Nuke

my sister had a magic kit that came with a bottle of finger smoke. apparently its some kind of oil with a low vapor point, you put it on your fingers, snap, and it smokes. the friction provides enough heat. i never bothered to figure out what was in it, but it was sticky and oily and very easy to set off. smelled like burning rubber cement. i cant imagine its healthy, but showmanship comes with some risk.

ideally any one ship should still be able to reach its destination on its own, multiplied it has a safety factor.

technical minecraft. go down the rabit hole of advanced item sorters, zero tick technology, quasi connectivity, rail wires and ultimately deciding on the crude, slow and reliable system i already designed in my creative world. now just to build it in survival. games that feel like work are wrong.

in pairs, nah, whole floatillas is the way to go. especially if they can link up in transit to share resources and possibly use a modular truss system to form centrifuges. redundancy beyond tumbling pigeon config. if anything goes wrong you can scrap the offending ship, reconfigure your latticework, distribute the crew/passengers/equipment/consumables to other craft. and continue on no worse for wear.

there is apparently no correlation between intelligence and brain size, of course when it comes to brains with human capabilities, we have few datapoints.

i think the worst thing scifi can do is handwave a technology we already have. look at the current state of technology and extrapolate. take fusion as an example, big honkin machines that take up a massive building. ok we make it smaller, maybe not a tokamak. look at some of the start ups with small reactors, eg hellion, polywell or dpf. oh that can fit in a rocket, battlemech, etc. what generation will those become viable? 3rd or 4th perhaps. assuming 50 years each (and counting for gen zero which is where were at) thats what we have 250 years in the future. antimatter handling techniques are a spinoff of fusion research. when did that split off (now if were being honest) then you do the math in reverse and figure where that will be in 250 years. sci-fi likes to do random breakthroughs that side step a lot of time, technology does go through growth spurts (guns and personal computers) but its more often than not a steady progression with brief periods of excitement (both computers and guns have significantly deeper histories than we give credit). worst example is in star trek first contact when zephram cochrain loads up magic carpet ride in the phoenix. the little crystal cd analogue seemed like a regression. napster was a thing, we had mp3 players. laptops were starting to become common and everyone had the internet. we were well past the brick phone. extrapolating these technologies (in a franchise that predicted flip phones) would have let to something resembling the ipod or streaming. il let it slide in that it was kind of a setup for a comedic gag (men in black did something similar). it was a good movie so i wont go into how it ruined the borg.

there was a time when i lived almost entirely on spam. i hold it with the same reverence as some do with ramen (college survival food). though these days i refuse to eat either one. ironically the good cuts of pork are, pound for pound, cheaper. spam is only useful for its shelf stability.

was working on my steam deck. updated all the things. i replaced chrome with firefox, added my profile to it. got winamp running, which clears up another major linux migration issue for the post-win10 world. i installed the forever winter, overload, people playground. took off scorn which performs horrible. wanted to install mw5 clans but it wouldn't fit (games are huge now). might take off the forever winter since its eating up one fifth of my drive, doesn't run to well, and i dont want to screw up my save with a bunch of bad runs. was able to get scav girl across elephant moseleum without dying, but i didn't grab any loot or kill anything. how do people aim with game pads?

sleep. its a thing i either have too much of or not enough. currently in not enough mode. went to bed at close to 2am, early for me, and slept 5 hours. when i got up to pee i looked outside and saw the recycling bins out, having gotten my pick up day mixed up, i had to go run my bin out, got dressed put my shoes on and get it out to the curb. the cat escaped and i had to get the treats to get her back in. which was a mistake because when i went back to bed the cat followed me and proceeded to steel my pillow and purr loudly. while pawing at the curtains letting the sunlight in. i booted her out and then she started scratching and meowing at the door. after not sleeping for the next two hours i got up. now im thinking about taking a nap, and its only about 10:30. not to mention i have an eye doctor appointment at 2ish. too much sleep i can deal with but not enough sucks.

i like to read, i just read slow and dont have a lot of time. audiobooks work, so long as its a human narrator, but half the books i want to read dont have audiobooks.

discovery went to far i think. plausible technology is one thing but they turned it into space magic. then add to that the fact that everyone acts like a teenager. then you have insufferable space magic.

