covid19

I Went to Disney World

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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{{Title link: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/disney-world-during-pandemic-extremely-weird/614617/ }}

{{OP by bambamramfan}}

jadagul:

brin-bellway:

jadagul:

This article is amazing and wonderful.

I can’t trust any take on Disney from someone so clearly ignorant of what he’s talking about that he can say this with a straight face:

“That is because in normal times you must choose perhaps four or five big rides, each lasting mere minutes, and spend hours waiting in line to be admitted to each.”

Dude, just showing up at a major Disney ride and expecting to be seated is like just showing up at a fancy restaurant and expecting to be seated: in both cases *you are supposed to make a reservation*. When I went in the autumn of 2015, ride reservations (“FastPasses”) were quite flexible (one-hour usage window) and very often available on a same-day basis: while we *had* reservations months in advance, we made last-minute adjustments to them pretty much every day (you can do this on your phone, thanks to the complimentary Wi-Fi [link]).

(Also a part of me is going “you’re complaining about how expensive everything is and yet you stayed at the fucking *Contemporary*??”, while another part goes “why did the Atlantic send some poor dude with a COVID-19-naive immune system to fucking *Florida*? they’re a bunch of Americans in the summer of 2020: did they *seriously* not have anybody who’d had it already that they could send instead?”)

Still, it’s interesting to hear some reporting from the field. Just…with some caveats.

That is all relatively recent, though. Fastpass was introduced in 1999; I definitely remember the process he describes from when I was growing up. And the author is of course describing how Disney “usually” is off of secondhand reports, since he’s never been before.

But yeah, the article is great as a description of how Disney is now. And the observations about it as being part of the American civic religion aren’t original but they are fairly good points.

I *suppose* you could call 21 years relatively recent compared to the total span of Disney World’s existence, but it’s simultaneously a long time.

I guess a generational thing does add another layer to the bit about his parents refusing to go there: *I* grew up hearing Dad complain about “standing in line for hours for every five minutes of ride” as the reason he refused to go to *Six Flags*, and perhaps even specifically as a reason why Disney was better than Six Flags.

(A bit of context: I was born in 1993 to a family that *was* upper-middle-class at the time and a mom that loves Disney World. I’ve been five times: 1998, 2000, 2001 (we were there on 9/11, it was a hell of a thing), 2004, and 2015. Our trips were generally around 1.5 – 2 weeks long: trying to cram everything into a long weekend is a recipe for exhaustion and FOMO.)

—

In additional to the description of how things were going on the ground, I thought the bits about the Disney World government having legitimacy in the eyes of its constituents, in a way the American government does not, were an interesting way of looking at it.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Disney #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #home of the brave

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I Went to Disney World

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{Title link: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/disney-world-during-pandemic-extremely-weird/614617/ }}

{{OP by bambamramfan}}

jadagul:

This article is amazing and wonderful.

I can’t trust any take on Disney from someone so clearly ignorant of what he’s talking about that he can say this with a straight face:

“That is because in normal times you must choose perhaps four or five big rides, each lasting mere minutes, and spend hours waiting in line to be admitted to each.”

Dude, just showing up at a major Disney ride and expecting to be seated is like just showing up at a fancy restaurant and expecting to be seated: in both cases *you are supposed to make a reservation*. When I went in the autumn of 2015, ride reservations (“FastPasses”) were quite flexible (one-hour usage window) and very often available on a same-day basis: while we *had* reservations months in advance, we made last-minute adjustments to them pretty much every day (you can do this on your phone, thanks to the complimentary Wi-Fi [link]).

(Also a part of me is going “you’re complaining about how expensive everything is and yet you stayed at the fucking *Contemporary*??”, while another part goes “why did the Atlantic send some poor dude with a COVID-19-naive immune system to fucking *Florida*? they’re a bunch of Americans in the summer of 2020: did they *seriously* not have anybody who’d had it already that they could send instead?”)

Still, it’s interesting to hear some reporting from the field. Just…with some caveats.

Tags:

#Disney #reply via reblog #covid19 #home of the brave #politics cw? #illness tw

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

Believing the mailman is a serial killer is 100% reasonable if you are a dog and your entire species has been bred to believe that showing up unannounced and leaving right away is, like, the scariest thing.

