This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

Ed, let's be terrible together <3

I personally can't stand most beers or wines, and will preferentially avoid anything with vodka in it, but will happily knock back assorted ciders. Cream liqueurs are also fantastic, but tequila is saved for special occasions with bros.

Having said all that, I can fully understand not wanting to drink - considering everyone else seems to make such colossal dicks of themselves while on the turps. It certainly didn't appeal to me for a long while before and after I could legally drink, but now I'm quite content having just enough to say "yeah I had a drink or two tonight, this totally excuses my climbing your furniture which I would've done if sobriety didn't come with such stupid standards of social conduct."

I mostly take advantage of the social excuses offered by alcohol to do shit I'm too reserved to do in person. Nothing illegal, mind - just "oh man let's go climb a hill and watch some fucking stars" line of inquiry.

i drink for the taste
ginger beer is p.good

Root beer is where it's at.

Ginger Beer is awful
I remember Root Beer being great but it is pretty hard to get hold of in Middlesbrough

Ginger beer is amazing! Though admittedly it's very much a binary drink, it can be awful if you cheap out on it. Also it's not everyone's cup of tea (except that it is ginger beer).

As for actual beer and other alcohols, I'm not really a drinker - though when I do drink, iiiit's usually to get drunk (usually at parties and so on). I'm not a big fan of beer? But I like vodka and citrusy things. Milk-based alcohol just tastes weeeeird.

I am a completely insane incoherent drunk, apparently. :3

also when i said ginger beer i meant alcoholic ginger beer
they have orange alcoholic ginger beer now and it's amazing

Agen you are a completely insane incoherent anything <3

Wow a two-page discussion on booze! I'm pretty sure I have some cents around here somewhere. I, like most of the people I know, started drinking on cider and then mistook a bottle of white wine for more of the same and sort of gatewayed into spaghetti and wine dinners from there. If you're not into wine, that's very well possible because I hardly ever come by really good wine that stands to be drunk on its own. Wine is mostly some kind of "good with this or that" drink and the best thisorthat I can recommend is kind company. Not bar-company. Just get some friends together, uncork a bottle and spend the rest of the night criticising and yelling at Sandra Bollock's acting in The Proposal.

Not a big fan of beer and things. I don't think it's an acquired taste though! I know people who just get right into it and drink... quite a lot, actually, and I know people who just say no because they tried too many times and squandered a fair amount of cash with it. The appeal of beer, I guess, is that it's so easy to come by? I have beer in my fridge right now, and I don't even know where it comes from.

I usually sneak a can upstairs in situations where popping a cork would be a bit too obvious and everyone would know that I HAVE BEEN TOUCHING THE WINE SUPPLY OH NO. Last I had it was a week ago when a friend was trying (and failing) to teach me advanced League of Legends 103.

Booze, I find, is best consumed in severe moderation and with a company that is equally tipsy. When everyone is just a little off their socks evenings often take a turn for the hilarious, even if it's probably not that funny in retrospect. The greatest about it is that it's not just "this is the taste of alcohol." You can do so much with beer and wine and cocktails (I made sabaillon once! 'Twasn't that great :< ) that it's hard to just say "I don't drink alcohol because I don't like the taste." You can, I guess, it's possible that you like absolutely nothing, but if you say that I will fix you a cherry martini or something.

The appeal of beer, I guess, is that it's so easy to come by?

Pretty much.

"oh man let's go climb a hill and watch some fucking stars"

Man do that shit anyway

Impulsiveness is awesome!

except when it's not

you will be more satisfied being honest with yourself having done something and not cared instead of making excuses as to why it's ok

I know, and as far as friends go mine are pretty up there on the bitch-tits scale (I know one of you might be reading this, so hello ) - that's totes a real thing and not something I just made up.

It's more that people ask "ok, but explain to me why you went to the park after that gig and climbed trees and scared the crap out of each other while failing to find a bridge or joggers to scare the crap out of instead", and mentioning you had a drink at the gig makes it totally ok in this modern day and age. Doing it sober (or "sober", considering like I mentioned I've never gotten close to bathroom-redecoratingly drunk) just makes you a weirdo.

Then again we bought a five-and-a-half-foot paper machie Día de los Muertos-esque figure (who was called "Michael Jackson" by the craft store owners for some reason), and took turns carrying his awkward arse all the way back to my mate's. We stopped at a cafe and caught a bus, and did this in broad daylight because the craft store in question wasn't open late, but more because we were that goddamn awesome. The bros agreed to call him Alejandro because one of them is the biggest film nerd.

^The point I think I was making with the above tangent is that we're not above doing silly shit, but a drink or two is accepted social signalling for a night where shit's going to go down. Maybe it's as physiologically negligible as the right pair of shoes, or listening to the right kind of music before a night out, but it's just part of the atmosphere for me, I guess. I'm pretty sure I'm only a social drinker - I don't drink alcoholic beverages at home.

My friends and I have all grown out of the rebellious teenage drinking years and are, as far as Facebook anecdotes go, predominantly responsible drinkers. Having said that, the main gig pub does a mean ginger beer, which is my only exception to the "no voluntary beers" rule.

