• Machinist@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    That’s Psilocybe cubensis, aka magic mushrooms. They’ve been bred to be easy to fruit given the right humidity and diurnal cycle. Somebody took colonized substrate and packed it under the fan, then initiated fruiting. They then took the card out of the fruiting chamber and staged the photo.

    Not particularly hard to do.

  • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
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    4 days ago

    Are we supposed to believe the mushrooms were growing in the graphics card while the PC sat unused somewhere?

    The fan and shroud of the card look suspiciously clean, and aside from that the GPU is the wrong way up. If you put it in the slot the mushrooms would be dangling downwards.

    Do mushrooms grow like that? They might, I’m not a mushroom expert.

    But either way, I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t intentionally staged.

    • tree_frog_and_rain@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Hi, mushroom expert here.

      It’s staged in the sense that someone probably took the fan or face off and packed the insides of it with substrate and colonized grain. They then likely replaced the fan and covered the substrate either with a plastic bag or a tote of some kind to function as a humidity tent.

      The mushrooms appear to have grown there. But it’s a novelty grow of cultivated mushrooms. Rather than mushroom spores landing there and somehow finding enough nutrients and the right conditions to fruit.

    • OrganicMustard@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      I see some strings inside the GPU that may be the mycelium. Also the bottom of the shrooms seem adapted to the space between the fan blades. The question would be what were the mushroom feeding off.

      • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        I feel like the bottom portion of the case was submerged in a flooded basement, and the graphics card bobbed just above the waterline

  • Thorry@feddit.org
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    4 days ago

    I hate how this is obviously an ancient system at this point, but it still has PCI-E so my brain considers it a ‘modern’ system. I’m fucking old man…

    Edit: Just checked this motherbord released early 2007, so pretty damned old. This picture is also around 10 years old…