Dark and Dreamful Daughter

After the cessation of “free Fridays” last month, my $work is kindly tailing us off slowly by offering us one “free day” per month for a few months, to be taken whenever we like.  I took my October free day this past Friday, so this weekend I’ve been enjoying the break.  I’ve only a couple of things to tell you about.

Tonight, all the family except my youngest and I went to a homeschool association teen event, leaving us two to have a father-daughter night.  I took her out to Taco Bell (which for some reason she finds quite exciting), then we came back and she suggested we watch a movie.

Now, the background you must understand is that, a few months back, I quoted something from The Crow to her.  Of those movies which I consider my all-time favorites—I sometimes refer to these as my “top X movies,” since the number only ever increases—one of my main criteria is quotability.  A good movie should provide lots of great quotes that you can bring up in everyday life, such as “buck up, little camper!” or “fuck me gently with a chainsaw” or “screws fall out all the time: the world’s an imperfect place.” I forget exactly which of The Crow’s great quotes I used in this instance (probably “this is the really real world—there ain’t no comin’ back”), but, the point is, my daughter didn’t recognize it: at not quite 10 years old, she’d never seen the movie, of course.  So I suggested we watch it, and, for some reason I can’t recall right now, we were alone at home that night as well.  Now, if you’re going to watch The Crow, you absolutely must watch it at night, with all the lights off.  It’s a very dark movie with a very creepy vibe, so you have to establish the proper atmosphere.  So we fired it up on the big TV, with the sound turned way up, and every possible light extinguished.  And I suppose she was really enamored of this, because, tonight, she requested another “dark movie” night.

So my choice for tonight was Dark City (the director’s cut, natch).  She seemed to enjoy it (as she did the previous choice), and she’s already picked out the next one (The Matrix).  So I suppose it’s become a tradition at this point, and I’ll have to start thinking of even more dark movies for her and I to watch.

The other thing I’ve been working on this weekend is my character for my youngest’s upcoming Witchlight campaign.  My inspiration for this character has been a race from a moderately obscure RPG that I bought but never played (primarily because the mechanics are super-wonky, in my opinion): Earthdawn.  Earthdawn, supposedly set in the same universe as the fantasy post-apocalyptic (and far better known) Shadowrun, had a lot of great fluff ... just not so great on the crunch.  While many of the races are the same in both games, Earthdawn does add a few new options, including a species of swashbuckling dinosaur people: the t’skrang.  This pic should tell you all you need to know about them:

So I had to make up a custom D&D race for them, which I’ve named the tsaagan.  “Tsaagan” is a genus of dinosuars in the raptor family—although it certainly sounds like a fantasy name—and these guys look a lot like raptors.  Plus the “ts” at the beginning is a nice homage to their inspiration.  So far I’ve written up the mechanics (the “crunch”), but not yet the lore (the “fluff”).  But that’s sufficient to get started, I think.  Next up I have to nail down the class, but I’m leaning towards fey wanderer, which seem particularly apropos given the setting.

And that’s all I’ve got for this week’s mostly non-post.  Next time I’ll work on something with a bit more substance.

The Wild Beyond the Daughter

Well, the Free Fridays are over, but I’m still only posting full posts once every other week.  Ya read this blog against my explicit advice, ya gets what ya gets.

This week my youngest has been starting her deep dive into the newest D&D release, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight.  She’s decided it’s going to be her first actual D&D campaign that she will actually run—thus far, she’s only run a Dungeon World campaign^* of her own devising.  But I ordered the book for myself, and she fell in love with it, and now she has her own copy ... she even got the bundle with all the cool extras in it.  She’s very serious about it: she’s asked my advice on which section to read first to prepare, and she got some sticky tabs from Christy to mark the pages.

So that’s what our nine-year-old teenager is up to.  We’ll see if she carries through with it, but she’s thus far been very determined in her goals.  So I think it will happen, sooner or later.  That’s my girl.

__________

* If you don’t recall, Dungeon Word is a sort of D&D-lite game based on the Powered by the Apocalypse rules.

D&D Story #1: The Demon Doll

You know, the great thing about having your gaming group be comprised of you and your children¹ is that all your D&D stories double as cute kid stories, so perhaps if you reader don’t care for the one aspect, you’ll enjoy the other.  Of course, if you don’t like either one ... well, see you next week, I suppose.

Now, as I explained in my post on game rotation, we’re actually doing a few different games—different campaigns, sometimes whole different systems—and occasionally we put aside one and start a new one.  Mostly this has to do with the sessions that my eldest child runs, because I just keep the two I have going and don’t experiment with new stuff.²  But that one is full of ideas, and every once in a while we just play something new and different for a while ... remember, one of the advantages that I talked about with the game rotation system is that you’re more open to experimental stuff.  Anyhow, the latest experiment is try to play a Pathfinder game.

If you don’t know what Pathfinder is, the short answer is that it’s an offshoot of an older version of D&D.³  The components of roleplaying games (TTRPGs, in any event) typically get divided into two categories: the nitty-gritty, mechanical bits, and the more abstract roleplaying bits like the setting and advice on how to roleplay and that sort of stuff.  Or the crunch and the fluff, as we generally refer to it.  The current version of D&D tends to try to strike a balance of about half-and-half crunch vs fluff, but there are other games which lean hard on the fluff and are pretty crunch-lite⁴ ... and then there are games which are super-crunchy.  Pathfinder is one of those.  That’s mostly why we haven’t tried to play it yet: it’s a lot to take in for our younger players.  But my middle child is ready (mostly), and my youngest has been playing for over a year now, so despite her young age she’s got some real experience under her belt.  So we thought we’d give it a shot.

I eventually came up with a character idea that I thought was pretty hip, and my middle child went with one of their first-ever⁵ non-shapeshifter-centric characters, basing him on the old videogame character Vexx.  But I promised you a cute kid story, so let’s focus on what my youngest came up with.

She’s going to play a young child: specifically, the long-lost brother of her character in the Freak Campaign,⁶ Rose Redd.  His name is Levi,⁷ and he’s 11.  At first, my eldest was none too keen on this plan, not wanting to run a game where they regularly had to put a young child into dangerous situations.  But my youngest persisted, and she explained further.  See, this young boy doesn’t actually fight when there’s trouble.  Instead, he lugs around a stuffed toy that he found (who knows where) on his long travels.⁸  This toy looks like a demon—a fluffy, lumpy, child’s toy version of a demon, granted, but a demon nonetheless.  Horns, red skin, pointy tail ... the whole kit and caboodle.  But it’s beat up: it’s threadbare, one of its eyes is missing, part of its stuffing has fallen out so it’s lopsided and parts of it are a bit flat, and so on.  It definitely doesn’t look menacing, but perhaps a bit creepy ... who thought this was going to make for an adorable children’s toy?  But here’s the dark secret: when Levi is put in danger, this demon doll actually morphs into a full-sized, very real demon, who goes rampaging off and attacks the enemies.  So the demon does all the fighting, while the kid very intelligently stays hidden and safe from danger.  Outside of combat, the kid can contribute in more roleplaying-focussed ways, like helping to solve puzzles or maybe some light scouting (the kid’s got to be very good at remaining unseen to have survived this long), and is probably decent at using his power of cute to make friends.  But, when the swords and spells come out ... so does the demon.

