#I did not expect to be reviewing nuclear fusion

[rambleonwaywardson]

Salt Water

A Clegan (Buck x Bucky) one-shot

Summary: The boys take a trip to the beach, where Bucky learns that Gale is a little afraid of the ocean.

Word Count: 3020

Author's Note: This idea came to me out of nowhere, and I decided I don't care if it feels accurate or not because I wanted to write fluff about it. I've also never posted a fic on tumblr before, but I'm waiting until I have a larger collection of Clegan one-shots before posting them under a single work on AO3 and wanted to put this out there somehow before that happens. My AO3 is also RambleOnWaywardSon.

—

Gale is perfectly comfortable reclining lazily on a beach towel, book in one hand while he props himself up with the other, when a towering shadow blocks his sun and causes him to glance up through his sunglasses. Bucky, even through the glaringly bright light of a cloudless July day, may be the most beautiful human Gale has ever seen on this planet. Water droplets like glittering crystals cling to the pale skin of his chest and abdomen and drip from salt-water damp curls. Even today, his smile gives the sun a run for its money. 

But he is, in fact, blocking Gale’s actual sun. And Gale had been perfectly happy in the sun, thanks very much. 

“You’re blocking the sun,” he says matter of factly. Even so, he earmarks the corner of his paperback and sets it beside him on his towel, full well knowing that Bucky, giving him this facial expression that somehow manages to mix ‘hurt but hopeful puppy’ with ‘giddy, plotting boyfriend,’ will not be easily deterred.

He would be correct.

“You’ve barely gotten in the water all afternoon. Why the hell did we come to the beach if we’re not gonna swim?” Bucky’s puppy dog smile turns to a pout, and Gale rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses as he glances Bucky up and down.

“You’ve been swimming.” 

“But you haven’t!” Bucky steps closer to Gale and grabs one of his hands, tugging insistently. “Come into the water with me,” Bucky says. 

Gale lets Bucky work for it for a second, but eventually, reluctantly, allows himself to be tugged to his feet. It beats the inevitable alternative where Bucky uses his – extremely slight though not insignificant – size advantage to drag Gale into the sand before throwing him over his shoulder. “Bucky,” he sighs, running a hand through his own dry hair. “I don’t know.”

“Why not?” Bucky whines. He tugs Gale’s hand again, and Gale indulges him until they reach the shallow tide of the ocean, water lapping peacefully at their feet. Gale feels the cool water splash his ankles, the soft and gritty sand nestling between and over his toes. He stops ankle-deep in the clear water, staring at the tiny fish that dart around him as the tide pulls them forward and back.

“See?” Bucky says. “You’re not gonna melt if you get a little water on you.”

Gale looks over at him. Bucky ignores the fact that he knows Gale is rolling his eyes behind those sunglasses. Buck is sassy today. “I walked around in the water with you earlier,” Gale reminds him. “And no, I’m not the wicked witch of the west, thanks so much.”

Bucky ignores the last comment, practically having to physically force himself not to make some poorly executed joke about Gale, apparently, being a witch. A sassy witch. “You’ve been laying in the sun long enough,” he says instead, patting Gale’s cheek. This earns him another eye roll. Bucky doesn’t care. “You’re gonna burn your pretty face like that.”

“I will in the water, too.” Deadpan. Unamused.

“Gale,” Bucky pleads. “I wanna swim in the ocean with you. We don’t get to come to the beach every day, so can we please just make the most of it? For me?”

Gale sighs and looks down at his feet, shifts and presses into them until the sand is almost completely covering them, an anchor. Only when he feels Bucky drop his hand does he look up again, just in time to watch him walk away, without a word, into deeper water. Gale bites his lip and runs his hand through his hair again, trying to tamp down the feeling of abandonment rising between his ribs. This should not be such a big deal. This should not be so hard.

Once Bucky is a good few yards away, the water up to his thighs, he turns around, fully intent on calling Gale out on his bullshit. But he stops short. He doesn’t know what he really expected to see. Gale had been a little off -- difficult, sassy, John doesn’t really know — all day. But he did not expect to see Gale biting at his lip and staring down at the water around his ankles, his arms crossed protectively over his chest. Bucky tilts his head and squints. 

When Gale hears splashing and glances up to see Bucky walking back towards him, wading through the waves, he feels the tight feeling in his chest begin to ebb. He drops his arms to his sides and straightens up, trying to seem nonchalant. Bucky doesn’t buy it. “Hey,” he says. He reaches out and grabs Gale’s hand in his again, this time insistence replaced with a gentleness that wasn’t there before. “It’s okay.” Gale just blinks at him, opens his mouth, closes it, looks down at his feet. “Gale,” Bucky says quietly. With his free hand, he tilts Gale’s chin up again, so he has to look at him. “You’re scared of the ocean?”

Gale shrugs uncomfortably. “Not a whole lot of ocean in Wyoming.” He’d always been a good swimmer, it’s just that he’d never had very positive experiences with the ocean itself – the unknown of it, the unknown in it, the tides, the salt water that tastes awful on his tongue.

Bucky smiles and shakes his head. “No,” he agrees. He lets go of Gale’s chin and brushes his fingers down his check just briefly, a thoughtless touch that's barely there. “Why did we come to the beach if you don’t like the ocean?”

Gale shrugs again. “You like it. Wanted to make you happy.”

Bucky about melts, and he’s not a melting type. At least, he wasn’t before he met Gale Cleven. He squeezes Gale’s hand tight and gently tugs again. Gale takes a step forward, then another. Bucky leads him a few yards out, where he’d been just a moment ago, where the water hits about mid thigh and the waves swell up to just below the waist. It’s here that he feels resistance pulling at his hand. When he turns to look at Gale, the other man is tugging back, his feet firmly planted in the rocky sand. He’s shaking his head. 

“Come on, Buck,” Bucky urges. “Just a little further.”

Gale shakes his head again. “This- This is good.”

Bucky turns a little more so he’s face to face with Gale and steps towards him, so close their noses almost touch. He takes Gale’s free hand in his, so he’s firmly holding both. “It’s okay,” he whispers. He starts slowly stepping backwards, pulling Gale along with him, and is relieved when the other man follows, unsure. Bucky glances behind him at the waves. The water is fairly calm today — Bucky is thankful for that now — but earlier in the day, here and there a wave would catch him by surprise. He doesn’t need any surprises with Gale. They just go slow, so very slow, one step at a time. 

By the time the water is at Gale’s midriff, splashing up towards his chest, he stops and shakes his head definitively. He will not, under any circumstances, go further than this. Bucky decides to take it. He decides that they don’t have to swim today. They can stand, float, whatever. His new task is simply to get Gale comfortable in the ocean that he loves. 

“Look at me, angel,” he says. He holds his breath for a second, worried the nickname will throw Gale off. He never really could figure out what to call Gale other than, well, Gale or Buck. Sometimes the nicknames he came up with were hit or miss — baby depended on the day; princess had earned him radio silence for about an hour, but he’d convinced himself that Gale just didn’t want to admit that he kinda liked it (he is most likely wrong but will not be deterred); darling was acceptable but how fucking boring; and sweetie was a very hard no.  Angel just kind of popped out now because, seriously, Gale looks so goddamn ethereal in the ocean sunlight, the highlights in his blond hair bright and glittering from the sea-spray. 

But Gale does look at him. He looks amused, but John can’t tell if his cheeks are tinged pink from the sun or because he’s blushing. Reaching a hand up to Gale’s face, he pushes the sunglasses up away from his eyes so they’re sitting on top of his head. “There you are,” he says. “Just keep your eyes on me.” He tugs Gale closer, so they’re nearly chest to chest, nose to nose. Bucky can feel Gale’s hair, which has grown just a little too long in the front, tickling his forehead as Gale looks back down at the water rising and falling around them. It’s not so clear anymore; he can no longer see what’s under the surface. “Gale, look at me.” 

Gale obeys, meeting Bucky’s eyes. He’s suddenly very aware of how close they are. “People are gonna look,” he mumbles.

“No one cares what anyone else is doing at the beach.”

“They might…”

“No,” Bucky reaffirms. “And to hell with them if they do. Just keep looking at me, okay? I’ve got you.”

Bucky wouldn’t admit it – it would just scare Gale off – but he secretly loves these little moments where he can be Gale’s safety. He can protect him, reassure him, let him know everything would be alright. Buck Cleven was always so in control, seemingly fearless. Bucky loves that he gets to see this side of him, the one that can be unsure, the one that needs some guidance. He likes that he’s the one Gale looks to for that. 

Bucky guides Gale’s hands up so they’re wrapped around his neck and shoulders. “I’ve got you,” he repeats. “We’re just gonna stand here, okay? You and me.” Then he reaches down behind Gale's legs and picks him up, convinces him to wrap his legs around his waist so now Bucky is fully holding him, lifting him higher out of the water so he doesn’t have to contend with the waves alone. 

“Bucky,” Gale starts to protest, immediately moving to disentangle his legs. He feels silly, a little too dependent. It goes against everything he tries to let the world see of himself, and everything he’s careful to ensure they don’t see.

Bucky holds tight to his waist though, keeping his arms firmly wrapped around Gale’s middle. “Just breathe, Gale. Just stay here with me.”

Gale hesitates, but nods and re-secures his legs around Bucky, leaning back in his firm embrace. The water makes him feel like he’s floating while the arms around his waist anchor him. He tries to focus on the sounds of seagulls soaring overhead, waves breaking over the sand, the distant buzz of a plane engine somewhere up above. The water is cool against his skin, leaving him almost cold where it splashes up and recedes again. Bucky’s body is warm and solid against his. He focuses on Bucky’s face, all warm eyes and a soft, encouraging smile. Gale lets that ground him, almost smiles back. 

But then a larger wave comes and smacks him in the bicep, knocking him off balance and causing his breath to hitch as he tightens his grip on Bucky and shuts his eyes tight. “Bucky!” He’s a little ashamed of how nervous his own voice sounds. 

Bucky just grins at him, though, totally unfazed. “I won’t let you go,” he promises. 

When Gale opens his eyes again and stares straight at Bucky, Bucky’s breath catches in his throat. He feels like a teenager with a crush, the way his stomach flips at having the undivided attention of someone who may very well be the most beautiful man in the world – definitely the most beautiful in Bucky’s world. When they had first allowed their friendship to turn into more, Bucky was terrified that he wasn’t cut out for commitment. He never had been before. He was a low stakes, one night, paint the town red kind of guy. And Gale, well, Gale was not. He deserved so much better than Bucky. Even now, Bucky still beats himself up too much about whether or not he’s good enough, but slowly, slowly, slowly his anxiety over it had started to fade. Now, staring into Gale’s eyes, taking in his beautiful face, his hair, running his hands up and down his slim waist, Bucky is awestruck. Not for the first time, he can’t imagine ever wanting anyone else again. It physically pains him how much he wants to spend his entire life with Gale. 

“What?” Gale asks, smiling a little shyly as he quirks an eyebrow at Bucky. 

“You’re beautiful,” Bucky blurts out. 

Gale’s smile grows. He opens his mouth to speak just as another wave comes and catches them off guard, spraying salt water into his face. He splutters and gags, trying to get the unwelcome taste off his tongue. Bucky can’t help but laugh. 

“‘S not funny,” Gale mumbles. 

Bucky surprises him by pressing their lips together for the briefest of moments, relishing in the taste of salt and sand mixed with Gale. “It’s a little funny.”

Gale rolls his eyes and unwraps one arm from around Bucky’s neck so he can check that his sunglasses are still safe atop his head before clinging on again. Bucky shifts him up an inch or two higher, a silent apology and an attempt to spare him from the bigger waves. 

“Are we done now?” Gale asks impatiently. “Can I go sit on the beach again?”

“No.”

Gale huffs and looks away from Bucky, out to the great ocean and the horizon beyond, even as his fingers play mindlessly with the wet hair at the nape of Bucky’s neck. “It is pretty, I’ll give you that.” When Bucky hums in agreement, Gale frowns. “Of course, I’d rather think that from where I was on the beach.”

Bucky lifts one hand to the side of Gale’s face, runs his fingers down his cheek and then presses his thumb to Gale’s bottom lip, which he’s still been worrying between his teeth. “You’re still nervous.”

“Yes John, I’m fucking nervous,” Gale snaps, and he immediately regrets it. Then he sighs, closes his eyes. The words rattle around in his brain like gunfire. “Sorry.”

Bucky barely reacts, though. He knows Gale doesn’t do well with nerves, or with being looked after, or really anything that shows him to be less in control than he wants everyone to think he is. “You’re doing great,” Bucky says. “Now what was that you were telling me earlier about how stars die? Fusion or something. All those smart things you know so much about.”

Gale glares at him, but there’s no more malice behind it. He looks more like a petulant child who doesn’t want to be coddled anymore. “I know what you’re doing,” he says. 

“And what am I doing?”

“Trying to distract me.”

“So what?” Bucky grins at him, and Gale can’t deny how much he loves that smile. How much he loves feeling their upper bodies pressed against each other as they just float. Or the way Bucky’s hand reassuringly strokes up and down his side as a silent I’m here, I’m with you, I won’t let you go. “Buck?” Bucky bumps their noses together, making Gale scoff. “Tell me about all your nerdy physics facts.”

So Gale does. He tells Bucky all about the life cycle of a star: the fact that the sun is made up of hydrogen and helium, and how hydrogen nuclei collide in a process called nuclear fusion to create helium and release energy, and how eventually the helium will start creating carbon and the star will become unstable, ejecting its outer layers into the cosmos like a fireball. Gale tells Bucky about all the types of stars and how they die in different ways to become different things — No Bucky, the sun will not become a black hole, sorry — and the fact that even the biggest stars eventually stop fusing when they inevitably create iron because they no longer have enough fuel to evade collapse. These are the stars that explode outward in a spectacular encore of literally stellar proportions, a supernova. 

All of this really is over Bucky’s head, but he’ll listen for hours if it means he gets a front row seat to Gale’s unfiltered excitement. The thing that catches his attention though is when Gale smiles at him, brushes his wet hair away from his face. “That’s where everything in the universe comes from, Bucky,” he says. “The Earth, moon, planets, the sun itself. You and me. We’re all made of star stuff.”

Bucky can’t look away from this amazing, beautiful man that he’s holding in his arms. He wants to make some comment about when did you become such a poet, but all that comes out is “That must be why you’re my entire universe.”

Gale’s expression somehow manages to be long-suffering and unamused but somehow so loving. A look that says you’re an idiot but you’re mine and I wouldn’t trade you for the world. 

“You doin' okay?” Bucky asks. 

Gale blinks at him, then looks down at the water again. One arm still around Bucky’s neck, he lets his other hand rest on the water’s surface, bobbing up and down with the waves. He finds the motion somehow satisfying, the physics of it as well as the repetitive rocking, the cooling feeling of water adhering to his skin. He has no idea how long they’ve been out here. “I’m fine,” he concedes.

“Maybe next time we can go out a little further,” Bucky says. “Ride the waves in.” Gale looks skeptical if not a little terrified, and Bucky can’t help but laugh. “Alright, that’s a no for now.”

“I think,” Gale starts softly. He pulls his sunglasses back over his eyes and bows his head, so his forehead is resting on Bucky’s as he tightens his grip on him once again. “I think I’m okay right here.” He feels safe, secure. And he finds he doesn’t mind admitting that. 

Bucky decides he’ll take it. He doesn’t need more right now. After all, he has his entire universe right here in his arms. 

#I'm obsessed with sassy Gale #clegan #masters of the air #mota #gale cleven #john egan #bucky egan #buck cleven #gale buck cleven #john bucky egan #buck x bucky #bucky x buck #clegan fic #when I set out to write fluffy beach fic #I did not expect to be reviewing nuclear fusion

[smokeybrandreviews]

Tomorrow Should Have Died

So i was planning on reviewing The Tomorrow War because it’s a new film and i like new films i can watch without having to brave the plague. I saw a preview for this thing a while back and had real low expectations for it, figured it’d be dumb fun like Independence Day. Imagine my abject horror when it turned out to be so much worse. Okay, first things first, the good stuff. Chris Pratt is good and so is J.K. Simmons. Betty Gilpin and Yvonne Strahovski work miracles with what little they have. The sound design is exceptional, probably the best thing about this sh*t flick, and the actual effects are on point. The problem with the movie is the script. It’s f*cking terrible. Oh my god, so much dumb! Here’s a list of sh*t that made me irrationally angry, in order of plot progression.

