I'm referring to biosynthesis meaning using regular enzymes. MAO and ALDH (aldehyde dehydrogenase) play a role here. The 'precursors' are common dietary things which contrasts something like methylamine or mdp2p.
As I see I'm sorry I misunderstood what you were getting at. I'm really in love with chemistry but my lack of access to a lab growing up (and now) has meant it was always just out of reach. If I could go back in time I would have focused more on learning that so I could get access to a proper lab instead of spending my time doing CS.
I thought computer science was going to change the world for the better and I devoted most of my time from age 14 into contributing to the field. But it was weaponized and turned against the population. All the big players we were fighting against ended up owning and controlling things like Linux. Now they've pretty much seized full control and I don't see regular people having access to things like a real PC in the near future. It's too dangerous to the powers that be. This is why the new batch of "coders" barely know anything about how a computer works. To them it's a black box.
I wasn't part of the hive when it was active but from what I've seen the discussion was primarily focused on standard lab synthesis. Not so much on biosynthesis. Shulgin did mention this briefly in TiHKAL under the DMT section but since then improved methods have been developed.
I caught the tail end of the hive and mostly lurked. A lot of stuff was over my head back then but I learned a lot. Discussion was mostly focused on basics and synths for common substances (two in particular). Some more exotic stuff got discussed but the community was mostly focused on buying supplies from the owner and discussing what they did with those supplies. I wish the rule here would change so we could talk about this more openly. I'm trying to be careful and not break the rule right now. I'm no expert but I know enough to get in trouble and have done some simply stuff in the past I learned from Hive and elsewhere.
I'm really sad children (and the general population) don't have access to the chemistry kits they used to sell in the 1950s. I wish I was born earlier so I could have lived through times when people allowed children to learn skills like that before high school and the high school courses were more advanced. Getting access to a simple lab is now pretty much impossible and the stuff to put in the glassware is even harder in a lot of cases. I hate that everything is so locked down now.
It's obvious this was done on purpose to dumb down the population because I see the same thing happening in all fields of study these days.
During discussion about endogenous DMT production we never discussed introducing other amines beyond dimethylamine (choline), piperidine (lysine) and pyrrolidine (arginine). The toxicity of propylamine, ethylamine and isopropylamine might be an issue though, I don't know.
My grandfather once made a comment about drug users shortly before he died: "Things are so crazy now they'll figure out how to get high off grass". He was disappointed when I told him people had already figured that out years ago.
Then there is the whole meditation things. I've never done it myself but I believe that people that really mastered the art were managing to control their bodies to the point where they could produce certain substances through thought (or lack of thought) alone. I feel like this is what induced them to see visions and achieve "nirvana". I'm pretty sure it's what the Buddha and few of his followers managed to do. Along with various "prophets" from other areas and times. The issue is when they attempt to teach others how to do it they end up making cults of personality. Which go on to form rituals and cultural groups around what they said. The words get twisted over the years and you end up with large portions of the population that don't practice what they really taught, worship them like Gods instead of trying to achieve that state themselves and in time this leads to wars and many other bad things.
I've personally been attempting to meditate more often and I've very rarely gotten something profound from it. But I'm not there yet. I have considered trying the hermit thing and doing the whole eating nothing but pine needles/nuts/etc and sitting under trees in the woods for weeks at a time. I've been fasting from time to time as well. But my social ties do not make this possible. I don't want to abandon my family. As long as they're alive I can't focus on this as much as I want to.
But I am a firm believer that the various substances like DMT, LSD, psilocybe, cactus and all the others we've made from them are simply short cuts for a state you can obtain on your own through will/thought/meditation. I think that's why people get dysphoria from taking the short cuts. They're not mentally prepared for it. Even I've gotten that often despite dabbling with so many things over the years. A lot of people never attempt taking the short cuts while alone. Which I feel is required to really go deep on them and make full use of the short cut they provide.
It's the person reading my post I'm more concerned about. Explaining - with appropriate disclaimer & precautions - how to DIY DMT using items from a supermarket (with a pharmacy section) is one thing, but someone unintentionally tripping for days is another. Even though I'll have explicitly highlighted how to stop the potentiation effect in the event of unexpected potency.
I know what you mean. I try to be truthful and open with information. I feel information should be free and not locked away behind some digital wall or exclusive library. But indeed there is a lot of information that could be very harmful if freely talked about around people that aren't prepared for it or wouldn't respect and heed warnings. Whenever I do talk about such things I try to warn people but they rarely heed those warnings IME.
I was very hopeful that free access to information with the internet would lead us into a new renaissance. But I fear we're entering another dark age.
I can relate. Maybe the substances are temporarily mitigating something specific which plays a key role in anxiety? The main candidate here would be adrenaline which is involved in the "fight-or-flight response". The most popular items that people self-medicate with for this are alcohol, nicotine, cannabis and benzodiazepines...but all recreational drugs are implicated both directly & indirectly. Usually you'd find an overactive stress response (see HPA axis) as the key underlying root cause so the idea would be to address this directly. The implication would be reduced social anxiety or at least a
position where you're better placed to overcome it within minutes. Anyway, I digress.
I self medicate with nicotine for sure. Cannabis not so much anymore because it puts me into a bad headspace. But I still smoke from time to time. As I said above I've been trying to obtain those states without the social anxiety while sober. The problem with most of these drugs is you become addicted and dependent on them easily. Benzos are amazing if you respect them and use them as needed for situations you normally couldn't handle. But it easily turns into an everyday thing and turns you into a zombie that can't remember yesterday. For me opioids were probably the best substance for pushing through that shyness. But we all know where a daily opioid habit ends up and it's horrible once you're stuck on them.
