Hello! My name is Yamen. I'm a Laser Fractal Space Wizard.
Complicated Reality is a collection of my art and writing.
Introduction
Believing things is simple, finding truth is tricky.
Reality is in between, it gets complicated quickly.
I can't tell you how it is, only show you how I see it,
but every time I take a closer look I find a deeper secret.
I make crafts with fractal math, mix chaos and equations.
Simple rules and special tools make stunning presentations.
I wonder if the world outside my screen is just the same,
iterated patterns in some cosmic chaos game?
But even if we are, I've found a niche that works for me,
exploring all the nuance, and sharing what I see.
Sometimes it's with a render, sometimes it's with a poem,
sometimes it's with a story of explorers far from home.
Sometimes it's with a question, or a smile or a wink,
that lets you know I know you know there's more than what we think.
Feel free to take a look at the things that I've created
while I explore the simple truth that Reality is Complicated.
News
Follow me on Patreon
9/30/23 6:00 pm
If you aren't aware, social media has been super hard for indie artists recently. Algorithms make ever increasing and esoteric demands, only to show a tiny bit of our content to a small slice of our audience. Over the past few weeks, craving a more direct way to reach you all, I started looking into managing an email newsletter. However, it looks like Patreon was a step ahead of me.
My first gallery exhibit!
9/10/23 4:00 pm
Update: This event has been postponed until October due to a Covid outbreak. When it's safe, I'll let you know the new date.
I'm proud to announce I've been invited to exhibit at a gallery in West Salem. I've been working all summer on producing a set of beautiful metal prints with some of my best fractal work to date. Most of these designs are brand new, you haven't seen them online. I'd love to show them to you, check out my events tracker for details about the exhibit and the Open House.
Upcoming Events
More EventsDon't let an algorithm stand between us.
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Don't let algorithms stand between us.
Social media sucks. Email is bloated with spam. How can you follow a modern artist, see all their content, and learn about their new projects, for free? Patreon is the answer. It's time to move on from the dirty feeds, and get back to a real artistic community online.
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What does a Laser Fractal Space Wizard do?
Fractal Art
Recreational mathematics
Poetry
Playfully subversive
Illustrated Poetry
Poems for images that required poetry
Short Stories
Brain tickling tales
How I Became a Legend
I've been sailing the Sea of Thieves since it came out, and it has become one of my favorite games.
It has a special place in my heart, because it carried me through some of the darkest days of my own depression. There was a while last year where I had all but given up on myself, and I struggled daily to find a reason to get out of bed. I wasn't an artist then, just a washed out tech worker who'd taken too many beatings for holding onto old dreams. My closest friends felt me pulling away from the world, and tried to lure me back by buying me a copy of Sea of Thieves. Logging in to learn the game with them those first few nights was so much fun, I could almost forget about the ways the rest of my life were collapsing, if only for a few hours at a time. When I learned that there was a tiny bit of content locked away for players willing to work to the top tier of the game, attaining Pirate Legend status, I became consumed with a desire to get there so I could share in that with my friends. Part of me thought it would be a nice last way to thank my friends for caring about me.
The grind was intense, and due to the pirate nature of the game, there were plenty of frustrating nights where hours of work would be lost to an opportunistic player sinking me. Having lost my job, most of my belongings, all of my money, and a lot of my friends in the real world, losing progress even in a virtual one was a salty burn. The anger I had about my life would boil, and some particularly bad sessions left me fuming, crying, and wondering why I kept logging into a game with such a capacity to hurt me. But after the anger passed, I'd remember. The pain was temporary, fleeting, and a small price to pay to give something back to my friends.
So I kept chasing buried treasure, hunting troublesome wildlife, and blasting skeleton lords with my cannons. If I got there, all the losses would be justified, so I couldn't give up yet. This exposure and immersion approach slowly taught me to adjust my mindset. To cherish the victories, but not to let the losses drag me down. To work with the wind, instead of complain when it won't blow the right way. To accept defeat gracefully so I can get back to trying again without a panic attack. I gained a sense of determination I hadn't felt in myself for longer than I can remember.
Then, one strange August evening, I had a transformative experience.
You can find more details about this in some of my other stories, but the short of it is that I rediscovered parts of my mind that I had long assumed were dead. I went through an intense series of self-examinations, and began to look at all the ways I'd twisted myself up with anxiety and bound myself with fear. After a night of disarming my demons, I woke up renewed. My mind felt free, my creativity was bubbling over for the first time in a decade, and I saw a new future ahead of me. That was the day I came up with my first plan for Complicated Reality, and the day I started learning to make fractal art. However, as eager as I was to start stretching my mental legs again, I still had one task in my mind that I needed to check off my list: I needed to become a Pirate Legend for my friends.
