#this is the sosing i needed from them

[sensitivecth]

calum hair

michael smile that's all i can't process the rest

wait why are those 3 wearing pants? (derogatory)

[youthprayer]

The first missionaries of YWAM Taiwan need you

In 1982, the first batch of the international YWAM team came to Taiwan from Honolulu, Hawaii for a short-term mission trip. This group of young missionaries saw the needs of the Taiwanese people and responded to God's call. Thereafter, they returned to Taiwan the following year and formally established the “Youth With A Mission Taiwan''.

Samoa’s incidental meetup with a missionary who had been to Taiwan

In June 2023, I was sent to serve in Samoa along with other members after discipleship training in Kona, Hawaii. The base leaders Fono and Sose were among the first missionaries that founded YWAM Taiwan. They were led back by God to serve in Samoa, and also brought me, a member from Tamkang Church in Taiwan, to Samoa to be connected with them.

In April this year, Sose was diagnosed with cancer by a doctor's examination and Fono was in Brazil then. After hearing the news, Fono changed his itinerary and came back early to be with Sose. After long prayers and seeking relevant advice, they finally decided to fly to the United States at the end of May for Sose to undergo up to 18 rounds of chemotherapy.

Brothers and sisters in Taiwan, please pray for the following:

1.For Sose's disease to be cured 2.God to place a suitable doctor to treat Sose 3.Receive support for all medical expenses for Sose 4.For the insurance company to pay all the medical expenses of Sose 5.For wisdom and accurate judgment to be added to the doctor who takes care of Sose

Please pray for Sose, and you can also donate online to help this missionary who once gave himself for Taiwan >> https://reurl.cc/4o6k43

[zaftikat]

On Aurebesh and cursive

I'm migrating a Twitter thread to Tumblr because twitter threads are hellish.

As a brief intro, I created a handwritten version of the Aurebesh for use on ChicksWithDice, because the current planet they're on uses paper books and pens. This post is going to be about orthography, and how to construct logical graphemes based on an extant ConAlphabet. So buckle up for a wild ride through proto-Canaanite scripts (namely Phoenician), modern Hebrew cursive, and the development of a cursive system.

Like most grapheme-based writing systems (as opposed to logograms and syllabaries) Aurebesh has a pretty direct connection to the Proto-Canaanite script system (and the alphabets derived thereof like Phoenecian and proto-Hebrew).

Let's take a look at a grapheme that exemplifies the connection. We don't need to go far to find our first culprit: A, א, and 𐤀. In Aurebesh, the character Aurek.

There's a pretty direct connection to be made from Phoenician directly to all 3 other characters. So in developing a handwritten system, I looked to the handwritten version of modern cursive Hebrew for inspiration (since I'm currently learning Yiddish for fun).

What stood out to me was how well cursive א translates into a cursive version of Aurek. It also worked for Besh/ב/B, Dorn/ד/D, Leth/ל/L and Resh/ר/R. I used the graphemes from ע, ס, and כ in other places as were appropriate, but they don't exactly correspond 1 for 1.

That leaves a hell of a lot of characters to fill in. So, I started thinking about how symbols would evolve as they were written over centuries, and people got lazy with their writing. The first thing I looked at was stroke count. When you need to write quickly you're looking at limiting the number of times you need to make distinct motions. Printed Aurebesh characters have a tiresome number of distinct movements. Aurek is a 6 stroke character. Besh is 7.

If we could take Aurek from 6 to 2 using cursive Hebrew as a guide and Besh from 7 to 3, the rest of the alphabet should follow similar conventions. Cresh could literally just be 1 stroke instead of 3 distinct lines. Esk could be written as 2 strokes instead of 4.

This ended up working for a large portion of the graphemes, which made life super easy. The hard part comes in dealing with graphically similar characters like Cherek and Krill, or Osk, Wesk, and Xesh. In their printed form, it's pretty clear each of these characters is distinct, but in a system where speed is emphasized, especially as we look to limit strokes, they tend to bleed together.

As an example, Cherek and Krill could both reasonably be represented by the cursive כ (see above). Cherek would also be a 1 for 1 phonemic correspondence to cursive Hebrew in that case, but graphically, Krill makes for a better analog. Krill would use the cursive כ and an alternative grapheme needed to be developed for Cherek. In that process, I looked at other alphabets and syllabaries that I had studied previously. Hiragana in particular stood out since the kana つ (tsu) has a similar vibe. Eventually, those inspirations evolved into what you'll see at the end of this post. My instinct for Osk was straight up just an O or something akin to cursive ס, which is honestly just what I went for. Then I got to Wesk and went, "oh kriff". I took a look at my handy cursive Hebrew chart that I have hanging above my desk for reference, and tried to come up with something. I came up with a version of cursive פ but in all honesty, I'm not happy with it especially when I could have opted for cursive ם, which is literally right there. I think Wesk and Yirt are my weakest graphemes, and I am liable to redo them as I work on this project more. With all that said in this long post, I probably owe you the actual Aurebesh. It's laid out as Roman, Printed Aurebesh, Handwritten Aurebesh. This is all subject to change, but I'm still pretty proud of the work I put into this! Thanks for reading this far!

If you'd like to support this kind of bullshit, and my Actual Play series visit the Soses Media Patreon

[kny111]

Decolonizing Healthcare: Addressing Social Stressors In Medicine

What does it mean to have a healthcare system that serves everybody? And what can physicians do to address the ways in which societal challenges impact our diagnoses?

Image Source: HealthSystemsGlobal

Rupa Marya, M.D., is exploring these concepts through numerous projects aimed at researching our current medical climate and collaborating with marginalized populations to make healthcare more effective and compassionate.

Following is a transcript from Marya’s 2018 Bioneers keynote presentation, in which she discusses her research and vision for the future of medicine. Watch the full keynote video here.View more keynotes, transcripts, and more from the 2018 Bioneers Conference.

