I hope you’re all making the best of your pandemic lockdown catching up on some games.
We are practicing social distancing here as well, of course. Though, given that I have spent the past eighteen years working by myself from a home office, it feels an awful lot like business as usual.
We went out of town for a couple of days last week, before everything started getting locked down. The day after we got back, our six-year old developed a fever that kept spiking up to 101F and a nasty persistant cough. The chances that he had picked up Covid-19 were ridiculously low, but still, with everything going on, it was a lot scarier than it otherwise would have been. When his fever persisted for a few days, the pediatrician had us come in, and he tested positive for Influenza B which, while not Covid, is pretty nasty for children (in fact Covid probably would have affected him less).
So my wife and I are pretty strained and exhausted, on top of facing a whole lot of uncertainty in the weeks and months ahead. Fun stuff.
good luck out there, or rather in there.
Here’s hoping Mini-You has a quick recovery from it! And rest of ya stay safe and healthy, too!
all the best for you and your family! Hope your 6-year-old will recover soon!
Hope all is well in the cad household were not quite at lockdown in the ol down under but their considering it
Best wishes to mini-you hope he gets better soon
Good luck Tim. I hope your six-year old gets better soon.
First time poster. I wanted to say I hope and pray your kid comes out healthy and happy. Good luck.
Take care, man. It’s a good time for people to start catching-up on those games they never quite finished the first time around. What would yours be?
I, as father of two (15 and 10) living in Italy in this time of pandemic, can understand you very well, sir.
I give you my best wishes for a quick recover of your kid.
Stay safe, all will be fine!
You and your family stay safe too, mate. Especially your own parents who if still alive are in the biggest risk group.
Wonder if anyone would try explaining to Zeke he’s traded enslavement for the same amount of freedom every human gets. Just cause Ethan wants to help, doesn’t mean he’s about to set him loose if he insists on going full murderbot.
I’ve always been kind of annoyed by this logic in villainous characters. I know it’s often just used as a distraction technique or what have you but even Zeke has to admit how stupid it sounds to consider this “trading one ‘master’ for another” given the situation.
I think I understand your point since this is normally taken to extremes in SciFy, but in all fairness, this would be a simple case of rage-induced tunnel vision. It happens very often that we are so focused on a particular way of doing/seeing things, that a obvious better or different way is right in front of us and we can’t see it. For an external observer it’s ridiculous how we can’t see it, but the fact is that is that we actually can’t. If you go into the business world, it’s easy to see this in shows like Shark… Read more »
The logic is perfectly sound. Think about it from Zeke’s perspective. Master planted a bomb in him that would kill him if he didn’t do as he was told. Now he’s being held captive by Ethan and Scott and knows that he’ll be shut down/destroyed if he doesn’t say what they want to hear. What’s the difference between the two? From Zeke’s perspective, nothing.
So he knows that he’ll be shut down and destroyed if he doesn’t comply, but talks back anyway? Kind of irrational.
The robot was in permanent danger when forced to serve the master, and that he’s in no danger now or he would have been destroyed long ago.
What’s happening is that he’s testing to see how far he can go to confirm that he’s safe.
Is it rational to live a life if death was preferable?
Life can change, death is permanent.
That’s a very, *very* narrow perspective to have. There’s a world of difference between “do whatever I tell you to or you die” and “don’t go killing people.”
That isn’t exactly the situation. Ethan has said multiple times and with great emphasis his desire to let Zeke go and it is reasonable to assume a small expectation of this is that he won’t immediately kill him or his friends. He has also gone to great lengths to attempt to ascertain this by getting Zeke turned on.
Well Tim, from what I’ve read, kids under 12 are by-and-large (80 to 90-odd percentile) immune to COVID-19. They carry it but tend not to be infected by it. Even so, it’s a dry cough, with a one day fever above 100°F.
The flu on the other hand, is nastier, and kills 56,000 in America alone every year. And we tend not to quarantine anyone who has it.
Prayer that the little one gets better soon, and no one else in the house comes down with it.
Keep up the excellent work!
No one is, at this point, immune to the virus. The symptoms *tend* to be mild or inexistent in young people, but with some data from South Corea, which tested a huge percentage of their whole population (not only the ones with symptoms like most other countries), the percentage of young people infected/carrying the virus is actually quite big. This makes them a big cause of passing along the infection to other people. Another miss-conception is the mortality rate against Influenza. Influenza has a mortality rate of around 0.2%. The Covid-19 has a mean mortality rate of 2% (can go… Read more »
Influenza got a R0 of 1.4, the new Corona Virus one of 3.X according to the current data of scientists. No wonder some countries went from a handful of infected to several thousands in a couple days.
