Worldbuilding, Writing, And Whatever Else I Like

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.

A scene extension for El and Liu and Aadhya hanging out the night before graduation, featuring some of the other conversations they might’ve had, both lighthearted and emotional

Liesel/El set a year after The Golden Enclaves, where El finally breaks and directly asks Liesel what she hopes for in return for all her help, to which Liesel doesn’t have a good answer that isn’t “I’m in love with you”

Crossover with Final Fantasy XIV, where El and Co are the Warriors of Light (See my massive post breaking down all my thoughts on that particular AU)

Crossover with Life is Strange, where Kate Marsh abruptly gets inducted into the Scholomance out of her mundane life à la Luisa

My gaggle of OCs as the class under El’s, exploring the events of ADE and TLG from another perspective, and how a character with a wildly different outlook might handle having an incredibly dangerous affinity

Orion tries estrogen. It doesn’t fix her, but it does make her happier

Black people fight for everybody. We stand in solidarity with women, lgbt people, poor people all over the world of every skin color and background. Every religion and nationality.

Today, stand with us. Be with us. Tell a black person you love them. Hug a black person (with consent). Ask that hot black girl out today. Make a black person smile. Black lives matter to everybody and you matter to us.

Stand with us on Juneteenth like we stand with you all year round, and I hope a happy Pride month continues for all of us

Also featured in this series is the titular Scholomance, an enormous clockwork thing built in a pocket dimension infested with wizard-eating monsters trying very badly to consume the children (high school aged) inside; the 25% survival rate of Scholomance students is five times the survival rate of wizard children outside the school, because the entire world has a wizard-eating monster problem and keeping them out is expensive enough that the wizards of London built a nuclear bunker (the titular Scholomance) to keep them out.

Life in the Scholomance is a strict routine of watching out for monsters, doing strenuous and delicate work to generate the mana you need to cast the spells you need to finish your schoolwork and keep yourself alive, and constant politicking with the other students who are also trying to keep themselves alive, even if it means getting someone else killed.

This is made much easier if you find people you can trust to join you in an alliance, a tight-knit strategic bond where you do whatever it takes to keep each other alive and intact until you can graduate, returning to the outside world with the skills and knowledge necessary to keep yourself alive to adulthood. Galadriel Higgins has difficulty finding or establishing one because her affinity causes a constant sense of low-level unease in everyone around her, who can tell there's something wrong even if they don't know what; when she does find allies, it's because one of them is willing to look past that sense of unease and confront the reality of who she is, even when she isn't willing to admit it herself.

Do you see where this is going, yet?

(El also has a bargaining chip because everybody thinks the school's resident hero and monster-hunter is in love with her, but that's not immediately relevant.)

ALL OF THIS TO SAY:

Also, I feel like Huntrix and Galadriel would get on like a house on fire.

This is Money Snake. She only appears every 312 years. 

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

When the public health emergency around covid-19 ended, vaccines and treatments became commercial products, meaning companies could charge for them as they do other pharmaceuticals. Paxlovid, the highly effective antiviral pill that can prevent covid from becoming severe, now has a list price of nearly $1,400 for a five-day treatment course.

Thanks to an innovative agreement between the Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, Americans can still access the medication free or at very low cost through a program called Paxcess. The problem is that too few people — including pharmacists — are aware of it.

I learned of Paxcess only after readers wrote that pharmacies were charging them hundreds of dollars — or even the full list price — to fill their Paxlovid prescription. This shouldn’t be happening. A representative from Pfizer, which runs the program, explained to me that patients on Medicare and Medicaid or who are uninsured should get free Paxlovid. They need to sign up by going to paxlovid.iassist.com or by calling 877-219-7225. “We wanted to make enrollment as easy and as quick as possible,” the representative said.

Indeed, the process is straightforward. I clicked through the web form myself, and there are only three sets of information required. Patients first enter their name, date of birth and address. They then input their prescriber’s name and address and select their insurance type.