Rupa Marya: I am the daughter of Punjabi immigrants who came to this country in 1973, with little money but plenty of caste privilege. We grew up with family vacations driving a VW van around the Western lands. My father would stop at the reservations. He would make us get out and listen and learn and look, and see what had happened to the original people of this land. He would talk to me about colonization, because we are also a people who had been colonized by Europeans.

I am a mother of two beautiful mixed heritage boys, and I am a farmer’s wife. I’m a physician who works in adult medicine, and who witnesses society’s ills manifest in my patients’ bodies, and a doctor who sees racism and state violence as an urgent public health issue. I’m a touring musician who has played in 29 different countries, singing in five different languages with the band Rupa and the April Fishes. To use a phrase taught to me by a Miwok elder, Wounded Knee, I am an Earth person.

What I’m going to describe for you is a system of domination in which we live, and what I believe are the direct health consequences of that system for all of us. I’ll begin with a description of how we have come to understand disease in a modern post-industrial context. In the 1850s, the germ theory was developed, which described how organisms such as bacteria and viruses made us sick. That led to the development of antibiotics and vaccines and systems to limit the spread of infectious disease.

In the 1960s, with the elucidation of DNA, we entered the molecular genetic era, where we are today. Here the gene creates a protein that can cause or protect from disease. How sick or well you were was thought to be preordained somehow by your genetics. This understanding has led to many powerful diagnostic tools and targeted therapies for specific diseases.In 2004, with the discovery of the role of RAS gene mutation in the development of colon cancer, exactly 2,000 years after Roman physician Celsus described the cardinal signs of inflammation, we are entering the era of inflammation. Instead of a reductionist approach to understanding disease, we are seeing how many pathways lead to chronic inflammation, which in turn creates the conditions for illness.

Today we will be talking about the impact of social stressors, which have been shown to cause chronic inflammation. These diseases require more systemic approaches, not simply focusing on the individual, but rather moving our gaze to the structures of society, helping us see how the individual pursuit of health is actually futile in a system that makes health impossible.

To understand the root causes of pathologies we see today, which impact all of us but affect black, brown and poor people more intensely, we have to examine the foundations of this society, which began with colonization. To me, to be colonized means to be disconnected and dis-integrated from our ancestry, from our Earth, from our indigeneity, our Earth-connected selves. We all come from Earth-connected peoples, people who once lived in deep connections with the rhythms of nature. I believe it is not a coincidence that the colonization of this land happened at the same time Europeans were burning hundreds of thousands of witches, those women who carried the traditional indigenous knowledge of the tribes of Europe.

Colonization is the way the extractive economic system of capitalism came to this land, supported by systems of supremacy and domination, which are a necessary part of keeping the wealth and power accumulated in the hands of the colonizers and ultimately their financiers.

In what we now know as the United States, this system of supremacy is expressed in many ways and with many outcomes. Today, we will focus on specific ones. First, white supremacy, which created a framework that legitimized slavery and genocide. Slavery created cheap labor, which is necessary for a functioning capitalist system. Genocide created unlimited access to resources in the form of land, animal parts, minerals, and raw materials, which are also necessary for a fully functioning capitalist economy.

As capitalism functions, it further entrenches these systems of supremacy.We all know that white supremacy is the scary guy with the swastika and the hood. But it can also look like any place where there is an abundance of white people in exclusive contexts, where power and access is not readily ceded to others. Please remember, lest you get caught up in a tsunami of guilty feelings, that as I talk about these things, I’m talking about systems of oppression that we are actually all a part of and that we all recreate, and these systems are what need to be dismantled.

There’s white supremacy and then there’s male supremacy, also known as patriarchy, which leads to the invisibilization of women’s labor, like creating the entire human race out of our bodies. Or in this context, reproducing the entire workforce and suppressing our wages, which further supports capitalism.

Patriarchy also leads to femicide, domestic violence and child abuse, which we see across all groups. We also see human supremacy, where people feel superior to the rest of living entities, thereby subjecting living soils, seeds, animals, plants, and water to horrific treatment in the name of exploiting resources, which in turn feeds the capitalist need for ever-increasing profits.

While this wheel of domination, exploitation, generation, and sequestration of wealth continues, we experience trauma as the byproduct and common pathway. Many studies show us that chronic stress and trauma create chronic inflammation. When we look at the top ten causes of death in occupied Turtle Island, we see diseases that have been described to us as diseases of lifestyle or ones that come about because of poor choices. Maybe we eat too much fried food. Maybe we don’t exercise enough. Maybe we have a genetic predisposition. What these diseases have in common in their pathogenesis is a component of inflammation, and we are just starting to parse out how the social stressors and the very structures of society contribute to and exacerbate this chronic inflammatory state.

It is unfounded to see these diseases as caused by individual poor choices in the context of a genetic predisposition. I see them as diseases that are virtually impossible to avoid because of the system in which we live, which generates a biological milieu of inflammation through trauma, chronic stress, environmental degradation, and damaged food systems. I see these as diseases of colonization.

If you’re a Native person, you’re like... It takes science and medicine a long time to catch up with Native knowledge. This is not news to Native people. When I met Oglala Lakota elder Candace Ducheneaux in Standing Rock, she talked to me about how these diseases that are so common in modern society and more heavily so in Indian Country are diseases that were brought by the colonizers.

We talked about diabetes, which I had been taught in medical school is a disease of insulin resistance. Either your pancreas doesn’t make enough insulin or your body’s cells are not sensitive to the insulin. These are both ways of seeing things that are based in a sense of individualism and predetermination.

On the Standing Rock reservation, before the damming of Mni Sose or the Missouri River, diabetes was rare. Actually across Turtle Island, diabetes was virtually nonexistent. Once the river was dammed, it ended up flooding nearby cottonwood forests. By shifting the ecology through a colonizing force, the people became more dependent on the cash economy for their food and medicine, and they lost the essential cultural connection to their traditional ways. This tragic loss of the commons is a hallmark of capitalist society, and the impact is felt in the individual body.

