Month: April 2021

Interior Monologue

Chill Regular-ass Post

I don’t think the pain I lived through was worth it so when people say things like, “I wish my life could be like yours!” or “I wish I could do the things you do!” I usually just smile and say nothing. But what I am thinking is, You would have had to walk the path I walked to be where I am, and you really don’t want that, so be happy how you are, because how I am is a result of things people shouldn’t have to go through.

I repurposed my suffering to metamorphose myself into a knife to slice reality into the shapes I wished it to be, but I was lucky and just happened to be resilient enough. Many weren’t, where I grew up, and they are now all gone, in the grave.

P1 Variant

Chill Uncategorized

The only variant I am worried about is the Brazil variant. It seems to have much greater humoral immune evasion and appears to be both more transmissible and more deadly (99% of the time, these occur together). Also, it’s understudied relative to other variants in relation to antigenic escape in vaccinated people, though the research I’ve seen indicates the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines should be effective against it.

On the bright side, we can produce new vaccines very quickly now, so I expect boosters for that variant to arrive if it becomes a large problem.

On the not-so-bright side, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers will make it all go on longer than it should.

Food Lyin’

Chill Regular-ass Post

In my experience, the very, very best food you can find in the US is roughly comparable to the average food in most of the rest of the world.

The very best food in the rest of the world can be found nowhere in the US at all.

Good Forward

Chill Uncategorized

The U.S. is unlikely to face a “true” fourth wave of COVID-19 outbreaks.

Speaking to CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Gottlieb acknowledged that young people were driving new coronavirus outbreaks in many states, but that vaccination efforts should prevent another devastating surge of the virus.

I agree with his assessment. We are mananging to stay just ahead of the variants and even the premature full re-openings in the US. At the current vaccination pace we will be ok. The doom-mongers are wrong, through no lack of efforts of Republicans and conservatives to make them be correct.

Unfortunately, the doom-shouters likely reduced vaccine uptake a bit so that’s not so good — but luckily not enough to really do deep harm.

What People Do

Chill Uncategorized

I was not surprised. People do mad stupid stuff all the time in real life. I’ve seen it in the army, where I grew up, everywhere. Seeing it at a societal scale is disconcerting but was not unexpected for me.

Eine kleine Nacht lesen

Chill Regular-ass Post

I knew this because it’s true of nearly all vaccines, but nice that other people are learning it.

A friend of mine’s relative had already gotten Covid, and she said therefore that the relative “didn’t really need the vaccine.” I told her that the relative still should get jabbed as the vaccine-based immunity was far superior — and far more likely to work against the variants — than natural immunity.

Amazin’ what a little reading gets you, ain’t it?

Unclosed

Chill Uncategorized

Why your brain loves closed captioning. Captioning has taken off among the non-hearing impaired — and for good reason.

I watch every show with subtitles, sometimes in two different languages at once. For instance if it’s a language like French that I am working harder to understand the spoken version of, I will have both the French and English subtitles going. (Note this article conflates “subtitles” and “closed captions,” which are in reality two different things, so I will as well.)

But most of the shows I watch are in English, though that is decreasing all the time, and I turn on the subtitles because there is so much barely-audible dialog and general poor audio that it helps me avoid rewinding so frequently.