Yes, I'm A Capitalist Pig.

So, I keep getting emails from vendors of various substances offering increasing amounts of cash for advertising on this site. To be perfectly honest I could use a bit of extra cash since we’re saving up for a wedding. But, I’m not about to start advertising without asking your opinions first.

Here’s what I propose for the best outcome for us all. On individual pages, such as Mephedrone:
The Facts and JWH-018 Toxicology, for example, I was thinking of including a single link to a single vendor, clearly marked out as an advert. Then, I’d be happy for people to email me with any bad feedback on those vendors, and we could get rid of the link together and wait for a better vendor to come along.

That way, there’s no hidden spammy links or otherwise tricking people into visiting a vendor’s site. It would be completely transparent and you lot all all get some say.

So what do you think? Love it? Hate it? Got a suggestion to improve the idea for everyone? Plz leave a comment!!1

By the way, if you hate it, I’ll have to look at other options, like a “Donate” button next to every awesome joke. Like that side-splitter below the image above. Or, how about this one:

Or this one:

Ho ho ho!

Quick edit: Thinking about it, a donate button might be another great way to benefit a few more people other than myself (not that I need your money to spend hundreds of pounds on several pairs of shoes for our wedding…). How about a single donate button down the bottom of the right hand side, but then we’ll give say 20% of each donation to charity, or at least a worthwhile organisation. 10% could be given to one of your choice from a select few and 10% could be given to one of my chosing, again from those select few. Some that spring to mind include Erowid, Drugs Forum or the Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reason & Science (very much like the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too).

Quick Edit #2: Perhaps we could earn a few donations… Like writing “[Your name] does drugz lolmayo!” in the sand of the Dominican Republic and taking a picture of us next to it. (Yes, we’re going there for our honeymoon…). We could even get those pix printed out on a mug or something for anyone particularly generous.

Other silly ideas welcome.

Nice one, guys. Seriously.

You’ve all just cost me a shitload of money. Once again, I’ve been forced to hand over more cash to upgrade my web hosting packages, due to the blog’s precipitous, yet perfectly predictable peak in popularity.

"Would you like to host a blog?"

I suppose you aren’t the only ones to blame. If my logical, well thought out, excellently articulated ideas and opinions require upgrading the infrastructure necessary to pipe them to the masses, I suppose I’m at fault too, if only a little bit. If I was wrong about something just a fraction of the time, or I was a tiny bit less modest, then maybe I could have kept the money for that death ray I’ve had my eye on.

Actually, running out of bandwidth timed rather nicely with my JWH-018 Toxicology write-up receiving over 100 mostly sensible comments. Neither is worth writing about on its own, but both things happening within a few days of each other practically forced me to write a bit of an update post.  So here’s a graph, some stats, and a few mediocre blog-related achievements:

Here’s the site’s traffic for every month since time began (I certainly can’t remember a time before Synchronium.net, and neither can you) to the end of January 2010. No actual numbers, but that’s some nice growth.

Sexy Statistics:

• We’ve written 87 posts between us
• Posts have rated 235 times with an average of score of 4.55
• There are 714 comments approved so far
• 9,178 spam comments have been dealt with
• Tim is our top commentator, closely followed by MauiGreenDragon
• Jo’s Hash Brownie Recipe has been viewed just over 100,000 times
• My first post has only had 27 views to date
• There are almost 10,000 links pointing to this site

Awesome Achievements

I’ve somehow convinced people that I know what I’m talking about

Thanks to my recent mephedrone coverage, I’ve given interviews and/or helped with research on the subject for BBC Radio, DrugScope and AOL, as well as a handful of smaller things like local or university newspapers or local radio stations. We also had the privilege of telling Jeremy Kyle to fuck off when he wanted to interview us for some (presumably terrible) legal highs “documentary”.

People keep nicking my shit

A lot of people have republished articles and images on their site without asking or linking back – the bastards. It seemed that every dickhead research chemical vendor who set up shop recently in an attempt to get rich quick has used my rather snazzy chemical structure images, and I’ve read more copied blog posts than I care to count. While definitely annoying, it’s also pretty cool to have created something worth nicking. One blog even had my entire RSS feed running down the right hand side for a while, but that was great, since each item linked back here multiple times. Which brings me onto…

People keep “licensing my content”

That’s basically the same as the above, but they ask me first and link back to the original article. (If you’re planning on nicking my shit, ask me first!)

