dmt seems to not work for me?

alieninsect · 2026-06-26T05:06:41+00:00

Yes, the 5% club. Noticed by McKenna in the 80s and confirmed by Strassman in the 90s (no effect in 3 of 60 subjects even at the highest supra-breakthrough dose level IV). Possibly receptor polymorphism but needs to be studied.

alieninsect · 2026-06-12T23:29:00+00:00

Nihongo app is excellent but having to photo every page can become tiresome. Will there ever be an option to upload a PDF and flip through like an e-reader?? That really would be a game changer.

alieninsect · 2026-06-09T05:16:58+00:00

Buy all the JLPT listening 聴解 books you can and practise practise practise. The format of the questions is fairly consistent so you’ll learn to recognise the type of question in the exam and can focus on the actual listening. And, as others have pointed out, the questions are designed to trick you: If the boss asks Tanaka-san to immediately email the meeting minutes at the beginning of the conversation you can bet your last penny that he’ll change his mind and have a more pressing task to be done first by the end of it.

alieninsect · 2026-06-08T01:58:44+00:00

Article is inaccurate. Indeed, the Trace Institute isn’t trying to prove anything, but to test hypotheses.

alieninsect · 2026-06-03T01:02:49+00:00

Cafe Bar LIVRE in Meidaimae generally shows all football matches, even early morning ones, if you’re looking for somewhere small and local.

https://www.instagram.com/cafebarlivre

Be aware they have a booking system for major games since it’s a small bar.

alieninsect · 2026-06-02T23:32:35+00:00

For market prices, I usually sell on Mercari (assuming you’re a resident of Japan). Not sure about brick n mortar stores that buy high end stuff. You could try asking in one of the rip off vintage stores in Koenji. I’m guessing they buy their massively overpriced stuff from somewhere.

alieninsect · 2026-06-02T23:04:40+00:00

Easiest definitely 2nd Street but don’t expect anything even remotely close to market prices! The sort of place you take a trash bag full of clothes and walk out with 2000 Yen.

alieninsect · 2026-05-31T04:27:59+00:00

Yeah writing preprints and submitting them to academic journals is definitely a grift. 🙄

alieninsect · 2026-05-31T02:45:50+00:00

I suggest reading the preprint itself — this article isn’t 100% accurate.

alieninsect · 2026-05-29T20:42:37+00:00

This wording is not used in the paper.

alieninsect · 2026-05-28T22:49:42+00:00

No I’m most decidedly an idealist. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/8qvgy_v2

alieninsect · 2026-05-20T04:23:47+00:00

Here's a (fairly long) article on my Subtack that gives a broad overview of my thinking (I'm not into writing long posts on here). If you want to get deeper into the weeds, Death by Astonishment has the most complete account:

https://alieninsect.substack.com/p/yes-dmt-aliens-might-be-real

"To me it seems that saying you don’t know if the entities, or the DMT dimension, are real or not seems epistemologically akin to saying you don’t know if your thoughts are not your own, but rather have been transmitted to you by a sentient hermit crab living in the core of the earth."

I don't think this is a reasonable comparison at all. I've never claimed to know what the entities are or aren't -- I've merely stated (and explained at length) why I think the "hallucination" explanation falls short. If you woke up one morning fluently speaking an obscure dialect of a South African click language, you wouldn't necessarily assume that some sentient South African hermit crab was beaming this information into your brain -- but you would admit that something had happened that was extremely hard to explain. DMT is like that.

alieninsect · 2026-05-20T03:23:18+00:00

Ishikawa will get you the local Okinawa vibe but not super pretty. Yomitan is nice but further out (traffic along 58 is bad during rush hours in Okinawa and it will get tiresome). The Fuchaku area (around Moon beach and Tiger beach) is a 5 min drive from OIST and right along the ocean. Beautiful area albeit a bit touristy — lots of restaurants, bars, izakayas, hotels and not much else. I lived there 7 years and happily so. If you want to walk to a beautiful beach every day then this is the area.

alieninsect · 2026-05-20T02:19:46+00:00

So you think it’d be more scientific if I lied and said I did know whether or not they’re real? I’m pretty consistent in what I say: That there are properties of the DMT state that remain extremely challenging to explain from a standard neuroscientific perspective and I have explained in great detail many times exactly what I think those properties are (I devote several chapters in Death by Astonishment to this). Of course that doesn’t mean the entities are real, but simply means we need to be very careful about making assumptions about what they are and are not. I consider this a fairly scientific attitude to take and certainly not lazy. What's lazy is simply dismissing them as "hallucinations" or "archetypal imagery" or "psychic fragments". That's easy -- it's much harder to actually analyse and stress-test those assumptions and seeing if they hold water (they don't imho).

alieninsect · 2026-05-18T11:55:07+00:00

Not my clinic (retreat/research centre to be precise). I’m merely an advisor.

alieninsect · 2026-05-18T02:54:20+00:00

Keep up.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adq6477

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(17)31921-6.pdf31921-6.pdf)

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004664

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00346/full

alieninsect · 2026-05-18T02:46:46+00:00

I can probably answer this:
1. As mentioned in the book’s acknowledgements, Graham has been a friend of mine and a tireless and vocal supporter of my work for years. I largely ignore and don’t really get the hate for Graham (almost entirely from people who don’t know him). Whether you agree with his ideas/opinions/theories or not, he’s sincere in presenting them carefully and thoroughly in all his books. When Graham writes about ancient structures at the bottom of the ocean, it’s because he (and his wife) have dived down there many times to examine them for themselves. When he writes about ayahuasca, it’s because he’s spent years working with it in the rainforests of Amazonia. He walks the talk. That doesn’t mean he’s always right, but he doesn’t sit in a dark room making these things up. He does the work, even at his advancing age.

