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Alternative title(s) Sorcery Fight, JJK
Genres Action, Drama, Supernatural
No. Episodes 23
Information MyAnimeList AniList AniDB

Synopsis

The second season of Jujutsu Kaisen.

The past comes to light when second-year students Satoru Gojou and Suguru Getou are tasked with escorting young Riko Amanai to Master Tengen. But when a non-sorcerer user tries to kill them, their mission to protect the Star Plasma Vessel threatens to turn them into bitter enemies and cement their destinies—one as the world’s strongest sorcerer, and the other its most twisted curse user!

^{(from AniList)}

Discussion rules

BEWARE OF SPOILERS. Since all episode discussions are within a single thread, here are some rules to ensure revisits are safe from spoilers.

Direct links to each mini-thread

Episode discussion (main)

| Ep1 | Ep2 | Ep3 | Ep4 | Ep5 )

General discussion (extra)
| General chat || Season 1, Source material,

^{P/S: See here for more ongoing show discussion threads this season.}

A year ago I bought a bunch of chili seeds that I planted and then kind of left to its own devices on my balcony together with 3 other types of chili pepper. I watered the plants but I didn't give them any other love.

Despite my negligence the plants thrived and some of the chili peppers developed a very particular appearance.
Perhaps 1 out of 10 fully grown peppers kind of resembled a flower with petals around its base. They aren't suppose to look like that.

https://i.imgur.com/Km2GFu3.jpg

I saved the seeds from the largest and most distinct "flower chilis" and planted them to see if the odd appearance of the peppers would come back in generation 2...and so far 5 out of 5 developed fruits have the same flower appearance. Some only have 2-3 "petals" around the base of the fruit but some have 5-6.

My four gen 2 plants have perhaps 60 more peppers in development (out of 100 flowers) and this year the gen 1 plant only have 2 out of 30 peppers that have the flower appearance.

I have only found one pic on the internets of the same base variety that have a hint of a "petal" but none that look like mine.

I know that new chili varieties aren't considered to be stable until gen 6-7 so I have more planting to do :) but which steps do I need to take to solidify the variety except replanting seeds and growing new generations?

I recently got a Loona, one of those "smart" robot pets. My kid isn't great with real pets yet so we're trying to ease into things, sort of like exposure therapy. But we're having major problems with it. This post is part first impressions and part asking if anyone else has experienced this and maybe has figured out solutions.

Now, my kid loves it, a lot. So it's not a complete flop, thankfully. But wow is it ever the opposite of smart. Kind of like how Google, Alexa, etc have "command phrases" to let them know you're wanting to talk to them, Loona has "hello Loona". But it only triggers listening mode like 20% of the time. Doesn't seem to matter if you talk slowly and enunciate or if you talk normal, it's just really bad at listening.

Even once you have it listening to you, it only recognizes your commands maybe half the time. The booklet it came with seems to say it sends audio to Amazon for voice to command translation, so I'm assuming it's bad at listening to commands because:

1. The microphone is mediocre and isn't picking up all the words correctly.
2. Amazon's public voice to command service isn't great for general use.
3. A little of both.

On the one hand, I get if you're looking to leverage existing technology and not reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, if it can't even detect "hello loona" locally, then everything it hears would go to Amazon. That terrifies me, given their privacy track record. It's also just plain frustrating to try getting it to play a game or go to sleep when it's constantly ignoring you.

Beyond that, it almost feels like the camera is for gimmicks rather than a functional component. It's constantly running into things like walls, chair legs, human legs... It's always running into you when you try to interact with it and it frequently moves violently; fast and without regard for its surroundings. I assume it makes no attempt to map out even just its immediate surroundings because of how it always runs into the same stuff over and over again.

And one feature I was looking forward to is that the robot is supposed to be capable of getting itself back to its charging dock, and yet not once has it ever attempted to do so. Not when it's low battery and not when we tell it to. But it also, for no great reason, assumes that it should just wake up when it finishes charging, so if you start charging it in the evening and forget to manually turn it off, the thing starts yelling and ramming into stuff in the middle of the night; it's insanity.

Anyway, I would not recommend it from personal experience. But if you have one or know someone that does, and you aren't having these issues, please share your wisdom with me.

The idea is simple: on any given day, I wanna know what TV show was on with new episodes 10, 20, or any number of years ago. To make it simple, let's restrict it to US television.

