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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Gonggong is named after a Chinese water god, and it does indeed have it’s own ice. It’s also red, covered in thiolins like Pluto, but even moreso. There’s also likely a thin methane exosphere, leaving methane frost on windows.

    Gonggong is very far out, moving between 33 and 101 AU over it’s 554 year orbit. It orbits at a 30° inclination, so telescopes would pick up some interesting shots of the other planets poles.

    The 1/30 g gravity is nothing special, plenty to jump around in, but enough to not fly away easily. It’s slightly flattened by it’s rotation, which is a nice 22 hours, much slower than other trans-neptunian bodies. This slow rotation is caused by tidal forces between it and it’s moon Xiangilu.

    Xiangilu is named for Gonggong’s minister, a nine headed venomous snake monster. It orbits every 25 days, nearly exactly a month like Earth’s moon, but in an eccentric orbit, changing size throut the month. Gonggong has a polar orientation like Uranus as well, leaving Xiangilu a constant half-moon in the dim sky half the year. Sadly eclipses would be very rare.

    The trip out there is rather long, but once there it seems quite unique and cozy.










  • Russia is 12th in Uranium exports, with 0.001% of global exports. Kazakhstan is first at 59%, but there’s Canada with 30%, France with 8%, and the US with 2%. There’s plenty of politically easy Uranium, especially if people start buying it over Kazakhstan.

    India, Brazil, Australia, and the US are also slated to have the most Thorium resources, which could be a more significant nuclear fuel with modern and near-modern reactors.



  • Skyrim could still be one of the most played games today, if the code wasn’t a steaming pile of garbage. The modding scene is already one of the largest in existence, and if it was as mutable as Minecraft it could stick around as the 3D rpg modding platform.

    Instead Bethesda throws minor updates no one wants that breaks everything every few years, and then makes 4 more games using the same steaming pile of garbage that holds everything back over a decade. Fallout 4 was pretty decent, and 76 may have redeemable writing underneath the crusty shovelware coating, but then Starfield is trash in every way.

    Skyrim was barely acceptable 15 years ago, but the engine isn’t capable of much more than a visual novel today, and all the decent writers have been chased away by Bethesda. Anyone writing new software would be an improvement.