Zerotonin

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

You wake up. It is May of 1893. You are on a train en route to Transylvania. Your diary says you have had queer dreams lately.

You try to believe it.

(An old woman puts a rosary in your hands. You accept it without question.)

You are a guest in a castle you have never been in before (you recognize every hallway and know without trying that every door is locked). Your host is a man you have never met before (you killed him you killed him you killed him he had turned to dust and there was blood on the snow).

One morning you cut yourself while shaving.

There is nobody behind you in the pocket mirror’s reflection.

( uploading again because I realized I accidentally missed a page )

You wake up. It is May of 1893. You are on a train en route to Transylvania. Your diary says you have had queer dreams lately.

You try to believe it.

(An old woman puts a rosary in your hands. You accept it without question.)

You are a guest in a castle you have never been in before (you recognize every hallway and know without trying that every door is locked). Your host is a man you have never met before (you killed him you killed him you killed him he had turned to dust and there was blood on the snow).

One morning you cut yourself while shaving.

There is nobody behind you in the pocket mirror’s reflection.

( uploading again because I realized I accidentally missed a page )

My absolute favourite comic journal by Stevenson. Made me cry my eyes out. Even when I can't articulate it, it gets to the core of what I think love is.

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.

Me? I passed for the first time at 7 months. I passed for the second time at 19 months. That fucking sucked. I felt like I had been given exactly what I wanted and watched it get taken away from me, and the idea that I should be passing more regularly in the months following really ate away at me and made me feel like I “failed” in my transition - I legit thought that I would never pass

It certainly didn’t help that, in addition to overwhelmingly seeing narratives online of passing early in one’s transition, every piece of medical information that was presented to me said that most changes would happen over the first two years. Maybe I was deluding myself, but baby trans me thought “oh that means I have two years to transition or else I fail because hormones won’t do anything past that”. And that ate away at me more than the not passing, cause I felt like I was “missing my chance” at having the body I wanted

And boy was I wrong, in the last year (my third year on hormones), I feel like I’ve seen more changes than I saw in my first year. My boobs are filling themselves out, my body hair is getting even lighter, my skin is noticeably softer even though I stopped moisturizing/doing most of my previous skincare routine. Hell, even my hips and ass have gotten wider. And this was *all* during an era that the medical information I was presented with gave me the impression that any changes that did occur would be minor

To show you what I mean, compare one of my first trans-flag photos, taken at 11 months on e, verses a semi-recreation I did earlier today at 33 months on e (same clothes and roughly the same pose/lighting, different mountains)

Notice a difference? I sure do - and to prove to you that this happened in the third year, here's a similar photo of me in between these two at 23 months on e:

I’m usually not one for transition timelines, mainly because my whole project is kind of a transition timeline, and if you wanna look through and see more of what I'm taking about feel free to either scroll a few posts down on my blog, or check out my google drive with all the photos from my projects. The difference doesn't look *too* dramatic to me, but some people I know irl have expressed that it is

Regardless, the point I'm trying to make here is that my experience on hormones was *not* passing at one year - and that's the experience of the vast majority of people I know who've been on hormones. Puberty takes many years, and yeah, that can suck to hear when you're expecting it to take two, but trust me, it's a healthier mindset to think of yourself as continuously moving in the direction you want, rather than waiting to arrive at a particular destination

This is popping off on TikTok rn so I figured I could this here too 🍳 👀

The animal agriculture class was the first time I experienced each macronutrient (fats, proteins, carbohydrates) being discussed in depth from the point of view of being needs that MUST be met, rather than things it's "okay" to eat "in moderation."

My college health class actually used the word "macronutrient," but it still mostly described fats and carbohydrates in terms of their calorie content and didn't go into the same amount of depth about them.

My animal agriculture class on the other hand, was the first time I'd been taught in a class that the amount of nutrition absorbed from eating food varies depending on genetics, environmental factors, what the digestive system is accustomed to processing and what it was conditioned to process during development, and mechanical aspects of the digestion process like how much it is broken down by chewing (!!). Of course it was discussing these things from the point of view of like, cows, but it was really striking to me that I'd never been taught about human digestion from this point of view, where digestion is a complex process that can be affected by various biological and environmental factors.

At the beginning of the class we did a lab where we went over feedstuff analysis, and this was the first time I'd learned about where the numbers in nutrition labels come from, the kind of tests that are done to break food down to its components.

The class discussed how the digestibility of food was analyzed by testing the food, feeding animals the food, collecting the feces, and doing the same tests on the fecal matter to determine how much of the starting nutritional content was literally just going out the other end.

This raised a lot of questions for me: I don't think Pop-Tarts are analyzed by confining a human volunteer to a small room and feeding them only Pop-Tarts, then doing lab tests on their poop. Does that mean we know even less about feeding humans than we do animals? At any rate, nutrition labels would have to be rough estimates to begin with, and then accounting for the variability in the way bodies process food, it's even less descriptive.

Now i'm in plant agriculture, and I'm learning about the different types of proteins and fats and what plants and/or animals they come from. There are different types of protein with different sources. There are...nine? I think? different amino acids that have to be consumed in the diet, and different foods contain different ones?? The reason combinations of grains and legumes are so common as staple diets throughout the world, is that this is closest to being nutritionally complete for humans???

