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this video has been going around for a while but the English subtitles didn't match the energy of the spoken French at all. i had to fix it.

reblog to spread this version

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at the goth bbq eating corn on the macabre

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A Workshop for Creating Magical/ Fictional Crystals: A Guide from a Geologist

Hi folks, its me, here to talk about fictional writing again! Today I'm just tackling the idea of magical stones/mana stones by looking at existing minerals today and some neat properties that they have, and how you can apply these things to a fictional world. The goal is mainly to help you if you are stuck trying to come up with a unique magic system, or a unique identification/characteristic of your mineral.

First Things First: Mineral Shapes

I am exhausted, petered out, down-right fatigued by seeing every mineral depicted with having the crystal structure of calcite and quartz. There are soooooo many cooler, more interesting crystal structures, don't you think you would stop and take a look at a perfect cube in nature? It is completely unsettling.

Second: Color

Color within minerals can either be really important, or not important at all! It is your choice to decide if color is going to be something that means something to your mineral. But what are some times when the color is important? Well.... there are some elements that are called chromophores, this classification just indicates that these elements, when present, will determine the color of whatever they are in. So, if you wanted to treat mana like a chromophore, you could say, "Oh everything that contains mana turns green!" This could mean that regardless of the mineral, if that mineral is a specific color, it means it contains mana. This concept is exciting because you can just stop here and use minerals that already exist! You can also use it as an indicator for a magical ore! Chromophores are typically metals, so if you are making a new metal weapon, making the ore of that metal a unique color would make a lot of sense!

However, your mineral can also just be every color of the rainbow like quartz and perhaps that's what makes identifying your mana stones elusive and create an illusion of scarcity that your character can solve.

There are other things that can change the colors of minerals, like radiation damage, and electron exchange, but I think that is beyond what would be helpful! So lets talk about some unique color properties that happen in nature that seem magical in the first place! Maybe you don't need to design a mana stone, but you want a unique gemstone that only the royal family passes down or something (IDK).

The first one is the alexandrite effect! This is where a mineral can change color in natural light vs. incandescent light. (the mineral itself is not changing, but the lights contain different amounts of different colors that then get absorbed by the stone). Even if you don't use electricity in your fictional world, you could have the colors change in the presence of light magic. This could create fun misunderstandings about what the mineral is reacting to!

Pleochroism

Pleochroism is something that most minerals have, it is frequently used to help identify minerals in thin sections, however minerals are usually not pleochroic enough for it to be visible to the naked eye! Pleochroism is just a fancy name to describe the change in how light is absorbed based on the angle of the mineral! So if you scroll up to the first image where I showed a lot of crystal shapes, most of them have angles where they are longer and shorter! This will effect the way light travels in the crystal. Tanzanite is a popular mineral that does this.

Photochromism

This is when a mineral will change color (in a reversible way) when exposed to UV light (or sunlight), I am not going to go too into the details of why this is happening because it would require me to read some research papers and I just don't feel like it. The mineral that is best known for this is Hackmanite!

Alright! These are all the really cool color effects that might inspire you or maybe not, but now I am going to talk about how you might find your minerals within a rock!

When I see a lot of magical caves/mines, typically I see them with some variation of a geode honestly, but most minerals are not found like that! Now I am sure most of you guys have seen a geode, so I will not really talk about those, but I will talk briefly about porphyroblasts which is when the mineral grows larger than the minerals around it, this happens in metamorphic minerals!

sorry random stranger, but this is an image of garnets inside a finer-grained rock at gore mountain in New York!

Another way you might find minerals is in a pegmatite! This is when all minerals are really large! This is a formed from really slow crystalizing magma!

But something else to think about is that your mineral might just be massive, it doesn't have to have distinct crystals, it may be similar to jadeite where small grains grow together which leaves it looking smooth and seamless! A note about all of these is that you would have to mine into the rock to find these, there would not be any natural caves in these rocks! Caves are only ever really formed in limestones and maybe marbles (rocks that react with acid).

How can your characters identify these minerals?