In times gone by people often drank beer and beeresque liquids more often than they did water, because clean water wasn't so easy to come by
Language was invented in the past, not the present!

This sounds apocryphal
reference please
also beeresque is my favorite word this week

This is something everyone in England is taught as part of their history class in primary and secondary school and I can find a fair few websites documenting the fact that people in the past had terrible diets (what a surprise) but none with strong citations. I guess they don't expect secondary school children to be interested in citations? It's pretty vexing.
Daily alcohol consumption was virtually universal in the Tudor era. I mean it's slightly obvious if you think about it, clean water would have been much harder to come by what with the lack of plumbing. By the Tudor period people had figured out that it was probably a good idea to stop drinking dirty water, but not quite what to do about making it fit for drinking again (it turns out just boiling it works but if you told someone that before they discovered germs they'd call you mad).
Milk and fruit juices and the fermented, alcoholic variety are more convenient and readily available than your village well. Alcohol was often diluted down to just 2-4% but it was still present with most meals.
This is also presumably why alcohol is so deeply ingrained in our society, it's just been around forever and there hasn't even been a taboo on it until relatively recently.

It's easy to look back now and think "but that's so stupid! Why would you drink beer all the time?", but that was just the cultural norm back then. People just didn't know how things worked.
I'm sure hundreds of years in the future people will look back on us in horror at how we could so casually line our walls with electrical cables, as if we were unaware of the irreversible brain damage this was causing, or something along those lines.

I've not been able to provide any links which really annoys me, I can barely find anything that says anything at all about what people drank and isn't written for 14 year olds with no citations, or (even more annoying) people asking this exact same question and receiving the answers I'm giving... but without the answerer giving any citations. So feel free not to believe me. This is just what I have been taught.

Even Wikipedia only has this to say:

Beer was one of the most common drinks during the Middle Ages. It was consumed daily by all social classes in the northern and eastern parts of Europe where grape cultivation was difficult or impossible.[citation needed] Though wine of varying qualities was the most common drink in the south, beer was still popular among the lower classes. Since the purity of water could seldom be guaranteed, alcoholic drinks were a popular choice, having been boiled as part of the brewing process. Beer also provided a considerable amount of the daily calories in the northern regions. In England and the Low Countries, the per capita consumption was 275–300 liters (60–66 gallons) a year by the Late Middle Ages, and beer was drunk with every meal.[citation needed]

I recall hearing that. It sounded pretty understandable to me, and it seemed to explain why certain cultures (like the Irish - g0m you crafty drunkard) have much higher alcohol tolerances than other races (like certain Asian groups or Native Americans). In those places you drank beer/mead or you drank diseased filled water and you died.

I am pretty sure I am some percentage of Native American, if alcohol dehydrogenase's ethic distribution has anything to say about me being a gigantic lightweight.

I'll generally have a beer to two if I'm in a situation that warrants loosening up. Now, while I could focus on loosening up without the aid of a depressant, its like people who try to get going in the morning by taking a shot of coffee and setting a chemical free alarm. You can do both.

In fact, the most common inebriator for myself is lack of sleep. I'll say or do stupid things, I can't drive worth anything, and I am waaaay more emotional, but if I'm having a good time I'm not gonna to take a quick nap just to get my senses back.

Anyway I'm bringing this back to where it started: sharing stories of intoxicated follies.
(sorry peeps who get miffed at alcohol stories!)

So I will rarely drink to the point of overt inebriation - two beers and I'm done. There is, however, one crucial exception.

The Superbowl.

As someone who really only watches sports by accident, and tries to maintain enough information to feign small-talk with more committed fans, The Superbowl doesn't have much to offer me in the realm of tv programming. 3 hours of football (oh sorry, American football, heretofore referred to as "FOOTBALL!") intermixed with commercials that were on youtube the day before and a halftime show featuring people-I-don't-care-about leaves me with not much to be interested in.

But the ritual is already there. Back when commercials were fresh and funny and my family would put out snacks and food and treats, I fell in love with the Superbowl Party. Eventually it transitioned into time with friends instead of family, and lil' smokies and sherbert became bratwurst and party drinks.

I've had two superbowls where alcohol was part of my party food intake. The first one was good, then, great, then OH GOD WHY. The second one was much less dramatic. But almost the entirety of my "When I was drunk" stories have come from these two parties.

I had never been hungover prior to that first Superbowl. I really hadn't started drinking beer until recently, but my roommate/landlord was a little more experienced in the art of booze (I think due to the influence of his older brothers) and would stock our fridge from time to time. Well I like to try different food/drinks and I hate seeing things sit in the fridge for too long so when the opportunity arose I'd grab that beer or two and play heavy rain or saints row or whatever the game of the week was with him.

Well I have another friend. She has a pretty cool job and we've been best bros for over decade now so I'd have the luxury of sharing some of the dranks she would get over the course of working at her pretty cool job. (now she would not describe her job as such, and the free booze is really one of the few perks of her toils, in her opinion, but hey I think her job is neat even if it is just glorified customer service) So superbowl was coming around and roommate was throwing a party and friend was invited and so was Noodly and other friends and anyway, my friend had apparently been stockpiling these free drinks for some time and figured this party was as great an excuse as any to get rid of them.

