treasure pile

Jack Delano

https://bloshka.info/

there's also this which also seems good but has less original sources and I haven't looked through as much :)

Colourful paint pigments preserved in their original pots.

*checks wiki*

Every stainless steel screw, nail, push tack, playground frame (yes most of those “plastic” playgrounds are built on a steel frame or if a titanium frame the bolts and screws are still steel), rebar), the zipper on your jeans -

Like look: Iron is actually so ubiquitous in modern life it’s INVISIBLE while being EVERYWHERE. If you WANTED to meet a creature sensitive to iron you would have to work to make sure you didn’t either invite them somewhere surrounded by it, or end up wearing it by accident.

Carbon dissoves into iron very very easily in its liquid form. You don’t actually get steel by adding carbon to the ore; you get steel by removing all but a small and very specifically handled amount of carbon from the steel. 

Like sure: carbon is part of what gives steel its particular qualities. But that carbon is already there in the ore, and inherent in the smelting process to get the ore to actually be iron, and to get good steel you actually remove most of the carbon and avoid adding much more, down to a few tenths of a percent. 

[nb: sometimes the actual process of this, especially back when we literally only knew how to do things by trial-and-error and did not actually understand the atomic metallurgy involved, is a weird back-and-forth of adding carbon via charcoal and then burning it away, etc, and it gets complex; the result is still “get rid of most of the carbon” and making steel always involves removing carbon from the iron smelted from ore.]

(You might be able to argue that the chromium usually added for stainless interferes, but since the premise is usually that rust - ie oxidization - destroys the effects of iron and the chromium is added to prevent that …enh. And that still does nothing to non-stainless.) 

So like sure: you can imagine that nothing but “pure” iron actually works, and any adulturation makes it useless. In which case just about nothing we have ever called “iron” or used as “iron” for most of human existence - absolutely including all of those “iron” bells, horseshoes, nails, and so on, that the legends are built around - counts as iron, because steel is quite literally the purest form of iron that has much functional use for us, and the iron we call “steel” has quite genuinely become purer and purer iron over the centuries, with all of the processes involved in making steel (especially not-stainless-steel) being based on removing the carbon already present (or avoiding the stuff that gets in naturally via the air in the process of smelting) and creating basically the purest that iron can get before it becomes soft and useless for anything except chemistry and magnetism. 

Maybe it’s something else keeping the fae away in the modern day, and someday in the future someone will be picking apart stories about how you can kill the fae with, e.g., “pencil lead” (without specifying “(technically graphite)”) and wondering why the fae aren’t back since no one uses pencils anymore and there are laws to keep lead out of consumer products.

And, despite the fondness of modern SF writers and others to neatly and tidily class various fey and other European folkloric creatures as all tricksy-false-dangerous-bad, OR all good-safe-friendly, OR even to be able to neatly state which kind are which based on rules … honestly in the past they ran the whole spectrum, depending on how each region, village or even family perceived things, and when the story got written down, and where anyone was on the most recent religious or social upheavals or … anything else. And some of them didn’t care that much about iron in general, but specifically reacted to the iron horseshoe, or iron nails, or iron bells, or … 

When you actually dig into the folklore, especially digging into it with the same rigour that you do other parts of history and historical anthropology and archaeology, rather than just taking the eighteenth century compendiums (who really liked to homogenize if they could) at face-value, one actually finds a huge range of underlying assumptions in the folklore about how and why the iron or iron artefacts are working, and how much of the other part (that is: the holiness of the bell, the magic of the blacksmith, the power of the cunning man or woman who’s messing around with this stuff, even literally how and where the “supernatural” creatures fit into the predominantly devoutly Xtian landscape - and no it’s not always just as evil devils!) is important; it’s a big mess, because it’s folklore, not a rigorously thought out worldbuilding norm, and not subject to rigorous falsifiable investigation. 

Folklore is usually messy like that. 

fucking steel have i yelled lately about how it’s

it’s not a thing, it’s not–there’s not one thing you can point to can go ‘that’s steel’ even as much as you can say that i.e. copper and tin yield bronze, it’s just—–

like

you know why we can get it to do so many, wildly different things in different contexts, thin and springy or massive and rigid or–

you know why? you know???? because ‘steel’ is just a catch-all term for ‘iron we did some intense shit to.’

the intense shit varies! it necessarily involves extreme heat and control of carbon content, but the how much and how and when of these things is what you alter to get different results.

steel is iron that we have compelled to assume specific structures on the molecular level. depending on what we want from the iron those structures vary! it’s still iron, though. usually more iron than iron, as op has discussed. it’s just iron that we’ve tortured in especially exquisite ways. it’s just iron! what the hell! what the hell!

loving this pushback against the continued promulgation of early-modern cultural homogenization ty ty and also

Also what about the iron present in most soil? Soil that doesn’t drain well usually has lots of reduced iron that is visible in the form of grey mottles. I’m from an area where the soil is bright red from clay content, so it’s not easy to see the other iron at first glance, but it’s there.

