Anodyne

From the booking page:

No. I'm not a subtle person generally speaking - if that was what I was trying to say, I woulda just said it. I was simply saying that your blanket "antioxidants are good for you" concept may be flawed. Yes, researchers tend to use pure compounds where they can - the reason that they do this is because it's really REALLY difficult to separate out the effects of a bunch of different things - it is often easier to find out what is going on if you just isolate them and look at them one at a time. Nope. You're giving general lifestyle advice in response to a specific question. And don't get me wrong, I agree with lots of it. But you posted it here, so here is where I responded. If you want to start a general "healthy eating" thread where you discuss your views, I will happily respond there instead.

...or maybe you don't: Yet another example of people confusing correlation with causation. Everyone is doing it, not only anti-vaxxers but cancer research scientists as well, and everyone in between... I wonder if this is something that we will ever grow out of, as a society? Wouldn't that be nice? If people actually learned statistics and rational thinking in schools, so they could learn how to question things, rather than just deciding that one thing they have been taught is sus, so it must all be sus, right?

Surely it was already covered under the analogues legislation? I mean, I know people were selling it openly, but I used to work in Redfern where people sold their diverted methadone openly... doesn't mean that it's legal. Says they're still tossing up between S4 & S9, my bet is on S9 - in the eyes of the TGA, benzoes do everything phenibut does, but makes them (or their business associates, fuck the TGA selection process is so appallingly corrupt) much more money. Phenibut is nasty but also cheap, there's a reason it was popular...

Dunno if you're still around @onyeka, but if you are I believe you can still buy copper sulphate (and similar copper compounds), which is one of the active ingredients in Cheshunt. The other active (ammonium carbonate) I think was the thing that caused old tins of cheshunt to basically turn to strong sulphuric acid when stored for a long time? So if you're going DIY you may want to leave this out, or just make up enough for your immediate needs. Bordeaux mixture is similar and probably easier to source the ingredients (copper sulphate + lime) for? Instructions here. Cheshunt compound: >Weigh 60 grams of Copper Sulphate & 330 grams of Ammonium Carbonate. >Powder together and mix well. The dry mixture should be stored in an >airtight container for a day or so before use, and can be stored that >way almost indefinitely. Dissolve 25g of this mixture in hot water and >make up to 8 litres with cold water. Bordeaux mixture: "For spraying in small amounts, prepare as above but only >mix 1 gallon of water, 3 1/3 tablespoons of copper sulfate and 10 >tablespoons of hydrated lime. Agitate the mixture thoroughly before >you spray. The homemade Bordeaux mixture needs to be used the day you prepare it. Make sure you rinse the Bordeaux fungicide preparation out of your sprayer with plenty of water, since it is corrosive Make sure you read all the safety stuff if you're not experienced with handling chemicals. Or if you just want something you can buy ready-made, mancozeb works ok - I don't know how it compares with cheshunt though.

Greetings folks! Hang on, before we get started I think we need a soundtrack: That's better. I started writing about this in the Cabin Porn thread (here), but decided to finally create a thread of its very own. This is the shack I bought up in the Macleay Valley area a couple years back. It's on a 30-acre block, only a few acres are cleared and the rest is dense bush, ranging from dry eucalypt to subtropical. It is not much like the surrounding bushland (open dry eucalypt), it has some weird microclimate thing going on with lots of diversity, which is great. And lots of lantana, which is less so. I think I'm going to spend the next decade or so warring that stuff - it seems to be choking about 20 of the 30 acres - but if that's the worst invasive species I have to deal with I'll consider myself very lucky. For the area this block is shockingly free from privet & camphor laurel, which is a minor miracle. There's some bamboo (mostly not the good building sort) and enough black wattles falling down to keep me in firewood for the next century or two. Pics are shack front/back/inside, best bathroom ever, separate bedroom (looks like they originally intended to build another room joining the shack/kitchen to the bedroom, but never finished), top of the garden (you can see some of the terraced vege beds in the "view" shots below next to the bananas), gazebo/outdoor kitchen, year-round creek. I've spent a good chunk of the last 2 years not being able to walk, so not much has changed since then - but at least this year I managed to get out there to explore/recon a little and take a few more pics. And if you've gotta convalesce, you could do worse than this view:

