Reblog To Make Him Lose Another 200 Billion, Like To Make Him Lose 1 Billion

The showrunners of game of thrones, when asked by a director if there were any themes that they wanted to have appear in the episode he was directing, responded 'themes are for eighth grade book reports' and that's why I'm never going to trust any media they create from here on out

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

YOUR GOD IS DEAD, and you’re the unlucky soul tasked with figuring out who killed em. As sheriff, you are working to uncover the truth behind this tragedy before your parish’s rage boils over and makes the situation even worse. There’s someone or something on the loose that can kill a god, and it’s hard to know who to trust nowadays. You know you can rely on your horse, your gun, your faith, and your lawman’s intuition. Ride carefully, partner. There’s trouble afoot.

I’m super excited to announce that my new solo journaling game is now published - you can find it here! This game was made for the Hints & Hijinx Jam hosted by @pandiongames. If you’re interested, I encourage you to check out other entries - this system is super fun to play (and to write!).  WHO KILLED GOD? is a solo mystery game of divine catastrophe and small-town suspicion in a Weird West setting. This book has prompts and mechanics to help guide you, but it is up to you to follow the clues to wherever they lead, whether that’s to redemption or ruin. You play as your town’s sheriff, trying to find the party or parties responsible for the death of your god. You will explore various locations around town, meet with townsfolk, and attempt to gather evidence while getting yourself out of tricky predicaments and tight spots. At the end of the game, you’ll find out whether or not you were right.

*yoda voice* ahsoka, know not how to connect with children do we. Do tiktok dance you must!

Aight gonna out myself but why the fuck doesn't wotc have any easy way to order magic cards from Canada? every official retailer on their site either doesn't go to Canada or has the most limited bs options that cost so much more than they should accounting for exchange rates. There's one store near where I live but I don't have a car and I hate trying to deal with game store dudes I'm just miserable :(

spike watches a movie

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.

coming out as trans on other platforms: carefully worded statement, thoughtful reflection on my responsibilities as a public figure

coming out as trans on tumblr: SKIDDLE SKIDADDIDALE MY NAME IS ABIGAIL

You are microwave safe. You are dishwasher safe. You will not turn orange after one use. You will not deform under boiling water.

Little old Italian lady: Do you have zucchini?

Me: Yes, right here.

Lady: Is how much?

Me: $2.99 a pound.

Lady: It's usually $1.49.

Me: Yes, in the summer.

Lady, pauses, then grabs two: I put it in a soup.

Me: Oh nice, what kind are you making?

Lady: You will not fantasize about my soup.

And then she walked away. "You will not fantasize about my soup" will be in my head forever. I love you, little old Italian lady.