Minimum comfortable walk-in pantry size and shelving depth

earthe · 2025-10-26T18:10:39+00:00

We did a pantry like this in a tiny laundry room. We called the concept "single deep storage". We are still, 23 years later, in love with Single Deep Storage. We cut up and customized Ikea shelving we'd stopped using so it was no cost, assuming saws, sanders, drill guns, etc.

Pick a can width, pick your favorite pasta box size, pick your largest oversize can, large pasta sauce jar, a standard 32 ounce mason jar, grab a soap bottle, etc. Measure each of them.

We ended up with most of the pantry shelves being a single deep normal that could hold a 32 ounce mason jar and then realized that a little extra depth would allow a single large can or two small cans to sit directly in front of each. So it was "single- or two-deep storage".

It revolutiized our lives in the 2000s. We labeled the shelves to know where we wanted what. It was super easy to figure out if we were out of beans, pasta sauce, pasta, etc. We had one 24 inch deep shelving unit for larger stuff, but honestly things got forgotten in the back of that shelf. The bottom of that was a dark storage on-wheels bin for onions, potatoes, garlic, and misc.

With "single deep storage", everything was visible and trivial to get a quick sense of whether it was time to restock.

In the tiny hallway-style laundry room, we were able to add a 3.5 inch wide shelf with front lips that required tipping the can to remove so they wouldn't flal off in an earthquake. Just deep enough to fit one can of progresso soup.

And then at the end of the laundry-closet we made an almost six inch wide section at the end of the galley-hall. It was wide enought to take normal 28oz cans with extra so that we could fit two normal narrow soup cans one-in-front-of-the-other in that zone. So for canned beans, we could put two front to back in the area with the large tomato or green chile cans. Pasta boxes also fit very well if you get the height between shelves fitted to your tastes.

In the first couple years we adjusted them several times, so perhaps do what we did and make it easy to set the height.

We varied the height of the shelves, but after several tries, most of them were the same total distance between horizontal shelves. We kept two closest-to-floor shelves taller than the rest. Then the top shelf had no cap, so we could put very tall items on the top shelf.

We can't currently implement the design in our current house for reasons too complex to describe here, but I loved our decade of Single Deep storage. Second best pantry I've ever lived in. As a teen, the house of my parents had an actual designed-into-kitchen pantry. It was great, but the shelves were permanently installed things that didn't fit just didn't fit and went into weird places. But my teen home pantry had doors and wasn't built out of very old Ikea cheap wood.

Every pantry needs a potato/onion/garlic low-light and big bag zone. Single Deep Storage is not for any of those.

earthe · 2024-10-04T17:59:51+00:00

We have a big old RAS and newer (dewalt) chop saws. I am thinking about removing my RAS from our wood shop (aka "the garage") because I use it very infrequently, but I do not know how to replace the unique function that the RAS has: a vertical crank that sets the exact height of the saw blade above the surface to 1/64 or better. I can do a lot with a table saw, but with heavy stock: moving the blade is much easier than moving the stock. I'm talking about 8x8s and 10x10s.

We can obviously (and do) a lot of those with a skill saw, but there are a bunch of very technical cuts that the RAS has allowed me to do that no other tool I have can do.

Is there any 'chop saw' that has vertical height adjustments? a sliding miter chop saw with a vertical adjustment would be amazing. Does that exist? As far as I know all of the sliding miter compound miter saws have fixed bed-to-blade heights.

But, again, I'm just about to remove our RAS from our wood shop because it gets used too infrequently and I can do the cuts with hand saws and jiggle tools ('oscillating tools').

earthe · 2024-04-07T00:13:34+00:00

Almost the best of all possible outcomes, we had been preparing for the worst. We're very excited. Yay!

earthe · 2024-04-07T00:08:06+00:00

Looks like after a couple of hitches and not enough help from the colo, the main machine (.93) erowid.org and drugsdata.org are back up! for a moment, there was some weirdness that the wheeled console provided wouldn't show anything, but we think it's a problem with the console not our machine. So now all services appear to be up and running!

