pfp source: no longer New York Times

apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.

dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!

although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!

on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.

furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.

annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D

As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%

"Hallownest's heart... Magnificent even in mourning."

closeups

There’s this idea that we see where creators think thar material about them/their characters is FOR them, and so they lay down rules about how things should be depicted (like you would on a gift for you) and they go into the comments to fight with people who put their tag on things they don’t like, etc. All these things that we see happening.

But they’re missing the point that— and I am not the first person to say this— things tagged with their character name are not there for them to see it, they’re there for other fans of the character to see it. I don’t post into the murderbot tag for the edification of Martha Wells, I post it for other murderbot fans. If Martha Wells showed up in my comments on an established fandom space I’m liable to panic-block and scramble for the exit.

And so these creators come in and say “this isn’t a good gift for me, don’t do this”, but that’s an essential misreading of the situation, and the thing is it’s kind of a presumptuous misreading of the situation when you’re monetizing your character. As my friend TD pointed out today, “don’t draw nsfw of my OC” is a perfectly normal thing to do within a peer to peer fandom context, but you are no longer interacting peer to peer when you have monetized your OC and are distributing them to as broad an audience as possible. You are the creator of a marketed figure. If you try to keep dictating people’s behaviour, that is how you become Anne Rice, which is never something you want to be.

But these creators are walking into spaces and saying that *everything tagged with their character name* is a gift for them and just like, no. If you keyword search your name on the entire internet you’re gonna overhear a lot of conversations that were not meant for you, and acting like it is even possible to make The Entire Internet safe for a public figure to look at is not a workable exercise.

Creators should not be walking into spaces where people are talking about their characters unless they’re ready to see a lot of things that were never made with them as the target audience. Make a fan art channel im your discord and let people bring things to you, but don’t walk onto the site where people’s favourite holidays to celebrate with characters include kinktober and whumptober and goreuary, where people explore their trauma through the lens of their favourite characters, where people experiment with different art styles and body type depictions of characters, where things that fall under the “fluff” umbrella include making characters into toddlers and making them so sad so they can have a hug, and expect that everything is going to be made with your comfort in mind. That’s just not how the fandom emotion works.

okay so i think i found the article op's (and me in my tags) talking about. being exposed to over 40 celsius (120 farenheit or so) for the whole day means youre sweating a LOT (the article says rashid- the farmer at the centre of the text- drinks around 17 liters a Day. humans usually only need 3, so i presume the rest is mostly used for sweat). so much so that the organizm reroutes water from other parts of itself to not die of heatstroke - salivary glands included, which means that 1. they have very little saliva in comparison to a healthy human being 2. what little their bodies DO produce is incredibly acidic, falling to ~5.5 ph from the ideal of 7ph. Teeth dissolve. Quickly. There's a mention of someone losing 8 teeth in two years

im not reading the whole article now (headache -_-), but later on the author of the article says about 30 million people (employed in agriculture) are at risk for extreme dental health problems. 30 million people at risk of not being able to eat solid food. 30 million people at risk of not being able to find work. being able to marry. being able to be part of their community. being able to speak clearly

Hi i loved the among us on guard demo SO much

Please call your representatives: VOTE NO on the FEDERAL BOOK BANNING BILLS HR 2616, HR 8705, and HR 7661!

Transcript below the cut.

If artists are the backbone of a fandom, then you all are the muscles. Connecting everyone and everything. Spreading fun and whimsy. That’s real neat, I think

nonhuman characters with no gender or their own distinct gender system that cannot compare to humans: pretty good pretty good

YES

and like done right, "nothing bad even happened" COULD be done really well. Like, Character A thinks they got Character B killed, fucks up their life over it, but Character B was actively hiding from them and there are huge emotional and interpersonal consequences? Good shit. Character A is guilty about Character B, Character B turns out to be alive, Character A is like, yay? Thumbs down emoji.

The biggest one I hate is "Character A thinks they got Character B killed and is very fucked up about it, Character B is not dead but thinks Character A has abandoned them and decides to become a villain about it even though it is really difficult to make us believe it's Character A's fault, even though Character A also thinks it is."