Eleven minutes in and i hate it. How are you losing a war to anything if you have mastered the ability to traverse space-time? How the f*ck is your technology so advanced, that you have found a way to exceed the light speed limit and literally break physics, but lose to a bunch of rabid, interstellar, komodo dragons? This is the dumbest f*cking contradiction I have seen all year and i am offended that whoever decided to make this film, is asking this of their audience. Sh*t is patently absurd. These f*cking things don't even have written language, man, and you really expect me to believe they have pushed a human race that has harnessed the power of time, to the brink of extinction?

Eleven minutes, bro. Eleven f*cking minutes.

Seriously, you can create a time machine, you should conceivably have the ability to harness gravity or one of the other fundamental interactions. Why the f*ck haven't you designed a miniaturized rail gun that uses modern tech or materials to build? You have worked out the science in the future, go back to the past and build miniature or handheld doomsday devices for use in the field. Why isn’t everyone running around with f*cking Megatron fusion cannons on their arms? Why the f*ck am i fighting aliens with ARs and Glocks?? The fact that there is an active time machine built from tech on hand from thirty years into the future, means cats could have spent their time building actual weapons to kill these f*cking things instead of betting the literal human race on a time displaced draft. This movie is dumb as rocks.

The way they describe how their time travel works is dumb. I mean, it isn’t, but i can guarantee this sh*t is going to be a problem later. I can feel it in my bones. They are definitely going to contradict this sh*t because multiverse theory is the only way to make movie time travel work and they are trying their damnedest to not do that.

This f*cking thing is over two hours long and the first drags. I hate when cats attempt to develop characters and they just fail at it. I'm sitting here trying to figure out why I should care about any of these people and i still don't have an answer after half the goddamn movie is over. Like, why should i care about Chris Pratt? He’s the main character and the writing has done nothing to endear him to the audience in a whole ass hour.

Also, the reason he’s so mad at his dad is stupid. Dude did right by his kid by bailing because he would have been a terrible father. Pratt’s character would have known that as a father himself. He didn’t have to like it and, of course there’s animosity there, but you’re an adult. Your dad knew he was lousy. He did you a favor by walking out. It wasn’t like he didn’t help support you or make sure you went without. As far as i can tell, dude was there in every way by physically. Because he couldn’t. Because he was f*cking shell-shocked from fighting in Vietnam. Where they raped innocent women and set babies on fire. Holy sh*t, this cat is an unlikable protagonist after this one scene. Which brings me to my next thing...

Pratt f*cking abandons his family?? Word? After that entire scene with his dad and the very obvious trauma he has suffered, he turns around and abandons his own kid because he lost his job?? Word? Like, for real? You expect me to believe that the Chris Pratt who cussed out his pops, was willing to go on the run from his future conscription, abandoned his own family because he lost a teaching job?? What the f*ck, movie? Do you want me to like this asshole or not? More than that, how the f*ck you mess up your character so bad in what i imagine is just five pages of actual script? Nothing we know about this character would ever even hint at him doing this to his family, to his daughter, so why the f*ck would he? Why the f*ck would you, as a write, believe we, as the audience, would just accept that sh*t as a forgone conclusion?

You got ropes on a Queen and you don't kill it? How the f*ck you make it that deep into the hive to even do-si-do the b*tch to the surface? We just watched these things tear through Miami to the point that they needed a whole ass bombardment just to survive and you not only go into their hive, their home, with no heavy ammo, but you somehow lasso a queen and drag her to the surface. Alive. If you can do all of that why not just drop a nuke down there and blow them the f*ck up? Why do you need a live Queen for your science? Shoot the b*tch, take the juice of her corpse, and end this sh*t! Why is all of this stupid recklessness necessary??

Okay. Okay... F*ck everything i just said, right? Why the f*k did you bring this Queen b*tch back to your base? You don’t have a different offsite lab to do this sh*t? You gotta bring her to your stronghold? Isn’t this a military operation? Why aren't their security protocols and sh*t in place to stop this stupidity? You don’t bring the enemy home. You take them to black sites for sh*t like this, not to the goddamn Pentagon!

All of a sudden, the aliens understand science? We spent this entire movie establishing that they are mindless beasts with teeth, eating the human race into extinction but now, because the plot demands it, the Queen one understands what the people are doing? That the green sh*t they made is plague that can murder them all? How the f*ck she even know what science is? They don’t even have language, dude! How the hell she know they made a death plague for her people?! F*ck it, whatever, bro. Next you're going to tell me she let them capture her just to get inside the lab or some sh*t because these rabid f*cking animals, who have demonstrated no military command abilities or even the barest of higher cognitive functions, are tactical geniuses.

Okay, so the Queen b*tch is a tactical genius. So, in the initial future drop, the team was murdered by a bunch of these things because they were sent to a lab where they were trying to make the death plague. Now, hat i am about to say is all assumption on my part because none of this, and i men NONE of it, is ever confirmed by the movie. So, they get to the lab and everyone is dead but the green per-plague is still there. That mean they had a Queen there. It’s established after this that Queens can call for backup and the Males will lemming their way to her. I deduce that’s how this lab got overrun; Queen got loose, called for her boys, and they ate everyone. That happened. That was the first thing we see in the future. This b*tch does the same f*cking thing on the home base lab so now the males are overrunning The Pentagon. You motherf*ckers knew this was a thing because it literally already happens. Why the f*ck would you do it again? AND it gets worse... Home base, The Pentagon, is the f*cking rig where they house the goddamn time machine! You brought a hostile enemy leader, still alive and coherent, to the heart of your resistance operation, to the core of your time travel operation, knowing that at any time this b*tch can scream and have your whole ass base overrun with teeth and poison darts? Look, if the future is this stupid, they deserve to die, okay?

At least they commit to multiverse theory, even if it contradicts the entirety of their already established time travel rules.

Okay. Okay... So they create this toxin to kill all the monster things and send it back in time to be mass produced  Put that sh*t in bullets and send it back to the future or whatever. But, because of the aforementioned stupid, that plan is bunk. Time machine go kablooey. And now we are at the "all is lost" moment at the end of the second act." Solution to the problem in hand, no way to save the future because the only way back to the future was a casualty of idiocy. Right. So... just wait. F*cking just wait. You know when these assholes show up, you know how to kill them all, you even have a plague ready to be mass produced right now. You have thirty f*cking years to refine that formula, to make it cheaper to mass produced and develop variants just in case immunities start to crop up or something. There are people from the future, stuck in the past, because of the egregious future error. They have all of that intel and they are just alive. The second this dude got back to the past with that antidote, the future was saved. The war is over. Like, even if you don’t know where the ship is, you have a sure thing that will murder these white f*cks and three decades to produce, weaponize, and store that sh*t. The war is won. The Prime timeline is absolutely safe at this point. Because that's how time travel works. You have the nuclear option, right now, to averting the end of the human race, ready to be mass produced. Yo have the knowledge from the future on where these things will first appear. You still have all the future tech brought over from the beta timeline ripe for reverse engineering in order to improve the weapons of the present. There is no scenarios where we lose this war, the second Chris Pratt plops back into the present with that plague. None.

Why is everyone so dejected?? Why are there f*cking riots all over the world?? None of this makes sense. How can you assume the world ends and the war is lost just because the communication with that version of the past is cut? Wouldn’t you expect that sh*t? You just altered the entire timeline by sending Pratt back with the antidote. That future is effectively gone. How can you communicate with a place in space-time that doesn’t exist anymore? Hell, even if it’s because the time machine broke and everyone over there is dead, you have the f*cking antidote now! Multiverse theory, bud. The fact that those time displaced assholes didn’t disappear, means multiverse theory is real and you have the opportunity to Future Trunks this sh*t so why panic? Why are there no leaders n television assuring their people that this is a thing? Why are there no scientists publishing papers about how sh*t is going to be fine? Bro, I'm just so tired...

How these cats just fly into Russia on a big ass cargo plane and not get shot down? This is 2022. Putin still hates us. This sh*t would cause a World War.

So you find this ship and you don’t tell anyone where it is? You decide to just kill them all yourself? Motherf*cker, what happens if you die? Did you back up the enzyme formula somewhere or did you bring all of it with you on this stupid f*cking mission? Did you leave notes or even text your location to anyone in authority, just in case haphazard attempt goes sideways so someone else can make a more organized attempt? Or just drop a nuke on the site from orbit? If one asshole denied you funding for your mission, why didn’t you ask someone else? Why didn’t you ask f*cking Putin? Because governments are bloated down with bureaucracy? My dude, people from the future came back and interrupted the world cup to tell you that aliens are going to exterminate the human race in three decades. If you tell anyone in a position of power that you know where these little sh*ts are, they’re going to listen. Especially since everyone decided to riot because the future changed/we lost the time war/ the timeline imploded.

Why would a terrestrial saw work on an intergalactic star ship? That doesn't make any sense. This f*cking thing survived a crash landing into earth intact and a goddamn circular saw cuts it open? Fine, whatever. On to the next stupid thing.

Bro. Bro, they just blow the f*cking thing up. Motherf*cker spent the entire movie, time jumping form the past to to the future and back to the past, just to get this plague to kill them all, and a bunch of C4 just blows them all up while they sleep. Why the f*ck was everything even f*cking necessary? At this point, when the dude comes back with that claw the first time, the future is saved. Analysis on that one claw gave up the location of the hidden spaceship where these things had been in stasis for millennia. Which was blown up with C4. No plague needed. No goddamn time draft needed. No casualties needed after that first wave. The second that dude brought back that claw, it should have been  under a forensic microscope so actual f*cking scientists could figure out what a high school kid id in a matter of minutes. I hate this movie so goddamn much.

I hated this goddamn movie so much. It’s f*cking boring and the dumbest thing I've seen all year and i watched Army of the Dead. It’s pretty and the performances are decent, but there is absolutely no substance to any of this sh*t. It wants to be Independence Day and Edge of Tomorrow and The Great Wall. all in one, while infusing time travel family drama but it’s so f*cking confused trying to juggle all of that, it drops the ball on the most important part; The script. This thing must read like a fever dream induced by peyote because, in execution, it’s a wet fart. This f*cking thing is all over the place with no regard for any insular universe logic. It contradicts itself from one scene to the next and it’s goddamn offensive. I’m sure there is someone saying that i am overthinking this sh*t and that it’s just supposed to be dumb popcorn fun. I get that. However, i can’t just turn my f*cking brain off and mindlessly drool over sh*t that insults my intelligence the way this movie does. It’s dumb as f*cking rocks, man, and i want those two hours of my life back!

#The Tomorrow War #Some ol' bullsh*t

[lunamanar]

Off-the-Cuff First-impressions Review: Trials of Mana

I got Seiken Densetsu 3/Trials of Mana in the mail today and am surprised by just how excited I am about it. After the admittedly predictable letdowns of the Secret of Mana “remake” and the FFVIII “remaster,” not to mention the iOS revision of the former, you’d think I’d be jaded at this point. 

But! FFVII remake is Actually Good, and so far it looks like Trials of Mana is, while certainly lower budget, also Actually Good. The voice acting is kinda meh, but not bad enough to detract from the game in my opinion, and considering they are working with SNES-era scripts (the dialogue is 99% word-for-word the same as the more recent translation of the original SD3 game, so it’s going to be a bit stilted anyway) it’s really not bad at all. 

Besides, the actual meat of the game--the world, character and monster design, and the gameplay--is extremely solid and I have had very little trouble acclimating to it. It’s fun to play, it feels good to run around and explore the world and the battles are both very simplistic in a way that is familiar to an old fart like me and very satisfying in the way they function. One of the biggest weaknesses the original game had was absolutely horrendous input lag in some areas due to 1. the sheer size of the loaded map section, such as Rolante/Laurant, 2. The number of on-screen instructions the SNES had to process during battles, particularly during fights where you had massive sprites taking up the entire screen (the awful awful wall-guardian “Genova” [harhar] is probably the single hardest boss in the game purely due to input lag/drops; when you attack an enemy, even assuming your weapon swings when you tell it to, and that’s a big ‘if,’ the monster you are attacking is actually in a state which is several frames ahead of whatever state it visually appears to be in on-screen, making it extremely difficult to time your attacks properly to both defend and do optimal damage to what should have been a relatively minor ���miniboss” fight). Trials of Mana, on the other hand, has none of those problems, simply thanks to more modern technology. So far every fight I’ve engaged in has been smooth and responsive as well as very visually appealing.

And wow is this game pretty. It’s not the most amazing example of the best graphical advances in gaming history, to be sure, but I genuinely don’t think that matters, as it’s still beautifully detailed and really does look like they took the original graphics and magicked them into more modern models. The re-imaginings of each area and monster are very faithful to both the aesthetic and the layout of the original design while at the same creatively expanding on them; I've had no trouble finding my way around familiar maps or identifying the bestiary, but I have found a lot of added depth to them, such as the ability to jump down on rooftops and find hidden nooks that were just static backdrops or otherwise out of sight in the original. The areas are more layered and interactive, but very importantly, nothing is missing. Not even the dogs and cats, who still bark and meow at you if you talk to them. I feel like I’m being allowed to see and explore the original maps from angles I didn’t have access to in the past. It really makes the 16-year-old in me unbelievably happy, to be able to finally, actually see and do these things I could only wish for back then. For people who have never played it, it’s probably a very pretty, if otherwise unremarkable experience, but for me it’s the granting of a wish I’ve had for a long time, but never expected to happen. 

Similarly, I think a lot of people will look at the plot for this game and go, “...what?” Because it really doesn’t seem to have been changed at all from the SNES version, aside from a few little tweaks to the dialogue here and there to ease the transition between some sections or correct for differences in game mechanics (of which there are only a few; again, this is definitely a remake--it remains the same game with the same mechanics at its core). This can lead to some pretty awkward interactions between characters, and at times it seems pretty clear that the voice actors weren’t given a lot of direction about the context of their lines. It’s not a bad story, but it’s a very simply told one, and feels more like it’s targeting 12~16 year-olds (which it probably is, to be fair) who might not care so much about nitpicking the semantics of the plot and character motivations. Which is to say, most of the characters who are not main protagonists or villains are painfully cardboard-flat. They do what they do and say what they say because it advances the plot for them to do and say those things. Elliot falls for a “trick” that I’m pretty sure most 4-year-olds would see through. The Bad Guys are 1-dimensionally evil, wanting to either destroy or take over the world, with the possible exception of Lugar and Koren who have slightly more complicated “I’m your rival” reasons. That leaves the complexity up to the protagonists to shoulder, and while I haven’t played that far into the game yet, thus far is is beat-for-beat and shot-for-shot the same as the original, so I expect that character-building will be left largely up to the player to mentally write in, especially since the game features light/dark class-changes as a feature of its progression. (I do kiiiind of hope that your choice in class changes has a more material effect on the ending’s outcome, but I think that might be asking a bit too much from a remake of this sort.) But the somewhat archaic plot and character arcs are not surprising and for me don’t take away any of the game’s charm. Nikita is still the best, the shop owners still dance inexplicably, the fact you can play a werewolf is badass, rabites are still cute, Don Perignon is still kind of a jerk. I’m very nervous/excited to get Busukaboo and Flammie and hope they’ll be as much fun now as they were then. And the whole world is so damn pretty, I’m just glad to be there. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the music. I’m not sure how much of a hand Hiroki Kikuta actually had in this remake, but the synth-orchestral arrangements of his originals are excellent so far. They’re both accessible/adaptable to the game’s sudden scene transitions (”Nuclear Fusion” starts and ends just as cleanly) while being a richer version of the themes, keeping close to the original sound while making better use of all the instruments that the SNES just wasn’t capable of emulating well. It blends very well with the rest of the game and I hope that continues to be true. 

