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Do you prefer the extended summer thread format? This poll is closed. |
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| Yes |
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126 | 44.21% |
| No |
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39 | 13.68% |
| I'm Scottish |
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120 | 42.11% |
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Barry Foster posted:What would you do? I know none of us are fortune tellers and none of us know what's gonna happen in the next month or so. My gut instinct is "don't go to a loving festival you idiot", but also this is really the only thing I've had to look forward to all year and I'll be crushed if I say no and then it goes ahead and everything's fine. I dunno what to do. go, imo, unless you're vulnerable/shielding. then don't see anyone for some time afterwards. staying in and being angry/sad on the internet isn't a great long-term thing for your health
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Jul 28, 2021 16:16
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| # ? May 27, 2024 21:02 |
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Some of us are entirely composed of being sad/angry on the internet.
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Jul 28, 2021 16:18
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sorry if this is a dumb question but - does northern ireland not play on the same olympic team as GB? because they're always called team great britain, and not team united kingdom. what do athletes from NI do?
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Jul 28, 2021 16:27
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Personally I wouldn't want to go to a music festival atm. We're not in the least bit bummed that our tickets for Primavera rolled over, and there's another festival near us with a tonne of bands we're desperate to see, but we just wouldn't be able to enjoy it, it still stresses me out going to the loving food market because there's always some unmasked dickhead getting all up in your personal space, I'm just not ready for it yet so that's that. I think it comes down to your personal feelings. It's not like you're going to Creamfields (I know some people who are actually doing this, it's absolutely mental and is going to be a bloodbath), if it looks sensible then fine, imo it's more just: are you actually going to enjoy it? I miss live music like hell, but I'm just not ready yet. If you are, then go have a good time within safe parameters. If not, no harm no foul. e: bump_fn posted:sorry if this is a dumb question but - does northern ireland not play on the same olympic team as GB? because they're always called team great britain, and not team united kingdom. what do athletes from NI do?
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Jul 28, 2021 16:28
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Guavanaut posted:I'd love to know what the "masks are bad, vaccines are bad, lockdowns are bad, social distancing is bad" people actually would propose as an alternative, but I think it's just "I want things to go back to normal" and nothing else, that's why all their language is about how everyone else is afraid. They are a group of primates being attacked by something they cannot see or do anything about, and human exceptionalism has left them completely and totally unprepared to deal with it. They feel alone and afraid on an existential level, and their only coping mechanism is to shut their eyes and scream into the void in a vain attempt to make it not be a reality. Hence why any acknowledgement of the situation is written off as delusional fantasy, why people are calling for doctors to be assaulted, and why it ties into the usual new world order bullshit conspiracies. And their constant framing of others as cowards for acknowledging the reality of their situation is pure projection, a futile attempt to pretend that deep down they aren't terrified of being faced with their own mortality in a cruel and random universe.
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Jul 28, 2021 16:30
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I would honestly feel a lot better if I believed that they were assailed by self doubt, the thing that really winds me up is the sneaking suspicion I have that most of the people who just blithely ignore the problems in the world are actually entirely unbothered by them, that the capacity for doubt and insecurity is something a lot of people just don't have, or have only in specific cases.
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Jul 28, 2021 16:34
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learnincurve posted:There was also the big spike after the euros because the gammons are morons. Someone in this thread kept arguing with me when I was saying there was actually a slower rate of increase happening and that the Euro spike might not be an actual trend but I kept getting poopooed for expressing slight hopefulness  Doctor_Fruitbat posted:a futile attempt to pretend that deep down they aren't terrified of being faced with their own mortality in a cruel and random universe. Also it's all this. "It's not real, if it is it's not that bad, if it is it's only the old and dying, if it isn't it's because my natural godgiven antibodies are superior along with my supply of zinc, also I'm scared of needles and will contrive a convoluted conspiracy to justify not getting a vaccine because saying I'm scared of needles isn't butch and the lads will call me gay." OwlFancier posted:the capacity for doubt and insecurity is something a lot of people just don't have But also this.