i bet solid anti-lithium might make things easier. you can use its paramagnetic properties to suspend it in a vacuum chamber. granted anti-lithium is going to be a lot harder to make than run of the mill anti-hydrogen. but if you can get the mass of containment down a lot, and come up with a means to transport it from containment and "burn" it in a reactor, then you have an ultimate antimatter rocket with solid isp. it gives you the means for sublight interstellar transfers. cool thing is if your containment needs maintenance, you can just put the block of anti-lithium outside while you work on the reactor, engine, etc. hydrogen is problematic enough when it doesn't try to annihilate with everything.

i thought it was good. i was hoping for dlc but the dev team disbanded in protest of what the publisher was doing. idk the particulars of it though. one post-human dystopian cat game with robots is not enough! any truth to the rumor that these same developers are taking over ksp2 development? because kerbal cats would be awesome. still failing to find time to play mw5: clans.

its worth nothing that dwarf stars, with the longest lives, are the most common type. i view the andromeda collision as an opportunity to go intergalactic.

well i didn't see this ever being a thing.

i was thinking of rendering ksp to the linux terminal. its really not hard to convert pixels to characters. just sort your terminal font by number of pixels and stick the ascii values in a lookup table. this becomes your intensity channel. text colors can be used for color data, so you will need to convert rgb color space to luma-chroma (this only requires a matrix-vector multiply). you can probibly do all the conversion in the shader, and then render to texture the output, and then once that texture exists do the final conversion to ascii and dump it to the terminal.

now you are getting into silurian hypothesis territory. even some of the other proto-human subspecies may have had something resembling civilization, lost in the scope of long time.

problem i have with flying cars is if you can fly, why do you need a car. all you need is a light vtol that is capable of take off and land from a single standard size parking spot. i dont want to know what kind of regulatory nightmare this would cause. having to deal with the faa and the dmv seems like asking too much of the general public's patience.

considering that the natural place to build a civilization is on the coastline, if you were to build on the coast while most of the earths water was tied up in glaciers (say at the end of the ice age), then those cities would be underwater now. divers have found plenty of under water ruins that nobody can explain, but generally the difficulty of exploring the seafloor has pretty much slowed down any archeology of those areas. the glaciers themselves could have wiped out any pre-ice age settlements. science requires evidence but the past existed whether or not any recognizable evidence survived and was found. however go back too far and the planet can no longer support modern human life, too little or too much o2, too hot, too many predators, etc. so the window for human existence is significantly narrower than the window for life on the planet. and granted i dont think you will find anything more advanced than an agrarian town that maybe existed 10k years before we have evidence for agriculture. geological processes can destroy evidence, but only at geological timescales. environmental changes on the other hand occur on significantly faster time scales.

yea. if we need to get out of here in a hurry, we could use old boom boom. of course i guess that requires going nuke happy. perhaps we can do something more sane. fusion based propulsion perhaps with physical fusion targets initiated in a magnetic nozzle by a light gas gun. or perhaps a big photon drive. old boom boom is nice because it would take plutonium away from people who would use it on other people. really its not the drives its the power systems. drives get you from point a to point be but power lets you thrive in a hostile environment. do that long enough you can mine enough nuclear material for another stack of pulse units. then you just need to launch a minimum of 2 missions to other stars. if everybody does this, you can benefit from exponential growth and allow a human empire to expand into the greater cosmos. granted this is a disjointed empire with travel times too long to allow any interstellar trade or anything of the like. people will live and die on the same planet for the most part, assuming you choose to live on planets. slow communication is possible so you could participate in a non-real-time information and cultural exchange. problem is without the fusion (or really good fission) all this is smoke in the wind. you couldn't even survive on the space ship in interstellar space let alone on any potential destination that your species did not personally evolve for. there perhaps is the possibility of colonizing bodies in the oort cloud, which could dangle us a lightyear or more away from earth. if perhaps this expands out a couple light years, and say alpha centauri has a cloud that extends out a couple light years, you could probibly jump systems with only a delta-v equal to the relative velocities of the two stars. you could do it on plasma drives and a fission reactor. as for the state of the world, the pendulum has merely started to swing the other way, the thing is its moving and not still. it will be back after some unknown period of time. the future will be different or it will be the same, or both. possibly many times each.

it was the 19th century, witch trials had fallen out of favor by that time. i used to carve space ships out of cans of spam. it also solves the starving artist problem.

i mean they tested their new tiles in the plasma wind tunnel, only thing left is a live test that you cant do if your ship blows up before it gets mostly to orbit.

had email or cell phones existed in dickens' time, the saying would have been death, taxes, and spam.

until they get tangled or collide with eachother anyway. though some helicopters have inter-meshing twin rotors.

to be fair the current problem is not the tps, but it certainly is slowing down the testing of same.