You separate out the isotopes. You don’t create U-235, but rather you extract the fissile isotope from your sample. There’s only a limited amount of the stuff in the world and the majority of uranium still buried (and in fact, the majority of it at all) is non-fissile U-238. Only something like 0.7% of the uranium in the world is U-235.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium

I suspect this is highly dependent on the level of enrichment of said uranium.

Even buying it piecemeal in dinkum quantities from scientific suppliers as a private customer, I’m seeing depleted uranium — i.e., 99.9% U238 and not realistically fissile material — priced at $32.50 per gram online. 2 kilos of that would thus be $65,000. Although I’ll be damned if I know just what the hell you’d do with the stuff.

I reckon weapons grade would run you just a smidgen more than that.

Correct on that count. The whole thing is now just a boy-who-cried-wolf situation.

My principal saw Schrade Switch-It clipped to my pants and thought it was a pager, and sternly admonished me not to bring my “pager” to school anymore.

Righty-o, man, no pager, I told him. No problem.

What a toolbox.

Definitely orange.

That’s not why. It’s because it’s cheaper for a manufacturer of your widget to just slap a Prop 65 label on anything and everything out of an overabundance of caution rather than go through all the testing and certification required to verify if there is or isn’t any such material in the product. There’s no penalty for false positives, so to remain “complaint” suddenly every manufactured good on Earth suddenly sprouted the warning.

Ah, yeah. Thanks.

I only have seven motorcycles (heh, “only”) so I guess there’s less for me to talk about there. Plus, they won’t fit in my photo box.

Unless I build a new, bigger photo box. Hmm…

Anyway, they’re the ones all lined up in a row in the headline image of this community, except for the Harley all the way down on the left end which is my next door neighbor’s.

No, I’m wrong. It’s the Mid-Atlantic ridge.

And we gained a pretty damn good idea during World War 2 and the Cold War when we were trying to map parts of the ocean floor for submarine warfare purposes, and discovered the mid ocean fault points. Especially the true extent of the Mariana Trench, Mid-Atlantic Ridge which is spang in the middle of the Atlantic between the jigsaw puzzle coastlines of Africa and South America.

Needless to say we weren’t to keen to blab to our enemies just how much we knew about the seafloor, and neither were they. What with submarine warfare being a Big Deal in the Cold War, and all.

Edit to add some additional detail now that I’m not pecking on my phone: Alfred Wegener proposed his almost-modern theory of continental drift in 1912, as well as the hypothesis of Pangea, the prehistoric supercontinent from the time when all the current major landmasses were together. You’re right that there was not a solid explanation for the mechanism by which this proposed action ought to occur. But even by the 1940s scientists were proposing that continental drift happened by way of the continents floating on convection currents of magma underneath and predicted there would be expansion joints in between them in the middle of the oceans.

Sedici is one of Cycle Gear’s house brands, from before they were absorbed by Revzilla. It’s the “upgrade” line to their cheap shit Bilt stuff.

FYI, the Tusk rackless luggage will beat the shit out of your rear plastics and if you’re the type of person who likes to keep everything clean and shiny, this will annoy you. It’s also a universal one-size-fits-none situation regardless of which setup you get (the X2 or “Highland” or the regular one) so you’ll spend quite some time puzzling over how to mount it and the setup always seems janky and gimcrack. It’s also a pain in the arse to remove and put back on.

If you can countenance it, I would highly advise just getting a set of pannier racks and doing regular luggage, either soft or hard depending on your preference. It really won’t be that much more expensive at the end of the day and it’ll piss you off a lot less.

I have the X2 “system” on my Orion RXB. It’s awful, and I’d never do it again.

I mean, what. You’re going to play Ikaruga on mobile? Of course you need your Dreamcast.

