There’s not all that much more to tell, really. And mind you it was 9 years ago. And it’s far from the only “wild” experience I’ve had that changed my perceptions.

Normally, particularly when it’s really dark, I have a lot of little blotches of a lighter, gray shade that fade and shift constantly across my whole field of vision. Until it abated temporarily, I wouldn’t have thought it possible for it to abate. But when it did, I got to experience a more potent experience of “darkness” than I had before probably ever. But it wasn’t just darkness that was amplified. My vision definitely felt “clearer” of… the ordinary sorts of visual artifacts I see pretty much all of the time.

It was a very calming and pleasant experience for sure. Definitely the sort of thing I wish could be the case all the time.

This has only happened to me once. It came on while I was meditating (so that may not particularly qualify as “spontaneous”, but anyway) and lasted until I fell asleep maybe an hour later. By morning, my vision was “normal” again.

You mentioned “good and bad.” I don’t think there was any part of that experience itself that I found “bad”, challenging, difficult, unpleasant, etc. Though that experience was had in a period of my life when I was regularly meditating and practicing mindfulness. Before that period of my life, I engaged a lot in fantasy and found it very fulfilling. But I feel like during that meditation phase of my life, I lost my taste for it, and I feel like I lost something of value. Fantasy has returned to me somewhat slowly since, but it’s still not as fulfilling as it was before. So if there’s a “bad”, it’s not particularly about that one experience about which we’re talking as it is about arguably-bad side effects of meditation/mindfulness.

I’m not saying my experience was (or wasn’t) the same as the experience you’ve had. I don’t disbelieve your account, though. And it wouldn’t surprise me if the same sort of experience I had might sometimes be experienced spontaneously by some individuals.

Anyone who mentions, acknowledges, or even doesn’t sufficiently attempt to ignore/deny my existence or influence in the world, anything they eat tastes and feels like eating raw, unseasoned egg whites for a month. And I’ll put knowledge of that fact in everyone’s minds.

Then I can do whatever I want to annoy the fuck out of people and they have to ignore me. Wet Willie Elon Musk in public while looking him right in the eye. Replace the audio at a Kid Rock concert with Baby Shark for the whole show and everyone has to pretend it was a typical Kid Rock concert. Draw dicks all over Trump’s face with a sharpie during a presidential address on live, national TV. Find every HOA president and kill grass in their front yard in the shape of Bevis and Butthead.

I wouldn’t be unreasonable. A wry, approving smile here. Stopping and reading an obscene message I planted before realizing it was me. Stuff like that gets a pass. I might even turn a blind eye to an involuntary case of the giggles brought on by my hijinks, particularly if it helps the vibe. Also, anyone under 15 is exempt from the whole egg whites thing and can laugh their asses off and point with impunity.

I’ve had some wild experiences for sure. Total loss of visual snow. Synesthesia. Major time distortions. Stuff like that. (Meditation is a hell of a drug. For realz.) Particularly during a period of time about 9 years ago.

Damn. They’re basing it all on LineageOS. I was hoping they’d make it a GNU/Linux phone.

A dozen, a hundred, it’s impossible to tell.

Anything?

Basically anything you can run on a computer you can run on a Raspberry Pi.

Of course Raspberry Pis are Arm devices. So I guess proprietary software that doesn’t support Arm (and the very rare FOSS software applications that go out of their ways to make it hard to use them on Arm for some fucking reason – looking at you, Cura) would be a little more challenging. But aside from that… anything, really.

Of course Trump is part of Azathoth’s plan.

Wait, what’s the one labeled “jackass” and how do you make it not give you agony? I will pay you an upvote if you tell me.

American here. Clearly it’s not a “culturally expected” thing in my neighborhood.

As if they don’t say this kind of stuff publicly.

I worked at a place whose policy was that you had to give four weeks notice to get your vacation paid out.

I remember getting the call from the place I was going to where they gave me the offer. I said yes and they asked when I would start. They said “well, you probably have to give like two weeks notice so that would put us at such-and-such date” and I had to tell them that no, I had to give four weeks notice. I remember them being surprised that that was a thing.

At the place I was leaving, I also had a real asshole boss. He decided randomly that we were slacking off or some shit and started demanding 7:00am demoes every day. (I wrote software there.) When I’d secured a position elsewhere, I pulled the boss aside and gave him my 4-week notice. I was the tech lead and lead architect and basically in-charge-guy on the team of only 4 people for “Big Project™”. The boss had arbitrarily made up a due date for “Big Project™” and promised that timeline to the managers over him over my team’s objections. By the time I quit, the arbitrary deadline had already passed and he was getting pressured. With me gone, it was doomed to slip much later still.

The asshole boss asked me why and I ended up telling him – politely – exactly all the problems I had with him. That and leaving him in the lurch of his own making were kinda cathartic, honestly.

The asshole boss got fired on a “do not pass go, do not clear out your desk, security will escort you out” basis after I left. As if I wasn’t already overdosing on schadenfreude. What exactly he did to get fired is the subject of rumor only. I heard someone say he called the CTO incompetent and promised to replace him in a meeting with lots of people. Another rumor involved a possible affair with someone else high up in the IT department.

Whatever the case, I think it was more awkward for asshole boss than for me. But he deserved it.

I can’t dare to hope ~that it’s about to go to zero~.

“No, sir, it’s a citation.”

“Oh, good guess, but it’s actually a Pontiac Phoenix. I can see how you’d get those models mixed up.”