u/Simon_Drake

The Saiyans are coming, Vegeta and Nappa. Goku is training in the afterlife for a year. Piccolo and Gohan are training in the wilderness for a year. Tien, Krillin, Yamcha, Chiatzu and Yajirobe are training on Kami's Lookout for a year.

What if the non-fighters used this time to contribute by recruiting some more candidates? There's no one out there that could defeat Vegeta and Nappa solo but maybe there's some people who could contribute as part of the ensemble. Especially if they go to Kami's Lookout to get some training.

Yajirobe is treated as a joke for most of Dragonball Z because he's so much weaker than the others and he's an uncultured glutton. But in late Dragonball he's pretty formidable, he defeats one of Piccolo's offspring and stands up to Goku so he's not a complete weakling. Next down the ladder of strength is probably Mercenary Tao and Master Shen. Easier said than done to convince them to contribute but Piccolo agreed to help too and they won't want the Saiyans to destroy the planet, that's where all their stuff is. Tao and Shen are both stronger than Chiatzu and they're not fighting alone, they only need to join in with the others.

An often overlooked fighter is Shen/Hero, Kami possessing a normal human body. He turned a mild mannered reporter into one of the strongest fighters on the planet including massive energy attacks and the power of flight. If Kami found a willing volunteer, perhaps someone who already had martial arts experience or some limited ki control they could be even more powerful. Maybe someone else from Krillin's dojo, or Nam or Pamput or Ranfan.

Master Roshi said he's too old to fight which makes sense but again he's not as useless as he looks. He kept up with Kid Goku when he was dressed as Jackie Chun. He's faster than he looks, can bulk up his muscles and rock a giant kamehameha, that puts him above Yajirobe and since the entire planet is on the line it's worth a try. On that topic, the Ox King trained with Grandpa Gohan and Roshi, he's huge and strong and knows the fundamentals of ki control.

So Bulma and Chichi gather all the new recruits outside Korin's tower. Tao Pi Pi, Master Shen, Roshi, Ox King, Nam, Pamput, Ranfan and the Orin Temple fighters. Anyone who can fly should go up to Kami's lookout and train with the B-Team. Anyone who can't fly needs to climb the tower like Kid Goku, get to Korin's house and drink the Ultra Divine Water, that should get them the power needed to finish the climb to Kami's Lookout. Then they have ~9 months left to train with Kami, Popo and the others.

Remember Krillin training with Kami took him from being kicked through a wall by Raditz to having the power to open the fight with a multi-target beam that kills three or four Saibaimen at once. How much stronger could Nam or Tao Pi Pi get with some extra training? And whoever is the weakest and unable to contribute on their own could volunteer to host Kami's spirit, with Pamput instead of a non-fighter he could be even more powerful.

The objective isn't to find someone stronger than Vegeta. The objective is to find people who collectively can contribute more than Yamcha did and not get Yamcha'd immediately. Worst case scenario, Nam or Ox King is the one the Saibaiman picks on to kamikaze, which would leave Yamcha alive for the real fight against Nappa. Piccolo and Krillin had a good plan to attack Nappa from multiple angles at once, but it failed because they relied on Gohan to be the damage dealer. But maybe Tau Pi Pi could be the damage dealer with his Super Dodonray or Master Shen or Master Roshi or both. Or when Chiatzu blows himself up to deal minimal damage to Nappa, that's when three kamehamehas hit him from all sides.

What we need is the opposite of Dragonball Z Kai. Instead of trimming the filler to focus on the Saiyans, add MORE filler and focus more on the unsung heroes from OG Dragonball.

Hemalurgy as a magic system is still poorly understood nearly 20 years after it was first introduced to us. We know several rules of how it works but we don't really know the limits of what else it can do. When Mistborn Era 3 is published, I expect our understanding of the Metallic Arts to be fundamentally changed as we learn new details of what is possible and better things we thought we understood previously. I wonder if Hemalurgy has some major secrets waiting to be revealed?

