The Semicolonoscopy

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%

The problem! I have no plot beyond just rewriting the books/show with them as pianists instead of hockey players, which doesn’t compel me. So I’ll just bask in the tender, heady vibes. So even though I might write this someday (I doubt it), I wanted to tell you about it because it can’t just live in my head. I want them free.

Hey, who needs a plot? I'm picturing Ilya watching Shane play, fully mesmerized by how long and strong his fingers look against the keys. Or Shane massaging Ilya's hands and wrists after a long practice, and maybe his mouth gets involved to help. Would a classically trained pianist cringe at the Pretty Woman piano scene? Probably, but we're being indulgent, so I say they reenact it.

Hadal: 'love language' robe with an Arabic love poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish embroidered onto the sleeve.

The poem reads:

قالوا: تموت بها حبـاًً، فقلـت لهـم. ألا اذكروها علـى قبـري فتحيينـي

I still love this moment in the RNM pilot, so I decided to make a cross stitch about it. 21 colors (mostly almost indistinguishable shades of blue) and 3 months later, it's finally finished!

Gratifying but occasionally frustrating process because the lighting in that scene is notoriously difficult to work with, so I kept playing around with a screencap until I had an image that StitchFiddle could interpret, then spent a lot of time redrawing what it couldn't parse--hair and Michael's ear, especially, and the noses a little bit. It was a fun challenge to see how light and shadow could work with this sort of pixel art in such a limited palette. Not sure I want to do it again any time soon, but fun!