In my previous post on what defines a ‘so bad it’s good’ movie, one essential feature I looked at was a movie intending to be good but unintentionally becoming bad – and bad to such a degree that it becomes aesthetically valuable. Because of incompetence and/or limited budget, the film can take on characteristics –…
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During a psychedelic experience, everything can appear more meaningful and significant – everything in both the outer world (what we are perceiving) and the inner world (all the thoughts and ideas we are having). Geometric hallucinations can appear deeply significant, as can spontaneous insights about ourselves, the world, and fundamental reality. Psychedelics have long been…
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An underexplored effect of psychedelics is how their use can affect both the career choices someone makes and the attitudes they have towards work in general. The LSD guru Timothy Leary famously told a countercultural audience – 30,000 hippies who gathered at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in 1967 – to “turn on, tune…
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The sublime is a concept in aesthetics that stands for the quality of greatness that leads to experiencing positive and negative emotions (e.g. fear and wonder) at the same time. This paradoxical emotion is often experienced in natural surroundings, during confrontations with natural phenomena that overwhelm oneself due to their size or power. This is…
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In my book review of Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies by philosopher Matthew Strohl, I outlined some of the features of ‘so bad they’re good’ movies and what distinguishes them from movies that are just bad. However, I think a point that wasn’t stressed enough in that review was how it is often…
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