Grigory Lukin.com

Friday night.

Someday, decades from now, somebody will tell me how much they envy all the alone time we all got during the covid pandemic. I like to think that I’ll just smirk, shake my hand, and say “You wouldn’t understand.” In reality, I’ll probably just stare at them and walk away without a word. The way each week flies by… I wrote about it many times before, and I’ll never be able to fully express just how weird that is.

Last night, I finally got enough motivation to sit and watch a two-hour movie Netflix, even though I cheated and started browsing Twitter halfway through. It was a South Korean sci-fi flick called Space Sweepers, about a group of morally ambiguous space scavengers who try to do the right thing. A bit like Firefly, and a lot like a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop. It takes about 20 minutes to fully get into the movie, but the payoff is well worth it. Highly recommended, two thumbs, five stars, yada yada yada.

It took me five consecutive evenings, but I finally defeated a particularly difficult mission in the original Tropico game I started playing about a week ago. The mission is simple on its surface: retaliate against your former homeland by growing and selling $2 million worth of cigars within 50 years. Early on, you get several choices: whether to bribe a cigar magazine in exchange for charging higher prices, and whether to use chemical fertilizer that would produce more tobacco but destroy your environment. I kept saying “no” to the second question, and I kept failing the mission despite all my efforts. It looks like that was by design: the game is too subtle to say it out loud, but the only way to accomplish the mission is by being a bad guy: poisoning your own island in pursuit of the profit. The environmental damage sets off social unrest, attempted coups, etc, which leads to more questionable decisions like rigging the elections in your favour, blatantly bribing your own officers, etc. What a fascinating game… It’s easy to disregard games that came out 20 years ago, but they were brilliant and engaging in their own way, and at least in this case, they’re more interesting than almost anything that comes out now.

Current boredom levels: making beep-boop noises when pressing buttons on my laptop. (Seriously, how is that not an actual feature?)

New boredom distraction: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. This book is about a lonely brainiac who discovers a chance to explore all the paths not taken, all the potential futures stemming from her life. The premise reminds me a lot of one of my all-time favourites, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. So far, the beginning is rather engaging. That should help fast-forward through an entire day – maybe two if I pace myself, eh.

In covid news, premier Ford is thinking of reopening Ontario – at least in parts, and starting with schools. They’re scheduled to reopen on February 16th, even though the province-wide will remain in effect. (If that makes no sense, don’t worry – nobody here can figure out that logic either.) If parts of Ontario, such as some of Toronto’s many suburbs, get their restrictions lifted, that’ll just encourage everyone else to drive extra 30 minutes out of their way to enjoy the newly reopened restaurants, hair salons, etc. All the local health professionals are extremely unhappy about this turn of events, and trying every argument they can to get the local government to change their minds. (So far, they haven’t succeeded.) The consensus is that an early reopening will get us hit with the third wave of covid, especially since the B117 variant is out there and spreading. This reminds me an awful lot of the Tropico mission, except I can see zero incentive for someone to be so villainous against their own people in real life. Is the gratitude of small-business owners really worth this?..

Stay safe, y’all.

Thursday night.

My fellow Torontonians on reddit were discussing what random hobbies they’ve developed during this whole pandemic mess. I started typing and got a little carried away… Heh. I guess I’ve done a bit more than I thought.

Here is the whole thing in its entirety in lieu of yet another boring recollection of an unremarkable day:

I’ve tried so much stuff in my 11-month lockdown…

• Read a bunch of sci-fi and pop science books;
• Played Stardew Valley twice, for 200 hours total;
• Learned a fair bit of French before stopping. (The pronunciation got a little too hard haha)
• Tried to learn Vietnamese on DuoLingo before stopping. (Their Vietnamese module isn’t very good – no pronunciation checks, etc.)
• Started learning Spanish on DuoLingo and still going 9 months later.
• Cancelled my summer vacation in Montreal and went on a looooong roadtrip around Ontario (3,200 km) to explore abandoned mines. Collected a bunch of shiny minerals. 🙂
• Tried learning harmonica (a gag gift from years ago) before getting bored and giving it up.
• Bought an Instapot and fell in love with it. (It can do so much, so fast! And so easy to clean! 🙂 )
• Started weightlifting with dumbbells before giving it up a few months later. I still do bicep curls every day, though.
• Bought a whittling set on Amazon before realizing that soft wood is pretty hard to find.
• Moved to my own little rental Studio of Solitude after my landlords decided to disregard every single covid guidance.
• Researched the hell out of people who successfully hacked lotteries in the past. I found some very interesting patterns in local scratch-off tickets but had to end the project after realizing they wouldn’t let me return unscratched tickets. Heh. (Broke even on the whole project, though.)
• Put my years of study into practice, put together a portfolio of very underpriced stocks in May, and it’s gone up by 168% since then. 🙂 (No, that’s not a typo. 168%) I’m much closer to early retirement now…
• Submitted my PR application, got invited to apply, and currently waiting for their final decision. (The 6-month point was a week ago… Patience is a virtue, eh?)
• Got briefly obsessed with the idea of collecting scrap metal as a profitable hobby. Got dissuaded from it when I realized that a) homeless people rely on that for their living, and b) I had no idea how to even begin to take apart an actual kitchen stove that someone left on the sidewalk near my place.
• Realized I’d never cut it as a hermit. (And never make it as a wise man either.)
• Started a daily blog where I write a bit about what’s going on in my life and a bit about the current status of the pandemic. It’s pretty much the only thing that helps me keep track of the passage of time since I’ve been working from home since last March.
• Signed up to join the local Search & Rescue organization – finally, a chance to do something objectively good instead of just self-isolating to help stop the virus from spreading.

I’m probably forgetting a few things, but these are the main ones. 🙂

Wednesday evening.

Aside from this day’s designation being aesthetically pleasing, it’s just another Wednesday, just another week, just another month, soon to be just another year of the pandemic… Sometimes I wonder just how much time I spent on this blog series. Other times, I’m kind of glad I’ve kept it going: it forces me to think and keep track of events, no matter how small. If not for this weird daily ritual, I think I would’ve lost track of time altogether, eh.

Today’s highlight on the news was the continuing coverage of Trump’s second impeachment trial. Apparently, they showed some never-before-seen videos of the mob storming the Capitol. I didn’t watch: I’m well aware how bad the whole thing was, how close it came to succeeding, and how low the odds of a senate conviction are. (It requires two-thirds of the senators to vote in favour, I believe. Some of those voting had been involved in the attempted coup’s incitement.) Meanwhile, there are sob stories from the domestic terrorists who got identified and caught: with the help of their lawyers, they’re releasing statements saying they’re very sorry and made a mistake. (Which ended up getting multiple people killed.) There’s a particularly strange article that claims most of the 1/06 domestic terrorists had financial problems in the past. Funny: I was broke for years at one point, and never did develop the urge to overthrow the government.

It’s a dumpster-fire. If Trump isn’t convicted, and he likely will not be, it’ll be an even bigger dumpster-fire. The footage of this unprecedented impeachment trial will fuel thousands of future dissertations, though, so there’s that. (Unprecedented in that there had never been another president who tried to overthrow his own government.)

Aaaaanyway… My online broker, Ally (hitherto TradeKing, hitherto Zecco) finally responded to me, somewhat, about their glitch two weeks ago. (All it took was 3.5 hours on the phone since last Friday!) They claim there was so much trading activity on that Gamestop Wednesday that they couldn’t submit all of it to their clearinghouse at the end of that business day. Because of that, they claim, so many things from that day got so messed up, including the cost basis of six investments I made with my Gamestop gains. It’s been two weeks, and nothing has been fixed. They’ve promised to try to fix it if I give them just two more weeks. That really is ridiculous… On the off chance you’re reading this and thinking of dipping your toes into the investing world – stay the hell away from Robinhood, Ally, and many others. This is just a shout into the void, I know, but still – feels good to vent a bit.

In covid news, the CDC has updated its official mask recommendation. Now they officially want people to wear double masks to ensure their face is as safe as possible. (I’m a trend-setting trailblazer! Heh.) Dr Fauci had been spotted wearing double masks in the past, even before this guidance came out. And to think, merely a year ago the official message was “masks don’t work, please don’t wear them” – with the hidden intent of tricking people so there’d be more masks available for the medical personnel. (Anti-maskers still whip that out when they get rhetorically cornered. Me, I just find the whole 180-degree turnaround to be darkly amusing.) I hope my new home, which has far fewer coup attempts, will adopt the same guidance: Canada is still at least six months away from mass vaccinations, so any preventative measure will help.

