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If You Can't Make Peace With Your Partner, How Can You Expect to Make Peace in the World? AMA with Annie Lalla

A Vtuber Built on Community, Not Virality. I’m a music artist, VTuber, and radio-style host — and more importantly, I act as a voice and gathering point for a community I call Cyber City Underground. My work lives at the intersection of music, conversation, and community: original songs, live radio-style streams, and spaces built around listening, dialogue, and shared humanity.

A core part of what I do is creating places where people can slow down, talk honestly, and feel connected — not optimized, not farmed, not reduced to engagement metrics. Through my music and my live conversations, I’ve heard the same sentiment echoed again and again: the current internet feels fragmented, hostile, and engineered to divide.

That’s why seeing UpTrust launch genuinely means a lot to me.

A platform that puts trust, dialogue, and human connection at the center aligns deeply with the values I’ve been building toward — resisting algorithm-driven outrage and instead amplifying voices, nuance, and real conversation. This feels like the kind of space where creators and communities can show up as people, not products.

I’m here because I believe in a better internet — one where trust matters more than virality, and where communities are built through intention rather than manipulation. I’m excited to be part of this early wave and to contribute however makes sense as things grow.

Glad to be here — and hopeful for what this can become.

— Oni-1
🎙️ Radio-Style Host | 🎵 Music Artist
Voice of Cyber City Underground

Looking for DIY ppl. I am disabled. I have a million hobbies. I love to learn. especially food and culture. I distract myself with useless knowledge. I graduated nursing school. overly obsessed germaphobe. Want to talk let's talk. Be kind be blessed.

Relatefulness vs Circling. I've been discovering distinctions and felt-senses of Relatefulness that seem to differ from how I know Circling. My short catch phrase is: "If meditation is the art of being, and Circling is the art of being-with, then Relatefulness is the art of being-human-with."

I like this, it's short and sweet. I can't tell what Relatefulness really is vs what I'm making it and, given that I'm a founding member, it doesn't matter. I'm gonna bully these points.

Jane Goodall is in more Flows than she is in Surrendered Leadership. Helping behavior, care, needs, art, and the building of infracstructure are welcomed in Relatefulness. One thing I notice about Circling, if person A offers person B something, person A is (at least culturally) more likely to ask, "What's underneath it for you?", as if they're asking, "What's this cocaine cut with?" It's rarely believed in Circling if the underneath isn't negative. If the offering Circler says, "Care", then most Circlers assume a spiritual bypass and probably imagine being less sexually attractive (sarcasm). In Relatefulness I'm creating that, Person A offers Person B something, Person B, taking notes from Hannah Taylor, feels whether accepting feels like comfort and then accepts or declines accordingly. 

In Relatefulness we let the responsibility for shadow-hunting be with the one offering. It's a huge leap to believe that accepting something is bad because the offer had some shadow somewhere inside of it. It's actually a ridiculous leap. It's stupid. The shadow could just as easily be ameliorated by seeing its energy flow generatively or made worse by non-rational repetitive rejection.

Boom. Suck it. (I don't know who I'm angry at....myself.)

Last night as I was leading lab it felt amazing. I was watching them float in and out of chit chat. The thing that wasn't in and out was everything they were talking about was meaningful. There wasn't anyone there, besides a voice in my mind, that was tracking whether they were using speech patterns of immediacy, "Being here now, I feel like my balls haven't descended." They were just talking. I did not police it because it felt so fucking good. We're monkeys and we feel good. What I did do was use immediacy leaning language and speak it between people. I let people see the effect and never brought up them following. If it's good and it works then they'll follow at their aligned speed.

I stayed in slight vigilance as the thing in my brain that polices immediacy, or is on the lookout from being policed, slowly calmed down. It was beautiful.

In short, Relatefulness is more about being monkeys than monks, healthy than right, in alignment than understood.

Pass the bananas!

I don’t know if I am doing this right. . I had the urge in my car to start singing an improvised song (inspired by my relateful camp experience at Annabeth’s Vocal Flow and Kedar’s bonfire jam) and it was in that exploration that I had the epiphany that I am allowed to write bad poems! This really excites me and now I’ve started to write a bunch of things that I feel poetic about. The permission to be bad has been crucial in my permission to try, and now I am wanting to maintain my permission to be bad and try in front of others. 

I haven’t posted on UpTrust because I question whether or not I am really “trustable” on any topic. I don’t feel qualified, or justified, or certifiably “trustable”, apart from maybe my honest attempts at honesty. But my honesty =/= truth. I could speak honestly about what I think a Beef Wellington is and still be wrong.  

But I can write bad poems, and I can be wrong, AND I can do that publicly. And in doing it publicly, maybe my poems become better and my honesty becomes truer. 

We need to recover the idea of the Soul from its destruction at the hands of modern metaphysics and its distortion in traditional Christianity.

