Wait... Wait wait wait, let me understand something.
So for this cisgender woman with naturally high testosterone (and/or an intersex condition, I do not know her specific condition and it's honestly none of my business) has to be be forced to take the same testosterone suppressing medications that these same competitive regulatory committee said wasn't good enough to suppress trans women's testosterone to allow them to compete in women's sports.
If she has naturally high testosterone, similar to that that trans women experience in their lives pre-transition then wouldn't she have the same advantages that a trans woman supposedly inherently has and can not be corrected with said testosterone suppression?
Like, no one should have to undergo forced medical treatment to be able to compete or to make it "fair" for their competition. Other athletes have all kinds of natural advantages, like Michael Phelps having an abnormal wingspan and larger lungs and heart. In fact, every high level athlete has some kind of physical advantage, that's how they're such high level athletes. You think the people they beat out for their spots just, what, didn't work as hard? Didn't grab those bootstraps tight enough? Fuck no.
Racism, intersexism, and transphobia are all linked, and this case is maybe the most glaringly obvious one.
Impulse looks up, surprised. He wasn't expecting anyone today. He makes his way to the side entrance of the silo, waiting for the doors to open.
When they do, he stares.
"Hi, Impulse!" Shadow says brightly, waving from behind Doc, who is standing with his arms crossed and eyes- both flesh and cybernetic- narrowed. The chill coming off his newly iced prosthetic arm causes a gentle mist as the potion vapors dissipate.
"Impulse. As you can see, there has been a...development."
"It was no one's fault." Doc says as he and Shadow follow Impulse deeper into the silo, down on the agricultural level where he'd been putting in another farm. "A creeper over a cavern I had not yet lit. My redstone is in shambles and so, it seems, is Skizz."
"We fell!" Shadow says brightly. "Saturation saved our asses but you know, one good CRACK to the noggin and the joysticks change hands!"
"You're alright though? Is he-...Shadow is he awake?"
"See THAT'S why we love you, Dippledoppler, your A to B problem solving and noooo! He is not! And I am kind of freaking out!!!"
Impulse gestures and Shadow immediately moves around Doc, dropping onto the shulker Impulse had been working from and leaning on him. Impulse curls an arm around his shoulders and looks at Doc, who raises an eyebrow.
"How long?" He asks.
"The whole time, dude," Shadow says, sounding suddenly drained.
Impulse nods. "Since I've known him. The, uh, swapping isn't new either but I mean you've met Skizz- the parameters are so specific it almost never happens. He has to ALMOST die, and then recover enough to survive another hit."
"Ah. So. A rarity, then."
"I got to see the nether spawn for like a second and a half!" Shadow points out. "Before a hoglin wrecked our shit."
"Mm. And if I ask who is in..charge?"
"Skizz," Impulse says, Shadow clearly drifting off leaning on him. "Shadow is- look Doc we don't KNOW what Shadow is. We're pretty sure he's not like an alternate Skizz but he's not STUCK either, he doesn't remember anything before Skizz."
"And the teeth and the eyes and the combat proficiency?"
Impulse shrugs. "Don't know."
"I see. I am alarmed. Impulse you can understand why I am alarmed, yes?"
"I mean yeah so am I but mostly because Shadow can't hear Skizz." Impulse looks worriedly down at Shadow, who is drifting in and out. "Its hard for them to communicate- like they're hearing each other on a delay AND speaking underwater. That's what Skizz wanted to work on this season, find a way to fully talk and then introduce the idea to the other hermits with a guaranteed method of communication."
Doc looks sharply at Shadow. "You asked if Skizz was awake and he said no."
"Yeah. Thats- I'm trying not to freak out but that isn't normal? At all?" Impulse sounds a little strained. "Wirh Shadow in charge he should be having the same half conversations Skizz always has. For either of them to be totally asleep is- its not great."
Doc looks between the dozing man leaning against Impulse and Impulse himself. "Has it occurred before?"
"....no?" Impulse sounds strangled.
"Mm. Shadow wake up."
"M'not asleep," Shadow mutters, half-asleep.
"No you are not. And you won't be. I am messaging Xisuma and the Hive and then you are both coming with me. I will need your aid, Impulse, in crafting an apology."
"An apology for what?" Impulse asks as he holds his arm tight for Shadow to haul himself upright.
"For horning in on Skizzleman's project," Doc says. "Since unprecedented situations call for unprecedented goats."
