Orbital Owl @Zuph@octodon.social

It's been over a year since I've been here! Things have changed a lot! Here's a new #introduction

I'm Brad, 33, he/him (mostly), in the US midwest, working on space science hardware (as far as I can get from the military-industrial complex)

I'm into:
#electronics, #embedded, #cooking, #hiking, #tabletop, #knitting, #sewing, #rats, #anarchism

I'm getting into:
#rust, #MushroomGrowing, #clarinet, #ukulele

I want to:
- Live in community with friends
- Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism

Me: *wants to call horseshit*

My Brain: Hang on, Brad, let's tone it down a little, this is a work meeting. Something like "poppycock" ought to do.

My Mouth: Horsey cock.

Spent all day trying to get either clion or vscode to debug a remote rust executable with either lldb or gdb, and ran into nothing but ridiculously esoteric errors. Cool cool.

Y'all, I've got to share this project name I came up with. We're extracting oxygen from lunar regolith.

Fused Regolith Oxygen Manufacture in Austere Geochemical Environments

or

FROMAGE

Yo check out this completely ghoulish email my sister got from her boss. (Pastebin for screenreaders: https://pastebin.com/raw/B9dMkU42 )

Boss sent this email while on vacation in Guatemala today. It's not the most callous email I've seen from this thing, but shew...

You know what I love? Fictional universes where there are just chunks of land floating around. Islands in the sky? Waterfalls flowing from impossible springs? uhhh yeah, gimme that good shit

Today I learned that the twigs and other parts of the pawpaw can be turned into a powerful, broad-spectrum insecticide with low risk of developing insecticide resistance! https://hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1993/V2-644.html

It took me a very long time to understand that I was succeeding because I was smart enough to compensate for my executive dysfunction, not that I was smart because I was succeeding with executive dysfunction. That small change helped me become a lot more empathetic to others, and a lot kinder to myself.

Hi friends! Do you have any tips or tricks on learning how to identify trees? It wasn't a skill I was raised with, and I'd like to pick it up as an adult. Aside from a few very obviously distinct trees, I'm hopeless! Slowly learning thanks to a couple of apps, but I'm still not sure how to pick it up systemically. (I live in the Ohio River valley, btw)

Seriously looking into massively leveraging myself financially to obtain some more secure housing for myself and some local comrades. It seems like a really good use of the privilege I have, and hopefully will free up brainspace for other folks, but it sucks to participate in a patently terrible and exclusionary system.

And it's horribly anxiety inducing, given the risk, and given that my risk tolerance is extremely low! 😂 😭

Not touching my face is easy!

Outside that absolutely ceaseless anxious nail-biting habit, that is.

Today's challenge was figuring out how to melt moon dust with just 5 watts.

Best I could do was, "Use the 5 watts to light an oxy acetylene torch"

*My friend with ADHD describes any relevant detail of their struggle*

Oh wow, that sounds a lot like this thing that I struggle with! But I don't have ADHD, it must be worse for them, I don't really feel like I started to struggle until I got out of school, I must just be lazy

At work, our science team is adopting some of the language of Sauron to describe and promote their current work. And like, cool cool, nerdy fun, but y'all do know that Sauron was the /bad/ guy, right?

This is actually serious and I wish I had more of a background in chemistry, material science, and metallurgy. The electrocution is easy enough, but I'm running on the fumes of my physical electronics classes for the rest.

Time to convince NASA to give me money to melt the moon and then electrocute it.