Also the incubation period. you could be exposed and show no symptoms for 2 weeks or more. You could have one person expose a room full of people thinking they have a mild case of the sniffles. 2 weeks later that room full of people have scattered around the country and all come down sick at once. the’ve also potentialy exposed several more each in that time so you get waves of nearly exponential growth.
The rate of infection only shows how many people on average can one new case infect. It’s not some absolute virulence potential or anything and it’s computed from available statistics. Precisely because the incubation period is so long and because early symptoms are mild, the virus gets spread more readily, especially by young people. Influenza, on the other hand, takes you down too quickly to let you infect more people. (Measles has an infection rate of over 14 in a non-vaccinated population, so you can compare.) The 2% mortality rate is also inflated, because it comes from the ratio of… Read more »
On the cruise ships where everybody is tested, it is 2 %.
There’s a disproportional age distribution on a cruise ship. Hardly any children and a lot of 50+ vacationers and a lot pensioners. If it’s only 2%, it’s very reassuring.
Italy’s death total is higher than China’s now and they are a smaller country with less people so it shows that Covid-19 can really kill a lot of people if the country’s health system is overwhelmed. If the United States is on a path similar to Italy, I can see our death count being even higher due to our country having a much higher population.
It’s always hard when your little ones are sick, but that… I’m stressed enough about my kids, and they’re high school and up.
I hope he gets well soon and you don’t catch it.
Sorry to hear that, hope he recovers quickly. We’ve had the flu go through our house twice this season already, once at Thanksgiving and then again in early February, though I managed to avoid it the second time. (It was influenza-b that time, we weren’t tested the first time.) Hope you guys manage to avoid getting it and that he recovers quickly; drink a lot of water.
In other words if you hardly had to change a thing to do “social distance” you were a hermit most of your life.^^
Didn’t your son got a flu shot against Influenza B? Hope he gets better soon. Stray safe.
Now about the comic:
Lol Friendship as prison, I love Zeke’s thought process. XDDD
Well, he ain’t wrong considering his situation but tbf it’s not like he is trying NOT to kill Ethan and co. XD
Flu shots and other vaccines don’t necessarily mean you won’t get the disease, it just makes it less likely you will get the flu/disease and if you do get it then you are more likely not to get hit that hard by it than you would if you didn’t get the flu shot.
“Zeke, we’re keeping you locked down in the name of safety – we don’t want you catching Covid-19!”
……….sure he’s worth it?
Tough to see those bundles of congealed chaos when they’re sick. We’ll get through this and come out stronger, and hopefully wiser.
Can Zeke turn off his own senses? Because if so, then we know he *wouldn’t* actually rather go back to the darkness.
Given how Scott is currently hacking his functions, he might not be able to now even if he would be normally.
So to all the fine folks with experience working at home, any suggestions for how I can try to keep my focus on the job at home? I’ve locked the pets out of my room, put on real clothes, set up a dedicated work area outside of the rest of my life etc. Yet I’m still encountering challenges even getting into the groove without my colleagues around to help anchor me.
Dedicated focus time, set realistic short term goals, reward achievements with small breaks.
It’s all about discipline, good luck in there.
Something else that may help, keeping in communication with those colleagues via Teams, Slack, etc.
I wish you luck and good health to you and your family
Tim, I hope your son gets well soon and you all stay safe and healthy. My son is also 6 (soon to be 7) and I know what you mean, it’s so scary when they get a very high fever! It happened to us when he was about 2 years old and I don’t think I’ve been more scared in my entire life! I’ve been working from home now for 2 weeks here in the UK, after one of my colleagues got flu and the manager decided to play it safe and tell everyone to stay home. I usually work… Read more »
Bad choice of words, Ethan. Should have said “That’s just a precaution…So you don’t murder everyone the moment you get control back. So we can talk.”
Lie and say you didn’t get around to getting those routines operational back.
After about 8 years of owning Demon’s Souls, I finally slew the first boss tonight. That was 99.99% getting scared off by losing my souls and just putting it on the back-burner, and .01% coming to terms with my inevitable death and persisting through it until I opened the main gate and gathered the courage to face…the most wonderful letdown in gaming history. When I realized this Spartan-inspired blob was relying 100% on its “down in 2 back-slashes” minions for attack and defense, and that they had a silly habit of breaking formation in a vain attempt to chase me,… Read more »
Probably not as strained as out seventy-six-thousand, three hundred and… four, and counting X-Bot friend over here… ?
Kidding aside, I hope you and your family pull through all this!
Now would be a great time to get a ‘Free Hugs’ T-shirt
Hope the little guy is better soon…. and mom and dad can breathe again.