peachythi

[peachythi]

Frothing at the mouth, knowing that Ruri Rocks (Ruri No Hōseki) is coming out in a little less than a month now.

Ruri No Hōseki releases summer of 2025 on July 6th!!!!

[peachythi]

A Man Called Ove By Frederik Backman

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[peachythi]

I don’t know if anyone knew this. But spraining your ankle kind of sucks.

[peachythi]

Arguably speaking, my dear mama can not judge me for my growing mineral collection when I know she spends several hundreds on jewelry. Its practically the same thing 🗣️🗣️🗣️

[peachythi]

I would like to go mining and exploring (at relatively safe spaces) but I also know that I get winded walking up the stairs

[peachythi]

Me @ Me:

[peachythi]

As a rock person. Dare I say a dirt enjoyer. I am not so patiently waiting for the release of Ruri Rocks (Ruri No Hōseki) This is my Cells at Work but minerals.

[peachythi]

[hii hello!! hi subspace t. mine!! >:D waves at you!!!]

STTSNRTTS WAVAING JOTOUSINLY ANSD EXCIFTEDLY AND LAOUDLY AND GKGKGKRKFF GHI HIVHI IHBIHHI HIVI IHVIHI HIVI HIVBIGIHIHHIIH HI HIVIVHIBIHIHIH HI IHIVHI HIVIBHIJIBIBV HEACEBSD WAVES EBSBESVDS JGIHO HEJELLO HOTOGJ HEKDLHO HDHII IHIHHIHIIHIHIH HHEHEHHELKO HAHONSX SKNNXC JSBCBZKC. XMCKBSICBHS DHIJSBDNFBSBDBGJJBDF!! .]]]]]]]]]]]] yioyoyoypooeeieieieueueee!!

-🩷💥

[peachythi]

Besides being weird about dirt, I also do art. Here, have this piece I did of my baby (dog). If you couldn’t guess his name is Panda and he’s the love of my life 💗

Signing out,

PeachyThy

[peachythi]

Some may ask why I call myself a mushroom creature 🍄

The answer is because I am. Hi! I’m PeachyThi and I’m a mushroom! That toy mushroom is my son Momo! I birthed him.

[peachythi]

Is ice a mineral? It has all of the factors of a mineral besides being a solid at room temperature. But neither is mercury and that is classified as a mineral.

Naturally Occuring✅

Definite Chemical Composition✅

Crystalline Structure✅

Inorganic Substance✅

I personally think it is but this is a debated topic. Wdyt?

[peachythi]

Ps. The definition of a mineraloid is something similar to a mineral but doesn’t have the same crystal structure and defined chemical composition to actually make it a mineral.

Signing Out,

PeachyThy

[peachythi]

Random Rock Fact: Opals are mineraloids formed from when silica rich solutions find their way into crevices and when that silica-rich solution’s water (wow what a mouthful) evaporates it leaves behind OPAL!

90% of all the world’s opals are also found in Australia!

The exact chemical composition of an opal is Silicon Dioxide times Water. Because the solution comes from silicate being taken from silica rich rocks being eroded.

Signing out your favorite amateur mineralogist and mushroom creature,

PeachyThi

theeancients on ig

[peachythi]

Today’s Exhibit of the Day? It’s one of the largest amethyst geodes in the world! At about 13 ft (4 m) tall and 9,000 lbs (4,082 kg), this giant weighs about as much as three compact cars. It was born when molten magma poured from the Earth’s crust some 135 million years ago. While its dazzling purple crystals might catch your eye, this geode would have originally been composed of colorless quartz—its distinctive amethyst color deriving from millenia of natural radiation, heat, and trace contaminants. 

You can spot this geode, and other sparkly specimens, in the Museum’s Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals. We're open daily from 10 am-5:30 pm! Plan your visit.

Photo: D. Finnin/ © AMNH

[peachythi]

This makes my mineralogy brain go brrrr in the best way.

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!

[peachythi]

If someone proposed to me I probably wouldn’t want a diamond. I’d like something with cool colors like peridot or a sapphire. (i wouldn’t say no to a diamond though…)

my friend told me that her boyfriend got her a super cool rock while they were on vacation together and you would not BELIEVE my disappointment when i realized she was talking about her engagement ring

[peachythi]

I like synthetic minerals! They’re exactly the same as their natural counterpart but with obvious symmetry. I don’t personally like glass made to look like crystals but they’re still very pretty. (opalite, goldstone, etc).

I prefer raw minerals but synthetic minerals are always valid 💗

Signing Out,

PeachyThi