Hackers, Mason Jars, and the Psychedelic Science of DIY Shrooms | Hacker News Reader

Hackers, Mason Jars, and the Psychedelic Science of DIY Shrooms

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73 pointsjelliclesfarm17 comments

Neat article, but inaccurate.

>...tailored to one species in particular, the most potent and easiest to cultivate: Psilocybe cubensis.

Wrong re:potency. cubes are ~50% the strength of the heavy hitters like p.azuresens & p.cyanescens (sp). But right about cultivation: the strength gains are negated by their extremely fickle fruiting habits. People grow cubes because they fruit in abundance indoors.

Mason jars are a thing of the past as well. r/unclebens really changed the game in the last few years. $2 ready rice is an off-the-shelf version of the DIY jar: a damp, nutritious, industrially sterilized colonization environment.

Used shroomery + PF tek in college, it cost around $100 and half was on a pressure cooker for sterilizing jars. For someone who struggled with depression at the time, it broke through in ways that SSRIs failed to. It also was my gateway into non-psychedlic mycology: growing mushrooms is fun, and I love cooking with them now.

Careful; shrooms are fun and rewarding just as a hobby, and may be a gateway drug leading to pressure canning your own foods, and / or having a pet slime mold.

I can vouch for this. I recently had a wonderful experience spanning a few months cultivating Psylocybe cubensis by salvaging spores from a bag of dried shrooms (spore prints are as illegal as the shrooms themselves here and really hard to come by). Coming from a physics background and never really having done work on living things it was almost magical watching the spores germinate on agar plates, transfering healthy mycelium away from contamination onto new clean plates, colonizing grain with the resulting mycelium and in the end fruiting several healthy flushes in a small plastic container in my cupboard. You really just need a kitchen and some commonly available groceries. I'm now cloning store-bought edible mushrooms and planning to grow enough for my own dinners throughout the warmer season. It's a very rewarding hobby.

I miss the days when some 15 year old could just start a website for mischievous/conversational interests and it could go on to become popular. If you tried to start anything like that today you would be de-listed from google search engine, kicked off AWS, and black listed from ad revenue.

Well, I learned everything I needed to know about mushroom growing over the past two years from what sounds like a 16 year old on YT. It doesn’t seem like direct ad revenue or listing is the goal for these kids. It’s only about sharing knowledge and passion. The other more serious ones make money by making deals directly with the companies who’s products they show off, without YT’s participation.

Not that I disagree - it just seems to me that video is the medium of today’s internet.

Agreed – the info is readily available, but to the GP's point, it's fighting an uphill battle against soft censorship. Subreddits have to tread carefully to avoid bans, and YT videos are frequently put behind login walls for content reasons.

> It’s only about sharing knowledge and passion.

This is what made Paul Stamets such an icon before the age of YouTube.

A lot of people nowadays just inject their spores into ready-made bags of rice such as Uncle Ben's so they can skip most of the sterilization process. Surprised the article didn't mention it.

I recommend this hobby to the neurotic, depressed and phobic. A psilocybin trip isn't always pleasant, and any kind of gardening takes time and effort, but the risks are relatively low (comparable to antidepressants, etc.?) and the potential rewards in terms of inner peace are high.

It's also a blast to watch 'em pop up, the rapid endgame of a drama that intensifies over weeks.

As I understand it, if you don't desiccate them the legal risks are quite low. Given their benefits it's a crying shame that you can't buy these over the counter at the local store. This is so much less a substance of abuse than so many of the other things they sell.

Interesting. Why is it riskier when you desiccate them, assuming you aren't selling them either way.

IANAL. As I understand it the possession of dried shrooms is much less ambiguously illegal than fresh shrooms. It varies widely between states. In mine a rare prosecution for possession of fresh shrooms failed due to that ambiguity.

https://www.inverse.com/article/7772-magic-mushrooms-are-leg...

In most jurisdictions in the US, cultivated [psychoactive] mushrooms of any form are illegal. In some jurisdictions, spores are legal for microscopy only, but as soon as you cultivate them the organic mass becomes illegal.

I would have assumed the opposite.

The pigs love to stick their thumb on the scale so that they can hit you with a more severe charge, so I'm sure they'd love it if your shrooms weigh 10x because of the water weight.

As a Cluster Headache sufferer I would like to remind everybody this is the only cure. https://clusterbusters.org/

What's the current best resource for this? Long ago it was pressure cookers and mason jars and even an aquarium! Is there a more streamlined simpler process now?

r/unclebens for sure

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