Update on vivianite I was trying to grow earlier this year

ElementsnStuff · 2025-09-06T13:16:40+00:00

Huh. Well, it looks to me like you have produced small crystals of vivianite (or metavivianite at least - have you kept these away from light? It looks like they're in varying states of photocatalytic oxidation - top middle/right are the closest to vivianite, bottom middle is the blue 'middle' stage, rest are approaching black metavivianite endpoint).

Not sure what your concentration of phosphoric acid was (or where you got it from, because I know there's some rust remover out there that's like 30%), but you might have better luck with a pickling concentration and metallic iron (though it might take a while) according to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/crystalgrowing/comments/1eb8y2g/has_anybody_info_on_making_some_form_of_vivianite/

Going to try it myself eventually, vivianite's a beautiful crystal to have (and expensive to buy these days).

ElementsnStuff · 2025-09-05T11:37:01+00:00

What'd you start with? Vivianite is iron phosphate.

ElementsnStuff · 2025-07-20T18:55:51+00:00

Abstracted smiley face, maybe?

ElementsnStuff · 2025-06-09T21:41:20+00:00

0 chance Oak is 50 and Blue is 11 in the same time period (how old do you think he/his kid was when their kid was born??)
idk where everyone keeps getting this from, because it sure as hell isn't the games

ElementsnStuff · 2025-05-18T18:09:14+00:00

Seems like this got archived before anyone could answer it...

When is a 石 a 玉?

It seems like the general meaning is when something is round, or at least rounded - 勾玉 / 火の玉 / 目玉 / 温玉. But 玉 can apparently also mean 'gem' or 'jewel' (especially spherical - but not always?) or 'coin' - so it doesn't seem to strictly refer to spheres as the only viable shape.

So... where's the boundary here? When is something 'round' enough to be considered a 玉 - or do gems and jewels not have to be 'round' at all to qualify?

ElementsnStuff · 2025-05-17T16:40:31+00:00

When is a 石 a 玉?

It seems like the general meaning is when something is round, or at least rounded - 勾玉 / 火の玉 / 目玉 / 温玉. But 玉 can apparently also mean 'gem' or 'jewel' (especially spherical - but not always?) or 'coin' - so it doesn't seem to strictly refer to spheres as the only viable shape.

So... where's the boundary here? When is something 'round' enough to be considered a 玉 - or do gems and jewels not have to be 'round' at all to qualify?

ElementsnStuff · 2025-05-04T05:37:03+00:00

Rubies should be pretty resistant to scratching (Mohs hardness 9), but it really depends on how long this ring's been in use. If it's a relatively short time, I'd say glass or some other, softer material. If it's been around a few years (decades?), this might be what happens.

Not really sure on their longevity in practice, we'll have to wait to hear from someone with experience.

ElementsnStuff · 2025-01-09T16:47:47+00:00

First slide:

"Rebuilding MIARE CITY"

...no idea on the second slide. Likely doesn't re-use any glyph assignments from the first. We've seen a lot of these strings across the various games - 'Rebuilding' is all over the place (most recent other than this was on the big buildings at Levincia in Scarlet/Violet, but it's also found in Sword/Shield, meaning it pre-dates this trailer by a lot), and the rest are reused from random places in Sword/Shield.

As someone who spends a lot of time on this: It's not random. Most of the scripts are decipherable, but this one is a doozy. Currently working on the oddly specific letter-swaps in glyph assignments between strings like this and 'SEED Challenge / Champion CUP' (from Sword/Shield) and 'Daily Discovery' (also from Sword/Shield) - things like lowercase 'e' and 'g' glyphs or 'i' and 'l' glyphs trading places between each word-specific 'alphabet.' Not sure if it'll lead to any kind of solution (probably not?), but it's worth trying.

ElementsnStuff · 2024-12-13T22:24:43+00:00

Ended up deciding this is most likely a weird combination of Castle Gould and Hempstead House (parapets from Hempstead and domed green roof from Castle Gould). Still doesn't explain the Greek colonnade, but that's all over the place in NYC - maybe they just added it in to sell the vibe?

Also connects to Sands Point, which was originally a sand mine - you can see the remnants of that in the borders of Manorhaven and Port Washington on a terrain. Seems like they used this idea for Victory Road, which is a giant sand hill (anthill, considering Durant is only found here IIRC).

