Weekly Psychedelic Links, Monthly Psychedelic Recaps, Yearly Psychedelic Recaps, Announcements, Blog Information
David Wilder
The Roundups and Recaps Are Ending
The Roundups and Recaps Are Ending
Monthly Psychedelic Recaps
David Wilder
This Month in Psychedelics - December 2022
This Month in Psychedelics - December 2022
Weekly Psychedelic Links
David Wilder
Weekly Psychedelic Links - December 2022
Weekly Psychedelic Links - December 2022
Monthly Psychedelic Recaps
David Wilder
This Month in Psychedelics - November 2022
This Month in Psychedelics - November 2022
Weekly Psychedelic Links
David Wilder
Weekly Psychedelic Links - November 2022
Weekly Psychedelic Links - November 2022

Blog Information

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The Roundups and Recaps Are Ending

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Image by Dave Hoefler

I’ve been writing regular psychedelic news weekly link roundups and monthly/yearly recaps here at Think Wilder for more than 7.5 years (all the while without missing a single week) and today I’m announcing that last month’s “This Month in Psychedelics” post marks the official end of these roundups and recaps.

Originally I had hoped to write a “This Year in Psychedelics” post for 2022, but I never got around to it. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that I’ve run out of steam. I’m pretty burnt out after consistently writing these roundups and recaps since the Spring of 2015.

You see, over the course of 2022 I struggled with two things:

  1. How to approach my work on this blog

  2. What I want to spend my personal time on

A while back—I’m not sure exactly when—I began to question whether I wanted to continue collecting links for the weekly roundups and recapping the most noteworthy psychedelic news at the end of each month and year, and I’ve decided that I need to drop these three columns to make room for something else. In fact, after thinking about it for a while I decided that I need a total break from Think Wilder for a while.

I hope to eventually come back and use this space to write, but I need to step away from it for the time being so I can focus on other things right now. If you are one of my Patreon supporters, I completely understand if you would like to cancel your membership while I am on hiatus, but if you are able to keep supporting me it is greatly appreciated. Until we meet again, keep thinking wilder!

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Celebrating Think Wilder's Seventh Anniversary

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Today Think Wilder is turning seven.

That’s right—seven years ago I launched this blog, and a whole lot has happened since then. I’m going to keep this commemorative post short and just share a few changes starting today.

Early Access to Weekly Link Roundups on Patreon

I’ve been writing my weekly link roundup column (“This Week in Psychedelics”) every single week since June 5th, 2015. That’s nearly seven straight years of relevant links to the latest psychedelic news stories located in one place. To be fair, it has been delayed by a week or two a handful of times but other than that it’s come out each and every Friday for a long time. And I always went back and posted previous weeks’ links even if I didn’t get them out on Friday.

This column has been one of my gifts to the psychedelic community. It takes a lot of work to follow psychedelic news and over the years I’ve heard a lot of people say they really value my work, so after a lot of deliberation I’ve decided to explore a new way of growing the blog by giving my $2 tier patrons early access to my “This Week in Psychedelics”, starting immediately. Those patrons will still see each week’s roundup on Friday. That’s just 50 cents per roundup—or 40 cents for the months with three Fridays! Everyone else will not have access to the roundups on a weekly basis.

However, I also want to make sure this information is still available to the wider community for free, so at the end of each month I will share the full set of links on the blog. So if you don’t mind waiting a few weeks to get each month’s links then you will still be able to see them. On the other hand, if you’d like to 1) Stay even more up-to-date on the latest psychedelic news, 2) Financially support my work, or 3) Help keep the lights on here at Think Wilder, then please consider becoming a $2 tier patron today.

I think this will be a win-win-win because everyone will still have access to the information (albeit with a bit of a delay), people who want early access to each week’s links will have the option to do so, and I’m hoping enough of my readers will want to become a patron that it will help me grow my Patreon account.

Other Changes to Patreon Benefits

In addition to this change, I also made a couple changes to other tiers on Patreon. First, I removed the $5-and-up "monthly Q&A" benefit because not many people ever participated in them. If anyone is really interested in doing that in the future then let me know and I can always bring it back.