I still remember the dial-up sound. Kids these days just don't know what it was like...
Don't get me started on dial-up. I worked for almost 15 years on a shitty 14kbps-28kbps (on a good day) connection. When it rained our old phone line would sometimes get so much static on it that you couldn't talk over it and the modem couldn't connect. I got broadband at home over a decade after 99% of people and I had to pay a lot of money for it. Then the cable company jacked up the price and the service was down all of the time. Thankfully, now I have a fiber line which is something I never thought I'd have access to. The Government ran it out here in the boonies for free. I'm trying to enjoy it as much as I can before it gets used for the real purpose they ran it everywhere (spying on the population with flock cameras and such).
I feel so spoiled now. Something that used to take me days to download now takes seconds. Doing my work over dial up all those years was very frustrating and horrible. Sometimes it'd take me hours just to sync with the CVS for projects I worked on with other people.
I have a copy of windows XP streamlined edition on CD somewhere. I didn't use linux much. My goto was always C with inline assembly where necessary.
I do not use Linux anymore aside from one computer I still have running it for gaming. I used to strip down XP myself. These days my only Windows machine is running a highly modified Windows 7. It's in an arcade cabinet I built. Linux is so bad now that you'd have to fork the kernel itself to save it along with re-writing/patching most of lower userspace. I would attempt it if I had a team behind me but there is no way one person could tackle that. We now have thousands of distros that are all the same. Spyware bundled right into userspace.
I mostly work on two of the BSDs these days. One of which I do not care for that much anymore before it's importing a lot of stuff from Linux. The other is a great project but you aren't going to be playing games or running wine on it. But as far as my day-to-day work (mostly living in emacs) it's perfect. A sane design in userspace, the kernel is small and I can understand and contribute to it and it's led by a person that doesn't put up with bullshit. It's my main OS on most of my servers and workstations now.
I've also been getting the Plan 9 forks lately. I find it better than modern UNIX because they tried to fix most of the problems in UNIX. Piping data to and from applications works much better. But it's really picky about hardware and it's probably impossible to port a modern web browser to it. The community around it is elitist as well so it's hard to break into it for newbies.
I am very much a fan of C compared to the other stuff in common use now. C++ is a train wreck and I despise Rust for many reason I won't go into now because it'd be another novel. My ideal OS would be a microkernel where you could pipe data between applications like Plan 9/UNIX but do it with more than just text.
The UI and userspace applications would be written in something like lisp, lua or another easy scripting language so anyone could hack on it and you could change anything in userspace without rebooting the system. You'd be able to hook in anywhere you wanted. Basically, something like emacs but for the entire OS userspace/GUI itself. As much as I love emacs it's a massive security exploit waiting to happen and lately I've been trying to move away from it and attempting to go back to using multiple applications for different stuff. But I find myself coming back to emacs because it does a lot of things better (I use it to read books, pdf files and many other things). I love being able to write a bit of lisp and create something in a few lines of code. I like being able to drive everything with keyboard commands. It has stuck around this long for good reason.
It's shameful we have this really powerful computers at home now but they're running slower than systems I had in 1999 because modern developers got taught so many bad habits and lies.
Do you like writing asm for non-x86? I was really into hacking on m68k stuff with asm for years. Mostly Sega Genesis games and things like that. I hate that modern developers do not consider portability at all. They also think it's acceptable to eat 16+GB of RAM at compile time and pull dependencies from all over the internet that can't be audited properly. There is so much code with stuff like browsers and the linux kernel that it's impossible to understand the entire system now. We could do so much better.
I've been playing with
TRON OS a lot lately. BTRON speficially. They released the source code but most of the documentation isn't in English. It's a really amazing OS and we'd all be probably running it today if Microsoft and the US Government didn't crush it in the 1980s. They placed sanctions on Japan for attempting to convert to it and get away from DOS/Windows in the late 1980s. The TRON OS is amazing because it was built from the ground up to allow all TRON OS devices communiate with each other. Japan was planning to run everything in the country using it (desktops, phones, tvs, even the train network). But the American tech companies like IBM and Microsoft got it shut down and plunged Japan's economy to stop it. Really interesting OS and story you should check it out if you don't already know about it.
I put together an opioid combo which uses zero illicit substances, it's partly discussed
on this thread. Think codeine without withdrawals, tolerance or other issues. A similar type of combo is possible for benzodiazepines.
I'll check out the thread thanks. If I had a proper lab I'd be playing with opioids all of the time for sure. I've thought up some new ones myself (which probably wouldn't be viable). If I had access to pure forms of certain opioids I would really like to combine them in ratios to test how addicts would respond to them. A mix that provided a good rush but had long legs.
I'm really interested in opium in general. It's an amazing plant and I feel like it was put here for us to use sparingly when in horrible pain. I have considered growing some in my garden because I love the flowers but I was afraid it would draw attention to me. I have yet to smoke proper opium with the old method. I am really interested in trying it to see how it compares to tea. One of the most amazing things about opium is when you consume it whole it's self limiting due to the theabaine.
We're way off topic and it might be bothering other people. Would you like to continue this discussion via PM or perhaps in another thread? Let me know. Good talking to you.
