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Plague Diary

Started by Doktor Howl, March 23, 2020, 07:17:36 PM

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Doktor Howl

#15
Quote from: tyrannosaurus vex on March 25, 2020, 02:05:31 AM
there is no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway, so why not

There are, however, fat bags of boodle and all the marijuana you can snort.
Molon Lube

altered

Before bed musings on 3/24.

I might be one of the only people who stands to actually do better in this than out of it. I'm not sure how to feel.

I've lived a life of non-stop personal crisis, with borderline personality disorder hanging over my head and more trauma than you can set on fire with a truckload of accelerant and a death wish. I default to anxiety and existential dread as a matter of course. I've learned, slowly, with backsliding, how to make them useful.

The apocalypse is my home.



More than that, I'm getting a job that pays a decent living wage in almost all places you can live at all without owning a yacht as of early December, and have a community I plan on living in that costs less than most communities that fit my needs (urban, transit, walking distance to groceries).

And this isn't a job offer that will magically dry up tomorrow when the industry it lives on collapses. I've been told I'm allowed to mention they're working on an app for COVID stuff. Government app with a civilian portal. Not sure how much else I can mention, but the point is clear: I'm about to become indispensable. Handling crises for a company working on crisis management tools during a global crisis.

So I stand to actually come out of this doing okay. Really okay. Finally have my shit together okay.

And I vaguely feel bad.

I don't know if QGPs reminder that I deserve nice things applies when I might do alright while the world burns. I worry about things others don't, because subsistence survival has been my main mode of being for so long that I'm used to it. Is it fair that I finally make it when someone else falls down into a lake of feces, someone who doesn't have a life history of septic swimming?



In the wider world, everything looks scarier and scarier and I've grown numb to it. I recognize the importance of it all, but I have no power to change it, and those who do are fucking morons and keep looking away from the burning building we all are in to hatefuck pure-bred show dogs over and over.

When you cannot change something, when it is enormous and all-consuming, you have to change your attitude toward it. And so I parse it and allow myself to feel nothing, because the magnitude is crushing. And I feel vaguely guilty about this too.



We have had, as Dok noted, an abundance of crises in my lifetime. I don't know how a normal human does anything, but I especially don't know how a normal human is supposed to react to the world ending in a hundred ways constantly for the entire time they've been alive.

I do not remember a time when things were okay. Not in a personal sense, a global sense. I grew up with the Kosovo war and Bosnian genocide. I was just starting to be able to parse that when 9/11 happened, along with everything that kicked off. Years of decreasing freedom and increasing fearmongering from the Bush administration. I was terrified of planes, and still have a deep sense of unease seeing them in motion.

This is glossing over a billion things that seem comparatively tiny, but were world-shattering to me. Gamergate, the war on trans people, anti-vaxxers and the anti-autism angle that they built. I'm leaving out a ton of global things that everyone here remembers clearly, starting with 2008 and going onward from there.

But those are unnecessary to make the point:

Things have never in my life been okay.

I'm inclined to feel bad when, for one singular time, I might be the okay one while everyone else falls down.

And I'm just not sure if that's damage, human response like some sort of pre-survivor's guilt, or the ethical response.
"I am that worst of all type of criminal...I cannot bring myself to do what you tell me, because you told me."

There's over 100 of us in this meat-suit. You'd think it runs like a ship, but it's more like a hundred and ten angry ghosts having an old-school QuakeWorld tournament, three people desperately trying to make sure the gamers don't go hungry or soil themselves, and the Facilities manager weeping in the corner as the garbage piles high.

The Wizard Joseph

Quote from: altered on March 25, 2020, 07:00:06 AM
Before bed musings on 3/24.

I might be one of the only people who stands to actually do better in this than out of it. I'm not sure how to feel.

I've lived a life of non-stop personal crisis, with borderline personality disorder hanging over my head and more trauma than you can set on fire with a truckload of accelerant and a death wish. I default to anxiety and existential dread as a matter of course. I've learned, slowly, with backsliding, how to make them useful.

The apocalypse is my home.