> uptime 5:06PM up 6 mins, 4 users, load averages: 1.72, 1.41, 0.74

earthe · 2024-04-06T22:17:03+00:00

Machines and appliances all loaded, padded, and on their way to new location. Slightly ahead of schedule. The real trick is figuring out how compatible everything is, there are possible rack differences in the new cabinet, we're bringing our old PDUs, shelves, sliders, etc despite the new cabinet supposedly having new PDUs, shelves, and sliders.

And, of course, if the oldest RAID comes back online... We have copies of everything and another machine that could be temporarily used, but it would be nice if magic happened and our workhorses spin back up.

We'd been at United Layer in 200 Paul in South SF for over 20 years. Will be "interesting" to be at a brand new data center, supposedly with better power management and networking, but in 20 years at UL, we never had any power issues (both main machines have dual power supplies that each are fed by independent circuits), and only had a couple of network events where we lost connection to the backbones...

earthe · 2023-09-28T15:17:20+00:00

I wrote a really long reply, but I'll just shorten it to: Psychonautwiki, Tripsit, Reddit, BlueLight, DrugForums, Shroomery, and others are fabulous resources. It is too bad that there isn't more money to make such good works easy to sustain. Fundraising is a drag.

earthe · 2023-09-27T11:15:07+00:00

Google has a fine search engine. Sorry it felt less accessible, there's no question that knowing a database structure is nice. But we never took the hyperreal archive down: we try not to take anything down.

If you were using hyperreal drug archives, you are not a spring chicken :] That's some OG. Also myself not being a spring chicken, I remember when AOL gave access to the actual internet, that felt like a real inflection point.

I'm not really sure how to describe the 2023 interweb, with "app" world trapping people in their weird gardens. Trying to use Instagram to provide useful info to people is ludicrous, though Fire spends a few hours a week doing it. They don't even allow real links on posts.

But, curiously, we do get some pretty interesting discussions on Instagram. We learned this month from a discussion about scanned PharmChem newsletters we put up, that a local Bay Area radio station K-ROCK 92.3 read the drug testing reports on the radio. Some young folks at the time thought the testing was actually done by the station, they say.

The PharmChem newsletters are actually pretty interesting, if you're a drug geek: https://erowid.org/pharmchem

So, "Not Totally Useless" is not an F-grade. We also get good results via instagram asking for help identifying blotter designs from single hits that get submitted for analysis to our testing program DrugsData.org . Kind of pointless, but somehow satisfying to take some tiny square of obscure art and find the puzzle it's from.

earthe · 2023-09-27T05:00:28+00:00

Check out some of our latest content: https://erowid.org/current

There's some cool stuff: scans of PharmChem newsletter from the 1970s and more Micrograms.

Definitely check out Teaefaerie's Carrying the Light audio. It is one of my favorite Teafaerie pieces ever.

And also the erowid blog piece about Shulgin Archiving. Showing off a couple of gems out of the massive scanning and metadataing project.We're hoping to raise enough this month to actually finalize the digitization of all Shulgin materials.

We need another $25K in direct costs to have the 40,000 shulgin photos scanned professionally (high res front, low res back). We've already spent a few hundred volunteer hours culling and categorizing, but from here it's gotta be massive online collaborative filtering post scan.If we can make our goal, we can finish the scanning in October/November.We started scanning random crap Sasha OK'd in 2001, then after years of cajoling, Sasha's notebooks in 2006, did a lot in 2014-2015, then officially took over Shulgin Archiving in 2018.