Now, this on its own is a pretty inventive concept.  (For those of you wondering how we plan to implement this mechanically, Pathfinder has a class called a “summoner.” It’s never been my favorite Pathfinder class,⁹ but this is actually one place where it can make sense.  The demon will not be an actual demon, but rather Levi’s “eidolon,” as a summoner’s pet creature is called in the game.)  Is the demon real?  Is it perhaps a protective spirit from some other plane that just somehow got stuck in this unsettling form?  Or maybe it’s a psychic projection of Levi himself, hinting at potential power that might be unlocked someday.  But that’s not even the point of the story.

See, in addition to being wildly inventive, my youngest child is also very crafty.  Like, as in arts-and-crafty.  She’s a maker, is what I’m saying.  And, at some point while we were coming up with all these ideas about Levi’s demon doll and how it would work in the game, she decided to draw it, for reference.  And then she decided she’d just make one.  So she did.

To be clear, she drew that picture all by herself, then (with minimal help from her mother) cut out some fabric pieces, put them together with hot glue, stuffed it with stuffing, then hot-glued all the pieces together, including the button for an eye.  What was once just a vague idea in her head is now an actual, tangible thing in the real world that she can hold on to at the gaming table.  It just blows my mind.

Did I mention she’s only just turned nine?

Anyhow, that’s my D&D story for today.  Or my cute kid story, if you prefer.  Tune in next week for what will probably be a more normal-sized post.

__________

1 For more details, see my post on the Family Campaign.

2 There’s also the game that my youngest—just barely 9 at this point!—runs, but that’s pretty sporadic.

3 And the long answer is: read this.

4 Pretty much any Powered by the Apocalypse game, like Dungeon World, for instance.

5 Outside of one-shots, anyway.

6 Again, see game rotation for (a few) details.

7 Currently.  He’s gone through a few name changes so far.

8 It is yet unclear whether Levi was kidnapped or ran away from home, and, if the former, who took him, or, if the latter, what possessed him to run away at 8 or 9 years old.

9 In fact, given that you summon a creature from a pocket dimension who can look like anyhting and evolves as you get to higher levels, I long ago pegged being a summoner as playing a Pokémon trainer in Pathfinder, and dismissed it outright.  I can tolerate a lot of atypical high fantasy in my D&D—monks, psionics, dinsosaurs ... even guns—but I gotta draw the line somewhere.

Isolation Report, Week #51

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

Well, our family is heading into the March birthday season, that annual time when we have two birthday weekends of our own, not to mention one of the two birthday recipients’ best friends, who also has a birthday in there.  In happier times, we’ve sometimes combined hers with one of ours and had joint celebrations.  This year, of course, it will be a pandemic birthday.

And, what makes me sad, and angry, and frustrated, is that, being that we live in America and are talking about March birthdays, this will be the first crop of kids now experiencing their second pandemic birthday in a row.  That sucks for them.  It would suck for anyone, but in this case I’m talking about kids celebrating birthdays ranging from their 7th (our youngest child, last year) to their 15th (our middle child and their friend, this year).  I mean, I can’t imagine how hard it would suck to have your 16th birthday, or your 18th, or your 21st, in all this shit, and I know there are people going through that too—I don’t happen to know any, but just stastically there have to be.  But at those ages (yes, I would argue even at 16) you’re starting to develop some maturity.  You’re starting to understand that, while the world is often awash with possibilities, sometimes it just sucks, and you have to learn to start accepting that.  But 7 – 15 ... man, those are your peak years of innocence, I feel.  Those are the times when, unless you’ve had some hard luck or some hard circumstances, you shouldn’t really have to be aware that life sucks sometimes.  You shouldn’t even have to think about it sucking for other people, much less yourself.

But, this is the world we live in, so we make the best of it.  We do Zoom birthday parties, and hold online gaming events, and, if we’re lucky enough to have social bubbles, maybe do very small parties within those.  And we make sure we let our kids know that they are still loved, even if the world is kinda shitting on them right now.  And we keep telling them that this won’t be forever.

Hopefully, we’re not lying.

Isolation Report, Week #49

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

Well, it’s a been a few weeks since I checked in on the political front, and that means it’s been long enough that the Senate performed exactly as expected and acquitted Trump of inciting the riot that stormed the Capitol and resulted in several deaths.  The majority of the Republicans, of course, had made up their minds beforehand.  If this were an actual trial, such potential jurors would have been dismissed as prejudiced ... in fact, the roots of the word “prejudiced”—meaning to “pre-judge”—are specifically referring to this type of behavior.  There were apparently only seven Republicans who were brave enough to vote to convict someone of doing something they very obviously did (on video, even!), and two of them aren’t running for re-election.  Think about what that means: for 86% of Republicans (or at least 86% of Repulican senators) care more about getting re-elected than about being honest.  Even if you’re a Republican, that should concern you.  Even if you believe Trump that the election was stolen, you can see that he did the thing he’s being accused of, right?  Hell, even if you agree that storming the Capitol was the right thing to do, and even if you believe that the Deep State government has no right at all to hold him accountable for his actions, you still understand that he incited the riot ... right?  Hell, if you were at the riot, you believe that: the Senators were shown footage of rioters chanting “We were invited by the president of the United States!” So he did it.  There isn’t much debate about that.  Senators voting to acquit are lying.  Maybe we could dream up some motives for that lie other than wanting re-election, but sometimes (as William of Occam was wont to say) the simplest explanation is the right one.

To be fair, many Republicans are concerned about this.  So much so that many prominent Republicans met to discuss the possibility of forming a new party.  They eventually rejected that idea, though, because a third party would not be successful.  Which right there ought to tell you that we have a serious problem with our system.  “We have to stay with the crazy people because the system is designed to help them remain in power” is never the position you want to be in.  And, honestly, my problem with this whole plan is partially the Democrats.  Sure, I’m absolutely a progressive and more or less a liberal, but I am not a Democrat.  I don’t want the Democrats to have too much political power and control everything from here on out any more than the more conservative among you do.  Furthermore, the Democrats are half the reason that a third party is not viable.  For all that they tear at each other’s throats, when it comes to shutting out third parties, the Democrats and the Republicans are in lockstep.  And, ironically, they will now pay the price for that decision, because having the Republicans split in two would only help the Democrats.

Ah, but enough about politics.  How’s our pandemic going?  Well, not so great, honestly.  The Mother had to go to the emergency room for severe pain about 3 weeks ago; they completely ignored her advising them that it was probably her gallbladder and said maybe she had some strained muscles in her back, shot her full of a souped up version of ibuprofen and sent her home.  She got an appointment with her doctor, who told her it was probably her gallbladder but she needed an MRI to confirm.  She got the MRI, the results said it was her gallbladder, and shd had a followup appointment with her doctor next week.  But, before that could come around, she was back in the emergency room with even more extreme pain, and this time they had the brains to work out that, hey: maybe it’s her gallbladder.  So, this past Monday, after spending the weekend in the hospital, she had an emergency gallbladder removal.  She’s fine now, and home, and recovering, albeit somewhat slowly.

