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Hello BYOB... just bought an account to try and help Lowtax by the measly amount I can. Also figured I'd have a laugh that I just got paid 70 dollars (Australian) to get stoned and comment about new "scary" drug ads for market research. It was pretty funny since most of the other people they paid were stoners too and seemed like cool and chill peoples. Anyway... hi?
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Apr 2, 2019 12:05
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 10:36 |
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Cheers mate, figured this'd be the best place to start a postin' cause you all seem chill and tell some bloody funny jokes. Also the study was hilarious because by the end of it the non-stoners, including the guy moderating, were more in agreement with us that weed should be legalized than with any of the sillier 'Reefer Madness'-esque ads proposed... think we settled with 'if you're getting stoned, maybe stay over at your friends house rather than drive' was the only decent one. Also some featured hilariously random images - like implying that being stoned meant your headphones instantly became tangled and you wouldn't be able to do your jacket zipper up properly.
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Apr 2, 2019 12:23
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To be fair they did balance it out with a picture of an empty bowl of potato chips. e: Speaking of which, hello Munchables! Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Apr 2, 2019
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Apr 2, 2019 12:31
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Well crimes I dunno about, that's for a judge to decide, but I have a bit of a pet story - my brother's dog had a lump that we were worried was cancer for a couple of weeks (he's twenty and the most awesome big fat party animal of a staffordshire <british> ever). Turns out it was just a minor infection that he got from a bite from an Aussie bulldog that he kept trying to hump despite her being twice his size and him having an anti-testosterone implant (prostate, getting old is a bitch) and also being bloody twenty. Mostly am just really happy that he's okay cause he's a funny little bugger who used to knock over peoples drinks, eat rotten fruit to get drunk and munch down on weed stems despite all efforts to stop him. Cheers for the advice about the avs tho too - I'll try to get one soon cause I'd like to give what I can to the cause! I'll try to get some pictures tomorrow of the old fellow (not a particularly disappointing euphemism in this case) if folks are interested.
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Apr 2, 2019 13:16
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Thanks for making me welcome BYOB, I'll try not to let you down! Not totally sure on how to post images yet... I did find a decent pic of the excellent dog I took a couple of years back. He's a bit fatter in it than he is now (I had to put the poor lil guy on a diet, made up for it by getting him really tasty treats though). I do have a couple of other animal stories without pics though too... I looked after the main aquariums at a marine biology lab for awhile and also worked for a couple of years at a place milking snakes to make antivenom. And sympathies to Hamjobs, had a taxi driver down the road doing that at 8 am this morning - I was fortunately awake but it was still dumb and annoying, particularly since the taxi must have had the persons phone number.
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Apr 2, 2019 21:16
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Thanks pixaal - hope I haven't mucked it up: https://i.imgur.com/GaJwLMw.jpg
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Apr 2, 2019 22:11
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Munchables posted:Greetings Stoner Sloth, I like your commercials, they're really bad. Haha, yeah awesomely bad... popular wisdom suggests the ad agency were a bunch of stoners taking the piss out of the government of the day. Mostly though was just a good excuse to punch some cones with mates and laugh at the sheer awfulness of it every time the ad came on.
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Apr 2, 2019 22:19
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xcheopis posted:That is a darling dog! Thank you! His name is Tiger and he's very sweet - loves everyone and just wants pats and foods. He used to be an excellent escape artist - would headbutt a welded steel door open and run away when my brother was out. Inevitably he'd go find someone's house who had a dog, get to play with their dogs and get some food and either wait to get picked up when we found him or else escape from there and run back home. Happened so often that the council basically came around and checked the premises and said 'okay, nothing you can do to stop him getting out - we'll stop fining you' to my bro. These days he's just a chiller - he is deaf and eyesight ain't so good any more but he'll happily follow along and be part of what everyone else is doing. Still have to watch him though cause he's the sneakiest food thief - was out of the room for all of thirty seconds the other day and he managed to swipe a packet of delicious beef jerky. Also when my brother got him he had no white hair at all - time makes fools of us all though I guess and I can't talk since I look more like Santa every day.
