Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
📚 nineteen of 2020: The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1967 Hugo Best Novel
Once again, Heinlein has strong and interesting SF (the moon declaring independence) coupled with politics I don’t entirely go for and serious issues with women and sexism.
Under normal circumstances, I would have spent this past weekend at Norwescon, running around a hotel and getting up to all sorts of geeky shenanigans with ~2,000 of my closest friends. Of course, these are not normal circumstances, so that didn’t happen.
Instead, the party moved online, taking place mostly in the Norwescon Facebook Group, with lots of people posting past costumes, planned costumes, memories of cons past, or silly updates on what they were doing at the con that wasn’t happening. And all in all, it ended up being a pretty good weekend, with lots of community silliness keeping all of our respective spirits up.
I made a point of posting at least once a day on both my personal pages and in the group, starting things off in group each the morning with a photo post asking people what their convention outfits were that day. Here’s my “Norwescan’t” experience this year…
Just realized that as of today, I’ve been social distancing for a month: the last social thing I did was the final Norwescon Concom meeting on March 7th. And the only times I’ve gone any further out than our neighborhood was when Prairie and I went for our trail walks, before King County closed the parks and trails.
One month down. At least one to go.
I’m occasionally whiny, am tired of this, and really want a night out at the Merc to see people and dance off the stress and tension.
It’s not fun. But we can do this.
Hey, we’ve got all those puzzles…maybe this is a good time to work on one?
There’s the border! This is kinda fun!
Hmmmm.
So many pieces. Why did we want to do this?
A little more progress.
A few sections are starting to come together.
Suddenly we hit the point of no return…
…and violà! Success!
Book eighteen of 2020: Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Sure, the miniaturization process is basically magic, and the only woman in the story is treated abysmally, even for Asimov. But if you can cope with those, the concept and adventure is still a lot of fun.
📚 seventeen of 2020: The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A fun, quick read; amusingly thematically appropriate for the moment. Only this has the advantage of being fictional with a satisfactory resolution. If only COVID-19 could be dealt with in five days.
📚 sixteen of 2020: This Immortal by Roger Zelazny ⭐️⭐️ 1966 Hugo Best Novel
Meh. Maybe it’s a combination of mid-60s SF and the current pandemic stress, and I might have been more receptive at another time, but this was a slog.
An update on WA’s coronavirus status.
As has been noted in a Twitter screenshot I’ve seen a number of people sharing, one of the key metrics to track is not the number of cases, but the number of deaths, and how quickly that number is growing. According to the Twitter post from Dr. Sam Wang of Princeton, “If the ‘doubling time’ of these slows to more than 3 days, we’re starting to bend the curve.”
According to a graphic from the New York Times, as of this morning, WA’s ‘doubling time’ is nine days.
This is good news. WA may have been first in the US to get seriously hit, and there have been some hiccups, but overall, we’ve been doing a good job of social distancing and controlling the situation as much as possible.
I’ve even seen other (currently unsourced) comments indicating that the UW medical center is not only not overwhelmed, but aren’t even as whelmed as they expected to be at this point, and are offering assistance to other places.
None of this means we’re out of the woods yet. But they’re all good signs that we’re doing the right things, however frustrating they may be.
Keep it up, everyone!
Just a bit of silliness today — I created a mask-wearing version of my social media profile photo to use for the foreseeable future, and I’m actually pretty darn happy with how it came out.
I took one of the Memoji caricatures of me from my iPhone, found an image of someone wearing a disposable mask, and then did a little image editing (“photoshopping”, only using Affinity Photo) to extract the mask, overlay it onto the Memoji, and warp it into place.
It’s silly but serious, and was a pleasant distraction for ten minutes or so earlier today.
Can I simultaneously respect the people willing to give their time, energy, and skills to voluntarily sewing masks to donate to hospitals, and the people who refuse to do so because it’s a request/expectation for more unpaid skilled labor in a traditionally feminine area?