I know Tumblr tends to be very US-centric, but there is something happening in my country that I absolutely have to share.
Soon, Brazil will host presidential elections. These are the first elections since the impeachment of our last president Dilma Rouseff.
The leading candidate is currently Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro is a man who has made racist, sexist, and homophobic claims such as, “I would rather my son die in a car accident than be gay,” and, “my sons would not date black women as they were well educated.” He even said to a woman that she was, “so ugly” that she, “didn’t even deserve to get raped.”
A few decades ago, when Brazil was under a military dictatorship, the government tortured many people for speaking out against the regime. Bolsonaro has said that, “their only mistake was not killing those people.”
However, something incredible has been happening.
A movement called Mulheres Unidas Contra Bolsonaro (Women United Against Bolsonaro) has been surfacing. The hashtag #EleNão (#NotHim) has been getting popular and gaining international attention.
Yesterday, women all over Brazil (and the world!) protested against Bolsonaro.
Here are some pictures.
São Paulo, Brazil:
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:
Ilhéus, Brazil:
Cuiabá, Brazil:
Porto Alegre, Brazil:
Brazilians living abroad also joined the protests!
Zurich, Switzerland:
Madrid, Spain:
Melbourne, Australia:
New York City, US:
Protests occurred in over 62 cities around the world.
Even if you’re not Brazilian, please share this post! Show your support and raise awareness of the movement!
Just about every year since the Carnegie Museum of Natural History acquired it, Fred the Crystal Skull has made an appearance in Hillman Hall of Minerals and Gems right around Halloween. So how did we acquire a crystal skull and how did it get the name Fred you ask? Just to set the record straight right off the bat, Fred is not one of the dozen or so mysterious skulls that some think were carved by an ancient Mesoamerican civilization thousands of years ago. Our skull was carved and polished from a single quartz crystal with modern tools in Brazil and was donated to the museum in 2004 by South American Gems, Ltd located in Guarapari, Espirito Santo, Brazil.Germany, China and Brazil currently produce thousands of carved crystal skulls every year in numerous sizes. Fred measures 7.8 inches high by 5 inches wide, which is slightly smaller than the average human skull (8 to 9 inches high and 6 to 7 inches wide) so he was named after a man of small stature, namely the step father of the former Head of the Section of Minerals Marc Wilson. Marc was Section Head from August 1992 to August 2017.
As you can see in the photograph of Fred, he has some internal flaws and fractures which is very common in the mineral quartz. Chemical impurities, physical flaws and twinning in natural quartz are issues that caused industry to develop a commercial process of manufacturing pure, electronics-grade quartz that can be used in circuits for consumer products such as televisions, radios, computers, cell phones and electronic games, just to name a few, and for crystal-controlled clocks and watches. As it so happens, the Section of Minerals also has a few lab-grown quartz crystals in the collection, including a large crystal nicknamed The Football that is nearly a foot across.
You will notice it is so clear that you can see the growth patterns of the bottom surface through the crystal. The Football was part of a donation of 57 lab created specimens given to the Section of Minerals in 2017 by Lynn Boatner just before he retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Fred will be on display in front of Wertz Gallery on October 24.
Debra Wilson is the Collection Manager for the Section of Minerals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.
some asshat just said “If you can’t fabricate your own one liners while spellcasting then you have no buisness being a Bard.”
fuck off. it’s great for the Immersive Experience if you can, but if someone doesn’t need to be able to lift a greataxe to play a fighter, they don’t need fuck all to play a bard.
screaming into the void since '89 