Category: Pandemic Diary

Pandemic Diary, November 17th, 2020: Silently Judging You

Today is officially Day 247 of me working from home from my apartment for my university library system during the pandemic. Or, in this case, not working, as this is my final week of holidays before I go “back” to work. Of course, since I am still at home when I “go to work”, all my days are starting to blur together: weekends, weekdays, holidays, working days. A couple of days ago, I actually had to stop and ask myself what day it was; I had forgotten it was a Sunday!

Social VR and virtual worlds such as Second Life have been my godsend, an opportunity for me to socialize while I remain stuck at home, with Manitoba stuck in a province-wide code-red pandemic lockdown. I now go for days at a time when I never leave my apartment.

This morning I loaded up Vanity Fair and went over to Muddy’s, where I fell into conversation with a man standing by the side of the dancefloor. I was doing what I usually do when I am in a club, right clicking on avatars and reading their user profiles, and he had such hilarious, sarcastic snark in his profile picks about all the things that drive him crazy in Second Life, that I had to instant message him, and we struck up a conversation. (I myself have a list of pet peeves in Second Life.)

And he was wearing a group title which I found quite amusing, so he very kindly invited me to join his private SL group, so I could sport it as well:

Silently judging Vanity Fair is wearing the November 2020 group gift from Graffitiwear, the Autumn Sunrise dress, which comes with a HUD with three different patterns

My recent blogpost, Making Plans on What I Want Done with My Possessions (Virtual and Real) in the Event of My Death, got a surprising number of views, and sparked some interesting discussions on the many Discord servers of which I am a member. I have now identified six people (three in my real life, and three from my social VR/virtual world communities), all of whom will have each other’s name and contact information, in case of any emergency involving me. I now need to draw up a Google Docs document with a list of my wishes and requests in the unlikely event of my death (COVID-19 or otherwise) to share with these six key contacts.

I have also called and emailed again the lawyer whom my financial planner recommended, in order to get the process started on drawing up a will, a financial power of attorney, and a healthcare power of attorney, and I have finally made contact (she apologized for not getting back to me sooner).

Manitoba’s premier, Brian Pallister, is currently taking a nosedive in the opinion polls for his handling of this public health emergency. The coronavirus pandemic is currently raging out of control in the province.

New COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people over the past seven days, showing just how bad Manitoba is compared to the other Canadian provinces (source: CBC)

The biggest newspaper in the province, the Winnipeg Free Press, has been savage and unstinting in its criticism of his performance lately (and frankly, Brian deserves it):

In response to a question about whether he is doing everything he can to control what is, right now, arguably the worst COVID-19 outbreak in any province, the premier actually congratulated himself for bringing in the most stringent pandemic restrictions in the country.

But Pallister should have known that having the harshest virus–control measures is not an accomplishment worthy of applause; it is evidence Manitoba is now teetering on the edge of a public–health disaster.

Outside the “Atlantic bubble,” Pallister crowed, Manitoba is now “leading the country” in pandemic restrictions.

Pallister made this perverse claim citing a story by award-winning Globe and Mail columnist André Picard from last weekend that did, in fact, note that Manitoba currently has among the “toughest restrictions” in the country.

But Pallister should have known that having the harshest virus-control measures is not an accomplishment worthy of applause; it is evidence Manitoba is now teetering on the edge of a public-health disaster.

Bragging about having the toughest pandemic restrictions in the country is like standing over the smouldering remains of a house that just burned down and bragging about how your firefighters have trucks with the best water pressure in the country.

…

As case numbers increase expeditiously and the body count rises alarmingly, he has drifted further away from any suggestion that he or his government played any part in the current mess.

When he’s not overstating his province’s restrictions, he’s claiming (without any hard evidence) that Manitoba is the most generous province in terms of economic supports for businesses. And, after that, he lectures Manitobans on “not being the weak link” in the battle to control the novel coronavirus.

When Pallister is encouraging people to limit their contacts with people outside their households and to wear masks in all public places, he’s certainly not wrong. He’s just the wrong guy to be delivering the message, because he simply doesn’t seem capable of admitting that his government has miscalculated badly on both the magnitude and timing of public-health orders.

