Listen to the Rain

I was worried that my new computer was failing, since it was behaving weird and I was getting some stuttering in games. Today I noticed when I woke up the computer that everything had been minimized, though I didn't remember doing that, and it was the last straw. I ran a Checkdisk on each drive--C: (NVME OS drive) passed, D: (HDD) passed, and F: (games SSD) had a bunch of oddness. It took like five minutes to even start and kept getting strange hitches during the run. When I came back to the startup screen, I ran Crystal Tools and saw that F: had "BA59" Unrecoverable Error Count, which is 47705 when converted from hex. I downloaded Samsung's official tool to check the drive health, and while the basic test came back with no problems, the S.M.A.R.T. test itself failed before finishing. So, now I'm copying the games off to C: and D:. I have plenty of space--it's just annoying that a month after I got the computer and arranged everything I have to rearrange it all again.

I managed to avoid any long-term effects that I know about from my bout with the plague, and sashagee probably did (her current health difficulties are hereditary and were probably triggered by her pregnancy), but I have another friend that came down with long COVID. He had it first back in April and then might have gotten it again from his girlfriend right before a trip to Scandinavia. In the month since, he's been plagued by joint pains and aches with no real explanation. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. He has a rheumatologist appointment but it's not until November--that was the earliest available--and he's hoping it goes away before then. Hopefully it doesn't take as long as my "long pneumonia" took to fade (twelve years!).

The last bit of news is that my boss finally convinced me to keep working from home. We haven't been back to the office since May, and we're finally supposed to go back next week. Every previous time we were supposed to go back, my boss suggested that I could keep staying home until sashagee felt better, and every previous time I told her that it was fine, I would go back. But this time, I talked it over with sashagee and we decided it would be better if I did stay home, at least for a few weeks. Our current schedule is two days in, three days out, which is pretty much my perfect ratio. Once sashagee feels better I'll go back, but she just needs a bit more time.

I hope everyone has a good weekend!

The first is that Laila took her first steps today!! Not completely unassisted yet, but this morning sashagee put her down and rather than plop on her bum immediately as she usually does, she stayed standing, took a couple steps, and grabbed on to the couch! She's been encouraged by her success and a couple times has tried to repeat it--she's been able to stand up on her own for a few moments, but hasn't taken any more steps. Yet. Soon!

Also, we were scheduled to go back into the office next week since the COVID level was reduced to Medium for Chicago, but it just got increased to High again so I get to stay home! Maybe that means I'll see her first independent steps too?

It's been a bit hard to find time to read or write lately.

sashagee is still sick, which means the main responsibility for basically everything falls on me. She can watch Laila while I'm at work (most of the time) and feed her (most of the time), but basically every other household task--cooking, cleaning, shopping, taking garbage out, errands, etc.--I have to do. On a good day, she can do a few chores and sit out on the couch with me while I work. On a bad day, she'll take two naps and go to bed early just like Laila does. And apparently hypothydroidism comes with memory problems, so I still have to keep track of all the chores just to make sure that nothing gets forgotten.

She went to an endocrinologist, but he told her it was probably related to her pregnancy, gave her some thyroid medicine when she got emotional on the phone, and then when she called back and told her that the tiny medicine dose was making her feel better in the morning but it wore off after lunch, told her it was probably allergies and all but accused her of pill-seeking. She's going to her doctor to get a new endocrinologist referral on Friday.

Tomorrow, after over two years of work from home every single day, we finally return to the office. While the New Jersey office is still closed due to higher plague there, starting tomorrow I begin my new schedule of Monday through Wednesday in the office, Thursday and Friday at home. For me, the Plague Years have finally ended. No more matcha in the morning, chill cooking lunch myself, and watching little baby Laila crawl around every day while I'm at work. But I still get to do it two days a week, and to be honest, I didn't really want to work from home every single day. My ideal would be three days home, two days in the office, but three days in is still nice. I like the train ride downtown, I like walking on the riverwalk in the summer at lunchtime, and I like being able to head anywhere else in the city after work, though obviously there's going to be a lot less of that now that I have a family at home. And I'm happy that they're giving us two power cords so we can keep one in each location.

Our home is in a bit of disarray, since with sashagee's illness and the amount of money we've spent on her and Laila, we're probably going to be here a few years longer than we originally expected, and that means we're redecorating. All the walls have paint swatches on them, but the actual painting can't commence until sashagee has had some better days so she can help. We're going to replace the vanity in the back bathroom, get rid of one of the couches I've had forever, we've already put rugs down, and installed a baby gate. There'll be a lot of changes as Laila grows up.

Final Fantasy XIV released patch 6.1 today, on the last Tuesday I work from home (hence my Endwalker story review), and I've got it open in the background and not participating in any of the new stuff, because I have to work. I do get to read aaron.hosek's commentary as he blind progs the new fights, though.

