I started watching/listening to critical rolls first campaign. Still sometimes do before sleep. I read that the later episodes got better production quality, so I might watch those.

I read this interesting piece on Hobby Drama about the sudden (or not so sudden) vanishing of Tiberius/Orion Acaba

|the British tantra guru Shaft Uddin

I know him. What a small world. I camped with him at MidBurn 2014. I was surprised to read his name here. But I am also not really surprised. There are even vice documentaries about the guy.

Anyway, I think this piece shows a specific problem in the current alternative scene (and all of its variations). There is a lot of science denial and anti-vaxxing. It is the same in Israel, where a whole hippie town does not want to get vaccinated.

I dont know exactly why there is this enrichment in this scene. I lost some friends to conspiracy theories and I attribute heavy use of cannabis and psychedelics for a long period of time during lockdown. Some people simply react negatively to being told what to do or freedom restriction. Specially if the majority of your energy recharging comes from going to festivals in all their forms. So it doesnt matter what the scientific basis is, it is not good because they cant do what they want to do.

Either way. 100/500 people getting infected is quite high. In my opinion such events shouldnt be held without vaccination or testing restrictions. At Kiezburn this year we had to come with a negative test and were tested every morning to make sure this exact thing didnt happen.

From someone whose best running achievement was a half marathon and now can't run 3 minutes without taking a break (ACL surgery two years ago) you get my extreme respect :)

Badged because you are a beast.

I remember the day. It was weird. I went to junior high school back then, I think I was in 7th or 8th grade... At home, my father had the TV on aljazeera and he kept repeating "bin Laden finally got you, you maniacs", while his face mirrored the horror he was watching on TV, and knowing fully what that meant for everyone. The next day at school everyone was talking about it in class, and everyone was EXTATIC. Celebrating. I remember that some discussions broke out about it where some students were arguing that the attack killed civilians, but many were quick to counter that many many more civilians were killed by the USA all over the middle East and that this was the only way to do anything against the military power that is the US. In case you didn't realize, virtually everyone in the middle East hates the USA, and usually has a valid reason why to.

I didn't know what to think. I understood both arguments. And even though it is obvious what was right and wrong and that terrorist attacks should never be supported, I still struggled in taking a stance.

Once I made up my mind though, I kept my opinion to myself. Because loudly speaking out against the attacks was an act of treason.

While reading the article, it struck me how the same 12% in the states that were against the war in Afghanistan (and were called traitors), are probably the parallel group to the ones in the middle East who did not support the attacks and were also seen as traitors.

That day, hatred won. Everyone knew what was coming. The wrath of the almighty would thunder down onto the whole middle east for decades. The results of which we see today.

What did it bring? More hatred. More trauma. More generations of hatred.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we would rather have the "traitors" on both sides in positions of power instead of the "warriors" and "heros".

Sitting in the train on my way to Berlin (again). I am trying to use as much of my "summer" as I can, given that I was robbed of two weeks of holidays with my family due to COVID. So every weekend in September and October is planned with travels. I hope I am superhuman (vaccine + COVID = 2000U/ml antibody titer right now).

While all this travelling is happening, I am having a very mixed time. Managed to go to a single Burn this year kiezburn, which is the German/Berlin version of a local burn, named after the Berlin Kieze, which is just another way of saying neighborhood, but it's smaller than a neighborhood, usually. So instead of a camp at a burn, they call them Kiez at Kiezburn.

I mentioned briefly in chat (and promised steve a small update, so here it is) that it was probably my toughest burn. I had a tough burn before, which was just after my weed-induced psychosis, but that was obvious why. This time, I went quite stable in my mind, not expecting 5 days of dread.

I often deal with a specific feeling of loneliness. Even though I am surrounded by people, friends, I feel alone. The reasons for it are not clear to me. I always wish to be part of a "group", a crew, a gang, a swarm, whatever you call it. But I never am. I always end up swimming between swarms. Being a connecting link. Introducing people from one tribe with the other. But I never really felt part of one. My strongest relationships tend to be 1-on-1 relationships with people that are not directly connected to each other, spread across countries, cultures, and social bubbles.

The only place I always felt like I belong was the burn. Any burn. Whether it was MidBurn in Israel or Borderland in Denmark. I always felt like I "found my people". This was the first time I didn't feel like it. I felt like a foreign squirrel amongst fish.

One particular dynamic kept repeating. I probably didn't choose the right Kiez/camp for my first time at Kiezburn. The camp consisted of the main organizers of the burn. Which meant that they knew each other for a looong time and throughout the whole burn it was hard to disconnect from the organizational part of the event, and just be. So I went out to find me some peers, which wasn't hard. Nearly every day, I met one person or groups of people I felt comfortable with or found interesting and asked if I can tag along. It went well, at first, until, I was forgotten. People would leave (as a group) to another place, or something, without letting me know.

I did cross my mind that maybe they don't want to have me around. But all of them went through the effort to find me on social media after the burn and kept contact. So I guess it wasn't that. I kept wondering why this would happen over and over. Add a little bit of alcohol, FOMO, and I end up feeling like crap every night when heading to bed.

I got to talk to one person I met, who was also part of such a group, and I asked her what she thinks happened. She said that she always had the impression that I "know everyone", which lead to the assumption that I am not part of the group. Or rather, that I am "fine without a group". I have heard this a few times over the years, and I always wondered where this impression comes from. Either way, it is the opposite of what I actually feel like.

This is a small excerpt of what made this burn tough. There was also a lot of miscommunication with a former lover/friend from Israel that joined me for the burn. But I learned my lesson. Never take responsibility in planning a burn for anyone but yourself. Why the heck do I keep maneuvering my self into positions where I am responsible for shit??

Long rant. Anyway. Off to Berlin for a psychedelic research conference :) If you are interested, there are live-streaming tickets and the program is quite nice https://insight-conference.eu/program/thursday/

Wasn't there a study suggesting astra biontech to be superior to biontech biontech when it comes to the delta variant?

It's the reason why in Germany they started to give combined vaccinations.

I am also wondering whether I am more protected now that I got astra had covid (gamma/Brazilian variant) hopefully biontech (coming soon)

Any conspiracy theorist will go bonkers for this passage

In fact, these antibodies were even able to deactivate a virus engineered, on purpose, to be highly resistant to neutralization. This virus contained 20 mutations that are known to prevent SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from binding to it. Antibodies from people who were only vaccinated or who only had prior coronavirus infections were essentially useless against this mutant virus. But antibodies in people with the "hybrid immunity" could neutralize it.

I asked them. There does not seem to be a direct connection between socio-economic status and obesity. If anything, people with low SES would be more exposed to contaminants

Just found out that there is even more details on this on the blog, look for parts 1 till 10

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/archives/

How did we cheat the paywall again?