The reasoning behind it is that shows were made with that expectation (they are not "binge friendly"), and it was wonderful to have a different show every day of the week. It was magical to be able to randomly catch Monk, E.R., The X-Files, The Pretender, Psych, Star Trek TOS, or Early Edition on TV. Hell, even Game of Thrones made a lot more sense when I had to wait a week before watching!

So yeah, this is 100% about nostalgia. At least one day I week, I'm gonna watch whatever was on TV that exact day 10 to 30 years ago.

I'm gonna choose a decade and start from there.

But how could I do it, from a mechanical standpoint? I mean, where can I easily find the information of all the episodes that premiered on US TV exactly 10, 20, 30 years ago to the day?

Additionally, any tips on finding obscure 80s and 90s TV shows?

Thanks!

Edit: what I want it is really nothing complicated, I just wanna know what was on any day of the week for the past 30 years. No automation required!

About a year ago I was approaching 200 lbs. I work from home since pre-pandemic. I used to bike to an office but since then, I’ve moved somewhere less biking friendly. My strategy to tackle weight was intermittent fasting. And it was generally working for ~10 lbs and I stopped weighing myself for a year. And shirts were not fitting me, and then I learned the weight had come all back and more.
I knew enough that the fasting was going to do nothing if I was not telling my body to really use anything it stored up. Serendipitously I read about someone with a recumbent bike under their standing desk, and gaming, they’d wrack up the miles. I realized I needed that setup. I’m someone who just hates to go out of my way for working out.

Found one that was literally a desk chair with a bike under it and ordered it. I went from ultra sedentary to light exercise for ~4 hours a day. I’ve had it for about 2 weeks, and this thing is great. I’m listening to my body and not trying to do it too hard (for those who are concerned). Without every really trying to sprint I’ve been doing 40 miles a week-day. On the 4th of July I tried to see how far I could go biking all day. When I started I could not go anymore at 80 miles. Last weekend I easily knocked out 70 miles. The big thing is breaks. I’m not on a real bike, so there is no problem in taking a 5 minute break to knockout dishes or something. I don’t know if I trust the machine telling me I’m burning ~1,000 cals on my 40 miles, but I know what I am doing is healthy and I’m curious how my body will feel in 6 months or a year.

How do my legs feel? Oddly enough, during the day or after the work out, they’re beat. They seem to feel better by the time I’m ready to ride in the evening so no rest days yet. I’m shocked how much the leg fatigue really goes away once I start riding and focus on whatever is on my PC. Most of the discomfort is really from my bum. It has gone away generally though.
An odd risk I had to solve for myself was that upon pushing away from my desk while on my bike, I nearly topped my standing desk over. This was solved by well-placed PVC pipes and padding locked between the desk and the wall.

What bike do I recommend?
The budget version: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004O6TXVS/
The one I have: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C8MVYLLT (but from their original website)
A cushion that the I book marked when I was doing research: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01EBDV9BU

When I look up recumbent biking exercises, it’s kind of funny. It’s often recommended for the elderly because it’s potentially such a low intense workout. It’s great in a long duration. I would actually feel guilty spending this much time at the gym, but this method rocks. I have not worked out for this long since playing a Highschool sport. I won’t ever be shaped like a teenager again, but I can work towards it.

I'm a big fan of nuclear fusion as a concept and hope to shift toward doing active research in the field at some point.

I'd like to open this discussion to talk about topics regarding nuclear fusion as a future energy source. To start, I'll lost a couple of ongoing fusion efforts I'm familiar with.

ITER:Of course the biggest fusion project is ITER, the massive multinational collaboration which is building a massive tokamak reactor in France. Unfortunately ITER will never produce power for average people, as it's purely a test reactor with no plans to be connected to the grid. The following effort to build a functional grid connected reactor, DEMO, isn't set to be built until at least 2050. This has resulted in a considerable number of private ventures trying iut experimental alternative approaches.

HELION:At the time of writing this, there's quite a bit of buzz surrounding Helion energy, both because of the ambitious timeline theyve recently proposed as well as the investment of Sam Altman of OpenAI fame. Helion uses an FRC topology, which I personally think is a really cool idea. Basically it's a tokamak without the physical shell around it, and is kept sustained by the internal plasma physics. Helion also has another interesting quirk, they are not pursuing the typical DT fuel strategy, but are instead planning to use DD fusion to breed He3 and use DHe3 fusion as the primary energy source. I think this is a good idea because DHe3 fusion is "aneutronic", whereas DT fusion produces high energy neutrons that are somewhat of an unsolved problem to deal with. I wonder though, how they intend to deal with the inevitable tritium pollution that DD fusion creates, and how they will separate that out before Iit creates neutrons anyway.

