>:3

Meep morp

ATTENTION

If you see this you are OBLIGATED to reblog w/ the song currently stuck in your head :)

Four months later and I’ve finally finished the next character, and the first non-human.

First regular human character

Eight detonations toll like bells as the leviathan finally fell still. Behind it, the hulking mass of the vessel split like a maw, mechanical arms grasping desperately like pharyngeal jaws attempting to stuff the corpse down its gullet. Lifeless eyes that had seen the passing of near a century slip above the surface a final time as it is dragged into the metal cavern under the unseeing gaze of its kin.

As the soulless beast of steel snags upon the pier the mighty corpse is hauled from the gloom into air choked with smog and the roars of flame. Its fat feeds the furnaces, it’s flesh fuels the half starved skeletons that scamper beneath the showers of sparks and screaming metal, over watched by stone faced enforcers and bent to the whim of the monsters that lurk in dens gilded with gold far beyond the land scarred with soot they use to line their pockets.

To compare those lords of depravity to the dutiful guild of scavengers, to the ever inventive legions of parasites or the humble handiwork of plagues would be a disservice to these pillars of nature’s establishment. They are a cancer, a corrupting rot spawned from a broken system, a self perpetuating scourge that bloats and grows as it draws the life from all that surround it until the entire house of cards collapses under their weight. This is not survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw, not pulling yourself up by the bootstraps nor the mandate proclaimed by some long dead god. It is a death cult, an ouroboros swallowing itself until the bloated head chokes on the famined tail, a self fulfilling prophecy of destruction doomed to fall.

But when the ash and dust have settled, the countless cohorts of creeping things have worked their time honoured role, when the unrelenting tides of time have weathered steel and skeleton alike, these kleptocratic kings of ruin will lie forgotten, merely another scar among the countless upon the Earth, the graves upon which they had built their foundations finally finding closure beneath silt and soil as the chorus of life sings on without them.

-bit of a vent post to try and deal with whatever the deep fried fuck is happening to the world rn

Messing around with some words, me and one of the Formid characters called Handra Kisund

Finally finished the most widely used Formid writing system. Be been working on the numbers for months now, and the alphabet for the past couple days.

At some point I’d like to make a conlang for it, but if I did that rn I would genuinely explode

(Also sorry the formatting is a tad shite, this has all been transcribed from a very messy stack of paper)

WARNING!!!!

People, please be careful. There are also people tracking children and people and putting bids on them based on their profile pictures on whatsapp, tracking and kidnapping them. Especially young children, so please be cautious, especially parents who have their children as their profile pictures.

Please pass this on to everyone so that they are aware of the danger. I don’t how it is all around the world but I know it can’t just be here so please please spread the word. Thank 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.

Cart :3

The flag of the Faerie Revolutionary Alliance, the first of many resistance and revolutionary movements to collaborated with the Allies during the Faerie War to overthrow the Faerie Empire (names are a work in progress, I know that’s a lot of faeries). The war hammer represents what was seen as a “people’s weapon” due to needing little metal, the tree represents the home trees many faeries build/built their civilisations in.