Around the 1920s, a few big game hunters visited the sub-saharan region of Africa to search for a magnificent catch. They stayed there for six weeks, but didn't manage to kill a single creature... Not even a simple zebra.

When they returned home, the had to inform their club of other wealthy sportsman that their trip was fruitless. Overcome with embarassment, one of the men shouted that they killed a giant beast, but were not able to transport it home. A lion? A rhinoceros? An elephant? The men asked, curious.

"No, no, no," the hunter told them, lying through his teeth. "It was much larger! It was... a hulking beast!"

The other unsuccessful hunters joined in with their own descriptions. A neck stretching upwards of twenty feet... horns atop it's long face... gangly legs and hooved feet... The other men were enamored with the insane stories of this incredible creature. They called it the giraffe.

Their lie quickly got out of hand. Their friends demanded that they tell the local newspaper of their discovery. Imagining that the story wouldn't be too impactful, they told a journalist of the legendary giraffe. It spread all around the country in the blink of an eye.

So, in order to further their charade, the men founded the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, an organization dedicated to making the world believe in giraffes. They created state of the art robotics and puppets that were sold to zoos, reservations, and even released into the wild. Some of their designs are still used today.

If you think that you've seen a giraffe, you're wrong. What you believed was a giraffe is nothing but metal alloy and code. Giraffes aren't real, and they never were.

Especially when dealing with minorities, representation and diversity matters. If white writers only wrote about white characters, then any attempts at diversity would be extinguished. I believe that writing characters of other races and nationalities, the most important thing is doing it correctly. Writing a character of another race badly is worse than not including them at all.

Flashing. Ringing. Searing. Every sound is piercing. Screams echo in the distance, perhaps the wallowing cries of my own agony. Voices skitter around me like maggots over a corpse, or rather like doctors over my burnt flesh. I desperately want to open my eyes and make sense of what’s happening, but I’m not even sure if I have any. All I can remember is my bones snapping against the guardrail, the putrid smell of gasoline, and then, the flames. I can make out pieces of conversation… Can she hear us?... 98% of her body… I doubt she’ll make it through the hour… Dying seems like a precious gift, a neatly wrapped package adorned with a bow. Out of everything in life I once feared of losing, I never expected to be clutching so tightly to death. The only breaths I can take from my smoke-filled lungs are jagged. Slipping. Falling. Fading.