#The Plutonium Show

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Two (2) programs that might prove to be "old news" for us but today they provide an EXCELLENT primer on the crazy making Megaliars & their Suckit Mouthpiece Omit Scoobie. Both serve as REFRESHERS on the vindictive nature of the unroyal duo and their united quest to burn down the BRF.

Why does it matter? We must continue to challenge their lies and the Megaliars with TRUTH. Please consider sharing both programs. Also, please follow the links to their YT channels and leave a LIKE to beat the pro-Suckit algorithm.

Thanks to all of you here on Tumblr, I've come a long way from the royal watcher who surprised herself in a puddle of tears in 2019 (or 2020) when Megaliar published viscous lies about Catherine via her online mouthpieces. At the time, I had a Twatter account and a male from her past (yes him) jumped into the feed to encourage me. He explained that she was on a mission to burn down the BRF. I asked, "when will she be exposed?" He replied "she already has been."

HG Tudor: This One's Wife

The Plutonium Show: Pluto & Zach Podcast #87

The Meghans voted Hypocrites of the Year!

2016 MM "I stick with a neutral colour palette."

[daisywords]

\

[kyri45]

PREV / NEXT / FIRST (ISAT Sky: Cotl!AU!)

FINALLY! I can show you what I have done with all your Sky Kid ritual offering!! They are now part of the population of the forgotten island! Just a disclamer, I'll try to add them as much as possible, but I can't assure I'll be able to add ALL of them. I'll do my best!

Also Isa being best boyfriend ever holding the hand to Sif so that he doesn't fly into space

The characters from the memories in roder of appearance:

Sky Kid by @princess-self-shipping

Sky Kid by @nolongerasloth

Sky Kid by @exoni

Scaredy Cadet from Season of Assembly

Scolding Student from Season of Assembly

Sky Kid by @plutonium-sky

Thank you again for your submission!

[astrolovecosmos]

Aries is associated with the metal Iron, the metal of weaponry and tools, Aries forges ahead.

Taurus is associated with Copper. Copper is known for its warmth, beauty, and conductivity.

Gemini is associated with the metal Mercury, Mercury represents the volatile, fluid, and transformative aspect of the alchemical process. It is often associated with the mind, spirit, and principle of change and transition.

Cancer is associated with Silver and the popular and healing Copper. Silver is a metal known for its lustrous appearance, malleability, and association with the Moon. Silver has been revered for its purity and connection to the divine feminine.

Leo is associated with Gold, the metal of power, royalty, and luxury. The metal of the Sun.

Virgo is associated with Mercury and Copper, showing the multifaceted nature of the sign. Metals of flexibility, one associated with mental agility and the other healing properties.

Libra is associated with Copper; Copper is often seen as a symbol of balance and harmony in various cultures.

Scorpio is associated with Plutonium and Iron, a metal of destruction and a metal of war.

Sagittarius is associated with Tin. Tin is a highly malleable metal, known for its ability to be easily shaped and molded. It is also widespread, used globally in many things.

Capricorn is associated with Lead and Platinum. Lead is known for its heaviness, density, and stability... and poison. Platinum is known for its durability, strength, and resistance to corrosion.

Aquarius is associated with many metals: Lead, Platinum, Uranium, and Aluminum. Lead and Platinum reflect Saturn's serious and heavy influence on the sign. Uranium is a radioactive element known for its instability and transformative power. Aluminum is a lightweight, versatile metal known for its strength and conductivity.

Pisces is associated with Tin, the flexible metal that historically has been used to decorate or in the arts.

[mitigatedchaos]

One snowy night (you find it snowing even in Florida), a wizard approaches you and shows you some of his fantastical wizard powers. He then offers you $10 million to become a Christmas character for 10 years.

Your lawyer, who was drinking Christmas beverages at your house, reads through the contract. He says that the contract seems reasonable, with no obvious loopholes. Once the contract is over, you will return to your original self at the same biological age you were when it started. You may pick a gender variant you like, but the form will obey the same general style (e.g. you may not pick "that guy, but as a handsome Hollywood actor").

Additional Information...

You will receive a flying sled. The sled has a comfortable magical bubble around it which ensures that the air is reasonably still and pressurized. It can fly up to the speed and altitude of a 747, and carry up to 2 tons.

You will be immune to arctic temperatures, although you will still need oxygen, food, and water.

