Just me and my thoughts

which, let's be honest, can be pretty random

[rethornall]

Verbal confrontation

I always really liked how Sarabi responded to Scar with dignity to all his tantrums

[onlytiktoks]

[depsidase]

[lazywriterinthedark]

[tooies]

reblog and put in the tags what your childhood password that you just stuck with is!

[looseinthecatroom]

[organicmatter]

i fucking love when halloween music is just surf rock with a ghoul laughing in the background

[ukiyoebirds]

You can give a bird a cracker, but you can’t make it check it’s g-diffusers.

Now in color!

[penny-anna]

Rocky on the trip back to Erid registering that Grace has defaulted to using he/him for him for sexism reasons and that they don't actually have to go by he/him. xe does some research on the human computer and spends several weeks cycling through different pronoun sets. starts switching so frequently Grace becomes convinced sie has started being difficult on purpose. after a while Grace is like omg will you just pick one and stick with it. Rocky is like okay i have decided. rock/rocks. rockself. Grace like well i can't argue with that.

[penny-anna]

#see the hill that I will die on is that if Andy weir was cooler rockey would use either they them or xe xir#you’re telling me cool middle school teacher Ryland grace is unfamiliar with the concept of fun new genders#absolutely not. his students have taught him about singular they them and neopronouns

Grace trying to explain to Rocky that they can be whatever they want to be and presenting a whole list of different pronoun options and Rocky (who has no concept of gender) being like 'why would I care about any of this'

[penny-anna]

Rocky: which pronouns does Grace use question?

Grace: he/him

Rocky: okay. Rocky will use he/him too

Grace: okay but I feel like defaulting to he/him promotes a patriarchal kind of mindset and we should be more thoughtful about it

Rocky: okay so use the other standard pronouns

Grace: she/her?

Rocky: yeah

Grace: okay but that feels weird too

Rocky: why weird question

Grace:

Grace, later, lying awake: I never considered that Rocky might wanna be a she... Am I a bad person?

[penny-anna]

Rocky: Grace mix it up suggestion

Grace: I guess I could

Rocky: Rocky he/she/they/it

Grace: I don't know if you can use it

Rocky: why not question

Grace: it's just considered dehumanising?

Rocky:

Rocky, being a little shit: I choose it/its

[penny-anna]

Rocky: this conversation boring, let's go back to Grace tones

Grace: okay so you won't pick a pronoun but I have to pick a tonal inflection?

Rocky: my thing more important statement

Grace: okay fine can't you just your tones for me?

Rocky: but Grace not qualified engineer

Grace: well is there a schoolteacher tone?

Rocky: uhh no

Rocky: schoolteacher not

Rocky: schoolteacher not prestige profession statement

Grace:

Grace: WOW.

[penny-anna]

Grace: is there not like a default tone to use when you don't know all this stuff about a person?

Rocky: yes but very rude to use for close friend statement

Grace: wait hold up 🤔 you think of me as a close friend?

Rocky: yes maybe Grace shut up now

[penny-anna]

Grace several years into their voyage, finally getting good enough at understanding Eridian to clock when Rocky has switched back to using the Neutral Tone for him, thereby implying that they are no longer friends: HEY??

[penny-anna]

Grace, in the middle of a big argument: did you just. dead person inflection me?

Rocky: uh-huh

Grace: does that mean what I think it means

Rocky: it means what it means statement

Grace: come ON

[kwarrtz]

I always assumed pencil lead was so called because it did in fact used to be made of elemental lead, which was replaced by graphite in more recent times, possibly because of lead’s toxicity. Turns out that assumption was dead wrong. Lead has been used for writing at various points in history, yes, but never as part of any implement we would recognize as a pencil. I’m fact, prior to the early 1500s, the closest things to a pencil that existed were the tools used for metalpoint drawing, which consisted of a wire of some metal, often jeweler’s silver but never, as far as I know, lead, inserted into a wooden rod. What changed in the early 1500s you ask? Well, that was when a large deposit of strikingly pure graphite was discovered in northern England. People quickly began cutting sticks of the stuff and using it to write, but because of its softness it had to be encased to handle. Initially rope and sheepskin were used, but eventually the transition was made to wood and the modern pencil was born.

