One of my favorite things that happened during my last mage Hawke playthrough was during the final battle against Meredith. Everything's going well. We're kicking her ass, she's got just this much health left, we're so close... but then everyone gets stunned dizzy.
Hawke is stumbling around all confused, seeing stars. The rest of his companions are stunned. I'm annoyed because I just want to end this fight. Don't know how or who did it, probably Meredith, but the situation's dire.
Meredith's standing by herself at the center of the Gallows, shouting nonsense and smugly believing the Maker's going to come down and make her his new bride after she murdered a bunch of innocent people.
Truly, this is the part of the story where Varric says they all thought hope was lost, that in the end, Meredith would pull a fast one on us and claim victory...
Until the REAL hero of dragon age 2 comes storming at her. I don't know why Carver was the only one to not be affected, but he literally jumped out of no where and just started bashing Meredith with his sword while everyone else was too dizzy to do anything until she was dead and the cutscene played.
"Hawke defeated Meredith-" LIES, VARRIC. I know the truth! I was there! Hawke didn't do shit! Carver Hawke was the main character all along! He got shit done and Varric gave Hawke all the credit!
I bring this up because last night I finished my warrior Hawke run and when we got to the fight with Meredith, I kind of hoped the same thing would happen where Bethany dashed in all heroic and got the killing blow on Meredith.
She did not.
She got squished by a statue.
But it's fine, Bethany Hawke was the true main character in my heart.
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"The first modern attempt at transferring a uterus from one human to another occurred at the turn of the millennium. But surgeons had to remove the organ, which had become necrotic, 99 days later. The first successful transplant was performed in 2011 — but even then, the recipient wasn’t immediately able to get pregnant and deliver a baby. It took three more years for the first person in the world with a transplanted uterus to give birth.
More than 70 such babies have been born globally in the decade since. “It’s a complete new world,” said Giuliano Testa, chief of abdominal transplant at Baylor University Medical Center.
Almost a third of those babies — 22 and counting — have been born in Dallas at Baylor. On Thursday, Testa and his team published a major cohort study in JAMA analyzing the results from the program’s first 20 patients. All women were of reproductive age and had no uterus (most having been born without one), but had at least one functioning ovary. Most of the uteri came from living donors, but two came from deceased donors.
Fourteen women had successful transplants, all of whom were able to have at least one baby.
“That success rate is extraordinary, and I want that to get out there,” said Liza Johannesson, the medical director of uterus transplants at Baylor, who works with Testa and co-authored the study. “We want this to be an option for all women out there that need it.”
Six patients had transplant failures, all within two weeks of the procedure. Part of the problem may have been a learning curve: The study initially included only 10 patients, and five of the six with failed transplants were in that first group. These were “technical” failures, Testa said, involving aspects of the surgery such as how surgeons connected the organ’s blood vessels, what material was used for sutures, and selecting a uterus that would work well in a transplant.
The team saw only one transplant fail in the second group of 10 people, the researchers said. All 20 transplants took place between September 2016 and August 2019.
Only one other cohort study has previously been published on uterus transplants, in 2022. A Swedish team, which included Johannesson before she moved to Baylor, performed seven successful transplants out of nine attempts. Six women, including the first transplant recipient to ever deliver a baby back in 2014, gave birth.
“It’s hard to extract data from that, because they were the first ones that did it,” Johannesson said. “This is the first time we can actually see the safety and efficacy of this procedure properly.”
So far, the signs are good: High success rates for transplants and live births, safe and healthy children so far, and early signs that immunosuppressants — typically given to transplant recipients so their bodies don’t reject the new organ — may not cause long-term harm, the researchers said. (The uterine transplants are removed after recipients no longer need them to deliver children.) And the Baylor team has figured out how to identify the right uterus for transfer: It should be from a donor who has had a baby before, is premenopausal, and, of course, who matches the blood type of the recipient, Testa said...
“They’ve really embraced the idea of practicing improvement as you go along, to understand how to make this safer or more effective. And that’s reflected in the results,” said Jessica Walter, an assistant professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who co-authored an editorial on the research in JAMA...
Walter was a skeptic herself when she first learned about uterine transplants. The procedure seemed invasive and complicated. But she did her fellowship training at Penn Medicine, home to one of just four programs in the U.S. doing uterine transplants.
“The firsts — the first time the patient received a transplant, the first time she got her period after the transplant, the positive pregnancy test,” Walter said. “Immersing myself in the science, the patients, the practitioners, and researchers — it really changed my opinion that this is science, and this is an innovation like anything else.” ...
