neat!

Oh hello

what a handsome bird. I have never seen these fellas before

They're really just chillin out there with purple mohawks huh

Thank you for telling me about them!

And why should I do that for the head of a family that oversaw the British Empire's legendarily brutal concentration camps in colonialist Kenya during the 1952-1960 Mau Mau rebellion, has personally and repeatedly shielded credibly accused rapist Prince Andrew and tried to get the scandal to go away, personally paid Andrew's financial settlement while the family treated Meghan Markle terribly and gave her none of the same protection, exerted a huge amount of control over UK public finances without any transparency or disclosure (while also receiving huge amounts of that money), got to personally edit laws according to her likes and dislikes, enjoyed sweeping legal immunities that are described as a "threat to UK democracy," is the most visible figurehead of British colonialism even as her descendants put on a horribly tone-deaf Caribbean tour (twice in one year!) that was basically about unreconstructed imperial imagery of the kind that is poisoning Britain, while the entire country buys into the fantasy that she is an impartial, uninvolved, kindly and benevolent grandmotherly figure....?

Okay, so, Labradorite.  Labradorite is complicated and sciencey, as all good rocks are.  I’ll see if I can explain it in a way that makes any sense!  (Once again, I’m not a scientist!  Correct me if I’m wrong!)

Most minerals, when they’re bright and pretty and colorful, look like that because while they were forming some impurities got mixed into them - usually metals like iron, copper, or titanium.  Without any impurities, these rocks would naturally be colorless.  We call these guys allochromatic (other-colored).

Other gemstones are certain colors because those elements are an important part of how they formed.  They’re not impurities that got mixed in, they’re actually part of the gemstone.  Their natural color IS the color you’re seeing.  We call them idiochromatic (inherently colored).

But labradorite doesn’t get its color from either of those things.  Labradorite is special.  It’s part of a third group: psudochromatic (false colored).  These rocks aren’t colorful at all, but they LOOK that way when light passes through them.

See, labradorite is actually just… grey.  From most angles, it looks like this:

You have to look at labradorite from a pretty specific angle to get those flashy colors, so when we cut it into cabochons for jewelry, or just polish up big pieces of it, we’re careful to do so at the most flattering angle, the angle that shows the most schiller, or “those cool glowy colors.”

Why just the one angle?  It’s all about labradorite’s crystal structure, and how it’s formed.

Labradorite is a rock that cooled down really slowly.  Because of that, it’s made of lots of very very thin layers of crystal, stacked on top of each other and all pretty much aligned in the same direction.  These are alternating layers of albite (mostly sodium), and orthoclase (mostly potassium), which solidify at very slightly different temperatures.  Labradorite is a rock that cooled in just the right way for a thin layer of albite to form, then a thin layer of orthoclase, then another thin layer of albite, and so on.

When light hits labradorite at the perfect angle to pass through a bunch of these layers, you get the schiller effect.  Basically, a little bit of the light gets bounced off the first layer and back to your eyes.  The rest of the light passes through to the second layer, and a little bit gets bounced back to your eyes again, and so on.  Every time more light gets sent back to you, it’s a little out of sync, and this makes it look like a different color.

(This is a very simplified way of explaining this.)

If these layers were all perfectly the same size, you’d get a uniform color, like the blue in moonstone.  But in labradorite, these layers might be different widths in different places, so different parts of the stone will reflect back wildly different colors!  We call this effect labradorescence to differentiate it from the uniform colored adularescence found in moonstone and some opals.

Depending on where it’s found in the world, labradorite can reflect all sorts of different colors!

If you're cold they're cold, bring them inside

Anyway, she was super fucking homophobic and abusive to me when I told her I was gay, so here’s the recipe

4-6 lbs of Hamburger/turkey burger

1 pk onion soup mix OR ranch mix

1 TBs ketchup

1 Tbs spicy brown mustard,

1 Tbs bbq sauce

1 Tbs steak sauce

1 egg

mix, shape into a loaf in a big pan, and bake at 350 for 2 hrs (maybe 2 and a half if you’re feeling dangerous)

(6 servings)

-2lbs red potatoes

-1 cup butter (2 sticks)

-1 cup cream cheese (1 pack)

-Chives (optional)

-Salt & Pepper to taste

1. drop those bad boys (potatoes) in a big ol pot. U don’t even have to chop them just wash them

2. boil til soft!

3. Drain

4. Mash (usually they’re small enough you can use a fork if u don’t have one of those squashers) until its a pretty chunky mix

5. add the other stuff. Keep mashing

Me in June.

It is a place of railroads and passage, of river barges and deep pockets hidden away like heartache - towns lost to the swallowing tongue of the green or that lay fallen beneath dark lakes of the inner dark.

featuring Fowler and his slightly disappointed father