Propaganda poster by Ed Reibsamen with a little help from Midjourney

Article by Aragorn Eloff

There’s been a lot written lately about the so-called TESCREAList ideology that is currently hegemonic in the Silicon Valley tech circles frequented by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. TESCREAL stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism – terms that are probably at least intuitively familiar. Reading recent critical descriptions of this facile, elitist ideology, which is driving a lot of the hype around machine learning, I’m struck by how familiar it all seems. Listening to a podcast on 60s psychedelia on my run this morning, it suddenly all made sense.

It turns out you can trace a pretty direct line back from TESCREAL ‘philosophers’ like Kurzweil and Bostrom to Wired magazine and the extropians mailing list, and from there to the legendary Mondo2000 magazine – a 90s tech-enthusiast counterculture publication from California put together by old sixties heads enthused by nascent technologies like the web, VR and ‘nootropics’. Indeed, 1992’s Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, a gorgeous typographic mess of glossy 3d graphics and paeans to the coming techno-singularity, feels almost like a secret peek into the TESCREAL gang’s wildest fantasies, although regulars like Douglas Rushkoff, Mark Dery and Bruce Sterling were admittedly far more interesting than the current dreck. Mondo 2000 was, in turn, the successor to the less glossy High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, 80s publications that mixed cyberpunk and surrealism with phone phreaking and experimental music. And then, of course, there was the psychedelic enthusiasm, particularly the strong echoes of one Timothy Leary.

As a diligent student at the Hofmann and McKenna school for young dropouts in the early 90s, I devoured all the Tim Leary books I could get my hands on. Classics like Psychedelic Prayers, High Priest and The Psychedelic Experience, but also an oddly singular text titled Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis, published in 1977. The book was written while Leary was languishing in jail for his psychedelics advocacy, and marks a shift in attention away from LSD and towards quintessentially TESCREAList topics like space migration, life extension and so forth. Indeed, Tim essentially argues in the book that by the year 2000 we’ll all be immortals travelling through space and indulging in increasingly exotic pleasures while expanding our intelligence using computers and smart drugs. As a useful heuristic, he coined some acronyms that are particularly revealing: SMI2LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension), HOME (High Orbit Mini-Earths) and HEAD (Hedonic Engineering And Design).

Essentially then, Tim Leary, psychologist and psychedelics guru, synthesised a fairly significant chunk of the philosophy that would become TESCREALism while sitting in his prison cell, undoubtedly fantasizing about the great outdoors and all the experiences he was missing out on. My fellow students and I also spent a fair amount of time in the early 90s learning how to SMI2LE and use our HEADs while gazing up into the stars waiting for our new HOMEs to be ready. In retrospect it was in large part a naive fantasy fueled in no insignificant part by prodigious consumption of 5-HT2A receptor agonists.

There is a grain of intuitive truth to Leary’s dreams, of course -—we could and should try to enrich life in whatever way we can – but when divorced from the messiness of real life in all its social, political and ecological complexities, SMI2LE, like TESCREALism (and, yes, like Fully Automated Luxury Communism) is the kind of indulgent hopium that’s fine, perhaps even vital, when you’re 16, but probably not when you’re a billionaire with immense economic and political power seeking to enact your juvenile fantasies at the expense of the rest of the world. More importantly though, the TESCREALists are far, far more boring than Leary and the Mondo crowd. We could do a lot better.

Aragorn Eloff is an experimental musician and long-time wanderer through the counterculture. He is based in South Africa, where he is currently working on a PhD on the philosophy of psychedelics. He writes on anarchism, embodied cognition and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

The post Leary, Mondo2000, and TESCREAL appeared first on Mondo 2000.

Developer: Melbourne House    Publisher: Infogrames    Release: 11/28/00   Genre: Racing Despite its short life the Dreamcast managed to receive a few kart racing games as the genre was exploding in popularity. And to be completely honest they are all bad....

The post Looney Tunes: Space Race appeared first on Classic-Games.net.

Developer: Soft Machine    Publisher: Virgin    Release: 08/18/00   Genre: Beat em up The original PlayStation has games for everyone in every genre. You like fighting games? Well god damn son there is an embarrassment of riches. Sports games?...

The post Crisis Beat appeared first on Classic-Games.net.

