I just listened to the worst thing I’ve heard so far about the Nutt Sack scandal – BBC Radio 4’s “The Report“, that aired on Thursday. Not only is this as balanced as a lone fat guy on a see-saw, but their arguments compel you to shout at the computer as you listen along. This program was more damaging to my mental health than any kind of “skunk” might be. My favourite bits are when the reporter asks if he can get high by smelling some cannabis and when this woman’s son has a “schizoid episode” because he robbed his mum’s jewellery. Unbe-fucking-lievable! A BBC Radio producer actually got in touch, and encouraged me to pass the link around (excellent marketing there by the BBC, and for once I’m not being sarcastic) so here goes: you can listen to it here.

So, let’s have some fun! I’ll be giving away a 5g bag of Mellow Yellow to the best comment on this post deconstructing this program. You can pick your favourite bits or you can pick apart the entire thing bit by excruciatingly painful bit. Points will be awarded for thoroughness, any references to relevant facts and the cut of one’s jib. I’ll pick the best one by Dec 14th.

As any regular visitor to Coffeesh0p will know, I try and trickle new products onto the site fairly regularly.  The most notable (and most anticipated) products to be added recently are Magic Silver and Magic Gold smoking mixes, but today, I added Koru Instant Energy Strips,  and I’ve got enough samples for 20 people to give away!

Koru Instant Energy Strips are a cool new way to get a much needed caffeine kick. You place one on your tongue and just let it dissolve, which gets the goodness into your blood stream much faster than drinking a cup of coffee. Since they’re so convenient and, well, instant, they’re perfect for just about every situation where you’d like to be a little more alert, without taking something that’ll blow your tits off (like Charge, for example).

So, how can you win some? Firstly, do you meet the following criteria?

1. You live in the UK
2. You’re not pregnant
3. You’re not a child
4. You’re not unusually sensitive to caffeine
5. You don’t mind the taste of mint

If you said “Yes!” to all of the above, all you need to do is leave a comment below. The first 20 people to leave a comment will get a couple of strips to try out. Please don’t leave your address in the comments – I’ll get in touch with you about that.

…And now we come to the part of the show where we take a look at the art work sent in by you at home! We’ve got three wonderful pieces to talk about today, sent in from all over the world!

While they each stand alone on their own merit, we think the three together capture the bigger picture by holding a mirror up to our ourselves. There is certainly a lesson to be learnt here. Take a good hard look!

Unfortunately, we can’t return any of the art work sent in, but we can give you a pipe instead.

By Alex, age 6

This first one from Alex shows us clearly the danger of drugs and the damage they can do to society. In this picture, the cat appears to have smoked too much catnip. Oh dear! Perhaps the party has gotten a little out of hand? We should heed the stark warning depicted here; catnip can destroy lives.

By Sara, age 8

Oh no! It seems the police has arrived to bust up that party! Thank goodness! These drugged-up kitties are obviously a danger to themselves and to society. We only need to look back at that first picture to see how incomprehensible and belligerent cats, and indeed we can be, under the influence of drugs. Thanks, Sara!

By Louis, age 9

Our final picture, sent in by Louis, depicts the inevitable consequences of illegal drug use. This cat is rightfully behind bars, sharing company with murderers and rapists where he belongs. Remember, children – just one drag on a “doobie”, and this could be you!

***

A big thanks to those who took part. You, as a community, have taught me that there’s a rich seam of lulz to be mined, deep within your drug-addled brains. If you have any other stupid ideas you think we should try, let me know. I’m sure I can find something to give away…

To the winners, send me an email with your address in, and I’ll get your pipes posted straight away.

Oh, and I’ve had this blog for exactly a year and a day! Thanks, everyone!

I’ve found the perfect episode of South Park, for the following tenuous reasons. Firstly, we’re all getting sick of hearing about this legal highs ban, secondly there’s currently a cat-related competition on the go (that reason will make sense if you actually watch the episode), and thirdly, we’ve just bought a new HDTV.

If you watched a few South Park episodes years ago, and thought it was a bit naff, I’d recommend giving it a go once more. When it first came out, it seemed that the only appeal was that there were kids swearing, but it’s since grown up a lot, while still being completely ridiculous. So, put the kettle on, roll yourself a gigantic herbal cigarillo and enjoy:

(As with most of the videos I post here, you’ll have to click the play button once, close any pop-ups and click play once more when the button turns green.)

If that’s not inspiration to take part in our current Competition, I don’t know what is.

Also, now we’ve got this TV, I need ideas about what to watch on it in high definition. On the short list so far is Planet Earth, Blue Planet, other excellent wildlife programs, and Band of Brothers. If you can think of anything slightly more unusual, leave a comment below.

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!

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.

Out of my three final exams, I’ve taken the two hardest ones already, leaving one small one for next week. Since this is an ethics exam which I can’t revise for, I’ve finally found a bit of time to do some interesting Coffeesh0p work.

Navigation

If you’ve been on the site before now, you might have noticed the simple breadcrumb navigation at the top of each page under the search box. What we used to have was a simple list of pages all the way back up to the home page.  It helps not only with navigation, but also with search engine optimisation, linking the site together to give a much more structured feel. One problem though – it looked totally shit.

