I'm Attention Deficit in High Definition

However, slaves distrusted Western remedies as ineffectual and dangerous. They also complained that these treatments were stereotyped... Slaves knew that some of the treatments worsened problems and, perhaps most important, they realized that a master's interest in their fitness for work was sometimes inimical to their health.

In short, enslaved Blacks often eschewed Western medicine because they suspected their owners of a greater interest in them as capital than in their welfare. They also questioned the acumen and the motivation of the "regular" Western practitioners who, in turn, ridiculed the spiritual component of African medicine as "superstition".

Test subject

and it's a painful distinction to make because that's a really strong motivator in its own right. like sometimes you'll ask yourself "okay well if I was going to make <insert project here> ONLY for myself, how would I do it" and the answer is going to be "I wouldn't" and that's a rough fucking pill to swallow.

on the other hand, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with daydreaming about projects you don't actually want to make, but which you like imagining Having Made. plan out a game you're not going to code. plot out a novel you don't care to write. Having Made Something is not the point of art.* rolling around in creative mud with no real objective has value god damn it

Because people with clefts have missing bone, the topology of the face is completely different to a regularly formed person's. This still applies to repaired clefts, to what extent depends on the original severity of the cleft and the success of the surgeries + orthodontics.

(I am going to use the word "cleft" by itself several times for the sake of brevity, please know I am referring to maxillofacial clefts every time. Clefts can occur outside of the maxilla, where they are known as craniofacial clefts, I will not be covering those right now.)

I find diagrams like this to be misleading, as they present the cleft like a thin "cut" in an otherwise fully formed head.

This is a more accurate visualisation of the condition, a cleft is more like a "gap" or "chasm". Tissue, both soft and hard, that would've been present in this gap is missing completely. That's skin, bone, muscle, teeth, and everything else.

People with clefts will often have a bone taken from usually the hip to be added to the upper jaw, to substitute for the absent material. People with clefts are also often missing adult teeth. Cleft repairs take a very long time, and that's under accessible healthcare of relatively high quality. The missing bone in the upper jaw causes most with maxillofacial clefts to have underbites, because the upper jaw is too short. Underbite correction is often the very last major surgery to be carried out. It is often done in the early twenties, because bones have stopped growing in length by that point in most people's lives. It is important to pay attention to the age of your character with a cleft. I don't expect you to have planned out an entire medical history, but the structure of a face with a maxillofacial cleft changes dramatically throughout early life. I think the underbite is the biggest thing I want to see more in people's cleft characters; remember the underbite caused by a cleft is due to a short upper jaw and NOT a long lower jaw.

For unilateral clefts, the nostril on the side of the cleft is smaller than the other, unless the cleft stops a while before reaching the nose. The cleft-side nostril also often has compromised breathing ability, causing many with clefts to rely on breathing through the mouth instead. People who are still going through treatment can have a fistula connecting the inside of the mouth and the nasal cavity. This fistula causes trouble with eating and drinking, as material passes into the nose and food can clog the fistula up. On the bright side, it can allow for the very cool party trick of being able to drink through the nose or eject fluids through the nose from the mouth. The deformed shape of the mouth affects pronunciation as well, since the jaws don't align as they should, people with clefts have to "cheat" to perform certain sounds. The voice also often sounds nasally because of increased airflow into the nose.

Even though the clefts are maxillofacial, effects can extend to the ears. People with clefts often get frequent ear infections especially as children, some have a flattened ear canal on the side of the cleft, and some have impaired hearing and may require hearing aids.

so a normal world loading square is supposed to look like this

and not like this (or the abover screenshots)

You try to pull the blanket off of yourself, and you realize that, it too, is made of chocolate. You try to shake it off, and step out of bed. Your carpet feels strangely spongy. You look down, only to realize it’s actually cake. Lovingly baked, and smelling of sweet fruit. You grab a piece, and cautiously take a bite. It is one of the most delicious cakes you have ever eaten.

You get up, confused, and exit your room to see if the rest of your house is like this. The door handle melts in your hand as you hold onto it, and covers it with dark chocolate carefully painted gold. The rest of the carpet on the floor is still cake, the guardrails on the stairs leading down are tempered chocolate, the tiles on the floor are the same, the windows are sugar glass, everything is edible.

You run outside, knocking over the lovingly crafted chocolate front door in a panic.

You realize, in horror, that your house was not an exception. The bushes, the grass, the asphalt on the road, the trees, birds, the world itself, is chocolate.