Keep Calm & Live On

The Hunger Games, Actual Teen style!

On the left, 15-year-old Josh Hutcherson.

On the right, 16-year-old Jennifer Lawrence.

-Haymitch Abernathy was 16 when he won the Hunger Games, and the Capitol attempted to force him into prostitution as they did with Finnick and many other popular victors. He refused, and in retaliation, they gradually killed off everyone he loved one by one—his friends from home, his family, his girlfriend. He began drinking heavily at a young age to deal with the trauma of the Games, the loss of everyone he’d ever cared about, and subsequently having to continually relive the trauma of the Games in mentoring roughly 50 children, two each year, whom he’d then have to send to their deaths in the Arena. 

-The Capitol also attempted to force Joanna Mason into prostitution. She, too, refused, and like with Haymitch, the Capitol retaliated by killing off everyone she loved one by one. She alludes to this in both the book and the movie version of Catching Fire, not flinching when she enters the Jabberjay area of the arena because there’s “no one left” that she loves. The movies don’t really explore this, though, while the books do more exploration both with everything the Capitol has taken from her and the lingering effects of her PTSD from her imprisonment by the Capitol. 

-The only reason Peeta and Katniss weren’t forced into prostitution was because the Capitol was too invested in the “Star-Crossed Lovers from District 12″ narrative. 

-Also, Katniss spent the latter half of her first Hunger Games deaf in one ear and had to have her middle and inner ear reconstructed after the Games—the explosion at the Cornucopia permanently fucked up her hearing in that ear. She’s able to hear again after the surgeries but never quite the same. 

-And Peeta had a prosthetic leg! He was severely injured while fleeing the “Mutts” at the end of the Games and was bleeding out from his leg by the time he and Katniss reached the Cornucopia. Katniss gave him a tourniquet using one of her last two arrows to tighten it. Doing so saved his life, but by the time the Capitol doctors took them out of the arena, the leg was beyond saving and had to be amputated. Katniss finds this out in their “post-Games” interview with Cesar Flickerman. 

-Just generally the movies glossed over or completely cut a lot of characters whose experiences in the games left them physically disabled (Katniss’s partial deafness and Peeta’s lost leg being cut entirely, Beetee’s spinal damage from the forcefield leaving him wheelchair-bound being largely kinda glossed over) or with PTSD (Katniss and Peeta’s PTSD isn’t really explored that much, Joanna’s PTSD is pretty much skipped over entirely, Annie’s barely in the movies at all, Haymitch’s entire backstory is cut, the fact that Finnick is basically just constantly putting on a show and barely holding it together under the surface isn’t ever really explored, pretty much all of the addiction subplots including Haymitch attempting to quit drinking and Katniss starting to drink at one point and everything related to morphling are cut…). 

-Basically as “rough” as the movies are they sanitized the FUCK out of the Hunger Games and the world surrounding them, and that’s…not a good thing.

The only reason Katniss and Peeta were saved from prostitution was timing. After their own Games, the rumblings of rebellion had really started to gain traction. All victors have to do a celebratory circuit of all the Districts, but Peeta and Katniss’s celebration circuit was being used by Snow as a “everything’s fine, please don’t rebel, we’re just a pair of teenagers in live” prop tool for Snow to try and supress the rebellion. Peeta and Katniss were much more useful to him as teens in love than they were as prostitutes. Then we went straight from there to the 75th Games, in which Peeta and Katniss were fighters. Between being used to quell a revolution and having the Quarter Quell go the way it did, there was no time for Snow to loan them out to people. But had the timing been different – had there been no rebellion or had Peeta and Katniss not been central to it or had it all been delayed long enough for the post-games celebrations to die out, then yeah, they would have been sold to the highest bidder just like Finnick was.

Cinna puts Katniss in a dress that is consciously designed to make her look much younger than she actually is, so as to play up the ‘teens in love’ angle they’re trying to sell the Capitol.

But the dress also has padding, so as to make her breasts and hips seem larger than they are, since she’s been literally on the verge of starvation for weeks, and wasn’t eating that much before that, and as a result she isn’t that curvy. Katniss is shocked by this, but Cinna explains that the dress was actually a compromise, because the original Capitol plan had been to give her plastic surgery.

Katniss then realises that none of the male tributes grew facial hair in the arena, even though several of them were old enough (note: she doesn’t say that all of them were old enough. Though Rue was the youngest, this suggests that there were other tributes who were young teenagers) and that something must have been done to them to prevent that from happening.

Also, it’s worth considering that Katniss and Peeta probably looked even younger than your typical sixteen year olds.

Katniss makes a big deal about how much they both get to eat at home, but if you read between the lines, Peeta lives off stale bread from the bakery and the odd bit of meat, and Katniss is essentially living the hunter gatherer lifestyle, supplemented by what they can buy from the baker and what they can get from Prim’s goat.

