Blog Number One Hundred Twenty-Two · 10:04pm Jun 7th, 2019
Hey everyone,
Grad school is finally done, and while I'm looking for work, I've started rejoining various Discord servers and becoming more active on Fimfiction than I've been in the last year. I'd forgotten how much I missed reading fiction.
I read a particularly great one that I cannot link to here because it is tagged Mature (no, not that, just Gore and Death and all that fun stuff), called The Murder of Elrod Jameson. It follows the titular character through an increasingly bizarre and complex plot in a world that's not so different from our own. It's written by the incredible and vastly under-appreciated Unwhole Hole, who also wrote the amazing sci-fi epic Equestria 485,000. I highly recommend checking out both fics, as long as you can stomach typos and a couple wonky formatting choices.
I am also excited to announce that I will be an on-call editor for Super Trampoline's forthcoming FimFiction Feghoot Festival, wherein you can submit a feghoot (a vignette that typically builds up to a terrible pun) for a chance to win cash. You can follow him for announcements regarding the contest, which officially kicks off with the launch of the contest group on Friday, June 14th, and runs for a month until July 14th. You can read about all the editors here, and I'd encourage everyone to submit an entry! Even if you don't win, it's great practice and a good way to get some feedback on your writing.
Speaking of editing, I'd also like to highlight a series I've been editing and proofreading for the last eighteen months (give or take): Quod Olim Erat, which wrapped up a few months ago, and its sequel, The Scuu Paradox. It's original fiction by our very own Lise Eclaire, and it follows a retired spaceship (a battleship, to be more precise) returning to duty in human form and her adventures throughout the universe, underneath which seems to lie some very curious secrets and the ones who are protecting them...
It's quite good, and the sequel is shaping up to be better than the original story. If sci-fi is your bag, I recommend checking it out.
As far as my own writing goes... I have some broad ideas for a couple new stories that I'm considering (as well as a host of old ones), but so far there's nothing concrete yet. I've been kicking around one (older) idea in particular that I want to rework into something else, but I'm terrible at making promises for publishing things.
- Floydien
Flod lives?
Flodddd
Wow, I say, this must be quite a swell contest, run by quite a swell guy!
Congratulations on finishing school! What did you get your degree in?
Eyyyyy.
Good to see a fellow lifer back in black.
~Skeeter The Lurker
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Materials engineering, which is more interesting than it sounds. A lot of the coursework focuses on different aspects of things like metals, glass, and polymers, like optics, thermodynamics, and mechanical properties. It's a pretty broad field that doesn't confine me to any one particular aspect of engineering, which is nice.
ohei food :V
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How does glass work
Glad you're still alive!
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Glass is interesting because it's an amorphous/non-crystalline solid, like a lot of plastics, but it's not carbon-based. Instead you generally have what's called a "glass-forming oxide," like silica, which has no long-range order throughout the structure but does have a short-range order with regards to the oxygen surrounding the silicon atom, and "network modifiers" like sodium which impact the structural network of the glass and some of its properties.
The brittleness of glass comes from this amorphous structure. Most metals are ductile for the opposite reason: their crystal structure, which essentially allows planes of atoms to slide past each other in order to relieve stress. Because glass doesn't have any real periodicity to its atoms, it lacks these crystal planes and therefore a way to relieve stress beyond simply fracturing. If you try to stretch glass to measure its tensile strength, you'll see in practice that it fails far below a metal.
It's a popular myth that glass is simply a highly viscous liquid, and that the distances between glass atoms are larger than that of other solids, like wood, which are the reason light passes through. In reality, the reason glass is transparent is due to the energies of the light photons. Some frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum, like x-rays or the ultraviolet, are actually absorbed by the glass network. The reason is due to the electrons in the glass. Electrons have energy, and they can gain more energy from absorbing these photons, but the energies only exist in discrete levels. Not every photon will have enough energy to excite the electron to a higher energy state. X-rays and the ultraviolet, having a higher frequency and subsequently a higher energy, do. The visible spectrum, however, does not, so photons at those energies will simply pass through the glass without being absorbed or reflected.
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oh no
Congrats on completing your degree Floyd!