Isolation Report, Week #16

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]


I originally thought I might make up for last week by doing a full post this week, but a number of factors have conspired against me.  One is trying to finish a thing for $work.  Probably the more time-consuming, though, is that our cycle of D&D (and other TTRPGs) has cycled back around to the Family Campaign, which is the one game where I tend to put in a lot of work.  So I suppose we’ll have yet another virus isolation report.

Aside from the slight interruption of Father’s Day, it’s been pretty much business as usual.  The news seems to be confirming that, yes, we did open back up too early—perhaps I’m just cynical, but is there really anyone out there who is surprised at this news?  Experts said, if you do a thing, another thing will happen, and then people who are supposedly in charge did the thing, and then the other thing happened.  To borrow the eloquence of a fourth-grader: well, no duh.  I’m definitely not feeling bad about our family’s decisions to maintain our mostly-staying-isolated lifestyle.  In fact, honestly I would say we’re staying at home even more now than we were at the beginning of the pandemic: we’re going longer between runs to the grocery store, we’re eating out way less, and, while The Mother and the smallies have been out a couple of times recently, expanding our “social bubble,” overall extra-domiciliar expeditions are, on balance, reduced.

Protests over our militarized police state continue, but the media seems less inclined to continue focussing on the story, which is ... frustrating.  I guess we’ll just have to see how things keep going.  I do find it encouraging that so many people—especially so many white people—are calling for change.  On the other hand, the idea that the public outrage might  be quelled by the 24-hour news cycle is ... frustrating.

So far, I haven’t baked any sourdough bread or tried to pick up any new hobbies.  Unless my daughter sucking me into Portal Knights counts.  I have been, admittedly, watching a shit-ton of television, have blown through most of my podcast backlog, and been trying to watch more videos on the Internet, but there’s not as much out there as I wish there was.  In many ways, we’re getting some cool new stuff—to name just one, check out Josh Gad’s Reunited Apart series—but a lot of what I used to watch is struggling to figure out how to cope with the new normal, and that goes for television too.

One spot of good news: Critical Role is returning this coming week.  This is good news, because, I gotta tell you: watching people who normally play games together live try to figure out how to play on Zoom or other videoconferencing technology where the lag is just enough to make it difficult for people to figure out whether to jump in or shut up and let someone else talk is ... not as satisfying.  The people who have been doing it that way for years already have a leg up, of course, but a lot of the streams I’ve tried to watch (such as the otherwise entertaining annual livestream games from the makers of D&D, this year called D&D Live 2020) are just not what they used to be.  So the news that Critical Role is going to come back, filiming with everyone in the same room (albeit no longer at the same table), is quite welcome.  And, also, they’re going to keep doing their Narrative Telephone series (new episode came out on YouTube just yesterday), which brings me a lot of joy.  We’ll see if the new format works for Critical Role or not.

In the meantime, we’ll soldier on, try to stay safe, and try to stay sane.  Hopefully you all will as well.

Father's Day Amusements

Well, there was going to be a regular post this week, but I’ve spent Father’s Day weekend playing games with my kids and essentially accomplished nothing.  But, you know: in the best way.

Yesterday was around 5 hours of Portal Knights.  If you haven’t played it, it’s basically Legend of Zelda meets Minecraft.  So there’s equal parts fighting wandering monsters, exploring dungeons, and talking to townspeople along with planting trees, mining for copper, and constant expansions to the insanely large house you’re building.  The cool thing is how these seemingly dissimilar gameplay elements interact: can’t reach a cool place you want to explore?  Just build a bridge or some stairs to it.  Can’t find the door to the dungeon?  Just pickaxe through the wall.  Contrariwise, can’t build that cool wardrobe you need to hold all your extra stuff?  Just explore until you find someone else’s house that already has one and just take it.  I had a human wizard I made back when I played for a while with the Smaller Animal, but for this game it was just the baby girl and I, so I created a furfolk ranger.  I optimized him for being able to just sit still and shoot the shit out of things: I put every ability point into dexterity and constitution, built the best bow I could, took bow master and the sentry power that increases your damage if you shoot without moving.  Then I started grinding: I let my daughter concentrate on house building and interior decoration while I provided construction site security.  Eventually I got to the point where nothing in the level could kill me before I just shredded it into oblivion without ever moving.  Sweet.  And then of course I started fulfilling requests from my daughter (go find me a wardrobe, we need more copper blocks, etc etc).  It becomes very easy to lose yourself in games like these, where they’re just hard enough that you’re not bored but just easy enough that they don’t piss you off too much and you quit.  The 5 hours was gone before I knew it ... and that’s why I don’t play videogames any more.  I’d never accomplish anything.