Typically when you are out in the field you will look to see what type of rocks the minerals are found in (The overall texture of the rock will tell you how it formed). If you know how the rock formed, it will narrow down the amount of minerals you need to think about by quite a bit! Next, you are going to look closely at it and observe its crystal structure, does it have an obvious crystal? if so what is the general shape? If it is broken, how did it break? Did it fracture like glass or did it break along uniform planes. Some minerals have a thing called cleavage (breaks along planes of weakness). If a mineral exhibits this habit, it will again help narrow this down. Next we can look at color. Color can be misleading, because minerals like quartz can be any color imaginable, but minerals like olivine will always be green! The next thing your character can do is test for hardness, minerals all have a specific hardness that can help identify it as well.

After you go through all of this, your mineral might have some special property! This could be magnetism, fluorescence, reactions to acid, or any of the color changing effects I mentioned above! Other than that, your character can take it back to a lab and do a number of things to identify it, but the most typical thing would be for them to make a thin section (very thin piece of the rock) and observe it under a cross polarized microscope!

On that note folks! I hope this helped in some way in thinking of new magic mineral properties! I have other guides that explore some different fictional worldbuilding issues you might run into, but if you have any topics you would like me to cover please that I haven't mentioned already, let me know!

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I can’t believe Harrison Ford is Harrison Ford’s real given name. Harrison Ford sounds like the name of a character who would be played by Harrison Ford.

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'Is that the game where you can fuck a bear?'

Well... It's the game where you can romance an archdruid who's undergone centuries of hardship dedicating himself to the protection and restoration of nature, who FINALLY has some of his burdens lifted and allows himself to be cared for and accepted by somebody else - in all of his forms.

'Is one of those forms... a fuckable bear?'

Damn fucking straight.

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The rest of camp when you come back from your romantic evening with Halsin

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If you know, you know… (but you probably know)

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AUGH CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS?

He's talking about how he got his scars from a she-bear when she tried to claim him in his bear form during the mating season for bears.

Halsin: "Rejecting unwanted advances is no failure. Even if it earned me some scars."

He spent three years as a sex slave and object to a drow couple, three years being treated as a toy and a novelty. When he talks about it to us in another scene, he uses the phrasing "I did what was necessary to survive... and perhaps a few things that were- less than necessary." A lot of us only get that part of the cutscene - he explains his escape, and it goes no further. But there's a bunch more to that conversation.

Here's the whole thing written out;

"One positive I will conceded about city life is that you never know what lies around the corner."

"Takes me back to some youthful misadventures in the Underdark. It was a long time ago - I was a foolhardy young druid, intent on seeing the beauty of nature’s otherworldly fauna and subterranean glow for myself.

"Certain events transpired and I found myself the guest of a noble draw house for some time. Well, something between guest, prisoner and consort, perhaps. It was touch and go for awhile."

Some quick notes before we keep going;

"Certain events transpired" - I think we can all agree we're curious what those events were. Was he kidnapped? Tricked? Invited in and then kept? Also holy downplaying, Halsin.

"something between guest, prisoner and consort, perhaps" - sort of lends itself to the implication that he was invited in and then unable to leave, rather than a kidnapping.

"touch and go for a while" - he's so blasé about it, but we know he's serious about how much danger he was in, even if he's telling us the story through a mix of humor and gravitas

"The house matron took interest in me and the patron also. They saw me as a novelty, perhaps. I was chained in their bedchamber for nigh on three years. It was not ideal, but not without its positives, either. I did what was necessary to survive and perhaps a few things that were less necessary." 

"The house matron took interest in me and the patron also" - that brief nod to drow matriarchal society. The drow patron may have taken an interest in him, but it was the matron who held his life in her hands.

"a novelty, perhaps" - not a person. Not something they cared about or respected or cherished. A toy.

"I was chained in their bedchamber for nigh on three years" - he was kept very close to the drow couple, in a very personal and intimate space, away from the rest of the house and from other prisoners. He would have been alone, most of the time.

"I did what was necessary to survive and perhaps a few things that were less necessary" - Alone, starving for companionship and completely cut off from nature - from natural light, from wildlife, from green growing things - Halsin had only the drow matron and patron for companionship.

"Don’t misunderstand me, I feared for my life and wanted my freedom back, but I was willing to wait for my moment. And, eventually, it came."

