Anodyne

Now I know that the journalists have totally fucked the pooch on this one, but they've done it in the best way, really. They're misreporting the study, saying that psychedelics cause more brain activity than normal, right? And some people will read that as: "acid makes you think more" or possibly even "drugs make you smarter/ are good for your brain". Given all the other ways that they could have fucked up the reporting & interpretation of that study, this is better than I would've hoped for. Think of the alternative, where they said this instead: "the study showed decreased brain activity after a dose of LSD". Neither claim is accurate, but the one that is actually less false (in terms of representing the study, anyway) would have been far worse for psychedelic publicity. Also, am I the only one who reads the phrase "brain activity" in Homer Simpson's 'duh' voice? It's like "book-learning" or "feeling emotional", I feel a reduction in my own brain activity just reading it. Anyway, I figure if you can't have accurate reporting, at least you get a [totally-un-scientificallly-supported] pro-drug message. I still call it a win. What do you mean, "they could always try doing both"? I thought I was recklessly optimistic at times, but that's just foolishness. Are you one of those people who expected the starwars prequels to be great? Or that presidents of superpowers would be literate? Fuck, you can be hopeful, but try to restrict it to vaguely-plausible things. Accurate & honest representation of drugs in the media is not on that list. If you try to put it there your life will be a despairing spiral of disappointment and rage, probably culminating in mandated NA meetings which you will fail to appreciate the irony of. So to those Guardian journalists I say, if you're going to arserape the scientific integrity of drug articles, thankyou for at least giving a reacharound.

cactard noun a person whose obsession with cacti borders on mental illness adjective: cactarded

I love fibre optic cable, have you seen the side-emitting version they've made that glows down the whole length? These guys made an Avatar-tree with it: Original Avatar tree:

Trip whips Best part is that you don't need any particular poi-twirling-coordination to play with them. They actually look best if you just wave them about vaguely.

Sorry to hear that Sally. Dammit I think I'm out too unless someone has a spare wheelchair. Not recovering from a recent injury as fast as I'd hoped, still having a lot of trouble getting around. Which is mostly fine because I'm convalescing at the moment & don't have to move very far, but not so good for wandering around gardens. Sorry to miss this one, there's a lot of people I'd like to meet, but it's ok - I'll catch you all some other time when I can walk. Perhaps this upcoming camp if I'm back on my feet by then. Have a good 'un folks. Harass some khat trees for me.

Yep I agree, and I get what you're saying. I almost didn't mention this because my problem with this book was so difficult for me to articulate. I suppose that personally, graphic imagery often distracts me from whatever sociopolitical point they are trying to make, rather than illustrating it. Something like if I went to a political meeting and the main speaker gave her speech about social reforms topless - wouldn't matter how good her arguments were, because my attention would be elsewhere. Or for a more realistic example, the way that political rallies often only get media attention when they become violent - it's a sensationalist thing, forgotten the next week along with whatever message they were trying to convey. For me, the images that stay with me are the sneaky subtle ones that get under your skin & you only realise later "oh fuck, that's what they meant by that". Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days was like that - a friend told me they were creeped out by it, and I read it & didn't really understand what was so bad about it. And then I thought about it, and thought about some more, and got a bit creeped out myself, and eventually decided that it's one of the more horrific things I've ever read. But while there's a little violence, there is nothing in the story that stands out immediately as being particularly R-rated (I actually once saw an anime film with many of the same themes as Reynolds which had been misclassified as children's cartoon), it's just the trains of thought that it sets off. If an image/scene is presented to me fully-formed, then I don't feel the need to imagine it so thoroughly. Whereas if they just imply something, I find myself having to think "hang on, how did that happen?" or "why did they do that?", and I have to think through the chain of events which led there before I can imagine the scene. Which for me is much of the point of speculative fiction. It's interesting to read other people's descriptions of possible futures. But I find it more rewarding if their descriptions make me think about how we would get from A to B, from present day to that hypothetical future. Because that's when I start looking around & seeing all the steps we are already taking towards those future paths.

dapperling nan obsolete word for dandiprat Leucocoprinus birnbaumii, "plantpot dapperling"

