#protolith

[proto-lith]

A COLORED PICTURE FOR ONCE??? DON'T MIND IF I DOOOOOOOOO

[rupeewallet]

A nice Riebeck and Lith moment!

[spaced-out-tiger]

Waves from my void, I doodled Lithhhh yaaaay ::]

(This fish belongs to @rupeewallet ::DDD)

And a simpler doodle cause yes

[anoelleart]

Protolith - Prologue

Charlotte Ujunwae died thrice before her twenty-eighth year.

1

August 30, the 184th Year of the Mother In the eighth summer of her life, Charlotte witnessed the murder of her parents. A deafening gunshot woke her. In the moment between opening her eyes and cognition, she thought it was a crash of thunder that roused her. But the sound of heavy rain banging on her bedroom window was accompanied by the scent of acrid gunpowder and burnt flesh. The slick smell of blood brought to her primal fear, the kind of fear where her body knew she faced mortal danger before her mind. A fear which made her veins run with ice before she even realized that it was indeed her mother’s body strewn across the floor. Her mother lay between her and the bedroom door with a hole in her chest. In her mind’s eye, lightning struck then, but her memories of this night warped with time. This moment of light revealed to her the stranger who’d murdered her mother. He held his gun to her father’s head. That night, Charlotte escaped by throwing herself out of a third-floor bedroom window. She did not remember how her head unceremoniously collided with a stray rock in her garden. At three o’clock in the morning, she gasped for air. Shards of glass were embedded in her bronze skin. Blood soaked her auburn hair. Yet, she dragged herself nearly three miles that morning on a broken femur until she reached her uncle’s farmstead. Under the tumultuous clouds, her scattered brain matter looked just like the dirt.

2

July 2, the 200th Year of the Mother In her twenty-fourth summer, Charlotte was unmarried. To her uncle’s chagrin, she had run away from any acceptable proposal. Had he not stolen her inheritance, she’d be a university student. Instead, she spent her nights downtown. On this night, the sky was clear and dark. The moon hung loosely, like a butcher’s hook above her. The first man who sought to hire her services instead wrapped his hands around her neck. She remembered most clearly his eyes, brown and yellow, his breath sick with alcohol, and the callouses which scratched her skin until blackness crept across her vision like a spider web. At three o’clock that morning, Charlotte lurched back to the land of the living. An undertaker stood above her, puzzled at this unexpected resurrection, perhaps upset at the loss of income, but more than anything, curious about the frightened and angry woman who was suddenly shouting at him. Her instinctual fear arrived too late, and though her return to life was met with a friendly face, she threw herself backwards and reached for the knife hidden in her boot. The undertaker was a tall and dark man, with a large smile and an even larger desire not to die by the knife of a prostitute. Over a gin on the rocks, he told her that he collected cadavers for the university morgue and garnered gold from rich medical students desperate for time with a true human specimen. “If you promise not to nearly die in another alleyway, I’ll give you the family discount,” the undertaker told her.

3

Her third death has yet to come.

***

Read more: Chapter 1, Part 1

[door]

9, 11, and 20 for the book ask meme!

book ask meme

9. Did you get into any new genres?

hmmmm not really? reading (especially fiction) was a big challenge for me this year, so anything that caught my eye that i thought might hold my interest, i read. it ended up being more nonfiction and het romance than i feel i typically read.

11. What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

my favourite fiction was Why Shoot a Butler? by Georgette Heyer (1933), which was such a blast. the protagonist is just a bitch of a man, every person who speaks to him tells him to his face that he sucks and yet he manages to be just charming enough to carry it off. it's a wonderful entry in heyer's mysteries and i loved it. (fyi i wrote about all the heyers i read here)

my fave nonfiction was Merlin Tuttle's memoir, The Secret Lives of Bats (2015), which was wonderful if you love bats and want to read about a man repeatedly almost dying in pursuit of them

20. What was your most anticipated release? Did it meet your expectations?

there are a few books i would say i was eagerly anticipating (murderbot, the last book in the last binding series), but to be completely frank the real answer is Gay Architects by Voigt and Bresan, mostly because the english translation was due out in the fall of 2022 and it took until march 2023 for it to actually arrive. queer architecture is one of my very passionate niche interests and this is (maybe?) the first architectural history book explicitly about queer architects. and unfortunately, it is very poorly/lazily translated. i don't know if that was part of what delayed its release, but i found it very disappointing. it's still extremely valuable, and i'm very glad that books like it are finally being written, but whew. this was a $45 paperback and some of the chapters were no better than google translate

[earthstory]

The Rama Schist

This is another part of the complex of twisted, bent, metamorphosed, nearly 2 billion year old rocks that sit at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and make up some of the oldest, deepest rocks exposed anywhere in the western U.S.

The other parts of the schist we’ve seen, the Vishnu Schist and the Brahma Schist, look a lot like metamorphosed parts of the ocean, metamorphosed sedimentary rocks and metamorphosed basaltic rocks. Those sit in contact with granites that look like an island arc that slammed into North America about 1.7 billion years ago.

These rocks fit into that same story. The Rama schist is a third component in the mixture of schists; more felsic, quartz and plagioclase rich metamorphosed rocks.

These rocks have the chemistry of volcanic rocks erupted close to the Earth’s surface, as happens often in island arcs. The rocks may have been faulted or moved around prior to running into the growing continent, but they were pulled into the same mountain building and metamorphic event as the surrounding sediments and basalts.

These rocks were probably volcaniclastic before they were metamorphosed, produced by explosive volcanic eruptions. Some of the layering is even maintained in the second image. Based on those details, the protolith of these rocks (what they were before metamorphism) was probably a tuff.

In other words, it would be fully accurate to call this rock a tuff schist. You’re welcome.

-JBB

Image credit: Tisha Irwin (with permission, taken on sample on GC National Park Rim Trail) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tishairwin/14491015401 Visit her page: http://www.photonsandplutons.com/ Also used: Ilg et al., GSA Bulletin, 1996http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/108/9/1149.short Previous articles: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php… https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=718487278212319 https://www.facebook.com/TheEarthStory/posts/718917208169326

[proto-lith]

oh yeah isn't there something that happens after like 22 minutes or whatever?

[proto-lith]

picture to go with this post of a happy postloops future....aaaa bby...finally grown up not horribly miserable <3333