Wow, I didn’t expect all this great input! I will have to address them individually so this post will make sense...
endlessness said:
We have a few chemists around here and they have been giving a lot of feedback over the years. The thing is, once you know your chemistry and have some experience, you realize that "teks" are not really necessary to be followed as such, you just need to understand what you are doing, why each step is being done.
Teks have a lot more "room for maneuver" than people think, if you understand the steps and dont fixate on being exact about quantities. That's why we constantly recommend people to read different teks, and specially read the FAQ, because this should give them a better understanding and not just blindly following steps. We want to help people learning how to learn, and eventually being able to go beyond the instructions so that they can create new methods themselves, find new paths to the different alkaloids, etc.
Can you care to say which teks are outdated, not easy to use, and which leave room for misinterpretation? That way we can fix the individual teks with edits or disclaimers. Sometimes the "pro chemists" don't notice the potential misinterpretation issues that a non-chemist would notice because for them all the steps are pretty clear. So maybe feedback from normal users is even more valuable in this sense.
Recently
blue.magic offered to make pictorials of different procedures, which is similar to what you are proposing here. He will probably take some time but it seems like a good initiative.
Thats great there are actual chemists on the board, I wish there was some way to give a little icon or something to their profile so it would be easy to see that they are better resources than the average poster would no, no offense to all of the great posts on this board! Are there any known chemists I can follow around on the board and read up on? I would love to see some input from them on these teks/processes. They would be a wealth of knowledge to tap on this forum. I will have to get some links and go through them to outline which are a bit hard to understand or outdated but one I can think of is the one on the main FAQ although I believe it states its outdated on there and is just for reference. What I was also referring to, or trying to, was that there seems to be a lot of questions on teks but as you mentioned, there is a lot of room for maneuvering in these teks. I guess I’m one of those people that are used to being fully knowledgeable (to some degree at least) before I attempt something but that may just be my lack of chemistry knowledge showing
The pictorals would be a great idea, it seems blue.magic knows what s/he knows they’re talking about. I will keep an eye out for that book, seems like they have a lot to add!
Jees said:
Cyb's max ion tek is a golden spoon on a silver plate, what more does one need?
Cyb’s Max Ion is perhaps the best tek, IMHO. I love how it has a second page (queue the “OMG it has a second page?!”) that breaks it all down. Its fantastic!
DrSeltsam said:
I get your idea of making the teks easy to use and eco friendly. In my humble opinion the documentation is pretty good already for the mescaline extraction teks at least. What would make sense is to consolidate the work that was done on cleaning up the extracts in the wiki. @moderators would you agree here?
Making it super duper easy doesn't feel right. If you make something foolproof only fools will use it.
Consolidation would be great! While the foolproof statement is a good maxim, personally I don’t think that would be a good fit for something like this. There will always be people who don’t care to put the time in and cut corners, but the rest shouldn’t have to suffer because of it. Clear directions and some explanations of the process would go a long way to give confidence before undergoing a long process such as most teks are. This is exactly why I like Max Ion tek because its not just a “do this and then this” list, it suggests Cyb actually knows what is happening and took the time to write it down.
downwardsfromzero said:
I think people who can't be bothered to even attempt to understand the principles behind extraction probably shouldn't do extraction.
Making it super duper easy doesn't feel right. If you make something foolproof only fools will use it.
Aye.
I agree, although this is a forum on sharing knowledge...why should it not be shared here? Theres nothing wrong with external links and research, but personally I feel there seems to be a lack of depth to dig further. Maybe I misspoke about the ease of use, theres no reason for a “foolproof” tek (that would be impossible, have you seen the Internet?) but I personally feel there should be more than a list of “do this and then this” teks out there. We shouldn’t let those few who don’t seem to care about the process dictate how teks are written for the rest of us.
CosmicLion said:
Extractions are pretty straight forward... there are not that many ways to go about it, even in lab... We pretty much cover most bases.
Synthesis is a whole other game all together though...
But hey! You never know... the "new" Salt Teks and the FASA teks were pretty neat upgrades!!
:thumb_up:
Excellent point! As a non-chemist, I didn’t previously understand the differences between synthesizing a la Shulgun’s “TiHKaL” and extracting naturally occurring alkaloids from plant matter. I took some time to read up on it after I read this post, thank you for the input! I agree the new salt teks look great, I will be moving on to learning about those next, I wanted to work my way up so I can actually understand whats happening first. They seem a bit more complex to me so I want to know what I’m reading first. :thumb_up: to you, Good Sir!
blue.magic said:
I agree with other that once you get the hang of said techniques, you find it's not a rocket sicence, even though there is a great deal of science in it. There is no one TEK to rule them all as the actual technique always depend on the available equipment, chemicals and so on.
I am writing a photo-book about extractions and syntheses of several traditional psychedelics, compiling the best I have found around the web.
However it's not a mere "cookbook" as I focused on detailed illustrations and extensive comments to make the reader understanding what is he doing.
I plan to give away the texts for review by Nexians who will criticize, edit and suggest updates in general.
Funding-wise, I think about allowing for some crypto-donation or selling prints via crypto-market. But the digital e-book will be avialable for free to anyone.
I agree, they seem easy, maybe it was just me wondering why it seemed so easy and I’m no rocket surgeon, either! That book sounds fantastic, I would love to read the comments you add on it, it seems like you know what you are doing from what I have read already! I will keep an eye out for it!