Stay safe, y’all.

Sunday night.

I tried and tried, but I just couldn’t get into that Vicious book (by V.E.Schwab) I mentioned a week or two ago. I stopped at the 53% mark. The first chapter was excellent, but the rest felt like a by-the-numbers drawing exercise to get from there to the end point, whatever it might be. As a connoisseur of supervillain fiction, I demand better villains, not an emotionally stunted guy obsessed with revenge or a mildly religious guy who becomes a mass-murdering zealot overnight. Meh. There are better ways to write bad guys.

In other procrastination news, after giving Stardew Valley about 101 hours of my life, I feel like I’ve achieved almost everything that game has to offer. My little farmer guy has a prosperous farm that’s routinely harvested by weird magic creatures. A family with a robot-tinkering wife and two creepy kiddos. A magic staff to teleport back and forth as needed… There just doesn’t seem to be much of a point to continue with that.

New distraction: my giant archive of Steam video games that I’ve downloaded over the years but never quite played. (I’m really tapping into the reserves here, eh.) The original Tropico game came out 20 years ago, and the graphics look quite dated by now, but the humour is still there, as is the challenging gameplay. It’s a construction/management simulator where you play as a third-world dictator with your own little island. It’s set in the 1950s and bears more than a passing resemblance to Cuba. Heh. It was a fine way to fast-forward through the evening, and that game alone has at least two weeks’ worth of missions to play through. I believe I got it for $5 or so. Talk about great bang for your buck!

In covid news, I’m about to take a huge risk. The local search&rescue group I mentioned earlier, OVERT, requires all applicants to have a valid First Aid/CPR certificate. Mine expired over a year ago. Six days from now, on Saturday, I’ll take a day-long course on that topic. The course itself isn’t challenging, but I’ll be surrounded by dozens of living, breathing people. The sign-up form has the standard “code of honour” disclaimer asking people to avoid coming in if they have symptoms, or might have been exposed to someone with symptoms, etc. I hope everyone that applies to will do so. And yet the risk remains… Aside from xgf’s socially distanced outdoor birthday party in August, where only five people attended, this will be my first social event of any kind in about six months. It’s a calculated risk: if I get through the class without getting sick (and it’s unclear how many people will be there: could be five, could be 50), I’ll be able to join the local rescue group. That’ll make this doomed year a whole lot more enjoyable.

One risky day in exchange for a chance to be a good guy once again and do something objectively good after almost a year of hiding out. (Which is all the good a regular person can do when a highly contagious virus is making its rounds.)

Should be fun.

Saturday night.

I dreamed I was a kid in school again, and that I’d lost my mask. There were no spares: by the time I went home and back to school, I missed several classes, and that was a big deal. That sounds like a not particularly subtle reminder from my subconscious that losing over a year of my life to this pandemic is no bueno.

It’s still below freezing outside, and there’s no sun. No point in wandering about parks when it’s both gloomy and cold enough to make it uncomfortable, so this weekend’s big excursion (if only to keep the car battery alive) was to a different grocery store a mile away. Exciting, I know. It’s wild to see hermetically sealed baby carriages pushed by protective parents… A few years down the road, we’ll find out if little kids got affected at all by seeing so few faces during the first year of their life.

I spotted a homeless-looking man who digs through this building’s recycling bins in the backyard and picks out the beer cans and glass bottles. It’s not just him: there’s an entire urban ecosystem, with people scavenging for recycling materials. I hadn’t quite been aware of that when I got so excited about the recycling idea a couple of weeks ago. In light of what I know now, taking and capitalizing on things that could’ve gone to someone in actual need (as opposed to a very early midlife crisis) would be downright unethical. Well, that, and I don’t want to get shanked in a hobo knife-fight. (That is not a good way to go.) And besides… A few days ago, during a lunchtime walk, I spotted an actual stove left on the sidewalk, free for the taking. There it was: a large kitchen appliances, all metal and chrome, just waiting to be disassembled and recycled. (Or fixed and resold, I suppose.) It kind of felt like the universe was mocking me: giving the single biggest piece of metal one can find in one’s home and asking, “Well, what now?” There was nothing I could’ve done with it even if I wanted to. It was gone the next day, scavenged and recycled by someone who does that out of necessity, not out of lockdown-induced boredom.