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Apr 2, 2019 22:29
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Love the image and thanks for the tip - I'll do that in the future, I tried it in a preview and it made the image huge though so was worried it'd mess up. Good for me to learn cause we get a lot of Aussie wildlife here that I can hopefully put up pictures of some time - mostly koalas and ring tail possums but also eastern brown snakes, blue tongue lizards, foxes, lots of awesome birds and the occasional kangaroo. We did have a couple of echidnas around the area too but they're pretty rare to find here - have mostly seen little ones out at night and moved them away from the roads. And trying to get the pond in the backyard filled up with stuff - hoping to get some frogs back again and have been stocking it with little fish and yabbies (fresh water crayfish type things) so hopefully get some shots of them too once it's up and running. Oh and Tiger got up earlier and was hassling me for food so I gave him a treat and told him that he was the bestest boy, then he went for another nap.
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Apr 3, 2019 00:14
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Ah cool, thanks to both of you!
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Apr 3, 2019 00:20
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Yeah those big bats are cool - usually flying foxes (fruit bats). When I used to live in NSW as a kid, over in Newcastle, we had a giant old morten bay fig tree in the back yard and had hundreds of them come around at night making a huge racket and hanging out. We don't get so many big bats around here but we do get lots of tiny little insect eating ones that use echolocation - you can see them flapping around hunting at dusk and dawn especially, usually just outside the streetlights illumination as they pick off the bugs attracted to the light. e: Also thanks for the extra help, I definitely need it! Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Apr 3, 2019
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Apr 3, 2019 00:47
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That dog is literally me when pissed sometimes. The kitty is adorable too! Trying a new gin tonight - it's green weaver ant flavoured which actually is pretty drat good - sort of half-way between lime and black pepper. e: Also people have been so noice here, I think I should tell one of my favourite animal stories. When I was a young man I studied toxinology, particularly marine toxinology because I used to SCUBA dive a lot. Anyways I wound up looking after the marine biology labs at the local university. We had a lot of snapper and other marine fish but my favourite animal there was George. George was a male blue ringed octopus - a very friendly and curious one at that who'd often come and check out what you were doing as you'd clean the tanks and go about feeding the residents. Anyway one day I came in and the permanent staff had moved George's tank up to the top of bookshelf type vertical series of tanks. Everything was fine for a few days despite my apprehension about this (George was known for escaping more than once)... and then I came in early one morning and George wasn't in his tank! Briefly feeling a bit of panic I told the supervisor. While we were all running around, one of us eventually though to check the tank below... only to find that George had managed to lift the lid of his tank a little and then slip out through a crack into the tank below him... and eaten an entire tanks worth of someone's graduate project - like stripped it bare of fish completely and was hiding camoflaged and pleased with himself between one of the rocks and the sand. In the end the experiment they were running had to start again, an extra 4 months of work to that point, and George was put down the bottom of the stack of tanks from then on. I also made sure to pay George a little extra attention every day and he seemed to appreciate it, he'd often sit up half out of the water, clinging to the side of the tank and stare at me as I cleaned his tank or get my attention by flashing his vibrant blue coloured rings as I went past. Anyway to this day despite octopus being delicious I tend to steer clear of it, and that's my story. 
Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Apr 3, 2019
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Apr 3, 2019 14:32
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They're so bright too. I'm told though that George lived a couple of years longer than he would in the wild and he certainly was a happy little fellow - was funny how much cleverer he was than most of the fish though, the snappers would inevitably start swimming towards the vacuum when you cleaned their tank and would get stuck sideways and panicking to the nozzle until you freed them... and then would go back and do it again immediately. Though speaking of, I'd been told he was tank bred and therefore safe (tetrodotoxin is extracted from their environment/bacteria - same deal as with blowfish except blue ring octopus use it like venom rather than poison)... turns out he'd been caught by one of the kind people who taught me to dive and in fact could have bitten and killed me when I cleaned his tank many times over.
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Apr 3, 2019 15:10
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Sweet mug! We have giant cuttlefish breeding grounds not far from here too - love those little guys, their eyes are so weird an hyper advanced, can see in circularly polarized light. In a good year we get somewhere between 1/2 to a million of them mating. Fortunately have little guilt in eating squid and we get ultra delicious southern calamari squid that are so easy to catch it's not funny and that only live for 18 months at best anyways. I'll try and figure out how to write up some of my snake stories too - they never got names but were cool little reptile buddies with very distinct personalities. Mostly handled eastern brown snakes but also milked a weird variety of imports that someone had smuggled in. We had a couple of Gaboon vipers for example... never really come to terms with the fact that people would smuggle venomous snakes to Australia - seems like carrying coals to Newcastle or selling ice to Inuit.  e: Was awesome work though - we produced a good portion of antivenoms used in oceania and a lot of Africa and Asia too. e2: Plus the venom extracts we made helped keep a lot of ex-racing horses alive for longer to produce anti-venoms 
Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Apr 3, 2019
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Apr 3, 2019 15:27
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hamjobs posted:i got a little teary over george; octopuses are my favorite animal at the aquarium and i am a big fan of cephalopods in general. He was a sweet little fellow, will always remember him fondly. And totally agree - such a weirdly alien creature but yet at least as intelligent as birbs or dogs/cats/pigs... just in a strangely different way.