More than that, I'm getting a job that pays a decent living wage in almost all places you can live at all without owning a yacht as of early December, and have a community I plan on living in that costs less than most communities that fit my needs (urban, transit, walking distance to groceries).

And this isn't a job offer that will magically dry up tomorrow when the industry it lives on collapses. I've been told I'm allowed to mention they're working on an app for COVID stuff. Government app with a civilian portal. Not sure how much else I can mention, but the point is clear: I'm about to become indispensable. Handling crises for a company working on crisis management tools during a global crisis.

So I stand to actually come out of this doing okay. Really okay. Finally have my shit together okay.

And I vaguely feel bad.

I don't know if QGPs reminder that I deserve nice things applies when I might do alright while the world burns. I worry about things others don't, because subsistence survival has been my main mode of being for so long that I'm used to it. Is it fair that I finally make it when someone else falls down into a lake of feces, someone who doesn't have a life history of septic swimming?



In the wider world, everything looks scarier and scarier and I've grown numb to it. I recognize the importance of it all, but I have no power to change it, and those who do are fucking morons and keep looking away from the burning building we all are in to hatefuck pure-bred show dogs over and over.

When you cannot change something, when it is enormous and all-consuming, you have to change your attitude toward it. And so I parse it and allow myself to feel nothing, because the magnitude is crushing. And I feel vaguely guilty about this too.



We have had, as Dok noted, an abundance of crises in my lifetime. I don't know how a normal human does anything, but I especially don't know how a normal human is supposed to react to the world ending in a hundred ways constantly for the entire time they've been alive.

I do not remember a time when things were okay. Not in a personal sense, a global sense. I grew up with the Kosovo war and Bosnian genocide. I was just starting to be able to parse that when 9/11 happened, along with everything that kicked off. Years of decreasing freedom and increasing fearmongering from the Bush administration. I was terrified of planes, and still have a deep sense of unease seeing them in motion.

This is glossing over a billion things that seem comparatively tiny, but were world-shattering to me. Gamergate, the war on trans people, anti-vaxxers and the anti-autism angle that they built. I'm leaving out a ton of global things that everyone here remembers clearly, starting with 2008 and going onward from there.

But those are unnecessary to make the point:

Things have never in my life been okay.

I'm inclined to feel bad when, for one singular time, I might be the okay one while everyone else falls down.

And I'm just not sure if that's damage, human response like some sort of pre-survivor's guilt, or the ethical response.

A few thoughts.

The world is inherently not fair, but that does swing both ways. It is utterly pointless to bemoan the fact in adversity, a total waste of A Good Time, not to mention a bit douchey, to do so in times of good fortune.

You may choose to be fair in an unfair world. To take your resources and seek to alleviate the suffering of others, to promote what you think is just, to have personal integrity even,  especially, when it's a burden to do so. In an inherently, demonstrably, unfair world this is the stuff of saints and hopeless fools alikeand so rare and much needed. It is therefore valuable in a way that mere currency cannot ever reflect, treasures laid up in heaven so to speak, but it is by no means required of you, or anyone else for that matter, to pursue such value at all. To me that's kind of the point. It's something that you have to choose, and it's QUITE alright to do so just because it may make you feel better or otherwise result in personal gain. Those who are helped will not quibble about your motives and you probably shouldn't either.

If you are ok while everyone else falls down that's ok. You may walk away, or you may stay. If you want to help others I'm sure some would appreciate it, but you should probably recover a bit first. There's always gonna be ways to help, but you must heal yourself after your own climb out.

Let yourself be your priority and give yourself some credit. That's what years of therapy ultimately taught me. I'm not cured of existential levels of depression or any of my other maladies by this, but it helps my soul in a way I consider akin to yoga helping a bad back. That's my take on it anyway, and I'll take what I can get.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

P3nT4gR4m

There's a difference between feeling sorry for the poor souls burning in the pits of hell and jumping in beside them to ease your conscience - the former is human, the latter is just fucking retarded. If there's nothing you can do to help them but something you can do to help yourself then there's no moral imperative on you to feel the heat.

