I'm now blogging at Substack. My Substack deliberately avoids sticking to any particular topic or genre. Some of it is reminiscent of things I've put on LessWrong, but I also post my visual art, songs, recipes, and absolutely anything else I feel like. Check it out if you wanna know what I'm up to these days!

This looks really cool and I'm totes gonna read it soon, and also tbh I was super curious how you were gonna categorize insects, arachnids, etc. from scratch, and if you ever try that please do let me know. :p

>the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle

the dumb phone i'm downgrading to arrived today and i think i might write that on the back of it or something

Here are the chords in C, in case it works better for your voice (or your fingers).

Verses:
C F
C G
C F G
Am
G
F
F G

Chorus:
C Am C
F G
Am
Em
F G7 C

btw, although i've read a lot of witchy books at this point, this specific framework is most heavily influenced by the book "Spellcrafting" by Arin Murphy-Hiscock.

here is how to cast a spell. (quick writeup of a talk i gave at DunCon)

Short Version
1. have an intention for change.
2. take a symbolic action representing the change.

that's it. that's all you need. but also, if you want to do it more:

Long Version

Prep

1. get your guts/intuition/S1/unconscious in touch with your intention somehow, and work through any tangles you find.

2. choose a symbolic action representing (and ideally participating in) the change you want, and design your spell around that. to find the right action, try this thought experiment: one day you wake up, and find you're living in the future where you've completely succeeded at getting the thing you want. you stretch and open your eyes. what's the very first thing that tips you off that something's different?

3. when it's time, lay out your materials and do any other physical/logistical prep work.

The Spell Itself

4. dedicate a sacred space (aka "cast a circle"). for example, carry incense around the space three times, or pour a circle of oats, or just move stuff out of the way. maybe ask something that vibes with protection and/or sacredness for you to help (such as a nearby river, or the memory of your grandfather).

5. raise energy. this means, do something that requires effort and focus and that invites your unconscious to the party while getting it engaged with the materials of your spell. maybe chant something relevant, or hold your hands over the magic herbs while pretending you can pour your intention into them. this is not the symbolic action; it just prepares you for the symbolic action.

6. release energy (that is, cast the spell). take the symbolic action you've planned. cut the string, drink the potion, burn the paper, whatever.

Conclude

7. seal the spell. do something that means "i'm now on the other side, in the post-spell world". the wiccans say "so mote it be". the christians say "amen". if your spell involved a jar, you could literally seal it with wax. i once did a spell involving a pair of earrings, which i sealed by putting the earrings on.

8. ground. "return excess energy to the earth." do something that gradually brings you back to a more ordinary state of mind. maybe imagine roots reaching down from your body deep into the earth and pretend you can equalize with the ground by sending your breath down and up those roots. or shake yourself like a wet dog. or eat a piece of cake.

9. release the space. thank whatever helped you cast the circle, then take an action that's the reverse of whatever you did to dedicate the space. walk the circle backward, or put all the furniture back.

Reinforce

10. choose at least one concrete action to take in line with your intention, and take that action. bonus points if it's a repeated action, like "every sunday i'll call my mom"

now, obviously 10 is the physical mechanism by which a change might happen in the physical world. but i recommend trying to answer for yourself, "how could including 1-9 possibly be superior in some way to jumping straight to 10?"


Hypnotic Framing

one more model of spellcasting: a spell is a self-hypnosis script.

standard hypnosis has 6 parts: 
1. pre-talk
2. an induction
3. a deepener (sometimes)
4. a suggestion(s) (pre- or post-hypnotic)
5. an awakener
6. following a post-hypnotic suggestion if one was given

In the Long Version above, 

1-3 is pre-talk,
4 is an induction
5 is a deepener
6 and 7 are a post-hypnotic suggestion
8 and 9 are awakeners
10 is following the post-hypnotic suggestion.
 

i'm not exactly up for "connecting the dots" as i conceptualize that, but i'm happy to say whatever words happen to come to me after i finish typing this sentence.

