• Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
    581·
    1 year ago

    I wanna be where the Old Gods are.

    I wanna see, wanna see them writhing.

    Tearing souls apart with, what do you call 'em? Teeth?

    • 1stTime4MeInMCUEnglish
      231·
      1 year ago

      Up where they watch, us tiny ants

      We cannot comprehend their plans

      I want to be, I want to see

      Ṕ̵̨̹͙̮̯̜̙̹͚̈͑͗́̉͊̋̊̉͗̕͘ā̵͇̩̟̲̬̼͔̹͇̥̱̪̭̲̈́̐͒͂̂͌͂̔ͅȑ̴̨̛̞̪̰̟̠̠̓̈́̀͜͜ͅt̵̝̘̙̪̖̱̰̘̦̜͕̖͎̿̃̃͊̐ͅ ̴̧̢̛̲̤̭̟̲͉͚͖͔͍̞̭̀̽̿̎̇̐͗̀͘͠ọ̴̡͉̻̹̍̀͋̌̃̈͋̈́͘͝f̸̡̢͔̰̹̟̔̇̈́͑͆̿͝ͅ ̵̛̘̒̅̆͐̌͂́̓̕̕ͅt̶̨̿̏́̿̑̍h̷̨̛̞̤͖͙͚̗͉̳͒̈́̂̀̽a̷͈͙̱̗͂̌̽͗̕t̸͕̝̫͚̝͓͎̳͙̟̰̠̅̑̆̽̏̃̍̓̈͆͘̚͘͝ ̸̢̧̫̤̤̯̠̗̻̩̬͉̠͉͘w̷̡͍͖̪̄̍̈́́̾͆o̸̧̪͍̮͉̟̲̜̟̎ͅr̴̡̪̞̳̣͖̺͓̣͆͛̆͂̓̈̌͝l̷̠͎̣̼̥͖̫̣̔̍̽̓̉̀̀͆̎̉̽͘͠d̸̢̛̥̭̮̜̪̼͚̟̦͗́̇͌͆̓̏̏͝͝

  • JGrffn@lemmy.world
    511·
    1 year ago

    Putting aside for the moment the fact that psychedelics are essentially just causing your brain to [temporarily] malfunction, this description eerily resembles the post-trip phase of psychedelics. You come back from essentially getting your blindfolds taken from you, seeing the world in ways that make sense only during the psychedelic trip, and even then it’s all overwhelming, only to come back and question just about EVERYTHING about reality. It’s been 3 years and I’m still going down the quantum physics/cosmology rabbit hole (as well as the philosophy and metaphysics rabbit holes, thanks exurb1a), all due to a strong bad LSD trip. It’s beautiful, it’s expanded my knowledge of things, but it is, indeed, very much like madness.

    • v_krishna@lemmy.mlEnglish
      231·
      1 year ago

      Psychedelics definitely aren’t causing your brain to malfunction. If anything, most of the research around neuroplasticity and using psychedelics for traumatic brain injuries and dementia and such show that they seemingly kick your brain into an overdrive mode where it is able to form connections at a much higher rate than normal.

      • JGrffn@lemmy.world
        21·
        1 year ago

        Taken in measured, clinically understood doses, sure. Taken to meet Vishnu, I assure you, none of what your brain experiences is normal function. Not to say they cause damage, but your brain definitely operates way out of spec for a while there.

        • v_krishna@lemmy.mlEnglish
          11·
          1 year ago

          Fair enough, I like the “operate way out of spec” language much more than “malfunction” but you obv have a point.

          As someone who has met Vishnu more than a few times though I’ve very very rarely come back with a Lovecraftian dread (though the rest of the ant metaphor in OP not that bad at all)

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        I mean, they kind of are…

        LSD especially “breaks” pattern recognition and so does mushrooms to a lesser extent.

        That’s why faces can freak people out, especially your own. Very very few people have faces that are perfectly symmetrical, and our brains do a lot of subconscious processing to make them symmetrical. That’s why symmetrical faces are enjoyable to look at. They’re literally “easy to look at”.