…Our low case numbers and deaths in the spring and early summer were clearly more a result of luck than competency. Now that we’re in a real pandemic crisis — one that registers on an international scale of severity — smugness and hubris should be set aside in favour of more decisive responses.

Pallister is quick to rage against any allegation that he or his government are to blame — even partly — for our current predicament. However, before he indulges in another grand mal bout of self-congratulation, he should close his eyes and try to visualize how that plays among the families of all those Manitobans who have died in the current outbreak.

Yes, Brian, like many Manitobans, I am (not so silently) judging you. As far as I am concerned, the next provincial election cannot come quickly enough.

Making Plans on What I Want Done with My Possessions (Virtual and Real) in the Event of My Death

I have been thinking about this topic over the past few days, so I decided to write this blogpost to share some of my thoughts with you, my faithful blog readers.

Irrepressible landlady to the well-known 1920s Berlin historical roleplay sims, Jo Yardley, wrote about it on her blog back in 2017, in a blogpost titled If Someone Vanishes in Second Life: those people in Second Life who just suddenly disappear, leaving all their online acquaintances and friends to wonder what happened to them.

Are they seriously ill? Did they die? Or did they just decide to ghost everybody, abandon their avatar, and set up a new, anonymous one? This sort of thing can and does happen in a virtual world where most users are only known by their avatar name.

I have also reviewed the book titled Living and Dying in a Virtual World: Digital Kinships, Nostalgia, and Mourning in Second Life, by Dr. Margaret Gibson and Clarissa Carden (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which deals with the subject of how SL residents choose to commemorate those avatars/people who have passed away.

In July of 2019, I wrote on this blog:.

According to Statistics Canada, the average life expectancy for Canadian men is 80 years. I am now 55, which means (if I am lucky) that I can expect another quarter-century of life ahead of me.

…

It’s time to be thinking ahead, planning for the future. I still need to draw up a will and a power of attorney, for example. I don’t have a lot of material possessions to leave to other people (my biggest purchases have been my computer and my car). But I do need to set something in place with my final wishes clearly spelled out for my next of kin to follow.

And I am still working on which Second Life avatars I will leave to other people in the event of my untimely death, via my will. You can read the entire saga here, here, here, here, and here on my blog to see how this quest got started! I know it might sound really silly to some of you, but I consider them perfectly valid possessions, and it would please me greatly to know they will still be providing entertainment and enjoyment to others after I am gone. (If you’re interested in inheriting one of my avatars via my will, please contact me and we’ll talk. I still have a selection for you to choose from!) In fact, when the time comes, I may have some Sansar avatars to pass on to others as well (and I am assuming that Linden Lab will set up similar procedures for Sansar as they already have for Second Life). My lawyer is going to have a ball drawing up my last will and testament!

I added:

The important thing is to make plans for the future, but to be flexible and prepare for any eventuality. For example, if I were to be run over by a bus tomorrow, I currently haven’t left any sort of instructions to let people know my wishes concerning my blog and my show (which I would want to be archived for future historians to pore over). I also have an experience called Ryan’s Garden in Sansar, that I would like to be kept in perpetuity as my personal virtual memorial in the event of my passing. I haven’t given anybody else access rights to my blog to post a message in case something should happen to me. I need to set all these things up. Strawberry Singh (whom I admire greatly) wrote an excellent blogpost on these topics, which I recommend you read. You should be thinking about all these things too.

Well, instead of being run over by a bus, I might contract COVID-19 and die. Right now, the coronavirus pandemic is raging out of control here in Manitoba, especially here in the city of Winnipeg, and anything could happen over the next few months. As someone who is older (almost 57), significantly overweight, and who also has asthma, type II diabetes, and hypertension, I am at high risk of a severe, possibly even fatal, reaction if I were to become infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. I take every precaution and follow all the experts’ guidance, but I still worry.

