Anodyne

Sorry... http://www.shaman-australis.com/forum/index.php?/topic/25500-chemical-shaman-we-will-miss-you/#comment-270992 Not forgotten, I re-read selections from his rants every few years when I need cheering up... usually when I'm a bit deranged already, so they make more sense... Anyways, on a happier note, welcome o zef one!

Zedo - SJW has complicated pharmacology, chiefly serotonergic activity, but also effects on dopamine & other types of neurotransmitter systems, plus a bunch of enzyme-inducing stuff... short story, it has lots and lots of drug interactions, some of them dangerous. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head if combining with caapi would be one of the risky ones, but personally I wouldn't chance it. At least not without doing some detailed research into both their pharmacologies first. At a glance though, I can tell you that SJW has been shown to downregulate 5HT2A receptors, which are thought to be important to psychedelic activity, so even if it isn't dangerous to combine with vine, it may dull some of the effects. Also, many of the actives in SJW aren't heat-stable, so smoking may not be a good ROA.

also, wouldn't you have to rename a whole bunch of monstrose bridgesii if you started censoring the tricho breeding discussions here? All those dicks...

Are you kidding? It's so hard to tell, via text... No, there aren't. The rules, and I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially don't they just say "play nice"? Wasn't there even a supreme court ruling a couple years back to the effect that cussing was part of Australia's cultural heritage, and the language used was less important than the spirit in which it was used? Or to put it another way: you can say "cunt", just don't be one.

Not sure if it's been embalmed into our law yet. Cops have been doing that for decades though, long before this tech existed. It is partly profiling bullshit (that they figure certain people - eg. those covering their faces - are more likely to be a real threat in some way, eg. wanted terrorists & fugitives), but it is mostly an intimidation tactic, as far as I can tell. You'll notice that they also target anyone using a microphone/megaphone, people who are obviously recording, and so on. I've seen arrest records after protests where the only charge was "resisting arrest", so if they can get away with arresting "ringleaders" on such circular reasoning then I don't believe they actually *need* legal support to harass people. But at the moment it is limited to certain events like rallies & strikes - cops don't get away with the same behaviours (or at least, not the same level) in a supermarket or school fete, say. In a way this has all been happening for as long as there have been cameras. Just much, much slower. But like the metadata retention scheme, it's at the point now where the speed & volume of the data processed have increased so much from previous generations of tech, that the entire nature of the system & the ways it can be used, is changing. I don't follow social trends so I don't know the proper terms for this stuff, but it's like a phase shift in chemistry - when you reach a certain point the matter isn't just "a bit denser", it is qualitatively different. I believe facial recognition (in the worldwide, real-time-linked sense we've been talking about) is another one of these shifts. In a sense, it has been happening for years, in another it has already happened. But there still might be room for plebs like us to get a say in who gets to wield that power in our futures, and for what purposes. So we should still protest shit like this, and wear bandanas to work some days for no good reason - just because we can. At least for now.

In a society where the government relies on facial recognition for law enforcement (and other even less salutory activities), how long do you reckon the right to dress as you please will last? If this tech becomes widely used, then covering your face with a burqa, or bandana, or facepaint, or scruffy hair, becomes not only socially-unacceptable but downright suspicious potential-criminal type behaviour (remember that cops only need "reasonable suspicion" to detain & search you). I sometimes wear face-covering garments, for various reasons, and it is interesting to watch peoples' reactions to that - there is some curiosity, but an awful lot of hostility & fear. I would not like to see those prejudices given any more government support.

Solanum nigrum? And (if that's what they are - my plant ID ain't so good) in answer to the edibility question...maybe? There seems to be a lot of local variation. But I think the gist of it is that they are usually non-toxic if you eat the berries ripe and any other parts cooked (leaves are eaten as a cooked vegetable in some places).

