Coronavirus

2x plus the booster.

I guess a ton of people got covid at the Gathering of Friends gaming convention, in case anyone was wondering if going to maskless conventions was cool or not

100% of the people that I personally know that went to Adepticon got it.

Can't wait for GenCon!

Wow, was that a Gathering of Friends With Benefits? Or was it just the stereotypical poor gaming convention hygiene that made it a super spreader event?

Counting a plumber and his apprentice, I have only had five visitors in my house since the start of 2022. Two visitors brought Covid, and one was just last weekend. Both of the Covid carriers were gamer friends who spent a whole afternoon sitting across the table from me. This pandemic is definitely not over yet. An old, close friend is in town for a month, and I agreed to let him stay at my house for a week, but now I am having second thoughts. He is fully vaccinated and boosted, but the booster is likely wearing off at this point, and he is an extrovert who is town to visit with a lot of people. He and I were both exposed to our Covid-bearing friend on Sunday. He is now staying in a hotel until Tuesday and will get tested before then. I don't plan to get tested unless I experience symptoms between now and early next week. 95% of new cases in Minnesota right now are Omicron BA.2, and the average onset of symptoms is three days.

I haven't had any visitors in my apartment since 2020. Except for a cop that woke me up 2am after he came in the wrong place. I don't know if he had covid. I just meet people other places or their houses now. Very few friends holding game nights and they're not open to newbies anymore.

Update from Southern China time! After my yellow code scare from two weeks ago things have been interesting. I think I tested seven times in the last two weeks. They closed down schools at first but the case load seemed to lighten over time so things started to get better. Since the final year exams in China determine if lower class kids are allowed to move up into the middle class the provincial government made a decision to allow 12th graders back to school first. Last Wednesday they allowed 6th grade and above to come back if the entire family tested. That left us with a different childcare problem as I have a 5th and 7th grader. Then this Monday the same deal for elementary schools. Finally a full week in the office.

Then yesterday came! I was tracking from early morning that the airport is closed (for accident of history reasons mail is in the IT portfolio) and our packages would be delayed. Apparently there are two cases at the local airport with 20 "close contacts". Then at lunchtime one of my local staff had to leave to pickup his kids. Apparently his school had one parent who worked at the airport. Then 2:15 came. Roughly half the Consulate turned yellow. Apparently one of the two airport workers decided to have romantic trysts at a hotel three blocks from the Consulate. Since we share a cell phone tower the entire Consulate now had a problem. I turned yellow despite only going between my house and work for the last two weeks (and likely will only do so for the last month of my tour of duty). The Consulate basically emptied as people had to leave to queue up to test at a local center. Having yellow codes they would have problems getting home as they cannot use busses or metro. The Consulate started running shuttles to take people to the testing center and most of the single people went. My wife and I couldn't really do so as it would create another child care issue, who knows when the testing would be done (sorry kids, figure out dinner for yourself and put yourself to bed, maybe see you tomorrow morning!). Reports from the single Americans make the test worthless as after ID codes were scanned the locals stopped all semblance of proper queueing.

Some of us started to get harassing phone calls from the local CDC. One of my US staff has decided to not test again and let his kids do the online schooling for the remainder of the tour, he leaves in a month. By the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations they cannot test us after arrival against our will and cannot deny us entry to our residences once we have our diplomatic cards. After a bit of a conversation they realized he was a diplomat and didn't have to test. He would still have to test to depart in four weeks, and wouldn't be able to go to a store or restaurant, but most of us have stopped doing that for quite a while. I have six missed calls that I won't ever answer.

Then last minute the CDC agreed to setup a testing site outside the Consulate. They do that so our guard staff can test as they cannot leave their posts for the time required to queue at a public site. I ended up going to that and it was almost impossible for me to get the required code and this testing provider uses a different identity recognition app that I haven't used before. One of the locals had to help me fill out the form. Most people who were left ended up testing at the Consulate which followed proper queueing and wasn't a long line, including my guy who wasn't going to test.