I took to my task with a new vigor. An enthusiasm for gaming that I'd been missing for years. My level of play skyrocketed, as grim determination was replaced with eager optimism. I fine tuned my muscle memory, and to this day I can scavenge an island and stock a sloop faster than anyone I know. I hit a groove, I found the rhythm of the game, and I invented lots of new ways to turn the tables on bad situations. And then, late one night as the morning hours took hold of the day, I completed a voyage wondering just how much was left ahead of me. As I watched the progress bar squeeze ever so close to completion of the last level I had yet to earn, it became clear: one single voyage remained between me and Pirate Legend.
I can't properly explain the emotions I went through as I took my sloop back out one more time.
Every little detail of the game that I'd come to take for granted took on new fascination. The waves crashing against the boat and the aurora illuminating the night time sky over the sea pulled me in. My trained hands plotted the course and managed the ship almost on their own, as I watched myself play out one more trip to Smuggler's Bay. It was almost dream-like, but so visceral and engaging. Before I knew it, I was hauling a handful of treasure back aboard my ship, and I had clear horizons all around. The dawn had given way to a bright, clear day, as if the game itself were clearing the path back to the outpost where my quest would finally be complete. Something happened on that last leg. It wasn't an ambush, or a Kraken, or even a hole to patch, it was something deep inside my soul finally letting go of all the pain and the loss and the frustration I'd put myself through.
For the first time since my reawakening, I was achieving a real goal I'd put serious effort into. Tears streamed down my face, while I shuddered with some hybrid of sobbing and laughter. I could have grabbed the most valuable treasure and crashed into the shore, but instead I made myself savor one last bit of effort to perform a perfect slow down to rest right up next to the dock. Then I peacefully carried my glittering loot to the turn in. I watched the last progress bar fill up, the final number click into place, and I hurried around the island to perform the final trivial steps to attain my long sought title. When the Mysterious Stranger finally gave me a nod of approval and welcomed me into the ranks of the Pirate Legends, the music swelled and every bell and whistle the game had went off to celebrate my goal with me.
Eager to visit the Legend Hideout, I raced over to the special spot, pulled out my hurdy gurdy, and tried to play the new shanty. By fluke, a different shanty came out, one we all know well, "Becalmed". My group would often play it at the end of a session as we sent our ship to rest at the bottom of the sea. I couldn't stop, as excited as I was to see the elusive Pirate Legend hideout, I suddenly had to let Becalmed play out one more time. The lyrics to this song can be found scrawled in a sailor's journal on the beach on one of the islands, and I know them well. It's a slower, somber song, but the emotional core is in those lyrics.
It's a song about how great it will be when the wind picks back up, how fast the boat will sail, how happy the crew will be, and how grand the adventures ahead are, but there's an unspoken shadow.
Those hopes are all for some uncertain future. In the present, the ship is becalmed: windless, and adrift with no sure path ahead. The crew is nervous, and the singer tries to keep spirits up by focusing on the good yet to come. I've always seen it as a poetic allegory for my depression.
As the final bars of the song played out, I reflected on how much it meant to me. I saw the beginning of my art career taking shape around me, I felt a return of energy and creativity within me, and I had hope for my future for the first time in too long. I was no longer becalmed, my wind had returned, and my adventures were waiting for me.
After a few nights of playing the fancy Pirate Legend content with my friends, I finally had my fill of the game, and began focusing on achieving other goals in my life. But I never really stopped playing. Every month or so, my group comes together to knock out a voyage or two. It's become such a comfortable place for us to hang out while we chat about life. The updates keep bringing new reasons to return, and it only takes a voyage or two to hook us back in for a few weeks. The game has grown a lot since those early days, and so have I.
I'm making strides as an artist, I've made significant and positive changes to my diet, medications, and overall health. I wake up excited to tackle new projects, and when I'm lucky I wind down my day with another night on the waves with my buddies. Depression still finds ways to get at me, but I'm getting better at patching the holes without drowning. If I ever really need help with some cathartic release, I log in, sail out to one of my favorite perches, play Becalmed, and let my sorrows sink into the sea with the setting sun.
Thank you, Rare. Your games have always been friends to me, but this one was a fair bit more, and I will always cherish the memories I've made with it.