Today, I gave it a bit of a facelift:

As you can see, it now looks like it’s supposed to be there, instead of like it was tacked on as an afterthought. It also shows a drop down list containing all the subcategories for a particular category, hopefully making navigation a bit easier too as well as linking the site up more solidly.  I’ve also moved the search box to the left and brought the category jump menu up beside it to make more room. Unfortunately, it only works on the shop pages for now. I think a good potion of tomorrow will be spent applying it to the rest of the site.

Advert

I also got a bit of time this week to have a proper go on Photoshop in order to design an advert for the next edition of Wasted comic. We advertised in the first issue, but a) that advert looked worse and b) our old Photoshop guy no longer works for us, giving me the perfect opportunity to flex my skillz:

What do you think? Your criticism is more than welcome – it’s the only way I’ll learn.

Competition Winner

Oh, and before I forget, the final competition winner is Virusboy. Your pills will be shipped on Monday!

Everyone else: Don’t be too disheartened. I’ve got some more stuff to give away in the near future, I just need to decide on the most awesome way to give it away, so stick around!

This week’s competition winner is Synthetikal. Those pills will be shipped out tomorrow, the day of my first of three final exams.

Last week’s winner also never got in touch, so I still have one more pack to give away. It’s almost like you guys don’t want free stuff…

So, I was having a browse round Drug Education News – a blog all about the Drug Education Forum, who are apparently “an umbrella body for national organisations committed to improving drug education in England” – and came across a post about legal highs. Admittedly, this is a repost of a member’s briefing from DrugScope, so not their own words, but that’s not why I have a problem with them. Have a read:

Devon-based Children’s Society projects are concerned about an increase in the availability of these [legal highs] substances and the use of them by young people in their area. This increase in use has been mirrored by recent articles in national press and sector publications, putting forward a range of limited research and anecdotal evidence – with particular attention paid to a few users who have experienced sometimes lethal side effects.

Steven Hawker, Young People’s Drug and Alcohol Worker at The Children’s Society Checkpoint project in Torquay, expressed concern about the way young people view these drugs and the way professionals communicate about them. “While we feel there is some advantage in highlighting specific risks and effects of individual legal highs, it concerns me there is very little literature highlighting the general risks of these substances”, he said. “Of particular concern are inexperienced substance users who may take the view that legal equals safe and that this may impact on them consuming potentially large amounts of stimulants or hallucinogens.”

The Children’s Society would be interested if any organisation has:

• produced any awareness campaigns in their area
• seen significant rises in use
• become aware of specific negative effects of particular drugs.

The Children’s Society would also welcome any thoughts on how young people should be made aware of the potential risks of legal highs, particularly substances where research into the risks of short and long-term use is limited.

Fair enough, sort of. These people are concerned for their kids, but that still doesn’t excuse the hypocrisy subtly interwoven into the fabric of their terror. I’m all for education, raising awareness and semi-anonymously informing people of their mistakes via the internet, so I thought I’d post a little comment outlining my opinion. It went something like this:

What about alcohol and tobacco? By the same reasoning employed above, their legality also suggests to kids they’re safe. In a similar vein, no respectable retailer of these legal alternatives to illegal drugs would sell them to anyone under the age of 18.

I agree that more research into these types of substance should be done, so that we know what’s safe to take and what isn’t. I can assure you though, that acohol and tobacco would end up much further towards the unsafe end of the spectrum.

Am I being a dick? No. Am I being beligerant? No. Am I furthering discussion on the topic? Fuck yeah! So why the hell did they delete my comment?! It seems to me the Drug Education News blog (notice I’m not linking to them for this very reason) simply do not want to listen when it comes to differing opinion.

And here was me thinking education was all about listening to what other people had to say in order to reinforce or refute your current understanding. At the very least, they could have let the comment stay and responded to it with a well reasoned argument about why I’m wrong. A pretty poor show, overall.

Blog Commenting In General

Commenting on blogs is a great idea if you have a site or blog of your own. The majority of blogs allow you to leave your URL along with your comment, allowing visitors to click through to your site, particularly if you have something interesting to say. Unfortunately for this reason, a comment system is subject to a lot of spam, but plugins for your blog can help stop those. This blog gets tonnes of spam comments from unrelated sites, but interestingly, I do get the ocassional legal highs site in there. It’s just a shame that they leave the same spammy message on multiple blog posts that add nothing to the discussion. As a result, they end up being marked as spam not only by me, but any subsequent blog that uses this plugin! NextGenBuzz & SalviaSociety are two examples – their aggressive spam tactics have ended up not only being a waste of time, but actually hurting their site’s reputation. Great going, guys!

Competition Winner

This week’s Hypnotic Pills winner is BFitzpatric! Please email me back or comment on this post before May 9th to claim your prize. Also, last week’s winner never got in touch, so I still have one more pack to give away! For details on how these can be yours, check out this post.

Oh, and it was my birthday yesterday. Huzzah!