We’ve stood up for the industry and druggies everywhere

Since Jo’s review on the second worst documentary ever made, Can I Get High Legally (the recent Horizon about infinity has to be the worst), we’ve published the views of a couple of interviewees, which tell a completely different story. Journalists occasionally mention that review when they get in touch, agreeing with us, or using that as an example of what they’re not trying to do. Are they trying to earn our trust? Maybe. I think the real reason is that my “Internet powers” scare the shit out of them. Well, maybe not.

We’ve had some interesting results in Google

First off, we immediately began to rank number one when searching for “synchronium”, above Synchronium.com, which has been there since 2004. Funnily enough, that guy probably gets more traffic now than ever, since no one ever actually searched for “synchronium” before this site came along.

Google Image Search is where all the fun is at though. At one point, our picture of Neal’s Yard Remedies superimposed with a giant rubber duck was on the first page of results for their name, but not any more. When you search for Daniel Siebert (“the salvia guy”), near the top is a picture of Kenny G, thanks to this post. Finally, Mephedrone Cat has shown his cheeky little face on the first page of results when searching for “mephedrone”.

If things continue like this, I reckon I’ll be king of the Internet in approximately 4 years.  Thanks to all of you for participating!

First off, you may have noticed distinct a lack of posting these past couple of weeks. I’m not going to apologise, because I’d rather only post when I have something to say, rather than just because I haven’t said anything for a while.  Thankfully, I’ve got some things cookin’ away that should be ready to blog about in the next month or so. As for what I’ve actually been up to, that’s been mainly programming and playing the shit out of Caesar 3 (why is it that the best computer games are always the old ones?) – nothing you guys would be interested in anyway.

We’re always surprised by the lovely emails and comments saying how pleased people are with Coffeesh0p’s service.  They’re not surprising because we think we do a terrible job, but we just thought what we do was pretty standard. We get orders, we post them, we answer customer emails. That’s pretty much it, so how can we be doing a remarkable job? I suppose because we’re a small company, we can always ship orders on the same day, and the Royal Mail certainly earns the cost of a stamp, since most of our smaller orders get there the next day. But surely there’s more to it than that? Well, we’ve done a bit of shopping on the internet recently, and it turns out everyone else is just shit!

I’m not slagging off this industry in particular, it’s just my online shopping experience as a whole has been a bit terrible recently. Firstly, I bought a copy of Professional Javascript about a month ago from a third party seller on Amazon. I figured that since I’m recoding Coffeesh0p pretty much completely, that the drag ‘n’ drop shopping basket could use a bit of a tweak. Amazon’s delivery estimate came and went with no sign of the book. Thinking it might have gotten lost in the post or something, the misses emailed the seller who told us to “check with the Post Office” because sometimes “the postmen don’t bother to leave a card if the parcel is too big for your letter box“.  Straight off, we thought this was horse shit, but just in case this guy had some secret insider Post Office information, we thought we’d check with the guys at our Post Office, who confirmed our suspicions.  This guy was flat-out lying to people! Further communications ended up with him telling us to wait another couple of weeks. If I don’t have it by next Friday, I’m going to write some Javascript to smack him round the face remotely.

Next up was a Bridesmaid’s dress we bought on Ebay (If you’ve just tuned in, me ‘n’ the misses are getting married). First off, we got a money request from PayPal, because the particular vendor couldn’t just accept normal payment as they’d reached their transfer limit or something. A week or so passed without a dress, then the person got in touch and requested that we get that payment cancelled and send a cheque instead, because apparently their PayPal account had been compromised… A few emails later and we’re still waiting.

