Where's my $2000?????

I tried to make a facebook account last year and even after I gave it a real phone number, which is already fucked up and invasive to me, IT ASKED ME FOR A GOD DAMN SELFIE WTF HOW DO I PSEUDONONYMOSLY POST GOD DAMN COMMIE MEMES ON FB??????????

Yeah, exactly. Is intelligence/sentience an emergent property of networks in general or are animals somehow special in some way we can't measure yet? Maybe if I found some (insert relevant drug) I would be able to understand it.

Not as good for flipping through than the physical thing, but http://library.lol/main/FB2BBF826E4D1EE294223194DF81B4B5

I'm probably conflating the Bloombutt terminal with something else, but isn't 90% of the point of these trading machines to have them physically as close to the trading floor as possible to get minimum latency for your robot market disruption? So making it open source doesn't help the little guy unless he can find someone willing to rent him server space in a specific geographical area.

A monad is a self contained unified I JUST ATE YOUR BRAN

Yeah I've foraged. Mostly in the (comparatively) dry-ass areas around Davis, CA, and didn't find more than one or two edible mushrooms per trip, but I got a chance to go out with a friend near Portland and dammmmn they got a lot of mushrooms there.

Oh one cool thing you can try when you forage, if you find a tasty mushroom you can pull up a little of the dirt around its base and try to culture it from the mycelium attached there. Cardboard is a decent, easy to sterilize starter stubstrate, then if you have a variety of wood (or manure or whatever) to play with, you can see if you can find one it likes. Though there's a good chance it'll be mycorrhizal and you won't have a ton of luck, it's still fun to try.

I really wanted to grow lion's mane but it died on me. And if I had the space/time right now I'd probably do king oyster, I think it's a lot tastier than standard oyster but hopefully it'd be easy to grow because it's an oyster.

What got me into all this shit in the first place (besides trying to grow some psilocybes) is a book called "Teaming With Microbes," I don't remember if I ever even finished it but it got me into the whole idea of the soil food web, which got me deep into the fungal symbiosis shit. But if I remember correctly it's a really broad overview aimed at non-scientist gardeners, so it's a good starting point, but some of the scientific detail when they try to explain stuff struck me as off.

For getting more into the soil science, I sat in on a bunch of lectures at UC Davis with Kate Scow, it looks like you can find her intro to soil science lectures here: https://video.ucdavis.edu/tag/tagid/ssc%20100 (Honestly I think the whole course was interesting, but she's the one that covers the soil biology stuff and the other lecturer is covering more the physics/chemistry stuff. Not sure which lectures exactly are the ones about the biology, but it's probably more towards the end of the course.) Her lab does a lot of interesting soil biology shit, though it's more focused on bacteria than fungi.

David Arora has a lot of good stuff on fungal ID, and there's also a paper he wrote floating around somewhere on how cultural context defines what fungi are "poisonous," with a focus on Amanita muscaria and how there are some groups (I don't remember exactly who, somewhere broadly in the "Russia" area) that see it as edible but with detoxification steps, and other groups (i.e. most western sources) label it straight up poison.

I think the basis of most veganism is they can't hear plants scream so they're not squeamish about it. But plants do communicate their trauma, they release gasses when they're injured that tell the other plants (other species, even) "watch the fuck out something is trying to kill me over here" so the surrounding plants can set up defenses. The gasses are also a cry for help to the predatory insects to come and eat the bitches that are nibbling on me. They also release different gaseous "screams" when attacked by different kinds of herbivores (for examples ones that bite off chunks of leaf vs ones that stab and suck). And that's just the aboveground stuff, not any kind of communication that can be happening along the fungal network entwined in their roots. So if there's a chance fungi have a nervous system, there's a chance that the superorganism including the plants connected to them also share that nervous system.

Also is paul stamets like a grifter or something?

Yes. Actually I see it as more of the thing where hippies run up against the reality of capitalism, and also have kids and shit they have to support, so they take the thing they love and exploit it for money. I think he is a True Believer in the power of fungi to heal the world, but you gotta fund that somehow so buy my supplements, please.

Scientifically white truffles are supposed to hit some brain receptors that are like orgasming so I guess that's pretty scientifically delicious. I've only tried truffle oil and I'm not sure which truffle it was made from, it was pretty tasty. And according to some professor I had, the chanterelles in Europe taste different and more delicious than the chanterelles on the US west coast but I never got to test that hypothesis myself.

How do they fuck????? :hillgasm: They have more than two sexes/mating types, some of them are compatible and some of them are incompatible.... I don't even get how it all works. (But mostly they reproduce asexually because who has time for all that mess?)

Annnnd a lot of the endophytes that do that are in the same group as Claviceps purpurea, aka ergot fungus, our friend that makes the ergotamine that we can turn into LSD.

But we (humans) hate them because they can make our cows sick or something.

There's some amount of really basic, "I (plant) don't need shit from you, I'm going to direct my sugar somewhere else... oh really? I'll send my nutrients somewhere else then" going on, but I know there's more complex signalling going on too. For example, there are "cheater" (or "parasitic") mycorrhizae that somehow convince their host to give them sugar without actually giving them anything in return (and can even reroute the carbon and stuff they get to other plants they're connected to). I'll have to read up on all that again. Good question!

Did he make Star Craft references or is that not a fungal ecologist teaching general ecology universal?

Yeah no till has that problem. That's when it's really important to do crop rotation and companion planting and stuff.... Can't do crop rotation if you don't know what was there last year though. Solarization, where you try to kill soil shit by putting a black tarp over the soil and letting it sun bake, might help, but it doesn't solve the problem of you have a lot of nice rotting organic matter in there, and some of it might have some shit that wants to eat live plants too. People doing no till on an industrial scale can do stuff like use massive machines to steam the soil. But that kind of feels like a solving one problem by creating another one kind of thing to me.

Community garden plots are cesspools, though. You find out what the real strong varieties are........

When our species is evolved enough maybe we can figure that out...........

Honestly I am really annoyed by Big Vegan's (PETA's?) "anti-speciesist" campaign because deciding that animal species are worthy of protecting but plant and other species aren't is the most speciest thing I can think of. And just like how in general with agriculture the pigs get fed high calorie garbage that is probably not their preferred or natural diet, we grow plants and mushrooms on what is most convenient to us, not what is most healthy and enjoyable for them. Like you think an oyster mushroom really wants to be grown in just sawdust, or just straw?? Those bitches make so many enzymes!! They love eating everything!!!

And on a more philosophical note, life is pain. So why wouldn't raising animals in an environment where they don't have to worry about where their next meal's coming from, where we've controlled the environment to avoid triggering as much predator panic as possible, and treat/eliminate their diseases, then kill them before they reach the pain of old age, be considered humane? Especially species we've domesticated to the point where they aren't very well adapted to the "wild" anymore (so would go extinct without being kept by us). Yes of course factory farms are terrible and disgusting........

I don't know! But the fact that there are desert mushrooms blows my mind

Ooooh Chaetomium. I had so many Chaetomium in my collection. (I was trying to isolate endophytic fungi from plant roots.)

Is the internet intelligent? I see symbiotic fungi as something more analogous to the wires of a network, and the fungi along with the plants they're networking are superorganisms. Are superorganisms intelligent?

I can geek out reading journal articles all day. I tend to find a few reviews on topics that are interesting, then find the papers cited in the reviews that sound the most interesting, then find out what authors tend to put out interesting stuff regularly and e-stalk them.

Medical mycology is gross, though. (coming from someone that took plant anatomy for their required undergrad anatomy course because they didn't want to dissect a cute mammal)