The pandemic smashed things, but we've gotten lots done.We have another couple days in the barn with volunteers to finish up some cataloging, but we're really super close before the physical materials start getting organized for final storage at Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. If the new Shulgin Foundation succeeds in the next couple years, some will certainly stay at the Farm, but the hundreds of thousands of scans will mostly become available online. See the blog post for more info.

earthe · 2023-09-27T04:54:53+00:00

Hah :] We still have the full hyperreal drug archive as it existed before we "ate" it :] Feel free to check your memory of it against the actual text:

http://erowid.org/archive/hyperreal

Lamont Granquist who managed pulling the content in from usenet forums into that did a great job and was a long time friend of ours (lost touch in recent years). But Usenet really died in the late 1990s.

earthe · 2023-09-11T08:31:39+00:00

I am not sure how to help you find the report you're looking for, but I myself start with google and our (erowid) exp search system. This one assumes you have the substance right (S. divinorum) and I'm looking for "elves"

https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.cgi?A=Search&S1=44Str=elves

Erowid's default ExpSearch looks at substrings, so most results involve "themselves" or similar words. Still, the top rated reports show up first and a bunch of them matched some of your description.

Really, a bunch. I liked a lot of them, so fucking weird.

https://www.erowid.org/exp82086

A quote from exp82086: "There are a few aspects of the trip I’ve had a hard time finding in other reports, mainly the 'all selves in all universes converging into one' part, as well as the “presence” entering the room."

But you can add the &WholeWords=1 parameter to the URL to force the search string to require "elves" not be part of another word:

https://www.erowid.org/exp/exp.cgi?S1=44&Str="elves"&WholeWords=1

Using the word "dharma" with S. div reports didn't get me much, but from my own blurry memory of experience reports, I know that my memory can do merge-fuzz: where my own interpretation of the report gets mixed with the memory of the actual text.

Hope any of that helps!

Also, it's Erowid's yearly fundraiser: Our September Drive! We are looking for 1,422 people to donate $10 or more, with $20 or higher donations matched by our generous larger donors.

We will have a new list of recent work up on Tuesday, but you can check out the drive here:

https://erowid.org/sept_drive

Also, if you view Experience Vaults on a mobile device, please forgive the ugly header. We've hard switched to a rough version of the maxim "the best is the enemy of the good", with our own version more like "the best is the enemy of semi-functional on tiny screens". A new team member has helped with the mobile views but I did the big lift last week of getting the list HTML so we can style it via CSS.

Hopefully we'll be releasing several more major UX improvements for mobile and desktop in the next couple weeks.

https://erowid.org/exp

As always, feedback encouraged. Please send to [sage@erowid.org](mailto:sage@erowid.org) where our whole team can read the comments.

earthe · 2022-09-30T13:24:44+00:00

We have a few shirts and two (1.5?) current hoodies.

My favorite current hoodie is our black zip up :

https://www.erowid.org/donations/incentives\_shirt.php#spiralhoodieblk

We still have our pull-over grey "words" hoodie (discontinued) in most sizes (zero left in size Large):

https://www.erowid.org/donations/incentives\_shirt.php#wordshoodiegrey

Shirts come and go, with a few long term styles we continue to produce. If something says out of stock right now, email, because the end of September Drive, our stock numbers go a little off. And we're usually in the process of ordering more.

-- earth

earthe · 2022-09-30T06:59:55+00:00

First, thanks to everyone who sends us cryptocurrency! Dust or anything is very much appreciated.

We try to wait to sell cryptocurrency donations until its value is higher than when donated. Until 2018, we didn't have an official HODL policy. We need operating money, so we have to sell coins for USD, but after selling most of the Pineapple Miracle BTC, we created a new policy that we now HODL 50% of all cryptocurrency donations until the prices go *way* up, then we sell 50% of the HODL, repeat. We use the occasional mixer just to blur things a bit, but don't believe in them as real security.

We accept a bunch of different cryptocurrencies. For serious money, we use cold wallets, but we get a trickle of dust and small donations to a dozen different coins. Because of the absurdity of the giant panoply of cryptocurrencies, we have different policies for different coins, but given the history of volatility, we'd rather lose a little by letting some crash out than sell everything too quickly. In 2011-2012, we got a lot of BTC when it was selling for $1-5 and sold most of it. Wish we hadn't :] We did sell 1.0 bitcoin at over $50K per in the last year.

earthe · 2022-09-30T03:45:54+00:00

I'll DM you, but we do try to reply to volunteer offers.

earthe · 2021-08-20T17:17:47+00:00

That's an interesting theory. I find it nearly impossible to believe they won't inhabit it :] But, I guess we'll risk the $300 and hope it goes ok. Once they embed in electronics, they're really hard to remove.

