystery and an eerie atmosphere. This game is available for a reasonable price via iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, Steam (Windows only), and Nintendo Switch.

the room. fireproof games.

PROTEUS

Looking for a place to purely wander with a sense of curiosity and positive vibes? Proteus renders a uniquely generated and responsive world played to dreamy music. Investigate and capture moments of discovery. This game is also available via SteamHumble Store, and itch.io


VIGNETTES

Vignettes is a kaleidoscopic, casual gaming experience with hidden puzzles and narratives. Purchase game here for exclusive content: https://skeletonbiz.itch.io/vignettes.

String Theory: 100 miles of yarn

Psychedelic yarn art. Krakow based artists Przemek Podolski and Marta Basandowskaby spin the yarn into mind-bending installations, highlighted by blacklights. Podolski said: “I was fascinated by the cosmos and its space. When I first saw string art I thought it was suitable for visualising the matter of the cosmos.”

Przemek Podolski and Marta Basandowska, use a black light and projection mapping to create the yarn installations.

Pinocchio : These people aren’t real?

If you look someone deep enough in the eyes you can see their soul, the idiom claims. This Person Does Not Exist plays with God’s digital palette (also known as machine learning) and designs people who don’t exist. If you look into their eyes deep enough they might become real. Learn how this is done here.

This Person Does Not Exist
This Person Does Not Exist
This Person Does Not Exist
This Person Does Not Exist
This Person Does Not Exist

Notable: Researcher Amanda Feilding

From a totally fascinating Wired article about Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and March who is a primary researcher of LSD as a powerful potential tool for mental health clinicians:

This is the future of therapy as Feilding sees it: You enter a clinic with your mind in a certain unwanted setting. Perhaps you’re ruminating over some kind of trauma. You meet with a therapist and do a relatively large dose of LSD, followed by smaller doses down the line, known as microdosing. (This has come into vogue of late, especially among Silicon Valley types who believe a minute dose of LSD makes them more creative without all the pesky hallucinations.)

“You need the peak experience to break through and change the setting,” Feilding says. “And then the microdose experience can give a little booster along the way and make it more energetic and vital and a bit more lively.”

Which sounds like something the authorities wouldn’t be so keen on. But medical officials in the UK and the US and elsewhere have actually been giving permission to study psychedelics of late. Still, the red tape is a nightmare, as are the costs. “There are three institutions in England which have a safe that can store psychoactive controlled substances,” Feilding says. “And then you’re meant to weigh them every week and have two people guarding the door. It’s insane. But I think it’s breaking down a little bit, and the more good results we can bring in, the better.”

See/Hear: The Daily Psychedelic Video blog

Since 2010, a team of self-described “psychedelic video aficionados” have posted a video a day on their aptly-named blog, The Daily Psychedelic Video. They write: “These videos can take you on very deep journeys, but only if you allow them the proper time and attention. Watching these videos when you’re randomly browsing the web in the middle of your working day is very different to watching them in your free time, relaxed, on a big screen, with a good set of speakers/earphones, and spliff in your hand.” They blog also offers an intellectual treatise on psychedelic aesthetics.

Here are a few of from their list of “Best Videos”:

The fractals created by the birds in the sky can sometimes be more beautiful than anything ever created with the flashiest CGI effects. (Original post on The Daily Psychedelic Video).
Baltimore rapper Rye created this hyper-psychedelic and fun version of Vengaboy’s Boom Boom. (Original post on The Daily Psychedelic Video)
An exquisite work of meditative psychedelia, Thomas Blanchard’s memories of paintings delves into microscopic bubble universes and finds endless infinitesimal detail in the interactions between paint, oil, oat milk and soap. (Original post on The Daily Psychedelic Video).
Cyriak, the web’s mad genius of consciousness-altering visuals, deconstructs 1950s style visuals and creates a complex swirling web of hypnotic disorientation.  (Original post on The Daily Psychedelic Video).