Enthusiastic sh.it.head

  • 5 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • My main counterpoint is for those of us who’ve acquired the taste, the rituals around beer (out at a nice place, away from your home/office, listening to decent tunes and drinking something cold, foamy, and a little bitter) are such that you can get that loose and relaxed feeling without the alcohol.

    I’m not the biggest fan of getting drunk anymore, so I find myself grabbing a non-alc beer pretty frequently these days. Sometimes just that, other times once I’ve already had two normal beers but want another drink.

    I could grab a soda, but I don’t like how sweet it is most of the time.




  • Thing is, it’s not that uncommon to do this, and it’s not like the cashier is going to report you as suspicious to the relevant tax authority. Sometimes people don’t have the full value for groceries in their bank account, or are right at the tip of their credit limit - but do have cash on hand to cover the rest.

    The point is to have a paper trail/transaction history of lesser value for the tax man. Two transactions in one visit is just as valid as two different visits using different payment methods.

    Comes down to whether you feel awkward doing the first one I guess (cashiers generally won’t think twice about it, aside from maybe mild annoyance). It is a classic “Things aren’t going great for me rn” move - but who cares, you know the truth.

    (Ignore all of this and pay your taxes, people)




  • Man, every so often when I’m at work, I’ll still daydream about renting out my local theatre, having them use a black question mark rather than the private rental image on their schedule website with a note that it’s a private rental with public access, then playing the Church of the Subgenius’ recruitment video (link for the interested: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o0x9ymMQUg8). Or, depending on my mood, one of those desert series stoner rock concert videos.

    Only thing stopping me is money, and the fact that ARISE is on DVD rather than Blu-ray - I don’t want to do Stang and co dirty like that, it would look like shit.







  • You should totally question the validity, but I’d pause before dismissing it entirely. It’s supposedly based on an opinion survey of psychiatrists and a group of ‘independent experts’ (footnote incoming) published in the Lancet in 2007. Edit: I said things that weren’t true about the Wikimedia image that I have removed - it’s based on the table near the bottom of the article.

    DOI is 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60464-4

    You should ask our friend ANNA if she’S heard people talk about this during her time in the ARCHIVEs.

    It’s not a completely objective harm/dependence measure, for sure, but the opinions of experts aren’t meaningless - it’s worth reading the article and judging the authors’ claims rather than this image. Though I will say the number of participants seems really low.

    On LSD,

    1. the opinion thing should be underlined and considered heavily (particularly in the UK, where rave culture is/was more top of mind than other places and LSD is/was in the mix, albeit I don’t think to the same degree as MDMA and other compounds), but also

    2. as crazy as it may sound, dependency can develop in some users. I’d argue it looks VERY different than dependence to other substances (frequency is obviously much lower, given rapid tolerance, and some people may not call once a week or every two weeks dependency*), but it still exists. Given that this is basically an expert opinion poll it’s actually placed more or less where I’d expect to see it.

    *Though in online discussion groups for folks interested in such compounds, those folks often do call that level of frequency a sign of dependency. Should note I’m talking specifically about macrodoses, not microdosing.

    (Footnote) from page 1049: “These experts had experience in one of the many areas of addiction, ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services.”


  • I’d say legalization is actually better in this case, as you can provide licenses to pharmaceutical manufacturers subject to QA regulations, lab accreditations, etc. Decriminalization just means that guy with 1:1 cocaine:fentanyl is probably getting a ticket rather than arrested.

    [Was going to put a ‘doesn’t help when the guy overdoses’ comment here, but thinking about it now people do overdose (and die) on just cocaine too. One of the factors that make this a different conversation than cannabis. Don’t know the thresholds for overdose re: just coke, though]





  • I understand this position - I used to be of the “it’s the internet, steal anything that isn’t nailed down” mentality too.

    And I still have a lot of that, to be fair. But COVID taught me a general lesson that I’ve been trying to take to heart: if you want nice things that cost money to function to keep existing, at some point people are going to need to chip in. My town lost a ton of good local businesses to the pandemic, and many others got dangerously close to closing. I don’t go out and support every local business, but shit I care about (my local independent movie theatre, live music venues, etc.) gets the amount of money I’m willing to contribute.

    If people don’t do this, nice things either disappear or become less nice in an effort to secure funding by alternate means.

    You’re welcome not to - the means exist where you don’t have to - but think about the declining quality of some of the stuff you enjoy and why that might be the case.


  • This is my concern as well (+ I’m a cheapskate who usually only buys consoles or computer stuff once they’re pretty much obsolete and <$100 used).

    History of every gaming device I’ve bought in adulthood including VR:

    1. Purchase with some games;
    2. If soft-modable, soft-mod and customize;
    3. Play happily for a few months;
    4. Put it in a box and never look at it again, or give to my kid who follows a similar cycle.

    Edit: Though my counterargument here is just how many options the Steam Deck opens up. Want PC games - see: all the shit I’ve never played? Got 'em. Emulators? Got em. Want to use it as a mini pc for minor pc stuff? Doable.