Sunday night, which means it’s time for another fast-forward through a new workweek.

I’m not sure what I’d do without video games as a coping mechanism. Last night, I stayed up till 4am to finish the XCom-2 game I’d mentioned earlier. (I hadn’t anticipated the ending to go for quite so long.) Today, I finally popped open Borderlands-3, which I got a month ago and was saving for a rainy day. (Incidentally, what’s up with all this rain? It still hasn’t snowed, and this might be the warmest non-Florida November I’ve ever had.) I ended up playing it the whole day, with a small interlude for my cheat-day pizza. Fun game: the cartoonish graphics and the goofy humour are just like in the prequels.

I have a pretty addictive personality: give me something sufficiently open-ended (like an open-world video game or a limitless hobby), and I’ll dive right into it. Typically, I allow myself just one or two new games per year, precisely because I know how much of my free time they take up. This year is a bizarre reversal: I want and need to spend my time doing something, anything, to deliberately fast-forward through time. I’m trying not to delude myself about vaccine availability: my working assumption is March 2021. Realistically, it may be April-June: after all, I’m not a medical worker and not in any risk group, so I’ll be the last to get my vaccination – and rightfully so. So, yeah, video games… Video games and learning languages and exercising and maybe reading (or at least flipping through) every book in my fairly sizable library. What a strange time, this lockdown.

In covid news, we’ve got some weird developments right here in the Greater Toronto Area. I know I talk a lot of smack about the US on this here blog, but Canadians are just as capable of doing stupid things fast and with gusto. A self-proclaimed “civil liberties group” called The Line Canada invades a different little Ontario town every weekend. A week ago, it was Aylmer: that town of 7,000 got invaded by 2,000 angry morons who protested lockdowns and restrictions. This weekend, it was a town of St.Thomas – just as small, but with 250 protesters this time around. That didn’t stop them from disrupting a remembrance ceremony, though. What a juxtaposition: a bunch of overly privileged marching morons invading the solemn ceremony of war veterans… We really do live in a South Park episode, don’t we?

And last night, the police in Brampton (another town near Toronto) had to break up two separate crowds with hundreds of Diwali celebrants. They gathered outside their temples, presumably not maintaining the six-foot distance, and definitely in violation of the local covid guidelines. There was a surge of cases after the Canadian Thanksgiving in mid-October. There might be another surge due to Diwali. There’ll almost certainly be one due to the US Thanksgiving. (At least the US/Canadian border is still closed.) And then there’s Christmas… Somehow, folks aren’t buying my appeals to cancel the holidays this year and celebrate them 110% harder (with interest) next year. Heh.