Every year, in the 48 hours before and after Christmas, you may use Christmas time magic to enable you to visit every occupied dwelling, and every child, in the entire world. (Christmas time magic is complicated, and may adjust if people start celebrating Christmas at a different time of year.)

If you have chosen Santa Claus...

The portal to your Christmas village domain is located at the North Pole. Your realm is a stereotypical Christmas village, with all the alpine trappings, located in a mountain valley. Local temperatures are always just below freezing. A full course of holiday food and drink is automatically generated every day, and firewood is replenished automatically.

You possess a magical gift bag from which you may withdraw one toy desired by a child within a 250ft range, per child (up to 18), per year. The item must be generally accepted as a toy (so no guns, tanks, bombs, gold bars, plutonium, etc), although for older children it may be acceptable to generate a gaming PC. The item may be worth no more than $6,000 (anchored at the start of your term as Santa) - if the item would be worth over $6,000, such as a luxury SUV for a teenager, it arrives damaged or aged, until it is only worth $6,000. You may create toys produced by no existing manufacturer, assuming the technology exists for something similar, and are required to do no engineering work. The True Spirit of Christmas prohibits you from deliberately creating dangerous toys. You may not create new video games, movies, or books, although you may copy any of these created throughout human history, even if you don't have access to it. (This excludes classified information, development plans for bombs, corporate records, etc.)

You may create a lump of coal (or charcoal) at will. You may produce one cubic meter of coal, charcoal, firewood, or lumber per minute. It appears gradually in an empty space in front of you and gently floats to the ground, making it difficult to injure someone.

Once per year per individual, you may sense whether an individual is naughty or nice. This is a form of Christmas Magic, and you have little insight into how it classifies people (your lawyer thinks it may be Confucian, but the contract is vague). Whether you give people gifts or coal anyway is up to you.

You may recruit Christmas elves for the remaining duration of your term as Santa Claus. While inside the Christmas village, a contracted elf will become the 4-foot-tall Christmas elf version of themselves, and become healthy, strong, unaging, and immune to disease. They must work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week (religious observances exempt), or they will be automatically ejected from the Christmas village. Christmas elves may use Christmas magic to create toys not desired by any specific child. This takes them 1 minute per $30 of toy value. Your Christmas village automatically supports, with room and board, a population of up to 50,000 elves. It also sports truly massive warehouses for holding toys prior to distribution. You may access any toy stored in this way using your magical gift bag. All Christmas elf contracts expire at the end of your term. Any elves still in your village, as well as their belongings, will be deposited in temporary dwellings in a safe location somewhere in the State of New York. They will continue to have pointed ears afterwards.

You may not give gift cards or cash (Wizard Law prohibits counterfeiting currency). However, you may give digital assets (such as lootboxes or Steam games). You may choose to automatically compensate companies in an account with your realm, from which they may withdraw some amount of toys created by your elves. The associated website is part of the Christmas village's domain, and requires little to no oversight on your part. The toys arrive in cardboard boxes 7-10 business days after they are requested.

You may legally eat any cookies and milk you find, at any time. These count as complete nutrition for you. No matter how much you attempt to diet, you will find that you cannot lose your holly jolly weight.

You may create ordinary Christmas decorations, such as garlands, at will. The decorations created in this way are generally made out of wood, paint, pine, twine, and so on.

When using Christmas time magic to visit the children of the world, you may enter buildings using a form of magical projection. This allows you to leave gifts, eat cookies, and so on, but you aren't able to steal items and bring them back with you from inside locked or closed buildings.

If you have chosen the Grinch...

Your domain is a very large cave located in the largest mountain on your continent. It is reasonably well-lit, ventilated, and habitable. There is an unlimited supply of awful, smelly food and water. Somehow, this food seems strangely appetizing, but other people will recoil at the scent.

You possess a magical theft bag that helps you to steal Christmas. Items so stolen are transported to parts of your cave, where they are heaped into large piles. You may steal Christmas-themed items such as Christmas gifts, food, and Christmas decorations and even Christmas trees. These items become legally yours - you may even melt down golden Christmas ornaments and sell the gold for scrap. (Overtly religious items such as nativity scenes are generally protected by the True Spirit of Christmas, unless they are against the True Spirit of Christmas in some way.) Your cave has many rooms, and you may choose to divert food items to a frozen room for later, if you like.

You may also steal other winter-holiday-themed items, including gifts for New Year's Eve, gifts intended for other winter holidays, and so on. If you attempt to steal a non-holiday item, it is possible that you may be arrested by the authorities. Only holiday items can go in your magical theft bag.

