Pandemic Scrapbook

Welcome to my cathartic pandemic scrapbook, I started it many months into the pandemic – most recent things are on the top 🙂 If you’re looking for chronological order, the bottom is the place to start!

There’s no overarching storyline (despite common trends), this is just what popped up in our day to day lives (via the internet, so almost our entire lives at that moment) as the pandemic continued on, it wasn’t sought out, honestly most of it was presented to me while passing time on the toilet.

So a company in China did some things that broke some American laws, the person at that company responsible for the company doing those things was in Canada at the time. America asked Canada to send’em on down to do that legal trial thing, and China said “hey no”, and Canada said “why not?” and China said “well we just imprisoned two of your citizens and have placed sanctions on pork and canola oil, two of your biggest exports to us” and Canada said “that… sucks dude, our Judiciary system is separate from everything else, we literally cannot do anything about this but go through the due process, that’s how all this is set up” and China said “okay well you don’t see your two Michaels back until we see company person back”

That whole due process thing was happening and finally company person went to America for trial, during the due process China claimed they arrested these two particular people because they were “spies” – this is of course an absurd sounding accusation and China seems to lie about everything so it’s hard to take this seriously.

Anyway, within hours of company person being released by the Americans w/ a plea deal the two Michaels after years of imprisonment were immediately released and en route back to Canada, these are photos of one of those Michaels

It’s like white supremacy is the biggest shittiest high-school clique ever

Royally dystopian, this is from the UK

The theme for today is apparently Alberta

Men! Sports! HEALTHY! … now where’d I put that caveman club

When the outcome of an evaluation is obvious to the one being evaluated do we even need the evaluation?

Denying reviews/evaluations on oneself reeks of an admission of guilt, and of course someone guilty wouldn’t want a review, so why is this our process? People working at McDonalds have more fear losing their jobs over any random occurrence while Premiers can spread disinformation and promote/pass policies that fill up hospitals and have full confidence they have nothing to worry about, incredibly disproportionate consequences

So things in Alberta are incredibly bad right now, BC isn’t far behind but BC has successfully kept that information out of the public domain – until recently as more and more whistleblowers are speaking up. Lots of anecdotal tales of punitive action for anyone who has publicly discussed hospital conditions throughout the pandemic, professionals very afraid for their careers are now still speaking out and being connected to media anonymously through activists.

Of course the response from the health authority is the same nonsense I’ve signed working on video games, it… is not helping their case, but also people who work with the public should never be gagged like this. There’s no trade-secrets to divulge. This is ridiculous.

Topical that I found this the day after I posted what’s below this

With everything else going on right now our provincial government makes their priorities clear (PS: one of those towns that burned down? maybe they should’ve known better than to be a town that wasn’t a tourist destination, promised help from the province has yet to materialize)

More traditional media sources have really been the top sales-people of provincial messaging, including misinformation (not all of them, there have been some fantastic examples of integrity and calling power to account [even if that power continues to gaslight in response])

Some might find it interesting, I find it an odd flavor of dystopian

BC School Covid Tracker started the first school year of the pandemic when parents were chatting and finding out about positive Covid cases that weren’t accompanied by any announcement or letters, they’ve reliably kept records of many, many school exposures from parents and teachers alike

The one in the bottom-middle has been setting BC’s health policy during this pandemic, while cases are on the rise they’re giving webinars encouraging travel

Alberta’s public health officer obsessed with vaccination numbers while hospitals are flooded and non-covid related departments (like Urology, the bottom fella in the snip is in that one) are being told their patients will have no care

I’m not a doctor, I’m a game developer – yet for over a year I’ve understood that this virus has a really high reinfection rate, so while vaccines are super awesome at preventing people from really bad scenarios they don’t put much of a dent in spread – aggressive re-opening plans until everyone who can be vaccinated is vaccinated (including children, < 12 cannot be vaccinated at the moment) was always going to obviously end up in this scenario, it’s maddening to watch this predictable metaphorical train on its glacially-slow-motion crash

This was propagated as non-fiction, dropped off at small businesses in our province

Is this what it looks like if you order a savior from wish?

Celebrity version of misinformation – as most of twitter pointed out those symptoms have nothing to do with being vaccinated and predominantly have something to do with…

So the government funded police are whining that people who want to stop trees from being chopped down are “well funded” – I’ve only seen one group bring in helicopters to this conflict and it wasn’t the group who consistently put their own body in harms way as a form of protest

Speaking of that budget, meanwhile the RCMP do nothing as…

It’s only the third day back to school for the year

One of the most phenomenal conflicts of this pandemic has been what has been referred to as “Droplet Dogma” vs. acknowledgement of airborne spread – the evidence has been overwhelming since the Princess Diamond cruise ship had passengers who had been quarantined in their room for weeks with no physical human contact contract the virus. Since then mounds and mounds of scientific studies have shown how viruses spread through the air.

…and yet

I’ll take Shiv’s word for it and just leave this here

the theme of 2021, “can’t make this stuff up”

Story in two parts, first part! Saw a tweet in which someone is questioning the local paper for our big local University about their priorities on what makes the front page

…so I clicked on the authors name of the article on the site, only one article posted (the one in question), then I googled and saw they’re employed by…

Over this pandemic I’ve watched lots of movies and TV shows I wouldn’t otherwise watch, lots of really poorly constructed ones. Regardless of how nonsensically they’re written, or how absurd their plot is… none of them have been able to match the absurdity of real life

and now for something completely different

what strange disinformation from insider.com (a magazine that pre-dated the internet), lying loses trust

additional context provided once professional reporters got wind of the viral insider.com article

Unbelievable, not just that anyone is buying into this garbage but how much organization/funding it’s receiving to have on-the-ground sticker PR campaigns and multiple websites

800+ people have been arrested because they’d like trees to not be cut down and they didn’t move when told to move, yet mobs can be directed to disrupt medical care by flooding the streets outside hospitals (thus far at least one death is suspected to have resulted in a patient not being able to receive the care they needed due to delays in reaching a hospital) and… nothing, not even an investigation, this is maddening

Not sure what I’ll post above this, that’ll be in the chaos of futuretimes – but definitely view this in the perspective of what’s below, which happened yesterday across Canada (very coordinated). Oh, also worth mentioning, I went to the first protest of my life because local school boards are forcing kids back in classrooms (removed online learning options) that have fewer preventative measures than the year before (at a time when cases are much higher than the year before, currently in a state of exponential growth, and we’re in what politicians are calling a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” when children < 12 can’t be vaccinated… whom this Delta variant show increases risk of severe outcomes of Covid)

by far the winning comment and it didn’t even need pandemic context

This is local, during a time of exponential spread being accredited to a variant dubbed Delta

the protestors started at hospitals and marched on to do their [hate] speeches elsewhere

Just casual acceptance of shitty behavior on my Facebook wall – partisan politics excuses shitty behavior apparently

The latest snake oil is making the rounds

Here in BC Friday we had 867 new Covid cases, reported Hospitalizations 159, reported ICU 84, and 3 deaths. In response to the exponential spread of the virus causing this pandemic our public health officer announced that masks are to be worn at all times indoors and an absolute maximum party size of 6 – this is an order, not a recommendation.

Oh also the Interior of BC already had masking orders because their cases spiked first, so obviously our premier this weekend…

Ah right, the original idea behind this scrapbook – capturing the insanity of the times that may be forgotten because we’re in the middle of a pandemic (never would’ve thought the fact we’re in a middle of a pandemic would be one of the things people are forgetting)

Anyway – Texas down in America saw various states of dystopia erupting in the world and classically said “hold my beer”, as a bonus they opened up a website to make reporting as easy as possible! They call it ‘whistleblowing’, yes, reporting on the medical history of someone who had an abortion or someone who intends to have an abortion, is being referred to on an official govt recognized website as ‘whistleblowing’.