"Oh shit we going nuclear up in here. Nootch."
Impulse can't help the nervous chuckle. "Yeah, I guess we are. Uh. Call Tango?"
"Callin' Tango," Shadow says, still leaning on Impulse who has not moved to push him off. He flails an arm in the air, opening the chat. "How much yelling is he gonna do?"
<shadow> hey mr. The tek you free?
<tangotek> shadowadowadyman? Long time no talk what's up?
<impulsesv> uh yeah. There was an accident.
"I am sure we will hear him from beneath his mountain range," Doc says as he waves away his messaging interface. "Alright. Let's go."
<tangotek> a what?
<docm77> we'll meet you outside the Himalayas
<tangotek> what kind of accidentificating happened, doc?
Impulse sighs. "What do we even tell him?"
Shadow shrugs.
<shadow> the new kind!
They can, indeed, faintly hear a "THE WHAT?!" as they take off into the blue.
under US law, it's illegal for anyone who's not a member of a recognised native tribe to own an eagle feather. the penalty is a $100,000 fine.
14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."
and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.
so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.
on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.
probably a good thing I don't intend to move back there anytime soon. I wonder what the statute of limitations is on bird crimes.
@freedomisscaryshit I'm fucking dying I think you forgot the word "feathers" in your tags?? or do you just wish you could grab whole ass eagles that land in your yard??
As an Indigenous person, it continues to astound me that there are such strict laws (written by White people) in our name, laws against...picking up things just found on the ground. Like, stop pretending this is "for" us. We don't want this.
so, for clarity, that's not what this is. the law against possessing feathers is an anti-poaching measure, derived from a North American treaty protecting certain migratory bird species from hunting. that treaty has an exemption for indigenous people to allow tribes that use eagle feathers in ceremonial or religious practices to continue doing so.
i used to collect feathers (illegally) as a teenager and the thing is that it's incredibly important for feathers from wild birds to be illegal to possess because it ensures that they never become fashionable to wear. the reason we passed the migratory bird act was because the american and european fashion industry was driving species to extinction in a timespan of years. not just decades. the ecological devastation of exporting birds for hats was absolutely insane and people were watching wetlands and forests and meadows just empty out in realtime. look at the wikipedia article for the plume trade.
the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.
these laws, as harsh and ridiculous as they seem, saved flamingos, spoonbills, egrets, and all kinds of hawks and eagles from extinction. the minute these laws weaken and people can make money off killing them again, they're fucked.
This is good! I want to add some stuff here about the general economics angle and the specifics of when this law came into effect, because people are talking about capitalism and conservation but nobody is really talking about the hat industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
But TLDR:
People were buying and selling HUMAN BONES by claiming they were legally obtained, you think they won't do the same with bird feathers if there's any wiggle room?
Anyway, here's a longer thing:
Hats were a big deal in the late 19th/early 20th century. They were a way of showcasing status and wealth: if you had rare, expensive, gaudy feathers on there, you were important.
So they were in high demand, such high demand that many rare native species were hunted to extinction, or near it. This isn't purely a North American issue, but the law we're discussing is specific to North America.
For that reason, it's not "there are such strict laws (written by White people) in our name," as a previous poster said, but "there are such strict laws written to protect native species, with a carve-out for religious purposes that are most common to indigenous peoples." Indigenous peoples got a loophole in honor of their historic practices, but the law was very much about the birds. The eagle feather law, which is the part that mentions indigenous tribes, is the exceptions clause, not the migratory bird act as a whole, and there are also international treaties for this.
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service issues permits for otherwise prohibited activities under the act. These include permits for taxidermy, falconry, propagation, scientific and educational use, and depredation, an example of the last being the killing of geese near an airport, where they pose a danger to aircraft. (src)
I know people hate econ/business theory on the hellsite, but consumer psychology is CRUCIAL to understanding shit sometimes. This law was in response to excesses of the gilded age! Now, in a time of microtrends that are picked up by millions of people at a time, is like the WORST time to remove it!
Let me tell you about the Great Auk.
Once in a while, people ask why there aren't any penguins in the arctic, the way they are in the antarctic, what would happen if they introduced penguins to the arctic, how long would it take for penguins to evolve to fill that role?
The real answer, mostly, is that there was. That niche in the arctic used to have a species to fill it, which was called the Great Auk.
It was similarly sized to a penguin, similarly shaped. It had very, very good down for pillows: see here.