I read this as him realizing he's blurring some lines in his story and correcting the trajectory a bit. He'll come back to this in a little bit and it's beautiful.

"Lolth’s noble houses are constantly at each other’s throats and eventually some rivals of my hosts sought to unseat them. It was chaos. Drop against draw, the clash of blades echoing throughtout the cavern. The feeling of warm blood that I could not see. I took my chance and fled while all were distracted. I never looked back until I breathed fresh air again and never learned what came of my hosts."

"Lolth’s noble houses are constantly at each other’s throats" - Yes, yes, they are. What's more, we know a few things from dnd lore about what happens when drow houses attack one another; when one house attacks another, the goal is the violent, unseen, complete erasure of the other house. No witnesses left alive.

"The feeling of warm blood that I could not see" - this has me asking about a thousand questions. I gift it to the werebear!Halsin apologists.

"I took my chance and fled while all were distracted" - at some point in his three years, he worked out how to escape and had to simply wait for a safe moment to do so. Imagine what he must have been feeling in that moment. I'm gonna write this at some point.

"I never looked back until I breathed fresh air again and never learned what came of my hosts." SUCH an important line.

"I never looked back" - Despite continuing to call them hosts, I think the fact that he fled without a second thought is important to his story.

"until I breathed fresh air again" - he'd been thinking about that breath of fresh air for THREE YEARS.

"and never learned what came of my hosts"

We do know what happens when drow houses attack one another. One house always falls; if the attacking house doesn't succeed, they fall and are wiped out. Whatever happened that day, an entire drow house fell.

The only way to get him to call them captors instead of hosts is to be so mean to him. You have to have your Tav be a Lolth-aligned drow and threaten to sell him back to them. After hearing this whole conversation up to this point, you'd have to say "So the mighty bear is an escaped pet... I wonder if there is a reward for your capture and return." and EVEN THEN, he doesn't lose his temper. With a hard face, he advises you not to try and suggests that his captors are likely long dead, implying he's thought about it. After he finishes, he sort of pauses and looks thoughtful, then says "interesting- I've always referred to them as my hosts, but I suppose captors is a more accurate term to what they were," which is just such a clear picture of how the situation sits in his mind.

Okay, back at it. Here's the rest of that conversation, which doesn't always trigger;

Halsin: "The passage of time has a strange way of polishing even the most arduous of memories into precious keepsakes. Had it been slightly different, I may have been put to work in the mines or or killed outright. 

"Perhaps I carry more resentment than I realize. Time can prove to be a trickster of one’s recollections. What will be multiple lifetimes for others now separate me from my captivity; perhaps I have lost perspective on what happened to me. I survived... and in years to come, I must have allowed hardships to become dwarfed by the shadow curse in my mind.  I lost friends… confidants… and had the weight of responsibility bear down on me unrelentingly. There was scant opportunity for self-reflection. 

"…I have not had true confidants for some time. The shadow curse robbed me of almost all my peers and replaced them with the weight of responsibility. Perhaps that caused me to gild undeserving memories of my youth. I am lucky to have your counsel - it was sorely needed."  

That was a LOT, but take all of it and put it together with this;

"Rejecting unwanted advances is no failure. Even if it earned me some scars."

In that moment, I don't think he's entirely thinking of the she-bear.

Maybe I'm just reading too deeply into how his story is marked by years of having his autonomy stripped away, but I think it's significant he chose scars over submission when presented with another situation that threatened to take his choice away again.

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Credit to @ride-a-dromedary for the gifs!

Clip of dialogue; https://www.tiktok.com/@rndm.lys/video/7342170304837405984

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Working out

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this article is behind a paywall but i'm obsessed with the headline + photo combo

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high school is soo funny in hindsight. the entire time you're there thinking it's the most important period of your life and then the second you're out you're like well that was fucking stupid

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somehow his energy matches David-Byrne-Giant-Suit Kermit

Disco Grover

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this is a man who falls down a LOT. this is the kind of GRACE that comes from a human being that eats shit at least once a week. we, because yes I am One of Them, will never develop to a point where we stop falling down, but we do find a point where we've fallen down so much we develop this sort of grace of "overcoming" or "rolling with" the falling down

spectacular how he overcomes the situation