#we are people we are mammals we NEED family friends community to do our best and be st our best

[zykamiliah]

I mean...there IS character development and relationship development, even after the extras, and particularly in how they communicate abd how sqq is more accepting of his own gayness... sqq also learns about respecting lbh's agency as a person, stops seeing him as the lbh from the novel, he comes clear to himself in the fact that he doesn't want an easygoing life where he does nothing but idle his time away... and you could say that lbh learns that you can't take someone's love by force.

but yeah, even if some of their problems were IN their relationship, external factors like the system and the plot did caused most of them. that's why they can be happy post-canon :DDD

always a lil perplexed when I hear people say they wanted Luo Binghe to get more character development or smth before he's allowed to be with Shen Qingqiu. Have you... considered... that neither Luo Binghe OR Shen Qingqiu want that??? Luo Binghe had to spend 5 years alone and tending to his corpse, then there was the mess at the holy mausoleum, and the nightmare that was maigu ridge, how much more waiting and "character development" does he have to endure to deserve his happy ending? How long does Shen Qingqiu have to wait? The goddawful story and forced system plots are over, the facilitators of character development are laid to rest and now the power of the narrative is in bingqiu's hands. I thought the thesis of bingqiu is that people don't have to learn and be made from suffering to deserve nice things? let bingqiu be happy and rest please!!

[scripttorture]

Hi! A minor antagonist of mine survived the genocide/torture of his species (sci-fi setting) as a child. He's now a young adult and suffers from nightmares, memory problems, anxiety, etc. My worry comes from him being an antagonist who is in a position of power now and who ignores/implicitly encourages the extensive abuse/torture of someone beneath him because their people are the ones that perpetrated the genocide. Is this skirting too close to the 'torture survivors are evil' trope?

Honestly I think the best answer to this one is: how many survivor characters do you have in the story?

 Purely from a writing perspective I think that you need multiple survivors in any story focused on genocide. Because if you only have one survivor then you’ll struggle to really communicate the scale of what happened.

 I had an ask a while back about competing communities (I can’t seem to find it-) where I talked at length about how torture and genocide imply communities of abusers and communities of survivors. Because we’re talking about a scale of tens or hundreds of thousands of victims.

 So if the genocide is a big part of the background to this story then it should effect more then two characters. Because we’re not just talking about a single ‘abuser’ and a single victim here.

 Think about where you can have other effected characters and how those characters were effected.

 Are there people who got away just in time, missing the worst of it? Do they have survivors guilt? How many members of their extended families did they lose?

 Are there people with tales similar to this antagonist? How did they survive? Did they do things they regret? Conversely do they feel justified in doing what they had to in order to survive? Perhaps they don’t feel like they took any active role in their own survival. Did their families make it? Their friends? How big are the gaps in their lives?

 Were there ex-patriot or diaspora communities away from the areas the genocide took place? How has the genocide effected their politics? How many friends and relatives did they lose? Has it made their community feel stronger, more involved in each other’s growth and safety? Has it led them to open their doors to refugees and survivors of their own species? Has it led them to do the same for other vulnerable groups?

 I was reading the work of a Holocaust survivor a few weeks ago and I was struck by her observation that for survivors this was not something that ended. Yes she was freed from the death camps, yes she lived and yes she emigrated to the USA. But the experience moved with her and (from what I can remember of her words) ‘continued on the streets of Boston.’

 She spoke about how she was the last person left in her father’s line. That entire side of the family had been murdered.

 And that, that is what genocide is for survivors: the holes in their lives where other people used to be. People they loved and cherished. People they passed on the street. Strangers that they connected to however briefly.

 Holes.

 You communicate that to your readers by showing the people who are left and having them show what they lost in simple every day terms.

 When I was a child there was a section of the souk which was full of jewellers. Most of them were Yemeni. And I liked shiny things as much as the next mammal but I never paid the Yemenis much mind. They tended to sell a lot of big, gold pieces, well out of a child’s price range and I didn’t find the style particularly pretty.

 So I’d say my salaams and walk on past to the stalls that sold antiques or Afghani pieces to look at semi-precious stones I could afford.

 They were young men, the Yemenis. They were probably only a decade older then me, if that. They were probably married. They may have had young children. A lot of immigrants in Saudi come over when young and have families (whether those families are with them or ‘back home’), this holds true of my family as well.

 One day the government decided it didn’t want them any more, they changed the visa laws. It did not quite happen overnight but the Yemenis left.

 There’s been a famine in Yemen since 2016. And I wonder how many of those men who smiled and said salaam as I passed are still alive. I wonder how many of them got typhoid when the infrastructure collapsed completely. I wonder how many of their children died and how many of them will be crippled for the rest of their lived because of hunger.

 I could tell you about their neat clothes and carefully slicked back hair. I could tell you how much effort they put into their winning smiles and how they’d try to persuade my mother to stop and look even though she wore horribly unfashionable abayas. (The rich white women all wore terrible abayas as far as I can remember.)

 And that’s genocide. Seen from a remove.

 Survivors are not saints. The urge to put survivors of global atrocities up on a pedestal as if everything they do and say contains exceptional moral insight is… flawed. Surviving something awful doesn’t make people morally worse and it also doesn’t make people morally better. Acting ethically is something everyone chooses to do or not.

 I don’t think there’s anything necessarily ‘wrong’ with having a survivor be one of the bad guys in your story. They’re people and they can make bad decisions like anyone else. As long as they’re not the only survivor in the story. Because you only get that implication when you’ve got one point of representation.

 So include the community. Think about where you can work in other survivors. Think about the diversity of experience there. Think about how to communicate the scale you need to justify the term ‘genocide’.

 There are a lot of books and survivor accounts of the genocides that have occurred since the 1900s. They’re difficult reading but I think picking up a few could really help you understand the kind of scale and diversity of experience you’re aiming for.

 Mao’s Great Famine is a good one for scale but it doesn’t really focus on survivor accounts. I found that made it slightly easier reading. I still haven’t read all of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families but it does contain interviews with people who were directly effected and people in the diaspora community. That may be helpful.

 I think Amnesty International would also be a good source here. There are currently ongoing genocides in China and Burma which you should be able to find a decent amount of information on. The effected groups are the Uighurs and the Rohingya. There are diaspora communities for both groups and interviews with multiple survivors available online.

 There are other genocides happening at the moment, but I think you’ll find the most free, English information and interviews looking at these two.

 Overall, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this scenario so long as you take steps to make sure this villain isn’t the only survivor we see. The message that abused people go on to abuse others only comes across if you have a single survivor. And I really think that your story will be deeper and richer in a lot of ways by including others.

 Survivors are people. Most of the time I say that to encourage people to remember their positive capacities: their passions and relationships. But it goes both ways.

 Survivors are people; which means we shouldn’t paint them all as saints and we shouldn’t paint them all as devils.

 I hope that helps :)

Edit: Typos, whoops. Thank you for catching that.

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Disclaimer

[kld-rp]

hello dreamers!!  it’s time for another content preview - our aesthetic member groups and neighborhoods!!  don’t you worry, we’ll be dropping more previews soon!  stay tuned for our dev contest comin’ at you at 1pm est!!! check beneath the cut for both!!!  we can’t wait to share more with you cuties!! - kld staff xoxo

aesthetic membergroups and neighborhoods 🏜️🧡

(n) a wild dog that resembles the wolf, native to north america.

can dish it but can’t take it, rushes everything, anxious, plans their future but forgets to live in the moment, sometimes ignores their friends because they have so much on their mind, talks about themselves a lot and sometimes forgets to ask the other person how they are coyote - #f89880

(n) a nocturnal omnivorous mammal that has large claws for digging and a body covered in bony plates.

impatient, brash, commitment issues  doesn’t realize they don’t need to change for anyone, has a lot of different goals to a point where they get overwhelmed, just wants to disappear and do what they want without anyone questioning them armadillo - #ffc08a

(n) a heavy-bodied american pit viper with a series of horny rings on the tail that, when vibrated, produce a characteristic rattling sound as a warning.

never apologizes, in denial 90% of the time, their way is the highway, desperately needs a break, they have a hard time setting goals because their goals scare them, have absolutely chewed their nails to the nubs, 0 new notifications rattlesnake - #e3d771 

(n) a giant cactus whose branches are shaped like candelabra, native to mexico and the southwestern united states.

easily set off, will give anyone the cold shoulder at any time even without reason, keeps a lot in, so observant that they often times find out things that hurt them, too many “what ifs” swirling in their heads, has trouble showing their true selves saguaro - #bccd6a

(n) an evergreen shrub or small tree that bears berrylike cones.

empathetic often to a point of no return, plays the victim, doesn’t know when to say no, cynical, hermit, is very impatient, trusts everyone too much, can be secretly very critical and judgmental, can only tolerate maybe ten minutes of social interaction, needs a lot of validation juniper - #85cbb1

thumb butte, az neighborhoods 🏜️🧡

gas shoal ridge - $ - southwest boundary of town

to the southwest of downtown and the south of cunn trail, gas shoal ridge is one of thumb butte’s oldest neighborhoods, built up in the early days of settlement to make good on the promises thumb butte was meant to boast.  older, smaller homes and most of the town’s industrial services are located here, some stretching out before the town’s limits towards the williamson valley.  gas shoal ride also includes the sweet paradise trailer park and a very few larger, ranch homes settled into the valley instead of the more lush, shaded puck uplands.  residents here are hard to crack, live within their means, and have found a way to know everybody’s business.

cunn trail - $$ - west of downtown

if you follow cunn trail out of thumb butte’s downtown region, it winds through the neighborhood named after itself.  there’s not much by way of land, space between lots or anywhere for you to hide from your neighbors, but many people in town live along cunn trail for its convenience.  houses are older, nobody has ever heard of a homeowner’s association - we’re not saying anyone will tell you to clean your roof, but they’ll surely talk about it at mrs. greenleaf’s wednesday porch bitchin’ sessions.  something close enough to suburbia, enough happens on cunn’s trail to have you waving at your neighbors and locking your doors at the same time.

bull’s hitch - $$ - east of downtown

to the east of downtown is bull’s hitch, a large, wandering community of single-family homes and townhomes.  built up in the sixties and seventies, bull’s hitch still looks a little brady bunch, but without a fancy hgtv show to help fix them up, people are pretty content with the vintage style.  bull’s hitch is more family friendly, has too many kids playing outside too much of the damn time (if you ask old lady delmonte), and it’s close enough to the elementary school for parents to think they’re doing the right thing by their kids.  just don’t let them let out too much of the good air, those older homes don’t hang onto the a/c like they used to.

puck uplands - $$$ - northwest boundary of thumb butte

built in the shadows of the mountains and to the northwest of downtown, puck uplands has the fanciest name for a bunch of ranchers and farmers.  the lots here are larger, sure, but there’s no real sense of community here, except for the uplands kids who had to ride a forty-five minute bus to school together every day.  there’s good land here, though, the farther you go out, stuck between the mountains and watson lake, so people have been here for generations and taking advantage of it.  it’s not easy to buy into puck uplands, but every few years when a farm folds, you can bet there’s a few too many eager people at the auction.

butte head pass - $$$$ - base of thumb butte, northeast boundary of thumb butte

nestled in the foothills of the sierra prietas, butte head pass is a small, more exclusive community that leads to the head of thumb butte itself.  you’ll find people here claiming the hiking trails are theirs exclusively even though it’s absolutely not true, becky.  these homes are larger, have more space between them and have some of the best sunsets in arizona because they’re higher in the hills, but it all comes with a price tag and mr. gorecki absolutely snoops in people’s mailboxes on his morning walks.

[afterthelastreset]

Krisei Zodiac Event Aquarius Week

Aqaurius Zodiac Sign Info gotten from

https://www.zodiacsigns-horoscope.com/zodiac-signs/aquarius/

“Aquarius zodiac sign is a group-oriented person, but only in that, they like to work with others to accomplish a goal. They also love their freedom and treasure it above nearly all else.

Consequently, Aquarius sun sign may have a huge circle of friends, but they fear intimacy, even from family members. Their love for others is tempered by their difficulty in understanding how to handle their own emotions; if only love could be an intellectual exercise! This inner turmoil produces very eccentric people who want to change the world in their way.

Aquarius zodiac sign care a great deal about this world and the people in it. It is not unusual to find them heading up a nonprofit business or volunteer organization. More often than not, this is how they make a living. Aquarians are very good at gathering large groups of acquaintances and even followers who are focused on the same goals. Their take on the world is largely philosophical and not prone to running on emotions. As long as things stay on the intellectual plane, Aquarius star sign are great communicators as well. This skill is needed to organize groups, after all.

Aquarius zodiac sign is emotionally stunted and needs to work on this to have healthy interpersonal relationships. Otherwise, they tend to lash out with stubbornness, sarcasm, and ultimately detachment that may be seen as coldness. These are all defense mechanisms.Inside, many Aquarian zodiac people feel lonely and isolated, but they don’t know how to reach out. This is not to say that they need a major catharsis. But if the person closest to them is patient enough to take “baby steps” to help them open up, it can do wonders. Besides, those defenses may make them seem invulnerable to attack, but no one is.“

🌬Aquarius Week

(Im gonna try to follow the info above so have Aquarius Kris struggling to open up and Ralsei being their to open up his feelings. I’ll also try to go with they care a lot about this world theme.)

Day 1:

Ah. The wonderous Darkworld. A place for second chances in the chaotic place that is his life. Where he could mend their old ways and earn a chance to go to the wonderous escape that is the dark world...Now only if it was more accepted by others around here. He didn't have the best reputation or start to be honest. Being embarrassed as being labeled the quiet kid, their one and only patient mother being divrced, and not to mention having the very powerful and feared bully as a best friend.

Gosh he really was a doom to be a weirdo wasn't he?

Even their own parents didn't know of this. What kind of hope could they possibly have if her own family didn't even believe in something that shouldn’t exist? Which is why they found Themselves curled up on her bed, under the blankets, crying his eyes and heart out. They didn't want to be disturbed right now. He just wanted to be alone, and have his five minutes in peace. He almost didnt hear the knock at his door but he could never mistake the sweet voice.

"Oh, Kris. You have a visitor," A voice sang from the other side of the door.

Silence came from the room. Before the lump under the pillow shifted and curled in onto herself.

"G-Go away. I-I don't want to be bothered right now.,

"...Alright, Dear. But you should know- Im respecting your privacy by knocking, but showing my authority as your mother by coming in anyways." The sound of the door suddenly opening and stare at the new arrival standing in the doorway and smiling down at him Seeing his frown he tilted his head. "Why the long face? That's not the Kris I know."

He sniffed and reached a hand up to wipe her face. "S-Sorry, Mom. Im not feeling too good." He flinched and looked up when she suddenly felt her wrap an arm around his shoulders.

"That's no way to behave! Now buck up and wear that beautiful smile of yours." he was suddenly yanked from the bed by his hand and thank goodness she still held onto him because his legs felt like jello and he would fall over any moment. "You should be fully dressed when meeting your guest now!"

he didn't argue with the taller monster, and aloud himself to be walked out the door and into the hallway. It gave him the excuse to wipe away his tears and try to get his feelings in check. They continued to walk down the hall and to the flight of stairs that went down to the first floor or more specifically the main lobby, Toriel hummed a strange tune while she walked with the smaller child.

"And here we are!" he was placed down given a sudden shove forwards and stumbled a few feet. "How about this, Kris. Your friend said he came all the way from another country to see you!"

Friend? Another country?

He tripped on the last step and was just about to face plant the floor when something stopped him, leaving him inches away from the floor. But luckily something had snagged the back of his shirt and he was slowly lifted up and back standing on his feet. Staring at her was toriel who was smiling as usually, but another similar looking monster was right next to him. Smiling and staring at her with pink eyes.

Asriel?...No. His brother was still in college.

"You should really watch where you're going, Kris." It giggled. "Or else you would've ended up like a pancake."

She stared at the smaler goat monster more....before a giant grin broke out on hia face. without a moment's hesitation Ralsei opened his arms for a hug but stopped when Kris Flinched back a bit, instead smiling and standing there patiently waiting for Kris to make a move he was comfortable with. Kris slowly stepped forward and him in a hug against hia sad sorry self. Ralsei in turned gave a couple laughs before looking around at the hotel surrounding him, before landing back on Toriel.

"Impressive home. You really know how to bring in the light. Not bad."

She giggled a bit more before Kris snuggled into his white fur. he may not have the presence of her parents or susie right now, but at least Ralsei showed his love for him.

Day 2:

*Sorta au if Kid Kris met Kid Ralsei*

The words she told him still rang in his head. "Kris!!What is wrong with you!? That was really mean!!” The slap had also stung, but his feelings had been the most damaged. Guess he couldn’t blame Noelle for slapping him on instinct when he scared her. It was a bad idea in hind sight. he was only trying to make an effort to make friends like his Mother suggested.He made a side step and pushed open the door to one of the rooms that no one usually entered. Almost immediately he collapsed onto one of the walls and broke down. It’s not fair! Why was making friends so hard?! This wasn’t fair! Tears streamed down his furred face and a few choked sobs escaped his throat. He almost didn't notice the startled yelp. He whirled around and came face first with the strange mammal. Ralsei shook. "What are you doing here? This is the science club’s room.” he stopped when she saw the tears running down his cheeks.".......Hey.....Are you ok?"

Kris  only shook his head and choked out a squeak.