If you come for their Feathers you do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of the Feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leasure. This is not a very humane method but it is the common practize.
- Aaron Thomas of HMS Boston from 1794, via wikipedia
The bird went extinct by 1850. It's not the only one to have been specifically hunted to extinction (as opposed to the more common habitat destruction), but along with the passenger pigeon, is one of the most notable and obvious examples of that. Plume hunting for just feathers and not the actual meat or other attributes is a whole thing
So that's the cause of the act: past overhunting in pursuit of, mostly, plumage.
But why the phrasing?
In the world of the wealthy, there is a general love for expensive, rare goods as status symbols. There is a trade for the eggs and meat and skin of endangered species, wanting to say you ate or wore something so rare that it was illegal, but you had the money to make it happen, had the money to pay the fines.
Imagine there is a bird with plumage as vibrant and identifiable as a peacock, but infinitely rarer. Just a few dozen in the wild. Just one feather sells for a thousand dollars.
You could go out, spend days trying to find dropped feathers... or you could catch and kill one, and get a good two dozen feathers out of it. Almost twenty-five thousand dollars, right there, and without the act, then so long as nobody knows that you killed the bird, it's perfectly legal to have, and sell, that feather.
Poaching is hard to prove. You can say you found the feathers on the ground. You can say you found an already-dead bird half-eaten by the predator that killed it. It's easy to lie.
Or... you can make it illegal to even have the feather. You don't need to prove poaching if it's straight up illegal to have; you just have to prove ownership.
There are exceptions to this rule: if the animal is domesticated and farmed, then you can buy and sell the feathers all you want. This is why you can get goosedown pillows and feather quills, quail eggs and pheasant tails for hat plumes, peacock feathers at the fabric shop, or turkey breasts on the market.
You can also collect as many feathers as you'd like from invasive species, like house sparrows, common pheasants, or starlings. Sometimes you get the double-wammy of the species being both domesticated and invasive, like rock doves/pigeons. You can jsut grab one. Just grab an entire pigeon. I hear it's not that hard.
But there are some very pretty, very vibrant birds out there that are native to North America and could easily become endangered if it were legal to 'just happen to find and keep' the feathers. Top of mind for me are blue jays and cardinals.
Imagine if it was suddenly really hip to wear a fascinator with cardinal feathers. Imagine if a microtrend the size of labubus hit that was entirely about bluejay feathers. Imagine if that happened and you did not have protections in place for native species.
You, yes you personally, might genuinely find and want to keep a singular feather that you found. But you can't ignore that the market forces that have people poaching anything else will also apply to birds. Elephants and rhinos hunted for their tusks? We (general we for humans) made that illegal with narrow and heavily controlled exceptions. Beavers hunted for their furs? We made that illegal so that the populations could recover. Snowy egrets hunted for their feathers?
You make that illegal so it doesn't die out like the Great Auk did.
Sidebar about the baleen trade also!
You can buy it. You can legally buy baleen and products made of it. You cannot SELL it unless you're native
Because it's difficult to claim you just "found" baleen, it's a lot easier to produce a chain of acquisitions. If you want, say, a professionally made corset with real whalebone, you need to buy the baleen yourself and then commission someone to make the corset, but they cannot make the corset using baleen they bought unless they are native
That stuff is expensive because of the acquisition costs! You are unlikely to dispose of any kind of certificate of authenticity by accident.
You can't even buy feathers from a native person, because, among other things, that acquisition process would rarely be recorded with the kind of specificity that you'd need to be able to ENFORCE that.
You'd have people "finding" feathers and asking a native buddy to sign off on it being legally obtained, because people do that with other shit. If there is ANY gap in the law that doesn't require extensive paperwork (religious exemption to use feathers) or paper trail (whale parts), people will sneak through.
Felicity’s story was set in the beginnings of the American Revolution, and addressed the conflict that she faced when her loved ones were split between patriots and loyalists. It also covered the effects of animal abuse, and forgiving those who are unforgivable.
Samantha’s stories centered around the growth of industrial America, women’s suffrage, child abuse, and corruption in places of power. Also, it emphasises how dramatically adoption into a caring family can turn a life around.
Kit’s story is one of my favorites. Her family is hit hard by the Great Depression, and they begin taking in boarders and raise chickens to help make ends meet. Her books include themes of poverty, police brutality, homelessness, prejudice, and the importance of unity in difficult times.