Many transgender women are hopeful that uterine transplants might someday be available for them, but it’s likely a far-off possibility. Scientists need to rewind and do animal studies on how a uterus might fare in a different “hormonal milieu” before doing any clinical trials of the procedure with trans people, Wagner said.
Among cisgender women, more long-term research is still needed on the donors, recipients, and the children they have, experts said.
“We want other centers to start up,” Johannesson said. “Our main goal is to publish all of our data, as much as we can.”"
-via Stat, August 16, 2024
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the western animation nerd in me wants to commission an editor (alas: i am broke) to edit together an amv of Taylor Swift's "Clara Bow" where
the Clara Bow section: would have a montage based off of Betty Boop. Because she was a caricature of Clara Bow (and also Baby Esther since Clara Bow copied her scat + baby-voice gimmick) and heavily influenced the infantilization of women in animation (for anyone who doesn't know: Betty Boop was purposefully designed to have a baby head and an adult woman's body to reflect her voice. infantalization in animation of women is based similarly off of "baby proportions in head" + "adult woman body" via peanut-shaped heads, big eyes, and facial spacing (space between nose and lips, a small bottom of the nose as well as a short height of nose, and many more) mixed with an adult body with breasts) Betty Boop, through globilization, famously impacted how Osamu Tezuka drew children and women (along with other influences, of course, but Betty Boop was one of them). So she impacted both Japanese animation and USA animation through trickle-down influences, but her biggest impact was probably on the iconic Ariel of the "Little Mermaid"
the Stevie Nicks section: would have a montage based off of Ariel from "The Little Mermaid". Betty Boop influence Glen Keane in his designs for her as he was trying to differ away from Disney's past princess designs (where you'll see stylization, yes, but also more adult-modeled facial structures) and one of the sources he looked for how to draw this 16 year-old girl was the design conventions (aka: infantilization) of Betty Boop, another famous teenage girl(? Betty's age is complicated and in constant flux depending in what age range best suits the story, but teenager is her classic statis) in western animation. From then on, seeing Ariel explode with popularity, they carry the same design philosophy to Belle and so on to success after success leading to the "Disney Renaissance" period. You can see other studios start to take note of this global success, as Dreamworks changes (it's wild seeing the facial differences between "Prince of Egypt" or "El Dorado" compared to any contemporary human-female characters from the studio) and you can even see Japanese animated properties start to change away from designing adult faces in its animated women (That generalization specifically is likely be correlation and not causation, I will fully admit, but globalization of media has lead to some fascinating influences and trends). Betty Boop was the start of this animation design trend of visually infantilizing women, but Ariel is the one who really catalysted and popularized the trend. Like. To the point that you'd be hard-pressed to not be influenced by her impact of not her, or "the Disney Princess Style" directly lmao
the Taylor Swift section: I'm not sure. I waffled between several different styles and properties ("Avatar: The Last Airbender", "Frozen", Miyazaki specifically from Studio Ghibli, "How to Train Your Dragon", "Steven Universe",... I think you could make an argument for having the Taylor Swift verse just be a montage of a bunch of properties) but I think for the infantilization throughline + chronology (as "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" came out before "The Little Mermaid") + western (USA specifically) animation stylizations of how women are designed... I think I'm going to go with the "Into The Spider-Verse" series? And say to cycle that tiny final verse with shots of all the series' female characters. because it truly has changed animation as we know it. Yet it still keeps with infant baby-heads for some of its female characters. Thankfully, not all of them as I think that would've been reductive to the movie series message about "Anyone can be Spider-man"; though even all the female adults have bigger eyes than the adult males which is one of the traits of infantalization. But it makes sense for both the teen boys and teen girls to have some infantilization in their faces since they are in-between childhood and adulthood. But yeah, the infantilization is the most prominent in Gwen and Penny. But it's cool. I don't see visual infantalization as bad btw, I just see it as a design choice that I like tracking the family tree of since it's a design choice that can be done in any style lol But I'm not confident in my choice of "Spider-verse", because it's female characters are not the main characters and I kind of want that to be an over-arching theme as well. But Gwen does sell a LOT and this series has impacted the animation industry's stylization in general (and hopefully also itd depictions of women and diversity ♡). So maybe I'll change my mind, maybe I won't. But the parts with Clara Bow/Betty Boop and Stevie Nicks/Ariel? I love that part of this concept so, so much, I'm cemented on those verses, and I am on CUSP of something with this idea lmao
like?? do you see the vision? idk, man. maybe i'll animate something or edit it myself (i won't; i'm too sickly rn lmao rip)
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