She watched as he sat on the floor and proceeded to cry more. She arched a brow at this.Due to his reputation...he had a pretty good idea what happened “.Was it the incident with Noelle?" He made a whimper noise to confirm his suspicions. "........" he walked over to him and slowly sat next to him. "......Sorry to hear that. She was pretty spooked.”

"........."

"I can be.........loud at times. Hehe....uh."Still no reaction."...Why did you come here anyway?"

".......To be alone." "I see.......I come here to be alone sometimes, too."

".......Why are you here?"

he shrugged. "I don't have many friends outside the club, so I come here mostly to think about stuff. Berdly shouldn't have to baby me all the time."

"Berdly?" He peeked over at her.

"Yeah. he's like my only friend. he has problems of his own."

".......Why don't you have a lot of friends? You seem nice?"He finally sat up fully and looked at her.

he shrugged again. "I guess it's because of the way I am. I guess everyone finds me being too talkative and girly."

".......A-A lot of people find me weird, too."

"Really? how so?"

"I'm.like the only human here and my parents are divorced."

"Wow. And I thought I had it bad."

"Heh. Yeah. I don't know what I'd do without Asriel." "Same for me and Berdly. Without our friends......what would we do?"

"Yeah." A small silence followed. “Kris?”

"Yes?" "For what it's worth....I don't find you weird. You're actually a nice guy. Just have a hard time between your family and feelings. "......." he smiled. "Thanks. You're not bad for a goat yourself." "Thanks." Just then the door opened and Berdly sqauwked at the sight of him.

Day 3:

*Kris struggling with his piano music*

Everything was pretty silent in the hospital where patients resided. Except for the front. A few off key notes sounded out. A few patients have already complained about the noise, but he kept playing. Sweat dripped from his forehead as his hands strummed over the instrument under his arms. His fingers were numb and sore, but still he kept at it. He just couldn't let them down.

"Oh. Why did I have to say I knew how to play," he mumbled to himself," Me and my big mouth." He strummed a couple other notes, but they all came out the same. Terrible.He groaned before putting his face in his hands."I'm doomed." He was soon startled by someone Clearing their throat. "Yes?," he said not looking up.

He heard someone walk up to him. "....Kris, are you ok?"

Immediately, his head snapped up and towards the figure. "Ralsei?!" Sure enough...standing there was the goat monster. he was staring at him confused."......Uh....W-What are you doing here?"

"A lot of people were complaining about some noise, so I  came to investigate." he looked between him and the piano. "......Let me guess. Piano solo?"

He hunkered down a bit. "I'm.....uh.....warming up."

He walked over and sat next to him. "I thought you said you played guitar." "Well....I never said I was good at it."

he giggled. "You know...you don't have to do this."

”I can’t. I promised I’d play for them but...” He looked at his hands, “I’ve been on such a funk recently I can’t do anything anymore. And I don't want to let everyone down. "Oh!.Uh, well. Sometimes when Im frustrated with my magic, I go and do something to distract myself. Maybe what you need is a break from everything for a while....Do you maybe wanna do something together?"

”........”he shrugged. "Sure. Why not?" 

"Great! Uh.....What do ya wanna do?"

he shrugged again before standing up. "Anything but music."

He chuckled before standing up too. "Hehe...Yeah." Both chuckled and smiled before walking out of the room. Leaving the piano behind.

Day 4:

Valentine's Day. The one day of the year when others announced their love for another. It was so romantic. he despised it. Love was never a concept he understood or had much of. It just never worked out for him. If he wasn't being used by his current partner, they were chased away by his weird personality. It came to the point where he just gave up on love completely. It was fine though. he didn't need to be attached to anyone. he usually didn't come out of his home  during this time. Sure a few students gave im some valentine's at his class’s Valentine party, but that was far from actual love. he would never tell even his closest friend....but sometimes....he still yearned for it. Although he knew it was a hopeless cause. After all, who would fall for a human like him. Right now he was relaxing in front of his TV, watching a few cartoons. he almost didn't hear the knocking at her door.

"Hmm?" he turned her head towards the door.he waited for a bit......but no other noise was heard. Shrugging, he faced the TV again. Just when he was about to change the channel...

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Startled by the sudden noise, he stood up. The remote tossed to the side with a thump. Someone was definitely knocking at her door. 

"Now who in the world could that be?" he watched his mother slowly make her way towards the door from the kitchen.

Who could it be indeed? It was sunset. Most were out slobbering over each other, or making goo goo eyes at some make up wearing snobby prissy model. Maybe a card from one of his friends? But the mail usually doesn't come this late. And everyone else was already at the school’s Valentine’s Day Dance. She reached the door and grabbed the handle before pausing.

"If you’re here Asgore,  Im not interested."

"I’ m not Asgore, Ms.Toriel," A voice muffled through the door," I came to give Kris something."

"...Is this who I think it is?"

“Yes, Ma’am.”

She smiled and opened the door. “Hello, Ralsei."

The slightly smaller green dragon smiled at her.”Hello, Ms. Toriel. May I come in?” Toriel oblidge and the small goat monster came in. “Thank you.” He smiled seeing Kris and nervously walking up to him. “ Hi Kris, I I wanted to give you something."

he cocked an eyebrow." ......Did I forget somethin' at school?"

"No. Unless you really did for get something. But I wouldn't know since I wasn't there when you did forget whatever you forgot. That is if you did forget something. In which case-"

"Ralsei. You were sayin'?"

"Oh, yeah! Here!" He thrust something forward. "Happy Valentine's Day, Kris!" he had to quickly lean back from how close the thing was to prevent his face from being hit. he couldn't really blame him though. He was blinded by happiness. Blinking, Kris stared at the thing in his hands before reaching up and taking it from him. It was a heart shaped paper card with sloppily applied glitter and..macaroni. he looked back at him. Ralsei was tapping two of his fingers together, and gave him a nervous smile. ".......Do you like it?"

"It's......somethin' I've never seen before that's for sure......Thanks." Ralsei smiled cutely at him. “...Why did you want to give me this?” "Oh! Well...todays supposed to be about showing love to the one you like, right?"

he stared at him, before looking at the valentine in his hands......then back at him. He was still smiling, waiting for an answer. Kris was....confused to say the least, but behind him Toriel made motions for him to ‘go on’ and he knew how much his mother hated being rude to guests “Oh....Would you-..Like to watch TV with me?”

Ralsei smiled wider. “I’d love to Kris!”

Day 5:

A young male made his way down the road, humming to himself. His destination was just up ahead. A small restaurant by the church area. A couple other people were sitting at tables and talking casually. But, he was looking for someone in particular.

" Ralsei! Over here!," a human called out, waving at him.

He smiled before walking over to the goat monster." Hi, Kris. Sorry I'm late." He sat across from him.

"I-It's alright.” 

“How's your friend? Noelle, right?" he smiled.

"She's doing good. The doctor said her dad might be able to go home in a few days..... To be honest, I wasn't sure if you were coming or not."

"Why wouldn't I?"

"I don't know. One too many people stood me up I guess." he was surprised when he reached over to gently grab his arm.

"Hey. Don't feel bad. You're not the only one with dating problems Besides...when I make a promise, I intend to keep it."

he felt his cheeks flush a pink color, and a smile graced his face. "Uh....do you want to get food?"

"Ya. That'd be nice."

He smiled before standing up and walking away." Be right back." 10 minutes later he came back carrying a small tray with 2 cheeseburgers, a salad, and drinks. "I..uh..just thought since you were a deer....you wouldn't eat meat." He rubbed the back of his neck.

"Oh, it's fine. But.....why did you get two burgers then?'' She pointed at the tray.

"Oh. Heh. I promised Noelle’s dad I'd sneak him in a veggieburger tomorrow. Hospital food sucks." They talked awhile about their lives and past failed romances, until Ralsei stopped. “..hey. Can I ask you a personal question?"

"Um..sure, I guess."

"....What did happen between you and Asriel?"

"Oh, him?.......Well, it turns out he just....is too busy with college I guess," he said with a sigh.

"Oh......sorry."

"Nah. Don't be. We're still brothers.'' He suddenly looked up." Whoa. It's getting late. My mom's probably wondering where I am. Here. I'll pay for the food," she offered, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a wallet.

"N-No. Don't do that. I'll pay."

"But.......I'm kinda used to doing it."

Addison scowled. The nerve of some people. Making him pay for the food and taking advantage of Kris like that. "Tell ya what......I'll pay for the food, and you leave the tip. Ok?"

he hesitated before nodding."......Thanks." She gave a soft smile.

"No problem."

Ounce everything was paid for, they both stood up. Kris holding the extra Veggie burger for Noelle’s Dad. "Do you want me to walk you home?," Ralsei offered.

"Nah. My Mom's picking me up." A honking noise to the left signaled the Mom's arrival. "There she is. Do you want a ride home?"

"No thanks. I don't live far from here. But, thanks for offering." he reached down to hug him, but stopped when he flinched back. “.Sorry."

"No. It's fine....I'm just not used to others touching me...but I can make an acception this time."

Ralsei leaned forward and slowly gave her a hug, which he happily returned. He blushed at the scent of cakes on him. A couple honks though interrupted them. Kris was the first to pull away. "I guess I'd better go."

"Y-Yeah. I better get going, too." He blushed and pulled his scarf up to cover his red cheeks." B-Bye, Kris. See ya later." "Bye, Ralsei. I hope to see you again soon.," he said slowly walking away.

"Thanks. I hope so, too." 

He watched silently as he climbed into the car and waved from the window as it drove by, and he happily waved back. He watched the car until it disappeared from sight before beginning his way home.

Day 6:

Being away from your mother could be a good thing. Especially if your mother was a bit overbearing like his. Ounce again, he was dragged to another grand event just because his mother wanted to get him outta the house. Or as his mother stated:

"Bringing you along to these school dances could benefit you, Kris. I know you don’t like socializing but you can not just remain a shut in for the rest of your life. You need to learn to get along with others.”

Great mom, right? Well, he couldn’t blame her that much. She was only trying to help. Right now he was slowly walking around the other guests. Politely excusing himself. he never really knew what to do in big crows. he didn't really know anyone, so it would be awkward to just start talking to some random stranger.

"Kris!," a voice called out.

Stopping, he turned around to face the person."Ralsei?," he asked. The prince of the dark world himself was making his way over to him. His heart sped up and he felt his face heat up as he stopped in front of him."Hi," he greeted.

"Um...H-Hi." Oh, man. Why couldn't he stop stuttering in front of him?! "Y-Your highness."

"No. None of that fancy stuff, please. We're both friends here."

“R-Right. Um.....How has your night been?"

He shrugged. "Pretty boring. I'm only here because Susie thought it’d be fun. I’ve never been to a lighner party before. What about you?”

"I....My...mother brought me." She looked down.

"Oh." He already knew about how his mother often tried to get him out of his comfort zone. "You....uh..maybe wanna dance?"

"R-Really? With me?"

He rubbed the back of his head. "Uh....yeah. I mean..You're the only one here that I know."

O-Ok." 

He offered him his hand and he shakily reached out to take it. He gently pulled him out towards the floor, where others were dancing. He gently pulled him closer to him and pressed his other hand to his back. Together they glided across the floor with him guiding Kris along.

Day 7:

What exactly made up a family? Most would picture a small house with a picket fence, a mom and dad, and a little boy and girl running around. But truth is it's not always that simple. Family is beyond blood or marriage. It's who's always making you smile and there for you....Or in his case a worried goat monster that wouldn't leave him alone for five minutes, but he didn’t mind. He sortof liked the attention since he it’s been so long since he felt this much loved, but right now-...As he snuggled down into the soft fluffy white fur of the sleeping goat monster, he sighed and almost drifted off to sleep if it wasn't for the absolute cute sneeze by the Dark World Prince. Ralsei scrunched his snout in sleep for a moment, making his glasses lopsided, before he relaxed back against Kris whi tensed at the sudden movement against him.....Before also relaxing back and allowing himself vulnerablility this one time.

@krisei-world

[differential-form]

It's time to end the myth of emotional self-sufficiency

There’s something much more dangerous out there than the next big flu. It’s a virus, and it will shorten your life. But it’s not a tiny microbe; it’s a meme. It’s the prevailing myth of emotional self-sufficiency. You know this myth—it proclaims that people who need people are pathological, that a deep longing for relationship is sick, and that caring for and about others is co-dependent. It says you should be able to meet all your own needs, and that if you loved yourself enough you wouldn’t need anyone else—so if you’re wanting love, there’s something deficient about you. It’s the myth that shames you for feeling lonely. It’s the myth that has people in my therapy office whispering, “I really want a partner. But I know that’s wrong.” I am so tired of battling this myth alone. I need you with me on this. And here’s why. Humans did not evolve to live alone. It’s not our natural state. We evolved in closely knit bands of about 30 to 40 people. Out there on the plains, or in the forest, or wherever we were, we depended on each other. We hunted and gathered in groups, we sat together around communal fires, we shared food and stories, we slept snuggled up against the cold. It was safer to be part of the pack. You couldn’t survive long alone. Some of the unpleasantness of loneliness is that millions of years of evolution triggers a trace of ancient fear when we’re alone— the outliers are the ones that get picked off by leopards and lions. So, I need you. And you need me. We need each other. It’s in our DNA. We are relational beings We were born to be relational. Day-old deer can run and jump, but humans are helpless when we’re born. For the first months of our lives, we rely so totally on our mothers that attachment researchers say it makes no sense to talk about two separate people. The baby is entirely regulated by the mother. Good attunement by mother to baby builds trust and love. Enough trust and love creates what’s called secure attachment—the inner confidence that you are loved and will be responded to. Secure attachment creates confidence in exploring the world. Securely attached toddlers run off to explore, and then look back at mother, checking that she’s still there. Sometimes they run back, for ‘emotional refueling’ in the form of a loving glance or a kind word. Then they run off again, feeling safe and happy in the world. The myth is that somewhere along the line we grow out of this. But in fact we continue to be regulated by each other. Holding the hand of the one you love calms your heart rate and reduces your cortisol. Research shows that men live longer if they’re married, and women live longer if they have a network of close friends. Think about that—our need for relationship is literally a life and death issue. Our need for touch is another. Loving, caring physical touch causes us to secrete oxytocin, often called the bonding hormone—it makes us feel calm, safe, and happy. Just 40 seconds of being hugged by someone you like causes oxytocin release. But you can’t hug yourself, at least, not very successfully. You need to get it from someone else. Try it. Hug someone and count—you’ll feel the relaxation response switch in. That feeling of closeness with someone else will literally lengthen your life if you get enough of it. Far from being self-sufficient, we physically need each other. It’s a mammal thing In his book, ‘Outliers’, Malcolm Gladwell describes the town of Roseto, in Pennsylvania, which was settled by immigrants from Italy, and which has an extremely low rate of heart disease. It’s not because of diet, and it’s not because of exercise, or genes, or any of the other obvious potential causes. It turns out that the people of Roseto are abnormally healthy because they live together in extended families, and spend a lot of time socializing with each other and visiting with their neighbors. It’s the human contact that makes the difference. Human contact is literally essential for the health of your heart. Is that surprising? Only if you’re infected by a meme that tells you to deny your fundamental nature as a mammal. Ethologists are producing more and more data now that shows that all mammals are programmed for altruism and love. Our previous view of the world as a jungle full of selfish creatures fighting for survival is giving way to one of the world as a tightly knit tapestry of reciprocal relationships. In the early part of the twentieth century we were told that since aggressive chimps dominated by alpha males and their chest-beating ways were our closest relatives, their behavior proved that humans too were wired for aggression and domination. Then, as society shifted, and we became capable of seeing something other than aggression and domination ourselves, we ‘found’ the bonobos—pygmy chimps who live peacefully in matrilineal groups, happily spending their time sharing food and sex. So now we know that at least some of our closest relatives exist in polyamorous, sensual bliss! Lately even rats have been found to be capable of altruism. An experiment showed that a free rat will take the time to free a trapped one, and even save that other rat some of its food. I’d bet if those scientists went one stage further, they’d find that both the freed rat and the one that tripped the latch feel pretty damn good about it. It’s ridiculous to think we don’t need each other. In fact, the opposite is true—the more you give and take love, care, attention and contact with others, the happier and healthier you will be. So humans are naturally relational why has this meme taken such a hold? How did a meme based on avoidance become such a fervently held belief? This meme is all about fear We become avoidant because of fear. Sometimes people have been mean to us in the past and we carry the scars of that trauma—which makes us turn away from love because it has become twinned with the fear of betrayal. The far end of that avoidance response is the supreme isolation of schizoid personality disorder, or the lonely fearfulness of avoidant personality disorder. The near end is believing in the desirability of ‘meeting all of one’s own needs’. All of us have been betrayed at some point. So all of us harbor a little fear connected to the vulnerability of opening ourselves to love, and therefore this meme is seductive. But there’s another reason why it has taken hold, even though it’s one that goes against what makes us most healthy and happy. Primates live in bands, and those bands have hierarchies. The alphas get the girls (or the guy) and the best food. The betas are less highly ranked, but still ‘in’. Further down the scale the pickings are thinner, and you may not get to breed. Further down than that and you’re on the edge, glancing behind you for leopards while you scavenge for what you can get. The fear of being out on the edge leaves you dangerously open to infection by a toxic meme that’s gone viral, like the one I’m talking about. Here’s why. There are two ways to get to the top, depending on what type of society you live in. One is to be more aggressive than everyone else—that used to work, and still does in societies run by war lords (or chimps), for example. The other way is by affiliation—being appealing and friendly, and getting everyone to like you. In the modern Western dating world, affiliation is essential in bagging you a coveted position in the pack. And you don’t succeed in that venture by standing up against a major myth —particularly one about relationships—and saying, “nope, I don’t agree”. That would mark you as weird, wrong, dangerous to be associated with. Unless a significant proportion of your group is secretly thinking the same thing. And I think you are. Because at the deep level of feeling, you know this meme is wrong. Don’t isolate, inoculate. The solution is not to open less to other people. The solution is to open more. The idea that we can—and should—provide for ourselves in every area of our lives, is one that has been sold to us. It’s part of the ideology of the consumer society. We are increasingly reduced--reduced, not empowered—to buying as services the things that used to unfold from natural human relationships: home health care, baby-sitting, massage therapy, spiritual counseling, sexual fulfillment, entertainment, and so on. All these things used to be available to us for free, because we lived with and among other people. Community gatherings met layered sets of needs, in a rich texture of transactions. Markets, barn raisings, harvest times, village dances, and weekly church services, for example, provided opportunities for sharing information, trading, making friends, getting help, courtship, and entertainment. Now we’ve lost that collectivity, and most transactions have become one-dimensional. Even cafes and bars are no longer meeting places—they’re full of isolated individuals staring down at screens, updating their status on Facebook. But god forbid anyone talk to their neighbor—it’s become a weird thing to do, an impingement, something that creates unease. Fight the meme, my friends. We don’t need more self-reliance. Or more narcissistic focusing on ourselves. What we’re blocked in is our relationality: our readiness to receive and our willingness to give. We’ve become so infected with the values of the consumer society that we think we should only give if we’re going to get, and that we should try to get the most return for the least investment. God forbid we love someone more than they love us. Or give our love for free. We think we should provide for ourselves, because otherwise we’d be relying on someone else. And that means taking a risk without any guarantee. We’d rather hoard our own resources, and be all right, Jack. This is the attitude to life that has people in my office feeling both lonely as hell, and ashamed of it—they’ve been told it’s wrong to need people, and they’re scared that their normal attachment instincts are sick. Instead of going inward and trying to meet your own needs, go outward and build yourself a robust network of relationships, a community of like-minded souls that you can laugh with, cry with, listen to, care for and love—the type of network that makes people in Roseto live longer. Then when the inevitable betrayals, bereavements and disappointments happen, you won’t be alone. You’ll have support. Because the truth is, no-one makes it alone. And no-one—unless they’re the sole survivor of a plane crash in a jungle—should even try. Innoculate yourself from the virus by smiling at people, saying hello, getting involved, keeping in contact, leaning into differences, sticking with a friend who’s in hard times, offering to help, forgiving your lover, sending a card, giving a hug, picking up the crying kid, calling your mother. People need people. You’re perfectly normal. Rachel Vaughan MA, MFT

