We've been WFH since March 6th. Washington was kind of a "Ground Zero" for the infection in the US, having the first patient, death and discovered community outbreak. It's been really interesting seeing things evolve, both locally and nationally. When it started blowing up in South Korea, Iran and Italy that one week, I realized this realistically wasn't going to be contained.
'atvelonis' said:
My town now has a curfew being enforced by the police. This is dystopian and insane for a virus whose death rate is not actually that significant.
Like Yaya says, the death rate isn't so much the issue as much as the potential for hospitals become overwhelmed. Hospitals can only handle so many patients, so even if something like 4% of patients need hospitalization, if half your city comes down with coronavirus at the same time, that could mean 5-10x more patients than usual. Also consider that if this happens around the globe simultaneously, this could also put a strain on the supply chains for hospitals.
If you don't need to go to the hospital, for coronavirus or other reasons, you'll likely be more impacted by the restrictions than the actual virus. But if you do need to go the hospital, lets say 1-3 weeks from now, you'll probably have a pretty bad time. (And also consider that older people, like your parents and grand parents are more likely to need hospitalization)
So it sucks, but it makes sense that the government is freaking out about it.
'atvelonis' said:
If people were going to go out anyway, why force more of them to go out during the day?
IDK much about that, I would guess it makes it easier to enforce the restrictions set in place, and maybe makes people take the situation more seriously.
I am working in a top-secret facility and as such cannot work from home...but nonetheless cannot come to work, so we're just stuck at home forced to use our free days until they're gone, and then probably vacation without payment. Dring this time I'm at home, playing games, reading books, and mainly watching various series.
...whihc btw is why I came here!
Westworld season 3 episode 2 features csd's 59-objects-falling-at-the-same-time glitch. LOL!
In Israel so far we have contained it until like 4 days ago and now it's burst. 2000 people sick, 2 dead by now. Hopefully it'll stay 1-digited....
I went to a gas station on Monday that was confirmed to have a COVID-19 postive employee working there. I've had some chest pains, coughing, and headaches (potentially due to stress) over the past few days. I'm not eligible to get tested unless I develop a fever, but I've been told to self-isolate for 7-10 days. I was pretty much staying home all the time anyways. Both my parents are in their late 50's tho and my grandpa lives with the family, so I'm still pretty concerned about spreading it
COMING SOON: A giant meteor. Please.
Give me +karma. Give me +karma.
Age: 104 Karma: 147 Posts: 1002 Gender:Female Location: you will be first against the wall pm | email
Uhhh so I kind of forgot about the interguild for a while because a chain of events caused me to significantly increase the difficulty of my course load. The other thing is that I didn't sign up for any CS courses this semester so I no longer have any reasons to come here and whine. But I thought I'd check up on you guys because of the whole coronavirus thing...
Re: Yaya - oh no, that's pretty bad. For what it's worth, though, it is very easy to develop psychosomatic symptoms (especially in times of crisis) so here's hoping everything's fine.
Here in HB-city (and the surrounding areas) basically everything is closed. Our university has completely transitioned to online lectures so I've just been sitting inside, doing homework and watching episodes of the twilight zone. Rambling ahead - I don't remember ever mentioning this to you guys, but I'd like to provide some context for the grand trolling scheme that neezles and I began around ten years ago (god, has it really been that long?) if you're curious.
(warning: disturbing content about non-conventional childhoods)
Spoiler:
For most of my childhood I was really, really extremely bored. The truth is that my mother has probably been suffering from depression ever since neezles was born, and the fallout from the SARS epidemic (c. 2003) caused her to develop a paralyzing fear of germs. All of this is from my observations because she comes from a culture that doesn't really believe in the concept of mental health - seeking help is not something that she would've ever considered. Except for some brief spates of normalcy, she has essentially been incapacitated for the better part of the last two decades, and our family was forced to structure our lives around her.
Because of her paranoia regarding germs, going outside was an arduous process. She considered everything outside of our home to be "infected", and anybody who went outside wasn't allowed to touch any of the furniture indoors (except for objects that were placed right next to the entrance door) until we took a shower and changed into indoor clothing. These rules were VERY STRICT - if you'd dared to violate them then she would've screamed at you and kept reminding you of it for the rest of the day.