OK so Hemalurgy lets you use a metal spike as a magical transplant, you drain an attribute out of someone and apply that attribute to someone else. Physical strength, eyesight, allomantic powers, feruchemical powers, even non-Scadrial abilities and attributes like Breaths can be taken. We have seen a couple of hints at extensions of this basic principle, this usually involves killing the 'donor' but can be done non-lethally with a weaker 'charge'.

Oh and if you take four hemalurgic spikes into a fifth person in just the right way they become a 12 foot tall blue-skinned mutant cave troll thing. Wait what? That seems very different to the first paragraph. That's not just stealing attributes, that's completely changing your bodytype and practically making you a different species. There's something odd with Kandra and their Spikes but that's starting from a weird amorphous state without a clear body layout so changes there are more easily explained with their own peculiar biology. And there's something a little odd about Steel Inquisitors but mostly because they have dozens of spikes giving them multiple powers in a way that should be fatal but it sortof harmonises to work together. Steel Inquisitors are odd but not in the same way a Koloss is odd.

I wonder if this will be reclassified as something different. "Type 2 Hemalurgy" or "Metamorphic Hemalurgy" or something. Perhaps we will learn about other transformations. Like those Chimeras we saw briefly in late Era 2.

Or maybe we'll learn that the transformation associated with the Koloss isn't really a form of Hemalurgy at all, it's a newly defined Cosmere-wide concept like Intention or Spirit-Webs that underpins the whole setting. Perhaps the Singer Forms are the same concept too, we might learn a new term like Mutagenation that covers Singer Forms and Koloss and Chimeras and those Dakhor monks with twisted bones. Maybe the Charred are another cousin-transformation, it's not strictly hemalurgy but it's accessing a transformation in a similar mechanism.

If you plan your spacecraft route carefully you can use a planet's gravity to accelerate the craft faster than it could have gone with the engines alone. Like using Earth's gravity to accelerate to Mars or using Jupiter's gravity to accelerate out towards Neptune.

IIRC this isn't 'free' acceleration, you're essentially stealing a tiny fraction of the planet's momentum and because Jupiter is a lot larger than the Voyager probe it works out to be a big speed boost for the probe and a rounding error speed loss for the planet.

But I think this means the directions are limited. One limitation is you need a planet in the right place for your destination, if Jupiter and Neptune happen to be on opposite sides of the sun then you can't use Jupiter for a gravity assist to get to Neptune. In that scenario you'd need to wait half a Jupiter-year (6 Earth-years) for the planets to align in a more useful arrangement.

But I think there's another limitation, that you can only use the momentum in the direction the planets are already moving. If you look 'down' at the solar system from 'above' the planets all orbit counterclockwise, so if Jupiter is in the 12-o'clock position and Neptune is around 10-o'clock then you can get a kick towards Neptune, heading out away from the sun but also slightly 'west' or anticlockwise. But if Uranus is around the 2 o'clock position you can't use Jupiter's anticlockwise momentum to head clockwise or 'east' on the solar system scale.

Which I think is a limitation on Interstellar missions but this is where my knowledge starts to fall apart. Can you use the Sun's immense gravity for a gravity assist (Assuming you could resist the heat) and head to say Alpha Centauri? Or would that not work because Alpha Centauri and Sol are pretty much static relative to each other and there's no relevant momentum to steal? If there was an interstellar target directly 'up' above the plane of the solar system, would that make gravity assists from Jupiter useless because they can only accelerate in the direction Jupiter is moving?

Amazon Prime has every episode of the reboot Battlestar Galactica. Except it starts with Season 1 Episode 1, "33 Minutes". Where is the Miniseries? It's not under the Season dropdown or Related Content or Customers Also Watched.

Searching Amazon TV has the BSG reboot included in prime, the original series and the movies like Blood And Chrome all available to buy/rent. But no mention of the miniseries anywhere. I guess Amazon doesn't have the rights for it and it's on Paramount+ or some other platform.

