That's how Izzy happened.
Please do not the cat.
I graduated high school in 2005, one out of some 300 of my graduating class. Had plenty of friends. Went to community college, several folks I knew from school went to the same community college, met plenty of new folks. Had plenty of friends. Transferred to university, had plenty of friends, got to know my roommates pretty close, that kind of thing.
Out of college, I disappeared into what I thought was going to be my career for a few years. When I came back up and looked around, I found myself in a different world with people that aren't people anymore, there are walking talking eating shitting cell phone stands.
I don't try to socialize for the same reason I don't go hunting for Carolina parakeets: Interpersonal relationships aren't a thing that exists in the world anymore. We killed them all and the corpse of the last one is on display behind glass at the Raleigh museum of Natural Sciences.
Soaps like Lava and Gojo have pumice in them. Because sometimes your hands need an 80 grit washing.
Both of my grandmothers are dead, but I did teach my aunt to use Linux. She had a laptop that "ran" Windows 10. It would take 30 seconds to open the Start menu. One SSD, one RAM upgrade and one install of Mint later it's a whole new machine. She can Firefox and Mahjongg just fine.
The Demon Core was a sphere of plutonium intended to be used as part of a nuclear bomb dropped on Japan. It wasn't used for this purpose, and instead nuclear physicists used it in various experiments. Two of which involved approaching criticality.
One experiment involved stacking bricks made of some neutron reflecting material, like beryllium or something, around the core. Reflecting neutrons back at the plutonium would cause more fission events to occur; if it hits a certain threshold called criticality it it will release a considerable amount of radiation and heat. The goal was to get close to, but not exceed, that limit. The scientist was about to place one more brick when his instruments told him it would go critical if the brick was placed, so he started to back off...and dropped the brick.
The core went critical, releasing a wave of heat and a blast of dazzling blue light. Thinking quickly, the scientist smacked the brick away with his hand. He spent the next couple weeks dying of radiation sickness.
A short time later, another scientist started a similar experiment, this time enclosing the core in two half-spherical metal shells. If the core was completely surrounded by the shells, it would go critical. He used the blade of a flathead screwdriver to almost, but not quite, close the shells. Then the screwdriver slipped and the shells fully closed.
The core went critical, releasing a wave of heat and a blast of blinding blue light. Thinking quickly, the scientist smacked the upper shell away with his hand. He spent the next couple weeks dying of radiation sickness.
Decades later, youtube hair and beard model Kyle Hill released a video detailing this story, and it has since become something of a sensation on the internet. Images of the demon core in its "closing the shells" configuration is often used as shorthand for something that is exceedingly needlessly reckless. Some of the humor comes from if ya know, ya know, some of it is based in the justaposition of teh high intelligence required to do nuclear physics, with the negligent stupidity of putting nothing between you and a long ugly painful death but the blade of a screwdriver.
I'm sure in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drug store.
I would end up with a farm that took all day to water, and never enough time to go down in any mine far enough to find iridium enough to make sprinklers out of, and then stop playing.
Don't worry, I've got a plan that will 100% take care of it. I'm going to:
- feed my cat her breakfast
- build some nice furniture
- probably get rained on because it's summer in North Carolina during the climate apocalypse and Trump fired all the meteorologists
- bake a pizza from scratch for dinner
- play a video game about process engineering
- feed my cat her dinner
- fall asleep listening to an astronomy podcast.
I think I've got it surrounded.
I'm convinced it isn't.
I kinda like the orange smell, too.