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Jul 28, 2021 16:37
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Borrovan posted:I think it comes down to your personal feelings. It's not like you're going to Creamfields (I know some people who are actually doing this, it's absolutely mental and is going to be a bloodbath), if it looks sensible then fine, imo it's more just: are you actually going to enjoy it? I miss live music like hell, but I'm just not ready yet. If you are, then go have a good time within safe parameters. If not, no harm no foul. Yeah this is the other thing I'm thinking about. Unless we're all of a sudden back down to, like, last summer levels of the virus, I'm always going to be looking over my metaphorical and literal shoulder. Definitely leaning towards no, then. I'm going to put it to the vote between us three, I guess EDIT I guess it's kinda bad that I'm considering leaving it and then, if things are looking bad in a month's time, fake a positive PCR test so I can get them to roll the ticket over then lol Barry Foster fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 16:43
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Szmitten posted:Someone in this thread kept arguing with me when I was saying there was actually a slower rate of increase happening and that the Euro spike might not be an actual trend but I kept getting poopooed for expressing slight hopefulness Yeah, this was me, and hope's still a bit premature now, let alone when you were posting it. The number of new infections are now dropping, but the actual number of infected people is still increasing, and most importantly the number of deaths is still increasing, since these things lag behind the infection rate. Hell, we had 131 Covid deaths yesterday, which is our worst day since March. When you were hope-posting about how things were getting better we had 19. I think at this point I'd say that the rate at which the situation is getting worse is slowing. We're still a little way (a week, maybe?) from things actually getting better, and since things have been getting worse for a couple of months it'll be another couple of months before the situation will actually be good (IE: single figure death rate per day). Gort fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 16:45
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Barry Foster posted:Yeah this is the other thing I'm thinking about. Unless we're all of a sudden back down to, like, last summer levels of the virus, I'm always going to be looking over my metaphorical and literal shoulder. Yea, I would go, but I'm less worried about personally catching covid than you are from your posts. If you're panicking about other people getting too close or worrying about safety the entire time, you're not gonna have fun, especially given some other people there are going to take it less seriously than you do.
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Jul 28, 2021 16:46
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DarkCrawler posted:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/28/queen-secretly-lobbied-scottish-ministers-climate-law-exemption no way charles is going to have the same pull as babs, so i guess their plan is just to get as much mileage out of her while they still can
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Jul 28, 2021 16:48
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:They are a group of primates being attacked by something they cannot see or do anything about, and human exceptionalism has left them completely and totally unprepared to deal with it. It's the same mindset that lends itself to "there's secret UFO technology and cancer cures that have been suppressed and they don't want you to know" yet whenever some new technology like 5G or some suppressed technology like mRNA vaccines (albeit suppressed for the usual lab politics reasons rather than ~them~) comes up, nope, that's also bad.
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Jul 28, 2021 16:50
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Barry Foster posted:
I would cancel, get the refund. If the festival does go ahead, perhaps you would be able to rebook at very short notice albeit at maybe increased cost. I've got an issue with airbnb credit I wish to god I'd been able to take a refund not have a credit to use by the end of this year! Gort posted:Welp, that's me out of the Labour party. "Maybe you can vote in internal elections for some people who aren't bad" kept me going a while but I've run out of reasons to believe they're salvageable outside of a few specific MPs, and giving money for Keir Starmer to spend is the exact opposite of helpful for humanity. Just email them at labourmembership@labour.org.uk (I think that's the address anyway) to actually leave. That's what I did. I got a reply within a week or so. (But that was before Der Sturmer won the election so there might be an inundation now.)
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Jul 28, 2021 16:50
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Borrovan posted:It's not like you're going to Creamfields (I know some people who are actually doing this, it's absolutely mental and is going to be a bloodbath), Oh god I forgot its going to be Creamfields again. I live 5 miles away (across the river) and can STILL hear them going. I guess its like having free tickets?
