I Feel It Must Depend On Your Definition Of Salad, Which At Its Broadest (a Dish Made Of Ingredients

there may possibly be one slightly hinged bat but sadly he is usually busy dusting Wayne Manor

I love when comics imply that Jason is a common gossip topic in vigilante and criminal circles.

Like in Batman and the Outsiders (2019) #6, when Jefferson says "From what people tell me... [Batman] gets kids killed."

And in Gotham War Red Hood, when Simpson tells Jason "they say he trained you."

People forget that you can light a bonfire with a candle; that's what this felt like to me.

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.

I invented Human Chow once! When I was in high school (and already very ornery on account of that) I found out that I had dietary restrictions, and decided I did not want to deal with that. So I teamed up with some actual nutritionists from the hospital that my mom worked at to create the cheapest, lowest ingredient, meal that I could eat three times a day indefinitely. Including all of the vitamins and nutrients that I would need, as well as the proper caloric balance. As I recall it involved soybeans, tomatoes, spinach, olive oil, and various veggies I could all get dried or frozen at the store. Then I put it through a food processor, and froze it into portioned pucks. It looked like vomit, tasted like whatever spices I threw on top of it that day, and meant I didn't have to worry about what I was eating for literal months, at the low low cost of being incredibly weird (and 25cents per plate). 10/10, I should get back to that.

I did, in fact, think of the meal cubes. I put it in an ice cube tray a couple of times, but I never did figure out how to dye it properly.

so tired of having to cook and trying to figure out wtf to eat, can I just have like. Specialized human dog food or something, like some vegetable and protein biscuits and a special drink so that I only have to think about maybe cooking something once a day instead.

The first one was a trap! This Side of Paradise is actually about avoiding groupthink and complacency. And also letting Leonard Nimoy actually have fun acting for once.

Star Trek TOS: Don’t do drugs. Here’s the episode witch alludes to use of drugs to escape reality.

Also Star Trek TOS: To survive this we need to get high… The whole ship crew actually needs to get high. And we sure going to have so much fun with it…

Conscience of the King! Gimme that sweet sweet Shakespeare in Space + Let's Talk About What To Do With Those Nazis We Found + those two guys who hate each other have to team up to unlock their mutual fave's Tragic Backstory(tm)

Reblog if your favorite Star Trek TOS episode is NOT, I repeat NOT "The City on the Edge of Forever", "Amok Time" or "The Tholian Web"! I need to know I'm not the only one who thinks there are other episodes that deserve to be favorite episodes!

Dangit I missed the window, gotta catch the next drop. (Never underestimate SH fans, they brought the guy back from the dead and haven't rested since)

WATSON'S SKETCHBOOK VOL 1 is available to purchase! 178 pages of black and white comics, illustrations, and occasional essays on Victorian queerness, covering the Watson's Sketchbook story from A STUDY IN SCARLET through SECOND INTERLUDE. Many of the comics have been updated and cleaned up from their online versions. Also they are signed and I drew a little guy inside!

I am frantically pushing this huge box of feels under a carpet labeled 'lol gay' and you waltz by and slide it off like a magician with a tablecloth. The nerve!

Recognizing that the "Unnecessary feelings" comment isn't about gay thoughts makes wrightworth better in my honest opinion.

"Seeing you gives me an extreme carnal reaction and I want to kiss you stupid"? WRONG. "Your being here makes me remember a time when I was truly happy. Your presence forces me to acknowledge the icy waters I am submerged in. Your fires make me realize how cold I am, and I'm too scared of reaching out. I'm scared that the moment I reach out, I will douse your flames because I am colder than the darkest parts of this trench I find myself in and I don't think your fire can handle it.

Your warm smile makes me realize how sad I truly am. I look into your bright eyes and feel the dark bags under mine sag. I am tired and I so badly want to rest my head, if only for a moment, on your shoulder, my oldest friend. My dearest friend. My only friend. I want nothing more than to cry in your arms, but my tears are so cold that I may snuff your embers when I wet your sleeves. You open your hands to me to take my burdens, but you don't understand how hefty it is. I will crush anyone under the weight of it, including you.

It would've been better had we not met, you are too earnest, too persistent, too kind for me. You will break yourself for anyone. I don't want to be the one you break yourself on. Because you are the only one who understood me.

Don't ever show your face in front of me again."

All of these options feel like saying "ampersand" aloud instead of "and."

It wouldn't be wrong, I suppose. "&" is a symbol for that word, and can be called that.

But why???

Thanks, Anon!

-submit your poll!-

Jonah should really have taken this as an object lesson as to Spiderman's willingness to stay down. Amazing Spiderman 20

This is literally the moral of one of Aesop's Fables the wolf and the spring lamb, and is more relevant today than ever before.

Your occasional reminder that if you post an art piece or a piece of writing that isn't very good, nothing bad will happen.

It's nothing to be scared of, what are people gonna do, be mean to you? Cruel people never need a "reason" to be mean to you, they do that anyway!

Fuck it!