#italian minerals

[overthemoonminerals]

Fluorite from Zogno, Lombardy, Italy

[er-cryptid]

Baryte with Calcite

Natural History Museum of Denmark, Mineral Hall

[robertocastigliaphotography]

Strawberry Moon 2022 Italy.

[sentimentalslut]

rlly hope my grandfather who was actively in the mob isn’t watching me write mafia au fanfics from heaven. that’d bum both of us out

[starburst2000]

Starlight Express Appreciation Month!

Day 28: Original Characters

OC TIME!!!

We have Mugunghwa the South Korean National Engine (a Korail), Petra the Mineral Wagon, and Fiamma the Italian National Engine and successor of Espresso (a Frecciarossa)

[lilianekhalil]

Recipe for Italian Carbonara with Bacon An applewood-smoked bacon-flecked peppery Parmesan cream sauce tops this traditional Italian dish of carbonara.

[aussieausie]

Urban Nomad: The Life of Author Neil the Smith (#3)

An article I researched and wrote 35 years ago – about the Swiss and Italian gold miners who came to Australia in the 1850s – triggered the launch of a Swiss-Italian Festa which is still running every year today in a local spa resort town. Their story is in my book here. I ran a social group called ‘The Springs Whole Health Group’. We never ran out of guest speakers on healing topics, from ley lines to chemical sensitivity, who I’d enjoy interviewing every month before our next meeting. Then I would write an article for the local paper which they always published on page 3. This while living frugally in an old caravan parked at the end of a street in the spa resort town. Over 5 years I became known as the man in the van. Visit my 8 fun and entertaining autobiographical books on my Author Page. You can find more of my adventures in my autobiographical books. (To be continued) Namaste. Neil the Smith (author) PS. I recommend – ‘Our Thoughts Can Change The World’ (104 pages) and The Great Regency Cover-Up’ (236 pages). Buy both now and save on P&P.

[fem-lit]

In the current epidemic of rich Western women who cannot “choose” to eat, we see the continuation of an older, poorer tradition of women’s relation to food. Modern Western female dieting descends from a long history. Women have always had to eat differently from men: less and worse. In Hellenistic Rome, reports classicist Sarah B. Pomeroy, boys were rationed sixteen measures of meal to twelve measures allotted to girls. In medieval France, according to historian John Boswell, women received two thirds of the grain allocated to men. Throughout history, when there is only so much to eat, women get little, or none: A common explanation among anthropologists for female infanticide is that food shortage provokes it. According to UN publications, where hunger goes, women meet it first: In Bangladesh and Botswana, female infants die more frequently than male, and girls are more often malnourished, because they are given smaller portions. In Turkey, India, Pakistan, North Africa, and the Middle East, men get the lion��s share of what food there is, regardless of women’s caloric needs. “It is not the caloric value of work which is represented in the patterns of food consumption” of men in relation to women in North Africa, “nor is it a question of physiological needs…. Rather these patterns tend to guarantee priority rights to the ‘important’ members of society, that is, adult men.” In Morocco, if women are guests, “they will swear they have eaten already” or that they are not hungry. “Small girls soon learn to offer their share to visitors, to refuse meat and deny hunger.” A North African woman described by anthropologist Vanessa Mahler assured her fellow diners that “she preferred bones to meat.” Men, however, Mahler reports, “are supposed to be exempt from facing scarcity which is shared out among women and children.”

“Third World countries provide examples of undernourished female and well-nourished male children, where what food there is goes to the boys of the family,” a UN report testifies. Two thirds of women in Asia, half of all women in Africa, and a sixth of Latin American women are anemic—through lack of food. Fifty percent more Nepali women than men go blind from lack of food. Cross-culturally, men receive hot meals, more protein, and the first helpings of a dish, while women eat the cooling leftovers, often having to use deceit and cunning to get enough to eat. “Moreover, what food they do receive is consistently less nutritious.”

This pattern is not restricted to the Third World: Most Western women alive today can recall versions of it at their mothers’ or grandmothers’ table: British miners’ wives eating the grease-soaked bread left over after their husbands had eaten the meat; Italian and Jewish wives taking the part of the bird no one else would want.

These patterns of behavior are standard in the affluent West today, perpetuated by the culture of female caloric self-deprivation. A generation ago, the justification for this traditional apportioning shifted: Women still went without, ate leftovers, hoarded food, used deceit to get it—but blamed themselves. Our mothers still exiled themselves from the family circle that was eating cake with silver cutlery off Wedgwood china, and we would come upon them in the kitchen, furtively devouring the remains. The traditional pattern was cloaked in modern shame, but otherwise changed little. Weight control became its rationale once natural inferiority went out of fashion.

— Naomi Wolf (1990) The Beauty Myth

[roseey1984]

[turndecassette2]

I do remember those magic knight people! Every once in a while I go back on your blog to try to track down those drawings because I like them and the concept in the description so much. I would love to hear more about them. Do you have a story planned out?

yeah, vaguely. so for the cosmology; there's this dystopian city I desperately need to draw a map of built above the fossilised remains of an ancient hell. the city mines the hell for 'hell-flesh', a semi-sentient magical substance that's kind of the physical container of the souls of the damned. I suppose this is like fantasy rare earths for fantasy compute or w/e. this has been going on for a while and the city is, kiruna-style, gradually falling down the pit. also as more of the hell is laid bare, semi-autonomous demonic creatures are let loose, maybe as a kind of immune response against human incursion.