After the damming of the river, rates of diabetes skyrocketed. This story is similar for tribes all over Turtle Island. It is important to recognize this didn’t happen simply because people became more sedentary and consequently more obese. This happened because of colonization, not by changing the indigenous body, but by changing the social structures around that body, which in turn creates disease.

One powerful study from Alberta demonstrated that First Nations tribes that had maintained their cultural continuity specifically through language had lower rates of diabetes. Just imagine that.

This is what is protective. It’s not the low carb, paleo diet. It’s not exercise. It’s not the latest fad or trend. This study also showed that self-determinism has a powerful protective effect from diabetes for Indigenous People. These same factors had a protective effect against suicide for Indigenous People in Canada, who experience rates two to five times the national average. This example, to me, demonstrates how disease is a complex manifestation of social and biological influences on groups of individuals that results in a common expression – here, diabetes.

While we can understand this clearly from a Native American experience, we must be aware that these social structures of domination produce trauma and inflammation for all of us. We are all affected.

So what can we do in the face of this knowledge that can seem so overwhelming? Simple things can have huge effects.

To heal the diseases that are caused by the trauma of colonization, we must decolonize. If colonization represents a dis-integration and a disconnection, we must reconnect. Our work is two-pronged: to reintegrate and to dismantle. We must reintegrate what has been divided and conquered in our societies, between our peoples, between us and the natural world around us, and within ourselves. We can do this in many ways: by promoting acts that increase local autonomy and self-determinism, by exposing the myth of treating the individual as limited in its ability to actually address root causes of diseases, by reconnecting to who we were before our respective colonization – through songs, traditional knowledge, reawakening our food and medicine ways, and reawakening our relationships to each other, to the Earth around us, and to other beings. We must dismantle those systems of domination that create and recreate cycles of trauma and inflammation, those systems that work in service of capitalism.

This is my vision of holistic healthcare.

Integrated, Holistic Healthcare

What does that look like for my work? How do I use my whitecoat privilege to address things systemically? Aside from starting to address diseases with my patients in the hospital as directly related to these phenomena, I’m doing these things:

With regards to integration, I have been invited to help create a clinic and farm to develop the practice of Decolonizing Medicine at Standing Rock, together with tribal members and healers Linda Black Elk and Luke Black Elk, great-grandson of Black Elk medicine man. We have been developing a framework for how to offer care that centralizes Lakota cosmology, an understanding of disease and health, and to create a model that can be replicable to other places and in other specific contexts.

We have incredible partners, including Mass Design Group and National Nurses United, as well as the Do No Harm Coalition at UCSF, who are over 400 healthcare workers committed to ending systems of oppression as a way of insuring health for all. We have raised over a million dollars so far, thanks to generous gifts from the Jena & Michael King Foundation, Colin Kaepernick, and crowdfunding, and seek five million more to break ground on this exciting project.

The Justice Study

With regards to dismantling systems of oppression, I have been working on a national study of the health effects of law enforcement violence or terrorism, called the Justice Study. We were asked by the community fighting for justice for 26-year-old Mario Woods, who was gunned down by SFPD in 2016, to create a study that would answer this question: If the wound is police violence and the medicine is justice, what happens to our health when the medicine is not given?

We gathered a team of public health workers and researchers, and we are currently actively compiling data. It’s already illuminating, showing how many areas of people’s lives are affected by police violence. We know that Native Americans, Black and Latinx people experience disproportionate rates of police violence, and we can see that they are most impacted by the long-standing effects of violence. How does this reality contribute to the health disparities that we see?

Across all races, we are being traumatized, with black, brown, and Indigenous people being affected more intensely. We are continuing to collect data, and we’ll be offering it to policy makers who wish to shape community safety away from models that uphold white supremacist frameworks into ones that create safety and mitigate harm for all of us.

What I want you to remember is this:

Health is impossible when living in systems of oppression.

We cannot effectively treat diseases like diabetes with a drug without addressing the systems that make diabetes so prevalent.

We must redefine the scope of healthcare workers and the work of healthcare to include not only care at the bedside of the individual, but dismantling the systems of oppression that create the conditions for illness.

And finally, we must reintegrate with the Earth, with each other, and within ourselves. We must decolonize.

[bonnie-barstow-of-flag]

The Not So Lonesome Knight: Part 15

Parts 1 X, 2 X , 3 X , 4 X, 5 X , 6 X , 7 X, 8 X, 9 X 10 X, 11 X , 12 X, 13 X ,14 X,

The brunette stares at the door in his wake far longer than she probably should have, his shirt tucked between her fingers. This notion of putting on clothes that belonged to her annoyingly attractive co-worker felt bizarre. Was this crossing a boundary she didn’t even know existed until this very moment? Was it even crossing a line at all because Michael had freely given her the shirt to wear? It would have been different if she had taken it without his permission. Wouldn’t it?

Bonnie haphazardly allows her gaze to falter downwards examining the shirt’s entirety. She supposed wearing it for one night couldn’t harm anyone. It is warmer than she expected. Of course, it had just been removed from Kitt’s trunk but it might as well have come straight off of Knight’s back. It is this thought in particular that propels her towards the shower. The brunette luxuriates under the stream of hot water for longer than she probably should have given Michael’s impending return yet, she doesn’t care.

For someone as observant as Bonnie, it felt strange that she hadn’t discerned the sheer size of Michael’s shirt until the very moment her eyes peer into the mirror. In the glass’s silvery reflection, she can’t help but notice how dwarfed her smaller frame was when it happens to be draped in the cotton material. The blue fabric extends, reaching for the brunette’s kneecaps but never quite makes it. Rather, it falls short by at least four and a half inches, exposing a good length of her bare legs without being inappropriately indecent.

With a laugh, she considers the pair of Michael’s shorts she had discovered folded up inside of the shirt. Feeling exposed given her habit of covering up her lanky legs, Bonnie tentatively slides them on over her own undergarments. The result was hysterical even to her. The cinched elastic of the waistband was scarcely enough to hold the boxers up over the curve of her hips. So much for the extra covering! The ensemble was better off without the shorts. Besides, Michael might be fine with gifting her his shirt but would he really be comfortable with seeing her in his shorts? Michael would probably need to have them back. She isn’t entirely certain he is aware that he handed them to her in the first place. Bonnie slips them off and folds them up, leaving them to rest on the sink’s counter for their rightful owner.