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Apr 3, 2019 15:50
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OMG - she sounds like quite the character! We mostly get common octopus as about the largest you'll see around here but would love to see a giant pacific, especially one as awesome as Victoria sounds  Also I love that they set up a gym for her
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Apr 3, 2019 15:58
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sounds great - nothing better than being around animals cared for by people who actually care. Would love to see the puffins too, those lil buggers are cute af!
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Apr 3, 2019 16:12
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Most scared I've ever been of an animal though was a tiger shark - got about 3m (10 ft?) from a 4.5 meter tiger shark up on the great barrier reef... managed to calm myself by realizing I could outswim a lot of the people with me even if I couldn't outswim the shark. Mostly was just awe at that chonky gal swimming past me like a well fed school bus. e: Also if it's not overly cliched... I honestly did once punch out a kangaroo. For good reason though! Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Apr 3, 2019
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Apr 3, 2019 16:30
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hamjobs posted:most reasons are good to punch out a roo; they're dangerous!!!! TY these days I'm just too tired to dive much but yeah, certainly a scary moment but luckily for all of us that old gal was well fed and happy so she didn't mind us watching her cruise on by. Was a moment though when I considered my options there and figured I'd be better of stabbing one of my dive buddies than trying to use the knife on a shark that size lolHaha and yeah - pretty much with roos, drat thing was about to gut my brother and everyone thinks 'oh cute animal, it's just playing'
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Apr 3, 2019 16:45
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Manifisto posted:those are some great stories. although I was a little Thanks mate and yeah, made me feel a little queasy that I'd been a little lax with George a few times. Still he was such a gentle fellow (graduate project fish aside) that I figure I was still pretty safe. But yuss - cuttlefish are adorable and those hourglass eyes are amazing if you ever get the chance Port Lowly in South Australia is amazing to dive in the cuttlefish breeding season!e: and hell yeah about the venom - not quite as bad a some of the frog toxins but still, somewhere between 125 - 250 thousand times as lethal as strychnine. Still at least it's a virtually painless way to go
Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Apr 3, 2019
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Apr 3, 2019 16:48
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at your revelation that the blue-ringed octopus was fully envenomed, I don't think venoms get much more deadly. I saw one in a tank at the Sydney aquarium and he looked cute and harmless.|
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Snake stories if anyone is interested? When I first started working at <redacted> I didn't realize that I was walking into dead man's shoes... oddly enough it was a non-venomous snake that got me the job opportunity, the roughly 5m long "pet" python that the last guy owned had strangled him in his sleep. Now mostly I got the job from unofficial experience, catching red bellied black snakes and such as a kid. Here we were dealing with a whole different level of beasty - mostly eastern brown snakes but also saw scaled vipers, PNG black snakes and all sorts. I never ended up dealing with taipans though - part of what put me off was my immediate boss and most experienced snake handler I've personally met, a guy called... let's say John. John had been handling a coastal taipan that bit him. Fortunately this was in the early nineties and the protocol had advanced significantly, including the use of pressure bandages. Unfortunately it's hard to pressure bandage a bite to the stomach. John had to have multiple doses of adrenalin just to keep his heart going before he got to hospital (a thing we had to sign a form to allow if we were in the same position) but he'd semi-miraculously survived (partly cause we had a limited amount of anti-venom on standby in a fridge). However the wound he got from it was roughly fist sized hole in his belly. Also after his close call we had to wear thick leather aprons at all times when handling snakes.
