plz spare a crumb of dopamine

Storytelling wise, Charlie Brown is always going to fall for Lucy promising she’ll hold the football.

We're talking about characters that span decades of comics, not a few-season tv show that gets repetitive if you do the same story and don't keep moving characters forward.

If all people did in comics was stories no one had ever told something like with each character, they would become something unrecognizable.

Maybe you can change a character enough to have that happen, but should you? Why bother using that character at all if you're going to tell a story that's so unlike them instead of using them as the storytelling tool they are meant to be?

I also think with how overwhelming the amount of comics out there is, telling "the usual story" every once in a while is helpful for onboarding new people, so they understand how a character functions without having to have read everything.

The repetition and the basic beats are why people choose to read a specific title. If that’s not what you’re interested in, you go somewhere else.

Fundamentally, the way comics as long running stories work is ‘see Character in Scenario’.

And while I do love me continuity and decades long story arcs of growth and change, the reason those work is that they’re STILL putting Character in Scenario; character may now be showcasing a slightly different response.

If I want to read about ‘Bruce’s conflict over whether he’s Bruce Wayne or Batman’, I’ll read Bat comics. Sometimes they’ll fall one way, sometimes they’ll fall the other, but they keep interrogating that point over the years and adaptions.

If I want to read about ‘what drives a hero to kill’ I am not going to be trying to read Bat books! I’ll be off reading someone who does kill, whether that’s The Punisher or someone more moderate like various Manhunters.

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%

Like. This is a fucking game. Two boxers fighting one another in a ring are two gamers playing a game together. I cannot stress the extent to which boxing, MMA, et al are games created and pursued primarily for idle amusement. Just because the game is happening in a ring as opposed to on a pitch doesn't make it less of a game. We are Playing Toys when we glove up and clobber each other. It is For Fun. They're dangerous games, to be sure, but the danger is the chief source of amusement for the participants and the audience. The boxers wouldn't be boxing if they hated boxing.

"If we did co-ed boxing there would be Men Beating Up Women 😡" Last time I checked a fight requires at least 2 active participants unless you're just beating up on yourself alone like Edward Norton in that movie. And as I said above, I presume nobody would pursue a career in boxing if they didn't like doing the boxing.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?

couldn't find a thread with both the followups together

What does it take to make African mythology real? Everything we had. Over 70% of our Kickstarter Backers came from Tumblr. Thank you. Now it's yours.

One moment, we're a woman who can be spoken over, overlooked, and ignored. The next, (often when we have the gall to stand up for ourselves) we're men who are violent angry and abusive.

By gendered racialization I mean the way that society views and treats us based on their categorization of us as Black Men and Black Women. While with what OP is describing it tends to be an either/or situation, for Black transfemmes, being openly/visibly Black and transfemme makes us subject to both concurrently. We do not get to leave being a “Black Man” behind even temporarily in the eyes of others, especially given society’s view of all Black women as being “masculine” no matter how “femininely” we present or behave.

For us, gendered racialization compounds each other, leaving us to be treated as both Strong and Aggressive Black Women and Virile and Violent Black Men at all times. We are often “positively” reduced to the ways we can support those around us or our sexual prowess/characteristics (real or rumored), while the second a nonblack person has something to gain from our suffering there’s no issue painting all of our actions as intimidating, aggressive, or forward. Of claiming a fear of violence, of harm, of impropriety that will be believed by many nonblacks no matter how we truly act or what we do.

Recently, another Black transfemme I know was accused of being a “homeless attempted coercive rapist” for commenting that she was going to take a nap in her car (before going back to her apartment) because she didn’t feel sober enough to drive responsibly. Later on, a white trans woman who was leaving at the same time used this to try to claim that she was trying to force her to let her come home with, and sleep with her because “she was homeless and sleeping in her car” despite the Black transfemme having an apartment at the time and the white trans woman knowing this.

The white woman’s reasoning? Another white trans woman had a crush on the Black trans woman, and the first white wanted to fuck the second, so she was willing to try and use these facets of gendered racialization to try to eliminate the Black trans woman from the “competition” on a whim.

This isn’t a rare occurrence, and for many Black transfemmes not in majority-Black spaces, this happening is a “when” not an “if” and a constant consideration we have to account for. If there’s not another Black transfemme around (such in small queer communities or isolated friend groups) we may be taken completely unawares by something that’s just.. sickeningly common.

again. i did not say you were not oppressed. this post is literally about how you are oppressed. it is a reminder that you are not the most oppressed person in the world, a way i've seen a lot of white transfems acting lately. maybe not even necessarily in a detrimental way, but in a way that definitely leans towards the "white is default" lane of thinking, which erases black suffering, which erases progress towards black safety. this, to me, is troubling, which is why i made this post. it's important when building solidarity within our community to understand who the most vulnerable of us are, because the safety of the most vulnerable of us will ultimately be the safety of all of us.

"weird! i wonder why!" she exclaimed, whitely.