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?

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

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

I like making costumes! If anything, it’s a good way of making clothes that you would never make otherwise, and there isn’t anywhere near an expectation of quality. Making a costume yourself basically automatically ensures that people would be impressed, no matter how shitty the costume is.

Regarding perfectionism, it’s something that I’ve had to learn throughout my various forays into arts - there’s going to be mistakes. There’s always going to be mistakes. You can’t avoid it, no matter how skilled you are. The skilled artists know how to avoid drawing attention to their mistakes, and that generally means that they just let it happen without caring about it. But also, it’s just a costume, and as mentioned above, people will be impressed regardless of how shitty it is.

Regarding effort, it requires a lot of effort. Because you’re making unusual clothes, you need to spend a lot of time to design it and make sure it fits properly. I designed costumes this year for me and my partner, and in total that took maybe 2 months. It’s also more expensive than costumes you buy online. The raw material (cloth, thread) was maybe around 200 USD total, roughly 4-5x the cost of a regular costume you can buy online, or 2x the cost of a niche costume that you can buy online. It’s definitely not a good use of money and time, but it’s a good hobby project.

Regardless of if you buy a costume or if you make one, here’s the trick: don’t skimp out on the wig. Most people don’t wear a wig, and the people who do tend to use cheap wigs. Cheap wigs have a plastic-y texture and are difficult to style. I get wigs from Epic Cosplay, which have a lot of different colors to choose from and tend to look fairly realistic.

Also, wigs never come with hair already at the right length! Make sure to give the wig a haircut, it’ll look way better if you remember

Gives a strangely similar vibe to seeing the slide reels. Pretty cool!

This trick also works for a lot of other non-steam games - always good to keep this trick in your hat

Custom, but I understand the appeal of sticking with the default.

I think the issue with wallpapers is that there’s a very fine balance that it needs to strike: not too simple that it’s monotonous, but not too fancy that it’s distracting and hides icons. Too many wallpapers swing too significantly in either extreme that I simply don’t like the vast majority of wallpapers that I find.

Interestingly, KDE seems to strike this balance relatively consistently - they must be aware and are actively attempting to strike that balance. I don’t know how else to explain it.

This is a pretty nuanced problem, in my opinion. Here are my thoughts:

1. You’re definitely judging them
2. I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong to judge them, but it would have to be for different reasons than you state. I would judge them for being personally incompatible with the fundamental tenets of society (ie that you contribute to it and act as a good citizen)
3. You can’t change the mind of someone who isn’t open to change. One of the things you’ll need to accept is that most people are only willing to learn from their own mistakes, and a good portion of those aren’t even willing to learn from their own mistakes consistently. You will need to wait until they regret their decisions before change can even be possible. And even then be aware that there’s a solid chance that they’ll still keep doing whatever they’ve been doing
4. It’s good that you’re thinking about this, but on the other hand, it’s not your responsibility to ensure that your friends have good lives. Your responsibility is to yourself, and if you act as though you have responsibility over other people, you come off as nosy, pushy, bossy. Be careful that you don’t confuse advising someone with assuming responsibility over that person.

I liked Control but Alan Wake was a sludge. Its age really shows. That being said, it wasn’t necessarily bad enough that I couldn’t tank through the game, but if Control were in lower A tier, Alan Wake would be upper C tier

State, I think?

It seems the rules are different for me than for you. I brought my backpack with my laptop. I did work during breaks. Or used my phone. I just made sure all electronics were off when in the court room. And I’m pretty sure I brought my water bottle too. The one thing that the security did enforce was my pepper spray, which I had to remove and hide in a bush outside. I’m not sure if that helps at all.

One thing you can do is to leave your laptop/things in the car. You can leave the building during breaks and then just come back into the building before the session restarts. That was what most of the jury did during breaks during my time

My gut instinct is that your mother may be wanting something else but doesn’t know how to put it into words. Not to say that she right, but I can definitely relate to that emotion.

