You do not want this future to happen to you I promise you. Because the minute you enter into a subscription existence you allow for a possibility of losing everything. Why?
Well, because when you stop paying then you stop having.
I buy my cars outright for this reason.
I have not thrown away my DVD collection for this reason.
I still have my old-school ipod for this reason.
I buy songs I really like direct from the artist on top of my subscription for this reason.
I back shit up on to my external hard drives rather than depending on a cloud only for this reason (which reminds me that I need to do taht this weekend).
If someone ELSE is holding the physical source of what you’re paying for? YOU DON’T OWN IT. You’re just giving someone your energy and time for permission to access it.
You’re leasing your existence.
Don’t fucking fall for it, do you hear me?
It’s bad enough we have to lease our water, our heat, our internet and our entertainment.
Buy what you want outright WHENEVER YOU CAN. Then do anything you can to maintain it in the face of planned obsolescence. I promise you, there will be a moment when you will be glad you did
Because aside from relationships? Things are literally all the system let us keep in this existence so don’t lease your fucking possessions if at all avoidable because at this stage in capitalism we’re all a few bad days from being unable to pay those leases. And then what? Then you only have what you can keep and it is those comforts and necessities that will keep you going, I promise you. Don’t let there be anything more that can be taken from you than absolutely necessary.
I KNOW that playing God is morally wrong, but holy HELL, it looks fun.
Why is it playing God? We aren’t violating any natural laws. God set the parameters of the universe to allow these things. There’s nothing wrong with it, there’s no hubris in learning more about how to manipulate the universe around us.
We made a whole-ass fish.
The reason this was accidental BTW is because they used paddlefish eggs as a negative control group for a breeding experiment on sturgeons because the scientists, quite naturally, assumed that they were SO unrelated it would be genetically impossible for them to mate. Like. I cannot stress enough to you how these creatures last related ancestors were
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
It sort of goes against the rules of genetics a bit.
Oh i forgot to add
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.
the scientists literally had to do the tests AGAIN just to be like “okay this is real right. This is actually like, not a fluke, this works right” and it worked again. They just Can!
So for those who don’t know what the original fishes look like, this is an American Paddlefish:
And this is a Russian Sturgeon:
So honestly, saying the hybrid is “weird looking” is a bit fort de café when you see its parents. I think the sturddlefish looks cute.
“these creatures last related ancestors were 140 million years back”
(glances at fish)
Yeah that’s exactly what I thought you’d look like, you Mesozoic fuck
he had a dream that five strangers silently entered his home and gently helped him pull on a pair of high waisted jeans, which caused him to wake up with a feeling of “indescribable dread”