Putting it here because I don’t think anyone would believe it if years from now I told’em “oh yeah, denying the horrific effects of Covid was a real big thing during the pandemic, heck, one province just removed all health restrictions one day and said everyone’s on their own!” – during a period of exponential spread and dramatic rises in hospitalizations…

It’s 2021 and journalists reporting on protest efforts are being pepper sprayed in Canada, not a dystopia I thought we were heading towards but here we are

This is the website of the Orlando Utilities Commission, who the people of the city pay their utility bills to – never would have guessed this is a potential stop on the path of Covid-denialism

So BC’s got a lot going on, two towns burned down, Covid cases doubling every 8 days with hospitals and ICU beds doing their thing and being filled 1-2 weeks later (simultaneously occurring are staffing issues with emergency response and nurses), and general uncertainty as multiple crises overwhelm us – provincial leadership has been AWOL

When commenting on the subject of desiring leadership to… well, lead, this is apparently what’s considered hysterical

This is on-brand for this person not being sarcastic, this is a local reporter with 60k~ followers on twitter who decided to take it upon themselves to call this softly worded critique as “hysterical”

I wonder what would happen to me if I put an “Invoice” in as many mailboxes as I could personally find, could have fun with different “descriptions” for payment required!
“Neighborhood Psychic Cleansing“
“Moving to New Zealand Fund“
“Lobbying for Free Weekly Ice Cream Truck“

Nova Scotia is holding a provincial election and I only know this because one riding… well, here

“John John” is trending on twitter at > 250k atm

This happened

So a bunch of countries sent soldiers to Afghanistan and dislodged shitty humans that were being horrible to the people there, so far so good (I mean, that’s the narrative I roughly remember from watching the news back in the day). Anyway, the countries brought their soldiers back and those shitty humans just kinda waited them out and are back to being horrible to the people there

What’s happening now is incredibly tragic and deliberately cruel

Here in “fatalities are a part of life” BC a second town burned down this year, is this our “new normal”?

Just the kind of casual hate mail thrown towards epidemiologists that dare try to protect people from the “hoax” virus

I’m figurin’ that whoever makes decisions for schools should at least have a basic understanding of how chalk works

Ain’t no fire gonna ruin their vacation

Just chillin’ here in let’er rip Canada 😦

Just some enraging disinformation – we’re not safe until everyone is safe, discouraging anyone from getting a vaccine is against everyone’s best interest

Well over a year into the pandemic (July 27th, 2021), there should be absolutely no question that the virus is airborne and dangerous (> 5million confirmed deaths, estimated at least 2-3x unaccounted for, even mild or asymptomatic cases reveal brain damage through medical scans) – this is how some people decide to spend their time

While software engineers are debating ethical boundaries of what AI should and shouldn’t be doing, non-software engineers side-step the whole issue entirely! No evidence? No worries, they’ll add that in post.

I remember transitioning from 2019 to 2020 thinking “maybe this is the year things will get better”

It’s 2021 and things have not gotten better, it seems to keep getting worse for a lot of people in a lot of different ways

So the Olympics are happening. During a global pandemic at a time when globally cases are spiking. This is all I imagine I’ll have on the subject

Just ordered a fancy HEPA-filter equipped doodad for the home in the first time in my life, cause… this

Laughed out loud then cried a little – really cool tech should be a celebration, but I don’t want to imagine the next wave of anti-vaccine propaganda

Okay I laughed

2021 everyone

Lots of paramedics, nurses, and doctors on social media trying to talk around what some call a “gag order” – seems some have had enough and are done beating around the bush

This morning greets me with a local BC reporter who ironically can’t take criticism (if you keep scrolling down you’ll actually find the fellow in question says some really gross, inflammatory things about people who don’t want other people to get sick in a global pandemic)

Housing market is insane by the way, I don’t think I’ve covered that yet? Aside from it being impossible that I’ll ever be able to own a home, the power dynamic is showcasing some miserable behavior

Our Health Officer removed public mask mandates, as a result more and more people are getting harassed for just wanting to wear their mask in public. Y’know, that thing that goes on your face that doesn’t do much selfishly but it helps prevent you from unknowingly spreading anything you may have. Depending on certain demographics, some people seem more likely to be harassed than others.

Was reading an article on this phenomena (cleverly titled: “Unmasking the racial politics of the coronavirus pandemic“) and this line stuck out for me: “With COVID 19, the trend of using masked Asian faces as the emblem of the crisis continues the trajectory of these racist depictions.”

Now where have I seen that before…

Ah yes, our provincial governments 2020’s “Back to School Plan” that featured just one person in the entire video wearing a mask

This morning’s doomscrolling stumbled on one of the original signatories of The Great Berrington Declaration (let Covid run through and maim all the poor people strategy – as idiotic as it comes because the damn thing has proven to re-circulate you dimwits it never goes away if you let it do that) gets caught trying to suppress other people from doing the exact same thing he did – only he wants to stop the people wanting to save lives rather than leaving them at more risk

So the theme this month is oil-stuff blowing up?

Here’s a wild thing about social media, it’s full of nonsense and flooded with paid opinions and yet through all the crap I can find out about something I absolutely never would have otherwise

Heck, I started following this group around the time police action started against their protest – I had no idea until today just how long their protest blockades and encampments were up for. Just consuming my regular media I’d of never known how long that group had been actively out there, just the odd spotlight (like an embarrassing RCMP infiltration attempt that drew my attention in the first place)

The numbers out of the corners office keep going up

The wildfires have become a national interest (aside from the general: “um hey look at BC maybe we should do something about this climate thing”), even Toronto papers are digging into them

So this happened today and this is my favorite take

It was a home to hundreds and surrounded by lands inhabited by thousands – the figure being discussed is 90% of the village burned to the ground

Let’s not pretend the insane nonsense of politicizing a virus isn’t happening in Canada as well, this stark American example just hit my feed

These politicians do not serve their people, they’re fucking psychotic

But forget everything below this scrapbook snip cause it’s time to forget about the “tough year” we’ve… “had”…

I encountered this advertisement just minutes after the previous scrapbook update

If the pandemic response hadn’t been (and continues to be) so bungled I would be more shocked. There has been nothing but sun, heat, and dryness – also plenty of fully-booked or sold-out camp sites

My wonderfully resourceful partner pulled out this site as I was adding to the scrapbook

I get an eerily dystopian vibe from this ad

What a time to be living in – when a peer-reviewed cross-Canada report involving support from various government agencies, independent researchers, and journalists gets casually dismissed by provincial leadership, and then the team lead of the report can instantly reply to the attempted spread of disinformation

I’ve walked down that sidewalk!

This same dude made some incredibly callous remarks around the pandemic as well (blaming young adults, gross things around pre-existing conditions, some other stuff) and never “walked back” any of those – so I guess the public has maybe had enough of his ivory tower garbage. Those fatalities, as far as we know today, are > 100 excess-deaths vs. same 4-day period last year (not counting today, nearly as hot as yesterday in our area but even hotter in the interior)

The above is from yesterday, the below is from today. The premiers statements were made during a Covid Victory Lap where they celebrated lifting mask mandates, but they had to comment on that pesky heat-wave (that was predicted)

Just a normal ad to see in 2021

For contrast to what’s below, here’s an example of a journalist acting in good faith (highlight from another journalists work, gives credit to them, and provides direct link with references)

This guy is a journalist by trade, I started following many journalists in BC to get quick up-to-date BC news, they’ll sometimes have cheeky comments but never trashy minimizing nonsense like this. I do not follow this one, but their comments throughout the pandemic have drawn enough attention to float to my feed. Here’s an example of a bad actor in journalism.

Note the wording, “evidence is lacking” – fuckoff. One long-term care home got hit and a dozen people who were two-shot vaccinated passed away. Just cannot believe the callousness of humanity from this pandemic, “oh it shouldn’t effect me so we need to make arguments to OPEN THINGS UP I WANT A NICE SUMMER”. Long-Covid Clinics are worldwide studying the long-term effects. Children end up with long-term effects, strategies to let the virus “naturally immunize the young who are at lower risk” were proven sociopathic within months of this damn pandemic upon reports and investigations of long covid. Oh, also, grey brain matter loss from even asymptomatic cases, but hey, old people who survived thus far are getting knocked off at roughly the same rate as a year ago so let’s not worry?