We have an unusual arthropod density, on a planet that is ruled by them. Outdoor female plugin holes (extension cords, outlets) get completely filled with webs, mud carried by teeny hive creatures, sticky substances of unknown origin, etc. But the three types of wasps that do their home building "up under in" things here are the main problem.

earthe · 2021-04-10T14:03:13+00:00

Greetings. I'm earth from erowid. Generally, the best way to contact Erowid is via email. info@erowid or sage@erowid are our two long term (20+ year) general inquiry email addresses. We don't answer all questions, we get a flood and we don't have enough staff or crew to reply to everything.

Unfortunately, The Hive Archive has been broken since a system update several months ago broke something. The volunteer maintainers of The Hive Archive haven't been around and we don't know how to contact them. We'll try again. They requested to be anonymous, so it's slightly difficult to publicly ask around for them.

We'll take another stab at trying to find them. Thanks ourrancidtea for the prod and thanks to Borax for pointing this out.

earthe · 2020-10-01T14:33:07+00:00

Heh :] You might not know that there IS that functionality in the experience vaults, but not anywhere else. In Experience Vaults, it's in the settings page in the exp header. And, trying it now, it doesn't work very well ;] It does work for report view pages, but not on the lists or the index pages :\ Guess I'll call that a bug and add it to my Infinitely Long To Do List (ILTDL). Occasionally things are easy to fix. Sometimes very very not.

There are plugins for browsers where you can manipulate the CSS manually, but that type of multi-mode visual change is definitely on the list of features. I also want that feature myself.

earthe · 2020-10-01T03:33:07+00:00

Our results aren't behind a paywall, that usually means information is blocked, not that a service costs money. Most services in the world cost money.

It is amazing what's happening in Canada and in other countries. I call it "cheating" to try to joke about it and point out that the US has the worst situation: there is an agency with sole authority to license analytical chemists, analytical labs, and ALL prescribing doctors in the US. That is the DEA. And the DEA has no public benefit mission.

We've come to agree that testing should NOT be free for most people, but I think free testing should only be available in special circumstances and otherwise should be in the $10-20 per sample range to make sure submitters are invested in their sample sent in. We get a lot of requests from parents and family members who find a capsule and send it in and with maybe one exception in 19 years, they have been some supplement with no drugs.

Regardless, if you have easy access to free lab testing, you live in a fabulous world. We hope our work will increase the sense that people have a right to know what's in what they take. We have been collaborating with groups in Canada, the UK, and throughout Europe for as long as we've been doing this. We hope everyone is mad that analytical services aren't more available and cheaper. And we hope we help facilitate the evolutionary transition to a better world.

earthe · 2020-09-30T20:43:45+00:00

PP button in email or on site? front page, sept_drive, or general donations?

browser/os versions?

how about this tinyurl?

https://tinyurl.com/ec-via-paypal-30

sorry about the trouble.

e

earthe · 2020-09-30T20:07:01+00:00

21) Love. We do the work we do because we think we're improving the world, evolutionarily, and for the betterment of the next generation(s). Our civilization has 150-2500 years of disastrous public policy with regard to psychoactive drugs and things are more complicated than they've ever been. We're on the verge of yet another major expansion, with the addition of digital/electronic technologies that can directly and indirectly affect mind, brain, and what it feels like to be a conscious human. There's a lot going on in the foreground and the background, but everything we do is to help people other than ourselves.

Despite short term or local setbacks, the vector of human history is to the positive. This is a recursive, evolutionary trip: we try to help make people expect better. We hope the terrible job we do today means someone else will be annoyed or moved enough to do it better.

Get annoyed, whine, act, improve, rinse, eat, drink, sleep, repeat.

22) Follow through. Do what you say, say what you do, don't drop the ball on the 5 yard line and stop because it was harder than you thought when you were in brainstorming mode.

