Thanks, didn't know this - but from my experience, DMT smoke smelled and tasted kind of plasticky (like when you burn plastic). Did I just interpret the poop-smell differently?
I think it's just like that because skatole is only one of many odours in excrement, but it's the one that makes in uncomfortable and makes you want to get away from it. So evolutionarily it's useful to just get away from skatole whenever encountered.
So it's not so much that it smells like poop, just is as revolting in some more general sense. And DMT probably has a lot of bitterness to it(can't remember what it tastes like, honestly, but I remember its cousins AMT and DPT being intensely bitter, though I didn't vape them).
Weirdly, skatole also smells nice in very small quantities, and is apparently used in perfume.
For anyone reading, I think this is the best description of derealization in the thread. The window metaphor is good. I even had a quite literal experience of this "window" kind of effect. I took a strong dose of salvia (known to cause derealization, as a dissociative drug) and actually saw my vision as a small "window" at a distance from my actual "self". It was like being aware of the blackness around my vision.
Later I took a much smaller dose of salvia and I didn't hallucinate but still got the strong feeling of derealization. It's so hard to describe but everything seemed "fake" or "plastic". Like hollow and so lonely. Maybe, I guess, what looking at a scene through VR would look like. The sun didn't feel warm, the grass I was touching had no feeling of comfort with it (?). Ah, I thought I could describe it but it's so hard to describe, I give up.
If you take a small dose of salvia you can understand what it feels like. Definitely don't recommend but as far as I know, it's harmless and (for me) impermanent.
My days/months have been flying by and I thought I was just because I'm getting older. Thanks for mentioning this in the context of working from home. I feel a little better now.
> My days/months have been flying by and I thought I was just because I'm getting older.
The theory behind this is that your brain "compresses" memories. Identical days are just stored as "and here I spent 5 days working". And if your weekends are mostly similar, then it's just "And then I spent 12 weeks doing routine shit".
For kids time seems to move slower because everything they experience is new and can't be "compressed".
As an adult you can emulate this by doing things you haven't done before, getting new experiences.
This is why backpacking around some crazy 3rd world countries is so intense, 2 weeks feel like few months, and 3 months felt like several lifetimes. It was so surreal when I first experienced it, after ie 2 months in India the memory of life back at home was a distant memory of a dream since every single day was an endless stream of completely new experiences and encounters.
Do yourself a favor, anytime you have vacation try to do and see something different, new, every day. Even now with small kids, when we try this our vacations feel much longer than they actually are. But prepare to be more exhausted, although I call it 'good exhaustion'.
I call it prolongation of life mentally, the best we have for now (apart from physical aspect of living healthier obviously).
>I knew from personal experience that this was a lie. Recipes always said it took 5 or 10 minutes to caramelize onions, and when you followed the recipes, you either got slightly cooked onions or you ended up 40 minutes behind schedule. So I caramelized some onions and recorded how long it really took—28 minutes if you cooked them as hot as possible and constantly stirred them, 45 minutes if you were sane about it—and I published those results on Slate, along with a denunciation of the false five-to-10 minute standard.
Trusting Google is just as apt to get you in trouble.
Google didn't write the recipe, though; the blogger/author did. I have never trusted the snippets that Google started taking out of context and attempts to spoon-feed you at the top of the search, because much of the time they don't answer what I asked. Even then, the source is cited, allowing you to see the context yourself. Google is a tool for locating information from other sources. LLMs do not always correctly cite their sources, let alone provide them.
For me at least, I sometimes find it very difficult to google information I don’t yet know a lot about. It is very difficult if you don’t know the jargon to find anything that goes beyond the very surface level. Or if you did find the correct word, it goes too fast and you are not able to follow. It can be difficult to find an article in the “goldilocks zone” where I can follow along but also learn a lot. I do not do this, but I can imagine that AI could help with that as a starting of point. Then I would probably still google to confirm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E