Frosting Sloth Art

Hi! I'm Cam. I'm a disabled (hEDS & co) queer autistic, working as an in-home caretaker for my regular job. I'm also a self-taught artist & want to engage more with that. If you like my art, I would super appreciate any tips thru #kofi, in my bio c: DM to ask about comms!!

I remember when shit like this would get wall to wall to coverage for weeks. We'd know all the kid's names. Hear from their families. Politicians would pretend to care. Now it barely makes the news outside of posts like this and we'll all forget because of the countless horrors.

Swedish scientists tracked 38,753 ADHD patients. The ones on Adderall had 31% LESS drug abuse than the ones off it. Adderall sits in the same DEA category as cocaine, fentanyl, and meth. The Swedish government tracks every prescription written in the country. Researchers pulled the records for tens of thousands of ADHD patients, checked who was on stimulants in 2006, then checked who had drug problems by 2009. People on the meds had way fewer. Longer on meds, fewer still. A 2017 US study of nearly 3 million adolescents and adults found the exact same effect. Swallow an Adderall pill and the drug seeps in slowly. Dopamine in your brain climbs over an hour or two. Slow climb, no high. But crush the pill and snort it, or melt it and inject it, and the same molecule shoots dopamine up in seconds. That spike is the high. Ritalin in a syringe is a street drug. Ritalin in a pill is not. Same chemical, different delivery. And then the ADHD brain does its own weird thing. It runs chronically low on dopamine, like a car with the tank always a bit below full. A prescribed dose tops it up to normal. That is why stimulants calm ADHD kids down instead of bouncing them off the walls. ADHD patients forget to take their meds. A lot. University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Anthony Rostain says only 20 to 40 percent of ADHD patients take their medication regularly after a year. A study of 4,011 patients found the average person on ADHD meds takes them 56 percent of the time. Four out of five adults with ADHD stop treatment entirely in year one. In a 2023 survey, 36 percent of them said they just forgot. The DEA shelves it with cocaine. The data shows it cuts addiction by about a third in the people who need it. And those people keep forgetting to take it.

It is so funny how ableists are like “don’t define yourself by your disability!” but you ask what “defining yourself by your disability” means and they reveal it is literally just mentioning it. THEY are the ones who define you by and see you as nothing more than your disability.

@ugandan_weekly @anishmoonka Echolocation is also called bio-sonar. And I absolutely did answer your question, not my fault you're an ignoramus.

@FrostingSloth @anishmoonka Actually sonar is mostly tech based and in literature we prefer to use that for inanimate characterization. But go off please…literati if the internet. Mxm! Didn’t even answer my question.

A mother sperm whale came up from half a mile down with a giant squid still in her mouth. A diver named Ludo caught the whole thing on camera. Nobody had ever filmed this before in human history. That was last September. A Smithsonian scientist named Michael Vecchione confirmed the species. It was an adult giant squid, an animal so hard to find alive that for a century we mainly knew it from beaks pulled out of dead whales and the occasional body that washed up on a beach. We have known these two fight for centuries. Sperm whales kept surfacing with large circular marks on their heads that matched the suckers on giant squid arms. Their stomachs were full of squid beaks, the one part of a squid that cannot be digested. The evidence was everywhere. The event itself had never once been seen. This hunt happened in complete darkness. The whale was far deeper than any sunlight reaches. She found the squid the way sperm whales always do, by making sounds that bounce off things around her. Her clicks hit 236 decibels. A jet engine runs at about 150. She is the loudest living animal on earth, and those sounds are how she sees in the dark. Her brain weighs seven kilograms. Five times heavier than yours. For a sperm whale, this was a routine meal. One whale eats four to eight hundred squid every day. The whole species eats about 110 million tons of squid every year, more than every fishing fleet on earth pulls out of the ocean combined. In the full uncropped video, you can see her baby swimming right next to her. Sperm whale calves do not go deep on their own. They only dive when their mothers bring them. She was teaching the baby how to hunt. That detail is the one that stayed with me.

The math on this signal should unsettle you. A single burst from this source releases as much energy as the Sun produces in three days. Compressed into a few milliseconds. The object producing it is probably smaller than Manhattan, maybe 10 kilometers across. And it has been firing on a precise 16.35-day schedule for at least 409 consecutive days of observation. Four days on, twelve days off. A burst or two per hour during the active window. Then silence. Then the cycle restarts. The CHIME telescope in British Columbia tracked 38 separate bursts between September 2018 and February 2020. Every single one arrived inside a five-day phase window. Half of them landed in a 0.6-day window. That level of regularity rules out anything random or catastrophic. Supernovae, neutron star collisions, gamma-ray aftershocks: all eliminated. Whatever this is, it survives each burst intact and resets. The leading explanation is a binary system. A magnetar, one of the most magnetically violent objects in the universe, orbiting a massive companion star. The 16.35-day period would be the orbital clock. The magnetar only faces Earth during a fraction of each orbit, so we catch its radio flares for four days, then lose line of sight for twelve. But binary orbits wobble. Tidal forces distort them. This signal shows no drift across 400+ days of observation. The precision is cleaner than most atomic clock experiments over the same timescale. The source galaxy is 500 million light-years away. A spiral galaxy similar to ours, with the signal coming from a star-forming region in one of its arms. The burst reaches Earth 1,000 times weaker than a cell phone signal would be if you placed the phone on the Moon. We are detecting something smaller than a city, across 500 million light-years of empty space, arriving on a schedule. More than 1,000 fast radio bursts have been cataloged. About 10% repeat. Exactly one repeats on a clock.