Today was board games, by my specific request.  We started “simply,” with The Wizard Always Wins.  This is one of those games that seems moderately simple: the rules are just barely complex enough to warrant a second reading to clarify some of the finer points, but it turns out that it’s chock full of interesting choices and competing strategies.  We really enjoyed it.

Then we moved on to Betrayal at House on the Hill.  This is a quite complex but amazingly fun game.  The storyline is very Cabin in the Woods, although it precedes that movie by several years.  Basically, you build a haunted house out of tiles, thus making it different every time, and the various rooms give you items, events, and omens.  Items are usually good, events are often bad, and omens are usually a mixed blessing: it can be a valuable item for your character, but every time you get one, you have to roll for the haunting to begin.  You have to get more pips on your roll than there are omen cards on the table, so obviously there will eventually come a time when you just can’t beat it.  But of course it might come much sooner than that if you have shitty dice luck.  If you fail this roll, you look up which haunting you get by cross-referencing the room you were in with the item the omen granted you: there are 50 different scenarios in all.  Typically, one of you becomes the betrayer—it might be the one who failed the roll, or it might be someone else entirely, or it might be no one ... yet.  We played this twice, and it was entirely different the second time, which was amazing.  We’re looking forward to playing again soon.

(By the way, I have to thank The Mother, who picked out both of those games.  She doesn’t even like playing board games that much, but she knows what we like.)

So that ate up another several hours, and thus no proper post for you.  But I had a great time with all my children, so I’m not complaining, and hopefully you won’t either.  Until next week.

Isolation Report, Week #14

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]


So, these past couple of weeks have been a bit surreal.  People are trying to open the country back up, but nothing about the virus situation seems to have changed: still insufficient tests to see if you have it, still unreliable tests to see if you already got it and recovered, seemingly no closer to a cure or a vaccine.  I did see one report that the number of reported cases is starting to climb again—to which I say, “no shit”—but no one is sounding any alarms yet.  Which I find disturbing.

But perhaps that’s understandable, since the pandemic as a news story has been eclipsed by the tenacity of the Black Lives Matter protests, at least in the US.  Although I understand that some protests are taking place in other countries too, so perhaps more than just here.  This is another issue that I hope for balance on: I am so happy to see that the protests are not just going to go away, as they have in the past, but I’m also very concerned that that crazy person in charge of our country is going to actually do something crazy as opposed to just talking crazy.  Following the news has become completely surreal: if it weren’t my country, I could almost find it ridiculous.  Is this what people in other countries were feeling right before their democracies failed?

And we’re still supposed to be having an election.  The primary voting is still fucked, and some election officials are saying “we’ve got time” to fix it ... but there isn’t.  In large counties, they have to pre-plan the elections months out—sometimes up to a year—and it’s very hard to change directions less than five months out.  And, even if some places are willing to try to do that hard work, other places just aren’t.  Hell, the president openly admitted that making voting easier makes it harder for Republicans to win.  (Well, I say “admitted” ... I guess “bragged” is more appropriate, as he was celebrating defeating legislation to make voting easier.)  Will our elections be fair?  Will they even happen at all?  The president is asking people to apologize for polls that don’t show him winning, and he already seemed perfectly fine with tear gassing citizens.  Once upon a time the concept that a sitting president might attempt to delay or even cancel our election would have been utterly ludicrous.  Now it’s only mildly silly, and becoming increasingly feasible every day.

So, I don’t really know.  This is supposed to be a virus isolation report for me and my family, but, for us, little has changed.  The “reopening” of things has certainly not been heartening, and we’re in hurry to rush out and mingle with the folks who don’t seem to give enough of a shit about their fellow humans to cover their faces.  We’re eating out slightly less, trying to get back to homeschooling the kids regularly, trying to reduce stress wherever possible.  Which is tough these days.


I’ll toss you a few more links for things I think people should watch, even when they’re difficult:

• Anthony Mackie makes an emotional appeal in an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show.
• The Daily Show once again exposes hypocrisy on Fox “news”; in this case, they interleave clips of Fox anchors and commentators ranting about racial justice protestors with clips of pandemic lockdown protestors.  (Of course, the Fox folks had nothing bad to say about those people being in the streets.)
• Dave Chappelle is full of (understandable) rage, and never afraid to be offensive, but I still think this show, which he believes to be the first in-person concert in North America since the pandemic started, is worth watching.
• Wyrmwood is a company that makes some things I like, and they released this video where they solicit opinions from all their employees about the ongoing protests.