Thanks to COVID, any boxes that get dropped off actually are a threat to the lives of everyone in the house. My dog does not know this, but he does have a justified true belief that all those containers are dangerous.

Any time there’s a knock on the door, it has one simple meaning: Gett yer case.

Tags:

#oh my god #puns #covid19 #philosophy #illness mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

argumate:

it’s not even subtle, as 2020 approaches my blog is full of these incredibly smug foreshadowing comments, real Pratchettarian bullshit like “don’t worry, a horrifying death is the last thing that will happen to you haha”

 

mitigatedchaos:

This is a misunderstanding, Mr. Argumate. You didn’t cause 2020 by posting, rather, you posted because 2020 would happen – it primed your brain for it.

Unfortunately this phenomenon tends only to happen in a way that can’t be used to act on the information effectively – partly because there are multiple possible futures, and the very effect of the information travelling backwards alters the future, even very minutely.

Ultimately the ability can be cultivated, but it’s really only useful for writing science fiction.

 

shieldfoss:

listen have you been committing chronofelonies again?

it’s cool you can tell me i’m not a time cop (:

 

shacklesburst:

that’s what you told us the last four loops and in each one you turned out to be a time cop :/

(see also)

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #time travel #unreality cw #covid19

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

 

brin-bellway:

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

 

brin-bellway:

@rustingbridges​​ replied:

are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)                            

God, I fucking wish.

*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.

My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.

A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)

A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)

The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.

—

Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)

—

†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.

rustingbridges replied:

regional municipality sounds sort of like unincorporated areas of counties, maybe? I don’t know the procedures for your area but official stats of 1/550 probably implies pretty high actual rates… shit sucks

I agree mask wearing probably has better uptake in NY than anywhere comparable in the US since we’ve had such a large volume of cases it’s got to be enough to convince almost anyone it’s serious

Tags:

#(update: I saw an article in the local paper recently complaining) #(that tests in our area are getting rationed even harder than in the rest of the province) #conversational aglets #replies #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #(oh also some good news: coworker-who-made-fun-of-me seems to be expressing interest in getting a cloth mask like mine) #(if I see her wearing one on multiple occasions I’ll remove the clip from my dirt file: sometimes people improve)

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

 

brin-bellway:

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

@rustingbridges​​ replied:

are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)                            

God, I fucking wish.

*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.

My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.

A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)

A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)

The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.

—

Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)

—

†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.

Tags:

#I’ve been thinking about this so much that it’s hard to keep track of #which of these things I’ve said publicly and which I’ve said privately and which I haven’t said at all #I hope I’ve included the correct amount of context‚ let me know if I haven’t #replies #rustingbridges #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #rants

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

Tags:

#I used to enjoy my work! #it wasn’t a Career (and I didn’t intend for it to be) #but it was easy and it helped people #now it’s dangerous and composed entirely of assholes #(it’s still rare for people to be rude to me in the *ordinary* sense) #(but under the circumstances just showing up is an asshole move) #reply via reblog #home of the brave #politics cw #discourse cw? #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

90377:

Memories of April 2020 by 90377
Instagram | Etsy Shop

Tags:

#…so uh I’m *strongly* legally discouraged from going outside more than the absolute minimum #(legally I have to treat every allergy attack like it might be COVID-19 and go into full lockdown for two weeks) #(surgical masks aren’t always enough even when you can get them and cloth masks are untested and presumably even less perfect) #I think I’m starting to go a bit astronaut #plants #covid19 #allergies #(every year it gets worse‚ my ability to just go enjoy the outdoors ever more restricted) #(I’d wondered what the escalation would be this year‚ hoped that #perhaps the allergist I would visit in January would help me *de*-escalate instead) #(but there was nothing she could do for me and I guess now I fucking know what this year’s escalation is) #tag rambles #(P.S. over dinner today Mom told me the forsythia in the backyard is blooming) #(and I should go appreciate it seeing as how it was my idea in the first place) #(so after posting this I went and opened up the back door to look at it) #(I held my breath) #(and when my lungs began to burn I shut the door again and quickly walked away)