Lived in Yunnan for over a decade, primarily as a vegetarian. Mushrooms there are indeed many and varied and quite tasty. Many poisonings annually but the government are pretty good at helping people to ID with warning posters. Personally ate many mushrooms that looked like this and never had hallucinations. Did have some others which made me feel a little ill, however. I suspect locals are unduly relaxed about types science would avoid due to hepatoxicity.
While occasionally FOAFs would get hallucinogenic effects from dining, I don't recall explicitly hearing of anyone seeing little people, or hearing the term he details in this writing. As such, I wonder where this guy gets his info from. Certainly, most Yunnanese would describe these mushrooms as 牛肝菌 ("bolete") and more specific Chinese common names for similar reddish species would include 桃红牛肝菌 ("peach-colored bolete"). As a general type, they are very common in markets across much of Yunnan.
Given the claims, the clearly infrequent effects, and the personal experience I can trust, I would conclude with three theories: perhaps either the compounds are rapidly degraded when non-fresh, safely broken down when cooking (traditionally these mushrooms are cut thinly before sauteeing or boiling in hotpot), or there are one or two "look alike" species which are more rarely found and contain additional compounds which are responsible for the occasional effects.
Although, the local hospital records imply that hallucinations can last for days or even months, so uh, probably not a great idea to go looking for them...
According to a voluminous illustrated tome I acquired during my extended stay, Yunnan has at least seven species of native psilocybe. Like nearby areas along the Himalayas, cannabis and opium are endemic and widely utilized in traditional cultures of the area. Heroin processed in Myanmar became a problem in rural Yunnan the early 2000s and present-era government shut it down with a heavy-handed campaign around 15 years ago. These days it's probably trans-shipped more than locally consumed.
My guess would be there is probably some contamination with something ergot-like going on. Long-lasting but maybe hard to detect because such a small amount is needed for effect that it's easy to miss.
Macbook air = small keyboard, small screen, limited battery, all parts expensive to service, etc. Try hacking a Mac Mini instead: https://github.com/vk2diy/hackbook-m4-mini
A MacBook Air is just a Mac mini with a keyboard, screen, and battery. You can choose to attach the same peripherals to your MacBook, and have the flexibility of a laptop when you need it. Paying a couple hundred dollar premium for this is a good deal.
I am working on fundraising and administration for a robotics venture. Very little work goes on engineering subjects at present, more often things like patent law, corporate administration, strategy, network build-out and the present penultimate goal fundraising for an aggressive scale go to market autonomous factory. However, the prior eight years have given me an amazing opportunity to study all manner of engineering subjects from mechanical to structural, electronic to electrical, production and fabrication through operations research, logistics and supply chain. I now have a very 'grass roots' view of venture administration, cross-disciplinary R&D and commercialization that is globally informed and very difficult to gain in any context. While significant yield remains at this stage speculative, nevertheless it is very interesting!
So many wrong statements here it's difficult to know where to start. Perhaps "Why Eventual Consistency Is Impossible in Finance" which is glaring: most of the economy runs on eventual consistency (brokers, banks, credit cards, crypto consensus).
As a point of interest, the English do have a sort of stiff upper lip thing going on since forever. It's normal in English upper class families to send kids to boarding school. This was partly enabled by empire, but seems to have persisted. I have English friends who think nothing of living on another continent to their children.
On the mental bearings of extreme travelers, I used to do some long distance (multi-week) cycle touring and offered accommodation to others through platforms for this purpose while living in China. They say you have to be half-mad to get in to cycle touring in the first place. Some of these people were very much in a weird mental place. After a bad experience with a German woman I stopped participating in these systems. Some of them would turn up broke with no shoes really in need of help. A subset of the people who finish go on to become motivational speakers. Most of them probably wind up happy, but grizzled and impoverished with more physical than mental health.
If you're in the area don't miss the Mỹ Sơn ruins ("perhaps the longest inhabited archaeological site in Mainland Southeast Asia") or the old French EFEO museum, now the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_S%C6%A1n
Exactly the same sentences grated here. It is the subjective passed off as the objective, passed on with a tone of false authority. A surprisingly large majority of public communications fall in to this category. Mastering this puffery, usually for the express purpose of swaying the wills of lesser minds or pressing buttons in funding and grant processes, grants you the reigns of bureaucracy and a career in corporate, public or international relations. A horrible way to waste a life.
Until they are replaced with dust, pollution, hair, animals, leaf litter, aggressive plants, seismic events, pollen, skin particles, birdshit, fallen logs, slime mold, etc.
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