Her sopping dark hair hangs down around her shoulder and she deliberates on pulling the sopping strands into one of her typical ponytails in order to avoid unsightly wet-patches. Imagining his reaction to those same unsightly patches, Bonnie eventually determines to pull her hair back rather than dying of embarrassment later.

Bonnie cringes at the thought of having to use the cheap, pre-selected deodorant sample left by the motel staff. Would it cover-up the pleasant scent of Michel that already encompassed her via his shirt? She hopes not. Bonnie figures she can’t very well share a bed with him without applying some form of antiperspirant. Please don’t smell worse than petrol, gasoline, or anti-freeze, she internally begs, giving the sample a tentative sniff. She is about to put it on when a wrapping noise against the door jolts her. Could the thieves have returned? Her mind races to life. If a sound could be applied to the rapid pace of her thoughts, it might have been likened to the sudden reeving of an engine.

Doing the first thing she can think of, she barricades herself in the bathroom. Bonnie’s heart gives a heavy, painful thump against her rib-cages before beating out a series of SOSes in her ears. Her turquoise orbs seek out a weapon but the only things available to wield in battle were towels, a shady looking toilet plunger, and soap. If she was crafty and quick enough, maybe she could fashion something out of the rod used to hold up the shower curtain. Standing on the thick fiber-glass ledge of the tub, Bonnie finds herself reaching for the rod. The brunette fumbles the second a familiar voice beckons to her. Thank heavens for quick reflexes or she would have ended up falling face flat into the hollow of the still wet tub.

“You okay in there, Bons? It’s just me!” He slips the door shut in his wake. Michael is extra careful to bolt the door. Tonight, he wasn’t going to be taking any chances.

Through gritted teeth she manages, “I’m fine.” Truth was, he could have easily given her a heart-attack. Although, the longer she considers it, the sillier she felt. She had been fully aware that Michael was going to be returning. Why her brain had automatically leapt to the worst-case scenarios, she couldn’t directly say. Maybe, it had something to do with the fears lingering in her mind regarding the previous break-in.

Scrambling downwards, she cracks the door open. “The water should be warm again if you want to take your shower. I’ll be out in a minute and the bathroom will all yours,” she communicates. Her departure from the bathroom, however, is made conditional. “Before I come out, you have to promise not to look.”

Michael places one of his large hands on his hips and flashes a smug grin in the direction of the bathroom door. “Oh?” The pad of his thumb is slowly dragged across his lip as he contemplates rejecting her demand. “Okay. I won’t look. Scout’s honor.” He makes a show of raising his hand in the boy-scout salute. He even turns his back to her and presses his eyes closed as a gesture of good faith.

Bonnie gradually emerges from the bathroom and slowly traipses across the room.

It is a real shame Michael had never really been a boy-scout and so he cast a glance over his shoulder at her. Although his full vision is clouded with his eyelashes, he can still make out her figure. Forgetting himself, he whistles. He can feel a strange glow warming the slopes of his finely chiseled face which, boasts a rare blush. A blush that is worn with pride.

The sound causes Bonnie to spin around on her heels. “You peeked! Didn’t you!” Twinges of indignation seep into the accusation. She should have expected him to pull a stunt like that. Huh?

“Maybe. Just a little.” He motions with his hand. “But can ya really blame me?” Michael cheekily prompts. He turns to face her refusing to conceal the fact that he is gawking at her any longer. Azure hues sweep upwards from her ankles, up the refined clean-shaven curves of her exposed legs, till his vision fixes upon her reddened face. Michael feels confident that his shirt has never better than it did on her far prettier frame. If he didn’t know any better, he was falling harder than ever for her. “You’re prettier than a picture.” Speaking of pictures, he’d like to take about a thousand different ones of her the way she looked in his shirt. The fabric seemed to hang with deliberate ease upon her more curved features and it fell loosely around her middle and legs. How was it he had never taken notice of her legs before now?

“What happened to Scout’s honor?” She laughingly questions. Bonnie hates how aware she is of his ogling. She can feel her entire face burning a horrible shade of crimson.

Running his hand sheepishly through his curls he returns,“must’a forgot all about it. Then again, I never made it outta cub scouts. ” His grin never wavering. “Maybe you should do a tune-up on my memory banks with those special tools of yours?” He bravely suggests.

“You’re incorrigible, Michael Knight!” She plucks the nearest pillow from the bed and swats him with it.

“Would ya want me to be any other way?” He prods. Chuckling loudly, he heads for the shower. He’ll definitely need an arctic blast tonight.

Sitting on the bed she watches his retreat to the bathroom. Was there a cryptic message in what he had said? She figures all of the day’s excitement had to be tainting her interpretation so she elects to drop it.

[serenityinself]

Sometimes I need to get things out, and I realize with the followers I have that this might be triggering as it talks about death, anxiety and depression, so please don't feel the need to read if it's too much. I just needed to get this out somewhere I don't really know any one on.

Dear Dad,

It's been a year since you left here,

And that's the best way I can put it without saying the words..

Because the words just make it too real,

No one likes to talk about it and neither do I,

So when the sadness takes over, we ignore each other and hide in our rooms as if that makes our sadness less real.

We choke down the depression and anxiety pretending that we can breathe thinking that we're helping each other, but it's apparent in our eyes that your departure broke us in a way we can't quite piece together.

I miss you, Dad. I miss your laughter, I miss your guidance, I miss just simply sitting together watching t.v and your presence.

I try to focus on the happy times but my mind always wanders.. Administering morphine soses after morphine doses, making sure it was enough to numb your pain but not too much to lose what little time we had with you, I'm sorry if I did it incorrectly..

