Is anyone else going through what is starting to feel like the insanely over-thought and fkg onerous step of wiping down the food shopping/giving it a little diluted bleach bath before putting it away? Just taken me fkg ages to put away what should have taken about fifteen minutes. The irony of washing the bleach down with bleach was not lost on me.
The only thing it has changed is how much I go out. Instead of once every two weeks it's now none. However, I realised a long time ago that neuro typicals were dangerous, especially to me. So I locked down then. I grew up in London, and at one point had about 800 friends on Facebook. These weren't just random people, but I genuinely knew all of them. However, then I started to look at them one by one and realised that I didn't really like most of them. I grew up in a time where we were pretty much forced to be social. Like, if I didn't want to go out my mother would literally start telling me to GTFO and go over the park with my friends. I was also taken to lots of social places, most notably a summer project for kids so we didn't go nuts with 6 weeks off. And I enjoyed it sometimes. However, then I started to rethink things a little. Like at the running club my dad was involved in (athletics rather, though we were far too young to do much apart from run) I hated it. We would go to events, I'd get half way around the course and just bugger off into the woods to be alone and play. Then when I reached my teens I just started staying in my room all of the time. Like, 7 weeks at a time. Then I realised that most of the social situations, fashions and music I was into I really didn't like at all. I grew up to punk, SKA and so on. Yet I was drawn into rave music and techno etc not because I loved it, but simply because that's what my "friends" were into and otherwise I'd have probably got my arse kicked. Same went for clothing and etc. Now instead of doing what most people would do (and F them off and make friends you have stuff in common with) I just rolled on with this fake life I had. And I soon realised I wasn't happy. My "friends" were burglars, liars, drug dealers and violent, and I needed to escape. I did make other friends, but if they came into my street they'd either get beaten up or the pee taken out of them. That was when I decided to just find a girlfriend in another country and do one. There was nothing left for me. I remember saying to my mate "If I am still here next year I'm committing suicide" and I meant it. I hated everything about my life, including my "friends" and it was time to leave it behind. And I did. America was much more like me. Jeans, Tshirts, punk, grunge. I belonged there. I'd already started listening to that music in the mid 90s when I started riding BMX again (alone). So when I came back to the UK I deleted my Facebook account, opened a new one and added my real friends. I was sick of getting PMs saying "Who the F is that?" and stuff like that. Like these people literally thought I didn't deserve to have a life and friends of my own. Best thing I ever did. I started isolating in 2009 when I began to realise the gravity of my diagnosis. You know? why I had done things I'd done, how short my fuse was and what the triggers were. The only way to fix that was isolation. Not from the whole world, because I sometimes go out. However when I do I like to be invisible. I made one friend down here, turns out he was an alcoholic so I just vanished. I don't try to make friends here at all, I prefer to be completely anonymous. People are hard work, and I have enough of my own crap to deal with. I also have to live a very calm and slow life. Anything faster and I start to act irrationally and so on. And I do a decent job of it. Removing stress factors reduces stress, but obviously there's no way to eliminate it completely so I just pick off one task at a time. Do I miss humanity? no. Not at all. Like, my sister in law tries to force me to be social and etc but she just doesn't get it. I don't want to. I'm someone that if wants to see you will come and see you, and if not you may not hear a word out of me for a year or more. I don't like feeling forced, as then I talk too much and it usually ends up bad. I just learned to pick out the beautiful parts of life, try and remember they are always there and focus on them. Bird song, watching the bees flying around. You know? all of those tiny things that make the world so beautiful yet every one seems to totally forget and leave behind. If it wasn't for those things I wouldn't be here any more. I've lived in my secure flat for 16 months now. I still haven't met the guy directly opposite me on my floor. Now obviously I can not speak for all autistic people as obviously we all have different personalities and life stories. However, given the way my life has been? I was bloody glad to be shot of them and everything else. Life teaches you lessons, and I had to learn the hard way. I've been put in some really awful situations I wanted no part of, but wasn't given much of a choice. And so I grew to hate people. Which isn't good either, I guess.
Meanwhile same in Iran - "Over 700 Iranians Dead From Methanol Poisoning Over False Belief the Chemical Cures COVID-19" (source https://time.com/5828047/methanol-poisoning-iran/ ).
Isn't that the stuff they were putting in fake booze and people in Thailand were dying from? Google says yes. I watched a docu about it. English kids going out there and going blind/dying from drinking fake vodka etc.
Yeah I saw that. It reminded me of the episode of South Park where Rob Reiner tries to kill Cartman so he can become the poster child for anti smoking. It's disgusting.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-52440641 "There were 33 million on the original 2009 procurement list for the stockpile, but only 12 million have been handed out. The government refuses to explain where the other masks have gone." I'm amazed there even needs to be an explanation. The disaster stockpiles were run down over time to save money, equipment near expiry was fed into day to day operations to reduce spending and never replaced. I'm a nobody who makes spectacles in a rural town in the north of England and I know that, everybody knows that.
Any one who hasn't experienced the severe issues with the NHS are either rich and have private healthcare or are healthy enough not to have used it for ten years or more.
Not sure if it was BBC or C4 but it turns out all these 'pieces' of PPE include items such as disinfectant and paper towels. Oh and gloves. Counted individually.
The use of logarithmic scales in the press is bugging me. It's all well and good presenting a flattening curve, but I wonder how many people twig that the last, flat part of the curve represents a bigger increase than the rest of the graph combined. The curve isn't actually flattening, it's just stopped becoming steeper, which is better than nothing, but not ideal. Then again if the BBC had a graph every day just going up and up and up at the rate of 5000-ish per day that wouldn't look very good would it.
But we should all then get a massive tax discount, right? Since we won't be being asked to fund the NHS? And we'll be allowed to keep that extra cash to pay for our private healthcare, right? Right? I'm waaaaay ahead of you guys on this one. Been preparing for years, in fact.
Non-log curves are not so useful for showing changes in trend when the trend is otherwise exponential. It's easy to see divergence from a line, but it's not so easy to see the difference in rate of line angle change. And it's change in trend that is critical: that shows you the R0 of the virus spread, which is what needs to be brought down in order to slow the total spread. Daily absolute numbers contain too much noise to do this effectively. It also make sit a real pain to compare responses. e.g. log-log graph vs. linear graph.
I don't like the Tories. At all. I witnessed them commit atrocities on the lower middle class and poor in the 80s, and pretty much leave everything to ruin. However. I must say that Boris is in the very least doing a half decent job of leading his country. Not like that orange clusterf**k. I mean all he had to do was copy most of it out of Winston's books, but yeah at least he doesn't scare me.