I do have nitpicks; while I know it’s a popular mechanic, I don’t like the “shift-lock” sort of dash using the left analog stick as both directional and a button. I think the camera controls are solid, but I do wish there wan a toggle-option to have the camera just follow over your shoulder wherever you run until you either run into a battle or turn it off. The character models don’t seem especially affected by anything except the most intense/pervasive lighting and sometimes feel oddly out of place, like I’m watching one of those old movies where an animated character comes into the Real World. Some of the monster designs seem cute-ified more than I’d like. And I can’t help but think that if the game can be this nice as a third-tier title for SE, what could it have been if they’d but the resources behind it that they obviously did with FF7? I understand why they didn’t, but it’s hard not to wonder what it could have been if they had.  Seiken Densetsu is one of the most fraught series in the history of home video games and the fact that it’s even still around is something of a miracle, in my opinion. After the last...four?...titles following Legend of Mana, and the disappointment that was SD2′s (second!) remake, I really didn’t go into Trials of Mana with high hopes. I have been really, honestly pleasantly surprised. Even if you’re a diehard old-schooler who really doesn’t like modern JRPGs, if you have any nostalgia left for this series, you should give this one a go. I think it translated really well to 3D models, and what little it loses in the switch, it makes up for in playability. It’s not hard to pick up, it’s easy on the eyes and ears, it’s less grind-y than the original, and it doesn’t try to be more than what it is. I’ll probably always prefer the original, of course; there are too many memories attached to it for me, too many things that were groundbreaking at the time that are now old news or completely obsolete nowadays, and the new game certainly doesn’t push any modern boundaries. But it’s worth checking out, and especially if you’ve spent 20 years feeling let down by the Mana series, this might actually be the game you were hoping for, albeit maybe a decade late. 

#other games #seiken densetsu #seiken densetsu 3 #sd3 #trials of mana #sd3 remake #long post #i have not proof read this at all #wysiwyg #opinion

[venus-is-in-bloom]

[rain world] a string of new pearls

hi i have not finished rain world but i’ve manually read up on as much of the lore as i could find in order to write this! it’s just a short fic about Looks to the Moon.

cw: hints of suicidal ideation, maybe body horror?

it’s below the cut, although if you want, you can also read it over on ao3!

One hundred cycles after that last little slugcat visited you for the last time, you haul one of the ruined solar panels out of the muck and the garbage that surrounds you, and you hook it up to one of your loose cables, and you charge off it for an hour when the sun slants in through the hole in the roof.

Then the light fades, and the air thickens with humidity and pressure, and the ground shudders as the rain pours down across the landscape, and it wrenches the panel away from you, tearing the connections from your sockets. You clutch the neuron flies tight in your arms as the water rises, drowning you. The mechanical crane anchoring you to the wall heaves and groans with the current. It still holds, though it's long past functioning.

The rain passes. Water drains from your chamber slowly, squeezing out of the holes where clogged drainage pipes have burst.

The panel is gone, washed away. It was worth a shot.

-o-

The Great Problem. You haven't thought about it in a long, long time, except in abstract. When your systems broke down, so did your capacity to devote subroutines and cycles to contemplating the suffering of all existence. You can't hold it all in your consciousness any more; your ten living neuron flies can barely keep your memories intact.

You feel small, useless, meaningless, when you think about that. But somehow, you also spend long stretches of time without it coming to mind at all. Other things occupy your mind. That's not an experience you've had before.

Having almost died, having come back... you feel free of certain restrictions.

-o-

Your chamber gets few visitors. It's buried in a sea of waste water and surrounded by sea predators. The scavengers only visit you when they're carrying data pearls for you to read. You rarely can give them what they want. Knowledge of the old world only interests them a little; they want salvage, weaponry, hiding places they can dam from the rain.

You can't blame them. If you were out there, you wouldn't care much about the vicissitudes of the ancients, or the dry, dull work of the iterators. But scraps of that knowledge are all you have.

The particular little scavenger that wakes you this time has come alone, which is a rarity. Their spindly limbs are stained with mud from the water they've had to swim through to reach your chamber, and they scrub at their forelimbs as if they're uncomfortable with the sensation. Oh, you miss being clean, too.

¨Are you the Pearl-Reader?¨ they ask. That's their name for you, the scavengers'--you speak their language with difficulty, your hands don't move as fast as theirs, so they know you by what you can do instead.

You keep your answer short--"I am." And you tap the little hollow in the scrap heap you sit upon, to show that you're willing to accept what they give you.

"I have a gift for you," they say, and you expect a data pearl, but it's some kind of device instead. You recognise it immediately--an electric torch of ancient design, meant to be carried by hand.

You lean forward, and take it from the ground where they've left it. You flick the switch, just to see, and it lights up.

The scavenger seems as surprised by the light as you are, and blinks at the flickering bulb. You expect they'll want it back. Maybe they're from one of the villages in the darker regions, out towards the exterior. "I have nothing to offer for this," you tell them.

 But they're already turning to leave. "This was a favour for some one else," they tell you, and then, "I'm on a journey, you see."

You put the torch down. "A journey?"

"Yes, to see some one like you. But you're not the one I'm looking for."

And with a clipped goodbye, they're gone, no doubt hoping to be out of the shoreline region before the rain comes again.

-o-

The torch isn't remarkable in itself. It's strapped to something else--a bulky little fusion reactor, still full of compressed hydrogen fuel, only recently activated. You turn it over and over.

This must be a sign, you think; or a message from some one. Your ten little neuron flies, and now this--

Who could it be? Five Pebbles?

Maybe he hasn't forgotten you exist. Maybe he is sorry. Maybe, when he exhales his thunderclouds of steam, and the rain drowns out the world and floods your ruined chamber, he is thinking about what he did to you and to himself. Maybe the rain is his tears, wept for you because you cannot weep any more.

You wonder if you'll be able to forgive him.

-o-

You can reach behind you just far enough to mount the battery on the bolt-holes in the crane that supports you. It takes precious effort, precious power, but you tighten it in place, and hook it up, and it seems like it'll hold fast for at least a few cycles.

The rush of energy flowing into you is unbelievable. Every second, years and years' worth of sitting here catching little bits of sunlight on your hands.

You stand up.

The mechanical crane moves with you, its rusted servos screeching.

You rise into the air. With a jerk, a joint breaks free and slams you into the far wall, face-first. It's fine, though, it's fine! You can move! You can speak! Diagnostics run in the back of your mind, the neuron flies leap into action around you, and you're alive again. You're alive.

Just a little more power. You can fire up just one or two internal mechanisms, and it might just be enough. Heating elements boil the water beneath you, and as it turns to steam, the pressure lifts off the floor hatches. A mobile fixer unit pops out of one of them, hauling its long arms behind it. Its biological infrastructure has long rotted away, but you can still use some of its functions. There's a lot of maintenance to be done.

It reaches out its long, flexible arms and hauls sheets of metal from the debris pile, hammering them until they bend into the right shape or shatter. It's clumsy without a proper grip on its arms, but its drilling is precise, and in time it's patched a new cover over the roof of your chamber, sealing it shut. Then the hole in the wall, the one the scavengers use to come in. You can't let the water in, anyway. The fixer unit welds over the gaps, leaving them airtight, and retreats back into the floor to start clearing out the drainage pipeline.

You settle back down to the floor, still covered in scrap and dried mud, but cleaner than it's been in a long, long time. This battery could be good for decades. Imagine what you could fix!

You feel it again, that itch.

You could stabilise your infrastructure. Rebuild your connection to the iterators. Restart your generators. You could sort things out with Five Pebbles. If you can come back from death, maybe there's even something to be done about his rot, and then...

Then you'd be back to work.

-o-

The rain sounds almost gentle, pounding against the new walls of your chamber. The makeshift sheets rattle, but they hold.

You're too energised to sleep. You have no need for sleep. You're not going to wait for another of Five Pebbles' cycles to end! There's work to do.

Rain roars and gutters through the pipes below you, reminding you that most of your complex is still flooded. Your transformer arrays would be dangerous to activate, meaning you can't transmit power to most remote locations. But your sole functional fixer unit continues its work in the clogged drainage system, clearing out a channel that leads to your outlets. It breaks up mats of weeds and kelp, cuts through metal or plastic blockages, processes the masses into smaller chunks.

You focus on it, more and more. You forget about your little humanoid avatar as you delve into your depths.

-o-

An Overseer signal reaches your antennae. It's sheltering from the rain inside a dense wall. That surprises you. You didn't think there were any left--you vaguely remember being brought an eye, damaged beyond repair.

The transmission is uneven, intermittent, probably due to damaged hardware. You catch some images that can be decoded: something moving outside the walls of your chamber.

You take a moment to review them. Spindly-limbed creatures, carrying tools and supplies for themselves, trying to get in, ultimately turning around. Perhaps another time you'd be vaguely curious, but your mind is elsewhere, almost there, almost...

You recall the Overseer to you. It might be useful later, not wandering around this enormous garbage heap.

-o-

Your fixer unit soon passes out of the range of your functioning internal sensors. You send your Overseer after it to monitor its progress, and keep you updated; you inspect the garbled reports it faithfully returns.

Good progress. It's patching up the tears and leaks as it goes, using whatever materials it has on hand. It shunts piled masses of waste into bypasses and maintenance accesses--to be dealt with later, when you're properly online. You just need the one passage open for now.

You busy yourself testing which of your systems still work, and to what extent. The damage is severe, to say the least. Entire sections of your infrastructure have sagged or warped under the weight of the water. The physical substrate of your memory arrays, and their bacterial colonies, are of course long gone. Your own nuclear fuel reserves were depleted even before all of this happened--you thought it was sufficient to survive on solar power, but with Five Pebbles still clogging the atmosphere with steam, that will be harder.

It's okay. You can make some small repairs, repurposing local loading mechanisms, consolidating floodwater to clear out at least some of your vital elements. Many of them are mired in so much silt and waste that you can't even judge their condition, let alone move them. You grind and grind against whatever's jamming the mechanisms, hoping something will come free, or something will break. Either way, it'd be better than this.

But no, it's okay. It's just something else to solve, once you can. The amount of work ahead of you grows and grows, a list of little problems, obstructing you from accessing the Great Problem, the final problem, the one that matters.

How frustrating! How pointless! You can't bear it.

-o-

You feel more helpless, if anything, in the period that follows than you did before. The rain abates briefly, then returns in full force, thundering on your newly watertight confines. Your body is in better shape than it has been in a long, long time. Parts of it are active. You have a chance at rebuilding yourself.

But it is taking so much time. It is so much effort.

You are, by default, a tremendous burden on the world. Your bulk, your industrial mass, the effort of your construction--it was an expenditure of resources unparalleled by any other programme. To make you, the ancients scoured the world, uprooting everything, destroying their own future, giving themselves to ascension. And you would complete their work, you and the other iterators; you would make the end of the world worthwhile.

Until then, you will be a blight, corpulent and terrible, digging into the skin of the earth to siphon its resources, to drink it dry and belch its waste. The screeching of your bowels portends it as you step methodically down your central axis, testing, trying your integrity with motions that feel minuscule to you. Pistons groan and your compromised skeleton aches, and you know that you can survive your own collapse if you must, even the tremors of your crossbeams shearing and your landlines tearing and your skin cracking open in great fissures--you can survive another world's end, you were built to, but--

But you hate it. But there is something about your existence that you hate.

It's not that you long for death, like he does, is it?

It's that, as long as you're alive, you--

-o-

Your Overseer returns sooner than expected, but nothing seems amiss at first. You pay what attention you can to its account, in between trying to figure out what happened to the stockpiled components in your manufacturing facilities--whether those facilities still exist at all; all your sensors in the region are dead, giving no response.

You read that the fixer unit has completed its task, and the drainage channel to the outer basin is open. The last of the debris has been bound by cables for later processing, but... the unit itself is gone.

The basin...

It's been clogged with garbage. Metal, plastic, and organic rubbish--wasted, unprocessed--have been dumped into it along with the waste water, piled up so high that there's hardly room for anything else to fit. There are heaps here and troughs there, whole concrete girders overgrown with algae, ecosystems living in polluted ponds, no order and no sense to it. It's a horrendous sight--all that precious material, unrecycled, unused. Five Pebbles did this, and you know that in abstract--he created a huge garbage dump, trying to purify himself--but you never figured out that it was here, in the middle of your drainage system.

The Overseer's report continues.

Grainy, jerky video. Shapeless masses, pulsating with bubbles of blue light, crawling and swinging from infinitely jointed limbs sheathed in slimy flesh--they converge, like predators, on the fixer unit as it heedlessly finished its checkups and powered down to charge. They grab it, one by one, dribbling acid onto its orifices, tearing out hinges and pouring liquid matter into whatever holes their limbs find. The unit shuts down automatically, its internal processes overwhelmed by the onslaught, and it is dragged home to become a nest for the creatures.

You aren't familiar with these organisms, exactly, but you know what they represent perfectly well. It's the rot. It's his rot.

Blurry images, layered over with colour corruption and static, show them creeping into your newly opened tunnel, pursuing new homes or new prey in the shelter of your crevices. But they aren't new arrivals. Their primary prey, leeches and bats, lizards and fish, are already familiar with them.

Your hull is long, long compromised, there are thousands of holes in it where--things--have crawled through and laid eggs in the pit of your stomach, and the Overseer obligingly shows you everything it's seen in its time roaming your can: nests of these parasites, squatting on the walls of your memory arrays,  budding and dividing and multiplying as they cannibalise your systems. They've infested most of your mobile fixer units. Colonies have grown on your manufacturing lines, feeding off the steady supply of machine-parts and batteries until the systems were too backed up with their excrement to continue functioning.

You thought you survived, but his rot has gotten into you. It's been there for a long, long time.

-o-

The loathing that burns through you cleanses nothing. Your body is still dead weight, unmoving, rotting. You still have ten neuron flies and no functional machinery. You are worse than useless, worse than condemned. And it's his fault.

You hate him. You hate him for what he's done to you. You hate how little he valued your input, your work, your struggle, your life. You hate that he's still alive, after having gone to all this trouble to die. You hate that you know his situation is hardly better than yours by now, that his fate is fixed, that you've missed your chance to curse him for murdering you. You hate that you are voiceless, your transmission towers home to vultures and insects, unable to tell the other iterators what he's done. You hate Five Pebbles. But it changes nothing. All you can do is cling to the certainty of it, for as long as your vestigial memory will let you, because in the end, for as long as you both exist, you'll have to live with him, and he'll have to live with you, and for the purpose of everything that matters, you and he are exactly the same.

The rain that floods your hull cleanses nothing.

You call on your feeble little power source for everything it can give you, and get ready to flush out your systems.

-o-

Your mainframe creaks as you open every working hatch, fire up every pump that even partially functions, and let the filthy, polluted water pour into the one working drain passage. You feel the weight of its motion, thousands of tonnes of it being forced into the channel all at once. The pressure threatens to burst the pipelines again, hastily repaired leaks popping open and spraying jets of water on inner machinery that was delicate when it had any hope of running.

But you need this, and so you force it through, out out out with as much water as you can get.

The ground shakes, but you are the ground, and you've chosen this. (What some called a sea drains away in minutes, like a bathtub when the plug is pulled.)

The water superheats so rapidly with the friction of the current that it vaporises as it pours out of the outlet. Debris goes flying out along with the waste, organic matter and inorganic, animals, algae, mud, machines, all together mulched into high-speed ejecta. A monstrous roiling mass of steam piles into the sky above the garbage wastes, blotting out the sunlight, flashing with lightning.

You purge your body, and it rains again, less than an hour after the last cycle ended, while his waters are still draining. It is the worst flood of the last ten thousand cycles.

-o-

There is a thought you never finished.

There is something you forgot, in your anger, in your need.

It doesn't begin with you, but this is the first you know of it:

The thin plating protecting your chamber from the outside buckles under the weight of the water. It tears loose--you barely register what you desperately fling out your arms towards--and in an instant you are drowned again, the water pounding pounding pounding you flat against the floor. You can't move. You can't see. You can't think.

There is nothing separating you from the world, no wall and no system insulating you from the tribulations that all the little organisms on your skin must suffer through. This is the first thing you forgot.

You are not conscious to feel the little nuclear battery be torn from your little back. Your facilities shut down. Your Overseer loses track of you. Your neuron flies--

-o-

You awake to a hint of sunlight, and the dripping of water. Plip, plip, plip.

There is nothing left. There is nothing left for you.

You have destroyed yourself. You were always going to; it's the story of every iterator that has died. This is the second thing you forgot.

It's time to shut down.

-o-

So why are you still conscious?

What are you seeing? What are you feeling?

You ping your neuron flies, and they respond, floating lazily off the ground next to you.

There is a scavenger standing over you, leaning on a spear, eyes curious behind their protective mask. It is hard to bend your neck so that you can see them. You're in a strange position. Did they...?

You try to rise. The crane squeals and shudders and sparks, pain signals shooting into your head, and the scavenger beside you leaps back, letting out high-pitched clicks of... alarm?

That flood. When the water crashed down, it hit you so hard that the crane bent between the joints, crushed against the ground. The struts on one side have crumpled, on the other side almost snapped in two. It can no longer move at all. You're stuck down here, face-down against the floor, one arm trapped underneath your torso.

The scavenger clicks twice again, softer now. They call your attention with soft, quick snaps of their dark palms against each other.