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Jul 28, 2021 16:58
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Barry Foster posted:What would you do? I wouldn't go. The Zoe symptom study people think cases are climbing rapidly.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:10
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I am getting really tired of my router resetting every time it starts raining is it likely to be an issue on my end or should I ring up BT and bitch at them until they fix it
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Jul 28, 2021 17:10
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Julio Cruz posted:I am getting really tired of my router resetting every time it starts raining Unless you have water coming into your house, it's not on you I wouldn't have thought. First place I would look is something outdoors, so likely the junction box out in the street. So yeah, have a pop at BT.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:20
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Unless my old job invites me back to work for £600 per week after tax (vastly more than i used to work for, they ain't done squat  ) i am not doing anything involving social interaction till 2023... i do & will miss going to archery class but that's it.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:25
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Julio Cruz posted:I am getting really tired of my router resetting every time it starts raining We had some minor router trouble lately and had a man come in and while he was here I asked him about this weird phenomenon: At 2:30am (and 20 seconds-ish) every night precisely, for approx 20 seconds plus or minus 10, the internet will hang, and then resume. We have a Sky minibox network in the house and this also interrupts the TV signal despite them technically running on seperate networks. It's always 2:30am, regardless of daylight savings or not. There is nothing scheduled in the router itself. He reckoned that a neighbour probably has a device set on a timer to come on/off at that time, and it just happens to interfere with everything, and that he'd seen cases of someone's jukebox loving with internet for several houses down. So yeah it could be anything so everything is worth checking.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:28
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Oh dear me posted:I wouldn't go. The Zoe symptom study people think cases are climbing rapidly. I gotta confess I haven't looked at that app for awhile and hooooly poo poo they think there's approx 800,689 people with symptomatic covid in the UK right now
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Jul 28, 2021 17:29
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Just Another Lurker posted:Unless my old job invites me back to work for £600 per week after tax (vastly more than i used to work for, they ain't done squat I'd have thought you'd be fine going to an outdoor archery class.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:30
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Gort posted:I'd have thought you'd be fine going to an outdoor archery class. Owners shut it all down when covid hit, no sign of it coming back so far and travelling all over N.I. for another club doesn't appeal atm.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:38
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My employer is reporting slowly increasing numbers of cases, including people needing enhanced care. Reading that alongside the BBC reporting on decreasing positive cases makes me think it's that 90% of people are getting symptoms, thinking "gently caress it, I can't be arsed getting tested", and going about their life, spreading it to a bunch of vulnerable people along the way. Remember, Boris said it's all over. We had Freedom Day and everything.
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Jul 28, 2021 17:56
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kingturnip posted:My employer is reporting slowly increasing numbers of cases, including people needing enhanced care. Hospitalisation & death might end up being the only reliable metrics for some time.
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Jul 28, 2021 18:00
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Canvassing this thread for opinions on the best way to grow a book club. We've got a pretty steady amount of people coming, around 11 regulars and I'm happy with that but there's part of me that wants it to be a bigger thing, not like a huge thing but I'm in a city of around 300,000 and I hope more than 11 in that city want to go to a left-wing book club. As far as I can tell I've got 'competition' from one other explicitly political book club that advertises itself, I think (based on random social media) that they've got pretty similar or lower numbers to us and a much more focused range. We determine our books on a rolling basis based on a vote of present members and have covered some pretty odd texts as a result. There are, I think, two other book clubs that exist but they're less public and more 'give us your email, you will receive a copy of the book and meeting instructions underneath the bench' which, I get, if you're setting up a book club with any sort of leftish ideology you're probably at risk of the security services deciding to pop by and make a nice (entirely innocent....) list of the attendees. But a part of me that's stubborn is wants it to be as mainstream and open as possible, with that for everyone education being at the forefront of the mission. I've done advertising on facebook before and its resulted in more likes but not actually any more attendance, if I kept pumping money into it I'm sure I could get a decent return but I don't have that money to pump in and the return would only be from likes, not from actual attendance. As an example of one of the more hilarious moments was when we were looking at Feminism, Interrupted by Lola Olufemi and it was right as the statues being toppled were hitting mainstream news, so we had nearly a hundred people saying they were coming to the meeting. Of course I panicked and started to scrabble around to see if I could invite the author (we were online at this point) and pay them a fee to turn up plus a fee to their chosen charity (out of my pocket), fortunately they had other commitments (I still donated the money) because we had absolutely zero new people at that meeting. From that point it became startling clear that you can have something happen at the exact right moment, but people aren't necessarily going to put in the effort to read even a short book and then turn up to discuss it. One of the hurdles I've identified and am hoping to address is making sure there are 'free' copies of the book for anyone who does think about turning up and they don't want to/can't pay the book price. That's up and running now but I've had zero takers so far and next month I may chuck some more money into the moneypit that is facebook to see if I can get some traction and when people have the book they might feel compelled to attend. So yeah, that's a very roundabout way of saying, does anyone have any neat tricks of suddenly making the book club way too big for me to manage? Or is this just an excuse for me to write out my problems and have someone tell me that a 11 person book club is actually a decent number, either way that I'm just way too obsessed about growth when I should just be content that I'm getting good discussions on a regular basis.
