That Time I Tried Magic Mushrooms

It should be no surprise to any of you that I am a fucking maniac. I drowned in ACE Juice. I'll tell you in a future video how I am in regular contact with the Dark Lord Satan. I am the soon-to-be legal owner of Snail Mail, as soon as Ubisoft gets back to me, which will surely happen any day now.

This might not be as crazy as some of the above, but it's worth adding to my channel's list of stupid videos with questionable grounding in reality. I'm going to talk to you about the time I took magic mushrooms.

Magic mushrooms, for those of you who don't know, are a psychedelic drug. They're not quite as "rainbows and unicorns" as popular media might have you believe, it's quite a bit different. In fact, especially at lower doses, you might not even get any hallucinogenic effects at all.

A week ago or so, I purchased a box of Agaricus Bisporus mushrooms. For those of you who don't know, these are the standard "magic" mushrooms that most people talk about when they use the term.

Now, I don't really like the taste of mushrooms. In fact, for a long fuckin' time I've really hated the taste of mushrooms. Like a lot. So I just did what anyone would do in this scenario, and I sliced them up and placed them on pizza. Unfortunately, we didn't have any pizza, so I had to make my own. Instead of making a pizza base which takes FOREVER, I thought I'd just spread some tomato sauce on a paper towel, and since I'm vegan I can't eat the cheese.

It's a new take on pizza to be sure, but hey- I did the best with what I had. I cut up the little white mushrooms into slices, put them onto the tomato-y paper towel, and tried my best to stuff it into my mouth. That didn't really work, and I know that those of you who saw my video on ACE Juice will at this point be thinking "What the fuck Alex, why don't you know how to eat".

I just misjudged, and I was nervous. I was about to embark on a spiritual journey, I'm sure anyone else would do the same in my position. With a bit of difficulty, I eventually consumed the entire paper towel's worth of mushrooms.

I waited for about an hour for the effects to kick in, listening to music, browsing Twitter. The usual. And boy oh boy, did they kick in fast. It sounded exactly like someone was banging on my window. My curtain was shut so I couldn't verify this, and I didn't really feel like getting up to check. My first mushroom-induced hallucination. How exciting!


The banging didn't stop, and then it kinda started to sound like someone yelling at me. I was listening to music on my headphones so I couldn't really make out what they were saying. Besides, it goes back to the old saying from Timothy Leary; "Turn on, tune in, drop out". I was turned on by a stray NSFW Twitter post, I was tuned in to my music, and I dropped out of caring why someone was yelling at me.

Another maybe 15 minutes passed and the commotion finally stopped. I figured I was coming down, and went to the kitchen to make a sandwich to get the taste of tomato paper out of my mouth.

Suddenly, my door was kicked in. Someone broke into my house! Naturally, I assumed they were police officers and froze. I had just taken an illegal drug, hadn't I? Of course. My disregard for the law was catching up to me. I know they say live fast and die young, but man. I'm only 18. I would never have thought that I had lived as quickly as I did, and that I would die so young at the hands of the state. Surely I'd be given the death penalty for this. Surely.

Whoever burst down my door quickly found me making a sandwich. Breathless, he said "Alex! Stop what you're doing!"

I thought maybe he was here to warn me about the police on their way to shoot me dead for my transgressions, so I asked why.

"I KNOW what you're doing." He said. "I know that you're making a stupid fucking video-length joke about using the wrong kind of mushroom, and you're going to put this on your YouTube channel and seriously upset everyone. I'm here to just stop you, you fucking maniac."

I really had no idea what he was talking about. I stared blankly for a moment, then responded, "I don't know what you want from me man, and I don't know how you know all this information about me, but that's not what I'm doing."

Then, it suddenly clicked. Suddenly, I knew what was up.

This dude was another hallucination. I wasn't coming down at all!

"Hey! You're a hallucination, aren't you?" I asked.

"What? No, fuck off, you know what you're doing."

Straight up, and because my YouTube channel is a place for me to be honest, I'm gonna tell you that I just straight up started touching his face. I wanted to see how realistic the hallucination was, and man it was pretty realistic. I could feel his face skin, his teeth, his stubble- it was all there, and the whole time he was telling me to go away. Kind of strange how he didn't physically restrain me, but I guess hallucinations can't interact with the real world.

"This is a lost cause, I'm gonna go home and when I get home, I'm gonna unsubscribe." he said as he left, stepping over the splintered remains of my door.

Then I waited. And waited. And waited. And nothing else happened. I assumed that I was coming down for real this time and went to sleep.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting experience. I'd do it again. Didn't taste good though, the paper really ruined it.



Agaricus Bisporus seems to be a very powerful substance. The hallucinations are remarkably realistic, and non-fantastical in nature. This is of course in contrast to my experience with Psilocybe Cubensis mushrooms, which was actually a much more interesting experience come to think of it.

On My Next Game

Naturally, as YouTube's number one game-boy, I've been thinking a bit about what my next game is going to be.

I'm going to say up-front, it's probably not going to be 3D. Every so often people will ask me to try doing a 3D game, but I just don't think that Godot's 3D capabilities are really worth me going through all the effort to learn 3D programming and graphics and all that strange scary stuff.

Besides, I like 2D games. 3D games can be super cool, but it's just not what I'm after at the moment- maybe at some point in the future I'll learn how to do a 3D game, but not now.

But anyway, I've been thinking more about ideas or themes that I want my next game project to have. Primarily, I want to slow things down a bit and make a slightly less hectic game than the past few games I've made. Guns and explosions are super cool and super fun but I'm in the mood to shake things up, at least for the time being. Who knows if I'll go anywhere with this idea.

The idea is basically just to figure out how to make a game that's still fun and interesting, just without so many fast-paced aspects. I would want to create a more relaxing kind of game, but I have yet to figure out how exactly I can make that fun. I've got some ideas- for instance, the "farming simulator" archetype could be a good jumping off point, and maybe I could figure out how to introduce other elements of relaxation.

I had an idea for a system in which you would accrue points or have some incentive to just stare at the screen and do breathing exercises or something. It might come off as a bit silly, but it's a cute idea and I would like to find a nice way to make it into something good.

Also, although this isn't really related to anything I was just talking about, I'll probably keep with the monochromatic or semi-monochromatic art style, since that was really nice to work with and I'm not very good at creating other kinds of 2D art. I am able to do white silhouettes, and I guess that's basically all I need.

I think it's possible to mesh that with the relaxing vibe if I need to, although those two things don't necessarily go perfectly together. It might require a bit of careful consideration to ensure that I don't create some crazy Frankenstein's monster of a video game.

Anything I've said in this video can totally change at any moment. Hell, even as I type this script out I'm worried that I won't want to record it because I'll have changed my mind so much by then. Everything I've said here is completely tentative. Maybe you should make your own relaxing video game. If you do, send it to me and I'll post it on Twitter or something. Also subscribe to me and I'll smile in real life. Also pledge to my Patreon.

Thanks for watching and stay tuned for more YouTube videos because I am a slave to Google and the ceaseless turning of the wheels of time. Goodbye!