june "unrelated string"

140 MILLION YEARS BACK.

If you don't know how far that is, that's basically the start of the cretaceous. Let me simplify that for you even further. Chimpanzees and humans seperated, what, 5 or 6 million years ago?

This is basically like if humans could hybridise with THESE THINGS.

This is the sort of thing that should be impossible. They used those eggs to be ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN.

And then THEY GOT FISH OUT OF IT.

Like. You can quite clearly understand why they didn't think anything would happen. WE ARE MORE RELATED TO BLUE WHALES THAN THESE THINGS.

THE AMERICAN PADDLEFISH AND THE STURGEON ARE SO COMPLETELY UNRELATED THAT THIS IS NOT PLAYING GOD. IF ANYTHING THIS IS AN ACT OF GOD.

THE SCIENTISTS HAD NO BLAME IN THIS BECAUSE NOTHING LIKE THIS HAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE

THESE THINGS, FOR HYBRIDS, HAD A REALLY HIGH SURVIVAL RATING. LIKE 70% OF THEM SURVIVED.

To put that into perspective, getting a blue whale and a squirrel and trying to hybridise them is more sensible, and that wouldn't produce anything but getting you banned from science. Most animals that aren't plants can barely hybridise two degrees away from each other.

BUT THESE TWO ENTIRELY UNRELATED FISH create PERFECTLY HEALTHY HYBRIDS.

And this is a Russian Sturgeon:

(glances at fish)

before the sturddlefish, a purple squale would have seemed more likely- and since that's ridiculous and obviously no one would think that's possible except as a joke, that should speak to HOW impossible this situation seemed, and why they thought obviously this will be perfectly fine. If you took squirrel eggs (the gamete) and tried to use whale sperm to fertilize them, you could reasonably expect that to not work. That should be a good control. The eggs would definitely not actually be fertilized, and even if sperm somehow made it into the egg and some kind of development started, you would expect them to not make it to term and definitely not make a whole ass new animal that's perfectly fine actually.

woag

Oh the world is ending and you need to know about this one specific thing? Yeah I have a guy for that but he doesn't feel like fronting right now

Sorry what's happening rn is this the bad guy? Yeah I just switched in idk what's going on

I know you're dating one alter but we're currently co-con with another alter who hates you so idk how I'm feeling rn

like i did not actually know about any of this shit until i looked up a basic plot synopsis of silence of the lambs and. that is literally beyond parody??

like, okay, yeah, sure, that totally doesn't make it even worse. i guess it can't be profoundly harmful trans representation unless you just can't Get Off Your High Horse to defer to hannibal motherfucking lecter as an authority on gatekeeping trans identity. this piece of media that emerged from a painfully recent historical context of real living trans people being systematically invalidated and abused with the right to basic medical care tauntingly dangled at the edge of their reach can't be transphobic at all if you have the Common Sense to agree that that was good actually nothing wrong there, what do you mean you're friends with multiple victims of that and would have been one yourself stop changing the subject shut up

Silence of the Lambs, Ace Ventura, RHPS, Sleepaway Camp, Longlegs, Psycho, the list goes on and on and on and The Hateful Image of You lives on in the hearts of everyone around us and TME people expect us to just, not care? Is it so hard to empathize with a trans woman for one minute that they can't even conceive of having The Hateful Image of You depicting yourself in a warped portrait with blood smeared on it and how it makes us feel? Especially that its a beloved community gathering thing to take part in The Hateful Image of You? That The Hateful Image of You unites everyone else in enjoying it? That the sharing of it perpetuates its renewal over and over again?

The Cult Classic Gross-Out Comedy reserves the honor of "disgusting enough to make the characters themselves puke" for the mere existence of a trans woman, whose duplicitous schemes against the cultural institution of men's sports are foiled at last because the police are so automatically biased against anyone visibly trans that it doesn't matter in the slightest that she was outed by sexually assaulting her directly in front of them

The Essential Cultural Touchstone Of Psychological Horror Thrillers quite literally spells out as a premise that its villainess murders out of a warped and futile desperation to experience at least some precious scrap of womanhood, and that that proves she's too mentally ill to be trans and explicitly thus self-evidently deserves to have been gatekept from gender-affirming care in the first place

and The Timeless Progenitor Of Every Other Slasher Film Ever contrives the sensationalized hidden danger of its titular "psycho" with a mishmash of stigmas and fears ornamenting the core notion of a privileged "man"'s deviant and confused sexuality running amok in laughably Freudian fashion, as cemented by One Of The Most Singularly Iconic Scenes In The Entire History Of Cinema invoking the leering male gaze to make palpable a cis woman's vulnerability by stylistically likening her murder to rape, after which the intrigue hinges on a "false" female persona hiding the notionally male predator while also literally being directly responsible for the harm that inevitably comes of "his" innocent attraction, which, like, literally could not be more perfectly vile a reflex of the boldly contradictory demonization of trans women except in that it offloads a bit of the weird equals scary factor onto plurality instead

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.