I remember how your eyes would start to just look overwhelmingly lost and you'd reach for my hand to help guide your breathing during your anxiety attacks. I know there wasn't enough air because the cancer made it hard to breathe.

You asked God why, and I didn't have the courage to tell you that it metastasized to your lungs even though I knew, I knew, I had known since November and we couldn't tell you because we wanted you to have hope. You didn't want to know the stage so we kept it to ourselves.

At one point I had anxiety attacks every single morning before work but I would compose myself because I knew you were on the other side of that door and I couldn't let you lose hope.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry about the time you couldn't eat and I burst out in tears and had to go for a drive, I promise it was the only thing keeping my sanity at the time.

I'm sorry we didn't get more time together.

Sorry I decided to go to school away from home because maybe we could've had more time together if I didn't.

I'm sorry I couldn't be stronger. I'm sorry that I can't always be there for mom now, I tried my best but nobody wants to talk about this sadness and I can't pry without breaking my own heart.

This crushing sadness. I was hoping that maybe the weight of it would lighten over some time but it just gets harder.

Why you? A question that every person I meet that had ever encountered you keeps repeating and I have no answers for them. I guess this world takes the good ones back as soon as it can..

Some days I float just fine, and some days I get crushed by wave after wave of sadness and there's not enough air and I just don't want to be here. You remember how I was never really all that good at swimming? Maybe it's just not meant for me.

I told you to let go and that it was okay, and that was the biggest lie I think ever left my mouth. I didn't want you to have to fight anymore, but oh god, I'm so far from being okay.

Everything is so broken, and I'm so sorry there wasn't more I could do

[countmohawk]

Ultra Sun Recollections - Training Intermission

Well, it finally happened. Even though I was going to just play through the game with a regular old team, the temptation to do some EV training was too much. Thus I took about a week off from the story progression to build a properly-trained “A-team”.

Doing competitive-level training in USUM is actually fairly simple. I followed a simple 4-step process to get my team ready:

1) Catch a buttload of Abras. Technically it doesn’t have to be Abras; any Pokemon with Synchronize will do. Abra just happens to be the first Synchronizer available; it shows up in the gated areas in Hau’oli City at a decent rate. The one downside to using Abra over something like Ralts, or even Espeon/Umbreon, is that Abra’s only move is Teleport, so you have to either put it to sleep or catch it on the first turn. (Butterfree gets Sleep Powder fairly early, though, and Compoundeyes means it will almost never miss, so there’s an easy out.)

If you don’t want to outright catch 30 Abras, you can also get one of each gender, pop them into the Nursery on Akala and breed them just as easily. Make sure the female has Synchronize, though, as the female’s Ability is favored on offspring at 4 to 1 odds.

2) Use Synchronize to catch Pokemon with good Natures. This seems fairly obvious - lead with the correct-natured Abra, then catch the Pokemon. They added a new wrinkle to the formula, however, with the addition of SOS battles. If you’re planning on SOSing for a particular Pokemon, whether for the increased odds of high IVs / hidden abilities / Shininess or because it’s one of the rare ones that only appear when others call for help, you’ll need your Synchronizer to be alive and on the field when the Pokemon you eventually throw a Ball at appears.

If you’re not actively using the Abra Squad as A-team battlers, you might consider throwing them into the Poke Pelago for a day or two on the Isle Evelup. 96 sessions on a max-level Isle (48 hours, or 24 with Bean usage) will take even a freshly-hatched Lv1 Abra up to a respectable level 38. Then you can fix their movesets with TMs so they can fight.

3) Breeding for Egg Moves. Some Pokemon can learn useful moves only by inheriting them from other species. If you want to utilize breeding as part of your training regimen, make sure the end-result Pokemon you intially catch is female. Then catch a couple of Roggenrolas in Ten Carat Hill until you find one with an Everstone, so you can pass down Natures while breeding as well.

You can also use the Day Care as an alternative to having to Synchronize for a good-natured Pokemon if you have a Ditto with the right nature. Bonus points if your Ditto happens to come from a foreign country, as you will then also have a higher chance of breeding a Shiny. This method is known as the “Masuda method”.

4) Training Effort Values! This is the last step, and there are 2 ways to do it: the old-fashioned way and the slow way.

The old-fashioned way is to go out and fight a whole bunch of Pokemon to get both EVs and experience points. SOS battles make it a lot easier to fight a lot of the same ones. You’ll also need a full set of the Power items, which cost 16 BP each at Royal Avenue; these add +8 to the EVs earned from each battle. Fortunately, Mantine Surfing is not only lots of fun, but it is also probably the fastest way to grind up the BP you need to pay for them; you can get 10 per two-minute surf session relatively easily. Ten such sessions and you’ll have completed the set; it took me roughly half an hour to get mine.

There’s also a slower, more hands-off way to EV train Pokemon: leave them on Isle Evelup at Poke Pelago for a while. For each 30-minute session of training they complete there, Pokemon earn 4 EVs in the state of your choice. 63 sessions is all it takes to max a stat out, which takes just under 16 hours if you use beans for the entire time. I’d recommend this method if you have to go or work or sleep or something, since it works based on real time rather than in-game time.

And that’s how I spent my last week! Recollections 12 should be up-and-coming within the next couple of days, so we can get back to experiencing this game’s lovely story and ambience.

[thenearsightedmicroraptor]

Hey, in ur Romance Post response (sorry, i know, really awhile ago) you said you get & process bird bones urself... what exactly do u mean by process? like it sounds really interesting,

I’m a vulture! People who participate in vulture culture (which can be anyone who works with or appreciate animal remains and wants to be part of the community) call ourselves vultures. I used to process a lot of bones myself, but now I live in a tiny apartment with a shared yard and I cannot really have things rotting in a bucket, so nowadays it’s mostly drying (usually using salt) or alcohol preservation.

The process is kind of spiritual for me as well? Not any special religion, just, a connection to life and death. There’s also something therapeutic about it, as I’ve had a lot of anxiety (still do! Much more controlled now, but I still do) so being able to handle things that would freak a younger me out in a controlled way helps me like, come to terms with all the organs my head in uncomfortable with and such. And from a scientific, artistic and nature-loving perspective, it is super interesting too.

