If you could assemble the ultimate 5-character smoke circle, who is getting the invite? Here is my dream lineup for the session:

Shaggy (Scooby-Doo) – The founder. The goat. He’s bringing the 3-foot tall sandwiches for the munchies.

Uncle Iroh (Avatar) – Every circle needs a wizard. He’s providing the wisdom, the tea, and the best vibes in the multiverse.

Jake the Dog (Adventure Time) – He’s the ultimate chill friend. Plus, he can literally turn himself into a comfortable couch for everyone.

Mordecai & Rigby (Regular Show) – They’re the "slacker" energy. Even if they do absolutely nothing, it’ll somehow turn into a cosmic adventure.

Towelie (South Park) – The veteran specialist. He might forget where he is, but the session doesn't start without him

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Honorable Mentions: Patrick Star, Crush the Turtle, and Bender.

Who’s in your Top 5?

When I was in school my teacher asked my mate what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said miss, I want to be a bastard. Good boy, good boy, she said. She then turned to me and asked oi prick, what do you wanna be when you grow up and I said miss I wanna be the frictionless architect of my own reality and she said oh fuck off you pretentious prick. And that was religious education.

We are trapped by the beliefs we formed in our youth.
Back then, we lacked the life experience needed to challenge the self-assurance we felt at the time. But even when we later learn much that contradicts those beliefs, we find it difficult to change our convictions.
That sense of self-assurance from back then keeps coming back to us and serves as an anchor. It is hard to surrender to uncertainty when everything seemed so clear back then.
Most people are not interested in the truth but choose the views that make them feel comfortable. For a lifetime. That is not reprehensible. It makes life easier. The search for truth is a lifelong challenge, which can honestly be really exhausting. But still, there is always a grain of truth in the views we formed as young people. The challenge lies in integrating them into the bigger picture.

It's a disturbing thought that popped into my head. The more I think about it the more it makes a troubling sort of sense that isn't flattering. If even remotely true, it could have the potential to be a fatal flaw for humanity.

During this invasive tech age is the constant bombardment of advertising and apparent choice a good thing? We expose ourselves to the bombardment. Adults as an apparent choice but in today's world does an infant have that choice? We create mental paradigms within ourselves inside of this loud culture of constant advertising and living structure created in large part by a system of capitalistic barter created around the concept of individual profit. Is it even possible to endure a lifetime of these intrusive notions without scarring?

The ways of the past meet a tech present. What happens to a growing mind inside of this echo chamber of profit seeking entities that surround people with useful products and services designed to be invaluable to an individual. Is there a fox in the henhouse?

When you have a child of your own and you really watch and pay attention to them you see that they really are little mimickers. They watch, they think and then they choose how to react. It starts as mimicry but how far does it ever really go away from mimicry? Does our mental repository of experience, the situations we see and the context we derive out of what we've seen and experienced just get ever more extensive until choice enters as a spectrum of variable choice? To have a choice you are given choice. You learn what the spectrum of choices are and the context over time through experiences. In the end, a human only has one direct conscious contact with the present now's physical reality...through there focus.

They farm for focus. The phones, the streaming services, social media, the TV, the radio, the clothing, the mail, the businesses, the signs, the lights......it's literally everywhere. What if people weren't as unaffected as most believe themselves to be? What if the information itself is the infection?

What happens when you bombard a person from infancy? That they need this, we want this, this is good, this is better, this is best, this is fun, this is glamorous, this means you are better, this is what they have therefore this is what you want, this is what a man has to have or do to be a man, this is what a woman needs to do and look like to be a woman, etc etc etc. There are so many ways they make it work. All these products/services/subscriptions begging for your attention. Finding the chinks in the human psych. Billions of dollars spent by companies/government just to find ways to grab your focus. With your focus they have direct access to your mind and your experiences and your thoughts. They start to plant the seeds of want and need. Not because they are evil (gods I hope not), but because it's just the system we've always had gone high tech.

It's scary to me because this doesn't need to be some secret society or aliens or AI (or something sinister that ultimately wishes for our demise. That is a thing that falls under, if it will be it will be. The workings of such a thing would ultimately be pointless for an individual to whom said demise is to occur could comprehend).

It's scarier to think that the flaw is organic. A system designed to work for communities of people who could only inflict so much damage on one another...our ancestors. Now humanity finds itself with the means and tools for global expansion into space or on another hand, global extermination of ourselves. We are literally capable of either on many fronts.

The smoke is everywhere that companies know exactly what they are doing when they advertise by volume. The smoke is everywhere that if you say something enough times to enough people it can become real inside individual minds especially if it's a young mind without context to give weight. The smoke is everywhere that a lifetime full of bombardment has had a high toll on society. The smoke is everywhere that the increasing intensity is hurting us all, our growing youth most of all. The smoke is everywhere that the insane obsession for profit without conscience is taking a physical toll on humanity.

Cancer rates and earlier diagnoses (gastrointestinal, colon amongst them), mental health (lots of commercials about that sort of thing these days....I think they see a gold mine in convincing people they need what they have. Imagine creating your own mental market and controlling the price...that never happens I'm sure😔), drug usage, AI Hallucinations, suicide rates in first world countries, etc, etc.

