amour-de-tous

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Here you go. Every known member of the DOGE Boys and Girls club.

Interestingly Katie Miller, former Pence VP aid and spouse of Nazi Stephen Miller, somehow found a job she is not qualified for with DOGE.

DOGE itself is corruption, waste, cronyism, and fraud. Save the government money by abolishing the DOGE Asshole Squad.

🤬

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SEBASTIAN STAN attends the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards on February 22, 2025

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People often say LOTR is a story about hope. (I'm reminded of it because someone said it in the notes of my Faramir post.) And that's true, but it's not the whole picture: LOTR is in large part a story about having to go on in the absence of hope.

Frodo has lost hope, as well as the ability to access any positive emotion, by Return. He is already losing it in Towers: he keeps going through duty and determination and of course Sam's constant help.

For most of the story, Sam is fueled by hope, which is why it's such a huge moment when he finally lets go of the hope of surviving and returning home, and focuses on making it to the Mountain. To speed their way and lighten the load, he throws his beloved pots and pans into a pit, accepting that he will never cook, or eat, again.

When Eowyn kills the Witch King, she's beyond hope and seeking for a glorious death in battle. It's possible that in addition to her love and loyalty for Théoden, she's strengthened by her hopelessness, the fear of the Nazgúl cannot touch someone who's already past despair.

Faramir is his father's son, he doesn't have any more hope of Gondor's victory or survival than Denethor does, he says as much to Frodo. What hope have we? It is long since we had any hope. ... We are a failing people, a springless autumn. He knows he's fighting a losing war and it's killing him. When he rejects the ring, he doesn't do it in the hope that his people can survive without it, he has good reason to believe they cannot. He acts correctly in the absence of hope.

Of course LOTR has a (mostly) happy ending, all the unlikely hopes come true, the characters who have lost hope gain what they didn't even hope for, and everyone is rewarded for their bravery and goodness, so on some level the message is that hope was justified. But the book never chastises characters who lost hope, it was completely reasonable of them to do so. Despair pushed Théoden and Denethor into inaction, pushed Saruman into collaboration, but the characters who despaired and held up under the weight of despair are Tolkien's real heroes.

(In an early draft of Return, Frodo and Sam receive honorary titles in Noldorin: Endurance beyond Hope and Hope Unquenchable, respectively. Then he cut it, probably because it was stating the themes of the entire book way too obviously, because this is what Tolkien cared about, really: enduring beyond hope. Without hope.)

Also, people who know more than me about the concept of estel, feel free to @ me.

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Sebastian Stan arriving at the Spirit Awards.

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Sebastian Stan at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards on February 22, 2025 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty Images)

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Sebastian Stan attends the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards on February 22, 2025 in Santa Monica, California. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

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I respect this moment so much. Him willing to be honest that he'd been fooled and played by this man as a way to try to persuade the people who are currently being fooled and played.

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he used ███ to make ████

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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.

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Asdfghjkl your drawings are always so adorable.

Could we get a tiny dragon?

He’s just a baby

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Big day for deranged evangelical freaks

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In response, Cheney, who has been a vocal critic of Trump, accused Vance and the former president of “abandoning the cause of freedom.” She posted, “Rarely has so much ignorance and ahistorical BS been crammed into a single tweet. I know you and @realDonaldTrump are busy surrendering to a KGB butcher, abandoning the cause of freedom, and destroying the security of America and her allies, but you would do well, @JDVance, to spend some time actually studying history.”

Earlier this week, Trump had referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator” after Zelensky accused Trump of spreading Russian propaganda.

Cheney ended her reply with a quote from Ronald Reagan, saying, “Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”

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Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes aka The Winter Soldier

Exclusive Outtake from Captain America: The Winter Soldier

@homoeroticfisticuffs asked for a way to find all of these outtakes so I'm gonna post this. These are all I have posted so far. I only have 5 left unreleased.

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whoever bought the domain spidersge.org and had it go to a simple html page with nothing except the text of the famous spiders georg post:

Thank you. You are doing good work. Hope you have a wonderful day

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the best time to grieve is when it spites the people who tell you not to

[ID: a 4-panel comic in medieval manuscript style of a person in blue sitting on a basket. /In 1 a person off-panel says: "What are you doing over there?" /2: That person comes on panel wearing yellow and helps Blue hold down the basket. Blue: "Trying to push down my grief about my illness" Yellow: "Have you tried platitudes?" /3: Blue yells at the basket: "'It could be worse!'" /4: A dragon pushes up the lid of the basket to yell: "It could be better" /end ID]

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Genuine question: I've switched to Firefox no less than five times. I try so, so hard to make it work. It used to be my preferred browser, for years.

But it crashes. Constantly. Over and over again it restarts, and I lose my place on the Tumblr dash, and all my tabs have to reload, and by the time it's all back up, it crashes again.

This is true on both my laptops and my Mac mini.

What am I doing wrong? Why won't it stay open for me?

"Firefox sucks" "firefox is clunky" "firefox doesn't work" with all due respect what the fuck are you talking about

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I've asked this question before and been surprised by the results, now I have access to more weirdos it's your problem:

It is the middle of a Sunday afternoon. You have nothing on, and aren't expecting visitors, deliveries or post.

Unexpectedly, there is a knock at the door.