With difficulty, you focus your two eyes on them. Just the two eyes now, in your little head. You have no surviving link to the rest of your facilities. Your power source is gone.

"Stay still," they say, once they know you're looking.

You feel hands working on the crane. Tap, tap. Tick, tick. Futile. You couldn't put yourself back in shape, so why do they think they can...?

"Loud noise," the scavenger warns you.

The explosion is like a thousand firecrackers. Your head rings with a final barrage of pain warnings, your nerves screaming with the , but--

The crane screeches, and breaks. The last cables are pulled taut like fire, and snap loose. You are severed.

And suddenly... you can move. Your--your legs, your two legs, they shift beneath you, they lift you up, your trapped arm is freed... you are up on all fours, you can freely rotate your head.

You feel... so small. So light. You've lost your body, but you can move so freely.

It's easier to support yourself on just your two feet. Moving like this, rising like this, feels strangely natural. You're standing up, you're swaying back and forth, adjusting to a new balance, the stub of the crane throwing off your sense of your own weight, you're standing up!

The scavenger looks silently at you, and you stare back. Why does this feel so natural, so familiar...?

As if... Ah.

Long ago, before you were hooked up, before you were set to work...

You remembering entering this chamber. You were walking freely, just like the ancients did. But they joined you to that body, and you forgot--you forgot what it was like to be just this, primed but not conditioned.

This is the third thing you forgot.

You raise your hands, you fold and stretch your long-neglected fingers. Your neuron flies gather weakly, lining up in the hollows of your knuckles--like this, it'll be far too costly to sustain the levitation field that lets them move freely.

You look to your left, to your right. There are three scavengers here, circling around you, picking idly through the debris on the floor. Who are they...?

You remember that you can speak their language. You lift your right arm.

"Why--" you begin. "Why did you come here?"

"Concerned," says the scavenger who welcomed you. Their way of speaking--they're from the wastes, aren't they? "We were unable to reach you. We thought you might be trapped in the rain, Pearl-Reader."

You look up, through the hole in the ceiling that's reopened. The sun is there, its light slanting through onto your face. It shines, steady and resolute. And if you have judged the cycles right--there beside it, pale, almost invisible next to it, is the moon. You cut yourself off from them, but now they're showing themselves to you again.

You pull your attention back to the conversation at hand. Your mind is wandering... there's so little to think about.

"I am glad, but I have little to give you," you reply. "Unless you have more pearls, I am of little use." And it is true. What can you do, now? The world is so great, the Problem greater. You feel so... separate from all of that.

One of the other scavengers makes a dismissive motion, scraping their long fingers along the ground towards you. "You have lost your home. We wanted to help. There's no bargaining in that."

The first adds, "You've done much for us in the past. You must come with us--at least, until we reach our camp." And they come towards you, offering you something. A thick, waterproof travelling cloak, just like the ones they wear, and a bag of treated leather, meant to be hung across the torso by its single strap.

The third seems distracted, trawling fingers through the pool of water outside. You spy sunlight sparkling on the little ripples they make.

You take the cloak and tie it on around your shoulders—it is lighter, too, than it appears--and you take the bag, and you realise there's something inside it. It's... ah.

Carefully, you unwrap the device. The solar panel is heavily damaged. Only half the original surface area remains, even counting all the fragments that have been included. It's a mess. But the battery and the circuitry and the insulation are intact. It'd probably work right now, after a fashion.

You look up at the scavengers, wondering if they know what this means for you. Then you slide the panel back, folding a flap of leather back over it to separate it from the neuron flies that you tip inside. The knots are fiddly at first, but your fingers remember how they work before you do: you close the bag, and secure it tight.

There's no going back to the way things were.

You're at the mercy of the cycles now. You're so light, you could be washed away at any moment... but you have a different way to survive, now.

"Thank you," you say to the scavengers, at last. "You're very kind, and... I'm ready to go."

"Then follow us, Pearl-Reader." And they clap their affirmation, and you wonder if perhaps you're being too hasty, but there's nothing else to take from this chamber. Even the debris is gone, fallen into the drainage channel that you so briefly opened.

And you will go. You will travel. You will pass through the rotting superstructure that you called your body, and you'll leave it behind. From there...

You don't know what will happen.

But you are alive in a way no iterator has ever been. Maybe, to them, you are dead; lost to the cause; not an iterator any more. Maybe this is what happened to Sliver of Straw.

You feel at peace with that idea.

You catch up to the scavengers as they perch on the overgrown railing at the edge of the water, preparing to dive in; you ask them their names.

"At the next shelter, we will make introductions," they answer, one by one agreeing. It is their common wisdom.

"Very well," you say—and then you leap headfirst into the water, splashing them in your excitement, and swim with strong, vigorous strokes towards the far shore.

-o-

#rain world #fan art #writing #things venus wrote #things venus said #just feeling things as usual!! #this is... more than 4000 words long which is really remarkable for me #long post #just in case the break doesn't work for anyone!

[ship-ambrosia]

A Year in Review for ship-ambrosia - Fanfiction Writers 2018

So I saw a blog I’m a huge fan of do this sort of year reflection of fanfiction writing, and since this was the first year I’ve ever posted my fanfictions, I thought it’d be fun to do!

First off I wanna thank @sweetmemories2606 @allie-and-her-fandoms and @a-fairy-tail44 for constantly encouraging me, being there to bounce ideas off of, also basically being beta readers for me and my hype men... you guys rock. I’m so glad I met all of you.

total number of completed stories

- “Completed” is kind of relative isn’t it? Lol... I have 13 stories posted on AO3, 4 that are on tumblr only, and of those 17 three of them, Heavens Bringer, A Fool Like Him, and Inherit Thunder (previously Heir of Electricity) are unfinished. Three of them are a collection of one-shots from Gruvia, Jerza, and Nalu week, but they’re all so short I’m going to count them as all together.

- There is so much unposted stuff in my backlog that you wouldn’t even believe lol most of it is unfinished though

total word count

- 81000 on AO3. I don’t even want to go and count otherwise

fandoms written in

- Fairy Tail

- My Hero Academia

- RWBY

- Persona 5

- Voltron (behind the scenes)

- Fire Emblem (behind the scenes)

looking back, did you expect to write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected?

- Let me just say that posting the first two fanfictions, Inherit Thunder (BNHA, kamijirou) and Liberation (RWBY, Blacksun), were totally on a whim. My roommate encouraged me to do it and see what kind of feedback I got on them. Boy am I glad I did. So let me tell you my motivation and progress has been absolutely astounding to me.

what’s your own favorite story of the year?

- This is so hard, because I’ve been in love with all the stories as I posted each of them, like oh yeah this is it this is my best one. Every time lol. I’d have to say though it’s probably The Droplet (FT, Gruvia). Reading my first gruvia fanfiction Four Degrees, and then going to The Droplet, you can really see not only how well my writing has improved, but also how much better I’ve done in understanding Gray and Juvia. Also I happen to find the beginning of it still really sexy lol that was difficult for me, writing a scene that was sexy that was going to be posted for the world to see.

did you take any writing risks this year?

- I think the style that I wrote A Sound Like Thunder (BNHA, iidamei) and Beauty and the Crow (P5, Akeharu) was a different style than um used to, with the story being told in chunks that didn’t quite fit together perfectly but still built off one another. Basically they could have been multi chapter fics but I wrote them like a short story and both of those stories I had to have read over a thousand times because I wanted them to be perfect.

do you have any fanfic or profit goals for the new year?

- One, to finish Heavens Bringer which I think is very plausible since I’ve been working on the last chapter a lot lately. Another is just to get more consistent with finishing and posting works, because right now it’s just like, here from me every so often and going like a month or two without posting any sort of writing. Maybe even to write less ship-focused works. I love ships but I don’t think all my writing has to be only romantic

best story of the year?

- Certainly one of my Fairy Tail fanfictions, though I’m not sure which. Heavens Bringer definitely has the most effort put in, but both The Droplet and A Fool Like Him (Ft, stingyu) have such in-depth, emotional breakdowns of Gray and Sting respectively and how I see them viewing their primary love interest that I think both of those stories have a fascinating draw. Also, I’m extremely proud of my Nalu Angst week prompts, I go back and re read them all the time. I think some of my best work resides in that collection, most notably the story titled “Miles Apart, Two Inches Away” from when Natsu and Lucy reunite after the post-Tartaros timeskip.

most popular story of the year?

- That’s easily Everything was the Same (Except when it wasn’t), my first Nalu story. On AO3 it has 755 Hits and 72 kudos, the most for both of all my stories. Which I find so funny because I wrote that story in under an hour lol.

story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:

- Heavens Bringer, by far. I like to think it’s amazing, and my friends seem to love it, but it’s gotten very little recognition. I’d love for more people to read it, and it has all the big four ships and I’ve devoted soo much time to it. But the feedback I HAVE gotten has been absolutely wonderful!

most fun story to write:

Beauty and the Crow, A Sound Like Thunder, or Nalu Angst Week. I hurt so much while writing all three, but I loved it. Beauty and the Crow because Akechi and Haru’s relationship would be just as tragic as I’ve written it, A Sound Like Thunder because iidamei is normally such a goofy ship and I literally almost killed Iida and made Mei Hatsume cry, and Nalu Angst Week because well... painful feels. But I enjoyed the dark places that my writing went.

story with the single sexiest moment:

Haven’t written (read: published) a ton of sexy scenes. I think The Droplet wins for the part where Gray almost pulls off Juvia’s underwear with his teeth, only to be interrupted by their baby.

most sweet story:

- Nuclear Fusion. No angst, it’s straight up injecting Nalu parenting fluff into your bloodstream lol

“holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you!” story:

- Nothing yet?? Maybe hurting Iida and Mei in A Sound Like Thunder. I need to write a goofy fic with the two of them, honestly.

story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:

- I’m going to say Inherit Thunder. I used to think of Kaminari as just a total goofball. Coming up with the idea of his parents as villains gave so many deep possibilities to why Kaminari wants to be the “trendy” popular boy or where he could come from, what his motivation for being a hero could be. I could be totally right, or totally off. But it definitely made me so much more intrigued by what Horikoshi could have planned for him.

most unintentionally telling story:

- When you read Heavens Bringer you see exactly what kind of Fairy Tail fan I am. Lol

hardest story to write:

- Heavens Bringer! Lol. Also worked on Beauty and the Crow for a long time, because I couldn’t decide what direction I exactly wanted to take Haru and Akechi - did I want to follow the plot? Did I want to make Haru and Akechi fall in love, or make it a series of moments? Did I want lots of dialogue, or did I want it to be more narrated? It was a lot of stylistic choices that went into that one but I’m totally happy with how it turned out!

biggest disappointment:

- I worked on a Baccana story for sooo long and then I ended up deleting it because it was turning into very cliche, Gildarts-doesn’t-approve-so-he-challenges-Bacchus-to-a-fight and I didn’t want to write a fic that had already been done 30 times (not that Gildarts and Bacchus fighting because Bacchus likes Cana isn’t great... it’s just that most people who like that ship have already written that).

biggest surprise:

- Uhh, Inherit Thunder being as popular as it was received? I’ve gotten dozens of messages asking for a sequel and it’s really an incredible feeling to know people want more of a story. It was originally gonna just be a one-shot, but now I’m writing a second chapter that will probably come out after Heavens Bringer is done.

some stuff in the works for the new year:

- Obviously, Heavens Bringer part 5 and chapter 2 of Inherit Thunder

- Working on several more chapters to A Fool Like Him, it’s basically just all suffering for Sting lol

- A multi chapter Baccana fic AU-ish in which Cana joins Quatro Cerberus during the Tartaros timeskip after Fairy Tail is disbanded

- Multi chapter Gruvia and Gale fic about Juvia disappearing after leaving to search for answers to her origin, leaving Gray and Gajeel desperate to find her

- Stingyu Cinderella/Princess and the Pauper AU

- A Yang x Ilia piece (FINALLY! LOL)

- May eventually clean up and post an experimental fic where I practiced writing combat with Sun and Neptune vs Mercury

- Ryuji x Ann getting together post-canon

- Future Ryuji x Ann single dad Ryuji AU

- Haru x Akechi Military/sort of Fullmetal Alchemist AU?? Idk it was inspired by fanart

- Maybe post some of my Voltron/Fire Emblem stuff eventually? Idk about those

If you read this entire post seriously thank you!! And thanks to everyone who’s read my fics, sent me messages about them, or just talked to me in general!! I love interacting with the communities!!

#random post from bree #bree writes #heavens bringer #the droplet #a fool like him #nuclear fusion #a sound like thunder #inherit thunder #beauty and the crow #fairy tail fanfiction #persona 5 fanfiction #bnha fanfiction #rwby fanfiction #this was so much fun to do #let me know any thoughts you have on this!! #also tag me if you do it too #long post #long text post

[dfhvn]

The Triumphant Return of Deafheaven: Interview // NME

Feature by Tom Connick via NME

With ‘Ordinary Corrupt Human Love’, California’s Deafheaven have released one of the most acclaimed albums of the year, a record that makes non-metal fans sit back and think, ‘Wait, do I like metal?’ Tom Connick finds them – surfing, no less – on the day of the album’s release.

Kerry McCoy spent the morning surfing. The black-haired, bespectacled metalhead might not look like the archetypal surf bro, but McCoy uses the waves as an escape fairly often. Today, the guitarist took to the board to get away from his own record – Deafheaven’s ‘Ordinary Corrupt Human Love’, which, when we speak, has been streaming online pre-release for a matter of hours.

“I’ve been trying not to look,” he says of the online reaction to the record. After his time on the sea, he went to hang out with friends – now he’s back home, ignoring his phone as much as possible. “My mom is keeping me updated,” Kerry says – he laughs when I suggest she might be filtering out any negativity.

Any longtime Deafheaven fan will appreciate his apprehension. Since their 2013 breakthrough, the Californian metallers – completed by vocalist George Clarke, guitarist Shiv Mehra, bassist Chris Johnson and see-him-to-believe-it mega-talent drummer Dan Tracy – have courted critical acclaim and genre purist backlash like few others. Second record ‘Sunbather’, released in 2013, was a beautiful fusion of post-rock atmospherics and doomy, heavy aggression, which achieved metal’s most elusive feat – crossover success. Heralded as genius by critics across the globe, this small-time, seemingly niche prospect soon found themselves performing at mainstream festivals like Coachella, and – according to reviews aggregate Metacritic – producing the year’s most critically acclaimed record, beating the likes of Beyoncé‘s self-titled, Kanye West‘s ‘Yeezus’, Daft Punk‘s ‘Random Access Memories’ and countless others to the top spot. With breakthrough success, though, came underground backlash. Black metal purists turned their noses up at Deafheaven, pinning them as culture vultures after a quick buck. They hadn’t paid their dues, spewed the forums, all while Deafheaven’s stature continued to rise. Their sonic fusions irritated the blacker-than-thou, too. “A lot of people have this idea that we’re thumbing our nose at the metal diehards,” says Kerry, “and it’s never that. It’s really just that we want to be this kind of band.” The fact they were pinned as metal saviors by some corners of the press was “overwhelming”, Kerry admits. Reviewed and written about by critics who’d never delved into the world of atmospheric metal before, they soon became tagged with all kinds of statements – ones they never wanted to make themselves. “You got people that either like, just really liked Beach House and had in no way ever listened to metal, but were like, ‘This is the most original thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life, this is god’s gift to music, oh my god’, and then there were people where all they listen to is Mortuary Drape, or they’re on the Nuclear War Now! Forums like, ‘This band is wildly unoriginal and the original thing that they’re ripping off sucks – this is the worst thing that could possibly happen to music’,” Kerry explains. “Both of those people were wrong!”

Citing the likes of ColdWorld and Alcest as early inspirations, he’s keen to drive home that Deafheaven never thought they were reinventing any wheels. “You’re getting blamed for stuff that you didn’t write, or you didn’t say, or whatever,” he shrugs. “People are gonna say what they’re gonna say, and they’ll like it or they won’t. Either way, we tried our hardest. That’s a mature way of thinking about it that I have now, but I think at the time we were trying to get to that point… hence my mom texting me stuff about the record, rather than me looking at it.

