:3

Just very clearly an attempt at saying, “my what?”

okay so i think i found the article op's (and me in my tags) talking about. being exposed to over 40 celsius (120 farenheit or so) for the whole day means youre sweating a LOT (the article says rashid- the farmer at the centre of the text- drinks around 17 liters a Day. humans usually only need 3, so i presume the rest is mostly used for sweat). so much so that the organizm reroutes water from other parts of itself to not die of heatstroke - salivary glands included, which means that 1. they have very little saliva in comparison to a healthy human being 2. what little their bodies DO produce is incredibly acidic, falling to ~5.5 ph from the ideal of 7ph. Teeth dissolve. Quickly. There's a mention of someone losing 8 teeth in two years

im not reading the whole article now (headache -_-), but later on the author of the article says about 30 million people (employed in agriculture) are at risk for extreme dental health problems. 30 million people at risk of not being able to eat solid food. 30 million people at risk of not being able to find work. being able to marry. being able to be part of their community. being able to speak clearly

I'm still in China, so stuck on mobile + without my drawing tablet, but I'll post my horse sketches and a modified version of my general animal drawing tips:

Horses, like any other animal, are 90% shapes. You want to get good at drawing these shapes. The most important place to start for a horse are at the SHOULDERS. You want to draw starting with the intention of the ENTIRE horse in mind. Don't do a bunch of disconnected hooves and legs and horse head shots until you're actually comfortable knowing what connects where. Doing a bunch of piecemeal 'studies' before you understand the whole animal's shape is a trap and a copout! You can see in my cleaned up horse lines that I always always draw out the shoulders, hips, and haunches.

Horses are hard for people to draw because their legs are weird. So this seems obvious to say, but get good at understanding their legs. You wouldn't believe the amount of people who go "horse bendy noodle legs hard" and leave it at that. It's best to look at a diagram of horse and human homologous limb structure, because then you can understand why they bend in the places they do. Like in math, actually understanding horse leg anatomy than simply memorizing what they look like at one angle is better, because then you can extrapolate what they look like from any angle using fundamental theorems.

Yesterday I saw a mother with a baby carriage, being followed by a girl of about 4-6 years old on a bicycle. The kid started ringing her bike bell like RING RING RING RING RING RING RING, and the mother turned to look behind them to see whether they were being followed by a cyclist who desperately needs to pass them for the sake of everyone's safety.

And the little girl - who just rang the goddamn bell herself 5 seconds ago - also turned to look.

me and my brother later had a small discussion about whether that could happen randomly (conclusion: no, he probably had to file papers or something) and whether daniel should now be referred to as dad’s ex-husband (conclusion: yes but only to see the face he’ll make) but at no point did we find it like... alarming? the world is big and weird. we were used to it.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

#I have a suspicion that a lot of people think aotearoa is a lot smaller than it actually is #I think there's a tendency especially for europeans and east-coast americans to think of it as 'a small island off of australia' #which like #it's small compared to australia #but most countries are small compared to australia #aotearoa has a greater area than the entire united kingdom #it also spans about 15° of latitude #which is 50% more than england #and also more than any US state except Alaska

"off of australia" is also a bit misleading; the distance looks small on a map, but that's because your brain is comparing it to the entire pacific ocean on the other side.

(Source: The valley of the Wilkin from Huddleston’s run, 1877, by John Gully)

Tolkien lived during this time in British history, and Lord of the Rings is written with this same nostalgia for English pastoralism. The Shire is an idealized version of pre-industrial England, and many of the themes of Lord of the Rings are rooted in this early 1900s nostalgia for a pre-industrial society. So the fact that Peter Jackson's films merge these two elements is unsurprising. Compare the above painting of the Aotearoa with the following painting of Edoras, and then the film version of it.

(Source: Edoras and the Palace of Meduseld, Alan Lee, 1993)

(Source: Shot from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Peter Jackson, 2002)