Propaganda poster by Ed Reibsamen with a little help from Midjourney

Article by Aragorn Eloff

There’s been a lot written lately about the so-called TESCREAList ideology that is currently hegemonic in the Silicon Valley tech circles frequented by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. TESCREAL stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism – terms that are probably at least intuitively familiar. Reading recent critical descriptions of this facile, elitist ideology, which is driving a lot of the hype around machine learning, I’m struck by how familiar it all seems. Listening to a podcast on 60s psychedelia on my run this morning, it suddenly all made sense.

It turns out you can trace a pretty direct line back from TESCREAL ‘philosophers’ like Kurzweil and Bostrom to Wired magazine and the extropians mailing list, and from there to the legendary Mondo2000 magazine – a 90s tech-enthusiast counterculture publication from California put together by old sixties heads enthused by nascent technologies like the web, VR and ‘nootropics’. Indeed, 1992’s Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, a gorgeous typographic mess of glossy 3d graphics and paeans to the coming techno-singularity, feels almost like a secret peek into the TESCREAL gang’s wildest fantasies, although regulars like Douglas Rushkoff, Mark Dery and Bruce Sterling were admittedly far more interesting than the current dreck. Mondo 2000 was, in turn, the successor to the less glossy High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, 80s publications that mixed cyberpunk and surrealism with phone phreaking and experimental music. And then, of course, there was the psychedelic enthusiasm, particularly the strong echoes of one Timothy Leary.

As a diligent student at the Hofmann and McKenna school for young dropouts in the early 90s, I devoured all the Tim Leary books I could get my hands on. Classics like Psychedelic Prayers, High Priest and The Psychedelic Experience, but also an oddly singular text titled Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis, published in 1977. The book was written while Leary was languishing in jail for his psychedelics advocacy, and marks a shift in attention away from LSD and towards quintessentially TESCREAList topics like space migration, life extension and so forth. Indeed, Tim essentially argues in the book that by the year 2000 we’ll all be immortals travelling through space and indulging in increasingly exotic pleasures while expanding our intelligence using computers and smart drugs. As a useful heuristic, he coined some acronyms that are particularly revealing: SMI2LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension), HOME (High Orbit Mini-Earths) and HEAD (Hedonic Engineering And Design).

Essentially then, Tim Leary, psychologist and psychedelics guru, synthesised a fairly significant chunk of the philosophy that would become TESCREALism while sitting in his prison cell, undoubtedly fantasizing about the great outdoors and all the experiences he was missing out on. My fellow students and I also spent a fair amount of time in the early 90s learning how to SMI2LE and use our HEADs while gazing up into the stars waiting for our new HOMEs to be ready. In retrospect it was in large part a naive fantasy fueled in no insignificant part by prodigious consumption of 5-HT2A receptor agonists.

There is a grain of intuitive truth to Leary’s dreams, of course -—we could and should try to enrich life in whatever way we can – but when divorced from the messiness of real life in all its social, political and ecological complexities, SMI2LE, like TESCREALism (and, yes, like Fully Automated Luxury Communism) is the kind of indulgent hopium that’s fine, perhaps even vital, when you’re 16, but probably not when you’re a billionaire with immense economic and political power seeking to enact your juvenile fantasies at the expense of the rest of the world. More importantly though, the TESCREALists are far, far more boring than Leary and the Mondo crowd. We could do a lot better.

Aragorn Eloff is an experimental musician and long-time wanderer through the counterculture. He is based in South Africa, where he is currently working on a PhD on the philosophy of psychedelics. He writes on anarchism, embodied cognition and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

The post Leary, Mondo2000, and TESCREAL appeared first on Mondo 2000.

Why does AMD keep pissing off the press and inflicting needless wounds on their reputation?
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The post AMD Teases Ryzen 7000 appeared first on SemiAccurate.

Four years ago Raspberry Pi introduced the Raspberry Pi 400, a slick (and very affordable) PC packed inside a compact keyboard. It hasn’t been followed by an official model based on the newer and more powerful Raspberry Pi 5, so makers have taken matters into their own hands. Arnov Sharma has shared his take on […]

The post DIY Raspberry Pi 1000 turns a Raspberry Pi 5 into a PC-in-a-keyboard appeared first on Liliputing.

Over the past year or two there have been a growing number of complaints that some 13th and 14th-gen Intel Core chips for desktop computers were crash-prone and generally unstable. Now Intel has confirmed the issue is real, promised to roll out a microcode update that will prevent it from happening on chip that haven’t […]

The post Lilbits: Intel’s 13th and 14th-gen desktop chip issues, AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 arrives, and a $56 Casio watch that’s also a (basic) fitness tracker appeared first on Liliputing.

Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Watch 7 and Watch Ultra are set to make waves in the wearable tech market with significant upgrades, particularly in the realm ...

The post Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 and Watch Ultra: A New Era with Exynos W1000 Processor appeared first on Gizchina.com.

Skulls! You’ve got one. I’ve got one. Everybody has a lovely skull keeping their lovely face right where it should be. Warhammer is big, so it needs must have multiple of them, hence their yearly event Skulls, which collates a bunch of Games Workshop related announcements into a sort of bizzaro world Nintendo Direct if Yoshi was actually a parasitic corpse emperor. There’s usually at least a few game announcements in there, and this year was a bumper. The headline announcement being an upcoming sequel to well-loved space-pope turn-based strategy Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus. Yes, yes. I’m getting to the dog.

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It’s tough being someone who, in the search for some sort of meaning in life, has arrived on video games as their foundation. I could have chosen a much worse passion, but I also could have probably picked one that would pass in normal conversation. Instead, no one I meet understands me. It’s lonely being better than everyone.

Elation for the WonderBox 6000 gets me. Unfortunately. It’s a bizarre game about loving one thing so much that it becomes the central source of your alienation.

I think. That’s as much as I could glean from the less-than-10-minutes of demo.

Elation for the WonderBox 6000 comes from Digital Tchotchkes, the creator of Go Fly a Kite, which I should probably play. They describe the demo as, “it's a costco free sample style demo.”

It starts off with a Doom-style text crawl telling you about the eponymous Elation for the WonderBox 6000, a game so transcendental that the protagonist suggests that it is the apogee of video games as an art. That if only more people played and understood it, then art wouldn’t have died. It is the protagonist’s goal to acquire this lost relic.

This opening exposition turns out to be something the protagonist is posting on the internet. The outpouring of distilled, potent opinions leads to them getting death threats, followed by a permanent ban from their chosen forum. We’ve all been there.

You’re then left to explore the wreckage of the protagonist’s life. You mouse around to see what’s interactive and then click on what you find to hear about it. Through this, you discover that society has continued its course toward refining the endorphin supply, which is part of why nobody remembers something as artful as Elation for the WonderBox 6000. Easier access to simpler stimulation has caused the masses to lose their way.

It’s difficult to tell if Elation for the WonderBox 6000 is making fun of, or trying to explain, the perpetually repeating discourse of how things were better in the before times. Or both. Why not take the high ground over every other perspective?

It represents a part of myself I’m unable to take too seriously. Some people have to travel abroad or get lost in the desert to “find themselves.” I’ve always known myself. I like video games. I might enjoy video games to an extent that other people find annoying. The whole reason I’m here (on this site, I mean) is that I want to support and spread the things I’m passionate about. It keeps me occupied until a bus finally decides to hit me.

But also, and I can’t stress this enough, the Elation for the WonderBox 6000 demo could be finished in less than 10 minutes. In that time, you look at stuff, talk to a person, and then walk to a place. That’s it. It could maybe be defined as the prologue. The game part of the game is beyond that demo wall.

It doesn’t really get me more excited to play Elation for the WonderBox 6000, but it also doesn’t make me less excited. I was just so disoriented when it ended.

On the other hand, it refers to the protagonist’s computer as “My portal to philistines,” which is what I will now call mine.

The post The shockingly brief Elation for the WonderBox 6000 demo really speaks to me appeared first on Destructoid.

Today Intel revealed some details about their new High NA EUV lithography tool.
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The post Intel Announces their NXE: 5000 High NA EUV Tool appeared first on SemiAccurate.

Today Intel revealed some details about their new High NA EUV lithography tool.
Read more ▶

The post Intel Announces their NXE: 5000 High NA EUV Tool appeared first on SemiAccurate.

Today Intel revealed some details about their new High NA EUV lithography tool.
Read more ▶

The post Intel Announces their NXE: 5000 High NA EUV Tool appeared first on SemiAccurate.

Today Intel revealed some details about their new High NA EUV lithography tool.
Read more ▶

The post Intel Announces their NXE: 5000 High NA EUV Tool appeared first on SemiAccurate.

