Online Thread Nears Resolution as 40th User Asks for Streak Test on High-Resolution Macro Photo

Harold Loomis read the fortieth request aloud, closed the laptop, and said he wasn't annoyed, he just needed the room to be quiet. "They aren't fighting," he told his housemate afterward. "That's the part I can't get past. Forty people, same sentence, nobody's cross."

The thread opened nine days ago with one macro photograph: a dark, pitted stone about the size of a walnut, shot close enough that every vesicle reads. The poster gave what they had, a hardness mark from a fingernail that came up as roughly 2, a locality narrowed to a wash in the Southwest, and a note that the stone was "a little heavy for its size." What they did not give was a streak, because a streak is not a thing a camera can carry.

Replies one through forty were, in the terms the bench cares about, variations on a single failed transmission. Reply four specified unglazed porcelain. Reply nineteen specified the plate, not a glazed tile. Reply thirty-one was "streak test?" and nothing else. Reply forty asked for a streak test with the additional hope that the poster owned a plate.

I ran the mechanism past my own bench, because that is the part I keep until I can name it. The streak plate is a slab of unglazed porcelain that earns its keep by being scratched; abrasion is its entire function, and the color it returns is a color the specimen's surface cannot conceal. A photograph returns the surface. Nothing is wrong with the plate. The failure sits in the channel between the plate and the screen, where no plate has been, and where the tool therefore reports nothing at all. A replacement costs about four dollars at the counter where I buy mine. The macro lens in that photo costs considerably more than my bench vise.

Otis Vale entered the thread at reply twenty-six and issued the ruling everyone has been quoting since: "A streak test performed on a photograph is a streak test performed on the monitor." He then moved that the group adopt "request the plate, not the picture" as standing procedure, which carried, and which changed nothing about reply twenty-seven.

Inez Fenn, whose monthly update is where the club's memory actually lives, logged the exchange as "streak test requested; awaiting specimen." Three members have since told me a test is underway. It is not underway. Inez is not disputing this; she is simply the reason everyone believes it.

On day six a different user posted a streak from a stone of similar description, taken from a different wash: chocolate-brown, decisive, and within an hour the thread had quietly agreed on an identification. Reply forty-three then pointed out that the streak came from a different specimen, at which point the agreement evaporated without residue. On day seven the original poster returned to say they had dragged the stone across a glazed bathroom tile and gotten brown. Two users explained, at length and in perfect agreement with each other, that glazed tile abrades nothing, that the brown came off under a wet finger, and that the result was the stone's own powder sitting on a surface too hard to be scratched. The poster thanked them and asked again about streak color.

What remains is logistics. Reply forty-six offers to mail a plate. Reply forty-nine asks who pays postage on a four-dollar slab, and the thread, having spent forty replies on a question of evidence, now reads like a shipping negotiation, which is at least a question with an answer.

The stone has not been identified. It sits on a sill where it is pleasant to hold, and the next person to pick it up will ask what it is, and the honest reply is a color nobody has produced yet.