Welcome home, Theseus!

During one visit, Ruth noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had AIDS.

On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Ruth decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.

In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told Ruth he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, "Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming!”

Ruth called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a "sinner" and already dead to her, and that she wouldn't even claim his body when he died.

“I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, "Oh, momma. I knew you’d come", and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, "I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Ruth later recounted.

Ruth pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him

and held his hand until he died 13 hours later.

After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Ruth buried his ashes on her family's large plot.

After this first encounter, Ruth cared for other patients. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them.

Ruth’s work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, "They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here'd come the money. That's how we'd buy medicine, that's how we'd pay rent. If it hadn't been for the drag queens, I don't know what we would have done", Ruth said.

Over the next 30 years, Ruth cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family's plot most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes.

Cashier: Can I help you?

Tommy, slapping down a bag of bird seed onto the counter: Yeah, how long does it take for these to grow into birds?

Sylvanas - Ode to Klimpt

You ever get an idea in the middle of the night that drives you absolutely insane until you get it out in one form or another? Yeah that was me at 1am when the idea for this smacked me upside the head like a bowling ball thrown off a building. I gave up on trying to sleep at 5am and loaded up on 3 nitro cold brews, and well, here we go. 

Loosely based on Gustav Klimpt’s “Judith and the head of Holofernes” 

I did this in one sitting. My ass is very unhappy about this fact.

I like to imagine she played soccer with the head off the top of Icecrown Citadel, maybe punting it towards the Argent fairgrounds to give someone a good scare.

You know what’s funny? In college I adamantly REFUSED to use Gustav Klimpt for any of the “masters studies” or similar projects on the sole grounds that literally everyone did it at some point. Welp, guess I’ve joined that club now. 

name: medea

pronouns: they/them, fae/faer, xe/xem

age: 18+

reads for: autism spectrum (specifically high empathy, “lower functioning”), being queer and disabled, nonbinary lesbian, afab transgender, genderfluid, asexual spectrum, aromantic spectrum, the non-curvy fat experience, severe adhd, osdd-1b system, borderline personality disorder, celtic pagan, discordian, dyscalcula, dysgraphia, motor skill disabilities, glasses since 4 years old, c-ptsd, being fat with disordered eating, polyamorous, delusions and paranoia due to mental illness, survivor of childhood sexual abuse / exploitation and again later on as an adult

sensitivity reading:

general questions and discussion: yes in-depth discussion of plots and characters: yes partial read (relevant sections): yes full read: yes

willing to read: original work, fanfiction (world of warcraft, critical role, netflix’s castlevania, dungeons and dragons, dream smp, mortal kombat, legends of korra, beastars, a court of thorns and roses, throne of glass, fairy tail), erotica/nsfw/explicit scenes

unwilling to read: available on request

rates: $15 usd (flexible) an hour for continuous support and manuscript reading with discussions. $3 usd for a thoughtful answer to a single question (with follow up for clarity ofc). i’ll allow discounts for students and for projects that i really like. price negotiable for discussion and reading less than a page. if content is something that’s harder for me to get through or deals with more intense material i may charge more

contact: @3stepsfromthegrave

Women’s History Month Variant Covers March 2021

So here’s the thing about rhino hunting: it’s perfectly legal IF you have the permits. It’s just expensive. You have to get the permit to hunt and the permit to import back to your home country. Rhinos selected for hunting are old, post-reproductive bulls. They’re not really genetically valuable anymore, and having the ability to sell hunting rights encourages African landowners to keep rhinos on their land. Trophy hunts aren’t figured into the poaching numbers… at all.  When they say that poaching has gone up or down, they are not including trophy hunting because those numbers are totalled separately. Trophy hunters have to buy permits, and this is not a financial problem for them. While it’s not completely unheard of (there’s one guy in particular, a South African big game rancher/hunter named Dawie Groenenwald, who did bring in twelve Americans to trophy hunt on his land- read more about that here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/), that’s not where the real money is. I’m certainly not saying that all trophy hunting is legitimate or even if any of it’s a good idea. What I’m saying is that it’s irrelevant to the poaching numbers.

The people killing these rhinos aren’t taking them as trophies.

They’re selling the horns in Vietnam.

