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good news! you're an animorph! bad news! you didn't know about the two-hour limit and got stuck in your first morph, which is whatever this wheel lands on

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Anyways the societal view of sex as a shameful ≠ a societal acceptance of non-sexual people.

Sexual shame is intended to give people a deep sense of inadequacy and impurity over basic desires. It’s intended to make a person ashamed of themselves so that they will listen to authority figures who claim to have a solution to this “impurity”. So an ace or sex repulsed person who is less receptive to sexual shame, either because of a lack of sexual attraction or a strong dislike of sex, poses a threat to whoever that authority figure is.

This makes the idea of non-sexual people as “broken” and “subhuman” of great benefit to the power structure because it provides ace and sex repulsed folks with a different reason to be ashamed of who they are and subsequently makes them just as easy to control as the rest of the population. 

This is why we can’t separate the movements for sex positivity and ace acceptance. At the root of it, both groups are fighting against the same thing, so we need to work together if we want to be effective. 

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Thinking about Krile.

Krile, who woke up one day from a coma to find that she was alone in the world. Who lost her home, her colleagues, her friends, the legacy of her grandfather, all in an instant. Who found out that the gift that she'd cursed for half her life saved her, and no one else. Who thought that maybe, at least her childhood friend and her dearest friend, both in distant Eorzea, might be safe and alive. Who received nothing but silence from either of them. And found out one day, months later, years later, that neither of them were ever coming back.

Krile, who continued on more alone in the world than ever before with nothing but a smile.

(Krile, who we didn't even get to see take a moment to hear about or process the fact that G'raha shut himself in a tower to sleep maybe forever without so much as a goodbye.)

(Krile, who learned that her dearest friend Minfilia was gone forever and simply carried on with a smile because there was work to be done. Much like Minfilia carried on with a smile when she heard her dearest friend Krile was in a coma. Because there was work to do. And to think, Minfilia never got to find out that Krile was all right.)

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this scene really stuck with me

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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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Small pikmin drawing :>

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when the adrenaline wears off and you realize you've been fighting throughout the night

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He’s trying to scam a fruit gusher offa me!!!!

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“And what of my wishes?!”

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Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

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Some of my headcanon for Urianger and Moenbryda in their youth: For a good chunk of time, Moenbryda is Urianger's only friend, meanwhile she is a very social person and he is definitely not her only friend. Urianger, despite frequently acting annoyed by her being around, starts to grow acccustomed to and even like her being around. And then starts to notice when she's not. And there's a phase of their friendship where he's really clingy, especially when she's trying to get him to open up more and meet more people. Probably at some point invites him to a terrible party where he spends most of the night outside because it's Loud and there are too many people he doesn't know.

Moenbryda starts dating before he does, and the first time Urianger finds himself just horribly jealous and does not yet have the emotional maturity to process why, so he just sulks and gives her the silent treatment instead, and Moenbryda is like "WTF why are you acting like this" and Urianger cannot give her an honest answer because he himself doesn't really know, so instead they pointlessly argue over nothing and then don't speak to each other for a while (which is awkward considering they live in the same house). It probably takes at least another two years for him to admit he actually has feelings for her himself.

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Hot take: Actual literary analysis requires at least as much skill as writing itself, with less obvious measures of whether or not you’re shit at it, and nobody is allowed to do any more god damn litcrit until they learn what the terms “show, don’t tell” and “pacing” mean.

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Oh. I really just reblogged two “not to be an annoying kids-these-days type but” posts in a row, didn’t I?

I feel the need to clarify that the kids are, mostly, alright. I’m really proud of a lot of them, and I’m hoping a lot of the others will grow out of their bullshit.

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honestly not to be an annoying 'kids these days' zillenial but i do feel sorry for kids who won't grow up with mythbusters, i don't remember a disturbing amount of my life before i was 15 but you know what i remember? the mild mannered guy with a beret and a walking advertisement for adderall blowing shit up for fun every week

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Not to venerate the halcyon and bygone days of yore, but it used to be that declaring that girls are too fragile and delicate to ever possibly compete with the boys or ever be as good as them at anything was rightly denounced as the kind of raging sexisim that made you sound like the flatly written villain of a teenybopper movie.

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hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

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