Bi Felicia!

[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled “immortality” after the poem by clare harner (more popularly known as “do not stand at my grave and weep”). the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]

During the Spanish Inquisition, people of red hair were identified as Jewish and isolated for persecution.[22] In Medieval Italy and Spain, red hair was associated with the heretical nature of Jews and their rejection of Jesus, and thus Judas Iscariot was commonly depicted as red-haired in Italian and Spanish art.[21] Writers from Shakespeare to Dickens would identify Jewish characters by giving them red hair, such as the villainous Jewish characters Shylock and Fagin.[90] The antisemitic association persisted into modern times in Soviet Russia.[19]

Feed your homunculus

Recast your wards

Drain all your old potions into the sewer system

Send that cursed demon tooth to the Wizard Council, their problem now

Somebody requested labradorite, so we’re gonna look at some labradorite!  We’ll start with this very cool piece of silver sheen labradorite.

This piece is full of very tiny black rod-shaped crystals.  These are crystals of ilmenite!  Every piece of labradorite I have ever seen has been full of this stuff.

The crystals are so small that they are invisible to the naked eye, and they have nothing to do with labradorite’s flashy colors.  (That happens due to how light interacts with labradorite’s crystal structure, and my microscope isn’t nearly powerful enough to show you that!)  However, the ilmenite in this particular piece is doing something really interesting!

Because the ilmenite crystals in this piece of labradorite are all aligned in pretty much the same direction, they all catch the light at the same angle.  At a macro level, this gives the stone a glittery effect, completely separate from its colorful labradorescence!  This glitter is called aventurescence.

Next let’s look at a very clear and gemmy piece of labradorite!  I bet we’ll be able to see the ilmenite really clearly in this one!

This piece has some really nice colors.  Unlike in the silver sheen labradorite, the ilmenite crystals in this piece are just kind of growing every whichway, so they don’t make the stone sparkly.

Zooming way in, we can see some interesting formations.  I’m not sure what causes this “dotted line” formation, but the ilmenite seems to do it a lot!

Ooh, this area is amazing!!  A crack inside the stone has caused the labradorite to do some wild things to the light passing through it!  It’s like how fractures in quartz can make little rainbows, but with the added optical effects of labradorescence.

Super gemmy labradorite being super gemmy~  Let’s zoom in on that.

It looks like a pastoral painting!  Look at that GLOW.

Everybody’s cracking jokes about how it’s a desperate attempt to stay relevant in the age of Amazon.

The stage itself was turned into a cafe:

You can’t even begin to comprehend the massive amounts of money this place makes, despite the fact that they turned the theatre boxes into reading nooks like this:

I’ve literally spent days holed up in there reading books for free while also consuming massive amounts of coffee and pastries.

I know this was definitely also rhetorical, but considering people in the notes are calling this one a heritage post, consider this an additional dose of My Dad Lore, aka a lot of other things he has pulled over the years

Somehow teamed up with his friends to get a fake person to pass driver’s ed back in high school, which I know is not just a made-up or exaggerated dad story because someone wrote the name of the same fake person in his and my mom’s wedding guest book

Once burned me a road trip CD for the drive home from college that turned out to consist of 21 “What’s New Pussycat?“s and one (1) “It’s Not Unusual”

Used to send me letters when I was away at summer camp about how everything at home was on fire, my sisters had gotten arrested, aliens had shown up, and various other crises – one time in full verse

Forced his office to reset the “Days since our last shark attack” sign someone put up as a joke when he borrowed one of me and my sisters’ toy plastic ones and stuck it on a coworker’s chair

Had another coworker ask him to retrieve a wireless mouse they left at the office on a business trip and proceeded to send them photos of it in increasingly threatening scenarios (about to be crushed by a car, etc)

Teamed up with me to get a cake for my middle sister’s graduation party with plastic dinosaurs on it that read “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TIMMY” so it looked like there’d been a mix-up at the bakery