Saturday night live blogging, whoop-whoop.

Another quiet weekend day. It’s curious that the pharmacy store across the street was pretty packed today, even though they have only one aisle of food and frozen food. (I ran out of hair pomade for my video meetings, and had a hankering for a frozen pizza.) That’s not the worst logic, since all the major stores are probably even more full than ever before. On the upside, I got a lot more proficient with using a self-checkout machine. (The machines have big plastic barriers between them now; that’s relatively new.)

Red Dead Redemption (2010 vintage) continues to amuse and amaze. Seth, the Gorlum-like character who loots cadavers for a living, is a fascinating character the likes of which I haven’t seen a lot in fiction. Kudos to the game’s writers and voice actors.

It feels so damn good to do nothing at all, just leisure with a side of self-guided education. (About 167 days in a row on DuoLingo thus far. C’est magnifique!)

In covid news, San Francisco is joining the rest of California in its curfew after a 265% increase in covid cases over the past month. Their curfew will go from November 30th through December 21st, and will be between 10pm-5am. It’ll be accompanied by all the other strict restrictions on businesses, gatherings, etc.

…I’ve been thinking about the Aztecs lately. I remember being a kid, reading about their culture, and wondering how on earth their society could function, logistically and morally, when they’d sacrifice hundreds or even thousands of their own people at a time? (Hey, what can I say, I was a weird kid.) The whole concept of slaughtering an entire town’s worth of people just to placate some god was inconceivable to me. Well, I think I got it now… Covid has been in the US less than a year. At this point, it kills over a thousand Americans per day. Sometimes over two thousand. At some point this winter, maybe even over three thousand per day. And people are fine with it. It has become normalized. There is no stimulus package, no coordinated federal response, no sense of urgency and unity – nothing of the sort. There are many others like myself who take this very seriously, and then there are those who actively and maliciously oppose and protest any protective measures. And there are those who are ambivalent: they’ll wear a mask to get inside a store, but still travel to their elderly parents or go clubbing.

If you’re reading this in the future, if you haven’t lived through 2020, this may not make sense. Hell, this barely even makes sense to me now, and I’m actually here. (Unfortunately.) But this is what the proudest country in the world has come to in less than a year: de facto large-scale human sacrifices, with many more to come. The Aztecs weren’t incomprehensible weirdos, they were just like us: human, corruptible, adaptable, and capable of rationalizing even the most gruesome atrocities. Gene Rodenberry was wrong: at its core, the fundamental human nature doesn’t change.

Stay safe, folks.