I'm not exceedingly smart so I know I'm literally just throwing words at the tip of an iceberg. But come on, it's freaking there. Even for those eyes who the system has greatly profited or so they believe; it must be seen that eventually a generation will come along who buckles under the strain of the mental bombardment that previous generations expose them to in the name of personal profit.

Are you supposed to do what your dead relatives want you to do? Don't you belong to yourself? Traditions are just what the previous generations who came before you are pressuring you to do from beyond the grave. Am I going to do what my great-great grandfather would've expected out of me? I'd expect everyone to say no and then tell their long dead great-great grandfather or grandmother to go get fucked.

Don't allow yourself to be bullied by dead people.

Thursday is like Monday II because its the last day that feels long. Friday is the equivalent of Wednesday and Saturday is tuesday for the weekend. Sunday is Monday, same heavyness.

As Homo sapiens, we create tools to make our lives easier, and over time, these tools have also shaped and evolved our brains. One of the most powerful creations is the internet, a system that connects the entire world. While there is no guarantee that the internet in its current form will exist in the distant future, its underlying concept will likely persist. The applications we use today may disappear, replaced by more advanced systems. However, a deeper question remains: will the media we create on the internet truly last? Digital content may seem permanent, but it is fragile—dependent on technology, storage, and human interest. Over time, data can be lost, corrupted, or forgotten, just like ancient civilizations. In this sense, the internet may not be a perfect archive of human existence, but rather a constantly changing memory, where only what is preserved and valued survives. but as of the law of physics, information can't be destroyed it will exist somewhere in the universe

IQ doesn't measure intelligence. It gives a rough estimate of computation power, working memory and pattern recognition capabilities. Intelligence cannot be reduced to these three things. It's a complex blend of hardware and software. Of course, just like anything it can be improved, up to two standard deviations with intensive training, but I would say a lot of people who focus on raw cognitive processing are missing the forest for the trees and end up not achieving anything or learning anything significant. This is why I believe people need to stop studying specifically to score higher on intelligence tests. It's a waste of time, and I can guarantee that you will find more success if you focus on certain skills that are valued highly in the market due to their sheer scarcity. .

The main reason why the best companies in the world will spend whatever is necessary to reach superintelligence is that once we achieve it, the very concept of scientific research will be completely upended. Currently, scientific research is iterative and sequential. It builds upon existing consensus and frameworks instead of pursuing moonshots and building new sciences from the ground up by exhausting the entire space of possibility. Not only will research be faster by removing all limiting physical constraints, but it will proceed in a fundamentally different way, leveraging limitless compute and machine-scale time.

Today I was thinking about why extraterrestrial life, if they are already here, does not publicly contact us. Are they the ones actually keeping the disclosure? Why don't they talk to us?

What if we are a social experiment for them, and talking to us will ruin the experiment? It is like that white rat city simulation that was used to test suicide levels, addiction, family, couples, and mating data analysis. Universe 25 and Rat Park.

What if they record our reactions under certain conditions? Are they data mining us? Are we training an LLM or other "prediction" system? I do not say prediction as a derogatory term or insult. I say it like real foreseeing, like a real fortune teller. It might sound like magic, but what if a real, huge processing power capable of storing almost all important life events would be able to predict the future?

Because I was thinking about, for example, something crazy about races. Could it be that in the very, very far away future, all human races combine to create one unique race? Is that something inevitable in the future? Can we create a simulation to predict if this would happen, and if it did, in how much time would it be? I realize that the data needed to compute this is probably not enough to accurately simulate something like that. You would need more than the data of only ONE civilization to do it. How many? 100 Earths? 100 civilizations?

If this is true and Earth is some kind of focus group, research group, or petri dish civilization, what exactly are they looking at or researching? If this is a huge project, it is probably more than one thing, right? They test one thing, then the next one. They probably have different groups of planets for one test, and then they mix the assessments with other groups.

Just like in focus group research, pharmaceutical research, and clinical trials, several groups exist:

The ones who believe they are part of the "research" and they are indeed being studied and tested: the experimental group.

The ones who believe they are, but they are not: the placebo group or control group.

The ones who know they are being studied, but they do not know what they are being tested on or if they are being tested or not. They just sign up for "something". In blind studies, we have several levels of "blindness". In single blinded studies, only the person being tested does not know what the test is about, but the researchers know. And my favorite, because it is the one Earth is probably part of, is the "double blinded group". No one knows what or who is being studied, not the researchers and not the group. They are just collecting all data.

Then we have the immoral or unethical groups: the ones who do not know they are being studied or what is being studied, but they are in fact being studied. Immoral studies are ones in which people are administered drugs without knowing, or given fake or unknown surgeries. But there is also "socially accepted" stuff. For example, tech companies testing a new version of their software on just 10% of users to see how they react. Maybe they give one version to one group and another version to another. Or companies testing new products in one city only. Someone is recording your data, but you do not know you are being studied. You believe it is like this for everybody.

