Poll of the Day > H1Geek1

(+) Yeah! (+)

The Wave Master posted...

Scarlett is going crazy staying at home all day. Mainly because she can't go anywhere. She's the type of perso who hates being told what to do. If you tell her to do something her first instinct is to do the opposite. She can't go anywhere, now she wants to leave the house. Leave the house to go nowhere or do nothing because everything is closed.

As for the idea of total isolation and quarantine, for me personally it's not possible. I have to leave the house every other day for dialysis to stay alive. I have to be at dialysis every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6am.

I do wish people who aren't sick to stay their happy asses at home. Trust me, people aren't all that great. You don't need to see them that bad.

Man, I feel for you. My wife had to do dialysis at the end, and we thought she might have to for the rest of her life. I wish it was easier to get a machine at home so you could do it there.

My wife actually passed away because she couldn't get Dialysis in our area and ended up developing an infection in her heart because of it (they ended up shipping her out of state to get it, but it wasn't fast enough).

I don't go to hospitals at all, even if I'm really sick now, because I don't wanna chance blocking someone else from being seen that needs to.


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I actually did PD at home dialysis, and my body absorbed the liquid too fast for non hemodialysis to work. I gained at least 50 pounds of liquid before I had to go to the hospital. I lost a toe and almost died.

Home hemodialysis is difficult too because of the location of my access. If mine was in my arm then Iwould just do it myself at home, but mine is in my chest. I'm mor stabbing myself in my chest three to four times a week. Plus, it already hurts like hell, and thus I come to the clinic three times a week.

I'm sorry for your loss. I don't wish dialysis on my worst enemy. It's painful, time consuming, and painful. It has taught me great patience over the last few years, and so this new world we live in doesn't phase me at all.

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The Wave Master posted...

this new world we live in doesn't phase me at all.

Even after this is all over a month, a year, a year and a half from now, I suspect we're all going to come out of our cocoons into a very different world.

Between working from home and noticing the reduced environmental impact of the shutdowns and the smaller businesses that just won't be able to come back at all after all is said and done, the forced necessity of UBI to stave off revolt as the economy all but collapses, prolonged deployment of assets like the National Guard...it's going to make the days and weeks post-9/11 look like a hiccup.

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I meant in terms of my personal life. The world has changed, and probably not for the better.

It is going to take a lot of hard work for things to come close to getting back to normal, if it ever actually does.

I'm scared what this post Covid world is going to look like the longer this pandemic continues.

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Yeah, it looks like Michigan is going into a lockdown of sorts.
Ho boy, my gf is classified as an Essential Buisness, so she's still working, and I still have online classes. It's the same as last week, just worse.

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

, the forced necessity of UBI to stave off revolt as the economy all but collapses

I'm sick of hearing people pretend that the temporary bailout/stimulus is the same thing as UBI. It's not. NPR was peddling this bullshit as well just yesterday and actually had Andrew Yang on. Doing something under the very extraordinary circumstance of an international emergency is very different from having done in the day-to-day.

Not to mention that Yang's UBI scheme couldn't possibly be funded under the current environment. The way that this is being funded is, again, by necessity a way that wouldn't be feasible in the long-term. And it's very likely that the stimulus will exclude at least some people unlike UBI which, in theory, covers everybody.

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Zeus posted...

I'm sick of hearing people pretend that the temporary bailout/stimulus is the same thing as UBI. It's not. NPR was peddling this bullshit as well just yesterday and actually had Andrew Yang on. Doing something under the very extraordinary circumstance of an international emergency is very different from having done in the day-to-day.

Not to mention that Yang's UBI scheme couldn't possibly be funded under the current environment. The way that this is being funded is, again, by necessity a way that wouldn't be feasible in the long-term. And it's very likely that the stimulus will exclude at least some people unlike UBI which, in theory, covers everybody.

Estimates say this disruption could last as long as a year and a half. They're going to have to figure out something before this country starts looking like 1789 France. Our modern society is 9 meals away from savagery at any given time. Look at what started happening in NYC after Sandy. Now extrapolate that to Sandy having happened everywhere there's pavement and indoor plumbing.

This is just the harsh reality of things Zeus.

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Estimates say this disruption could last as long as a year and a half. They're going to have to figure out something before this country starts looking like 1789 France. Our modern society is 9 meals away from savagery at any given time. Look at what started happening in NYC after Sandy. Now extrapolate that to Sandy having happened everywhere there's pavement and indoor plumbing.