[eta: the following paragraph is superfluous. feel free to skip it.] 

i was kinda trying to write a novel, and over the years i've read a buncha books on how to do that, but i realized i'd been reading books with an extremely intellectual/design-based/outlining perspective on novel writing, so i thought i should read at least one book that was not like that. i read /from where you dream/ by Robert Butler. his thesis is that good writing comes "from the same place as dreams", as in the hallucination things you have when you're asleep. and he goes on about this for the length of a quite excellent book. i liked what he said enough that i thought i'd try his approach for a week, and i liked that enough that i decided to devote myself to it for a month. during the course of that month, i found myself taking Robert Butler a lot more literally than i think he intended; i decided that if i was really going to write "from where i dream", then why on earth was i trying to do all the work while i was awake? if the idea is to let dreaminess into waking life or something, then perhaps consciousness should try collaborating with dreaminess while i'm actually asleep. so i started to learn lucid dreaming.

it turns out that Stephen LaBerge, the head honcho of contemporary western lucid dreaming research, prescribes a curriculum that looks a hell of a lot like my naturalism curriculum, and it starts with prospective memory training—or what you probably think of as "noticing". on the first day, notice whenever you see an animal. on the second day, notice whenever you write anything down. etc. and each time you notice your target, that's your cue to perform a "state check"—a test of whether you're awake or dreaming. there's an important psychological component to state checks, but my favorite physical action for state checks is to pinch my nose and try to breathe. (in dreams, i can breathe just fine with my nose and mouth closed off.) once you're pretty good at choosing to learn to notice an arbitrary target experience category like "flowers" or whatever, then you can look through your dream journal for common dream signs (for me these include flying, or having long hair, or tornados), and then when you set the intention to state check in response to encountering a dream sign, you stand a chance of actually doing it.

there are a whole buncha other techniques and strategies that can help with lucid dreaming, but this seems to be far and away the most popular and effective. (the second most popular and effective is probably "imagining in great detail what it is like to become lucid in a dream", which also sounds like my naturalism stuff.)

why do our curricula have this in common? i think it's because in lucid dreaming, it's pretty obvious that you can't count on your intellect/system 2/deliberate reasoning/etc. to be online while you're asleep, so whatever method of "planning" or "intending" you rely on is going to have to operate by some other route. in LeBerge's field, the reason for this is transparent: you're asleep when the critical moments arise. you have to be so good at state checks that you can literally do them in your sleep.

although my naturalism stuff targets (mostly cognitive) behaviors in waking life rather than in dreams, it sort of says "look, if you really want to know something, don't try to know it with your waking mind. learn it with your sleeping mind, and then it'll be in you for real. it'll be part of you, you won't just be holding abstract concepts at a distance and thinking about them. if you wanna change how you see the world you'll have to go way deeper than the intellect. you'll have to be able to notice the critical moment while you're asleep and then in that moment wake yourself up enough to do something about it."

so i, too, tell people that if they can perform a simple action each time they smell something, they're already most of the way done.

 

A surface-level summary of my work from the past 5-10 years in one sentence: Trigger-action planning is better when supported by prospective memory training.

>attempt to help people with something like 'generating the true hypotheses' rather than 'evaluating the hypotheses that I already have'. Or 'how to do ontological updates well and on-purpose'.

To me this seems like an accurate and beautifully succinct description.

How to build a stockpile of testosterone for HRT, as a buffer in case of emergency:

• Get your provider to prescribe "single use" vials and make sure they're marking them as "single use" in their prescription notes. These usually contain 200mg, which for most people is two doses or more. By design, you're meant to throw away the leftovers when you don't use all 200mg in a single dose, and that is what pharmacies and insurance companies expect you to do.
• Use each vial more than once, just make sure you alcohol swab the top.
• Organize your vials by expiration date. This will not necessarily line up with the order in which you receive the vials, so you have to actually check. Use vials with earlier expiration dates first.

This will result in access to testosterone at twice the rate you use it, and you'll be able to build up at least a bit of a buffer.

I'm not telling anybody to do this. Just that if I were scared of losing access to HRT, this is what I'd do.

Edit to add: A friend suggested a couple more details to keep in mind. The "single use" vials lack a bacteriostatic additive like benzyl alcohol, so they pose a greater risk of infection. Extra important to be meticulous about sterilization! Also, sterile syringe filters can be used to save a cored or otherwise problematic vial—either filtering entirely to a new container, or just filtering when drawing.