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Apr 3, 2019 17:22
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pixaal posted:Sloth with 8 octopus arms reading a book Needs to be smoking a pipe/joint/bong/vaporizer and possibly having a glass of whiskey or gin too 
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Apr 3, 2019 17:37
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True.. also am so lucky with gin here at the moment - a local one, Never Never I think, won the best gin in the world. That and lots of the local distilleries are amzing - been drinking Green Ant gin which uses a species of weaver ant to flavour it and is awesomely citrus-ey and peppery Also been getting finger limes (or caviar limes) which are this weird native off-shoot of citrus called micro-citrus and my gosh, they are amazing - like little fish roe made up of lime juice. So good with booze, gotta try to make a mojito with them soon.
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Apr 3, 2019 17:44
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Manifisto posted:I would love to! I once got as far as the Yorke Peninsula/Innes and the Flinders Ranges (the latter is totally amazing by the way) but I didn't have time to make it to the Eyre Peninsula, people said Port Lincoln was very cool, now I have a reason to see Lowly as well! Cool - Yorkies has some of my favourite fishing spots and Flinders Ranges is awesome, If ya up there again try and get to Arkaroola - it's one of the most unique geological parks in the world... just looks so otherworldly Also if any of y'all are down this way then let me know cause I know peeps up around most of the southern parts of Australia. Oh and there's also really good wreck dives all along the coast here - Star of Greece is really close to shore, old... hmmm... 60's I think?... fishing vessel that's so well preserved.e: Oh gosh... I forgot... if you get the chance ever then head to a place called Naracoorte, you won't regret it. When I went there a friend had just captured the first footage of Australian elapid snakes hunting bats in caves (think it was a tiger snake) but it's also just amazing for caving + got a unique fossil record of marsupial lions and 1 ton wombats Stoner Sloth fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Apr 3, 2019
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Apr 3, 2019 17:48
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Wait, wait, hold up, I'm sorry but I'm still processing the octopus story. Your university had a BLUE RING octopus, like the kind from Australia that can kill in minutes and there's no antivenom, you just die? And you, in a course of study about animal toxins, were told a specimen was innate when it wasn't, go clean its enclosure? Lol - yeah made sure to tell everyone, didn't sue them cause university was poor and would take money away from legit research + figure really I should have just assumed it was dangerous anyway regardless of what I'd been told. Really that's the only way to deal with lethally venomous animals but I was very young and had yet to learn. But while it's true that there isn't an antivenom*, tetrodotoxin is weird in that so long as they keep your heart and lungs going for 16-24 hours then you recover with essentially no side effects. That and I was literally 2 minutes away from one of the biggest hospitals in the state. The speed of the venom, while rapid, is somewhat exaggerated and frankly by the time I'd felt the start of effects I'd still have had time to get into hospital and would likely have survived. As for the second question... yeah a lot of what was taught was wrong and sometimes we had teachers who had simply allowed their knowledge of the subject to become out of date. My personal all time favourite example of that was with an oceanography teacher who insisted that there was no life to be found below the photic zone (where light gets to). There were pictures of it in our text book  *Think they do have one that works but is still in development and hasn't seen full human testing. Also apparently reducing the core and especially brain temperature a couple of degrees neutralizes much of the effects I think I read somewhere a few years back.
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Apr 4, 2019 07:04
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Goons Are Great posted:Oh no, does that mean you are drinking ants? Sorry man, but it does. But very few of them (maybe 10 in the whole bottle) are used to flavour the gin - they're a kind of weaver ant that have been used by indigenous Australian peoples* in cooking and medicine for thousands of years and the use of them in this kind of thing is helping keep large colonies alive and thriving by making them valuable enough that people don't just do the whole people thing and casually wipe them out. Sort of taste like a mixture of peppery and citrus flavours, a bit like lemon grass and black pepper but strangely different? *they're also used in South East Asia too apparently from at least 400 AD according to wikipedia at least Anyways I salute the fallen ants who went into flavouring my drink - they were delicious - and in general though I'm very pro-ant; my housemates got annoyed with me a few times cause I won't let anyone get rid of the ones around the house or use pesticides. Also I'd love to hear anything you can tell us about ants - I've read a lot of E.O. Wilson and one of his students books over the last couple of years and am always interested to learn more
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Apr 4, 2019 07:27
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Goons Are Great posted:From a biological perspective it is very acceptable, partly even encouraged to thin out ant population of big, thriving colonies, so if their chitin and proteins can make a gin taste a bit weirder, that's acceptable. Also I'm quite sure one hungry bear kills more of them in a minute than gin production requires in a year. I have some new gins coming to day that aren't ant flavoured so I'll give the spicy boys some time to recover their numbers. Definitely right about the friends bit - we'd be in bug trouble without them! Saw a really cool little mantis out hunting this morning and that made me smile. Looking forwards to your ant thread too - we get spiders here that mimic ants as well so it's always worth watching the ants to see if you can spot an imposter.