Imagine if I'd never seen Battlestar Galactica before and didn't know about the miniseries? I'd see Season 1, Episode 1 and assume that's the start. It opens with a recap of "Previously on Battlestar Galactica" so clearly it's not the start. Do I need to buy one of the movies? Google would tell me this is the reboot series, there's the original series from the 70s then a sequel series from the 80s, plus a TV-movie repackage of the original episodes of the original series. Then the reboot series had a spinoff prequel series set before the cylon war and a spinoff prequel movie set before the first episode then another spinoff prequel movie set sortof before and sortof during the first episode. So do I need to buy Blood And Chrome? Are these clips of "Previously On Battlestar Galactica" from the Caprica show?

I mean I was there 3,000 years ago when the miniseries first aired so I knew what was missing. But this isn't how you bring in new fans to a major franchise. This is poorly structured and tells an incomplete story that new fans won't even know is incomplete without doing research.

I read Three Body Problem and the sequels in English and I don't speak any Chinese. The English translation is almost entirely in English except for the names or occasionally explaining a particular piece of wordplay like Luo Ji or "The Chinese character for ..."

A lot of the characters speak Chinese most of the time, except it's in English for the audience. There are also times the characters switch to speaking English and sometimes a Chinese character who doesn't speak English needs it translated for them. I suspect in the original Chinese these chapters would have been written entirely in Chinese despite the characters officially speaking English. Like a WW2 movie where the German officers all speak English, it's just a switch for the sake of the audience.

However. Several times in the Deterrence Era and Broadcast Era there will be someone from the Common Era who has trouble understanding the future-speak. It is described as a combination of English and Chinese, or as being mostly Chinese with some English vocabulary mixed in. The Common Era Chinese speakers can usually talk clearly enough to be understood but it takes a while for them to understand what the future people are saying, especially if they didn't speak English originally.

How is that future-speak written in the original Chinese of the novels? Is it actually constructed as a mix of Chinese and English? Or English words transliterated into Chinese characters, or vice versa? Or is it like German officers in a war movie, it's ALL in Chinese but the narration explains they're talking a strange future dialect?

The current Desolation impacting Roshar is a special case, and for a few millennia before that weren't the normal procedure either. Something I don't understand is how a normal Desolation ended.

The timeline for a Desolation is broadly:

1. Heralds are on Braize being tortured endlessly
2. One of the Heralds that ISN'T Taln, breaks
3. This opens the proverbial floodgate letting Odium's forces through to Roshar
4. The Heralds manifest bodily on Roshar and help the humans fight Odium's forces
5. War
6. Usually several Heralds die. The remaining Heralds then suicide to join the others in Braize and hold back the forces of Odium

But what happens between Steps 5 and 6? When does the Desolation end?

What if the Heralds killed themselves on Day 1, would the Desolation end immediately? I know by the end they couldn't stand the torture anymore and didn't want to go back. But at the era when they'd withstand the torture for centuries maybe they could take one day off on Roshar and go back to Braize before the Desolation really gets going.

I'm sick of hearing that rejoining the EU would be "undermining democracy". We voted to join the EEC back in 1975, but the political parties of the time didn't wait 30 years to start complaining about it.

I'm sure the fringe parties (who used to be unelectable) like National Front would have complained from Day 1 after the referendum. But how long did it take for a mainstream political party to propose leaving the EU?

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BUG: Copy-and-pasting objects to a new slideshow will create an undeletable custom colour of #eeeeeeff IF that object has a gradient fill.

Google Slides lets you define custom colours. Google Slides does NOT let you delete custom colours from the palette manually. When you refresh/reopen a slideshow and no objects use a custom colour, it is removed from the palette. Or that is what is supposed to happen. Under these circumstances a new colour is created that the user did not make, cannot see, there are no objects using it and it is not clear how to remove it.

