A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I really hate the sentiment that you must be under the influence of something to reach a certain level of creativity. Some artists have found success with this and that's fine, but it is not a requirement. Not even for the most surreal and otherworldly art.
Also there are other ways to poke that side of brain. Most of the good abstract art I write was under sleep derivation.
Then again, I mainly write code, but it was still up to interpretation what that snippet is supposed to do.
I write my best when I’m depressed. I’m okay with finding alternative routes for that, though weed isn’t one of them. I find weed helps me when I’m doing visual art, but when writing? Weed practically renders me incapable.
I now understand why writers’ usual substances of choice are alcohol and caffeine.
Redbull and vodka for devs XD.
Except alcohol, that doesn't make pretty code.
There is a short time when you are drunk enough to be direct and witouth inhibition and boosted enough I guess. Have to live on the edge.
Relevant xkcd.
I noticed the same, when tired my brain take shortcuts and is far better at fast solving, but I lack the long view in this state. Brains are amazingly interesting.
also shakespeare is incredibly specific. the example I like to use is the famous
"Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ears!"
Which takes place in a crowded marketplace.
Count the syllables: 1 (friends), 2, (romans), 3 (countrymen), 4 (lend me your ears)
it's a line in which the meter matches the intent - attracting attention in a big group.
Bill will also often add an eleventh unstressed syllable to his dialogue lines if he wants a character to seem vulnerable or weak, indicating they have fallen off meter because of their inner thoughts
very occasionally he does an eleventh STRESSED syllable when a character is being especially dominating and murderous.
The other famous examples is when a peasant or very low status character speaks, it won't be in verse at all, but plain prose.
Dépend, if you are ADHD canabis is an amazing way to increase the symptom and trigger an hyperfocus while going at 200% on all directions, great for a créativity boost. Whole reducing canabis and increasing active plant like caféine help reduce the symptom and make it easy to speak to neuro-typical. May be he had ADD or ADHD and used this to trigger what was called creative transe. My bad I missed the no requirement part. Yeah I join you on the sentiments, but I am not convinced artist need drug to create, like you are.
THC reacts strangely with my ADHD, It triggers some sort of dysphoria where I end up frustrated and angry that my brain/body isnt acting the way I want it to respond .
I have had different experiences with smoking (which I dropped entirely) vs gummies. Gummies (any edible really) tend to take effect very slowly over the course of an hour and the high is much more calm than any joint I ever smoked. It lends itself well to creative sessions : as long as I'm able to get started, I don't stop easily.
Interesting that the effects are so different for each brain. When smoking I am not able to filter as well, I dunno of the filtering part slow or the idea part of my brain go faster. It make me have pint of vue different of mine on subjects. Which is interesting.
For me it opens up possibilities that my sober brain doesn't consider because my sober brain filters and edits things based on assumptions. So i sometimes miss details when sober because my subconscious brain dismissed those details as unimportant. Most of the time, that filtering process is a positive part of decision-making. I should be ignoring certain variables because knowledge and experience identified those details as a waste of time. However, on weed, i consider things i wouldn't have considered because that filtering process is lessened. So most of my stoned thoughts are worthless, but every once in a while i realize something that i was missing because my brain was ignoring that important detail when sober. It's great when I haven't been able to figure out that day's Wordle....or i realize why someone was pissed at me.
so you're saying i should stop drinking coffee when I wake up and instead just smoke a bowl? I feel like I'm not as creative as I used to be, and my drug of choice has been coffee for the past 15 years...
Prior to transitioning I always said the two substances by brain required to function were cannabis and either caffeine or adderal, stimulant+weed kept me functioning tolerably even when I really didn't feel like it. Now estradiol is on the list too lol
Hemp was very common back then for many uses. Cannabis does not automatically mean THC.
It does mean that though, even low potency stuff like the plants they grow specifically to make rope still have varying levels of cannabinoids in them including THC, also that's literally the only reason to bother smoking it, might as well pack a bowl with hay otherwise
Well, in the context of a clay pipe, the evidence suggest mary Jane, not hemp cloth.
Ohhh pipe not plumbing pipe
Ignoramus here: what's the difference?