Finally, one of our wholesalers has been a complete pain in the arse. When we moved house 3 fucking months ago, we placed an order with them (and paid in advance) and I emailed them to tell them we’ve moved. So a few days later, a package turns up at our old address and I have to go and pick it up. When I got it open, there was half the stuff there we ordered and an invoice with “Rest will follow” scrawled across it. Since then, I’ve emailed a million times and we’ve still not got the rest of this pretty substantial order. Apparently, they’ve been short staffed, had trouble with customs and all sorts of other shit. Truth is, I couldn’t give a crap, since I paid nearly £40 for shipping! The icing on the cake though, is that they’ve apparently sent the rest, but they’ve sent it to our old address despite three separate emails with our new address in to at least two different people! Arrgghh!

So, yeah, I suppose that does make us pretty awesome by comparison.

Mini Competition

I’ve still got three more Bamboo Shotgun Pipes to give away, so I reckon it’s high time we had another competition. To cheer me up, this competition will be to create the best drugs related cat macro.

Here are some examples:

At the end of the month, the best three, as judged by me ‘n’ the misses, will get a pipe. To submit your entry, attach your pictures to my Contact Form. Make sure you actually submit the form, though…

Good luck!

Harry Pothead

I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Harry Potter franchise, but I’ve seen all the films at some point and I’ve read the first book when I was about *this* big. So, this week, me ‘n’ the misses went to see the new Harry Potter film at the IMAX in Birmingham, where the effects were special and there were 150% the usual amount of dimensions (at least for the beginning of the film).

I’m sure we’ve all seen this “Harry Pothead” picture (you should have, it’s about as old as the Internet), but this latest film was jam-packed with drugs references all by itself. Firstly, they all got pissed down the pub, at which point Hermione got frisky and a million parents all cried out at once… and were then suddenly quoted in a New York Times article, but that wasn’t even the best bit. Some time later on, this girl that fancies Harry leaves some chocolates on his bed, but then Harry’s mate Ron (who looks exactly like my brother, I shit you not!) eats them all. Unbeknownst to Ron, these chocolates contain some kind of love potion. When Harry finds Ron later on, Ron is completely off his tits, as though he’d snorted 300 mg of MDMA about half an hour before. He tells everyone how much he loves them, hugs cushions and generally makes an arse of himself. It’s odd that none of the aforementioned parents seemed to mind about this, but a little bit of underage drinking is a moral outrage. If only that mindset transferred over to real life…

Yet another parallel between magic and drugs was drawn when Harry consumed some of his “luck potion”, which magically seemed to make him feel rather coked up – talkative, inappropriate and overly confident.  Perhaps there’s some deeper message here, showing us that everyone gets up to this kind of shit once they’re old enough? Or perhaps, JayKay Rowling was just battered when she wrote it?

The final point worth mentioning is when Harry’s new teacher suspiciously harvests some leaves and mentions their potential black market price, while reminding us all that such topics of discussion are hypothetical. Even if he was talking about their usefulness as a magic reagent, I still like to think he might roll one up at the end of a hard day’s teaching.

Spiritplants Radio

My mix on Spiritplants Radio is now online in their archives in case you missed it the first time round.  You can listen to it right here:

Drugs Forum

Drugs-Forum is currently making a few changes, ranging from the entire structure of the site, to a bit of spring cleaning. Somewhere in there falls the task of designing a new logo, which I’ve had a crack at. It seems a real possibility that it might get used, pending a few minor changes. Here’s the current version:

Unfortunately, it’ll be much smaller if it’s actually used, so a big part of the design process has been taken up by trying to make it look clear at a smaller size. I’ve shown it here bigger because it looks even better.

As usual, comments & criticism welcome!

Tomorrow (Sat 1st Aug), there’ll be an old mix of mine on Spiritplants Radio.

Spiritplants Radio is a great little community-based online radio station that plays a massive range of awesome music. They  feature the best in new and classic psychedelic rock, electronica, jazz, progressive news, psychedelic lectures, literary pieces, comedy, and many shows of home-grown programming. You can check out any of the shows in their archive, or turn on & tune in any time. It makes great listening at work, at home or anywhere else where you might be avoiding being productive. There’s also some forums and chat you can get involved with. I’ll probably be in and out over the weekend if anyone wants to pop by and say Hi.

So this mix of mine was from an new year’s eve party I was at a couple of years ago. The theme is “chunky” and the genre is “many”, but it’s pretty lively and fun. Hopefully everyone will get something out of it!

