Blue Feathered Corvus

heyy ummm so I'm an Aboriginal person in Australia who's super into vexillology (flags and shit) trying to find literally all of the flags that exist for Indigenous peoples across the globe. I don't know of any like..proper lists or such that have all of them, all I've got is just knowledge of some of the more recognisable ones (Australian Aboriginal flag, Torres Straight Islander flag, Tino Rangatiratanga, Sámi flag, etc.)

“Was it your bomb?” “I don’t know. Neither does Beetee,” he says. “Does it matter? You’ll always be thinking about it.” He waits for me to deny it; I want to deny it, but it’s true. Even now I can see the flash that ignites her, feel the heat of the flames. And I will never be able to separate that moment from Gale. My silence is my answer. “That was the one thing I had going for me. Taking care of your family,” he says. “Shoot straight, okay?” He touches my cheek and leaves. I want to call him back and tell him that I was wrong. That I’ll figure out a way to make peace with this. To remember the circumstances under which he created the bomb. Take into account my own inexcusable crimes. Dig up the truth about who dropped the parachutes. Prove it wasn’t the rebels. Forgive him. But since I can’t, I’ll just have to deal with the pain.

That doesn’t make Gale an evil person. I would argue that Gale is still a good person, who resorted to bad things in the name of freedom, only to learn in the worst way that those resorts have consequences. And he recognizes that in the scene above. He doesn’t try to argue against Katniss, he just accepts that they will never know if he had a hand in Prim’s death or not, and that’s bad enough.

So I apologize, but I must take on this task. A new hand must touch the beacon. The knowledge must be passed on. The chain can not be broken.

So.

The Game.

The following are the rules of The Game:

there is no winning The Game

once you know of The Game, you are always playing the game

the point of The Game is to not think about The Game

if you think about The Game, you have lost The Game, and must announce this to those around you - causing them to also lose The Game

A "reset period" of roughly an hour or two before loss announcements is common in colloquial rules to allow yourself and those around you to properly temporarily "forget" about The Game, however that is not an official rule.

available in many languages, they list the constitutional rights you have if ICE agents go to your home. right now they’ve closed free ordering for nonprofits but you can still print your own or order them in bulk as a business.

They may look like the person has become calmer and less involved, dismissive, even. Some people become intensely subservient and silent. Some become catatonic.

Panic doesn’t always involve screaming, crying, and obvious signs of distress. It involves an extreme form of the person’s fear response – which can be altered by circumstance, ability, and what they’ve learnt to fear.

They do not work on the same principle.

I can see how vaccines look like a "like treats like" situation, but in homeopathy "like treats like" is a kind of magical thinking.

Let's take an example from Chicken Pox, a virus for which there is an effective vaccine and for which there is a common homeopathic treatment.

Chicken pox infects people once, and it is extremely rare to get a second case because once you have had it, your body forms persistent antibodies against the varicella-zoster virus. When I was a kid, they didn't have a vaccine for this, so kids mostly got chicken pox once and it ran around whole schools and that was it. It's a virus that is fairly minor in children, though it can cause dangerously high fevers. Adults who get chicken pox typically get much sicker than children who get it, and it can lead to permanent harms like infertility in adults who get it. Because it can be so dangerous, we don't want people to risk getting it, so we vaccinate.

The way the vaccine works is that it takes a weakened form of the virus and introduces that into the body of a person with a healthy immune system. The immune system responds and the person who got the vaccine may get some minor symptoms, like a headache or a slight fever, but it will be nowhere near as severe as getting actual chicken pox would be. Because the immune system was exposed to the virus and responded, it now has antibodies against the virus that recognize the virus and respond immediately before it can start replicating in the body. If a person who has either previously had chicken pox or who has been vaccinated against it is exposed to the chicken pox virus, their body uses those antibodies to react to the virus and protect against a systemic infection.

Are you familiar with Star Trek? It's kind of like the Borg. You can't use the same attack pattern against the Borg multiple times because if you do, they'll recognize the pattern and will be able to defend against it. The virus is the attacker, and your immune system is the Borg. It knows what it's looking for and won't let anything get through its defenses.

Homeopathic remedies don't seek to prevent illness or provoke an immune response, they seek to cancel out something that is happening in the body.

For chicken pox, which produces itchy red bumps, homeopaths use Rhus Tox - a dilution of poison ivy, a plant that causes itchy red bumps if you encounter it in nature. The Rhus Tox didn't cause the chicken pox, it's not given to prevent the virus, it's from a plant that is completely unrelated to the virus that happens to produce some of the same symptoms as the virus when you touch it.