[Continue Reading]
AI Art
Fractal infused generations
Guides
Hard Won Wisdom
Managing Tolerance as a Medicinal Cannabis User
I'd like to explain the responsible way to build a medicinal schedule around cannabis.
Before I do, I have to emphasize that this is not an approach for maximizing your high. This is the approach for people who are treating chronic conditions with cannabis that they can't talk to their doctor about for whatever reason. It will take a lot of the fun out of the process, and it requires a discipline that most recreational users aren't interested in. Finally, I am not a doctor, and I do not have expert level knowledge. This technique is the result of digesting similar information online when I became a patient, tested and refined by personal experience. As always, your mileage may vary.
The first step is to be clear with yourself about the benefits.
If you skip this step, you are flying blind. "When I take RSO and it works, I know it because my joints hurt less and my appetite comes back". You need an understanding of what relief is, or it becomes easy to fall into a routine where you go through the motions without getting any actual benefit. The first rule of responsible drug scheduling is "Don't do it just to do it." It's one thing to maintain a regular schedule of intake, it's another to intake repeatedly without any benefit just to keep up your schedule. "It's been about 8 hours, probably time for my next dose" is an OK thought. "I've been doing it every 8 hours but it's not helping any" is a warning to change your schedule, and probably an indication of built-up tolerance.
The second step is to be clear with yourself about the cost, and I don't just mean financially.
Obviously, you cannot maintain a schedule if you can't afford it. But there are other costs that you can't overlook. Cannabis is friendly, it doesn't come with a lot of extra costs, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's cost-free. Every dose raises your tolerance, that's a cost. Every high comes with a corresponding low, that's a cost. If your drug comes with any degree of stomach discomfort, that's another cost (and one you really, really don't want to downplay). If getting stoned gives you the munchies and you binge junk food, that's a cost too. I'm not saying "focus on the negatives", I'm saying "don't ignore them".
Once you understand the benefits and the costs, you have the start of a framework for building a schedule. This is the hard part, and there is no quick way to skip it other than starting with a lucky guess.
The nature of your schedule should be "The minimum necessary to continue reaping the benefits".
This is where most recreational users duck out and thank me for my time. Our culture glamorizes over-indulgence, but if you're a serious medical user you don't get to play that game. Bigger doses mean bigger tolerance, and tolerance wins that arms race every single time.
Think of it like driving a car with almost no gas left and a bunch of hills between you and the gas station. You need to use just enough gas to get up one side of each hill, and then coast, and then try to carry that momentum forward into the next hill. If you slam down on the gas to speed down the hills to get to the gas station sooner, you'll be out of gas before you get there.
Finding that "just enough" amount isn't easy, and it takes a lot of trial and error. What makes it tricky is that if you take too much and build up too much tolerance, you have to give up the drug for a while before you can properly try again. It doesn't help you to calibrate your levels from a heightened tolerance. As long as you aren't binge-dosing, it only takes a couple of days for cannabis tolerance to soften, but that's still a couple of days going without relief, or finding it through a substitute. (Hot showers and long naps are a good start! More drugs is probably not a good start.)
Alright, if you've made it through all the precursors and you're still on board, here's the process.
If you skipped down to this part, please take a moment to read the whole comment, because this process is only for a specific type of user, and it won't help much as generalized advice. If you're a recreational user looking to control your habit, I have a better guide for you already written out. This process is also written with cannabis in mind. Tolerance rates for other drugs are different and will require different timings, but I'm not going into that end of things, because the further from simple cannabis you get, the harder it is to control for unintended contaminants (aka, other drugs in the mix). This process should work about the same whether you smoke or vaporize or ingest your doses.
Go without for 2 days. This sucks, but it's too important to skip over. Remember, you're trading a few shitty days for a schedule that helps you avoid them in the future. You will return to this step every time you find your tolerance is too high. It sucks, but it's a cost for doing it right. On the plus side, the more often your practice the discipline of a tolerance break, the easier it becomes to do them, and the better you get and building self-control.
Take a small dose. This should be the amount you'd give a total newbie who asked you to be gentle. It might not be enough on this day, it's better to do too little than too much. If it's too little, you'll get to do more soon. If it's too much, you're back to another 2-day break.
Every hour or so after your dose, actively run through your lists of benefits. "I think taking this helps my joint pain. Am I feeling joint pain relief right now?" Don't feel like you have to lie to yourself, and don't answer the questions dishonestly. If you have the thought "I'm not getting that kind of relief, but I'm still getting this other kind of relief," that's OK! Add the other kind of relief to your list of benefits if it's not already there, and keep checking every hour. Yes, it's obnoxious, but if you need to it's worth setting an hourly alarm on your phone. You very much want this data to plan with, so don't be lazy about it!
