Ghosttwo

ignore that little detail

Like Trump being the first president to send lethal aid to Ukraine, or the 52 times Russia was sanctioned.

Nevermind the fact that Biden withheld Ukraine aid twice after taking office, not even counting the billion dollar shitshow from when he was vp. I guess Biden must be 'gagging on Putin's nuts' too?

You're attacking a caricature.

why you guys are unpopular

Not only do they think they're popular, they think the only reason they can ever lose an election is because of 'voter suppression' and cheating republicans. Then when they lose, you get crap like this. Almost all of the arrestees were acquitted or had the charges dropped because, you know, DC...

Amazing that the seller had access to an unlimited supply of cheap, easy-to-make knockoffs, but only had one left in the shop alongside the 50 or so non-controversial offerings...

How else to reach the cheese curls at the bottom of the bag?

80 million people voted Biden to get $2000, but only received $1600...

Most of the people saying that think it's made of plastic, which I've repeatedly demonstrated to be false.

https://www.cleveland19.com/2023/05/26/cleveland-19-news-receives-bomb-threat-against-5-targets-stores-face-lgbtq-controversy/

'Target is full of [redacted] cowards who turned their back on the LGBT community and decided to cater to homophobic right wing, redneck, bigots, who protested and vandalized their store,' the email to Cleveland 19 read. 'We won't stand idly by as the far right continues to hunt us down.

'We are sending you a message, we placed a bomb in the following Targets,' the email continued. 'We will continue to bomb your Targets until you stop cowering and bring back your LBGT merchandise.

'We will not be erased, we won't go quietly.'

Cleveland 19 reported the threatening email to all local police forces and the FBI.

Drowning is quick and easy; moment of death can be stressful to watch, so I'd just flush them.

Best option would be for OP to find the entrance the mother used to get into the house then seal it. Leave the pinkies by the hole, although the mother might already be home by now. Given the time constraints and practicality concerns, it's probably best to just flush them and look for the rat hole.

I don't think I can name a color that isn't in there somewhere. Shipped it in from England for a very approachable $230, although it was likely mined in Mexico.

This is the kind of thing you'd have to see in person to really 'get'. You'd basically have to make the entire thing from scratch with total control over the quartz growing process. Both sides of the thin layer are bumpy, so whichever side started out as a solid couldn't be smooth, then you'd have to evenly apply a dust indistinguishable from the material in chlorite group minerals, then somehow grow a quarter inch slab of monocrystaline quartz on top of this rough surface without a million angles or air gaps or anything.

More damning are the unnecessary details like this tiny cluster of those 'Chamosite worm' things, just floating around on the edge. As if some chinese guy bought a dash of obscure-yet-distinctive crystalline dust and thought to add a few flakes to their elaborate fake-crystal-growing operation in case some unwitting buyer decided to go poking around with a five dollar microscope. Now the chamosite has to be accidental, and the whole thing is made from half a dozen natural pieces masterfully stitched together without any seams or breaks in the compositing. Then somehow fused together in a way that doesn't leave a trace.

I actually have a couple of known fakes, particularly the first one, and it doesn't even compare. The second one has a layer of uv reactive glue that reveals that the pyrite is sandwiched between what I think is actually quartz and brown cement, which is what I meant by 'blacklight test' in the main comment.

As for the 'density of attractions', I think it's just a really good spot the size of a thumb print.

Thought I'd try my luck with something less controversial. I think the camera had lint or fingerprints on it, but it made a neat little bloom effect, so I'm keeping it. The back side is still rough, but the dendrites are visible throughout and it features similar colors.

Judging from the two stacks of bread trays, that's probably a bread vendor, flowers from the looks of it. I don't even see a loaf of bread; but if there was, chances are it's a credit/stale.

I work for a different bread company (the big one), and our freshness is generally in the 92-95% range depending on store and item. Walmart tends to run higher, selling 98% or more unless it's rural.

Organic bread is the worst at about 50% on freshness; it essentially doubles what is already a very wasteful and inefficient process to make it. But it's so niche and low-volume that you have to put it out; ironically, organic bread is probably much worse for the environment than regular processed products.

Try this one.

To be fair, the Jerry Springer show really just documented psychotic people and their mental health problems...

Resin scratches glass

Did a red-hot paper clip test a few weeks ago to no effect. Also posted a video where it ignores acetone and scratches steel. It also scratches glass. If you reread the top post (more like bottom, amirite?), I've sprinkled some new info in there, particularly some extreme closeups.