SO FUCKING SAD FOR HUMANITY RIGHT NOW

It’s cutting through two-vaccines like butter you dimwits, even if that were true people are suffering who wouldn’t have otherwise

Also – while this fella comes under criticism for being dramatic his numbers are always striving for accuracy with plenty of receipts

The scam is getting even more elaborate, not just futures, micro-futures! (futures are a thing where you basically wager on the value of a thing at a certain point in the future, and enter an agreement to buy an amount of that thing at a specific price at that time)

Reminder: There is zero productive purpose to these currencies, it’s all just gambling

Groups with plenty of money and massive platforms use those platforms to incite harassment on anyone they deem a threat to whatever their messaging is, including doctors whose only motive is to save lives – these doctors do not have the same money to fight this harassment through courts, it comes from masses after the trigger is pulled on the platform

Thankfully we won’t see these peaks near the coast, but also, whoa

It’s really strange to watch hordes of people be manipulated into a frenzy over an actually-unbelievable child trafficking scheme involving online furniture orders (reference below first image), yet in real-life have someone like epstein be actually proven to host child-predator parties, go to jail, and be found dead in his cell without a peep from the same crowd.

Fiction that had hundreds of thousands of interactions basically overnight

So it started as a major headline about someone I knew pretty much nothing about (except that I hated how their software legacy acted like a more effective virus than most virus software), they were found dead in a Spanish prison awaiting extradition to America for tax fraud. At least, that’s the most clear answer I’m willing to find before dropping this event here and moving on, there’s lots of speculation and this news just hit

That said… whoa. Um. This is a… story. I have no idea how much is fiction vs. non-fiction, I imagine any step of it may contain elements of both? I mean, well, you’ll see

“Trouble” is quite the monumental understatement

It is currently June 23rd, 2021, so this pinned tweet was posted exactly a week ago, below tweets also 2021

aaaaaand I’m done – I prefer my fiction in books, movies, and video games. Disentangling the non-fiction very quickly stopped being interesting for me. I imagine many actors (including the particular person) in this live-action play are bad actors playing games with real-life consequences who couldn’t care less about the damage they leave behind

Cheeky prediction: “Getting dumped” gets absorbed into “Cancel Culture”

Okay so this thing is real, real scary, but if you pay this magazine your money you can then inform yourself on how you can expend your energy to protect yourself maybe (you’ll find out what tangible things you can take from it after you pay!)

The future of ransomware: The Economist holds your PC ransom cause you didn’t read this article, pay monthly or else

It just occurred to me that maybe future me re-reading this won’t consider any of this outlandish at all, years down the road this behavior could be so normalized that a scrapbook put together of future events puts this insanity to shame as very boring stuff

No image to go with this one, just an uncomfortable sense of dread

Okay okay okay, it looks very propaganda-y but also… the format matches the dystopia we’re living through. Credible professionals attempting to correct misinformation end up targeted in “op-ed” articles (I don’t pay as much attention to Ontario so haven’t read these ones in-particular, but I have read articles showing this pattern in BC and other places in the world)

Been seeing a lot of comments on reddit lately about the language being used in major media headlines (Toronto Star is not a small thing), language like “under fire” or “Country slammed other country for thing!” or basically what you’d expect at a live-action wrestling match

Someone sounds jealous

All their articles are paywalled so I have no idea what the contents are

One thing very impressed on me during this pandemic: Disabled communities tend to be overlooked in a lot of ways and they don’t tend to have… “professional” advocates, thus tend to be forced to self advocate if they want to see change.

I also learned self advocation is hard, when you’re the one in the middle of the shit-storm it’s not the best place to express yourself in the emotionless tone required to not immediately get derailed by the apparent endless stream of anti-advocate… well, trolls. I’ve learned these things by coincidentally following a few of these self-advocates who were saying things that sounded really smart around pandemic related issues. Now I’m seeing more of the barriers disabled communities come up against and the massive amount of resistance put up against reducing those barriers.

Funny how these premiers have so much in common, even across party lines

Without any context I saw a lot of bizarre hatred towards “Critical Race Theory” on social media, something about white babies being blamed for their ancestors actions was the basic impression I got. That seemed like a real strange thing, so I googled it and read the words not of promoted and re-shared Facebook ads and instead read the words of one of the founders of the theory.

I think a fair summary would be: Just because the most horrible manifestations of racism aren’t necessarily happening today (examples: slavery if you’re American or residential schools if you’re Canadian), that doesn’t mean there aren’t still systematic issues that continue to promote tragedies or disadvantages for certain demographics. We should continue to collect data and observe and take action when racially themed injustice is observed.

That bizarre hatred that caused me to even look up what those words meant?

Yes this stage of Very White People is an obviously unbiased source of feedback concerning racial injustice

Doing a crap job? It’ll be okay as long as you got someone re-writing history

Though I started engaging on my twitter account to have a nice concentrated place for all “news” about my endeavor of turning game development into a work-for-myself situation… I’ve long since abandoned that intent at some point during the pandemic (couldn’t even tell ya when, not a conscious decision). I’ve accepted that for right now my twitter account is going to be my personal history, I can tell this has been a rough time for my psyche, my memory has never been worse. Thus I’m using twitter to keep an electronic memory for me to look back on when I’m in a better spot to process everything (is that ever going to be a thing? who knows! maybe the entire history gets sucked into a void and inevitably amount to nothing, but I’d like to think there’ll be a space in the future to revisit).

This scrap-book was originally intended to capture the absurdities I kept stumbling across while on social media, that has also changed. I couldn’t articulate what the purpose is now, all I can tell you is occasionally I see something and think “I’ll add that to the scrapbook”

I’ve re-tweeted the snips below on twitter to keep it in that artificial digital memory, but I cannot emphasize how important this is to see right now. We’ve been through 3 “waves” locally here, our government seemingly spends the majority of their energy and money convincing people to go out to wineries and restaurants and gyms for their “mental health”. We’re a rich country, we got first in line for vaccines, so now we’re going to have our summer we deserve!

That is so, so frustrating. Especially since there are worldwide examples of countries who are not nearly as “rich” as we are who minimized grief and tragedy from this pandemic (won’t even focus on deaths, we still haven’t hit the tip of the iceberg of the effects of “Long Covid”, children still cannot be vaccinated and Mis-C cases are rising, likely due to the new Delta variant). Before the rise of every “wave” came the lifting of protective restrictions, every single time if we just stayed course longer (or shorter w/ more severe restrictions – note: at no point during this pandemic were we not able to go out and say, visit the dollar store, or a clothing store, or hell, a mall! our shopping malls never closed) – no no, our restrictions are about not visiting other peoples homes. I can tell you right now, I’ll give up malls for the rest of my fucking life if it means I can safely spend time with my friends.

Long tangent, didn’t expect that. Anyway, the reason I loaded up this scrapbook. Focus is on UK, but relevant to all “western” countries.

Those are some heavy credentials, this person probably knows what they’re talking about when it comes to a global pandemic

Angel just saw this – looked into the website, opening June 28th 2021

Oh how convenient, our public health officer who owns a winery will have just weeks beforehand lifted Covid travel restrictions, allowing everyone to visit this Southern Okanagan Wine Village!

Waitwaitwait. Let me get this straight. So there’s some real big trees out there that people wanna cut down for money, other people don’t want them to. The people wanting the trees not cut down are just kinda, hanging out, making a blockade to prevent logging equipment from reaching old growth sites. This so far sounds, um, pretty boring right?

So somewhere along the lines Canadian RCMP started a media blackout at the blockade – strange right? Media is actually in court to resolve that issue right now. Anyway, a lot of hubbub about media so far and like, why? It’s just some activists chilling out in the woods having a dispute with a corporation, right?