AMD is bringing its Ryzen PRO chips for laptop and desktop computers into the AI age. The company’s new Ryzen PRO 8040 Series processors are basically business-class versions of the Ryzen 8040 Mobile chips that launched last year, meaning they have the same Zen 4 CPU cores, RDNA 3 integrated graphics, and Ryzen AI NPUs. But […]

The post AMD launches Ryzen PRO 8040 mobile and Ryzen PRO 8000 desktop chips with Ryzen AI appeared first on Liliputing.

AMD just took over the workstation market with the new Genoa based Threadrippers.
Read more ▶

The post A look at AMD’s new Threadripper 7000 line appeared first on SemiAccurate.

It looks like AMD is fighting paper with paper for the launch of the new Ryzen 8000 series.
Read more ▶

The post AMD fights Meteors with paper at Ryzen 8000 launch appeared first on SemiAccurate.

Propaganda poster by Ed Reibsamen with a little help from Midjourney

Article by Aragorn Eloff

There’s been a lot written lately about the so-called TESCREAList ideology that is currently hegemonic in the Silicon Valley tech circles frequented by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. TESCREAL stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism – terms that are probably at least intuitively familiar. Reading recent critical descriptions of this facile, elitist ideology, which is driving a lot of the hype around machine learning, I’m struck by how familiar it all seems. Listening to a podcast on 60s psychedelia on my run this morning, it suddenly all made sense.

It turns out you can trace a pretty direct line back from TESCREAL ‘philosophers’ like Kurzweil and Bostrom to Wired magazine and the extropians mailing list, and from there to the legendary Mondo2000 magazine – a 90s tech-enthusiast counterculture publication from California put together by old sixties heads enthused by nascent technologies like the web, VR and ‘nootropics’. Indeed, 1992’s Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, a gorgeous typographic mess of glossy 3d graphics and paeans to the coming techno-singularity, feels almost like a secret peek into the TESCREAL gang’s wildest fantasies, although regulars like Douglas Rushkoff, Mark Dery and Bruce Sterling were admittedly far more interesting than the current dreck. Mondo 2000 was, in turn, the successor to the less glossy High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, 80s publications that mixed cyberpunk and surrealism with phone phreaking and experimental music. And then, of course, there was the psychedelic enthusiasm, particularly the strong echoes of one Timothy Leary.

As a diligent student at the Hofmann and McKenna school for young dropouts in the early 90s, I devoured all the Tim Leary books I could get my hands on. Classics like Psychedelic Prayers, High Priest and The Psychedelic Experience, but also an oddly singular text titled Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis, published in 1977. The book was written while Leary was languishing in jail for his psychedelics advocacy, and marks a shift in attention away from LSD and towards quintessentially TESCREAList topics like space migration, life extension and so forth. Indeed, Tim essentially argues in the book that by the year 2000 we’ll all be immortals travelling through space and indulging in increasingly exotic pleasures while expanding our intelligence using computers and smart drugs. As a useful heuristic, he coined some acronyms that are particularly revealing: SMI2LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension), HOME (High Orbit Mini-Earths) and HEAD (Hedonic Engineering And Design).

Essentially then, Tim Leary, psychologist and psychedelics guru, synthesised a fairly significant chunk of the philosophy that would become TESCREALism while sitting in his prison cell, undoubtedly fantasizing about the great outdoors and all the experiences he was missing out on. My fellow students and I also spent a fair amount of time in the early 90s learning how to SMI2LE and use our HEADs while gazing up into the stars waiting for our new HOMEs to be ready. In retrospect it was in large part a naive fantasy fueled in no insignificant part by prodigious consumption of 5-HT2A receptor agonists.

There is a grain of intuitive truth to Leary’s dreams, of course -—we could and should try to enrich life in whatever way we can – but when divorced from the messiness of real life in all its social, political and ecological complexities, SMI2LE, like TESCREALism (and, yes, like Fully Automated Luxury Communism) is the kind of indulgent hopium that’s fine, perhaps even vital, when you’re 16, but probably not when you’re a billionaire with immense economic and political power seeking to enact your juvenile fantasies at the expense of the rest of the world. More importantly though, the TESCREALists are far, far more boring than Leary and the Mondo crowd. We could do a lot better.

Aragorn Eloff is an experimental musician and long-time wanderer through the counterculture. He is based in South Africa, where he is currently working on a PhD on the philosophy of psychedelics. He writes on anarchism, embodied cognition and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

The post Leary, Mondo2000, and TESCREAL appeared first on Mondo 2000.