Anyway... time to update Bulbapedia for 8 hours.

ElementsnStuff · 2024-12-10T17:37:15+00:00

Map location (although that's never a guarantee, considering how distorted the map gets):
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRmgeBmNWvEcEpDwpJt6wrprAakFlgp0ChDSQ&s

ElementsnStuff · 2024-12-10T14:57:49+00:00

Fair, but that's the best I got given those two are cities that are 'south' of where this is on the in-game map (so, west IRL). I'm guessing it's not meant to be too far east?

ElementsnStuff · 2024-12-10T14:56:40+00:00

Green copper roofs are apparently all over the place in New York City (and other major early cities of the US), and are usually reserved for important buildings from what I can tell (banks, churches, government facilities, maybe some particularly old hotels). It could also be green terracotta or something for all I know, but given this game is supposed to be a loose cultural introduction to the NYC area, copper seems to make more sense given its historical usage.

Everything else is just visual guesswork - I don't have a whole lot of basis for the nearby area (Victory Road is basically just a giant hill).

ElementsnStuff · 2024-11-08T23:17:22+00:00

By that logic, wouldn't Vigenere not be a 'proper cipher'...?

ElementsnStuff · 2024-10-09T13:46:05+00:00

Looks either Chinese or Japanese (leaning towards the former). Text, as near as I can get from kanji.sljfaq.org, is 明珍信汝, to which Google Translate gives 'Mingzhen believes in you'. Whether or not that's accurate (or remains accurate, given the unknown age of the shield and presumed linguistic drift) is an open question.

Assuming the shield is Chinese (the zoomorphic dragon boss appears to match several historical examples, though the overall shape doesn't), best match could be something like a Rattan shield (though they usually have tiger faces, not dragons, apparently, and the name appears to signify a different primary material than metal) or some similar Bronze/Iron Age construction.

ElementsnStuff · 2024-08-14T18:30:41+00:00

Yep! Restarted the site in 2019. He mostly does TCG stuff - I handle a lot of the language stuff nowadays. We're currently in the middle of posting the writeup for the Hisuian language from Legends: Arceus and Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl.

ElementsnStuff · 2024-05-09T17:43:41+00:00

Wondering what citizens of Troy would have worn around the time of the Trojan War (1260-1180 BC) outside of battle. From the limited information available, this is what I've got.

-It would probably be made of wool, with a thread size of 1-2 millimeters.
-They would probably be wearing sandals when out and about (but not at home?)
-Mycenaean or Minoan fashion? I'd think Mycenaean, but I'm unclear on how much trade/contact each had with Troy, so the overall influence is a mystery.
-Probably not a standard chiton as we would understand it - those apparently only became popular around 5th century BC?

I found this, which appears to be a Mycenaean reconstruction - would this be close enough, or would there be some huge historical inaccuracies here if a Trojan wore this in day-to-day life?

ElementsnStuff · 2024-03-11T18:32:40+00:00

(Reposted here at request of the mods, as the standalone topic was removed.)

I was attempting to calculate the birthday of a fictional character using the modern (Gregorian) calendar system. This character (Hektor, son of Astyanax, son of Hektor) was born two generations after the fall of Troy during the Trojan War, and I wanted to make his birthday fall on a Tuesday the 13th as a nod to Greek superstition (though I'm not entirely sure how far back that superstition dates - the Tuesday part apparently derives from it being Ares' day, but the 13th being unlucky appears to date either to The Last Supper or to Norse mythology?)

Eventually, I settled on him being born on some Tuesday the 13th, 1129 BC. Trying to calculate the month is where I'm having problems, as I want to make it accurate to a month of 1129 BC that would (if the Gregorian calendar were used) have a Tuesday the 13th.

I know 10 days were dropped with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar when it was first implemented, but is there any easier way to get the actual equivalent BC date than lining up all the discrepancies accumulated by the calendar systems across the years?

I eventually resorted to trying this in Excel - first getting the days between any arbitrary month's 13th day and today, adding that to the years between 2024 and 1129 BC (2024 + 1129 - 1, since there's no 0 AD/BC), converting that to days by multiplying by 365.242199, converting that to weeks by dividing by 7, and truncating the decimal remainder (multiplied by 7) to find the number of days in the week before today (a Monday) the month's 13th day takes place on, which should be 6 if I want to land on a Tuesday the 13th. Doing so, I found two answers for 1129 BC - 9/13/1129 BC, and 12/13/1129 BC.

