Opinionated Jerkface

Things only exist if you can see them in indie Sci-Fi puzzle adventure, Object Impermanence. So does this post only exist if you see it too?

The Steam page may also only exist if you see it:

Black Cubes Ate the Sky by Bastien Lecouffe Deharme

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%

you come across a young woman, in the process of being petrified by her lover(?), a golem of living clay. her eyes, the only organic thing left of her, say she is terrified, but the Clay Man says she asked him to do this. do you free her, and in the event she does want it, deal with her anger, or leave her to her fate that she may or may not want?

if the stars and their light are actively malevolent, is darkness more moral than their tyranny? is utter chaos, lit only by impossible colors and prowled by things that should not exist, preferable to an oppressive, but orderly, comfortable, and relatively safe rule by spiteful gods, eventually damned to have your soul consumed by the stars? is either preferable?

you are twisted into uncountable variations of yourself, a hundred thousand million possible futures. in one, you are immolated by the raging death throes of a god. in another, you survive eternity, becoming the final Law, that No Thing Shall Be. another, you are the captain of a vessel that sails to the resting place of a sealed god, to be consumed by it. yet another, you march an army to the gates of the Garden of Eden, and batter down the walls to secure the secret of immortality to do with what you will. are all these myriad, infinite futures you? do you want them to be? do you want to be a conqueror, a saviour, a nobody? do you really have a choice?

you learn that the divine is not untouchable. the gods are awful, vulnerable to slights, wars, and petty jealousy. and they can be killed. both the highest gods of the Wilderness and the minor gods of the Zee. does that bring them down to the level of mortal, or elevate the mortal to the divine?

do you ever really have a choice?

does anyone?

if given the opportunity to wrench free from your shackles, would you take it, no matter how terrible the consequences, the pain it would take to be free?

would you?

would they?