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you feel angry (you feel pain)

stop, take a moment to gather yourself and breathe deeply (stop, take a moment to apply first aid to your wound)

find the root cause of your anger; what brought your anger about and how come? (find what caused your injury; what hurt you, what type of wound?)

what can you do to regain control? try not to fuel the anger with violence; mitigate by being gentle to yourself and others (what can you do to keep you safe from further and future injury? what further treatment do you need? try not to aggravate your wound; be gentle and cautious)

Are you in the Way?

Are you in the wAy?

Are you in the waY?

and we will say "When I was YOUR age, fruits and vegetables came from a supermarket and they were bred to get shipped 1000 miles in a truck and sit on shelves for weeks, and they tasted so sour and watery it was like eating paper compared to these ones. It wasn't even legal in some places to grow your own food"

and they will roll their eyes like yeah yeah just because everything was miserable in the 20s doesn't mean I have to have a smile on my face standing in the hot sun while you listen to that one guy talk about his bees FOREVER

And many other people have been just spitting, foaming at the mouth fucking FURIOUS. How dare I have the audacity to imagine a future where things get better?

Don't I know how BAD things are? Am I not aware of the TERROR and DEVASTATION of climate change and fascism and biodiversity loss? How dare someone be so bold, so callous, as to imagine something other than misery and suicide. How dare someone suggest it will get better. How dare a person propose that there is a future where we will be okay, in the face of so much terror. Hasn't she seen the abyss opening its jaws before us?

Well? What do you think?

there were kids who stayed inside because of the black plague and went on to help cure it.

there were women who sat at home and cleaned the house and dreamt up a world where they could vote and have jobs.

there were kids in the mines who thought up a life outside of it. there were children who hid in annexes and wrote a diary where they prayed for a future without a terrible man in control

there were slaves who wanted freedom so badly and had hope that it would get better

there were gay people who hid in the corners of clubs and fought back for a future where they could walk down the street together

do you know what all of that has in common? they had hope that things would get better and they made that change. they looked at the world in its cruel ways and fought back.

so now, there are kids and teenagers and young adults and new adults who dream of a world so beautiful and the only amazon their grandchildren know is the rainforest

and it is in everything we do that we find this hope. wishing on dandelions, counting the stars, making our own clothes out of crochet or knit or sewing it, watching the sunset, going to the farmer’s market, feeding the birds, planting seeds.

I mean, I already knew about it, but I just learned about it

Did you know that the target audience for Farming Simulator is actual real-world farmers? Because I didn’t. I just assumed that farmers probably don’t want to go home from a day of farming to do some (presumably highly inaccurate) virtual farming?

Like, imagine if the target audience for Power Washing Simulator was actual professional power washers.

Farming Sim gets sponsored by companies and shit to put ads in their games. But since the game is for farmers, all of the ads target farmers. Advertising products that, realistically, only farmers would be interested in. Aka John Deere tractors and shit.