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height i could understand. reasonably short people seem like they’d be advantageous for space travel, up to a point — same as pilots on earth. but legs seem.. pretty important. i can’t imagine that someone without legs would be as mobile or able to stabilise themselves as well as legged individuals in low gravity, and doing an eva to repair something outside a spacecraft would seem especially perilous.

i agree with the second half of your comment, but with regards to the first part, don’t you think that space travel — an endeavor that subjects the human body and mind to immense, unadapted-for stress — can/should only be undertaken by the most physically and mentally capable?

we’re hardly experts at space travel (google says only 533 people have been to orbit). given that number, any disability is significant for the job of going to space at this point, especially when every action can potentially bring immediate death to everyone around you.

i’m with you on the technical bit. in any style of writing where the goal is to concisely convey information, you’re definitely right that style doesn’t matter in most cases, so repeating words isn’t really something to avoid. to kinda piggyback off your anecdote, a lot of people trip into that pitfall of trying to make whatever they’re writing sound too unique, and in doing so, they (often inadvertently) add a layer of verbosity that adds wordiness instead of anything meaningful to what they’re trying to say.

my issue is that i reuse adverbs and adjectives within a few sentences of one anther and simply don’t notice it — like saying “rain fell in gentle waves,” then a sentence or two later, “the tide rolled in, soft, gentle, crashing against…” it just feels.. lazy, unimaginative to me. i read somewhere that it’s a quirk of the brain (perhaps only for some people, i don’t remember) where words in immediate memory get looped and “stuck” there. that seems to be what happens when i write, and it chaps my ass.

prowritingaid has a very good, free, web-based tool that will parse out all sorts of neat things in your work. for example: i write fiction and have a real problem with “echos” — words that i repeat within a certain distance of each other — and i even miss them when proofing/editing. pwa is a godsend for this. if scrivener would add their own native version of this (hint hint incase any of you L&L people lurk here.. and it would take ten lines of java that i’d give to you for free) i would be completely covered for a word processor.

on the other side, the desktop version is expensive and needs some ui work badly. they say it’s ai-based, but it feels more like a reason to drm the product than anything. still, the free version is excellent for my limited use scope, so i hope you’d have some luck with it too

the other thing to try and do is find someone that you would use as a language buddy. there’s a subreddit (i forgot the name) where people look to pair with others who are looking for/offering certain language combos, then you get on imessage/whatsapp/whatever and use each other as a language bot. right now i’m looking for someone who speaks mandarin or cantonese and needs someone who speaks english, so if that’s you op, hit me up

can we get apple/google to factory unlock bootloaders too? how about x64 chipset options instead of locking down their phones with arm?

i’m kind-of not kidding, either — more asking. is there precedent for governments being able to force companies to completely open up their systems to whatever the courts define as “competitive?”