So she made a pitcher of pomgranite martini mix with several mini bottles of grey goose vodka as the base.

Here is the story: I drank 3/4 of that pitcher.

I really didn't know what my limits were, or what to look for in myself as an indicator of having too much. But I think I now have a reliable indicator of my intoxication levels.

It's called "what is btp cooking now?"

Is it grilled shrip wrapped in bacon and stuffed with mozzerella cheese and jalepeno? -> Not intoxicated
Is it fried hushpuppies? -> slightly intoxicated
Is it mozzerella cheese sticks because oh man I have left over cheese and hushpuppy mix? Do these cheese sticks fuse together into a gigantic bowl of fried crisps, melted cheese, and paper towel? Does he start eating it anyway? -> quite intoxicated
After this disaster of a dish does he look in the freezer for something else to fry and pull out a tub of blue-bell vanilla icecream? Does he proceed to fry it in fish batter??? -> Dude, it is time to stop.

If I have to say the most disgusting thing I have ever tasted, it was that fried fish-batter icecream. Second place is a super old cup of coffee I tried at a counselors office when I was like 8 - it's basically why I don't drink coffee now.

I only recall a few other things from that night. Not one of those things is who won that superbowl (though now it would be hard to recall who even played in it - I think Greenbay?). I recall thinking "I need to go to the bathroom" and then filling my bathtub up with all of the aforementioned food. (I was thinking "I need to use the larger receptacle"). I remember leaning my head against the toilet seat and cursing Bill Cosby. I remember standing in the shower because my roommate told me that would help, and seeing little pieces of shrimp at my feet. I also remember waking up the next day with a really sucky hangover and the worst ice-cream related memory ever.

The second Superbowl was much nicer. My roommate (wait no, ex-roommate then) smoked three racks of ribs, I had a pilsner glass and drank a grand total of FOUR BEERS. As the prolific video I took shows, I was pretty far out of it - hence, throwing my phone out in the yard, releasing the hounds, and having to "go to the bathroom" again.

It ended much better though. By the time I came out of it, my roommate was passed out and the other guests had had their fill. I just sat in the kitchen smacking on ribs and watching the replay of the puppybowl. Good End get.

....

wait don't I already have a thread to post long crap like this?

Hey, if you ever need someone to go over a radio in your ear and help you keep up with sports small-talk, I do it for a very low rate/hour.

Upgrade to the "3-Point Package" and I will also answer difficult trivia questions for you, to impress all the sporty ladies and regular joes.

I change my name to "Cyragooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooal" for it

Here's something on Italy's medieval days

https://books.google.com/books?id=KKrhJ9...ty&f=false

Which I think boils down to people from the middle ages not understanding something ohmygod

Oh and read down a bit to find them talking about how drinking water was simply out of the ordinary

All alcohol contains some degree of water (Even cleaning solvents rarely get above 70% ethanol) the presence of 4% ethanol is enough to eliminate a decent number of organisms that don't have the enzyme to break down alcohol.

The issue that people in that era often found, and many people today in poorly developed regions, is that the very sources for their water were contaminated. They figure dirty water is bad but sometimes they have very little choice. Finding clean water isnt as simple as "just boil it". Boiling water and storing it is really hard if you dont have the right resources. There are places worldwide that have to deal with cholera and other water-based diseases. Its a real problem.

Anyway, there is genetic evidence that there was significant selection pressures for those who could tolerate alcohol over those who could not in those regions. There is a nice research paper on the subject listed in the wiki article about alcohol tolerance.

Also I totes agree that people should still take responsibility for their actions while under the influence. It's why drunk driving is such an issue. I think few people actually blame their problems on the drink itself. If they do then there are other issues they need to deal with.

The issue isn't so much that I can't find any useful sources that support my claim, it's that I can't find any about what people used to drink at all. Not even ones that say they drank water all the time.
Mehga's one is pretty good though.

I care if people think I'm a weirdo! I don't want to be a weirdo!

Here have some data:

https://www.gallup.com/poll/141656/drink...-high.aspx

Honestly lower than I expected, but still a clear majority. In the circles I run in, it's 79% which I guess is what colored my perceptions.

how cool are certain drugs though. can we get some sort of comparison on the top 10 most popular drugs based on cool factor. mods?

thanks. i like to make informed decisions

I stumbled on this today and I got really happy and then kinda sad.

Nobody read the last page

I made that last page about me and I'm sad at past Mehg's narcissism

Present Mehg's narcissism however, holy fuck so great.

so i participated in this i guess

more rap battles need back to the future references IN MY OPINION

Pretty sure that banner was someone's senior project.

Or maybe just one in a whole portfolio of obnoxious advertisements.

I feel like this place has been kinda quiet since the other subforum was created.

I also feel like that and in fact it the suspicion of the inevitability of that eventuality was part of the reason I publicly was agin it