Molly’s father, a doctor, is drafted during the Second World War. Throughout her story, friends of hers suffer the loss of their husbands, sons, and brothers overseas. Her mother leaves the traditional housewife position and works full-time to help with the war effort. They also take in an English refugee child, who learns to open up after a life of traumatic experience.
American Girl stories have always featured the very harsh realities of America through the years. But they’re always presented honestly, yet in ways that kids can understand. They just go to show that you don’t have to live in a perfect time to be a real American girl.
Dont you fucking dare disrespect the American Girls in my house. ESPECIALLY Addy!! That was my first REAL contact with the horrors of slavery, as I read about her father being whipped and sold and her mother escaping with her to freedom, but also how freedom was still a struggle.
Don’t forget Kirsten, the Swedish immigrant who had to deal with balancing her own culture and learning the english language and customs of her classmates, or Kaya (full name Kaya'aton'my, or She Who Arranges Rocks) , the brave but careless girl from the Nez Perce tribe, or Josefina, the Mexican girl learning to be a healer.
And then there are the later dolls, that kids younger than me would have grown up with (I was just outgrowing American Girl as these came out), like Rebecca, the Jewish girl who dreams of becoming an actress in the budding film industry, or Julie, who fights against her school’s gender policy surrounding sports in the 70s, or Nanea, the Hawaiian girl whose father worked at Pearl Harbor.
These books, these characters, are fantastic pictures into life for girls in America throughout the years, they pull no punches with the horrors that these girls had to face in their different time periods, and in many cases I learned more history from these series than social studies at school. And that’s without even mentioning the “girl of the year” series where characters are created in the modern world to help girls deal with issues like friend problems, moving, or bullying. We do NOT disrespect American Girl in this house.
American Girl is probably going to be the only exposure young girls are going to get to history from a female perspective. This is actually kind of important considering that in history classes we dont really get that exposure. We dont hear about what women felt and endured during these time periods cause schools are too busy teaching us about what happened from the male perspective, which is not unimportant, but we need both. Girls need both.
These books were such a crucial part of my childhood and shaped my love of history, which still ensures today. These books can be a young girl’s first lessons in diversity and cultural awareness (hopefully burying that insensitive “we’re all Americans” tripe) and looking at history from more perspectives than just that taught in school. They also are an example of how women have ALWAYS been part of history, which some people would rather us not believe.
I think Kit and Kaya were the newest American Girls when I started “aging out” of the books, but hearing about some of these kinda makes me want to revisit them!
OP (of the tweet thread) was either a actively trying to start shit or is just a huge fucking moron. Probably both.
I’d like to point out that the company that makes American Girl dolls actually doesn’t skimp when doing their research and they don’t make the dolls with the intent to be offensive in any way:
And they departed from the norm in Kaya’s doll to fit her culture! The other dolls all show their teeth, and Kaya does not because that is considered rude in the Nez Perce culture!
It is absolutely true that these books covered the stuff in history that was absent from our history books. I still distinctly remember reading about Addy being forced to eat bugs she missed on tobacco plants, and that started me out from a different perspective and made it easier for me to know to reject the sanitized version of the slave trade we’re taught in school. And these books are targeted at ages 8+, which is a pretty critical time for developing your own thinking and morals.
when i was in 3rd grade i was reading the Meet Addy book at school & a couple boys made fun of me for reading a “doll book” - my teacher overheard & started reading Meet Addy to the class after every recess. everyone became extremely invested & by the end of the year we had read the entire collection of Addy books & did a presentation on the civil war at the end of the year that we all presented to the class one by one.
i think back on this & realize that as third graders we were talking about how awful slavery was & because we were simply innocent kids without any societal or institutional influence yet, all of us could kept saying “why would you treat a HUMAN like that ?!” this one girl for her birthday invited all of us for her party & she got the Addy doll - every single one of us (boys included) held her & was in awe of this doll - it was such a touching experience.
i went back home about a year ago & ran into my third grade teacher in the grocery store. she said that year opened up a whole new teaching structure for her. she now reads american girl stories to her students starting day one of class every day to calm them down after recess & she’ll get through maybe four or five sets of books a year. she has the dolls in the room with packets on information from the doll’s time period that her students can “check out” to take home for weekends to care for them.
we oftentimes overlook how powerful toys can be in influencing young children & american girl honestly knew that kids could read intense moments in history & synthesize the issues to learn how to be a better person. my grandma bought me my first doll, molly, when i was only six & the dolls became a huge part of my childhood. when i turned 21 a couple years ago - we were living in minneapolis - she took me to have lunch for my birthday at the american doll place in the mall of america & bought me the Addy doll for my birthday. it was such a powerful moment i hasn’t expected.
i’ve since gotten rid of majority of my childhood toys, but i still have every single one of my dolls & all the books that i plan on gifting to my future children.
