★Kingdom★Burning★Down★

Excommunicated variant cover by Trevor Henderson on Instagram

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%

Next, "die" does mean "day," though nominative singular is "dies," i.e. "dies irae." It could be conjugated "die" if it was in ablative or locative case, but "die ad die" would mean something more like "day to day." "Ad" is in a "to" direction and "ab" is from, i.e. "ab urbis," and ablative case is used to indicate the movement of a thing. In short, "by" is not really a way to translate "ad"; we might want "per" here? (Through, by means of, etc.)

Hollow people fill themselves with meaning by falling into the embrace of Luke Skywalker or Jesus Christ in much the same way. A pointy question might be "why do you believe in god?" or "what makes you think Star Wars is worth paying attention to?" We often sketch these types of questions as rude, but they really don't have to be.

In deep fandom as in deep religion, you become an "expert," you buy the merch, you debate canon over trivia you've already made up your mind about, you master the lane and then stay in it. It's a parallel social process, turning towards a known cultural institution for comfort in the face of a cruel & unfair world, and I think it's facinating.

We can meet these folk with more compassion than Roger manages to muster up here, but I also think we need to be aware of when someone's so wounded it's not the time to pull their covers back, or whether we even can or should. Sometimes you just leave these circles because you're a bigger, healthier person than those who stay in them. You can criticize fandom like this and not be wrong, but Ebert's only scratching at the surface level of a really interesting phenomenon.

It's actual insane how much fandom and religion overlap. For example, "canon" is a term that's originally about which interpretation of scripture is correct. Fandom & religion even become similar in terms of their insular cultures and exclusion of others. Look back on the history of church schisms and tell me they aren't showcasing the same kind of drama that plays out in fan communities today.

For me, a really neat piece of this is how fandom and religion both attempt to define culture within certain lines, and those definitions are ultimately destined to fail if you read too literally. You can learn from Jesus as much as you can from Yoda, but if you treat anything they have to say as literal, gospel truth, you're putting too much authority in the hands of one fake guy. I think embracing the mystery & the ambiguity is empowering, but it's not without some peril of its own.

A note from Wisdom Kaye:

"Sometimes Antisocial, Always Antifascist"

Little Menaces - Bug Tea Party - Bramble