Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es

I spent a while scrolling through r/hypnosis and was just kind of aghast at the amount of content that is (1) contentious (2) founded on absolutely nothing (3) linked to some guru.

There's something else that makes it very hard for me not to read this kind of thing as a scam against newbies.

The phase of hypnosis where a person goes from awake to hypnotized is called an "induction," and learning to do inductions is one of a handful of experiences you can have that will literally make you feel like a wizard in real life.

Any act between consenting adults can constitute "sex." What makes it sex is a function of the people involved: I have no love for feet and no act involving someone else's foot is likely to constitute "sex" for me. For many couples, it's not sex at all if everyone isn't barefoot.

Likewise, a dirty secret that every hypnotist will discover eventually is that you can do almost anything and call it an "induction." Hypnotic induction demands skill, but not technical skill, and it especially demands emotional fondness or at least a sense of understanding between the parties.

The induction is going to be the central point of focus for many new hypnotists and yet it's one of the least technical aspects of hypnotism.

Hypnosis resources for novices focus to a great extent on inductions, and the advice is highly technical: it encourages you to sort your subjects into a great number of categories and warns you that most categories of subject will not respond to most kinds of induction.

This creates a state of mind where before you've actually hypnotized anyone, you've learned a discipline and developed a dependence on a particular curriculum structured in a particular way, and it creates a state where if you encounter failure, you're meant to interpret that failure as a sign that you could have addressed the situation by buying more books.

I think this is a pretty grim situation for new hypnotists. It's not an uncommon situation, though. My actual opinion is that many communities, ultimately, become dominated by the exchange of branded myths. First by a group of first-order myth creators who benefit directly -- the master hypnotists and guru -- second by a group of people who have no chance of being sorted to the top of a community based on charisma, but who have a chance of making it to the top by demonstrating technical knowledge.

Third by people who have no choice but to find the mythical content compelling -- who have been told "believe this now and you can have all the things you want later." These are the true victims -- they're participants not because the myth serves a social function for them but because they actually believe the myth is true. And these are the ultimate bagholders of every self-help community -- crypto, the metaverse.

Hypnotism is actually incredibly satisfying, but my experience is that it's satisfying in a very tactile way. There's a lot of personal discovery involved: you're going to a place that's very intimate, and you're taking someone else, and you don't know what it will be like for both of you.

I believe that in a place where there's only room for a small number of people, there's little room for sorting, and I suppose I want to be in spaces that create the potential for that kind of intimacy.

(At the very least, my ideal community would have zero "master hypnotists" in it.)

Passkeys: A shattered dream.

https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2024-04-26-passkeys-a-shattered-dream/

Last November, NASA's Voyager 1 sent home garbled data, and engineers traced the problem to the flight data subsystem (FDS). The problem turned out to be a single chip in the FDS memory. They couldn't repair the chip but could move the affected code into sections and store them in different parts of the FDS system. They tested the new system this week, sending signals to the Voyager 1, 22.5 light-hours away. It worked, and Voyager 1 is back.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

"Being alive is as special an occasion as it gets" 😍

I. Feel. Every. Single. Fucking. Word.

#ActuallyAutistic #ADHD #AuDHD #LateDiagnosis #Ableism #Sexism #PeripheralVestibularDisorder #ChronicPain #InvisibleDisability

Sleeping more flushes junk out of the brain

Rhythmic activity during sleep may get fluids in the brain moving.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/sleeping-more-flushes-junk-out-of-the-brain/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social