We Apologize For The Inconvenience

I’ve written this as a comment below, but it feels important enough to add to the top of the post, too:

It would feel a little self-indulgent to respond individually to everyone’s comments here, but I just wanted to mention how blown away I am by everyone’s kind comments. I can’t tell you how much it means to hear all your well-wishes, and it gladdens me to know that my little passion project has attracted the ears of such thoughtful people. Thank you all.

I’m not out of the woods yet, but whatever comes next health-wise, I’m nonetheless making steady progress on the next episode’s script, Thorium.


Hello, listener!

Boy howdy, it sure has been a long time since we’ve had a new episode, hasn’t it? Unfortunately, I’m afraid it may still be a while yet before we get to hear the stories behind thorium.

A new and rather unexpected health issue has cropped up for me recently, and it’s going to be an issue for the foreseeable future. It’s nothing terribly worrisome, but it is taking up a lot of time and energy. I’m not sure what kind of schedule I’ll be able to stick to for the next couple weeks or possibly months.

The good news is — knock on wood — all this should be well behind me a few months from now.

Actually, the real good news is that walking the halls of medicine allows for new opportunities to collect chemical elements! A friendly MRI tech let me keep my bottle of contrast agent, pictured above, which allowed me to add gadolinium to my personal collection! (Granted, the bottle is empty, but there’s still a little bit of gadolinium slime stuck to the walls of this vessel.)

Anyway, I’m sorry for the loss in momentum. I would much rather be pumping out episodes at a rapid clip! I’ll be back at it as soon as I can, and as always, thank you for listening.

24 Replies to “We Apologize For The Inconvenience”

    1. I hope your recuperation and element collection are going well.
      Attached, as an invisible force, is the earliest sunshine this year from Minneapolis. It feels extra bright today, reflected off of fresh snow. Bright days and other illuminations to you!

  1. I join the others in wishing you good health. During the ordeals of recovery I hope your mental and physical energy, including your humor, will carry you through. Maybe they will need some rests but will perk back up.

    It feels unfair for you to educate and entertain us, and then us to not be there for you, giving something back. I know your podcast is not a diary, though. Anyway, posting messages requires energy, to strangers especially. If you decide to drop a hote about yourself, though, it will be good to hear from you.

    I will be thinking of your well being.

    Good care and good recovery.

  2. Best wishes for a good recovery TR.

    Sad that you are having to navigate this experience, though glad that you are receiving skilled medical treatment.

    Hope to hear presently that you are starting to feel better. In the meantime, all best wishes from a loyal listener in SW England

  3. My best wishes for this hard time, and merry Christmas!
    Luckily for me, I still have many episodes ahead of me before reaching the temporary stop to Actinium!

    One of the best podcast ever: as a (once) chemist, I would have had it when I was a university student back in the 90s 😉

    Greeting from Italy,
    Domenico

  4. Get well soon – I hope this resolves quickly! And thank you for this wonderful podcast. I’m already on the mailing list, btw.

  5. Dont worry about hurrying releasing episodes, your health is far more important, thankyou so much for this wonderful informative podcast, try and have a Merry xmas and happy new year, rest up and recharge yourself
    Once again thanks

  6. Just finished actinium after taking my sweet. old. time. through your fab show. Love your great writing, acting, attention to detail and accurate pronunciations of foreign language. You are also very funny! Having zero science background doesn’t deter from the joy of learning about the history of elements via your presentations.
    Wishing you all the best during your recovery and peace during these troubled times.
    Be well!

  7. Just discovered your wonderful podcast a couple of days ago – what a great resource for someone who stopped studying chemistry at 13 (more than half a century ago)! Wishing you a speedy recovery and many more podcasts to come…

  8. Hoping you have made great strides in the right direction since you posted this! I found this podcast a couple months ago and have been working my way slowly through. I appreciate your wit, vocabulary, and inside nerd jokes (even though I’m sure I’ve missed a few)! Looking forward to the next episodes, however, I’ve got plenty of extra reading to do with the episode pages and Theo Gray’s book! Thanks for such an enjoyable podcast, and I hope your healing continues! Best wishes from Northern Indiana!

  9. Hope things are going okay for you. Happy New Year, and I’ll look forward to new episodes when you’re able.

  10. I just want to say thank you for being a friendly voice through some very lonely time during the current global events. Every episode has been so interesting, funny and I’ve even choked up a few times. Thank you Mr. Appleton and get well soon!