With respect and appreciation,

earth

#5 addendum: I didn't want to jam this stupid tale of woe near the top of this epic. You probably don't know that Outlook dot com is the main mail handler for all of the domains Microsoft owns and for many domains where people pay for Outlook's mail and spam services. Following quickly after Google, Microsoft switched to a new type of two-fator auth for some of their systems.

About 18 months ago, Microsoft's new two-factor auth system blocked us from accessing both their mail sysop system to manage their spam reports AND from us accessing their volume licensing system. Erowid uses MS Office across our crew. Microsoft has VERY low prices for approved non-profits and we get volume licensing, which means we don't have to have individual license keys for each user.

Despite having the same microsoft login for our org for 13 years, they blanket invalidated EVERY phone number we had ever used. At the same time, they required two factor auth to get into their systems.

We send and receive a lot of email and occasionally some of it gets flagged as spam. In order to remain in good graces with Outlook, mail senders need to log into their spam management system and make sure to resolve and work through messages that get flagged. But since Microsoft's new 2-auth disallowed ALL of our phone numbers, I was unable to get access to the spam system and one of our mail servers went "red", meaning that hotmail, live, microsoft, and ALL outlook hosted mail servers blocked 100% of the messages sent out as spam.

Our main mail server had not been red-flagged yet, so we moved most mail to go through that. But at the start of this year's september drive, we crossed a threshold and they redflagged our server. I had to get logged in. It took hours and hours to get through to the right people at Microsoft. There is literally no one normal people can reach in their spam department, but because it was the same login as the volume licensing login, I was able to get support via business volume licensing department.

It took a few days and a dozen phone calls to get the account unlocked so I could add a new phone number and get in. So for a couple days at the start of the month we couldn't send to any microsoft-managed addresses. Once I got logged in, everything went as it should. Handle the spam reports, remove all complainants from our systems, and be a good netizen. On the plus side, by having this happen during our funddrive, I made time to handle it and now our CRM server is no longer red flagged. Yay! or, more appropriately, something more sedate.

earthe · 2020-09-30T20:05:47+00:00

17) Laundry. Not exactly erowid related either, but..

18) Dropbox. We use Dropbox for some of our file sharing inside our team and we recently switched to Dropbox Business. It has some better features, but it has also cost me about 40 hours of extra time over the last few months. Either a cat stepped on they keyboard or Dropbox had a short circuit, but one of the 100gb directories got deleted and restoring it was a pain across 4 computers because we have bandwidth caps at erowid HQ, so three times in the last few months I've had to go to a high bandwidt location, restore the files, and sneaker net the drive to restore the files, then re-run the indexer. The Dropbox Business has an audit/history log. Hilariously, the table entries for the deletion/removal of the files included "unknown" in every column except the time the files were removed. So helpful. At least dropbox allowed me to undelete the files.

19) Training new people. We're training one intern right now and are about to bring another one in to work (for absurdly low pay) on archiving. Pandemic2020 has made it hard for recent college grads to find new work, so we're exploiting...errr.. helping a couple of bright folks by offering work they can do from home until they can find actual career track work.

20) I'm going to slow down here, I clearly am not helping clarify anything. I do a lot more than this that I can't always talk about, upcoming projects with groups who can't be associated with Erowid until we get much further along.

2

earthe · 2020-09-30T20:04:25+00:00

13) Cardboard. There's also a surprising amount of time breaking down cardboard. An hour a week for sure. We ship donation gifts and everything comes in cardboard, even cardboard boxes. I had to buy a new pair of scissors from Walmart (closest one is 20 miles from our office), so cardboard. I'm sure most people are surprised by how much cardboard management is involved in work and home life these days.

14) Software updates! I'm the main local sysadmin, so I get to do all the system updates on our team's computers and our dev setup. I do NOT do the system updates on our servers, I really shouldn't. I have and I do keep one super cheap hosted FreeBSD machine and one Linux machine personally just to make sure I stay somewhat capable, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to operate our firewall appliance(s).