And also protein supplements are mostly useless unless you're an Olympian or something, because the body doesn't have a way to store protein for later. If you eat protein and your body doesn't have an immediate use for it, it just gets taken apart in your liver and you pee it out. Sports greatly increase your need for energy far more than they increase your need for protein, but everyone thinks you should eat a ton of protein as an athlete and that carbohydrates are unhealthy.

I learned from the same chapter WHY fiber is important to help digestion (having texture to the stuff in your gut stimulates peristalsis which is the muscular movements that push things along).

I feel really weird and resentful about health textbooks and classes now, because it feels like they didn't want us to have the facts on how our bodies work, and instead just taught us to see certain foods as "good" or "bad," as though it was more important to be afraid of "unhealthy" food than to understand why food is needed. Health classes barely teach why food is needed.

Like, vegetables are seen as the quintessential "healthy" food, but what is traditionally seen as "vegetables" are mainly important because they provide micronutrients, fiber, and water (the water content in food is actually a big deal). There's a reason they aren't staple foods. You need carbohydrates and fats to live. Period.

I say "what is traditionally seen as vegetables" because it's an incoherent category nutritionally. Beans, sweet potatoes, and spinach are doing very different things for your body. Are beans even a vegetable? Clearly "comes from a plant" isn't the main criteria since grains, nuts, and fruits aren't considered vegetables.

So like, the "myplate" graphic (and the "food pyramid" that came before it)? Total bullshit basically.

It's really frustrating how writings on healthy eating assume you are probably already eating too much or are at risk of overeating. I learned very young about the harms of being "overweight" and eating too much of a certain nutrient. But I just realized from my reading in the plant agriculture class that I had never read a resource that teaches in the same detail about the harms of undernutrition.

It's so easy to fail to get the nutrients you need, holy shit. Particularly protein, because it isn't one thing, it's a bunch of different types of molecule pieces that are found in varying amounts in different foods. People who eat animal products or soy don't have to worry about it very much, since they are essentially complete in terms of protein, but if you are a vegan who doesn't/can't eat soy as a staple, you HAVE to be careful to eat a variety of foods that complement each other in terms of what they're lacking. There's something called the PDCAAS that rates each food by the amino acids they contain, but generally the best idea is to eat a bunch of grains and legumes.

I'm not saying that people can be "scared straight" out of developing eating disorders. But I am saying that young people can benefit from being exposed to scary information when they have the power to possibly encounter situations where that information is applicable. And the horrifying realization of what starvation is and does is such an information.

My plant agriculture text explained that carbohydrates and fats are the basic sources of energy under normal circumstances, and that it takes around 1,600 kcal per day to run your internal organs. Protein is only used for energy in unusual circumstances. When fat reserves are exhausted and there isn't any food, the body starts breaking down proteins for calories—and the first ones to go are the ones that are already all throughout the bloodstream, found in YOUR ANTIBODIES. That's right, when you run out of fat to burn off, your body starts EATING ITS OWN IMMUNE SYSTEM.

The plant agriculture book also says that digestion and energy needs vary from person to person, like literally when different people eat the same meal their blood sugar rises different amounts, and that how the body decides to store energy or use energy stores is determined by complicated feedback loops controlled by hormones. Meanwhile the average person thinks that it's a matter of "eat too much = get fat and unhealthy, eat less = lose weight and be healthier" and even the college health class I took used more or less this model.

Like people are walking around with this completely wrong idea of how their bodies work and making AWFUL decisions based upon it because the resources they have to educate them think it's more important to...make people afraid of food? I don't think it's even common knowledge that the body burns most of the calories you consume just from existing. I want to chew concrete.

Why don't we teach everyone in school why staple foods are staple foods?! Not even getting into people who are so deep into eating disorders they think carrots have too much sugar, it's so normal to do things like "cut out bread" or "cut out carbs" (????!??!) and to perceive hunger as an innately untrustworthy thing, when genuine success at dieting like this is a great way to Corn On The Kill Yourself.

I'm just kind of reeling right now at how much research and monitoring it would take to safely diet in the ways people constantly attempt to diet with NO research NO supervision NO medical testing, 100% believing that they are doing something good for their health.

If people aren't taught what a macronutrient is and why you will die without it, they will think celery sticks are a "healthy" substitute for a chocolate chip cookie, and then not understand why they feel like shit.

Also... this is slightly different, but it's connected to the problem of "people not understanding what food does to the body". In the animal agriculture class, it was surprising to me how in livestock animals, things like muscle and fat composition are strongly genetically determined. All the modern breeds of cattle, pigs, chickens, etc. used in corporate farming have been bred to be very lean and have very little fat while having huge amounts of muscle tissue, because that's what the modern consumer wants in meat.

With pigs, a lot of older heritage pig breeds were bred to store most of what they ate as fat, because pigs were used to change food waste into lard that could be added to cooking for flavor and calories. And most of these breeds either went extinct or dwindled severely to be replaced by "meat" breed pigs that don't put on very much fat at all.

With humans, "everyone knows" that the amount of fat and muscle in your body comes from what you eat and how much you exercise. But a feedlot-finished beef cow that spends the last several months of its life doing nothing but gorging itself on carbohydrates will stay lean and put on muscle because it's genetically predisposed to.

Reason 1: Practical

This first bit isn't directly relevant to the doomed Franklin expedition--I initially thought it was, but I was misremembering a story about HMS Polaris--but this is an explanation of nominative determinism in the nautical sphere as a whole, so. In short:

There is a very good reason why it's bad luck to rename a ship.