Now, you may remember we have this little thing called a pandemic going on right now—it’s sort of the basis for this blog post series, in fact.  What’s it like, having to go to the hospital in the middle of the pandemic, even if for a non-pandemic-related cause?  Well, the first thing is, I can’t tell you firsthand: the farthest I ever got into the hospital was the front desk, when I went to drop off some knitting and a cell phone charging plug.  In fact, even taking her to the emergency room meant driving her, dropping her off at the door, then waiting in the parking lot until they let her in.  Yep, that’s right: when you walk up to the emergency room (at least ours), a security guard comes out, asks you what you’re in for, then makes you wait outside while they figure out what to do with you.  Once they did let her in, all I could really do was go home and wait for news.  I didn’t see her again until they wheeled her out to go home.  (And of course that was days and days later, because I dropped her off on a Friday night, and when you need “emergency” surgery on a weekend, that means you wait until Monday.  But that’s probably a whole separate rant.)

But my secondhand report is, the hospital staff is haggard.  They’ve had to see a lot of death lately, and they’re probably being pushed to their limits ... if not beyond.  I could almost forgive the original idiot doctor who misdiagnosed her with “back pain,” except for the extra $400 it’s going to cost me (that’s what it’ll cost me, mind you: it’s going to cost the insurance company much more).  But we’re lucky enough to have a hospital very close to us, and second time was the charm and she got a good doctor, and excellent nursees, and overall we’re pretty happy.  And, even though she’s still in a lot of pain from the surgery itself, the lack of a gallbladder full of gallstones (which the surgeon described as “highly inflamed”) means that she feels a lot better than she did when she went in.  So we can’t complain.  Too much.

Hopefully we’ve exhausted our drama quotient for the year (both personally and politically), and the rest of 2021 will be completely boring.  At this point, I’m looking forward to that.

Isolation Report, Week #43

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

Well, there’s been a little bit of $work (mostly catching up on some stuff I never seem to have time for under normal circumstances), and way too many videogames (primarily Portal Knights, except not on the PlayStation any more, because: fuck Sony), and there was a New Year’s Eve celebration in there somewhere.  We watched The Iron Giant, which I’ve always said is one of the greatest kids movies of all time, because a) it’s not a musical, b) it has some pretty great animation (being the first cinematic directorial effort from Brad Bird, who would go on to do The Incredibles), c) it proves, as fas as I’m concerned, that Vin Diesel (who voices the giant) is capable of complex characterization no matter what people think, d) plus a surprisingly great performance from Harry Connick Jr (as a beatnik-turned-scrap-dealer) and a dependably hateable villain from Christopher McDonald (whose Kent Mansley—“works for the government”—has an oily despicableness exceeded only by his Shooter McGavin), e) it has an equal number of very funny moments and very emotional moments (it makes nearly all of us in our family tear up at least once, and often more than once), and f) it has an amazing message, which I once used as the centerpiece of a blog post on individuality.  But mainly it’s not a muscial, a virtue I appreciate more and more as the years go on.  After that, the smallies and I played some Trine 4 until 11pm, when we gathered everyone up to celebrate the arrival of 2021 in Denver (because I didn’t really expect the Smaller Animal—who, to be fair, is now mere inches away from being the biggest person in the house—to make it to midnight), and then we played a bit more, and then it really was midnight, so we celebrated again, albeit on a smaller scale, and then everyone went to bed except for me, and I sat up and fucked around trying to finish the giant bottle of pink “champagne” I had bought at Trader Joe’s.  I did have both The Mother and the eldest helping me out this time, but no one really likes sparkling wine but me (and, honestly, I’m a bit “meh” on it myself), so I wasn’t able to polish it off.  But then the next night I did, on account of a giant bottle of sparkling wine always has less in it than you think, partially because a lot of it disappears into bubbles, and partially because most of the weight of the bottle is in the glass.  (Pro tip: sparkling wine will not survive until the next day unless you have some wine stoppers, which I finally bought some of this year.)

And that’s our New Year’s for 2021.  It’s only been a few days, but so far it’s seemed pleasant enough.  It certainly feels like 2020 was a low point, but I will not tempt fate by trying to claim that it couldn’t get worse.  Rather I shall just point out that we have a few early indicators that 2021 could be better—such as a new President and a couple of new corona vaccines—and, while neither of those things are going to be perfect, at least they’re positive signs, and I will choose to take them as such.  I wish a better 2021 to all of you, to all of us, and pretty much to all of the world.  I think we sort of kind of deserve it.

Pandemic Holiday Report

Well, no time for a full post this week, but I don’t want to blow you off entirely.  What can I talk about?  Hmmm ... how about some reports on how our holidays are going?

• For our weekly family gaming session, my eldest ran a Christmas one-shot: we all played elves (no, not those kinds of elves; those kinds of elves), and we had to rescue Santa, who had been captured by a demon and taken to Hell.  At first, Santa was under the demon’s spell, and we actually had to fight him, but we managed to break him out of his charmed state through a combination of non-lethal attacks and appealing to his better nature.  I played a mostly-monk (I took one level of fighter, mainly for the fighting style) who used a candy cane as a mace and also punched things.  My middle child played a warlock (whose patron, naturally, was Santa) with a celestial bent (so he could heal and flame strike), and my youngest child played a druid who turned into things like arctic hares (for speed) and polar bears (for sheer mauling power).  We were 10th level, and we all had complicated backstories of what toymaking department we used to work in before joining Santa’s personal guard, based on which artisan’s tools we were proficient in (for the record, I was leatherworking, the Smaller Animal was glassblowing—for ornaments, natch—and the sprite was a carpenter ... you know, for making blocks and Lincoln logs and whatnot).  Best line of the night: Santa pulls a holy avenger out of his sack (my eldest actually rolled that randomly on a magic item table) and runs the demon through; my youngest pronounces “damn ... Santa is gruesome.”

• The super-creepy surveillance elf is gone for another year, thank <insert deity of choice>.  We actually tried to avoid having that thing back this year, but our youngest actually started asking about her back in October or so.  So, you know ... Santa does what is necessary to please the children.  No matter how creepy, apparently.

• We watched one of those old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials on Christmas Eve.  We sort of wanted to watch “the one with Snow Miser and Heat Miser in it,” but that’s one of the few that isn’t in our DVD box set.  As a next best thing, we watched “the one that tells Santa Claus’ origin story,” because the Winter Warlock is sorta-kinda-the-same-as Snow Miser.  Besides: I had just said something about Burgermeister Meisterburger to the Smallies the other day and they both looked at me like I was crazy.  So, you know ... they needed the education.  I probably hadn’t seen it in a decade or so, but it holds up moderately well.

• My youngest got a stuffed narwhal which is actually a bit larger than she is, when measured from tip (of horn) to tail, and enough Littlest Pet Shop buildings to create her own LPS compound.  My middlest got a giant Nerf Fortnite dart (shot)gun and the new Spider-Man game for the PS/4 (the one with Miles Morales instead of Peter Parker).  My eldest got a new bedframe (as the old one is falling apart) and a promissory note for a new office chair (we didn’t want to buy one without them testing it out first), or, as they described it when talking to the grandparents: “nothing much, just a couple pairs of headphones and a toothbrush for my dogs.” Being an adult sucks, apparently.