Modernity dismantled the notion of the soul. It took the human being apart to see how we work and said "well, there's no part labelled soul in here, so I guess that's not a thing."

But we actually implicitly live as if there were such a thing as a soul. We experience ourselves as souls, and the people around us as souls. 

So to align with modern metaphysics, we have to pretend this is not the case, in exactly the same way that, eg, traditional Christians pretend to believe that people go to heaven when they die.

This pretending causes us great unnecessary distress, and we would be happier, more whole, and more aligned with reality if we recovered a notion of the soul.

BUT WATCH OUT!

Because one of the candidate notions of the soul is that provided by traditional Christianity, and it's a candidate that a lot of people are turning to in response to the problem above. But traditional Christianities notion of the soul is a gross distortion. It sees the soul as a *thing* which you *posses*, that is fragile and susceptible to the dangers of the world, and must be protected from temptation and corruption, through your human lifetime, so that it can arrive intact in paradise. And this is horrendously confused.

We need new notions, new creativity in this area, and a willingness for smart, rational, scientifically literate people to recover the language of the soul.

#DeepTakes

Erotic energy is often not about sex.
I think it is mostly an impulse to create something together. I don’t have a good model for the causal mechanism of how it works, but I think that attraction essentially hints at a specific potential between the two parties. Sex and “baby” is the creation-potential only a tiny fraction of the time.

Here are some of the many alternative creation-potentials, in no particular order. Would love to hear what else y’all notice, as this is not an attempt at an exhaustive list:

• A project for you to create together

  • as small as a party and as big as an organization

• An emotional gift one of you has for the other

  • eg: a piece of advice, sharing of life experience, an introduction to someone important

  • Similarly, information share—eg: a mutual friend needs to be taken care of 

• A quality or characteristic for you to integrate/embody more: The classic projection of a “golden shadow”

  •  Eg: “She’s so strong” because I’m not claiming my strength, or “he’s so smart” because I’m not comfortable admitting my own intelligence 

• A psychodynamic transformation (aka "healing")

  • Eg: you projecting your mom/dad stuff onto each other can be seen as a beautiful chance to make it conscious so you can be more present and available in all your relationships

• A different kind of relationship: Ongoing friendship, mentorship, employment, or some other awesome/potent relationship

• A chance to see what you’re avoiding in other relationships. This is the classic where someone cheats rather than deal with stuff at home.

---

You meet someone new and feel that sudden frisson of erotic excitement. That’s a crush—must be romantic love, right? We’ve watched it happen so many times in ourselves, our community, our movies and books, that it’s almost taken for granted. But I think as soon as I point out the alternatives, they seem obvious too. I wonder if there are other media and cultural narratives to help support more awareness of the alternative? I feel like this would help people be more open to different kinds of love, different kinds of relationships, and suffer a lot less. I feel like this awareness has done so for me, at least.

Hat Tip to Ken Wilber, where I first heard of using the word “eros” as the creative impulse of the universe driving to more novelty.

Telepathy is Real. I've just listened to the podcast The Telepathy Tapes and now I believe telepathy is real.

The baseline premise is that nonspeaking autistic people have telepathic abilities with people who recieve them with open-mindedness and love. They have it with each other, and are able to meet in another realm at a place they call The Hill, where they can speak freely with each other and learn massive amounts of content instantaneously. In the final episode of the season, we get loads of clips of what individual nonspeaking autistic people wanted us to know, information they painstakingly spelled out one letter at a time. They are concepts and perspectives I've only heard from the deepest meditators I've ever come across. They are concepts that, in my opinion, can't be pretended with that level of accurately by anyone who hasn't had direct experience of Oneness.

Since then, at night before I fall asleep I practice opening my heart and exploring for The Hill. I also imagine creating invite-only Flow sessions where nonverbal autistic people and their family member and/or personal aid join, and we speakers open our hearts to listening from there. We would also speak what we find out loud, and the nonspeakers can use their spelling techniques to guide us when they want to.

Since the movie Arrival came out I've stayed captivated by its premise. Benevolent aliens arriving to show us a new way to see reality and bridge divisions. The thought that belevolent teachers are already here in the form of nonspeaking autistic people, they've always been here, and they're the people we've tended to ignore and pity is so incredibly compelling to me and gives me immense hope for humans, the earth, and the future.

The church I grew up in, and still attend when I travel home, has a member named Erin who is nonverbal autistic, though she can say "mama." My attention has always been particularly drawn to her. She seems to see me, but in a different way than other people. One Sunday during worship, she pointed into the air and behaved the excited way she did when she saw someone she really likes. I was maybe 7 or 8, and it seemed entirely true to me that she was actually seeing someone and not just imagining it. I loved it, and loved seeing clear evidence that the invisible person was someone joyous to be with.