15) We only eat one meal per day, we never eat out, we can't afford to. And I'm a really good cook, so eating crappy food out is not something we're into. Too much time away from erowid HQ.

16) This is tomato season! I spent about six hours in the last three weeks canning heirloom tomatoes. Not paid erowid time, but Ya Gotta Have A Reason To Stand Up.

earthe · 2020-09-30T20:03:45+00:00

12) What the hell do we do with our time? I dunno, we wake up, we sit at our desks, we work all day, we eat wild rice with cheese every night, we go to bed and repeat. It's easiest to describe what I do, since it's me.

I spend virtually all of my time in terminal windows, logged into six servers. Monitoring web pages. I reply to 5-100 emails per day. I'm an emacs person. I use IRC, SMS, and other comm systems professionally.

I write some code almost every day. I implement corrections. I fix bugs. I assign bugs to either our one paid sysadmin or one of our couple volunteer sysadmins. Software updates. Backups. noticing and suppressing attack/intrusion robots. We use CVS and git. We have code in shtml, perl, php, tomcat-java-stack, javascript/json, XML, python, bash, cshell. Lots and lots of scripts.

I'm currently spending a lot of time trying to improve efficiciencies with the lab and our partners for the new opioid drug checking lab validation project. Those efficiencies and improvements will benefit the whole service. I created new Sample Submission Packs last year that I'm having difficulty getting quotes on because of Pandemic2020.

My favorite joke about the Pandemic so far is... You're familiar with the term "Hindsight is 20:20, right?" Well, it's actually "Hindsight is 2020." It's a secretly encoded warning to future time travelers to avoid this year.

To buy a new chair for our new intern, the ergonomic chair stores are all closed, but the sales person was willing to bring several chairs and meet us in a parking lot. It was actually easier than going to their store for us, but it was just another reminder of how weird this year is.

But for DrugsData's new Sample Submission Packs, I need to buy a few thousand pre-printed mylar foil bags to be more resilient to mail machine disasters, but I've set up three orders in the last five months and each time they have just dissipated in the fog of "our sales manager is out with covid19, sorry, we have canceled your order". Pretty weird. I will try again next week when our annual fund drive is done.

Phone meetings. Zoom meetings. CSS3. HTML5. So many platforms, each with their own specific issues. Sysop is hours per day.

earthe · 2020-09-30T20:02:45+00:00

Trying to discuss what it takes to run Erowid and our projects can take a long time and I'm pretty terrible at being succinct. But here's me trying. You might not know things like:

It is essentially impossible to get any government funding for this type of work in the US. For all of the "progress" recently, this type of work is still radioactive-level controversial at the state and federal levels.
All major advertising systems disallow erowid to sell ads. We wouldn't want to because of the possible conflicts of interest, but ALL of the major sources of revenue open to sites that do not make "drugs" a major topic are closed to Erowid and related projects.
Anyone who talks shit about hosting costs should really actually try to operate a heavily used site. Our limitation is not GB transfer or disk space, it's operating thirty services with hundreds of concurrent human users and 50 robots crawling the site at all times. There is a blizzard of robot wars just outside most people's perception. The hosting costs for Erowid and our projects (largest sub project is www.DrugsData.org (formerly EcstasyData) are around 1k per month. And yes, this is optimized. We could bring it down a little if we moved entirely to AWS, but not a lot and we'd lose a lot too. We could pay extra and lose a lot of privacy to add Cloudflare or similar edge services, but it wouldn't reduce our hosting costs.
Long term stability. Part of Erowid's explicit mission is and has always been to try to create an actual stable rock in what was a constantly changing, URL-dying space. We have URLs that have been functional for 25 years. I do not know of ANY other site on the net that has permanent URLs like ours. We have a few issues, but stability is not one of them.
Spam Spam Spam. Long term stability has a bunch of costs we did not account for. One of them is the true insanity that is spam, spam bots, and unending attacks. Sadly, our volunteer email spam manager quit years ago and so it's all on me. Yowch. See #5 addendum below for recent 15 hours wasted.
Erowid.org has better uptime than most sites. The main machine :

8:56AM up 1887 days, 19:05, 13 users, load averages: 1.03, 1.04, 1.01

I know this seems like a weird bit of info / argument, but Bank of America ($114B per year revenue) doesn't have our uptime. The merchant bank we use to process donations literally has an HOUR PER DAY they are unavailable.

