transmandrake

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Evidence to my previous reblogs tags

What the actual fuck

These are not the same fucking character

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x

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Pulp sci-fi illustration by Italian artist, Aldo Di Gennaro (b. 1938).

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On one hand, it's great to see people learn how to unfuck their living spaces. On the other hand, that stuff like "frequently used articles should be stored near where they're used" and "trash receptacles should be placed near activities that generate trash" are being received as radical ideas points to a serious knowledge transmission problem.

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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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hi everyone! the developer of the website I host Explorerz on is having a hard time covering his monthly costs. i think Comicfury is such a wonderful space for comics and one of the few remaining websites that values art over predatory profiteering. Kyo makes it a point to keep the game level - ads are opt-in, custom css for comics is available to everyone, etc. if you can spare a couple bucks each month (the lowest tier is $3 which shakes up to 36 dollars a year), you’d be preserving one of bastions of creator-centered webcomic culture and helping it continue its growth!

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Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (HAL Laboratory, Nintendo, 2000)

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sad helicopter ;m;

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foxtaur!

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Organizing these small drawings

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just some sketchbook doodles working with low-budget supplies I used crazart colored pencils / Markers, Crayola watercolors, sharpies, apple-barrel acrylic, a rainbow pencil and some knock-off acrylic pens.

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being plural means you feel like you're normal and then you remember you are wearing the skin of your former self that probably doesn't really exist anymore and occasionally worries about cartoon characters and furry ocs possessing your body for a minute because you got triggered over something random.

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you lost yourself to the woke agenda. Stop being a trans man and go back to a cis man

I don't know what to add in response to this ask it's perfect on it's own. I don't want to soil it

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candlegirl meets her match

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It is so annoying when people respond to "the queer community has an anti-masc problem" with "well society loves and praises masculinity!" Okay... yes... but that's not what we're talking about 😭 The queer community ≠ society as a whole. Also? The society that praises masculinity does NOT praise queer masculinity. Cishet society does not praise butches, masculine trans people, or anyone who is masc in a queer way. And unfortunately, many queer people have this same problem.