I know that The Windup Girl won a whole heap of awards & was really popular & all, but I really didn't like it. He had some interesting tech stuff, some of it pretty cool & imaginative, but I felt that he totally ruined it with all the gratuitous sex & violence - I mean, I don't mind that in a book, I liked Palahniuk, I liked Welsh, I liked Burroughs FFS (try The Place of Dead Roads, I rate it as highly as Naked Lunch... but with more gay cowboys), but with Bacigalupi it just felt like he was putting rape scenes in there for the hell of it. For a bit of contrast, there's Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake, which explores a similar post-biotech/climate-change apocalypse world, but does it in a more Slaughterhouse Five kind of style... I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I actually find all the atrocities to be more vivid when they're not spelled out quite so graphically. I don't like all of Neal Stephenson's stuff, but for his take on the nanotech-future, his book The Diamond Age explores what a society might be like if you could just build anything you liked in your local matter-compiler (or whatever the hell they're called). It was a bit more imaginative than his standard super-geek-saves-the-day schtick.

disgruntled

I second China Mieville: Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council. Chuck Palahniuk: Rant - if you like Welsh, you'll probably like this Alastair Reynolds: the Revelation Space series is good, epic space opera with hard sci-fi elements. I still get a bit freaked out when I remember one of the short stories from his collection Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days Yeti, hah I thought I was the only one who liked Anathem. I was so sad when I finished that book & then looked up & remembered that none of it was real & I couldn't go join a concent. Just read Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's about first contact with aliens - some really good discussion of psychology & language, reminded me of Mieville's Embassytown or Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (another good one if you haven't read it yet)

Yay, I've been outta action for awhile, am looking forward to seeing y'all! Great that all you Newcastle etc folks are coming down, should be a good 'un.

