wizard on muggle violence is prevented by virtue of there being like a 50/50 chance that muggle is packing heat. muggle on wizard violence is prevented by knowing that wizard can give you boils spelling LIL BITCH on your forehead if you try to start something.

‘did you witness any strange or inexplicable acts while you were in america?’ they demand. 

english wizard: *two hour lecture on legal history*

That’s why Ilvermorny is “the only American wizarding school.” That’s why the American magical population feels like something the size of the British one pasted on something a couple orders of magnitude bigger. That’s why Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them is so white. That’s why nonmagical people have a persistent quiet willingness to believe in magic just enough to allow for the possibility of its existence, and fill their stories with it, and readily interact with the idea of it. It’s an elaborate homegrown smokescreen to hide hundreds of integrated magical communities from the magical community that demands magical communities keep themselves secret.

The forces behind the International Statute of Secrecy made themselves such an absolute nuisance that some 95% of the magical population of America stole their hide-from-the-muggles spells and locked them out of knowledge of their existence.

The International Wizarding Community: “You are now forbidden to let any nonmagical people know you exist.”

Six Gazillion American Wizarding Communities: *Jedi mind trick hand motions* “Fuck you, we don’t exist. Nothing to see here.”

The International Wizarding Community: “Looks like the problem’s been solved, I guess. Pip pip cheerio.”

“Listen here, you fucking rattler, I do not have time to hear about the differences between hares and rabbits.”

think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?

writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?

maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.

how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?

how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept - how does that work?

what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?

me:

me:

me:

me:

See, it shares its habitat with ants that would happily drag a vulnerable pupae off to become snack food for their hideous hive mind. So the caterpillar builds a long stem leading down from its anchor point. Ants aren’t so good at climbing down such a narrow line, so the pupae is safe.

The net part comes from dealing with rain, which would flow down the stem and waterlog the cocoon. So the cocoon is a net, which allows for drainage and easy drying out afterwards.

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!

Under Grey Skies - Chapter One

Necromancy is one of those schools of magic that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Tobirama learned that the hard way a long, long time ago, and now lives with the consequences.

Madara finds him interesting. Hashirama just wants Madara to behave. Tobirama could say the same to Hashirama.