I’m white and my first real introduction to slavery and the underground railroad was Addy. She was a young girl like me I could connect to and care about her story. American Girl does a great job of making history relevant to kids.
Also American Girl sells all sorts of books unrelated to the dolls. The Care and Keeping of You books were super important as I started puberty and were the most comprehensive, non judgemental account of what was going to happen.
They also have “the smart girls guide” series which covers topics like crushes, worry, middle school, drama and gossip, sports, friendship, the digital world, communication, money, confidence, etc.
I want to say I think there was an American Girl Doll magazine series that came out, but don’t quote me on that. there were lots of helpful girl guides that used the American girls as examples for doing good or learning lessons or trying to understand why girls did what they did
I learned a lot of my core beliefs from these girls.
I remember being very invested in Molly, Addy, and Kaya. Mostly cuz I look like Molly, and the other two had a lot of information on two of my favorite time periods. But I owe a lot of my personality to these lovvely girls
yo don’t forget my girl Caroline. Her father was captured by the British during the war of 1812 and she basically learned how to sail and rescued him herself.
I can confirm that they really do their research - during the creation of Caroline the company called a museum I was associated with and quizzed them extensively about what sort of food kids would have eaten at the turn of the 19th century.
When i was like ten I wrote a letter to the American Girl magazine saying that the girls in their magazine were all really skinny and it made me, a chonk, really sad because it was showing that I couldn’t wear any of the outfits they suggested, and I got a personal letter back from the editor apologizing for making me feel that way and saying they would work on that. Dunno if they actually did, i can’t remember, but they did promptly personally respond to a letter about something that was not exactly on the radar for girl’s media in fucking 2002. So there’s that.
I’m happy to report that the messages from American Girl have only gotten better in recent years.
These are from one of their latest books, A Smart Girl’s Guide to Body Image:
They got a lot of flak from conservative parents for this and they did. not. back. down.
Their newest historical doll, Claudie, is a black girl growing up in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Her story is about Black artists thriving, and making a safe, beautiful place for themselves in a society that tries to reject them. It teaches about the NAACP’s protests against lynchings, in ways kids can understand, but there’s also so much Black joy and creativity showcased in her story.
Another historical doll, Melody, is growing up in the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement. She faces the struggles and triumphs of attending a newly integrated school, and learns about the bombing of a Black church in Alabama that killed four little girls her age. Her stories show how black people found support and community within the church, as well as music— she loves to sing! If you have a free hour, I highly recommend watching her special on Amazon (free with prime). It stars Caila Marsai Martin from Blackish and it will make you weep.
The girl of the year for 2022, Corinne, is Asian, and her story touches on the issues of anti-Asian hate in the wake of covid. When conservative parents threw a fit about this, American Girl went ahead and made the girl of the year for 2023 Asian, too.
Any of their dolls can be customized with assistive devices like hearing aids, service dogs, and wheelchairs. They also have bald dolls, to include stories about girls battling cancer or alopecia. And it’s not just girl dolls— they have boy dolls now, too! And dolls with no gender assigned to them! People complained that they couldn’t find any dolls in the Just Like Me line that looked like them, so they now give people the ability to create their own custom doll, with tons of different options.
I’m not claiming American Girl as a company is perfect, but I am saying they’re important. Girl perspectives, girl stories, and girl communities are IMPORTANT. If there are kids in your life who would benefit from these stories, or if you’d like to read them yourself, you can find any American Girl book for pretty much dirt cheap on eBay, and libraries usually stock tons of them!
Just consider the fact that Vetinari wears the lilac for a second.
It’s one hell of a political statement, coming from a man who is typically all about being very subtle and understated and keeping his cards close to his chest. Just consider how much of a— aha… ballsy move that is.
He’s openly stating with each passing year that he believed in the Glorious Revolution, that he believed that Lord Winder should have been assassinated, that he believed that police brutality on that scale needs to be stamped out once and for all.
That he believed, and still believes, that unfit rulers should be overthrown.
He meets with aristocrats and the “perennial waverers” as they are termed in the book with a lilac bloom pinned to his robe. He wears a symbol of the hopes and dreams of his youth, every year.
