@xtinehlee It wasn’t quite anaphylaxis, thank goodness, but very uncomfortable: I was stung on my index finger while squeegeeing the floor on the last day of work, and couldn’t move my finger (or really breathe properly) for a week. @xtinehlee Still, it was enough for me to avoid bees like the plague. I was told by a doctor the allergy would either get better, or become deadly, so I was like, “Okay, keeping my distance from now on!”
… in a way that I haven’t felt intellectually stimulated in years. Even a bad theory, presented with intelligence and verve, can be exciting in a setting where people actually care what’s true and are willing to debate it. Today, I’m missing that. You’d have intelligent conversations with complete strangers in cafes, just because of what you or they were reading, or because someone overheard a bit of a conversation. It was cool and exciting. And today I miss it far more than I miss any food or place back home.
Today I suddenly remembered seeing Roger Penrose speak at McGill University in 1999 or 2000. I saw so many major figures speak in Montreal, and today I suddenly missed having access to events like that. It’s not the same as watching a talk online… Penrose’s talk was about Platonic forms, quantum computation, and consciousness—Emperor’s New Mind stuff. It was *very* unconvincing (to me, and to many students; the Q&A after was kinda brutal, and Penrose seemed a bit). But it was also stimulating…
@GeekinKorea youtube.com/watch?v=j5EmCK…
And since I’m Canadian: if Korea had handled COVID as “well” as Canada, we’d have a total of ~37,650 dead here instead of ~2,400.
That’s still ~15x the death rate, which is not what I’d call “good.” (Not gonna even project how many confirmed cases there’d be here: it’d be a lot more than the ratio of confirmed cases in the US because w/o track & trace your confirmed cases number becomes far less reliable.)
If you calculate deaths by a proportion of population, Korea handling things as “well” as the USA would means ~106,200 deaths so far, as opposed to the 2,404 deaths we’ve actually had.
i.e. The US COVID death rate is 44x worse overall than South Korea’s. One could argue that there’s a degree of apples and oranges: Koreans are more accepting of mild, necessary privacy intrusions (so track & trace was more practicable), it’s “less cosmopolitan,” fewer variants.
But at the end of the say, mishandling is also obviously a factor.
Not that I think Korea’s been perfect re: COVID, but… I’ve been thinking about how lucky my family has been that we happened to be a place where the gov’t and populace was strongly committed to not just letting the pandemic kill a bunch of people who didn’t have to die. Wait, did I say “If Korea had handled things as well as the US”?
I actually meant Sweden. (“I was distracted,” says the frazzled parent.)
It’s almost a year later.
Now, Korea’s got: 2,394 deaths and ~284,000 cases.
Sweden, with 1/5th the population of S. Korea, has 1.14M cases and 14,775 cases. If Korea had handled things as “well” as the US, we’d be at almost 6 million confirmed cases and (roughly speaking) around 75,000 deaths.
Just because Sweden’s handling it better than the US, doesn’t mean it’s doing well.
@VyrelionAB Hi! Yes, it’s correct. They’re slow (thus slower movement rate/bad AC); the more “fermented” they become, the worse that becomes, which is why Neanderthals are slightly worse. @VyrelionAB In other words, they’re easy to kill, weak in combat, & mainly a threat in terms of spewing Black Barm to increase player character infection—get those infection cards/effects in play!
(This was originally playtested with 1st level characters, though, so… anything can happen.)
This is worthwhile and the tragedy is that your relatives who need to read it probably won’t, and nobody can make them. But you should check it out. twitter.com/CassieY4/statu…
Thread. (If you have the stomach, it gets into what kind pf punishment is typical here.) And virulent misogyny in general seems to be sharply on the rise, so… yeah. twitter.com/koryodynasty/s…
Not at all “reassuring.” twitter.com/theAliceRobert…
@marc_laidlaw @flightofsand @theBekku @nameshiv @jeffreyford8 @SophieOrbital I should disclose I was involved in several of these projects—copyediting, contributing co-translations with my wife).
But I’m not I’m not flogging for royalties—pay was upfront. It’s just been a small scene, and I was involved in a few projects. I’m pretty out of the loop now!
@marc_laidlaw @flightofsand @theBekku @nameshiv @jeffreyford8 @SophieOrbital There are some other projects in the works, from what I gather.
The writer who really needs to get translated is Jeong Soyeon. A few short things are available—one we did for Clarkesworld:
clarkesworldmagazine.com/soyeon_04_19/
… and one that appeared in Guernica:
@marc_laidlaw @flightofsand @theBekku @nameshiv @jeffreyford8 @SophieOrbital’s the translator for that pair of stories and did a great job on them. @marc_laidlaw @flightofsand @theBekku @nameshiv @jeffreyford8 @SophieOrbital Oh, there’s that Kaya Press anthology from a few years ago:
Some of the selections are a not to my taste, but some are very interesting.
@marc_laidlaw @flightofsand @theBekku @nameshiv @jeffreyford8 There have been a sort of flurry of translations lately. Besides all the stories that were in Clarkesworld a few years back, I’ve enjoyed Bo-Young Kim’s two collections:
https://t.co/wT7SxdvcZF @marc_laidlaw @flightofsand @theBekku @nameshiv @jeffreyford8 I especially liked the “I’m Waiting for You” stories, which is a novella/short story pair—an epistolary story made up of letters written by lovers accidentally separated from one another by time dilation. It’s “The Forever War” except it’s “love, not war, man.” I really dug it.
Yes!*
(*In Canada, where an election is now impending.) t.co/tqCdizXJt3
Ah, the cruel, terrible victimhood of being expected to research harder than “I saw a PragerU video once” or “My dad says…”
Also: insufficient sample size.
(Oh no, I guess I’m treating the National Review poorly, aren’t I? Yeah, academic standards are so darn oppressive.) twitter.com/NRO/status/142…
Imagine how this would read to the average Korean uni admin: “Trust? Support? Wait, but when do we tell them how to teach? We don’t? But how do we establish control via policies, then? WE DON’T? WHAT?!?”
(Even translated, it’d be in an alien language.)