Warning: we've got a matryoshka of disturbing content
[I'm skipping forward in time here, but I also distinctly remember being screamed at when I was 17 for taking a shower that was less than 20 minutes long. I'm not going to expand on how SHE had to turn on the shower tap for me because my hands, at that point, were still dirty from "outside germs" - the logistics of that are left as an exercise to the reader]
So I guess when I was a kid, I decided that the path of least resistance was to not go outside at all, because she mostly just ignored us whenever she wasn't yelling at us. This is why neezles and I were able to spend entire days attempting to "go for the record" and to generally waste so much time enacting zany schemes on the interguild. You guys served as a great source of entertainment, and I'd like to thank you for that - I hope even those of you who were evidently frustrated ( Quirvy) can look back with a sense of amusement. I suppose, with my personal experience, that if I were a moderator on a forum where some young siblings were trolling for up to 12 hours a day, then I probably would wonder what was going on at home. But that's only because of my experience.
Anyway, I guess quarantine brought a lot of those memories back. I'm very fortunate in that I have a wonderful friend whose parents are allowing me to stay at their house for no charge. My friend has young siblings, too, and it just shocks me how happy they are, and just, in general, how normal families can be when there isn't a constant undercurrent of resentment and untreated mental illness. But anyway
I understand that this crisis is distressing for everyone - it's completely unprecedented by anything within living memory. But please don't neglect your mental health. Try to continue doing the things you enjoy, maybe pick up a couple of new hobbies while you're at it, go outside and take a walk every once in a while (while maintaining social distancing of course...) I'd even recommend limiting the amount of news you read, because at some point the productivity of staying informed plateaus and it also negatively affects your mental state. There's also the inconvenient fact that the mortality rate of the virus is still not really known due mainly to (1) lack of testing, due to government incompetence and also (2) lack of information, due to government interference... (I can rant about this but I don't want to)
Anyway, stay safe guys, it'll be over... at some point, eventually.
I agree a lot with what HB says; I think mental health is pretty important right now, so try to not let yourself get too stressed out about the situation. It's very easy to in these times, when you're mostly confined to your home, and it seems like everything you hear on the news and social media is about the Coronavirus. I think it's pretty important to be able to find an escape from all of that.
'aych bee' said:
I hope even those of you who were evidently frustrated ( Quirvy) can look back with a sense of amusement.
Haven't I always maintained I thought it was pretty amusing? At times it got to be a bit much, but I wouldn't have kept a ban chart with all your usernames and a ranking of bans per staff member if I didn't find it entertaining in some way. I think the person you're thinking of is Isa -- I feel like you got under his skin way more than me. Thomas was the one who really got under my skin.
As a whole, your story is particularly interesting to me; makes me wonder if we'll be seeing similar long-term germ-anxiety issues like that stemming from the Coronavirus outbreak.
Age: 104 Karma: 147 Posts: 1002 Gender:Female Location: you will be first against the wall pm | email
Re: Quirvy. Somehow I always considered you our main adversary in our trolling campaigns. I guess, subconsciously, I probably always knew that you weren't as irritated as you sometimes came across, as otherwise I wouldn't have provoked you as often. Isa put up a good fight, but second place never means quite as much.
Sometimes I wonder if Thomas ever graduated. It was kind of strange how nobody in the department seemed to know him when we're supposed to be pretty tight-knit.
> As a whole, your story is particularly interesting to me; makes me wonder if we'll be seeing similar long-term germ-anxiety issues like that stemming from the Coronavirus outbreak.
That's... probably one of the consequences that will have the largest impact on a longer timeframe. I won't lie, these past few weeks have been fairly difficult for me - seeing my mother's behaviour normalized and being constantly reminded to stay inside triggered something that has made me feel quite powerless. But (at least in Canada/the US) I feel like it has become more acceptable to discuss topics of mental health on a societal level, so hopefully people will be more open to seeking treatment.
I dunno what else I can say besides I'm sorry you had such a rough childhood, HB. Sadly the more people I get to know, the more people it seems like had less than ideal upbringings, and I definitely take my relatively stable one for granted
As far as germ-anxiety goes, it's pretty interesting. My best friend has legitimate OCD, and it most commonly manifests around the fear of poison, brain damage, illness, etc. She's usually freaking out about something (that seems completely logical to her of course), and I do my best to convince her otherwise. However, she's been oddly chill about COVID-19, and we've kinda switched places as far as who's freaking out & who's doing the reasoning
My quote unquote symptoms haven't really gotten any worse or better, so idk if I have anything. I'm still self-isolating etc to stay safe, but I'm definitely confused
COMING SOON: A giant meteor. Please.