Pay attention to the order that your benefits go away. You might find a trend, say your joint pain always comes back before your gut troubles, that's valuable to know! You're going to want to know which benefits go away the quickest, and which ones last the longest. You're going to build your schedule around the benefits that last the longest, and use the other benefits as training signals. You do not want to pin your schedule to the benefits that disappear quickest, even if they are the benefits you care about most. This sucks too because it would be a lot nicer to re-dose as soon as the first benefits start to fade. But if you do that, you'll still build a tolerance that interferes with the rest of the benefits, and you might end up with too much tolerance for even the primary benefits.
When the full list of benefits has faded, wait two more hours. This sucks, it means intentionally denying yourself relief for a little bit, but keep reminding yourself that these few hours are a small trade for an effective schedule. You won't keep these hours in your schedule forever, they are part of the initial calibrations. These are the hardest hours in the whole process, but you can put yourself through two hours, I believe in you!
For your second calibration, take the same size dose. Not more, not less. You are now testing your tolerance. Do Steps 3 and 4 again, pay attention to your benefits, and take note of any benefits that you don't get or that don't last as long. Those are signs of tolerance, and ultimately your schedule is about mitigating tolerance.
If your benefits are lessened, you have a tolerance. It's almost impossible not to have some tolerance, especially if you haven't gone back to sleep, so don't panic if you do. But track exactly how much of a difference there is, and put it in terms like "My second dose gave me joint pain relief for two hours less than the first dose." If you lose more than an hour of relief from a primary benefit, it means you're using too much or too often. It's up to you to decide between the two, but if you're not sure, try lowering the dose before adding more time between doses. Your goal is to be able to have nearly continual relief, so a smaller dose is easier to manage than more time between doses.
However, if you don't get one of your primary benefits during your second dose, this is a bigger warning sign. It means you blew your tolerance up too much, and you're headed all the way back to step 1, including another shitty 2-day break. Use smaller doses in steps 2 and 6. Yep, this sucks, but trust me, it's worth it in the end. If you keep blowing your tolerance, you'll need to keep raising your dose, and you'll get less and less benefit out of each dose until it stops working at all. Then you have to do a hard detox without any cannabis for several weeks, including the crazy-ass dreams, the lack of appetite, and the general feeling of "fuck why did I let it get this bad". That's hell, so don't trick yourself into going there.
You might have noticed that so far, the guidelines are "start small, and cut back from that", so you might be wondering "when is it appropriate to raise the dose?" You only raise the size of the dose if the last dose didn't provide any benefit, and you only do so after sleeping. The wording here is precise, the difference between steps 8 and 9 is whether you get any benefit. If you got no benefit at all, the dose is too small and you can increase it. If you get some benefits, but not a primary benefit, it means you're dealing with tolerance instead. I'm emboldening it again because this is the thing people mess up the most: Do not take bigger doses throughout a day. The size of your first dose in a given day is the size all of the rest of your doses that day will be. DO NOT INCREASE YOUR DOSE BEFORE SLEEPING FIRST.
If you can manage to sleep without a nightcap, do so. It's much, much better for your tolerance if you don't dose right before bed. I recognize that for some people, a dose or relief is a prerequisite for sleep, but try your hardest to not consider yourself one of those people. If you need a rule, it's "You have to spend an hour in bed trying to sleep before you can consider a nightcap." You must give yourself a chance to sleep without a dose, because sleeping is when your body does the most work to lessen your tolerance, and it doesn't do a good job if you spend the night sleeping off a fresh dose.
Keep cycling through steps 2 through 6, including waiting two extra hours between doses. When you get 4 days under your belt where you didn't blow up your tolerance, you've found the right size dose, and it's time to fine-tune the timing.
Lock in your dose size before continuing. This is your dose for now, and it's the dose you'll keep using, maybe indefinitely. You will not go over this dose size, because if you do it will ruin your schedule. Accept it for what it is, understand that you put real effort into determining it, and trust yourself to stick to it.
Now we finally get to start trimming the extra hours out! If you've happened across a good schedule already, you may not need to make further adjustments. Sometimes just keeping a regulated intake is enough to smooth over those two "extra" hours, which just means you got a bit lucky in picking out your schedule. But if you're still roughing out those two hours between every dose, this is finally the point that you can cut them out slowly. Start by knocking off half an hour. If you've been going for 10 hours between doses, try 9.5. Don't increase the actual number of doses in your day, just trim the spacing in between them. The time you cut here gets added to your sleep break, to keep you in balance. Stick to the new schedule for another 4 days, then if you still need to, trim another half hour off. Go slow with this, and don't use it as an excuse to let your tolerance get out of control.
