Padmapani

actually that patch is pretty nice, esp. with the reverb. but ever since i heard the speedfiaker remix, i find that every version of the tetris theme that doesn't come with heavy, distorted 909 kicks is missing something.

i don't think we'll se a "traditional" inactivated vaccine here any time soon. and if we do it's probably not going to be too effective. the hard part about making an inactivated vacccine is getting the immune system to do much (using all kinds of additives to provoke some reaction) and apparently the technique used by novavax is pretty effective compared to more traditional ones. for the booster for south african or brazilian variants the key is probably for them to be available soon enough (we hear enough reports of new waves in regions that had previously reached herd immunity to the original variant). now with the situation in tyrol and the incompetence of our government i'm not sure if we have enough time for anything to come to the market. still, due to their advantage in development time mrna vaccines will again be first. novavax are already working on a booster for the new variants too, but they'll probably take 2-4 months longer until it will eventually be available.

vini vici knew how to ride the cheese train back when they were sesto sento and they do still know it as vini vici. brazil and isreal are probably to blame here. (what i really find strange is that they somehow found their way into the lineup of the biggest rock/indie/metal festival here in austria two years ago or so). highlight tribe only got popular again because vini vici remixed their 90s track free tibet. tropical bleyage is just another average dacru artist. do you think they got more recognition than digicult or u-recken?

i try to get any mrna vaccine i can. now with the studies out and millions vaccinated we know they are safe and more effective than the competition. this together with being easier and faster to produce makes them the vaccines of the future. (if anyone's interested why we get mrna vaccines just now this scishow video explains it in simple layman terms.) i acutally declined the bullshit astra zeneca vaccine today. if i can get biontech or moderna in two months i have better protection sooner than if i get astra today (i wonder how astra zeneca even got their study that's riddled with sloppy statistics, widely varying study protocols between subject groups and seemingly arbitrary choice of what's included in what metric published in any journal). also even though astra seems to convert most serious cases to mild cases that isn't much help against long covid, which is my main worry. with an mrna vaccine your cells start producing parts of the enemy just as when you get a viral infection. the main difference is that it's not the whole virus so it cannot replicate and infect more tissues (the virus can spread to and kill nerve cells, endothelial cells in your blood vessels, heart muscle cells, etc. while the vaccine almost exclusively gets to the muscle its injected in and the relevant immune cells). the spike protein is what sticks out of the virus and is the main target for antibody production in this case anyway. the only other accessible target is the nucleocapsid protein which sits below the spike on the virus and as we now know isn't responsible for immunity in most people (the exact targets on the virus that are recognised by the immune system depend on which individual immune cells your body has produced and come into contact with the viral proteins). iirc >80% of antibodies people produce bind to some spot on the spike protein, and even there around 50% (again iirc) bind the receptor binding domein of the spike protein. but if you're looking for a "taditional" vaccine novavax is your best bet. it's an inactivated vaccine but the study shows a very high efficacy. definitely something i'd also happily take if i happen to get the chance before biontech/moderna. the sinovac vaccine had promising preliminary data from the early days of their phase 3 study, but in the end that didn't hold up. 50% efficacy isn't much to brag about when multiple competetors have 90% or above. oh yeah, the stupidity of the government is something you can always count on. i can't wait for the day when i can finally leave this sorry excuse for a country again. having to stay here for the whole winter instead of spending at least a month in a civilised place where they base their decisions on facts rather than the interests of demented province politicians (or their friends) or on what they expect will appeal to the gut feeling of the idiotic masses really gets on my nerves.

personally, i got all the usual shots as a child, and i still get every vaccine that's recommended plus all those extra vaccines available for diseases one might encounter when travelling the world. in the past i was often sick but not anymore. this is what having an adult immune system that has already gotten lots of exposure to various germs looks like. if you want to decrease your chances of catching a cold even further, you only have to work in healthcare for a few years. exposure to pathogens (it doesn't matter if by sickness or vaccine) grants immunity. the amount of the additives you find in vaccines is miniscule compared to the amounts you ingest in your daily life anyway. you'll get more aluminium in your daily diet (and also by using deo spray) than in any vaccine, a hundred of times more mercury from eating a single saltwater fish then you'd get from a vaccine and also a lot more formaldehyde from sitting in a room containing cheap furniture (or cigarette smoke) than from a vaccine. warning about the "risks" of these additives in vaccines is exactly the same as warning a person that they might get drunk from the little amount of ethyl alcohol that exists in every apple when said person is already an alcoholic that drinks a litre of vodka every day. it's completely nonsensical to anyone with a little knowledge in chemistry.