Although the pandemic has meant fewer trips out to visit friends, we were never going to travel for the holidays, and it’s rare that anyone comes to stay with us.  Or even to join us for Christmas (Eve) dinner ... my brother has come over a couple of years in the past, and I think we hosted my best friend and his wife at $lastjob once, but that’s about it.  My brother has moved on from wife-with-family-in-LA to wife-number-three, and my friend moved back to Florida to be near his family, so we’re used to spending the holidays “alone.” I put “alone” in quotes, though, because there are 5 of us humans here—not to mention the two dogs, three cats, and various aquarium denizens, including Jeffo, the immortal dwarf African frog—so it can actually get rather crowded at times.  So “alone” is not really the proper term ... perhaps “isolated,” on occasion, but at least we have each other for the holidays, and a few new toys to play with, and plenty of videogames and movies to play and watch, and loud-ass cats who need to yowl around the house for a few hours before they snuggle up beside you in bed, and dogs with horribly stinky breath who love you unconditionally and often inconveniently, and people to do things with.  Christmas Eve I read The Velveteen Rabbit to my youngest; Christmas day the older two made Oreo truffles together.  The Mother and the youngest did all the tree decorating, and worked on several art projects to create cards or ornamants or other holiday frippery.  Last night I spent an hour playing a videogame with my middle child that no one else really likes to play but us.  So we can’t complain, and we know that many folks are having a worse time than we are right now.  We’re pretty lucky, overall, and we’re pretty happy about it.  We’ll be glad when we can go out again, when things return to some semblance of normal—or as close as we’ll get to that, I suppose—but, for now, this is good.

We hope you all had a very happy holiday, whichever holiday it happened to be, and we wish you all the promise of a better year to come.

Isolation Report, Week #41

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

Happy pandemic holidays!  And if you’re pissed off that I didn’t say “merry pandemic Christmas,” I will refer you to my (now classic) happy whatever post.  And, also: suck my left nut.  Not the right one—I’m not rude or anything.  Just the left.

Also, it’s worth noting that that very post contains my first volume of Christmas music that I ever shared with you guys.  Back in those days—nine years ago now—I considered trying to share my mixes via some sort of Internet playlist ... Pandora, Rhapsody, what-have-you.  But the only decent option that would be free for everyone was YouTube, and, while there was a lot of music on YouTube, there was also a lot of music not on YouTube.  And, especially given my eclectic tastes, there was just too much that wasn’t already out there.  But much has changed: YouTube handles licensing for songs you upload differently nowadays, resulting in way more songs being uploaded, and it’s also easy to upload them yourself.  So there really is no excuse any more.

Thus, here you go: my inaugural holidy mix, as a YouTube playlist:

Yuletidal Pools I [featuring Michael Buble]

You’ve still got 5 days or so to listen to it.  And it’s quite peppy, and it’ll put you in the holiday spirit.  You know, unless you’re all grinchy.  Actually, there’s a few songs in there for the grinches out there as well.  Fun for the whole family.

Actually, I don’t know why I said that: there are quite a number of F-bombs in those songs.  So, you know: share with children at your own risk.  In my house, I just listened to my 8-year-old tell a mother on television who had just said “Language!” to her daughter “oh, just let her say ‘fuck’ ...” But, hey: I’m not in charge of your kids.  Probably you should be happy about that.

But, speaking of my kids, they’re all getting ready for Christmas, as they do, and (mostly) not letting the pandemic put a crimp in their holiday spirit.  We’ve been buying our gifts nearly 100% online for years anyhow, and we never travel for Christmas ... when you’re trying to organize 5 humans, 2 dogs, and 3 cats (and even more various animals in years past), the idea of traveling is pretty insane.  We just figure, if our families want to see us, they can drag their asses to our house.  We’ve got more room, and all our furniture is pre-chewed.  So far, not too many takers.  But we don’t mind.  Sometimes just having each other is enough.  This year, of course, we’re mostly sick of each other ... but I think we’ll be okay.

Hopefully.

Anyhow, you’re very unlikely to get any sort of substantial post next week, as it’s that fallow time between Christmas and New Year’s.  So I’ll avail myself of this oppotrunity to wish you merry christmahannukwanzaakah,^* and here’s hoping next year will be better.  I think it probably will be, but I don’t want to be too confident.  Don’t want to jinx it.  But, for your sake as well as ours, I’m definitely wishing it.  For us, for you, and for everyone around the world.  Just a little bit better ... doesn’t have to be a lot.  I’m not greedy.

__________

* Again and as always, ™ previous co-worker Jon Sime.

Isolation Report, Week #29

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

Another two weeks, another 14 days spent marveling at how much worse “worse” can get.  The fact that none of it is even surprising—not that no police officers will be charged in the murder of Breonna Taylor, not that our president will not agree to leave office peacefully if defeated in the election, not that the Republicans are completely comfortable with their hypocrisy regarding Supreme Court appointments, not that the Democrats are toothless in their response and blustering pointlessly, not that the number of deaths from the pandemic continues to rise while the rest of the world is handling their shit and revoking our passports, not that the president knew how bad it was in Feburary and did nothing—is possibly the most depressing thing.  Literally the only thing that surprises me any more is that anyone else is surprised by any of these things.

The fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died was not so much surprising—this is 2020, after all—as it was a punch in the gut.  Someone that I watch (probably Stephen Colbert) said that they had been getting texts all weekend with various expressions of sadness and profanity; this was reflected perfectly in our online chat at $work where the NPR story reporting her death was followed nearly immediately by two messages: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO” and ”FUCK!!” ... I’ll leave it to you to guess which one of those was from me.  Besides the terror at what damage Trump and the Senate Republicans (who have already pledged to confirm Trump’s nominee, without even finding out who it’s going to be) can do, it’s also worth reflecting on the fact that it’s just a massive loss for democracy.  I’ve watched several tributes to her life and legacy, but I highly recommend Trevor Noah’s, which touched me the most.

There isn’t a lot of other news to report: there’s been a bit (more) family drama, a guinea pig funeral, a colonoscopy appointment made, a broken dishwasher.  There’s a new D&D book coming out that I’m quite looking forward to.  The smallies and I finished season 2 of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, which is just a beautiful, funny, touching animated series; if you have both Netflix and children and you haven’t watched this yet, you really must do.  My sleep schedule is nearly completely random at this point, but $work is still going moderately well.  Well, as well as can be expected, I suppose.  The humans in the house have mostly committed to not killing each other.  At least for now.

I understand that many folks (including my own parents) are starting to go out more, even eating in restaurants.  So far we’ve held off on that.  I pointed out to my mother this weekend that she couldn’t really be wearing her mask while she was eating.  She said, no, you just wear it to the table and then you take it off to eat.  I said that was like wearing your hazmat suit to get to the radiation and then taking it off once you arrived.  Call us overabundantly cautious if you like.  We’re fine with that.

Oh, and I did actually take a COVID test recently.  I had no fever, but there was a sore throat, and just a touch of labored breathing, so I figured better safe than sorry.  There’s a drive-through place near us where they basically hand you the giant Q-tip and tell you what to do and then you give yourself the test.  Then they text you the results; they told me to give it 3 – 5 day, but I got a text within 24 hours.  Negative, if you were concerned.  Which, as I say, I figured, but one doesn’t want to mess around.  I still believe we’re all going to get it eventually, but I really want to know when I’ve got it.  I don’t think I’m in any particular danger once I get it, but of course we have the kid with the heart condition, so one has to be careful.

