my BIG interest, by the Aspergian

I like flint knapping. I like to use snowflake obsidian. I also like to collect slate from the creek and paint it with clear nail-polish. Then I like to make it into a useless axe. The slate is an excellent material for modeling prototypes. It can be hard to find obsidian at first. One day I hope to make a razor, so that I can get my boy-beard off. I can make a cheese knife, for cutting cheeses. Mr. Goff taught me about flint knapping. It's how you knap flint. Conchoidal fracture. Ever since I had my first rock collection, I loved obsidian. Snowflake obsidian is like natural glass but not like a fulgurite. It's different. A fulgurite is when lightning strikes sand at the beach, fusing it into a glass model of the path the static took when it discharged into the earth at that area of sand. And snowflake obsidian has spherulites. My spelling checker doesn't like it when I write about flint knapping. It makes lots of words red. Spherulites are most common in glassy rocks. Glassy rocks are largely composed of silica. So is glass. So is sand. Spherulites are -also- crystals. Devitrification means the process of making glasses crystalline and brittle. Sometimes they are clear, but usually nature makes them opaque. That's why I like spherulites. Glasses also don't have any regular repeated molecular structure, so they can be considered not solids. Obsidian is formed when acidic lava cools very quickly when it comes into contact with the atmosphere. If it cooled slowly, it would crystallize and become solid and be called a rhyolite. Obsidian is a rhyolite, but its molecular structure is still fluid. Pliny the Elder wrote that it was named obsidian after Obsius. Obsius was a Roman and he discovered obsidian in Ethiopia. But back then. The spherulites you can see in snowflake are made of cristobalite. Cristobalite is quartz and tridymite when it's been polymorphed into a spherulite. I can't explain polymorphism to you right now, but I can do that tomorrow. Right now I want to tell you about flint knapping. Snowflake obsidian is my favorite flint to knap, even though it's not flint. I just call it flint knapping because then people know what I'm talking about. It should be called obsidian knapping, or more specifically snowflake obsidian knapping. I almost knap obsidian exclusively. Because slate is just a modeling tool. You can knap slate, but it's not done like glasses with their ability to fracture conchoidally. It sort of flakes apart. You probably can't shave with it.

If I ever go to school to become a Ninja, I will make sure to tell my teacher about how I can make weapons out of rocks. I will show him with a game called Rock, Paper, Scissors, Knap! Where:

1.00 Knap beats Rock
1.01 Knap beats Paper
1.02 Knap beats Scissors (by a longshot)
1.03 Knap beats Knap (this is where it gets interesting for the layman)

Knapping is a small craze. I'm crazy about it, anyway. I have an Ishi stick, which is named after the Native American Ishi who taught anthropologists and historians about flint knapping. The Ishi stick is good for making long pressure flakes. You can make arrowheads and stuff, but slate isn't a good material. I could also make flints for flintlock rifles, except I made a vow to never make a weapon that will kill, like Hattori Hansö. He was a famous Ninja from Japan in the 1500s. He was also called Hattori Masanari. If I ever become a Ninja, I am going to revive the clan. Until then, I will never make a weapon that will kill. Unless I am attacked. Even then I won't make firearm weapons from snowflake obsidian. Besides, it wouldn't EVEN WORK.

Knap beats Knap means that you have to specify your material. The most common knapping materials are flint, chert, agate, and obsidian and they're usually listed in that order. The reason they're listed in that order is because it's a list in ascending order of their viability as weapons, flint being the weakest and obsidian being the strongest. That's another reason that I like obsidian best. And when you play rock, paper, scissors, knap, you can always beat your opponent by saying "knap: obsidian" because most people don't know this. But if you're playing a game that doesn't exist, one called "rock, paper, scissors, knap, gun" then you might lose. Unless you knew that flint is the only type of flintlock gun and they specified a flintlock gun with obsidian for flint, because then you could just laugh at them and then cut their hand that is holding their gun off with knap: obsidian. Then they would have to caulderize it. If they were going to make you take out the trash or whatever, like if you had a reason.

Well, I've got a lot of rocks in my pockets and my pants are heavy so I have to stop telling you about obsidian knapping. Sometimes I get holes in my pockets.