Good Things Friday (151) and Link Love
January 14, 2022
1. Tami at Disabled Girl on Fire started her Patreon for helping her to help people in her community. A darn good cause. If you can, it’d be great to support her!
2. I’m getting myself in order for the 2021 tax year thing. I always feel very anticipatory about this even though it’s possible we’ll owe money. Suppose that’s the anticipation talking: I want to see if my projections last year worked out as intended.
3. Delightful: We got a case of a variety of formulas from Enfamil for … I don’t know what reason that we couldn’t use. I couldn’t donate it anywhere here but was loathe to just throw them out. That’s perfectly good formula! I shipped them to Penny and she was able to distribute them in a day!
4. We took Smol Acrobat out to greet JB coming home from school one day and the squeals from the happy elder sibling were really something. We’d stopped halfway up the street, Smol had given up walking, and was leaning on my legs but was so happy to see their JB that they practically ran home with the renewed vigor. It’s very nice to see them adoring each other right now.
5. Our friend sent us an absolutely hilarious gift.
Challenges this week: I’m still exhausted every week. It’s frustrating that my health did improve with therapy and still only moved my baseline from untenable to moderately to severe misery depending on the day. I hope this isn’t the best time I have left.
Same or Different? The Question Flummoxes Neural Networks. For all their triumphs, AI systems can’t seem to generalize the concepts of “same” and “different.” Without that, researchers worry, the quest to create truly intelligent machines may be hopeless. (Humans are too flawed and biased to be designing independent intelligent machines safely.)
BLM protesters cleared over toppling of Edward Colston statue
Long COVID could become Finland’s largest chronic disease, warns minister
If I wasn’t already laying down, I’d want to crumple to the floor with this headline: Pfizer expects updated COVID-19 vaccine data for kids under 5 by April. Data by April. That means no approved vaccine before May probably. It’s not that I expected us to go back to any level of normalcy (much good that is) but I had hoped we could have SOME kind of protections for our under-5 population by now.
Along those lines, I feel very much every single word that Chuck Wendig writes here: The Great Surrender: How We Gave Up And Let COVID Win
This letter to Captain Awkward, and feel like absolutely screaming at the LW’s 2-siderism: #1362: “Family being opposite but equal butts about COVID – How do I maintain sanity?” This is why I’m STILL noping out of a number of familial interactions. How can you seriously tell a person who has the responsibility to keep a small child alive and well, who has NO protections whatsoever, that they are being too careful???
Scalzi with An Omicron Update
The state of air travel security practices is ridiculous: What to Know If An SSSS Code Shows Up on Your Boarding Pass
Changing the tune a bit here, check out the fantastic chairs that Mr. T built over at Northern Expenditure.
The Pirate Kitty of Ferny Hills: How a thieving ginger cat brought joy to a Brisbane neighbourhood
This was pretty funny to watch
I don’t know if the translation is accurate but … the laughter is refreshing after all the other terrible news.
Federer and Nadal react to the news of Djokovic being stuck at an airport in Melbourne (English subs) pic.twitter.com/urBqHqTLuq
— embix (@brezelradar) January 6, 2022
This was lovely!
While soprano Lisette Oropressa was singing her 4th encore, “Sempre libera” an opera number that has a tenor part, opera student Liu Jianwei spontaneously joins her in song when he noticed there wasn’t anyone else singing it (as this was a solo recital).pic.twitter.com/bBmzzZ7x4p
— GoodNewsCorrespondent (@GoodNewsCorres1) January 10, 2022
I can’t get to the “gave up and let COVID win” article but I hope it’s not about “us” not getting vaccinated. As the person who always did the extra work on the group project there is nothing more frustrating than that I CAN’T do extra work on the group project of getting vaccination numbers up. I can only do my own share, which I did, and as I see post after post from healthcare workers begging people to help them by getting vaccinated I have to remind myself that they’re not talking to me, there’s no way I can help them.
(If it’s about politicians’ decisions, I guess I too will always wonder if New York could have actually got our numbers down to 0 if we kept our shutdown past 3 months. Or kept our mask mandate longer than 15 months. Or reinstated it earlier.)