Every use of a leaf blower is a massacre. The stream of air from a handheld leaf blower comes out between 180 and 200 miles per hour. That's enough to shred caterpillars, strip butterfly eggs off leaves, and fling overwintering bees, fireflies, ladybugs, and moths into the street. A chickadee needs 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to raise one brood. They overwinter in the leaf litter that falls ever autumn. The leaf litter your neighbor is blowing to the curb is next summer's songbird food. And on top of it, leaf blower emissions are their own category of bad. Running a two-stroke gas leaf blower for 30 minutes produces roughly the same hydrocarbon pollution as driving a car 1,100 miles. California and a growing list of cities have banned them outright. Germany's environment ministry told citizens not to use them unless "indispensable." Is it time for a total ban?

Apparently this needs to be said again since MAGA is VERY confused: Yes, Democrats were the party of slavery- 150+ years ago. Then came Reconstruction. Then the Civil Rights Movement. Then the parties realigned and ideologies flipped. That’s not an opinion. That’s documented history. You don’t get to ignore 150 years of history and then call me uninformed. At this point, it’s not confusion. It’s willful ignorance.

At the beginning of my misdiagnoses, PCP said if it doesn’t show up in a blood test, talk to your psychiatrist. I went to 2 out of network psychiatrists who both screamed THIS IS NOT ANXIETY! YOU NEED A CARDIOLOGIST! PCP laughed at their alarm. Refused the cardiac referral. 1/2

chatgpt has ≈A BILLION ACTIVE MONTHLY USERS and they all think "MY usage isn't a big deal, i'm not the problem, i'm not responsible for genai's negative effects on the world" i'm here to inform you that yes! you most certainly are part of the fucking problem!

I grew up with a single mom on section 8 and food stamps. My entire life I’ve tried telling people these assistance programs are made to keep poor people poor.

@SurvivingCFS Too many "social services" treat adults like children. Homeless adults are not children. They are people suffering under capitalism.

In America the homeless services may be free, but you will pay with your dignity, your self respect, your safety, your health, your autonomy, your freedom of movement. I understand why people will choose the streets over being in these programs and shelters. They strip you of everything but your life. It’s demoralizing. Dehumanizing and more than anything else: depressing.

I stopped reading at this passage. Naveah Crain is dead because the state of Texas put a layer of bureaucracy between women and their healthcare providers. Period. Abortion bans kill women.

@ugandan_weekly @anishmoonka Underwater it's called sonar

@anishmoonka Does she use ‘echolocation’ to find or kill the 🦑 ?

A whole family gets a “mild sickness.” They recover but the 5 y/o never does. It starts the same: sore throat, fever, headache. OP mentions,”I told the doctors exactly what this looked like on day 1 & they laughed at me.” Then the child sickness escalates to severe head pain, inability to walk, seizures. White blood cell count: 51,000. Bladder: 500% full. Later develops encephalitis and meningitis which doctors said it came from a “simple sickness.” Days later, she passed away. Here’s the part people don’t want to face: Research has already confirmed that Covid can trigger both encephalitis and meningitis. A “mild” infection does not mean harmless. It means unpredictable. And Covid is still taking young, healthy lives every single day.

This is going to be one of the greatest health stories of the decade. For decades, every winter, we would admit many babies struggling to breathe from RSV, and now its gotten much rarer. Infected kids go on to have a higher rate of asthma. And a vaccine is eliminating all of that.

Part 2. A hospital in India can take someone who has been blind for years and give them their sight back in six minutes. It costs less than a pizza. And they have done it 6.8 million times. The hospital is called Aravind. It was started in 1976 by a man named Govindappa Venkataswamy, known as Dr. V. He was 58, had just been forced to retire, and his hands were crippled by arthritis so bad he could barely hold a pen. He had scalpels custom-made for his twisted fingers and still performed over 100,000 eye surgeries in his life. Two years before he retired, Dr. V walked into a McDonald’s for the first time. He looked at the menu, looked at the assembly line in the back, and came out with an odd idea. He would sell cataract surgeries the way McDonald’s sold burgers. So he mortgaged his house. His brothers and sisters pooled their life savings. He opened an 11-bed clinic in Madurai. Then he flew to Chicago and enrolled in Hamburger University, the actual McDonald’s training program, to learn how the assembly line worked. At Aravind, cataract surgery is broken into small steps. Nurses prep one patient while the surgeon operates on another. Each surgeon switches between two tables. The operation itself takes about six minutes. So far Aravind has seen 55 million patients and done 6.8 million surgeries. More than half of those patients paid nothing. Not a rupee. The ones who can pay subsidize the ones who cannot. A surgery at Aravind costs between $40 and $125 depending on the lens. In the US, Medicare pays about $1,766 for the same operation. Aravind also has better results. Their complication rate is 1.5%, and serious eye infections happen in about 2 out of every 10,000 surgeries. Most American hospitals are not that good. They built their own lens factory too, called Aurolab. Imported lenses were costing hundreds of dollars each, so Aurolab makes them for around ten. Today Aurolab produces roughly 10% of the world’s eye lenses and ships to 160 countries. Every year, Aravind sends doctors and nurses out to rural villages for 2,500 eye camps. They screen people who have been blind for years, bus them to the hospital, operate on them, and bus them back home seeing. Dr. V died in 2006. His family still runs Aravind. Harvard Business School has been teaching the story as a case study since 1993. I still do not see it in my feed. A 58-year-old with crippled hands walked into a McDonald’s. Fifty years later, 6.8 million blind people can see.

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

There’s a famous story about a rabbi who survived the Holocaust, camps and all, while his entire family was killed. When he returned home, he said, “It could have been worse.” His students asked: “How could it possibly have been worse?” The rabbi replied: “It could have been us doing all the killing.”