Hey Flux, thanks for the links. I have encountered those in my searches - still trying to wrap my head around the second one (and others like it), but I think the gist of it is this: pregabalin/gabapentin inhibit neuroplasticity. This can be either a good thing or a bad thing. It isn't necessarily the same as just saying "lyrica causes brain damage" as that first article implies. If the changes that are occurring in the brain are detrimental (such as those in MS, as the paper discusses), then blocking them can be a good thing. This also applies to the kind of changes that can occur in chronic pain - where your brain has learned to send pain signals and continues to do so long after the physical injury has healed - it is just a matter of some faulty wiring, in essence. In that situation, if you can block those connections from forming in the first place, then you may be able to save people from a lifetime of chronic pain. And since lyrica seems to block those kind of new connections, then it could be very helpful in those circumstances. Where it all goes sour is when these drugs start getting thrown around to anyone who happens to be in pain, without looking at the whole picture. So if, for instance, you had a severe injury and were given lyrica immediately, it may head off those chronic pain issues at the pass, and they would just never form. (of course, you might still have the cognitive side-effects and withdrawals to deal with, but that's getting off-topic) However if the doctors were slack, or just hopeful, and waited awhile before prescribing lyrica until there were signs of chronic pain - then the story is very different. In that situation, the patient has already formed those faulty connections, and the lyrica is actually stopping them from getting better - it is stopping the neuroplasticity which would allow the brain to change its wiring again, to form healthier pathways. Same story for drug addiction (which of course affects many pain patients) - we are talking about some pretty entrenched neural wiring there, and changing that isn't easy even without the handicap of plasticity-blocking drugs. But of course, pregabalin is perceived as having "low abuse potential", so doctors are just handing it out in place of opioid painkillers & NSAIDs. I still believe it can be a miracle drug if prescribed correctly, for stuff like neuropathic pain, and possibly in acute care (eg. after severe injury or amputation). But it is being prescribed way more widely than that right now, which seems pretty reckless and short-sighted. I loathe pharmaceutical-company ethics, so I would be fuming about this anyway, but since this all applies to me personally as well, I am extra pissed off. I am going to be a long time untangling the mess that they have made of my brain.

Actually, from what I've been reading this kind of response isn't as rare as you might think. I don't know what the split is - you might be in the minority - but the internet is littered with exchanges that echo the one between you & sagi above. Some folk don't get euphoria, at any dose. I'm in this group as well - the first time I heard about people using pregabalin recreationally I was very confused. I was taking a bunch prescribed to me after spine damage had me unable to walk & bedridden from the nerve pain, and while thankfully it worked for that and getting back the use of my leg was nice, it didn't get me high. And after learning about that potential, you know that I tried. Then it seems there is another split between those who get withdrawals & those who don't, and this is not necessarily related to whether or not they find the drug to be fun. I certainly didn't, and I found the cognitive side-effects distressing enough that I stopped taking it cold turkey at one point. This was before anyone had warned me about the potential for withdrawal - but as it turned out I had no troubles. When I had to do it all again recently, I did a rapid-taper over the course of a week just to be safe but again there were no withdrawal issues. Seems that some people just don't get them. So yeah, while I think it's sketchy as hell the way this drug is being widely prescribed with no warnings about any of this, it does look like the addictive potential might not be as cut-and-dried as it is for some other drugs (like benzos & opioids).

Good point. REALLY good point. I'm in contact with a few drug-and-alcohol professionals, a few pain specialist types (including the ones who put me on Lyrica) and I have never heard any of them mention this. Given how freely this drug is being prescribed, it seems like something that should be talked about, but I am not having much luck researching the topic. All the research seems to focus on the benefits of inhibiting neuroplasticity in chronic pain patients - none of them seem to consider the possible downsides of doing that to someone's brain, especially since the kind of people who get prescribed pregabalin probably have a better-than-average chance of being depressed &/or opioid addicts, for instance. So if anyone comes across research into (or even discussion of) this particular issue, could you please send it my way? I would be interested to learn more about this.

According to this study of some North American specimens, coprine (the alkaloid that reacts with alcohol) was only found in C.atramentarius, not comatus or micaceus. So use caution, of course - species have been known to vary in alkaloid content between continents - but it's likely that this whole "ink caps can't be eaten with booze" thing has been exaggerated and extended to species which don't actually contain the compound. In light of DNA tests showing that the old "coprinus" classification actually included genetically very different species that just happened to dissolve into similar inky puddles, this variation in alkaloids actually might make a lot more sense than previously, when they were thought to all be in the same genus. Also, while combining coprine & ethanol can make you extremely nauseous, it is not dangerous in the sense of causing organ failure or death, like some other fungal toxins. Just to put it into perspective a bit.