I hope everyone is doing well! I'm going to try to be more consistent with updates in the future, but with my schedule now it's hard to find time to sit down to write. I should at least be able to read more now that I'll have reading time on the train!

Thank you all so much for the well-wishes!

I'm feeling much better, with basically no signs of the plague left except a slight cough here and there. Unfortunately, sashagee has gotten sick and much sicker than I have, exacerbated by having strained her back by holding onto Laila while she was coughing. She's currently lying in bed now, like she did for most of yesterday when she had a migraine brought on by the changing weather, though at least today it's only her shoulder that hurts and not her head.

Thank G-d Laila has been her happy baby self throughout all of this.

Obviously all of our plans are cancelled, but that seems to be the trend among all our friends anyway. Some friends who were going to host a small New Year's gathering cancelled it due to rising cases (and then somehow caught the plague even though they rarely go anywhere and double-mask most of the time--must have been a family gathering), and my traditional Erev Christmas Chinese food dinner was moved to a trip to Christkindlmarket which we couldn't go to anyway thanks to both of us being sick.

I've been referring to this as "The Plague Year" for a while, but it looks like I was too optimistic by half. It's definitely the Plague Years now.

We went to the theatre.


Thirteen Days was the last show that I was going to go to before all theatre was cancelled last year, and at the time they vowed that when the Plague Year ended they'd put on the same show again. Well, the Plague Year hasn't quite ended yet but it's ended enough that they were able to put on a show, so I bought theatre tickets for the first time in a year and a half, my parents agreed to come visit and babysit Laila, and sashagee and I went for a Sunday matinee.

Thirteen Days is about the Cuban Missile crisis, like the movie of the same name, both adapted from Robert Kennedy's memoirs, though the play obtained special permission from the estate to adapt dialogue from recently-declassified transcripts of the meetings. lisekatevans played Bobby Kennedy--the play has an entirely-female cast--and did most of the narration. If I have a criticism about the play, it's that a lot of the action was told, not shown. Maybe it's because there wasn't enough recorded dialogue to come up with a satisfying script for those meetings, or maybe it's because they weren't as exciting as the meetings that we did see. I would have liked to see some of the meetings that President Kennedy wasn't present for where EXCOMM hammered out their recommendations, though.

That said, the atmosphere of the play was terrific. There was a real sense of danger in the air, at the possibility of global thermonuclear war, and even though I already knew all the historical events I was still in suspense about what would happen next. I already knew about Stanislav Petrov, and a couple years ago I read Able Archer 83: The Secret History of the NATO Exercise That Almost Triggered Nuclear War and learned how close I was to dying in atomic fire before my first birthday, and the common thread of all of these is (pessimistically) how many times humanity came to the brink of a nuclear war or (optimistically) how we always pulled back from the brink. I had that in mind the whole time I was watching, especially since we only got the American perspective. As in the Able Archer incident, the Soviets had no way of knowing what was going through the Americans' minds. That applies to everyone, actually--the most memorable moment for me was after multiple discussions about a quid pro quo removal of missiles in Turkey, how the Americans wanted to remove the Turkish missiles anyway, how they'd have to talk to NATO, how they can't remove the missiles in response to the Soviets' actions because that looks like bowing to a thread, President Kennedy shouts, "We've been talking about this for a WEEK and no one has told [the Turks]?!" The flow of information was definitely much slower in the days where you'd have to wait for news to come in over the wire, and those scenes where the stress breaks through stand above the various "Mr. President, we recommend invading" ones.

The play is definitely in the "America, Fuck Yeah" mode. Since it's based on Robert Kennedy's memoir, it's about how in the face of unwarranted Soviet aggression, America's steady head and firm resolve forced the Soviets to back down and prevented war. But any changes would make it a completely different play, and it's worthwhile to present America's perspective--that's certainly what the people in those meetings believed they were doing. And with already having to cut out a lot of meetings, adding in a Soviet or Cuban perspective as well would have required changing everything and presenting an entirely different play.

It's currently getting great reviews and runs through the end of the month.

Saturday morning, we woke up earlier than usual, showered, and got dressed to prepare for the day's events--sashagee's parents had offered to come into the city, pick all of us up, take us out to their house in the suburbs, and watch Laila to give sashagee and I some time to go on a date! I suggested going to Geneva and walking around the shops, since I haven't been there in years and certainly not since the Plague Year began. After arriving and making sure Laila was all set up, that she was fed and changed and calm and we wouldn't be leaving a screaming sad baby with sashagee's parents, we borrowed their car and set off:


The first priority was finding food. sashagee still can't eat anything too spicy and doesn't want anything that causes gas--Laila had an extremely bad day after the farmer's market dinner on the 10th and it turns out it's because sunchokes can cause gas--and also we didn't want a contemporary American deal because that's where we were going for dinner, so we skipped a few restaurants until I noticed a place called Egg Harbor tucked away in the back of a courtyard plaza. It's a local breakfast chain (and also in Georgia? ) that had a lot of omelets and skillets and so on. That's usually a downside, because American breakfast food is full of either pork, mixed milk and meat, or both, but as soon as I saw they had shakshuka I new what I was getting. It was good, with chunky tomatoes and slightly spicy, and I even appreciated the English muffin they paired it with after sashagee suggested that the English muffin pockets would efficiently carry the shakshuka to my mouth. They paired it with jam so I didn't do that, but maybe in the future I should.