In other words, pencil lead has always been made of graphite. The thing is, for centuries people assumed that the stuff in this deposit was just some weird kind of lead ore (this is why graphite was archaically referred to as plumbago), a belief which becomes more understandable when you realize that to this day, this is the only large deposit of pure, solid graphite ever discovered. As there was no means of artificially producing solid graphite back then they had no way of knowing of its existence as a unique substance, and lead was the material whose properties most closely resembled those of the stuff in the new deposit. Or to cast it in a completely different light, today we would say it’s wrong to call graphite lead because lead is the 86th element whereas graphite is a form of carbon, but if, prior to this chemical definition, lead was just a colloquial term for any soft, dark gray metallic substance, were they even wrong? Would they have understood if we tried to correct them? Maybe it’s more accurate to just say that the definition of the word has changed.

(As a fun aside, one of the other early uses for graphite was as a lining for cannonball molds, making for rounder and thus more effective cannonballs, and so the deposit was quickly put under the strict control of the crown. This meant that for years graphite for pencils actually had to be smuggled out of the mine.)

[facelessoldgargoyle]

Wow!! That’s so interesting. If you know, what does being assumed to be a lead ore have to do with the name plumbago?

[ofthefog-deactivated20220221]

plumbum is the technical name for lead, coming from latin.

[headspace-hotel]

Wait tell us more about the forbidden smuggled pencil lead

[magiclilybean]

Wait tell us more about how and when they starting making synthetic graphite

[magiclilybean]

Wait tell us about how that deposit of graphite came into existence

[kwarrtz]

I was curious about this too. The origin of natural graphite deposits is apparently a bit of a contentious issue, but I found this paper which looks at the Borrowdale deposit in particular (which is the one I was referring to in my original post). I’m not a geologist so the details are over my head, but the gist of what they’re suggesting seems to be that volcanism in the area brought relatively carbon-rich rocks from deep in the crust up closer to the surface where that carbon ended up saturating hydrothermal fluids. As that water circulated through the hills in the region the conditions were right for that carbon to then crystallize out as graphite.

I should also clarify that graphite in general isn’t rare in the Earth’s crust, it just isn’t usually in a particularly usable form to begin with, being either very impure or consisting of tiny flakes. What makes the Borrowdale deposit unique is that it contains relatively pure graphite chunks large enough to hold in your hand, or to, say, cut into lead for pencils. Over the years though we’ve discovered ways to purify and make use of graphite even in its more commonly found forms. Modern pencil lead, for instance, is made by mixing graphite powder with clay and then baking it, so it isn’t actually pure graphite at all. This is why pencil lead comes in different softnesses (HB vs B4, etc.)--the higher the ratio of clay to graphite, the harder the resulting lead. According to Wikipedia this process was invented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795 while France was cut off from England’s natural graphite supply because of the Napoleonic Wars, so there’s yet another way the histories of pencil lead and British military affairs are oddly linked.

There are apparently other ways of synthesizing graphite, including ways of producing high-quality graphite crystals for scientific and industrial uses, but you’ll have to look into that yourself if you want to know the details of how they work.

[escuerzoresucitado]

[reading-writing-revolution]

[titsay]

we could sit together and do nothing all day—i'd still be the happiest

[64mpg]

u can just do whatever at any age all of the time nobody cares except teenagers

[64mpg]

teenager will be like ur 40 with a hobby ? 💀 that’s sad <- nobody else thinks this way though they are just going through some stuff

[ukiyoebirds]

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it check it’s g-diffusers.

[megustamemes]

Sofa sitting positions

[rights-for-redshirts]

I found it

[mygfturnedintothelawofcycle]

This has to be like an ancient relic or something

[titsay]

naps with u >>>

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Neighborhood poll, b/c they can't decide.

[justsomeguycore]

horror movie showing a child’s drawing of the monster or ghost or whatever but instead of a little kid and crayons they’re like a preteen and it’s manga style

[jefpoo421]