  11. Hope you are doing well, i have really enjoyed listening to your podcast and look forward to your return. Best wishes for a speedy recovery from here in Surrey, UK.

  12. I would like to offer a hearty second to essentially all of the above. As someone who’s been in love with chemistry since first dabbling in it during elementary school, your podcast has been an absolute gem. Incredible. I even occasionally get my (significantly less chemistry-enthused) wife interested in some episodes. I simply cannot express enough how much joy you’ve gifted me over the weeks as I have learned fascinating stories and details, not to mention been turned on to new books.

    I hope all is going well and do take your time. I will gleefully download and consume every episode you put out at whatever pace they appear in my podcast feed. If I could wait some random number of months between every “Hardcore History” episode, I can wait any amount of time for the kind of quality chemistry content you produce.

    Be well and thank you for all your hard work!

    1. Oh my. I can’t believe I haven’t seen this group’s Kickstarters before, this is a serious risk to my wallet. Thank you for sharing!

      Incidentally, I’ve been meaning to mention for ages that I spent a bunch of time poking around http://sightless-sanctuary.net a few months ago and thought it was awesome. It looks like you’ve made a ton of updates since then, too, so I’m eager to dive in again! Your writing makes me want to play in a campaign you DM.

  13. I would feel a little self-indulgent to respond individually to everyone’s comments here, but I just wanted to mention how blown away I am by everyone’s kind comments. I can’t tell you how much it means to hear all your well-wishes, and it gladdens me to know that my little passion project has attracted the ears of such thoughtful people. Thank you all.

    I’m not out of the woods yet, but whatever comes next health-wise, I’m nonetheless making steady progress on the next episode’s script, Thorium.

  14. Honestly, I have to wonder why I never thought to share any of the previous Element dice projects here… I only found out about the first after it ended, and series 2-4 all came at inconvenient times for my wallet, but considering that tips for element collectors are a regular feature of this program, it should have been a match as perfect as chocolate and peanut butter.

    And always nice to hear from another creator that they like my work… Haven’t posted as often as I would like, though I do have a couple of mathematical musings I should get around to posting.

    And sadly, I’ve never actually played D&D, though I definitely want to give it a try, both as a player and as a DM… Sadly, living in a small town that isn’t very pedestrian friendly, lacks viable mass or paratransit and the one person in my household with a driver’s license not having a car… well, let’s just say I didn’t notice a difference when covid lockdowns came around… and I haven’t had any luck finding an accessible virtual tabletop either(just signing up for Roll 20 gave me the impression I’d spend most of a game session fighting with the interface, and most of the other I’ve researched are desktop applications without a Linux version… or if there is a Linux client, it’s GUI-only and aside from Firefox, I live in the CLI).

    1. Ah, that’s seriously a shame! I can understand the difficulty. It can be impossible to find a game that doesn’t make considerations for accessibility. But if you have access to some kind of voice chat and a dice roller in the CLI, that should be enough to get a game going. I would definitely be down to give it a shot sometime! If you ever want to try to figure it out, send me an email! You might already have it, but it’s trappleton at gmail.com.

  15. Don’t actually have a microphone I can plug into my computer unless you count plugging in a pair of earphones with one dead ear piece and taking advantage of the fact that microphones and speakers are fundamentally the same thing operating in reverse, but I suppose buying a microphone would be the easiest part…

    And I’ve actually written my own dice class in C++(pulling up the source code, the date listed in the comments at the top coupled with the class being in the same source file as the dice games program I wrote to show off tthe class suggest it was actually my final project for the first semester of the two-semester C++ course I took in college)… And while I suspect the professor would’ve been happy with just rolling d6s, I coded it to do any number of sides, and starting value, and included a multiplier that can handle things like a d10% or numberingg a d20 5-100 by fives… does require all the numbers be connsecutive multiples of a constant multiplier thouugh… perhaps I should go through my old code, upgrade the dice class to allow the creation of dice based on a array of values, separate the class from the dice games so it can be used in other programs and write some more game code using it… skimming through the primitive menu I used, I don’t think I ever got all the logic for Yahtzee coded up… and I had forgotten about the Triple-6 game I created for the project(The program uses 3d6 for it, one numbered normally, one numbered by tens, and one numbered by hundreds and your score is just the sum of the three dice, kind of silly, but hey, considering gambling has long been held as a immoral past time by some, a game of chance where a perfect score is the number of the beast is kind of fitting)… and now that I think of it, I should probably get some of my code in a state for sharing on the Sanctuary… too bad I never got the hang of cross-compiling for Windows…

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