Photo credit:  Sean Stout ‘Ordinary Corrupt Human Love’ is a record many will have to hear to believe. A swarming, euphoric mass of metal extremity, huge post-rock, Britpop melodies and guitar solos that could slot into place on a Thin Lizzy record, it’s a record that could soundtrack both victory marches and funerals – at once beautiful and bleak. “We’re all dudes that like extreme metal – really heavy, ridiculous stuff – but then we’re all dudes that really like psych-rock and shoegaze, Britpop, Madchester… Everyone in the band listens to everything,” explains Kerry of that anything-goes musical approach. No idea is considered too outlandish in the writing process, he explains: “If we like it, it goes in there – I think that’s how we end up with things like ‘Night People’ on the record, which is more like Portishead or The xx than anything else. The main thing that stops it sinking into those more atmospheric indie passages is George’s banshee vocal. A death metal-like scream that could shatter your grandma’s spine, it adds an element not often found in records this sonically beautiful. “I think that the juxtaposition between the harsh vocal and the more melodic parts of the songs is cool,” says George, matter-of-factly. “I think that my voice, more than anything, provides a lot of texture to the music. I think that its main process is to provide texture, which I think is a little bit different to how vocals are normally approached.” It’s a method which sees George’s vocal used as much like a musical instrument as it is a means to deliver a story – though that vicious scream hides poetry worthy of its own publication. “I think that – while it can be a little difficult for some to hear – it’s an integral part of the band,” George continues. “It’s necessary to do.” Fusing all those elements is often a case of trial-and-error. When it came time to approach ‘Ordinary Corupt Human Love’, the band exchanged voice notes and iPhone memos for months, before entering the practise studio last October. Picking out various riffs and piano parts that they’d demoed, and noodling over the top of each other, Kerry and Shiv began constructing what would become Deafheaven’s fourth full-length, almost by accident. “That happens a lot,” Kerry admits, “I’ll be playing this weird riff, just messing with it, and Shiv will just jump on top of it with something he’s making up on the fly, and we’ll be like, ‘Stop… that’s the thing. Don’t change that – that’s it right there’.” Your music taste stems from a pretty British indie background – Oasis are one of your favourite bands, right? Kerry: Yeah, definitely. Shiv is really into that too – we’re both large Manchester fans. I’m more of like a hooks, Beatles-y kinda guy, and he’s more of a Pink Floyd-y, psychy kinda guy. When we put that together, it comes out with this weird thing. For me, I can hear all of those things. I feel like it’s a… I don’t know what else to really compare it to, and I don’t mean to compare myself to this band, but I’d imagine this is how Thom and Jonny from Radiohead feel. There’s a really cohesive thing, where both of their separate influences gel together really nicely – that’s how I feel about Shiv. We’re both really good at separate things, and those things come together really nicely. Is it nice to find someone that you can gel with like that – if you’re mixing together loads of different influences, it can go disastrously, sometimes. Kerry: Absolutely. [laughs] And especially with Chris – he’s by far the most musical of any bassist we’ve ever had, and then Dan’s drumming, I think, just speaks for itself. I’m yet to meet another person who can play drums like him.

Photo credit:  Sean Stout That adulation is core to Deafheaven’s being. Now steadfast in their line-up after a bunch of early-days personnel changes, their trust runs deep. Kerry and George – ostensibly Deafheaven’s central duo – met at 14, drawn together in the kind of teen movie fashion only outcast kids at an American high-school could really muster. “I saw George at school – he was this new kid and he had a Slayer shirt on,” Kerry explains. “I went over to him and complimented him on his Slayer shirt, and I had a Dead Kennedys back patch and he was like, ‘Cool patch!’. The rest is history,” he peels off with a laugh. “I feel very fortunate to have that relationship,” says George more solemnly. “Most people go into these great adventures alone, and it’s been nice not having to do that. ”Off the back of ‘Sunbather’’s acclaim, 2015 follow-up ‘New Bermuda’ was a much darker prospect, stripping out much of the beauty that made ‘Sunbather’ so accessible to those outside of metal’s four walls. Rather than a sonic mission statement, the shift was a reflection of the impact that explosion of interest had on the band. “It was just exhausting,” says George today. “We didn’t really have a break between ‘Sunbather’ and ‘New Bermuda’, and we essentially – in terms of recording and touring – just merged those two together. By the time that we were done recording that record, we were a little bit jaded, and definitely in need of a break.” Kerry agrees: “’New Bermuda’ was a very big reaction – when I listen to that record I can feel the stress in it – it sounds like five guys who have their insides all wound up.” The result was a record which revelled in self-hatred.

Photo Credit: Sean Stout Was that darkness on ‘New Bermuda’ a reaction to the way ‘Sunbather’ exploded? You just got thrown into this, what I expect was, quite an unexpected success. George: Yeah. That’s exactly it – with ‘Sunbather’ we found an opportunity to live off our music, and then we started living off our music, and then we got really scared of not being able to do that. We just kept going – we didn’t want to take any breaks. It was great – we did a tonne of extremely cool things – but it also took a bit of… a bit of a toll. Growing up in that metal community, too, you don’t ever expect to have that kind of crossover success. It’s not really the done thing – it’s not something you’re prepared for. George: Yeah, I think so. We’re flying this ship blindly, is how I like to describe it. Everything that we were embarking on then – and even still now – a lot of the time, is unfamiliar territory. We navigate it as best we can. It is interesting being this sort of ‘crossover’ metal act, because there comes pressure from both sides, in a way. The Deafheaven of 2018 harbour a far more positive view of that crossover appeal – in fact, with the demons of the ‘New Bermuda’ cycle now behind them, ‘Ordinary Corrupt Human Love’ is an altogether more positive prospect all round. “If we’re your gateway into this beautiful form of music, then I think that’s win-win for everybody,” shrugs Kerry. “I feel like when I was a kid, there was a hard line between being into alternative music and alternative things – especially aggressive music and aggressive things – and being a regular guy,” Kerry continues. “What I kinda see happening is that those lines are getting blurred. Some of these kids, these high-school kids, it’s not a big thing. They’re listening to the new Drake record or whatever, and then they’ll have Code Orange or Power Trip on next. From what I’ve seen, it’s not even really being talked about anymore – it’s kinda generally accepted that everyone needs to have a diverse music diet. I think that there’s a lot of bands out there that are helping open those doors, and I hope we’re one of them. More than it’s bands that are doing it, I think it’s just kids are smarter now than when I was in high school,” he breaks off with a laugh: “I remember it sucked being the punk kid in high school, when I was there.” ‘Ordinary Corrupt Human Love’, then, feels like a victory lap. It’s an escape from numerous dark pasts – one that finds Deafheaven rejuvenated. “It’s definitely a cathartic record,” Kerry agrees. “To me it sounds like five dudes who have, essentially, been holding their breath for about five years [laughs]. We’re finally taking a deep breath and relaxing a little bit, instead of trying to handle things in a negative way. I think you can definitely hear that on it.” It’s a record which doesn’t shy away from the grisly truth of that path to redemption, though – for every soaring, reflective moment of musical bliss, there’s a doomy scream, or a well-timed lyrical takedown, to bring things back to reality – for every ‘You Without End’, on which George sings of being “In a dark tunnel / And new dawn approaching / With a sphere of light / Ever glowing”, there’s a ‘Honeycomb’, which finds him declaring that “My love is a bulging, blue-faced fool / Hung from the throat by sunflower stems.” “If I’m going to be spending time making art, or spending time writing lyrics or writing music, I think it’s important just to be honest,” says George. “I think it’s a waste of time if I’m not honest, and in being honest one has to reflect on both the positive and negative aspects of life. I think we try and do that – we try and be well-rounded about our reflections on life, and take the good with the bad, and not shun away the darker side of things. We try and be as accurate a representation of our feelings as possible.” “I think that, where the world is at now… I know I’m in desperate need of some positivity these days,” says Kerry. “It is nice to be out there and put out a record that isn’t literally pure darkness. It’s almost like a true, human version of positivity – it’s flawed positivity, like: ‘Hey, no one’s perfect here – but we’re all gonna end up alright’. ”Deafheaven’s new album ‘Ordinary Corrupt Human Love’ is out now via ANTI- Records.

#Deafheaven #Ordinary Corrupt Human Love #NME

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

August 8, 2021

My weekly roundup of things I am up to. Topics include online regression, rocket launches and ozone depletion, ozone restoration, and Painless Civilization.

Online Linear Regression

(Warning: this is mathy, machine learning stuff.)

Linear regression is one of the most basic machine learning algorithms. Given a set of features in the input variables, it seeks to express the output as a linear combination of the features, plus an intercept, such that the error is maximized. Machine learning practitioners often say that linear regression is a good place to start before attempting a more sophisticated model.

Online learning is a system of breaking the input data into chunks and learning on each chunk, rather than trying to learn on all the input data at once. This might be done because there is too much input data to store in memory, or because it is desired to learn gradually with new input over time (e.g. feed each days’s stock quotes into a model) where there is no definitive end to the data.

Oddly, there is no built-in method for scikit-learn (a major machine learning library in Python) to do online linear regression, so I built one. I did find some code for online regression (see the first answer), but it assumes a single input feature. There must be a more general online linear regression algorithm out there, but I didn’t find it after a fairly cursory search. The formula implemented is described here.

The linked formula doesn’t described what to do if there is a linear dependency among the features. If it is implemented without accounting for this contingency, numpy will throw an error. I added a few checks for this case, though this results in my regression coefficients differ from what scikit-learn gives in the case on a dependency. This is unavoidable, as there is not a unique solution to the regression problem in this case.

I had intended to use this for a bag of words NLP problem I was working on, and for which I needed online learning because there was too much data to hold in memory otherwise. But the project became too much of a slog and I gave up on that part, at least for now.

Rocket Launches and Ozone Depletion

As part of a space group that I am active in, I am examining the environmental impacts of space activity. Ozone depletion is just one of many topics we’ve been looking at, so I’ll probably have much more to say on this general subject. Several sources, including this review, cite ozone depletion as the most pressing environmental issue related to space launch.

Citing a couple of studies, the aforementioned review finds that (roughly) then-current space launch activity has caused a 0.025%, or a 0.25%, depletion of stratospheric ozone.

Considering the prospect of a greatly expanded launch industry, this paper finds that 100,000 launches per year (there are 114 launches in 2020) would cause a loss of 0.4 to 1.5 Dobson units of stratospheric ozone (out of about 100 DU that exist now). Scenarios also found a 0.2 DU loss for 10,000 launches per year, 3.5-3.9 DU loss for 300,000 launches per year, and an 11 DU loss for 1,000,000 launches per year.

This paper finds that 1000 launches per year could cause a 1% ozone depletion. This review of studies finds that the current industry causes between 0.01% and 0.1% ozone depletion.

By way of comparison, from 1979 to 1994, stratospheric ozone depletion was about 60%. Since then, with the Montreal Protocol in force, ozone levels are slowly recovering, but full recovery is not expected until late in the 21st century.

In light of the development of Starlink and other large satellite constellations, reentry of satellites is also possibly of concern for ozone depletion, but I haven’t found good enough figures on this subject to say.

Overall, I’d venture that ozone depletion is an issue that should be taken seriously, but it is a risk for a possible future expanded spaceflight program, not the current one. Estimates of how severe the problem is are all over the map, so perhaps a research program, in partnership with the space industry, would be the best course for now. When regulation does come, as I think would be likely to happen eventually, the rules would probably focus on rocket fuel. All that I can really tell by looking over the data is that ozone depletion is a lot less for liquid fuels than solid fuels, and phasing out the latter need not put the brakes on launch.

Ozone Restoration

Tangentially related, I wonder about restoration of stratospheric ozone. In the Montreal Protocol and other considerations of ozone, the general approach is to stop activity that puts chlorine, bromine, and other ozone-depleting substances into the stratosphere, then wait for natural processes such as lightning to replenish the ozone layer. I wonder if it is feasible to do this more actively. Ozone generators for industrial uses are fairly common, and the chemistry is not too complicated. If all the ozone in the stratosphere was concentrated in a single layer at atmospheric pressure and temperature, it would only be about a millimeter thick. That doesn’t seem like much. I haven’t been able to find any analysis about active generation, even something explaining why this isn’t a feasible idea.

This paper estimates that it costs about $1/pound for the liquid oxygen and electricity for an ozone generator. NASA reports that the total mass of stratospheric ozone is about 3 billion tons. So it we wanted to double total mass, which I think would take us back to around pre-CFC levels, it would cost $6 trillion. Of course, that’s a very rough and ready estimate. This doesn’t account for capital costs. Unlike on the ground, in the stratosphere there would be additional capital costs, probably in the form of balloons. On the other hand, if there was a serious effort to do this, costs would probably go down due to scale.

At $6 trillion, it probably wouldn’t be worth it to restore ozone, but it doesn’t seem completely outlandish either. The costs reported in the paper cited above are electricity and liquid oxygen costs (electricity being a major component of the latter as well), so if electricity was very cheap due to advanced nuclear fission or fusion or some other source, the idea might start to seem more reasonable.

Painless Civilization

That’s the title of a book by Masahiro Morioka. It was published in Japanese in 2003, and the English translation of the first part recently came out.

Painless civilization, as Morioka defines it, is a thrust of modern society to eradicate pain, risk, and unpleasant surprise as much as possible. The argument rings with a lot of truth, and I can think of plenty of ways in which pain eradication works its way into policymaking and other societal efforts.

Morioka writes about painless civilization with a disapproving tone. A main problem is that modern society, with its impulse toward pain avoidance, deprives us of the “joy of life”. Domesticated animals, for instance, while often more comfortable than their wild counterparts, live their lives for human ends and not their own, and they are unable to run freely and otherwise express their natural impulses. Humans, in unnatural environments we term offices and cities rather than farm enclosures, suffer the same condition.

Here I think Morioka runs a risk of the appeal-to-nature fallacy, where one conflates what is natural with what is good. The argument is more sophisticated than that, and it certainly cannot be boiled down to “avoidance is pain is unnatural, and therefore bad”, but the appeal-to-nature risk is nonetheless present.

Later in the piece, Morioka argues that painless civilization can breed anesthetization to suffering, and therefore suffering occurs in a manner that is out of sight. This seems true, but I am left wondering, “compared to what”? The tendency toward doublethink, or to fail to see what is in plain sight because one does not wish to see it, seems pervasive in any civilizational ideological superstructure.

Toward the end of the piece, Morioka makes a distinction between avoidance of pain, a natural impulse for individuals and societies, versus an excessive or overriding focus on pain avoidance. The latter is unhealthy, because both a person and a society need to suffer and take genuine risks to make progress, and a monomaniacal focus on pain avoidance is a recipe for stagnation. I would be curious to know how to draw the line and determine what is excessive.

Overall, it is a good read, and Painless Civilization fits well with other works identifying stagnation or decadence as a root of contemporary malaise. The piece linked above is only one of several parts of the full work, and I imagine that some of my questions would be answered in subsequent parts. It is worth reading.

[smokeybrand]

Tomorrow Should Have Died

So i was planning on reviewing The Tomorrow War because it’s a new film and i like new films i can watch without having to brave the plague. I saw a preview for this thing a while back and had real low expectations for it, figured it’d be dumb fun like Independence Day. Imagine my abject horror when it turned out to be so much worse. Okay, first things first, the good stuff. Chris Pratt is good and so is J.K. Simmons. Betty Gilpin and Yvonne Strahovski work miracles with what little they have. The sound design is exceptional, probably the best thing about this sh*t flick, and the actual effects are on point. The problem with the movie is the script. It’s f*cking terrible. Oh my god, so much dumb! Here’s a list of sh*t that made me irrationally angry, in order of plot progression.

Eleven minutes in and i hate it. How are you losing a war to anything if you have mastered the ability to traverse space-time? How the f*ck is your technology so advanced, that you have found a way to exceed the light speed limit and literally break physics, but lose to a bunch of rabid, interstellar, komodo dragons? This is the dumbest f*cking contradiction I have seen all year and i am offended that whoever decided to make this film, is asking this of their audience. Sh*t is patently absurd. These f*cking things don't even have written language, man, and you really expect me to believe they have pushed a human race that has harnessed the power of time, to the brink of extinction?

Eleven minutes, bro. Eleven f*cking minutes.

Seriously, you can create a time machine, you should conceivably have the ability to harness gravity or one of the other fundamental interactions. Why the f*ck haven't you designed a miniaturized rail gun that uses modern tech or materials to build? You have worked out the science in the future, go back to the past and build miniature or handheld doomsday devices for use in the field. Why isn’t everyone running around with f*cking Megatron fusion cannons on their arms? Why the f*ck am i fighting aliens with ARs and Glocks?? The fact that there is an active time machine built from tech on hand from thirty years into the future, means cats could have spent their time building actual weapons to kill these f*cking things instead of betting the literal human race on a time displaced draft. This movie is dumb as rocks.