I go for birds the most because a) I love birds, and I love drawing birds, and having an actual reference of their skulls is irreplaceable, and b) where I live right now, they’re the easiest to come by, whether it be roadkill or cat victims (keep your predators indoors, peeps). I’m not that actively collecting either because of the size of my apartment atm,  but I still love all my babies a ton.

OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER: I live in Europe, and can legally pick up  most bird species. In the United States, because of a history of poaching and birds going extinct, it is illegal to own any part of native birds, be it feathers, bones, eggshells, nests ect ect. Check your local laws, and be respectful, we need to protect the nature these wonders came from.

ok obligatory disclaimer over and i can freely share my lil darlings. Pics under the cut!

This is Salomon, my pride and joy (well, one of them, at least). I found them more or less like this and dried them in my windowsill, I’ve had them for, i think three  years? maybe more, and it is incredible that they hold together so well and with almost no odor, considering that they were one of the first things I ever picked up. Underneath is  my skullshelf! Moth of my complete skulls go there. Here’s a better picture (including some beautiful dried flowers, bc I love all deads)

The fox with the peony was the first skull I ever picked up, and he was almost completely clean already. I named him Palnatoke after the tales my childhood friend once told me on the hill where he was found, years before. The hare has no name, but the long-beaked bird is presumably a loon, and named Sose after the beach i found them (also almost clean, but full of dried-up seaweed, a real experience to clean up!) The other two bird skulls were gifts, a blackbird and a small corvid (jackdaw or magpie?) that my mom’s friend found in an old house she was cleaning, and she thought, hey, i know who would appreciate this!I did, a l o t.

Close-up of Sose! The only bird-skull I have with its lower jaw intact and no flesh-bits attached

Here’s an alcohol preserved favourite. A tiny baby, presumably a swallow, had tumbled out of its nest, and it was already stiff when we found the poor dear, but it’s so delicate and fine, nothing missing, all the little fathers still in their sheathes.

And then my possibly most bizarre addition, which I got from a farm who were going to eat the duck and throw the rest of it out, I got the head of the moscovy. Probably one of the most emotionally loaded piece in my collection? I love it a lot, he’s very loaded with the process of life and death and the way we live our lives and, i could talk a lot about it. He’s also stunning though, once you get over the honestly slightly brutal setup.

I simply call him The Duck.

I have got lots more of little things and pieces, but these are my most impressive and photogenic deads

[rueur]

Morning Pages #50 (04.11.2017)

Saturday 4th November - 7:52 a.m.

So a lot has happened. A lot has changed. I think it’s fitting that I’m starting this up again the day after I submitted the last assignment of my degree. That, and I’m right back where I started the very first day I started these morning pages: back at Emily’s apartment in Northcote. Except it’s my apartment now! Mine and Evan’s. We moved in together on the 12th of August, because Emily is going to be living in Sydney for most of her time now. She’ll still be travelling interstate for a bit, but she’ll be spending a lot more time with Bruno and Romy and Quinn, her partner. We’re still receiving a lot of her mail, which I haven’t had the time to forward to her because of uni and work and everything, but I’ll have the time now, I suppose.

Anyway, I should let you know that I am indeed on track to graduate, on the 15th of December with a weighted average mark of over seventy, which is fucking incredible. I actually cannot believe I’ve been able to do this, uninterrupted for three years despite all the shit that’s come my way through it all. I am actually an incredibly strong person, and I forget that so often because of all my momentary bouts of fear, of all my apprehensions and timidities. I have to acknowledge that it takes so much strength to just be who I am. I’ve communicated that to Evan and he understands what I’m talking about, for the most part. I’ve told him a lot about my grandparents, and my parents, my sister, Ikaros, and all my pets. We’re thinking of getting a dog, Evan and I. It’s just that we don’t really have the space for one here so we’ll have to move first, which is a shame because I’m really enjoying living in this apartment with him. This place is basically the setting of our first few months together. On our first date he dropped me off here, we kissed goodnight on the steps outside. The first time we had sex was in this room. I’m fairly certain I wrote about that so I won’t write about it again now. Far too much has happened to be looking that far back.

Anyway, yeah, we’re thinking of getting a dog. I’ve been going to adoption days a lot, mostly by myself because Evan’s been working so much. But we went to one together on the 29th of October because it was a Sunday and it was just up the road at the Northcote pet warehouse. There was a dog there named Raven who just came up to me right away and gave me a massive hug, the little thing. My heart is breaking all over again just thinking about her. I really want to find her again and rescue her. Oh man I haven’t done this in ages and my fingers and my arms are hurting from writing this fast. I used to be able to get these pages done in like fifteen to twenty minutes and it’s been ten minutes already now and I’m not even finished with the first page. I’m getting there though. I suppose you have to maintain the habit for this to feel as easy as it had felt in March or in April. I want to keep writing about all the stuff that’s happened since June but I know that technically these entries aren’t supposed to be like a diary at all. I just choose to write about my day and my life and Evan and all of that because it’s what’s on my mind most of the time, and it’s nice to have a record of that stuff, I suppose. I haven’t been able to record me and Evan moving in together which is a shame because I had recorded a good bulk of the beginning of our relationship. Ooh! Second page now! My arms are hurting a lot I think I may have to change the way I’m sitting right now. I’m lying down facing the window and listening to Childish Gambino’s ‘The Night Me And Your Mama Met’ on repeat. This song is just so soothing, it’s been really nice to write essays to. Okay, I’m changing the way I’m sitting right now though. I was only sitting this way because my laptop needed to charge a bit but now it’s on 66% and that should be enough to finish off these last two pages.