Other Asian countries too, mostly China and anywhere that’s had significant sinicization, but Vietnam’s burgeoning economy and the meteoric rise of an emergent upper-middle business class has meant that it’s where all that rhino horn is going. It’s a status symbol, a way to curry favor with business higher ups (Source: http://www.poachingfacts.com/faces-of-the-poachers/buyers-of-rhino-horn/). This isn’t even a secret. The people who traffic rhino horn say openly where it goes (Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/). They talk about how it gets there, and who does the killing. It’s an enormous industry and immensely valuable. TRAFFIC has been working on this for over a decade now, figuring out who’s killing the rhinos and where the horns are going. Nine years ago, the first big report from TRAFFIC came out on the trade from the African rhino-having countries to Asia. Here’s the link to that: http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/trafficrhinoreportsummary.pdf

Nat Geo did the numbers again in 2015, in that article I linked above. Things haven’t changed much since then.

The reason poaching went down during covid isn’t that the actual hunters weren’t allowed to travel. (Besides, do you really think that if it was rich white dudes doing the majority of the poaching, it would have slowed down or stopped? Money, dear boy, can get you pretty much anything you want. A chartered flight to Kenya, a private home to stay in… a rhino permit or two…) Rather, the middleman dried up. It’s only profitable to kill a rhino if you can move the parts, and if your middleman isn’t traveling between the rhino countries and the Asian market, well…

And you can probably guess who the middlemen are. Often they’re students. Frequently they’re workers. And until recently, they were mostly Vietnamese or Chinese nationals. Now, TRAFFIC notes that many rhino horn syndicates are using white South Africans due to heightened suspicion. (Source: http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/environment/125451/profiling-ups-risk-for-asian-rhino-horn-mules.html)

And normally, there actually is a lot of traffic between China and Vietnam and the rhino countries. I don’t know if people here are quite aware of the relationship between China and several African countries- particularly Kenya, but there’s been a lot of Asian investment into Africa. In Kenya, you see a lot of Chinese workers coming in, working on development projects, and then going back to China. Something like 20% of African infrastructure projects are funded by China; one out of every three is built by Chinese firms. (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-07-19/china-s-belt-and-road-leaves-kenya-with-a-railroad-to-nowhere). Most of the part-time labor is local (source: http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/801581468195561492/pdf/WPS7614.pdf), but not all of it- and the full time labor, while mostly local, is roughly 22% Chinese citizens. There were well over 150,000 Chinese workers in Africa before the pandemic (source: http://www.sais-cari.org/data-chinese-workers-in-africa). You also saw a lot of Vietnamese workers… before the pandemic. Both China and Vietnam called their citizens home pretty quickly. Vietnam in particular. By July 2020, arrangements for most Vietnamese workers in Africa had come through after a good deal of public outcry, and they were back in Vietnam (source: https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/19011-stuck-in-guinea-equatorial,-vietnamese-workers-forced-to-work-despite-rampant-covid-19-cases).

No middlemen, no profit. No profit, no poaching. It’s not a triumphant story of white trophy hunters butting out of a place they don’t belong; it’s a much more complicated story of economic oppression of native Kenyans, South Africans, and citizens of other rhino countries and exported Vietnamese and Chinese workers.

Poaching isn’t what it used to be. It’s gotten a lot more complex, and reducing it to something that hasn’t been true since the 1950s-1970s means that we ignore the real problems and direct our energy into something that isn’t happening. It’s like… how when a corporation tells you to take personal responsibility for climate change. This isn’t a single person sneering and shooting a rhino. This is an entire industry that CITES and other NGOs are trying hard to grapple with. The nature of the beast has fundamentally changed.  I get that it’s really easy to blame Europe and America for the shit that’s been done to subsaharan Africa’s natural resources. It’s right, too, but… the story of people attempting to extract resources from the continent isn’t over. Ignoring that the market for rhino horn isn’t the trophy industry just makes it easier for that particular black market to go unchecked.

Additional sources and information:

https://www.savetherhino.org/what-we-do/reducing-illegal-trade/

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/rich-men-rhino-horns/529455/

https://www.savetherhino.org/thorny-issues/trophy-hunting-and-sustainable-use-rhinos/

http://www.poachingfacts.com/poaching-statistics/rhino-poaching-statistics/