I think that’s all there is to report.  I hope the world gets better soon.  I’d certainly like to start having lunch with my coworkers again, and I know The Mother would just like me to leave the house, lunch or no lunch.  And my children wouldn’t mind getting back to a semi-regular field trip schedule.  But we wait, and we watch, and we hope that the election gives the country a chance at recovery.  If not, then ... then I don’t know.  Other than being able to predict that Trump and his family will be enriched by the continued deaths of the American people, I can’t guess what that dystopian future would hold.

Hopefully it doesn’t come to finding out.

Isolation Report, Week #27

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

Well, it’s been a few more weeks, and the world doesn’t seem to be getting any better.  Police officers keep killing innocent black people, Trump continues to do whatever the fuck he wants, and the only people who claim to have any chance at a vaccine any time soon are so unreliable as to make the prospect of taking a vaccine even scarier than not having one at all.

The only plus side whatsoever about the political situation is that Trump is apparently too stupid to stop doing skeevy shit for even a few days, so there are constant reminders about his unfitness for the presidency.  Of course, a majority of people voting against Trump is by no means a guarantee that he won’t win, as we all know from painful experience.  Nonetheless, it’s probably the best shot we have.

On the personal front, our guinea pig died a little over a week ago, despite an emergency trip to the vet, antibiotics, and feeding a liquid diet twice a day for several days.  The kids went to their first birthday party in months, although it was understandably small (i.e. attended by only the 3 families in our “social bubble”).  The PS/4 is still on the fritz, so it’s difficult to watch DVDs.  Work is going well, I suppose ... I mean, as well as one can expect given the prolonged lack of contact with my coworkers.  On the plus side, our work hired a comedian to do a Zoom show for us.  It ain’t the same as going out to a club with the folks from work, but it’s certainly better than nothing.  (And Adam was pretty funny, I thought.)

But we’re hanging in there, and certainly it could be worse.  And, you know ... only 3½ more months till this horrible, fucked up mess of a year is finally over.

Isolation Report, Week #24

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

Well, The Mother is back from Colorado, safe and sound.  And virus free?  It seems so, but she (and our littlest one) are staying even more out of the public than usual for the requisite 2 weeks, just to be sure.  It seemed that Southwest, at least, is doing a soft-of-decent job at trying to keep everyone safe(ish): they’re only flying 2 people to a row, and I believe the masks were required (of course our ladies would have done that anyway—heck, we even got some glasses for the little one on the off-chance that that’s helpful—but it’s nice to know everyone else will mask up as well).  The trip itself ... well, I’m sure many of you know how it feels to go home to visit your family in the best of times, much less when people are in and out of the hospital.  Not so much fun, overall, although it was nice that The Mother got to meet her neice for the first time.

Meanwhile I was stuck at home with our two older children, one of whom is ostensibly an adult, but neither of whom is noted for their motivation or pliability.  I believe I described it as like pushing elephants uphill—the classic “herding cats” didn’t really begin to cover it.  If my elder child ever figures out how to monetize talking people into going out to buy them food, they will soon be wealthy; if my middle child ever figures out how to redirect all that time spent complaining about doing a thing into just doing the thing and moving on with his life, he will soon find it nearly impossible to fill all the extra hours.  Still, it was only 10 days that I had to do it unaided, and I’m somewhat compensated by the fact that my children refuse to read this blog, so they can’t bitch at me for bitching about them.

Our politics continues to be somewhat depressing, as Trump’s obvious strategy of constantly inventing new scandals so that all the old ones get forgotten continues to work on a grander and grander scale.  Having gotten away with kidnapping people off the streets of Portland, he’s moved on to screwing up everyone’s mail delivery in the hopes that will tip the election in his favor (remember: that’s not just my opinion of his actions—he actually admitted it), talking about trying to delay the election, and—perhaps most bizarre for its banality in the face of his other actions—looking into having his face added to Mount Rushmore.  Sober people are talking and even writing about the possibility that Trump could refuse to leave office even if he loses.  Trevor Noah’s old jokes likening Trump to an African dictator really seem less and less funny all the time ...

Am I heartened by the official acceptance of the Democratic nomination by Joe Biden?  Honestly, not that much.  (For my level of enthusiasm for Biden—as well as the level of enthusiasm for the majority of voters, I suspect—I will refer you once again to The Daily Show ... they sum it up better than I ever coould.)  A bit more so by the choice of Kamala Harris, who I’ve always liked, even though of course she’s not perfect.  But, hey: at this point, if lack of perfection is the worst thing you’ve got going for you, you’re a fucking political rockstar.  While Biden may not get us anywhere much farther that out from under Trump—assuming he can even get us that far—there’s always the chance that Harris will be president soon afterward, and then we might see some real reforms to the horrific state of our political system.  But, you know, I ain’t holding my breath.

I’m also extremely amused by the people (Colbert, for instance) who talk about the fact that Donald Trump fears going to jail once he’s out of office.  Even if Trump were capable of understanding consequences—and he’s definitely not, as nothing he’s ever done, no matter how bad, has ever spawned any—this is laughable to me.  We don’t send rich white guys to prison.  Roger Stone isn’t going to prison.  Nixon didn’t go to prison—hell, even Spiro Agnew didn’t go to prison.  The concept that Trump, or even any member of his family, might go to prison one day is so remarkably naive as to be amusing ... you know, if it weren’t so depressing.

Likewise, the concept that DeJoy will be in any way inconvenienced by having to testify before Congress—if he even does!—is also just silly.  If he decides to go, he’ll pretend he doesn’t “recall” anything and nothing will change.  Hell, if he decided to go and say “hell yeah, I’m sabotaging the post office: whaddaya gonna do about it?” ... still, nothing would change.  Better yet, why should he bother to go at all?  There are no consequences for not showing up, apparently, so he could make better use of that time on a golf course or a private jet or somesuch.  People on the screens rant about how Congress should be “grilling” DeJoy, or “holding him to account” ... I say, why bother?  What difference would it make?  There are no consequences for corrupt officials lying before Congress, there are no consequences for corrupt officials failing to appear before Congress, there are no consequences for Presidents scheming to rig elections, there are no consequences for police officers shooting innocent civilians ... why do we even bother any more?  Safer to expect the worst, I think.  Perhaps then I might be pleasantly surprised.

But, as I said before: I ain’t holding my breath.

Isolation Report, Week #22

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

Today I drove to Burbank Airport (much closer and more sedate than LAX) and dropped off The Mother and my littlest one.  By this point, they’ve landed in Denver.  Flying during these trying times is certainly not something our family was looking forward to.  But due to some family medical issues, this trip really couldn’t be postponed.  So we put masks and goggles on them, we availed ourselves as often as possible of the many thoughtfully placed hand sanitizer stations, and we got in and out as quickly as possible.  That’s the best we could do.

I have to say, this was only my second time at Burbank, and obviously my first during the pandemic endtimes.  I was quite impressed at how helpful the airport and airline employees were.  When there were buttons to be pushed (such as the “walk” button for the crosswalk), there was nearly always a masked and gloved employee to push it for us.  We ended up touching nearly nohting the whole time, and everyone was super polite, not annoyed as you sometimes see with overworked transportation workers.  It was easy in, easy park, easy out.  I hope I get the opportunity to use Burbank more often.  You know, if flying ever becomes a thing we do on a regular basis again.

At $work, I was able to polish off a new project that came up with some urgency, so I’m pretty happy about that.  It wasn’t a difficult one, but it had deployment challenges, and a few times when I could have taken shortcuts: that is, doing lower quality work that could be completed faster.  But happily my bosses weren’t interested in that route, so we got it done in a relatively short timeline without compromising.  I was pretty pleased about that.