Speaking as a person who is close to someone who is depressed, there is a sort of mental drain and negativity-by-diffusion associated with being near someone who is depressed, and it’s really difficult to put into words. I can know full well that depression is a clinical illness and that the other person can’t help it, but I will still get frustrated over their inability to match my energy.

If your depression and anxiety are as limiting as you say they are, it may be a good idea to talk to a therapist and get some medicine for that. Speaking from my own observations, you can definitely fight depression, but only to a small extent. Severe depression and anxiety are debilitating to the point where you will need medicine just to get close to what a regular person might feel

My understanding is that automount is different from what you’ll need. The automount that you’re using is probably mounting when you log in, but you’ll probably want to mount when you turn on the computer.

For that, you’ll want to edit fstab. That’s a file that tells the system that you need to mount this drive during boot-up. On KDE, there’s a partition manager software that can edit fstab through a GUI, but I’m not sure if there’s something similar in Mint. If not, the file is in /etc/fstab. Make sure to double check for typos when you edit fstab because errors can prevent your computer from booting up properly. Or just be proficient at terminal so that you can undo the changes when you make an error.

Word of advice: use the nofail option for secondary/storage drives

In a similar vein:

Get a fire ladder if you’re not living on the first floor

But seriously, learning to use a fire extinguisher needs to be emphasized more. I stopped a fire from becoming serious because I was trained to use a fire extinguisher and I put out the fire quickly. My partner didn’t know what to do and she just handed the fire extinguisher to me. If she were there alone, the building could have burnt down. Or at minimum, all of our possessions could have been damaged.

It’s easy to learn, but YOU NEED TO LEARN

The biggest advice I can give you is, you need to try to be social. It’s easy to hang out with friends in high school because everyone’s locked into the same building every weekday for 6 hours.

Once you’re an adult, you no longer have that limitation. Even college is more of a “go to class for 2 hours a day then leave afterwards” type of experience. It’s certainly liberating to not be forced to be someplace for long periods of time, but it also means that the primary reason that you hang out with your friends (ie, because they’re already there with you) is now gone. It can make for a very lonely experience.

You need to go out of your way and actively maintain your friendships. Make plans to meet up at least once a week or something. Otherwise, you won’t really get another chance to make deep friendships

Because party Democrats are fucking cowards who fold the moment they face a moment of resistance. If I were the Republican party, I would have considered it to be a safe gambit.

It’s good that the Democrats are refusing to give in now, but they really could have started doing that up to a year ago.

Not finicky and Arch-based don’t really go together well.

Just go with Bazzite or something, the exact distribution doesn’t matter (as long as it’s not Arch). The more important choice is the desktop environment, which is the user experience and looks of the distro. If you’re moving from Windows, I assume you’ll like KDE Plasma. It’s basically Windows 10 but modernized, with a more aesthetic and clean look. (It’s also paralyzingly hypercustomizable, so I would recommend using the default settings initially and slowly learning the settings, rather than diving into the settings headfirst the moment you install)

I personally use Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE Plasma), but it’s slightly more annoying to set up than something like Bazzite

All of them work pretty well. I personally use Thunder because it just works really well with my usage habits (swipe controls are very customizable)

I haven’t bothered to check for Proton compatibility at all. The compatibility is so good that I just by default assume that it’ll work.

Now, if you have online multiplayer games, they likely won’t work due to anticheat not supporting Linux. But if you do single player games, there’s virtually complete compatibility

Linux Mint is a good choice, works right out of the box. The UI is a bit dated though, so I ended up settling on Kubuntu. It’s very aesthetic (like an updated version of Windows 10), and for the most part it works out of the box, but digging through its settings can be really overwhelming. Basically losing a bit of accessibility but gaining a much more modern aesthetic

If you choose to use Kubuntu (or any distro that uses KDE Plasma), I would recommend sticking with default settings and learn the settings slowly over time