If it makes you feel better, better political decisions could have mitigated the damages and deaths, but there is no way to eradicate a highly contagious, widely circulating virus with widespread animal reservoirs. It was always coming, but we could have had Australia sized deaths rather than UK sized deaths.
@Jenny: That’s the part that makes me MADDER, honestly. No we couldn’t have escaped all of it, but no it didn’t have to be this way either.
No, it’s not specifically about the vax rate, but it does address the frustrating “group project” feel that you describe, and I feel too, just in a different way.
An excerpt:
“There exists little clarity on what anybody is doing, which mostly means, nobody is doing anything.
From this, you can feel the lack of leadership and the loss of focus and good communication cascading out through the populace like a wave of surrender. Masks? Fuck ’em. Gone! Gone. I mean, to be clear, they were gone mostly when the CDC botched that communication early on, but here, now, I go out and I don’t see a mask on a face. Not from anybody. Not even as our cases are triple where they were in this county. Vaccine mandates? Temporarily gone, and probably full gone soon enough, with no seeming plans to introduce them. Testing? Quarantine? Isolation? Contact tracing? Can’t find tests, and the CDC has changed who should get them. Quarantine and isolation is already limited now, and for the most part here, parents and workers are subtly encouraged in schools and in jobs to just… casually not test at all because if you test, you might find it, and then your kids might not be in school (THE HORROR) and you might not get to come in to do your job (OH SHIT) and so maybe, y’know, I dunno, don’t go looking for COVID and you won’t find it. (This, a particularly Trumpy echo.) Contact tracing? Hahaha. Haha. Hahahhahgaaaaaaah yeah nobody is tracing shit anymore. It’s on you if you wanna do that. Good luck.
And from all this has cascaded a particular attitude, even among people who were once maybe careful, who are vaccinated and are not necessarily thoughtless people —
The attitude is, I give up.
It’s, “I don’t like this anymore, so I’m not going to do it.”
It’s, “Well, we’re all going to catch it anyway, gotta live my life.”
It’s, “I don’t want to hear anymore about how the bridge is out, I’m just going to accelerate the car and assume they’ll put the bridge back up before I get there, or at the very least, I’ll just jump the ravine in my Toyota Camry.”
They are bored with the pandemic.
They are tired of it.
They don’t want restrictions.
They don’t want to stop or even slow down.”
The TikTok is actually a very sweet video. Federer has a foundation, and Nadal was going to play an exhibition match in support, and they utterly got the giggles. They are clearly good friends, and it’s a fun video, but has nothing to do with Jokovic, who is an ass.
https://youtu.be/jJV-mF6chSg
Ah ha! I suspected it didn’t really have anything to do with Djokovic but I enjoyed the video regardless.
I can’t say I’ve given up, per se, since we are still taking as few risks as possible, outside of childcare…. But I have had to re-assess and accept the risk of sending my kid to childcare under the current conditions, which makes COVID feel close enough to inevitable, and to think about what that means for me and my family. So I’m in a different place mentally, just due to the sheer everywhere-ness of Omicron (and because I have to be or I’ll crumple into a ball of stress). I don’t want to get COVID, I don’t want LO too, but I recognize the likelihood is there, and I still don’t think I should pull her from preschool for ~2-3 weeks to try to wait it out. Gah. I hate this pandemic.
The Pfizer delay was a huge blow and I’m honestly still a bit upset about it, if I dwell on it. Moderna followed up with similar delays and no firm timeline.
Captain Awkward letter did have a pretty great response, though, basically telling LW#2 off for not respecting a parent’s wish, and supporting their choices whole heartedly.
Yeah, I’m not quite there but I can see that being the next step because we’re all doing the most that WE can and we simply can’t rely on others to do more than whatever they’re (barely in some cases) willing to do. I just hate the people who say they’re sick of it so that’s their justification for refusing to do even the least possible.
I’m still very upset by both delays. Trying to refocus on other things but definitely wishing hard that they weren’t so.
I did appreciate Captain Awkward’s response.