Enthusiastic sh.it.head

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Erowid is still good, though I wish there was a little more info about current operations and projects outside of maintaining the experience report database. As far as I can tell, both Erowid Monthly and Erowid Extracts are dead, Ask Erowid is dead, DrugsData is not currently receiving samples, etc.

    There’s reason to play some stuff close to the chest, obviously, but there used to be more activity than just the experience database, and it’s sad to see the other functions languish. But as a repository of drug information it’s still pretty great.

    A newer good harm reduction/info site is tripsit.me, which also has a trip sit via chat service. Can’t speak to the quality of the chat service, over something like the Fireside Project which has been around for a while now, but the infosheets on tripsit are pretty good.

    Edit: Ugh, going through the other Erowid sections again…beginning to think I need to step up and see if they want more volunteers. Lots of dead links where Wayback can probably help a ton, the Character vault can probably be expanded quite a bit, etc. But this all might just be the focus moving on a bit. I just wanted to see Ralph Metzner’s blog, since you hear so much about Tim Leary and Ram Dass but Metzner was right there with 'em.









  • Odd.

    I love my sibling - but they’re kind of an asshole. There isn’t any real malice behind it, or at least I’d like to think so, but they just do not consider the opinions, feelings or needs of others at all. A little bit of that is healthy. I’m talking to an unhealthy degree. It has repeatedly bit them in the ass, and was a major factor in torpedoing what could have been a good career before it could get going, so thoroughly that they’ll likely never work in the field they trained for.

    In the last couple years, they’ve at least started to learn when it’s best to just keep their mouth shut, but it was a long time coming.

    At their core, they are not a bad person, but I always find myself frustrated with something after spending time with them, which is upsetting. I really wish this wasn’t the case.


  • I feel like there was a very short window where PCs were just easy enough to use that most people had one, but the OS experience was just complex enough, with things breaking frequently enough, that you had to learn some basics out of necessity.

    Like , I’m a 100% not an IT guy - but I know all sorts of shit that seems like it should be common knowledge, but isn’t. Any time I manage to get something in our IT and software environment functioning at work, or explain the chain of events to some catastrophe based on evidence in our software logs, and I get talked about like some kind of wunderkind, it is frustrating more than anything else.

    I’m not some IT genius, I’m your average asshole who knows some basics about the tools we use in 99.9% of the work we do. Chances are if there were more of said assholes we wouldn’t run into the problems I address in the first place. But admittedly, perhaps some of that knowledge/ability to think that way comes from having to figure out shit like why my DOS game wouldn’t work in 1995, or what the fuck that purple monkey Mom downloaded a few years later was actually doing.

    Ugh - sorry, this turned into a rant, this kind of shit has been top of mind recently…



  • I wonder…

    Suppose you had a company that, at it’s core, was closer a vps provider than anything else. People who want to host videos on the service pay a fee. The hosts can solicit money via the usual means (patreon, personally working with advertisers, merch, whatever), but part of the service agreement is that the hosting service itself cannot place their own ads. You also have some backup system in place where after x amount of time, videos get archived to some outside service (Internet Archive, some peer-to-peer mechanism - no idea what the options are). This is to at least try to mitigate storage limitations and other problems with retaining a large back catalogue.

    All of this is said from a position of deep ignorance - but could something like this work? My stumbling block is anyone running a company is eventually going to need/want an additional revenue stream and ads are an obvious first stop. For this to exist it would pretty much take an activist owner not budging and ruling with an iron fist. That, and would such a service be able to offer hobbyist hosts a fair price, given this is where a lot of people start?




  • Problem is, many otherwise good doctors are not very knowledgeable about illicit drugs, particularly those that are comparatively rare/aren’t a public health crisis (LSD, while popular, is kinda niche compared to meth and opioids).

    A big chunk of the time you’re just going to get “Don’t use drugs”, simply because they don’t have much else to say about it, and don’t want you taking risks based on something they’ve said. Doesn’t mean don’t ask*, but know you may not get useful harm reduction information from Dr. F. Practitioner.

    *That said there IS a risk that such a question can paint you as a potential drug seeker, and so create barriers to care if someone decides to add that to your chart when you were just trying to minimize risk.