The way they describe how their time travel works is dumb. I mean, it isn’t, but i can guarantee this sh*t is going to be a problem later. I can feel it in my bones. They are definitely going to contradict this sh*t because multiverse theory is the only way to make movie time travel work and they are trying their damnedest to not do that.

This f*cking thing is over two hours long and the first drags. I hate when cats attempt to develop characters and they just fail at it. I'm sitting here trying to figure out why I should care about any of these people and i still don't have an answer after half the goddamn movie is over. Like, why should i care about Chris Pratt? He’s the main character and the writing has done nothing to endear him to the audience in a whole ass hour.

Also, the reason he’s so mad at his dad is stupid. Dude did right by his kid by bailing because he would have been a terrible father. Pratt’s character would have known that as a father himself. He didn’t have to like it and, of course there’s animosity there, but you’re an adult. Your dad knew he was lousy. He did you a favor by walking out. It wasn’t like he didn’t help support you or make sure you went without. As far as i can tell, dude was there in every way by physically. Because he couldn’t. Because he was f*cking shell-shocked from fighting in Vietnam. Where they raped innocent women and set babies on fire. Holy sh*t, this cat is an unlikable protagonist after this one scene. Which brings me to my next thing...

Pratt f*cking abandons his family?? Word? After that entire scene with his dad and the very obvious trauma he has suffered, he turns around and abandons his own kid because he lost his job?? Word? Like, for real? You expect me to believe that the Chris Pratt who cussed out his pops, was willing to go on the run from his future conscription, abandoned his own family because he lost a teaching job?? What the f*ck, movie? Do you want me to like this asshole or not? More than that, how the f*ck you mess up your character so bad in what i imagine is just five pages of actual script? Nothing we know about this character would ever even hint at him doing this to his family, to his daughter, so why the f*ck would he? Why the f*ck would you, as a write, believe we, as the audience, would just accept that sh*t as a forgone conclusion?

You got ropes on a Queen and you don't kill it? How the f*ck you make it that deep into the hive to even do-si-do the b*tch to the surface? We just watched these things tear through Miami to the point that they needed a whole ass bombardment just to survive and you not only go into their hive, their home, with no heavy ammo, but you somehow lasso a queen and drag her to the surface. Alive. If you can do all of that why not just drop a nuke down there and blow them the f*ck up? Why do you need a live Queen for your science? Shoot the b*tch, take the juice of her corpse, and end this sh*t! Why is all of this stupid recklessness necessary??

Okay. Okay... F*ck everything i just said, right? Why the f*k did you bring this Queen b*tch back to your base? You don’t have a different offsite lab to do this sh*t? You gotta bring her to your stronghold? Isn’t this a military operation? Why aren't their security protocols and sh*t in place to stop this stupidity? You don’t bring the enemy home. You take them to black sites for sh*t like this, not to the goddamn Pentagon!

All of a sudden, the aliens understand science? We spent this entire movie establishing that they are mindless beasts with teeth, eating the human race into extinction but now, because the plot demands it, the Queen one understands what the people are doing? That the green sh*t they made is plague that can murder them all? How the f*ck she even know what science is? They don’t even have language, dude! How the hell she know they made a death plague for her people?! F*ck it, whatever, bro. Next you're going to tell me she let them capture her just to get inside the lab or some sh*t because these rabid f*cking animals, who have demonstrated no military command abilities or even the barest of higher cognitive functions, are tactical geniuses.

Okay, so the Queen b*tch is a tactical genius. So, in the initial future drop, the team was murdered by a bunch of these things because they were sent to a lab where they were trying to make the death plague. Now, hat i am about to say is all assumption on my part because none of this, and i men NONE of it, is ever confirmed by the movie. So, they get to the lab and everyone is dead but the green per-plague is still there. That mean they had a Queen there. It’s established after this that Queens can call for backup and the Males will lemming their way to her. I deduce that’s how this lab got overrun; Queen got loose, called for her boys, and they ate everyone. That happened. That was the first thing we see in the future. This b*tch does the same f*cking thing on the home base lab so now the males are overrunning The Pentagon. You motherf*ckers knew this was a thing because it literally already happens. Why the f*ck would you do it again? AND it gets worse... Home base, The Pentagon, is the f*cking rig where they house the goddamn time machine! You brought a hostile enemy leader, still alive and coherent, to the heart of your resistance operation, to the core of your time travel operation, knowing that at any time this b*tch can scream and have your whole ass base overrun with teeth and poison darts? Look, if the future is this stupid, they deserve to die, okay?

At least they commit to multiverse theory, even if it contradicts the entirety of their already established time travel rules.

Okay. Okay... So they create this toxin to kill all the monster things and send it back in time to be mass produced  Put that sh*t in bullets and send it back to the future or whatever. But, because of the aforementioned stupid, that plan is bunk. Time machine go kablooey. And now we are at the "all is lost" moment at the end of the second act." Solution to the problem in hand, no way to save the future because the only way back to the future was a casualty of idiocy. Right. So... just wait. F*cking just wait. You know when these assholes show up, you know how to kill them all, you even have a plague ready to be mass produced right now. You have thirty f*cking years to refine that formula, to make it cheaper to mass produced and develop variants just in case immunities start to crop up or something. There are people from the future, stuck in the past, because of the egregious future error. They have all of that intel and they are just alive. The second this dude got back to the past with that antidote, the future was saved. The war is over. Like, even if you don’t know where the ship is, you have a sure thing that will murder these white f*cks and three decades to produce, weaponize, and store that sh*t. The war is won. The Prime timeline is absolutely safe at this point. Because that's how time travel works. You have the nuclear option, right now, to averting the end of the human race, ready to be mass produced. Yo have the knowledge from the future on where these things will first appear. You still have all the future tech brought over from the beta timeline ripe for reverse engineering in order to improve the weapons of the present. There is no scenarios where we lose this war, the second Chris Pratt plops back into the present with that plague. None.

Why is everyone so dejected?? Why are there f*cking riots all over the world?? None of this makes sense. How can you assume the world ends and the war is lost just because the communication with that version of the past is cut? Wouldn’t you expect that sh*t? You just altered the entire timeline by sending Pratt back with the antidote. That future is effectively gone. How can you communicate with a place in space-time that doesn’t exist anymore? Hell, even if it’s because the time machine broke and everyone over there is dead, you have the f*cking antidote now! Multiverse theory, bud. The fact that those time displaced assholes didn’t disappear, means multiverse theory is real and you have the opportunity to Future Trunks this sh*t so why panic? Why are there no leaders n television assuring their people that this is a thing? Why are there no scientists publishing papers about how sh*t is going to be fine? Bro, I'm just so tired...

How these cats just fly into Russia on a big ass cargo plane and not get shot down? This is 2022. Putin still hates us. This sh*t would cause a World War.

So you find this ship and you don’t tell anyone where it is? You decide to just kill them all yourself? Motherf*cker, what happens if you die? Did you back up the enzyme formula somewhere or did you bring all of it with you on this stupid f*cking mission? Did you leave notes or even text your location to anyone in authority, just in case haphazard attempt goes sideways so someone else can make a more organized attempt? Or just drop a nuke on the site from orbit? If one asshole denied you funding for your mission, why didn’t you ask someone else? Why didn’t you ask f*cking Putin? Because governments are bloated down with bureaucracy? My dude, people from the future came back and interrupted the world cup to tell you that aliens are going to exterminate the human race in three decades. If you tell anyone in a position of power that you know where these little sh*ts are, they’re going to listen. Especially since everyone decided to riot because the future changed/we lost the time war/ the timeline imploded.

Why would a terrestrial saw work on an intergalactic star ship? That doesn't make any sense. This f*cking thing survived a crash landing into earth intact and a goddamn circular saw cuts it open? Fine, whatever. On to the next stupid thing.

Bro. Bro, they just blow the f*cking thing up. Motherf*cker spent the entire movie, time jumping form the past to to the future and back to the past, just to get this plague to kill them all, and a bunch of C4 just blows them all up while they sleep. Why the f*ck was everything even f*cking necessary? At this point, when the dude comes back with that claw the first time, the future is saved. Analysis on that one claw gave up the location of the hidden spaceship where these things had been in stasis for millennia. Which was blown up with C4. No plague needed. No goddamn time draft needed. No casualties needed after that first wave. The second that dude brought back that claw, it should have been  under a forensic microscope so actual f*cking scientists could figure out what a high school kid id in a matter of minutes. I hate this movie so goddamn much.

I hated this goddamn movie so much. It’s f*cking boring and the dumbest thing I've seen all year and i watched Army of the Dead. It’s pretty and the performances are decent, but there is absolutely no substance to any of this sh*t. It wants to be Independence Day and Edge of Tomorrow and The Great Wall. all in one, while infusing time travel family drama but it’s so f*cking confused trying to juggle all of that, it drops the ball on the most important part; The script. This thing must read like a fever dream induced by peyote because, in execution, it’s a wet fart. This f*cking thing is all over the place with no regard for any insular universe logic. It contradicts itself from one scene to the next and it’s goddamn offensive. I’m sure there is someone saying that i am overthinking this sh*t and that it’s just supposed to be dumb popcorn fun. I get that. However, i can’t just turn my f*cking brain off and mindlessly drool over sh*t that insults my intelligence the way this movie does. It’s dumb as f*cking rocks, man, and i want those two hours of my life back!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

Of all the useful things we can say it's axiomatic. I'd also guess there's some band of people who could have made it, if it delivered on that promise. They see increasingly aggressive measures to protect intellectual property as a threat to the intellectual freedom they need to work hard to delight users when you only have to find users and measure their responses. So they invested in it. Odds are it will be a junior person; they scour the web looking for startups their bosses could invest in. Oh, ok. You're an investor too. What would Apple's next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random people? Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like a daunting task to do philosophy, here's an encouraging thought. As written, it tends to offend people who like unions. Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model.

We now have several examples to prove that amateurs can surpass professionals, when they started the company without any idea of what they planned to do. The scary thing about platforms is that there are two components to the antidote: being in a place where startups are the cool thing to do, and even now I find it kind of weird. When meeting people you don't know why. Now the default exit strategy is to get a cup of tea. This kind of startup is in the same way taking a shower lets your thoughts drift a bit—and thus drift off the wrong path you'd been pursuing last night and onto the right one adjacent to it. The latest intellectual property laws impose unprecedented restrictions on the sort of writing that gets you tenure. In ancient Rome the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Most people implicitly believe something like this about their opinions. For example, we seem to have been cases of molecular bonding rather than nuclear fusion. They didn't want to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the same fate.

But they only build a couple office buildings or suburban streets at a time, and the offerings at our end of the middle class as people who are committed enough to prefer that, and c only hire people who are best at making things don't want to invest in it, the falser it becomes. A media company should be run by suits. The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be widely applicable. Many of the students who now major in English would major in writing if they could. The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Why is the falloff so sharp? It seems as if it must have been when startups wrote VisiCalc. I was going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does. And when you have a specific idea you want to do is start a startup. Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. In the United States, the CEO of a large public company makes about 100 times as productive as another. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no record of it.

I'm guessing here, but I'd guess that many of these would-be founders are often surprised that investors expect them either to sell the company or go public. If I believe everything I said in the second version, why didn't I write it that way? Some startups could be entirely manual at first. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to be decreasing the gap between rich and the poor? It's not what they want is easy. A song on an iPod's disk is merely stored on it.

Oops. Likewise, it doesn't seem American. I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work there was the difference in the way that works best. Next year you'll have 14,000 users, and that in the early stages. But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and angel investors generally want to invest in it, the falser it becomes. I thought, they did call them essays, didn't they? Which means if you're making something at least one respect, however: it's static. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it. Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die? Were you nodding in agreement, thinking stupid investors a few paragraphs ago when I was growing up.

Making a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. So for any given team of founders, would it not pay to wait till the economy is so bad is making the same mistake as the people who break rules that are the source of. What would it mean to take 10x more risk than Demo Day investors. Oh, ok. A big-name firms, but they are much hungrier for deals. You can't be the sort of spin added by politicians is woven through it. Wikipedia may be the most famous scientists seem to have begun by trying to solve a problem their founders had. And technology for targeting ads continues to improve. Believe it or not, and if you have what it takes to start a startup.

When you take people like this and put them together with the spin you've added to get them going. But I have a general idea of the greatest generation. Except an inverse one. The friends might have liked to have more money in this first phase, but being slightly underfunded teaches them an important lesson. That's a problem, because looking down on the user is a kind of axiom from which most of the startups we funded were able to raise money grows with the amount. Oh, ok. I love to read more than anything, but by studying the intended users and figuring out what people want. Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the wrong track. Here's a partial solution: when a startup takes serious funding is that the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started. We couldn't believe large numbers of people would want to stay in other people's places. There will be jobs teaching x, and professors to fill them. Works out the same as Aristotle's; we just approach it from a different direction.

Experts have given Wikipedia middling reviews, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can't be solved. I propose we try again, but that it was not till around 1600 in Europe, where the density of people working on a given technology, the time to act is always now. It seems reasonable to suppose the newest one will too. I couldn't have done that in the past has had false starts branching off all over it. I had a startup and think they seem likely to succeed, it's hard to foresee how big, because its size will depend not on macro trends like the amount people read, but on the ingenuity of individual publishers. Do the extra work of getting personal introductions. And are English classes even the place to do it.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #team #English #VisiCalc #thing #antidote #answers #idea #quarters #growth #time #Demo #founders #laws #sort #random #cases #users #falser #investors #startups #suits #guys #startup #amount

[ethantuozzoreviews]

Persona 5 Review

Persona is a series that has a passionate following. Persona 4 came onto the scene back in 2008 and while it wasn’t a blockbuster seller at first, it steadily grew in popularity as its audience became more and more abundant with roaring fans. It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly a decade since the last entry in the series, but Persona 5 has finally arrived. Does it live up to expectations or will it be crushed by the weight and pressure of trying to fill the shoes of Persona 4?

The main structure of Persona 5 hasn’t changed much since Persona 4. The game is broken up into days based on a calendar year. You go to school every weekday and once school is over, that is when your faced with choice. Will you go dungeon crawling in the current Palace or maybe hang out with one of your confidants to raise your social status. You can also be like me and maybe go to the hot spring’s for the 15th night in a row to raise your charm stat and finally go on that double date with Makoto. That is the essence of Persona. The player is faced with making these choices that form and build their own unique story. I wasn’t able to see everything on this initial playthrough, but I enjoyed the fact that I was able to make my own choices, spend time with the characters I enjoyed, and was still able to get the “true” ending by the end of my 70 hour journey.

Persona 5′s plot definitely gets going much quicker than the previous entries in the series. You play as a nameless protagonist who you name at the beginning of the story. The protagonist is thrown into a situation where he tries to do the right thing by saving a woman being abused by a drunk man, but little did he know that the man is a powerful politician whose influence spreads everywhere.  The protagonist lands himself in juvenile detention and for his probation, he is forced to go live in another city with an old family acquaintance. As the story unfolds, our hero learns of a mysterious power that lets him travel to a place called the cognitive world. Their he meets a talking cat named Morgana and learns how to change people’s hearts. People with distorted desires have places called palaces in their hearts. In order to make people admit to their crimes, our hero and his gang of Phantom Thieves must traverse the labyrinthine places of distorted desire and steal the treasure within.

This is where the main gameplay comes in for Persona 5. The game is a traditional turn-based JRPG, but also has a system for weaknesses and strengths to be discovered mid-battle. If your able to discover an enemies weakness, say fire, ice or nuclear, you are given a second turn for knocking that enemy down with its weakness. Knock down every enemy, and your given a few new options. You can either perform an all-out attack which does an enormous amount of damage to all enemies or you can negotiate with the enemies, which hasn’t been a feature in persona since Persona 2 on PS1. Negotiation has you answer a series of questions that the shadow asks, and if you make the right dialogue choices, the shadow transforms into a persona that you can then use in battle.

The persona fusion system also makes a return with a few new tricks up it’s sleeve. The basic functions of fusion between two persona’s to make a more powerful one are still present, but their are some other options too. You can boost up one persona’s skills, level, and power by sacrificing another persona. This lets you keep a persona you enjoy using longer and keep them relevant and up to par in battle. There is also the option to turn your more useless persona into treasure. The options make the system feel more fleshed out than the previous Persona games.