Steps To Reproduce:

1. Create Slideshow1 and Slideshow2.
2. In Slideshow1 create ObjectA, let's say a circle with a Red border and the fill is the first coloured gradient of "Light Red 2 Linear Gradient".
3. Copy the Object.
4. Open the menu to set the Background colour, check the colour palette, the custom colours for both solid and gradient should be empty. Cancel changing the background colour.
5. Open Slideshow2 and open the Background Colour menu to confirm no custom colours.
6. Paste the object, let's call it Object B.
7. Check the menu for Slideshow2 Background Colour. There is a new solid custom colour with the name "Custom Colour #eeeeee, close to light grey 2". Selecting this colour then choosing Create Custom Colour lets you see the last two digits of the hex code are FF, an opacity of 100%.
8. There is now a Ghost Colour in the Custom Colour menu. No objects have this colour as border, fill, text colour, text highlight or as a step in it's colour gradient. A visual inspection of all objects in the Slideshow would show NO uses of this colour. Closing and reopening the slideshow SHOULD remove the colour from the Palette but it does not.

Deleting the object you pasted into Slideshow2 (ObjectB) then reopening Slideshow2 WILL remove the Ghost Colour from the palette. Alternatively, changing the fill colour of ObjectB to say Green will also remove the Ghost Colour. However, finding the correct object to delete is easier said than done.

1. Copy ObjectB in Slideshow2
2. Return to Slideshow1 and paste the object, let's call it ObjectC.
3. Slideshow1 now has the Ghost Colour in it's palette.
4. Deleting ObjectC WILL remove the Ghost Colour, but deleting ObjectA will not.
5. But ObjectA an ObjectC are visually identical. Same dimensions, same colour options selected in the border and fill menus. C is a copy of B which was a copy of A, the two objects should be identical.
6. So how can you tell which object needs to be deleted to eliminate the Ghost Colour? You can't.

Now let me tell you how I found this.

I have a custom colour in my palette that I am fairly certain I didn't put there, because you can't delete custom colours easily I'm very careful about making new ones. I opened a new slideshow and copied my slides over one by one, then one section at a time, until by process of elimination I found the shape with the custom colour. Except it DIDN'T have that custom colour, it had an unrelated custom gradient that went from Grey to Light Grey 2. I made a new object with that colour and copied it to a new slideshow, bang, ghostcolour appears. I did several tests to narrow it down and find the cause. It appears to be ANY shape with ANY colour gradient being copied to a new slideshow.

So how do you fix this if this happens to you?

1. Let's say you have SlideshowAlpha that has the Ghost Colour #eeeeeeff in the custom palette and you want to remove it.
2. Somewhere in SlideshowAlpha is ObjectX that has the Ghost Colour associated with it. You need to find it
3. So how do you find ObjectX in a large Slideshow? Trial and error.
4. Create a copy of the entire slideshow, SlideshowBeta.
5. Delete Slide 1.
6. Refresh/reopen SlideshowBeta.
7. Check if the Ghost Colour is gone. If it's gone then ObjectX was in Slide 1.
8. Repeat Step 5 until you have checked ALL slides.
9. When you find the slide, delete segments of the slide in fractions and repeat this process until you find the specific object that has the Ghost Colour.
10. When you find the object, make a note of precisely where it is.
11. Return to SlideshowAlpha, find the original version of Object X.
12. Create a brand new object (ObjectY) with the same dimensions, properties and fill colour. ObjectY will look and act the same as ObjectX just without the Ghost Colour because it wasn't copied between Slideshows.
13. Delete the original ObjectX and the Ghost Colour should be gone.
14. However, there might be more than one object with the Ghost Colour and it won't vanish until you remove ALL objects with it. Good luck.

I might just ignore it and accept it's impossible to remove.

It makes sense for laundry to smell dirty if you don't use enough washing powder. But somehow using too much washing powder also makes your laundry smell dirty. Logically you'd expect it to smell more like Lavender or Orange Blossoms or whatever. Or maybe just a chemical smell of detergents if not the scents of the washing powder.