(imagining this sort of thing + branching passages. but in the middle of an italian intra-feuding city-state w a population ca modern day singapore)

a kind of grid of bridges and fortresses has been built above the pit to protect the fancier, upper parts of the city from the decaying/descending bits below. the lower city is mostly miners etc & due to the fucked up mutagenic influence of living near a hell & touching hell stuff all day the people in the upper city treat them with suspicion. there's a 'join the US navy-army-whatever to get health insurance & education & basic human dignity' or like french foreign legion situation where by joining the elite magic army manning the little fortresses, ppl from the lower city can gain some access to the upper. in the reverse I guess for the upper city ppl it functions a bit like 'the wall' in asoiaf where criminals, noble bastards etc go to maybe redeem themselves or die horribly.

the fire magic used by the guards to fight demons etc is derived from the burning corpse of a god that is said to have been there since before the founding of the city (presumably the entity responsible for the hell situation in the first place). by swearing fealty to this dead(-ish) god one gets the ability to summon his divine flame but you forfeit your chance at an afterlife, or maybe you go to hell (no-one is quite sure). everyone kind of assumes once the body is fully burned the god will return/reincarnate (and either save or destroy the city, depending on who you ask).

the politics part; at its founding the city was part of some empire that has since collapsed (pretty recently). the city is dependent on trade to stay viable/fed and to appease the new warring states/mini-empires that have sprung up around it. the current ruler is a reclusive young queen & she has her favourite lord/advisor, an ageing academic who is sort of trying to liberalise the place or make it superficially less fashy. other lords dislike this & are working to either find her a proper king or hasten the return of some deity or other that will return the place to its former glory.

I guess the story? has this noble child bastard protagonist from a shady family* of word-mages who is sent to the 'centre' fortress & works her way up to become the apprentice of some hero-knight demon slayer guy with a possibly shady past (I think rn the name I have for the guy is Chaimé & idk if this is a good name? like the spanish jaime but w more e, & the tiny bastard is Myia I think). I imagine her being the sasuke to a happier, more popular girl who saves her from a demon (embarrassing) then is outed as a half-demon herself (she's the redhead in the drawings) & Myia warms up to her as she (demon girl) becomes increasingly isolated from the outside city (being supposedly dangerous or too powerful? I don't think Myia has much natural magic or w/e in her aside from being a nerd & very persistent).

sorry there's a lot here that would be SPOILERS if I ever actually made this into something coherent enough to be an actual comic ha ha. the knight/mentor guy gets dragged into a kind of fantasy 'business plot' & I guess part of that would be like, seeing to what extent he goes along with it & if he's actually a good person ha ha. + there's a bunch of other characters w stuff going on that I haven't figured out the looks of yet but. they're important in my head. the big bear-ish bf guy who gets sent on an expedition down the pit etc

* I have a distinct image of these people living hidden away in some gormenghast-style estate. they've habsburged themselves into being mostly deaf but the only ones around who can fully read/write the divine language that lets them do word-based magic & the other houses kind of have to put up w their weirdness. also scheming nobles in dune using sign language is 1 of my favourite things in the new film adaption & I like the idea of outsiders being forced to learn to sign (or else being cut-off from higher level magic) as some sort of power move? I don't think they involve themselves that much in politics since that's below them but are def part of the 'bring the gods back' thing, for better or worse. anyway after 'avas demon' (GUILTY PLEASURE I know it has such pretty colours but comes from such an unhinged part of the internet, will never stop apologising for this) started posting again I realised it had a character w the same look & vibe so will try and re-design protag girl to look more like this cute person I saw in a fashion post on IG

... let's see how this goes. came up w all this BS after some viz lady at comicon asked me if I wanted to make them a manga but it's grown from being too little to being too unwieldy to pitch. will see after I finish up my current projects. how much blood, swearing & genocide can a story have before it stops being YA. I think chainsaw man is sort of YA but dorohedoro isn't

[overthemoonminerals]

Blue Barite from Italy

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Harvard University has a library that protects the rarest colors in the world.

The Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies houses the Forbes Pigment Collection, which contains more than 2,500 samples of pigments, some incredibly rare and harvested from things like mummies, heavy metals, poisons, and precious minerals.

The collection was amassed by Edward Waldo Forbes (1873-1969), who directed Harvard's Fogg Museum, between 1910 and 1944.

Forbes is considered the Father of Art Conservation in the United States and spent most of his life traveling the world to collect various pigments that he used to authenticate classical Italian paintings.

The pigments are still used by art experts to authenticate and understand paintings.

[robertocastigliaphotography]

“ Unreal “ Full Moon January 2023 . Rocca Calascio  Abruzzo. Italy.