I haven’t been keeping up with the news as much due to Colbert being off for the past two weeks and Noah being off for the past one.  Possibly this is a good thing.  From what little I have heard, I’m probably better off taking a short break from it.

The grocery store Friday was the best it’s been for a while—possibly the best it’s been since pre-week-zero.  So that’s something to be appreciated.  Then there’s the fact that ... actually, come to think of it, that’s it.  That’s about all the silver linings I can come up with right now.

Recommendations for how to pass the time:

• I’ve finally gotten caught up on The Adventure Zone: “Graduation”.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, and even if you don’t normally care for D&D podcasts, I highly recommend it.  As good as Griffin is as a GM, I think Travis may be even better.
• Umbrella Academy season 2 is pretty friggin’ awesome—possibly even better than season 1.
• Portal Knights is still a great timewaster, although now my gaming partner is gone to Colorado.  No worries: my middle child just got a copy of PixelJunk Monsters 2.  We used to have a great time playing the original, years ago, so we’re hoping to recapture a bit of magic.  So far, it’s been pretty cool.
• Quibi, in its desperate attempt to remain (or maybe even become) relevant, has stumbled on a fun way to leverage the pandemic: they’ve done a “remake” of The Princess Bride, with different celebrites reprising the roles, each one shooting their part in their backyards or what-have-you.  Each scene features different actors for the same characters, and of course the whole thing has to be cut together to make it seem as if they’re interacting with each other when in actuality they’re nowhere near each other.  It’s all very low-tech, of course, and nothing matches (for instance, the Man in Black hands Vizzini a glass of red wine, but it’s become white wine by the time it gets to Vizzini’s hand), but that’s part of the charm.  Some of the casting is utterly inspired—Jack Black for the Man in Black’s climb up the cliffs of insanity, Dave Bautista for Fezzik’s rock smashing, Patton Oswalt for Vizzini’s battle of wits (for the princess? to the death?)—and it’s all great fun.  Of course, you can’t watch the whole thing, unless you have Quibi (which of course no one does), but you can watch what might be the best stretch of it on YouTube.
• I find that just sitting outside (by the pool, if it’s not too hot, or under the patio fan in the side yard) while working from home can be quite relaxing.  I have a new laptop and its battery life is much better than my old model, so I can be outside for quite a bit longer than I used to manage.  I’m still working, but just reminding myself that the outside world didn’t go away just because I never go outside any more can be good for the mental health, I think.

That’s enough for this week.  Shooting for a longer post next week.

Isolation Report, Week #20

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


I had to go to the doctor for the first time during the pandemic: apparently, I (probably) have diverticulitis.  My grandmother had this for many years, so it doesn’t surprise me too much.  Now I have to go find a gastroenterologist, and I’m sure there’s a colonoscopy in my future, which is never pleasant to look forward to.  In other sad news, The Mother‘s dad and brother aren’t doing well, so it looks like she will have to undertake a short plane ride in these troubled times, which definitely isn’t pleasant to look forward to.  Our littlest will accompany; neither of them would sleep much otherwise.

We subscribed to HBO Max; it was the same price we were paying for HBO Now, so we figured why not.  Mostly what’s on HBO Max is the same as what’s on regular HBO, but there are a few extra things.  One of which is Doom Patrol, one of those marvelously inventive comic book series (like Preacher or Legion) that is oh-so-much-more than a typical superhero story.  While he wasn’t the inventor of the Doom Patrol (a group which actually preceded the X-Men by a few months, despite seeming like a rip-off of them, which makes it decades old), it’s Grant Morrison we truly have to thank for this bit of Dadaesque surrealism (see also Happy!, on Netflix).  While the core four characters predated him, Morrison gave us Crazy Jane, Danny the Street, and the amazing Willoughby Kipling, expertly portrayed by Mark Sheppard (a character actor who’s made a career of brilliant recurring characters in great series such as Supernatural, Warehouse 13, and White Collar).  If you don’t like shows where you are constantly trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, definitely do not watch this one.

Let’s see ... what else ... we’ve been playing some family board games.  The Wizard Always Wins, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and Bears vs Babies; all highly recommended.  Also some card games—Minecraft Uno and Timeline—and of course the littlest one still sucks me into Portal Knights on a semi-regular basis.  That game is for me what I understand Animal Crossing is for other folks during these weird times: we mainly just battle things and go on quests so we can get more materials to build our awesome house.  It’s up to 3 stories now, with a rootfop observatory on top and a vegetable garden and pool out back.  There’s also a large bathroom with a red crystal ceiling, a little marketplace full of vendor stalls out front, and a cannon in the side yard that we occasionaly fire off the edge of the world just so we can watch the flaming cannonball shoot off into the abyss.  We really do spend a lot of time on it ... it’s weirdly soothing, vaguely creative, and surprisingly social.  Plus my kid loves it when we share decorating tips.

So things aren’t too bad on the personal front, although I grow ever more fearful at the state of our country.  While the rest of the world seems to have figured out how this whole virus thing works, we’re traveling backwards in time; as The Daily Show recently pointed out, we’ve now arrived at 1918, when the president said to ignore the doctors and scientists and encouraged large gatherings, people claimed that wearing masks to avoid infecting each other was unconstitutional, and localities triggered a second wave by reopening too soon.  Protests for racial justice continue unabated, but the news seems to have forgotten (or perhaps merely grown apathetic).  In point of fact, we’ve now progressed to the point where our president is sending in secret police to disappear people off the streets, and our system continues blithely on.  Is this what people felt like in Argentina in the 70s? in Russia in the 30s?  (I hesitate to mention Germany in the 40s due to Godwin’s law, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind.)  I bet you all those people in all those countries said the same thing we’re all apparently thinking: “obviously that could never happen here.”  I mean, I’m assuming people are thinking that, because otherwise why the fuck isn’t everyone in the country freaking the fuck out right now?  A couple of news stories that faded fast and a few sternly worded tweets from the opposition?  Is that really all the reaction we can get for secret fucking police? kidnapping people?  I dunno, man ... I’m not feeling particularly sanguine about the future.

Isolation Report, Week #18

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


Well, there was an Independence Day celebration here in the US ... sort of.  We mainly just swam and made s’mores around the firepit.  That’s about as much patriotism as I can muster these days.

The past two weeks all my regular news sources have been on vacation, so I’m looking forward to seeing what the world has been up to tomorrow.  Wait ... did I say “looking forward to”?  Yeah, maybe that’s not the proper phrase.  Come to think of it, I’ve actually been fairly unstressed the past couple of weeks.  Maybe I shouldn’t go back to watching news stuff ...

I continue to be disappointed in how quickly it seems the coverage of racial justice protests seems to be disappearing.  In one panel I watched recently, the folks worried about “ally fatigue.”  I wish I knew what the right thing to combat that was.  But I understand the sentiment.

Critical Role has come back, and Narrative Telephone is also continuing, so that’s the best of both worlds.  I’m blasting through all the TV shows I said I wanted to catch up on ... perhaps sometime in one of the next few reports I’ll explore how much television I’ve blasted through.  Then again, that also might depress me.