A quick disclaimer though… remember this was recorded at a party I was obviously at, so any fuckups in the mixing (especially early on) can be scratched up to the “influence” i was “under”.

It’ll be on at 2 PM US Pacific time, which I think is 10 PM here in the UK. It’ll be on twice more over the weekend, so I’ll update this post when I’ve got the details. at 12:30 PM and 7 PM US Pacific time on Sunday which is (dum de dum de dum…) 8:30 PM on Sunday and 3 AM Monday morning if you’re in the UK.

Our station features the best in new and classic psychedelic rock,
electronica, jazz, progressive news, psychedelic lectures, literaryOur station features the best in new and classic sychedelic rock, electronica, jazz, progressive news, psychedelic lectures, literary pieces, comedy, and many shows of homegrown programming.
pieces, comedy, and many shows of homegrown programming.

It’s that time again. I’m coding Coffeesh0p from the ground up for the third time since I started in 2006, only this time, it will look exactly the same. Sounds pointless, right? Well, programming is very much like skinning a cat – there’s more than one way to do it, and currently the programming behind Coffeesh0p resembles an epileptic retard with Huntington’s Chorea trying to skin a cat with a dull pocket knife under a strobe light. Almost.

The reason I’m recoding it this time, and also the reason behind why I recoded it last time is that I’ve gotten a lot better at programming since the previous incarnation. This time, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around taking an Object Orientated approach. That means using code to represent things as an object, such as a product, a news post, a comment, or a basket, which is a great way of looking at things. Before, I might have written some code to pull product information straight out of the database and display it, which works OK, but if the database behind the site changes for some reason, then I’d have to go through every page and update the code to work with the new database. Object orientated code makes anything like this much easier, because all the code to talk to the database is kept in one or two files, which can be modified or swapped for something else really easily. Since each object is kept in a single file, they can also be reused for any other site that requires something similar. For example, Coffeesh0p and Salvia-Trip.net both use the same object to talk to the database – I just borrowed the code from one site and uploaded it to the other.

As Coffeesh0p expands, the existing code has become much harder to maintain and add new bits to, which is also much easier using objects, as the code is far easier to read and understand. Imagine if I wanted to add a comment to something. Without objects, it might look something like this horrible mess:

$sql = "INSERT INTO `comments`(`item_id`,`name`,`email`,`body`,`rating`) ";
$sql .= "VALUES (1, 'Synchronium', 'pretend@email.addr', 'Here\'s my comment!', 5);';
mysql_query( $sql, $database_link );

But with objects, you don’t even have to know any PHP to work out what the following does:

$comment = new Comment();
$comment->item_id = 1;
$comment->name = 'Synchronium';
$comment->email = 'pretend@email.addr';
$comment->body = 'Here\'s my comment!';
$comment->rating = 5;
$comment->save();

As you can imagine, coding like this hardly gives me a headache at all!

Learning to code was probably one of the best things I ever did. Seriously. I’d recommend it to anyone, and there are loads of books out there for beginners.

So, yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to. Nothing interesting or hilarious, but important nonetheless.

As a treat for indulging my geekiness, I bring you the Brass Eye episode on drugs. Brass Eye got a passing mention in my misses’s last post, Can I Get High Legally?, and it occurred to me that a lot of readers from outside the UK probably wouldn’t know what we were talking about. Well, for those that don’t know, it’s one of the funniest TV programs of all time, written by a personal hero of mine and comedy genius Chris Morris.

Click the red play button once, close any adverts that might pop up then click the green play button to watch it. The first 40 seconds or so are blank, so you might want to skip it forward.

No, this won’t be another edgy list of all the books everyone thinks are really “far out”, like
The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, Food of the Gods or The Doors of Perception. This will be a list of incredible books that will force you to think about your place in the universe from a totally rational perspective, instead of relying on half-baked theories thought up by crazy bearded stoners.

I promise you that if you read all of these books on this list, not only will will feel a renewed sense of wonder at the world around you & universe at large, but you’ll also come away from it with a sound understanding of the scientific method and a perfectly tuned bullshit detector necessary to wade through the heaps of crap spouted by lesser mortals.