Your may return Christmas. Using your magical theft bag, you may place items back where you originally found them, or back with the original owners. However, you may also choose to redistribute Christmas and give items to different people, or put them in different places. Even when using Christmas time magic, you may not e.g. place Christmas trees in front of a flying aircraft, as this is against the True Spirit of Christmas.

Unlike Santa Claus, when using Christmas time magic, you may also enter stores, warehouses, and vehicles, to steal Christmas from Amazon. You may even take down the "Merry Christmas" signs at Target.

Your holiday sense allows you to sense the range, direction, and location of nearby Holiday items to steal.

You may steal holiday music. Not pirate, but steal. If you are walking through the grocery store and hear a rendition of "All I want for Christmas is you," you may rip the song to your device of choice, and the file containing it on the originating server will be deleted.

You may create contraptions. These machines are always composed of junk and tend to have a Rube Goldberg element to them. They are not particularly durable. If the contraption is doing something unusual, it is powered by Christmas theft magic. You can only focus enough to create a contraption with magical effects if you are trying to do so in order to steal or return Christmas (or other winter holidays). (The effects of magical contraptions are limited, but generally do allow you to steal Christmas more effectively or efficiently. The more powerful a magical contraption is, the more comedic it must be.) Other contraptions are limited to what can be accomplished via ordinary technology.

You have one loyal dog. Though surprisingly resourceful for a dog, unlike the Christmas elves, he can't create any Christmas gifts at all.

In either case, you may visit people and generally travel and talk to people outside of Christmas.

[kittyoverlord]

Edit: finally cleaned it up and filmed to catch all the sparkles in the explosions. Video sound is part of the opening theme for Never Stop Blowing Up.

Details and pics below the cut.

Dimension 20 Nail Art Masterpost

Close up pics

Super happy with how these turned out. Was going to stamp every part of the explosion, but I ended up liking how it looked better by just dabbing it with my finger. I made a rewind symbol with a triangle stamp. I already had the vampire plate out for the gunshot wound, so I added some fangs as soon as vampire Cosmo Chase and vampire President showed up. The Adrenanoxinil Plutonium Sulfate was made from a mad-scientist set with custom lettering.

If you want to start doing themed nails, a basic alphabet plate is your best friend. I have a few alphabet plates now in different fonts and it's the best.

Original text and pics from right after the finale:

Literally just finished my NSBU finale manicure. Am going to clean up and post a video soon, but wanted to get this up ASAP. Also, because I was working on this while watching the finale I was able to add a little vampire nail lol.

Sometimes I like the pics pre-clean-up because with stamping sometimes you get cool designs on the finger.

[mbta-unofficial]

Ok so I’m a Boston born and raised nuclear engineer and I feel an INTENSE need to correct the physics in your post— an electron can’t hit a U-238 nucleus (or any nucleus) b/c the Coulomb force keeps the negatively charged particles from the positively charged nucleus. I think you meant a neutron rather than an electron, but there is still an issue— U-238 is considered a fertile isotope, not fissile (I.e. only VERY PARTICULAR neutrons will make it fission, normally it just absorbs neutrons and later decays into plutonium, which IS fissile, but that takes time so this can’t cause a chain reaction fast enough). Anyways, I think you meant “a neutron hitting a U-235 nucleus”, which is the normal fission reaction that powers reactors. But this only releases ~200 MeV of energy so one reaction isn’t enough to annihilate even one Yankees fan :(

Hate this city. Assholes as far as the eye can see. Stick my neck out and some twerp starts lecturing me about fissile materials. Maybe I show him what a fertile isotope looks like once you get a nice dinner at the four seasons, loosen the tension a little bit. Get the plutonium flowing. Fuckin coulomb forces keeping us from the ones we love.

or maybe just the ones we find ourselves irresistibly attracted towards, who knows. I knew an electron who went nuclear once. He and this girl had like, a gravity to ‘em. I saw them in the north end, and the didn’t even react to me. It’s like they led these incredibly charged lives and now they’re just this dense mass together.

Yet I’d never live anywhere else. Ah well. Home is where the hatred is. Gil scott heron said that

[cityof2morrow]

Nightlife Neon Recolors

Published: 9-22-2023 | Updated: 9-28-2023 SUMMARY “ The SimCity Nuclear Power Preservation Society has perfected their waste collection techniques to provide the average Sim with all the plutonium your home can handle. Don’t ignore that old geiger counter, get it ticking with the warning radiance of the EverGlow Plutonium Rod. Handle with care, extremely fragile.” Here are 20 recolors of the Everglow Plutonium Rod (Nightlife EP). By default, it is the parent mesh of the EverGlow Uranium Rod from the same EP – so these recolors will show up on both lights. Recolors will also show up on any items reposited to the plutonium rod such as some of the lights by PineappleForest HERE (2021) and HERE (2022).