Personally our company made out like bandits during the financial collapse, simply because we were offering a saving on a marginal cost which, before the crunch, nobody gave a shit about. After it happened they were knocking our door off the hinges. Did I feel bad for all the poor bastards going under and losing their everything? Yes. Did I feel good about drowning in filthy lucre, while all this was going on? Equally yes.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
Not actually a meat product.
Ass-Kicking & Foot-Stomping Ancient Master of SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK
Awful and Bent Behemothic Results of Last Night's Painful Squat.
High Altitude Haggis-Filled Sex Bucket From Beyond Time and Space.
Internet Monkey Person of Filthy and Immoral Pygmy-Porn Wart Contagion
Octomom Auxillary Heat Exchanger Repairman
walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Cramulus

Quote from: altered on March 25, 2020, 07:00:06 AM
Before bed musings on 3/24.

I might be one of the only people who stands to actually do better in this than out of it. I'm not sure how to feel.

I've lived a life of non-stop personal crisis, with borderline personality disorder hanging over my head and more trauma than you can set on fire with a truckload of accelerant and a death wish. I default to anxiety and existential dread as a matter of course. I've learned, slowly, with backsliding, how to make them useful.

The apocalypse is my home.


Totally understand what you mean. You've been through so much shit that when something good happens, your expectation is that the other shoe will drop any moment now. The current state of reality is difficult to accept whether it's good or bad.

This is (obviously) a strange time for ALL of us. We ALL have to learn new skills in order to cope with the coming weeks. Your challenge, I suspect, is figuring out how to relax into it. To turn off the fight/flight warning lights and set cruise control. Cause this is it for a little while.


chaotic neutral observer

2020 Mar. 25

I understand where altered is coming from, sort of.

My anxiety is the worst it's been since they started me on the pills.  It's nowhere near redline, but I've dusted off some of my old coping mechanisms.  It's kind of refreshing, in a way, to be experiencing anxiety with a legitimate cause; it's easier to understand than the kind of anxiety that has no reason, that happens just because my brain chemistry happens to be off that month.

I'm experiencing a bit of schadenfreude (just a little bit).  That general anxiety, that fear of human contact that a lot of people are going through?  Welcome to my world.  I've spent decades here, and I know the tricks, how to move in pitch darkness without stumbling, how to pretend everything is normal when it really isn't.  I should feel more guilty about feeling this way than I actually do.  But I hope you don't have to stay in my world long.  It's not likely to make you a better person, I'm sorry to say.

I've been working from home the last few days.  My hands, once chapped with cold air and aggressive hand-washing, are starting to recover.  It's nice to work in a quiet environment, although I wouldn't say my productivity is up.

I'm spending too many of my waking hours in a single room.  I should take up meditation again.  I need to relax.
Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando.

Cain

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/us/politics/coronavirus-fbi-shooting.html?fbclid=IwAR26dTjQ-g8IJ8nvPa_SMAB1oTxFEh_ghl_-uCFD8j04rwjlm_0opydIhfY

QuoteA man suspected of planning to attack a Missouri hospital was killed during a shootout with F.B.I. agents, the authorities said on Wednesday.

The deadly encounter took place on Tuesday afternoon in suburban Belton, Mo., after agents on a tactical team tried to arrest the man as part of a domestic terrorism investigation.

It was not clear whether the man was killed by F.B.I. agents or died by suicide. He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Officials identified the man as Timothy R. Wilson, 36.

According to officials, Mr. Wilson had expressed racist and anti-government sentiments. He had been under F.B.I. scrutiny since September, and the authorities said that at one point he had considered attacking multiple targets, including a school with a large number of black students, as well as a mosque and a synagogue.

"Wilson considered various targets and ultimately settled on an area hospital in an attempt to harm many people, targeting a facility that is providing critical medical care in today's environment," the F.B.I. said in a statement.

Last week, Belton's mayor issued a stay-at-home order for its residents. Authorities said Mr. Wilson said he felt compelled to act because of the mayor's order and intended to use a car bomb to cause mass casualties at the hospital.

altered

I wanted to say that people's replies have helped. Waking up today, I was able to take a deep breath and accept that life isn't a struggle for me and that maybe I do deserve it, even when a lot of people are currently and will soon be struggling in my place. I'll do what I can and try to live life without it being a constant catastrophe. If I have enough to help people without existential dread, which is quite likely, I will.