Click on any of the pictures to see the book on Amazon. Here goes, in no particular order:

Antimatter

Author: Frank Close

With the recent release of the Angels & Demons film, this book is essential reading, and weighing in at less than 150 small pages with big text, there really is no excuse. If you’ve ever wondered anything between “What the hell is antimatter?” and “I wonder if I can build an antimatter superweapon to take over the world?”, then this is the book for you.

What it’s about: This book gives a detailed, yet understandable history of particle physics and separates antimatter facts from antimatter fiction.

Why it will expand your mind: Humans have evolved to cope with things of average size, in average temperatures for an average length of time. This book forces you to think small – not down to the size of cells, or even the simplest biological molecules, but to atoms themselves and beyond. Because we’ve not evolved to deal with things on such a small scale, particle physics is almost an alien concept. Thankfully, this book is written with clarity in mind, peppered with plenty of helpful diagrams and examples.

The Selfish Gene

Author: Richard Dawkins

Heard about this crazy, heretical “Evolution” business? This book is chock full of solid evidence, impeccable logic and brilliant thinking that will leave you with no doubt about evolution’s roll in everything you can see around you. Forget religion – this is the book with all the answers, and the evidence to back them up.

What it’s about: This is the book Charles Darwin would have written if he knew what we know now. Dawkins fills us in on the details of modern evolutionary theory from a gene’s-eye view of the world.

Why it will expand your mind: Evolution explains everything. Everything! If aliens exist, they too would have evolved. This process is so universal, it provides a thread on which to hang every other fact we’ve ever learned, uniting them all with one common explanation. A solid understanding also allows you to easily explain absolutely anything you might encounter.

If this is your first foray into evolutionary biology, you might like to start with River Out Of Eden. Your brain won’t be torn asunder with logic and reason, but you’ll definitely get a glimpse of the bigger picture. If you’ve done any biology-related higher education, then I’ll also suggest The Extended Phenotype, arguably Dawkins’ most important work, after you’ve finished The Selfish Gene.

Bad Science

Author: Ben Goldacre

Bad Science is your defence against a world of horse crap where everyone is trying to rip you off. Ben Goldacre also blogs at BadScience.net and writes a column with the same name for The Guardian. You can read an entire chapter of this book here.

What it’s about: Confused about MMR jabs? Homoeopathy? Crystal healing? Fish oil? Then read this book.

Why it will expand your mind: You’ll learn the simplicity of the scientific method and why it’s so important to the world we live in. It will teach you to think for yourself and apply a healthy dose of scepticism to the next dose of health advice you might hear about from someone trying to sell you something. Not particularly mind expanding on its own, but it has a synergy with all the other books in this list.

The God Delusion

Author: Richard Dawkins

If you’ve heard of Richard Dawkins, this book is probably why, having already sold over 1.5 million copies. Even if you’re religious, you need to read it, because you should always hear the other side’s argument – if something challenges your beliefs, and your position remains the same, then your beliefs can only be strengthened.

What it’s about: While it’s not possible to unequivocally prove that God doesn’t exist, this book presents several cast iron arguments why all religions are (probably) wrong, the logical fallacies at the heart of faith itself, and the evils perpetrated in the name of religion every day.

Why it will expand your mind: As hard as it to imagine, the life of an atheist is not one of misery and pointlessness. The outlook on life presented in this book will encourage you to enjoy your life as much as possible, look after others and realise exactly where you fit into the universe. Combined with the other books in this list, there is no room left for unsupported speculation – there are rational answers out there to be marvelled at.

A Brief History Of Time

Author: Steven Hawking

Probably the most famous popular science book of all time, A Brief History Of Time has sold over 10 million copies. Funnily enough though, hardly anyone has actually read it!

What it’s about: While the first book in this list dealt with the miniscule, this book deals with the massive. From the Big Bang to black holes, and everything in between, this book covers the hot topics in cosmology with as much clarity as could be expected. While a little mind-boggling at times, persevering is totally worth it.

Why it will expand your mind: For the same reason as Antimatter – this book deals with things we haven’t evolved to comprehend.