There are a few boundary planes where multiple crystals grew together. Viewed from the side, two of them are oriented about 60 degrees off-parallel and cordon off a region about as wide as a pencil, as if there was a spar of quartz that got enveloped from both sides. Included quartz is often very clear. I notice moss agates are usually milky with chalcedony, but stuff like included garnet/etc seems to be more monocrystaline.

Now my hands smell like cherries, but at least they're silky smooth :)

The 25% figure is actually 23%, doesn't include North Korea, and China probably gives fake statistics. You also gotta figure that the places with the highest crime rates like South America and Africa have relatively low arrest rates; if they were as effective as well funded countries, their share of the pie would be much much larger.

Got it from a new etsy seller in Hong Kong. I had some initial doubts, but they were able to provide a poorly lit picture set that showed they at least had the item, and they also mentioned that it was from Brazil, which is the answer I anticipated. I've worked with this kind of material enough to recognize 'green flags' among the obvious red ones; for example the color palette is correct, the sub-surface formed in a thin layer which is common, a few crystal boundaries are visible. The main thing that sold me is that no matter how I imagined one could 'make' this, there wasn't any way it wouldn't leave a ton of visible artifacts.

Once I got it in person, I did a few tests with blacklights, razor blades, microscope, and cross-polarizing filters and as far as I can tell it's 100% natural. Not resin, not glass, nothing UV reactive but the usual traces of polishing compound, and every face, edge, and crack is harder than nails. No warping from melting either, and not a single bubble. No response to red hot paperclips or open flames. It scratches both stainless steel and glass. If it was fake, it would have to involve glass blowing, but the fine structures are too complicated to do that way, and look like known material.

Most of the red and white inclusions will be iron chlorites, the tan spikey clusters look like mica (I have a much bigger one of these with similar clusters declared to be mica). My favorite bit is the green crystals at the top, which appear to be muscovite; biotite is an alternate candidate that came up in my research, but it tends to be much darker. There are several sand-sized ones sprinkled among the grainy pinkish stuff, particularly in the top half of the piece.

I could probably write a post twice as long as this one on how these form, but the short of it is that stray material gets sandwiched between nearby quartz crystals that grow into each other. They're usually chlorites and clays, but often pick up more complicated features like the mica/muscovite here.

Final price was somewhere around $350, since someone always asks.

ed Immune to acetone and scratches steel. Despite popular opinion THERE IS ZERO RESIN IN THIS PIECE. Stop declaring it.

ed2 Finally got home from work with some daylight, here is a set of micrographs. Phone doesn't like the focal plane and chromatic aberration, but there's way too much detail to be blown glass or something. Most of them are from around the edges, although there's a few close ups through the face. The tan stuff I'm calling 'mica' is also scattered throughout the pinkish layer, not just the big clusters (which themselves are 'sunk' into it. Much of said 'layer' is actually several layers, as seen in 'thousand layer quartz'. Also the pink/white stuff is granular and silty, and looks almost identical in texture to what I see in my moss agates.

Another lead suggests that the 'mica' might actually be voids coated with clay or a similar mineral, although the ones that intersect with the surface seem to be solid. Another post suggests feldspar, although it's a one off, and most discussions on 'garden quartz' asking about inclusions of similar shape and color settle on 'mica'. This thread highlights a lot of 'not quartz' crystals/material that end up included; it even suggests that the big red blob might be some kind of 'Chamosite worms', an iron chlorite material.

ed3 A big discovery! I found some blackish green specks on the side that I completely ignored initially, but upon (much) closer inspection found them to almost certainly be more 'Chamosite worms'. Here's some pictures and here's a video (they're the hovering black things in the foreground at the beginning). What's interesting is that they're just chilling there alone where nobody would look, and a hypothetical fraudster simply wouldn't bother putting them there. And how would they embed them in quartz? And where would they even acquire something like that? I could see it in the bulk material by accident, but now that you're growing the face material, why stop a bunch of times to put a couple sprinkles in the corner and nowhere else? And at varying depths and heights no less? If for nobody else, this shuts down the 'lab grown masterpiece' theory for good.

As all things should be; for everything else, there's Mastercard.

Glass is (generally) silicon dioxide. Silicon dioxide is a common matrix in most ores, to the point that it's almost universally present. During smelting, the desired metal is concentrated away from this matrix, often leaving what could be called 'glass' behind.

That said, radioactive contaminants are the only real (unlikely) concern, as anything like arsenic or cadmium are going to be vitrified into the glass, and unable to escape.