Give me +karma. Give me +karma.
Age: 104 Karma: 147 Posts: 1002 Gender:Female Location: you will be first against the wall pm | email
Thanks for your words of support, Yaya. I've only recently opened up about this, because it was instilled in me that the quality of my upbringing would somehow reflect poorly upon me (????????????????) as a human being. I definitely find it MUCH easier to commiserate with those who have had similar experiences, though, because those who have stable families tend to either find it too foreign, or too horrible, to think that parents could inflict so much damage on their children.
Hope you're still holding up well. I went to Walmart the other day and the aisles were labelled with one-way arrows in order to facilitate social distancing. Seems pretty apocalyptic if you ask me (does anyone remember how pop culture was saturated with dystopian and zombie-related works circa 2012????????? What was that about??????)
Yup, basically back to normal. I still don’t know if I actually had it, but I’m sure lots of people are ib the same boat. I stayed isolated like a good little vector
COMING SOON: A giant meteor. Please.
Give me +karma. Give me +karma.
Age: 21 Karma: 38 Posts: 850 Location: Clinging to the last whispers of life in my decaying body pm | email
interguild just be like that, server issues maybe?
Can you feel your heart burning?
Can you feel the struggle within?
The fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make, you cannot kill me in a way that matters
Karma: 160 Posts: 1642 Gender:Male Location: An antique land pm | email
Okay, I non-ironically think that the masks have the capacity to look extremely cool. They just have to be sewn and not be straight-up medical masks. You can get little patterns, or do a solid color, or make a reversible one with one color on each side, etc. If you match it with the rest of your outfit, it's not a bad look at all. I actually wouldn't be surprised if they stick around in fashion afterward.
Regardless, I would still describe this situation as dystopian. I'm all for social distancing and whatever other measures need to be taken to slow down the virus, but I'm not going to rescind my earlier complaint about a curfew being insane and unhelpful. If I want to take a midnight walk while respecting all other statutes, I should be able to. But my larger concern is that this is massively intensifying the stratification of wealth both nationally and worldwide, disproportionately affects people who already have bad living situations. See this recent article in The New York Times, which comments on just how differently the effects of the virus manifested in ZoomU based on these factors. As a semi-extrovert myself, I'm definitely struggling to exist in quarantine, but many people have it much, much worse. I don't like that this affects the college experience in such an imbalanced way.
On a brighter note, I have been cooking a fair bit during this. I made some baked salmon last night, which I think came out pretty well. Diced carrots and leeks cooked in butter and mixed with cream and parmesian (plus some spices), spread across one side of the salmon and all wrapped in a puff pastry, then baked. I think that the seasoning was a little imbalanced (I didn't have all of the ingredients; no grains of paradise, which I really should have made up for with some extra pepper), but I think that it was overall solid.
'jellsprout' said:
As a kid I always thought tennisballs looked delicious and I liked biting them. I still remember the feel of the fuzz on my teeth and tongue.
A friend of mine strongly insisted that I read a Harry Potter fanfiction called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I don't usually like fanfiction so I resisted for a while, but I started it recently and I'm blown away by how good it is. It starts out like a satire of Harry Potter, in which he's a staunch rationalist trying to make sense of magic and the absurdity of the HP universe, but it develops its versions of the characters very well and feels less like a silly comedy and more like a serious, fully-fledged drama the further you read. The characters and their conversations are very smart, well-written, and original. I might even prefer it to the original Harry Potter.
Karma: 160 Posts: 1642 Gender:Male Location: An antique land pm | email
What is everyone enjoying and/or looking forward to this holiday season?
I'm grateful that it's cool enough outside to wear proper jackets. I like to layer and it means I get to wear more wool. I like to breathe in and get that jumpstart of cold air when you step outside. Wakes you up!
(I like the summer well enough too, but it's winter now, so I'm appreciating the winter.)
'jellsprout' said:
As a kid I always thought tennisballs looked delicious and I liked biting them. I still remember the feel of the fuzz on my teeth and tongue.