Listen to your body, and keep in mind the order of benefits you deduced earlier. The first benefits to fade are your warning signs. They don't mean "I better take a dose right now", but they do mean "the time for another dose is coming". With practice and patience, you will get a very good sense of which feelings in your body represent a readiness for your next dose. It takes a couple of months of this routine before you can do it by feel, so don't do away with your phone alarms or whatever you use to keep on schedule.
Your schedule is correct when it reliably provides your primary benefits without over-inflating your tolerance. If you still feel the benefits but it's time for a new dose, wait a bit. If you can, mentally award yourself bonus points. Every extra hour you squeeze out of a dose is an hour less tolerance you have. It's OK to skip or delay doses, it's not OK to double up on doses even for "emergencies". The response to an emergency is something new, not more of the same.
If your schedule slowly stops working, you need to occasionally pepper in a day or two of tolerance break to keep things moderated. Even a very well-tuned schedule usually requires a break every few months, if not more often. Yep, it sucks, but it's still better than not getting any relief due to a high tolerance.
Well, this certainly turned into a long post. If you stuck through all the way, I'm convinced you care enough to make this advice work. It really is a chore, and it's not a lot of fun, but this is the responsible way to figure out a regular schedule and avoids the most common causes of failure. However you approach the task, I wish you a lot of luck. Cannabis is a truly wonderful medication when you use it wisely, and can give you parts of your life back if you take the time to work with it. Good luck!
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How to Fight the Urge to Get High All The Time
How do I stop myself from smoking all the time?
(This was originally written in response to a stranger online.)
I really wish someone had set me down and explained this properly when I was younger. I know the precipice you're looking at and I've been through some of the futures you're scared of. I promise you, you can take control and you will be so, so much better off. You can absolutely find a balance between cannabis and life that doesn't leave you feeling trapped, but it won't be measured by an intake rate or a weekly cost. It's entirely about control. With control, you can smoke a little or a lot, as you decide, as a sensible adult, because it's your brain to play with. Without control, it doesn't matter how little or much you smoke, you build a special hell in your own head every time you do.
Right now, you're leaving open the door to failure, and wondering why the breeze rolls in. It sounds like you're early enough in this habit that right now is the time to get this framework straight in your mind because it's a bitch to untangle later on. As backward as it sounds, we don't build tests to help us succeed, we build tests to find out where we fail. Every day that you ask "Can I prove I have control?" you are inviting a demon to your door to tell you that you can't, and every time he wins you get weaker. Let's be adults about it and cut out the middle man. You're the one that chooses what you do and don't do. The weed doesn't smoke itself. Don't test yourself, just decide. "Today I will not" and that's the end of it. We'll get to the details in a second, but this perspective is the key. You have to own your decisions, and not let them be something inflicted on you. When you decide to take a break, own that decision. Getting cravings? "I decided to put up with the cravings." Getting frustrated? "I decided to put up with frustration." Can't sleep? "I decided to put up with a rough night." These aren't things inflicted on you by a cruel universe, they are temporary conditions you choose to endure for your own betterment. Don't open the door back up to giving in, move on with your thoughts and your body will find a way to follow.
Being a responsible psychonaut means accepting that the bad days are the price you pay for the good ones, and the sooner you learn that lesson, the easier it is to manage that debt.
Now trust me, I know those nags, and all the cozy sounding invitations to slip up. They're like mosquitoes, and the advice above is more like a hammer aimed at your brain. Even if you squish some of them while you work the forge, there will be more. Here's a little more practical webbing, the three D's of Down Days: Distraction, Distance, and Dinner. If you're looking to clear a single day, you have 24 hours to fill with not smoking. If you're looking to get past the cravings, it's closer to 72. Use your tools to fill these hours. The biggest tool in the chest for this is distraction.
If you can turn your focus away from what you're doing without, it will go a long way to turn the volume down on the cravings. A good new video game is really great for this but maybe stay away from the game you play when you're stoned. Change the scene to change the mind, you know? Books, movies, music, shows, even a good scholarly journal can do the trick if you find one to catch your fancy, just give your brain a place to go instead of dwelling.
