Logo? What logo?

Now, of course, we know: we want one of you to fix it.

That's right, it's time for a logo competition to help tidy up our masthead and make things look all pretty. You, yes you, could fix up our logo and make this a blog to remember. If you were really ambitious, you'd make sure this logo either worked with our current header or else you'd have a new header for us as well. This will be the logo we eventually smack all over schwag (of which you'd get a full set), so it has to be eye-catching; but at the same time, we don't want something overly "druggie" or super psychedelic to the point of illegibility. The winner will get our undying gratitude and a few hundred bucks that we cobble together from our couch cushions (if you are looking to retire to the Bahamas with a bunch of gold-plated supermodels, this is not the gig for you). We know you're worth more than that, but this blog is not a source of income; right now, we're just putting it out there for love. We're not really designers here; so if you dig the site, we need your help!

To submit: use our contact form to post a link to your design. It's just that easy!

This is probably a good opportunity to delve just a little bit into the reasons we started this blog. We used to put out a magazine called Trip - the Journal of Psychedelic Culture, which was nationally distributed on newsstands and sent to subscribers throughout the world. We had a good run with that magazine, but print is hard work, print distributors screw you over, and hey, someone invented the Interweb.

But beyond just practical matters of distribution, a key point of view with Trip was that we were representing a counterculture. We were situated in a position of resistance, promoting messages that encouraged people to challenge the status quo. However, as time continued to march on, it started to seem apparent that we weren't really a counterculture at all. I mean, sure, hippie idealism is always going to be in the minority, and you'll never convince the mainstream that rubbing 5-MeO-DMT into your eyeballs is all that great idea. (It's not?) But when it comes to the sheer fact of getting high, counterculture doesn't hold any particular monopoly on that concept. Practically everyone's doing it, all the time; it's just different flavors for different people. We were maybe doing ourselves a disservice by separating ourselves too completely from the river of altered states that washes over society; we're not a counterculture at all, we're mainstream in our desires. Hence the red, white and blue in our current header. (I should point out I keep saying "we" but I probably mostly just mean me, since my colleagues on Trip were a disparate bunch and man, you just never knew what the hell they were thinking.)

Anyway, DoseNation has been tons of fun to kick off and ramp up, and you're welcome to join in the fun. If you sign up for an account, you can submit posts to the queue; we check it once a day or so and would love to have more people helping round out our coverage, since none of us is doing this full time (obviously) and we're used to the magazine style of having multiple voices in the mix. You can use our contact form to shout at us as well about what you like and what you don't like about DoseNation. We're just a few months into this venture, so naturally some things will get refined and adjusted as we go on, and your feedback has already been a part of that; don't be shy.

On a side note, as James mentioned, we hit some technical difficulties on the ISP side during the week, but you may not have realized that at the exact same moment, yours truly was experiencing massive haywire on the personal side, as the Internets refused to cooperate with our wireless network at home. Consequently I couldn't post for a few days, which I guess is lucky for me since none of my posts got swallowed. But I realized how much fun I've been having posting here when I was suddenly deprived of the ability to do so. We shan't let mere database catastrophes and Ethernet flakiness get in our way - dammit, we've got drug blogging to do!