mrna vaccines contain pretty much no additives compared to your usual inactivated vaccine. you only have the mrna itself and the lipids to make up the droplet containing the mrna. typical vaccines contain a whole range of additives to attract immune cells. otherwise you'd get next to no reaction from the body. yep. it's just that we see comparatively many allergic reactions (still a very small number) now, because the people who get allergic reactions are allergic against polyethylene glycol instead of chicken protein. in your daily life you do not notice a PEG allergy, but you do notice a chicken protein allergy, so the affected people will usually know they cannot get the vaccine in case of the flu shot. when a new disease appears (SARS) you get people working on vaccines. when a very similar disease (COVID) appears a decade later you do not need to modify much to get a working one for the new disease. i don't see any point here. i'd rather be shocked if it was any different. that's how science works. not really. there are many large biotech companies whose profits eclipse when can be earned with covid vaccines by far. if you mean small biotech startups like moderna or biontech, well duh, of course companies that haven't yet had any medicine approved but focus on exactly the technology that's applicable here will make most of their profits from these vaccines. so no surprise here either. there isn't very much money to be made from these vaccines sold at imho extremely low prices. a dose of any covid vaccine costs somewhere around 10€. a dose of your typical pneumonia vaccine costs 100€. i leave the calculation of the profit margins to yourself. the managers of such companies do neither care about the health of the people, nor about the prestige nor the profits directly. they care about creating value for the shareholders, because that's their job and if they don't they're fired (and don't profit personally from their stock options). so they'll do whatever it takes to get to stock price up and make a nice dividend for shareholders. and we do see stocks are going straight up for the companies involed in vaccine production. it's not so much about the profit they're making (of course they do profit, but not much they can do here if they have 20 competitors selling the vaccine dirt cheap) but more about the attention they get for being part of the solution to the crisis the world is in as well right now as proving they have the technology for easy development and production of highly effective future vaccines (where a lot more money can be made).

sampling from the back of the throat or the anterior part of the nose detects ca. 90-95% of positive cases compared to ca. 95-97% when taking the sample from the nasopharynx. i really hate taking samples in the throat (and most of the time refuse to do it) because most people just can't put their tounges out of the way. also, you'll inevitably get "brechreiz" (what's the english word for that?) if you scrub and turn the sampling brush around there for the required 5 or so seconds.

that sounds like an excellent idea (one i've also been playing with for a long time). but the great difficulty is finding a suitable place to set up everything.

personally, i use the test kit from abbott (covid-19 ag rapid test device). you can get it online for less than 10€ per test (but it's a kit with 25 tests). it's a little more accurate, cheaper and more practical than the others. (probennahme is eigentlich recht einfach. sobalds geht (ca. nach 0.5 bis 1cm) das staberl nach hinten/unten drehen und richtung ohrlapperl fahren bis man ansteht. am besten den kopf nur ganz leicht nach hinten. falls man den kopf zu wenig nach hinten legt kommt man nicht gut hinein, falls man ihn zu weit nach hinten legt fahrt man den hals runter statt anzustehen, was auch keine tragik ist aber würgereiz auslösen kann. im zweifelsfall sollte man eher weiter unten bei der nase entlangschrammen (niesreiz möglich) statt irgendwo weiter oben herumzustochern. wichtig is noch: wenn man an der richtigen stelle ist ein paar sekunden drinnenlassen und drehen) if you're looking for something cheaper (i.e. fewer tests per unit sold), you can also use the joysbio antigen rapid test kit. that one uses a swab from the anterior part of the nose. according to the manufacturer it's almost as sensitive as the other kind of test (though i'm a little sceptical about that. there's a paper out there that says that taking the swab from the anterior part of the nose are 50% less sensitive, putting it at something like 92% sensitivity instead of 97%) and it's officially allowed to take the test yourself. we sell those for 9€ per test. you can probably also get it cheaper online, but then you'd again have to take the whole kit (20 tests) instead of single tests.

