Nine sols. A metroidvania with parry-based combat and insanely good plot.

Perhaps euthanasia is cruel, but the alternative must also be considered.

My cat died from some sort of cancer. We noticed blue welts growing from her face years ago, but the vet said that they were harmless, some sort of allergic reaction. They got bigger over time, and more started to appear. Tests were done, but the vets still said that it was nothing to worry about.

Over time, her personality changed. She was never really extraverted, but she still liked attention. Over time, she started hiding from people. She only came out to eat, then went back to hide again. We never saw her walking around like she did in the past.

The night when she died, she pulled herself to visit the bedroom, then crawled back out into the living room and curled up onto the sofa and waited to die there. We knew something was wrong when we woke up the next day because she left a trail of blood that led us to her. At that point, it was already too late.

In hindsight, it was clear - she was in constant pain for years. It was why she was hiding from people, why she seemed to start avoiding attention, why she stopped doing anything that she enjoyed. That night, she knew she was going to die, and she paid everyone a final visit before resigning herself to die on the sofa. It was an undignified, likely painful and slow death, that was preceded by years of debilitating pain. If she were given the choice, would she have chosen euthanasia? I’m not sure, but it feels clear to me that she knew she was going to die and was suffering for years.

My understanding is that there was a scene where a young girl rides a naked man/woman around. Apparently it has since been changed to make the child older, but… I can perfectly understand why anyone would be hesitant to accept such a game based on that description alone. Even if it’s not intended to be sexual, the developers were certainly pushing the line

I think it really depends on your definition of what counts as year of Linux. Will Linux usage ever beat Windows or Mac? Of course not. But it can definitely get popular enough that companies have to think really hard about whether they need to support Linux or not. And meanwhile, Linux isn’t going to get popular overnight (or in a year, for that matter). So do you consider the year of the Linux to be the end of growth? Middle of growth? Or beginning of growth?

For me, I think year of the Linux desktop already passed in 2021, with the launch of the steam deck (where I’m defining year of Linux to be the point where Linux usage picks up and will hopefully end at a point where companies have to take Linux seriously)

Correlation, not causation. It’s possible - likely, even - that people who have difficulty with focusing or controlling their anxiety are more likely to use TikTok, since that is a platform that was designed to cater to such an audience

7 is a soft reboot and it’s really good, I think it’s a good starting point. 8 continues from 7, and neither games mention anything from the first 6 games. The only returning character is Chris Redfield, and only as a side character that you see 1% of the time

Thanks, we had that issue but I think we just solved it by downclocking

Although, that would assume that companies don’t already trend towards doing so

This, apparently:

And this is the second oldest:

Pro tip: don’t. It’ll make you feel worse than if you just isolated yourself.

The incentive structure of dating apps is completely twisted and makes you feel like every part of yourself is getting commodified and ranked.

Find some social groups or clubs and go hang out there. You’ll have a much better time. Many people don’t mind if you aren’t comfortable with communicating, just being present is a positive in their book.

A broad statement like “trees consume carbon dioxide” would actually be an incredible paper to publish because it means that there is 1. a lot of interesting data that could back up a statement so broad and 2. extremely applicable to a wide variety of fields. When I say “uninteresting,” I really mean a very specific type of uninteresting, like "sunlight does not affect the growth of the fungus Neurospora crassa. " It’s uninteresting because it doesn’t really tell us what affects the growth of the fungus, only that sunlight does not. If you got this result, you likely wouldn’t even feel like it’s information that’s worth making public, hence the lack of papers that have these sorts of results. But, if it weren’t published, then grad students across the globe would keep testing sunlight and keep finding the same thing again and again, wasting time and money. Hence the argument that all data should be published, regardless of how useless the results are

That makes sense, but unfortunately in a frustratingly unhelpful way. NF-kB is the central mediator of cellular immunity. What that means is that everything that needs an immune response triggers NF-kB and everything immunity-related gets activated due to NF-kB. Likewise, TNFa is the prototypical pro-inflammatory cytokine. It’s remarkably good at triggering immune responses in a wide variety of cells, and every immune response that I know involves TNFa in some way.

In other words, having inflammatory symptoms be caused by NF-kB>TNFa is less of a “that’s an interesting pathway” and more of a “yeah, of course NF-kB and TNFa would be involved, what’s new?”

The concern is that we don’t really know what’s activating NF-kB in the first place, and so as a result you can’t really fix the core problem. And because NF-kB and TNFa are involved in basically every immune process, it’s hard to tell if these proteins are the ones actually responsible for causing your symptoms. You’d be operating on a hunch, essentially. Though I will say that your unusually nondescript and broad symptoms do seem roughly in line with what I would expect from TNFa signaling.