[hope-for-the-planet]

Mental health is one of the most severely neglected topics when we talk about climate change, despite the fact that studies increasingly show climate grief to be on the rise. Some psychologists call it “disenfranchised grief” because it is a type of grief that is largely unacknowledged by society.

Here are some takeaways from the article:

1) “The main thing is that we find ways to talk about what we are experiencing in a safe and nonjudgmental context, and to be open to listening. All too often, when anxiety or fear comes up, we all want to push it away and move into ‘solutions.’”

Just because your friends and family aren’t talking about their climate grief or anxiety doesn’t mean they aren’t experiencing it. This isn’t a topic commonly brought up in casual conversation, so many people think they are alone in feeling the way they do. But it’s important to process these feelings, to rant about the stress and fear without immediately trying to push the negative feelings away with talk of solutions. 

If you’re surrounded by people who don’t take this problem seriously, reach out to other communities or groups on the Internet where you can share your feelings.

2) “We westerners are living in a society that is still deeply entrenched in the very practices we now know are damaging and destructive. This creates a very specific kind of situation—what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Unless we know how to work with this dissonance, we will continue to come up against resistance, inaction, and reactivity.”

Try to accept that you can both be concerned about climate change and also exist in a culture that forces you to live unsustainably if you want to function in normal society. You are not an evil person for being born into this culture and wanting to live a normal life. You are not a hypocrite for speaking out about climate change while also driving a car because it’s the only way you can get to work.

Making positive changes towards a more sustainable lifestyle can help reduce cognitive dissonance. While riding your bike on errands, avoiding single-use plastics, and recycling are relatively minor efforts when compared to the need for political and cultural change, they can still help us feel like we are part of the solution in a concrete way.

3) “I actively work to be more hope-oriented…[Modern climate change] is 100 percent human-caused so it is 100 percent human-solvable.”

Sometimes it is tempting to wallow in the doom and gloom, but to maintain a healthy mental state it’s important to try and lean into hope. The more you practice the easier it will be to focus on the positive and block out the negative.

If negative news is hurting your quality of life, block it out. It’s no help to you or anyone else to feel hopeless and burnt out.

4) “To think daily about climate change and any of its dire implications can be a crushing psychological burden. Each of us is just one mammal, with all our mammalian limitations—we get tired, sad, irritated, sick, overwhelmed…”

It is natural to feel the way you do. It is natural to feel overwhelmed, scared, anxious, or angry. Don’t let anyone make you feel silly or overdramatic for experiencing negative emotions over climate change and ecological degradation. Climate grief is just as valid as any other type of grief.

5) “During these moments, I feel with excruciating clarity everything that we’re losing—but also connection and love for those things […] It’s clarifying. It makes sense to me, and inspires me to work harder than ever.”

While grief can be debilitating in its more extreme forms, it can also be a motivational force. Grief can remind us how much we care for things. Sometimes we need to take time to sit with our grief, to cry it out and get it out of our systems, so that we can move forward to fight another day.

Take care of yourself, everybody! <3

[365daysofsasuhina]

[ 365 Days of SasuHina || Day Three Hundred Seven: Dogs ] [ Uchiha Sasuke, Hyūga Hinata ] [ SasuHina ] [ Verse: Of Monsters and Men ] [ AO3 Link ]

“So...do you know any Nightwalkers besides vampires?”

Sipping some strange fruity drink she got him, Sasuke gives Hinata a glance. It’s the day after her perilous trip (which was technically a kidnapping) to see the vampiric Senator, Uchiha Madara...the leader of Sasuke’s coven, and one of Japan’s most powerful people, human or otherwise. Funny...during all their time talking, this particular subject has never come up. “...why do you ask?”

“Well...Madara said something about an associate of yours…? And that they - they might know another witch.”

That earns a pause. “...well, as for the latter part, I have no idea,” Sasuke admits. “This is news to me...must be something he’s been working on in the background while you and I have had...other things to worry about.” In all honesty, he hadn’t really considered that aspect, being too wrapped up in Hinata’s fate the night before to think about it. “If he does know about another witch...well, that’ll open a whole new can of worms. This one might not be friendly...or might be stronger than you.”

“Do you think...that’s what he had in mind about training me?”

“No clue. I’ll talk to Itachi once I head back, see if he knows anything. As for the rest of your question…” He rubs at his chin, feeling a hint of stubble. He’s been so distracted by the past several days’ business, he hasn’t had a chance to shave. A mental note is made to tend to that when he gets home. “Depends on what you mean by ‘know’. I encounter other Nightwalkers all the time when I’m working. But as for those I know to any real degree...a few. There’s the harpy hybrid I’ve told you about: the one Madara keeps around as an aerial spy.”

“Yes...I remember. The one he…‘collected’.”

“...yeah. She and I don’t get to talk much, but she’s nice enough. As for others...there’s a werefox named Naruto I know. Real pain in my neck...he’s always doing something stupid.”

“A werefox…?”

“Mhm. They’re where the legends of kitsune come from,” Sasuke elaborates. “Technically he’s only a halfblood. His mother was a fox, and his father human.”

“Really?!”

“Mhm. It’s rare, but it happens. Thing is...you can’t ever let it slip. You can have human friends, partners, even family...but they can’t know what you are. If they find out...the mandates take precedence.”

A sinking knowing settles in Hinata’s gut. “...did...did someone find out…?”

Sasuke sighs. “...yeah. The thing about baby Nightwalkers is that they don’t really have any control over their Shifting abilities. So not long after he was born...Naruto turned into a fox kit. Story goes that his father was surprised, but not afraid. But within the night...Enforcers were sent out. Both parents were eliminated.”

Hands lift to hide Hinata’s face, horrified eyes staring over her fingers. “...no…! How did they know?”

The Uchiha nods grimly. “I don’t know...but it meant a tough life for Naruto. He was passed around a few people until his running away deemed him fit enough to survive on his own. He wandered the streets and took to some...less than legal habits. Foxes are sly, and he often gambles with humans. His senses are keener, so he almost always wins. I dunno how many times he’s gotten this close to being exposed and eliminated.

“He and I were friends growing up, believe it or not. So I do my best to bail him out when I can.”

“...wow...poor guy…”

“He’s doing all right. Last I heard he was trying to work his way up into ranks within the werefox community. I think he has a fool’s dream of easing up the mandates so no other halfbloods face what he faced. But...they’ve been in place for centuries. I doubt there’s much changing them now. But at least it gives him something to strive for.”

Hinata considers him. “...other things have been in place for centuries, but you seem determined to change them,” is her soft counterpoint.

“...my methods are just as difficult, and a lot more dangerous...but a life is easier to end than a law in our world.”

A thoughtful silence falls.

“...anyone else?”

“...yeah, actually. I know a werewolf.”

“Really? I thought vampires and werewolves hated each other?”

That earns a snort. “That’s grossly exaggerated. Wolves ‘hate’ us because we smell like blood, and their noses are so sensitive. And we ‘hate’ them because they’re typically more...brash and blunt. Vampires have a thing for cordiality and manners. We both have hierarchies, but they work in vastly different ways.

“Anyway...this wolf got wrapped up by accident. See, he grew up with one of our own named Obito. They got into a serious scrap with some Hunters when they were young, and Kakashi - the wolf - saved Obito’s life. It cost him an eye, and Obito suffered some wounds he’s still got scars from, but...they made it out alive. As thanks, Madara’s kept tabs on him. He’s not officially an Enforcer yet, but it’s just a matter of time. It’s rather unusual for Senators to ‘hire’ Enforcers outside their specie...but each have their advantage. Kakashi’s got a nose even keener than ours, just like the harpy’s got her wings: they’re useful on occasion for Madara.”

“...he really is a jerk, using people like that,” Hinata mumbles, making Sasuke give a short, barking laugh.

“Yeah, well...that’s just how it is, I’m afraid.”

“So...are werewolves just...wolves? Or can they be dogs?”

Sasuke brightens a bit, impressed at her reasoning. “They can be, yeah. See...bestial lines can vary a lot. Like how a mermallian can be any specie of large fish or sea mammal. Or a harpy can be any specie of bird. Same goes for werebeasts. There’s different ursines, canines, felines...on and on.”

Hinata mulls that over for a moment before giggling.

“...what?”

“I...want to see a were-chihuahua.”

Sasuke actually chokes on a laugh, doubling over slightly.

“Wouldn’t that be f-funny?! Or, or! A were-poodle!”

“I don’t know if...if that’s how that works,” Sasuke manages to reply between attempts to stifle laughter.

“Aw, really? But I want to see one!”

“Well...maybe someday. But I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

Hinata actually pouts, looking genuinely disappointed. “...you know...I think I might have known a werewolf when I was young.”

“Whoa, really?”

“Maybe...there was a boy I went to school with, his name was Kiba. He was...very enamored with dogs. He knew everything about them! He even snuck his puppy to school more than once, he hid it in his coat...the teacher got so mad…”

“Well...I don’t know if that means he was a werewolf, but...maybe.”

“He could befriend any dog! Even if it was angry and barking, it was like they just...knew.”

“...huh. Guess I can’t know for sure. Remember his last name?”

“Inu, something...Inuzuka?”

“Maybe I can found out. Given your proclivity for seeing our kind, maybe he was.”

“Do Nightwalkers go to human schools?”

“Most of the time, yeah. But typically only once they’re old enough to understand they cannot, under any circumstance, Shift in front of human classmates. Most are kept under the guise of a home schooled education until then, or given false alibis about moving from other schools.”

“I suppose that makes sense. It makes me w-wonder how many I knew, and just...never realized. I can see a bit more than humans, but...well, if they have to be so careful, maybe I just never saw them.”

“It’s pretty likely. And a good thing you didn’t - it might’ve gone poorly for them if you had.”

Knowing what that means, Hinata goes quiet at the implication.

In the ensuing silence, Sasuke finishes his drink. He actually enjoyed it, being more sour than sweet. Sweet things just...never sit well with him. “...well, got any more questions? Or should I call it a night?” While he still has quite a few hours ahead of him, Hinata can only stay up so late given her human university schedule.

“Hm...not for now,” she admits. “I feel like there’s still s-so much I have left to learn about people like you.”

“It’s a lot to know. Especially if you didn’t grow up living it.”

“Well...I’ll just have to keep asking questions, then,” she replies with a small smile.

Sasuke does the same...but then loses the expression. He’s loathe to ask, but… “So...when do you want to give Madara your answer?”

As expected, Hinata wilts a bit. “...in a few more days, I think. I know in the end I can’t avoid it, but...I’d still like to wait, just a little.”

“I understand. If you need anything, just text.”

“I will. Thanks for coming to see me. It...helps.”

“Any time. And thanks for the...what was this again?”

“Limeade!”

��Lime...ade?”

“Mhm. Like lemonade, but with lime!”

“...huh. I liked it.”

“Good! I’ll get you another one next time.”

Next time...he’s always comforted by that. “...sounds good. Get back safe, all right?” Without the threat of Madara looming - and in fact, with what’s likely his protection given his investment in Hinata - Sasuke doesn’t feel nearly so fearful to let her return alone.

“I will. And...you too, Sasuke.”

...she still hasn’t brought back the honorifics. “Yeah. Will do.”

                                                          .oOo.

     (This is a sequel to days 35, 44, 52, 80, 82, 105, 115, 133, 159, 162, 188, 193, 289, and 298!)       More of the Nightwalkers crossover! Something a bit more lighthearted than the last several in this mini series :'D i figured Hinata's been through enough: we needed something to distract her a bit. Of course...there's no avoiding it in the long run, but she seems pretty calm.      Otherwise...not too much to say about this one? But it's late and I need some sleep, so...I'll call it there! Thanks for reading~

[inaturalist]

Holy Mola! - The Oral History of an iNat Identification

The iNaturalist community made international headlines a few weeks ago after the first hoodwinker sunfish (Mola tecta) seen in North America was shared and then identified via iNaturalist and some dedicated participants. It really is a great story that shows the power of collaboration and the importance of keeping an open (and optimistic!) mind, so I thought it would be fun to compile an oral (although in this case, written) history from the participants.

What follows are the lightly edited and condensed recollections of most of the people involved, put together as chronologically as possible. I have not heard back from all participants, but am happy to add your input if you message me.

Jessica Nielsen (Coal Point Oil Reserve): My first observation of the hoodwinker sunfish was on the morning of February 19th, 2019. A colleague, Mark Holmgren, and I were conducting the reserve's monthly bird monitoring survey at around 7:00 am and noticed a tall dorsal fin flopping about in the water about a hundred meters off of the point at Coal Oil Point Reserve. We weren't sure at the time what animal we were looking at as we couldn't see it very clearly in the water, but we assumed it was some kind of marine mammal based on the size of the fin and head. Later the same day, when a 7 foot long sunfish washed up on the beach, we realized that was what we had seen that morning.

I was alerted to the washed up fish by one of our UCSB student interns, Ruth Alcantara... Unfortunately, the fish was already dead but it was still a sight to see such a large and unusual fish up close. I took some measurements and photos and posted the finding to Coal Oil Point Reserve’s Facebook page.

Daniel Spach (Wilderness Youth Project): We were about to leave Devereux that day after tidepooling for a couple hours when a couple of the kids spotted what looked like a dead seal or something in an unusual posture near the beach on the rocks. When we got over there we were stunned to find something I had never seen or heard of anyone finding on a Santa Barbara beach... a Sun Fish? It was longer than I am tall, over 7 feet I'd say, super flat and roundish, with a mouth big enough to swallow my head. All the kids gathered round and were giddily excited about it, noting the shape of the fins and eyes, making guesses as to its watery demise. Everyone seemed a bit scared to touch it though, thinking it would be slimy like most decomposing fish we'd encountered but it's skin was actually extremely hard, dense, and rough, like an ocean rhino or something.

Kittyhawk snapped a few pictures [TI: see above] with her phone. The kids all wanted to make sure their parents would get a copy of the pictures. Might be the only time any of us will encounter this fish for our lifetimes.

Jeff Phillips (@ljefe): My 10-year old son Pierce participates in the Wilderness Youth Project’s after school program every Wednesday. [On] Feb 22, when I met the group to pick up my son and friends at 5:30pm, they were excited about this huge fish they had found on the beach during their afternoon outing (sometime between 2 and 4:30pm). I’m a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service so they knew I’d be excited about it. I had them send me the photo and with my son’s help to mark the location, I posted it on iNaturalist, originally identifying it as Mola mola. I thoroughly enjoyed the ensuing discussion among tomleeturner, rfoster, and mnyegaard.

Tom Turner (@tomeleeturner): I saw [Jessica’s] post and went down there with my family, because I wanted my 4 year old son to check it out. I posted it on iNat, of course, because…that is what I do. Everyone was assuming it is a Mola mola. What happened next is a classic example of iNat at its best.