Well! June 17th 2021 is when I saw this slip by my feed.

So RCMP infiltrated a camp of activists that are just chillin’ hoping trees don’t get cut down – and get this – these civilians caught them and ejected them
Sure hope this stellar dark-ops job isn’t indicative to how Canadian spies operate, though it may explain how fucking sabotaged every layer of our political system is

Worth noting, “top-performing” does not mean that it’s what the majority of people consume by whimsical choice – these links are promoted, each click is paid for. This isn’t a Top 10 of public opinion, this is a Top 10 of who is paying the most money to get the most attention on Facebook – I started following this well over a year ago and it hasn’t looked that much different the entire time

At first glance it may not seem like there’s a theme, so for context…

Being Canadian I had no idea who this twat was until a faux pas elevated them to news that reaches over here – in theatrical outrage over a song entitled “Wet Ass Pussy” he made a claim that women who exhibit these symptoms should see a doctor, apparently (according to him) his doctor wife agreed

When I first saw this name I had no idea who it was, turns out they’re the source for quite a few unfounded conspiracy theories – which was quite a shocker given they seem to profit off of writing books about… unfounded… conspiracy theories…

There’s that last one that I wasn’t terribly familiar with pre-pandemic-times – rounds out a very strong theme dominating the Facebook Top 10 Promoted Links

This is a local teacher, I’ve been following them for over a year – consistently sensible and brings up topics what our household also discusses, as they’re direct impacts to our lives (that comment on democratic process? both my Federal and Provincial representatives have ignored all my correspondence, the only reply copy/pasted rhetoric that didn’t address my concerns at all)

Wave 4 has not happened yet, and while I hope it never does… it’s hard not to believe it’s inevitable. Especially as the UK tightens things up due to running into issues with the Delta variant, we’re here discussing…

Where did that 2021 motto go? Ah right, “Bloody furious, but strangely not particularly surprised.”

Saw this shared by what I believe is called a “crypto bro” that I’ve known for nearly 20 years now

If it wasn’t shared by someone who also posts their daily crypto investment earnings I would’ve seen this and just assumed it was a scam, not shy at all about promoting tax evasion eh? Guess the IRS isn’t as scary as American TV has lead me to believe

This juxtaposition…
(note: BC has very limited testing data, testing < half the rate of any other province, within that limited data we still see the Delta variant doubling every 6-8 days under current restrictions…)

These stacked on top of each other on my twitter feed, North America as a whole seems to not be paying attention to the UK (…yet we have mirrored anti-mask rallies in Canada, the UK, and America – among other places in the world, seems the more you look at local news from different regions the more anti-mask rallies you find)

Children are unvaccinated and Delta dramatically increases their risk, vaccine breakthrough in one-dose adults is incredibly high, and 2-dose adults down to around 80%~ protected from 95%~ (4x more risk, from 5% risk to 20% risk) – but yeah, if we just pretend it’s over. We can turn a blind eye with our “hope” so we can “heal”

The date is June 14th, 2021, and anti-vaccination rallies across the world are still happening, these are from the UK

Just look at these martyrs, throwing their lives on the line for the “freedom” to prolong the worst aspects of the pandemic for everyone else

Never heard of this guy but witnessed live all their work – and now they’re pivoting career-wise as lobbyist for a company embroiled in controversy

Ah, so this is the fella who wrote into the script: “None of the children will wear masks, except that asian one – this will show how sensitive we are to asian culture” in BC’s “Back to School” TV ad last summer

If I wasn’t sitting under a suffocating amount of grief this would have sparked joy

Sentence this asshole to assisting the covid wards in hospitals

Earlier this year the World Health Organization re-branded all of the virus variants (ex: “Indian” variant aka B.1.617.2 is now “Delta”) and… things like this is probably why

Cannot tell if this nurse genuinely believes vaccines magnetized her body (the “proof” being very light metal objects can “stick” to her skin…) and thus are a danger to the population, or if they simply received enough money they simply had no qualms of appearing to be a buffoon in a publicly televised hearing

Some context for this “Vaccine Choice” movement – the venn diagram of conspiracy theorists pushing for “Vaccine Choice” and groups publicly very anti-choice when it comes to a womens right to abort an unwanted pregnancy… are probably nearly a perfect circle

Future humans reading this – is Master Class still a thing?

Alright I give my province of residence quite a lot of flack throughout this scrapbook, but I’ll give credit where credit is due – no one that’s attempted to call them out on their BS has had armed authorities show up at their home here

Related to just below – encouraging people to vaccinate is a good goal. Encouraging everyone (especially non-vaccine hesitant people) to make very expensive (both monetarily and emotionally) plans…

The carrot on the stick is the exact thing that increases risk of a 4th “wave”, which would in turn eliminate all those plans

Ontario does quite a bit more testing than BC – it is very, very difficult to get a child tested in BC and in general BC tests (per capita) less than half of the Canadian average. Due to this, any case charts relating to children or schools are missing a significant amount of cases, obfuscating any information from the chart.

Ontario, due to higher testing yields, have more reliable charts. Reminder: Generally it takes 2~ weeks for any change in policy to be reflected in the chart (virus has quite a high incubation period – during which pre-symptomatic spread can occur). Note the 2 weeks after each school closure/opening

Ontario is keeping schools closed after the third wave in anticipation of avoiding Wave 4 (thanks to variants that are increasingly more dangerous to children, who continue to at high degrees catch and spread the virus asymptomatically)

Meanwhile, BC is keeping schools open *and* dramatically reducing **all testing**

Sometimes someone else takes their rage and puts it into words before you have a chance to, all that’s left is to hit like

Bout to enter Wave 4, due to public policy. Wave 1 caught us by surprise, we have no excuses for Waves 2, 3, and 4 – every step of the way there were global examples to follow (or even domestic in Atlantic Canada)

Hadn’t heard from Brazil in awhile, as devastating a time they’re having other crisis seem to fill the media space – and then I saw this on twitter

So the really interesting thing about the broad adoption of social media is that receipts are kept kinda very easily. So when someone shifts the death of their ex-spouse from a tragedy to part of some bizarre conspiracy…

Context: This fella was the brother of the current premier of Ontario

Horrors on horrors. This is going to be a particularly dark time for the scrapbook. It’s been a practice in Canada since the late 1800’s to take children away from their indigenous parents and “educate” them. In one of those education centers 215 children’s bodies were found in a mass grave.

Adults who spent their childhood in one of these Canadian education centers have been telling their stories to this day, the last education center “closed” in 1996! Common words found in relation to these stories: Torture, neglect, assault, rape, death.

A horrific discovery prompting discussions on very real systemic problems involving atrocious activities – you would think, you would really think, that anyone right now working with anything around that area would do so with the utmost amount of sensitivity.

Of course mementos of grief were just tossed into a garbage bag, can’t have those visually offensive **shoes** ruining anyone’s good mood. Those people may have to start thinking about things that may just lead to *gasp* recognizing and solving obvious problems

We all take actions that impact our neighbors, I’d like to think I try to add more value to my neighborhood rather than take value away (or at the very least avoid doing things that make my neighbors miserable). In the scale of the world, with how easily transportation happens these days, every country is effectively a neighbor to all other countries.

Countries that choose to let the virus thrive are horrible neighbors, forcibly prolonging this experience on the rest of the world. Also important: It’s become very apparent that the people living in these countries have very little sway over what happens in those countries, the poor behavior of a country is a very poor excuse to be an asshole to people of that country. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be in Brazil right now, even approaching the idea makes my heart heavy.

Pandemic schmandemic, we need sportsball

This is a story in snips

…aaaaand now I’m super curious as to how it ends!

methinks this won’t be ending this evening

Stumbled on this and immediately thought of this scrapbook entry

So preventing corporations from logging trees > 1000+ years old would be the same thing as murdering 215 children and tossing them in a grave after ripping them away from their families – am I getting this right? Also, this is an issue that people specifically voted in this government to take action on, very liberal use of that word “arbitrary”

Okay, so this only caught my attention because a senior person in the UK government just did a whole spiel about how badly their government is handling the pandemic – name is… Dominic Cummings. That was just days ago, kind of a big deal really. Here’s a quote from that article:

Cummings apologized for not doing more to change the government’s strategy and said Johnson, whom he worked alongside for years, was “unfit for the job” of prime minister.