Likewise. Outer Wilds was an incredible experience but it’s one of those things that will inherently have zero replay value. Unless maybe you feel like doing a quick run-through as a comfort food nostalgia game, or something. It’s fairly unique in that your progression in it is based purely on your personal knowledge of what you’ve discovered in the solar system, and if you had foreknowledge there’s literally nothing stopping you from beating it on your very first launch without even doing a single time loop. There’s even an achievement for doing the same, no doubt intended to be earned once you already know everything.

The Qidi Q2 has built-in spaghetti detection (and print failure detection in general), auto leveling, bed mesh compensation, etc. It’s not a print farm machine, though, so how you’ll get your parts off the bed and into your finished bucket will require some outboard tools and elbow grease. If its mechanicals are anything like my prior X-Max 3 from them I don’t predict it will require any adjustment, maintenance, or parts replacement for many hundreds/thousands of hours of runtime. I guess eventually you’ll need a nozzle at minimum, and you might want to lubricate the linear guides on the gantries every now and again.

It’s also compatible with their “Qidi box” filament changer doohickey if that sort of thing is important to you.

These days this is true of many other brands as well. The early days of your printer showing up as a kit full of bits and requiring you to spend as much time wrenching on it as using it are gone, unless you deliberately go and seek something like that out.

Qidi, Anycubic, Prusa, Creatality, and probably tons of others I can’t think of off the top of my head also make machines that are unbox-and-use.

I still maintain that Chrono Trigger was the masterpiece of the SNES. Not of its genre, not just the best RPG on the platform, not just a standout for being ahead of its time.

What got me about Chrono Trigger is the crux of the 1000 AD cast’s main quest, wherein the three kids from the present become accidental time travelers and complete what amounts to an entire young adult novel’s narrative arc where they manage to rescue Princess Nadia/Marle from the past and marginally improve history, and in any other story that is where the Happily Ever After would go and the end credits would roll. But via extended highjinks they ultimately wind up gaining some future foreknowledge of the Day of Lavos after witnessing its aftereffects first hand.

These three are not heroes or warriors (Crono possibly notwithstanding, since he’s already suspiciously good with a katana) and were not called upon by the gods. None of them are any kind of chosen one. There is no ancient prophecy. They are not the scions of a past fellowship of heroes who saved the world from an ancient evil generations ago. No villain has burned down their village in the first act. They aren’t facing much real adversity or hardship in their lives, none of them really have a secret and tragic past, and they all have homes they could go back to pretty much at any time and forget about all of this.

They’re just three kids. Lavos isn’t their problem, or even the next generation’s problem, or the generation after that. It won’t rise to destroy the world anywhere near their lifetimes, and they’re certainly not powerful enough in that moment to do anything about it anyway.

But it’s Marle who decides right then and there, no. Fuck that shit. Without hesitation. No one else can time travel and change the past, at least as far as the three of them know. As Marle says, this can’t be the way the world ends. They have to try.

There are so few RPG stories of that time where the decision to embark on the quest to save the world is left to the player characters’ own agency, and so neatly aligns with what the player would probably want to do themselves.

Crono needs a legendary sword that requires a time-hopping fetch quest to get all the ingredients. Frog requires a sword that’s already legendary, and a whole episode devoted to getting it powered up further. Marle, Luca, and even Magus require triple techs and in the case of the former two, a deliberate power up by Spekkio to even be able to access them in the first place.

…Ayla can merely punch people for 9999 damage.

That was Violet Beauregarde’s fate. Veruca was the one who was a bad egg (or a bad nut, in the book/Depp adaptation).

But in keeping with the theme, Trump wins nothing. He loses, good day sir.

And the PS2 slim.

Based on my limited understanding, Sony didn’t make the drive ejection controls available to game developers. Maybe clever hackers could do it nowadays since the PS2 in particular has had its system architecture analyzed down to the molecular level. It’s probably not a good idea to tie the progress if your program execution to it, though, because of the above. Hardware revisions could change at any time.

Given that the PS1 didn’t have a powered drive tray and the lid release was fully mechanical, he’d have to develop telekinesis first.

The whole Fission Mailed sequence near the end of MGS2 leaps to mind, also.