        On LSD and mushrooms, that just stops happening.

        It’s why people gain insight from psychedelics, their “autopilot” stops functioning. It might not seem like a malfunctioning brain because that’s the entire reason people choose to do those drugs. But it’s still making the brain malfunction

        • SoleInvictus@lemmy.world
          5·
          1 year ago

          Speaking of broken facial recognition…

          Pro tip: if you’re experimenting with microdosing shrooms and you’re testing your upper limits, under no circumstances should you watch a pirated Nicholas Cage movie with poor, low quality compression. That was a fucking nightmare.

            • SoleInvictus@lemmy.world
              3·
              1 year ago

              At that dosage, I wasn’t hallucinating but the part of my brain responsible for recognizing and making sense of faces and, in particular, facial expressions wasn’t working anymore. For example, if my wife smiled, intellectually I knew it was a smile, but instinctually it gave the same feeling you get when you watch badly animated characters smiling or if someone were to make a surprisingly realistic face out of pineapple slices and ham or on a carved pumpkin. It just seemed wrong and made me intensely uncomfortable because I knew it should feel like a person, but instead it had that creepy uncanny valley feeling. Multiplied by 100. I’m finding it surprisingly hard to describe, I hope that conveys it somewhat.

              With that in mind, now imagine the faces Nicholas Cage makes.

    • Irishred88@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      I’ve experienced LSD a few times and Mushrooms once. They are subtly different but I like to lean into the difficulty of the experience (when or if it starts to go that way). I feel like I’m being taught something important and doing so has been beneficial. To me it feels like a death and rebirth experience. I’m not foolish enough to think it’s the answer to my problems, but boy does it ever shine a light on things! For me, they bring me back to being a kid, experiencing everything with wonder and curiosity. It’s a breath of fresh air because I spent my young adult life trying to “grow up” by trying to fit into everyone else’s expectation if what adult means. It made me realize I am individual as well as connected to the human race and I should enjoy and embrace that.

      • JGrffn@lemmy.world
        7·
        1 year ago

        Honestly, even bad trips are good trips. The trip I reference in my post (500ug LSD + cannabis during the peak for added mindfuckery) was, by all means, a bad trip that left me with PTSD and on at least one occasion I had a panic attack during a work call, where reality felt a bit too much. Not something I enjoyed, but even then I could appreciate that it had changed me for the better. I got a lot of my shit together after that trip and I appreciate life a lot more than I used to. I was fat, single (and had been all 28 years of my life), had no aim in life, had no hobbies, no appreciation for leaving my room at all or interacting with people in real life. Today I proposed to my girlfriend of two years, I do photography as a hobby and actively try to go out and appreciate the world around me, reached my target body weight, vastly increased my social life, and I am paving the road to a life I desire to live. Not everything is perfect, and maybe I am attributing too much to the trip and not enough to simple aging and maturing through that time, but there was a stark before and after for me. As far as I’m concerned it’s been the most positively life changing event in my life that I absolutely cannot recommend anyone in my life to ever try.

        • Irishred88@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          As far as I’m concerned it’s been the most positively life changing event in my life that I absolutely cannot recommend anyone in my life to ever try.

          My thoughts exactly. I treasure the experience but I could never recommend it to anyone as it hits everyone different. The best I could say to someone considering it is that you better be willing to confront yourself and your most difficult feelings.

          I’m happy to hear that it was a net positive for you that’s wonderful.

      • SoleInvictus@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        The ego death many experience can really teach us a lot. The self replicating machine elves found by doing DMT offer a totally different perspective too.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
      55·
      1 year ago

      Incorrect, it’s not a malfunction, it’s your thought process in overdrive. You’re thinking so fast and so clearly that your brain literally can’t keep up. You have overclocked yourself.