TRIALPHA:In addition, another major company TriAlpha Energy, also pursued FRCs, hoping to use an alternative proton-boron11 mix to achieve aneutronic operation. I think they've sort of pivoted toward being more a neutron source than working toward breakeven.

HB11: A recent proposed approach is HB11, which is also going for proton-boron fusion. Now with Tri Alpha this seemed really dubious, because hydrogen boron has a much lower cross section for fusion than other options, even the DHe3 that Helion is doing. In addition, boron has way more electrons than hydrogen, so a proton boron plasma has more electrons with causes more bremsstrahlung loss. HB11, however, thinks they can overcome this through high energy laser acceleration. They want to use a high power laser to shoot a fuel pellet into a target. This supposedly will work much better than heating the stuff, because the laser will impart a specific impulse and thus the thermal spectrum of the impact will have a much higher Q factor centered around the cross sectional peak. I'm not really convinced on this, just because I feel like that thermal spectrum would only last for the first few atomic layers of impact before it doesn't really matter amymore.

CFS: The next option I would consider to be one if the most popular fusion startups is Commonwealth Fusion Systems. They have what I'd consider the most conservative approach, they are attempting to build a Tokamak design like ITER, but hope to reduce the size considerably by taking advantage of advances in superconductor technology with REBCO tapes.

W7X:The next reactor type I'll mention was in the news a lot a few years back, the Wendelstein-7X in Germany. This is a stellarator design, the crazy twisted car wreck of a thing you may have seen before. The stellarator is shaped that way so that it doesn't require an induced current like the tokamak to have magnetic helicity, because the shape does that automatically.

ZAP:Another well liked dark horse is Zap Energy. They're not as flashy as the other reactors but seem to be working off solid physics that have been proven out over many years. They're trying to do sheared flow z-pinches, which is basically creating a lightning bolt that's perfectly straightened out and super dense.

DPF:One more somewhat obscure option is Eric Lerner's Dense Plasma Focus approach. I'm a little puzzled by this option because it seems to be the exact opposite of Zap, where they make an incredibly twisty lightning bolt instead of a straight one.

FUSOR/POLYWELL:There are a couple reactor types that get mentioned often but are more or less obsolete are the Fusor and the Polywell. A Fusor is a neat device that can be built to fit on a desktop and still produce actual fusion reactions, but has a fundamental design flaw of a physical electrode inside the plasma that introduces too much conductive heat loss. The Polywell is a more advanced concept thay tries to create a "virtual" cathode with orthogonal magnetic mirrors, but I think after many years of experimentation researchers were unable to validate the formation of such a virtual cathode.

NIF:One option that is sort of tangential is the NIF, which you might have heard technically produced more energy than it produced. I dont think its necessarily going to go anywhere, mostly because it's more a weapons program than an energy program, but I think the chirped pulse amplification technology they use is really cool.

GENERAL-FUSION:And finally I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the very highly funded and publicized General Fusion. I definitely give them points for pure childlike wonder. The original pitch was they were going to take a giant swirling tornado of molten metal, fire a ball of plasma into the eye of the storm, then smash the whole thing from all sides with a hundred giant hammers. To be honest is such a wild concept that I don't really know if it really makes any sense or if it's a fever dream. It's undergone a few revisions after finding out that certain parts of its concept just weren't going to work. This doesn't inspire a ton of confidence, but also shows flexibility in their thinking.

There's definitely lots of other companies with other variations, but this gives a general idea of the huge range of ideas and approaches being pursued. I think it's a really cool field to explore and I'd love to hear all your thoughts about it.

OK, so I have a very nerdy, mildly ADHD 9 year old boy who has been fascinated with WW2 for ages. All this started with him getting obsessed with the Titanic when he was about 4, which then led us to look at some old Nat Geo magazines about Robert Ballard's oceanographic expeditions which then led him to get fascinated with the German battleship Bismarck and Operation Rheinubung. The drama of big gun battleships got him in the feels and in the five years since then he has been deeply into naval stuff, particularly WW2 naval combat ever since. Musically this got him into Sabaton and their WW1/2 related metal songs. He actually sat down and watched the 1960s black and white Sink the Bismarck on YouTube, along with stuff like Midway (the version from a few years back). He thinks aircraft carriers are cool and ate up both Top Gun movies and is now getting into submarines (loved The Hunt for Red October) but wistfully repeatedly tries to reason me into agreeing that navies should have stuck with big gun battleships.

