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☮ Social ☮ PD Social Distancing Talk Thread: Swirly Congregation That's 100% Pandemic-Proof

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Thanks. :) I tend to have waves of having more or less energy to work on stuff really hard on Bluelight, and right now I'm feeling it, so I'm trying to capitalize on that.

As some examples:

Here is a search for LSD + 2C-B reports
Here is a search for DMT combined with anything else (but not by itself)
Here is a search for LSD experiences from experienced users which were difficult

The custom search engine will be able to build these sorts of searched by selecting from menus, like how Erowid works. If we get everything tagged in the TR forum it will be so awesome. :) (by the way if anyone has time and inclination and wants to get on board as a TR mod for the purpose of tagging reports... please let me know. I'll never be able to do it all myself).
 
Hey everyone :).

I've been lurking a lot more than commenting lately, mainly because I've been veeerrryyy busy with work and life but it has been a very positive and productive period for me lately.

Last week I had mini vacations because of a national holiday, so my gf and I went camping on a beautiful beach in the desert. We tripped there, it was quite the experience. Hadn't taken acid in quite a while, I think May when I took only half a tab at a Mogwai concert. The sunset was so beautiful, and the weather kept changing. During the night we were wrapped in a sea fog so dense we could see little water drops when we pointed around with our lanterns. Amazing days.

Now I'm back at work going at full power again but stopped by to say hi :p
 
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Hey man! Sounds like the good kind of busy. :)

I got a surprise ticket to see Primus tonight, I was gonna go eat dinner at a friend's house but Primus seems like a better use of my time. :) Only thing is, it's supposed to rain all evening and night and it's outdoors, so that kinda sucks, but still worth it I think. Almost all my friends are going too and some people I hung out with all weekend at the festival.
 
Shadowmeister said:
I wish PD Social was bumping like the old days. All of Bluelight actually. :\
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Things have really slowed down lately. I know a lot of people IRL that don't even come here anymore they all jumped ship to reddit because they allowed sourcing and what-not. I wonder why a lot of them haven't come back now that those things are banned over there. Perhaps they've gone to imageboards. Forums in general are growing less and less popular now. It makes me sad.

Also I built a little JavaScript application that quickly creates tags for tagging trip reports.
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Why aren't maintaining the forum itself by now? You know PHP, right? Considering your day job I've always been surprised that they haven't made you admin to keep this place running. The place could really use an upgrade to Xenforo or something more modern. Sadly, as much as I love vBulletin it's pretty much a dead end now that the new company took it over. Version 5 is a disaster and maintaining the older versions requires doing everything yourself these days. I know the code base like the back of my hand still but I wouldn't want to attempt to modernize it. I've worked with Xenforo a lot and it's a good upgrade path and pretty easy to write custom add-ons for. You could incorporate your tag system and split those forums off into a nice database with little effort. If I had the time I'd volunteer to help out but I don't want to commit to it with the possibility that I might be going back on the road for work soon. If I can avoid that I may reconsider though.
 
There's been discussion of upgrading to a new software like Xenforo. We mods also feel it's time for us to keep with the times, so rest assured that any needed changes will be properly discussed and addressed.
 
I can already see people whining about a new look on the forum... "why does everything look so different???" :D
 
Cream Gravy? said:
There's been discussion of upgrading to a new software like Xenforo. We mods also feel it's time for us to keep with the times, so rest assured that any needed changes will be properly discussed and addressed.
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I'm aware but I didn't want to put it out in the open. I know you guys are working on it I'm just surprised you've got a programmer you trust doing mod duty that hasn't jumped into the code yet. I try not to pry or post those things but I feel like this place will slowly continue to die if all this good content isn't presented in a way for people to consume it easier. I know y'all will eventually get it sorted though, it's a big job moving everything over to new software so I know it'll take some time. I wish I had the time to jump in and help like I did a few years ago. :(

Bagseed said:
I can already see people whining about a new look on the forum... "why does everything look so different???" :D
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IME people don't seem to mind when vBulletin boards are converted over to Xenforo. The software is from the same people that wrote this one mostly (minus those of us that moved on 10 years ago) and the upgrade comes with so many new features that people seem to like it. The place will just need a new custom style done for it to match this one which shouldn't be too much trouble.