[finalfrontierpublishing]

Vaster Than Empires by Ayezur - bound by myself. 

Bookbinding spammage under the cut.

So I fell in love with japanese stab binding and decided to do a faux stab pattern atop a case binding for this particular bind! 

I love Rurouni Kenshin, and i love how timeless the story is. This fic is very dear and close to my heart, and I am so proud to have an opportunity to hold this fic in my hands. 

Statistics:

163848 words || 452 pages 

Body text: Garamond

Chapter headers: Nipponica

This typeset was made fairly early in my binding journey hence my adherence (and passion) for Garamond font. What i was insistent on was sticking to the sakura border that surrounded the body of text, despite my printer telling me there would definitely be a white border around that. It was rather unsightly, so i decided to try to use a guillotine to remove it. Oh boy. One textblock was sacrificed to the bookbinding gods because the guillotine hates me and doesn’t like cutting square. this particular textblock is not square but i am pretending it is, for reasons. As you can see - it is also my virgin rounding attempt and it is mostly acceptable. 

I changed cover design at least 3 times - vacillating between using a shiny HTV design, using chiyogami paper and ultimately i committed to the stitchery after great indecision (and realizing my chiyogami paper wouldn’t match my bookcloth). i owe muchly to @teleportbooks​ for showing me it could be done, who did a lovely faux stab binding and i was very envious and decided i had to try to make one of my own. 

 my first try was rather ghastly - the bookcloth i chose from a mystery bookcloth pack was this awful brown that just looked hella washed out with the burgundy thread under lights (see below). I like browns but this is just --- eugh. 

i am easily convinced to redo something from scratch (I hate cutting boards with a passion) when i find something absolutely hideous. 

Moved on to using Burgundy Italian bookcloth from Hollanders with gold linen thread and voila. I am not that much of a fan of bright red and gold (it just feels FESTIVE AF to me, being an Asian in Asia) but i won’t fight what works. Endpapers came from a Mineral-themed paper pack - the endpaper is rather lumpy from the threads of the stitching but i have zero regret. 

I also applied HTV (Siser Metallic) for the title - thought about putting the title on the spine (decided against it as was trying to keep the theme of stab binding), and did the title on the front instead. Lack of foresight while i was designing - if given half a chance i would have done the title right to left instead. i also overcooked the HTV a little because it didn’t want to adhere right off the bat (this is odd, because ??? duo cloth usually hates htv more than anything, and this hated HTV more than duo). 

Completed with simple white (due to indecision, stuck to neutral colour) ribbon bookmark and cherry blossom charm. 

How much do i like doing some form of stitchery? Very much. Would like to try some embroidered spines - i’ve seen some fucking exquisite examples and i’m in an aspirational mood. 

Resources: https://beccamakingfaces.com/2013/10/05/japanese-stab-binding-tutorial-maple-leaves/ was an excellent reference for a stab binding tutorial for this pattern which i modified a little along the way. 

[barbielore]

In 2012, Mattel released the Hope Diamond Barbie - yes, modelled after the most famous diamond in the world.

I vaguely seem to recall being taught growing up that the Hope Diamond was the biggest diamond ever found, but it's occurred to me while writing this that I don't know if that's true. Apparently the largest diamond in the world is the Cullinan diamond, discovered in 1905 and named after the owner of the mine (and not, like, the miner... but if I go too deep down that path I will start talking about things REALLY unrelated to Barbie.)

While the redhead version was a Gold Label release with 6500 dolls created, there was also a blonde version that was a convention exclusive for the 2012 Italian doll convention.

The doll was designed by Robert Best, a very prolific Barbie designer. I don't think it's one of his best efforts but I do think Hope Diamond Barbie looks elegant and refined. I significantly prefer the redhead version of her.

[ducklooney]

Happy birthday, Dickie Duck!

On December 18, 1966, the famous Italian artist and writer Romano Scarpa writes and draws a comic called "The Miner's Granddaughter" (or in Italian "Arriva Paperetta Yè-Yè") in which Paperetta Yè-Yè, i.e. Dickie Duck, appears. She is Goldie's granddaughter (not sure if she is Scrooge's granddaughter) and she is an older teenager, very friendly and very active and exciting in many things. Yes, she works as a reporter for Scrooge's brother, Gideon McDuck and his news agency "The Duckburg Chronicle" and in certain situations also works for Brigitta MacBridge (Scrooge's second love besides Goldie). She also goes to high school and college (not sure how old she is, but definitely between 18 and 24) and has female and male friends behind her, such as Beckett, Neptunia, Olympia, Walter, and Aracuan Bird. She is mostly very popular in Brazilian and Italian comics where she is mostly represented. Also, she is a friend of Daisy Duck, Brigitta, Magica and in some cases she is a babysitter for Donald's nephews and Daisy's nieces. In certain comics, Fethry is her boyfriend, while in some comics, Gyro is her boyfriend. She appeared in animation only once, in 1982 as an intro to the Topolino Show created by Romano Scarpa. And now, pictures of her from the beginning until today.

If you love her and her family and friends, feel free to like and reblog this. Happy birthday to you, Dickie!