I particularly want to highlight the last one.  You don’t know who Wyrmwood is, and, for purposes of watching the video, you don’t really need to know.  It might be useful to know that they’re craftspeople—they’re makers.  But even that is purely optional in the end.  The point is, this company didn’t just want to make a blanket statement, which many would (rightly) perceive as just words, and perhaps suspect that the statement is more for show than anything else.  Instead, they wanted to ask their employees what they thought.  Their employees don’t agree on what the right response is, and they put that in the video.  Their employees have different opinions, and different levels of engagement, and they put that in the video.  There are black employees and white, women and men, gay and straight.  Each one has a different take, and it’s all in the video.  Probably the most compelling opinion came from a white employee, who said this:

So, I’m a combat vet.  ... If a solider kills an innocent civilian in another country, you’re going to Leavenworth.  If a cop kills a person here, who is innocent, did not pose a threat, they at worst get fired.  That’s a huge issue.  There’s a lot of good police officers, just like there’s a lot of good soldiers.  How you deal with those bad people defines you as an organization.  And an organization whose slogan is “to protect and to serve,” if you’re putting your life before the people you’re supposed to be protecting and serving, that is an inherent problem.  The consequences for actions, those are what need to change.  You change those, you change the equation.

Just in case you decided not to watch the whole thing.  But you really should.


Finally, on a lighter note, I’ll leave you with another call to check out “Narrative Telephone.”  My peeps over at Critical Role have kept it up, and I swear it’s the only decent thing about this whole pandemic bullshit.  Not only the fun of watching the story degrade hopelessly over time, but the joy of watching their faces when they watch the same thing you just watched: they give each other shit, they shake their heads in despair at their own foibles, they analyze what went wrong and where.  It makes the whole thing take more than twice as long, but it’s so worth it.  Remember: you don’t have to enjoy D&D or even know anyhthing about it; just enjoy the stories.

• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Episode 4
• Episode 5

Because there should be a little joy in the world.  The pain is necessary, but sometimes you need to take a break.

Protest Is the Bedrock of Democracy

The world is suffering through interesting times right now—and I use the word “interesting” in the same context as the supposedly (and apocryphally) Chinese malediction “may you live in interesting times.”  In my own country (the United States), we are now undergoing a layering of protest against racial injustice on top of the pandemic concerns.  There are a lot of opinions on this out there, and I wonder if anyone still reading things on the Internet like this post has an opinion unformed enough to be changed.  I suspect not.  I suspect that we all just read and watch the things we already believe, so that we can feel good about how sound our beliefs are, and don’t do much challenging of them.  I don’t exclude myself from any of my criticism, of course, but then that’s why I named this blog what I did.

Nonetheless, I have listened to a few opinions that dissent from my own—probably not as many as I should, but a few.  I have to confess, though, that I’m a little puzzled this time.  That is, on many issues, I can at least understand where people are coming from, even though I don’t agree with them.  If you say that it’s wrong to steal money from the rich via the gunbarrel of taxes, and we should just rely on their generosity to support charitable works, I understand that point of view.  It’s crazy, of course—it didn’t fly for Scrooge, and it doesn’t fly today—but at least I see where you’re coming from.  If you say that your holy text tells you that non-heterosexual non-cisgendered people are an abomination, I of course violently oppose your viewpoint, but at least I know which religious passages you’re wilfully misreading.  This one though ...

I understand racism, at least a little.  I am, after all, related to a lot of racists.  If I were to tot up all of my blood relatives, I would feel pretty confident in coming up with more racists than not, even considering that a lot of the most racist ones have done the nation the great service of dying.  I understand that the majority of it stems from not understanding any culture outside their own, from the systemic dehumanization that was the foundation of slavery in this country, and from being educated in systems that didn’t address any of those issues on the grounds that this was “too delicate” to discuss with children.  At this point in history, it really requires a stubborn insistence on ignorance, but at least I understand the root causes.  But, okay: say you hate black people.  They’re less than human, you’re sure of it.  Now, how do you then take the leap to say it’s okay for police officers to kill innocent people without repercussion?

Because, you understand that the legal systems in place that protect the cops don’t just protect them when they kill black people, right?  It so happens that they tend to kill more black people than anyone else, and that’s why this issue has become centered on race, because figuring out why the police are more likely to kill blacks than whites (or even Hispanics, or Native Americans, or Asian Americans, etc) is a pretty damned important thing to figure out.  But the truth is, the police kill all of those types of people, and probably plenty more besides, and they are protected from prosecution for murder regardless of whether the victim was innocent, whether the officer in question followed procedures or not, or a million other things.  Are all police killings murder?  No, of course not.  But how can we know how many of them are when there is no way for the officers to be held accountable ... hell, not even any way to simply track how many deaths there are.  No matter how racist you are, I can’t see how you can be comfortable knowing that, if a cop decides to shoot you in the street tomorrow, there will not be any consequences.