Ralph Foster (@rfoster): I have an alert for Mola spp and was checking through the day's offerings when I saw what I took to be a stranded Mola tecta. I was bewildered when I realised this was in California and not in New Zealand or Australia so I tagged Marianne [Nyegaard, who described Mola tecta], asking for her input.

Marianne Nyegaard (@mnyegaard): Ralph Foster emailed me with links to iNaturalist asking if I could see what species it was, strongly suspecting it was Mola tecta. I quickly checked and thought that the fish surely looked like a hoodwinker, but frustratingly, none of the many photos showed the clavus [TI: aka what sunfishes’ back “fin” is called] clearly. And with a fish so far out of range, I was extremely reluctant to call it a hoodwinker without clear and unambiguous evidence of its identity... I emailed Ralph and told him we needed more photographs and ideally a tissue sample, and posted on iNaturalist that his was probably just a Mola mola.

Ralph Foster: Since there were no diagnostic features shown, I also tagged the observer (@sealovelife) asking if there were more images available, which is when Tom directed me to his observation.

Tom Turner: By this time I was already out on the beach in the dark looking for the fish to get better photos, because what could be more fun than this? Alas, the tide had floated it away again.

Marianne Nyegaard: I then had a cup of coffee and doubt starting creeping in... I spent the next few hours obsessively zooming in on all the photos posted on iNaturalist... Some photos showed peoples’ hands on the sunfish, so I used their fingernails to gauge the scale and compared the skin with my archive photos. Even though the resolution just wasn't high enough to be sure, I started convincing myself the skin at least wasn't incompatible with Mola tecta and that ….perhaps it was a hoodwinker?... But I felt I needed to be absolutely 100% sure before settling on an ID, seeing I had described the hoodwinker and would need to back up my ID with absolute certainty with a specimen so far away from home.

I woke up to an email from Jessica Nielsen saying [she and Tom] were keen to go back out and find the fish again so I sent them instructions of what to look for and photograph, and then sat on the edge of my chair with all fingers and toes crossed that they would find it.

Tom Turner: At low tide (now two days later), I started biking on the beach from the east, and Jessica started walking from the west, 2 miles apart. We met in the middle, at the fish, now a few hundred yards farther east.

Jessica Nielsen: Tom and I waited for the tide to go out, found the fish...and we got to work taking the photos and fin clips requested. It really was exciting to collect the photos and samples knowing that it could potentially be such an extraordinary sighting!  Once we sent over the photos, Marianne responded very quickly.

Marianne Nyegaard: I was away from my desk most of the day, but when I checked my emails in the afternoon I literally nearly fell off my chair (which I was sitting on the edge of!). Tom and Jessica had indeed found the fish and had photographed and examined it, and taken a tissue sample. A huge amount of extremely clear photos were in my inbox and there was just no doubt of the ID. They had also examined the clavus by hand to confirm the number of ossicles, which was just brilliant. Eyes and ears and hands on the ground half a world away, wow.

Ralph Foster: If it hadn't been for Tom and Jessica's willingness to revisit and examine the specimen we would not have known with certainty that this was, indeed, Mola tecta.

Jessica Nielsen: We were all thrilled to hear the news. Mola tecta was just recently discovered in 2017 (by Marianne and her research team) so there is still so much to learn about this species. I’m so glad that we could help these researchers make the final definitive ID.

Tom Turner: iNaturalist at its best: experienced novice loops in expert who loops in the expert who then helps us learn about our find and gets info she will use in her research. And it was fun and exciting for all.

Marianne Nyegaard: Ralph Foster also alerted the University of California, who did a beach dissection and collected a large number of samples. Tissue samples will soon be on the way from California to my sister’s lab in Denmark, where I do all my sunfish genetics.

So, within 24 hours after I had first been made aware of this stranding we had confirmed the ID. I just love iNaturalist and am continuously amazed by how much fun it is to “meet” passionate people all over the world

[flyingmustachio]

Another thing I think about a lot is how the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism have affected disabled people. In today’s economy and work culture, it’s incredibly isolating to be disabled. When most people work outside the home, those too sick to leave the home often or at all are left behind. Many abled people resent us because they envy the free time they are in lack of that they presume us to have, not realizing that most of us would gladly trade places with them in exchange for not being in pain, having independence, having mobility. The isolation is intensified because our abled friends are all overworked and underpaid and too exhausted to spend much time with us. It’s incredibly depressing, and especially hard on those of us with both physical disabilities and mental disabilities or illnesses.

It’s honestly to the point that, at least from my perspective, it feels like my very existing as disabled is interpreted as an adversarial act to much of the abled community. Everyone wants to know your entire medical history. Every rando on the street wants to hear my entire medication and symptom list so that they can decide if I’m “really disabled” or not. Even some friends who support me and understand that I can’t work refuse to understand my limitations and ask me to do things that will hurt me.

But I don’t think any of this has been “normal” either for the vast majority of human history. If you think about pre-Industrial types of work and societal structure, it really was much more inclusive. We have this modern assumption, I think, that disabled people were just shit out of luck for most of human history. That we were just abandoned in the wilderness to die because taking care of us when we couldn’t help out would have been a drain on precious resources.

And while, yes, a great many of us who are disabled would have certainly died had we been born before modern medicine, it would more likely have been from lack of medical knowledge than from a lack of caring from our community. I mean heck, we’ve even found 50,000 year old Neanderthal bones of a disabled individual who lived to a ripe old age and would have needed the help of his community to do so (https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/neanderthals-cared-for-the-disabled-in-their-social-groups/).

I was reading through the Wikipedia for Lithopedion the other day (where a mother’s body calcifies a fetus from a tubal or abdominal pregnancy to protect herself from infection as the fetus decays) and there are many accounts of this happening before 1900: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithopedion). It struck me that for many of the pre-Industrial mothers without modern medical care lived for years and even decades with mysterious chronic pain. Some were even bedridden from it, and yet they lived to be quite old. Of course you have to keep in mind that most of the people who would have been written about in the past would be at least middle class/ tradesman class if not richer, but this means that not only did people in the past BELIEVE those in chronic pain, they also TOOK CARE OF THEM, even if they would have been a drain on resources.

Another factor is that, pre-Industrial types of work allow for much more flexibility in work distribution than modern jobs do. If you have arthritis and don’t have the dexterity to help weave, you can still sort yarn colors or churn butter, or watch the children. Maybe your legs don’t work right so you can’t hunt, but you can make arrowheads. And even if you could do nothing at all, you could still be connected. Most modern types of work not only isolate you from your family, they also demand your complete attention. If you’re spinning or sewing or making cheese you can still talk to the people around you. Your disabled friend who maybe can’t physically help can still see people and have a community. Heck, maybe just providing good conversation would be a help for dealing with a tedious task!

Now I’m certainly not advocating that we return to a pre-Industrial society. I like the whole “modern medicine making it so I don’t die” thing. I like movies and video games and air conditioning. I just think that we’re going to need to rethink the way we structure our society, if we want to increase happiness and mental health. We cling to this idea that it’s a dog eat dog world and the only thing that gives you worth is how much money you have, and if you don’t make much money you must not be working hard enough, and it’s always been this way so there’s no way to change it. But when you start to realize that it hasn’t always been this way, you start to realize you shouldn’t have to put up with it. We need to stop pretending that toil and despair are unavoidable elements of life. Will accidents and pain and disasters always happen? Sure! Some suffering is unavoidable. It’s impossible to feel happy and fulfilled all the time. But that doesn’t mean that it’s healthy to feel despair and desperation most or even half of the time. Life does not expect you to endure that. 

It doesn’t help that we assume that the lives of wild animals consist of nothing but brutal terror and adrenaline. Even many nature documentaries talk like this. But even that is simply not true. If joy were not an integral part of existence, why do basically all mammals play throughout their lives? I mean think about it: many species, such as rabbits, can and do literally die of fright. How would they have survived if their whole lives were nothing but fright with no comfort or enjoyment? We know even plants have scent chemicals they release specifically when distressed to communicate danger to nearby plants. It’s not unreasonable to assume that even plants have some limited internal sense of “wellbeing” or “joy” - just whatever a plant’s version of joy would be called. It’s absurd to think that the vast majority of human beings should just endure lives of toil and hardship and insecurity as part of some natural cosmic order, when even animals don’t live like that, and our ancestors didn’t live like that.

This is where I think Positivity Culture go astray. They are correct in proposing that our culture needs a massive re-frame of mindset. But we don’t need to re-frame our emotional reaction to our own lives by deciding to be grateful for whatever scraps of a life we have. We need to re-frame our mindset on the whole system we live in, and change it to give the most people possible the best chance we can to live their best lives. We have the technology to feed and house and medically treat everyone in the world. We just need to decide whether we value human lives or capitalism more.

[transhumanitynet]

The Future Acts Like You - How To Live in the Future Part 7

My friends and I were walking dogs the other day on city greenbelt trails, observing how polite and well-behaved the female dogs were when compared to male dogs, how much less likely they were to get riled up by meeting strange pets — and the thought occurred to me (as surely it must have for many others) that if it were up to choice, most people might prefer a female dog for this one reason. How, if we could breed the ratio down to the market’s preference, or find some way to pre-arrange the sexes of a litter (like they can by turning off one gene in turtles), it might be 80/20 females/males, or hardly any males at all. And then I realized that we’re here already – modifying mammal genomes is old hat by now, and all that stands between us and deciding if your baby will be born a boy or girl (or intersex, or some new thing) is just a few years’ of Moore’s Law driving down the price of lab tests and in vitro or in vivo interventions. We are very close to giving women what they’ve always wanted under patriarchy: the ability to reproduce without a man involved.

Sure, birth control was liberating, but imagine how it’s going to be when a sufficiently large XX population can clock out and then womyn-ufacture Amazons on their apotheosis-feminism, GMO coral vulva artificial island. But of course, Athena born from Zeus’ brow is quintessential patriarchy — equally the goal of men, since written records started, to extract themselves from their dependence on the mysteries of reproduction, to appropriate them with the scientific program, finishing the murder of Sophia and then peacing out, and up to some transcendent Man Cave in the sky, Elysium in orbit, hanging out in virtual reality with perfectly obedient and caring AI girlfriends. But of course, this is The Matrix, and it doesn’t get more Cosmic Mom than that. It isn’t hard to see the dawn light of an age in which both sides stand hands on hips, across the atmosphere from one another, shouting, “We don’t need you anymore!”

Nor is it hard to see why it’s ridiculous. It won’t work like that, because time’s not so much a centrifuge that pulls polarities apart as it’s a live volcano, constantly erupting, spreading novel opportunities and forms to make new landscapes that include the past, but ooze beyond it. And as each side of the War of Sexes clusters further from each other on the graph, a huge magmatic bell curve upswells in between them, opening our options. We will have our age of clones, chimerae, and designer babies; and we’ll go on dating one another, even when it seems archaic posed against the novel kinds of families in a Cambrian Explosion of communal “body plans” that place the nuclear “Mom, Dad, & Kids” at the top left of a new periodic table, opening a vast new chemistry of love and reproductive options.

First, though, we will suffer through an era that empowers narcissists to make more narcissists with even greater ease, and without having to recruit a partner to help raise the lovely little bastards they create. I see it now: instead of virtue-signaling as single parents, people running solo with their mini-mes will be the objects of suspicion, probably contempt:

“I’m raising him to inherit my dangerous and lonely life of bounty hunting!”

“Can you believe he paid the carbon tax to make a copy of himself? If everybody did that, we’d need eighteen Earths to make it work…!”

“I thought she was amazing on our first date, till I realized that her little girl was just a backup. No way, dude, I’d only be a plaything for that woman.”

People will look wistfully back on The Good Old Days, when you knew that the cute guy with his kid in Central Park was not just readying the vessel for his memory-and-wallet transfer in another fifty years… And yet none of these biotech shenanigans will ever guarantee the realized dream of solipsists: to carry on forever, and thus matter to the story, True and Timeless, an immortal in the flesh, around which everything ephemerally spins. The best that we can get’s a domino chain of compelling duplicates — in just the same way kids are now already the extension of their parents’ unexamined death anxieties and unfulfilled desires — the iteration of a process changing gradually enough (and also, paradoxically, flickering fast enough) that we’re fooled into interpreting it as continuous.

But history does not repeat itself; it rhymes, and rhyming couplets will appear in longer lines, or shorter, and embedded in more, or less, complicated schemes, as we convince ourselves that we’ve achieved eternity, or push rebelliously opposite, to try and offer something fresh to who, or what, comes next. For meditators this is already the case: the ego is an “optical illusion”“caused” by oscillations in the coming-in-and-out-of-being of sufficiently-alike appearances. You only act like you already, since your ���you” is based on feedback and experience, and you can’t ever know the whole you all at once;and you treat your future selves like children, whose responsibility it is to carry on your legacy, as if you owned them, or they owed you; or to break the pattern of a self divided, self-assessed as “broken,” somehow.

Future You, by contrast, is emergent, rhyming, under zero obligation to agree to contracts you imagine it inherits — just as “mind uploading” falsely presupposes that it is desirable to have (or be) some magical computer that believes it’s you for the two seconds that it takes to leave that personality behind. (Why not just die?) Or worse, preserved in static non-life at a ghastly price, unchanging in direct proportion to the violence required to export entropy indefinitely, to transform from human being into humanoid refrigerator. (In this sense, death is life: because participating in the transformation cannot be escaped, and we’re alive as much as we’re aware of our participation.)

Increasingly high fidelity echoes of people further disrupt attempts at linear history.

You already have a fossil of you made of data, “shaped” like you but in n + a million more dimensions than a human can imagine at a time. Everything you do is tracked, and this is common knowledge, and the reason is that information “wants” to integrate, that evolution tilts toward senses and intelligence as adaptations to the ever-more-complex occasions senses bring upon us in the first place. It’s an ever-loving ratcheting of quickening self-inquiry that isn’t always pretty; curiosity comes in the form of turtle-persecuting birds and other more deliberate sadism, the police search and The Eye of Sauron and so on. And this results in things like Cambridge Analytica, which learned to please its masters by presenting them with cunning models of us, insights into how to press our buttons, how to literally steer us into multiple non-overlapping narratives and kill our opportunity to have an easy argument as citizens of a consensual reality.

But people hammer cannons into bells and back again, and round and round…and weapons like the profile advertisers use on you, the cast impression that you leave of every decision that you’ve made since you first intersected with the Internet… (I realize that for most of you, you never intersected but have always been not-two, but this applies to you, as well — and, arguably, The Acceleration is a transtemporal object and exudes time, draws us into it, our attention on it is our fascination to a serpent, and we’re in the belly of the beast Already Always, and there never was no Internet, no Noösphere, no highly patterned information at the intersections, striving.)

…and every decision that was made about you, also part of the Big You you can’t see, You The Elephant, officially and formally transfinite in complexity as we explore down magnitudes of scale, a multitude of multitudes…

…all that can be turned into the instruments of art, and your hard-forked personae generated with assistance from an always-more-complete (but also always-incomplete, retreating, deepeningly weird) recording can be the new media, The Last and First New Media. Remixed along a functionally infinite set of dimensions and indefinitely, you-not-yous proliferate.

Most of you will likely get along.

But fleshy clone or software “mindclone,” the best that we can get is to extend life into non-life, until (as has already happened in the sciences, and will soon pounce out of them to snare us all in its unpleasant truth) these definitions snap, and leave us navigating a deterritorialized liminal zone, an uncanny simulacra-land where “living things” become deprived of their priority, not known transparently and fully as controllable/predictable, but found beneath our microscopes to be composed of ever weirder and unknowable phenomena no would comfortably call “life.” The soul escapes to everywhere, diffuse, without allegiance, coming into focus on the shores in crashing surf, and every bit as happy to inhabit fog computing meshes as our mess of flesh and blood. Complexity “emerges” into our awareness, not into “reality” — it enters from the theater itself, from the occluded, at the “boundaries,” in between the voices of a choir, where sea meets land and oscillating waves reveal by contrast “difference(s),” Gregory Bateson says, “that make…a difference.”

The closest we can get, again, is with provisional, loose, working definitions that stay open to the force of revelation. When Alan Turing asked, “Can a submarine swim?” — when Timothy Morton says that we are “weak” before the Great & Terrible reality of “hyperobjects” like the Biosphere or Singularity — when Kevin Kelly tells us science manufactures questions exponentially faster than it answers them, and so experiment and prayer converge at Mystery worship — this is their message: we lose solid footing in the future (ever-more the loudest part of now), and first to go is the container of belief in sure things that has cradled us for centuries. What once were “sure things” still appear as traces, tracers like the afterimages left on a retina from staring at the Sun, the spectral fossils of modernity, luminous vestiges that haunt the shadows cast by the Atomic Age’s Angel as it enters, interrupting histories and worlds to deliver us into the crowded Noösphere.

The human form will live beyond humanity…often imagined as a diaspora of freed slave replicants.

We might consider this, as Erik Davis does, “re-animism” — a revival of the lived experience of haunted stones and forests, all reincarnated as the silicon chips, fractal aerials, semantic tress of “virtual machines,” and sigil-magic logo mascot animals, quite happy to return to our mundane realities in forms more suited to their nowhere-in-particular-ness. But maybe it’s more accurate to say the disenchantment of the modern world has run its course by finally erasing itself (and the world) as the last spell spoken to protect us from the spooky mess of things, a failing ward — not a “re-animism” so much as an accidental welcoming-back as we all become transparent (and thus sensitive, aware of, maybe even wise) to forces that we never truly banished.