i've had that feeling some time ago, but now i see it very differently. the divison is more between the people who are able to use their brain and those who don't. and believe me (i work in a pharmacy and talk to about hundred people every day), those who don't are the great majority. if you're advocating for sensible policies you're not running with the pack (in fact when i spoke out for another lockdown in autumn one week before the lockdown actually came, i was confronted with a lot of hate from many directions). in our situation we have a government that's torn between their own stupidity and desire to appease the people on one side and the advice from experts who know what they're talking about on the other side. so we have policies where the right things are eventually done, but too late and too half-heartedly. to do the right thing yourself is not about law and order. i have isolated even when there were little restrictions and do meet people when it is forbidding during lockdown as long as everyone is tested. do what makes sense and not what the law tells you. but i must admit that breaking the law in such a way feels more familiar and "right" than following the law when it actually makes sense what was really a bit shocking to me is how >90% of the people do not think about the consequences and just do whatever is allowed, even if its pointless (wearing chin-shields in autumn, that don't do anything to protect people but satisfy the law). still the majority is advocating for an end to lockdowns for various reasons (ranging from "oh the economy", "they just want to control us", "i don't believe there's any virus", "i want to do whatever i want", ...). a year ago i wouldn't have thought that the only way to get people to do something that should be clear to everyone is to make it mandatory by law. while we have people at work who openly admit having a very limited mind ("why do you think about such things? i am happy if i know what i'll have for supper today"), even the majority of the seemingly intelligent and educated colleages try to subvert the meaning of the policies by implementing measures that satifsfy the law but are not suitable for curbing the spread of the disease (let's do some half-hearted testing with the cheapest test kit every now and then, so that everyone can wear their dirty mouth rag instead of masks that acutally work (ofc this is not an exact quote)). it's really baffling how people cannot seem to think further than at most the next week. how could anyone be advocating for an end to lockdowns but at the same time refuse both wearing a proper mask and getting vaccinated? all that while they have family and friends in high-risk groups. as long as you're not doing anything to end the pandemic, you cannot expect the pandemic to end any time soon. sorry for the rant, but the longer this whole thing drags on, the more i am convinced that we're living in a world of imbeciles.

if your nuttery just affects youself, you're completely fine to do whatever you want, but if your nuttery puts other people in danger and kills some of them i do draw a line there. your freedom ends where it infringes on other people's freedoms. that's also why i have absolutely no problem advocating for strict lockdowns and selective repoening for vaccinated people as an anarchist. it may seem strange and unintuitive to us at first but the draconian ways in which the crisis is handled in some parts of asia is actually the more liberal policy. note that i'm not saying that china is acting like it does because it cares about people's rights. it doesn't (and also other countries have handled it better than china). but china's focus on keeping the economy running in the mid to long term has the side effect of keeping people in lockdown for shorter periods as well as giving more people the opportunity to not be infected against their will.

luciferase has that name because it glows. lucifer is literally the light-bringer. we know that sars-cov-2 cannot have been bioengineered in a lab. it uses previously unknown sequences for known functions. if it were bioengineered it would use known sequences (among many other reasons). a vaccination activates the immune system and in that respect is like a small infection. if you are so sick already that you die from the vaccine you'd definitely die from the disease. do you have any source for face paralysis? bill gates is a rich guy who doesn't know what to do with his money, so he uses it in ways perceived to be for the common good to polish up his image. he has warned about future pandemics, just have many others over the years. and they were right. agenda 21 is real but is a non-binding UN agreement on sustainable development and use of ressources. i have no idea what that has to do with anything. sure, mk-ultra was real. but it never was a conspiracy theory

damn, the recovery really seems to be dragging on for a long time for some people. just last week at work i had a conversation with people who have been suffering from depression and breathlessness for two months since the infection. one of them even could not even get a full night of sleep since then, despite being put on benzos. lockdowns really are a small price to pay. but still, almost every day i hear people complaining about having to wear masks and thinking vaccines are an evil ploy from the governments.

