self-loathing men and forgotten women

jungkook and his toe socks against the world 😤

+bonus:

Spin the wheel again. That's who's trying to protect you.

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.

bts music videos — mic drop (2017)

I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”

I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.

i experienced a brief moment of crisis and said back ’yes. planets are real. did you…. think they weren’t real?’ and he looked even more disturbed and said, ‘no. they’re just made up for movies and shit, right?’ and i was totally horrified by this point and said ‘planets are real. the solar system has nine of them. the universe has billions of them. we make up fictional planets for movies but there are definitely real planets that actually exist.’

he said, like he sincerely thought i was fucking with him, ‘how do you know planets are real?’

i said, ‘i’ve seen them. i’ve seen saturn through a telescope. you can go outside right now and see mars and venus in the sky. i swear that planets are a real thing.’

he said, muttering now, ‘well, maybe that’s just what you think.’

trivia: love love yourself in fukuoka

“Seven dozen people lost their lives in that explosion,” says Jimin grimly. “The elementals called rank and refused to disclose details for weeks. We still don’t know much about it, but we do know that the perpetrator was Jeon Jungkook. It was a—scandal doesn’t really encompass it. He’s the son of a fire elemental and a water elemental, both of whom are in the Elemental Assembly, but he kept out of the public eye until last year. When he caused the deadliest magical explosion in Korea in seventy years. And then disappeared.” Seokjin makes a strangled sound in the back of his throat. “Only to turn up in a seal shop in the middle of Seoul?” [Jeon Jungkook's been on the run for a year now, fleeing charges of murder and arson, but Park Jimin—and Jimin's clan—are about to bring that to an abrupt halt. Or: in a world full of magic, BTS, as always, find a way to pave a new path of music, dance, and love.]