It almost reads as a throwaway statement at the end of an incredibly emotional book, but it’s far from it. There’s so much meaning in the fact that Vetinari wears the lilac and visits the little graveyard each year under the cover of darkness. Is it any wonder that he wound down a corrupt City Watch, and is so vehemently against the prospect of war and loss of life?
He believed that police brutality on that scale needs to be stamped out once and for all.
Oh Gods, that’s why he did it. I’ve read these books so many times and I’ve never realised why Vetinari wanted the Watch so diminished and powerless in the early books. Why the whole Guild System exists. It’s not just politics and economic policy. He saw how bad it got under Swing and Winder and he saw the best man he’s ever know try to stop it from the inside and be killed in the street for it. The whole system had to go and Ankh Morpork would be better off without a state run justice system than risk it having that much power again. And it’s only when he sees John Keel come again to lead it, whether Vetinari consciously knows it or not, that he decides that they can be allowed to rebuild
we, in a manner akin to that of a man who once was, in Rome, an orator of significant skill, who was then for his elegance of speech renowned and now for his elaborate structure of sentences cursed by generations of scholars of Latin, the language which he spoke and we now study, Cicero, write, rather than by any efficiency, functionality, or ease of legibility have our words, our honors, the breaths of our hearts, be besmirched.
Not many jnſtances of Punctuation - but for many Daſhes – et words Capitaliz’d for emphavſis, but not logicaly - ſpeeling and word Endings varied Gratelie - and the long S - ſ - vſed in at the ſtart and Centre of wordes - & the short “s” vſed only at the end - as with the U and V, and the I and J - but v and j only at the ſtart of wordes (we diſtinguishe not between Vouels and Conſonants, only decoratiue Letteres). Ye letter “y” being in lookes cloſe to an Olde letter “þ” which is vſed as “th” - Y may be vſed in the place of TH - but only ſparingly - and ſtill Pronounc’d the ſame as TH. Long and rambling ſentences - ſeeminglie without end - a paragraph can conſiſt of One whole ſentence, and ſhort ſentences are rare – we ſcribe like hiſtorical Modern English – and other european Languages.
scientists in the 1990s, putting a Get More Purple gene attached to a harmless plant virus into an already purple petunia: please get more purple
the petunia, sensing an apparent honest to god Get More Purple Disease, using the previously undiscovered RNAi antiviral ability to shut down all other purple genes along with it just in case: you put VIRUS in petunia? you infect her with the More Purple?? oh! oh! her children shall bloom white! jail for mother, jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!
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.)
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.
THE POWER WAS OUT ALL DAY luckily just after I updated eldritch tobirama, so coming back to five comments (and two spam bot comments, whoo!) was nice 🧡
But in those like, eight? Nine hours?? That i was without any power or internet i did some yard work and also took a shower and oh I also wrote almost 7k of a bizarre crossover idea in a manic haze where Butsuma sells Tobirama to a demon (for idk power for the clan or some shit) and that demon. Is Sullivan. From Iruma-kun anime. Who didn't expect to get summoned but is like "ho boy, well, I AM going to have to take care of another mysterious human child soon! This one can be a test run!"
Sixteen year old Tobirama is living in a horror film thinking he's this demon's shiny new exotic pet. Sullivan is living in a heartwarming family Hellmark movie. And Opera is just there giving a thumbs up trying their bestest to keep the paranoid ninja teenager from running away into the Netherworld thinking he's gonna get eaten if he doesn't get a good grade in Being A Pet
Also then Iruma shows up, and Tobirama locks the FUCK in because that's his new baby brother now. Fight him, Sullivan. What do you want with Iruma. Tell him your schemes damnit. (I haven't actually gotten to this part yet but it's gonna be great) Sullivan is just gonna coo over his oldest grandson being so cute and deadly and protective over his new brother 🧡🧡🧡
I like giving Iruma (and Tobirama) siblings if that weren't obvious by now
Rereading what I had and LMFAO holy shit, yeah, Tobirama is living in a fucking horror movie. He's so not okay.
Sullivan is like "I will be friendly and tone down the demon things and be so nicies and surely he'll like me!" Because he wants a good grade in Grandpa
But no one has actually sat down with Tobirama and assured him that he is in fact fully and entirely Sullivan's *actual* grandson now, he's not just here as entertainment. Tobirama is as you can guess very fucking terrified at all times
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