I regret that I have been unable to contact the lawyer whom my financial planner recommended to me, in order to draw up a proper will and a healthcare power of attorney. But we now live in perilous and uncertain times, so I have decided to spend the day today doing two things:

  1. Identifying the key people (both my real life and my social VR/virtual world community) who should have each other’s contact information if the unthinkable happens (real name, telephone number, email, etc.); and
  2. Drawing up a list of my personal wishes, for example, what I want to have done with the RyanSchultz.com blog, my Second Life avatars and other virtual possessions such the Ryan’s Garden world in Sansar, and my real-world possessions as well, in the event of my untimely death. I will also need people to do various tasks, for example putting a message out on social media such as Twitter, and on each of the almost 100 social VR/virtual world Discord community servers I belong to, in order to let the people there know that I’m gone.
My main Second Life avatar, Vanity Fair. I have already contacted Strawberry Singh (now known as Strawberry Linden) and she has agreed to let me bequeath Vanity to her in the unlikely event that anything should happen to me. I take great pleasure in the thought that Vanity Fair will live on after I am gone, and Strawberry will no doubt find it useful to have another avatar available to her as she creates top-notch marketing content for Linden Lab.

I think that doing this will give me some ease of mind, knowing that, in the absence of a will, a number of people will still know what I want to happen to my stuff (both virtual and real) if I should die. In one of my blogposts about my cancer scare two years ago, I wrote:

I…had a nice long chat with my psychiatrist today, and she made me realize that what I am doing here is simply trying to assert some control in a situation where I am not in control. This is apparently a very normal, human response to a situation like a health crisis.

And that is exactly what I am doing here: trying to assert some control in a situation where I am not in control. Obviously, I will not be blogging all the details of what I decide here, but after I have done this, I will tell you what I have decided to do about my blog in the case of my death. All the rest will be shared only with those key people I have identified in Step 1 above.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Although I suffer from a chronic form of clinical depression, I am not suicidal. I have every intention of living that extra quarter-century to age 80, and beyond! I have to live to witness and document what happens next in the ever-evolving metaverse! But I do need to get some practical matters settled. I hope you understand. Please don’t worry about me. I am taking good care of myself and coping with the current situation as best I can.

As always, stay healthy, stay sane, and stay strong in these trying times.

Pandemic Diary: November 14th, 2020

I saw this on my Twitter feed; so funny and so, SO true! (image source)

Today is official Day 244 since I began working from home in self-isolation for the University of Manitoba Libraries. I have attended a lot of virtual meetings in that time (mostly in Microsoft Teams, but also in Zoom and Cisco Webex) and I just howled with laughter at the image above, which appeared on my Twitter feed a couple of days ago. I need all the belly laughs I can get lately.

The latest news update from the province is grim: Another 15 Manitobans died today, a new record. The current five-day COVID-19 test positivity rate is 12.4 per cent provincially and 13.1 per cent in Winnipeg—the highest level yet. At Victoria General Hospital, just a stone’s throw from where I live, the outbreak has expanded to a new section of the hospital, and as of today, 42 patients and 38 staff there have tested positive for COVID-19.

And yet, unbelievably, there are still covidiots out there, who feel that their personal freedoms (and their rights to go shopping and to church) are being infringed upon with the current restrictions being placed upon Manitobans.

Yes, we have out anti-maskers here in Manitoba; in fact, there is an anti-mask rally taking place today in the Mennonite Bible Belt town of Steinbach, south-east of Winnipeg, where the local hospital is already so overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients that it is treating patients in their cars. The Winnipeg Free Press reports:

As anti-maskers were preparing to rally in Steinbach, the community’s hospital was reportedly being overrun with COVID-19 patients.

It became so hectic Friday, some patients were being triaged in their own private vehicles, because of a lack of space in the Bethesda Regional Health Centre emergency department, the Manitoba Nurses Union said.

CTV News reported on the anti-mask rally:

Hundreds of Manitobans gathered in Steinbach, Man. to protest COVID-19 restrictions implemented across the province, which led to at least one of the rally’s speakers being handed a $1,200 ticket for violating the very orders they were protesting.