This is just the harsh reality of things Zeus.

There's a difference between reality and paranoia.
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Revelation34 posted...

There's a difference between reality and paranoia.

Forgive me if I think that once things have reached Global Pandemic status and economic collapse looks like a very real possibility that it's time to err on the side of caution.

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Revelation34 posted...

There's a difference between reality and paranoia.

There's also a difference between rational precautions and unnecessary panic.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Estimates say this disruption could last as long as a year and a half. They're going to have to figure out something before this country starts looking like 1789 France. Our modern society is 9 meals away from savagery at any given time. Look at what started happening in NYC after Sandy. Now extrapolate that to Sandy having happened everywhere there's pavement and indoor plumbing.

This is just the harsh reality of things Zeus.

A year and a half isn't how long people are going to be locked in their homes, that claim is presumably based on when *everything* returns to normal which is a far, far, far cry's difference. The big issue right now is finding ways to assist when people are locked in their homes. Other social programs exist to pick up the slack afterward.


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Zeus posted...

A year and a half isn't how long people are going to be locked in their homes, that claim is presumably based on when *everything* returns to normal which is a far, far, far cry's difference. The big issue right now is finding ways to assist when people are locked in their homes. Other social programs exist to pick up the slack afterward.

And a month ago, the world we live in was inconceivable. How's your crystal ball doing at seeing what a year and a half from now looks like? Mine broke back in 1998. Got any winning lotto numbers for me?

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

And a month ago, the world we live in was inconceivable. How's your crystal ball doing at seeing what a year and a half from now looks like? Mine broke back in 1998. Got any winning lotto numbers for me?

The fucking irony.
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Alright children. If you don't have anything nice to post don't post anything at all.

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Great name. See you next topic.

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

And a month ago, the world we live in was inconceivable. How's your crystal ball doing at seeing what a year and a half from now looks like? Mine broke back in 1998. Got any winning lotto numbers for me?

You can't play that card while incorrectly citing an absurdly forward-looking claim based on hypothetical models >_>

Although if we were to throw around absurd hypotheticals, I'd argue that we do now matters because the bulk of humanity could also wind up wiped out in under a year. Is it likely to happen? Fuck no, but it has as much basis as the idea that the world is going to be in lockdown for over a year.


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Well you guys seem to have far more faith in humanity, especially Americans, than I do. With people still going to Spring Break parties and hanging out in groups like everything is normal this thing is going to drag on much longer than it had to.

I prefer to prepare for the worst and hope for the best, but you can wish in one hand and shit in the other, I'm pretty sure we know which one will fill up first.


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...I mean is that going to make things drag out more?
I'm not justifying their behavior or anything, it's just that using even the basic "with social distancing vs without social distancing" graphs is saying that there's a huge time difference between the two, with social distancing making it last longer.

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Well you guys seem to have far more faith in humanity, especially Americans, than I do. With people still going to Spring Break parties and hanging out in groups like everything is normal this thing is going to drag on much longer than it had to.

I prefer to prepare for the worst and hope for the best, but you can wish in one hand and shit in the other, I'm pretty sure we know which one will fill up first.

While some people aren't taking it seriously, look at what other nations have done -- when shit doesn't work, they impose martial law and mandatory quarantines. Even with a Republican in the White House, we're bound to have the same happen eventually should things keep up. I expect that a month might be overly optimistic for getting it under control, but even the more dire credible models aren't suggesting that we'll be quarantined 1.5 years out. If we're a year out, we're more than likely to have the damn thing cured or it would have run through the whole population.

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My wife and I disagree about a lot of things, and one major sticking point is Faith in Humanity.

I would love to believe that humans are good and will do the right thingwhen pressed.

My wife believes the opposite. She has no faith in humans, and thinks and knows people will not do the right thing.

"The individual is smart, intelligent, and cunning. People are dumb, ignorant, and panicky."

I do not know how this will play out, none of us do, we can just only make guesses, and hope for the best.

My sister and her kids just visited my house, and after they left, I bleached down the door knobs, and the chairs because of the potential of this virus.

Let's be clear, things have changed. And that's all we know for now. Let's just take this one day at a time. But I'm scared. I wish I wasn't, but I'm scared. Every sneeze or cough or loss of breath I'm terrified.

