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Shitkicker Extraordinaire

@val-ritz / val-ritz.tumblr.com

Val, he/they, asks open. if you're here about the rubies it's gemsngems.com

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GEMS

they're truly outrageous, and i just realized i can pin posts now

Hello! If you're here because I made an offhand remark in 2020 about getting a fistful of rubies for $20, I was simplifying very slightly. The lot of rubies that I got are now going for about ~$28, and you can find them here on gemsngems.com.

Do your own due diligence! I've had good experiences with them, I was able to corroborate those experiences with some other reviews online, but your mileage may vary.

FAQ

Q. What's the deal with this company?

A. Best as I can determine, gemsngems is a wholesaler operating out of Bangkok. They supply mass-produced lab-grown gemstones. Because they're operating out of Bangkok, note that international shipping times are probably going to be your enemy. I had to wait for my zircons for like six weeks.

Q. Hey, some of these ruby entries are looking more like $400 for one instead of $20 for ten. What gives?

A. The corundum this supplier has comes from three processes: flame fusion, hydrothermal synthesis, and Czochralski pulling. Flame fusion is cheap and easy, you cram some powdered aluminum oxide and some impurities into a plasma torch and bam, you've got rubies, or sapphires, or spinels, or padparadscha, or whatever. The resulting stones are good enough for me, which is why I bought them.

The hydrothermal process uses a big-ass autoclave to simulate the natural process by which these crystals formed. A saturated solution is put in and allowed to become supersaturated by slowly cooling it. Seed crystals are added to entice things to grow, and you've got pretty damn good stones. Notably, this can be used for things like beryl. It's more time and energy intensive, and that jacks up the price, but the result is basically indistinguishable from natural gemstone.

Czochralski pulling takes a seed crystal and puts it on the end of a puller rod that's dipped into a crucible of molten whatever. The rod is very slowly and precisely pulled upward, resulting in a monocrystalline "ingot" of that whatever. If you're trying to build a laser, don't, but that's kind of the only reason you'd need a gemstone with this kind of purity and structure.

Long story short, if you only need the rocks to look at like a dragon, you're fine with the cheapest option.

Q. Hey, why is there alexandrite listed in the corundum section?

That's simulated alexandrite. It's a corundum that's been doped with a colorant that changes hue from pink to green based on what angle you view it from. You can actually get true beryl alexandrite from this site, but since it's a beryl stone, a great big hunk of it's gonna be pricey, because of the above lecture.

Q. Do you actually have those rubies?

You bet your ass.

Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

~*~earlier~*~

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Frodo: Merry. You’re absolutely right. I’ll wait.

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Frodo: :)

Frodo: Hello. My name is Frodo. I am a Hobbit. How are you?

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo, crying: please I can’t understand what you’r saying

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wizard-guff

Ok, but Frodo didn’t just learn out of a book. He learned like… Chaucerian Elvish. So actually:

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

Aragorn: *laughing too hard to walk*

dYinGggGggg…

i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.

to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!

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audreycritter

Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.

Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*

Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y'all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.

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sainatsukino

Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man

Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s

Tolkien would be SO PROUD of this post

It got better

there may come a day when i do not reblog this post, but it is NOT THIS DAY

you are feeling very simpson today you feel like you are becoming homer you have a deep craving for doughnut and you feel like saying doh and you want to punish boy

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Reblogged

the legendary sage of website cove

nay, this be the home of the legendary sage of wiscomb bight. the GPS always sends folk to the wrong door.

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Reblogged quiddie

plausible deniability remains highly erotic

let's convince ourselves that this is okay. let's rely on technicalities to exonerate ourselves. let's avoid looking what we're doing in the eye. let's live under its shadow, both aware of what this is but unwilling to say it out loud, since that will shatter the careful illusion we've built

sometimes a friend comes by to drop something and says "yeah after that i'm off to a puzzle warehouse" and you have no choice but to leave your depression spiral, get dressed, and follow that friend to the middle of nowhere to see the puzzle warehouse

there's two floors.

i feel like those posts thatre like “REAL gay people don’t talk about yaoi discourse they go to gay clubs and do ket” are crazy like i understand they’re critiquing a hyper specific genre of online queer but babe they can do both… i know people who are ravers and are always on shrooms and read mcr rpf like i feel like we draw a big line between the online queer community and the in person one but that girls at gay bars have tumblr accounts it’s really not that seperate

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