      • JGrffn@lemmy.world
        14·
        1 year ago

        I’m not sure if you’ve tripped before, but that hardly explains the reality-obliterating hallucinations on all sensory inputs. There’s feedback loops everywhere at that point. The moment there’s hallucinations or synesthesia you could argue the brain is not operating to spec and, at least temporarily, malfunctioning, as in, you probably wouldn’t usually be able to use your brain to overcome challenges it’s been designed to overcome when operating normally.

        Hey I’m all for it, you can argue you learn a lot about reality itself once your senses go out the door and your brain stops processing reality the way we normally process it, but it’s still not how the brain has been designed to sense and respond to reality.

    • Sagrotan@lemmy.world
      10·
      1 year ago

      And, like all things, it’s a question of wise measure. Too much radical acceptance can bring you in the vicinity of dangerous fatalism. And like fatalism, it’s a tool, right, and an important one. Mind the dosage, though.

    • IHadTwoCows@lemm.ee
      8·
      1 year ago

      Radical acceptance has gotten me through a lot of things, and my wife is going through a tremendous amount right now so she’s trying to accept also.

      The problem is that down the road you may look back on the situation and decide that you handled it entirely wrong by dissociating. YMMV

    • Krauerking@lemy.lol
      1·
      1 year ago

      See funny enough acceptance has just made me casually suicidal and uninterested in participating in the grander world because of it’s bullshit. I’m not directly suicidal just completely done with self interests or dealing with others so… You know… Be careful if what your normalize and how you feel about things.

      • bane_killgrind@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        You can’t accept what hasn’t happened yet. You could do something about circumstances to position yourself for the future.

  • GutsBerserk@lemmy.world
    38·
    1 year ago

    Imagine a commoner from the Roman Empire waking up in a Tokyo Mall for a couple hours… and then going back and trying to explain his adventures…

  • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
    221·
    1 year ago

    The problem is that there’s only so much of that which can be expressed, the only way to experience the latter part is if that madness drove the experiencer to becoming your story’s or game’s antagonist force tearing their world apart trying to recreate the conditions they think will take them back to that higher world of alien understanding.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
      8·
      1 year ago

      Congratulations, you reinvented the Faust saga. Faust was given not just a brief moment but several years of understanding before the devil would claim his soul but narratively speaking that’s not a bad idea, gives our protagonist (not every protagonist needs to be a hero) plenty of time to fuck up. Goethe gave the whole thing a happy end, quite non-standard actually.

      • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        No I meant antagonist because the best way to actually give perspective to this madness is to see it from the outside. It’s a prospect that inherently defies the ability of humanity to understand, so don’t try to, make our protagonist a secondary actor who enters the story where some raving mad lunatic has already torn through screaming about the flipping towers of lightning or words who’s writings encompass the universe or having witnessed and moved the hands of a god.

        Leave the incomprehensible for a perspective we don’t need to fully comprehend to be able to interact with it.

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
          2·
          1 year ago

          The player will always have a somewhat outside perspective on the protagonist. Gameplay-wise the player could be trying to keep the protagonist sane… or if the player leans into the insanity suddenly the game reacts and punishes the protagonist for trying to immanentise the eschaton. Make the player fight for the fate of the protagonist within the protagonist.

          Also I’d highly recommend against going that route if you don’t have a well-marinated schizo as script writer, we know dealing with that “eldritch horror” all to well it’s called the genome. Ever wondered why virgins can have realistic dreams about sex? Realistic as in sensation, I mean. Certainly can’t be personal memory.

          • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
            2·
            1 year ago

            I mean babysitting a lunatic from the outside feels like a risky manoeuvre from a game design perspective.

            It’d almost have to be a 2nd person game to get the weirdness in a way that doesn’t require you try to explain the incomprehensible to the perspective of the player, because honestly I feel even letting the lunatic act as a narrator has too much of a risk of failing the test of incomprehensibility.