But somehow it smells dirty like sweat and body odour. Why?

I have two theories:

• That isn't the smell of sweat and body odour. That's some other smell caused by partially dissolved washing powder or an unexpected chemical reaction that is happening in the washing machine.
• The excessive washing powder saturates the solution of water and detergent. So the rinse cycle isn't able to fully rinse the clothes because there's too much other stuff in the water. And the smell of dirty clothes IS the smell of sweat and body odour and greywater waste still stuck on the clothes that haven't been fully rinsed.

Any thoughts on the cause?

"In 3 years, on the morning of May 12th at 10:00am, on an island 9 miles southwest of South City, the Androids will attack for the first time." - That was Trunks' warning during his first visit, to give the heroes a chance to train and prepare for the android attack. Then Trunks left for 3 years so he didn't risk contaminating the timeline too much and preventing his own birth, we later learn that Dragonball time travel involves alternate timelines but he didn't know that when he first arrived.

3 years later, Trunks returns during the fight with the Androids. Maybe he didn't change the clock in his time machine for Daylight Savings. But his second visit he doesn't care about contaminating the timeline because his objective IS to change the timeline, have everyone survive the Androids attack. So Trunks could have arrived earlier, even a day or a week earlier.

Here's what I think would change:

• Trunks would remind everyone how serious this threat is. It doesn't matter how much stronger they've become with their training, these Androids are a nightmare and you can't treat this as a fun challenge.
• Trunks would remind Goku about the heart medicine. If Goku says he hasn't been feeling symptoms yet, Trunks might tell him to take the medicine anyway just in case. Or at the least remind him about it the very first time Goku starts feeling weak fighting Android 19.
• Trunks could tell everyone they won't be able to sense the Androids' Chi and they need to spread out across the city to look, but also don't go around solo because these Androids are intense. Keep your power level low until you spot them then power up which is a signal flare to call everyone else.
• Arrange into groups of three: Goku with his old buddies Krillin and Tien. Trunks with Gohan Piccolo, three generations of mentoring. Yamcha, Yajirobe and Bulma on the sidelines with the Senzu Beans. Vegeta won't team up with a scrub so he can fly above the city as a cross between the cavalry ready to dash into fight and also bait in case the Androids try to rush him.
• Yamcha doesn't get Yamcha'd. Trunks will instantly spot that these aren't the Androids he warned us about, therefore something is screwy with the timelines. This should put the team on alert that they need to be even more cautious than they already were.
• The team is one Super Saiyan stronger. So when Goku starts feeling weak he'll have Trunks saying to take the Kami-damned medicine. Tap out instead of pushing yourself, the others can handle this.
• Vegeta curbstomps Android 19 as normal. For arc-plot reasons you kindof still need Android 20 to escape and wake up Androids 16, 17 and 18 otherwise the saga ends too early.
• From there not much is different. Goku gets heart virus symptoms bad enough to put him to bed but not as bad as normal because Trunks reminded him to take the medicine sooner and he didn't need to push himself against Android 20. Perhaps they could also take the logical step to bring Goku to a hospital with actual doctors and medicine instead of relying on Chichi with a damp cloth. So Goku could recover from the heart virus a lot sooner.
• So what's next? Goku would still be out for the first encounter with Androids 17 and 18 and breaking Vegeta's arms.
• Maybe Goku and Gohan are with Piccolo, Krillin and Tien when they investigate the mysterious deaths that turn out to be Cell? Would Goku's presence change the first Cell fight with Piccolo meaningfully? Would it change the rest of the arc for Goku to have seen Cell personally?
• I think Cell would still be outclassed and run away, then Goku would still recommend to use the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Except perhaps Goku would bring it up sooner if he recovers from the virus sooner. So would that move later events like Goku and Gohan are done in the chamber before Vegeta and Semi-Perfect Cell so there's someone to stop Cell absorbing Android 18?

Any thoughts?

Did you attend the Rejoin EU March today? Do you have any photos to share?