So, we can continue to argue or just be prepared as best we can, and continue to live or lives the best we can considering the dire circumstances.

Please be as kind to each other as possible. It's all I'm asking.

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It's already under control in Asian countries that isn't China (though Hong Kong is doing well), Italy has passed its peak, and Spain is having more trouble with the "cure" than the disease. Stop watching fear porn and enjoy the quiet and the "vacation" for the time being. A lot of these people acting like the world is going to ****ing end have no basic idea of how viral infections work and think it's some horror movie. You probably already had the disease and didn't even know it. It could act like the normal flu, a small cold, or no symptoms at all thanks to the wonders of the immunity system. Still it's no nothingburger, if you are old, have health problems, like to suck on cancersticks or God just ****ing hates you, you're at risk and of course Wave has a good reason to worry since he has the cancer aids, though corona isn't the only disease he should worry about.

One thing we need to do is get production ramped up on medicines that can prevent death in cases.

In mmany cases, the virus itself doesn't kill you. Rather, its a response to it called a cytokine explosion. It has been a symptom of viruses before, and some researchers are realizing its one of the things COVID can do.

In the past couple decades, There have been made some medicines that can specifically target and limit that specific response. So that you can suppress it without suppressing the rest of the immune system (like a medical steroid would).

At this point, the most important thing we can do (other than locking down as necessary or taking other steps to limit spread) is to get the death rate down as far as we can. If we can get the death rate down and get together enough of the necessary drugs to treat the primary reasons people die from it, we can open things back up "early" without having to put people's lives at significant risk. If we know the right medicines to keep people from dying and get enough of it, then the disease will be a lot less scary.

A lot of new reports and people are focused on finding drugs that interfere more with the virus itself in some way, and with the eventual vaccine. In the short term though, we also need to stop people's own bodies from killing themselves due to over-response to the virus.
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i can't help but think there are other diseases that trigger a cytokine storm and we should already have something for that...

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There are. But its only just now coming to be noted that cytokine storms are happening from Covid.

Given the potential for explosive growth in the number of people needing care, I hope we have a good number of existing amounts of those medicines though. Because otherwise, if we want to keep death rates down, we'll be wanting to ramp production up ASAP.
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Unfortunately, like all other things...the vast majority of them are all made in China. Electronics, pharmaceuticals, cheap disposable plastic crap, plagues, you name it. China has it all!

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WhiskeyDisk posted...

Unfortunately, like all other things...the vast majority of them are all made in China. Electronics, pharmaceuticals, cheap disposable plastic crap, plagues, you name it. China has it all!

I didn't get a kick out of finding a cardboard box with "made in China" stamped on it yesterday.
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There seems to be a lot of non-Geek posts in this topic. I feel like I might have to slap a bitch.
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Topic is infected, I say we drag it to a ditch and execute it with a tank shell.

Welp, time for me to be the change I want to see, etc etc.

BLOODSHOT MOVIE.

Opinions?

I'm not sure how to feel about it. On one hand, it's based on a Valiant comic, and it's always been a neat premise. On the other hand... Vin Diesel.

It pretty clearly ate shit at the box office due to... obvious reasons. But Sony released it digitally, because they straight up gave up on the idea of anyone going to the cinema any time soon. Which is going to make this a weird beast, in terms of success/failure/critical opinion.

Has anyone seen it? Planning to? Does anyone care at all, other than me and like three other people?
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Was going to see it at the theater, but that did not happen, so I am waiting for it to hit the streaming services.

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On a more positive note: I'm now officially engaged.

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In geek news I am very close to finishing Breath of Fire 2. It's basically my dialysis game. I play it 3 times. a week during my painful dialysis treatments, and it helps to pass the time.

I stopped trying to go to sleep at dialysis became if I did the nurses and techs would find a way to wake my happy ass up during treatment anyway. Either to give me medicine, tell me my blood pressure is low, or a few times because I was bleeding to death, and now I just stay awake.
.
The next game on the dialysis playlist is the Grandia HD collection. Grandia still has one of, if not the best, turn based battle systems every created.

Stay safe out there and keep gaming.

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shadowsword87 posted...

On a more positive note: I'm now officially engaged.

Congratulations (or condolences)


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This feels weird but I'm going to actually contribute to the topic.