On Saturday afternoon, an estimated 500 people gathered for a ‘Hugs over Masks’ car rally in Steinbach, a city that is currently experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases. According to provincial data, the Southern Manitoba city has 263 active cases and has reported 14 deaths – the highest number of any area in the Southern Health region.

Anti-mask rally held in the Mennonite Bible Belt town of Steinbach today (Source: CTV News/Danton Unger): no social distancing and not a face mask in sight
Another shot of the protesters at the anti-mask rally in Steinbach (source: Austin Grabish/CBC)

The situation here is starting to become surreal.

Oh yeah, and in the middle of all this, did I mention that I might be going on strike? The University of Manitoba Faculty Association (which represents 1,200 professors, instructors, and librarians) recently voted 80% in favour of strike action in an online poll.

Nigaan Sinclair, a First Nations professor at the University of Manitoba and the head of the Department of Native Studies, writes in an editorial in today’s Winnipeg Free Press:

Unless an agreement is reached between the University of Manitoba and its faculty association this weekend, the institution will face its third strike in history, on Monday.

As of Friday, negotiations were continuing with the help of a mediator: a hopeful sign. If talks break down, rotating picket lines, socially distanced rallies, honk-a-thons and online campaigns will begin Monday. It will be a strike like no other in Manitoba history.

Yet, faculty association members — instructors, librarians, and professors like me — don’t want a strike. Students definitely don’t want it, either. By all accounts, U of M administrators don’t want a strike.

No one wants this work stoppage, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So why might it happen?

In the U of M’s 143-year history, strikes have happened twice — in 1995 and 2016. If it happens, this will be the second strike under Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservative government. So, this is all on Pallister.

Four years ago, the 23-day strike was held despite faculty and administration agreeing to a small pay increase and commitments to address workload and protect jobs. While the agreement was not perfect, it was enough to get the university running again.

But Pallister sabotaged the negotiations. He commanded the university to mislead the faculty association and withdraw salary increases. This resulted in the university negotiating in bad faith, originally offering a seven per cent pay increase over four years and then – almost overnight – offering two years of zero per cent, a 0.75 per cent increase and a one per cent increase over the last two. Without this, there would likely have been no strike.

Later, after Pallister’s interference came to light, the Manitoba Labour Board forced the university to pay faculty members $2.4 million in compensation.

…

So here we are, on the cusp of a strike no one wants, at the behest of a premier who seems dead set against the public sector.

…

Pallister wants to cut public-sector jobs, salaries, and working conditions, period. He’s using the pandemic as an excuse.

I was on sick leave/long term disability for the treatment of a serious clinical depression during the 2016 strike, but I vividly remember walking the picket lines for three weeks during the 1995 strike, at one of the entrances to the Fort Garry campus, in the middle of a bitterly cold Canadian prairie winter.

I am significantly overweight, and have asthma, type II diabetes, and hypertension, all of which put me at a high risk of a severe, possibly even fatal, reaction if I were to become infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. I support a strike, but I will not be doing ANYTHING that will puts me at risk, and that includes walking on the picket line. If that means I do not receive strike pay, then so be it; I have sufficient savings to live off of for a month or two, if it comes to that.

We should know by Sunday night whether or not we are going on strike, so I just have to sit and wait.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ, what an absolute fucking mess.

Pandemic Diary, November 12th, 2020: Manitoba Lockdown

Shoppers lined up outside the Garden City Walmart on Remembrance Day to purchase goods prior to the enactment of new restrictions in Manitoba. (source: CBC)

The CBC reports:

When you look at the latest pandemic indicators, Manitoba is struggling to contain the spread of COVID-19.

On Wednesday, the province reported a record number of daily COVID deaths (nine), a record number of people in hospital with the disease (218) and a record percentage of tests coming back positive (10.7 per cent).

The total number of COVID-19 deaths in Manitoba has doubled since Oct. 26 — a mere 16 days ago.

Intensive care unit capacity is almost maxed out. Health-care workers are getting infected with COVID-19 and two have died.

Contact tracing is backed up anywhere from days to weeks. Provincial epidemiology can no longer pinpoint how and where COVID-19 is spreading.