They don't even think that the Rhus Tox will provoke an immune response from your body like actually touching poison ivy would, they're attempting to use an unrelated compound (that is so diluted that it isn't even present in the preparation) in place of your immune system to attack the itchy red bumps.

So I'm going to go over this in a few brief points:

Vaccines are preventative ONLY, they are not a treatment for illness or symptoms of an illness

Vaccines work by introducing your immune system to a partial, weakened, or dead virus so that your immune system can form antibodies against that virus and prevent that virus from replicating in your body when it is later exposed to a whole/strong/live virus.

Different vaccines have different levels of effectiveness and produce different lengths of immunity; this is for a number of reasons, but if you get a measles shot as a kid you may only ever need one booster, while you need a flu shot every year and a tetanus shot every decade. All of them work the same way, though: they show your immune system what a virus looks like so that your immune system can kill the virus.

That is why immune compromised people sometimes can't be vaccinated, or why vaccines don't work as well for them or may need higher doses or more boosters. Because they don't have a healthy immune system, weakened viruses like the ones in the chickenpox virus might be too strong for their immune system to fight, and even if it doesn't get them sick, their bodies may not be able to produce enough effective antibodies to protect them from the virus in the future. That's part of why it's important for as many people to be vaccinated as possible; the more people who are vaccinated, the harder it is for viruses to spread, and vulnerable people like immune compromised people or babies too young for vaccination won't be exposed to deadly viruses.

Homeopathy, on the other hand, aims to treat symptoms of an illness that a person is already experiencing.

Homeopathic treatments do not aim to provoke an immune response, they aim to cancel out a symptom with a cure.

Dilution is a very important part of homeopathy, with homeopaths claiming that the more diluted a preparation is the stronger it is. This is simply incorrect; I don't know how to make a more logical explanation of that, it is just wrong that less of a substance causes more of a response.

Homeopathy says "like treats like" and that may seem like using a vaccine with a weak virus to prevent infection from a strong virus, but their version of "like" is different - Rhus Tox (poison ivy) is supposed to be "like" chicken pox because both cause itching. Rhus tox is also supposed to treat PCOS, erectile dysfunction, uterine prolapse, sunken eyes, nausea, and backache. "Like" can have an extremely broad meaning in homeopathy, which should be cause for suspicion.

Drinking peppermint tea when you have a sore throat isn't going to make your sore throat go away faster, but it might provide some relief from the pain.

A heavily spiced tea isn't going to cure anything, but it might give some temporary relief from a stuffy nose.

No soup is going to cure your illness, but it will give your body some much needed vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes that will help it fight off the illness and recover more quickly.

And sometimes things just straight up do nothing but make you emotionally feel better - that's okay, too. Just know what are realistic expectations for what you're doing.

Homeopathy is *very specifically* the dilution of substances in water to use water's memory to treat illnesses on the principle of like treats like. Calling drinking tea for a sore throat "homeopathy" is like calling stretching "chiropractic" or calling all massage "acupressure."

In the last decade or so people (largely people who want homeopathy to be taken more seriously) have been expanding the use of "homeopathy" to cover more and more home remedies and CAM practices, it's important to know what the actual meaning is so that people don't start to conflate "drinking tea" with "drinking water that was once near a leaf of poison ivy" because it legitimizes the latter.

People who have had a cold and felt better after having some warm soup (clear liquids! vitamins! minerals! protein! rehydration and nutrition, which you need when you're sick and will make you feel better!) who think of that as "homeopathy" are going to see people discussing homeopathy as a scam, quack practice that does tremendous harm and they'll think "what is that person talking about? homeopathy is just putting lemon and honey in tea for a sore throat, it's fine" which will make them more resistant to criticisms of actual homeopathy and will perhaps make them adversarial toward discussions of evidence-based medicine.

This is semantic creep that needs to be firmly addressed; that was NOT a common definition of "homeopathy" when I started getting deep into exploring the world of CAM and quack medicine fifteen years ago, and I'm a bit concerned that it has spread as far as it already has.

of course!! disclaimer that the worldbuilding, overall idea, names of daemons, and relationships the characters have with them all come from @bluefeatheredcorvus, I am simply a paltry imitator enjoying the world they’ve created

Finnick’s daemon, Vivian, is perched on the counter, watching them warily, when Annie and Naoise come downstairs the next morning. Annie gives her a wide berth and grabs two mugs out of the cupboard, then starts making the coffee. Finnick’s passed out on the couch, an arm slung over his eyes to try and shield them from the sunlight pouring in through the window.

Vivian rarely goes near him. Their bond has to be almost constantly stretched to the limit, and Annie doesn’t know how either of them stand it.