DETAILS Requires Nightlife EP. §175 | Buy > Lighting > Wall Lights *Unlike the default recolors, my recolors do NOT emit colored light - they emit a soft glow instead. Comes in several ridiculous, fruity flavors – baby blue, beetlejuice, blackNblue, blue crush, blue wash, cherry, chocolate milk, fuscia fruit, grape soda, green uforia, hot pink, lemon head, licorice, limeaide, orangeaide, purpleaide, purple berry, strawberry milk white. DOWNLOAD (choose one) from SFS | from MEGA CREDITS Thanks: CreeSims. Sources: Beyno (Korn via BBFonts), EA/Maxis, Offuturistic Infographic (Freepik), EverGlow Uranium Rod Recolors (Cree, 2022), Uranium Rod Neon Floor Lamp (PineappleForest, 2022), Uranium Rod White (Dot, 2009).

[monsters-conquer-the-world]

OOZEPUNK

WHAT IS OOZEPUNK?

Oozepunk is the term I'm coining for the microgenre of urban heroic sci-fi horror-fantasy that first exploded in the mid-80s with movies, shows, and comics like Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Toxic Avenger, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Hellboy, Street Sharks, and others. Lots of natural crossover with Biopunk and Cyberpunk, aesthetically and philosophically.

Your childhood trauma didn't let you forget Roger Rabbit heavily featured colorful nightmare slime, did it?

A ragtag gang of weirdos (often horribly mutated--more on that soon) band together to save a city that doesn't understand them. Grimy sewers, abandoned buildings and graffiti'd brick walls are lit up by neon lights, streams of mysterious, glowing goo and/or the unearthly lights of futuristic particle weapons--ideally all of the above!

Beyond the "cracked concrete and gutters full of liquid plutonium" aesthetic, Oozepunk prankishly asks "What if catastrophic aberrations of science, particularly DUMPING TOXIC FUCKING WASTE STRAIGHT INTO THE ENVIRONMENT created fucked-up monsters... but they're HEROIC fucked-up monsters!" These catastrophic aberrations of science grant the heroes incredible powers, but COST them their place in human society. (Ghostbusters and Roger Rabbit eschew character mutation in favor of discovering that the undead and olde tymey cartoons are real [and exploitable!], respectively. 'Busters and 'Toon sympathizers alike are treated like insane idiots and/or frauds in their respective universes.)

Oozepunk heroes are challenged not only by strange supernatural beings, but by human society itself. The Ghostbusters battle with local politicians as much as they do the undead. In the recent (and delightful) TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, Splinter warns the Turtles of humans and their obsession with "milking" mutants for their blood--on top of the villainous mutants they're trying to thwart!

Crank up the creep factor in Oozepunk and you get awesome anti-establishment goo-horror like 1988's The Blob, The Stuff, Street Trash, and probably a bunch more. Toxic Avenger is a batshit crazy splatter-comedy (i.e. classic Troma)... and still garnered sequels, a kid's cartoon and toyline!

And there's a Shredder's Revenge-style Crusaders beat-em-up coming out next year??

This looks dope as shit

Ghostbusters and TMNT are the only current, "evergreen" (or radioactive green!) Oozepunk franchises I can think of off the top of my head, but Oozepunk elements are buried in almost all of the stories and settings I love the most. Heroic kaiju like King Kong, Godzilla and Gamera paved the way for our freaky friends, but so did comics characters like Fantastic Four's Ben "The Thing" Grimm, The Hulk and Swamp Thing. Hell, I think I blame SESAME STREET of all things for starting me down the Oozepunk path.

Surprise! I've loved screaming trash monsters with secret hearts of gold since I was a fucking baby, and they've ALWAYS been there for me!

But it's not just Oscar, Sesame Street as a whole is a proto-Oozepunk utopia, years before the big Ooze-splosion of the 80s. Muppets, monsters, talking animals and chill humans all live and work together to scrape by with a little dignity in a gritty-but-wholesome urban world!

Sesame Street, a decades-long reminder that educational childrens' programming can and SHOULD be cool as hell looking and loaded with all kinds of friendly mutant freakuloids.