Timeline of Manitoba’s COVID-19 cases (source: CBC)
Monthly COVID-19 deaths in Manitoba (source: CBC)

Meanwhile, my employer, the University of Manitoba, has imposed its strongest set of on-campus restrictions yet, including the use of three-layer facemasks and eye protection when unable to practice social distancing (there have been a total of 29 positive COVID-19 cases at the University since the beginning of the academic year):

ON-CAMPUS ACTIVITIES: 

  • The wearing of 3-ply, disposable masks is mandatory on all UM campuses for all academic and research activities. Masks will be distributed in the situations for which they are required; a mask should be worn at all times on UM grounds. Further, unit supervisors will communicate directly with employees regarding the need for these masks to be worn, and will provide these masks if required. 
  • All work that may done remotely must be done remotely.  
  • Employees accessing UM campus(es) must be reduced as much as possible – only essential activities should take place on campus.  
  • Employees accessing UM campus(es) to be reduced to a maximum of 20 per cent. 
  • Individuals are encouraged to limit their time on campus(es) as much as possible. 
  • Cancellation or postponement of all in-person discretionary activities (either being contemplated or previously approved) until at least January 2021. 
  • Closure of all but absolutely essential common spaces and lunch spaces; all other UM spaces will be closed. A reduced number of study spaces will remain open. 
  • Eye-protection (shields or goggles) are recommended for all laboratory work or in situations in which 2-metre physical distancing is not possible. 
  • All UM sport and recreation facilities will be closed. 
  • The University Centre Pharmacy and the Fort Garry Bookstore will be reduced to 25% of normal capacity. 


RESEARCH: 

  • Suspension of all research involving human participants. 

The University of Manitoba has already announced that the upcoming winter term (January-April 2021) will be conducted almost entirely online and remotely, the same as the current fall term.

While things are certainly bad here in Manitoba, they are still nowhere near as bad, compared to the grim numbers of COVID-19 infected and dead in the United States. The situation in North Dakota and South Dakota, immediately to the south of us, is particularly grave (and yet, neither Republican-governed state has issued a facemask mandate). North Dakota nurses have rejected a recent government decision to allow hospital staff who test positive for COVID-19 to stay on the job.

All the major news media are rebuking Donald Trump for his stunning abdication of leadership as he and his craven team of flunkies fight against a clear election loss to Joe Biden, or assisting in any way in a respectful, orderly transition:

President Donald Trump had predicted in almost every campaign rally that the media would stop talking about the coronavirus pandemic the day after the election. But as it turns out, no one is ignoring the worsening tragedy more than the President himself.

Instead of taking charge as the country plunges deeper into the worst domestic crisis since World War II, Trump has disappeared inside the White House, saying nothing on camera since he baselessly claimed a week ago that the election was being stolen from him by President-elect Joe Biden.

He’s spending time with advisers, not strategizing on how to tame the out-of-control health emergency but seeking a path to win an election already declared lost. He’s also found time to purge the top leadership of the Pentagon, and with few appointments on his public schedule appears to spend his days watching news coverage and tweeting misinformation about voter fraud.

In essence, Trump, his family and his advisers are spending all their energy desperately trying to save a job — the presidency — that he appears to have no intention of doing in any meaningful sense.

History will damn Donald Trump and his administration for their mistakes, misdeeds, and inaction during what will be the worst surge of the coronavirus pandemic crisis yet in the United States, leading to untold suffering, misery, and death among Americans.

I’ve posted this image before, but it bears repeating…

Meanwhile, I am escaping messy, painful reality again today (the first official day of Manitoba’s emergency code-red pandemic lockdown), by spending most of my time in various social VR and virtual worlds (and, of course, writing about them on this blog).

My little hobby provides me with an outlet for socializing while stuck in my apartment during lockdown, when we are all urged to stay home by various levels of government in an effort to flatten the curve and avoid overwhelming our hospitals and healthcare system. Creating and styling new avatar looks as inexpensively as possible puts me in a state of positive mental flow, and it gives me a feeling of pride and accomplishment (no matter how small).