Every forum I've converted had a few people complain at first but they came around within a couple of days. It's a lot better than moving to any other software. Forums we've converted from vBulletin to things like IPB had _lots_ of complaints roll in because it's such a different software platform. That's been the norm for a long time, there were always people that preferred one over the other. Folks seem to like UBB/vBulletin/Xenforo or they prefer IPB.
 
Yeah the move to Xenforo is actually pretty imminent now, which is cool. At least it's supposed to be. My impression on the reduction in traffic is that, like always, members drop off, but unlike the past, new members are not joining at nearly the same rate, because the mobile experience is so terrible on the current site, and tons of people just use Internet on mobile these days. They might drop by to lurk a bit and then are just like fuck this. Also, it does seem to me that forums are less popular, which does also make me sad. We still get tons of lurkers and people finding the site for answers when they Google something, which is great, but I wish more people would participate again. :\

Man, I went to see Primus last night, that was cool. What a weird band. Got more drunk than I meant to, though and I feel pretty shitty this morning. Why is it so easy to do that with alcohol? Well, I know why, I just wish it wasn't...

My ex still refuses to approve my mortgage refinance... my loan contact has been super cool and keeps prolonging the date when they will cancel my pending loan, but we have a meeting today and I think that's gonna be it. :| I offered her $2000 cash on closing yesterday though so maybe she'll bite at that. I'm just trying to fix my god damn roof! What the fuck...
 
Bagseed said:
I can already see people whining about a new look on the forum... "why does everything look so different???" :D
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Oh they will. When the upgrade goes ahead, we'll see no end of complaints lol
 
Shadowmeister said:
My ex still refuses to approve my mortgage refinance... my loan contact has been super cool and keeps prolonging the date when they will cancel my pending loan, but we have a meeting today and I think that's gonna be it. :| I offered her $2000 cash on closing yesterday though so maybe she'll bite at that. I'm just trying to fix my god damn roof! What the fuck...
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Oh man, so sorry to hear that mate!! :( I hope she sees sense, that's a generous offer from you <3
 
I hope she sees sense too... most likely I'll just lose my rate I got locked in, my $100 appraisal deposit, and not be able to fix my roof until I sue her to get her off my deed. :\ Of course her literally preventing me from getting necessary repairs done only further makes my case for me that she shouldn't get any part of the house.

I CAN'T FUCKING WAIT until I never have to think about this fucking crazy person again!! :X
 
Sounds like she's just being a cunt. Pretty sad that you can't even fix your own house because of an ex-girlfriend, terrible state of affairs that the court system in the states always give women the benefit of the doubt. Every time I've seen a family member or friend deal with the court when a woman was involved they got treated like shit. My father went in there one day in an attempt to stop child support payments from my mother and it took hours before anyone realized he wasn't the one paying and was trying to do her a favor by having them stopped. My friend had a false 50B taken out on him and the first three or four people we talked to assumed he was a wife beater until he finally got one that realized it was already decided she was lying and he was attempting to drop the charges against her.

Concerning the move to Xenforo: I think things will pick up for sure once it is all done. It's a better experience for mobile users and it'll push bluelight back up the search rankings hopefully. That's one of the main reason I'd like to see trip reports moved outside of the forums. Google changed their algorithms for forums ages ago and rank them way down the list now. It has gotten so bad if I want to find content from this website I have to limit my search to just this place. Used to be you could query and it'd always return bluelight within the first few results. Now they rank horrible youtube videos and tons of other websites above this forum. :(

I'm of the opinion mobile kinda ruined the internet too. A lot of folks have never used a forum properly because they never browsed places like this before they got a smartphone. Those that do post are doing so with their thumbs so it's unlikely they'll post anything of substance and if they do it's always short one-liners. It's even worse now that no one sells a proper keyboard on a phone. I really miss my first android because it was a slide phone and I could type pretty fast with it. I don't like typing on anything where I don't have real keys.

I've been jamming on my list of nerd music lately. Always loved this track:

 
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Yeah I hate Internet on mobile too, but unfortunately everyone is catering to it. Also typing on mobile does not facilitate in-depth responses, thus lowering the quality of content on the Internet all the way around.

Yeah it's not because she's the woman in a marriage, it's because my state is what they call a "dower state" (I think that's the term), which means that everyone on a deed to a property has to approve and sign off on selling it or taking out loans on it. The house is not even being considered marital property so it has nothing to do with the marriage. If she was the one still living here and trying to get a refinance, I could do the same thing she's doing. If some unrelated friend was a co-owner, so could they.
 
