I think blaming Cryptokitties for the speed of Ethereum is the wrong idea.  Although it seems clear that they're a major cause of current speed and fee issues, ultimately this is Ethereum's fault and Cryptokitties are a perfectly valid use of the blockchain.  The kittys are just highlighting a weakness of the cryptocurrency. 

Although I've obviously heard of them before, just after reading your post was the first time I've really read up on them.

While I'm not really drawn to actually own a cryptokitty, it does seem like a fairly smart use of Ethereum's smart contracts.  The idea that the cyrptokitties can exist, breed and be traded independently of the creating company is an interesting concept, and I can see something of the allure of owning a verifiably unique cryptokitty.

That said I'm of something of a loss to explain the huge sums of money some of them are going for ( https://kittysales.herokuapp.com/ ).  I suppose it's possible these sales are fake.  Or it's possible that there are some early ethereum adopters out there with a huge willingness to gamble.  Or perhaps I have it all wrong and they'll go down as a shrewd investment. 

#withdraw
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Airdrop joined. Forum stage 1

You mean tethers?  They're supposed to be backed by the company having a dollar in a bank account for each one they've issued.  However, people have cast a lot of doubt on whether that's true or not.   That said they've so far managed to stay at around a dollar at other exchanges. 

They have they own section on this forum

Nobody knows, as far as the short or medium term goes people can only guess.

Moxie Marlinspike's latest venture, MobileCoin. 

https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/

https://www.mobilecoin.com/

Has some interesting features.  Keeping the ledger in the SGX is at least a non-evil use of the SGX ( I hate the SGX ), although I really don't know about the SGX having both the PINs and the private keys.

The white paper is on the site, it's a pretty short read.

Monero wasn't really on my radar but I've been meaning to read up on it for a while now

Transactions can't be "cancelled" unless a transaction that invalidates it goes on the chain.   However, as the number of unconfirmed transactions grows they will eventually fill the assigned memory on the mining computers, so they'll look to evict some transactions starting with the least lucrative (ie yours).  That's probably what happened to yours.   You could just retransmit it though (or anybody could, if they still had it ) assuming it wasn't now invalid. 

The above advice was correct (the problem was with the gas price) but incorrect about the nonce (the nonce has nothing to do with this, it's just a transaction counter to prevent replay attacks). 

You could try 1.5 or 2 gwei if you want to be very cheap, but expect it to take a long time to confirm.  The weekend would have been a good time to do it actually.