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You want tech with materials.

Look up heterojunctions, strained silicon, strained GAs (gallium arsenide), and quantum dots.  Also angled (rotated) graphene layers.

Oh, heck, look up resublimated thiotimoline.  Maybe you can use it .

I'd like to blame Würd, since MicroSlough does deserve most of the blame (eg. Magick Quotation Marks).  But changes in The (One and Many) Right Way to store and display characters have turned various real problems into mud to be tracked everywhere.

Start, if you are of stout heart, with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers … racter_Set .  Chase the links, especially the ones into UniCode, and venture upon the Basic Multilingual  Plane.

I'll try to get to a few reviews tonight.  I'm still looking at Kirsey's backstory, considering how to change B1 and B2, and not getting very far with the overall story arc.  I don't like the start I have on K's life story, and have a direction I like more,  but there are details that have to mesh, and fit with tbe timeframe.  Nor do I have a title.  But the big thing is to get Kirsey's parents together, with their circumstances and baggage, and do it in about 6,000 interesting words.  "Nitwit, blubber, oddment, tweak" just won't do.

And of course, projects and projects.

Passives have other uses, and one just bubbled up in my head:  'They were beset with problems' can set the topic, an introduction before presenting the bill of particulars.  You could force it into the grammatical active: 'They had many problems', but the 'They' are passive victims either way, and the sentence has less force, perhaps due to the less vivid verb, perhaps due to the mismatch between grammar and meaning.

There are also some things that naturally fall into the passive voice: "I was born in 1966 ..."  It also works well for certain types of statements: "I'd been told that people here were aloof.  Sometimes I wondered if they could speak English."  "I was taught to use a comma before or after direct address."  And sometimes it signals weasel-wording, and sometimes the active subject is unkown or irrelevant:  "The monument was erected after the great flood in '53."  Passive voice has a place, but it usually lacks color and force, unless the topic provides it:  "I've been arrested, twice, for letting my ice-cream cone drip on the police station steps."

It's best when you don't notice it.

Followup thought on that third example: The speakers are not identified; they are anonymous voices in a crowd.  I have no problem with the original way.  The reader doesn't  need to attach any identity to either.

This was posted in a place I often read.  It's off-topic there, so there's no point in looking for more

https://youtu.be/bzDtmMXJ1B4

A national plan will only help if it's a good plan AND it's universally applicable.  Oh, and it must be adjusted as we learn.  We've learned that asymptomatic transmission doesn't occur.  We've learned that full lockdowns don't work, but targeted quarantines might.   We've learned early on that Medicare reimbursement rules required hospitals to send sick, infectious people back into nursing homes UNLESS the state acted to forbid it, as Florida did.  We've got evidence of treatments working or not working, but the national planners (FDA) threaten to pull the licenses of doctors who use the drugs off-label.

No plan survives contact with the enemy, because if the plan survives, the army locked into the plan doesn't.  What's needed is to distill our experience into a policies that are flexible enough to work in a wide variety of circumstances, and comprehensive enough to cover all the territories on the battlefield.  The US Army has a Center for Lessons Learned.  It hasn't always lived up to its name, but it has helped a lot.  We need this for pandemics.

And we need elected officials more concerned with fighting the disease, using the ever-growing body of knowledge, than with enforcing their own authority by threatening religious communities and threatening ever-harder lockdowns for harmless 'violations'.

My approach: Start dialogue, drop into flashback.  Return from flashback, use closing dialogue.  I've got limited practice, but if it's needed for the story it can work.

Not for a while, I'm afraid.  I'm in reactive mode.

To those waiting on reviews: I'm tied up into and maybe through Tuesday.  I'll get back to you then.