Evan and I had sex last night, it was the first time since Sunday, I think. We’ve been having a bit of a periodic sex life because of all the clutter we’ve had to deal with: Evan’s prolonged work hours, my crazy uni/work schedule, and the fact that I only get evening/weekend shifts at my restaurant. Yes, I’m working at a place on High Street in Thornbury, a place I handed out my resume to with Wren and it turns out they liked me and they hired me, back at the end of July. It’s a pretty okay gig. $20 an hour, and the evening shifts are about 5 hours long so 2 evening shifts a week and 2 weekend shifts, I end up making about $400 a week: basically more or less the same as Evan for less than half the hours Evan works. But I am hating the fact that working at the shop takes away my entire weekends, most of the time, and Evan’s entire week is taken over by his work. So we don’t really have too much time together. I’m looking for full-time work right now, something I can do with my degree. Kill Your Darlings is hiring and I think it might be good to look into that? There’s a good chance they may hire me just because I used to be a subscriber! Actually I think I might still be a subscriber, but I haven’t been reading anything at all. I should probably do my research.

Anyway I’m working today. 11:30 a.m. till 12 a.m. which may or may not be 1 a.m. because I might have to close the shop. I hope not, though. I just got my period, last night. During sex. Evan was cleaning up afterwards and the condom was just all covered in blood. His fingers were all covered in blood. It was strange, but thankfully he didn’t seem to mind it. But goodness, this morning I woke up and felt like I was either going to explode, or that I was so empty that my body would collapse in on itself and I would turn into a black hole. I took a dump and I’m yet to eat, but I’m feeling a lot better now. I miss Evan though, I miss him so much. He left at like half past seven and I won’t see him again till LATE tonight because of my dumb restaurant job. They’ve also been hiring other people which means I’m not getting as much shifts or as much choice of shifts and it’s really fucking irritating. The place is so mismanaged. And although the work is pleasant and the people are lovely (with one exception: Josh), being there is just not good for me, I think. That and I’m keen to finally find something in my field. I’ve been working three years, getting my qualification so that I can contribute to Melbourne’s creative industry. I mean I’ve been doing that with The Yarra Reporter, but I want to do MORE. That, and it would be nice to be paid, you know?

Actually, I’m also thinking of volunteering at an animal shelter. To get my dog fix until we can actually adopt a pet ourselves. We really can’t have one at Mitchell Street, as much as I would like and as much as I’ve been trying to persuade both myself and Evan that we can...it’s just not a viable option. This is no place for a dog. A tiny, second floor apartment with one human who’s barely ever home and then me, who’s looking for full-time work as well. I really don’t know what I’m going to be doing with myself though. Sam said she’d write me a letter of recommendation to work at Robinsons, but I’ve been thinking about that and I don’t know if I’d want to work at Robinsons. So I’ve been asking myself what I DO want to do, and I don’t know if anything’s at all appealing right now. All the creative writing jobs on Seek are ‘content writer’ or ‘social media manager’ or something like that, which could be fun but it also could be totally capitalist and soul-destroying. But the main thing that’s put me off Robinsons is the fact that it’s retail and I’ll have to make ‘sales’ and be equally capitalistic. Fucking hell though, it can’t really be avoided, can it? I applied for The University of Melbourne’s Master of Secondary Teaching, specialising in English and SOSE. There’s a very real chance I’ll be accepted into that, but I don’t want to be a teacher either. Not right away, that is. In all honesty, I see myself doing that eventually...but definitely not right out of uni. It’s a personal belief of mine that teachers should have a fair amount of life experience under their belts before they return to high school on the other side of it all as teachers. The best teachers I had were teachers who’d lived, and who’d taken their field by storm, seen all there was to see and then used all their passion and experiences in their classrooms. I want to be a teacher like that, and in order to do that I’ll need to be really really brave and step right into the creative industry. That means time to write more slam poems, time to write short stories and novellas and novels and enter them into competitions, time to write articles and send them to Djed and Peril and KYD and Going Down Swinging, everybody. Time to do a lot more at The Yarra Reporter, time to make myself fucking prolific. I have to be everywhere, doing everything. Rue Tunga on the scene with my camera and notepad in hand, taking in all that Melbourne has to offer and spewing it all out in the form of CULTURE. I’m actually terrified right now, but writing this has gotten my head together a bit, it seems. I mean I needed this. It’s 8:22 a.m. now. It’s been a half hour of writing and I’m nearing the end of this third page. I’m not as slow as I was when I started this, that’s good to know. But to be fair, I’ve been writing non-stop all week. I had four assessment tasks due within a week of each other. And I had to finish them all one after the other. I think the worst one by far was my gothic fictions essay. I got my last one back and it turns out I didn’t do too well on it: H3. Part of me thinks it was justified and part of me doesn’t. But I swear to god I deserve way better on this last essay I did on Dracula and Frankenstein. I compared the two monsters alongside the era they were written in.

Oh, so I’m running out of space now, so I’ll just say one more thing before I’m done for the day. Evan and I got a lift to my restaurant (from Wren and their cousin Tahni who’s visiting from Queensland) to hand in my employee papers (it’s been cash in hand since I started, like everybody’s been cash in hand up until now) and then we were walking back home when we decided to get some stir fry things to eat with the rice I had in the rice cooker at home. We bought food stuffs and were walking down Mitchell Street when Evan slipped and fell on our bag of prawn crackers. He got so mad he swore REALLY loud and then flung the bag into the street. He said he almost threw our food too. Then he walked home really briskly and left me behind a bit. We got home and the rice hadn’t cooked because I hadn’t turned the rice cooker onto ‘COOK’ it was just on ‘WARM’ for three hours. So Evan, in a continued state of agitation, ordered three packs of steamed rice from Loving Hut on UberEats. Fucking hell. I flipped the rice cooker on, and our rice was done before the Uber rice came. He said he almost punched a hole through the door, and he almost threw our whole bag of food. Because he slipped and fell. It was a bit of a stressful scene. But it was followed by some nice food and Dexter, and a really honest and loving night, and some great - if not slightly bloody - sex.