            It’s like we’re trying to pass the anti-turing test, you know that protagonist you’re controlling is a human but they’re just so fucking cracked in behavior and mannerisms that they feel completely alienated from the player empathetically, like we’d be trying to send them into the uncanny valley just on how they talk and act.

            Also, it can’t be a 4th wall breaker, that’s an obvious reach for “I saw beyond the veil and into the eye of madness” but it’s been done so many damn times that the players would immediately catch wise once the hint was dropped and we’d be the latest cash grab for MatPat by the end of the week.

            Honestly the writers shouldn’t be able to imagine what the protagonist saw either, this is a guy we sent into the void of madness and we gotta write him as if we’re just watching someone who went insane then recovered then went insane again in a cycle lasting what could have been nanoseconds or eons by the protagonist’s reckoning.

            This guy needs to be the perfect equivalent of that ant that saw the circuitry and understood it then came back only remembering that it understood for the brief moments its was “above”

    • SgtAStrawberry@lemmy.world
      7·
      1 year ago

      I seen a similar explanation that would work quite well for a game. It was a 2D world and the knowledge was seeing it in 3D. Combined with your description would definitely be able to be translated into a game.

        • Klear@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          I made a game like that for a game jam. It’s very short, somewhat janky and the level design isn’t too great, since I barely had any time left to thrown some levels together by the time I had the base mechanics somewhat working, but I’m still pretty proud of it.

          I might return to this and turn it into a proper game at some point, but I always seem to be busy.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          31·
          1 year ago

          Oh wow, I was coming in here to mention the novel. I always thought that the square should have gone insane rather than try to convince everyone of the truth.

          • Sotuanduso@lemm.eeEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            From an outside perspective, trying to convince people of a truth they can’t comprehend looks a whole lot like insanity.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
              21·
              1 year ago

              I understand that, but this is a truth he shouldn’t have been able to comprehend. It would be like if a 4-D being took you a positive direction along the W axis. What’s the W axis? You can’t even conceive of a W axis. Your brain did not evolve to hold the concept of a W axis as part of basic rationality. Then the being allowed you to look at your family in 3D space from a distance along the W axis. You’re literally seeing something your eyes would not be able to see. That would drive anyone insane.

              I mean I get that a 2D living square is not a human, but he seemed to have the same ways of thinking as we do.

        • SgtAStrawberry@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yeah something like that. After watching it tough I do believe that while 3D to 4D encapsulates a bit more of the Lovecraftian feel, 2D to 3D would be a better medium to use for a game exploring that that feeling, as unless we actually find some elder gods to show us the forth dimension we really can grasp it. Which would work better for the feeling, but I do think it would also hamper it.

          Or we go a step even further and start with a 2D game then go to a 2D/3D game and then transition to a 2D/3D/4D game. That would probably be the best way of showing of the feeling.

        • SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world
          6·
          1 year ago

          Yeah. I don’t see how everyone doesn’t see that as the goal.

          People who try to hold on to " the way it’s always been" or tradition or whatever just don’t fucking get it.

          Blasphemy in the face of evolution itself

        • SoleInvictus@lemmy.world
          6·
          1 year ago

          Here here. It’s about time we start controlling the trajectory of our development. Evolution through natural selection is a shit system. I’d know, I studied it. I’m ready to CRISPR my (figurative) ass until I’m what I want to be.

          • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            I wanna be immortal psychic catgirl.

            CRISPR plz…

            Would definitely have huge tits and ass

  • lunarul@lemmy.world
    17·
    1 year ago

    The ant trying to tell other ants about the incomprehensible world beyond sounds a lot like the allegory of the cave.

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
    17·
    1 year ago

    This reminds me of Taravangian from the Stormlight Archives. He experiences exactly this, a few hours of clarity when he understands everything… and then it is gone. Those few hours determine his actions for decades.

  • BuckWylde@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 year ago

    As someone who experiences audio and visual hallucinations due to a sleep condition there are days when it feels like Cthulhu could show up at any time and I would ask him if he wants to get lunch.