I mean from a fiction POV, you can literally do anything you want, and can also mess around with “how MUCH iron is too much?” “what does the iron actually DO?” and so on, because it’s literally garlic and vampires. 

From a lore perspective, pick your poison: as noted multiple times, almost all of the folklore we have about this shit is actually derived from extremely and emphatically Christian sources so if you go back to them you’ll rapidly find that it’s as much the fact that it’s a cross, or a church bell, or been blessed by the priest, or the human using the iron thing is saying the Lord’s Prayer or the Hail Mary, or the bones of a saint are involved, or whatever. Because the actual folklore we have is from an aggressively Xtian era - or is being passed down through families (and is therefore idiosyncratic in the way these things are) with huge variation. 

An equivalent is the whole “eat hot lead” quip. The “hot lead” isn’t some special kind of lead. It’s just lead (in bullets)… .that is hot … .because it came out of a gun. 

I think the idea of “cold iron”, or “cold-forged iron”, comes from the practical necessities of RPGs. “This creature is resistant to all weapons except those made of the material that pretty much all weapons are made of” isn’t going to fly.

Bertha Wegmann (1847 – 1926) 

Four-leafed glass door made by the Catalan artisan, carpenter and stained-glass maker Frederic Vidal around the year 1900. He was a master of the cloisonné technique of stained glass.

Some more of his work, all made around 1900:

And a beautiful example of his furniture:

(By the way, Frederic Vidal was the brother of the Modernist painter Lluïsa Vidal).

1: the most famous one is the first one we found and it was by a person named Nanni. I just think we should remember the person who wrote it

2: we wound up finding like, a whole closet full of complaints about Ea-Nasir

3: I read translations of several of them as well as suplemental information on Ea-Nasir by the professionals that studied him, and it's been a while, but i will now tell you a summary of his life story to the best of my ability as i remember it

He started off early in his career becoming one of the main copper dealers working directly for the palace, where he built up a good reputation for himself.

Then he moved into being more of a middleman, buying the copper from the outlying city states and then selling it to his old contacts at the palace. And also on the open market. Soon he was dealing in both the wholesale ingots (which is what most of the complaints are about) and finished copper products direct to both smaller merchants and the general public - things like decorated copper pots etc.

At some point he wound up in one of the city states buying copper and stayed there.

It was the island city state of Dilmun, in the Persian Gulf, downstream from his hometown of Ur.

There is absolutely no evidence to say i am right about this next point, but i know how people work, and given what follows, i strongly suspect he got in with the wrong crowd and developed either a gambling problem or a drug problem (or it could have just been women and beach parties, but i do suspect drugs or gambling more)

Anyway, what we do know is that he sort of stopped coming back to his old city, and started running a sort of scam. I really think it was basically like the bernie madoff thing, he would say "if you give me the money, i can buy you the best copper at a good price" and someone would give him the money, and then he would spend that money, and then he would get really really hard to track down, and then when the person finally did track him down he'd be like "fine!"

So he'd get someone else to give him money for top shelf copper, then he'd spend like half that money on bottom grade copper and send the shitty copper to the person who was hounding him to complete his contract. That person would write an angry letter, often threatening legal action, and Ea-Nasir would basically be like "listen, you gave me money for 100 ingots of copper, i sent you 100 ingots of copper; if you don't want them now, that's on you"

He did this a lot. Two of the guys in charge of buying copper for the palace itself (his old job) had to buy good copper with money out of their own pocket after he took the palace money they gave him and sent shitty copper to the palace. And remember, he KNEW what the palace standards were.

At some point in all this he got himself a business partner, and one of the tablets is from this business partner, and it basically says "i'm sending you a good customer with good money who is exactly what this business needs. Please, please do not be the asshole you usually are."

Another complaint tablet i liked is like the third one this author is sending him and among other things it says "do you not know how tired of you i am?"

Anyway, as you can imagine, he burned all his bridges, ruined his reputation, and drove himself out of business. At which point he had to move back home. My guess is he left some angry loan sharks in Dilmun holding a large IOU when he bailed.

Then he tried to start a lot of other businesses. I think he opened a restaurant briefly? He even did some speculative real estate.

Somewhere in here, he had to sell some of his house to his neighbors. All the houses were touching, like, they all had shared walls like an apartment complex, so he basically plastered over the doors to, idk, half his house, and they knocked a door in one of the shared walls to access it, and just like that half his property became part of his neighbors' home. He must have been very broke.

In the end, he wound up running a second hand clothing store out of what was left of his home.

So that's the tale of Ea-Nasir, people really have been living the same stories since always, haven't we.

here it is today