the one in sri lanka? that lineup can't be real, can it? i mean there's no almost goa trance but otherwise just about every big name i can think of is on there. sounds too good to be true. on the other hand the sankra 2021 in switzerland (if it does take place at all the coming summer) doesn't sound that shabby either.

this is such a shithole country. not because of the extened lockdown, which is definitely necessary, but because nothing works as it should. i am a category 1 person because i do covid tests so i should be among the first group of people to get a vaccine. the vaccination campaign has already started but no one knows how i could make an appointment. the official hotline says to call another hotline. the other hotline doesn't work at all, so i call the next day. then they say they cannot do anything because i'm under 80 years old. the next official info point says they have no idea and aren't responsible. so i call the original hotline again and they say the employer does make appointments automatically. in case the employer is a hospital that is true but i don't do tests inside a hospital and my boss has no information whatsoever. i'm really starting to think that india has way more efficient administration than austria. i do think we will reach true normalty by the end of the year (as long as we can get vaccinations above 70-80% by summer). but i surely hope we can get access to normalty sooner with a filled vaccination card. but the only thing i know is that i'll make up for all the time spent at home once the clubs open again. how are you doing covid-wise rtp? still occasional bad nights or 100% back to normal?

it's that time of the year again:

that track penzoline posted sounds a lot like prometheus.

very interesting. we've seen darker, more acidic techno make a comeback in the past years. now with added goa influnce i wonder when we'll see producers jumping onto it combining old goa sound with the punch of modern techno.

autoimmune reactions are definitely a prime candidate for explaining long covid. just today i read a paper discussing that they found signs of inflammation in 60% of people 2 months after people had covid (they included about equal numbers participants from symptomatic and asymptomatic cases). that has me a little worried of what we'll see in long term cases from our second wave now. (just to be clear, the great majority of the study participants did not have any symptoms from this inflammation). you'd need extensive lab work to actually find cells responsible for an autoimmune response. and afaik the markers aren't included in the large haemogram by default. but there are specific markers you can look for that might be positive that your doctor can order from the lab. but i don't know which ones they are or indeed if we know already which ones could be positive for long covid. from what i've read today you can specifically look for anything happening in the heart with a heart mri. there are probably other procedures to test for other kinds of inflammation. but i don't think that our doctors could get the insurance to pay for something like that if there are no clear symptoms? what sort of symptoms do you have in these "bad nights"? since you've already had the virus, getting a vaccination would most likely be pointless. a good way to test if you have lasting immunity (up to now we only know that it lasts longer than 6 months for most people) right now is to do an antibody test. you can get a quick yes-or-no answer with those test cassettes you can get in the pharmacy for 15-20€ (the most widespread one is called "cleartest corona", but different companies offer exactly the same test for a cheaper price in a different packaging). of course a quantitative lab test would be even better, telling you exactly how good your immunity is, but i don't think there's already a standardised test at the lab institutes. still, even without that information i'd bet my money on vaccinations being a pointless increase of risk in your case.

... i keep confusing the edit button with the quote button...

to be exact, it's not strictly neccessary to kill off the cells "infected" by the rna-vaccine. the rna is degraded in the cell eventually. but all cells present parts of the proteins they are making at the moment on the surface and if the immune cells see anything that's foreign, they designate the offending cell as damaged or infected and kill it off. this is also one point that should make rna-vaccines more effective than inactivated ones. if you just inject "dead" virus you never get infected cells presenting proteins and therefore lower t-cell response (however you still get b-cells producing antibodies). a virus particle in itself is nothing more than a sophisticated delivery system for rna (or dna for dna-viruses) into cells. any live vaccine (except those for bacterial diseases) or any viral disease turns your cells into factories for bad stuff. so that's not the issue here, that happens all the time. the only differences here is that a new delivery system is used and that the rna cannot replicate inside the body. it's rather the immune cells only getting a look at the spike protein instead of the whole virus rather than not all immune cells getting a look. so repeated injections don't make a difference for that. in theory it shouldn't matter much because the spike protein should be the only thing that sticks out of the virus particle and therefore be the prime target for any immune response, but reality is often more complicated than that. autoimmune reactios are a possibility with lots of infections. especially with covid we see autoimmune response against heart muscle cells or the myelin sheats, that cover nerves, after the infection. typically we see a few orders of magnitude less cases of autoimmune response for vaccinations than for the disease itself. also the risk for autoimmune disorders is mainly dependent on the similarity of structures of a pathogen that infects your body (and also your genetic makeup) rather than if the pathogen gets inside your cells. for instance campylobacter infections (responsible for about a quarter or so of cases of infectios diarrhea) can also cause antoimmune reactions because some structures on these bacteria look remotely similar to structures in human joints. synthetic antibodies are only there for treatment and not for protection. they don't last very long inside the body so you woudn't get immunity for longer than a couple of weeks give or take. the main danger here is that when you introduce a large amount of foreign proteins into the bloodstream you always have the risk of a severe allergic reaction. of course that can be managed in the hospital setting where such antibodies are administered. i'd rather have any vaccine than to be in the situation where i'd need an antibody cocktail.