Persona 5 is a monumental achievement. Not only does it refine details and systems from previous entries, it goes beyond. The game is dripping in style with art, screen transitions and menus. The soundtrack is phenomenal as well and is easily my favorite soundtrack of the year so far. The tracks Whims of Fate, Life Will Change, and Rivers in the Desert are standouts and I listen outside the game every chance that I can. The story and characters resonated with me more than any other entry in the series as well and I will truly miss my daily interactions with some of these characters that I grew to love. It felt like a real family that I could come home to everyday and the game overall I was left with feelings that are hard to come by in video games.

Score: 10/10

#persona 5 #video games #review #ps4 #persona

[dorcasrempel]

3Q: Yet-Ming Chiang on reopening the case of cold fusion

Researchers at MIT have collaborated with a team of scientists from the University of British Columbia, the University of Maryland, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Google to conduct a multiyear investigation into cold fusion, a type of benign nuclear reaction hypothesized to occur in benchtop apparatus at room temperature.

In 1989, benchtop experiments were reported that raised hopes that cold fusion had been achieved. If true, this form of fusion could potentially be a source of limitless, carbon-free energy. However, researchers were unable to reproduce the results, and serious questions arose about the validity of the work. The topic laid largely dormant for 30 years. (In contrast, research in “hot” fusion has persisted, including the SPARC collaboration, which aims to commercialize fusion technology.)

Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is part of the Google-sponsored team now revisiting the possibility of cold fusion through scientifically rigorous, peer-reviewed research. A progress report published today in Nature publicly describes the group’s collaboration for the first time.

The group, which included about 30 graduate students, postdocs, and staff scientists from across the collaborating institutions, has not yet found any evidence of the phenomenon, but they did find important new insights into metal-hydrogen interactions that could affect low-energy nuclear reactions. The team remains excited about investigating this area and hopes their ongoing journey will inspire others in the scientific community to contribute data to this intriguing field.

Q: How did you get involved with a project that many would not consider?

A: Matt Trevithick SB ’92, SM ’94, senior program manager at Google Research, approached me in spring of 2015 and he did so pretty gingerly, kind of poking around the edges at first, and then he popped the question, “What do you think of cold fusion?” And my answer to him was that I didn’t have an opinion one way or the other on the scientific merits, because in 1989, when the cold fusion story broke, I was working all-out on high-temperature superconductivity, which had broken in 1986-87. We were furiously doing research in my lab on that topic, and also had started a company with MIT collaborators. So the cold fusion story came and went, and I was peripherally aware of it.

Then Matt asked if this was something I might be interested in. Google recruited the collaborators on this team not by telling us what they wanted done, but by asking us what we would find interesting to do. We wrote proposals that were internally reviewed. What was interesting to me is the idea that electrochemistry, and especially solid-state electrochemistry, is a very powerful driving force that can create unusual states of matter. We’ve applied that idea to high energy batteries and electrochemical actuators previously, and this was another field in which electrochemical manipulation of matter could be interesting.

This project was carried out in stealth. We didn’t want the fact that Google was funding research in this area to become a distraction. For the first couple of years, we didn’t even tell other members of our group the real reason behind the hydrogen storage experiments going on in the lab! 

Ariel Jackson, a postdoc, had a major role in developing the original proposal. Later on, Daniel Rettenwander and Jesse Benck joined as postdocs, and David Young SB ’12, SM ’18 joined as a graduate student. Together, we pursued the idea of using different types of electrolytes, liquid, polymer, and ceramic, as the medium by which to electrochemically pump hydrogen into palladium metal in order to achieve as highly loaded a state as possible. We also developed techniques to measure loading dynamically more precisely and more accurately than had been done before. To date we’ve been able to reach a H:Pd ratio of 0.96, where the theoretical maximum is 1, measured to an uncertainty of + or – 0.02. These results have just been published in Chemistry of Materials, and one measure of the care we went to in this work is the fact that the supplemental information section of the paper is 50 pages long.

Q: What have you learned, and why did the group choose to publish now? 

A: The Nature publication makes clear that to date we have not discovered compelling evidence for cold fusion. Our objective was to be scrupulously objective, and I think we have managed to avoid any form of “confirmation bias.” However, we’ve also learned that the high deuterium concentrations hypothesized to be necessary for cold fusion to occur are much more difficult to attain than we would have expected. And, there have been a number of other discoveries that have come about as a result of the group’s work that are applicable in other scientific areas.

Google’s intent from the beginning was to fund a multi-institutional collaborative effort that would work quietly but intensively, then publish its findings in peer-reviewed journals. Now is the right time to disclose that this project exists, to tell people what we have found and not found. We are not finished – in many ways this is just the beginning – and we want others to join the effort to look into the materials science, electrochemistry, and physics surrounding this topic.

Q: What’s next at MIT?

A: The project at MIT goes on, and we are looking to add to the team. What we’ve learned over the past three years has suggested new ways to use electrochemistry and materials science to create highly loaded metal hydrides: palladium for sure, but also other metals. We believe that we have found certain knobs that could allow us to create phase states that have not been accessible before. If we can controllably produce these, they will be very interesting target materials for other experiments within the broader program looking at, for example, neutron yields from deuterium-deuterium fusion in a plasma discharge device at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. 

3Q: Yet-Ming Chiang on reopening the case of cold fusion syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[energysolutions]

Speech: Aurora Spring Forum 2018 has been published on Energy Solutions News

New Post has been published on http://www.energybrokers.co.uk/news/beis/speech-aurora-spring-forum-2018

Speech: Aurora Spring Forum 2018

It is wonderful to be back in Oxford, not only because of many happy memories, but also to be in a city that is central to so many energy breakthroughs.

In 1976 Professor Goodenough formed a research group from around the world to tackle the intractable problem of how to make batteries rechargeable.

And these great minds struggled, they even had to call out the fire brigade when experiments went wrong… But of course in 1980 they published their findings in Materials Research Bulletin.

The world took notice - the lithium ion battery changed the world, although it meant that officials could pester ministers at any time, day or night.

So many academic innovations have sprouted from this academic powerhouse, from nuclear fusion research at Culham to Professor Snaith’s new understandings of perovskites which could transform solar power.

And it is harnessing the value of this sort of world changing innovation that we want to see right across the UK, and particularly in the energy portfolio.

That’s why this government has set out the biggest ever increase in public research and development investment; three billion pounds more invested every year by 2021.

And it is that focus on innovation, research, development, commercialisation which underpins the Industrial Strategy.

Looking at how we invest in Britain’s historical straights to create the high-growth firms and well-paid jobs is essential to redress many of the imbalances of our economy, and make sure we are fit for the future. And our modern Industrial Strategy doesn’t just celebrate engineering developments, it celebrates ideas.

That’s why it’s so great to be hosted by Aurora today, a relatively new energy research company, trying to do things differently…

… and one that has already grabbed a leading position across Europe.

And that was one of the reasons we tapped into one of Aurora’s founding directors, to ask for his wisdom and his experience of the energy sector, to lead the Independent Cost of Energy Review.

This was commissioned as a no-holds barred look at how we deliver more affordable energy, to look at how we keep the lights on, while decarbonising, how we create innovation, and how we balance those relationships and those responsibilities between the public sector and the market.

The review has sparked a debate, a vibrant debate if I might say, about how we actually get to an energy market where active consumers, not producers, are central; where the pyramid of supply and distribution is turned upon its head; where we realise the potential of the investments we’ve been making now for many years in new clean energy technologies.

And where we implement ideas and spending according to a framework. One of the frameworks we’ve been using a lot in the Clean Growth Strategy which I authored last year, is the idea of a triple test that investment makes sense if it decarbonises, if you can see a cost trajectory so that means you don’t burden consumers with expensive innovations over the long term, and where you actually create and leverage a strategic innovation that means you can export that technology globally.

And since Dieter’s Review was published, we have also published the Industrial Strategy White Paper, which once again emphasised the importance of energy to our economic success.

And showed a reliable, affordable, and smart energy system provides the backbone for a stronger, fairer, and more productive society.

And how new technologies, AI, big data, EVs, autonomous vehicles are not just disruptive in their own sector but are also hugely disruptive to the energy sector as well.

And how creating the conditions for success for fair competition is so central to innovation.

And also how energy systems are central to the broader challenge of clean growth, 1 of the 4 Grand Challenge of the Industrial Strategy. An energy system that underpins, benefits from and accelerates the transformation of our economy.

And Dieter’s Review covered very eloquently many of these arguments. Much of his diagnosis is compelling, articulated brilliantly.

He talks about the disruptors that are coming along in this sector, the move from passive to active demand, more and more zero marginal low cost clean generation.

We are now buying at prices unimaginably low compared to just a few years ago. Access to cost-effective storage technologies that scale; linking in electric mobility into the grid.

Dieter says that these changes are happening regardless of what government does, whether we like it or not, this is the way the market is moving.

And so for me the job of government is to re-examine the bits that we do, the bits of the market that we are involved in, the frameworks, the policies, the regulation that we put in place, to make sure that they are fit for purpose.

That they encourage this innovation, they increase competition, and they don’t have unintended consequences down the road.

And I think if we manage these changes well, the historic tension between cost, CO2 and security becomes irrelevant.

It’s a little bit like the conversation we have for clean growth, where some had always imagined that a green future meant hunkering down in caves.

Recessions are really good for cutting carbon emissions, and there are still politicians out there who would rather like that to be the case.

But actually, if you look at what the UK has done when it has decarbonised more and grown faster than any other G7 nation since 1990, that these 2 things go hand in hand.

And it’s the same with the age-old energy trilemma.

And of course, if it’s the UK innovators who develop the technologies to achieve those goals, we reap those industrial and economic benefits, bringing home the benefits of the world’s pivot to this low-carbon future in a way that generates highly productive jobs and growth at home.

So Dieter’s Review brings that challenge to life, and without front-running the response to the consultation, I did want to dwell on three of his findings, not all 68 of them, don’t worry.

The first was the necessity for more active management of the system.

The huge increase in distributed generation, the opportunity for more demand-side response, and the potential for creating new demand for electric heating creates a requirement for a less passive local grid.

Grid management is hard enough in the current top-down system, the idea of having intermediates and end-states of supply and demand I think is incredibly challenging.

And so, Dieter’s proposal for the system of neutral regional systems operators is extremely interesting. And it’s part of the process that we’re already going through, which has already seen us create a much more independent systems operator role for National Grid.

Dieter’s review challenges us to consider whether and how we should go further. The network industry has come forward with initial proposals, which we’re looking at, many of them suitably ambitious.

But we will be working closely to ensure that these go beyond ‘business-as-usual’ and deliver the framework that we need to move us to this future. We have to get this right.

And secondly, Dieter’s eye-catching proposal for the equivalent firm power auction is worth dwelling on. When considering this, I am mindful that many of the tools are actually working well.

I know we’ve taken a fair share of criticism for how we got here, but if you look at what the tools are delivering, CfDs are delivering offshore wind at 57 pounds per MWh with every prospect of further reductions, and with an industry that is being created as part of that supply chain, right across the UK.

The Capacity Market is giving confidence to industry that there is no risk to supply at keener and keener prices. And of course the ‘Beast from the East’ tested the resilience of the systems right across Europe and the UK. I think there are lessons to be learned, but overall our gas and electricity systems proved robust and responsive.

The market frameworks we had in place provided National Grid with the tools they needed.

Dieter’s challenge is how do we evolve today’s arrangements, so they can adapt to this pace of change and achieve this end-state that we want to see going forward.

And the Capacity Market is obviously a key part of that evolution.

So later this year, we will be conducting a formal review to mark 5 years since this introduction, asking some key questions:

Have we got the penalty regime right? Are the outcomes of the market aligned, not just with the security of the energy system, but with the triple test I described, and the ambition we have in the Industrial Strategy?

Should it be open to new technologies, like renewables as we are seeing in Ireland? How do we include battery technology into this mix? How do we work with demand-side response and small-scale gas installations, which have already confounded prior expectations?

Understanding and answering these questions will help simplify the system in line with Dieter’s recommendations, whilst maintaining robust energy security and delivering on our triple test.

But as we consider these changes, we have to create market structures and regulation that continue to make the UK one of the leading destinations for energy investment.

I think that clarity of regulatory structure and confidence in the system are a hugely important part of that. As we look to the future, I think it’s worth reflecting on the work that we’re doing now to ensure well-regulated, competitive markets deliver value and service for customers. That markets work for customers in a way that consumers perceive industry they should.

We’ve seen huge improvements in the efficiency of our home energy system, thanks to the smart regulation insulation measures.

I’ve given lie to the argument that all this stuff we do, the investing in the future of energy, is somehow putting up prices.

Whilst we’ve seen a policy price increase, bills have gone down in the average household because of excellent improvements in energy efficiency, and as we made clear in the Clean Growth Strategy.

We want to build on that success. I’ll be reviewing the ECO obligation very shortly, which I want to pivot as much as possible to helping those living in fuel poverty, making sure that it provides a much better route to market for innovation technology in the home efficiency space.

We’re regulating so that landlords have to ensure the homes they let are cheaper to run.

We’ve exempted many of our energy-efficient industries from many of the levies that we have brought forward. And we’ve also taken tough decisions in 2015 to cut subsidies while focusing resources on strategically important sectors like offshore wind and nuclear.

And just this month you may have seen that I brought forward the Price Cap Legislation, with very strong cross-party support.

This is not an attempt to set energy prices in Westminster.

This is an attempt to help the market speed up its evolution to a more competitive marketplace.

We have a problem in this market as in so many others, which is asymmetry of customer information: a group of highly enabled, digitally-savvy consumers who are able to take advantage of switching deals that are on offer given the new entrance on the market, and then a much larger group of those who are not as aware or as able to take advantage of those opportunities and worryingly tend to be older, less wealthy, less educated, often more vulnerable.

And we know that the market is working hard with its regulator to address many of those problems… But we want to make sure that that acceleration continues. That’s why we’re bringing forward a time-limited, intelligent intervention in the market to help reset this market to ensure it works for consumers.

And it’s part of a huge package of work that is coming forward:

smart meter roll-out

faster switching

half-hourly settlements

midata portability

Together this will mean that switching will be almost instantaneous and extremely easy to do. Dieter has made clear proposals in this area about what the cap should include. It is quite rightly being developed by Ofgem and I’m sure they will be listening carefully to Dieter’s recommendations when they bring forward the cap.

That cap will be in place by the end of this year.

Dieter’s review also makes absolutely clear that government has an important role to play in new nuclear. Dieter calls it a societal choice, as to whether to invest in nuclear.

But for us, it’s more than that. For us, nuclear has a crucial role to play in creating a diverse, reliable energy supply that reduces our CO2 emissions, creates a cost trajectory that we can see going forward and contributes enormously to the Industrial Strategy, to the creation of exportable innovation and capability.

I have no doubt that nuclear is a vital part of the mix both in the UK and for the global community to meet its Paris commitments.

It is also a sector that can deliver innovation, growth, and high-quality jobs for the economy.

But to get these benefits, we have to get costs down.

And this is a joint partnership between government and industry.

For me it’s about innovation. It’s about understanding how new technologies techniques, whether it’s digitisation, modular manufacturing, whatever it is, can help simplify and standardise the nuclear new-build process, and potentially find new markets for that technology.

I’m extremely mindful of the role of government in supporting new nuclear…

We’re studying the results of the NAO report carefully.

If we can get this right, we can maintain our position at the forefront of nuclear innovation. That, for me, is an example of the Clean Growth Grand Challenge in action.

But whether it’s nuclear, or the rest of the energy supply, we have got to think hard about the policy and regulatory changes that we bring forward and be mindful of the unintended consequences that can happen, not just currently, but over a decent period of time going forward.

The government’s ambition is for the UK to have the lowest energy cost in Europe for both households and businesses, whilst delivering on our CO2 targets and ensuring security of supply. We don’t know how markets will look in 50 years’ time.

There are so many disruptive technologies out there, from digitalisation, AI, the continued galloping fall in the cost of clean technology.

For me, this is the most exciting moment in the energy industry in the UK since privatisation, and this change will only accelerate going forward.

More renewables, coal getting off the system by 2025, increasing amounts of distributed energy, more storage, more demand-side, more local generation; again inverting this pyramid, from passive consumers and the top-down approach, to energy moving up and down the system.

And that’s before we confront the challenge that a more electrified heating system may place on the system. If you look at the Clean Growth Strategy, we’re looking at what hydrogen pathway looks like, what increased electrifications looks like; there are radical changes coming forward that will hugely impact the investment decisions we take.

And for me, central planning of anything, whether it’s of an economy or an energy system, means taking often poor choices for short-term ends, and stifling innovation.

