Quite Good

[Segaholic2]

Never smoked anything or had a sip of alcohol in my life, and I don't plan on it... So I can't contribute much to this thread.

[Light Speed]

I don't really drink, but that's more because anything alcoholic I've tried tasted like shit, i.e., beer tastes like someone pissed in my Mountain Dew, which already tastes kind of like someone pissed in my Sprite.

Ah, you must be drinkin' the wrong beer, then. I've had some that tasted like pure shite, but eventually found the good stuff. New Castle, McEwan's, Killian's, Guiness. Those're some great beers. Heh, I don't know what I'd do without 'em. XD

I think all alcohol is an acquired taste and I have no desire to acquire it.

Never smoked anything or had a sip of alcohol in my life, and I don't plan on it... So I can't contribute much to this thread.

Yet you posted anyway. :)

[Squirrelknight]

Yeah, call me a pussy, but I can't drink the stuff unless its diluted in something sweet to cancel out the... bitterness.

[Bo]

I don't drink/ smoke/ whatever.
I am addicted to caffeine (through coffee; I'm not much of a soda person), but I'm in the tiny fraction of the population upon whom it doesn't have a stimulant effect... there's stuff about that in tiny print on cough medicine labels. I drink coffee for the taste, though, and don't mind decaf. I'll get a headache if I don't have caffeiene all day, but after a day or two the withdrawl's over.
I'm for legalization of drugs, for the record. It's stupid to use them, but nobody needs to protect stupid people from themselves.

[Green Gibbon!]

Yeah, call me a pussy, but I can't drink the stuff unless its diluted in something sweet to cancel out the... bitterness.

Yeah, me too. I admit it, I'm a Smirnoff drinker. The same shit that my little sister drinks. And I can only down THAT after I've loosened up with a couple shots of Wild Turkey.

I think the fact that alcohol is innately nasty is one of the main contributing factors to me not really missing it.

I'm for legalization of drugs, for the record.

The ban on drugs makes about as much sense as Prohibition, and is about as successful.

[EspioKaos]

Yeah, call me a pussy, but I can't drink the stuff unless its diluted in something sweet to cancel out the... bitterness.

Heh. <a href="http://www.woodchuck.com/">Woodchuck</a> would be perfect for you.

[Light Speed]

Yeah, but finding an alcohol drink that tastes good rather than just drinking some non-alcoholic drink seems pointless. Unless you are drinking just to get drunk.

[Delphine]

Never smoked anything or had a sip of alcohol in my life, and I don't plan on it... So I can't contribute much to this thread.

Yet you posted anyway. :)

He's obviously trying to catch up to me in the amount useless posts I've made. I can't stay away from this place, the new forum is like a drug.

[EspioKaos]

Yeah, but finding an alcohol drink that tastes good rather than just drinking some non-alcoholic drink seems pointless. Unless you are drinking just to get drunk.

Yes, but Woodchuck = alcoholic. And very good.

(Ignore this comment if your reply was not directed at me.)

[Segaholic2]

He's obviously trying to catch up to me in the amount useless posts I've made. I can't stay away from this place, the new forum is like a drug.

Why would I be trying to catch up to you?

...Holy crap, you're 90 posts ahead of me. *spamspamspam*

[BlazeHedgehog]

I'm rather proud that I have neither smoked nor drank, but considering half my family smokes my lungs are probably so full of second-hand goo I'll die of lung cancer anyway.

Never really saw the point of mind-altering substances. If you need to take a drink or smoke a joint to make you feel happy then you've got too many problems to be wasting time getting high.

Besides that, I'm afraid of hangovers - especially when you consider if I take a couple of tylenol I just kind of tune out. If I can't hold my liquor just from a couple of weak, offbrand, over-the-counter painkillers, then can you imagine what would happen if I got a couple beers in me? Damn.

