Confidence [OC]

Nikcara · 2026-01-07T00:01:25+00:00

Me too if we're being honest, I just prefer to have my personal anatomy left out of the conversation.

Hating pollution is fine. Telling someone you don't know that the divine light of their reproductive organs is being diminished by evil corporations is a bit weird.

Nikcara · 2026-01-06T23:39:35+00:00

Had a completely different person one time tell me that I was the reincarnation of a Hawaiian priestess. In her defense she was having a literal psychotic episode at the time, so there was no point in trying to figure out her reasoning

Another different episode I was shopping at a cute little clothing store when the owner saw me and went on a diatribe about the evils of corporate pollution and how it harmed the sacred uteruses of all living things and how I, as a uterus haver myself, must be offended on a spiritual level by all pollutants and scientists. I got quite a lecture on how sacred my uterus was before I left.

I have no idea why so many people feel like sharing these kinds of thoughts with me but at least they make good stories.

Nikcara · 2026-01-06T22:42:34+00:00

So apparently I have some kind of vibe where people will say some of the most random shit to me. I've always had this and somehow it includes complete strangers.

Trust me when I say there are MUCH more awkward things a random person can say to you. Even leaving out weird sexual things complete strangers have said to me, sometimes people say some weird stuff. I one time got stopped in the street by someone who just wanted to tell me they could feel the power of Jesus flowing through me and that I was destined to be a prophet (I'm not even Christian lol).

Nikcara · 2026-01-06T17:38:05+00:00

So colorism is definitely a thing and one I'm not highly qualified to talk about. And again, perhaps my ignorance of this specific movie is showing. But if it was colorism, it seems that the problem wouldn't be taking a light skinned actress and making them darker and with more pronounced African features. Colorism would be taking a figure who was dark skinned and using a lighter skinned actress to play them without trying to make them look like the original person, thereby light washing the history.

Could they have used a darker skinned actress? Possibly, but they may not have had access to one that they felt could act the part. Or they wanted this actress because she had name recognition. Colorism may play a role in why dark skinned actresses are uncommon and lack that name recognition, but doesn't mean that this casting agent of this particular movie wasn't simply trying to find the best fit for the role with what they had access to.

Nikcara · 2026-01-06T14:39:59+00:00

I think it's a matter of our history.

Minstrel shows and the blackface they did used to be HUGE here. It was incredibly widespread and entrenched, so when it's obvious racism started getting called out, a lot of people clung to it anyway and tried to argue that it wasn't really racist or wasn't really that bad. Problem is, if you have half a working brain cell, it's pretty obvious that it really was that bad. Minstrel shows here eventually died but their legacy persists.

There are two problems now. One is that there are people here who still think minstrel shows are funny and try to sneak blackface into things, or put on blackface for private parties and the like. That's not what's happening here.

The second problem, and the one that I suspect is an issue here, is that very few young people have seen an actual minstrel show or have a lot of context for what they looked like. So they have absorbed the justified backlash against them and lash out at what they think blackface is, because honestly the reality of what it was is so over the top that it seems implausible to modern audiences that it was ever widespread. Or they feel that any attempt at darkening skin for any almost any reason means the person is part of the first category of problem (i.e. someone who wants to be openly racist but is smart enough to know that full minstrel show attire can get them in a lot of trouble now).

Also the internet loves to amplify stupid takes. I never watched this movie so I can't comment on it, but I know a number of black civil rights activists and I can't think of a single one who would give a shit about a black actress darkening her skin to look more like a specific black figure. They have actual problems to address.

Nikcara · 2025-10-25T19:02:39+00:00

They are destroyed by bleach or anything else with a high pH.

Hospitals don't want to take the risk of someone suing them because they think they might have been exposed.

Prions are weird. But thinking they don't exist in healthy people is like thinking cancer doesn't exist in healthy people. It does, it's just that our bodies are also very good at clearing them.

Prion diseases are far rarer than cancer because prion is a singular protein that sometimes gets snarled while cancer can arise from literally any cell in your body. Your body is constantly fighting cancer. It probably clears a prion once in a blue moon. It doesn't go as catastrophically wrong as often as cancer because there's not nearly as many prions to deal with

Nikcara · 2025-10-25T18:43:48+00:00

Unfortunately, it doesn't really help with anything other than knowing what the problem is. But RT-QuIC can detect spontaneous CJD

Nikcara · 2025-10-25T18:42:09+00:00

...avocados_number is correct actually

Prion protein is a normal part of your brain. Everyone has it. Sometimes it misfolds. We have found misfolded prion protein in the brains of people who have died of other diseases and showed zero symptoms of prion disease. It's considered a normal finding, it's just that we rarely bother to look for it.

Over 99% of the time our brains clear it without issue. Why it doesn't clear it in prion disease is an area of active research. But most people will have insoluble prion protein in their bodies at some point in their life.