“It was completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position,” he reflected. “It’s just completely crackers that someone like me should have been in there, just the same as it’s crackers that Boris Johnson was in there.”

…anyway, Boris Johnson is their Prime Minister, and I haven’t seen him respond to anything about this, but now I see he’s been busy

“Bloody furious, but strangely not particularly surprised.” is basically my 2021 motto

Some context if ya didn’t wanna read the linked article

Just wanted to immortalize this sentiment in some way

So our provincial officials are running a campaign pathologizing anyone who has concerns over their response as “anxious” – of course, the premier needs to take it one step further in a talk-show interview by also dismissing all credible critiques as well.

Oh yeah, those pesky “smart people” like the ones who informed numerous countries worldwide on their covid elimination strategies which resulted in their citizens **not** living with restrictions for over a year (… as we have in BC)

May 26, 2021. Incredibly stressful times approach yet again. Restrictions that have successfully brought our hospital counts down from “whelmed” to “we still aren’t doing elective surgeries in the Vancouver area”… are being lifted.

Hey! We got room for more people to get intimate with ICU intubation! Go out there and hug it out before your ICU slot is taken!

Further knock-off effects of the raw amount of disinformation being spread at this time – statements (like: “Covid is Airborne”) heavily backed by many studies worldwide are being flagged as disinformation, and moderators seem to have a difficult time telling the difference. In this particular case, lack of acknowledgement of airborne spread is a major driver for this pandemics continued existence. Oh, by the way, a majority of misinformation spread regarding the pandemic was traced to just 12 sources. My tone may be light, but my emotions are livid.

Note the check-mark next to their name, this is the verified account of an Oxford University Professor

The year is 2021 and my provincial government’s communication strategy includes phrasing public policy in the form of a survey

Aww look at those young people they look like they’re having such a great time

I always enjoy a good zoom-oopsie story

In hindsight I should’ve kept a compilation of these, including the Canadian politician that left their camera running while they accidentally put on a strip show when changing from jogging to “professional” clothes

No dystopian or apocalypse themed movie or book prepared me for this – life is truly stranger than fiction

First thing I saw online was someone filling grocery store bags (had to double-bag, the first bag was leaking) right from the pump – that was in the morning, things escalated quickly

Because no dystopia is complete without a discount will

In the first couple decades of my life I spent growing up in Alberta I had not once seen these flags
Today is May 11th, 2021 – nearly another couple decades since I left that home province

What the fuck, stop polluting my birth province you fucking literal nazi’s and what the fuck is an American confederate flag doing Canada? FUCK.

Just one small example of headlines that feel they belong in satire… but alas, life is becoming harder and harder to satirize

So I clicked on a Facebook advertisement – naturally the sales pitch of a “virtual earth” doesn’t include actual access to a virtual environment… but instead focuses on monetizing virtual regions

Note the 4 choices given someone visiting this site, and how none of them have anything to do with how to actually virtually interact with this “Earth 2” outside of throwing money at it

Y’know, I grew up around adults who would always criticize the government. Weirdly they thought they could solve their problems by just voting in the person whose lies they preferred more. I admit, as a child I didn’t understand how this solved their problems

It’s almost like all those complaints are the root result of public servants not serving the public, but instead serving those who see $1000 as pocket change

Someone paid money so that I would see this ad. Let that sink in.

Saw some amazement that after a full 24hrs+ of horrible press that the BC Government didn’t change their “pop up” strategy of vaccination, some factoids on this particular one:
– Some people had camped out overnight
– At 7:30am an estimated 250~ people were in line
– Knowledge of the site slowly spread on social media until news outlets picked up on it
– Health Authority official channels didn’t acknowledge its existence until line up reached point where…
– … hundreds of people, some who had waited up to 4 hours, told to go home as they were out of vaccines

Some of these days I wonder, am I being dramatic feeling like I’m living through a dystopian nightmare?
Then I see things like this and I have no doubts, just what feels like a bottomless pit of sadness and grief

Disinformation, a personal short-story told in screen-snips

Aww they liked what I said and then followed me! That’s nice

No wait, **that** escalated quickly – from retweeting incredibly harmful conspiracy theories to **organizing protests**

Pay attention to what is being promoted, who is promoting it, and the other things they promote…

So I actually probably wouldn’t of remembered it always but now I will

I looked at every comment on this tweet and I was the least savage by far – this is a government not enabling people to stay home and crush a pandemic-level virus, who encourage people to take Whistler vacations (shocking mass-spread event at… Whistler…), who refuse to acknowledge asymptomatic airborne spread in schools or other workplaces

Disinformation is the reason we can’t have nice things

That’s an obvious direct motive – the less direct motive (generally cause destabilization by raising phantom divisive issues on massive platforms so people yell at each other) is harder to feature in a ‘scrapbook’ snip

It has not been a good year for the world. So many things are happening that if you stopped to think about any individual event and really reflect on it, any single one will be enough to set your innermost essential essence to shrivel up and weep.

Future me, this is where I’d like you to stop and think.

Reported 2000~ deaths **daily**, with estimates that in any given region actual deaths are anywhere from 5x to 100x higher than recorded

Mass cremation sites for dead bodies, no confirmation if those bodies had ever been tested for Covid – certainly no testing after the fact

Kind of related to below, the things organizations (including governments!) are dumping their ad spending on are… insane. Keep scrolling down to see examples of this curriculum the Alberta government is *paying ad money* to convince people their decision is the right decision (this is occurring *after* massive push-back from a large array of educational professionals, including no school willing to pilot their program)

Apparently it’s no longer “The customer is always right”, it’s “Throw money at marketing until you’ve convinced the customer”, and also governments are businesses and we’re their customers because they BUY ADVERTISING SPACE TO SELL US THINGS

Vast amounts of money are poured into disinformation, it then snowballs into crowd-sourced reinforcement as people prefer to believe the comfortable disinformation as opposed to an uncomfortable reality

“Where do these resources come from?” indeed, delivered right to peoples doors

Context: This person was asked on a British “conversation” show LBC, they weren’t aware it was to “debate” someone who signed “The Great Berrington Declaration” and were shocked that the show was even giving that other person a platform

I may tend to really enjoy data but there’s a certain… earnestness to an anecdotal story. I like telling my stories, I enjoy listening to others stories. This is a story that I found had… layers.

I honestly couldn’t believe something as barbaric as conversion therapy was real, I thought it was just a dark-comedy skit from Shameless. It’s unfortunately so real that certain Canadian politicians are arguing for the practice.

This Alberta MLA (Janis Irwin) had the best possible response

Imagine attempting to make a case for conversion therapy and in thus doing consuming a whole bunch of peoples time to tell you to fuck-off… in the middle of a pandemic with many unresolved questions being asked of government on that pesky global crisis.

So Canada’s House of Commons called an emergency meeting to debate whether we should change national strategies from… Covid Coping to Covid Elimination. Things are bad. They’re looking to get much worse before getting any better.

After catching the last bit of the live stream I saw this ad

Yes, just the time to be announcing opening an amusement park, complete with obviously-photoshopped-on masked and I promise you the most dystopian music to an amusement park promotional video you’ll have ever heard

Bonus offer if you bulk purchase tickets to bring even more people to the mass event!

Been having groceries delivered weekly for nearly the entire pandemic at this point (luggin’ a weeks worth of groceries without a car and not using public transit was a massive pain in the butt). Sometime during this pandemic the building we live in “upgraded” the buzzer system, instead of a hard-wired land line to or suite it now buzzes to a cell phone #.

That cell phone # is also the # used to order the groceries and also it’s with Rogers which has a nation wide disruption since the middle of the night yesterday.

