Erowid Crew Blog

Trying New Spot Plate Methods

We’ve been trying to come up with better ways to do and photograph the spot plate reagent field tests for the variety of chemicals. Both the ones sold as ecstasy/molly and the wide variety of substances and pharmaceuticals that people send in for analysis.

The solid ceramic spot plate we’ve been using for the last 15 years makes it so the colors are hard to see in darker reactions.

So we’ve been hunting down translucent glass plates but haven’t found many. We would like one that we can use AND recommend to Erowid visitors around the world they can buy for a reasonable price.

Here are some photos comparing the translucent spot plate with the opaque one.

Old spot plate:

lightbox test — A drop of marquis reagent on some random aminated oxygenated phenethylamine-ish chemical.

Perhaps the most interesting is that all three of these color spots are Marquis + the same chemical. The right hand spot is the oldest (over an hour since drop), the left one is maybe 30+ minutes, and the top middle one was dropped within a minute. This chemical starts off as a grey purple, to a very dark nice blue purple, then goes to a dark blue, then winds up in this greenish gray color.

Main Extracts 27 Sprint Final Night: Snacks, Vitamins, Calcium Carbonate, and an Anxiolytic

All praise to a finger of Laphroaig 10.

Served with a some B-vitamins, a couple grams of amino acids, boysenberry-flavored calcium carbonate, and chunks of two flavors of Strong and Kind bars: Jalapeno and Mustard.

Blood Sugar, Acid, and Stress Moderators

The last few days of getting the newsletter ready for the printer are always stressful. One develops coping strategies.

Friday Night Bug Fixing and Random Noodling

I spent a pleasant few hours this evening going through my to do list and clearing out easy micro bugs, including weird little issues in the donations area that only affect a small number of folks.

Fire updated the donations area for the higher level donations to make sure that Solve Et Elucido is showing up properly. We’re very happy with Vibrata’s artistic play on the Erowid logo and really like the small 12×12 inch (30x30cm) size.

We know it’s out of the price range of most of our supporters, but one of the curious things about trying to fundraise for a non-profit is the need to have items available at a number of levels. So, along with creating a new Drug Geek shirt and working on stickers for normal supporters, we have to work on developing unique items that can be available only to people able to donate hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Today I also fixed a couple of small issues in the Experience Vaults that was causing certain types of reports marked for Admin Attention to get lost because they fell out of the review process into a bucket that was rarely looked at by the team, instead of having reports highlighted.

The Erowid team has used a lot of different communication methods for internal and external info over the years, but we’ve never had a public crew blog. We’ve had a dozen wikis, a number of blogs, CRM ticketing systems, email, forums, Twitter, plain text, HTML, absurdly complicated database systems, IRC, other chat formats, posting through other organization’s publications and systems, interviews, and conferences.

The plan is to use this crew blog as a random mix of items that will provide additional public visibility of what it is we’re working on. It is likely to be extremely boring, mixed with rants, system updates, and commentary about anything the main Erowid crew decides to post.

We will, as always, try to keep the tone respectful and upbeat, but most of us can’t actually contain our disdain for people, organizations, and publications that lie publicly. Personal attacks are off limits except for critiques of top-tier public officials who abuse their bullypulpits.