That, and, when I was a kid (say, 7?) my brother had some Mace he gave my mum. Being the curious bastard I was (playing with lighters, etc) I began squirting it all over stuff, including a balloon we had (for some reason, I think I got it from someone's birthday party). For some reason, the combination of the rubber on the balloon and the mace produced some kind of smell, and, somehow, I got high off of it. Scared the shit out of me because I began to hallucinate; I could see... like, black ash, or something, falling all around me. The only person in the house was my brother who was sleeping -- thankfully he didn't hear my frightened cry (read: scream) for help. I curled up in the fetal position on the couch, squeezing my eyes shut as much as they would go -- when I opened them, the hallicination was over, and I just pretended like it never happened. To this day I'm pretty sure none of my family even knows.

I still get relapses every now and then, at least one per year. They used to frightening me but by now whenever it happens I'm pretty used to it.

Maybe -- and I'm venturing out on a limb here -- maybe that has something to do as to why I never want any of my friends to mess around with marijuana or any sort of drug, or why I'm absolutely resistant to doing any of that myself.

[Titan]

Never really saw the point of mind-altering substances. If you need to take a drink or smoke a joint to make you feel happy then you've got too many problems to be wasting time getting high.

Exactly. Never gonna touch it myself either.

[MartinB]

I'm for legalization of drugs, for the record. It's stupid to use them, but nobody needs to protect stupid people from themselves.

But... but what about protecting non-druggies from druggies? What if the druggies go out trippin' with knives and EVIL INTENT? It'd be nothing but trouble.

[Popcorn]

By the way did you vomit... Thats really the only drawback from mushrooms...

Nope. There's a vague sensation of nasuea through the whole experience that comes and goes, though, but it seems irrelevant when you're having so much fun. I can type out a big list of the entire experience if anyone wants.

I kind of ruined it towards the end, though, by going home when it started to rain, and having to talk to my parents whilst stoned to space. I think it was beginning to wear off by the time I got online. (Blaze didn't believe me, HA.)

Never really saw the point of mind-altering substances. If you need to take a drink or smoke a joint to make you feel happy then you've got too many problems to be wasting time getting high

That's what I think, too. And about video games. And books. And movies. And jetskis. Basically, if you have to do any of those to have fun, you've got serious problems, you depraved weirdo.

[BlazeHedgehog]

Yeah, but what's so fun about being high? There's plenty of other things you can do, healthier things that are quite fun as well. As humans, we can have fun <i>without</i> taking something to make us think it's fun. If you need to force yourself to make something fun - or fun-er, then that's kind of lame, really.

[Popcorn]

Believe me, there's a lot of fun in being high.

I'm not sure 'taking something to make us think it's fun' is any different from 'doing something else that we think is fun'. Getting high is fun in itself, just like playing a game is. It's just another means of amusement.

Mind you, it's not without its drawbacks. I doubt I'll do anything like that again for a good while and never anything stronger.

[Delphine]

Don't believe Popcorn! Drugs are EEEEVIIIIIL and anyone who uses them is a self-deluded MANIAC who rapes small animals and molests little boys!!!

[Grant]

I can type out a big list of the entire experience if anyone wants.

Go for it. I'm interested, anyway.

[Light Speed]

I'll second that. It'd be a good read if nothing else.

[Ash Holt]

Ahaha, yeah. Hmph, I gotta find some article someone sent me once. It was a test that was done on some guy; they told him to draw something, then they gave him some acid, and the test sort of shows how his drawings developed during his trip. Interesting stuff.

Wow, that took all of two seconds to find, thanks to Google.

http://www.cowboybooks.com.au/html/acidtrip1.html

[G.Silver]

Wow, that wasn't nearly as interesting as I had hoped. Speaking as a so-called "artist" anyway. The middle painting with the tempura was sort of cool though.

[Protodude]

though im to young to drink, ive had scottish ale, fat tire, which is pretty good, and corona light (which kinda sucked)

and as long as i have caffeine, videogames, anime, and masturbation, i wont do drugs

[Delphine]

though im to young to drink

As if that's ever stopped anybody.

