Rannm Thawts Five

Random, as I said, thoughts. 536 is 2³ × 67

• Turns out, I may have been wrong—it might be possible to ferment mushrooms into alcohol, without creating methanol. You just have to break the chitin down into fructose first, for which, apparently, you use bacteria cultures—specifically of the Vibrio genus, which are the agent responsible for seafood-associated gastroenteritis, and also are the thing that breaks down all the chitin the world's aquatic arthropods shed. Maybe in a fantasy setting you store your mushrooms in jars with raw oysters?
  
  The Vibrio bacteria break the chitin down into sugar; you have to use raw mushrooms, since a cooked mushroom's chitin content drops from 8% to 2.7%. Then you boil the resulting sugar, perhaps with the remains of the mushrooms, which kills the bacteria. Then you add your yeast and ferment as normal. I would think the non-chitinous parts of the mushroom lend a flavor to the resulting brew, too.
  
  Of course, the genus Vibrio is best known for a little fellow called Vibrio cholerae—and notice what the specific name is. Compared to cholera, even methanol from moonshine is nothing to worry about. Though, you'd probably use V. parahaemolyticus, which usually causes much milder, food-poisoning kind of symptoms, and is found in freshwater snails. (And, again, boiling solves the problem, and it's a part of all brewing.)
• I don't know if you recall, but I had expressed a wish for a JRPG that didn't feature some eighth-grader's attempt at deconstruction. You know, where every character, group, and institution didn't have a bunch of dark secrets and hidden agendas.
  
  It's called Fire Emblem, and it also features an actually half-decent romance mechanic and, in the latest one, Awakening, time-travel that isn't crap. I don't play turn-based JRPGs for "challenge", so I play it on "normal" difficulty and "casual" mode—especially that second one, because without it, people can get killed in your fights, and that's no fun. (Although I still don't know how the alternative works, because whenever I lose a character, I reset, exactly as I would without the casual-mode on.)
  
  A tip: play it in Japanese. Aside from Awakening having Ono Daisuke, Kana Asumi, Sawashiro Miyuki (!!), and Koyasu Takehito, is the fact they haven't done a good job dubbing a game into English since Infinite Undiscovery in 2008. Be warned, though, the "subtitles" are actually the close-captioning of the English (I think—confirming the suspicion would require playing it with English voices, and that ain't happening), and often aren't actually what the Japanese says—to the point of "Kega de wa arimasen ka?" being translated "Hang on tight!" (it means "Are you unhurt?").
• Searching the blog suggests I haven't mentioned it before, but if I have, excuse the repetition: zled milk is solid at room temperature, rendered liquid by their body temperature. How? Zledo, like ostriches (which have the same mass) have a body temperature of 313 Kelvin (40° Celsius, 104° Fahrenheit). Cheeses begin to melt long before that point, and not having been cultured, it doesn't have the kind of protein-matrix that holds cheese together up to c. 322 K (49° Celsius/120° Fahrenheit) or even higher.
  
  Now, it doesn't exactly turn into "cheese", per se, when it cools—more a nutritious wax (although arguably that's what cheese is), something like lanolin, which has a melting point of 311 K/38° Celsius/100° Fahrenheit. (The Lhãsai mammary is a sebaceous gland, while the Earth one is probably a sweat gland.) The milk of zledo is still consumed in liquid form (because they nurse), but when they consume the milk of domestic animals (mostly zdhyedhõ'o, the dog-horse things), they don't drink it, they eat it. (Its texture when cold is more like soft cheese—brie, say, or camembert—or even like butter, than it is like lanolin, though; they slice it.)
• This won the 2013 Best Short Story Nebula, and was nominated for the 2014 Hugo in the same category. And truly, the writer displays an ability to touch the emotions reminiscent of...Edward D. Wood, Jr.
  
  Because seriously, this is a level of risible bathos on par with Bride of the Monster. Maybe, just maybe, this...textual output...can work its way up to the artistic level of a Roger Corman flick—something like, say, It Conquered the World. But I wouldn't get my hopes up. (Maybe get Beverly Garland to give it a whirl—though it might be beyond even her talents, in a way that even "act like this is a threat" wasn't.)
  
  Is it impolite to point out it's "T. rex", not "T-Rex"? Or that they didn't have any voices at all, "rough, vibrating" or otherwise? They also, if they had any lips at all (see previous post—dinosaurs probably didn't have much in the way of lips, along with their lack of real cheeks), certainly didn't have the kind that can be curled back to bare "fangs".
  
  Ed Wood III here, in her author-profile, says her husband is a "dinosaur fanatic". It's funny to me because this is obviously some weirdass "hurt-comfort" fantasy of theirs where he also gets to be a paleontologist (never mind the kind of physique, mien, and bearing that generally go with field-work like that). It's also heavy-laden with ideologized adolescent persecution-complex. And this not only got published in an actual magazine—an alleged SF magazine, no less—it also got the Nebula, and could've got the Hugo! (This is starting to look less like work of the Ed Wood/Roger Corman kind and more like work of the Legato Bluesummers/Sephiroth variety.)
• Scorpion may be the world's single worst show. Like, ever. Its basic conceit is "stupid person's idea of smart people"; and it's risibly implausible from its smallest details to its overaching plot-structure. It is, in other words, an infinite fractal of jaw-dropping incompetence, every aspect of its creative enterprise being one-dimensional yet having mathematical properties that let it resemble a surface.
  
