Greetings, energy beings of planet Gaia! I have ingested large quantities of an exotic plant from the Far East which gave me new, mutant powers of bullshit detection and a renewed faith in our one true god Zardoz. It doesn’t matter how interesting your week has been, mine has been more interesting.
Discovery #1: Kratom is Bullshit!
At the behest of my client at DabConnection.com, I experimented with this Thai herbal drug making the rounds at convenience store kiosks. Read my bummer trip report on kratom here, where I risk bodily soundness and my sanity in trying to get any reaction out of this rip-off product, including gulping down mugs of kratom tea on an empty stomach at 5AM because that’s the thing you do on an average weekend morning! Alas, I got nothing but dead air for the trouble, which included gulping down so many of the half-gram pills that I rattle when I jump up and down.
I love my career.
I found out confirmed proof that alleged “kratom strains” all come from the same plant, too. My suspicion that the alleged “kratom plant” is actually catnip can neither be confirmed nor denied by my cat, who recognizes catnip but will not touch the stuff.
If I offer him catnip, he’ll sniff it once and give me a dirty eye, insulted that I would disrespect him with this offering, before pointedly batting it away. I have a Mormon cat.
Discovery #2: Government Drug Propaganda is Bullshit Too
No, not my exploration of the origin of anti-drug billboards, that was last time. I mean government comics issued to students by the US Bureau or Narcotics, a specimen of which I discovered with a whoop of joy at a university archive and used pdfimage to extract the jaypegs to present “Teenage Booby Trap,” circa 1970!
The comic makes for fun reading though, with its whacked-out depiction of 1960s drug culture and frenzied illustrations of bad narcotic hallucinations, which just make kids look at them and go “Cool! I want to be attacked by a flying purple harpie too! I want to try some drugs as soon as possible!” In between is propaganda text about how pot “opens the door” to all the other bad drugs, hilarious in light of modern cannabis legalization.
Discovery #3: A good video game movie may be impossible!
Over at my geeky domain gig, whose client has the good graces not to ask me to be a guinea pig and scarf down large amounts of substances not approved by the FDA for research purposes, I began listing bad video game to movie adaptations and ended up standing that premise on its nose by asking “Wait a minute, has there ever been a GOOD video game movie?” No, I insist, at least not on the level of, say, good novel to film adaptations like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
It’s a good post, too, because I cite the media philosophies of Marshall McLuhan and use them to jump off into my own beard-stroking speculations about media theory and do other intellectually bloggy things. The only upcoming video game movie I think has a shot is the adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s, because at least a single-character horror-comedy is easier to pull off.
Yes, there you have it, and you saw it here first. Even if you actually work for Blumhouse productions, you STILL saw it here first, understand? I’m not a blogger to get scooped by reality.
Discovery #4: Backgammon is a Russian plot to infiltrate Russia!
At least that’s as far as it’s gotten lately. You see, post-COVID-19, gamer geeks are withdrawn from their LGS to home where they have to come up with remote ways to play board games now (but football is still going on, go figure). Which means Tabletop Simulator is selling great on Steam, and it includes a Backgammon set. And I said “Waitaminute – WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BACKGAMMON?” It used to be HUGE in the US! Every household had an elegant leather and ivory set, an arena where 1970s swingers would bet their wives for the evening.
Or so we’d be lead to believe between the celebrity photo ops, Hugh Hefner with his Playboy bunnies, and the shower of magazine ads associating Backgammon with booze and other adult entertainment. Oh, how that game was glamorized! It’s still played in Russia as you can see, but Americans all dumped their Backgammon boards at the turn of the century or something because I guess nobody is mature enough for adult pastimes anymore.
If you think the magazine ads for booze and Backgammon are something, you should see my old IMGUR album of forgotten cigarette advertisements from the middle 20th century. It’s enough to make you sniff a Klompen Kloggen!
In other dreary news, I’m now a wiki maintainer
My DabConnection client also runs the /fakecarts/ subreddit, and needed somebody to turn the endless list of reported fake THC cartridges into a Wiki, so that job fell down to I, blog monkey. I am slowly stabbing it into shape. We have to sort between true fake brands of THC cartridge, counterfeits of real brands, brands that were reported as fake but later discovered to be legit, and not-quite-fake but nevertheless black market brands produced in some barefoot hick’s basement which nevertheless may be a straighter smoke than the licensed dispensaries are providing these days.
So if you vape carts, drop by there to get the straight dope on legit carts sorted from the fakes. You won’t see me, but I’ll be behind the scenes toiling away on the pixel acres like a fieldhand in a Robert Lee Hicks painting. Let me sniff your Kloppen Kloggen or something.
And if you, YES YOU, are a cartridge maker and have any complaints about being in the wrong slot, I have the rant already prepared about how it’s your own damn fault! It’s your fault for running an extraction lab in California without (a) getting a license, and (b) skywriting the license number over my exact house, so I can find it.
Is this too much to ask? No, after the shit I put up with from you vape people, this is not too much to ask! Huh? Show some respect, some professional courtesy, maybe a burnt sacrifice?
Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you lunkheads, but I’ll figure it out next time!