Now to figure out what happens when your $200 worth of groceries just kinda disappears cause a major telecom company couldn’t keep critical infrastructure running.

We left a sign by the buzzer to call a phone # that isn’t with Rogers when it arrived – that phone never got called, I went down to see if there was a confused grocery delivery person by the door a couple times, nada

The date is April 19, 2021 – Variants of Concern are still very much a concern, India has fostered a super-mutant variant and is in big trouble while flights from India and Vancouver have been happening every day for months.

Forget all that though, Stay Home because of all this other crazy shit that happens if you go outside. It was a single CBC news article that was quite massive about weekend events that happened in Vancouver, I appreciate this reddit user’s TL;DR:

Note, “Saturday’s homicide” is embedded in there as a reference – guess they figured everyone already knew about that one (someone shot outside a fancy restaurant)

My tolerance for politicians has dramatically taken a nosedive during this pandemic

As a world we are over a year into this. There is so much research tying schools to being massive vectors of transmission. Nevermind that just out of pure logic we know:
– Children rarely get severely ill and rarely show symptoms when infected
– Children *can* get infected
– Asymptomatic humans can spread the virus (studies actually show children have viral loads higher than adults!)
– Schools in BC are poorly maintained, have suffered budget cuts over the years (are looking forward to more budget cuts), and generally have very poor ventilation (seriously, if you’re not a parent ask to do a walk-through of a local school, just take a friggin’ look!)

Anyway, our provincial officials are dead-set on keeping schools open, to the point of obvious data manipulation (including contract tracers explicitly telling parents of children who received exposure notices that their child cannot receive a test for Covid unless they exhibit multiple symptoms)

Today is April 16th, 2021

I’m really really proud of it and am certain future me will enjoy seeing this again

Whoa, something I’ve been waiting for this entire pandemic (maybe it happened already and I missed it) – a Canadian politician (Alberta’s Premier) directly speaking to and denouncing the actions of anti-vaccination groups

Sometimes the things we’re looking for are found in the most unlikeliest of places

If given his position I would be adding the word “motherfucking” between “unhinged” and “conspiracy” – this just one of the many reasons I shouldn’t be in his position

I made a live-tweet during a Throne Speech that got some attention, when I clicked on my Notifications to see what was up… well, look at what was trending

Oh, relevant context: BC’s Public Health Officer just last week said we were “one month behind Ontario” when it comes to how bad a time we’re about to have with Covid

Denying schools are a vector of transmission has an unusually high priority all throughout our Provincial Government

Meanwhile in Ontario… same day! Funny timing, that

Sweden was the poster child for what was called the “Great Berrington Declaration”, which was basically a sociopathic plan to just do nothing and let Covid run through the population in an effort to reach “Herd Immunity” quickly so we can all get back to our “normal lives” as fast as possible

Brazil tried something similar with a much higher population size, we have a deadly variant outbreak in BC here thanks to un-checked spread and rapid mutation in Brazil called the P.1. For the last week 3000~ people are dying per day in Brazil (April 9, 2021), truly heartbreaking

Sweden has the highest deaths per capita right now vs. all of their Scandinavian peers, oh, and that “normal life” they rushed to? Well, we’re a year into this and they never had a “lockdown” but their lives were anything but normal – oh, also they’re suffering from the worst economic impact vs. their peers as well. It really was a lose-lose-lose strategy, so I guess they opted to try a different… uh… PR approach…

So more and more people are noticing our provincial government is doing a poor job, and also that the stakes are quite high

It’s a fairly tense time and I’m spending too much of that time on social media (for further context on why this would pop out to me for 3pm on a Friday, scroll down)

Don’t let this all distract us from the insanity of a proposed Alberta School Curriculum, where Grade 3 Students are being trained to defend placing advertisements for escaped slaves – people seem quite upset about a number of things in the curriculum (like Kindergarteners needing to learn about Mesopotamia) and yet I don’t think anyone with sensibility can actually stop this from being taught in schools and replaced with… oh I dunno, knowledge and skills that match our modern age?

No description available. — “Education? Well this is awkward, when you gave me the task to write this curriculum I thought you said Indoctrination”

BC: “We’re going to hold a press conference after we break 1000 new cases, the majority of which are these pesky Variants of Concern – during that briefing, we’re going to report a very low number of those variants of concern that just 1-hr after the briefing will be invalidated by a much larger number by our own BC CDC public data. We’ll take up our talking time by chronically repeating information until reporters are severely limited during question period. While this will all look somewhat strange, it allows us to justify not increasing restrictions and upsetting the various groups who yell at us all the time threatening more Freedom Marches”

Ontario: “Hold my beer”

Are our politicians playing a game of who can be the worst?

BC has just entered what the government is calling a Covid “Circuit Breaker” – basically, nothing changes for us in this household. Other people won’t be able to dine in restaurants, and most kids should be wearing masks in school. That’s what’s going to change our trajectory from 1000+ cases (it was 500+ last week….) apparently.

I’ve sent a letter to both my MLA and MP demanding our health minster be removed from their job. This is relevant to highlight how I feel my province has been handling the pandemic.

Anyway! Great segue to how Ontario is handling their own problems today.

That sounds pretty strict, alright, let’s see where this takes us

I… I’m not sure… how food and drink changes the intent or behavior of people at that venue or like, how having food around makes Covid less *viral* – maybe it fills up on snacks and gets sluggish?

If I was working for this enormous game industry entity my work would be contributing to this persons paycheck

If this information is accurate it means that 100% of our virus security leaks are due to British Columbians traveling outside of the province and bringing it back – because 0% come from travelers coming *into* BC

Even Nova Scotia had 7 cases from contact with a traveler – that 0 seems really unlikely, but this is also the province that seems to think magically children can’t spread the virus, and where thousands of people are told to isolate due to being part of an exposure event but whom are never tested unless they show symptoms

So a ship got stuck in a canal

March 23rd, 2021
Brazil attempted to aggressively ignore the pandemic, opting for a catastrophic “response” of “just let everyone get it”. So everyone got it. Then they got it again. Now they’re getting it again – and it’s mutated. It’s reported to be much more virulent and much more dangerous to middle-aged people.

Here in BC our government resists testing, so while we’re aware of what they’re calling “Variants of Concern” and we know there’s about 100+ daily being caught, we have no idea what the actual spread is here. Alberta tests though, and > 50% of their new cases are specifically the Variant of Concern that sprouted from and now plagues Brazil.

I put the date up there because this very moment is an incredibly high-anxiety moment, what I’ve snipped for this scrapbook isn’t a best guess, it isn’t some doomsday promise, this is reality for the people of Brazil right now. I feel transported a year back, desperately hoping my friends and loved ones keep safe.

Oh yes, that’s sinking in all right, whether I let it or not

What I want to be doing? Building some games that make me enough money to support my family before I head back into the corporate world in defeat

What I’m actually doing? Probably getting angry at my government on twitter (or an MP/MLA’s mailbox)

I posted that weeks ago from *now* and someone liked it, dawww validation can never come too late

Random sampling of bizarre hatred thrown towards someone who collects data and puts that data in charts

Made sure to include the the date in the image

That escalated quickly. To follow-up the below post, I’ve been getting spammed via news highlights that the rich dude who threw billions of company dollars (note: it wasn’t his own money, this is lost on these reporters who use a single human to represent a corporation) at a cryptocurrency lost anywhere from 13 to 36 billion in personal wealth depending on source of the article. Then today I saw this and… the topic is heating up. It’s one thing for a bunch of “investors” to be conning each other and anyone willing to listen to them, but now they’re forcibly pulling otherwise sensible human beings into the con

Makin’ a quick buck off someone elses work isn’t new to an economic ecosystem that encourages perverse motivations, but we have achieved new heights of transparency around the strategy

As some people in this world get nervous about the collapse of various unsustainable economic systems they’re taking small slices of their wealth and storing it somewhere they hope isn’t effected. Then they’re spending another slice of their wealth to promote others to do the same thing, promising that if they invest their life savings (which they should do! because it’ll all disappear!!) they can skip rungs in the social economic hierarchy and they too won’t have to worry about life paycheck-to-paycheck.
The very fact vast amount of human resources are being spent purely to worry and prepare for these “doomsday” scenarios is yet more evidence that we have the resources to solve a lot of problems people are having today, but instead choose to spend that energy on anxiety over some imaginary wealth scoreboard.