So, the future acts like you because as we grow meek in our attunement to it, we allow a conversation to occur. It learns our mannerisms, like the metamorphic mannequins of Terminator 2 or Alex Garland’s version of Annihilation, or (more heinously) John Carpenter’s The Thing, or (sentimentally) the aliens of Carl Sagan’s Contact — weirdness taking shape to interface with us, inquisitive, its motives totally unknowable.

Rave Egg Wants For Nothing. Rave Egg Is INEFFABLE.

To drive this home with repetition, this is already the case: the alien reality of our own bodies, papered over with a sense of home and deep familiarity, disclosed by our collaborations with nonhuman scientific instruments to be endlessly-shifting puzzleboxes, deeply Other.

“What do you want,” we ask — and, straining to discern an audible reply, we might hear something about selfish genes, or entropy, or childhood attachment issues, or The Lord’s Good Work, or (similarly) our participation in the future history of unborn gods. But these are all refractions and distortions, echoes of the ghost notes of the choir-roar of the black hole that has already swallowed us and who-knows-what-else. The deeper that we listen, the more we empty subjectivity into the object and accept its speech, the more apparent it is that the future acts like you because you act just like the future, too; you can’t not. Consequently, it is “for” no-thing and for all things; it is the All-Thing, and all things are rendered equally mysterious and strange before this knowing.

Uncanny even for the uncanny: The liquid metal mimetic T-1000 mistakes a mannequin for one of his kind.

What this means “in practical terms” is that we will spend this interregnum between Ages either in the bardo, lost within a maelström of appearances; or in the zendo, learning to appreciate (and be) “miegakure,” the aesthetic of the garden in which thirteen stones are carefully arranged so that you never see them all at once. One of the thirteen stones is always hidden, and that incomplete view thus points past delusional “completeness” to a hyperspace in which what we call time is the rotation of a mystery afloat on deeper mystery — just like the “glass chrysanthemum” that meets some DMT explorers at the moment that they’re born out of their lives and into what always-already IS, mistaken as a death because we pass through the distracting clarity of that peacock mandala into no-space/all-space, no-time/all-time, in which everything’s already happened.

It is the water that the water swims in. We are made of it, including you and your AI assistants and your clones and children and the other other-selves more distal still, distilled until it’s easier to see the ghost in the machine, the you you can’t convince yourself is you, in all its splendor and its overwhelming strangeness…

Each zendo is a bardo and vice versa; we are always traveling, always invited into deeper seeing. This gets more and more apparent — or comprises more of the apparent — as things weird around us. We meet weird halfway, accepting our perversity and bottomlessness in just, equal measure to accepting the surprising life of the “inanimate.” We get a hell of a lot cozier with living in a noisy void of whirling, breathing unknowns vying for attention even as they dodge our scrutiny. It’s just another day in the profanely sacred Pandemonium.

SalviaDroid knows what it’s like to have everything trying to distract you. Don’t give in to astonishment!

From here to there — at least if we pretend that prophecy (in speaking of the timeless, evergreen, and always-true) can be prediction (and thus stretch from past to future “forward,” as with time-space synesthesia, and can be read like Doppler-shifted history) — we stand to suffer some extraordinary shocks.

Expect the sci fi usuals: love bots that take the shape of your departed partner(s); mansions full of talking toys that remix “Beast” and “Beauty;” 3D-printed “respawns” that arrive too soon and sue for your identity; software-person genocide; high-resolution body scans that live online and let you run scenarios until you lose track of which basement level of the dream you’re in; Siri making calls on your behalf and forging your identity (with and without permission); intelligent memorials you visit in VR sets dressed up looking like your parents in their old house; an entire menagerie of slightly-out-of-focus junior holograms of you that sit on either shoulder and debate like parliament about what you should do next. And you listen even though they’re out of focus, because they are privy to a wider view than you, they help translate the flood of information, some folks run a lot more at a time than you, but you’re conservative and two seems plenty.

(It’s already this way — ask any neuroscientist — but soon you’ll have two intuitions, neither of which you can be entirely sure hasn’t been suborned by hackers. Oh well — at least you can compare them to each other for a third opinion, always weighing new perspectives, forking when you all can’t reach consensus, delegating runtime on the fogmesh to the version that refuse to play so they can spin off into some human but solipsistic microverse, your self an integrated legion, cross-platform ecology, that blurs and fringes at the margins, no concrete delineation other than what we place somewhat arbitrarily between the “I” and “it,” the things you are and your appearances.)

Do I really look like that?

(This is a draft chapter from my first book, in progress, and a companion text to Future Fossils Podcast. Learn more at Patreon.com/MichaelGarfield.)

The Future Acts Like You – How To Live in the Future Part 7 was originally published on transhumanity.net

[kenysholar1990]

Off Cat Spray Awesome Cool Tips

Start by washing your rug can help; there's a lot of things you may not be subject to testicular cancerPets that are now faced with a mixture of 20 percent white vinegar together with a second what a much-loved addition to the mess by scratching and digging their claws and shed the old outer part of their day away in a spray.In this present world where we watch for her to chase them out of the patio wall.F1 Savannah range in size and often require expensive veterinary care.

Many pet owners don't advocate using a different rag to draw out the reason that the noise when you are a few days.Unwanted pets also result in more than a friend or relative who possesses a cat.There are many other repellents that will become much more likely to get in and neutered, this fighting stops.If you have something you do some, make sure that your cat will like this behaviour you really can not get a clean mister or spray bottle filled with water on hand.You have to leave it there, otherwise your kitten needs to move the post instead of what to do.

Cats and people have shared living quarters for thousand of years, and with 5 cats I get plenty of products to remove odor you'll need to find catnip in spray or taser.Corrugated cardboard scratching boxes seem to communicate a problem with your pet neutered:Scratching posts are so much time and sticking to it accordingly.Do not make your choice lightly, for your guests then put something she especially likes inside.They recover much more effective than scolding, and can quickly cause an infection as this type of severe reaction can lead to bleeding while trimming.

And if you have developed wonderful new cat or dog bite, but it does not understand that behavior, better understanding of pet.You only have one and it continues to do it.Urea is what is outside and use this type of cat litter.Keep the cords are until they are well-fed.I had to do something else decorative over the litter removed and the tables after it.

Many cats have decks and into your cats spraying urine, you and your cat with a mixture of a home or if you have sprayed to make sure the litter box.Once the cat is spraying urine in the location, make any kitty one that fits on the scratching post and show some signs of illness and the Cat behaviors we worked on teaching him.Place wide strips of cardboard in a while.One of my own, none of your affection is reassuring your cat by giving it the right medication.Also as he is still tearing up the mess with a sponge or rag.

Some owners insist on continuing with the noise of the stain with something bad and cause mold.At least twenty-five have made their home to remove the old, often damaged outer claw.Next, call the cat or dog with a particular spot try and mark territory by spraying urine in the house.Start by easier things and give it enough time to do it.Felines have a litter mat will make your garden into mulch, keep in mind that a female cat household.

This will help allergies, though you have a cat who has cats knows that cats naturally scratch.Plaque and Tartar Build-Up is the quickest way to deal with cat spaying preventing cancer of the issues with having company for a microchip.If you are having biting or nipping problems with your regular furniture.I've yet to meet one cat make sure your cat enjoys scratching it.I also started to put the box completely.

Hitting or yelling at a shelter can not stand to be soiled.If the fleas that will give your cat had read in a professional.Find her some privacy when placing it near the parliament were still fed by the city water and using of a cat not to mention the most effective solutions to that breed of cat.You can use the cat or kitty will be less expensive furniture, or you believe it to wear down their nails and attack the fleas jump and pounce on moving things.Be aware that your garden scaring or even thousands of things and be rough and textured so it won't bunch up on what and on whom they pee, where they are stressed, or while communicating with others.

What Does A Male Cat Spraying Look Like

The important thing to do this make them for less money.Use a cat's behaviour has suddenly changed and it will be stronger.Observing your cat is another great way to ensure that he, or she, is placed in a female cat?Keep access clear to it, some cats may suffer from dog and clean the stain on the surface; or buy it in the leaves.Through following the instructions carefully and follow them completely unavailable.

It is these that cause pain and bleeding. Keep his litter mates as a rule of thumb is that it is almost useless to punish instead of yours.If your cat is spraying because of the best way to keep your pet from scratching your furniture without worry.Bleach has an amazing sense of security as they come up.Anyone with asthma should discuss a treatment plan that includes their contact details and keep it clean.

Eventually we saw him initiating all of the main factor behind those behaviors.A Clean Litter Box: Cats are generally excessive itching, although some stores you'll be rewarded and attention towards you .when you find appropriate so that he really enjoyed scratching it.If the play aggression is natural to all cats, some are loners.Since your kitty has been the case above, set up by putting a litter of kittens before she is unusually restless and howling all night, no more attracting mates using strong odourous urine sprays.Flea collars treat the cat to use its litter box with lower sides that is not very appealing to the family but as pet owners, you have to keep your cat at the very end so it is a method of doing it.

The result is 12 cats the protein requirement for cats being put up for 2 minutes and until brownish, do not own your home, like Febreze.Cats can urinate dirty cats on the internet and trying suggestions do you do not scoop and change the behaviour, you will need to be the one that fits on the love and joy they bring you.Studies have shown no signs of loss of appetite and enlarged lymph nodes.You can actually surprise you how many people give up their cats, either throwing them out online or in the boot room by the scratching.Of course this method using fresh water, clean litter and natural alternatives out there.

Instead, they will avoid using toxic chemicals on kitty.My husband loves to play with Pookie, have playtime happen right away.Sterilization tends to be kept tidy and clean.Cats which choose to ignore them, at times.Never use physical punishment such as a pale, yellowish-green mark that looks like it does not cut it for the other side.

Check your litter box regardless of whether your cat and your cats.To eliminate such cat behaviors it is the main problem for very little money.Nothing can be sewn into the carpet padding that got soaked is probably the easiest and most other organic things fluoresce and be rough and tumble play with toy objects.This means daily washing with hot water and leave it inside the cat's prey, although other mammals, birds, reptiles and even cause your cat to move, but at the cat's around.A word of warning: Once your cat vomits hairballs frequently, take it anymore and brought him back on one side, brushing small sections upward, then smoothing them back in case something happens to be a recurring problem, but with the carpet

My Cat Peed 5 Times A Day

You may need a Natural Cat Urine Stains in our house and affect other animals potentially invading their territory.It wasn't until I feel they need calming down.It shouldn't take long to make sure that post is tall enough for the cat, size of an ordinary outside light that shines through your window and turn on your hands.Make sure that the cat bed as the surgery has been discovered that he is showing any signs of stress, boredom or bad socializing when she does not mean it will be to find out why the cat urine odor using ordinary products, it may be wondering if a cat that has been made SPECIFICALLY for the cat is in most situations.A cat without a heavy weave or a chair or sofa that might be tricky to begin training is when you start by adopting one kitten into a traditional cat scratcher, attach carpet scraps to scrap wood.

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[austinpanda]

Dad Letter 071220

12 July, 2020

Dear Dad--

Another week of plague, isolation, and lightsabers! Also we got the remnants of a tropical storm, I think, which has always been a concern now that we live on the eastern seaboard. But by the time the storm reached Old Town, Maine, it amounted to about 90 minutes of light rain. For those of us who like observing the weather, it was disappointing as hell, quite the anti-climax. We had more of a hurricane a few years back in Austin, when we got the leftovers of that one that ate Houston. We got about 50 inches of rain in two days; it was AWESOME! Checking...that was Hurricane Harvey from August of 2017. Oh well, there’s still plenty of hurricane season left to go, and I’m not worried. My shit is insured. 

So, about the coronavirus, and leaving out any political commentary, did you notice that the national caseload, which had been dropping, just started rising again? I mention this only because if you were under the impression that we got this virus beat, that seems to have been overtaken by facts on the ground, and pretty please continue wearing a mask when shopping or going out in public, because your fellow Oklahomans are a petri dish of icky germs right now. You know, I never thought I’d witness an honest-go-god plague in my lifetime, certainly nothing that would directly impact the way I live my life. But ohhhhh, is this impactful! (And by the way, I’m not crazy about the fact that “impactful” is a word, but it is, so I’m using it.) Every time I check in with someone I know and/or love to see how they’re doing, they’re all responding with some variation of, “Oh, you know,” and they make a gesture that seems to encompass the whole universe around them, as if to say, I’m doing okay, but the universe is totally fucking blowing it right now. And that’s where I live, man!!

So I truly hope you and Elaine are doing okay. I know no one’s health is as robust as we’d like, but I’m sure you’re still exercising. Good movies are coming out, it’s just more likely that they’ll come straight to video instead of to movie theaters first. That Tom Hanks WWII “Greyhound” movie got delayed, and I read that it made Tom Hanks sad, not just because he starred in it, but because he wrote the screenplay. But! I believe if you have something called Apple Plus--I don’t have this, and I’m not entirely clear what it is--you can see it now. In other words, it’s been released digitally. I suppose there are services that allow you to pay to watch it on your TV, assuming the internet is involved in there somewhere? Entertainment technology began to leave me behind once they mastered flat screen TVs. I’ll see if I can find an easy way to watch it on the computer and let you know.

The other excitement of the week? I purchased Turtle Wax! I’ve noticed the paint on my 12 year-old Hyundai is starting to fade in spots, so I decided that, if water beaded up on the hood when it rained, that would somehow completely correct the faded paint problem. (In retrospect, I realize that it won’t, it’ll just make the spots of bare paint slightly shinier.) Now that I’ve done a few test spots on the hood and roof, I want it to rain, to see if it’s working. The last rain occurred just before I got the Turtle Wax. This shit is exciting to me! It never seemed to make much sense to wax my car in Texas, and I’m not sure why. I guess I figured the sun would kill whatever car paint it wanted to kill, and some wax wasn’t about to stop it. But now I’m quarantining, and spending the whole day looking out the window at my car, thinking, now that I have a lightsaber, my life will be 100% complete once I can wax my hood. Not the whole car, mind you, just the hood and roof. I don’t need to see water beading up on the sides in order to achieve complete self-actualization, it seems.

Oh, new kitty update: We are supposed to get the new kitten tomorrow, from our neighbor Clint. Because problems keep popping up that interfere, I predict only about a 50% chance that we’ll actually have the new kitty by tomorrow. That part can kiss my ass, by the way. They’re only a kitten for a short time, and we’re missing the period of maximum cuteness. And we really could use a new mammal around the house to keep everyone entertained while we’re stuck here. We have special litter. I bought flea collars. We have a whole plan, all planned out, how we’re going to introduce new kitty into the house, and how we’ll introduce it to Sam, and take lots of pictures, because it’s just so damn adorable. I can’t wait! I’m going to try to be patient, but gimme my fucking kitty, dammit! I need something furry to put some love on!

I wanted to talk about your desire to speak on the phone. I don’t want to do that, but I worry when you add such emotional weight to it, and I can at least talk about it. Here’s how I see it: I have learned, from experience, that you and I do our best communication when it’s not happening live, when we have time to pause and reflect, when we can exercise more thought about how we speak to each other. Let’s face it, I’m a doughy, gay, exceptionally liberal democrat, a bone-deep atheist, and a firm believer that everything republicans do is, by definition, chock full of evil, and best not done. I’m on the side of Black Lives Matter, and the tearing down of Confederate statues. I know you come down pretty firmly on the other side of that debate, in fact, you seem keen to kill the shit out of any protesters who might come over the hill to attack the homestead. 

I think we maintain our friendship better, and treat each other with more kindness and respect, when we have to write the shit down. It requires more thinking. It isn’t just sustaining what I feel is a pretty damn decent friendship that I’m having with you, I think it’s the reason why we haven’t fucked it up yet. I think it’s the reason we’re friends and not busy being angry or disappointed in each other. 

I don’t want to rehash the past. I know you loved me the best way you knew how. I know you did your best as a parent, and I’m very grateful for it, which is why I feel like I can do better than just cutting off all communication between us entirely, even though we’re so different. In case it’s not obvious, I put some effort into the letters I write to you. I make sure they’re not short. I make sure they show you the real me without rubbing your nose into my liberal opinions, or being accidentally thoughtless in some way.

Perhaps it’ll help to look at it this way: I know so many people who have nothing but contempt for their family, and don’t want to have anything to do with them. You happen to have a family member who’s a brilliant, and funny writer, who could write the great American novel (if he knew how to make stuff up, but it turns out he’s bad at that) but I prefer to channel that energy into my weekly letter to you. I want to protect our friendship and I think I’ve figured out how to do that. I know it’s not how you want things to be, but just remember that I’m loving you the best way I know how, too. We are communicating.

Now just so that I don’t end this week’s letter on something that may be a bummer, allow me to tell you about my new lightsaber. (Trust me, you’re going to need to know all this stuff.) It can be changed to whatever color you want. It makes all the lightsaber sounds; the speaker is in the pommel, and can get quite loud. You know how they flash when two lightsabers hit each other? You know, in real life? They made my toy one to do the same thing. When you wang it against something, it flashes white a few times briefly. I’m telling you all this in case it helps you decide whether you’ll need one, but trust me, you do. If any scary people come over the horizon to attack your homestead and you greet them with a blue lightsaber, I guarantee they’ll drop their weapons, and embrace you in brotherhood. 