After we were done eating, we went over to Graham's so sashagee could get some coffee. There were very few people in masks--I'd estimate around a third or less, including a third or less of the staff at the stores we went to--and almost every store had a sign saying that masks were optional for vaccinated patrons. I've been fully vaccinated for months but sashagee just got her first shot a couple weeks ago, so she kept her mask on whenever we were indoors. I went by staff practices--if the people working at the store weren't wearing masks, I didn't either.

We didn't have a lot of time because we had left a milk bottle behind but had no idea how Laila would take to it, so we only got to go to a few stores. The first stop was when sashagee noticed a huge collection of plants in the window of a store called GROW. Still mourning the loss of all the herbs we bought, which were devoured by aphids probably blown in from nearby trees the one time we opened our windows on a windy day, she picked out a stromanthe plant for its pink leaves--it's in the office right now, the room which previously didn't have many plants. We left and went further down Third Street before I asked if we could stop in at Harvey's Tales when I saw it was a bookstore. sashagee made a beeline for the children's section and wanted to buy a copy of The Hungry Hungry Caterpillar, so our current plan is to get one more copy so we'll have three--the Japanese copy I already own, the English copy we just bought, and a French copy as well. If we can raise Laila to be trilingual, she'll appreciated it--to this day I'm sad that my father never taught me German growing up, back when he was much better at it than he is now after almost fifty years of it being barely used.

By this point is was almost 3:30 p.m. and we had been gone for three hours, so we stopped at Graham's one more time for ice cream--I got a coconut and almond ice cream malt--and checked into a store that had a bunch of small stalls because they promised a tea collection, but didn't find any tea or even the store that was supposed to sell it. Then we went back to the car and drove back to sashagee's parents' house, where we discovered Laila fast asleep on sashagee's stepmom. They said that she had taken to the bottle just fine--when they initially gave it to her she looked incredulous and screwed up her face to cry right until milk came out, at which point her eyes got wide and she devoured it all and then fell back asleep. What a good baby.

We stuck around a bit before going to Hardware for dinner:


Maybe it's because it was talked up to me so much, but I thought it was nice but not amazing. The Brussels sprouts depicted in the picture were good but not the transcendent experience I was promised--though even sashagee's father, who had expounded on their virtues many times, was a bit disappointed in them--and the smoked salmon salad I got was delicious but too heavily dressed for much flavor other than creamy dill to come through. The baked goat cheese, however, was excellent, with a pickled jalapeño compote on top of the cheese and crispy bread to put it on. Amazing.

Then we went back and sashagee's parents drove us home where she immediately collapsed into bed and I stayed up for the spectacular thunderstorm that smashed into the city around 11 p.m., an event which Laila slept through. Not a surprise, though, since it was the first day she'd had a bottle, the first time she'd been away from us for an extended period, the first time she'd spent a lot of time outside (in sashagee's parents' yard)...so many firsts. Anyone would be tired after that.

What a lovely day!

Not sure "politics" is the most appropriate tag on here, but.

On Friday morning I went downtown to go pick up a birth certificate for Laila, since I'm changing over my work insurance to include her and therefore I need to prove to the insurance company that I'm not trying to run a payment scam on non-existent patients in cahoots with a doctor or something. I wasn't expecting it to be a particularly onerous activity, and it wasn't...but it certainly took a long time! When I got there, there was a line extending about halfway down the block, so I went to stand in it. When I finally got to the door, I was let into the Vital Records line that snaked around the inside of the building, and then when I got to the door of the Vital Records office they let me in to the third line inside for vital-records-only activities. All in all it took me about an hour and a half to get through all the lines, though I was cheered by the couples waiting to get their marriage licenses. One of them had matching T-shirts!

The comforting thing is that once I actually got to the desk, actually getting my birth certificate took five minutes, so the problem was the sheer number of people needing assistance, not any deficiencies on the part of the workers. I had two copies printed, took the L home, and sashagee took a well-deserved nap.

Today, we went for sashagee's post-birth checkup. I originally expected to stay at home with Laila, but last night was rough so she wanted me to come with her. Surprisingly they let me come too and stay in the exam room, so I kept Laila distracted while the nurses looked sashagee over. She got a clean bill--not totally healed, but everything is healing up nicely! Hopefully soon she'll be back to 💯!

Today's the day that I get my second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine! Soon I'll be immune, one of the lucky people in the zombie movies who somehow don't react to the rage virus, and I'll be able to...still stay at home most of the time because really, what is there that I'd want to go and do? The CDC's updated guidelines means I'll probably be able to have a Seder this year since Pesach is two weeks from now but it's not going to be a huge one. It'll be me, sashagee, britshlez, and maybe one other person. It won't be until much later in the holiday cycle that things get back to normal, though I am excited for sashagee to go to her first Seder!

We've gotten a ton of emails from high up in the AMA the last few days over an incident with podcast put out by JAMA. The emails didn't have any context, so I just notice that something was horribly insensitive and we'd need to do better and recommit ourselves to racial equity and it was a lot like every time I log onto social media against after Shabbat and try to reconstruct what the Discourse is. So I looked it up and that article is a good summary, but here's the pull quote that JAMA tweeted out:

"No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care? An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors in this user-friendly podcast [...]
-image archived here

Even the idea that they were going for clicks is belied by the content of the podcast, which has a lot of complaining about how terrible it is to be called racist. So we're meeting this afternoon for a town hall where they're going to go over steps forward and what we're going to do. We'll see if there's any good actionable steps they announce

I started a new TTRPG! thosesocks invited me to play in a Scum & Villainy game (a derivative of Blades in the Dark). We've had one session so far and most of it was taken up by character and ship creation, so I can't really say that much about how it plays, but we started off with a mission to steal a bunch of speeder bikes (essentially) and came up with a plan to do it via staging a race and then winning. My character is a "gothic hood ornament," a mystic devoted to fighting the Dark Between the Stars, since I read this setting primer and the space feudalism, humanocentrism, guilds, and vanished aliens called the Ur all sound a lot like Fading Suns, one of my favorite RPGs ever. I'm looking forward to seeing where the game goes!

Lastly, our drier is fixed! I didn't realize it was broken, but it had always been weird--the windows fogged up when it was used and I thought that something might be leaking, but it's stuck in a closet and since it's a washer/dryer combo it was far too heavy to move myself without risking it falling on me, which was not something I wanted to happen in a pandemic. Last weekend my parents came over for dinner and for my father to do some Dad Things around the house and when sashagee mentioned how dusty everything is, he managed to wiggle his way over the top and find out that the hose had been disconnected at the back! Probably by something falling off before I even moved in--there were drier sheets and a detergent back there that I've never used. My father reconnected the hose, I vacuumed out the inside of the closet, and now hopefully it won't be nearly so dusty in here all the time. Good thing too, with a baby coming.

Alright, now time for that town hall.

Just a quick note that I got my first shot of the COVID vaccine (Moderna version)! I was at the clinic for another post-surgery follow-up on Friday and while I was talking to the doctor, a nurse stuck her head into the exam room and said that they had an extra dose of the vaccine that was going to expire and would I like it? Obviously I said yes, so they gave me the shot, watched me for fifteen minutes to make sure that I didn't have an adverse reaction, and then sent me home. The injection site was sore, but that's all that happened and now I go in next month for my second shot and then I'll be (mostly) immune!

sashagee can't get the vaccine since she's pregnant, so this is a real blessing.

Here are all the games I beat in 2020, in chronological order:

( Read more... )

Finally I return to Deus Ex, almost ten years after the time I reviewed The Nameless Mod in my second review ever.

I got Deus Ex as a university student, when I had plenty of free time to play it--I can look over and see the original CDs from where I'm writing this--and I played it through multiple times my sophomore year. I even spent a bunch of time in the multiplayer mode they released in patch 1.12, whose player base was small enough that I got used to seeing the same people over and over again, and where I still remember the time I jumped into a game, killed five people in quick succession, and then someone said in chat:

"Who is Dorchadas and why is he kicking my ass?"

Probably my proudest moment in any competitive FPS, to be honest.

I've been wanting to replay it for years and it's never left my computer--as the saying goes, every time you mention Deus Ex someone reinstalls it--and this year is the 20th anniversary so it seemed like a perfect time. I'm not sure I was considering just how perfect it really was, however. A pandemic? Protests? A government that seems content with both increasing its control over daily life while also not caring if the people live or die? I posted a quote from the game:

Walton Simons: "This plague... the rioting is intensifying to the point where we may not be able to contain it."
Bob Page: "Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them."

...and people thought I was quoting a news article from that month. What a year 2020 has been.

Let's escape into the idyllic world of conspiracies and cybernetic superspies, shall we?


( Read more... )

Today sashagee and I went to the hospital, and while I sat in the car for three hours--thanks to the plague I wasn't allowed to come in with her--she had a bunch of tests done, pictures taken, and here's the result!

( That's a baby alright )

May 10th, 2021. So excited!