What could you live without? I started thinking about this awhile ago. Partly through necessity, but then I became interested in following the idea to see how far it could go. I was inspired by the whole “tiny homes” movement - not that I actually want to live in a trailer home - but I was interested in their ideas. Basically they said: why does it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and decades of your life (if you’re lucky) to own your own home? Is it because we have an idea of what kind of house is an acceptable home? Spare bedroom for guests, a shed for the tools, a big backyard… but how often do most people use those things? Once a month? Once a year? Wouldn’t it be cheaper, instead of paying the tens or hundreds of thousands extra to buy the three-bedroom house with swimming pool & 2-door garage, to just buy a one bedroom cottage and then rent tools when you need ‘em, sleep on the floor when you have guests, maybe use a share-car service and spend more time in the local park or gym rather than needing a private workout room or pool. Whatever the activity, there’s probably a way you could manage to do it in a smaller space, or in a public space (yes, all entendres intended - but that’s probably a separate discussion). Most people seem to cringe at the idea - what would you do with all your stuff? Well the tiny-home solution is to just not have much stuff, to borrow or rent tools & things as needed, then get rid of them again. Personally, I think that’s taking it too far - I’m a hoarder, and I like my tools & reference books & out-of-season clothes to be there when I need them. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to count on buying/borrowing/renting whatever they need, whenever they need it. And from what I gather a lot of the tiny-homes folks also keep storage lockers anyway. But I thought the point was an interesting one - how much money are you paying for a house big enough to keep all that crap in? If you could own your own house for a quarter the standard price, if only you discarded 80 or 90% of your crap, would you go for it? Or do you really need that spare bedroom to store all your backup toasters & fondue sets? So that’s how it started originally, thinking about housing & how I could ever possibly afford to build my own house on the income from my part-time unskilled award-wage shitkickin job (so please excuse all the personal digressions in this post, I’ve just left them in as examples) … and then I started expanding the idea - instead of just wondering “can I live without lots of stuff & a big house to make things cheaper?”, I started thinking, “if I can live without a fridge/freezer, I won’t need a big reliable solar system for my electricity, which might knock a good $20K off the cost”, and “hey, I don’t even want an indoor bathroom”, and “if I can learn to make my own X, then I won’t have to buy it” (where X is well, almost anything - bread, fuel, fenceposts, string, entertainment…) And then other things - could I live without a car in a rural area? You’d say no (& I do recognise the safety issues) but I’ve known plenty of folks who do. Because that’d be about half of my income gone right there, just maintaining & running a vehicle good enough to handle those roads. And half the reason for having a reliable vehicle in the first place is so you can get to work… to make enough money to run the car… and round it goes. Or maybe instead I can just ride to work with my boss, and then do a days work on my neighbours fences whenever I need to borrow his spare ute, and save myself the expense of keeping my own. As an added bonus, this would make me really think about whether I needed to go into town, rather than just making recreational shopping trips out of boredom, which would save plenty more money. When you have to make conversation with your racist neighbour & then drive for two hours to buy that wine & cheese, you start wondering if you can make do with some home-brew & raiding the vege garden instead. And then if food is one of your major expenses, well I’ve already had times when my food bill couldn’t have been much more than $1000/year, and that was with full-time work/study and without a real vege garden. How much could I knock off the bill if I put in a few good days work in the garden each month, instead of spending that time working for someone else so I can buy food from the supermarket? Sure it might take some time to harvest & prepare & preserve all that food yourself, but if you don’t have to work a full-time job to pay for it all, then you’ll have a lot more time on your hands! And which would you rather do, spend your time working your current job, or spend your days digging potatoes & making kimchi? I guess we sort of started this discussion in the penny-pinching thread awhile back, talking about tips & tricks for saving money on things. But now I’m trying to think bigger, about lifestyle changes which would mean needing and buying less things overall. I just feel like we float through, or are pushed through our lives without often sitting down to think about these things from a cost-benefit standpoint. How much does it cost us to have all this stuff, all those possessions, this much privacy & personal space, this many “conveniences”, our “job security”? How much do we pay in time & stress & RSI & lifelong back problems? Is it really fucking worth it? For what? He who dies with the most toys wins? Unless you’re a pharaoh you ain’t taking it with you, so what’s the point? Perhaps we could be striving for happiness in each day, rather than waiting on some nebulous future paradise (like “heaven” or “retirement”). So what do you think? What could you live without if it meant you could work 1 or 2 days a week instead of five? Or for those already living on a pension or casual employment or some other sub-poverty-line income, have you thought about accepting Jesus Christ as your personal saviour? Or um, a tiny home. Or some other life simplification. Whichever floats your boat (hey, houseboats! fuck yeah). Or Jesus Christ in a tiny home. I think I’m tangentalising here. I blame the reckless drug abuse. But that’s kinda my point (yeah, nice save). How much of our time and money is spent just distracting ourselves from the fact that we don’t actually like our lives, because we spend half of them working to pay for the distractions from our crappy lives! It’s that same fucken circle I was talking about with the car. Circle of life my arse, it’s a circle of crap & I want out. Living in a tent and eating nettles really does not sound so bad, if that’s the way to escape then I think I can live with that. I guess I’ll find out. I’m sure I’ll miss all the beer & skittles, hookers & blow, bread & circuses like my own left arm, but after the last year I believe that you don’t need all your limbs to be whole anyway. I figure shit is always bound to hit sooner or later, but maybe if I’ve opted for a bit of voluntary simplicity in the meantime, then the involuntary sort of deprivations won’t hurt so much when they arrive. Prepping for the soul, I guess. Or maybe just a midlife crisis, who bloody knows? I really can’t tell anymore if this kind of thinking is soundest rationality or antisocial insanity, but happily I no longer feel like I have to care. Maybe I've just read too much Fight Club. I get that I’m in an easier position than most to make these choices, as I have some land, no dependents, enjoy working out how to do stuff for myself, and am already a recluse with a childish “fuck yourself” attitude towards society in general, so living out bush & growing my own beans doesn’t seem like a big leap from where I’m standing now. But I know that a lot of you folk share at least some of these traits, and I’m curious to know what you think about all this. What might you live without? Electricity? Steady work? Human company? Stable accommodation? Do you like making things for yourself? You mightn’t think that your gardening & carpentry & baking & brewing & so on skills are good enough to make a living from, mine certainly aren’t - but as they say there's a difference between making a living & making a life, and I wonder.. maybe they’d be good enough to just make a life from.

