posts from coronalife

"Why was the daily screaming at 8pm instead of 7pm tonight?"

lol at Lyft for saying it out loud: we made everyone data scientists because title inflation

re Animal Crossing: "Imagine if everyone had a job that they enjoyed, that they were good at, and that could sustain them. What if they could thrive with no job at all, a step well beyond universal basic income?"

depression and smell - hahaha, but actually. I used to think sensory input was just a thing you could carve off on its own - like your life would be equally rich regardless of how well the senses work. I don't think that anymore. this feels relevant; how your body feels (as you take it in through your senses) has a big effect on how you feel emotionally which has a big effect on how you think.
(side note: I'm not sure how strong that effect is; it's not infinite, because otherwise why not just take super feel-good drugs all the time? but it's probably stronger than we give it credit for.)
also it'd be hilarious if "aromatherapy" turned out to be a real thing that worked just like this.

my friend Daniel made this Assassin Chess, which is reasonably fun despite being playable on your own with just dice, and having only a few pieces. I think I can almost always win, but it's not trivial, and that seems like a step in itself.

other notes, I finally defeated a20 heart on all characters in Slay the Spire, and I think its hold on my life has loosened as a result. oh, and I beat Shandalar. I've cooked a lot, managed to bike basically daily despite not having my commute, and hosted half of a short Monster of the Week (think Dungeons and Dragons but simpler) campaign. so, like, there's my quarantine achievements.

wow! gosh!

usually when I say "wow!" I am speaking in doge. today I'm not! I'm gonna write "covid-19" and "coronavirus" so that if I'm ever searching for this blog post I can find it, but obviously it's what we're all thinking about all the time.

should I have seen this coming, and how?
Scott Aaronson says yes, but I don't get it. Similarly, SF (and Breed) is getting a lot of credit for handling it right. Clearly, I'm glad we did, and it's better to be SF than NY here. But like... SARS (2002) could have been this bad too. What's the thing that was different here, that led to it being obviously the right thing to do to shut down hard, while in 2002 it would have been a big overreaction? I'm not saying "there isn't one", I'm just curious what it is. (maybe some rule like, "we saw a case in the US that we didn't know where it came from"?)

life right now is really pretty fine; we're just working from home and seeing friends on the internet instead of in person. got some ergonomic chairs and monitors and so working from home isn't actually terrible. cooking a lot. riding bikes daily - I don't have my guaranteed hour of commute/exercise so I'm being physically active somehow.

more worried that, somehow, the world gets even worse because of this. like, what are some good things we still had? a bunch of local restaurants and coffee shops that we liked? how about an economic problem that just wipes them all out :-/ Tyler Cowen was saying, there's not as much value being destroyed here - if you're a landlord and you can't pay the mortgage and have to sell the building, well, I mean, someone's buying; the building's not destroyed and so the value isn't all lost. But I just assume it's all consolidated. Who will be buying? Some big nameless property-management company that happens to have deep pockets. The rich get richer, etc. And you'd hope that federal bungling this so badly -> voting out every republican everywhere, but Trump approval ratings "crisis bump"; hard sigh.

I do feel like I can't concentrate great these days, and haven't been sleeping amazingly; ah well. Something something collective psychic blahs, ok. It could be worse, thankfully, basically everyone I know is fine, and not much immediate monetary worries.