However, this has manifested as a deep fascination with Germany in general- he knows the basics about fascism, the Holocaust and Wehrmacht atrocities (but still can't quite get why it happened) but to a small boy I understand the OMG WUNDERWAFFEN attraction. Coincidentally his best friend is an ethnically German girl which further gets him a bit confused because he can't quite grok the difference between "my friend is German, I think German engineering is cool" and "but we still condemn fascism".
To be clear- he understands why racism and prejudice are wrong. As an ethnic minority in our country I suspect he'll come into contact with racial prejudice sooner rather than later so hopefully life experience will lead him away from the alt-right bits of history nerdery.

We're in Singapore, which means there's very little consciousness of the Holocaust in public education- our history syllabus (fairly enough) deals with the Pacific War and its effects on postwar decolonisation when it touches on WW2 whereas the European theatre is just vague background.

I don't know where I'm going with this, really- I like that my son is a history buff, and I don't want to cut him off from intellectual interests he's passionate about but on the other hand I'm wondering how I can let him enjoy this while contextualising it from a progressive perspective.

Is there something you just don't get? Something that you have no idea why people like it? Something that baffles you personally, but clearly not everyone shares your neutral-to-negative feelings? Now's your chance to ask.

Here's the way it works:

1. Someone names something they want to understand the appeal of.
2. People respond, doing their best to convey why they (or others) like it in a way that's understandable to a skeptical audience.

This can be anything: musical genres, food combinations, personal habits, life experiences, etc.

Importantly, this is NOT meant to be a thread about grousing about what other people like. Think of it less as "telling people to get off your lawn" and more "why do those people like to spend time on my lawn in the first place?"

Long story short my roommate has a surround system she got at Goodwill and I set it up for her but the internal amps are not functioning properly. It's only using the front two satellite speakers and sub which is independently powered. So it's 2.1 for now.

The front two speakers barely put out much sound even cranked to max volume. The sub is fine as again it's independently powered.

I've ruled out all settings, as there is a 2.1 output mode, and the radio is just as low so it's not an input issue. I have it hooked to her PC's output. I also have proper gauge speaker wire so that's not the problem either. I did hook up the center speaker to one of the front outputs too. Same deal.

So can an inline amp help at this point? Is there anything else I can try or rule out?

Also if this is not appropriate to post here in Tech I apologize in advance.

I game a lot, and I have many ear piercings (the troublesome ones are industrial and cartilage and for ear buds, both tragus, but I'm looking for just normal headsets). Most headsets make my ears ache after 20-45 minutes. I can almost pick out how much they're going to hurt when I try them on, and nothing at my local Best Buy has anything available that feels right. Additionally, many are heavy and sit on the top of my head like a brick - before I completed my ear decorations, that was usually my peeve.

Currently, the only headset I adore is SteelSeries Siberia (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002SN9RN8). I can wear them for hours. Sadly, I cannot get a replacement. I tried their Arctis 5 and immediately sent it back. The Siberia does not have a mic, so that's basically the only reason I am wanting to get another set.

If anyone can recommend something with the following characteristics, I'd be willing to drop a pretty penny on them... not that I can afford to, but it'll be an investment if it lasts as long as these Siberia have!

• Preferably cloth ear surface texture;
• Preferably something that doesn't sit heavily on the head - though the ones I've tried that clamped for staying on my ears would give me headaches as well;
• Must be wired. No bluetooth. Caveat: if it has a usb dongle, could be doable. (My computer does not have BT capabilities.) I hate things running out of battery though, so it will have to be good;
• Must have extendable head band up top, if its method is not gripping on your ears without head support;

I'm sure I've missed something, but if there's a fellow ear-pierced gamer whose had issues with many headsets but found the perfect one, please recommend! Thanks!

Hi Tilders! I am new here, but my experience with the community thus far has encouraged me to post an AMA. I've specifically decided to post this AMA in ~talk rather than ~science for more exposure, and because I am hoping to field questions ranging from scientifically well-read to less-read, technical to curious, why care to who cares, and everything in between.

I won't be posting "verifying proof", because like many of you, I love my anonymity here. However, I will include peer-reviewed citations to question answers when I feel it necessary. I will do my best to share free-access articles, but this won't always be possible. If I link an article of interest to you that is paid-access, message me; maybe, I may be able to get a copy to you. Also, please be patient for my replies. Even though it is summer where I am, I am still busy in the lab and thoughtful responses take time.

