earth, fire, water, wind - it's not hard
Forgot the most important element of all: surprise.
Surprise and fear.
surprise and fear. and a fanatical devotion to the pope.
Ah! I'll come in again.
Hey now everyone, the order is:
Previously—on Avatar...
Captain planet! He's our hero! Gonna take pollution down to zero!
It’s kinda sad.
I DM for my TTRPG group. One of the things I’m most proud of was a years long, multi-arc universe chock full off world building. (We were using the star drifter ruleset, though everything else was homebrewed.)
One of the the limiting factors for interstellar civilization is “luminium”; a faintly glowing semi-metal that’s a superconductor at room temperature and technobables its way to some kind of exotic energy source (I think I went with quantum tunneling from another universe or something.)
The problem with the stuff is that if it starts corroding it becomes unstable and explodes if conditions are right. The other problem is that the only known way to synthesize the stuff is lost to the Terranogene sphere. The only FTL is through wormholes that jump an enclosed spheres
That same society that figured out luminium also built “port ships” that were large dormant autonomous ships that had the portal generators on board.
Any how. Luminium’s atomic number is 1869 to honor this guy.
It was one of my favorite Easter eggs And they’ve still not noticed even though they now short hand it as “1869” (they didn’t know what it was called and that’s how they started identifying the stuff.)
Though im kinda proud of that campaign. I may have gone a little stir crazy during covid.
Sir this is a Wendy's.
...
And that was really cool so your meal is free, please go on this sounds like a super fun campaign.
it was a blast. it was flexible enough that they could derail to their hearts content without me running out of material, the back story to the history was that eventually the first large and successful colonization effort started with "Solarians" who were basically pacifist-adjacent scientists and academics tired of our bullshit and settled places starting with the moon, then going to mars, then to Jupiter's orbit, then finally off to Alpha Centauri (from where they launched the first batch of forty-some portships that they'd pop off to to check on thinks and then go back to Centauri.)
meanwhile the people left on earth went the way things go, and it turned into a cesspit, eventually some dumbass using antimatter as a bomb, leading to the second waive of human colonization and Earth sterilized. (They eventually take over the portships they could find, and built the Stellarian Empire. AKA the badguys.
the Empire and Solarian Diaspora eventually start drifting apart with still-basically-human abilties, but some are furies and some are scalies and some have somekinda weird symbiotic relationship with algae in their brains that allows them to retain the memories of their parents and everyone the algae has been in.
meanwhile back on earth, it turns out Earth was returned to a more primordial state and is a stuborn little planet doing the whole life-thing again. Certain asshole-solarians decide to flee the empire, and created a world-religion that saw Solarians as divine messengers and Stellarians as demons, etc, shaping Itrayan society; starting from around their bronze age. the whole point was to unleash the Itrayans as some sort of hyper-zealot warriors. (the solarians kept cloning themselves and used synthetically-created algae for memory transfer.)
Eventually we get to a relatively modern age (slightly ahead of today, with neural implants and a few other odds and ends.) when Stellarians show up on a portship, setting off a war that sees the empire fracture into a dozen fiefdoms and several more political alliances. that war was fought with Augments who were genetically engineered and implanted with cybernetic whosewhats. These augments from bothsides were, when the war was finally ended, stuffed into cryo (under false pretenses) and launched off into the deep of space.
My players wake up, refurbish the broken down and basically derlict ship, find a planet and get resources before they die and all that for the first campaign arc. I still laugh that their engineer guy who had an entire manual for the ship in his starting gear, sold the manual for a little extra energy. Then he kept fighting with the ships automated repair system that kept putting bulkheads that were located in really inconvenient places back in. (Yes. I know how to screw with my party, lol. the manual's instructions were basically "tell the AI to update the blueprints." which was also how they were meant to discover the ship had an AI to handle some very annoying tasks like life support.)
You know, i always wonder why sci-fi/fantasy writers always makes some of these fictional "elements".
Like if you want to add physics to the story but not really, why don't they make it so it's another matter entirely. It doesn't have to be only made of proton, neutron, and electron y'know?
Because we like our unobtainium, okay?
Also part of it is, we don’t want to get too complicated here, the stuff only really exists to bypass things and maybe give some interesting abilities (for example, the energy output of the “corroded” stuff is unstable. It could be used to provide pulsed power for things like railguns, or as a sort of electrically-fired fuel for missiles.)