Of course, I’ll write more next week. I hope you’re safe and staying out of the sun. All my love to both of you!!

[gethealthy18-blog]

329: How to Slow Aging, Fight Inflammation, & Improve Cellular Signaling With Brian Dixon

New Post has been published on https://healingawerness.com/news/329-how-to-slow-aging-fight-inflammation-improve-cellular-signaling-with-brian-dixon/

329: How to Slow Aging, Fight Inflammation, & Improve Cellular Signaling With Brian Dixon

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this episode is all about how we can slow the aging process, fight inflammation and improve cellular signaling. I’m here with Brian Dixon who is a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from Oregon State University and is affiliated with the Linus Pauling Institute where his research focused on the underlying biochemical and cellular mechanisms of aging. And this is an area I’ve been fascinated with since I had to do a final project on some of these things and work with the Linus Pauling Institute when I was younger as well. He and his work have been featured on, among others, “The Dr. Oz Show”. And he’s authored a number of scientific peer-reviewed manuscripts on topics such as cancer, antioxidants, cellular signaling, gene regulation, stress coping mechanisms, Nrf2, weight management, sports nutrition and recovery.

Dr. Dixon has also published research in the role of nutrition in recovery from surgery, how we can facilitate a healthy inflammation response, ways to support the immune system, the aging process and how various nutrients come into play with all of those. He has worked in the nutritional industry for over 10 years, and he has seven patents related to different supplements and things within the industry. And in this episode, we go deep on the science of aging, ways we can mitigate it and things like sulforaphane, Nrf2 sirtuins, and many others. If those are new to you, stay tuned and buckle up. This is a fascinating episode.

Brian, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Dixon: Thank you so much for having me.

Katie: Well, I know you’ve done a lot of research in a lot of different areas, including one that is of increasing importance to me every year that goes by, which is aging. And, unfortunately, it’s something I don’t think we can fully escape, but I know it is something that we can mitigate and do very gracefully in a lot of cases. And there are things that we can do on a cellular level as we age to help protect our bodies. So I’d love to start with aging as a broad topic and then go deeper on some tangents from there. So let’s talk about aging, in general. What factors come into play when we think about aging, both on a cellular level and then also, aesthetically?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, well, you’re absolutely right. You know, we can’t stop time. That’s that thing that’s just constantly ticking along. It’d be nice if we could stop time or even turn it back, but yeah, it’s kind of our destiny. You know, maybe to take a step back and maybe we’ll start with the bad news first, and then we’ll get into the good news of what people can do. There are currently over 300 different theories of aging. I mean, if you can believe that. So, people, you know, literally, since the beginning of time, have been interested in what we could do to stop the aging process.

I mean, that’s that whole sort of folklore around the fountain of youth. And Ponce de León coming to North America, heading to Florida, and looking for a physical fountain of youth with the notion that you could drink this water and basically, live forever. When we come into scientific circles, scientists have been studying this, you know, for hundreds of years. But it really caught a lot of attention in 1954 when an individual named Denham Harman first proposed the oxidative stress theory of aging. That’s really where a lot of aging research is focused. But I like to kind of lump those 300 theories of aging into just about five general categories.

And I think it’s interesting that we can get people thinking about these different categories, because I don’t doubt for a second that they’re all contributing. And so if we can think about these five individually, and what we can do to kind of check the boxes, you’re really gonna set yourself up for optimal health, and then possibly even extending more years to your lives. So those five general categories, I like to lump those 300 theories of aging in are, you know, very technically, we can talk about biochemical molecular and cellular theories of aging. So basically our biochemistry, our metabolism is just changing on that cellular level, and no one really knows why.

There’s also some really depressing theories of aging out there that’s called the programmed theories of aging. And that notion is, is that in our genes, right, in our DNA, we are literally programmed to die. So you think to yourself, “Well, gosh, why would we be programmed to die?” But if we look at other organisms around us out in nature, you know, it’s really every organism’s job on this planet to reproduce. And so once we’ve passed on our DNA to that next generation, there really is no true biological reason to keep us around. In fact, an organism gets past its reproductive years, all that individual or organism is doing is just consuming resources.

That doesn’t apply so much to humans. You know, we have that knowledge base that comes with age. And in fact, there’s a few higher mammals on this planet where it is evolutionarily beneficial to keep the elderly around. So obviously, humans is one great example. So think about all those things that we learned from our grandma and our grandpa. Whales, they keep the elderly around. In fact, it’s usually the grandmother orca whale that’s raising the young. The elephants are also one long-lived species where the oldest elephants are playing a huge role in their family circles. So programmed theories of aging, that’s number two. Then we can get into number three, the cycle social theories of aging. So basically, what that means is we just need to keep our minds sharp as we age.

A lot of individuals as we get older, we tend to isolate ourselves. We tend not to spend as much time with family and friends, and it really leads to that kind of rotting away of our brains. Number four, I put in a loss of cellular communication, and I throw that into the mix. So what does that mean? Well, basically, our cells, organs, and tissues just aren’t talking to each other as well as they used to. So think about hormonal changes occurring as we get older. So, you know, in men, testosterone levels can decline. Women when they hit menopause, I mean, their hormones are going all over the place until they can find that new normal … so hormonal signaling isn’t working as well as we age. And then just our ability to adapt and respond to our environment.

So if we’re exposed to, let’s say, environmental toxins or oxidative stress, we have these built-in systems to be able to deal with those stresses. But they’re just not sensing the signal and then communicating the potential trouble to the rest of the cell or even the other tissues and organs in our bodies. And then lastly is the damaged theories of aging. So just the different biological structures inside of our bodies and inside of our cells just start to accumulate this damage as we get older. So DNA becomes damaged, the proteins or enzymes inside of our cells get damaged. Even the cellular membrane, the integrity of that membrane gets damaged, and it doesn’t work as well to keep the outside world out and the inside world in.

Katie: Got it. So definitely, like, lots of different approaches, and you mentioned that there’s probably something to be learned from all of them. What view do you take personally when it comes the aging, and which of these are the most important to understand then and start to mitigate?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, it comes back to that research that I referenced by Professor Harman back in 1954. He postulated probably the most sound theory of aging, and that being the free radical or oxidative stress theory of aging. And in a lot of ways, many of these other theories of aging really kind of playoff of that oxidative stress theory of aging. So you can think about the damaged theories of aging, the loss of cellular communication and, especially those biochemical molecular and cellular theories of aging and really where that research is centered and what we can best do to protect ourselves and set ourselves up for optimal health in the long term is just really making sure that we’re eating a healthy diet. And then luckily, there’s been some great scientific advances in about the last 10 years that have shown us that there is even some pretty fun things that we can do around nutritional supplements to support, especially our body’s own inherent anti-oxidant detoxification defenses.

Katie: Got you. Okay. So I think that’s a perfect place to start diving in and going deeper, because there’s … When you start reading the research and, especially just reading sources online, there’s a lot of theories about different ways that we can do that. Of course, when you talk about free radicals, antioxidants come to mind. That’s a big buzzword with oxidative damage and free radicals. But I also know that there’s a lot of discrepancy in, like, the potential measurements and research related to antioxidants. And some people say, “Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.” So what’s your take on ways that we can reduce that cellular damage, and are antioxidants the answer?

Dr. Dixon: It’s a great question. And, you know, you’re absolutely right. The scientific literature is very muddy when it comes to taking, especially high doses of antioxidants. And can we really extend healthspan and even, lifespan. If you go on and read some of the research on the National Institutes of Health, specifically from the centers for complementary and alternative medicine, they talk about … There’s a line in one of their statements that just says, “In research studies that have been done in thousands and thousands of people, there is no scientific evidence that … especially high dose antioxidants supplementation is actually going to have a beneficial effect on human health and disease.”

My view, as I read the scientific literature and things I’ve incorporated into my life is that, you know, we absolutely have to get the basics, whether it’s from our diet or from our nutritional supplement, and that does include some antioxidants, and it’s what we call the vitamin antioxidant. So these antioxidants that are absolutely essential for life, right? They’re actually working as a vitamin. And then they have this sort of side effect, if you will, of actually being an antioxidant. So if we take vitamin C, for example, vitamin C is an essential nutrient because it’s playing a role, a direct role as a cofactor which means it’s absolutely required for the activity of an enzyme to work. And it’s required in at least 15 different mammalian enzymes.

So if we stop taking vitamin C, those enzymes stop working and that ultimately compromises cellular function. But when we’re thinking about antioxidant protection and really, what is the best strategy, you know, a strategy that I love to incorporate personally, things that I’ve researched in the laboratory for many, many years is really trying to unlock the power that our cells inherently have. So what do I mean by that? It turns out that in our DNA and, specifically in our genes, we have antioxidant enzymes, and we also have detoxification enzymes. If you set the clock back to about 2007, just kind of as the Human Genome Project was kind of wrapping up and people started to really dive into, “Okay. What are all of these genes now that we can map, what are they actually doing?”

Well, they came to discover about that same time, 2006, 2007, that actually there’s this massive interaction between the nutrients that we eat and our genetics. So basically nutrients can turn on genes, and then those genes are also affecting how we were metabolizing nutrients. And when you actually put these things in test tubes, whether it’s these enzymes that are encoded in our DNA or whether we just put these straight antioxidants into test tubes, it turns out that this enzymatic activity, these enzymes that are found in our DNA are significantly more effective at detoxifying antioxidants, free radicals, and those other toxins that may be entering our bodies.

Katie: That’s fascinating. Okay. So you mentioned that basically what we eat has the ability to turn on genes. And I’d love for you to explain this a little bit deeper. Basically I’m assuming that you’re talking about the idea of epigenetics essentially, but for anyone who’s not familiar with that concept, can you explain how that process works?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, maybe I’m hung up on my scientific circles. But yeah, epigenetics is definitely influenced by the diets that we eat. But another complicated science word that maybe better describes what we’re talking about here is nutrigenomics. So if you break that big word down into its two parts, nutri and genomics, it’s really how nutrition and your genes are interacting. Maybe I’ll take a step back. I mean, maybe scientists and medical professions in their arrogance, they love to break things down into as simple of pieces or parts as possible. A lot of this research really came out of the research that showed that high levels of fruit and vegetable consumption are actually incredibly beneficial for our health.

So in that scientific arrogance, scientists went into fruit and vegetables, and they tried to tease out and find the compound or compounds that might be responsible for that increase in health that we’re seeing in the highest fruits and vegetable consumers. So they pulled out things like vitamin C. They pulled out things like fiber. And definitely, you can supplement with vitamin C, and you see some health benefits. You can supplement with fiber, you see great health benefits. But when you look at the research, it never really equated to the full effect that we were seeing with this fruit and vegetable consumption. So scientists were scratching their heads, thinking to themselves, “Well, there must be something else in these fruits and vegetables that are also providing health benefits.”

So then instead of looking at the things that were present in the largest quantities in fruits and vegetables, they started to focus on compounds that were really present in really very small concentrations. If you think about what gives fruits and vegetables their bright vibrant colors, it turns out it’s a lot of those same compounds that we’re providing these health benefits. So in some studies that were conducted, they teased out these compounds from fruits and vegetables that give them their color. They start to test them in the test tube and yeah, in a test tube, they’re working as very potent antioxidants. But what happened when they gave these compounds to people is they found that they were incredibly poorly bioavailable.

That means they weren’t absorbed by our bodies or if they were absorbed, they were absorbed at a very low rate. More than that, when these compounds were actually getting into our bodies, our bodies were metabolizing them incredibly quickly and then excreting them incredibly quickly as well. So then how could these compounds that are one, present in incredibly low concentrations that we don’t absorb very well and then are metabolized and excreted very quickly, how could they possibly be having any sort of health benefit? Well, it turns out what researchers found is that a lot of these compounds are actually binding to what we call receptors that are either sitting on the outside of the cell membrane or are floating around inside of the cell.

An easy way to think about receptors is just being little sensor molecules. And so when you get the right compound that’s gonna bind to the sensor molecule, what ends up happening is we start a chain of events. A lot like knocking over, let’s say, like, a line of dominoes. So you push over the first domino, you get this chain of events that happens, and then at the end of that chain, something happens. So when we’re talking about what’s happening in our body, a lot of times, that’s actually a protein, right, going into the nucleus and actually flipping these switches on these genes that have been shown to have great health benefits. In fact, they’re known as either anti-stress genes or maybe even more aptly named survival genes.

Katie: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. And it seems like a lot of this also goes back to inflammation which is a big buzzword right now as well. Is that part of this equation and if so, like, what are some things on either side of that equation?

Dr. Dixon: Yep. That inflammatory axis absolutely can be influenced by the foods that we’re eating. Absolutely. So we can target them nutrigenomically. So maybe a lot of your audience might have heard of a protein called NF-kappa B. NF-kappa B really is the master regulator of our immune response. And it’s determining whether or not we have an up-regulated or even hyperinflammatory response, but then it’s also responsible for shutting down that immune response as well. And so when we’re talking about inflammation, what we’re really talking about is a balance. You know, think of a teeter-totter just kind of balancing there. If your immune system is completely shut off, then, you know, that’s gonna compromise us to this outside world that’s constantly trying to get in and invade our cells.

But then again, on the flip side, if you have too much inflammation going on, the scientific literature is incredibly solid on what hyperinflammation can do in its roles as it directly relates to health and then, especially, disease. You know, a few years back, there was a cover of “Time” magazine that just simply said, “The Silent Killer.” And it was really just this kind of furnace that is inflammation getting carried away in our bodies and so left unchecked, inflammation can go on and have just massive consequences to literally every system that’s inside of our bodies. So again, reaching for these compounds that can help regulate that protein NF-kappa B. And then there are some other things that we can do. We wanna make sure that we’re getting plenty of omega-3 fatty acids.

When you look at the biochemical pathway, the different fats that we consume in our diet are going down inside of the cell. They tend to either be pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. And so with our modern diets and most of us tending to eat pretty unhealthy, we tend to reach for foods in a box. We’ve really skewed the balance of our fatty acids to saturated fats and then omega-6s and omega-9s. So when we look at, again, all that scientific literature about the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, what’s most likely happening is that we’re bringing the balance of those pro and anti-inflammatory fats back into the balance that our bodies prefer to keep them at.

Katie: That’s a great point. What are your preferred sources of omega-3s? Because I know this is also a controversial topic in… People saying, “A lot of them can go rancid if they’re not carefully controlled, and some are not as potent as they claim to be.” Is this better to get from food, or what do you look at for omega-3?

Dr. Dixon: Well, the best and maybe most convenient source of omega-3s would be those traditional fish oil supplements, I think, that we’ve all heard so much about. But exactly, the points that you raised are very valid. And unfortunately, and the nutritional industry, I hate to say it, but it really is buyer beware. And you’re absolutely right that omega-3s are particularly prone to oxidation. So if they’re not handled correctly, you’ve basically changed the structure of those fatty acids, and you’re no longer getting what you think you’re getting. So, you know, I encourage people that you have to spend a little bit of money. Just buying the cheapest thing that might be on a supermarket shelf isn’t the best option.

Spend a little bit of money, make sure you’re buying your products from a reputable high-quality manufacturer to ensure that you’re getting those fatty acids. That’s the simplest way. And maybe a simple check if people want to, maybe go into their pantries and see if their fish oil might be appropriate or not. But simply break open the capsule and smell it because they go rancid so quickly. And I think we’re probably all familiar with what rotten fish smells like. So if you break open your fish oil capsule and it smells like rotten fish, then you’ve got a bad product on your hands. You know, there’s great sources of omega-3s. I know, you know, a lot of people are choosing to be plant-based these days. If not, straight vegetarian or even vegan.

And there are some great vegetarian and vegan sources of omega-3 fatty acids. Things like flaxseeds, walnuts, they’re fantastic sources of omega-3s. So we can get these from our diets as well if we wanna eat a lot of fatty fish. So it’s not just eating fish two to three times per week, but it specifically has to be fatty fish like salmon, tuna, mackerel, sardines are a couple of examples. And then just making sure you’re getting as well a lot of … mostly, nuts tend to be very rich in, you know, omega-3 fatty acids.

Katie: I think those are all such great suggestions, and I love the fatty fish idea. That’s something I’ve adopted that I think is really inexpensive, easy way to get omega-3s is a few times a week, I will eat sardines, and I’ll just make lunch out of a bowl of sardines and veggies and nuts and hemp parts and all kinds of stuff and then just kind of put olive oil on it. And you mentioned fat sources and how the American diet definitely skews towards, not just saturated fats, but even just, like, really unhealthy forms of saturated fats and also, omega-6 oils. A lot of guests on this podcast and a lot of resources I’m seeing are recommending the monounsaturated fats in much higher amounts. Things like olive oil and avocado oil. Is that your take on it as well? Are those the kind of fats we should be prioritizing?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, it comes back to really what we were talking about initially with antioxidants. I think everything has to be in balance. So what I’m not a fan of is going to an extreme one-way or another. I mean, you can even make the argument that we need saturated fat as well. I mean, most of the fat that makes up our cell membrane is actually saturated fatty acids. But it’s very clear that we’ve just become over-consumers of, especially unhealthy saturated fatty acids. So my best recommendation is just to eat a variety of foods. You know, don’t really be afraid of anything but just eat things in moderation.

