September 2025 blog

some fun things I've come across:

hyperreality

Hypereality is when a simulation becomes more real than the thing being simulated. It's basically to do with the idea of nostalgia for the unreal, where you're searching for the feeling of something that is more exaggerated than its real life counterpart, with the belief it is more real. Eg. with nostalgia for the 90s - our nostalgia is hyperreal. We're not nostalgic for the actual 90s, with all its mundane parts to it, and even if we were, our version has become inevitably distorted due to the difference in time. So over time, the simulated 90s becomes the dominant version in our minds, the realer-than-real version. This video on hyperreality is interesting too.

It's an interesting concept because being on the internet constantly predisposes you to indulging in hyperreality. You don't really have to look further than instagram idealism (seeing people's projected best versions of their lives, houses, holidays, fitness, whatever).

disco elysium

into the mainframe

I haven't done any kind of psychedelics properly in about two years, and then very recently accidentally did way too much ketamine, and ended up K-holing so hard I temporarily had no idea where or who I was.

To describe the experience, I couldn't properly see anything, so my vision was just hallucinations of sounds as three-dimensional objects coming towards me. Everything sounded like Windows 95 error sounds, and I was convinced at one point that people I work with were there and witnessing me like this. I was so confused and stuck in that one spot on the couch that it felt like that forty minutes stretched to six hours, and everything had that "nefarious robot/metallic" kind of feeling to it that's hard to describe (like the world was made of metal grids or circuitry instead of organic textures). There was also a reverberation to voices and other noises, so the room I was in sonically felt like a metal chamber with sounds having a tinny midi-like autotuned filter over them.

In the meantime, I still could barely see, because the levels of synaesthesia impacting my vision combined with general hallucinations made everything look like a repeating chamber of nonsensical fractal shapes that I could occasionally make out to be people and objects in the room.

I would have occasional moments of clarity, where while my vision was still totally fucked with computerised hallucinations, and I still didn't one hundred percent know where I was (and how long this had been happening, who was there, what drug I'd taken, etc), I could, however, occasionally recall I was at some kind of party with my friend [redacted] sitting next to me, and I was also both slightly worried about what was happening and also knew I was potentially making a fool of myself in front of others. So through my garbled unresponsive mouth muscles I would use those moments of clarity to fix a statement together like, "What the fuck is going on...", making the statement with an exaggerated expression of incredulity to diffuse my unease with humour and hide the fact that I legitimately did not know what was going on, and then using others' seemingly amused reactions as reassurance that nothing horrible was happening.

I will say that a positive effect of this dose, is it functionally had the effect of a psychedelic trip where I felt a resounding sense of togetherness in the world or whatever, the kind where you feel like you're "seeing through time" with your life mashing together and you're mentally sorting things into "useful/not useful".

When I was coming down, I started blubbering/reminiscing about my teacher to the aforementioned friend, since the funeral was still fresh in my mind. I tried to articulate these profound thoughts of kindness and love prevailing over everything else, and would've sounded like the most stereotypical drugged out person.

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When I got home, my boyfriend gave me a talking-to where he turned Chat GPT on voicemode, and held it up while I was laying already hungover in bed, getting it to tell me facts about what can happen when you mix too much alcohol with ketamine. Then, as if to add insult to injury, he prompted it to create a eulogy for if I had died, as well as what he would have to post on social media, and a script for what he would say to my family on the phone to let them know I'd died unceremoniously on a couch at a party. An uncommon method but an effective one that, probably only my boyfriend, with his particular occasionally morbid sense of humour could pull off without it coming across as overtly depressing.

All in all, I would say it was neutral experience, however if this was my first experience with a psychedelic trip, it could've been pretty hellish. I've enjoyed lower doses a lot where you just get chatty and peppy and ready to dance, so I personally had no idea that too much ketamine could feel like you're in a psychedelic washing machine for 40 minutes.

strange grief

This kind of ties into a more serious note. I attended a funeral this week for a teacher who, although I hadn't seen him for a couple of years, had stayed in contact with well past school had finished. He was an eccentric guy, always wearing loud colourful t-shirts and flagrantly ignoring the principal's dress code. He let us skive off a lot in class and once got in trouble for using the school labs to try to dehydrate his personal fish supply. Post-school, he would often love heart my instagram stories of me getting up to strange things most teachers would disapprove of. But he was beloved, and incredibly prolific in the school and local community. He lived nearby my mum and ran the local Facebook group, often turning up to new neighbour's doors with a clipboard ready to welcome them into the neighbourhood. He would also often travel to the Solomon Islands and had recently started a charity effort in a village there to get their curriculum up to scratch.

Seeing my year 8 tech teacher with his head in his hands, weeping overcome with emotion on wednesday is an image that will stick in my brain. It's always been an interesting balance to me for teachers - they're meant to be open and sensitive, but also need to censor their own vulnerabilities so as not to lose face or authority with their students. It's an interesting balance so seeing so many teachers overcome with emotion at the funeral was quite touching to me. And I think that now that this particular teacher is gone, it's made me reflect on how well he was able to show his human side while never being inappropriate towards students.

This all has made me think more about connections too. It's easy to let them slide, and although I'm much more connected than most people, I want to make sure that doesn't fade. I felt myself sliding a bit over winter, electing to go the easy route and not see friends or organise catch ups as regularly, and I personally have had a couple of minor disruptions to my social network recently making it harder to engage the way I normally do. but I think that without regular connection, I can feel a little lost. And so does everyone else.