Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Agreed. And Kefka was way cooler anyway.

    (I firmly believe most people gush over FF7 so much only because it was their first exposure to a mainstream console RPG in non-Japanese circles. FF7 as a whole was a fairly meh entry into the series anyway, if you ask me.)

    Not only did Kefka have real style, twisted though it may be, he also for all intents and purposes actually managed to win. He fractured the world, scattered the heroes, built his goddamned tower, and was lording it all over everybody with a penthouse view. He didn’t have angst; he was just nuts. It was frankly a complete fluke that he got the shit whacked out of him by a little girl with a paintbrush, a 8x per round attacking Moogle with Genji gloves, a senior citizen, and a mime.


















  • The US loves to disenfranchise prisoners and felons, because the US has carefully throughout its history jiggered the system so that black people are significantly more likely to wind up as prisoners and felons. Felon disenfranchisement became suspiciously popular among US states immediately following the Civil War. No points for guessing why.

    The situation has improved somewhat recently, with many states (although most of them not in the deep south…) relaxing laws and allowing previously convicted people to have their voting rights restored either automatically or via some process. To my knowledge, however, only two states allow incarcerated people to vote: Maine and Vermont.


  • Well, metallic sodium liberates hydrogen real fast on contact with water, which I guess is tantamount to the same thing.

    Yes. But not to the same level as just dropping a brick of pure sodium in a bathtub. In a battery like this there is not pure lithium/sodium/whatever just sloshing around inside. The sodium is tied up being chemically bonded with whatever the anode and cathode materials are. Only a minority of the available sodium is actually free in the form of ions carrying the charge from cathode to anode.

    Just as with lithium-ion chemistry batteries, it is vital that the cells remain sealed from the outside because the materials inside will indeed react with air, water, and the water in the air. Exposing the innards will cause a rapid exothermic reaction, i.e. it will get very hot and optionally go off bang.