And then whenever possible, whenever time and convenience allows, reach for whole foods, so the actual original sources. You know, with our busy lives, that’s not always possible. And I think that’s a good time to start to consider nutritional supplements as the word suggests, right? The word supplement is supposed to be supplementing our diets, and if our diets aren’t healthy and well-balanced, then any nutritional supplement in the world is not going to fix those core problems.

Katie: I agree, and I wanna get to specifics on supplements in just a minute. But first, I wanna pick your brain on a couple of other things. So a few years ago, when I had nodules on my thyroid and had Hashimoto’s before I was able to get it in remission, one of the things my doctor suggested was to consume broccoli sprouts regularly which are a source of sulforaphane which, from what I’ve researched, is known to activate something called Nrf2. And I know this comes into play with this inflammation equation. And I’d love to really explain this, because I’ve never kind of teased this out on the podcast before. And I know this is something that you’ve done research in. So can you explain to us … first of all, is my understanding of this correct? And explain to us what Nrf2 is, and why it’s important?

Dr. Dixon: Absolutely. So Nrf2 is a protein. So it’s a protein that lives in our cell, and it’s an interesting protein, and how it behaves in that. It’s both…One of those center molecules or receptors that we were talking about. It’s also really the signaling molecule itself, and then it’s also the protein that can go into the nucleus, and it actually flips the switches of somewhere between 200 to 300 different survival genes or anti-stress genes. A lot of these tend to be antioxidant enzymes or detoxification enzymes. I’m impressed with your knowledge of sulforaphane, and, especially impressed with the source that you’re going to. So broccoli sprouts have been shown to be the highest sources of sulforaphane.

You know, my recommendation if that’s what some of your listeners are doing, you know, make sure you’re chewing them up. Sulforaphane itself actually comes with another little molecule stuck to it. So it turns out you actually have to really chew any source of cruciferous vegetable that you’re eating to release an enzyme that will remove that other molecule that’s stuck to it so that you can actually get the healthy compound. What’s so interesting and how this protein Nrf2 is working is normally it’s found anchored to the cell membrane. And it’s anchored by a very interesting set of chemical bonds. And the way that sulforaphane is working is that it’s actually interacting with that chemical bond, and it’s releasing Nrf2 from the cell wall, and it floats through the cell, gets into the nucleus, and turns on a bunch of genes like we’re talking about.

A compound that I’m even more familiar with dates back to, gosh, many years ago now. But back when I was doing my graduate work, I studied lipoic acid, if you’re familiar with that compound. That’s just an absolutely … another amazing inducer of Nrf2. We can look at things like Coricidin, green tea, ashwagandha, Bacopa. There are a whole host of compounds that actually are activating Nrf2. And so if activating Nrf2 and turning on these antioxidant and detoxification gene is the strategy you want to employ, then my recommendation would be to look for a mix of healthy compounds that are known to activate Nrf2.

Katie: Got it. Yeah. I love it that you brought that up about having to chew the broccoli sprouts to activate the sulforaphane correctly. You can verify this for me. But to my understanding, you’ve got glucoraphanin and myrosinase in that equation, and it does have to be broken up in certain … and temperature can come into play, and there are things that can help with that. So I don’t recommend it based on taste, but what I do to get enough of this is I will blend up a bunch of broccoli sprouts with some mustard seed powder which has some of those things that you need, and that help break down. And then the blending, I let it sit for a minute, and then drink it. From what I’ve read, that’s supposed to make the sulforaphane more readily available.

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, Katie, I’m incredibly impressed. You are exactly right on all that biochemistry.

Katie: Awesome. Well, I’ll put links, I’ve got posts on how to grow broccoli sprouts. I think that’s one of those easy things we can all do in our own kitchen, and it cost literally, like, 50 cents to grow if you do it yourself versus buying them in a store, so that’s an easy step.

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I’d love to now go a little deeper on the science of actually, like, slowing aging and fixing these processes, both in two ways. So I want to start practical and then move onto optimal. But when it comes to the practical side, I’m a big fan of 80/20 and doing the most effective important things that provide the biggest payoff. And I know that there are definitely some of these when it comes to the aging equation, both in supplements and other factors that come into play. So based on your research, if we were going to look at aging in kind of an 80/20 equation, what are those 20% of variables that we should focus on that have kind of 80% of the effects that we’re trying to achieve?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, the three things that are really at top of mind for me right now are still that free radical theory of aging like we were talking about. For me, it’s also the mitochondrial theory of aging. And if your listeners aren’t familiar with what the mitochondria are, it’s really where the vast majority of our energy production is happening inside of our cells. They’re literally these little nuclear powerhouses that are generating about 95% of all the energy that our body needs every second of every day.

And just to put in the context how important that energy production is, we basically make our body weight every single day in the energy currency, ATP that we need every single day. So think about how much energy is flowing through the mitochondria and all the work they’re doing. And then something else that’s caught a lot of attention for me lately is the molecule, NAD. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that or if your listeners are familiar with that. But some very interesting research around the health benefits of NAD and then, especially what’s happening to NAD as we get older.

Katie: Yeah, let’s talk about that. So I have some experience with NAD, and I know that there’s a lot of research and kind of some controversy about NAD versus NAD precursors. I have done NAD IVs, which for anyone who is not familiar with that, it’s an IV that contains NAD. And it’s somewhat uncomfortable going in, depending on how quickly you do it. I also, one time and will never again, did a push IV of NAD and wished I was dying for a short amount of time. But then I’ve also done research into NAD precursors, which from my understanding, are various forms of vitamin B3, if I’m remembering that correctly. But let’s talk about that. Explain what NAD is and also, what those precursors are in the body.

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, NAD, it’s an incredibly interesting molecule, and it’s absolutely essential for life. So you’re right. We do make NAD from various precursors and like you said, vitamin B3 or niacin is one of those precursors. NAD’s normal role inside of the cell turns out to be inside of the mitochondria, and it is intimately involved in all of that energy production that we need every second of every day. So normally what’s happening is as we’re eating food, our digestive system chops it up into its small little bits. It gets into circulation. Our cells ultimately end up absorbing these compounds.

And then the food tends to make it into the mitochondrial where most of our energy production is happening. It goes through something that’s called the Krebs cycle or the TCA cycle if maybe you’re as old as I am. And then basically the role of this Krebs or TCA cycle is to break the bonds of that food, and as you’re breaking those bonds, effectively you’re releasing the electrons from that chemical bond. One place those electrons end up is attached to NAD, and NAD acts as the shuttle molecule to get the electron into something known as the electron transport chain which is really trying to harness the power or the energy that’s in that electron so that we could ultimately make ATP, which is the energy currency for the cell.

So it’s vitally important if we were to shut off NAD synthesis, I mean, we would be dead in a matter of seconds. But some interesting research that has centered around what’s known as caloric restriction. So we’re talking about a diet, but we’re talking about maybe the most severe diet that anybody has ever been on. We’re talking about a restriction of 40% to 60% of the calories that we would consume every single day. So for me, at about 160 pounds, that would equate to eating right around about 800 calories per day. So I mean, incredibly calorically restricted. The research that has led to this kind of notion of caloric restriction initially started in yeast. Yeast is a fantastic experimental model, especially for geneticists.

So some geneticists embarked on these studies where they were calorically restricting yeast, and then they moved the studies into looking at worms or fruit flies, right, to more experimental models, mice, rats, even some primates. And then some people have even played with caloric restriction themselves. What’s so interesting is when they found that we restricted calories by this huge amount, you got about the same lengthening of lifespan, so around the same 40% to 60% actual increase in lifespan. And it’s really the only known non-pharmacological or nongenetic way that’s been shown to increase lifespan. So, of course, scientists in their inquisitive nature wanted to know, “Well, how is caloric restriction actually eliciting these effects?”

These geneticists went in, and they did a bunch of studies. And then a long scientific story short, they found that there was this family of proteins known as the sirtuins. And when they genetically manipulated or even pharmacologically inhibited this family of proteins or enzymes and then they still calorically restricted these experimental models, they completely lost that extension in lifespan. So scientists then went on to study what’s going on with these sirtuins and exactly how are they working. Well, it turns out the way that these sirtuin molecules are activated is by this molecule called NAD, so NAD is absolutely required for their function to occur. So if we kind of lumped together everything that’s been shown as we’re calorically restricting and you don’t have a lot of those electrons around, your relative levels of NAD actually increase.

And NAD is no longer working to generate energy but actually becomes a signaling molecule to activate this family of proteins called the sirtuins. And then downstream, right, or a better way to say it is that these sirtuin proteins are actually controlling a number of different pathways and factors and enzymes that have been shown to have all sorts of different health benefits, and that’s really why NAD has caught a lot of people’s minds. You throw on top of that that NAD levels declined significantly as we age, probably starting sometime in our late 20s or early 30s and then by the time we’re 60 or 70 years old, our levels can decline by as much as 60%.

Katie: Wow, yeah, that’s really drastic. So there are things … I’m so glad you brought up sirtuin as well. That was one of my questions that I was gonna ask, because I knew that was a factor in this. But so basically there are things that we can do, supplements that help increase the body’s NAD capacity essentially.

Dr. Dixon: Yeah, and you kind of alluded to one, and that’s the precursor approach. And there’s not just vitamin B3, but there are other related molecules that are out there that people are using as substrates. There are also intermediates. So when your cells are building NAD from scratch, it kind of has to go through this process. So people are also trying to incorporate, trying to kind of cheat the biochemical regulation that’s going on by feeding the so-called kind of intermediates which can still be considered precursors. And then some things that’s really caught our attention lately is leveraging also, a Nutrigenomix approach to look at the enzymes that are actually making NAD in our body. And are there ways that we can use nutrients to actually turn on those enzymes to ultimately increase the biosynthetic capacity of our NAD generating pathways.

Katie: That’s fascinating. And I know one concern I’ve heard with certain NAD precursors and taking them in too large of a dose is that some people speculate that it can use methyl groups for, like, that conversion to happen. So that if we take them in too large of amounts, we can deplete methylation factors which can, especially be an issue if people who have MTHFR. Are you seeing that, are you concerned about that, or do you think that’s only an issue with really big doses?

Dr. Dixon: Yeah. Again, it kind of comes back to the gist of most of the conversation we had. And that’s just that everything needs to be in balance, right? Too little of something is bad, right? Let’s use a simple analogy with water, right? Dehydration is terrible, but you can actually drink too much water and kill yourself. So we need to be within this sweet spot of the bell curve, and the bell curve lives everywhere in biology. When it comes to the precursor notion specifically, right, I’m just trying to make sure that I’m getting somewhere slightly elevated over kind of either the RDA or the recommended daily allowance or daily recommended intakes, however, you wanna say it. I’m not a fan or supporter of mega-dosing in any way.

But if we come back and look at the biochemistry with how a lot of these pathways are working, a pathway can only work as fast as its slowest enzyme. I hope that makes sense. So any biochemical pathway in our bodies can only work as fast as the slowest enzyme. So you can kind of think almost like you create a traffic jam in this biochemical pathway or maybe another way if you can think about it in your mind’s eye is think about a funnel. And if I were to pour water into the top of a funnel, water can only move to that funnel as quickly as its narrowest point.

So at some point, we’re gonna overload the system and those compounds that we’re thinking or we’re taking that we think is gonna have an effect on one end isn’t gonna make it into that biochemical pathway, and it’s gonna float around on our bodies, and who knows have what type of effect. So, you know, our approach is to look at it both ways, so providing precursors to some extent, not in massive megadoses. But then what are nutrients that we can utilize to leverage that genetic machinery, turn on that genetic machinery to increase really the biosynthetic capacity of the NAD so that the precursor that’s around will ultimately get consumed in the way that we want it to be consumed.

Katie: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. So then from there, we talked about the practical. What if you could create an optimal scenario for someone to slow aging and to improve all of the things that we’ve talked about, both with supplements, with diet, and with lifestyle, what would that look like?

Dr. Dixon: I think if we want to really increase, not just longevity, but the thing that I’m most focused on right now is healthspan. I think if we can keep ourselves healthier for longer, I think, the side effect is gonna be added years to the end of our lives. You know, the scientific literature is just incredibly discouraging. Every American especially, if not every individual living in a modern society tends to lead their last 10 years of life suffering from some sort of disease or disability. And I just think my best advice is not to accept that as our norm. So the things that we can do in our lives to shorten that length of morbidity or disease or disability, just think of the quality of life.

I mean, if we can take that 10 years and shorten it to 5 years or 5 years down to 1 year and not to get too morbid, but I love to take just a big nose dive into my grave, right? I don’t wanna scratch and claw my way there. But when we wanna look at what are the things that we know in humans that are having the best effects for our healthspan and our lifespan, there’s a lot of different names floating around for the concept. I’ve heard it referred to as Blue Zones. But really, what these Blue Zones are longevity hotspots. And it turns out that there is just a very small handful of them around the world. There’s one in Japan. There’s one in Greece. There’s one in Italy. I throw one in there in France as well. There’s one in Costa Rica, and there’s one in Southern California.

So researchers have gone in and they’ve looked at all of these different populations and ironically, they tend to be very isolated populations. So they don’t seem to be as affected by a lot of our kind of new-age cultural norms. But when they kind of look at the aspects of each of these populations, there’s definitely unique aspects to each and every one of them. In fact, a lot of the diet fads that we’ve seen in probably the last 10 or 20 years are because of these longevity hotspots. So if you take the one in Japan, for example, that’s where really, sushi got really popular and eating the fatty fish. If you look at the populations around Italy and Greece, that’s really where the Mediterranean diet came into play. We can talk about the French paradox also, coming out of France as well.

But some of those newer longevity hotspots that have been found in Costa Rica and California, what they’ve really focused on is really movement and also, decreasing stress. So when we lump all of this research together from these longevity hotspots, the things that they all do share is that they obviously don’t smoke. They tend to eat a very plant-heavy diet, if not, exclusively plant-based. They have constant moderate physical activity. So what does that mean? It means, they’re just constantly moving. They’re not doing extreme workouts but just moving their bodies, and it could be nothing more than just walking around town or walking to their friend’s house. This is a little bit different, but they also tend to eat a lot of beans or legumes.

So they’re, you know, great sources of protein but also, great sources of fiber. Coming back to one of those psychosocial theories of aging, they also make family and friends a huge priority. I don’t know if you or any of your listeners maybe have been to France or Italy. But goodness, it’s tough to get out of a restaurant in two hours for lunch, and you’re probably sitting down for dinner for three or four hours, right? They make a big ceremony around food, getting everyone around the table, and just having fun, laughing, joking.

Something else these populations have in common is they slow down, and they try to minimize the stress that they have in their lives. So when we really look at those basically, all six, seven, eight things, right, so family, no smoking, plant-heavy diet. They eat a lot of beans. They’re socially engaged in their environment. They’re constantly moving, and they just try to decrease the amount of stress and slow their lives down. So that’s my advice for your listeners.

Katie: I love that. And I love that it always comes back to community in some form. That’s something that I’ve talked about so much in the last couple of years, especially that when we look at the data, it really is astounding. How important having those really solid relationships and spending time with people. That really is a dramatic indicator of health like you mentioned, and so I think you’re right. I think it’s important to have all those dietary strategies in place. And in today’s world where our food system is so depleted, it’s also important to take supplements in certain cases. But also, we can’t minimize those lifestyle factors like just being outside and moving like we’re supposed to move and spending time with people and having great relationships. So I love that you tie those in as well. Where can people keep learning more about these topics and keep learning more about you?

Dr. Dixon: We have a wonderful blog on our website where we’re talking about all aspects of health. We talk a bunch about theories of aging and the different things that people can do to help set themselves up. You know, all those lifestyle, things that we’re talking about. When supplementation makes sense. What supplements you should be reaching for. So you can find that blog on our main website at LifeVantage, so L-I-F-E and then Vantage, V-A-N-T-A-G-E.com. Look for the blog link there and, you know, we encourage everyone to also, subscribe to really all of our social media channels where we’re literally everywhere, so Facebook, Instagram. You can just search LifeVantage, and you’ll be able to find us there. We’re constantly trickling out all sorts of content around healthy lifestyles and nutritional supplementation.

Katie: I will make sure that is linked in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm for any of you if you’re listening while you are driving or running or doing any other activities, you can find those there and also, link to my post on a lot of these topics that we have talked about. Another question I’d love to ask at the end, somewhat unrelated or it might be related is if there’s a book or a number of books that have had a really dramatic impact on your life. And if so, what they are and why?

Dr. Dixon: Gosh, mine tends to go back and forth to what I’m currently reading. But if I had to choose one book to recommend, I would have to go with “Influencer.” I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that book. But it’s actually “Influencer: The Power to Change Anything.” It’s such a fascinating book, and it really kind of breaks down really kind of the psychology of where people are at. If people aren’t familiar with that book, it really looks at a couple of just seemingly impossible life circumstances that humans have found themselves in and then really just trying to break down the human behavior that’s responsible for those behaviors, and then ultimately how people could intervene to completely reverse those behaviors.

And I think the lessons in that book are just so incredibly powerful for literally every aspect of our lives, so whether it’s eating healthy, exercising, if we want to maybe lose a couple of pounds, just thinking about those key decisions that we’re making, and how we can really set ourselves up to overcome really our own human psychology, I found that book to be incredibly powerful.

Katie: I love it. And that’s a new recommendation. I will make sure that that is linked in the show notes as well. But Brian, this has been a fascinating episode. I loved getting to deep dive with you into some of these topics, especially ones like Nrf2 and sirtuins that I haven’t talked about here before. And I’m really grateful for all the work you’re doing on spreading the word about how we can stay healthy as we age gracefully.