And I also understand the fact that protests are inconvenient.  I understand that, when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee in the middle of the anthem while you’re just trying to enjoy watching a football game, that’s irksome.  But I don’t believe that anyone on Fox news actually believes it when they try to argue that this is the not the “right” time to protest.  The national anthem is not the right time to protest, right after a mass shooting is not the right time to protest, right now right here in my very own city: that’s not the right time to protest, people say.  But of course, this is a moronic argument.  If the protest didn’t disrupt your life, it wouldn’t be much of a protest, would it?  Of course “this” is not the right time to protest, no matter when “this” is, because the wrong time to protest is the only time to protest.  If there was such a thing as a “right” time to protest, protesting then would be meaningless.  And, again: regardless of how you feel about the protestors, you already know this.

Even more incomprehensible to me are the people trying to say that protesting is itself undemocratic, somehow.  Many of these same people claim to be students of American history, claim to idolize the founding fathers.  So obviously they know that this country was founded on protests.  We were protesting unjust government by the British, not being treated equally with citizens in the motherland, taxation without representation ... remember that great American slogan?  That meant that the government was taking money and not listening to those they took it from.  That was worth protesting.  But now some say that it’s not okay for the government to take lives and not listen to those they take them from?  How can anyone reconcile this position?

Though it’s written in a different time, for a different issue, in a different country, I feel these words from a British student protestor still have relevance today:

Those who take to the streets, or engage in direct action, don’t have lobbyists to fight our corners. This is the only power that people can exercise, beyond box ticking in a ballot once every five years. Protest is vital to our democracy, giving a voice to those with no platform or privilege. So next time you read about troublemaking activists, wait before passing judgment.

And yet this is not just a matter of people talking: the police themselves are more often than not taking the attitude that protestors are the enemy.  Not just through tactics of violence against them, which is already deplorable, but through tactics such as not allowing protestors to leave so that they can then arrest them for being out past some arbitrary curfew.  And localities are encouraging this by instituting more and more ridiculous curfews: I heard Stephen Colbert ridicule some places recently for 6pm curfews, but I’d say his research team needs to step up their game: here in Los Angeles, where I live, many localities are declaring 4pm curfews.  Is anyone even trying to justify this?  What justification could you even give, apart from trying to curtail or even eliminate protests, or to have a legal excuse to arrest people?

I’m even going a step further: to hear conservative pundits rail on about the horrors of looting, and what terrible people these must be ... again, are these not the same people who claim to idolize the founding fathers?  What the fuck do they think the Boston Tea Party was?  It was a massive, coordinated act of looting, which resulted in property damage of over a million dollars by today’s standards.  This is what the major conservative organization in America is named after, for fuck’s sake!  And now they want to turn up their nose when people are looting?  The hypocrisy is so rank you can taste it.

Look, I’m not advocating looting.  It’s terrible if you’re a small business owner, minding your own business and someone breaks your windows and takes your shit.  But we live in a capitalist society and, the sad truth is, if no one’s losing money, no one’s taking action.  I’m sorry, but in our country the bottom line is the bottom line.  Once the rich people start losing money over this issue, then we’ll damn well see some action taken in the government to fix it.  Am I happy that this is the fucked up way our country works?  Of course not.  But I’m not going to try to deny it either.

I guess the biggest thing I can’t understand is how anyone can continue to support Trump.  The man literally had people shot and gassed for a photo op.  Some of the people shot with rubber bullets and gassed with tear gas were journalists; others were clergy and lay members of the church Trump desired to stand in front of.  Sure, you could argue that Trump denies that they ever used tear gas, but but do you expect me to believe that you trust the word of a man who lies so often that he constantly contradicts himself over the word of dozens if not hundreds of eyewitnesses, one of whom is a Catholic rector?  Seriously?  This is the philosophical equivalent of plugging your ears and screaming “la la la I can’t hear you!” at the top of your lungs.  I understand that you can make such a statement.  I just can’t understand that you could do so sincerely.  I don’t buy it.  You know in your heart what is true.  You know what is right.  It’s time for us all to be honest with each other.  It’s time for us all to stand up for what we believe in, rather than just paying lip service to it.  It’s time for us all to stop trying to make our side “win” ... it’s time for us to just be human and strong and do what we know is right.

Links to things I think everyone should watch:

• Trevor Noah talks about the falling dominoes
• Wes Moore points out that the most peaceful protests come from the most peaceful police
• Roy Wood Jr tells us to take the pot off the stove
• Cory Booker says that we need love
• Hasan Minhaj makes a passionate appeal to Asian Americans
• the mayor of Washington DC renames the site of Trump’s atrocity Black Lives Matter Plaza