#ultralearning

[mr-sir-galahad]

Pacing and Leading Drill 001 - Universal Pacing

One way to induce trance is to direct the bottom's attention to different elements of their experience, then mix these observations with suggestions in a natural way.

One challenge I faced when I started (and occasionally still do 😅) is feeling like I have nothing to say, especially when I have limited inputs from their environment, like on a phone or video call.

One way I found to practice when I was low on energy was to invent universal pacing statement that must be true for anyone.

"You may start to notice the temperature of the room" "And you can feel the weight of your body as it settles into the surface beneath you" "Notice any sounds that might be at the edge of your awareness, or the silence." "Thoughts might arise from nowhere, or feelings about those thoughts, or about the sensations you feel."

As a drill, it's simple.

Don't worry about making suggestions to "go into trance" or "drop for me." Just describe to an imaginary person what they must be feeling or tell them what to pay attention to.

A few things I found helpful while I was working through this drill:

It's a drill, not a scene. Don't sweat the details. Repetition is fine. A little nonsense is great. It's more about becoming fluent and comfortable than saying the right words

Go slow and steady, so when the ideas start to come to a trickle, you have time to think without breaking the flow

If you feel comfortable linking statements together or adding suggestions, go for it! You can always come back to the basic drill (statement-statement-statement) and have it be a success.

Be patient with yourself.

Here's an example of what the drill might sound like:

Visit Original Link

If you want to give it a try yourself, I've included my reference sheet below. You can read it directly or keep it as a reference to pull out when you feel like you're running out of ideas.

Softening Terms: 

Begin to, start to I Want You To, It would help if you   You may… or you may not  You might X, or you might Y Perhaps, maybe Can, could, or may (giving permission) It’s easy to, simple to, possible to, just For just a moment

Awareness Terms:

Become aware of Pay attention to  Feel, experience, sense, notice, find  Realize, discover, recognize

Objects of Awareness: 

Pressure against the surface beneath you (chair/couch/bed if known)  Body parts (hand, arms, legs, feet, elbows, tongue in your mouth, etc)  Temperature (against skin, of body, warmth, coolness) Air   Weight of your clothes  Muscle tension or soreness My voice (its qualities, the words) Breathing (pace, quality, etc.)  The imagined image of how you look from the outside  Light and shade (even behind closed eyes) How you feel about your feelings  Thoughts as they arise Sounds in the environment  Gaze “The sensations/feelings”

Finally, when it comes to using this in practice, I recommend @h-sleepingirl and @gleefulabandon's resource here which goes into more practical detail in an accessible way.

[bagofmayo]

Learning: Intro

The following truly is not a revolutionary thought: high school does not really teach you "true" knowledge.

I have been pretty much an autodidactic my entire life. I have multiple interest that I pursue through, well, the internet. I find most of how school is traditionally taught to be slow, tedious, and unnecessary. Memorization over intellectual rigor, to say the least.

But, of course, the greatest benefit of such institution is structure. With self-learning, I tend to shift abruptly from one place to another. However, proficiency only comes through focused understanding.

Recently, I have stumbled across Scott Young's Ultralearning. He documented how he learned the MIT computer science curriculum in a year (MIT Challenge... he has a fantastic TED talk on Youtube).

This led me to want to start my own Ultralearning project through MIT open courseware. I have finals coming up in a month, but for a couple weeks now and during winter break I have a lot of time in which I can pursue my goals.

[mr-sir-galahad]

On Starting to Learn [Hypnosis]

When I first started in kink, I wanted to learn all the things: "I want to learn rope!" & "I want to learn flogging!" & "I want to learn cigar play and whips and needles and wax and knife-play and be a master Dom and..."

In retrospect, I was on some newb-ass shit.

Not just because I dreamed of mastering many complex skills in just a few years without teachers, mentors, or any prior knowledge (🤦🙄)... but because I didn't really know what I wanted.

Get Specific:

For example: "Learn rope." Did that mean tying people down for wild sexy-times or creating artwork on a human canvas? Did that mean putting suspended bottoms on display at play parties or torturing intimate partners with semenawa at home?

It's all 'rope,' and while many skills overlap, many don't. Without a clear intention, buying all the books and signing up for every class had a downside:

I put myself on someone else's escalator, quietly absorbing their definitions and biases along with their favorite ties.

I'm almost a decade older now, hopefully a little wiser, and I'd like to try again - this time with intention.

The Goal:

My goal is to be fluent with hypnosis so that I can seamlessly negotiate and lead:

Hypnotic introductions with new subjects in controlled student environments

Complex kink scenes and spontaneous play with intimate partners in a range of environments (including public dungeon play)

1:1 video play with online friends

To create vibrant, amazing experiences that leave subjects feeling 🤯 while mitigating the risks.

That means explicitly deciding (at least at this stage) not to focus on things like therapeutic hypnosis, stage hypnosis, group sessions, brainwashing, and "covert" hypnosis.

And applying the lessons I've learned as a student, teacher, content creator, and course-designer to learn the skills effectively and document the process.

Here we go. What could go wrong?

[mr-sir-galahad]

What Does it Mean to Get 'Better' at Hypnokink?

In this recent webinar with @binaural-histolog (which was excellent, Binaural, ty), a lot of commenters brought up intermediate education, suggesting that there's adequate beginner instruction and plenty of advanced material presented at conferences and workshops, but that the middle was missing.

