Day 56!

love it when you look up a word’s pronunciation and only get the formal Linguist zalgotext-style version. like damn i guess i’m not using that word.

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.

Did you enjoy Across the Spider-Verse? Do you like TTRPGs?

You should check out the award-winning TTRPG I wrote as a love letter to Spider-Man, called Anyone Can Wear the Mask.

(not for nothing, but the art in the game by Elijah Forbes is gorgeous)

It's a 3-player RPG where one player plays a local superhero; another, the City the hero has sworn to protect; and the third, the villain threatening the safety of the people. You draw cards, roll dice, draw a map, and tell a story about what it means to be a hero.

It's currently available in print and digital, which includes the PDF and audiobook with narration by Aaron Catano-Saez (Skyjacks: Courier's Call). Peep the game's trailer:

You can get the game right here:

Print: Jeffstormer.com/shop

Digital: jeffstormer.itch.io/mask

Once or twice every few weeks they'll just switch. People get used to it

i think if jessie and james teamrocket transitioned theyd just switch their names and call it a day. or this already happened. this is my one true belief

OK my thoughts on yr s3 because time passes inevitably. Will maybe update after ep 6

- I saw a post where someone said "Wilmon has to get together otherwise what was it all for?" And while I do respect this viewpoint, I am a suckered for tragedy, and the point of the story is that for some amount of time, whether it's forever or these tumultuous few months of their youth, it HAPPENED

- to wit, in cmbyn elio and Oliver do not get together, Oliver moves on and elio is still remembering and trying to move on and they both remember and even though it was just that summer they have both been changed by this and they are holding it in themselves. A love story does not have to be happy for it to be love

- if August and Sara have a happy ending I'll eat a shoe though

- August is such a fascinating character, I love how they brought in Erik being a traditionalist and an assailed in such stark contrast to who Wille is and how Wille sees his big brother

- I really hope the Erik thing gets a better conclusion in episode 6

- it almost feels like there are two many loose ends to tie up nicely so I am kinda worried about that

- the main thing I want is for Wille and Simon to have a conclusion though, no matter if it's good or bad. Also for Wille to be happy and not kronprins anymore bc happy and monarchy cannot coexist for this little ball of anxiety

whats cool about being trans is my parents are totally right. i did kill their beautiful son. im the thing that animates his corpse in an ever more convincing parody of a happy girl. i devoured him from the inside out and now there is nothing left of him and he is dead dead dead and there is only me, with my hollow eyes and dark eyeliner and long hair, and my big smile. my limp, effeminate gestures belie the marionetting of the boy they loved. my fagginess is his death. already his body becomes a fitter home for my parasitism in full; the tits, the hips, the thighs. sorry about your kid. thanks for the biomass <3

and with your help it can rack up 700k notes on tumblr in 2024

no tumblr this doesnt need tags im releasing it into the wild as god intended

actually im just gonna make my own post about it: please read more webcomics. please try them. every time people make posts about “aw man i wish SOMEone would WRITE about FLAVOR OF QUEER THING/TRAUMA OR ABUSE BUT IN SPECIFIC WAYS I CAN RELATE TO/WHATEVER” and then it gets reblogged into a giant thread of people agreeing with it and demanding Content i die because whatever it is is definitely being painstakingly created by an indie author who would really like for people to consume it and every time i point this out people suddenly can’t read lmao

it is out there it is free it is being made from firsthand experiences by people who care very very deeply who would be DELIGHTED to hear that it’s resonating with anybody at all, please throw some of that enthusiasm and support at people who will actually appreciate it

if you’re an indie comic person and any of this applies to you i encourage you to reblog this with a link to your comic and a short synopsis so people can browse the notes and find shit they’re looking for. or make your own post on your own blog if you don’t want to fool with other people i don’t care this is a sign from the universe that you should be louder about what you’re working on because people can’t fucking find it apparently.

i’ll go first i make kidd commander and it’s about an ensemble cast of queers on their way to kill god, they live on an airship and they’re all too pissed off to die. it’s free to read and it’s in the middle of its third arc right now. it lives here http://kiddcommander.com/

go go go

Elden Beast appearance is depending on the ending

Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.