I saw a reference somewhere — probably on twitter — that before all the schools closed, an elementary school student asked his teacher what he should do while all the craziness is going on.  The teacher said: “This is a historic period so you should keep a diary.  Decades from now, people will want to know what it was like!  Write down your thoughts so you can tell people.”

I also started Ken Liu’s Wall of Storms and it has this quote right at the beginning: “History is the long shadow cast by the past upon the future.  Shadows, by nature, lack details.”

Ok.  I agree with that.

We’re stuck in the house with nothing but time.  I’m already feeling slightly stir-crazy.  I realized I have this blog-shaped thing I still pay for.  Thus, I’m booting up a little public diary.  I will post a little something every day.  When this nonsense is over, I will stop.

I also realized I have no interest in writing gaming things right now.  The world is not all that funny at the moment.

You can read.  You can not read.  This is for my sanity — not yours.  I can only promise snide asides, sarcasm, and jokes.

3:15pm on March 15th, 2020. Some bullet points.

  • I am torn between believing we live in a simulation, we’re in the dumbest possible future, or both.
  • We’re at ~3000 cases and 65 dead.  With testing so slow, no one knows the real counts.
  • Outside my window, except that it rained and made the ground no bueno for going out and digging, everything looks fine.  This is frustrating.  With the apocalypse going on, I was promised something… a little more active.  Zombies.  Nuclear wasteland.  Dudes in hazmat suits making Darth Vader noises.  Nothing.  Pfft.
  • Meanwhile, all the grocery stores are empty for no real reason.  People are hoarding because it’s fun.  Nothing is wrong with the water supply, the food supply, food logistics, delivery logistics, or the grocery chains.  The world is running out of neither toilet paper nor pasta.  Yet people are acting as if this is it.
  • I was reading “The Anarchy: the Relentless Rise of the East India Company” by William Dalrymple but somehow I couldn’t get through the Great Famine of 1770 with the COVID-19 chaos.  I put it aside to pick up Ken Liu’s “Wall of Storms.”  I enjoyed “Grace of Kings” greatly and what the world needs is Chinese-myth inspired action and steampunk.
  • Stuck in the house for weeks, I’m going to buckle down and learn Rust and then work through some of the new Rust game engine tutorials.  Because what I need is another programming language.  I figure it can’t be as difficult as learning Russian.
  • I am still learning Russian.  More and more sticks every day.
  • I am going to lose so much weight with all the exercising to keep sane.  I’ve about doubled my normal workout and I’m not at work grazing on junk.  If I wasn’t deep into Ring-Fit, I would start doing Darebee and youtube videos.
  • I should probably spend time in the basement finishing up wiring the second set of my hydroponics sensors.  I just… am full of ennui and it’s hard to focus right now on incredibly fiddly electrical engineering projects requiring reading technical readouts.  Plants are doing fine.  Plant I was convinced was dead came back to life totally improbably.
  • Work bumpity bumpity bump.  We were in travel!  Once!
  • In politics:
    • Bernie is hoping Biden implodes on stage tonight. Biden isn’t going to implode on stage.
    • While the world melts, Trump is walking around talking about pardoning his minions.  This guy can’t even take a break for being awful for the end of the world.
    • There ain’t nothin to do except wait for testing capacity to ramp.