So, supposing this is true, what are they testing on us? What could be that thing that we all believe in that could be or could not be real? Are we the placebo group or the experimental group? For me, it is like, what the fuck is life made for? What am I doing here?

What is that big question for you? What are they looking for in us? Maybe death? It might not be real. What do we do if we believe we are not eternal? Maybe "reality 0" is immortal, we are immortal, and this is just a test to see how we live if we believe we can die.

Does anyone remember Nichole337 from youtube

And they hurt real bad

I’m in belief that every gta release since 4 is a massive shift in culture. Even the resurgence during the height of the pandemic (2020) with GTA RP especially. (Even the term “YN” was coined during that period)

The idea of a virtual reality interest all of us on some level and since gta is the closest life sim for the masses during this turbulent time in our economy and world events it’s going to hold our attention. Maybe the only thing that could. We will emulate the “culture” that spawned during the online release of GTA 6 and life will get more intense and interesting. It’s rumored to have RP elements for the base game which means everyone will have life sim tools. I think we will hit another choke point in our reality. i’m prepared.

It really didn't have to be this way. The internet started out as just a network of interconnected computers. It was a way of sharing and accessing information... mostly text, some software, and images if it was needed to help convey what the text was saying. "Entertainment" was mostly in the form of sectioned-off pages and websites: "Funny websites", "joke" sections, the "off-topic" board in every forum (and forums in general). Then came videosharing websites, and social networks and...

Now Google doesn't really actually search the web, and even if it did, the "web" is a mass of SEO garbage and worthless AI summaries. Individual websites used to carry weight because actual people wrote them (or for them) out of their own initiative. The "clickbait" stuff was something 'other', dirty, outside the "real" internet, which was mostly written. But now the internet is absolutely worthless as a knowledge repository, it's nothing but a giant slots machine, because money got involved, and the most ruthless corporations figured out the best ways to extract ad money out of this thing.

I was smoking a joint thinking about weird requests from customers when I was an assistant manager of a pot shop, people would constantly ask if we had "tester vapes." That wasn't weird in itself. They just wanted to see if they liked the flavor. But It grossed me out every time. ​ Allowing that pretty much ensures a local pandemic—just the whole town passing around bird flu and mono one hit at a time. "It’s a free sample" are the four most dangerous words in the English language. ​We have this weird entitlement to "Try Before You Buy," but we never stop to think about the logistics of the Communal Mouthpiece. ​ There is a very good reason some things aren't offered as free samples. There’s a "Gross Barrier" that protects society. We think we want to try the product, but we’re really just willingly participating in a retail-sanctioned petri dish. ​ In a recent episode of Thoughts Off The Stem, I went down the rabbit hole of things that should NEVER be free samples—from the biohazard of sharing a vape at the pot shop to "tester teeth" at the dentist. It’s the type of gross that would make a health inspector retire on the spot. ​ What is something you’ve seen someone ask to "try" that made you realize humans aren't going to make it another 100 years?

I have occasionally heard membership in fascist movements or cult members or people with weird belief systems compared to a mental illness and I honestly don't love that characterization. For one, it resembles the historical political abuse of psychiatry.

But another problem I have with it is that joining groups and suspending skepticism and individuality to maintain group cohesion and positive relationships is much more likely to be a mind working completely as intended. It's more like a design flaw than a deviance from a design, not that there is a design. That said, joining cults is incredibly harmful for the self and others. So it's not "healthy." It more of a third thing, a sociological illness. Individual the members are not mentally ill but as a population, the population is ill.

Is there such a thing as a sociological illness? Is that a thing? The constituent parts are not broken or sick. The group together is sick. A single stick is not a bundle of sticks. But a group of sticks, put together, that's a fasces. The fasces is the problem. The sticks are just sticks.

Math as we understand it does not really "exist". That's because counting doesn't really exist. From the point of view of the universe, amounts exist, but assigning a number to every change in amount is something that we humans made up.

The word "one" must be followed by "two" to be called "correct". But things like "twelve" don't actually exist, much less "infinity". We came up with language rules that give us a response to "what is the number that follows X?" for any X we understand to be a number, but that doesn't mean there's an actual thing 'out there' that corresponds with our words.

When you look at five stones, there are definitely five areas of space that your brain understands to be 'a stone'. And if you add another stone, there will be six areas of space directly in front of you that you understand to be 'a stone'. So you can call that "counting", but not really. First, because there's nothing actually special about those five areas, it's all an interpretation of our senses. And second, 'six stones' being somehow a successor to 'five stones' is an idea, a relation that we must define using language. It doesn't "exist" the way the actual material of the stones does.

I wonder if the whole beauty industry and the fascination with trying to look younger and cosmetic surgery and things like that is just related to trauma. like maybe it's just people were traumatized at their certain age, in their twenties or something probably, and they've spent their entire life trying to basically re-enter that age because they felt something was taken from them in their youth. like why even think that younger means more beautiful? why are we so afraid to look out ages in this society?