#icarus project

So, yeah. I finished my Icarus project.

Lay of Nimrodel

Music: Broceliande Original lyrics: J.R.R. Tolkien

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

Last fall, teams of scientists began fanning out across the globe to stalk and capture thousands of other creatures — rhinos in South Africa, blackbirds in France, fruit bats in Zambia — in order to outfit them with an array of tracking devices that can run on solar energy and that weigh less than five grams. The data they collect will stream into an ambitious new project, two decades in the making and costing tens of millions of dollars, called the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, or ICARUS, project. Each tag will collect data on its wearer’s position, physiology and microclimate, sending it to a receiver on the International Space Station, which will beam it back down to computers on the ground. This will allow scientists to track the collective movements of wild creatures roaming the planet in ways technically unimaginable until recently: continuously, over the course of their lifetimes and nearly anywhere on Earth they may go.

By doing so, ICARUS could fundamentally reshape the way we understand the role of mobility on our changing planet. The scale and meaning of animal movements has been underestimated for decades. Although we share the landscape with wild species, their movements are mostly obscure to us, glimpsed episodically if at all. They leave behind only faint physical traces — a few paw prints in the hardening mud of a jungle path, a quickly fading arc of displaced air in the sky, a dissipating ripple under the water’s surface. But unlike, say, the sequence of the human genome, or the nature of black holes, our lack of knowledge about where our fellow creatures go has not historically been regarded as a particularly pressing gap in scientific understanding.

But over the last few decades, new evidence has emerged suggesting that animals move farther, more readily and in more complex ways than previously imagined. And those movements, ecologists suspect, could be crucial to unraveling a wide range of ecological processes, including the spread of disease and species’ adaptations to habitat loss. ICARUS will allow scientists to observe animal movements in near totality for the first time. It will help create what its founder, Martin Wikelski, a biologist at the University of Konstanz and managing director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, calls the “internet of animals.”

an incomplete, hasty list

1. similar to other social movements, such as queer pride or disabled pride, mad pride insists that the pain + struggle that mad people suffer does not negate the inherent positive experience, or simply natural aspects, of living a mad life.

2. this does not erase or negate the suffering of mad people. mad pride opens space so that the suffering does not define the experience of madness. 

3. it also opens space for the criticism of the medical model of madness, which insists that mad people are “mental ill”. the idea of illness comes part + parcel with a concept of health, in that the mentally must be treated, cured, or changed so they might meet, or grow closer to meeting, the standards set by normative society. mad pride does not pathologize difference.

4. the psychiatric industry is capitalist + exists to profit off prescribing psychotropic chemicals to mad people. psychiatry is an ENTIRE BRANCH OF MEDICINE that exists to make money off a growing population of diagnosable patients, often with faulty, corrupt, or poorly understood research backgrounds. the standards of behavior, psychological experience, + reaction to stressors are set by a body’s ability to successfully meet capitalist standards. if that body is unable to + said disability is characterized by extreme emotional, mental, behavioral, or psychological states, those bodies are under threat of psychiatric evaluation by employer, family, doctor, + law. this is to say - if you don’t fit into capitalism, you will be pathologized. mad pride says LOL NAH

5. mad pride uplifts + amplifies the voices of people who have been preyed upon, harmed, + traumatized by the psychiatric industry on the basis. these experiences frequently exist at the intersection of madness + race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, socioeconomic class, primary language, place of birth, immigration status, chemical use, sex work, + more.

6. what’s more, it uplifts + amplifies the voices of mad people who have pride in their madness. be it their creativity, their outlook on life, spirituality, perseverance, resilience, attention to detail, conviction, compassion for others, or even their simple survival, there are numerous reasons a person can feel proud of themselves + the lives they lead as mad people. any of these positive qualities can be pathologized through the right lens. mad pride celebrates them.

7. by criticizing the assumption of madness as illness, mad pride makes space for people to build their own frameworks of how their madness operates within the context of their ideologies + lives + cultivate their own meaning out of their experiences. in doing so, mad people are empowered to build their own systems of reaching higher qualities of life as they wish. after all, quality of life, not ability to function under capitalism, that brings people closer to lives worth living. at least, that is a the goal. as it is, capitalism works very hard to keep our quality of life as closely tied to our success by capitalist standards as possible.

8. mad pride does not erase any biological influence on madness, but is critical of the neurotransmitter theory that SCIENTISTS EVERYWHERE AFFIRM is a yet unproven theory that is warped + manipulated by the psychiatric industry to appear more global, effective, + undeniable than it actually is. seriously, this is documented. google it.

9. mad pride asserts that mad people need not change to be proud of themselves. it also asserts that any personal growth, development, learning - basically, any autonomous choice to engage in change - is each individual’s prerogative, to be celebrated as any individual, mad or not, might celebrate accruing new skills, habits, attitudes, or values.

It’s a pretty common problem in the mental illness world to be put on a bunch of drugs and then find yourself disempowered to stop using them. Doctors might advice against it and refuse to give you safe cessation info, or you just might not have someone with the necessary qualifications to guide you through the process.

If you’re in this boat, or if you just want to take an active role in your drug regimen, this little guide is for you! Click through for a free download.

Icarus Project update: 1 instrument, check. 4 to go.

Weep woop fanart time. This time it’s for Icarus Project on Garry’s mod because yes