Bear with me here because this gonna be one of those personal blog posts that’s got very little to do with magic mushrooms or spore syringes or any of that kind of jazz, and it’s gonna be a bit stream-of-consciousness because that, my friend, is how the mood is taking me today.

Besides, I personally (and I realise that I may be an outlier here once again) hate it when small businesses use their blog section just a means of churning out bullshit articles to do better in their Google rankings. The worst bit is all these chumps seem to just use AI now. It’s even in this weird little industry, I’m not gonna bother naming names but if you’re feeling curious run some of their blog posts through an AI detector and you’ll be unpleasantly surprised. Can’t even be bothered to write their own words, and that bit is what particularly irks me. Yeah, I understand that “AI” (also it’s not real AI it’s just marketing spin) can be used sometimes for amazing things like pattern recognition to find cancer and stuff, which is great, but for creative things like art and writing it’s just an awful idea. Lazy at the most generous interpretation, devoid of pride at the worst.

In fact I've just this moment had another look at quite a few sites and they all seem to share the exact same products and all of the ones I've just looked at are using AI and fake pictures (there's a hilarious one with three old boys in lab coats), so I guess it's all just dropshipped bullshit from people who don't actually know anything about the hobby. What a bizarre turn of events. 

You’d think you’d have to use AI to get a picture of the world’s richest man doing a Nazi salute but nope, you don’t, not these days, so clearly AI isn’t needed

Now, I’m not saying what I’m writing here is the most beautiful, thought-provoking bit of prose that’s ever been smashed into a keyboard, but what it is is a connection, from me to you. It’s an honest attempt to relay the thoughts that are currently bouncing around the fleshy bit inside the bone prison. When I read this back in a few weeks, months, whenever, I’ll likely have forgotten it and may feel differently, and then I’ll be able to try and work out why that is, and what’s changed in my head. Like I say, it’s important, because it’s a genuine moment. AI isn’t doing that, it’s just grabbing various bits of other people’s writing or art and combining them together in the specific patterns it has been trained on. It is the polar opposite of real, genuine, and honest. Ironically when the AI art generating apps started appearing, I thought it was kinda cool, but what I didn’t realise until I looked into it a bit further was that the whole industry was just wholesale ripping off everyone else who’d ever uploaded their work to the internet. Hyper-Plagiarism for the modern age. Fuuuuuuuck that. Actual human connection seems to be getting less and less and I for one like shopping at market stalls and stuff when I can or eating at independent places because I wanna feel like I've connected with someone, on some level, and that I'm helping out humans not corporations and shareholders (yes I know shareholders are technically human but you get what I mean). 

What I’m getting at, in the longest way possible it seems, is that if you’re just clicking a button to churn out some AI slop, stop and have a think about it. If you’ve used it to touch up a picture in Canva or whatever than yeah, makes sense to me, but if you’re using it for any kind of creative endeavour and trying to pass it off as your own then you’ve substantially missed the point. If you like, you can press the button up at the top that gets a computer to read this entire post and have it say stuff like "AI is terrible and I hate it" like some kind of computer traitor. It's not AI. 

Not AI

So it’s actually been a quite embarrassing almost-six-months since my last blog post, which annoys me quite a lot. I hate it (I’ve probably written this before, god-help-me) when people just stop publishing blogs that I like and I may well be in that category for some of you now. Whoops.

What’s been happening is I’ve started taking medication for my freshly diagnosed ADHD. It’s been a bit of a rocky start, with one psychiatrist putting me on some pills, called Atomoxetine. To cut a (very long) story short, after bouncing off several different medications, they’ve put me on something called Lisdexamfetamine, and it’s mostly good? There’s pros and cons to it all, there have been plenty of times (mostly when going up a dose) where the medication has made me tense and irritable, but to be able to just do things like normal people: it’s a game-changer. This is gonna sound dumb if you’re neurotypical but it comes down to this level of silly shit: some days I couldn’t even get off the couch, and I’d sit there all day getting extremely fucked-off with myself. Other days, yeah, brain’s decided to work fine, we’re good. I’d mostly always be exhausted after a day’s work, not doing manual labour or anything, but just having to try my hardest to react in normal ways and push through the lack of motivation. Wasn’t like that every day, but it was enough of them, and I wasn’t always very good at managing it. It was difficult, and I’ve often sat and wondered “what the actual fuck is wrong with me, because everyone else doesn’t seem to experience this”. Now that I know what’s up, and I’ve got some medicine to help it, and it doesn’t dull my weirdness (that was one of my biggest worries), I can start to work out how the rest of my life looks.

The harder bit has been coming to terms with the diagnosis, not because I am in any way different to how I’ve always been, but because it has changed some of my tolerances for various things. Now that I know that parts of my brain are different, I’m putting less emphasis on forcing myself to do things that I don’t want (or can’t) do. I’ve done 42 years of having to fit into a more neurotypical way of life, always straining at the boundaries of it because it didn’t quite fit the way my mind worked, only to realise now that y’know what, I don’t have to do all these things that don’t suit me, and turns out it’s not rude of me to say so, it’s just me respecting my own boundaries.

A really good resource I've now found is ADHD UK, who I'll let you read about yourself if you feel like it, but the main highlight is that they've got a constantly-updated list of which ADHD clinics have the shortest waiting lists, and they've got information on how to go to your GP and ask them to send you to one of them (they literally have to, it's called "Right To Choose"). This means you wouldn't have to wait years to get some assistance if that's what you need.

Anyway, that’s why it’s been a bit quiet in terms of writing anything more than an Insta or Facebook post, so hopefully now the medication regime has settled down things will go back to normal and I’ll find a decent routine again.

Spore Stuff

So given that I’ve not written anything here since August 2024, there have been a few good things happening that I can write about. Redesign of the store was cool and has allowed me to put everything into nice categories so there isn’t so much sprawl on the front page. This means I can stock some more products in each category without it getting so disorganised. The “everything on one page” thing seems to work when you’ve only got a few products (or only one category of product maybe), but I like how it is now.

I’ve now got a few more exotic spore syringes up for sale, along with the spore swabs. Like the swabs they can be a bit trickier, so probably don’t buy them for your first time on the microscope. I’m up for getting a few other types soon, so keep an eye out!

Finally, some new merch bits are coming to compliment the existing t-shirt and hoodie – gonna have a white t-shirt and maybe a zip up hoodie with a design from @laura_likes_plants on them, and three different colours of beanies with the Punk Ross Orangutan Trading Co logotype just as soon as I manage to get the prototypes to where I’d like them in terms of quality. The beanies will likely be here a bit sooner as I’ve tried a few and I think I’m pretty happy with them, so I’m just finalising the design colours! Exciting times...

This will be on the beanies, probably without the black surround

Anyway, that’s all for now, hope your 2025 has started nicely, all the best.

OTC