OOZEPUNK! Whaddya think?

[mariacallous]

Launched between August and September 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are the oldest and most distant probes built that are still active. They are also the only probes to have left our solar system and venture into the wider expanses of space. The secret to their long life? Nuclear power. But at some point, their mission will end.

The Voyagers began as planetary missions. Their goal was to carry out the so-called Planetary Grand Tour—that is, to visit the four outer planets of the solar system through a series of flyovers. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all got a new face thanks to the probes’ robotic cameras and their many scientific instruments.

The icy giants Uranus and Neptune, in particular, were studied for the first and only time in history by Voyager 2, while successful observations of Jupiter and Saturn were the basis for subsequent interplanetary missions to these worlds, such as Galileo, Juno, and Cassini-Huygens. Voyager 1, on the other hand, had Titan—Saturn’s largest moon and one of the most intriguing satellites in the outer solar system—as its primary target.

Once the Voyagers’ planetary journeys were over, it was possible to begin a new mission phase. After their last planetary stops, both probes reached escape velocity for the solar system, allowing them to be released from the sun’s gravity. Since 2012 for Voyager 1, and 2018 for Voyager 2, they have become interstellar. We know this because after those dates, sensors on the probes showed that charged particles from the sun became less numerous and energetic than those detected from the galactic environment. This was a golden opportunity to study the boundaries of the solar system and the environment outside of it.

The Secret to a Long Life

Reaching such a distance is only possible with the right energy source. Many probes use solar panels, but if they move too far from the sun, they become useless (the farthest probe that uses them is the Juno probe orbiting Jupiter). The secret of the Voyagers lies in their atomic hearts: both are equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs—small power generators that can produce power directly on board. Each RTG contains 24 plutonium-238 oxide spheres with a total mass of 4.5 kilograms.

Plutonium-238 is an unstable isotope, which means it undergoes radioactive decay. The plutonium atoms in the RTGs release alpha particles—comprising two protons and two neutrons—and these hit the RTG canister, heating it up. The heat is then converted into electricity.

But as time passes, the plutonium on board is depleted, and so the RTGs produce less and less energy. The Voyagers are therefore slowly dying. Nuclear batteries have a maximum lifespan of 60 years.

In order to conserve the probes’ remaining energy, the mission team is gradually shutting down the various instruments on the probes that are still active. For example, in October, Voyager 2’s plasma science instrument—which measures electrically charged atoms passing the probe—was turned off; the same device on Voyager 1 was turned off in 2007 due to a malfunction. These instruments were used to study charged particles in the sun’s magnetic field, and it is precisely this detector in 2018 that determined that Voyager 2 had exited the heliosphere and become interstellar.

Four active instruments remain, including a magnetometer as well as other instruments used to study the galactic environment, with its cosmic rays and interstellar magnetic field. But these are in their last years. In the next decade—it’s hard to say exactly when—the batteries of both probes will be drained forever.

[sonicexelle-junkary]

Team character!

Featuring; Jag the Anteater, Plutonium the Mongoose, and Shade the Hyena.

Two of these guys aren’t really horror characters, but ya know what, I don’t care, imma show them anyways.

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

What Pluto said: "Meghan Markle's Dangerous Obsession with Catherine has seriously gotten out of hand" (please don't scroll by without sharing)

[rose-of-pollux]

SO

Saw BTTF the musical two times in as many days (originally was supposed to see just today’s matinee, but I arrived early enough yesterday to be like “This is my last chance, why not see it twice?” and saw last night’s show, as well. Behold, the highlights—

I saw Roger with Casey last night and Roger with JJ Niemann today; Casey and JJ are both amazing Martys

Roger has a new bit as Doc; after saying he remembers vividly what happened on November 5th, he just spaces out momentarily trying to recall until he is successful. Took me by surprise and I was cackling, but thankfully I was far from the only one 😆

I thought I was prepared for the Main(e) house bit. Casey threw in a random nonsequiter into it: “My grandmother is a psychiatrist.” It was SO out of left field that Roger broke, which prompted a “Why are you laughing, Doc?? This is serious!!” We are all laughing at this point.

Roger got his revenge in the next scene, throwing out a random “Your great-grandmother taught me yoga.” The randomness of it coupled with the lore implications made me let out the most ungodly shriek of laughter; I was in row three—there was no way they missed that, and if either of them end up seeing this, I am so sorry 😅

In both shows, there was a lesbian couple at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. Would they have been realistically out in 1955? Probably not. Was it still awesome? ABSOLUTELY. Also kudos for having Strickland, of all people, not even batting an eyelash and instead continuing to police the heterosexual couples.

