Sunflowers

oh shoot it was octopath anniversary... um i was going to do something.. have some post-canon doodles as consolation

And like... this is something I have thought about. You never hear any english speaking person claim movies from their own countries are stupid because of that. Like yeah of course every country has bad movies, but never have I heard the reason being "the language is dumb" for an english speaking film.

What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?

What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?

What if the rainforest ADVANCES?

What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?

What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?

What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?

What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?

What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?

What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?

What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?

What if we win?

The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.

Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.

It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.

We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.

People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.

Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.

Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.

We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.

In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 – more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.

When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.

When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.

When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!

We fixed it.

Since 1990 extreme poverty has decreased worldwide by over HALF.

yeah. maybe that would be fair to say about say, discrete viruses. but about syndromes?

like. the conditions of the human body don't know that they're taxonomically discrete. they don't know that they have different names or lists of symptoms. if a human body has a consistent issue with say, its heart rhythm, or its inflammatory response, or its glandular response, or immune system

the reason that ehlers-danlos syndrome (EDS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), postural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS), IBS (irritable bowel), autism, and even shit like coeliac and PMDD or endometriosis overlap is bc like. these are largely inflammatory issues or issues with the fascia

It's not "what the fuck, how can this person have all these different things wrong with them", bc these are largely like. syndromic definitions of how x bodily issue manifests in different systems, structures, or organs of the body

many of these conditions change in definition over time

and that's bc they're studied and understood more over time where people more meaningfully understand underlying causes and issues, such as through hormone or genetic profiles, or largely like. immune response

it's also how "rare" conditions become understood as more common over time

I recall reading the book A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness. It's about a nuclear worker who received a lethal dose of radiation due to a prompt-critical accident while making nuclear fuel. As the title implies, he died over the course of 83 days.

What struck me about the book was, it's pretty clear his DNA was just shredded and nothing was really replacing itself effectively. His organs and systems failed at a rate consistent with their typical cellular lives. At each step of this, they brought in specialists to manage the problem: he wasn't producing erethrocytes, they brought in hematologists. His stomach lining was breaking down, they brought in gastroenterologists, &c. Each one had this faith that if they kept him going past this crisis, his body's natural healing would take over and he would get better. But looking at his body as a whole, it was obvious from very early that was Just Not Happening. Each specialist was looking at it as "Oh no, my one part is failing, I need to get him through this and the rest of his otherwise healthy body can pull him along!" except the whole damned body was going because that's what a lethal neutron flux does. And somewhere around day 30 or so they should have said "I'm sorry, this is not going to work, we are switching to palliative care" and he could have died a week or two later, but that's not how specialists think.