So many wildlife to keep me company in my hermitage - wallabies, scrub turkeys, black cockatoos, king parrots... every one of them a more competent forager than I am - if the competition becomes too fierce I may end up abandoning my vego ways and just eating them instead, but in the meantime I'll just admire them. Here are a couple of the regulars - I saw quite a few carpet pythons around, which made me happy. This is one of the smaller ones who hunts up around the cabin at night, resting at the bottom of the garden. And the resident goanna, who judging by her attitude is the true owner of the place: I got woken up every morning by tapping at the window, which went on for an hour or so. A little golden whistler would fly down, crash into the window, then fly back up to a nearby tree & warble awhile. I thought he was just a slow learner, and scolding me for my weird transparent walls, but after watching him for a while I realised what was going on: he wasn't flying into the windows by mistake - he was fighting his reflection in the glass, then swooping back up to his branch to sing a little victory song. I confused him terribly by waking early one day and opening some windows to air the room - he flew straight through his normal battleground and couldn't find the way back out! After trying to chase him out for ages, I got frustrated and just tried to grab him, and amazingly this worked. He wasn't scared at all, no doubt because of his extensive battle prowess! It rained almost the whole trip - in the end I only narrowly escaped being flooded in, but there were a few clear hours when I managed to get a couple of plants in. I set them up as best I could but hopefully they are tough specimens who can fend for themselves. There is one baby caapi, care of @Change - I hope it likes its new home! Near an old gate with a good stretch of fence to grow along - if that survives it can be the standard bearer for the rest of the ethnobotanical garden to come.

Just been reading an interesting paper, hadn't come across much in the way of effective herbal remedies for hayfever etc in my previous reading, so I thought it was worth dredging up this old thread to add it: Rosmarinic Acid as a Novel Agent in the Treatment of Allergies and Asthma But then, any excuse to eat more perilla is fine by me! Apparently there is a version of kim chi which is made with green perilla leaves instead of wombok - sadly my attempts at growing the green-leafed plants haven't yielded enough to try this, but it sounds like the absolute bomb. I may have to attempt a variant with purple perilla instead if my green plants don't lift their game.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction with the IDs, gotta get my mushroom-hunting game back on! It was the first time I'd stayed out there (at least, the first time with two working legs) and gotten to explore, and it just happened to coincide with some epic rain, so I was stoked to find so many fungal friends around. Found these little phosporescent Mycena (chlorophos maybe?) one night as well which I took as a blessing from the mushroom gods. They were growing right outside my back door too - or at least, where my back door would be, if I had a back wall - I've only ever found them once before so it was pretty magical to just look out the window and see them right there!

As MG said, tryptophan is cheap & easy to find, which makes it nifty even if the uptake & biosynthetic pathways to interesting tryptamines aren't ideal. In that table, smaller numbers are better, essentially. The smaller the number, the higher the % of the precursor had [probably] been converted to psilocybin. So the N,N- DMT number is not the best one - the reason they said that this may be misleading is that apparently it was not absorbed very well in the first place (only 5% absorption using their method), so that perhaps what was actually going on was that most of the absorbed DMT was converted, and if you could optimise the absorption somehow, this could be an effective pathway. More research needed, in short. Certainly can't hurt to throw any DMT-containing mulch onto a patch and let the mushrooms work out the rest. I was actually more interested to find the paper just so I could read how they had fed the precursors to the fungus - I had heard of these studies before but was never sure if they would just absorb them from the environment (eg. in their water), or if you had to inject them or something... still not certain, but it sounds like the former, which certainly makes things easier!

Found the German paper referred to in TiHKAL, here's the results & discussion. They don't discuss their method in any detail, but do refer to "submerged cultures of P. cubensis" - I'm not sure if they're talking about liquid media, or whether this just means they soaked their cakes in solutions of the precursors - probably the latter? A biosynthetic sequence from tryptophan to psilocybin. Agurell S, Nilsson JL. (1968) Incorporation of labelled Precursors into Psilocybin precursor introduced "Dilution"(Spec. activity of precursor/ spec. activity of psilocybin) L-Tryptophan-Ii3 132 Tryptamine-Cl4 33 N-Methyltryptamine-H3 2 N,N-Dimethyltryptamine-C14 31 Psilocin-H3 6 DL-4-OH-Tryptophan-H3 >500

dontcha love it when you stagger home in the wee hours of the morning and unknowingly drop everything out of your pockets as you fumble for your keys in the dark with frozen fingers...then stagger back out to go to work the next day and discover that so little time has passed that all your cards & stuff are still laying out on the footpath where you dropped them.

^^^ I never even thought of them, the staining should've been a hint! The wide variation in colouring might make ID a little tricky, but there were heaps of them around so I'll try for some spore prints next time around. Been years since I tried any serious mushroom ID, I am very rusty and forgetting to do obvious stuff like that. @spooge, forgive the noob question, but why were you thinking Laccaria over Lactarius? ("it looks more like one" would be a fine answer, I'm just curious) It also just occurred to me that 6 is probably actually a slime mold, which might make it difficult to key to a fungal family...

@spooge got it! Thankyou Marasmius tageticolor looks like a good contender hey? (keeping in mind these little fellas had had a couple days heavy rain so mightn't have been looking their freshest)

Not subs, keep your hopes up and look for blue staining and dark purple spores. You may find some helpful info in past threads like this one. I hope someone IDs them for you though, as I always forget what these little fuckers are called, and would like to be able to curse them by name.

