My group is starting up again.

Our host is opening his house for gaming again starting Monday. Not much has changed in Maryland over the last three months, but I guess he’s decided it’s safe enough.

I’ve got two 85 year olds in the mix in my extended family, one of which we have multiple contacts per week with due to his health issues. So I won’t be attending. Presumably Monday nights will no longer be on Zoom like they have been since April. I’ll be coasting to a stop with my main group for the first time since 1992.

Trying to decide how I feel about it. I’m not angry and there’s a part of me that sees it as one less thing in the schedule to manage. I guess I’m mixed.

The concentric ripples of concern are hard to navigate.

My spouse and I are healthy, as is our kid. My in-laws are generally healthy, but pushing 70. Our in-laws watch the kid two mornings a week. My father-in-Law is the primary “check on and remind to take medicine” guy for his parents, who are in their 90s.

So everything we do is constrained by the possibility of chain transmission to the 90yos. Nuts.

With one exception, zero of my local gaming friends are doing any face-to-face gaming right now. Unfortunately, the exception is my best friend, one of the first friends I made when I moved to Minnesota in 1991. He is the same guy who asked me a few months ago about moving in with me just as lockdown was getting lifted here.

His theory was that we could avoid everybody else and hang out all the time playing board games and watching movies. His immune system is not strong due to a couple of health issues, and he is 56, so it made sense that he would try to ride this all out in the smallest possible social circle.

But I saw all kinds of problems with the idea. My girlfriend has a similar weakened immune system and is currently sheltering with old people, but also gradually moving her stuff back into my house. Since I still go to work as usual and typically meet with multiple job candidates every week, she wants to avoid direct proximity with me until there is a vaccine or the pandemic somehow ends. So she definitely doesn't want someone else around when she is delivering stuff. Another problem is that my friend is currently unemployed and taking online classes while I work at least 50 hours a week plus summer house and yard projects, so I would often be too tired to hang out. My friend is an extrovert and I am moderately introverted, so that dynamic would also be exhausting for me. The biggest concern is that my friend's extroversion involves a wide social circle and a lot of travel, including some international travel, making him one of the highest risk people I know unless he can control his normal impulses. Also, his house costs like twice as much as mine, and is in a trendy area, so he would logically be happier there. And he is allergic to my cat. So I said no.

He has indeed slipped back into old habits. Just last week, he invited me to a board game get together, claiming that it would be safe because everybody would be socially distancing. Uh, okay. I pointed out that due to very recent rioting in downtown Minneapolis, both his neighborhood and his destination would be under curfew. And there was a big storm coming. He acknowledged all that and said he was going anyway. He is also planning to spend the winter in Florida again, despite their severe mismanagement of the pandemic there. I swear, 80% of the trouble with this pandemic is the optimists.

As for your friend in Maryland, he is delusional. The only thing that has improved so far in this pandemic is that doctors have gotten somewhat better at treating the disease, so the kill rate has declined a little. Otherwise, there is no data supporting the idea that it's safe to start socializing normally again. What has changed is that people have gotten bored with an invisible, intangible threat and have decided to disregard it. I firmly believe that there will be multiple vaccines of varying efficacy available by early 2021. Aside from going to work and buying groceries, there are few things that are so pressing that I am willing to die for them instead of waiting a few months for a vaccine.

A few of my local friends have floated the idea of in person gaming recently. It is tempting just because I miss it a lot, but I think it's pretty objectively not a safe or smart thing to do yet. That's 1 on 1 gaming, there's no way I would even be tempted by a general gaming meetup right now.

It's a tough one, I feel for you Sagrilarius, because mental health is also important right now. I think the only conditions I could do this sort of thing is with an iron clad bubble agreement with a few extremely close friends that I super trusted. If that overlapped with a board game crew then that's be perfect but...

My Gloomhaven group started meeting in person about 2 months ago, but Saskatchewan, Canada is having a much "lighter" experience during the pandemic. Our population is over 1.1 million and we have only had 24 deaths. Moreover, it's the rural communities (Indigenous and Hutterite communities) that have been the hardest hit in the province while the urban areas have had very few cases.

I expect to see a surge in cases by mid-September, thanks to 100 million Americans failing to act sensibly on Labor Day weekend.

ubarose wrote: My F2F group is stopping. It's only my neighbor, her daughter and us. We have all been working remotely or in extremely isolated on-site conditions, and only seeing each other, but Tuesday Al starts back at school.

Ugh, it is so hard. My mother broke her foot a couple weeks ago (she's in her 70s) and we wanted to bring my parents down here to recoup but then I went back to work in-person this week so that was all out the window in terms of risk.

Shellhead wrote: I expect to see a surge in cases by mid-September, thanks to 100 million Americans failing to act sensibly on Labor Day weekend.

Wouldn't that imply that cases had at some point stopped surging?

"Thanksgiving is Coming!"

-Doctor Stark

My wife's coworker's family all had it in early July. The 17 year old daughter has possible permanent heart damage and is still straining to walk around the house almost two months later. Was a talented varsity soccer player.

This shit is so sad.

The heart stuff we are learning just makes my blood run cold.

Gary Sax wrote: The heart stuff we are learning just makes my blood run cold.

The permanent lung or heart damage is scary, but the potential brain damage is my biggest fear.