I really want to set up a game of DnD on Roll20, would anyone be down?

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Date, time, feel, edition?

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We'll hash out the deets later.

The basics:
5e
Time/date (depends, at least once a week)
I dont have a completed campaign in mind yet. If anyone else wants to DM, speak!

Edit: I personally wanted to do a modern monster of the week campaign set in Vermont.

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Oh, the biggest one: microphone or no microphone?

'Cause I don't play without a microphone, and PO doesn't play with a microphone.

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Congratulations on getting engaged Shadow. Getting married was the best decision I have ever made.

My only advice is to make sure you talk about and hash out things like religious preferences, child discipline, conflict resolution, and finances. People say that getting married doesn't changed anything, but your whole life is about to change.

Just make sure that the person you're getting married to is the right petqon for you, and that you try to grow together instead of apart. Relationships are ways hard worwork.

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Has anyone seen it? Planning to? Does anyone care at all, other than me and like three other people?

Kinda want to watch it, it looks like some cheesy action movie from the 00's. Bloodshot looks like a mix between Punisher and Spawn. Though the movie isn't doing that well in the reviews and Sony is planning to do a Valiant Cinematic Universe with this?

Yeah, honestly the best way that I can tell we're going to do well together because we agree 100% on how you train dogs. It's a good way of comparing that sort of stuff.

Also, we've been living together for almost 3 years now, nothing's happened so far.

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shadowsword87 posted...

Oh, the biggest one: microphone or no microphone?

'Cause I don't play without a microphone, and PO doesn't play with a microphone.

To be fair, I don't play on Roll20 at all, because of how clusterfucky it was last time.

Maybe it's improved since then, but my biases take a long, long time to fade.
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...I said microphone or not you grognard.
I'm fine with playing on Discord or Skype or any other VoIP.

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Eh, that's why I wanted to hammer out the logistics and boring shit first. I've also never been DM on roll20, so... yeah.

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CynicalZealot posted...

BLOODSHOT MOVIE.
Has anyone seen it? Planning to? Does anyone care at all, other than me and like three other people?

Planning to. Dug the comic a million years ago but hadn't thought about it much until I saw the trailer. Vin Diesel isn't the best choice but at least you know what you're going to get before seeing the film, so that's a plus I suppose.

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shadowsword87 posted...

...I said microphone or not you grognard.
I'm fine with playing on Discord or Skype or any other VoIP.

But my point is, it doesn't matter whether or not -I- use a microphone or not if I won't even use the program/platform itself.

I'm too spoiled by SeaChats and text-based RP. Then again, most of my online RP was borderline freeform anyway, so doing it that way doesn't cause combat to take 47 hours (which it probably would for D&D).
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Lol, PO just doesn't want anybody to know he sounds like Mickey Mouse.

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And if I play with people, I want to actually *chat* with peeps with good microphone control.
There's a level of roleplay that's lost in the physicality, and more importantly, emotion that talking in character. No amount of raw text can fill that I've seen from online games.

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So I watched Cop Out last night, which -- despite being a bomb -- supposedly had the highest box office return of any Kevin Smith film: a measly $58m! I never realized that Smith's career was *that* low-key, given all the attention he's received over the years.

I know that Smith trash-talks working on the film (especially concerning Bruce Willis) and a lot of people have a low opinion of it, but it was pretty funny... well, in the first act, anyway. It was also interesting for the casting, as I found myself doing double-takes while spotting a younger Rashida Jones (and thinking, wait, she kinda looks like Rashida Jones... and then remembering when the movie came out) and realizing Michelle Trachenberg (sp?) played Willis's daughter.

The surrounding controversy kinda supports my decreasing opinion of Kevin Smith, a high profile whiner who has thus far squandered most of his lucky breaks while still being fortunate to live a pretty awesome life. Granted, I imagine he makes more money off his cult of personality (including paid appearance like "An Evening with Kevin Smith") than he does legitimate ventures at this point.

I also realize that while I've seen a lot of Kevin Smith films, I think Cop Out is probably the only one I liked (with Dogma being my previous "favorite").

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Zeus posted...

I also realize that while I've seen a lot of Kevin Smith films, I think Cop Out is probably the only one I liked (with Dogma being my previous "favorite").

I still think Red State was his best movie, with Dogma being second.

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