Shopping for fabulous free fashion finds for my small army of Second Life alts also helps me pass the time when I am bored (I often do it before I turn in for the night). I still firmly intend to bequeath as many of them as possible to other people via my will when I pass on, so I figure, why not add to their inventories? 😉

Before the pandemic hit, I used to visit places like Second Life to experience the unusual, the exotic, and the fantastic: those places which could never exist in the real world. Fairyland forests. Space stations. The Old West. Victorian steampunk. Blade Runner-esque urban noir environments, where the rain comes pouring down.

But nowadays, instead of teleporting to impossible worlds, I am using Second Life to visit virtual recreations of mundane places in which I have not set foot since the pandemic started. Places like the inside of supermarkets, for example:

Nostalgic visit to a SL supermarket
The produce section: I haven’t been in one since March!

I have not set foot in any retail establishment since I began working from home in self-isolation in my apartment for my university library system on March 16th, 2020 (except for two trips to my local drug store, one to get my flu shot and a second one to stock up on my favourite brand of shampoo). Today is officially Day 242.

All my grocery shopping is done online through the Walmart website, where are I schedule a date and time for grocery pickup. I drive to my nearest Walmart, I park in one of the designated parking spots for grocery pickup service, and someone wearing a facemask loads my groceries into my car while I stand a fair distance away, wearing a facemask myself. The pharmacy delivers all my prescriptions to my home. And I have no need or desire to visit any shopping malls (in fact, I gave my mother and stepfather, who are both in their eighties, a very stern lecture when I learned that they had gone for a walk through Polo Park Shopping Centre earlier this summer, just to get out of the house).

I am remaining focused on maintaining my mental health, which means that I am doing things that make me happy, like writing for this blog or visiting Sansar, Sinespace, or Second Life (I am spending a lot of time lately at Bray’s Place). Every so often I write up a cranky blogpost when I am a bad mood, like yesterday’s rant about the Futurist Conference taking place “in” Decentraland (for which I have since apologized). I still have lots of books to read (paper and digital), and I still have lots of cleaning to do around my apartment, among other chores.

And I am still spending a lot of time, especially in the evenings, watching Netflix on my iPad, either perched in front of my Windows desktop, sitting at my kitchen table, or lying on my sofa. I have moved on from gorging on the post-apocalyptic, science fiction, and zombie apocalypse fare, and I am now watching a lot of crime dramas.

I just finished binge watching Broadchurch over the past week, and I can recommend the TV series highly. It was some of the best TV I’ve seen this year: a gripping crime drama featuring two bickering detectives, taking place in a seaside U.K. village, with a rich cast of well fleshed-out characters that you genuinely grow to care about over the three seasons of the show’s run (from BBC, on Netflix).

And, having finished Broadchurch, I am now watching another British crime drama, Retribution, about the investigation of a murder of a newlywed couple in Scotland.

I have to say that I am definitely getting my money’s worth from my Netflix subscription! Netflix just has so much more content to choose from than rival services such as Amazon Prime, Crave, and Apple TV.

I had a subscription to Amazon Prime last year, but I cancelled it because I didn’t find the breadth of content I was expecting (although I may renew just so I can catch up on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). I joined Crave (a Canadian streaming service) just so I could watch the final seasons of Game of Thrones (since G.R.R. is apparently never going to finish the series of novels upon which they are based, and I wanted to know how it all ends). But after that, I didn’t find much else I wanted to watch, so I unsubscribed earlier this year.

And I got a free one-year Apple TV subscription when I bought my iPhone earlier this year. Again, after watching The Morning Show and the alternative-history space drama For All Mankind, there wasn’t a lot of other content I was interested in, so I plan to let my subscription lapse rather than renew it.

For my LGBTQ content, I rely on two relatively inexpensive subscriptions to OUTtvGo (a Canadian service) and Wow Presents Plus (for their RuPaul’s Drag Race shows, including the recently concluded Drag Race Holland). I cannot get enough drag TV! As I have said before, RuPaul’s Drag Race is one of the things keeping me sane in this dumpster-fire year. (And yes, I am still doing digital drag in Second Life.)

Stay healthy and stay sane!

Photo by Tai’s Captures on Unsplash