For the ones that need it today

I'm so tired

This is how it feels going to and from work in 2025

but you should see the other guy

JUST GUYS BEIN' DOODS

redraw of the meme under the cut

Happy Confederate Surrender Day!

i love hearing about elon musks continuous gaming blunders bc nobody is even forcing him to talk about video games ever he’s just obsessed with the self own

Multi-billionaire brought down by a guy in chat spamming “U HAVE NO FRIENDS AND WILL DIE ALONE”

put me in the universe where Columbo ran through the 1980s and had a crossover episode with Knight Rider. I think they deserved it, and I am not just saying that because they're my two favorite Old Shows. @telebeast wrote a little fanfic blurb about it and I HAD to visualize it into a comic (which is also the longest comic I have finished thus far at five pages...), so writing credit goes to them.

Autism W!

this company is so frustratingly misleading. They did not bring back the direwolf (Aenocyon dirus). They modified a modern grey wolf (Canis lupus) into having some direwolf morphology. There has been no de-extinction. This is pure hype slop. As a friend said "these are dire wolves the same way La Croix is a fruit".

oh my GOD i have so many thoughts on this shit.

first of all, HORRENDOUS marketing. Colossal Biosciences is doing INSANELY scummy shit, and they have tried to "bring back" creatures like woolly mammoths and dodos with no real success. i'd bet my bottom dollar they're trying to use this language for this project as a "proof of concept" to sell to investors, because THEY DID NOT DO SHIT.

they edited, by their own admission, 14 total genes, making 20 changes between them, using CRISPR technology (which is entirely it's own mess of a situation and probably doesnt give us the degree of control its usually sold as, but thats an entirely different can of worms)

but i need to make it clear. MOST OF THOSE CHANGES. WERE TO COLOR. other changes were to ear size, body size, and fur texture.

THEY MADE TIMBER WOLVES. THAT ARE WHITE. AND CALLING THEM DIRE WOLVES.

and if that wasn't bad enough, Dire Wolf were Not related to wolves. they're not in the same genus. dire wolves are most closely related to african jackals and african painted dogs than anything else currently alive. theyre more closely related to my niche canine blorbo The Dhole than any extant wolf species, particularly north american ones.

and lets be clear, even with jackals being the most related currently alive species, jackals are still more closely related to timber wolves than either one is to the dire wolf.

there are LITERALLY MILLIONS of genes worth of difference between grey wolves and jackals, and millions MORE between jackal and dire wolf. and they edited FOURTEEN. and CALLED IT A DIRE WOLF.

dire wolf were only Called that because they had similar skeletal shapes and pack hunting behavior, but currently we think they'd look more like a jackal or coyote than anything else. and reconstructing COLOR? spending MOST OF YOUR EDITS ON COLOR? this is not at all what a direwolf would look like, even remotely, and it CERTAINLY wont tell us anything about how they BEHAVED.

they make claims about how they want to release these animals into the wild (to their "rightful place" as their website says), but the ecological niche that dire wolf filled no longer exists. dire wolf are a species of megafauna, who specialized in hunting other megafauna. the only living species of megafauna is moose, and modern timber wolves, bear and humans are known for hunting those just fine. if you released a dire wolf into the north american wilds, it would compete with endangered timber wolves for resources.

its one thing to save a species from wild extinction that experienced it recently, where its niche was not otherwise filled, but wolves DID fill that niche. introducing a dire wolf at this point would have the same issues as introducing an invasive species. this was not a species that RECENTLY went extinct in the wild. there is no longer space to support an animal like a dire wolf in the wild.

they say they're "committed to transparency," but they refused to release the 2 complete dire wolf genomes they used to splice into the pups DNA. when it comes to welfare, they've refused to explain what species of surrogate they used (most speculate it was a domestic dog) or what care conditions for those are/were.

this is a flagrant marketing ploy, its total BS.

and not for nothing, the Colossal Biosciences website uses AI generated images.

you can do it, magikarp!

[art by me - neonscrapyard]

instagram || etsy

Note: your title, not your URL--for instance, mine is "I have a few dice…one or two maybe"

Thank you to everyone who read the post and understood that this is about your blog title, not your url

Pokemon Hanafuda

okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

Hell yeah

are you sure you’re there for us? how can i possibly tell these people to believe in you?

Tedesco