I don’t suppose you can elaborate on what makes a main character bad without using the word woke?
Your words. Maybe you didn’t explicitly accuse me of racism. But you did the Joe Rogan “just asking the question” thing of proposing a question and already implying the answer you presupposed.
It is equally baffling to me that because you don’t understand why I have an opinion, it must be because I’m a racist.
I’m kinda done trying to explain to you why I have an opinion. It’s not that I haven’t explained it well enough. It’s that you refuse to believe me.
My dude, I am literally praising the writing they did on DS9 and LD with Sisko and Freeman. Two people of color who are in charge.
I am not criticizing Disco or the writers for the existence of the characters. I think it is very cool that there’s a woman of color running the ship. And that the mushroom engineer has a loving marriage with his doctor husband. And that they picked up a cool enby person with a ghost boyfriend who plays the cello.
I am not criticizing the existence of these characters. I am criticizing the execution.
I am saying that the writing was bad, the plots made no sense, and the characters’ motivations were all over the place. And yeah, the main character thing was bothersome. Not very Star Trek. The show about an ensemble cast doing space stuff.
If one person says hey we should do this thing, and everyone else says no we shouldn’t based on the information we have, and it turns out that the one person was right because of things nobody knew at the time, that’s a boring plot device. When it happened multiple times, and then kinda all the time, I stopped watching.
Kirk and Sisko sometimes disagreed with their crews. Sometimes they were wrong. Burnham was always right. And it got old.
Don’t worry, I’m not the type of person you think I am. I have queer friends. My partner’s a bi she/they. I drive a Prius. I’m gonna vote for the woman of color here in a few weeks. Pretty cool of you to make that assumption, though.
I actually really liked Disco S1 and kinda S2. But the whole “one special person across time and space” thing got kinda old. One person is always right. No matter what. That and the Discovery-is-special-ex-machina Burn alongside the ridiculous constantly-reconfiguring-geometry ships made me lose interest. I hear half the Disco bridge crew had like zero character development in the last season, and they just didn’t even bother having Detmer there for a lot of it.
Strange New Worlds? Lower Decks? Hell yeah. Perfect Star Trek. 10/10. Disco and Picard? Trying too hard to make “prestige TV” and ending up forgetting why Star Trek is good: ensemble casts working together.
Counterpoint: Star Trek with a “main character” is no good. Recent shows make that pretty clear.
I think it would be just as viable as Monk up in the front lines. As a lvl 4 monk, you’ve probably got 18 Dex and 14ish Wis. That’s AC 16. Dance Bard will have 14ish Dex and 18 Cha, so also AC 16. Same d8 hit die as Monk, too.
I sort of feel bad about raining on the parade of the person distilling isopropanol in his garage earlier, but it really is dangerous.
But most of us chemists also need to be reminded of it. To the point that someone had to write a paper whose entire point is “don’t distill isopropanol”.
Please, don’t do this thing.
The issue with isopropanol peroxide formation is that exposing it to air – even when just using it, like when you’re cleaning parts – starts the process. The air in the head space of your containers is also enough to form them over time. You don’t necessarily need to see solids in the containers for it to be dangerous, since they’ll crystallize out as you concentrate the solution during distillation.
It’s also a numbers game. It probably won’t explode the first time you do it. But there’s a chance each time. Do it enough, and you’ll have an incident.
There are chemical reductants that can clear peroxides. For industrial scale isopropanol distillation, I’m not sure what they use. It may be that they just never distill down to the point that peroxides concentrate to a dangerous level.
I love EnF. But I assure you, organic peroxide formers are scarier.
No no no no no.
I’m a chemist. Organic chemistry PhD, now a process chemist in the industry. I do this for a living. Do not distill isopropanol that’s been exposed to air for any meaningful length of time.
Isopropanol slowly reacts with oxygen in the air to generate peroxides that, when you concentrate them down, EXPLODE. Source. Sorry, not an open access journal. But please take my word for it.
Unless you have a way of confirming the peroxide levels in your isopropanol are near zero, do not concentrate it down by distillation. You’ll blow up your glassware, which will probably expose what you’re distilling to your heat source, which will generate a secondary fireball.
PLEASE do not do this.
I bet she drinks prune juice
Drawbacks are mostly the economics of it. You have to convince people to put time and energy into turning waste into monomers. If the monomers you get from crude oil are cheaper, you’ve got an uphill battle.
The catalysts can be complex, but the good ones are really simple. The zinc one in this article is pretty easy to understand. Ours was an organic molecule, but a really abundant and cheap one. (We could easily recover and re-use the catalyst, too, which I also doubt most of the metal salt catalysts are capable of). Part of the project was optimizing that catalyst. We found ones that worked a little better, but were like 10x as expensive. So we just used a little more of the simple one and figured out how to use it over and over.
I worked on a similar (but competing) technology to this one for a few years. Depolymerization is absolutely the way forward for most polymer recycling.
For most uses, manufacturers want plastic that’s colorless and has good physical properties. Melting down clear plastic can work, but it degrades the polymers in hard-to-control ways. And if there’s any pigment in the plastic, forget about it.
If you break down polymers into their constituent monomers, you’ve turned a polymer process into a chemical process. Polymers are hard to work with. Chemicals are, comparatively, pretty easy. You can do a step or two to extract all the color and impurities, then re-polymerize the cleaned up material and get plastic that’s indistinguishable from brand new.
If your depoly process is good, it can distinguish between different polymers, so you can recycle mixed waste streams. Ours was even pretty good at distinguishing nylon from PET, which I sorta doubt the zinc process will be. But hey, more competition in this space is gonna be good for the world.
It was a scan during upload to their cloud photos system. Everyone else does it on their servers, Apple was going to run the scan before so they didn’t have to ever have them. To not have images scanned before upload, a user would just not have to use their cloud photos service.
The messaging was really badly handled. They almost certainly just scan all the same photos on their servers instead now.
I work a 9ish-to-5ish in a science field, salaried. Nobody really cares when I arrive or when I leave, as long as the work gets done. Sometimes science stuff goes off the rails and I have to arrive early or stay late, but I keep track of my hours and arrive a little early or leave a little early on other days to compensate.
I mean, it took four years of college and more than six of a PhD to get to this point, which stunk. But now I can monitor my chemicals stirring in a flask for a few minutes while hanging out on my phone, which is nice.
Hopefully not as a bunch of really good question posts full of mod-deleted answers.
You assumed I was saying a thing because I was a racist. I explained why I wasn’t. And you just refuse to believe me. That says so much more about you than it does about me, and I’m pretty tired of explaining it to you. Consider the conversation over.
LLAP 🖖