I Love Soulmates But Also This-

bread so tasty. bread so nice. toast it once. toast it twice.

'We said our goodbyes

And blew the stars out

Like candles'

- ellen everett

Redraw of an old drawing i did a while back :)

you can love him, but you can't keep him, tumblr user @/pencap / mother mary, badflower / the burning, venetta octavia / bastards and betrayal, pinterest user @/soupenthusiasts

Hello, OP here.

I didn't quite know how to feel about this post ad-on, since I wrote the post in a spur of the second, omg-I'm-so-excited-about-this-show flash. And the Palestine-Israel conflict is one I very much avoid, for a few reasons.

But I do want to say that I very much appreciate how @mo-mode puts an emphasis on seeing things from all sides. The chance that every person you disagree with is a monster is actually very slim, my friends.

I'm just not a friend of the internet and this website's quick hand at polarizing and simplifying complex topics.

THAT BEING SAID

Reblog with your fave illegal streaming website, y'all. Kick Disney where it hurts.

After tireless searching I've finally found an illegal website to stream Percy Jackson over and now I'm making it everyone's problem

If someone would ask what my biggest need is I'd say touch. By Lord, please, pplesse I need to be touched. Right now. And if they raise their eyebrows and eyes flicker to my chest I will commit arseny. I need fingers pressing against my elbow as you pass. I need a hand at my back. The quiet presence of my friend appearing behind me. I can lean back. They have me. They gave me.

I need eyes. Eyes that meet mine and mean something. I need love. And by God isn't that a way to simple word. I want my friend to watch me turn away with a small smile before they continue their conversation. I want to elicit a warm feeling in a chest. I want someone to hug me and not as a goodbye.I need care. I need sustenance. Require it. Need your hand on my arm and need you to say hey, it's okay. How about a little walk before we continue this work, hm?

“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”

— Ilya Kaminsky, from “A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck,” Deaf Republic

I’m sorely I just. This is the most inspirational thing I’ve seen this week.

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.

Clement Gelly, “Graffiti, Through Grief and Discovery”, pub. Hazlitt [transcript in ALT]

“Do it scared” but please realize that, if you Do It Scared too much and don’t let yourself rest + relax + have fun in between, you will fuck yourself up. If you “do it scared” all day every day, you will burn out badly and quickly. Sometimes this is temporarily necessary but please keep this in mind.