As someone who's had maybe more than their fair share of "bad" things, sure, they can be turned to good ends. But they also had a point, that smartarse who said "what doesn't kill us leaves us scarred, scared & broken husks of human beings"...(or something along those lines)... My point wasn't that bad things could be good, just how you respond to them. I've known rich people who were miserable aresholes, and homeless junkies who were cheerful sweethearts. I definitely wasn't trying to romanticise a difficult life, or recommend that anyone go seek one out. Maybe you'll have better luck, but mine sure hasn't turned me into a perfect katana, maybe a chipped machete with the handle held on by multiple layers of duct tape... "it's still good mate"...so rather than looking for "good" or "bad", I try to look for interesting things...my definition of "interesting" leads me into enough trouble without looking for more!

Corb Lund gives the best advice for dealing with highway cops since Fear and Loathing... ..."round these parts that hair alone'd make probable cause..."

That's it! Thankyou, new-and-improved waterboy! Now that I see the name I vaguely remember making that mistake in the past as well - thinking that it must be an Austrobolete just because it was growing under eucalypts... so racist... or something. I have never even heard of Artomyces before, apparently there are shitloads more coral fungi than I thought there were. The area has amongst the highest rainfalls in NSW, so I'll probably be seeing a lot more of these little guys, thought it'd be polite to learn their names

Yep, like I said, I am not sure that you can ask for an alternative test - get some real legal advice before trying this. I think if you were belligerent about it in any way, it would go poorly for you. But there may be a distinction here between "refusing", and just "requesting an alternative" - which I didn't make in my previous post - my apologies for the sloppy wording. It certainly IS an offense to refuse testing if you're pulled over. What I'm still unsure of though, is whether the testing method is negotiable. Depending how the actual legislation is worded, it might be possible to *politely* request that they do a blood test instead. If the law just says you need to submit to a drug test, and you are being cooperative, it would be kinda weird if they objected to your request. Given that you are obviously not trying to dodge being testing, and are actually asking for a *more* invasive, sensitive, and accurate test. Like those T-ray scanners they use at airports: you can refuse to let them scan you, but only if you let them strip-search you instead.

Thanks @mysubtleascention yep I reckon you're on the money with guessowii. Does anyone have any ideas about the rest? I mean, at first glance I would guess that (3) is an Agaricus of some kind (ah, but is it edible?), I can't remember what (5) is called (and there is a "shaggy-stemmed Austroboletus" which is confounding my searches for one that has a shaggy cap instead), and (7) some kind of Ramaria or the like? But what of the pretty candy-striped ones in (1)? Or those little black match-heads on (6) - I've never seen anything like those before. Or that cheeky blue staining on (2)? So many mysteries!

Country: because fuck it, there's moods where the blues just ain't blue enough. (this is a beautiful recording of "Waiting Around to Die", if you want to skip straight to the song it starts around 1:40)

I could be wrong about this, but I thought that you could refuse a swab test... and they will just detain you and do a blood test instead. If you're really concerned about the safety of the enzymes used (which are designed to stay on the swab, otherwise the test wouldn't work, so I really doubt you are "ingesting" much, if any) you could try calling legal aid to confirm this. But I don't think you will be able to dodge being tested - they will just find some alternate way to test you, which may involve you spending a night in a cell awaiting test results (plus as many "accidental" contusions as they think they can get away with) as the cops pay you back for the inconvenience of making them find a pathologist at 1am on a Saturday. Which is, depending how big is the bee in your conspiracy bonnet on this topic, arguably not worth the fucken hassle or bruises.

Alright sir Skellum, consider us as having shaken hands & made up, lol. I won't go into details, but I think the best things that have happened to me are things that most people would consider "bad" things. None of them were fun at the time. Some of them continue to affect my day-to-day life in negative ways. But overall, I think the difficult experiences in my life have shaped me into a better stronger person than the "good" ones, if nothing else just by making me slow down a bit and pay more attention to my life and the world around me, and think about what was important to me. I posted this in the "don't cha love it when.." thread way back: Wow, three months since anything was loved?! Sooo... DCLIW you get dumped, crippled, & fired, then wake up one day to realise that it's all ok, life is good. It's made me wonder what else I don't need.

Sure, let's derail another thread, why not? Or maybe instead, we could utilise this wonderful forum software which has all these great buttons like "Report post" and "Ignore Member's content" which you could potentially use to resolve these issues.

If you don't know what is on the strips, why are you claiming that it's "untested"? Either you know what they use, and know that it's untested, or you don't know what it is and therefore don't know its status - you can't have it both ways. But if you UTFSE, you will find that this is a topic that has been discussed here before, so you may find your answer here: Positive Drug Drive test may not show impairment Sure, there is some information that should be (& in this case, is) free & open to the public. Understanding of that information, however, is not guaranteed.