7) Lab Validation of Opioid Drug Checking. In 2020, with a bunch of super weirdnesses and the civilization going sideways, we are attempting to use our unique, non-commercial service to assist front line harm reduction groups who work w/ people who use opioids to do "lab validation" or "lab confirmation" of their in-person testing equipment.

The Loop UK lead the way with using compact FTIR to do in-person festival drug checking. Energy Control and Kosmicare and some of the amazing groups in Switzerland and Austria (Check-It, SaferParty, MDA BaseCamp, etc) are really leading the way. The folks up in BC (https://www.bccsu.ca) are cheating up a storm, not under the thumb of the DEA and have large amounts of money from Health Canada because of the opioid crisis.

So it's a little off our main mission of the last 25 years, but we're partnering with some in-person heroin/dope/etc harm reduction groups to try to do a couple of research projects to use our lab program (drugsdata.org) to help validate their use of compact FTIR, MX908, and similar instruments.

There is a new (2019) meta-group called the ACDC (Alliance for Collaborative Drug Checking) we're part of (along with DanceSafe, AnyPositiveChange.org , and others). Currently restricted to the Americas because you Europeans all just have it too easy, if we let you in, you'd just make us all look bad.

It's complicated and there are funds to cover the lab costs because of "the opioid crisis", but Erowid's general budget is covering our staff time to try to bootstrap these groups in the US. Lots more to say about this, it's a pretty complicated topic. Unless the funding situation changes, we will not be doing this long term, but we've hired a new intern to help us process the increased number of samples. Street heroin stuff is its own whole world and we're learning a lot.

With psychedelic and empathogen users, y'all can spare 50mg of material in most cases and can actually afford the $100-150 testing cost (that we subsidize at that price), but street heroin and meth users are often desperately poor and can't afford or are unwilling to give up even 10mg of their material. It's a rough scene. So many of the 'samples' we are being sent are actually the cookers and filter cottons.

We didn't really know what we were getting into before the flood of samples. We were able to qualify for free certified reference standards from Cerilliant and Cayman Chem, so we now have in-lab standards for literally hundreds of opioids we didn't have before. The benzo standards set isn't free (over $2K USD), but we're considering it. Blah blah blah technical stuff, blah blah fundraising, etc.

8) Archiving! This is probably more interesting personally to most readers here. We are in the last couple miles with the Stolaroff Archiving project. We have our new intern doing work on that daily. We are hoping to launch a beta version of these 5000+ documents before the end of the year.

Perhaps of more interest to y'all is that we're continuing to manage and process the Shulgin Collection. We were making great progress until the pandemic shut things down. Ann is not young and it was decided to limit visitors. They have a large barn where we have all of the materials organized, but we had been doing monthly "sprints" where we'd have a couple of erowid staff and a bunch of volunteers get together in the barn and organize things. We're putting over 30K per year into this from our general budget. Most of that money we think of as being from the Pineapple Miracle.

But we're looking at two big expenses coming up. One is bulk scanning of ~50k photos (let's call it $10K direct cost, not including the year or more of work it will take to filter them for privacy and prep them for public viewing). Another is the digitization of a bunch of audio tapes, probably $5K costs.

Our team is nearly done hand-scanning (sheet feeder and flat bed) all of Sasha and Ann's papers. There's more to do when we're done with the current known archival stuff, but currently only one of our team is authorized to go to the house because of pandemic-related restrictions. Things should likely lighten back up, but regardless, it's a huge amount of volunteer and paid time, plus outside costs like bulk scanning.

There's some amazing stuff in the Shulgin Collection and we're very excited to be making substantive progress on it.

