Bags

I am still working on all the fine details, and I have been on the journey for a while now, but ditching my smartphone has been one of the best things I have done in a very long time. My fancy new "dumb phone" came in a couple weeks ago and I have been loving it (Lightohone 3)

I have always been good at "doing nothing", but not even having the option for the dopamine drop of scrolling whatever has been such a positive experience.

I actually haven't thought about it THAT much lately because it's just become my new normal, but yesterday at work I went to the bathroom and there was someone standing at the urinal peeing, and scrolling on their phone... Like you can't even have that short singular human experience of ripping a hearty piss without distraction??? It made me think a bit deeper about how happy I am that I've "fought my way out of the machine" and never let myself get too far gone.

I've only really ever played Pathfinder (I forget the version we played), and DnD 5e. The types of campaigns I like to be part of are really fast-and-loose numbers-are-a-suggestion type heavy on the storytelling and roleplay. I've played some amazing campaigns, and I love sharing all the crazy stories.

One fun one that comes to mind is a 5e campaign which was anime mech fighting high-school themed... I played a "warlock" character who was a deadbeat street thug who schmoozed and lied his way into the academy to try and move up in the world even though he had no mech fighting or other relevant experience, and my patron was a significantly older otaku who would channel their years of expertise through me via sat phone/an earpiece to pilot the robot. Out of everyone in the campaign, I had the smallest, weakest weapon, a simple dagger, but I was able to manipulate the images reflected off the dagger's blade and did most of my damage and combat via psychological warfare and manipulation (which were canonically things that I had tons of experience with from my time on the streets). I ended up getting like full-mech active camo as a logical extension of the blade-reflection-manipulation and went towards a stealth build which was fun.

After all the people I played with all moved away and we stopped playing, I tried to go to a game store and find a campaign. I found some people who were looking to start something, and I built a Kenku alchemist/rogue with a whole tragic backstory with a bunch of various villains I gave to the DM if they needed anything to tie in. I 3D printed a bunch of little percussion instruments, made a custom not-obnoxious utility sound-board on my phone, and even made a custom Guiro with differently-spaced ridges that the sound of was supposed to be my "real kenku name"... Nobody cared, everyone was annoyed at my insistence to be thorough in roleplaying, the wizard was a min-maxing Timmy rules lawyer who's only character trait was "Hat that slowly gets bigger without you noticing until it's a really fucking big hat", and needless to say I only played like 2 sessions lol

It depends on which theorist you talk to. Some say seconds to minutes, others say days to weeks, the nutcases say thousands to millions of years.

And at the end of the day, the electrical properties of these elements probably aren't that interesting or useful, and almost certainly won't be like, semiconductors or anything fun. Just dumb, heavy, really fucking radioactive wire lol.

One time in a steampunk gunslinger campaign I played a half-elf sniper/artificer who was secretly a prince running away from his tyrannical king/queen parents to join the grassroots resistance against great evils conspiring with the crown. It was one of the most complex/fun characters I have ever played, and getting the party to avoid interactions with royal guards (so I wasn't recognized) without outing myself was a fun silent puzzle between myself and the DM. It was also funny that I was basically The Handsomest Fellow (tm) who wanted to be judged on merit instead of beauty and had to deal with a ton of unwanted attention from NPC's, and tried to make myself look as haggard and disheveled as possible at all times, lots of fun all around.

We played this campaign for almost 2 years, and the LAST session before we all graduated and moved away and went our separate ways ended with me getting recognized and outed to the party and I am still salty about that cliffhanger like 8 years later lol

Also our Paladin was basically Rob Halford (Judas Priest), his holy mount was a motorcycle, and I convinced the DM to let me craft and attach a permanent charm of flight to said motorcycle...

I tried GMing a Pathfinder game once with 3 really good friends, and fell so thoroughly flat on my face haha. I am really good at coming up with stories and settings and characters, and I am good enough at improvising when given some kind of tiny seed of direction, but being the provider of said seeds of direction and navigating my own creations... Fohget-about it.

I have no idea what my local laws are, but I noticed something the other day about my local police vehicles that I will never be able to unsee.

Excellent font choice.

The "island of stability" actually encompasses many of the superheavy elements that we have already produced. The "stability" part comes from "magic numbers" of neutrons in the isotopes that are theorized to have some kind of stabilizing effect on the nuclear shells.

The difficulty is that we can theorize the number of neutrons we need to stabilize a certain number of protons, but finding atoms with the right number of protons and neutrons to smash together to hopefully create that total number is... difficult. Sometimes those particular isotopes with the proton/neutron quantities required either just plain don't exist, or are themselves a wholly synthetic isotope with its own set of problems like being insanely slow or difficult to produce, having a crazy short half-life, incompatibility with various acceleration methods, etc.

The elements at the very end of the periodic table are somewhat tenuous as we know "elements" to be, as there has only ever been very VERY small amounts of this material produced, and the isotopes of those materials that ARE produced split apart almost immediately with insanely small half-lives, so it's not like there's any amount of it just kicking around in a jar somewhere in some lab.

There's a ton of interesting reading on the theoretical island of stability in superheavy elements, where a special number of neutrons added to the isotope can possibly make these superheavy elements stable for a macroscopic amount of time so they could actually be studied and handled instead of instantly exploding apart and only being detected through their decay products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

I think there are elements with experiments designed to produce them up to around atomic number 125 or 127. Currently the highest confirmed, named, and somewhat categorized is 118. There's info out there about the theoretical elements. Here's the page for element 119. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ununennium. Purely theoretically, you could just keep adding rows to the periodic table, and it will keep going, but most of those materials will never actually exist or never could exist. It's kind of like theoretical vs applied math.

There aren't that many people browsing these communities, the same people that see this post will probably be all the same people that saw your last one, give or take a few. There was only one other topic posted to casual conversation since yesterday evening...

It's probably a lot easier to just try and start public conversations in random threads (or make your own about something you want to converse about) instead of just saying "PM me to chat"...

What's your favorite breakfast place in the state? I go to the Classic Cafe in Providence pretty much every weekend. I get a weird anxiety about going to the same place twice in a row, like I will be silently judged, so if I ever go out for breakfast Saturday AND Sunday, I'll hit up a different spot on Sunday and see what else is around. Bolt Coffee is really good but it's expensive.

Many years ago Nokia made a couple prototypes of an official Star Trek communicator phone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3EN05faZVU

I would do some seriously regrettable things to have one of these that works with modern networks.

I've been weaning myself off video content altogether, which I feel is the most surefire way to avoid AI video.

I feel like I'm going to turn into such a paranoid tin-foil-hat nutcase and just trust nothing I don't see with my own eyes... I mean I would be ok with that, it just sounds miserable.

I want to travel outside the US more and take my tourist dollars and give them to some other place... and maybe even though I am white and was born here, they won't let me back in for some reason and that will just force the issue of me having to leave for good.

The only problem is that when I'm outside the country, I feel like an asshole and feel some responsibility for the current shitstorm (even though I've voted against it at every opportunity, part of local political action groups, etc) and feel like everyone can instantly clock me as an American and will hate me... I was in the Netherlands recently and some woman thought I was from Spain, so that did make me feel a little better... I really didn't want to come home from that trip it was so amazing :(

The corporate entity that owns the company I work at recently bought another company in Norway, and I got very excited as this new company does things related to my expertise that not many other people in the organization have... I was supposed to go visit and learn more about their facility and planned on vying HARD to get transfered there, but after the acquisition and a bit of back and forth they basically just said "We are ok on our own we don't want any involvement" and that was that...