Ok Slightly Late For Ace Week, But Here's Most Of The Ace Books I Own!

One of the details that gets lost in the transition of manga-to-anime for Fullmetal Alchemist, is the overt presence of foreign language. For example, the Xingese characters actually regularly speak Xingese amongst each other. While they aren’t the only example of foreign language being spoken, they are the most prominent. In the anime, every character no matter what race or what country they are from, speaks the same language as a translation convention. The only real hints that there are other languages present are very minor, like the fact that Ling wrote his message to Lan Fan completely in Kanji and that no one outside of them could read it. 

However, the manga has an interesting convention to denote that foreign language is being spoken, by giving every foreign language speech bubbles that are horizontal instead of vertical. This is lost slightly even when the manga gets translated because in Japanese, the vertical speech bubbles also have vertically typeset dialogue which help better distinguish the languages. Nonetheless, the speech bubble shapes are very distinct. When Ling talks to Ed, his speech bubbles are all vertical

As are Lan Fan’s

But look at Fu’s thought bubbles here and compare them to Paninya and Al’s vertical bubbles. They’re horizontal! Fu is shown to be thinking in his native tongue!

Conversations that we heard all in one language in the anime, were supposed to be in Xingese.

Like Ling, Lan Fan, and Fu on the roof.

And Ling speaking with Mei at the end of the final battle.

Its just one of those really neat details Arakawa uses that makes FMA’s world just a bit richer in the manga than what we see in the anime version of the series.

I'd like to know why the minerals are hazardous!

YES I got someone to bite!

Okay, so, the two specific minerals I have in my collection that are hazardous are hazardous for different reasons.

First off, chromite.

Reason it is potentially hazardous: On its own, chromite isn’t necessarily dangerous.  It becomes dangerous when exposed to certain environmental conditions.  Under certain conditions, the chromium present in chromite changes from Cr(III) (trivalent chromium) to Cr(VI) (hexavalent chromium).  Hexavalent chromium is a known toxin and carcinogen.

Reason I still have it in my collection: You need very specific circumstances to transform the Cr(III) in chromite to Cr(VI).  Generally, those circumstances occur when chromite ore is being processed to produce chromium.  All my chromite does is chill in a jar all day.  There’s very little likelihood that my chromite has oxidized to form hexavalent chromium.

(Not to mention, despite some vigorous Google searching, I couldn’t find anything about chromite being hazardous, just that mining and processing it is hazardous, neither of which I am doing.)

My second mineral in the “Danger Jar” is uraninite, aka pitchblende.

Reason it is potentially hazardous: It’s a uranium ore, which makes it weakly radioactive.  Marie Curie (one of my role models) famously died as a result of exposure to radiation from pitchblende.

Reason I still have it in my collection: Marie Curie processed literal tons of pitchblende during her research.  I have a small specimen the size of my thumb.  Also, while it is radioactive, its form of radioactivity (alpha decay) makes the main concern internal exposure (breathing in particles, ingesting it), rather than external exposure (just being in close proximity to it).  Basically, it doesn’t give off much radiation anyways, and what little it does isn’t as hazardous as you might think.

(Not to mention, it was actually part of one of those mineral collection kits that you can like, just buy online or in a store.  Pretty sure that if it was seriously dangerous to my health, it wouldn’t be available for easy purchase.  Also, at undergrad I literally sat next to a cabinet that set off a Geiger counter because it had so much pitchblende in it, but the professors weren’t concerned at all.)

HOWEVER

Out of an abundance of caution, I keep my chromite and my pitchblende in a sealed container (as of this morning, a nice glass jar that used to house a Bath and Bodyworks candle) and store said jar not in my bedroom.  I’m 100% sure that my samples aren’t actually dangerous for me to have, but I like to take precautions anyways.  Blame my microbiology and chemistry background for that.

Bonus: I mentioned a few other minerals in the tags of my post about my Danger Jar.  Namely, cinnabar and orpiment.

Cinnabar is a beautiful red mineral that is also incredibly toxic because it’s mercury sulfide.

Orpiment is a beautiful orange-yellow mineral that is also incredibly toxic because it’s arsenic sulfide.

There are actually two other arsenic sulfide minerals that I would also like for my collection, in addition to orpiment.

Realgar

Arsenopyrite

All of these I have handled in mineralogy (I think...I can’t remember if I handled cinnabar or not).  And all the professor said was “Wash your hands before you eat, because these have mercury and arsenic in them.”

any noun can become a verb if you don’t care enough

Unironically, vegans need to be advocating for more and better sheep, llama, and alpaca farms. Wool is one of the best fabrics we have in terms of versatility, longevity and most importantly, insulation. Even wet, it retains 80% of it’s insulation potential.

AND IT DOESN’T SHED MICROPLASTICS

normal poet: uses things like alliteration and onomatopoeia and imagery. ya kno, poet stuff

synesthetic poet: haha these words look pretty together

english: coconut oil

french: :)

english: oh boy

french: oil of the nut of the coco

hey, don’t cry. one half flour one half yogurt knead into dough and fry for easy flatbread and dip in balsamic vinegar, okay?

how to find literally any post on a blog in seconds (on desktop)

there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~

I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant. every single post, every single time. in chronological order starting with the most recent post. note: it will not find #croissants or that time you made the typo #croidnssants. for a tag with multiple words, it’s just /tagged/my-croissant and it will show you everything with the exact phrase #my croissant

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant/chrono will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the exact phrase #croissant, but it will show them in reverse order with the oldest first 

url.tumblr.com/search/croissant isn’t as perfect at finding everything, but it’s generally loads better than the search on mobile. it will find a good array of posts that have the word croissant in them somewhere. could be in the body of the post (op captioned it “look at my croissant”) or in the tags (#man I want a croissant). it won’t necessarily find EVERYTHING like /tagged/ does, but I find it’s still more reliable than search on mobile. you can sometimes even find posts by a specific user by searching their url. also, unlike whatever random assortment tumblr mobile pulls up, it will still show them in a more logically chronological order

url.tumblr.com/day/2020/11/05 will show you every post on the blog from november 5th, 2020, in case you’re taking a break from croissants to look for destiel election memes 

url.tumblr.com/archive/ is search paradise. easily go to a particular month and see all posts as thumbnails! search by post type! search by tags but as thumbnails now

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio will show you every audio post on your blog (you can also filter by other post types). sometimes a little imperfect if you’re looking for a video when the op embedded the video in a text post instead of posting as a video post, etc

url.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/croissant will show you EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant, but it will show you them in the archive thumbnail view divided by months. very useful if you’re looking for a specific picture of a croissant that was reblogged 6 months ago and want to be able to scan for it quickly 

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio/tagged/croissant will show you every audio post tagged with the specific phrase #croissant (you can also filter by photo or text instead, because I don’t know why you have audio posts tagged croissant) 

the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog! 

caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks. 

if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else

if you’re on mobile, I’m sorry. godspeed and good luck finding anything. (my one tip is that if you’re able to click ON a tag rather than go through the search bar, you’ll have better luck. if your mutual has recently reblogged a post tagged #croissant, you can click #croissant and it’ll bring up everything tagged #croissant just like /tagged/croissant. but if there’s no readily available tag to click on, you have to rely on the mobile search bar and its weird bizarre whims)