Second, I added a "patron recognition" benefit to the $10-and-up tier. From now on those patrons will get a mention in a "Patreon Sponsors" shout out screen that will appear on my YouTube videos! I will reach out to my existing $10 tier patrons to see if they want to be named, but moving forward anyone who wants to show up on my shout out screen can join this tier to do so.

This decision has been difficult for me to make, but I am hopeful that y’all will understand. It’s been a wild ride the last seven years, and I’m currently in a process of reshaping things here on the blog and my YouTube channel so things will continue evolving. I hope you’ll stick around to see what happens. I know I will!

Previous Years

Every year I celebrate my blogiversary by announcing improvements to the site. Here’s what I did to celebrate the first five blogiversaries at Think Wilder:

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Celebrating Think Wilder's Sixth Anniversary

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Today Think Wilder is turning six.

That’s right—six years ago I launched this blog, and a whole lot has happened since then. In this commemorative post I’m going to go over the evolution of my work here at Think Wilder, share a couple improvements that I’ve made to the website, and give an update about where I’m taking things in the future.

Think Wilder’s History

So let’s start off with a little bit of history. This blog’s first post was published on March 27th, 2015. Before that, I had launched two other blogs that eventually ran out of steam.

The first was a cigar review blog; I don’t remember its name. I used to be really into cigars, smoking anywhere from 1-3 cigars a day, trading them with people online, subscribing to cigar magazines, and spending thousands of dollars on them over the course of 2 or 3 years.

That was shortly before I got into psychedelics. I hadn’t even tried cannabis when I got into cigars, so in a way, tobacco was one of my gateway drugs. Although really my gateway drug would’ve been caffeine, because I drank a lot of soda when I was younger and got into coffee before I got into cigars.

But anyway, I digress. My second blog was a book review blog where I wrote reviews about the books I was reading at the time. It was called DDubsReads because one of my nicknames in college was D Dubs (short for “David Wilder”) and I liked reading. It was kind of a silly name to be honest.

I wrote a fair amount of reviews of books about psychedelics but was a bit afraid to exclusively write about them because this was a bit before psychedelics really went mainstream. It was around 2008-2010 or so. In addition to writing reviews about psychedelic books, I also reviewed science fiction, classics, science, nutrition, and spiritual books.

It was a fun blog to run but eventually I stopped posting content, and I essentially stopped blogging for 3 or 4 years, if I’m remembering my timeline correctly.

Then one day while I was listening to one of my favorite tech podcasts (The Talk Show) I got the inspiration to start up a third blog, and after some brainstorming I decided to name it Think Wilder.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to write about, so my early posts varied in topic quite a bit but included a lot of the same types of topics as the books I reviewed for DDubsReads. In fact, the tagline I chose for the site was “An Open-Minded Exploration of Everything.” That doesn’t really explain what to expect from a blog called Think Wilder, does it?

A few years into this project I decided to narrow down the topics I wanted to cover on Think Wilder to psychoactive drugs, spirituality, technology, and personal development. Then a little over a year ago I made the decision to stop covering news about all psychoactive drugs and instead go back to just covering psychedelic news, in addition to creating content about the other topics.

And today I’m going to be making an announcement about how I’m niching down even further now, so that I can focus on what I really want to talk about with my platform.

But before we get to that I want to share a couple improvements I’ve made here on the blog.

Site Improvements

Every year I celebrate my blogiversary by announcing improvements to the site, and this year’s no different. As of today, there are now two new archive pages that will make it easier and faster for you to find the blog posts I’ve written.

The first site improvement is a resource guides archive, which is where you’ll find a list of the resource guides I have created. As of now there’s only one but I’m planning to create some more this year.

The second improvement is a general archive page that lists the blog posts that don’t fit into the other defined categories on my blog: reviews, link posts, resource guides, and psychedelic news roundups and recaps.

You can check the new archive pages out by hovering over the “Categories” menu item at the top of the site, and please let me know if you have any ideas for site improvements that you’d like to see me implement in the future.

A New Direction

So getting back to what I teased earlier, I’ve decided to niche down a bit further and narrow my focus to psychedelic news, reviews, and resource guides.

I may still post something that would fall into the categories of spirituality, technology, personal development, or any another topic, but I’m really going to be focusing primarily on psychedelics from here on out.