So we stick to things people are familiar with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a superconductive wire composed of nonbarionic matter or not- it’s still going to behave a certain way, and sometimes you can get lost in the weeds explaining it, when really it’s just a handwaive away.
I also don’t like introducing power supplies that my party can exploit for really big booms. They may have, for example, opened a portal inside a neutron star (the portals swap a spherical volume of space. So suddenly they created an unstable mass of neutronium roughly 30m in diameter in some douches fleet yards.)
(In their defense the douchenozzle lost control of a sentient grey goo and it was the only way to keep it from spreading.)(but they did blow up half a solar system. And rendered it unnavigable past its Oort Cloud.)
“Fuck you”
starbombs your entire system
Yeah I dunno if a year is enough to connect this singular dot.
1869 is also the year the US intercontinental resolution was completed, which would seem to be a much bigger connection to an element allowing travel than the guy who made the periodic table.
Luminium’s atomic number is 1869
Even in the realm of fantasy, that is absurdly high. Like, that is insane. That's like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin. Even if you ignore how impossible it would be for something like that to exist, physics would have some strong words about how catastrophic that would be for everything around it. And by everything around it, I mean the entire fucking planet and probably a few neighboring ones.
I'm usually fine with hand waving away pesky things like physics and the laws of thermodynamics when it comes to fictional worlds, but holy shit there is a limit.
(Chuckles in evil DM)
Yes. I know it’s absurd. (The island of stability is only predicted to go out to what? 120 something? And then isn’t really stable in a practical sense.)
That's like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin.
This gives me…. Ideas. I know the math breaks down before the big bang, but if anything could get that hot…I would imagine pre-expansion universe. Now how to stuff them in one?
Why is this something widespread? I did chemistry up till A-levels and no one ever asked me to memorise the periodic table and no one gave a shit about committing it to memory. WTF is going on.
It's common in the US. Our priorities are... Misaligned.
Our education system values rote memorization over actually learning something. So instead of teaching you how to use the periodic table, they teach you "The element of Hydrogen has an atomic mass of 1" etc.
A few teachers who actually give a fuck will do both, but they are required to teach the test for funding. Because that's how they are graded.
Omg my high school had 2 chem teachers and both were insane and took the class too seriously. The first week was making us memorize the elements and being drilled in almost daily tests to see if we could write them down.
By the end of the week, my teacher said if you didn’t have at least an 8/10 from her quizzes, to basically change classes. She and the other teacher often went overtime and ignored the period ending bell which pissed off a lot of other teachers.
The periodic table of elements was on a paper that she’d roll up during our quizzes and for the rest of the year, we had to take our quizzes with the assumption that we’ve memorized the tables and could do equations and conversions with no references. The class had to be graded on a curve since most of us 16 year olds had other school work to focus on.
In the end, I think no one from those classes ever became a chem major. It certainly made me hate it.
IMO, some people think that being educated means achieving mountains of rote memorization, and little else. Some of those people also become teachers.
This may also be why there's a big row every time someone changes what algorithms are taught in basic maths (in the US, anyway).
My wife has a couple graduate degrees on this subject. This is one that I got to be the unwilling editor on her papers for.
Its a lack of understanding how students need to learn the information: memorization by usage versus memorization by rote.
Memorization by rote: This is the old school method of teaching. You memorize random facts figures with no context or usage. Its a bit of standalone information that is often not useful. Memorization by rote leads to kids that can say all of the letters but not recognize the symbols or associated them with sounds and words.
Memorization by usage: This is a much more effective method to teach. Its also much harder. This requires teaching the concepts and systems and linking the information together. You memorize the same information by repeated usage but it's in context. It takes a ton more skill to teach this way because you have to engage the student through the entire process, repeatedly.
Yeah this is exactly why I mentally checked out of chemistry. Memorization was being pushed harder than conceptual understanding.
What did you memorize?
I recall most of chem being "here's a rule that applies to a very narrow subdomain but literally nothing else." So we learned a lot of mostly useless rules and then we'd do a lab where most the chemicals didn't use any of the same interaction rules or naming conventions as each other. Or here's a lab test we can use only on chemicals that mix perfectly and don't separate, cloud, etc.
Yeah I don't get it either. My degree is in chemical engineering, and I always had a periodic table available for every test going to back to grade 11 chemistry.