HeadphonesandLSD said:
I'm of the opinion mobile kinda ruined the internet too. A lot of folks have never used a forum properly because they never browsed places like this before they got a smartphone. Those that do post are doing so with their thumbs so it's unlikely they'll post anything of substance and if they do it's always short one-liners. It's even worse now that no one sells a proper keyboard on a phone. I really miss my first android because it was a slide phone and I could type pretty fast with it. I don't like typing on anything where I don't have real keys.
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I couldn't agree more. Moving from my old keyboard phone to my newer iphone has caused an extreme reduction in my use of my phone for texting. For that matter, I still browse/type mostly on my desktops (I have two lol) and can't imagine trying to do much of any browsing on my phone. It's really telling that things like twitter are so popular; a site that focuses on short sentences lacking substance is one of the most widely used platforms for the dissemination of information? No wonder no one wants to post on forums... that would take too much time and effort and require thought out paragraphs to be created!

I thought it was weird enough that people liked laptops more as time passed... Now phones are the center of the internet. Can't watch porn efficiently, costs much more for data, can't type easily, can't load any real software. I really don't see what people fancy in them. I'll be using desktops as long as they build parts for them still.

I recall a customer asking if desktops weren't made any more when I worked at an electronics store. I told them I had just built a new one myself and that there was a table full of them right behind them. They were genuinely surprised. Let's just say I wrote them off as unintelligent right then and there. I mean, if anything desktops are picking up for gamers, laptops will never supersede them there, and certainly not phones. I'd like to see someone fit a gtx 1080 inside their phone. And a 144hz 1440p monitor for that matter.
 
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Yeah I hate Internet browsing so much that I just won't use the Internet except for functional things like finding the address of a place/directions on my phone, I'll just wait til I get home (I have a laptop and docking station so it works like a 2-monitor desktop setup). I'll go without Bluelight if I'm on vacation or something and don't have my computer with me. It's like pulling teeth trying to do anything not social media-related on phones... and social media is kinda like pulling teeth too. :p
 
well professionals in academia, programming, creative/media will always have the need for large screens and real keyboards. and a lot of (higher) education nowadays is also impossible to obtain without a computer.

I doubt that they will disappear, but the market might get smaller because people seem to use them less often. I browse the web mostly on my tablet, which for me is good enough for most purposes. but yeah using a phone exclusively for internet sucks ime.

fortunately, the desktop version of bl works very nicely on an 8inch screen.
 
Yeah, I just can't imagine trying to do the things I do on a phone. I use my computers as multi-media hubs that store hundreds of GB of music, movies, games, photos. I have all my old college writings stored. Where else would I keep such a digital library? A cloud? I don't own the cloud!

Those air hubs they make now like you can buy from apple are really dope though. That kinda works for having media but using mobile devices more. Still, I enjoy the GUI from a computer better anyways. I have no interest in touch screens.
 
Yeah, I agree with the anti-mobile-browsing conservatism. I actually got my first smartphone in early 2015, I refused vehemently for years to make the switch from my old trashy nokia phone (Not really THE old nokia, it was a ramped up colored screen version with a low pixel built in camera). Finally gave in because everyone here uses WhatsApp for texting (I think that particular app is not very popular in the US?), and friends but specially family were pressuring me to join them in that.

It took me a while to get accustomed to writing in a touch-screen. I still hate it, and agree with X's sentiment on it being a factor in the declining quality of internet content. You type less because it's impractical as fuck, so you also read less because others are typing less too. So your attention span while reading shortens and shortens because it's underused. I actually feel that many of the stimuli we have every day through social media is like an education in ADHD. An explosive amount of info in images and oneliners. Can't see how educating your attention like that could be without really bad consequences, but maybe I'm already an old rag looking to newer generations in contempt ;P

But to get back to the point, yeah, I rarely browse the internet on my mobile and much less type things out. Now get off my lawn !
 
Back in MY day, we didn't have none of these smarty-pants phones. We had landlines, and we liked it that way! Why, I remember as a boy, we didn't have any answering machine! And if we wanted to learn something, we went to the library! Caller ID? More like Satan's Premonitions, if'n you ask me!
 
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