Chaos threatens humanity once again. Reports of a mysterious plague named ‘the Bloom’ emerge from the Tyrtaeus sector, and the arrival of an Imperial Inquisitor sets in motion a chain of events which will test your tactical prowess to its limits.

In Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, you’ll take command of the Grey Knights, an elite chapter and secretive order of Space Marines, tasked with aiding the Inquisitor in the eradication of this foul corruption.

Force Commander, given the grave nature of this new threat, I have been authorised to distribute the following confidential military doctrine to assist your encounters with this plague. I hope that these Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters tips serve you well. For the Emperor!

Turn-based tactics, Space Marines style

A single Grey Knight is an army unto itself, whether executing enemies at distance or purging them in melee combat. Your elite soldiers don’t miss their shots, offering you total precision when they open fire on the forces of Chaos. Repeatedly attacking foes will stun them, creating an opportunity to target specific body parts and reduce your foe’s effectiveness or even unleash a stunning execution to boost your entire squad with an extra action.

Take Down the Reapers of the Bloom

Force Commander, early reports indicate that the Grey Knights will take on towering, powerful boss enemies in the form of the Reapers of the Bloom, from Greater Daemons such as Aeger the Benevolent, to the hulking corroded Chaos Knight, Cruciatus the Generous. Each will require you to rethink your tactics in order to achieve victory. But an even graver threat awaits those who discover the Bloom: Mortarion, the Death Lord and Primarch of the Death Guard.

Personalize the Grey Knights

As Force Commander, you can customise each battle-brother to your liking, tweaking crests, skin colour, hair colour, armour pieces and more. Grey Knights arrive trained as a particular class, starting with the Justicar, Interceptor, Apothecary and Purgator. An additional set of four advanced classes unlock throughout the campaign. As your Grey Knights gain experience, you will be able to further shape their training to suit your style on the battlefield, sharpening their skills until they become the ultimate weapon against the darkness.

An Unpredictable Enemy

Across an expansive campaign, our prognosticars suggest you will face a wide variety of Nurgle’s threats such as Poxwalkers, Helbrutes, Plague Marines, and Myphitic Blight-haulers as you battle the Bloom. Enemies will mutate across combat missions depending on which strain of the Bloom is present, visually changing them and offering combat buffs such as additional armour.

Psyker Power

Each Grey Knight has a reserve of Willpower, which is spent on psychic powers, and is primarily regained by slaying enemies on the battlefield. Psychic powers range from increasing the power of melee attacks to area of effect buffs for your Knights. Additionally, by supporting Inquisitor Vakir’s research into the Bloom, you’ll gain the ability to deploy powerful single-use psychic abilities called Stratagems which can turn the tide of an entire battle.

Purging the Bloom

Between battles, you’ll preside over command of the Strike Cruiser, the Baleful Edict. From the helm, you’ll respond to the growing Bloom threat, monitoring its spread via the Star Map and deciding where to go next. But be warned, you will have to make tough choices in order to limit the Bloom’s spread. The longer you leave an outbreak unchecked, the more enemy resistance you can expect.

The Changing Battlefield

Combat zones will change over time as the Bloom takes hold, offering new cover opportunities as well as new hazards. Players can also utilise the environment to their advantage, unleashing massive plasma battery explosions or collapsing pillars on foes. Players can set waypoints for their Grey Knights as they tactically move around each map, avoiding parts of the level where an enemy might be in overwatch stance, or where noxious corruption might otherwise damage them.

Upgrades on the Baleful Edict

The Baleful Edict acts as your command centre, where you’ll find key areas in need of your attention. The Manufactorum lets players first repair and later upgrade their vessel, enhancing its response capabilities significantly. In the Armoury, Grand Master Vardan Kai offers equipment requisition to boost the war effort. Finally, in the Libris Malleus, Inquisitor Vakir will enhance the Grey Knights’ combat abilities and unlock tide-turning psychic abilities called Stratagems.

Add to Your Arsenal

By showing its dedication to the chapter, your Strike Force is granted rewards over time such as additional Grey Knights, Master-crafted weapons, Armour and specialized Wargear. Completing optional combat mission challenges known as Glorious Deeds, which impose tougher limitations or objectives, will unlock additional requisition points to spend in the armoury.

Beware the Warp

Warp Surges are unpredictable combat mission events that can call in new enemy reinforcements, activate powerful mutations, and introduce unpredictable effects and hazards onto the battlefield, upping the challenge. The more corrupt the map, the more likely a Warp Surge event will occur, but enemy actions and Grey Knight abilities can further influence Warp Surges as well.