The cannabis plant when left to itself doesn't create much THC (which is what gets you high), but it is very useful for making rope and clothing, as well as oil and other products. Only when you make sure that you only have female plants (and take care of them in a certain way) do they produce lots of THC.
So just because the plant is growing somewhere doesn't mean that someone is smoking it.
The active drug part of the plant is the resin found at the flowers of the female hemp plant, created during pollination season. There is neglible amounts of THC in the rest of the plant, as in basically nothing. So you would only get high if you smoked that particular part of the plant, not the rest. So sailors could have saved on tobacco by using the dried leaves of the harvested hemp plants they imported for rope, but it wouldn't have made them stoned in the slightest.
Yes but it was found in clay pipes. I.e. smoking pipes. For whatever reason it was being smoked there.
Your sailor analogy is a possible explanation, but it doesn't make as much sense in a home or domestic setting.
It might not have gotten them as high as modern weed but it definitely still would have worked, they're not gonna smoke it for no reason
Yeah it has been suggested it was used for medicinal purposes as early as 1 BCE. I have a feeling they’d have discovered how to make it stronger in the ensuing 1500 years.
So he was smoking hemp?
It was in a pipe though?
Sorry, I read it as plumbing pipe for some reason.
I always hated Shakespeare, mostly because of how it’s taught.
Imagine reading about Quinten Tarantino in the future, they study his methods, his dialogue and cinematography, but they hand you his screenplays and ask you to analyze them. Not once actually showing you one of his movies.
In high school they tried to make me read all that nonsense and I had no idea what any of it meant. As an adult i saw a play as it was meant, and it gave me much more context and visual understanding. I still don’t get why he wrote like that, I prefer clear language over poetry, but I at least appreciated it way more than i did as a kid being forced to read
Reading Shakespeare is torture. That is why we make actors do it for us.
It was written in prose so it could be memorized and to hide injendos and jokes.
Do you think the future teachers will have a section dedicated to feet in Tarantino movies??? 🤨
Drugs were always very common through all the history, Cannabis was used until the 20th century as "tobaco for the poor", apart of Cannabis also funghi and other psycho active plants known in Europe in the middle age and before, eg by artists as inspiration.
Cannabis was used until the 20th century as “tobaco for the poor”
No, it wasn't.
Here's the paper for anyone interested. TLDR: In 2001 cocain residue was found alongside tobacco and hemp residue. There were also refrences to drugs in art and poems that the author supposes are cocain and cannabis. Fastwarward to 2023 when traces of cocain THC & CBD were found in bones from Milan. Today the author of the 2001 study is using the 2023 results to support his findings. As far as I can tell no one else has tried to test the pipe fragments.
Wait, how can that be right? Shakespeare had access to coca leaves and was smoking them? I know it's not literally impossible but it seems unlikely...
Francis Thackeray, in his 2025 article, suggests Sir Francis Drake could have acquired it when sailing in the area. Since traces of it were also discovered in 1600s Milan its possible that the spanish were circulating it. This 2024 study discusses how the Spanish at least knew of it as early as 1499.
Yeah before people in America made a big stink about it and said it'lll turn you crazy or into a mexican, or whatever racist unscientific garbage excuse they made to start a moral panic to make it illegal, people smoked or otherwise consumed cannabis. It was just normal. The same way people consume drugs like coffee today, yes coffee is a drug.
It was the blacks getting the white women high that did it
As a former poet, this is 10000% accurate
i'm not what you'd call a poet, i handle the instruments, but i have this thing where for example the word for cat gets stuck between your brain and your tongue so you say claws cuddler or something like that (sorry, coffee is brewing you don't get a good one yet) and when a good one pops out you get good poetry. i blame the drugs.
Weed ---> iambic pentameter
Pot isn't like opium. Most people can use pot occasionally and be sober most of the time, it's probably less common for someone to become a pothead than for a drinker to become dependant on booze
Many people in all walks of life and all social statuses enjoy getting stoned occasionally
How many millions of brilliant people have been executed over the drug war? Depending on how you classify "drug war" (like the wars over opium, or chocolate for that matter), they have been murdering people over this for centuries (whether to push or pull).
... and they still do today. It's an abomination, our modern version of the witch hunt.