In high school, my teacher gave us a printed copy on the first day of class and said, "This is your best friend." We could bring that page into any test. He also allowed some handwritten notes and alterations to the page, notably a list of polyatomic ions, and colour coding of certain elements. But if you forgot your personal copy, he'd give you a blank one before the test.
In university, I wasn't allowed to bring a loose sheet with the table on it, but one was stapled to the back of every test and exam if it was required (you don't really need chemical properties to do fluid mechanics and heat transfer). Also, most tests were open book, and most of my textbooks had a periodic table printed on the inside cover anyhow.
My orgo professor let us use notes for the quizzes but not exams. We were allowed to use a molecular kit (sticks and balls) on exams.
Orgo was the one core course where we couldn't bring any supplementary material to the tests - no textbook, no handwritten notes, no molecular kits. But they still stapled a periodic table to the back of the test.
I have no idea. I did chem in college and tests included a printout of the periodic table.
I have a degree in chemistry and I never had to do this. ~98% of the time you're working with the same 5 elements. Many elements on the table literally only existed for a microsecond in a lab decades ago.
Same on everything except my professors actually made us memorize ~15 because we used them so frequently in gen chem and they said it would help on timed tests.
Now I just keep a periodic table as my computer desktop and posted in the lab.
Our chemistry teacher made us memorise up to Argon with a song, that was literally just him singing the 1/2 letter names of all the elements. HHeLiBeBCNOFNe...
It was on a poster on the wall in every lesson. It was in the textbook. It was printed on the exam papers.
I've no idea why he tried to make us do that, and the annoying thing is I can still remember a good chunk of it 30 years later. I could have been using that chunk of my brain for something useful.
"1066 Battle of Hastings
1096 First Crusade
1120 Sinking of the White Ship
1153 Treaty of Westminster
1189 Third Crusade
1215 Magna Carta
1265 First parliament
1314 Battle of Bannockburn
1348 Black Death
1381 Peasant's Revolt
1415 Battle of Agincourt
1485 Battle of Bosworth..."
Etched into my brain for 25 years for absolutely no reason
And the amount of time dedicated to ox-bow lakes. Where are they all? You'd think every second meander would be an ox-bow lake by now, but I've never even seen one.
I think geography teachers made them up and hoped nobody would ever check.
I have always simply refused to memorize anything.
I had to memorize every element until Radon in 2nd Semester. Just position and therefore the amount of protons (the "order number"? idk in english), but still: such a waste of time. When we asked "y no table of elemens?", our prof said that we should be glad that we had a system to memorize.
I asked a chemistry teacher about this and he was baffled that we had to do this.
The best part? I wasn't even studying chemistry! But rather general "engineering science" which had a lot of focus on material science. But chemistry was my least favourite science. I wanted all engineering but chemisty. ;_;
the "order number" idk in english
The English term is "atomic number".
Thx. Makes way more sense than "Ordnungszahl" in German.
The fourth one is air. Wind is just the movement of air. You wouldn't say water is river
You forgot heart… 
Ether
Aether. Ether is something else.
ether makes higher than the clouds.
It's space, Jim. But not as we know it.
Sort of
Today we differentiate between the physical substance (or category of substances that are the ethers) and the alchemical concept of the aether, but look at the etymology of "ether".
The term "ethyl", as in ethyl alcohol or ethanol, similarly traces its origins back to "ether".
At the time these various "light" flammable easily evaporated substances were conflated with each other, and were thought to be this sorta mystical stuff that was the fifth element from which the 4 other ones were differentiated from. Since it was undifferentiated it was supposed to be "pure", and free of the messiness of ordinary life (space was thought to be filled with it because of the "perfect" predictable movements of the heavenly bodies). This is also where we get the word "quintessential", which literally means "fifth essence", to mean a pure, perfect, and archetypical example of something, without complications. It's also where we get the word "ethereal" to mean "otherworldly", "light", "ghostly", etc.
It's for similar reasons that we use the word "spirit" to mean both something that comes in a bottle and a disembodied soul. All sorts of alchemists from different areas and different times believed different things of course, but a lot of alchemical thought was based on the idea that everything had essences inside it which were hard to perceive or touch directly but which gave things their properties. In other words something's essence is it's spirit.
Of course what they called "spirits" or "essences" were really things like distillation products, gasses driven off by heating, and the colored flames that you get when you put some metals in fire. But that's what they thought was going on.
I have not done a chem class where they didn't let you use the periodic tabke
You forgot "fuckin' magnets".
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