I hope these insights provide a guide for your investigations Force Commander. You can start your battle against the Bloom right now on Xbox. Share your triumphs with your fellow Grey Knights on our social media channels and strike down this foul corruption!

The post 10 Things to Get You Started in Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters appeared first on Xbox Wire.

Propaganda poster by Ed Reibsamen with a little help from Midjourney

Article by Aragorn Eloff

There’s been a lot written lately about the so-called TESCREAList ideology that is currently hegemonic in the Silicon Valley tech circles frequented by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. TESCREAL stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism – terms that are probably at least intuitively familiar. Reading recent critical descriptions of this facile, elitist ideology, which is driving a lot of the hype around machine learning, I’m struck by how familiar it all seems. Listening to a podcast on 60s psychedelia on my run this morning, it suddenly all made sense.

It turns out you can trace a pretty direct line back from TESCREAL ‘philosophers’ like Kurzweil and Bostrom to Wired magazine and the extropians mailing list, and from there to the legendary Mondo2000 magazine – a 90s tech-enthusiast counterculture publication from California put together by old sixties heads enthused by nascent technologies like the web, VR and ‘nootropics’. Indeed, 1992’s Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, a gorgeous typographic mess of glossy 3d graphics and paeans to the coming techno-singularity, feels almost like a secret peek into the TESCREAL gang’s wildest fantasies, although regulars like Douglas Rushkoff, Mark Dery and Bruce Sterling were admittedly far more interesting than the current dreck. Mondo 2000 was, in turn, the successor to the less glossy High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, 80s publications that mixed cyberpunk and surrealism with phone phreaking and experimental music. And then, of course, there was the psychedelic enthusiasm, particularly the strong echoes of one Timothy Leary.

As a diligent student at the Hofmann and McKenna school for young dropouts in the early 90s, I devoured all the Tim Leary books I could get my hands on. Classics like Psychedelic Prayers, High Priest and The Psychedelic Experience, but also an oddly singular text titled Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis, published in 1977. The book was written while Leary was languishing in jail for his psychedelics advocacy, and marks a shift in attention away from LSD and towards quintessentially TESCREAList topics like space migration, life extension and so forth. Indeed, Tim essentially argues in the book that by the year 2000 we’ll all be immortals travelling through space and indulging in increasingly exotic pleasures while expanding our intelligence using computers and smart drugs. As a useful heuristic, he coined some acronyms that are particularly revealing: SMI2LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension), HOME (High Orbit Mini-Earths) and HEAD (Hedonic Engineering And Design).

Essentially then, Tim Leary, psychologist and psychedelics guru, synthesised a fairly significant chunk of the philosophy that would become TESCREALism while sitting in his prison cell, undoubtedly fantasizing about the great outdoors and all the experiences he was missing out on. My fellow students and I also spent a fair amount of time in the early 90s learning how to SMI2LE and use our HEADs while gazing up into the stars waiting for our new HOMEs to be ready. In retrospect it was in large part a naive fantasy fueled in no insignificant part by prodigious consumption of 5-HT2A receptor agonists.

There is a grain of intuitive truth to Leary’s dreams, of course -—we could and should try to enrich life in whatever way we can – but when divorced from the messiness of real life in all its social, political and ecological complexities, SMI2LE, like TESCREALism (and, yes, like Fully Automated Luxury Communism) is the kind of indulgent hopium that’s fine, perhaps even vital, when you’re 16, but probably not when you’re a billionaire with immense economic and political power seeking to enact your juvenile fantasies at the expense of the rest of the world. More importantly though, the TESCREALists are far, far more boring than Leary and the Mondo crowd. We could do a lot better.

Aragorn Eloff is an experimental musician and long-time wanderer through the counterculture. He is based in South Africa, where he is currently working on a PhD on the philosophy of psychedelics. He writes on anarchism, embodied cognition and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

The post Leary, Mondo2000, and TESCREAL appeared first on Mondo 2000.

AMD just took over the workstation market with the new Genoa based Threadrippers.
Read more ▶

The post A look at AMD’s new Threadripper 7000 line appeared first on SemiAccurate.

It looks like AMD is fighting paper with paper for the launch of the new Ryzen 8000 series.
Read more ▶

The post AMD fights Meteors with paper at Ryzen 8000 launch appeared first on SemiAccurate.