#pandemic journal

[mutantlover]

Filming Italian Horror Like A Horror Movie Night. Every 3rd Saturday in 2021, at my apartment.

[chillyfeetsteak]

a few years ago, when i was trying to remember the things that make it worth it

[sleepinglionhearts]

Selections from my Hobonichi Techo so far :)

[blackbackedjackal]

there's cliche's and then there's intentionally leaving a piece vague but it still having meaning and assuming your audience isn't stupid so they can come to their own conclusions about how the piece makes them feel based on visual language

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. again gave the “lab-leak” theory a major boost, as its Energy Department, citing “new intelligence” but holding “low confidence” in it, joined the FBI in smearing China.

Reported exclusively by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Sunday, the claim immediately made headlines in major U.S. news outlets. However, its timing and source “only show the low credibility” of the report, analysts said, adding that the new hyping of an old topic is part of the U.S.’ political and information warfare with China.

[bernie-jsyk]

Friends! Strangers! Weird-Dream-Havers! Sleep Masks is now open for submissions!

Navigating COVID's many conflicts--from familial gatherings to conspiracy theories to economic pressures to the deepest grief and loss--is an ongoing struggle.

How does this impact our dreams? What do we dream about, and how have these dreams changed over the pandemic? Sleep Masks: A COVID Dreams Zine is meant to lend insight on these questions through a collection of micro-memoirs.

Dream descriptions of up to 500 words are welcome. Submissions are open until July 31, 2023, and contributors will be notified by mid-August (and will receive a print copy of the finished zine!).

Further background and guidelines are available in the form. If you have any questions, feel free to send me an ask.

Thank you so much, and I look forward to hearing about your dreams!

[corona-journal]

1000 days of covid.... a reflection... what do you remember?

If I asked many of the memory of covid, it would be toilet paper shortages, the media call to treat nurses and doctors as heroes, lockdowns and social isolation. But there's more, though....

The picture above is of a near bare row of supermarket shelves, with only a few rolls of toilet paper.

My own memories, in general terms, would be:

The curious spread of this flu variant through China and its neighbouring countries. (Via media reports. Plus its rapid rise up the priority reading list for the broadcast reader/ reporter/ news team)

The slow response of most governments to the emerging cases (easy with hindsight)

The tourist ship Ruby Princess docking with (eventually a total of) 22 cases on board, docking in Sydney. No quarantine controls enforced effectively at that point in time. (And Covid had been a thing well reported)

The toilet paper shortages, followed by shortages of pasta, rice, disinfectant and other staple foods from shelves. Never seen so many bare shelves before, except in news reports where people cleaned out stores in the face of cyclones or snow storms.

The growing weirdness of still going to work when others were getting government pay to stay at home. Apart from the driver, there'd be 2 other people on the bus in.

Add in the loneliness and the ghost town feeling of walking through an empty city. Except for the essential food services, so kids could still get you your order of coffee and mcbreakfast.... odd contrast, you'd agree.

Oh, the anger and entitlement of the covid deniers and anti-maskers.

My father in law complained about mask wearing on a flight down from Queensland to visit us. While my wife, a nurse, is donning full personal protective equipment (PPE) to help with patients. He's not entitled, just an oblivious, selfish idiot.

A bit of resentment at those who got the payments to not work, while I was an essential worker, in the finance sector had to work through. Discussing insurance with customers. All of them wanting discounts for (multitude of self justified reasons). That was tiring...

On the 'others staying home' a lot of people were making bread, trying new hobbies, going back to old hobbies, riding bikes to get fit... that only seemed to last 2 months, then it was easier to watch digitally streamed shows...

Oh, the growing gap between those who could afford the digital upgrade to work and/or study from home. And those that couldn't... that gap is bigger, and will show up in a decade or so...

Travel? Yeah, we'd travel from the couch to the kitchen table, work, then we'd travel to the letterbox and then to the couch again. On weekends, some of us would travel to the shed, to mow the lawns as part of the outside world travel.

Then the acceptance, as we waited for the vaccine to be made. Too late for too many in China, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom....

The USA being the most vocal of the anti-maskers and covid deniers. Because of Trump and his idiot approach to the crisis and his vanity.

A few covid conspiracy people I have spoken to, and seen the marches. I don't have time for dealing with these kind of people. Got used to being able to distance myself pretty quickly.

Overall though, I've become a bit more self directed towards entertaining myself (books and going back to the scale hobby of modelling) and fed up with a big insurance company making lots of profit while increasing the consumers insurance bill by about 20% average per year...

And remote studying has become a lonely grind. I am succeeding in my course so far.

Overall, post vaccine roll-out, we've adapted.

It's gone from being "the Chinese flu" (a pejorative term) to the "spicy cough".

So far, I have remained covid free.

And I have science, medicine and society to thank for that.

23 December 2022.

1000 days of covid.

