So, not only does October’s edi­tion of Wired UK sug­gest 4chan in its list of unusual places to make friends online — yup, that would indeed be an unusual place to look — but it seems to have decided to enlighten its read­ers on the won­ders of i-Dosing too.

Wait, what? i-Dosing is an actual thing now?

For any­one unaware, “i-Dosing” is pur­port­edly a tech­nique whereby teenagers lis­ten to music that emu­lates the effects of tak­ing drugs. There are a num­ber of web­sites that claim to offer such music, and I sup­pose it’s pos­si­ble that they actu­ally existed as some kind of weird inter­net non-entity before the Daily Mail went fuck­ing crazy (more so than usual) in July of this year. I wouldn’t, how­ever, be sur­prised if the Mail arti­cle was a ludi­crous prank on the reac­tionary truth-averse news­pa­per, and the web­sites sprung up in the aftermath.

(Some­body linked me to a cou­ple of “i-Dosing” tracks back then. The first was a pretty min­i­mal­ist early-Industrial kind of track, lis­ten­able but hardly trippy. The sec­ond was a poor mashup of early-2000s dance hits, which I turned off just for its abysmal pro­duc­tion values.)

So con­grat­u­la­tions to who­ever gave the story to the Mail, it’s pretty hilar­i­ous in an “oh god the media sucks” kind of way.

To the i-Dosing kid­dies, curse this new-fangled tech­nol­ogy, grum­ble / pipe / slip­pers. What’s wrong with the good old two litres of Coke, some high-volume Prodigy and play­ing Wipe­Out 64 until it hurts to look away from the screen? (Or until your mum called you down for lunch, of course.)

And Wired, seri­ously, i-Dosing is not a thing. At least your side­bar item wasn’t a Mail–esque “OH GOD YOUR KIDS ARE ON DRUGS” piece, but please, can we all let this story die now?