@whumpril - Alt.12 - words that can’t be taken back
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It is said a Siegrind’s memory doesn’t entirely kick in before 5 years old. That they do not need it, that instinct and the Force are enough to survive without Flock. It is wrong of course: a misconception due to the unwell-known culture, to make Siegrinds appear dumb and savage compared to core-worlder.
One of my earliest memories comes from when I was three years old- or so the Temple Knights told me. My Flock was very small then: Just my parents and myself, far away from the luxurious planet that sheltered our species. I was too small to realise how unnatural such a small Flock was, however, and with the closed off nature of Siegrinds, it took me years before I learnt it. Before I became aware that Flock were meant to be more than one, that Siegrinds could barely bear living per group of three. By then, my feathers were grown, my spirit molded by the Jedi ideal. By then, it was too late for me to become a full-fledged Siegrind- and I knew without having ever stepped on it that my birth planet could never be my home. I would forever be, by the experiences that forged me, an outcast.
The young me was still blissfully unaware of that fact however, barely bothered by the tiny size of her flock. There was enough love from my parents to replace a thousand Flock members, and though running through the galaxy was hard, it was also exhilarating.
That memory, as most of my memories are, can be traced back to a single picture. It is drenched in the smell of fear, spoiled by the iron taste of blood. It happens in the aftermath of a fight, though I don’t remember which, and my mother is the centerpiece of it all. In it, she is holding my cheeks between firm, cold hands. She seems injured, and her wings are clipped, but no matter how hard I focus, I can’t remember her coat coloring. Only her eyes, blue like deep ocean water no sunlight has reached in years, survive in my mind.
She tells me things, likely about the Jedi who are going to take me away, about the new and safe life I’ll have in the Temple, about other idealistic absurdities no one ever believed but still held onto to keep hope. She tells me things, but no matter how many times I rewind the memory, I cannot hear her voice, nor her exact words. The memory is static- stuck in time, frozen for all eternity in a limbo between two lives.
There are two words however, that escape that rule. Two words that struck me, that looped in my head again and again until the voice that whispered them wasn’t my mother anymore, but my own voice.
"Remember me," she said.
And, like flood gates springing open, I remembered.
There is a particularity about Siegrinds, you see. A rite every adult must pass, but that I never will, for I am a lone-Flock. A rule no one knows but natives and outcasts. Jedi chose to isolate themself, spring high walls around their mind, so that Force Sensitivity would never affect them, or others. Siegrinds… Siegrinds embrace the Force, whether they are Sensitive or not. The Flock form a big looping bond that welcomes you or rejects you, but that is here, always present in the back of your mind, always feeding vital information about who is coming, who is thriving, who is sick or dying.
It tells you about your ancestors, about their history and how not to repeat their mistakes. It groom you into a group-oriented individual, until the boundaries between minds are unclear, and a Flock becomes one. Change and growth promote survival, and thus, children are taught orally, their bond faint and weak so that their ego may spread. But little by little, memories are passed, and while the child is different from the elder, both bear similar knowledge in their mind.
That day, my mother gifted it to me. Bits of her birth, bits of her culture. Bits of everything we both knew I would never be able to be. That day, my mother pushed on my side of the bond a closed vault I’d spent most of the end of my childhood hacking, containing a tenth of what a whole Flock would have given me, but so much more than what the Jedi would ever offer me.
She gifted me her knowledge, her memories, her sorrows and worries… and cut the lifeline that linked us.
The memory stops there, forever frozen in that single instant. Lonely blue eyes gaze at me, and I stared back confused, unable to understand why my Flock would mourn something still alive, still thriving… Until the link is mercilessly cut, and she disappears from my senses.
My mother was alive then, I am sure. Her primaries have likely long grown back now, and without a fledgling at her charge, perhaps she is flying free throughout the galaxy. Perhaps whatever obstacle made her leave home went away, and she came back to her planet, forgetting everything about the young chick she gave away. Perhaps she is six feet under, dead after years of slavery, of being one of those “pet birds” rich people enjoy.