When you do, it'll kind of suck. It will feel like a lot of work, and it probably won't really be that fun in the end. The hardest part is getting started, that lack of motivation is the killer when it comes to weed withdrawal, but it's an illusion. Shit's no harder than any other time, and if you get off your butt and get to it, you'll be in the flow of things quicker than you'd expect. So make a deal with yourself, "I can't give up for 30 minutes". Again, not a test, a decision. "I'm going to play this game for half an hour." "I'm going to read 50 pages in this book." If you're lucky, you'll get a few hours or maybe a whole night out of it. If not, you still get a super powerful tool: "I could do this for 5 more minutes".
Once you're half an hour into something, your mind has started building plans for that thing and has desires about watching that thing develop. You can hijack this to short-circuit your decision-making.
Everything will still feel like a pain in the ass, but whatever you've started doing is now the easiest thing to keep doing. You can keep doing the "I want a bowl" sad song, or you can keep doing something more interesting and less agonizing. It's a simple choice, but one you have to make and commit to. Try Distraction first, because the next two steps come with harder costs.
Dinner is next, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Our brains do STUPID shit when we get hungry, and weed withdrawals are notorious for masking hunger. A good sandwich can do some damage to a bad mood, and if nothing else, cooking is a pretty intense distraction. Even if you don't "feel" hungry, make a point to eat a few nice meals. Scrounging for junk food and ignoring your stomach will make the withdrawal subjectively harder, so decide to eat well. The cost here is that it's a dangerous game to quell emotions with food. For a day or two, it can be a good plan, for longer than that you can build bad inner tension. Sugar is about as potent as THC, we're just super used to it. Using a crutch to get off a bad leg while it heals is OK, as long as you don't find yourself breaking your legs to keep the crutch.
If those two aren't giving you enough to make it to bedtime, Distance is the heavy play. The further you are mentally and physically, from the space you typically consume weed in, the easier it is to go without. If being near your supply is making it hard to hold back, move yourself. You're allowed to do that, you don't have to sit there and torture yourself. Removing your supply is an option, but not one I recommend you do in response to cravings because it kills your confidence in a sinister way. Flushing your drugs keeps you from using them, sure. But it also keeps you from overcoming them and reinforces the idea that you are too weak to do so. It's actually a way of hurting yourself, in a pretty twisted way.
If it gets to that point, you need to be looking at stopping for a lot longer than a day or a weekend. If you're just looking to survive the cravings, it's not worth the shot to your self-worth.
What's better is to move yourself. Doing this mentally is the realm of Distraction, and if that hasn't worked, it's time to find a place to be. This is Distance. It doesn't have to sound fun, or like a good time, it just has to be farther away from your weed than you are currently, and you keep increasing that distance until you're ready for bed. At the barest, most desperate (which is really not a level you should hit with weed cravings, but you might), your goal is to build an obstacle course so that the act of failure comes with a steep fee of effort up front. I don't mean traps and balance beams, I mean distance and time. Make it take more than a few minutes to get from where you are to where you could smoke, and give yourself room to catch yourself if you start to turn back. You only go back that direction if your bed is that way. And when you go back, it's for bed and nothing else until the morning.
Bed is the goal. It's the finish line. If you're taking a break for a day, it's literally the threshold. If you're going for longer, you'll find every day is a lot easier than the day before, a night's sleep does wonders. Fill time until bed, then go to bed. Even if it's hard, even if you don't sleep well. Even if you get those intense withdrawal dreams (little tiny trips to reward you for a hard day).
Just focus on getting through the day and into bed, because you really will feel better in the morning.
And don't forget to drink some water. Dehydration is almost as bad as hunger when it comes to killing our brains, and you need the water to let your body process the change. Stay wet!
I know this is pretty long, but it's such an important lesson. Take control, use your tools, and be responsible, and there's a wild world of psychedelics that you can build paradise with. If you don't, it's doom.
Finally, I need to point out that some people benefit more from using cannabis medicinally. In these cases, the approach has to change. Using cannabis this way usually means losing the euphoric effects of getting high, and requires the user to manage their medicinal tolerance carefully.
[Continue Reading]
Complicated Reality
is a collection of art, writings, and other creative works
by Yamen O'Donnell.
My art uses generative tools, as labeled.
My writing is traditional, with no generators.
For questions or comments, please email me:
Commissions Open
I'm happy to work with you on your projects. From graphic design and art, to print design and production, and even content writing and website building, I have skills to compliment a wide variety of projects. My clients include musicians, DJs, artists, authors, product designers, business owners, event organizers, and of course, art collectors. For details and a bid, please send me an email describing your project:
