Bartimaeus

I'm sorry, but could you very clearly state what you're trying to accomplish? I just don't have a good enough idea of what you're trying to do to provide any kind of input.

Nurses Die, Doctors Fall Sick and Panic Rises on Virus Front Lines Over 200 health workers at a single NYC hospital have fallen ill. Unlike China, we in the 'first world' don't have the equipment to do this.

Rock 'n' roll artist Alan Merrill of coronavirus.

The Twitter-level pandering in shows has gotten pretty bad among the big studios (Disney, for example, is hilariously terrible in this respect). I don't have any problem with LGBTQ characters (after all, I love Steven Universe which is composed almost entirely of them and I love them all!), but I really, really don't enjoy obvious pandering and token inclusion via poorly written and uninteresting characters and storylines. When a jarring and annoying character or character "twist" like that shows up, I just have to keep reminding myself that it's the bad writers' fault for making bad characters, and not anybody else's. Just like how women were very often written one of a select few ways throughout certain eras of cinema, so too are we going through a period here where companies are eager to show how progressive they are through lazy passive progressive character-writing (...instead of like, you know, actual interesting and consistently written and set up characters that exhibit a number of traits and mannerisms that make their character, LGBTQ or not, fun as well as believable, and hopefully relatable when appropriate).

90s country artist Joe Diffie of coronavirus.

Similarly, I try to never use laptops, but happened to see a deal on a relatively low-end-but-surprisingly-solid Ryzen one for $200 a few months back and decided what the heck - never wanted a gaming laptop anyways for heat and ergonomic reasons. Very glad I did, because teleconferencing has suddenly become a must for everything. It came with a budget SSD, and I replaced the RAM with 16GB (came with 4GB) and it has actually since become a shockingly well-performing laptop.

My sister, who thought she was getting over the virus finally a few days ago, told me she think she's relapsing, as she's started having really bad coughing and breathing again. I've heard of some such relapse cases, and from the sounds of it are at least sometimes fatal. Used to have three sisters, hoping I won't be down to one anytime soon. Can't do anything to help her. She says she's planning on going in tomorrow if it stays like it is right now.

Lately, I think we're all starting to think a little more like Guard Dog regarding the federal government...

@"chinese virus": pence was recently insisting to other world leaders that they call it the "wuhan virus", they didn't give a crap and he looked like a fool for it, so probably? @asians: please no, it's already hard enough to find good asian food here, I just found a good little mom & pop vietnamese place a couple of months ago and they're probably going to go out of business because of this

Story I saw: https://www.vox.com/2020/3/25/21193803/trump-to-governors-coronavirus-help-ventilators-cuomo

Trump says he'll withhold critical supplies from blue states unless they start being nice to him. Yeah, contrary to what I said a few weeks ago, maybe I would prefer if he died of coronavirus, I'm not totally sure at this point anymore, really.

glad to hear there'll be a good RLM episode out of it

I'm "excited" to see what the death rates for Florida will end up being - big population centers, high percentage of old people, everybody there seemingly not giving a crap, no testing, big tourist destination, certain to be a lack of critical supplies and health personnel, and a government that's saying everything is great and don't worry about it. Not because I want anybody to die, but more out of a morbid fascination for "what will this thing do in a situation where literally everything that can go wrong is going to go wrong".

A little under half the population thinks it'll all be over by Easter, and a significant portion of that will probably be planning on gathering en masse in their local churches. Killing off your voter base through misinformation is a bold idea, Trump - we'll see how that works out for him.

Correct. The death rates in Spain and Italy are absurdly high which suggests they're badly behind on testing as well, but given our own failures, it does not bode well for us.

U.S. has overtaken China for official confirmed cases numbers. Mind you, the Chinese numbers are almost definitely cooked...but so are ours (although more likely by incompetency/lack of resources to test). Really wish I didn't know so many people that worked at hospitals right now, including family members...

Actor Mark Blum of coronavirus.

The actual ballerina stuff was fine. It's just that...I do not find Natalie Portman a believable or compelling actress in the slightest, and consequently almost always find her characters unlikable in whatever she appears in (a small-but-not-totally exception for her character in V for Vendetta, I guess...and she was good in Leon as well), and it kind of snowballed from there on pretty much every front because of it. Laugh-out-loud CGI stuff that's supposed to be fueled by her inner struggles which I just did not care at all about, everyone in the movie is insane (and/or a scumbag) which fuels the ludicrousness even more, unreliable narrator (which would be fine with a character you like - not so much one you already dislike to begin with, just annoys me with her even more). I've seen Perfect Blue, the movie Black Swan is heavily based off of, and while Perfect Blue had its own set of problems, I found it a waaaaaaaaaaay more enjoyable experience. I really just need to give up and accept the fact that I'm not going to like anything Natalie Portman appears in, I guess - she's pretty consistently been a movie-ruiner for me.

What Malcador said. The only place mail has been currently going on before being disposed of and my hands cleaned is my floor...but if you want to get technical, the contents could be infected before arriving as well (especially in this cold weather where the virus likely lives for a longer period of time), OR they could get infected by me removing the contents while still holding onto the packaging.

Amazon workers test positive for covid-19 at six U.S. warehouses I was already thinking of starting a like 4-tier mail system where it's like "okay, this mail is 1 day old...this mail is 2 days old, and this mail is 3 days old, and now this mail is 4 days old and safe to open". Might start implementing that now.

Black Swan (2010). it sucked lmao

Many years back when I was...a junior? in high school, I was doing a sort of silly "team-building" and trade skills-familiarizing program during the summer, and early into the program, we had a day where we did a height-climbing activity sort of for fun and sort of as a challenge to ourselves. Basically, we had to climb a 7-8 story tower while wearing a safety harness - it'd be a joke for any real climbers, but for someone totally unexperienced like myself (who's also terrified of heights), it was a daunting, Herculean task. My entire body had just about turned to jello by the time I made it all the way up (just about lost all control of my legs), and I almost passed out. Got made fun of by one of the other students for it, too - but the kicker there was that he absolutely refused to try to do it himself because "he just didn't want to" (and obviously, we all knew it was because he was a total hypocrite chicken himself). He almost got kicked out of that program for bad behavior several times, and went on to become a super senior (he was a year older than me so I still saw him around when he should've already graduated) and then later started working at a local Gold'n Plump. Felt like a bit of cosmic justice there, the rat bastard. (e): On reflection, it was probably more like 5-6 stories, not 7-8. It was really tall, but not like "this is literally impossible for someone who's not already a climber" tall.