The fungi are some kind of Coprinus/Coprinellus - they only grow on dead wood, so they are not harming your plants, just creating better soil. They're also edible, and can be used to make ink & dyes. I have seen gardens looking like that when plants were put into too-shady conditions. Understory tropical plants still need some sunlight...sure in their natural environment the tree canopy is catching much of the light, but leaves don't block as much light as say... bricks. The shade behind a house is a lot thicker than the shade under trees. Dunno if that's what is happening here, but if it is he might need to rethink his plant selection. The soil looks fine too, not "fine" as in "just alright", but as in "damn girl, that is some fine soil you have there". Whenever I have to dig through soil like that to get to a pipe or something, I carefully remove all that fine black topsoil & set it aside. You could have hidden issues like pH/salinity or overall drainage problems, but black sandy loam is not a bad thing at all. If you live in a really high rainfall area and are going to be digging everything up anyway, then you could add a bit more sand, maybe. But the root structure in that last photo looks fine & healthy - no signs of rot?

Something that I think about a lot is design. With good design, things last a long time and make your life easier. With bad design, tools give you RSI, burn down your house, and contribute to landfill. So I wanted to start a thread where we can shame poor design in all its forms, in the hopes that maybe we can learn from their mistakes. Here is one I used to look at every day. I actually started thinking out that it had one good design element: that the gutter in the middle of the roof emptied into a hollow upright pole, so that you got a 2-for-1 upright support and downpipe. That's neat, I thought. On closer examination, I discovered that the top of the pipe is sealed and the water just runs down the outside. At first glance this bus shelter doesn't look so bad, right? It's got a fair amount of overhang on the roof, and the clear roof and traffic-facing wall mean that it has decent natural lighting and you can see approaching buses. Here's where it starts to fall apart: the angle & height on that roof means that in any slight wind, there is no place to stand where you are out of the rain - the seat is covered in water in that 2nd photo. It also means that any time after about 10am that seat is in full sun, so there is no shade on those 40 degree days - you can walk by on any summer day and find 2 or 3 old ladies with their shopping trolleys huddled in the tiny patch of semi-shade behind the shelter, because there is none to be had inside it. Like turning over rocks in the forest. And because the walls are made of that metal mesh stuff, it doesn't keep the wind out either, and rain blows straight through the wall into the "shelter", soaking everything & everyone inside. I understand that Transport NSW want to keep homeless people from sleeping in their bus shelters, for some reason. So I guess if the idea was to make them as leaky and drafty as possible, then their design was a great success - anyone looking for somewhere warm and dry to sleep would go elsewhere. But if the idea was to make an actual bus shelter, it is a complete failure. So folks, what design flaws haunt your lives and make your work harder than it needs to be?

That looks beautiful! I'm not a professional either, I barely even rank as "amateur", but from everything I've learned you have done a damn-near perfect job. Especially for dry (no mortar) work, which is extra-tricky to get stable. Nice work!

This is another one of those that narrowly misses being a clever design. I saw they had diverted the water from the gutter across in the vague direction of the green wall below it and thought they might have designed it so that the wall could be fed by rainwater. As it turns out, the pipe is just open (I gather it was only bent because the plants were now blocking the path a downpipe would've taken), and not even angled sharply enough for the water to hit the plants on the wall - some of the birds nest ferns in the bed below might catch some of it, but mostly it just goes onto the path. While the greenwall is watered by drinking-quality water. Palm, meet face.