The podcast says that the reason they are nonverbal is muscular- a lack of fine motor skills, which is what speaking is. But that they can communicate very slowly with gross motor skills by pointing to a board with letters or tapping them on an ipad. It makes sense to me that a fully capable brain inside a body that demands slowness and introspection would naturally find the realms that meditators spend their lives intentionally cultivating, as well as realms beyond.

I want to listen to what they want to teach me.

Telepathy is Real. I've just listened to the podcast The Telepathy Tapes and now I believe telepathy is real.

The baseline premise is that nonspeaking autistic people have telepathic abilities with people who recieve them with open-mindedness and love. They have it with each other, and are able to meet in another realm at a place they call The Hill, where they can speak freely with each other and learn massive amounts of content instantaneously. In the final episode of the season, we get loads of clips of what individual nonspeaking autistic people wanted us to know, information they painstakingly spelled out one letter at a time. They are concepts and perspectives I've only heard from the deepest meditators I've ever come across. They are concepts that, in my opinion, can't be pretended with that level of accurately by anyone who hasn't had direct experience of Oneness.

Since then, at night before I fall asleep I practice opening my heart and exploring for The Hill. I also imagine creating invite-only Flow sessions where nonverbal autistic people and their family member and/or personal aid join, and we speakers open our hearts to listening from there. We would also speak what we find out loud, and the nonspeakers can use their spelling techniques to guide us when they want to.

Since the movie Arrival came out I've stayed captivated by its premise. Benevolent aliens arriving to show us a new way to see reality and bridge divisions. The thought that belevolent teachers are already here in the form of nonspeaking autistic people, they've always been here, and they're the people we've tended to ignore and pity is so incredibly compelling to me and gives me immense hope for humans, the earth, and the future.

The church I grew up in, and still attend when I travel home, has a member named Erin who is nonverbal autistic, though she can say "mama." My attention has always been particularly drawn to her. She seems to see me, but in a different way than other people. One Sunday during worship, she pointed into the air and behaved the excited way she did when she saw someone she really likes. I was maybe 7 or 8, and it seemed entirely true to me that she was actually seeing someone and not just imagining it. I loved it, and loved seeing clear evidence that the invisible person was someone joyous to be with.

The podcast says that the reason they are nonverbal is muscular- a lack of fine motor skills, which is what speaking is. But that they can communicate very slowly with gross motor skills by pointing to a board with letters or tapping them on an ipad. It makes sense to me that a fully capable brain inside a body that demands slowness and introspection would naturally find the realms that meditators spend their lives intentionally cultivating, as well as realms beyond.

I want to listen to what they want to teach me.

Meta is ending its fact-checking program in favor of a 'community notes' system similar to X. Maybe this is good for this platform making this kind of platform even more needed? 

"We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Zuckerberg said in a video. "More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."

"The reality is that this is a trade off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down."

What do y'all think? 

How should I landscape my house? I am working on landscaping the home I bought in October, starting with the front yard due to a couple of issues. First, there is a big dip in the yard that floods every time it rains heavily. Second, the driveway is right in front of my bedroom window, causing headlights to shine into my room when people come and go, and limiting my ability to open the windows due to privacy concerns.

I’ve hired a permaculture landscaper who is currently working on a design. Meanwhile, I need to decide what to do about the driveway and whether to add a carport.

I could really use some opinions on the following:

• How would you deal with the flooding issue?
• What would you suggest for the driveway or adding a carport? I can move the driveway to the other side of the house or leave it as is.

I can post photos if there’s a way to do that. I have many ideas also but curious to hear what folks think with this info.

Experiment: How is whatever's happening serving the greater good? If we zoom out long enough, we can often see that massive setbacks created foundations for evolution. Eg:

• The great oxygenation wiped out almost all life on Earth, but also created the atmosphere.
• The extinction of the dinos paved the way for bigger mammals—and eventually humans.
• Industrialization put tons of people out of work and polluted like crazy, but coincided with some of the greatest quality of life increases in recorded history
• In Trump and a Post Truth World, Ken Wilber suggests that Trump’s 2016 win was one manifestation of evolution taking a step backward to correct the way the “Green meme” went unhealthy—because the one thing that Trump was coherent about back then was being anti-pluralistic.

What’s a thing in the world that you don’t like right now, and think is a huge step backward, that might also be a step forward? How so?

By design, this is an unverifiable experiment from a third person perspective. Since we can keep zooming out + everything is interconnected, we’ll probably never know for sure, even if we live for thousands of years. 

But by design, this is verifiable from a first person perspective: Does your experience improve or change in any way by the experiment? How so?

(note that this doesn't ask you to deny any suffering—such as the horror of the oxygenation event's great extinction, or stop trying to make things better. Like everything, this perspective can be misused. "Everything happens for a reason" is usually dismissive, "if there were a reason for this in the long run, what might it be?" is additive. Like allowing versus expressing, it's not about bypassing the difficulty but rather creating a larger container for it. Freedom comes through acceptance rather than resistance.)

#TTT