Obsessed With Mass Market Paperbacks. Their Pleasing Rectangular Proportions. How They Fit Badly In A

This is actually so creative I can't even

Dandelion

You open your eyes and look around So bright and blue, the sky You’re in your mother’s embrace, so safe and sound Till the wind blows out and makes you fly

You fly around in the wind’s embrace You see a child running after you With giggles and a big grin on his face You’ve never felt so special, have you?

Suddenly, you’re grabbed by a hand, so wild And you close your eyes in fear But when you open your eyes you see a beautiful child And you know that it’s going to be safe here

The child smiles and whispers down in your ear And you feel so contented to hear his secret You feel happier when he says “you’re beautiful, oh dear” As he continues wishing for a little pet

He blows you away and the wind catches you  But now you finally understood That there’s nothing else that you want to do Because being a dandelion feels so good

Fuck them. Fuck them for laughing. Fuck them for being so mindless. It hurts even worse knowing laughing at pain wasn't a conscious decision. It came so naturally to them.

Fuck them for having the power to hurt me without even thinking about it.

//—i thought about adding what situation exactly I mean but does it even matter

Hope has dirt under her fingernails

Hope has dirt under her fingernails. Her broken foot trembles beneath her as she stands up, reading herself for another punch.

Faith clutches the rim of the sink, breath fogging up the mirror. Then she takes her meds and closes the door behind her.

Perseverance hands bribes to cops and takes the first cleaning job she gets, eyes averted as she gets slapped for tardiness.

Selflessness shivers on her bedroom floor, the memory of loosing a patient on the operation table replaying behind her eyelids again.

Love sits in the visitors hall of the hospital, waiting to replace the wilted flowers beside the coma patient.

Passion only leaves the house to go to therapy, the world too painful to look at for long.

Strength looks at the others and decides to make a home in their hearts.

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

Woon Young, on Tumblr

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Culture Shock

Guys, I am currently experiencing culture shock, in the city I live in since my birth.

Let me explain...

After my school burned down (again), I got a letter from an unknown source (though I believe it's from one of the Wayne Kids).

The Letter said that I had received a full scholarship, allowing me to visit Gotham Academy for my senior year.

My entire family was overjoyed, because that meant that we didn't have to look for a new school AND that i get a decent education (plus Gotham Academy doesn't look too bad on College Applications).

In the letter I was also invited to a visitation day (which was today) and let me tell you, that school is... it's something else.

It looks as if it's never been burned, they have non damaged and clean tables, PLANTS!!!, and MORE THAN ONE room full of Computers that aren't from 2002.

We also ate in their cafeteria, and y'all, it's edible food.

I am absolutely floored.

They also gave me my school-uniform and honestly, those are the nicest clothes I've ever owned.

(I mean I guess you can expect these things for the price tag. I mean I couldn't afford the books, let alone the tuition, so thank you whoever gave me the scholarship <3)

Anyway, I am excited for my first day of school.... tommorow?? (Damnit Gotham Academy is in a different school district, my twin brother got another 2 weeks of holidays(Im not gonna hear the end of it)).

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.

Andrea Gibson, Lord of the Butterflies

working on a zine about the intersections of fatness, gender, and growing up online. it's a long time coming and i'm still not sure where it'll take me.