WARNING: if you're creeped out by descriptions of DIY surgery & pictures showing tiny amounts of blood, turn back now. Wasn't quite sure where to put this - while it isn't really plant-medicine related (and I'll explain why it isn't), the self-sufficiency theme seemed to fit so it ended up here. When I was younger I had terrible plantar (=on the soles of your feet) warts which made walking really painful. No conventional or folk remedies worked, but I finally got rid of them by another method, which I decided to document with a small wart which appeared on my finger last year. So first here's the background: warts are virally-infected skin cells, and most wart-removal methods just work by burning off the affected area. This can be by laser, by cold-burns (liquid nitrogen), chemical burns (most OTC treatments are salicylic acid), or some kind of caustic plant sap (eg. petty spurge, a common herbal remedy for skin growths). The problems with all of these methods are (1) that they can do a lot of damage to surrounding uninfected tissue, and (2) that warts often have deep roots which don't get burnt, so they will just grow back. So armed with that understanding, and being a DIY kinda person, I tried to come up with a solution - and while slightly gruesome, this does actually work so I thought I'd share. It's based on the idea that there are several things which will fuck up virally-infected cells, so I'll just incorporate all of 'em, why not: heat, iodine, and physical removal of the tissue. For today's DIY surgery you will need: bucket of hot water iodine solution (eg. Betadine) nail clippers &/or scalpel (or other sharp blade like razor blade) tweezers Ok so first step is to soften up the skin. If possible, soak the affected area in HOT water for ages. Like as hot as you can stand. If the wart doesn't have deep roots, this alone can be enough to kill it, if you just keep doing it - I knew a lady who would just soak her hand in a bucket of hot water while she watched TV every evening, keeping a kettle of boiling water nearby to top up the water & keep it hot, and this killed several small surface warts after a week or so of daily soaking. But if the warts are large or have deep roots, then you'll need to do more... Step 2, open that sucker up. The virus is lurking in infected cells under the skin surface, and is probably protected by a layer of callus. You need to get rid of that - if you're confident with a scalpel (or a razor blade) that can work, but I just did this one with [sterilised] nail clippers (I've also heard of people just scraping the top layers of skin off with pumice or a rough scrub brush after softening the skin by soaking, but since the virus can be spread by contact this might not be a great idea). You're NOT trying to cut out the whole wart, just to remove the protective callus on the surface, so this won't be too painful. Now you can see all the roots: At this point you have a few options. Since the skin is broken & those infected cells are now exposed, you can apply iodine which serves the dual function of killing off any exposed cells & preventing infection. You can also just continue with the soaking-in-hot-water method, and that will keep killing off the surface wart cells too. If they're only shallow and you rinse & repeat enough, this could work. But for large areas it can be painful to expose all those raw nerve endings to scalding water, not to mention risking infection if you're doing this on a regular basis. So my preferred method is to move on to... Step 3: pull them out by the roots! Warts send down roots to latch on to minor blood vessels so they'll have a direct supply of food & resources on tap. If you look closely at a wart it has a structure something like a raspberry, and each one of those little "drupes" can have deep roots. In the picture you can see a kind of cross-section of a few of these. If possible, grab these one-by-one with tweezers and pull them out. If the roots have gone into nerves or blood vessels this process can be fairly painful and bleed a lot - don't freak out, that's normal. However the virus can spread by blood, so try to keep that away from any other areas of broken skin, and clean it off quickly with betadine. After you pull out each rootlet drop a few drops of iodine into the wound to kill off any cells which might have been shed or left behind. You probably won't be able to physically pull out the entire root structure of a large wart (just like with plants, some roots will snap off or there won't be enough above-ground material to get a good grip), but if you can get most of them and drown the area in iodine, that might kill off the remaining bits. At the very least you'll make it smaller & easier to deal with next time. Once you yank out a few and see how deep they can go, you'll understand why putting a few drops of liquid nitrogen or caustic agent onto the skin surface often achieves nothing. Finish up by cleaning the area with iodine & sterilising your clippers/blades/etc so as not to spread the virus when they're next used. This is the same area healing up a few days later. Turned out I had missed one tiny piece and had to wait for it to re-grow a bit so I could get a good grip with the tweezers to yank it out: ...and a year later:

Violet. I know sweet FA about 'em, but I'm sure the hairy stem would be a clue for those who know their plants better - if you could get some shots of the leaves (it looks like one has been cut off in the top right corner - they are usually heart-shaped to lily-pad-shaped if you're trying to separate them from surrounding plants), that might help narrow it down?

lol I was just listening to someone from the foundation who created Harold talking about how that was not their finest moment and how that whole "just say no" campaign has been a resounding failure. People working in drug education/harm minimisation are now trying to bring the focus more on well...actual education, rather than just avoidance. Instead of "Just say no", we should have: "Just say KNOW". They talked about how the image of "happy healthy Harold" implies a standard of normal healthy behaviour that compels people to hide their drug use, which in turn leads to much harm. When there is pretty good evidence that social contact helps recovery immensely. So if we would just stop telling people that their habits are socially unacceptable, they wouldn't be so socially isolated, and would have a much better chance of avoiding many of the harms of drug use & addiction. Which I thought was a pretty spot-on analysis. They also talked about how it is near fucking impossible to get real drug education in classrooms though, thanks to conservative parental types. A few years back some schools in Western Sydney tried it, printing pamphlets with a harm minimisation bent - so rather than "don't use drugs", the message was "how to use drugs safely". It ended in a literal book-burning as angry parents set fire to all the pamphlets they could find. So maybe Happy Harold is as good as you can get, in that context.

