Quarantine random thoughts #5

Wow… it’s two weeks since I wrote the first post of this series. Two weeks that most of us have spent shut in our homes.

I’ve realised that I hardly know anyone who has to go out to work. I suppose it’s another case of echo chamber: most people in my social network can work from home or in any case are not part of that large group of people who can’t afford the safety of social separation and have to go out every day to provide some indispensable service.

Aside of the prime minister catching it, there aren’t significant news here. Numbers keep climbing. Nobody knows what will happen, for how long it will happen, what will we find on the other side. But it does look like the worse predictions get more clicks, and this does not improve the media landscape. If you want to read something a bit less gloomy, you might like this article on the Oxford Science Blog: COVID-19 ‘should not necessarily foreshadow an economic downturn’.

In the last few days I have noticed a surge of conspiracy theory links coming from friends and family… still trying to decide how to deal with them. I have also received my first Covid19 joke from my friend Perry:

Yesterday while watching The Stranger on Netflix (I haven’t finished the season, but the first few episodes are not bad at all), I felt a strange uneasiness seeing people going around and standing closer than two meters apart. It’s a bit like when you watch an old movie, where people are smoking, don’t use the web, don’t have a smartphone or you catch a glimpse of the twin towers in New York, and you instinctively realise that the scene was happening in a time “before”. Of course, eventually we will go out again, but at the moment it feels we are all living in a time “after”.

As you might guess I like to be blogging again. I rediscovered the continuous process of thinking about things in the context of a blog post. Some old friends got back in touch, and I also got a few inbound links (thank you Dave and Colin), I had forgotten how good it feels :)

To complete the 2002 vibe, I have also restarted using an RSS reader. NetNewsWire works very well on MacOS and iOS, and I have a Feedbin account to keep things nicely in synch, so now I’m rebuilding my subscription list, reading good stuff every day, and wondering why did I ever give up.

That’s all for today. Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.