fandom this fandom that i think art-making just commonly involves scavenging and it is insane that major swathes of culture are legally owned by intellectual landlords

+bonus:

Spin the wheel. That's who's trying to kill you.

Spin the wheel again. That's who's trying to protect you.

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

Ship in Moonlight, by Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817 - 1900)

Love the concept of Bad Thing that provides protection from Even Worse Thing. This villan has dibs on killing me someday, so they’re not going to let anyone else do it. Person has a permanent illness that’s super hostile to any other type of infection. Lawful evil tyrant absolutely PISSED at chaotic evil invader killing their subjects. Person has been cursed by the gods but the curse supersedes all other hexes and magical ills. This shit absolutely charges my batteries.

bts music videos — mic drop (2017)

Christian Siriano | Fall/Winter 2025

I used to be a grader and an occasional substitute prof for an introductory astronomy lab. That means that the majority of the people in this lab are only taking it because it’s a requirement and about half of them think it’s an astrology class.

I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”

I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.

And there was another boy who, during a lab in our observatory where we would look at certain things in the sky, asked where the sun was. At 10pm in November. After some questioning it was revealed that he thought the moon and the sun were the same thing.

My friend, whom I love dearly, found out that the moon orbits the earth as a 20-year-old in an upper-level political science class, and was utterly and completely flabbergasted. When questioned, her defense was that she doesn’t have anything to do with the moon, so why would she have needed to know?

i was once talking to a friend of mine about how at that point in time you could see mars, jupiter, and venus at the same time, which was pretty cool, and she said “where’s pluto? wait, it was destroyed” and that’s how i found out that my friend, who is in her third year of a medical degree, thought that pluto stopped being a planet because it was eaten by a black hole.

When i was in physics class my sophomore year of high school, the teacher drew a simplified diagram of a person standing on the planet earth as part of the explanation for how it was initially discovered that the earth was round. And one girl sitting in the class said “wait… we live on the OUTSIDE???” she had spent her whole life thinking that the earth was a hollow sphere and that we lived on the inner walls of it

i had a coworker in his early twenties who, when i mentioned seeing admiring how bright mars was that morning on the drive to work, laughed and said ‘mars? like the planet?’ and i was like ‘yeah mars the planet. it looks like a very bright star, it was supposed to be extra bright and close lately.’ and he got quiet and oddly worried and he said, quietly, carefully, ’…are planets… real?’ like he was checking to see if i was completely insane.

i experienced a brief moment of crisis and said back ’yes. planets are real. did you…. think they weren’t real?’ and he looked even more disturbed and said, ‘no. they’re just made up for movies and shit, right?’ and i was totally horrified by this point and said ‘planets are real. the solar system has nine of them. the universe has billions of them. we make up fictional planets for movies but there are definitely real planets that actually exist.’

he said, like he sincerely thought i was fucking with him, ‘how do you know planets are real?’

i said, ‘i’ve seen them. i’ve seen saturn through a telescope. you can go outside right now and see mars and venus in the sky. i swear that planets are a real thing.’

he said, muttering now, ‘well, maybe that’s just what you think.’

the conversation did not get any better from there.

Was at the planetarium once and overheard two middle aged women talking about the flat earth theory. One of them said that she thinks they have a point because “if the world was round you’d be able to cut off a lot of flight time going south [over Antarctica] to get to London [from Australia].”

She thought the arctic and Antarctic were the same place, that north and south on the flat map were connected the same way the eastern and western edges are.

at work, I was showing this woman a lunar calendar (normal calendar that shows you what each day’s moon phase is for the year) and she asked me, “are these things, y'know, accurate?” she was fully convinced that the moon phases were mysterious, unpredictable occurrences and any attempts to track them were akin to horoscope predictions. I was so taken aback I could only respond, “yes… scientists are pretty confident about the moon’s orbit…”

“It has nothing to do with me so I wasn’t interested” is a take I’ve heard from folks in their 50s about geography, but…

I mean, there was the lady who was genuinely convinced that sentient creatures lived on the moon and were communicating with Antarctica.

Absolutely insane.

Spin this wheel of ~300 AO3 tags three times.

cr. namuspromised

Had to sketch some Sansa (and jon) from “I will burn with a light of my own” by @dialux rn and gahhhh it’s amazing I love the fic <33

you're a tasteless ratatouille, ch 1

READ THE FIRST CHAPTER ON AO3!

opposite of a parasocial relationship (I would Rather Die than be perceived by an entertainer I liked)