It’s just that there is so much to talk about in the world of psychedelics that I’ve been plenty busy keeping up with it all and haven’t really had the time and space to create content about other things for a while, and so I’ve decided that Think Wilder is going to be all about psychedelics moving forward.

It’s crazy to think that it took me six years to figure out what I really want to create content about, even though looking back it should’ve probably been more obvious. I suppose in this case, hindsight is actually 20/21!

Psychedelics are the most fascinating thing I’ve ever come across and I want to use my platform to spread information about them so people don’t end up making the same mistakes I did when I first started experimenting with psychedelics 15 years ago.

So if you’re here for news, reviews, or resource guides related to psychedelics then stick around because that’s going to be my main focus from now on. Here’s to six years, and many more.

Previous Years

Every year I celebrate my blogiversary by announcing improvements to the site. Here’s what I did to celebrate the first five blogiversaries at Think Wilder:

Five-Year Blogiversary!

Today Think Wilder turns five.

It some ways it seems like just yesterday that I had the idea to start a blog, but in fact it was many moons ago. And technically it wasn’t just “a blog”—it was another blog. There were two starter blogs before this one that I eventually shut down after they ran out of steam. The first focused on reviewing cigars at a time in my life when I was obsessed with cigars. The second blog had loads of book reviews, mostly in the science fiction and what I dubbed “psychedelic literature” genres. But something told me I should give blogging a third try, and I listened.

And I’m glad I did. This blog (and later, my YouTube channel) have been a much-needed creative outlet for me. I’ve learned a lot over the years by:

  • Providing 252 weekly link roundups and 7 monthly/yearly recaps chock-full of psychedelic news

  • Giving my two cents on plenty of books and films

  • Getting comfortable with being vulnerable by sharing bits and pieces of my personal life

And things are just now starting to heat up. I’ve got plenty of things that I am working on and I am looking forward to being able to share them with you as they become ready.

Every year I celebrate my blogiversary by announcing improvements to the site. Here’s what I did to celebrate the first four blogiversaries at Think Wilder:

This year’s site improvement is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s a navigational enhancement that builds on last year’s Link Posts archive page. In addition to that archive, there are now five brand-new category archive pages:

They are located under the Categories menu in the navigational bar at the top of the site. These archive pages make it super easy to locate the entire catalog of posts in each category without having to page through them manually at a snail’s pace (five posts at a time).

For the last few years I kept putting off this project until I made a final decision about whether or not to continue covering all psychoactive drugs in my roundups and recaps, which I just decided against recently. That’s partially because I knew that it would lock me into an organizational structure for the blog and I didn’t want to paint myself into a corner that I might want to escape from in the future. And it’s partially because I knew that it was going to take forever to build the Weekly Psychedelic Links archive page. Which turned out to be true.

But these archive pages are finally done, and I’m really happy with them. I hope you are too.

In addition to completing my category archive pages project I also separated the Psychedelics, Spirituality, and Technology topics from the Categories menu in the top navigational bar and put them under a new menu option called Topics. I think that makes it the blog’s main areas of focus a bit more obvious than before, and it looks better too.

So here’s to five years. I can’t wait to see what the next five bring. And I hope you’ll join along for the ride. Until next time, keep thinking wilder y’all.

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Think Wilder Is Going Back to Its Psychedelic Roots

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For the last year or so I’ve been running an experiment on this blog and my YouTube channel by trying my damnedest to cover the hottest news about all psychoactive substances in my weekly link roundups and monthly/yearly news recaps. But that’s about to change.

Think Wilder is going back to its psychedelic roots. Moving forward all of my link roundups and news recaps will focus on plants, fungi, animals, and chemicals that can be reasonably classified as “psychedelic”.

Before you object, let me first clarify that this doesn’t mean that I won’t ever publish anything about non-psychedelic drugs again. You’ll still see content related to mind-altering substances like cocaine, heroin, alcohol, and nicotine from time to time—in the form of feature pieces or link posts. However, I won’t be focusing on drugs like these in my regular roundups and recaps.