I wondered, but I never seeked: once a bond has been consciously broken, why waste energy in trying to mend it back? That day, my mother gave me the gift of knowledge, and banished me from her Flock. That day, she stopped being my parents and left me in a foreign culture, cut away from all clans. The raising, the feelings and the memories she gave me: I will never forget. It is neatly sheltered in my mind space, a clue on my roots, a lost dream of what could have been…
The future however? The future has no yearning for those who left me behind, for those who pushed me away. It doesn’t care for their noble intentions, doesn’t bother with their self-centered pity. What has come to pass may never be changed, and it is just as well: for changing the smallest event would mean undoing our own persona.
As a youngling, I curled around the memory. It kept me warm when I felt cold, kept me steady when I felt unbalanced, kept me focused when I wandered. I didn’t understand why many of the other Initiates held so little interest in their own roots, or why I was scolded for attachment. The mind-vault gave me an objective , a construction to beat in order to gather the precious knowledge held inside. Ironically, its keyhole taught me just as much, if not more, about the Force and who I was than its very content. When I was captured, my ancestors' brush with slavery helped me survive more than once. It taught me how to bow my head in time, how to convince my Master about the benefit of unclipped wings, how much I could get away with and which lines I should never cross. As a Padawan under Aheka, it reminded me of Flock-bonds, of ages-old rituals and of the virtues of trust.
All throughout my life, this memory at the root of it all, I followed my mother's last request and I remembered.
Alt12 is tackling digital health, pregnancy and parenthood one comment at a time
#SuryaRay #Surya What can a smartphone owner expect when she’s expecting? We’re starting to see more and more apps that could change how we consider digital health and social interaction on mobile. When Jennifer Wong was five months pregnant in 2009, she went searching for a mobile app that would give her more information on her pregnancy. Wong didn’t find what she was looking for — instead, she found a business idea. Along with her husband Casey Sackett, Wong founded Alt12, a company that aims to provide women with information and a social community built around the iPhone for three topics: fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood. “I realized that mobile was a platform for where things were going, and there was a lot of focus on mobile,” Wong said in an interview recently in San Francisco. “But there were a lot of male developers out there, and we thought women’s health and women’s lifestyle was a really great place to go.” With initial seed funding, Wong started out with the company’s first mobile app called Baby Bump, hiring writers to research and produce educational information about the different stages of pregnancy, developers to build the network to support a strong social community, and eventually adding e-commerce features to sell some of the kid-related products the editors were recommending. With this three-pronged approach to content, social and commerce, Baby Bump just hit 8 million downloads recently, with 1.5 million of those users spending at least an hour a day on the app. The company just released an iPad edition of Baby Bump, which is among the top pregnancy apps for the iPhone in Apple’s App Store this week. “We look at this as sort of a new approach for women on mobile,” Wong said. The trio of apps highlight some of the recent trends in digital health, where people are looking for mobile-friendly specific information and support around conditions like pregnancy, and online communities have cropped up as a result. After the release of Baby Bump, the company expanded to produce Pink Pad (they found a good number of users on Baby Bump weren’t even pregnant yet, just searching for information on fertility), and Kidfolio, which provides parenting advice for the users who graduate from Baby Bump. The company raised a $1.26 million seed round in 2012 led by Felicis Ventures with participation from InterWest Partners, Social+Capital Partnership and a few angel investors. While Wong initially set out to answer questions about pregnancy and give mothers a way to connect via mobile, she was somewhat unprepared for the strong response from users within the social groups section. She thinks that because the apps started on mobile, they encouraged constant commenting, and comment moderation became a huge part of the business. “In a sense, I was very open-minded about it,” she said. “I had used online groups before, so I had some idea of what we were getting into. But what we had done was something slightly diferent because it was mobile, which people just use differently. We were treading in new territory.” Wong said that comment moderators will check particular threads where there are concerns of threats like domestic violence or self-harm, and will make sure that moderators in following shifts continue to monitor those discussions, sometimes suggesting a user seek medical advice if necessary. They have worked to carefully dissuade comments that promote self-harm, such as teenagers on the Pink Pad app talking about “pro-ana,” the controversial pro-anorexia trend that’s cropped up online recently. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. * GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013 * Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back * Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012 http://dlvr.it/31ZyJX @suryaray