[Popcorn]

Okay, so. I have this friend named Tom who first tried magic mushrooms (amongst other things) a couple of months ago, and liked 'em a lot, and has taken them a couple of times since. He asked me if I'd like to join him one time and I thought, sure, why not. This was actually pretty brave of me, since I've always found any kind of drug (including medicine) a pretty foul concept, but, y'know, curiosity overwhelmed me. So we went and sat in the fields overlooking my house. Apparently being intoxicated is at its best when appreciating the beauty and wonder of nature, or something. Nature wasn't looking too beautiful or wondrous at the time, though, 'cause the sky was mostly clouded over and it was kind of cold and windy (I live right next to the sea). I brought with me a couple of books and some Big Red chewing gum (that rare and most holy of commodities, obtainable only through importing from the States).

If you haven't seen a magic mushroom before (and I hadn't), let me describe them to you: they're this unappetising greenish-grey and withered and twisted and gnarly, and basically look like the least delicious, most inedible thing ever. They're also kinda big. I heard they tasted really bad (to the extent that Tom recommended I bring along a couple of cans of Coke to extinguish the taste after consumption), but they weren't as awful as their reputation and appearance had led to me to expect. They kind of tasted like normal mushrooms, but a lot earthier and more bitter-- so, y'know, you wouldn't put one in your salad, but it wasn't much worse than chewing grass or something. Anyway.

The effects are generally said to take between half an hour to an hour to kick in. There was this initial worry for the first 30 minutes or so, 'cause Tom started feeling it way before I did. I dunno if it's 'cause I'm kinda big and he's kinda small or something (I can drink a lot more alcohol than he can before feeling any effects), but for a while it looked like I might not get it at all, which apparently can happen from time to time. (Another of our friends, Adam, didn't feel anything at all the first time he tried some... apparently the mood you're in can have an influence on the trip itself, too, so I made my best efforts to feel relaxed.) The one thing I did feel fifteen minutes in was a slight, and brief, feeling of nausea, as I said earlier-- nothing I couldn't handle, although the sensation came and went for several hours afterwards.

Despite Tom's advice, it was impossible not to start looking for any changes before anything happened-- but it doesn't really work like that. There was no on/off switch. Eventually you realise that you're tripping out, and must have been doing for a little while. I guess that, since one of the effects of the drug is to mess with your sense of time, as it begins to kick in, with it goes the ability to pinpoint the exact point of impact; but anyway. The first change I can remember experiencing was a greater sense of relaxation and happiness that I guess must've been the drug's doing, rather than the company of a friend-- but absolutely everything became hilarious. We'd just start cracking up at the stupidest jokes. And also the cleverest ones, because suddenly I became the wittiest man alive; everything I said turned to gold. It was magical.

The first visual effect I think I experienced was this weird green outline surrounding Tom's nose. It was kind of amusing, but more novel than anything. Eventually it disappeared, and I was back to a contented but fairly standard square one. Slowly, though, my perception of things changed. The first was my general perception of spatial surroundings-- it became very hard, in a cool kind of way, to trace the path we'd just walked along back to its root. Things seemed to stretch off in either direction. The horizon seemed simultaneously further and closer than it had ever been previously, and I became able to see and identify distant objects in greater detail than before-- I remember thinking how clear a van looked in the distance as it trundled along some country road or something. All kinds of sensations came and went: the feeling that you were sinking peacefully into the ground, that where you were wasn't really the same as were you thought you were, that the sky and the ground were spinning away from one another, and that the sky looked convex, like we were underneath a massive, beautiful, inverted dome. When I waved my hands in front of my face, they left trails; there's a strange sense of seeing multiple points in time all at once, so you can throw a stone and see it at every point of its arc simultaneously. Every sensation was pleasant. I was surprised at how effortlessly gentle everything was.