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Jul 28, 2021 18:27
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Barry Foster posted:I wish I learned this fifteen or so years ago, because now I'm pretty worried it's the only genuine emotion I still have left I'd go, tbh. Unless you or someone you have to see in the 10-14 days after the festival is vulnerable. Maybe it's a minority opinion, but I long since passed the stage where I now balance risk of infection against maintaining my own mental health, and for some activities I land on 'do it as safely as possible' rather than 'don't do it'. Even stuff like going to a restaurant can be so helpful in improving your personal wellbeing that I think it justifies the small risk, provided you take all available precautions and do it only occasionally. Something like going to a festival you've been looking forward to all year would almost certainly qualify as being beneficial enough to me to justify the risk right now. In terms of weighing your personal risk, if you've been double vaccinated you have (probably) around 70-90% protection against infection, and considerably more against hospitalisation and death. Does that mean you'll definitely be fine? No, there's always a slim chance. But the vast majority of people I'm seeing hospitalised with Covid now are either unvaccinated, single-vaccinated with comorbidities, or double vaccinated and very frail. Should you be concerned about potentially spreading infection to more vulnerable people? Yes, but the risk of that depends mainly on your plans in the 10-14 days after the festival. Again it's great and sensible to be concerned about this stuff, but statistically you (a vaccinated person attending a single event and taking proper precautions, including mask-wearing and minimising trips out afterwards) are not the main vector of spread by a long shot. Can you handle severely curtailing your personal life to make a statistically very small contribution to reducing infections? All this might come across as selfish, I dunno. But I think Covid is going to be with us long enough that we have to think beyond 'I just won't do anything until all this has blown over' otherwise we're all going to seriously suffer with low mood, low motivation, worse physical health etc. It's easy to discount things like going to a festival as having no tangible benefits that you can stack up against the Covid risk, but they really, genuinely do. jabby fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 18:27
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UnquietDream posted:Canvassing this thread for opinions on the best way to grow a book club. My missus and her friend run a cinema bookclub that became a podcast during lockdown, so my advice is to have a podcast where you and your mate ramble about the book for an hour
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Jul 28, 2021 18:39
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UnquietDream posted:Canvassing this thread for opinions on the best way to grow a book club. We've got a pretty steady amount of people coming, around 11 regulars and I'm happy with that but there's part of me that wants it to be a bigger thing, not like a huge thing but I'm in a city of around 300,000 and I hope more than 11 in that city want to go to a left-wing book club. 11 person book club is actually a more than decent number! I've been a member of a few in my lifetime (including before social media) and just now and then we'd have quite a full venue, but it was rare. I'd say 4-5 regulars is good going! I've turned up sometimes and been the only person, not even the organizer bothered to turn up! I'm a member of a facebook book club. We all read whatever we want and post with a review if we can be assed, sometimes a good discussion is generated, more often than not though, there are a couple of likes and a desultory comment. I found, pre-covid, that any sort of regular group meeting from a branch meeting to a local conservation activity group and so forth, from AGMs from political orgs to old school chums etc, physical attendance in the modern era is very low. The local U3A which I joined for a year or so ran into problems with their regular film club because they just never got enough people to cover the fee you have to pay to the Performance Rights place let alone cover the cost of film rental. There's so much competition for peoples' time these days, group activities on a regular basis requiring a regular commitment have fallen far down the list. One-offs for demonstrations or whatever can still pull in crowds.
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Jul 28, 2021 18:55
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There is never going to be a time where we are covid-free. There is never going to be a time when it's "safe" to go out and be confident no-one around as covid. It's an endemic disease at this point. All you can do is get your two jabs, wait two weeks, wear masks indoors, and get on with your life. Also on group events - yea, blame the abundance on distractions on the internet to act as junk food for our free time rather than healthy, sustaining human interaction. It's a feature of the modern world and it's gonna stick around, for the next decade or so at least.
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Jul 28, 2021 19:00
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Nothingtoseehere posted:There is never going to be a time where we are covid-free. There is never going to be a time when it's "safe" to go out and be confident no-one around as covid. It's an endemic disease at this point. All you can do is get your two jabs, wait two weeks, wear masks indoors, and get on with your life. If we were talking alpha or wild type I would agree wholeheartedly. But Delta changes the equation. @jabby I'll reply when I'm not phone posting but thanks for the input
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Jul 28, 2021 19:08
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i've never cared for going out and doing things, anyway 
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Jul 28, 2021 19:14
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Barry Foster posted:If we were talking alpha or wild type I would agree wholeheartedly. But Delta changes the equation. How does Delta change things? To me Delta is evidence that trying to severely curtail your personal life (to the point of avoiding all socialising) and 'wait Covid out' might not be possible. Because right now deaths and hospitalisations are low and your personal risk is extremely low, but all it takes is another variant to emerge that's more deadly or more vaccine-resistant and we're back to requiring full lockdowns again. I guess the answer to the question "should I go out?" largely boils down to whether you see things improving or getting worse again in the future. I'm not massively confident they won't get worse again, so I'd go out now because you might need the fortitude to get though several more serious waves of this crap and that means taking care of yourself when the risk is reasonably low.