I’ve also caught up on nearly all my outstanding podcasts, so I’ve gone back to audiobooks.  I had been behind for a bit, and, at the beginning of the pandemic, I wasn’t doing well even keeping up with new podcasts, since my commute was gone.  But I’ve worked out now how to work some podcast/audiobook time into my schedule, and I just started my first new audiobook in nearly a year.  So that’s ... progress?  Something.

I also took a few days off to turn the 3-day weekend into a 6-day weekend.  I spent a bunch of time fiddling with the code for my Google Sheets GM sheet: that is, the thing I use to help me run my D&D games.  There’s a bunch of products like that out there, but I don’t care for any of them, mostly because I have my own idiosyncracies and house rules.  So of course I continue to write my own.  A few months ago Google Apps Scripts upgraded the version of Javascript they use to run the back-end stuff behind Sheets, so I’m finally getting some features I’ve been longing for—when told the situation, my boss said something along the lines of “welcome to 2017.”  I still don’t like Javascript much, but admittedly this is way better.  Anyhow, I upgraded everything, and that of course caused some problems, and I wrote some brand new systems, which was pretty exciting.  Anyway, that took up nearly a week.  And I lost a few more chunks of time to Portal Knights with the baby girl.

Anyhow, I think that’s all there its to talk about, really.  Next week should be another full post, barring any unforeseen circumstances.

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 #9

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]


This week the Slack channel at work informed me that I was going on PTO.  You see, the work calendar connects to the Slack and, when there’s an all-day event, it announces it the day before around 6pm.  So, paydays, company holidays ... and people’s PTOs.  Helps us remember that so-and-so is going to be out for a few days.

In this case, I was completely caught off guard.  PTO? what for?  Finally, I worked it out that The Mother and the smallies were supposed to be going to Great Wolf Lodge for a homeschooling conference (slash vacation), and I was going to take a couple days off from work to just chill out at home.  But, you know, those plans were made a long time ago ... as of now, there’s no conference, no Great Wolf Lodge, and no need for PTO.  It’s a bit of a sad reminder that, you know, even though this interminable situation seems unchanging from week to week—to the point where it’s super easy to lose track of what day it is—time still is marching on, and more and more of our lives are being eaten up by this crisis.

Will it be over soon?  There are rumblings of reopening various things, but that’s primarily because our moron-in-chief seems to think that killing his voters is preferable to having them upset at him.  Who knows? maybe he’s right.  For the rest of us sane humans, though, it doesn’t seem like this ordeal is going to be over any time soon.

On the plus side, we’re gaming pretty regularly now.  I still have my two campaigns going, my eldest is up to two as well, and this week my youngest suggested that she’d like to try running a game.  At 8 years old, I’m sure she wouldn’t be the youngest GM ever, but surely in the ballpark.  We’ll see how serious she is about it.

Other than that, not a huge amount has changed.  The Mother’s sister had her baby, so that’s taken up some of her attention.  Sadly, she also has an aunt who’s in the hospital and not expected to make it.  This is an older woman, so the sickness is not coming as a shock or anything, but the fact that no one can visit her in the hospital is quite depressing.  And, if she does die, they will likely only allow a fraction of her family to attend the funeral.  It’s not clear if the illness is related to the ongoing virus or not, but respiratory failure is a component of the illness, so it’s certainly possible.

But, other than that, we continue to solider on, taking the good with the bad.  Hopefully we’ll last another week before having to return to the grocery store, and we’ll likely keep eating a lot of takeout and not nearly as much produce as we should.  But we’re together, and safe, and I’m sure there are plenty of folks in the world who are in worse situations than we are.  So we’ll be thankful for what we’ve got and hopefully things will return to some sense of normalcy before too long.

Isolation Report, Week #6

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]


Okay, this shit is starting to get scary now.

Way back in week #1, I wrote:

Now, on the one hand, I find this somewhat silly.  It’s a cold, people.  Yes, it can be quite serious for some—mainly the elderly, those with compromised immune systems, etc.  I have a kid with a heart condition, so I’m not callous to that side of it.  But the chance of disease is always out there.  The flu (which is caused by a slightly different class of virus) can be fatal as well, and we have that every year.

You probably noticed that I’ve moderated my rhetoric over the last few weeks.  That’s not because I changed my mind so much as it is that, as the crisis wore on, I noticed that some of the things I was saying were being echoed by crazy old white politicians, mostly (but not all) men, mostly (but not all) Republicans.  As Twain once said about majorities, once you find yourself on the side of crazy old white Republicans, it is time to pause and reflect.

And, don’t get me wrong: I have come around a bit more to the common line of reasoning.  The explanation that, if too many people get sick all at once, our medical system (in the U.S., I mean) couldn’t handle the strain, thus causing more people to die than would otherwise, is a very rational and sensible argument.  (It says some disturbing things about our medical system, of course, which the conservatives are always assuring us is “the best in the world” whenever they’re explaining to us why everyone can’t be allowed to have it, but that’s a separate issue.)  But, as I’ve noted several times, treating this issue like we either all stay home or all go out at once is a logcial fallacy (specifically, the fallacy of false dilemma).  So I think there’s a more nuanced discussion to be had, but, honestly, I’ve avoided it, because “nuanced discussion” and “the Internet” go together like anchovies and ice cream.  If I say I have issues with this continued state of lockdown, most readers are likely going to lump me with people like this idiot (from a recent Huntington Beach protest) or like the Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, one of the main Republicans responsible for not delaying their primary, who infamously told voters it was “incredibly safe” to go out and vote while dressed in full protective gear.  Even worse, I could get lumped in with the multiple (and remarkably dangerous) idiots, mostly from or appearing on FOX “news,” who keep on saying that it’s okay if some people die as long as we keep the economy going (if you’d like a montage of such idiots made as humourous as possible given the subject matter, The Daily Show has got you covered).

So, no, I don’t want to be lumped in with the idiots, especially not the dangerous ones.  But ... I have to talk about this anyway.  Because a few things have come up that I find pretty disturbing.

First off, there was the announcement that Google and Apple were going to get together and start tracking infected people via their phones.  I don’t know that I was as disturbed by the announcement itself—although, any time Google and Apple want to work together, you should already be suspicious—as by the media reaction, which was, from what I could tell, “hey, that’s neat ... technology! am I right?”  Obviously what it should have been was, “holy fuck! 1984 much??”  And, yes, supposedly it will be voluntary, and supposedly there will be all these controls in place to protect privacy, but, honestly, any time a concept like this comes up and people actually think it’s a good idea, I get worried.

There’s also my lovely governor Gavin Newsom saying that, even once the lockdown order is lifted, restaurants might be taking my temperature before I can come in.  What the fuck?  How is that even a thing that people are considering?  Also, he said that all menus might have to be disposable.  Well, why not plastic utensils too?  Yay.  We’ll be safe from viruses and drowning in garbage.  Maybe we’ll finally get the plastic straws back.

I already talked about governor Newsom saying he expected my neighbors to put “social pressure” on me if they see me out and about for anything other than “essential purposes.”  Now New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has announced that wearing masks in public is mandatory, and gave essentially the same response when asked how such an order would be enforced:

People will enforce it. They’ll say to you, if they’re standing next to you on a street corner, “Where’s your mask, buddy?” in a nice New York kinda way.

Again: don’t get me wrong.  Cuomo is certainly one of the heroes of this crisis.  But I can’t help but feel that people in our country don’t need more excuses to get in each other’s business.  Is it really okay to encourage this kind of public friction?