They’re much more well-nourished than the bulk of District Twelve, but Katniss can still easily spot the Career Tributes, because they’re the ones who have always had enough to eat. She’s one of the older (and therefore almost certainly heavier) tributes, but she still gets to hide in trees to get away from the Careers, because she’s significantly lighter than all of them.

Malnutrition tends to push back puberty. Katniss would probably be less well-developed than a modern teenager of the same age.

Notably, we don’t hear about her getting her period— or even wondering about that like she does with the facial hair— in the arena. Which, yeah, could be because of our culture’s habit of viewing menstruation as less kid-friendly than graphic child murder and mentions of prostitution, but it’s worth considering that in real life she might well have not started it yet.

While wearing the final interview dress, even with the padding to give her bigger breasts and wider hips, she says she looks about “fourteen at most”, which even accounting for Cinna’s borderline magical design skills, suggests that she probably tends to look like a younger teen even without it.

I get what you’re trying to say but you have to understand that there are kids who grow up on tobacco, there are kids who don’t know how else to cope, there are kids who think it’s a small way to rebel against someone who hasn’t treated them fairly. Most of these kids are in poverty or are seriously struggling. It’s not fair to label them as nothing but attention seeking morons.

you don’t want to spend time smoking while you could spend doing something else, even if it’s nothing.

you don’t want to smoke in designated areas or outside, especially if weather is raging with all its might and its the only place you can smoke (not to mention the inevitable littering).

you don’t want to smoke in your home, where it can take awhile to vent it (and if you don’t, guess what - second hand smoking is still toxic for your health).

you don’t want to debate with yourself whether you should spend money on food or on smoking.

if you smoked for awhile, you must build the nerves of steel to resist doing again, and dark days will be waiting for you to fail.

there are people allergic to smoke - they can’t be around you when you smoke (hell, imagine if you’re one of them and you’re smoking).

If you’re currently on HRT or planning to get surgery, smoking can be *especially* dangerous and may prevent you from receiving that care.

Smoking while taking feminizing hormones exponentially increases your risk of cancer. Why? Because your breast tissue (which is right above your lungs) is growing, which requires more oxygen & blood. If you’re smoking, that oxygen can contain carcinogens, which will now be stored in all that brand new tissue.

Smoking while on estrogen also increases the risk of blood clots & heart attack

Nicotine REDUCES the circulation of estrogen, so it can essentially nullify your hormones.

Being a smoker puts you at higher risk during surgery by minimizing circulation, which can lead to infection and even tissue death.

Tobacco companies *specifically* target the LGBT+ community (e.g. pride events, bars, etc) because they know we are 1. less likely to quit 2. face higher levels of stress 3. are less likely to have health insurance

Please know, I’m not sharing this information as scare tactic, but rather trans folks are often not given this information or have providers who aren’t aware of it.

insulin has been mass produced (from animal extracts) since -1923-. slow acting insulin has existed since the ‘50s, and ‘human’ genetically engineered insulin (derived from E. coli bacteria) has existed since 1982.

insulin treatment for diabetes is not some new or ‘unproven’ treatment. according to beyondtype1, “Humalog rapid-acting insulin came on to the market with a list price of $21 a vial in 1997.” adjusting for inflation, a vial these days should cost about $34 at most. instead, it costs over $300. there is NO reason for it to be steadily gaining in price to the point that diabetics are unable to afford their lifesaving medication, other than the sheer inhuman greed of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

“ We’re a team of biohackers with a variety of backgrounds, and skills, and relationships to insulin and diabetes from many cities and countries around the world, including Oakland, California; Baltimore, Maryland; Paraiba, Brazil; Dakar, Senegal; Yaounde, Cameroon; and Puerto Rico. We’re working to develop the first practical, small-scale, community-centered model for insulin production to make insulin accessible to all. We envision a world in which communities in need have local sources of safe, affordable, high-quality insulin, and where people living with diabetes and their communities can own and govern the organizations that produce the medicine they depend on to survive. 

What We Do

We are creating an open-source (freely available) model for insulin production that centers on sustainable, small-scale manufacturing and open-source alternatives to production. We are developing protocols to produce short-acting (lispro) and long-acting (glargine) insulin, working on developing open-hardware equivalents to traditional production equipment, are researching sustainable regulation pathways to bring our insulin to the public, and are building capacities for local, small-scale manufacturing.

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Our work would not be possible without the support of volunteers, interns, and community advisors. We welcome people of all backgrounds from all over the world to bring their enthusiasm, time, connections, and experiences, both in life and in work. Our volunteers promote us on social media, build equipment, run experiments, write reports and blog posts, facilitate meetings, connect with other organizations and groups, meet with experts in the field, run virtual events, and contribute in designing tools, resources, and methods of all sorts.

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