I am more or less at peace today, 3/25. Things feel normal in an almost movie-like way. It feels fake but I am able to accept it. I'm not upset or depressed. My anxiety is reducing itself. I'm having normal human interactions with people in real life. The news has gone ignored.

I have a black cloak. A gift. I intend to buy MOLLE panels and stitch them to it. If this is going to be an apocalypse, I will be prepared. If not, I will be fashionably functional.
"I am that worst of all type of criminal...I cannot bring myself to do what you tell me, because you told me."

There's over 100 of us in this meat-suit. You'd think it runs like a ship, but it's more like a hundred and ten angry ghosts having an old-school QuakeWorld tournament, three people desperately trying to make sure the gamers don't go hungry or soil themselves, and the Facilities manager weeping in the corner as the garbage piles high.

Faust

29/03/2020
I've been working from home for two weeks, and apart from anxiety for both of us, the disruption up until now was minimal. We go for a walk for an hour in the field to avoid other people. We are getting food home delivered and clean it down when it gets to the door. It has been harder for herself though, her parents don't live far away but we've made the decision (including them) not to meet except maybe across the garden until at least after the baby is born. Inconvenient but still, a minimal disruption.
My mother lost her Job, at least until the factory reopens, and I am worried about her, but for the most part she has been able to consume her time with gardening.
Found out on Friday though I wont be allowed in to the hospital for the birth or be with herself. I understand why, I'm not grumbling, the less pressure on the health system the better and less unnecessary risk the better, but it sucks, I am worried about herself needing someone to support her through it, but we will have to make do.
I cant apply for my paternity leave either, the welfare website just has a big redirect to the pandemic unemployment section whenever I try to register. But I will phone them on monday.
Sleepless nights at the chateau

Cramulus

jeeesus man, I can't imagine giving birth in a time like this -- or not being there when the baby is born! Yes, it's the responsible thing, but good god damn, my heart goes out to you.

Doktor Howl

3/29/20

It turns out that making horrible tiny robots of DEFF is an essential occupation, so I still go to work.  We can't have one apocalypse conflicting with another.  Also, these things make the Russian surveillance state that Cramulus mentioned look antiquated.  Like having a couple of guys trying to listen in on an entire city's phone system, as opposed to millions of tiny things that recharge by parking on power lines and sucking up induction.

I got made the company's plague czar, and I threw everyone out who could do their job from home, among other things...Such as draconian penalties for coming in sick (and a vastly modified attendance policy that forbids punishment and allows people to go in the hole on PTO), 300 gallons of hand sanitizer made from isopropyl and water, etc.


Molon Lube

Doktor Howl

Yeah, that sucks ass, Faust.  Good luck.
Molon Lube

The Wizard Joseph

Faust I will pray as often as the spirit may move me and I can spare the brain time for your well-being and your family in this struggle. You may wish to study emergency birthing procedure, youtube and other more reliable outlets alike in the event that the possibility of getting to the hospital becomes nil or too risky. That said I apologize for my next entry. It's grim, but must be contemplated.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Wizard Joseph

3/29/2020

Every day I am more and more grateful for what abundance I have available to me in terms of simple necessity being met, and family, and also the residual luxury of having access to information and the internet. Today my father attended his first virtual church service over FB live. By how sluggish FB is being I presume that the same is happening on a huge scale. I believe that this trend will continue and due to sheer utility consider FB and various videoconferencing platforms to be choice picks for investment at this time as well as all technology and logistical Telecom concerns that support it. In addition going forward I expect to see various common goods becoming highly competitive luxury items like cosmetics, sanitizers, and sad to say eventually high quality toilet paper. Medical supply must be held on a level of sacred trust similar to how we may have once viewed gold. Trump is in my estimations INTENTIONALLY seeking to set the states in competition for these goods and I believe that he hopes to spark open, violent conflict sufficient to establish martial law powers for himself and put the military control system, that his office commands, in authority over the governers. Any governor who doesn't capitulate will be considered "rogue" and subject to military action. Any governor who capitulates gets federal aid if they just stick their tongue up his ass and wiggle it with convincing enthusiasm. I suspect that a grand majority will pick option 2, and so geography and isolation alone will eventually cow the remainder after a certain amount of suppression. We will come to a point where violent criminal authority enacted by government and cartels alike will become the norm.