I've had bad hallucinations before in hospital, drugged up on various substances. I specifically remember lying in the bed thinking that I was being forced to play cards with Wario, and, true to form, that he was cheating all the fucking time. The mushrooms produced nothing like that effect. You don't hallucinate (at least not without a whole lot of mushrooms)-- you don't see things that aren't there. You don't see miniature devils with electric guitars dancing over your maggot-infested stomach. It's nothing like that scene in Beavis and Butthead Do America. You see things as they are, but they look a hell of a lot more interesting than they did before; they twist and turn and change colour and blend into one another. You know that really pleasant half-conscious state that exists between being asleep and awake, where your imagination just runs wild and everything makes just somehow makes sense, and things just seem to follow logically from one another in the most satisfying and effortless of ways? It's a lot like that. Most of all was the overbearing sense that nothing mattered. We never stopped talking to one another, describing what we were seeing (in a brilliant bit of game design, if someone puts an idea in your head by describing what they can see, you'll be able to see it too-- and vice-versa), laughing and talking about how great everything was. I'd just gotten off my shift at work and kept thinking back to poor old Russ, who'd taken over from me, serving customers and filing games and having to cope with all the responsibilities and problems in life that suddenly seemed so completely irrelevant. There was this feeling that, in this state, nothing really counted-- I could do anything I liked and it didn't really matter.

The other thing is that you're completely conscious and aware that you're high the whole time. You always have the ability to say, "So, this is what magic mushrooms are like. Cool," and remark at how amazed you are that you're actually doing this. We kept saying how much of a pair of complete dicks we'd look like to someone walking past who happened to see us lying there discussing how awesome clouds are. It started to rain and it didn't matter-- it was just another fascinating sensation-- but we agreed that it'd be best to head indoors, simply for the sake of our future selves not being drenched to our dicks. So we walked back to my house, which took only ten minutes by Tom's watch but seemed to take hours. The path seemed to stretch on and on in front of us, and I kept being surprised at how little and how much progress we'd made along it.

Going home was where the novelty of it all started to wear off. I mentioned earlier how one of the major pluses of the experience is how responsiblity-free you feel, how distant you feel from everyday life-- well, home is sort of a symbol of those kind of things, so to be high and simultaneously trying to unlock your front door and hold sustained conversation with your father about how you've got to delete some stuff from his PC's hard drive because it's out of space is both difficult and deeply unsatisfying. To be at home, surrounded in remnants of my now totally irrelevant previous existence, felt all wrong; I wanted to go outside and marvel at the inherent red genius of postboxes. Coming down from the high a bit, I got online, typed that post up there, and got on IRC, where Blaze categorically refused to believe anything I said. Tom, still in relatively alien territory, was still having a good time. (My guitar survived, to relieve people of their understandable concerns, although when I returned to it later on it was, mysteriously, quite violently out of tune.) Tom noticed at this point that I was looking a bit down; I drunkenly told him I'd like to sleep and he politely left me alone. I don't know what became of him after he left. He possibly had some adventures with a rainbow and some fluff he found in his pocket or something. Presumably he didn't jump off a cliff out of the sheer joy of it all.

The way it wears off is odd; you sort of rise out of it in a rush, like coming up for air in a swimming pool, and then just blink, and suddenly it all vanishes. The effect is quite refreshing, like having a cold glass of water after getting out of a sauna. I still felt a bit floaty for some time afterwards, but that, too, left me within the hour.

I think that's just about it. I'd recommend it to anyone curious; it's apparently harmless (although I did wake up this morning with a headache, which is possibly connected) and pretty fun. It's a bit of a long-term commitment, 'cause you have to have about five hours free (preferably spent all in one place; moving around was a mistake) and it's a good idea not to have any work or school to go to the next day. But I wouldn't make a habit of it. The experience also wasn't quite as mind-expanding, life-changing or inspiring as I was hoping it'd be, contrary to many of the other trip reports I've read on the internet. I doubt, for instance, that it has much altered my appreciation for the beauty of the universe or improved my poetry.

Incidentally:



I think that one's pretty awesome.

[Popcorn]

Incidentally, if you're wondering what happened to the Big Red, I found it hours later in a bin outside my house. Taking mind-altering drugs and fishing food out of trash; I've reached a new low.