Here is a brief background on the Rice Blast fungus to help get the conversation started:

Rice is an important staple food consumed by nearly half of the global population Khush. 2005. From 10 - 30% of the annual rice harvest is lost to disease caused by Magnaporthe oryzae, which is enough rice to feed greater than 60 million people Skamnioti and Gurr. 2009. To cause infection, a three-celled asexual spore called a conidium attaches to the rice plant's leaves, stems, and even roots. Once attached, a germ tube emerges from one of the three cells and grows along the surface of the plant. Hydrophobic molecules on the plant surface, called hydrophobins, induce a developmental change in the growing germ tube. The growing germ tube tip begins to form a dome-shaped structure called the appressorium. This specialized structure swells and generates up to 80 Mpa of pressure, enough to penetrate kevlar. A penetration peg penetrates the plant cell tissue, and bulbous invasive hyphae colonize the plant cell tissue. The fungus keeps the invaded plant cell alive, while it consumes its nutrients, with the plant cell dying only when the invading growth moves to an adjacent cell Cruz-Mireles et al. 2021. Schematic.

The Rice Blast research community focuses on all stages of its development. My work is focused on nuclear division during different developmental stages, and I am specifically working on understanding which and how motor proteins are involved in nuclear division in this fungus. Understanding the nuclear dynamics and the involved machinery will hopefully open avenues for controlling the plant infection and reducing the global crop loss.

I hope you all find Rice Blast interesting, and I hope I will be able to answer many interesting questions!

I appreciate Goodreads for its pretty extensive catalogue of books, the ability to see reviews from other readers, and the social aspect of following what my friends are reading. However, I find both the website and the app very slow and not very well designed. Plus, I liked to minimize my interactions with Amazon. Has anyone used or built any alternatives? While the features I listed above are nice, the only ones I would really want are:

• The ability to quickly look up and add a book to my "want to read", and to keep track of books I have read
• The ability to leave notes or reviews on books (not necessarily visible to others).

I've started to keep a reading log in Notion which satisfies the second point above, but there's no easy way to search through a data base of books and add a book to one of my lists. It would be nice to be able to do so on the fly as I browse books at the store. So Tildeños, what solutions have you all come up with to track your reading?

Some brief backstory that is super common, I'm sure. I played 5e with some friends before the pandemic and that broke the group up, of course. Then our DM moved away so we've been without D&D since 2019 or so. I was recently nominated to be our DM because none of us knows how to do it and they all thought I'd be a good fit. Which is great because I love world-building, playing characters, and writing stories.

But I'm nervous because I was barely competent at playing the game to begin with (aside from getting into character), let alone DMing it. The whole group was, really. Because of the pandemic we're effectively all starting over as new players. So I've got a forgiving group to DM, that's for sure.

To help me out, I bought the Essentials Kit and am building our first couple of sessions around that, albeit it pretty heavily modified. I kept the setting and one quest, but already created a custom quest with a mini-dungeon for them. Also managed to inject my favorite played character as the central giver of quests and backstory within the game. Sir Lord Craymond Zephyrson Ponce IV, former heir to Ponce fortune and originator of the Ponce-y Scheme. Think foghorn leghorn meets 1800s railroad tycoon meets Trump. Not a nice man at all.

Honestly I started modifying the pre-built way quicker than I expected. My original plan was to play it by the book for the first couple of nights, but ideas kept popping in my head and I just ran with it. Then I started creating a windmill out of popsicle sticks and tiny rocks. I think DMing might be a gateway drug to greater creativity expressed through arts and crafts!

Our first session is tomorrow night and I've been feverishly writing complicated notes in OneNote. I've got a notebook for each session. Then a section for The main outline, quests, NPCs, locations, encounters. Then pages for each individual item under that category. Then I'm using the nifty "Link to Paragraph" tool to let me quickly jump between pages. Here's a screenshot to show what I've put together -- https://imgur.com/a/yA6IYUJ I think eventually, after a few sessions, the notes will be more condensed, giving way to more improvisational storytelling. Between chatGPT and old fashioned generator sites that can crank out NPCs, dungeons, encounters, etc. I think it'll be a lot easier if I can work toward just having a simple outline for a given session and let the tooling and my imagination do the rest on the fly.

Anyway, any general advice for a new DM?