It gets worse. I pray that I am wrong, but the apparent blessing in this virus not provoking a strong, much less fatal, immune response in children under 10 or so may in fact be a horrific, existential threat to the continuation of the species. The children are still human, the virus absolutely does infect them and begin replication. All young children are therefore likely asymptomatic carriers bearing a disease vector with about a 1 in five chance of killing the untreated, and potentially crippling to various degrees the lungs of countless more for life. I consider it like Russian roulette with bullets in chambers 3 and 4 bearing a truly horrible but survivable sickness if you have basic necessities and a caregiver to hand, and a bullet 5 WILL require hospitalization that will largely be unavailable in the coming years. It's a dice roll for your life just to be around others or in an unsanitized environment and if you fail that infection check you play roulette with the best possible outcome being an asymptotic carrier. Regardless if you get infected every person in your quarters with you almost certainly will get infected on their dice roll and then also play roulette for severity. There are things you can do to modify the dice roll like social distance and ppe, but you can only bypass it by remaining in containment. Imagine a world where just speaking face to face with a child provokes an check for infection, and a hug imposes a steep penalty to that roll for you life and everyone else's that is in quarters with you. If this becomes endemic, and I don't have the luxury of presuming otherwise given that it manifed a second strain called S and the original strain is L in a few months. We need 2 vaccines now at best, and they're not telling people. I don't blame them, but it's true. Panic is worth lying or even killing to prevent at this point ethically in my opinion.

I have been trying to sleep, and succeeding in fits, but my meds are running low and I need a doctor I can't access due to lack of insurance and a VERY steep penalty to the infection check just for being in a hospital at this point.

I have ideas slowly gestating in me on how to counter this horrible low blow we have been dealt by nature. They're not ready for full expression yet, but one of them is a new form of public Service that accepts inevitable infection in exchange for being a capable helping hand in dealing with the logistical problems we now face that They are currently ignoring.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

Bruno

Shit, Faust. I'm sorry to hear that.

My company is apparently essential enough to stay open, so at least I'm still getting a check every week. They ask us several questions, and scan our foreheads for temperature before they let us in, but that's right after driving all the way there with the window down, and C19 doesn't always present fever. they tell us to socially distance, but we have two meetings a day where we have to huddle up to hear the supervisor in a noisy environment, and it's fairly half-assed the rest of the shift as well.

I don't go out except to shop, and I try to keep my distance from people when I do. I have some homemade hand sanitizer in a Dr. Pepper bottle in the drink holder of my car that I made from pure grain alcohol and h2o2, and also a bottle of hibiclens, which is technically a soap, not hand sanitizer, but whatever.

I went out and got groceries this week after having them delivered last week. I'm wiping everything down with Lysol before I put it up except I forgot, and put a bunch of stuff in the freezer this week before wiping it down, and a freezer is the worst place to put a virus. The little fuckers could stay viable for decades in there.

I spend a lot of my free time researching things that could boost resistance to coronavirus. Right now I'm taking supplements including a 1-a-day, Zinc, Vitamins D and C, and I have some bottles of echinacea and elderberry extracts that I'll start taking if I have symptoms, and I'm going to start including a lot of leeks in my diet as well as growing some in my garden along with some stinging nettle (it's got something to do with lectins, apparently).

Here's a link to the lectins thing in case anybody's interested:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354207002380?via%3Dihub

Quote...The most potent lectin against the SARS-CoV-induced cytopathicity is the mannose-specific plant lectin isolated from leek (APA)...
... In addition, the N-acetyl glucosamine-specific lectins isolated from the stinging nettle (UDA) and from the tobacco plant (Nictaba) are also markedly active against the SARS-CoV...
Formerly something else...