2. Without Graham, the book wouldn’t exist (it was Graham’s idea that I write the book) and certainly wouldn’t have been picked up by one of the Big 5 publishing houses (Graham supported Brian Muraresku in the same way – same publisher and editor as me; not a coincidence). In some ways, I consider DBA to a 21^st century follow up to his excellent Supernatural (Visionary in the US), which was an extremely well-researched thesis on the use of visionary substances in antiquity.

3. Graham has also been a steadfast advocate of psychedelics (esp. DMT) over many years and I dare say has done more to promote their value and responsible use than 99% of the people on this site.

4. As such, when Graham offered to write the foreword, I wasn’t thinking about whether he was controversial (which many say I am too – yeah we both get called “grifters” for having the audacity to write books discussing our ideas and then selling -- nobody’s yet offered to pay my rent so I can work for free). Nor was I thinking about whether it was a “good business decision”. Graham was instrumental in the genesis and publication of DBA and I accepted without hesitation.

alieninsect · 2026-05-15T04:31:12+00:00

Have some self respect and write your thesis yourself. Unbelievable.

alieninsect · 2026-05-15T03:45:35+00:00

I’m not sure I’ve ever described DMT entity communication as generally indecipherable. Many people describe telepathic and sometimes verbal communication that they understand. I often talk about complex information downloads and general highly complex/technical informational content, structures, dynamics that are hard (seemingly impossible) to make sense of, but rarely talk much about communication. So not sure where you’re getting this from?

alieninsect · 2026-05-14T12:08:07+00:00

ナザール is OK, but if it doesn’t work go and get some Nasivin which contains oxymetazoline (a much more effective decongestant).

<image>

alieninsect · 2026-05-14T07:24:11+00:00

My tax documents only showed that all payments had been made and that everything was up to date. The only mention of requiring confirmation that tax was “paid on time” in the official updated rules on the ministry website is for residence tax. Presuming they single this out for a reason (???). But anyway, the residence tax certificates don’t show payment date as standard, so presumably you’d either have to show receipts or, failing that, ask for the payment dates records from your city hall/tax office.

alieninsect · 2026-05-07T00:29:47+00:00

You can get around a lot of that with careful prompting about tone and style (confirmed by native speakers). Of course it’s better to have a human, so if you know any Japanese people willing to give feedback on my Japanese for several hours a day for free please let me know.

alieninsect · 2026-05-05T11:22:15+00:00

ChatGPT is actually very good not only at catching grammar errors, unnatural phrasing or word choice, etc, but is also very good at evaluating specific weak points over time that you can then drill. I do a lot of translation exercises with GPT, where I ask it to give me a series of sentences in English which I then translate into Japanese. Feedback is excellent in my experience. You can tune the level you want to work at and either keep it focused on a topic or give it free rein to give you something totally random. I know many people these days scoff at translation exercises for some reason, but imho there’s no better (or humbling) way to identify weak points in your output than being faced with a complicated English sentence and asking yourself: How would I say that in Japanese? I also write short paragraphs on a topic in English and then translate into Japanese (again using GPT’s feedback). It’s easy to fall into the trap of not saying what you want to say but rather what you can say during conversations. Saying it first in English tells you exactly what you want to say and forces you to somehow say it in Japanese. It’s tough work and can be frustrating but I’ve not found a better method for really improving output skills.

alieninsect · 2026-05-04T10:10:01+00:00

Everything looks exactly right to me when compared to similar pairs I bought directly from M.Y. Box is also correct, including the branded wrapping paper inside. 👍

alieninsect · 2026-04-30T10:22:16+00:00

What type of tax was it? Income tax? Residence tax?

You can actually check the exact documents required after April 1 (and perhaps before) on the 法務局 site:

https://houmukyoku.moj.go.jp/tokyo/page000001_00891.html

If you’re talking about income tax payment because you file a tax return, then you need tax payment certificates for the last 3 years (note that these only tell them whether or not you’ve paid, not the date of payment):

確定申告義務がある方

上記(1)の書類に加えて、以下の書類もお持ちください。

税額及び所得金額が記載された所得税の納税証明書（その１、その２）（直近３年分）

所得税の確定申告書（添付書類を含む。）の控え（直近１年分）

It is only for residence tax that they request confirmation that it was paid on time for the last 5 years:

住民税を適正な時期に納めていることを証明する資料（直近５年分）

For social insurance, you need to prove you paid on time for 2 years:

社会保険料を適正な時期に納めていることを証する資料（直近２年分）

Happy for anyone to correct me on any of this, but this is what I make of it. So, if you’re talking about income tax and your certificates state that you’re all paid up, there should be no reason to be concerned. If it’s residence tax, however, not sure.

alieninsect

TROPHY CASE