Dicko - I assume one point of trying to hybridise divinorum would be to get a plant that produced viable seed? Since S.divinorum is sterile and has to be propagated from cuttings. That's just a guess though. Other times hybrids are bred to tolerate different climates or pests better, for example an active species with no frost tolerance can be bred with a hardier (but inactive) species to create an frost-tolerant plant that still has some activity (eg. Psychotria "nexus"). This can be useful when trying to grow plants outside of their natural habitat, but you're right - it isn't necessary. If they grow happily where you are, then you can just follow normal procedures, no fancy hybrids required But another reason to cross plants together is just to see what happens!

Whoop! Week long trip sounds grand. You legend. That line-up looks amazing, and I'm also looking forward to finally meeting some of you folks from other states & NNSW who I've been chatting with online over the last bloody 15 years! Long overdue.

Aw shit, you've gone and inspired me @toast ...my reasons for not going to this thing are evaporating fast, I think I am going to have to do it. There will always be more money, right @El Presidente Hillbillios? You guys got room for one more? Or do I need to stow away in Darklight's Weetbix compartment?

Tahitian limes can go really yellow if you leave them on the tree until they fall off, like these guys from my yard. Those are limes on the left, small Eureka lemons on the right. The limes are a little more spherical, thinner skins, smaller "nipples", but yeah they can look very similar.

Nah mate, you misunderstand me. I didn't stop out of sympathy - being mistreated doesn't excuse mistreating others - I stopped because I recognised the futility. Worlds apart, as you say. I'm ok with burning bridges if they don't go anywhere I want to go anyways. And this grudging paranoic world of yours populated by evil scheming women is one of those places. Hate & violence just breed more of the same - you are welcome to them. If I was going to have an crazy conspiracy theory I'd at least want mine to be a bit more creative...like Burroughs who had a theory that women were inhuman Venusian parasites of some sort... (now there was a bigot with style!)...y'know, something with a bit o' pizzazz! But as it stands I'll have to settle for my current situation, where the women in my life conspire to be gorgeous & wonderful instead. So for them, and for all the men I know who are equally amazing, here is what I actually came in here yesterday to post: Don't cha love the first jasmine flower, and the start of those soft sweet-scented spring nights

Ok, you can chill dude. Sorry if I misunderstood your crack about "feminaz mother" ...to be fair, you usually don't use sentences or punctuation, so it can be fucken hard to follow what the fuck you are saying... which I was legit trying to do, because the kind of irrational hate you've been spewing is not healthy. It feeds into a cycle of hate & grudges & division & hate & more hate - why even start down that path? I actually was not trying to get into a discussion about feminism - if I wanted to do that, there was that whole "why I hate women" thread to play with - I was just trying to get you to do a reality-check based on some of the stuff you've been writing. Because I don't know you man: all I've got to go on is what you write here, and wishing harm on complete strangers who have no conceivable impact on your life - that is some unhealthy behaviour. Remember that guy who was talking about the end of days a few weeks back? And you & a few others were trying to talk sense to him? That's how this situation - with you talking about scheming women with their conspiracies for "supremacy" - looks to me. That is the only reason I even got involved in this insane discussion. If you just want to pick a fight, I'm out. This path goes nowhere I want to go. And you seem like a good guy in other conversations, so I hope you get past this.

So she got custody in the divorce, huh? My condolences buddy - but wishing ill on Russian unionists is not a rational response to that. Neither is calling me a bigot. Bigotry is where you pre-judge an entire group - such as you judging all "feminists" based on a bad experience with your ex. But I am judging only you C'mon man, you must've expected someone to call you out eventually - and why do you fucken care what I think anyway? Tell me, would you have been triggered so hard if that article had called those harassed women "unionists" rather than "feminists"? No? And you know what - conservative media understand that, which is why they use the word in the first place... must be fun to write for those publications... just sit around dropping F-bombs and watching those knees jerk.