I’m sure someone was very proud of their… clever solution

It was explosives at a gender reveal party (what even is this party? when did that become a thing? get off my lawn) that set most of California on fire in 2020. This just passed my news feed 😦

Been trying to take some downtime from the constant bombardment of horrible things in the world, but I couldn’t let this one slide. Throughout the pandemic the BC Government has pushed advertisements of a particularly dystopian flavor (if the fella hadn’t already passed I’d of thought they contracted out George Orwell to write the script for their “Please go to community centers!” video), and this… I wonder what future me will think of this.

I think I’ve been slowly desensitized to… whatever this is. From the paragraph of a name to the fact this exact product was pushed explicitly to me through whatever machine-learning nonsense they’re using.

Wondering how future me (or friends) will think of this, so leaving it here.

“IDEAL GIFT FOR HER” – oh wow! finding the ideal gift is so hard and they made it so easy!

It’s a Tuesday, welcome to February 2021 – pandemic wise, two new variants are confirmed in our province and spreading rapidly (one dubbed the “UK” variant, the other “African”). Meanwhile, entitled assholes are feeling oppressed, and you know you’re really really oppressed when your show of defiance is… a house party featuring 100 McDonalds cheeseburgers.

“I’m as good at hiding my face from cameras as I am at being a decent human being”

It’s pictures of mostly text

One of the leading narratives around schools this pandemic has been “Children need to be in schools for their mental health”. While I’m sure this is very true in some communities, it seems like when school is brought up as a topic with most of my friends it’s usually associated with some kind of trauma.

It’s gone so far that our provincial health officer and premier have both – on camera – stated that Children do not spread the virus, so schools are safe. This is a lie. On camera. With full confidence. My rage is getting me off-track so I’ll just paste the image.

I won’t give them money to get past their paywall so all I’m left with his this bleak clickbait

My button would have been for a cup of Swiss Chalet Sauce

Oh no. So I looked at a news site (I wanted to read the below article, but not from my phone) and saw this

This only needs to be said if both of these things are true
A: This reckless monstrous profiteering exists
B: People are falling for it and that’s heartbreaking

The words I would apply are significantly less charitable, but I appreciate the sentiment

America has a new president, we watched the video, it was a very fancy inauguration. Despite appearances by celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, and Garth Brooks… this is the person that stole the show for me

Conspiracy nuts are starting to realize they’ve been lied to. That’s also bombarding my social media – unfortunately it’s not all of them, this one (WTF @ the upvote/downvote ratio) seems to be trying to stoke some fires

One of the first provincial ads (supported by the government of BC) I saw after March 2020 (the period of time that the realities of the pandemic started setting in, and people started dying here) was an ad for Tourism BC.
Since then tourism in BC has been pushing hard against pandemic restrictions

The Canadian Atlantic Bubble already coordinated multiple provinces to enforce a provincial ban, but y’know, we need to look into the “legalities” here to stop spreading the virus at the root of a deadly pandemic that has nearly killed 2 million people worldwide in less than a year

“Oh golly gee, compared to all our international peers Canada and even BC in particular is doing very poorly, but y’know what, tourism is just such a constitutional right that those chains of transmission need to just keep on keepin’ on!”

It’s the morning of January 12th and I’m gettin’ ready to shut off the social media tabs as the coffee slowly forces my brain into moving. I think it’s relevant to say that this morning ritual (back in the before-days) used to yield hilarious or heartwarming things that I’d send on over to Angel. These days it’s flooded with… well, this, and instead ends up in this strange scrapbook.

If you started chronologically from the bottom, here’s the follow-up to an earlier post…
…if you’re starting here, spoiler alert

“Help we’re having such a hard time locating these mysterious suspects”

Me: “Didn’t there used to be fun, light-hearted things that could trend on twitter?”
Angel: “Yeah and now it’s dominated around some asshole”
Me: *clicks Explore*
Me: “Ooohhh! Grindr is trending but didn’t make the top trending dealie! At least that should be fun
…scrolling…

You know you acted way out of order when the gay hook-up app bans you

Update: Right now it’s impossible to tell if Grindr was in the original broadcast (but at a different time) with whatever Starplay and V Live are, or if they were photoshopped over Spotify, Twitch, and Youtube. I don’t care enough to check further than googling “did grindr ban trump” and getting a whole bunch of weird related results where the trump administration forced Grinders previous Chinese “owners” to sell to Americans 🤷‍♀️

Vaccines are on their way, we (our household) probably won’t see them and be immunized for another half a year (no essential workers, no healthcare workers, no seniors, etc), so I haven’t been paying too much attention…
…but I have been paying enough attention to see that our province has decided to go against Health Canada and the manufacturers instructions around the second dose. The health officers in my province have decided that a vaccine which takes 2 doses has the second dose delayed so that more people could get the first dose. Kinda glad I’m not the Guinee Pig in this mass experiment.

This person contacted the manufacturers of the vaccine who strongly recommend *not* doing what our province is doing, there’s no data or testing to show if a delayed second shot will work at all or if it would even invalidate the efficacy of the first shot

Due to yesterdays performative coup there’s a dominant topic in this morning’s social media and news. This is basically the big take-away.

Translation: The behavior is supported by the party leaders

Welcome to 2021, Jan 6th

This is the second thing I saw that informed me what was happening, the first was Trade Chat in World of Warcraft

It may be an awkward and confusing coup for everyone involved

The photographer who stuck it out to get crisp shots stole my eye from whatever nonsense they were photographing

Just wanted to point out this same crowd got real angry at pandemic ‘lockdowns’ (Note: in many cases, businesses were asked to close down, there were very few lockdowns in western countries – and absolutely 0 happened in Canada so far)

If you’re going to join an insurrection at *least* be cheerful about it?

A compilation that appeared on my social media

Meanwhile 😦

A significant slice of the tragedy pie from the “reopen the economy” or conspiracy nutbars that encourage spreading the virus is that chances are they themselves do not directly suffer consequences for their actions. They tend to only serve as a link in the chain of transmission to a vulnerable person or encourage others to do so

This is a rare, rare case of direct consequences

For the record, New Zealanders enjoy full-time jobs in person, and many wonderful crowded events – it’s not “economy vs. the virus”, it’s bad policies vs. good policies

It’s been December and if you’re watchin’ for the dates you may notice I’ve stopped contributing to as much in here, that’s due to a very conscious effort to avoid social media (though I do peek in every now and again)

This is what today’s (28th) peeking revealed, the context added after the image. Now back to closing those tabs.

I found this to be a pretty condensed summary of the bombardment lately – it doesn’t get more real-life-super-exploits (and pay-to-win) than this

I promise I don’t go out of my way to look for American news, this was snipped from Twitter and posted on Facebook from someone, at which point I brought it here

Reminder that this is stuff that just crops up, not seeking it out. Started following this person who seems to embody their persona in a show called Brooklyn 99 that Angel and I really enjoyed. Her response is on point.

They’re a party promoting that the pandemic is a ‘democratic hoax’, embracing racism, and are basically okay with people dying if they’re old or poor – but hey, even an entire group holding up values closely aligned with **fictional** **super villains** need a bone thrown their way?
no

This is either
A: Accurate and a portrayal of the most disgusting type of human
B: Embellished to sell a product which is also a portrayal of the most disgusting type of human

Current global count, note – there have already been many studies in the world (in places that got hit bad, like Italy) where deaths are anywhere from 4x to 8x higher than regular looking at average deaths over the last decade during that time period. Covid only accounts for a fraction of those higher-than-average deaths

December 14th, 2020
Speaking of countries who showed the world how to do it right, New Zealand and Australia can party together while thousands of people are dying of the pandemic virus daily in North America.

