rjshae

There's an interesting study linked from SlashDot: Italy sewage study suggests COVID-19 was there in December 2019 So yeah, wow. One wonders when this outbreak actually began. From time to time I've wondered if it had any relation to this event in September: What happened after an explosion at a Russian disease research lab called VECTOR? They claim not, but...

A key take-away from that study: There wasn't much of a civilization on Earth 17,000 years ago. I doubt we'll be chatting any time soon.

My PC died a couple of weeks back and I just got my Chromebook, so doing a lot of catching up...

While my broken game PC is being replaced, I began a replay of Icewind Dale. Unfortunately the character voices are broken and it uses the ancient AD&D ruleset, but otherwise it's playable. I did check the progress of the Co8 port of IWD, but that seems to have slowed to a near halt. That's too bad; I would have liked to played it with the ToEE engine.

Wouldn't rat cannibalism be a good thing?

No, it's just a bit of harmless humor.

I think the goal is to reach a baseline level of cases where contact tracing can feasibly keep it contained. The hiring of contact tracers is on the order of thousands. If you have millions of cases, then there's no way they could be sufficiently effective. If we're not in lockdown, just a few missed cases can rapidly spread the pandemic again and we're back to flattening the curve. Hence, there's a case goal to reach. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/25/844088634/when-is-it-safe-to-ease-social-distancing-heres-what-one-model-says-for-each-sta

I binge watched the first season of Motherland last weekend. Seems mainly to be targeted at a young adult audience. It wasn't horrible. Might make a decent PnP RPG setting.