The rest of this blog post explains why I’ve come to this decision, so if you’re interested in the reasons behind the change then you can keep reading. If you’re not, then at least now you know what to expect in the future from Think Wilder.

Rewinding back to the end of 2018, after 3.5 years of covering mostly psychedelic news on a weekly basis, I began to cover all psychoactive drugs. As I explained in that that year's recap:

Earlier this month I polled the Think Wilder audience on Twitter and Facebook about the overall scope of the blog, asking if I should narrow my focus to exclusively write about psychedelics or expand it to cover other psychoactive substances as well. Thank you to those of you who responded. Most people seemed to be interested in psychedelics, but a few reported that they found information about other drugs to also be valuable. After mulling it over for a few weeks, I decided to expand the scope of the blog to focus on all psychoactive substances. First of all, I wanted to avoid practicing drug chauvinism, the belief that some drugs are inherently “better” than others. I also feel like there is significantly more honest reporting about psychedelics than there is about drugs like stimulants and depressants and wanted to help balance things out. But most importantly, I realized that although I’m far more familiar with psychedelics and am by no means an expert on other drugs, I still have a healthy interest in psychoactive substances in general and want to see them fairly covered. I added a “cocaine” section to this year’s post, and you can expect to see news about other psychoactive substances like benzodiazepines and deliriants in the near future.

Many of those things remain the same today. I don’t want to participate in what I termed “drug chauvinism” at the time (although I have since come around to prefer the term “psychedelic exceptionalism”). Instead, I want to promote the ethos of drug positivity throughout my work.

I still think there is more decent reporting about psychedelics than other psychoactive substances, but have learned that I truly feel like I have more to contribute to the psychedelic niche than in the overall drug niche.

And I have maintained a strong interest in all things psychoactive and love learning more about non-psychedelic drugs. However with all of that said, I still have decided to make a change.

There are two main reasons why:

First and foremost, narrowing the scope of my regular news coverage will significantly cut down on the amount of time it takes to create link roundups and news recaps so I can focus on other projects that keep getting put on the backburner.

To give you an idea of how much time I’ve put into covering drugs over the last five years, each weekly link roundup takes anywhere from 10-20 hours to complete, while monthly recap videos take about 10 hours and monthly recap blog posts take about 20 hours. All of that work is done without any outside funding other than my Patreon patrons. (By the way, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to those of you who are supporting me there and invite everyone else to become a patron to help keep my work going.)

Since covering non-psychedelic drugs takes up about half of the time it takes to produce my link roundups and news recaps, dropping them from my regular updates should enable me to spend more time covering psychedelic news as thoroughly as possible and free me up to work on other content and projects that I’ve been wanting to create for a long time.

Second, I feel like I’ve drifted away from what I want Think Wilder to be.

When I first started this blog I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do with it. But after a couple years I started to realize that I really wanted to focus on psychedelics, spirituality, and technology. Expanding my scope to cover all psychoactive drugs was a departure from my original intention and didn’t really reflect my true passions.

My initial—and most influential—experiences with drugs involved psychedelics, not uppers, downers, or other all-arounders. Although I do have limited experience with some non-psychedelic drugs, I am by no means an expert on them and have come to the realization that it’s better to leave coverage of those substances to people better equipped to discuss them.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, this news doesn’t mean that this marks the last time I’ll ever cover non-psychedelic drugs on Think Wilder. I have some ideas for psychoactive drug content that have been bouncing around in my noggin for the last few years, and hopefully some of them will come to fruition sooner or later. And I still plan to link to big news stories about non-psychedelic drugs, too.

This decision has been difficult for me to make and it feels bittersweet. On one hand, I’m fascinated by psychoactive drugs and love learning about them, but on the other hand I just don’t feel called to continue going down the path I’ve been following any longer.

These changes are effective immediately. This week’s link roundup will return to the original name that the column sported until the end of 2018 (“This Week in Psychedelics”) and the news recaps at the end of the month will be called “This Month in Psychedelics”.

I hope that everyone who was tuning in for psychedelic content is excited about this news and that those of you who come here for news about all psychoactives understand where I’m coming from. Obviously I can’t please everyone and I just have to listen to what I feel is right for me. Thank you for your understanding and feel free to contact me to let you know what you think about this announcement.