The thing that pisses me off about the constant testing is that it squeezes the enjoyable parts of my day out. I still have to do all the annoying stuff (plus extra showers due to the tropical climate after standing outside for 2-4 hours), but when surprises like this happen it's the stuff that makes life bearable that is pushed off. We ended up losing an hour of free time to the surprise test. Since my son turned 13 in early April I started taking him to the gym and teaching him to lift. It's probably the best part of my weekday block. Weekends it's from 2-5 when we play boardgames as a family (currently redoing a LotR Journies in Middle Earth campaign at my youngest's request). It's the stuff that makes the struggle of being here bearable that loses out. So, no gym yesterday and my muscles are really sore (two weeks off from lifting, two days on which isn't a full routine, then a sudden stop) and yesterday was a bust.

One more month to bear.

The guy that runs the game group I go to cancelled this last week because he had covid, then messaged me yesterday (a day after we were talking and he said he was feeling better but still bad and sick) asking if I was up for games that afternoon. I feel like the entire world had just really said fuck or at this point. A ton of people I know have gotten covid over the past couple weeks. Almost as if saying fuck masks wasn't the best move.

Edit: with the way literally everything else in the world is playing out these days I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the death cult assholes wore everyone down in the end. Sorry I'm feeling pretty fucking frustrated these days and it might be leaking out here.

Went on a first date yesterday. Woman looked just as good as her pictures, and there was a strong resemblance to Helen Hunt. As she walked up to me and I reached out to shake her hand, she advised me that she had recently been exposed to Covid at work. Last Monday, her boss took her to lunch. He came down sick and tested positive for Covid the next day. So we skipped the handshake and took a walk around a local lake on a warm, windy, beautiful spring day.

The conversation was going great so we took a second lap around the lake. It was probably safe. I mean, we didn't maintain much distance, but we were mostly facing the same direction and walking side-by-side. After three miles of walking I set her free to go shopping for a Mother's Day present, but we plan to get together again soon. I still mask up when shopping or at the gym, but I was willing to take this particular risk.

I still wear a mask everywhere indoors that isn’t home.

I don’t care what anyone else thinks.

I’m really tired of all the bullshit. All of it.

Iron Man is dating Helen Hunt.

Sagrilarus wrote: Iron Man is dating Helen Hunt.

Don't jinx me. It was a great first date, but I tried and failed to reach her today to schedule a second date. We have each other's phone numbers and I gave her my email, but she hasn't emailed me back so I can get her email address. She told me that we should abandon the dating app and just talk to each other by phone or email, but I see that she has put up two new pictures on her profile since last week and logged in just yesterday. So she is still looking and possibly on a date right now.

Online dating offers a huge potential selection, but the game gets old after a while, especially if you aren't especially attractive. I saw a surprising stat recently from a study about online dating. I assumed that men are more visually oriented than women, but 2/3 of women report getting at least an okay amount of interest from online suitors. Meanwhile, just 15% of the men are getting a large majority of the messages from women.

Turning back to the main topic, Covid cases have been rising locally in the last month or so, and the Twin Cities is now considerated to be a moderate risk area. Not as bad as in the northeastern part of the U.S., but worse than most of the U.S. right now. Might be good time to dial back on the dating again.

Women have some additional criteria like “will he kill me” that us men don’t worry about so much.

I’ve been working away from the house for a change of scenery. But with the rate ramping up in the mid-Atlantic I’ve set my car up for full power so I don’t have to work at restaurants anymore.

It's not just the threatening ones. My girlfriend and her friends (all roughly middle-aged, like we are) have told me any number of completely flabbergasting stories about the behavior of men on dating apps. So many that it astounds me that almost any men manage to land a date, outside of the apps that are mostly used by people just trying to get laid for a night. You know all that behavior that you think hiding behind a screen enables for people? Well, even when there are pictures and real names in play, that kind of behavior still happens. I suspect that a lot of women end up defaulting to the few really attractive guys (the 15% that Shellhead mentions) because the vast majority of others than they connect with on those apps are fucking idiots, so they might as well aim high, as it were.