2020 has not been a good year for a lot of people. A lot of unnecessary hunger, pain, and even death is rampant in many countries (not Australia or New Zealand) due to an argument of putting “the economy” before peoples lives – when you put “the economy” first these are the kind of people who benefit

Related to below – basically a group of politicians is refusing to move forward in Pandemic Relief aid to citizens unless corporations are immune to any covid related liabilities (continued to operate in an unsafe environment resulting in more spread/deaths)
This is the kind of plot point where you expect some super hero to come in and defeat the bad guys, instead all we get is a couple of “renegade” politicians whose own party is working against them

Totally predictable thing happening, zero accountability for the politicians that refused to acknowledge it as a potential problem (not just refusing to acknowledge, but mocking anyone who brings the topic up)

This directly effects a family member who’s one of those (quoting the letter itself) “lowest paid frontline workers”
Note the date. MERRY CHRISTMAS! We’re keepin’ yer Pandemic Pay!
…the “We” in this case, is our provincial government, it’s *their* frontline workers.

On December 3rd I decided to have some fun in this facebook group, special shout-out to my friend Keven who had no idea how many people were awaiting his anonymous response

December 2nd! We made it to the last month of 2020!
… oh no, Alberta why

I just can’t even today

It’s impossible to avoid being made aware that it’s “Black Friday” today, stuff like this is threaded into every internet moment on our slide towards idiocracy

Christmas is approaching! A cozy Christmas with the core household, looking forward too…
…oh wait, what’s this? complaining about your children in the household?

Things like this have been circulating on Angel’s social media in the mom circles. Nevermind that there are a number of highly accredited studies showing that children are critical in the circulation of the virus – no no, these moms have spent the entire pandemic complaining about their children and demanding schools be open.

Thanksgiving approaches in America

To bring context to the below – note, I’m using Positivity as the metric because as cases skyrocket in BC testing is not increasing – check out that number on the right, we’re (per population) half the testing throughput from the rest of Canada. This is BC CDC’s own data.

The reality of this is that we have absolutely no idea what our real infection numbers are, today we have 277 people in the hospital, 58 in the ICU, just over the weekend 17 deaths were reported in BC. If you extrapolate from that (the low % of people who suffer dire consequences touted by anti-pandemic-measure doorknobs) our actual infection cases are dramatically higher than what manages to successfully get caught by tests and reported, and despite current restrictions it is growing dramatically.

So I give you positivity, because when you don’t increase testing the percentage of people who are testing positive is as close as we’ll get to seeing the actual trend. Oh, and that purple, with the highest positivity? My region, the same region as that nail salon below.

Topic continued, won’t anyone think of the nail salons?!

It’s Nov 24th and I’m having an incredibly grumpy day, and then I see this hypocrisy – Canada’s own politicians promoting conspiracy garbage, but also please oh please stop auditing businesses that may have been taking advantage of “free money” (additionally rage-inducing as the same political party has been spreading baseless propaganda about businesses not being able to “keep employees because of government relief money” when in fact, maybe, just maybe, we’re in a global friggin pandemic so maybe no one wants to risk their family members over a minimum wage job?!)

Note: “Conservatives” and “Tories” are one and the same, the party changed their name some time in the past but some people hold on to the old one

While more than half the population of the world is struggling with a pandemic, China (who it hit first) locked it down and stopped transmission. They got to continue their internment camps of millions of Uighurs, continued suppression and indoctrination in Hong Kong, and oh! They’re planning massive space missions.

Oh this is special. To any conspiracy spreader this is only one small reason “The Great Reset” is a conversation topic. We are in the middle of a pandemic that has today verifiably (and the actual number is much higher, many, many unaccounted for deaths orders of magnitude higher than previous years) killed 1,383,353 people in under a year.

Clearly a global problem, that needs coordinated solutions. Testing is one of those methods to help understand a greater picture, understand what actions to take to help lower the spread.

So today in BC for just $75 you too can contribute to that data that could save lives! 🤦‍♀️ (note: Countries that are successfully enjoying low spread and closer-to-what-we’re-used-to-lives just… test their people)

A friendly sign reminding you that masks are mandatory while on the ferry

Elections Canada… why? I mean, I completely registered a business, did my taxes, and managed everything to do with well, me, as a Canadian Citizen online safely and securely and have for years.

In our last federal election we had messages on WeChat and QQ social media offering to pay people to vote for a specific party (not the party that won) – how is that not being addressed while we… brag about manually counting marks on paper by hand like they did back when we didn’t even have color photographs?!

Date: November 17 – and this is something that’s getting more and more attention

So uhm, groups of people (some of who claim to represent very large groups of people) are having very obvious lies called out, so they… all congregate in a safe digital space to spew their garbage without being harassed for it

I guess with religious extremism showing up in the news less we needed some new form of extremism to fill the void?

I censored some of this because I worked with this person for years, and I would’ve never expected, well, this from them (I’m taking you with me on my journey on this one, so it may be tl;dr, sorry not sorry!)

Anyway, I *had* to google this and story checks out, there’s a group of humans that looked at what’s going on around the world and realized, hey, stuff is really screwed up, we need some kind of strategy to recover

Okay, so I found the Context and the Opportunity statements for this “Great Reset” proposition, so it does exist

Err, wealth inequality (one of the biggest problems at large) rapidly escalated over the last couple decades, y’all wanna claim credit for that? Eh, your bed, you lay in it, but I’m starting to see where the conspiracy nuts uh… fuel is coming from

So I kept digging, funny thing about big broad sales-pitches like “The Great Reset” – if you aren’t clear about what that means you leave it open for people to interpret it however they please and run with it. So can I really blame that dude I worked with for his incoherent rant?

I FOUND IT! THE BIG SINISTER… erm… sensibly sinister? agenda? Well, they do have *an* agenda, so I guess that part’s true

Ah, the scrapbook did not exist back when the president of america suggested people find a way to inject cleaning fluids (like bleach) to combat the corona virus – the follow-up was a huge increase of ER patients who had ingested cleaning fluids
Clearly, as a people, we do not learn – at least it’s not bleach (mouthwash to combat a virus that attacks internal organs? C’mon)

The race is on for a vaccine, one claims 90% effectiveness and just today a new one announced 95% effectiveness – so hopefully these brutal anecdotal stories have a light at the end of the tunnel

Aaaand back to the insanity of the world. Coordinated spamming of conspiracy garbage seems to have its eye on Canada now – and no, that video did not mention any kind of “great reset”, it had the word “reset” in it within the context of resetting our efforts to hit 2030 targets for Canada

November 15th, 2020

In front of the white house, November 13th

Different perspective

Nov 11th, won’t anyone think of the tourism industry?! (during a… global… pandemic…)

Further Context – just months after the Pandemic started BC launched a Tourism campaign to get people moving around…

Province refuses to acknowledge aerosolized transmission or that children can spread to other children, put out orders to stop in-home socializing… but also no plan to enforce order (?) while ignoring exponential spread since schools opened

Went to reply to a comment:

Amazon Fulfillment Jobs,

“I’m still wrapping my mind over a proper letter-format comment that doesn’t capitalize mid-sentence i’s.

– Sincerely, an observer”

Except… all comments were deleted before I could! So what I was replying to no longer existed

Finally Nov 10th!
The Secretary of State for America in a news conference just… welp:

And also, while I’m sure that data isn’t scientifically accurate, I’ll forgive it for the rest of the message (bizarre overlap between believing crazy conspiracy theories with support for the old regime)

Follow-up to that 2020 joke about the landscaping company, they pivoted for profit right quick

This is a Canadian news station, I saw it cause Walter (kids step-dad) posted…

Also, optics, not good

…still… Nov 9’th…
(some commenters are pointing out that the optics on firing the head of the country’s defense after refusing to acknowledge the results of an election are… not good, not good optics)