  This show is so bad, my father—who sat through the reboot of Battlestar Galactica until the very end, when the whole rest of our family had bugged out in the second season (he had no illusions about its quality, he just has a very high threshold of pain)—was either the first or the second to decide, after only the first episode, that it was not worth watching.
  
  Plus, seriously, writing the title the official way—"</Scorpion>"—is moronic. It's annoying to write in an HTML editor (because it gets interpreted as code, and thus vanishes, if you don't write it with "character entities"), which completely neuters the point of having it, in this day and age. Why did they do that—did they realize they were going to get mocked for thinking "nothing says hip and edgy like closing your nonsensical XML tags"? What does the "scorpion" tag indicate, anyway—and who would need it? (Mortal Kombat's code probably doesn't include a lot of XML.) At least the forward slash in Face/Off won't make it instantly vanish if you write it that way, outside of the file-system of a PC.
• Did some research. There's a guy in my third book who has electric-eel type electrocytes replacing some of the muscle-tissue of his forearms—letting him deliver shocks with his hands. (He's a transgenic assassin with the genes of electric eels spliced into his DNA. His partner is a girl with the genes of poison-dart frogs, who can kill anyone whose mucous membranes touch hers—except for him, because he's also got genes from the fire-bellied snake, Liophis epinephelus, the only known predator of dart-frogs, in his saliva glands and mucous membranes.)
  
  What I was researching was whether his powers also work on zledo. A lethal current for a human is, apparently (sources vary, but I'm going off what the electric eel article on Wikipedia says is the minimum to cause heart fibrillation), 700 milliamperes for longer than 30 milliseconds—an electric eel applies 1000 milliamperes over 2 milliseconds, which is why they seldom kill humans unless they stun them and cause drowning. Our assassin friend can flex his electrocyte-muscles longer than an eel can, though (I guess 21 milliseconds is necessary, at one whole amp?); he's a human being with willpower and spec-ops training. Also, eels don't know, and aren't anatomically set up, to grab both of their enemy's biceps at the same time, to be sure current goes through his heart (although they do coil around the chests of animals, which isn't creepy at all).
  
  It was hard to research this: if we're supposed to be able to find "anything" on this wonderful Internet thing, can you tell me how strong a current has to be to induce electronarcosis in an ostrich? I found out how strong to do it to a calf, though (a calf at typical slaughter-weight is the same size, c. 100 kg, as a female zled), and it's 1250 milliamps. (It doesn't say for how long, probably a couple dozen milliseconds like a human.) I think I can conclude—since he hasn't got the amperage to stun or kill a female zled, let alone a male one—that no, his powers do not work on adult zledo, even without the fact their military uniforms have an energy-dissipating lining. He'd probably go after the exposed head, going for electronarcosis instead of cardiac arrest, anyway, if the zled was not his target.
• So...I had to describe part of an adolescent character's school-day, on a planet with a different day-length from Earth. I'm not complaining; it's cool to describe daily life under circumstances other than ours. I consider that the sine qua non of science fiction. But it forced me to come up with a way to do timekeeping on that kind of planet. And, as always, when there's already a real solution to the issue, I use the real solution.
  
  When NASA sends a probe to Mars, its timekeeping consists of dividing Mars' day (24 hours 37 minutes 22 seconds) into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds. Those seconds, though, are 2.7% longer. So I did the same thing. One thing that's interesting is, if humans and aliens both do this, the difference of their units becomes, on every planet, the same as the number of units they divide the day into.
  
  What I mean is, zledo divide their day into 12 zbeihõlto of 120 aecho of 120 dothã'o; in terms of their equivalent of "Julian" time, their time-units are not evenly divisible by ours (because their day is not the same length ours is). But on a colony world, where they and we redefine the base unit (second and dothã) according to the stellar day's length, theirs is simply twice what ours is—because they divide a day into exactly twice as many dothã'o as we do into seconds.
• It is occasionally said, and truly—therefore not often enough—that writers' workshops have ruined more than one good writer. The essential problem is that a lot of people, for one reason or another, turn off their brains when asked to evaluate a narrative work. I don't know if they're trying to be helpful, and assume that the audience is entirely composed of oblivious thickheaded children, or what, but they certainly act as if that's what's going on.
  
  For instance, a student film by the ane-ue, this one, with the ghost train. Did you notice the wanted poster of No-Name, there right at the beginning? Yes, well, when ane-ue was getting feedback on her storyboards from her class, somebody asked, and I quote, "What does she have that the bounty hunters want?" You know. The woman on the wanted poster. What does she have, that the bounty hunters want? Gee, Davy, do you think it might be a bounty on her head?!