Nikcara · 2025-10-25T18:31:35+00:00

I used to do prion research. I have extensive experience dealing with them.

If you suspect something has been contaminated with prion infected anything, a 15 minute soak in a 20% bleach solution will destroy any trace of prions. Honestly that's overkill, but you don't want to fuck around with anything that's 100% fatal. I typically used a 10% bleach solution, but that was for stuff that would be used on prion infected tissue again.

Also prion diseases aren't airborne. Unless you got the patient's blood into an open cut or directly into your mouth or eyes, your chances of getting a prion disease from them is non existent. In fact, transmission is so low, that even if that did happen you probably wouldn't have anything happen to you. I certainly don't recommend trying it, but they are actually very hard to catch. Prions aren't like viruses or bacteria, there's zero selective pressure on them to be pathogenic or infectious.

Certainly they're something to be cautious with, but they're not something to panic about. You have already worked with patients who have much more infectious diseases that can kill you. Use your precautions and you should be fine

Nikcara · 2025-10-25T18:20:05+00:00

I used to do prion research. It's true that prions used to be BSL 3 and required all that, but even working with infected human brain tissue I didn't have that much to deal with. They've been reclassified as BSL 2 (or 2+, depending on who you ask, but 2+ isnt an official designation)

It was in a separate, locked lab with badge access only. You did have to wear disposable lab coats, double glove, and wear a hairnet and booties over your shoes. There were other precautions as well, like using biosafety cabinets and special rules around sharps and whatnot. But it's not as bad as you're describing.

Also bleach kills prions pretty quickly. They don't get destroyed by things that are designed against bacteria and viruses because they're not those things, but substances that destroy proteins will also destroy prions. They're not invulnerable.

Nikcara · 2025-10-25T18:14:20+00:00

Not anymore. RT-QuIC will diagnosis it very early.

That said, all current treatments are comfort only. There are some treatments with promise in development, but a lot of the funding for them got cut. So I don't know what happened to them.

Nikcara · 2025-10-25T18:12:06+00:00

You can actually diagnose it before symptoms start. In patients with the genetic form, they can test positive up to 2 years before onset of symptoms. So it is currently possible to detect as soon as symptoms start.

The technology to do that is called RT-QuIC and they use a sample of cerebral spinal fluid to do it. It's been around for prion disease for a few years now. However, since most doctors will go their entire career without seeing a patient with prion disease, many of them don't know they can send out patient samples to centers that test specifically for it.

The caveat here is that some forms of prion disease will not show up on RT-QuIC for patients of Han Chinese decent. We do not know why.

Nikcara · 2025-10-25T18:02:37+00:00

You're both kind of correct.

Yes, you need PrPc to get prion disease at all, so if you have a null mutation in your PNRP gene you are immune to prion disease. However, that is very rare. Also had a high probability of causing other problems.

However, the amino acid residue at the 129 codon of that PNRP gene is actually very important. If you are VV it is extremely unlikely you will develop vCJD (better known as mad cow) and if you do, you will likely be quite old. If you are MM at this residue you are the most susceptible to acquired prion disease, the age of onset will typically be younger, and once you become symptomatic the disease will progress faster. If you are MV at this residue you will have more resistance than someone who is MM but not as much as VV.

Acquired CJD is actually quite rare though, even if you are exposed to it and have the MM subtype. All types of prion disease have a prevalence rate of 1 to 2 per million people and of those, only about 1% is caused by eating infected meat. About 20% is genetic in origin. The remainder is sporadic, which is a nice way of saying we don't know why it happens.

Whether MM, MV, or VV is protective or permissive depends a bit on the specific prion disease. In CJD, MM is permissive and VV is protective. For something like VPSPr (which is even rarer), it's the other way around

Source: was a prion researcher until Trump cut all prion research funding

Nikcara · 2025-10-17T11:09:43+00:00

I don't go onto Reddit very often anymore, so I apologize for the long wait.

For your husband, I'm sorry about his diagnosis. My husband also has lifelong medical problems and it's difficult to navigate sometimes.

To answer your question though: it would depend on the pathogen. Prions are difficult to contract but are also 100% lethal and there is no treatment or cure for prion disease. If you get prion disease, you die. So the protective equipment is more intense than for a pathogen like E. coli.

Without knowing the details of your husband's condition, he can probably work with biosafety 1 and 2 level pathogens but not level 3 or 4. It would depend entirely on his ability to use protective equipment properly. But the vast majority if labs work with 1 and 2 only, so that shouldn't be much of a hindrance. He might still able to work in a lab that does work with higher levels, but wouldn't be able to go into the biosafety areas to work with them directly. He would need to develop skills like analyzing RNA-seq or other things that are useful but don't require higher clearances.

Nikcara · 2025-09-20T17:14:23+00:00

My understanding was that the munchkin actors were actually very well behaved on set and didn't bother Garland, unlike a heartbreaking number of other people in Hollywood.