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Jul 28, 2021 19:25
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Nothingtoseehere posted:There is never going to be a time where we are covid-free. There is never going to be a time when it's "safe" to go out and be confident no-one around as covid. It's an endemic disease at this point. All you can do is get your two jabs, wait two weeks, wear masks indoors, and get on with your life. 'Freedom' as you put it was never an option, it's about whether society adapts to a new norm as the virus settles down or we get bunkered into the plague lands for a few decades.
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Jul 28, 2021 19:27
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Just Another Lurker posted:'Freedom' as you put it was never an option, it's about whether society adapts to a new norm as the virus settles down or we get bunkered into the plague lands for a few decades. If society does adapt to a new norm, it'll basically regress back to the old one with more mask-wearing on public transport. Covid is not a deadly enough disease to actually vastly change habits, we'll just return to higher baseline death rate and get on with life. Society can and did continue on when vastly more deadly and virulent diseases were a fact of life, so it is highly unlikely that covid will suddenly bring on the sea-change some people seem to be hoping for. This is not a moral judgement on whether that position is correct, it's a statement of historical fact.
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Jul 28, 2021 19:38
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jabby posted:How does Delta change things? To me Delta is evidence that trying to severely curtail your personal life (to the point of avoiding all socialising) and 'wait Covid out' might not be possible. Because right now deaths and hospitalisations are low and your personal risk is extremely low, but all it takes is another variant to emerge that's more deadly or more vaccine-resistant and we're back to requiring full lockdowns again. Well, I guess my response would be that we know how much worse Delta is (replicates approx. 1,260% more quickly, is approx 225% more transmissible) whereas we don't know that there won't be another, even worse type. I'm not massively confident things won't get worse again either, but I do take your point. My mental health now compared to this time last year is in the toilet. Absolute rock bottom. And in the meantime I'm heartened by today's pfizer figures that there's 96% protection from symptomatic (whatever they take that to mean...) illness two months after second vaccination (and obviously serious illness and death are even less likely than that). And finally, well, for someone with as much suicidal ideation as me, why the gently caress am I worried about a tiny chance of dying? Who gives a poo poo, let the good times roll why not, if only one more time EDIT for accuracy Barry Foster fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Jul 28, 2021 |
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Jul 28, 2021 19:44
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When will we be able to go on holibobs to Spain and so on? Summer 2022?
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Jul 28, 2021 19:48
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Nothingtoseehere posted:If society does adapt to a new norm, it'll basically regress back to the old one with more mask-wearing on public transport. Covid is not a deadly enough disease to actually vastly change habits, we'll just return to higher baseline death rate and get on with life. Society can and did continue on when vastly more deadly and virulent diseases were a fact of life, so it is highly unlikely that covid will suddenly bring on the sea-change some people seem to be hoping for. This is not a moral judgement on whether that position is correct, it's a statement of historical fact. Spanish Flu agrees with that.. i went worst case for emphasis. With luck we'll see mask wearing becoming more acceptable as i enjoy not having colds & or flu every year.
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Jul 28, 2021 20:06
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Just Another Lurker posted:Spanish Flu agrees with that.. i went worst case for emphasis. yeah say what you want about covid but the one takeaway I'll confidently take from the last year and a half is that I've had no colds and thats been good
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Jul 28, 2021 20:21
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Stealing this post from the covid thread.
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Jul 28, 2021 20:26
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I think there will be enduring changes brought about by COVID, and some of them will be positive. To highlight one: the last 16 months really did a lot to normalise discussions of mental health. I’ve never had so many earnest talks with friends, family, coworkers, even bosses, on how we were coping. There was nuance (anxious? depressed? lonely? stressed? burnt out?), and there were honest answers (“No, I’m not doing ok”). I think we were heading this direction anyway, but the COVID/lockdown pressure cooker really accelerated this, and it’s for the good.
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Jul 28, 2021 20:34
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