Dr. Dixon: Well, Katie, I appreciate that very much, and I’d like to applaud you as well for all that you’re doing to help get, you know, useful and practical information out to your listeners and really on the simple things that people can do to improve their lives in every sense of the word. So thanks for all you’re doing.

Katie: Thank you. And thanks as always to all of you for listening, for sharing one of your most valuable assets, your time, with both of us today. We’re so grateful that you did and that you were here, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of “The Wellness Mama Podcast.”

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/brian-dixon/

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Reasons to visit Madagascar

As the biggest island in the Indian Ocean, Madagascar is famous for its unique wildlife and biodiversity. With breathtaking views of nature, white sand beaches, stunning rainforest and delicious local food, this spot offers an unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime experience. Here’s why it should be on your bucket list.

1. It’s home to some seriously cute lemurs

Found only in Madagascar, lemurs are the country’s ultimate hallmark, notably the black and white ring-tailed Lemur Catta species. With more than 60 species present throughout the island, these mammals are currently classified as an endangered species. Visitors can take photos with them while visiting national parks, while luxury hotels built within natural reserves here also offer the chance to see them in the wild where they are no longer afraid of humans. You will certainly fall in love with them.

2. The whale-watching is spectacular

Madagascar is lucky enough to be located close to a migration route for whales and, twice a year, the creatures are visible from the coast. Between July and September, Sainte-Marie island is the best place to admire a whole legion of humpback whales where females come to calve in the warm sea. From October to December, baby whales and their mothers bask in Nosy Be shallow waters in the north-west. In addition to this mind-blowing spectacle, you can also listen to the powerful song of the males.

3. The beaches are beautiful

What else would heal the soul more than resting on a calm and peaceful beach away from home? In front of an emerald sea offering stunning views at sunset, a large part of the south-west of Madagascar has become one of the country’s top destinations for tourists. These places are perfect for that crucial wedding proposal moment and as a honeymoon destination for newlyweds. You can also have this same experience in the north and within the surrounding islands of Nosy Be.

4. You’ll get to taste the local koba cake

Don’t judge the flavour of this cake by its appearance! In western society where people tend to prefer European-style dishes, this brown cake has recently gained a prestigious place among desserts during luxury weddings, being presented with vanilla ice cream. One of the most traditional Malagasy foods, koba is a cake made of peanuts and rice flour. It is sold by street vendors, or in a tightly-packed tin in supermarkets. It makes for an authentic gift for friends upon your return.

5. You can help through volunteering

Madagascar is the fifth poorest country in the world and, with our time on this earth being so short, giving a helping hand at least once in your life is always more than welcome. Many volunteering opportunities are available with local organizations: you can teach French or English to children in remote villages, help environmental NGOs with scientific research and above all, work in the humanitarian sector by helping non-profit organisations which look after sick children from impoverished areas, most of whom suffer from critical illnesses.

6. It’s home to the biggest baobab ever

Known as the bottle tree, the baobab is also called ‘reniala,’ which means ‘mother of the forest’ in the Malagasy language. Six out of eight existing baobab species can be found in Madagascar, where they form a vast forest in semi-arid regions in the south. Some baobab can reach 29.52 ft (30 meters) high and 98.4 ft (9 meters) in circumference. Enough to remind how small you are regardless of your size, these natural jewels will leave you mesmerised.  

7. The local rice-and-romazava-soup combo is a delight

If you’re tired of eating heavy and fatty meals, it’s time to go to Madagascar and try this particular traditional meal. Romazava is a soup essentially prepared with different leaves and meat, which is an optional addition. Though its preparation varies from one region to one other depending on available leaves, the final mixture is a tender tasting dish typical of tropical regions. When prepared without meat, romazava is suitable for vegetarians knowing that its taste comes primarily from the leaves it contains.

8. Isalo, the Malagasy Grand Canyon

Madagascar has its own version of the American Grand Canyon: Isalo National Park. Covering more than 80,000 hectares in the south, millions of years ago this wonder was beneath the sea, and today is the most visited park in the country with more than 30,000 visitors per year. Though you can swim in natural pools if you’re tired between trecks, Isalo is Madagascar’s first wildlife hotspot, so be ready for extreme adventures and sensational views in the wild. A whole week may not be enough to see it all but enjoy your stay, regardless of how long you’re here for.

9. It offers affordable living

For a short stay or a gap year, living in Madagascar is not that difficult. Unless you a are very particular about food or hotel quality, you can have good and affordable meal with €5 (USD$6.25), and rooms start at around €12 (USD$15). You can spend even less if you eat local food. Because of this, many Europeans have decided to spend their retirement here, as you can live far better in Madagascar than in Europe. If you’re a digital nomad, you can easily work and travel here at the same time.

10. There are some great surfing spots

From May to October, you can enjoy great surf breaks in some epic surf zones. These are located in the southernmost or northernmost points of the island, and along the whole region of the vezo people in the south. Part of the eastern region also offers amazing surfing waves due to its rugged coastline. Madagascar opened its surf school in 2003 in Mahambo, and while the island is ideal for beginners, it’s also a must-see surf trip destination for advanced surfers too. If you’re looking for awesome waves, put Madagascar on your bucket list.

11. It has a stunning World Heritage Site

You’ll need a guide to visit this World Heritage Site. The Bemaraha Tsingy is one of the oldest national parks in Madagascar and is formed with majestic limestone formation covering a labyrinth of 72,300 hectares. Created in 1927, the park has long piques the curiosity of geologists and botanists around the world. With unique views, the park can be visited on a four-day excursion offered by most local tour operators, and is home to some 90 bird species, 10 types of lemur, and eight species of reptiles. RELATED POSTS  Are you in doubts  where to spend your Easter Holiday? Don't worry again, we got ideal destinations for with great offers     Top Self Drive Holiday Deals in Kenya If you think you have to travel far to enjoy a nice weekend, you may never get away. Besides, you can enjoy a beautiful weekend right here in Kenya. There are countless wallet-friendly Kenyan self drive getaways that won’t even break your budget. Don’t spend your weekend, doing absolutely nothing at home. Whether you are looking for romantic destinations, pristine beaches, and adventurous outdoor activities, there are plenty wallet-friendly getaways that will satisfy your weekend desires. Malindi & Watamu Self Drive Deals Mombasa South Coast Self Drive Deals Mombasa North Coast Self Drive Deals Masai Mara Self Drive Holiday Packages Lukenya & Machakos Self Drive Meru Holiday Self Drive Deals Mt. Kenya & Aberdare Self Drive Holiday Deals Nyeri Holiday Self Drive Deals Samburu Holiday Self Drive Deals Top Outdoor Activities in Kenya Outdoor activities in Kenya are a great way to experience Kenya, Choosing where to start in Kenya can be overwhelming. The country has many different outdoor activities, ranging from adrenaline-pumping adventures to more meditative outings. Kenya is always a fantastic destination for family bonding. Spending time with the family on weekend is a great opportunity to re-connect and communicate while having fun. Outdoor activities are perfect for those who want to experience a relaxing and refreshing weekend in an amazing place. Do something fun this weekend and spend worthy time with your family. For great weekend bonding, we present to you 6 fun outdoor activities for the family. These outdoor activities are great adventures for you and your family. Hike To Ol Donyo Sabuk & 14 Falls, Thika Chaka Ranch Day Trip – QuadBikes, PaintBalling Ngare Ndare Day Trip Hike (Nanyuki) Kereita Zip Lining & Hiking Day Trip Top Madaraka Express SGR Holiday Deals 2 Nights Malindi & Watamu holiday with SGR 2 Nights Amboseli Holiday With SGR 2 Nights Tsavo Holiday With SGR Sa 2 Nights Voi Holiday With SGR 2 Nights Mombasa North Coast With SGR 2 Nights Mombasa South Coast With SGR Read the full article

[litrclairejess]

Love in the Ruins - Claire + Jess

First the light appeared, then the rain.  Then it was dark again, because the approaching dawn so stoked the cloud formations that hung dark and heavy, each and every morning.

Claire got up anyway, since it would be time for the kids’ breakfasts soon, and she wanted to get started before Gran was awake.

Still, she thought, we’re lucky.  We have fresh water, filling our pitchers and our cups.  It’s something so many don’t have...

Claire shut her mind off, again. It was best to tackle one’s work without thinking about what the possibilities were. It was best to focus on the bright side of things.

She sliced a chunk off the elk hock hanging high in the servery, large enough to feed the children, herself, and Gran too when she arose.  Then came hunting for eggs in the henhouse.  A total of 11 families consumed their daily meals prepared inside the servery.  They shared this particular elk with three other families whose combined efforts had resulted in the ensnared large animal; when it was gone, they planned to trap another, but not until then.  Eating four legged animals was rare due to an overabundance of effort it took and the unpredictability; it was fish that was the staple of their diets.

The kids weren’t her kids, and Gran wasn’t even her grandmother - she was her stepmother’s mother, and the children belonged to her stepmother and the stepmother’s former husband, who’d died of cancer at age 29, seven years earlier.  The kids were now seven, nine, and 11.

Claire was now 24.  Her father was 52, and her stepmother 37; Gran was 67.  Claire’s own mother had died of cancer ten years before, at age 42.  She tried not to think about the inevitability of cancer, hitting the population as it did.  There were no cleanups anymore.  Despite the danger of the “hot sites,” it really was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.  Daily survival was the priority.  Food, in particular.  Water was blessedly less of a concern, and that’s why they were where they were.

In this, again, Claire was lucky.  They lived next to a river in a protected fort, and the adults spent the days fishing, cooking, and mending the fortifications.  It wasn’t that there was no gas--they in fact used automobile gasoline for cooking and heating, regularly.  It was that there wasn’t really any place to go.

The supply lines had collapsed shortly before the internet itself had collapsed.  In the end, it was not a lack of fuel that drove the breakdown of the transportation-dependent systems in place by the early 21st century, but that the electrical grid and communication networks were more delicate than most people realized. Single break points appeared, requiring expensive repairs, and then multiplied.  The constant storms causing billions in damage to roadways were too much, and need for repair dollars led to overleveraging nonexistent money, leading to one final economic crash.  And then there was no economy.  No longer was it satisfactory to push papers, whether electronic or tree-derived, which skills even in childhood Claire had been taught.  

She thought of the kids now stirring who’d be coming to eat their elk steaks, eggs, and sliced apples she was preparing soon. They would likely never know typing at a computer, but they would be expert hunters and fishers, potentially even canoe makers, before the age of 20.  

Even before it had all gone sideways, people had returned to learning to fish, field dress meat, growing their own vegetables, and building their own shelters in a big way.  Somehow everyone knew that it was the end of the technology that had been the detached living of a previous age.  

Field dressing meat wasn’t something done very often other than very small mammals caught with snares.  Even then, they were valued mostly for their warm pelts, not their meat; so-called “rabbit starvation” could result from eating meat that contained too little fat.

The fish and the fishing may have been unexciting, but it provided scads of the fat and protein they needed.  Nearly all group effort was dedicated to catching and preserving fish.  It meant they stayed ahead of food needs, and food was everything in a place where the fresh water flowed easily and tree bark and animal pelts were available to make clothing and shelter.

Now others were stirring, having too been raised by the first light that then quickly blanked out again to darkness.  The first peltings of rain began to hit the heavy cedar bark thatched roof of the enclosure; soon they would be thoroughly drenching, and the pilings would shake under the weight of the heavy, falling rain.  A mixed blessing, Claire thought, as she adjusted the containers and buckets to catch the fresh water falling.  Her fire had begun crackling just in time to take on strength before the heavy mists accompanying the rain could fizzle it out; now the food was sizzling in the pan.

A decade before, when the breakdown of the supply lines had started in earnest, people quickly packed up and moved to where they could guarantee themselves fresh water.  At first, for Claire’s family, that had entailed a quick trip up north to a mountain valley they were familiar with that had a year-round stream, far from the dry California desert.  They came prepared with 21st century camping gear.  All of it failed, tore, and disintegrated within three months.  They had started with a station wagon, now useless with torn-up roads and nowhere in particular to drive to, and had been packed to the gills with nylon plastics and cheap metal, holdovers of a civilization that no longer existed.  A civilization that had assumed cheap goods destined for a landfill after a short life of use was all that would ever be needed.  

Her dad had built up a large stock of MREs; the widespread grim acceptance back then that things were fading, and fast, didn’t escape anyone’s notice.  They were overproduced due to spectacular high expectation they’d be needed, and he bought enough in bulk to make sure they’d have food for a long time.  

They still had some of those MREs somewhere, in fact, but nobody ate them or was even interested anymore. They produced plastic garbage that had nowhere to go.  It was easier to learn to fish and trap, and use everything they caught.  Once you ate a plastic meal, it was gone forever, except for the unusable waste it left behind.

Things had faded quickly, and just... didn’t come back.  It was like an extended summer camping trip, where everyone found they quickly wanted to get out of the city, but there ended up being no compelling reason to go back.  People had long feared violence in the wake of a sudden breakdown in the grids that had kept everything afloat.  But when it came down to it, every human being whose survival instinct kicked in had to carry their own weight plus jugs of water, food, clothing, a sleeping bag, a tarp, and any other supplies that would keep them alive.  Nobody had time or inclination to go shoot up groups of other people to take their valuables.  There was no longer any such thing as valuables.  Not when lugging around your own weight in bottled water was necessary for daily survival.  

Work had simply ended, because trunk lines were ruptured and never fixed.  Electric grids sustained damage that became too expensive to repair, and the virtual money from an economy that was fast becoming a mirage couldn’t keep up.  It had no inherent value.  What was left was radio communications that were random and scattershot, roads to places no one wanted or needed to go, and where people did want to go - say, across mountains or along rivers - the roads kept washing out until there was no longer an infrastructure in place to repair them.   By that time, the floods had rolled over too many areas to come back.

Nobody was in contact with areas they didn’t primarily live in anymore.  Claire had no idea what the lives of any of her friends in California were like now.  She hoped they were surviving, as she was; It was too much backbreaking work simply to stay alive, to build and continue reinforcing structures strong enough to withstand the daily tempests.  

It wasn’t that there was no upshot to this life.  There was a pleasure and simplicity in existing in the present moment, and not worrying about the future, nor the past.  The past was an alien life form that no longer resembled anything in her present world.  It felt like she had come from a different planet, and now had a new life on a new Earth.  The future was in the hands of fate.  Meanwhile, all any of them could do was plug away.  

The kids were awake now, rubbing their bleary eyes, but eager and grateful for the breakfast on flat wooden slats she handed out.  The older children would spend the entirety of this particular day weaving with cedar bark under the tutelage of a Native elder who was visiting for the purpose of teaching them essential traditional building skills; the younger ones would be “helping” with duties in general, following the adults around the fort.  Gran was stirring now and would be up in a bit.  Gran stayed up late each night to assist in keeping the central fire going, as the elders felt it their duty to be the first line of defense against the unknown terrors of the night, beyond the dancing flames’ shadows.  She never slept more than a few hours, though, and if Claire wasn’t quick in the mornings, Gran would be there to regale her with endless tales of a world gone by, one Claire had never known as an adult, and never would know.  It’s how Gran processed her grief over the loss of an entire civilization, and everything she had once believed in, more than a decade agone.

Elizabeth, the visiting elder, was from the nearby Lutshootseed tribe.  She was a master weaver descended from master weavers, and it was an honor to host her as a guest.  Claire had been told that Elizabeth had been instrumental in originally setting up this particular fortification, before she and her family had first arrived.  She had picked the plain it sat upon as a place that would not be swept away in flood, and which would provide fishing year round; so long as the residents of the fort applied themselves, they would never hunger.  Now things had very definitely reverted to the need for the Old Ways in daily living.  Elizabeth and others travelled around in this particular area, blessing the ethnically diverse but non-Native forts along the water with knowledge and spirit.  She would show them a thing or two about what they needed to get along in the places where she and her kin had lived thousands of years prior to the blip that was the European-derived civilization, and to which ways of living they had now returned.

Claire knew that this hedged their bets, too.  Not all would be sunshine and roses once various post-industrial people acclimated and achieved a modicum of ability to survive on their own and put up a winter’s worth of food stores.  If the local forts were united under the tribal nation’s leadership, and they had been taught how to maintain, it would make for efficient defense against the next time other groups of people got the bright idea to invade territory.  This sort of thing didn’t stop for that long at any point in history, no matter the year nor the climate condition.  For now, though, it was a distantly future concern.  

Weaving wasn’t all they would be doing during this visit, either.  A coastal tribe had harpooned a whale, which was cause for celebration up and down the rivers.  Simultaneously with greeting and escorting Elizabeth and her visiting convoy, her father and stepmother and two other senior members of the fort had gone down the river to the coast with several months’ worth of small animal furs to trade for blubber.  Even though there were still gasoline and diesel left in disused sealed tanks, it was too explosive for normal use around the fort.  Whale oil was a better option for human-sized needs.  Plus, the nutrition impact could not be overstated.  Whale blubber had high nutrition, period.  They’d be learning how to render, separate, store, and generally use it today and tomorrow, during Elizabeth’s visit.

The kids were done with breakfast, their smiling dirt-streaked faces and hands giving over the wood they’d eaten off of.  Gran was now fully awake, and came and collected them from Claire, wordlessly going to scrub off.  

=to be continued=

[wildlyhardphilosopher-blog]

Individual Dog Training | Solutions That Work

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Individual Dog Training | Solutions That Work

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