[theintrovertedteacher-blog]

“Introverts in the Classroom” – Artist’s Statement of Intent-ish

You could say that I drew this comic for a course in my Teacher Ed program……. But in all honesty, it was more like the opposite. I exploited (sorry G & T!) the freedom our instructors provided, and basically used “course work” as an excuse to spend days on end drawing comics for fun. I also used “course work” as an excuse to buy new Pigma microns and a fancy Pentel pocket brush pen, so life is very good. As much as we’d like to think of personality as an ever-changing spectrum, sometimes you just know what kind of person you tend to be. I always knew I was introverted. It doesn’t mean I’m necessarily shy/aloof/apathetic/no-fun party pooper/etc. In fact, when the situation calls for it, I think I can crack a good joke in a crowd, public-speak on command, and act out super wacky poems with zero sense of shame. But none of those have anything to do with introversion –shyness, maybe, but not introversion. By Jung and Barnes (1921)’s definition, the difference between introverts and extroverts lie in the manner in which our energy is gained. Extroverts gain energy by interacting with the external environment and people, whereas introverts tend to gain energy through internal, solitary events (Kise, 2007; O'Connor, 1985). In my case, as much fun as I may be having in a crowd, I need to charge my battery, so to speak, at the end of the day. Heck, as a student in the super social Teacher Ed program, I find that I even need to recharge midday by taking a walk alone (as much as I love my classmates). We deplete our energy when socializing as much as we gain energy through solitude.

This brings to my point that as teaching veers away from the “traditional, old-school” methods towards the more “innovative, researched-based” methods (I’m intentionally keeping the quoted words vague), we often forego individual time for more collaborative time. And when you observe students collaborating and synergizing and all that great stuff, as a teacher it is so easy to get caught up and think “this is so amazing! I’ll use this model on everything that I do!”. And forgotten are the quiet, overwhelmed, and possibly quite capable students who are internally SOSing as they push through the day (or they could become withdrawn if they are unable to push through). 

When that happens, the knee-jerk reaction might be to shift the blame towards the introverted students and just tell them to speak up more. No doubt, some students will eventually adapt and push themselves to speak up more to avoid embarrassment, but it does not change the fact that we are constantly burning them out by depleting their energy. I don’t think that’s right. I think we need to re-evaluate our pedagogies and ask ourselves: “are we teaching to include all our learners? Am I striking a balance in my collab. vs non-collab. time?”

Due to a limited time frame, the scope of my inquiry project/comic isn’t so much “how do I modify my teaching to meet the needs of the introverted students”, as it is “I know we’re doing a lot of collaborations these days and that’s just the way it is. How do we make the experience less difficult for the introverts?” As such you would notice that I focus on strategies to provide “access points” for the introverted students. For example, really giving them time to think; providing them with headphones (which essentially act as thinking caps!), varying roles in group assignments, etc. These “access points”, from personal experience, can make a surprisingly huge difference and benefit everyone else as well.

Now, I’ve been asked where I found resources (book, journals, websites) dedicated to strategies for teaching introverted students. I haven’t broken the news yet, but as far as I’ve found, the answer is ARE THERE??? PLEASE TELL ME WHEN YOU FIND THEM!!!!!! This topic seems to be overlooked in the teaching world, and that would make perfect sense to me because the needs of introverts/quiet people in general had been completely under the radar until Susan Cain wrote her bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. 

(By the way, this book changed my life. Susan Cain is my hero. I would not be who I am now, if she hadn’t stood up for all of us as a role model. But more on this in another time.)

In any case, this inquiry project is a very personal synthesis from everything I’ve learned so far about inclusion (special thanks to Shelley Moore with her inspiring seminar about inclusion with our cohort in January), cooperative learning, and my own experience as an introvert. I hope you enjoyed the comic and gained something out of it; I know I did. In the many years to come, I will continue to search for answers and during the process, I hope to serve as both a role model and an advocate for the quiet students. I hope I would give them hope as Susan Cain did for me.

All the Best,

V. 2017

Please find my resource list here, but do keep in mind that neither of them directly answer my inquiry question: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwVNVdtDUmgAUjZIYzZIM0hUQTg

[grotesqueanmial]

the culture of ateneo leadership is one big circlejerk where a leader would always have exactly the following traits:

1) always outgoing 2) has a social advocacy of some sort, or popular

and more importantly,

3) know someone from the inside

the moment you are a different kind of leader, then you get shot down fast. 

that’s why i hate aiesec!!!!!, asla!!!!!!, and even orsem and ams to an extent because that’s where i see it the most. aiesec is where all the pretentious people who are popular get to be leaders. asla is the creme de la creme of leadership seminars, but of the people i know there, it always goes back to 1, 2, or 3. orsem this year literally became dana’s friends + nikita + gob (because someone needs to continue it). and don’t even get me started with ams. execom becomes an inner circle where you lose friends.

of course i can’t hate the people in it. individually, they comprise great individuals, but as a group they are so, so, so vulnerable to groupthink and so deadset on thinking about ~the future~, ~legacy~, and ~commitment~ when they haven’t done anything geared toward it

it gets me worked up so much because i have been shot down so many times to be a leader and tangina naman oh? because AMF, MA, and SOSE students in general do not make the final cut unless they are (1) or (2), because lol SOSE people are unknown to most. it takes a Cam Dee in AMF to make it to ASLA and it just takes a friend in like, ID or some soh/soss course because lmao connections

to some extent, i don’t really care about it anymore. but on the other hand, it’s frustrating that it looks like the breeding ground for politics on a national level: one built primarily on connections, with little focus on those in the sciences. juxtapose that with singapore, where their leader is a mathematician. tangina lang.

it’s nearly 5 AM and i can’t sleep with all this vitriol from such a toxic culture. i don’t even have the nerve to call them out because i already know that it’s going to be met with so much opposition for me to care for. i know a lot of people who know me well know that i hate ateneo leadership culture with all my guts but no one, even me included wants to talk about the elephant in the room

i’m not gonna give up on being a leader. i’m not even going to wish them badly. i’m just going to wait for my time to shine and prove that you don’t have to fit their mold and idea of a leader to actually be one.