So what should be in the middle? What does it mean to be 'better' but not... advanced?

The question matters. Fields tend to advance as they grow in the number of participating members, and without a systematic approach to knowledge, a clear idea of where one might go next, that funnel never gets built. Progression seems too hard or like magic and unbelievable, so newbies pile up.

I'm running into that wall myself, struggling for the last few months trying to get clarity on what the heck it actually means to 'git gud' when I realized that if I step back, I actually have experience on this from my previous work as a coach, teacher, and course designer and wasn't applying it.

D'oh.

The Skill Funnel

Different factors change the type of practice and performance that determine what is considered advanced or successful. Things like:

Timing: is the skill performed in real time (improv) or prepared in advance and presented (oil painting)

Clarity: is excellent performance easily measured by objective criteria like wins and losses (chess) or subjective (charisma)

Infrastructure: how high is the structural barrier to excellence? (humor compared to tournament play in Magic: The Gathering)

Real-time performance requires automaticity where preparation benefits from greater attention to detail. Objective skills require tuning to the game where subjective skills reward tuning to your audience.

These aren't the only measures, and they aren't fixed categories but spectrums that are constantly fluctuating:

The way I am training to play, most scenes will be live-but-negotiated, so I can rehearse and prepare but have to perform in real time. Whether the scene was good or not is entirely subjective and personal—between me and the subject—but within certain models, my performance could be assessed and graded. And the structural barriers to entry are incredibly low.

Tailoring Practice

On these measures, then, hypnosis is closer to coaching than coding, which suggests likely best-avenues for practice:

Practice: get very good at routines for common situations (inductions, common suggestions, etc.)

Preparation: learn how to best negotiate, plan, and stage so that performance in the moment is 'peaked' but remains flexible

Responsiveness - identifying the subject's experience in the moment and having responses that typically move things towards 'good'

Tailoring - learn ways to discover meaningful differences between subjects and tailor play

Variety - the ability to improvise a range of responses so you can play with the same partner multiple times without boredom

The skills would be very different for a content creator making files or a hypnotherapist, and starting with things that provide immediate return on things that I care about makes it clearer what I should practice.

[whostolemybrain]

My First App - The Plan

So I want to program an app in only one week. Here's the plan for my first app.

For my first app, I want to program an app that I myself plan on using from time to time. I enjoy playing Magic the Gathering (MtG), a well-known trading card game. What I want to do is simple: I want users to be able to search for cards they (or a friend of theirs) have in their collection and want to see the price of the card.

Why is that important? In MtG the cards are only sold in random booster packs. Individual cards can only be obtained via secondary markets, specialized to provide those individual cards. So for any cards, both supply and demand dictate the price. This also means, that some cards can be significantly more valuable than another one.

Anyhow, I want the users of the app be able to fetch those prices from their phones quickly and easily. Luckily for me, I know that there is a website which collects these data from other websites and presents them on the web, even providing an API for their database. This will be the backend of my app, since I really don't want to program a whole database and/or web-crawlers and so forth for this app.

Another feature of the app should be both a text search (for the typers) and an image search (for the non-typers), so that you can easily search for the cards. The second feature should work well, since most of the time you will hold the MtG-card in one hand. This makes typing really hard and annoying.

So much for the plan of my first app. If you want to see how it turns out, or where I go next, feel free to follow me.

[whostolemybrain]

Ultralearning Flutter

I want to learn flutter fast and efficient, and become really good at it. For that I will use core ideas from Scott H. Young's Ultralearning and apply them to my own journey.

There are nine core concepts Ultralearning: Metalearning, focus, directness, drill, retrieval, feedback, retention, intuition, and experimentation. Each of these aspects, if applied correctly to your current work ethics, can be insanely impactful in learning.

For my flutter ultralearning project I took those factors and formulated exact steps to follow, in order to apply them to this type of programming. For me, personally, the most important factors are: directness, feedback, and drill. What does that mean?

1. Directness can be formulated into a tip every aspiring programmer has heard already: If you want to be a good programmer, you need to start building your own projects. Now why is this relevant? There is a plethora of reasons, but two really stick out. First of all, you actually do what you want to to, so you get better at the actual job. Thinking about running a marathon will never get you there - you need to actually go out and train. It is the same for everything you do. Second of all, applying information in any context requires deeper understanding of concepts, which in turn leads to better retention and higher levels of knowledge in general.

2. Feedback, in this ultralearning case, can be formulated into two different aspects. First of all, the apps produced and the code quality should be evaluated by yourself. Taking a close look at your own work enables you to see where you lack in ability or used ineffective methods. Then there is feedback from other people, which is much harder to get by. Few people actually take enough time to go through an unpublished app and tell the creator what they could have done better. Therefore the best way to get feedback is by getting the app ready to publish and then also publish it. While feedback may still be somewhat vague, since people do not know how you wrote this app, it will still point you in a general direction: What do you need to do to provide a better user experience?

3. Drill is somewhat related to the other points. It's all about attacking your weakest point over and over again, until you learned so much, that it is no longer a weakness of yours. By getting feedback you can see those weaknesses, and by being direct in your approach your faults become visible early on in your learning process.

I will try to apply these concepts to my learning projects, and monitor how they affect my results.

If you are interested in more updates on my progress, feel free to follow me.