All You Need In Life Is A Color Picker Willing To Expose You To The Unbounded Madness We Call Color Vision.

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.”

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

ok slightly late for ace week, but here's most of the ace books I own!

“People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.”

— Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No 1 (via elesheva)

Check Out These Clever LEGO Adaptations of Famous Works

Ars Technica

New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC

Recall uses AI features "to take images of your active screen every few seconds."

I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.

So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.

Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.

This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.

Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.

And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.

Again, look into backing up your shit and switching to Linux Mint or Ubuntu to get away from Microsoft doing this shit.

Glass Onion (2022) + Art

you gotta be able to say "die"

you gotta be able to say "suicide"

you gotta be able to talk about "sex"

they're uncomfortable topics, YEAH for SURE

because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn't make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.

even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like "rape", "abuse", "queer" or "racist". cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify "rape" as distinct from "sex" and "racism" as distinct from "acceptable behaviour" and "queer" as distinct from "invert"

like the function of communication is not to minimise immediate discomfort. we gotta be able to talk about stuff that's hard or sucks or causes difficult conversations.

life really is just like. you meet people you love them and then you lose them and you never see them again. and it's inevitable and it happens to everyone and there's nothing you can do about it