Swamp Thing
New Member
Hi everyone, Jay here from Banbury, Oxfordshire.
I was quite a strange and lonely teenager back in the 80's. I loved "The Doors", computers, tropical, freshwater fish and plants, including aquatic plants. After quite a few years away from the aquarium hobby I'm staging something of an eccentric comeback. Call that a "mid-life crisis", if you will. In as much as I thought to myself, just after Christmas, "why not go out and buy a swamp?" So I bought a, "way too expensive", [unheated] propagator, a heat mat, some led lighting (from Craftboys [never lose it], {paraphrasing a little Duran Duran's "wild boys" there, for you}), all from Amazon (makes sense getting a swamp from the Amazon, I guess). I'm now going to go out and buy some clear, plastic containers and use these to grow (hopefully it works) various aquarium plants which I'll have in pots (maybe clay to help weight them down) with soil and a gravel layer on top (to prevent the soil from floating out). I might forget about having them submersed and just keep the bottom of the pots in an inch or two of water and grow them emerged. I think I'm going to specialise entirely on Cryptocorynes. My first one arrived today from "ProShrimp". Cryptocoryne becketti "Petchii". I blew way too much money on a plastic, "Creature of the Black Lagoon" figurine from Amazon (£25) which I'll keep on an inverted, clay pot, pedestal in the corner. I've also got an A.I. to produce some great AI artwork which I'll frame and have these in front of "The Swamp" (AI is a1111 - stable diffusion, txt to image generator, running locally on my Linux machine at home. I <3 my computer). I asked for "Donald Trump, The Creature of the Black Lagoon and Gal Gadot (why not? she's a welcome addition to any social gathering). In the swamp". This is one swamp we don't want to drain.
Anyway, I'm rambling on. It's great to be here. I miss, "old school", newsgroups. Demon Internet had a news server and you could subscribe to various newsgroups via "Turnpike". I miss the "aquarium plants" one. Not sure how possible it would be to get back on there. It's a shame ISP's don't provide newsgroups for free anymore.
Thanks guys for letting me join. I'll definitely start asking questions about the best soil mixes to use for my swamp but will leave that for future posts. My best friend is a retired electrical engineer so I might ask Brian for help in running some led lighting off of a Raspberry Pi for a more controlled and cooler implementation.
PS You can't beat a Brucie Bonus, you really can't.
I was quite a strange and lonely teenager back in the 80's. I loved "The Doors", computers, tropical, freshwater fish and plants, including aquatic plants. After quite a few years away from the aquarium hobby I'm staging something of an eccentric comeback. Call that a "mid-life crisis", if you will. In as much as I thought to myself, just after Christmas, "why not go out and buy a swamp?" So I bought a, "way too expensive", [unheated] propagator, a heat mat, some led lighting (from Craftboys [never lose it], {paraphrasing a little Duran Duran's "wild boys" there, for you}), all from Amazon (makes sense getting a swamp from the Amazon, I guess). I'm now going to go out and buy some clear, plastic containers and use these to grow (hopefully it works) various aquarium plants which I'll have in pots (maybe clay to help weight them down) with soil and a gravel layer on top (to prevent the soil from floating out). I might forget about having them submersed and just keep the bottom of the pots in an inch or two of water and grow them emerged. I think I'm going to specialise entirely on Cryptocorynes. My first one arrived today from "ProShrimp". Cryptocoryne becketti "Petchii". I blew way too much money on a plastic, "Creature of the Black Lagoon" figurine from Amazon (£25) which I'll keep on an inverted, clay pot, pedestal in the corner. I've also got an A.I. to produce some great AI artwork which I'll frame and have these in front of "The Swamp" (AI is a1111 - stable diffusion, txt to image generator, running locally on my Linux machine at home. I <3 my computer). I asked for "Donald Trump, The Creature of the Black Lagoon and Gal Gadot (why not? she's a welcome addition to any social gathering). In the swamp". This is one swamp we don't want to drain.
Anyway, I'm rambling on. It's great to be here. I miss, "old school", newsgroups. Demon Internet had a news server and you could subscribe to various newsgroups via "Turnpike". I miss the "aquarium plants" one. Not sure how possible it would be to get back on there. It's a shame ISP's don't provide newsgroups for free anymore.
Thanks guys for letting me join. I'll definitely start asking questions about the best soil mixes to use for my swamp but will leave that for future posts. My best friend is a retired electrical engineer so I might ask Brian for help in running some led lighting off of a Raspberry Pi for a more controlled and cooler implementation.
PS You can't beat a Brucie Bonus, you really can't.