Still, I understand that, if I really am saying that I fear this solution may be doing more harm than good, I absolutely sound like one of the crazy people I described above, many of whom have used that exact phrase.  So allow me to very explicitly differentiate my position from theirs in two important ways:

1) I am not in any way advocating for immediately “reopening the country.”  Not even advocating reopening it any time soon.  Again, I have to stress: there are other options.  There are partial measures.  We can still be safe without becoming completely paranoid.  There is a better balance we can strike.

2) I have no desire to “protect the economy.”  Fuck the economy.  I could care less about the economy, at least on a macro scale.  I do care that restaurants and specialty shops (such as my local aquarium store, which I just visited today) are having a tough time.  I care that many people are out of work right now.  But I absolutely do not care that rich people are losing money in the stock market and large corporations are going to make smaller profits, and let’s be honest: when some idiot on FOX “news” talks about the economy, that’s what they’re really talking about.

So what do I care about?  Well, aside from my worry about people who may be losing their jobs and/or their small businesses, I’m honestly mostly concerned about everyone’s mental health right now.  We have a very good idea of how many people are dying from the virus, but almost no information on what “social distancing” could be doing to suicide rates.  How about the increase in domestic violence?  And it doesn’t even have to be that serious to be concerning: the mental stress is easy enough to see on the faces of those folks who are doing their best to keep us entertained, and those are the people making us laugh.  For those who are under no such obligation, the strain is even more obvious (for instance, check out how hard it is for Liam O’Brien to stay upbeat in the first “unplugged” episode of All Work No Play).

But I needn’t go out to the Internet to see depression setting in: there are signs here in my own house.  Irritability is on the rise.  There’s lots of sleeping at odd hours ... because, why the fuck not?  My eldest dropped their classes because online learning just doesn’t work for them, so now they really don’t have much to do other than sleep.  The Mother can plan no more field trips, nor park days, nor outings to DojoBoom for our younger two children, so even though homeschooling our kids is something she was already doing anyway, it’s still become difficult and frustrating for her.  I’m fortunate enough to have a job that I can do just as well from home as I can from the office, and yet ... it’s been very hard to maintain focus, and seeing your coworkers inside a box on the computer screen isn’t the same as going to out to lunch with them.  I absolutely dread weekly trips to the grocery store (in fact, we skipped last week altogether), which I used to vaguely enjoy.  Look, I don’t need everything to go back to normal all at once.  I just need things to get ... better.


One a more positive note, the experts are telling us that all this staying at home is having a positive effect, and that the computer models are showing not as many deaths as they had originally predicted.  Of course, the cynical side of me wants to point out that computer models were significant contributors to the 2008 financial crisis, so we probably shouldn’t just blindly trust them, but I suppose even cynical old me has to count that as good news.  Still ... I worry that we’ll take it too far.  I said privately at the beginning of all this that I feared we were in the midst of the first dangerous mass panic caused by smart people.  Because, you know, normally panics are caused by people who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.  In this case, the people making most of the decisions are absolutely right in their understanding and their reasoning ... and, yet, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re making the best decisions for us all.

Everyone out there: take care of yourselves.  Not just physically, with your handwashing and your masks—I mean, do that too, but don’t forget to take care of your mental self.  Stay sane, and stay as happy as you can manage.  And here’s hoping that we see some positive changes in our situation sooner rather than later.

Isolation Report, Week #5

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]



This week didn’t get a whole lot better.  But primarily I blame that on the return of the rain.

You may recall me whining about the rain before.  On March 10th, which was a Tuesday (if this is week 5, that would have been week 1 ... the week that I actually made it to the office one day), it started to rain.  It was supposed to rain for 8 days; it did rain, off and on (but more on than off) straight through to the end of week 2 (so closer to 13 days, although maybe there were one or two days in there when it only drizzled or something).  Again, it may seem to some of you that I whine over trivialities: were I back in DC, for instance, it would have nothing unusual in the least to see rain for the better part of 2 weeks.  But I don’t live in DC.  I live in southern California.  You know why I moved to southern California?  To get away from the damned rain.  (Okay, there were many other reasons too, but let’s not ignore that one.)

Week 3 was dry, but still overcast and unseasonably cold.  Week 4 it started to warm up, and we actually got some decent swim time in.  I actually did some laps in the pool, which makes me feel a tiny bit better about laying around the house all week.  Then on Sunday it started raining again (as I noted last week), and it racked up another 6 days: it was still coming down pretty hard Friday night when I went to bed.  Yesterday and today have been a bit brighter, granted, but I just don’t feel inclined to trust the weather at this point.

Tendency toward depression is only compounded by dreary days when you can’t really go outside, even moreso than usual these days.  There’s a lot of sleeping odd hours in my house these days, and I’m starting to worry about people, myself not least of all.  I’m mostly staying focussed on work ... mostly.  The Mother declared it to be “spring break,” so no homeschooling this week.  This gave her time to concentrate on the fact that her baby sister was having her own baby (her first, even) in the midst of all this (life goes on, as they say), and the younger two kids have mostly spent the time digging out old videogames (and entire game systems—the PS/3 has been hooked up again, the Wii was out, and I won’t be surprised to see the Gamecube next) and rediscovering old classics.  My putative sister-in-law did deliver her girl, by the way: over 24 hours’ labor and over 9 pounds, but completely healthy and not seeming to notice that she has entered the world at a somewhat ... challenging time.

Grocery shopping is not getting any better; after a surprising uptick in week 2, it’s been constantly devolving into a queasy soup of restrictions and paranoia.  The first couple of weeks there was a bit of a feeling of camaraderie with your fellow shoppers ... a touch of “hey, we’re all in this together.”  There seemed to be precious little of that left when The Mother and I went out on Wednesday.  We specifically set out to get 2 weeks’ worth of groceries so that we can skip it altogether in week 6.  The Mother may have to do one more Costco run, and I’m sure she’s not looking forward to that, but the online delivery service reports that it’s already all booked up for the week.  So I fear we may be stuck with it.  Maybe they’ll have toilet paper.

Sorry.  Bad joke.

The one bright spot for me—not so much for The Mother, granted, but she has a new neice to long-distance-dote on—was another installment of the Family Campaign.  So far, we’ve done “flashbackstories” for everyone, and we had the initial “you all meet in a tavern” session (I put as much of a twist on that as I could, but it’s a standard trope for a reason), but this is the first actual “let’s travel together and start to get to know one another” type session.  It was a lot of fun, and I didn’t get nearly as far as I’d hoped, so we’re going to do another one next week (and then we’ll go back to doing some other campaigns to give me time to gen up some exciting bits for the next leg of their quest).  This was a nicely balanced session, I thought: some shopping, some fireside chats, some revealing character moments, some traveling-can-be-uncomfortable moments, and finally a good old-fashioned ambushed-by-bandits encounter (only this one was on a river barge, adding the extra danger of possibly falling off the boat into the strong current).  It was fun, but there’s more to be done before they get on the ship for the month-long journey that will take them to their final destination.  So I’m looking forward to next week, and hopefully the 3 of them are as well.


Enh, that’s enough for this week.  This was supposed to be the worst week of the crisis, so it’s all downhill from here, I guess?  We shall see.



[Update: It’s now Sunday night and it’s started raining again.  Shit.]