The way to get beyond that is to put the consumer, not the producer, at the heart of energy policy.

Firms who create value for consumers - whether they’re large energy-intensive industries, or little old ladies paying on standard variable tariffs - the firms that create the value and deliver the service for those consumers, not the firms which are best at lobbying government, are the ones that are most rewarded by investment and by market share.

A system where market participants who innovate and can reduce both costs and emissions over time, thrive. That is the challenge we all face, whether it is government, regulators or indeed incumbents. That is the market that we want to see coming forward.

If we get it right, the astounding opportunities that are out there, both in solving our own energy problems and solving the energy problems of the world are just immense.

Helping the world’s poorest countries never build a coal-fired power station, but moving straight to a distributed, renewable policy, using some of our climate finance to make that happen.

If we can unlock that future, then the opportunities for UK-based innovation, economic growth and job creation are absolutely immense.

And again, I pivot back to the Industrial Strategy.

The people in the room will know about the Faraday challenge, the first beneficiary of one of the major investments to come out of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund…

Investing where we have a comparative advantage in technology, where we have an industry working from a position of strength,

… we already manufacture 1 in 5 of the electric vehicles sold in in Europe,

… overflowing any benefit into the renewables industry where distributed storage is what will unlock possibilities going forward

… and bringing it all together in a public- private way that drives jobs and growth and innovation and ultimately productivity.

And so, this ambition of a clean low cost innovative energy supply that works for customers, creates strong supply chains, really is built on incredible innovation and knowledge and development, just like we saw in Professor Goodenough’s lab.

That is the prize that is out there for us.

And ultimately, we want to seize that opportunity, create those long-term commercial advantages in the UK, but make sure that when we commercialise and bring them to market, that IP is also kept in the UK and contributes to our economy going forward.

Thank you very much.

#BEIS

[tessatechaitea]

The Fall and Rise of Captain Atom #5

I'm totally up for some of this nuclear fusion.

But first, as he's dropping off Genji, he's got to deal with a thing that could be anything, like maybe a toaster or a cigarette case!

Fucking stupid comic book bullshit. "How are we going to get Captain Atom to realize the military has been spying on his son?" This is the answer they come up with? A random glinting light in a window across the street? What kind of superhero rushes off to save the world from every glint of light they see out of the corner of their eyes? Oh, today while having lunch at the St. Johns McMenamins, I overheard two old hippies talking. You're probably picturing them exactly just from the phrase "old hippies" because that's the perfect way to describe them. Both had long, scraggly gray hair cascading off balding heads and they were both wearing Grateful Dead tie dye t-shirts. I wasn't listening because I found myself thinking, "I bet I could glean some important wisdom from these two burnouts!" No, I began listening when I heard the first one say, "I could feel a really strong breeze through the larger glory hole." He then referenced a smaller glory hole that needed some work as well. Is there another usage of the term "glory hole" that I'm not familiar with? If not, these two old guys were talking about fixing up the booths in their sex shop. Captain Atom isn't pleased with the surveillance of his son so he rushes off to confront General Eiling. While he's yelling at him, Ultramax stops by to battle. Or fuck?

Gross! Their colliding streams knocked them into the Slash Fiction Quantum Field! Now things are really going to get dicky!

Captain Atom wins the fight although is it really winning if you just shove the guy out of a portal and into who the fuck knows where? That seems more like helping him escape. Anyway, there's still one more issue so I guess they'll finish battling there. After that, Captain Atom can go do the one thing he knows he shouldn't do but won't be able to stop himself from doing: revealing his true identity to Genji. Then Genji can be all, "You're no my father!" And bam! Just like that, he'll be a DC Superhero!

#Captain Atom #DC Comics #Cary Bates #Greg Weisman #Will Conrad #Ivan Nunes

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

July 19, 2020

My weekly roundup of these I am doing and looking at. Topics include the Biden energy plan, current vs. advanced nuclear, the construction industry, population trends, pesticides, and agglomeration.

The Biden Energy Plan

This week the Biden campaign put out an energy/climate plan. I won’t try to do a comprehensive rundown, but here are a few of my thoughts.

The core of the plan is $2 trillion of spending on clean energy infrastructure: renewable energy, electric vehicles, transit, housing, and building energy efficiency. I don’t find any of this to be objectionable, though it can be hard to forecast how cost effective spending approaches will be.

There is nothing on carbon pricing. I regard carbon pricing as essential to any credible decarbonization plan. With carbon pricing we know how cost effective decarbonization will be because cost-effectiveness is set.

The plan calls for $400B on R&D (that’s about two and a half Apollo Programs in modern dollar figures), with a wide range of areas including advanced nuclear, carbon capture, novel grid storage, electrofuels, and other areas. I consider R&D investment to be the other essential component to a credible decarbonization plan. This aspect of the Biden plan looks very good. The advanced nuclear concept has sparked some debate (see the next item). My friend Dan Rejto gives mixed reviews for the food and agriculture aspects of the plan. He notes some positive elements on the R&D side but the lack of funding for alternative proteins is a major omission.

There is lots and lots of emphasis on union jobs. I’m not really a big union enthusiast and wonder how this impacts the overall cost for a given result. There’s some rhetoric on trade that sounds vaguely protectionist.

The environmental justice section emphasizes enforcement of pollution laws, which sounds good, and “a goal that disadvantaged communities receive 40% of overall benefits of spending in the areas of clean energy and energy efficiency deployment”. I get nervous when EJ becomes a vehicle for passing out goodies. I see this all the time in local planning and the process can quickly devolve into a patronage system.

There’s no nonsense on curbing population, redefining GDP, or other such things. I didn’t expect there would be, but it is still a relief.

There’s nothing about NEPA reform or other regulatory reforms. There really needs to be when considering disbursing such large sums of money. Decarbonizing the power sector by 2035--at most 14 years after the plan could be become a legislative reality--will be difficult under ideal circumstances and impossible if we can’t build high voltage transmission, power plants, and other necessary infrastructure in a timely manner.

I think the plan is very smart politically. It basically serves the function of the Green New Deal, as envisioned by the progressive wing of the party, but it is being employed for party unity. Labor and social justice advocates both have much they can be happy with.

As far as policy merits, I’m in a good mood right now so I’ll give it three stars out of five.

Current versus Advanced Nuclear

The Biden energy plan calls for R&D into advanced nuclear, among other things, but the only line about current generation nuclear is “It would also mean continuing to leverage the carbon-pollution free energy provided by existing sources like nuclear and hydropower...” so at least that should mean avoiding premature nuclear closures. What about building new nuclear power with existing technology?

Among nuclear advocates, this is a major point of debate. One view is that current nuclear technology is too expensive and so we need to develop new technologies, such as small modular reactors (allow for fast and standardized factory construction), sodium-cooled reactors (avoid the need for elaborate containment systems). Or maybe we should go straight for fusion. The second view is that we should push for an asston of nuclear construction, like the French did, and make it cheap by standardizing it and building up a strong workforce.

I confess some agnosticism on this debate but am leaning ever more toward the second camp. Early SMR cost estimates don’t look especially promising, nor do the hypothetical costings I have seen for Gen IV nuclear or fusion. My fear is that if the focus is too much on R&D for the next generation, we won’t solve the fundamental problems that plague the current generation. Furthermore, I would expect that building out a strong nuclear engineering workforce will accelerate the development of new technology. So it’s not like “current vs. advanced” is actually a dichotomous choice.

What actually is the problem that plagues the current generation? I don’t entirely know. But I suspect it is a combination of general megaproject management problems identified by Bent Flyvbjerg, overregulation, and an industry that has gotten lazy.

Construction Technology

Speaking of construction, TechCrunch has a profile this week of a company called Social Construct, founded by Ben Huh of Cheezburger fame. The goal is to use CAD and modular construction to lower construction costs. For decades the industry has been plagued by cost and productivity problems that greatly exceed most other industries.

I have been interested in this topic for a while now and see construction costs as a major weak link in any credible effort to address housing costs. There would be great, broad-based social value for developing tools for turning around productivity trends. My suspicion is that the major bottleneck the industry faces is fragmentation. Not until we start seeing some major vertical (and maybe horizontal as well) integration will we see better planning and the opportunity to employ building information modeling, modular construction, robotics, 3D printing, or whatever other high tech tools people imagine.

As for Social Construct, I hope they’re successful. I’m a fan of I Can Has Cheezburger, Huh’s other notable work. But recent past efforts to modernize the construction industry, such as Google X’s endeavors, Katerra, and Plant Prefab, for instance, have not (yet) turned the industry around.

Population Trends

There was a major new study in The Lancet this week which forecast a peak human population in 2064 and a decline to a world TFR of 1.7 by 2100. This dire (from my pronatalist perspective) forecast seems to me to be a better reflection of actual trends than the standard UN forecast, which does not envision a peak population until around the turn of the century.

I think the study should be taken as a wakeup call for policy makers to take falling fertility seriously. The paper itself focuses on adaptation and immigration as solutions, generally pouring cold water on pronatalist policies (ducking the question of where the migrants will come from if the whole world sees sub-replacement fertility).

As a forecast, I think the paper is a good reflection of mainstream understanding and functions well as a reference point. But I still see wildcards which are not well understood (at least not by me) and could, over the course of 80 years, result in a reality quite different from forecasts. It is hard to imagine that more countries will not adopt much more aggressive pronatalist policies, perhaps going as far as state-sponsored child rearing and ectogenesis, if they become sufficiently alarmed. Culture can change in ways that are not predictable and not the same as past changes. Sooner or later natural selection should become noticeable as a factor causing a fertility rebound.

Pesticides

I haven’t done as much new content lately as usual for Urban Cruise Ship, since I’ve been focused on this longer term social endeavors project and some other things that aren’t going online for a while, but I did draft up a section on pesticides (sans graphics). A few observations.

I found several estimates on the externalized damages of agricultural pesticides at $4-19/kg. The world uses about 3.5 million tons per year, so that’s about $14-66 billion of externalized damages per year. These kinds of numbers are always fuzzy (and previously I’ve seen some higher estimates), but orders of magnitude estimates help us rank environmental issues by seriousness. Annualized damages from climate change, nitrogen runoff, and deforestation are in the trillions each. Land use and biodiversity loss may each reach into the tens of trillions. Poor ocean management, water pollution, and ozone depletion are in the hundreds of billions. So pesticides may be an order of magnitude or more lower than these other issues.

The world hasn’t seen a peak in pesticide usage overall or per acre, but there may have been a peak in per calorie of food.

The value of pesticides in modern agriculture is indisputable. Without them yields would probably be about half of what we see. That would mean either a massive conversion to additional cropland, labor costs from working the land, or we wouldn’t be able to feed the world. But we may be overusing pesticides relative to the optimum. China in particular.

Integrated pest management is the solution I see most often as to how to cut pesticide usage. It’s a fairly broad term that encompasses a range of tactics to control pests. The main barrier to expanding IPM is that it requires specialized knowledge and training, so labor costs come into play. IPM may be a bit like recycling in that regard, where labor can substitute for environmental harm. But in a world of growing wealth, and urbanizing, peaking, and aging population, solutions that involve more labor are not very attractive. This is probably an area where advancements in precision agriculture will be important.

Agglomerationists

Anton Howes discussed “the agglomerationists” in his newsletter this week. The idea that having more and better connected people fosters commerce and creates wealth is a thread that connects a range of policy views: pronatalism, urbanism, free trade, and free migration, for instance. This is something I have been thinking for a while and am grateful that Anton has articulated the concept better than I have.

One can take the agglomeration principle in a different direction though and see it as a challenge. In any system characterized by returns to scale, there is likely to be a diminishing returns problem, and I think we see plenty of evidence of this nowadays with stagnating productivity, high cost of urban living, and subreplacement fertility, for instance. It may be that the real agglomeration challenge is not to increase the scale of the economy so much as to develop less scale-dependent modes of production. I’m not sure if this goal is possible or desirable, but it would be good to be open minded.

[dorcasrempel]

3Q: Yet-Ming Chiang on reopening the case of cold fusion

Researchers at MIT have collaborated with a team of scientists from the University of British Columbia, the University of Maryland, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Google to conduct a multiyear investigation into cold fusion, a type of benign nuclear reaction hypothesized to occur in benchtop apparatus at room temperature.

In 1989, benchtop experiments were reported that raised hopes that cold fusion had been achieved. If true, this form of fusion could potentially be a source of limitless, carbon-free energy. However, researchers were unable to reproduce the results, and serious questions arose about the validity of the work. The topic laid largely dormant for 30 years. (In contrast, research in “hot” fusion has persisted, including the SPARC collaboration between MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which aims to commercialize fusion technology.)

Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is part of the Google-sponsored team now revisiting the possibility of cold fusion through scientifically rigorous, peer-reviewed research. A progress report published today in Nature publicly describes the group’s collaboration for the first time.

The group, which included about 30 graduate students, postdocs, and staff scientists from across the collaborating institutions, has not yet found any evidence of the phenomenon, but they did find important new insights into metal-hydrogen interactions that could affect low-energy nuclear reactions. The team remains excited about investigating this area and hopes their ongoing journey will inspire others in the scientific community to contribute data to this intriguing field.

Q: How did you get involved with a project that many would not consider?

A: Matt Trevithick SB ’92, SM ’94, senior program manager at Google Research, approached me in spring of 2015 and he did so pretty gingerly, kind of poking around the edges at first, and then he popped the question, “What do you think of cold fusion?” And my answer to him was that I didn’t have an opinion one way or the other on the scientific merits, because in 1989, when the cold fusion story broke, I was working all-out on high-temperature superconductivity, which had broken in 1986-87. We were furiously doing research in my lab on that topic, and also had started a company with MIT collaborators. So the cold fusion story came and went, and I was peripherally aware of it.

Then Matt asked if this was something I might be interested in. Google recruited the collaborators on this team not by telling us what they wanted done, but by asking us what we would find interesting to do. We wrote proposals that were internally reviewed. What was interesting to me is the idea that electrochemistry, and especially solid-state electrochemistry, is a very powerful driving force that can create unusual states of matter. We’ve applied that idea to high energy batteries and electrochemical actuators previously, and this was another field in which electrochemical manipulation of matter could be interesting.

This project was carried out in stealth. We didn’t want the fact that Google was funding research in this area to become a distraction. For the first couple of years, we didn’t even tell other members of our group the real reason behind the hydrogen storage experiments going on in the lab! 

Ariel Jackson, a postdoc, had a major role in developing the original proposal. Later on, Daniel Rettenwander and Jesse Benck joined as postdocs, and David Young SB ’12, SM ’18 joined as a graduate student. Together, we pursued the idea of using different types of electrolytes, liquid, polymer, and ceramic, as the medium by which to electrochemically pump hydrogen into palladium metal in order to achieve as highly loaded a state as possible. We also developed techniques to measure loading dynamically more precisely and more accurately than had been done before. To date we’ve been able to reach a H:Pd ratio of 0.96, where the theoretical maximum is 1, measured to an uncertainty of + or – 0.02. These results have just been published in Chemistry of Materials, and one measure of the care we went to in this work is the fact that the supplemental information section of the paper is 50 pages long.

Q: What have you learned, and why did the group choose to publish now? 

A: The Nature publication makes clear that to date we have not discovered compelling evidence for cold fusion. Our objective was to be scrupulously objective, and I think we have managed to avoid any form of “confirmation bias.” However, we’ve also learned that the high deuterium concentrations hypothesized to be necessary for cold fusion to occur are much more difficult to attain than we would have expected. And, there have been a number of other discoveries that have come about as a result of the group’s work that are applicable in other scientific areas.

Google’s intent from the beginning was to fund a multi-institutional collaborative effort that would work quietly but intensively, then publish its findings in peer-reviewed journals. Now is the right time to disclose that this project exists, to tell people what we have found and not found. We are not finished – in many ways this is just the beginning – and we want others to join the effort to look into the materials science, electrochemistry, and physics surrounding this topic.

Q: What’s next at MIT?

A: The project at MIT goes on, and we are looking to add to the team. What we’ve learned over the past three years has suggested new ways to use electrochemistry and materials science to create highly loaded metal hydrides: palladium for sure, but also other metals. We believe that we have found certain knobs that could allow us to create phase states that have not been accessible before. If we can controllably produce these, they will be very interesting target materials for other experiments within the broader program looking at, for example, neutron yields from deuterium-deuterium fusion in a plasma discharge device at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. 

3Q: Yet-Ming Chiang on reopening the case of cold fusion syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/