Alyx Woodward (obsolete) @Alyx@computerfairi.es

I don't remember all the details, but "Californian" was a few miles away and they saw the lights of a ship that was firing off skyrockets

and they did nothing

they convinced themselves it was just "company signals" or people having a party, and they did nothing

never even bothered to check. it wouldn't have taken long but it was just too much effort for them, for reasons unknown to us

"Titanic" was merely the biggest artifact of human society's positive _addiction_ to easily burnable carbon. white civilization, "Western civilization", just MAINLINED that shit, and it's almost killed us all

well

that's to one side. I wanna talk a little about a side-effect of "Titanic" going down, and that's the "Californian"

I bet a lot of "Titanic" nerds still talk endlessly about the design of the ship, as if this or that technical fix could have made the idea work

forgetting that the only reason "Titanic" floated at all was because of a huge number of human beings shackled to _coal_. digging coal out of the ground, turning coal into coke, shoveling the coke into a boiler, over and over and over

so of course it went to the bottom and because the society that built "Titanic" was awful and dysfunctional, the failure of the dream killed a thousand people or so

everything about "Titanic" was gross, in both senses of the word. both just BIG, and "gross" in the sense of disgusting. it was a vessel built to float not on water but on the stratification of humanity into a rarefied upper class and a solid dense mass of lower class humanity

I admit it, I've had an interest in disasters. I feel bad about it, but I feel also like I've learned something about how human beings break down under pressure

and I find myself thinking about "Titanic" right now, and the role played by a nearby ship, the "Californian"

"Titanic" should never have existed in the first place. it was a crime, that it even existed. human technology and society couldn't support it properly

TEMPO and its relatives are generally used catalytically, in small quantity. this catalytic quantity of the nitroxyl radical get oxidized _in situ_ to the active oxidizing agent, an N-oxammonium ion, by a co-oxidant present in excess. here? the auxiliary oxidant is simply air. copper(I) trifluoromethanesulfonate, 2,2'-bipyridyl, and N-methylimidazole in acetonitrile form some kind of system here that must bind molecular oxygen usefully so that it can oxidize the TEMPO

well, that's a fun one

the benzyl alcohol in question, 2-amino-5-bromobenzyl alcohol, is obtained from the corresponding benzoic acid via lithium aluminium hydride reduction in tetrahydrofuran. bleah! LAH isn't fun stuff. reacts explosively with water, and in fact the moisture from air is capable of setting the stuff on fire

but the TEMPO oxidation is straightforward. other oxidizing reagents might be expected to attack the aniline ring (aminobenzenes or anilines are notoriously sensitive to oxidation)

oh I haven't done _Organic Syntheses_ roulette.

hm, nothing matches 7667

but 5727 matched two articles! here's the first one

http://orgsyn.org/demo.aspx?prep=v90p0240

while back I talked a bit about a class of reagents based on a substance nicknamed "TEMPO", or 2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidinyl-1-oxyl radical, a stable nitroxyl radical compound that is the basis for a family of oxidation reactions in organic synthesis

this is one such reaction, using TEMPO in an oxidation of a benzyl alcohol to a benzaldehyde

Lomax's mom hollers out the question, "are you all right?" Lomax is not all right, and their bafflement is extreme

so is their cat's. Ramsay hisses in fright in a corner, then dashes out of the room in one bound

(btw, after Kara / Chara had somehow achieved soulbonding with all three of the Toriel kids, and was trying to relax on the couch, our cat Gibbs came up and regarded Chara from a short distance away. definitely questioning. no hissing tho)

perfection is spoiled again. page twenty-nine

https://www.parallaxcomic.com/comic/page-29

Lomax screams loud enough to be heard outside, startling a passing bird. curiously the window to his room has _two_ horizontal cross bars, not one, as seen from inside. maybe a blunder

🔴 or a different window

Lomax's collision with default reality is a rough one. apparently they collided with the floor, too; Lomax vaguely remembers floating in the air

so nobody (of course) answered my question about what happened to witchcraft.cafe

well, what happened to witchcraft.cafe?

PLEASE?

#askfediverse

set different squares to mean things, try to set up lines of things to give yourself bonuses? heck, the possibilities are manifold

huh you know a bingo interface that you could edit would make a pretty sweet interface for a gamified way of setting yourself reminders of shit you needed to do

ok it's got a fresh OpenBSD installation on it, w00t

now the next step is trying to figure out how to set up ssh remote access

so that'll be another week or work, bleh. you know I may be the engineer in this #pluralgang but I kinda hate computers too

Chara why do you have to be a video game character who HATES COMPUTERS

don't you know how weird that is

U..!

that'd better not be on some sort of test, [expletive deleted]

page twenty-eight. the second perfect page, haha

https://www.parallaxcomic.com/comic/page-28

Lomax is still blinded from the henshin sequence and their vision is slow to clear. vaguely though you can make out the window with the cross motif that we saw in an earlier page; they're back in their own room, it would seem, from wherever they were, head aching

they catch sight of their new appearance in a full-length mirror

Lomax's response to seeing they're an anime character now: "U..!"