All that to say, I’m not a doctor and I have no experience with translating knowledge into practicable therapies, so definitely talk to a doctor about it. But TNFa is very easy to detect in your blood, and if TNFa is causing your symptoms, then it’s really easy to just check to see if you’ve got high TNFa in your blood when you’re taking the antibiotics vs. when you’re not. If you had the money, you could even buy a test kit yourself and get an answer in a single day, assuming you know how to use the kit

I’m not familiar with COVID, but it does sound to me like you’ve got long COVID. I’ve got no advice on that front - frankly, I don’t think anybody really knows what’s up with that. I get the impression that that’s why the advice that you’ve received so far are primarily focused on treating symptoms.

If your hypothesis is correct that your antibiotic is helping through its immunomodulatory effects, then it looks like it’s acting primarily through inhibiting cytokine production. Messing with cytokines will certainly affect your ability to fight off infections, since that’s how your body signals to immune cells that there’s something wrong. Of course, immunity is all about balance, and you don’t need to block cytokine signaling completely in order to decrease it to manageable levels… A brief search shows that there are inhibitors for TNFa, which based on your links seem to be what you’re leaning towards as the molecular mediator.

Have you considered bringing this up to your doctor? I’m not sure how feasible it would be to do a “trial run” with one of these inhibitors to see if it helps your symptoms. However, it may be simple enough to ask for a blood test to measure the amounts of different cytokines in your blood. My understanding (don’t trust me on this - I’m not a clinician) is that standard blood tests don’t typically measure cytokines, which is potentially why your blood tests so far haven’t been able to pick anything up out of the ordinary. That would at least help rule in/out any possible causes.

I will also point out an alternative hypothesis that might be worth considering - it could be that the antibiotic is depleting your microbiome, which would reduce the same cellular pathways that your antibiotic is said to inhibit due to your cells being in less contact with bacteria. Have you tried other antibiotics, and did they have a similar effect?

No reason, I suppose. In my opinion it seems to just be a holdover from the previous systems of publishing. The prestige of a journal is ranked based on how often it gets cited (or in other words, how influential the papers are within the journal). Publishing insignificant/uninteresting data would lower a journal’s average citation count, which would make it seem less prestigious than other journals. Hence journals are incentivized to only publish interesting data. It’s a shitty system that everyone knows is shitty but nobody has a good solution for how to fix it

Immunologist here: what you’re describing seems vague. Inflammation is honestly just an umbrella term that generally refers to any time when the immune system is doing something (hence the seemingly conflicting advice). As a result, it’s not entirely clear to me what specifically you’re referring to.

Remember that no pathogen will just sit there and let themselves be destroyed. Many will actively exploit the immune system to cause disease, and in those cases, having a stronger immune response is actually bad for you. As well, I’m not sure what you mean by having higher “baseline inflammation,” because again, inflammation isn’t a singular thing

Survivorship bias is the idea that there might be an unknown filter that’s filtering the data before you even get to see it. In the case of the plane, that’s referring to a story from WW2, where planes returning from combat were recorded for where they were shot. Famously, the recommendation was to thicken the armor on places where the planes weren’t hit, because the “unknown filter” in this case is that if the plane were shot down, then you would never be able to record where bullets hit on that plane. Hence, the most important areas of the plane are actually the places that weren’t shot in the surviving planes.

In the case of the graph, this is a graph compiled from looking through a lot of papers and recording how significant a result is. Essentially a measure of how “interesting” the data is. Here, the unknown filter is that if a result weren’t interesting, then it wouldn’t get published. As a result, there’s a gap right in the middle of the graph, which is where the data is least interesting. In recent times, there’s been a philosophical argument that even uninteresting data should be published, so that at least it would prevent wasted time from multiple people attempting to do the same thing, each unaware that it’s already been done before. Hence the reason why people made the graph in the first place

I was taught in my Micro course that lichen is actually a symbiosis between 3 organisms: fungi, algae, and cyanobacteria. The cyanobacteria produces energy, but more importantly fixes nitrogen into a more biologically available form, which would not be otherwise accessible in the environments that lichen grows in

Scientists don’t wait for mice to get cancer, then cure the cancer. That would be inefficient. They just force the mouse to get cancer instead. And cures are tested based on how quickly the mice die to the cancer with or without the drug

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While that is true, I think those same selection biases also make the sub quite a poor source of actual advice.

1. The posts obviously only talk from the perspective of one party. This makes it very easy for responders to think that the other party is unequivocally bad. I remember several times where the OP seemed in the right, until the other party reveals that the OP was lying and manipulative.

2. Building on point 1, the type of people who would be willing to post their problems on social media tend to also be the type of people who would be unwilling or unable to consider the other party’s perspective.

3. People who browse r/relationshipadvice tend not to be the types of people who appreciate nuance, nor do they tend to notice discrepancies or omissions in the story. Where a normal person might ask for more details, a responder on this sub is more likely to “trust their gut” and fill in the gaps with what they assume has happened.

There are multiple times in which a post asks for advice about what appears to be a minor problem but then gets overwhelmed with “just break up” responses