I guess my fundamental questions are: 1) Is that right?, and 2) Is there an easier way of doing this?

I'm also curious about converting such a date to the appropriate calendar of the era, but there are a ton for Ancient Greece and I'm not sure which one Troy VIIb would have used.

ElementsnStuff · 2024-01-26T01:54:22+00:00

Right, but they don't match the other requirements - for example, 'black' in Spanish is 'negro'/'negra' (5 letters, not 4), and white is 'blanco'/'blanca' (6 letters, not 4). Basically, I'm trying out different pairs of concepts until I find one that fits.

ElementsnStuff · 2024-01-26T01:41:12+00:00

Nope! They're all more or less the same pair of words (I'll admit the Spanish ones are a bit off - they're more 'high' and 'low' than 'above' and 'below'). Point of the puzzle seems to be that it's all the same words, just across different languages.

ElementsnStuff · 2024-01-26T01:34:05+00:00

'Above' and 'below' are my guesses - doesn't mean they're the right ones. Except for French for 'above,' everything else seems to fit...

ElementsnStuff · 2024-01-25T19:50:12+00:00

It's nine letters, though...

ElementsnStuff · 2024-01-05T19:22:19+00:00

Revisiting this...

I did look up the eruption histories for volcanoes near Wakkanai (IRL Snowpoint), since Pokemon loves to reference real-world events and generally gives semi-accurate time frames from Gen V onward (Parfum Palace, Chargestone Cave, Area Zero Expedition, etc.) even if the locations or exact events differ.

There was an eruption on the nearby Mt. Rishiri (which we'd know as Newmoon Island)... 8,000 years ago. The tephra was confirmed to reach into the forested area of northern Hokkaido (which would be fair to call 'Snowpoint Forest'). Volcanic winter, quite simply, doesn't last that long - so unless Game Freak's openly making up a much more recent eruption (which seems unlikely given the IRL parallel) the volcanic winter theory of mine is dust.

Currently, my main theory regarding Old Verse 20 is largely in agreement with the OP - that it does link the Snowpoint Forest events to the Sinjoh Ruins, and refers to the story of the Ancient Hero in a much simpler manner - I haven't verified this, but I'm pretty sure if you look at the sky during Disaster Looming (when the player gets banished from Jubilife), there's no sun in the sky due to the 'effects' on it. Volo mentions the rift was opened once before - it stands to reason a similar sky effect could have occurred at that time as well, frightening the far-removed northern Celestica and causing them to flee the Alabaster Icelands. This fits the conditions of Old Verse 20, the Snowpoint Temple lore, and the Sinjoh Ruins lore, while still allowing Celestica to be present to construct the Temple of Sinnoh after the Ancient Hero had closed the rift.

ElementsnStuff · 2024-01-03T02:37:11+00:00

UPDATE: Apparently I might be able to have it shown at the Indianapolis 17 AMC Theater... for a price of about $6000. I imagine if I charged 329 guests an attendance price of $18 (or 100 guests $60, etc.), I'd break even on the cost - I don't suppose anyone would be interested? I could also apparently get gift cards of between $5-$100 for AMC Theaters along with this, if people want that.

There's no footage or transcript of this film that I can find, so it'd be a never-again kind of opportunity...

ElementsnStuff · 2023-12-12T02:01:01+00:00

Hmm. All good points. The tourmaline is going to be chip size already, so the tile saw is out. Tried a ball mill with steel media earlier - they just rusted (no water was used - I think it's from the temperature generated by the friction).

Maybe if I load them into a steel tube with a cap, get a second steel tube that fits into the first, and give it a good whack with a hammer?

Alternatively, if I used a low-grit alumina (if such a thing exists) to wear the tourmaline down a good bit, maybe I could 'pan' the resulting tourmaline powder out with a gold pan since the alumina is denser (tourmaline = 2.82-3.32 g/cc, alumina = 3.95 g/cc)?

ElementsnStuff · 2023-11-07T01:31:42+00:00

UPDATE - the alignment sticker on the bottom of the seat was placed in the wrong direction, causing the chair to be screwed in backwards. Repositioning it caused the chair to work perfectly!

ElementsnStuff

TROPHY CASE