JJ had his own banter going with Roger, which was also great—there was an extended “Wait, what?”/“Weight?? What??” routine that was just as priceless.

I was also cackling at Roger basically chasing JJ around the DeLorean when he had the plutonium in one hand, waving him away with the other. 100% in character for both of them.

Added angst, which I am also always here for: just after Doc tears and trashes Marty’s warning note and just before the cable snaps, when JJ did the “I’ll tell you straight out!” line, Marty grabs Doc by the shoulders, and Doc responds by just shoving him away in frustration. Like this has to be the first time Doc, his mentor and best friend, who has been nothing but supportive and encouraging up until now, has ever done anything like that—and Marty doesn’t even get the time to process that, as the cable then snaps and they have to split up. But that moment is now Canon to me, and I absolutely have to pick it apart in a future fic.

There was an auction after the show for two puffy red vests signed by the whole cast with the proceeds going to Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS—the winning bid was $1500 for each one, far more than I could’ve afforded, so kudos to them, at any rate.

…I did, however, make a smaller donation to get a full-cast signed Playbill, which I shall treasure always.

As I guessed, as sad as I am about the show leaving Broadway, I know I will carry the inspiration it gave me forever 💜

[reality-detective]

Studies from Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not show evidence of radioactive fallout in keeping with “nuclear detonations.”

The plutonium and cessium could not be shown to coincide with the time of the bombing. Instead, they were likely deposited approximately two years afterward. 🤔

[thecurioustale]

The Complete History of Computational Physics

1950s Scientists:

"Gentlemen! In our quest to conquer God we want to simulate the atom! But to do it we'd need a computer capable of per-forming in excess of six calculations per second!"

"Impossible! The heat out-put alone would melt the Earth."

"What if we bombarded the computer laboratory with a steady plume of some thermally super-conductive yet safe gas, like a brominated asbestos aerosol?"

"How would we de-liver it to the machinery?"

"We could use super-magnets, nay, hyper-magnets of pure plutonium arsenide, activated by exposed 500 mega-volt leads right next to the intern's desk."

"Extraordinary, Bob! But where would get an intern?"

"You there, shoe shine boy! How would you like to earn 5 cents a year???"

"Golly gee, sir, would I ever!"

"Dick, put in another government grant re-quest for an additional 100 tons of plutonium. Dave, get down to the soda fountain and pick up a couple bricks of arsenic and one of those ice-cream novelties I like."

"Already on it!"

2010s Scientists:

"All right people, our grants are up next year and we need something to show for it."

"What don't we try to simulate an atom?"

"Didn't this laboratory already try something like that in the '50s?"

"Yeah, our predecessors spent a couple decades on it, but they failed. All they managed to do was create a Superfund site and build some kind of anti-gravity superweapon that nobody knows how to operate anymore."

"But! They didn't have the necessary processing power. We have supercomputers now! So let's get to simulating."

"Actually, we probably still don't have enough computing power for it."

"What?!"

"Yeah, um, atoms are tricky, especially the big ones past atomic number, oh, 2 or so."

"Well, can we maybe write a paper about how they're tricky?"

"I bet we could! We could even get our remote German postgraduate intern with the weird hair to make a really nice animation for the PowerPoint presentation."

"Brilliant!"

[literallymechanical]

So, the philosopher’s stone was first synthesized on February 18, 1973, in a Soviet science-city called Sverdlovsk-45.  A day-drunk reactor technician showed up to work with a “weird rock” and boosted the uranium -> plutonium transmutation rate about four percent over what mass/energy equivalence should allow.  The stone was imperfect, and it went inert within a week.  He never managed to recreate it.

The process was independently discovered in 2010 by a very sleep-deprived BYU student who read an article on Cracked.com about David Hahn, the “Nuclear Boy Scout."  She made a stone from smoke detector americium alpha sources, mercury thermometers, and a bunch of fool’s gold – pyrite, crystalline iron sulfide – among other ingredients. She currently leads a schismatic group of Mormon fundamentalists.

We have a stone, obviously. It's likely the Bay Area "startup" we've been monitoring has one, but we haven't confirmed it yet. Brussels never completed their Magnum Opus, thank god. That's all we've found to date, but I'll keep you posted.