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Apr 5, 2019 00:38
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Goons Are Great posted:
That is interesting - alkaloids more generally occur in poisons than in venoms (usually proteins or peptides). Do they know if the alkaloids are acquired environmentally or if the ants make them themselves?
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Apr 5, 2019 02:32
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Goons Are Great posted:This is actually still an very active field of research, as the detailed nature of how they produce it is still hidden. It is believed to be very similar to how bees to it (obviously, as they are closely related), so they synthesize their cyto- and hemotoxic liquid somewhere in the gaster (the big butt-like thing on the abdomen), most likely using things their cells poop out. Very interesting, thank you I'll ask more questions about this sort of thing in the ant thread now that it's going!
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Apr 5, 2019 06:07
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Just weed for breakfast so far... not sure I can bring myself to eat anything, another night of no sleepings unfortunately. Also Brownie is adorable JB 
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Apr 5, 2019 23:07
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hamjobs posted:
Thanks friendo - given that a try and managed a piece of toast with some nice Kangaroo Island honey Goons Are Great posted:Can you guys recommend me a good drink? On my way into a bar to meet friends, I want to try a bit. Some excellent suggestions so far... and definitely steer clear of those long island ice teas for now! I'd like to add to them: Mojito - very refreshing and pretty light, lots of variations on it too White russian - nice if you prefer a milk based cocktail and every stoner should try one at least once IMHO Gin and tonic - lots of variations but can be really nice with good gin and at least decent tonic water, switched to drinking a lot of these recently to avoid straight spirits or mixers with coke as much I used to drink a lot of whiskey, mostly irish and bourbons, and they can be good straight or with a mixer. Old Fashioneds can be good whiskey cocktails if they're made well but they're associated with people trying to be Mad Men if that's still a thing? Anyways hope you're having a good night Goons Are Great! Resting Lich Face posted:The next thing you should drink after that mule is a glass of water. Also excellent advice
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Apr 6, 2019 01:50
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Manifisto posted:all sorts of cocktails classic and new are interesting to try but when it is very hot out there is nothing like a mojito, this is mint's highest and best use Haha beat me to it, definitely agree with this though!
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Apr 6, 2019 01:51
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Resting Lich Face posted:I want him to have fun and not have much consequence.  yeah, am never good at following my own advice with alcohol either. I'm thinking of having a sneaky mojito but wondering I should wait till noon at least, been wanting to try one with these finger limes I have... they're weird but awesome native Australian fruit, kind of like caviar or little bubbles of lime flavoured goodness that burst when you chew them.
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Apr 6, 2019 02:13
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Ant thread is great, and your effort posts make really interesting reading.
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Apr 7, 2019 01:28
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It it better or worse to have an expensive, custom designed, one-of-a-kind, purpose built anime gently caress pillow made by a big name brand rather than a crudely made, hand drawn, DIY anime gently caress pillow held together with duct tape out of old rags? Asking for a friend.
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Apr 7, 2019 08:26
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Manifisto posted:what are your friend's principal goals? portfolio diversification? resale value? Definitely portfolio diversification is a major concern, he is feeling awfully exposed if there is a crash in some of the more niche gently caress pillow markets.
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Apr 7, 2019 08:41
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Manifisto posted:theyre not for everyone but a sophisticated anime gently caress pillow investor can hedge their exposure with thoughtfully structured derivatives, why just yesterday my gently caress pillow puts came into the money and I was all That's some great advice and I'll pass it on, he could really use a win after he lost a bundle through a bad investment in an anime themed garbage disposal unit (that you could gently caress) when it turned out not to meet health and safety standards.
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Apr 7, 2019 09:16
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This is Law of Disposal and LO how she makes it plain, Send not your weak and your sex-pillow, send me your strong and your sane...
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Apr 7, 2019 15:25
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No child lives in poverty... (as far as we can tell)?
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Apr 7, 2019 15:42
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 10:36 |
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Tempura, I choose you!
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Apr 7, 2019 16:11
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