If reading is not your thing, there are plenty of documentaries online about all the topics these worthy tomes cover. Perhaps I’ll make a list of those too one day.

Exam Results

Yesterday, me and the misses both got our degree results. We both got a 2:1, which we’re incredibly happy about, especially since we’ve always had Coffeesh0p to look after too. I know you’re probably here to read about drugs related stuff, but I don’t care – this is my blog and I’ll be smug all over it if I want to!

Mini Competition

Since I’m in a good mood and I’m still on the lookout for suggestions about any of the things I mentioned before, I’m going to raise the stakes a little bit. I’ll be giving away five bamboo shotgun pipes to the best five suggestions. If you’re not sure what I mean, please go back and read that post, then comment about any of the points raised in it at the bottom of this post. I’ll pick the five suggestions I like the most and give away a pipe to each person. Couldn’t be simpler, right? Just like Johnny 5, I need your input!

New Stuff

Since my last post, I’ve spent most of my time adding new products to the site. Tonnes of them, in fact – entheogens, smoking mixtures, pipes, grinders. All sorts. Since that’s all I’ve been doing though, I don’t want this to be another post full of links to new stuff, because, let’s be honest, it makes this blog look tacky. This isn’t supposed to be one big advert, blogging (I hate that word!) about what I do is just my hobby.

Hopefully, in the next few weeks then, I’ll be putting a couple of the latest products on the front page of the site, where the “Coffeesh0p Dev Blog Latest Posts” are now. I’ll also make an RSS feed available for anyone that wants to subscribe to that, keeping these blog posts relatively free of links.

Update:
Here’s the Latest Products page and RSS feed.

- Synchronium BMedSc (Pharmacology) & Mrs Synch BA

Since me ‘n’ the misses have finished our degrees (just waiting on the results now…) & almost finished moving house, hopefully we’ll be doing some cool blog & Coffeesh0p stuff soon.

For the blog, firstly I intend to do a couple of interviews with some interesting people. While I like to talk a lot about drugs, medicines, pharmacology, etc, I’m also a bit of a nerd, so I’m looking forward to talking to a few like-minded people who run drugs-related sites. I’ve also got a bong I’d like to give away, but I want to do it in a much more awesome way than the last competition. I’m thinking …joint rolling contest? Would that be something you guys would be interested in? The details (and legality) would need to be worked out, but that sounds like it might be a laugh. I figure before you should be granted bong access, you must first appreciate and master the art of rolling.

Any other suggestions? If you can suggest anything better, I’m all ears. Well… mostly.

Now uni has finished and we’ve moved into a bigger house, we can finally give Coffeesh0p a go full-time, something we’ve been looking forward to for ages. Firstly, now we have more space, we can start buying entheogens (such as Salvia & Kratom) by the kilo directly from their source. That should mean we’ll be able to sell them to you for much cheaper. Also, we’ve got the room to expand our range again, so keep an eye out for loads of new products. If there’s anything we don’t sell that you’d like, leave a comment and I’ll try and hunt it down.

Since I’ll now be making Coffeesh0p (and this blog, of course) my number one priority, I’ll be able to make some interesting changes. I’ve already done a bit of housekeeping stuff, like made the basket page look a little friendlier and put some cooler buttons on all the forms. I also had a go at adding a delivery address option on the checkout, but that’s not working right. (If anyone wants stuff sent to an alternate delivery address, btw, just email me. ) I’ve got a few ideas on what to do next, but I’d also reallllly like your input. In fact, here’s your chance to be a harsh as possible – what looks shit? What’s completely defunct? How could I make it look 110% more awesome? What essential, must-have features are we missing? If you can think of anything at all, please enter a comment below!

In case the idea hasn’t sunk in yet, I’m looking for your opinion on all these things. Leaving a comment couldn’t be simpler – just enter a name & email (don’t worry, no one but me will see your email address, and it doesn’t have to be a real name), and then pour your opinion all over the comment box. Hit submit and you’re done. Even if you’ve never left a comment anywhere in your life and this is the first bit of communicating you’ve done online, please write something!

© Synchronium – stealing other people’s ideas since 2006.