@bundibird @scrapironflotilla thanks for just engaging with this little effort (it will continue)

@tafkarfanfic @bouncinghedgehog your posts helped with hope and morale when things were tough.

I'd invite you to reblog and share your memories, no matter where in the world you are.

[iliveinprocrasti-nationn]

i can never understand all the people going “covid’s just a cold” “it’s just like the flu”. it’s not influenza or a rhinovirus. covid sars-cov-2: severe accute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. scientifically, it can never be a cold or flu, and it will cause severe accute respiratory syndrome. that’s not posturing or dramatics, it’s science

[sparklemaia]

g.) all of the above

[astxrwar]

i will not correct all the virology/vaccinology misinformation in that post. I will not correct all the virology/vaccinology misinformation in that post. I will go outside and look at the sky and have peaceful thoughts and leave them to be wrong. i am capable of this

[remembertheplunge]

Aids Pandemic hits the Twin Peak's Bar

9/29/1990 Saturday

Drove to San Fransisco. Ran into Dick. He said that a mutual bar tender friend from Twin Peaks Bar now dies of Aids. His legs are paralyzed. He is in a hospital bed in the living room of his parent's house. His Mom and sister are there. And the blonde bomb shell bar tender takes AZT. 4th bar tender there to go. He will never be back. terminal.

The paper on 9/28/1990 said the 80's were nothing. We are in for an Aids pandemic 10 times what we have seen.

I said to Cliff last night that our little core of (gay) folks in Modesto waits. If the worst hits, we can train to support others. The paper says you change your (sexual) habits or you die.

[schuylerpeck]

oh the neighbors are having a dinner party and I cannot even be bothered to worry about noise — there’s a low song I’ve never heard, the trilling cadence of conversation and laughter, an offer for more wine, the smell of something simmering on the kitchen’s back-burner. thank you for this little living story to fall asleep to, I hope you enjoy your night.

[eternalistic]

See full article at archive.is “Ben Hu, a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who had done  extensive laboratory research on how coronaviruses infect humans, was identified in U.S. intelligence reports as one of the researchers who became ill in November 2019 with symptoms that American officials said were consistent with either Covid-19 or a seasonal illness. None of the researchers died.” “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has assessed with moderate confidence that a lab leak was the most likely origin of the virus and the Energy Department came to a similar conclusion with low confidence. Four other U.S. intelligence agencies assess with low confidence that the virus arose naturally, while the Central Intelligence Agency has been agnostic.“ “The U.S. intelligence community is planning to declassify more information regarding its search for Covid’s origins as soon as this week, under a law that Congress passed and President Biden signed in March. It couldn’t be determined if the declassified intelligence would include the names of the researchers, and representatives for the director of national intelligence declined to comment.” “Hu is noteworthy, current and former officials say, because of his central role in coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Further, some of the projects he worked on were funded by U.S. government grants, according to documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act by the White Coat Waste Project, a nonprofit that opposes taxpayer funded research on animals.“ “The Government Accountability Office noted in a report last week that some of the research at the Wuhan Institute was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Institutes of Health. Between 2014 and 2019, about $1.4 million was disbursed for work at the institute by both agencies before such grants were suspended.”

[devsquared]

For Theatre International we're supposed to bring in the text of a post from the internet that we find this week that is particularly striking

There's a bird site post floating around here I'm going to use, a post Michael Sheen wrote to a fan in answer to a question about their lack of confidence causing them trouble in a role they'd been cast in:

"Imagine the character is a real person who can only live again when someone plays them. They're desperate to be alive. To connect with people. To breathe. To see. To touch. Only you have the power to give that to them. Now get on with it and leave your worrying about yourself"

I love this so, so much. Memorised it immediately

Never been able to just "be confident." Oh sure I can fake it, but it's brittle and liable to lead to a self-centred sort of insecurity that revolves on itself getting ever worse, like the midnight picking of a hangnail. Bah. Useless. Boring

But shift the lens from the artist as someone who has to do it "right" - whatever that even means - to the artist as someone helping someone else, that's a mental-emotional place I can work from and thrive even in terrifying or frustrating conditions

It's like helping a friend move house, isn't it? You don't endlessly wonder if you're carrying the cartons "correctly." Or how other people will perceive your carton carrying. Cartons need carried; you carry cartons. Doesn't even matter if you're not confident about it. Your friend needs help and you provide it. I'm not trying to say there's no craft; I am saying that if there's craft in carton carrying, it probably comes after self-aware pantomime carton carrying gives way to authentic carton carrying

Very cool and sexy of the world to give me the 52 words that sever the entire artistic process from the rubbish holding me back right when I needed them and was ready to listen

[lesenbyan]

There are few things worse, I think, than reading a call to action memoir that is so close to right but really should have been shelved for at least 5yrs before going to print so the author has time to learn enough to see all the false equivalencies that really hinder the point

[freebooter4ever]

WE BROUGHT AHKY HOME TO CAIRN CITY ^_^