If you want to live without these things, then why are they still in your life? You could probably achieve a life free of this stuff simply by going to live in a cave in a national park somewhere & eating snakes for the rest of your days. It might be a difficult decision, but it's not a complicated one. The point I was trying to make earlier is that there is usually a trade-off. You have let these things into your life with something that you wanted (or thought you wanted). When you decide you want to live without those arguments with your girlfriend, say, sometimes the only way to achieve that is by breaking up with her. Likewise with the social connections you're talking about - to be free of the bad, you would probably sever your ties with a lot of stuff that you like - a whole lot of physical & social comforts. What I was asking was: which of those trade-offs might be worth it for you? What I am slowly realising is that many of the things I had been taught to like are not things that I want at all, or if I do want them, I don't want them enough to pay the hidden costs associated with them. So why not ditch capitalism like the nagging girlfriend that she is, and join me out in that national park? I'm not sharing my cave though, get yer own.

Holy shit, that's awesome. I look forward to reading that compilation!

Sally, sorry to hear about your car - I hope the bastards pay out in a timely manner!

Good company, food & tunes - thanks everyone, and special thanks to Horus.

I was curious about that too - here's their definition of "document" used in that legislation: Which then leads you to their definition of "writing": ... and "person": So even if you have your non-profit company print off your purely pictorial instructions for "cultivating a drug of dependence", eg. growing trichocereus, then if you have been "reckless as to whether those instructions will be used by another person" for nefarious purposes, (i.e. if anyone might ever read them & then do something naughty) then you are guilty under this law. Not as regards coffee though. Ironically, given the caffeine-dependence of this country, caffeine is not on their list of "drugs of dependence". You can find the original here (starting on page 238) if you're interested - it's a long list.

Thanks for that. The bill led me to the original Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Act 1981 which it's an amendment of. Here are the salient bits (emphasis mine): Humorous phrasing aside, that is actually much worse than I expected. Is this limited to Victoria, does anyone know?

Does anyone have a link to the actual legislation?

There might be no point stressing, but there is a point being aware of the bounds of such legislation & how it is likely to be used. If you like to read, anyway.

About damn time we got around to celebrating it then!

I've recently become a bit fascinated with all the awesome figs that grow around Sydney & was wondering if anyone could help me ID this one. Pretty sure it's not the 'weeping fig', Ficus benjamina (yeah thanks google) but aside from that I'm not sure, eg. if it's a native or what. I've had a look at a few keys, but I'm not much of a botanist - superba is my best guess so far, but I'm not sure because there are very few signs of aerial roots on this one & most pics of other trees don't show such long weepy whippy new growth.

I sometimes feel like my body is just being stubborn & ungrateful when it purges... no, don't reject that, it's good for you, you stupid... no dessert until you finish your cactus greens... seems so wasteful sometimes, but what can you do? Area postrema does what it wants, it doesn't care about your petty plans for enlightenment. I purge so often, at the slightest provocation, that it doesn't usually even bother me now - like if you had to run up a hill at the start of every journey, it's just a physical task I need to get thru. I think of it now as something William Burroughs wrote in the The Yage Letters: "There is a feeling of space-time travel that seems to shake the room. It occurs to me that preliminary yagé nausea is motion sickness of transport to yagé state" Nausea & vomiting are inconvenient sometimes, but they do serve a practical function as well - to help stop you from being poisoned. It strikes me that people who didn't get nauseous or throw up - whether because of some drug or a genetic disposition or whatever - would be at greater risk of poisoning themselves by OD'ing on something, because they wouldn't experience that protective reflex of the body to get that stuff back out. Though it does seem like the body isn't always the best judge of what is & isn't poison - like it's been reading that TGA "Poisons List" with all the drugs on it... friggin narc vomiting-centre... This is your area postrema, showing its deep concern for your psycho-spiritual development:

If that is a quote of the actual legislation, then it seems pretty retarded. How does one "cultivate a drug"? And why call them "drugs of dependence" rather than simply "illicit substances"? As for the law itself (I can't see the fb page, is it a state or federal thing?), I wonder if they still have to demonstrate "intent" to actually charge you? For instance I'm pretty sure my mum has a bunch of old pharmacopoeias with instructions for making opium & cannabis tinctures, but without intent to manufacture (eg. a bunch of those plants in her garden) would they really throw her in jail for five years? I don't see it. It kinda sounds like they've just added drug literature to their list of watched items along with large flasks & other equipment which tends to be used for drug manufacture. Maybe we can just sign an end user declaration when we buy our copies of Stamets