"LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it."
— Timothy Leary

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Working out that shrooms and LSD are much safer than heroin or crack is probably more difficult because they are portrayed (even by the users) as being radically reality-altering experiences. And in all honesty I would never recommend LSD to anyone purely because some people have a bad reaction to it and for those people it can have terrible mental health consequences, but for me it was a great, safe way to have fun for many years and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

It's a hard thing to tease out, but the way I think about it, the 'drugginess' of a drug is more closely related by the amount of times you do it, over the effects. I'm actually quite a bit more concerned about the 3 or 4 cups of coffee I'm drinking a day than by the spliff I had at a party six months ago, for example. The good thing about psychedelics is, that it's extremely difficult to become addicted to them- you drop acid and then you probably won't want to do it again for quite a while. For some people, once is enough. But alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, even pot... these drugs tend to get abused over the long term because the effects are relatively mellow at normal levels of consumption, and people can end up living in semi permanent states of intoxication. Maintenance dosing... This is basically what's happening within the legal drug culture that's in place right now.

So... there's something to be said for intense drugs- their intensity is pretty much a barrier to long term addiction.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Tue, 9 Nov 2010 09:17.

Quote from S14 DRIFT :

So are you denying that many forklift operators aren't individuals who have problems such as abusive parents/spouses, financial or personal difficulty? Sure there are forklift operators who have perfectly good lives...but still..

Hmm...

(bit of a double negative problem in there)

On another forum, guy asks his boss...

Quote :

Me: Ay, when can I tap that?

Boss: What do you mean Trevor?

Me: When can I tap those CO2 tanks to the new fill stations...

Quote from senn :

I miss games (any game) where you had to escape the police and it actually felt like a challenge. it's too easy nowadays.

This comes to mind...

Ok- I had a bit of a look and found this comment-

"Before accusing the video for being an advertisement, do some research. Honda stopped production of the NSX in 2005. It was developed with the help of F1 driver Ayrton Senna who died 1994. This film pays tribute to the legacy of the car (and a lesser extent, Senna) and the principles and passion that went behind its creation. "

I guess if the car is no longer in production it can't really be an ad. Still, I found the whole thing to be overtly manipulative, as it employs the same kinds of tricks found in automative advertising. This is like a homage to car ads as much as it is to Senna or this particular car.

Sorry I wasn't 'feeling it'.

What's the big deal? It's a car ad...

I'm Here

http://www.imheremovie.com/ (you can watch online)


Beautiful little movie by Spike Jonze.



edit: Loved The Social Network.

Winter's Bone also good.

Quote from Klutch :

Imagine if MDMA was legal and alcohol was illegal.

The club and nightlife scene would change so much. No more bashings or glassings, no more violence.

I agree. Really, if I had the power to decide alcohols replacement as societies number one drug of choice, I would probably choose MDMA. By that I don't mean that instead of Friday night beers you'd have your Friday night pills... but, yeah.

Kev is right though. Out of all of the drugs on that list, mushrooms have to be the most intensely affecting as an experience. I can certainly say that my most intense drug experience ever was with mushrooms (I have done most psychedelics). Not sure how I'd frame that experience in terms of 'harm' though, so I can sort of understand its position on the list.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Fri, 5 Nov 2010 19:24.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Yeah, but, well... It's funny. How can something so mind-obliteratingly extreme as magic mushrooms be - statistically - several orders of magnitude safer for both the user and wider society than booze?

Surely if everybody went out and tanked up on shrooms every weekend those statistics would quickly swap ends, with thousands of shitfaced tripheads all over the country laughing their tits off and blundering into oncoming traffic.

I used to frequently imagine what society might look like in the absence (not prohibition, just absence) of alcohol, and I'd come to the conclusion that things would be 'better'. When I think about a society where mushrooms have swapped roles with alcohol as the most prevalent drug, I really can't imagine what that would be like.

"Official: Just do mushrooms"

Heh. Imagine the ad campaign for that

Quote :

Even more than this, the answer lies in a paraphrasing of a remark by comedian Mort Sahl about why the student movement ended. "The government withdrew its funding.""

Too cynical for me. The Arts have always been connected to politics, at times more strongly than at other times. But to say that an artistic movement lives or dies based on the amount of government funding it is recieving is going (way) too far. Without the CIA, Abstract Expressionism would still be an important 20th C art movement- its place in art history would not be diminished. Art is always about ideas, not necessarily the practical or political application of those ideas. Look at Pop Art... it was a reaction to Abstract Expressionism... and AE was a reaction to/a further refinement of the ideas and aesthetics of previous movements and artists. It would have happened with or without CIA involvement. That the artists themselves were clueless about this side of things attests to that- also the fact that a lot of them were actually communists shows how purely artistic statements can be subverted towards political ends.

AE did at some point enjoy an incredible level of commercial success amongst the public and art dealers. There's a great Gerald Scarfe documentary (Scarfe on Art?) which goes into this side of things- where insane amounts of money were being asked for AE works at one time... there's a great scene where Scarfe visits a working abstract expressionist and watches him 'paint' a canvas, which consisted of nothing more than the artist standing at the top of the canvas and dripping down different colours of paint (I think it was cheap house paint), a process which took all of about 5 minutes. Scarfe asked the guy just how much such a work could be expected to go for on the market- the artist replied that he was confident the work would sell for around about $50-100,000.

Now that's probably CIA influence

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Fri, 5 Nov 2010 05:35.

I had to look up TL;DR (too long, didn't read?)

Makes a strange headline In the end I guess it's fairly plausible that the CIA would promote American artistic production at the time for political purposes (someone should have been whispering in Truman's ear that poo-pooing Abstract Expressionism was probably a bad idea ). You could probably find an analogy in the way NASA enjoyed a great deal of funding around the same time in order to show up the 'Russkies' on the science/technology stage. The difference being I guess that Abstract Expressionism most likely would have still been a strong American movement without political support.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 4 Nov 2010 12:09.

Stravinsky - Dumbarton Oaks

Quote from FPVaaron :

it's hard to justify that rubbing your jeans or hanging around in 7/11 for 30mins just to tell the clerk behind the counter what a rad job he is doing was really a night worth remembering.

Hahaa!

edit: lol again!

Quote from Klutch :

You only get what you want out of the experience.

Your right really, but I've noticed that you've linked on occasion to various information at Erowid for example. I'd put Erowid in the same category as sites such as the Lycaeum, or the deoxyribonucleic hyperdimension... these places don't really go for the idea that drug taking is just for fun, they tend to be more serious about things in terms of the transformational aspect. I thought that you would have probably read up on some of the content there.

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 30 Oct 2010 14:14.

Well, according to my old drug texts, the idea is that you're indeed supposed to be able to learn and take away from these things- otherwise, what's the point?

A few hours spent feeling up your own jumper before returning to reality as an obnoxious teenage troll wasn't exactly what the original designers/enthusiasts had in mind or hoped for now, was it?

:hippy:

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Sat, 30 Oct 2010 09:23.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Ecstasy certainly didn't do much for Klutch.

Quote from BeckyRose :

That would be an awesome video game.

Have parodies gone too far?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... p;feature=player_embedded

Last edited by Electrik Kar, Thu, 21 Oct 2010 05:30.