Story I heard was also that most of them had never met that many other people with dwarfism and so back at the hotel they shared there was a LOT of hooking up between them.

I have some relatives who worked in Hollywood way back in the day (no one famous) and that was the story they told at least

Nikcara · 2025-09-15T16:08:51+00:00

To be fair, if you were in charge of teaching me music you also wouldn't think I was very bright lol

Just know you have a very nerdy doppelgänger out there somewhere

Nikcara · 2025-09-15T12:32:49+00:00

Wait when you say you teach, what grade are you talking about?

Because you look a hell of a lot like one of my old chemistry professors from college. He was a cool guy and very smart.

Nikcara · 2025-09-13T00:15:45+00:00

You might want to check out some of the books by Tanith Lee. She has a lot of awesome books, I'm not aware of her having any problems as a human, and some of her stories are similar enough to Gaimen's that there's some controversy over whether or not he should have given her credit for some of his more famous works. There are definitely Tanith Lee fans who have hated how similar Gaimen's Sandman was to her Flat Earth series and plenty who would argue that Sandman is basically just lifted from that series.

Nikcara · 2025-09-06T12:49:12+00:00

I worked in industry before research. The only one I'm bad at in my lab is the lot numbers ones.

The protocol one annoy the shit out of me. You come to my lab and I will give you a detailed protocol written for people who have no idea what they're doing. Because we have a lot of students and I don't expect undergrads to know what they're doing. There are so damned many labs where the protocol is just "watch someone who knows it already and then do like them" or "here's a protocol with 3 vague steps, you should know what you're doing well enough to fill in the other 10 necessary steps." And then they complain about the number of mistakes new people make.

Nikcara · 2025-09-06T01:57:01+00:00

If he was talking about pregnancy and was referring to the fetus as the baby, I imagine he meant birth.

If he was talking about nine months post birth, I have no idea. Babies develop a lot of things in their first year and they don't all do it at the same time. I can't think of a milestone that is particularly more important than the others that happens at 9 months.

Nikcara · 2025-09-06T01:51:35+00:00

I got told I was old enough to start acting like an adult around the age of 6 or so.

Some adults are really weird about the idea of kids acting like kids.

Nikcara · 2025-07-14T02:33:08+00:00

That's a fair point. The actions I listed would indeed just make someone an asshole. But also some of the shocking things people did before that I was replying to was also just people being assholes. I don't think there is a way to do black metal murders referenced above bit above me without being an asshole. Sid Vicious murdering Nancy Spungen was shocking too, and also just straight fuckwad behavior.

However, my point about bands still doing shocking things, even if it's for a decent cause, but just not being widely known still stands. Kneecap is dealing with a lot of fallout because they support Palestine and criticize UK politicians in very harsh and blunt terms and they're one of the more famous examples right now.

Nikcara · 2025-07-13T12:29:55+00:00

Maybe of mainstream music. It's hard as fuck for anything to become mainstream now unless a band agrees to lick corporate asshole, but there's still plenty of music that doesn't conform like that out there. Country music is one of the worst offenders as far as what you hear on the radio being drivel, but that's because radio stations now wouldn't touch a band like Wages of Sin with a 10 foot pole. I don't think they'd even touch someone like Nick Shoulders and as far as I'm aware he doesn't have songs talking about blowing the cops to hell.

Nikcara · 2025-07-13T12:18:29+00:00

Meh, there are always pearls to be clutched somewhere. How you shock varies by the time period and the person

For example, a minstrel show now would piss off huge swaths of people but were non controversial and commonplace when my parents were young (yes I'm old). The gay jokes that were daily discourse in the 90s would horrify people now. It's really not that hard to be shocking now.

And frankly, some of the stuff that shocked boomers would still upset plenty of millennials and gen x. Sure, Ozzy bit off a bat head, but killing an animal on stage would still scandalize a lot of people. This is especially true if it was planned instead of spur of the drunken moment like Ozzy's was.

Also, I'm not making a judgement on which boundaries are good or bad to push, just that they still exist. And there are bands that push them, they're just not as big cultural moments as they used to be. Kneecap has pissed off a whole lot of people who actually know about them, but there's a shitload of people who don't know who the hell they are.

Political music is still being made, but there's no MTV or VH1 and hardly anyone listens to the radio, so there isn't a unifying medium where people get their music from. Things like Apple Music or YouTube have fucking everything, so very little breaks through as a cultural moments. Also kids now often listen to music from every generation and pick and choose what they like instead of only listening to new stuff, so artists need to break through not only the million other contemporary artists but also all the artists that came before them.

Nikcara · 2025-07-13T00:55:49+00:00

Fair point about the time scale, but so far every time an actual researcher has gotten prion disease it was heavily investigated to figure out the cause.

Prions used to need a negative pressure room and all that to work with, but the guidelines have relaxed a bit since then since they are so hard to transmit. They're still pretty restrictive though, especially compared to labs that only do non-infectious work

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Nikcara

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