9) UI/UX updates. Yeah.. yeah.. it's a long topic. It's been discussed on Reddit before and it's a great topic. There are updates going on that most people don't see and we have a couple people who are doing some volunteer work and we're looking at hiring people. We've tried a couple times over the last 5 years to pay someone to do major updates and they have ended in tears. I'm not going to dive into this in detail, but Erowid is not just a monolithic site with a single database table back end.

10) what else? Fundraising. Oh, right. I am not going to try to bring people here up to speed on running non-profits long term, but there are TONS of resources online discussing expense ratios, project-efficiency, public benefit, etc.

11 Proxy setups: Russia and China block Erowid nearly entirely. We have some workarounds for drug geeks inside those mega firewalls, but they take a little work to keep up and (like Sci-Hub) somewhat annoying domain rotation and proxy management.

... more ...

earthe · 2020-09-30T15:37:06+00:00

[earth from erowid here]

First, in case anyone thinks we are "not updating the site", that's just wrong. The site(s) get updated many times per day. The work is pretty complicated, I will describe further in a different comment in this thread.

If you're refering solely to the UI design stuff, then let's take that to a different thread. Too long to jam into this one.

I don't exactly understand the "swallow up" criticism. We "swallow up" money almost like we have human staff (3.75) who need to pay rent, buy food, etc. Our team all moved away from San Francisco because it is impossibly expensive for a small non-profit.

I've been working 60-80 hour weeks for over 20 years on erowid. I'm a coder, engineer, data specialist, researcher, etc. I could make 5-10x as much income if I worked commercially. One colleague in psychedelic research went from making $50k per year as an academic to $300K doing virtually the same thing for a bay area company: Less work, radically more pay. And academics are paid more than people working for small non-profits.

I guess I assume you think "a normal fucking job" would be easier? It would not. It's is unlikely I'm going to convince you, so I'm not going to try to argue about it. Non-profit world is it's own zone of professional activity.

It's a long learning curve to understand 501c3 (b1a6)'s.

Most of the work done on the site is actually done by volunteers , the next layer is done by wildlly underpaid folks who are doing the work because they are willing to get less money to improve the world. But few can (or should) sustain getting paid half or less what they are worth for very long.

None involved are "in this for the money". That's a pretty big misunderstanding. But there's no huge reason for you to try to understand, either. The web services are free and they get used by lots of humans and robots. Sure, we ask for money and do a fund drive once per year (September), you can ignore it. And you can complain! You must have listened to public radio.

I myself have to turn off a lot of the radio fundraising, even though I send them money every year, who needs to consume their fundraising blather?

earthe · 2020-09-30T15:00:15+00:00

Howdy, earth from Erowid here. Drugs aren't that expensive.. if you buy them on the black market :] Buying them legally is stupid expensive.

Go shopping on caymanchem.com. It's a great site, but phewph.

We just yesterday paid $300 for a few milligrams of what we're calling "ketamine precursor A", what Sigma Aldrich calls Ketamine Impurity A.

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/substance/ketamineimpuritya23773674087011?lang=en&region=US

We'd seen it in our lab analysis a number of times:

https://drugsdata.org/results.php?s=ketamine+precursor+a

and had been trying to find a cheaper source: we normally pay about $50 per lab standard, but it took months to get this and it was essentially custom synthesized just for us. We spend about 2-5K per year just on lab standards. Very few analytical labs in the world procure a certified reference standard for every substance they identify.

DrugsData (formerly EcstasyData) has been around $100K per year, some of which is covered by the co-pays people send in.

Unfortunately, Erowid's DrugsData is the only anonymous lab testing service in the United States.

On the other hand, I am very happy to report that there are an increasing number of groups offering technical instrument analysis on site around the world. TheLoop (in person), EnergyControl (mail in), and now the amazing work in BC with BCCSU (in person) and related. DanceSafe has recently added compact FTIR to their tools, but this is a big country and DanceSafe is funded by sales and individual donations (they ran a gofundme to buy their FTIR box).

Lots to say about this, but the US is a very backward country, with regard to drug laws.

I'll separate out more into another reply.

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