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there are three main kinds of vaccines currently in development: one is the vaccine with adenovirus vector (sputnik, astra-zeneca). this uses a modified adenovirus (one of which also cause the common cold), which also contains rna for the the spike protein from sars-cov-2. this is probably going to provide nice antibody production because it uses alive adenovirus your immune system has to fight off. the chance of such a vaccine protecting against the common cold are minimal, but if you've been infected with a similar strain of adenovirus before the vaccine might be elimiated by already existing antibodies against that sort of adenivirus without having to recognise the sars-cov-2 spike protein at all, rendering the vaccine ineffective in such people. the second ones are the rna-vaccies (pfizer, moderna). the rna that encodes for the spike protein is shuttled into the cells using specially designed lipid nanoparticles. since the infected cells are also going to produce the spike protein until they're cleared by the immune system, we can expect good immunogenicity here, even though you have nothing replicating in your body. in principle rna-vaccines combine the positives from live and inactivated vaccines, but up to date no rna-vaccine has ever been approved for humans so there's a risk for unknown side effects. the third ones are "classical" inactivated vaccines (sinovac), where the virus is grown in cell culture (no dead animals involved, it'd probably be a human cancer cell line that has been used in labs for decades) and then inactivated using chemicals (and probably heat). the advantage is that it cannot replicate inside the body, gives the immune system a chance to "look at" the whole virus, but on the downside all the antigens your body will ever see are inside the syringe of the vaccine already. so the immune response is most likely going to be weaker. there's no "double jeopardy" here. if the virus mutates in one of a few particular ways that change the spike protein, your immune system will not recognise the new virus and have to start fresh with producing antibodies. but it doesn't matter if you've had the disease before or the vaccination. a small concern i have here is that theres a small chance that some mutations in the virus might have old antibodies trigger a potentially dangerous overreaction from the immune system (as we see with dengue fever. if you're infected with one strain you have an unpleasant but managable disease and you're immune to that strain forever. if you however get a different strain than the one you've had before you're in for a really bad time). however this would also be of more concern for people who've had covid-19 before than vaccinated people because antibody levels would most likely be higher in the former group. yeah, polio outbreaks from vaccination are real (in the few areas where not everyone is vaccinated), but since we're 99% there to eradicating polio forever it's a small price to pay. just like no one would want to return to a world where smallpox was still around. the smallpox vaccine was more dangerous than pretty much any vaccine we use today. sure, in our age group there's a >99% chance that you'll survive the virus. and even a 2 in 3 chance you'll not get more sick than with the flu. but still in all age groups there's a ca. 5-10% chance for suffering long term consequences (including chronic fatigue for months, dizzyness, drop in iq of nearly 10 points, high blood pressure, and in some rare cases heart failure or demyelinisation (think multiple sclerosis)). a friend is currently doing a study on post-covid changes in the brain and while it's too early to say anything definitely, he has seen activation patterns commonly associated with depression in the great majority of test subjects. also only a small proportion of subjects (even those who had mild disease) report feeling 100% healthy even after months. this virus is no joke and we will only realise the full impact of this pandemic in the coming year.