My hair has gotten long enough that it conceals my ears.e

In covid news, yesterday the US senate passed a budget resolution for the $1.9 trillion covid stimulus package. (That’s a lot of dollars, y’all.) It would include things like grants for restaurants, as well as $1,400 checks (not the promised $2,000) that would go only to those whose pre-pandemic income was sufficiently low. The exact threshold hasn’t been agreed upon, but just the very fact that it’s being discussed… It’s madness. Even if someone were making $100,000 before the pandemic, if they lost their job they’d also be pretty broke and desperate for cash by now. The next election is still 21 whole months away: if Democrats actually fought for those promised $2,000 checks (monthly, not a one-off), that wouldn’t have hurt their re-election chances almost two years from now. It’s almost as if they’re trying hard to appear all conservative and frugal to avoid angering their Republican counterparts. (The same counterparts who helped set off the attempted coup and tried to get them all killed almost a month ago.) Ho hum. And for posterity’s sake, I just want to note that all 50 Republican senators voted against the covid resolution. The 50-50 tie had to be broken by vice president Harris.

In other news, it’s Superbowl tomorrow. It’ll be held live, but with a smaller crowd than usual: there’ll be 7,500 vaccinated healthcare workers who will attend for free, and 14,500 fans who paid for their tickets. There’s a fun legalese clause called “Fan Health Promise.” It amounts to fans promising that if they have any symptoms or if they’ve interacted with any covid-positive people in the last 14 days, they wouldn’t attend. Knowing human nature and how much people love their football, I doubt a lot of people would actually stay home under those circumstances… With that clause and other legalese in place, the NFL officially refuses to accept any responsibility if any of the fans get sick. That could potentially result in a huge case cluster, yes, but the bigger question is how many new clusters will appear after the inevitable Superbowl parties people will host for their friends… That’s how one of my coworkers caught covid – after watching a football game at his neighbour’s place. (Let’s be serious: no one will wear masks or abstain from drinking/eating at a Superbowl party.) Imagine the same thing, but in several million households… With luck, there won’t be a spike in cases, but luck has been quite unreliable of late.

Stay safe, y’all.

Wednesday… night? Evening? If the sun hadn’t set at 5:32pm today and if it hadn’t been so dark outside, this would’ve been evening on my personal scale. Let’s go with evenight, then, eh?

I ventured outside today despite the cold, because of the sun… A splendid lunch-time walk around the block. A giant boat, concealed under the tarp, was lurking in the alleyway next door. A neighbour with a fancy Porsche. A kindergarten squad on their patrol.

In the meme stonk world, everything went up for the day, though not a whole lot. A good day overall for most of my investments. It blows my mind to see that my hoard can go up by more money in one day than I would’ve earned in an entire year working part-time as a college student. Not for the first time, I can’t help but wonder what strange new level I’ve unlocked at last, what else awaits me just around the corner…

Today was spent mostly jumping from call to call at work, but also laughing hysterically at this tweet and the conversation it inspired. If digital decay devoured it by the time you’ve read this blog: it was a juxtaposition of a girl who tweeted that her college boyfriend had modeled his entire persona on Ryan Gosling’s character in the amazing move “Drive”; the other tweet was a guy’s confession that he adopted his entire personality from Ryan Gosling’s character in that movie, got a girlfriend at a local diner, and kept up that charade for over four years. If those two were talking about one another, then that is comedy gold. (And also a lot of commitment to the bit!) I watched Drive ages ago, and loved it, but never quite had the urge to impersonate the protagonist… If I blog about trading in my Kia for an old Mustang, you’ll know what happened. Heh.

With all the fancy new covid variants showing up in Canada, some experts recommend double-masking just to be on the safe side. KN-95 masks are just about impossible to find right now: not on Amazon and definitely not at local pharmacies. Whenever I venture outside, whether to walk or to shop, I put on a 3-ply cotton mask and cover it with a regular filter cloth mask on top. Gotta stack those odds, eh? (Can you tell I spent 10 years of my life in Nevada?)

In covid news, the official Canadian covid timeline is starting to unravel… All the delays have caused Ontario to miss its self-imposed deadline. The original plan was to administer first shots to folks in high-risk retirement homes and Native American (or First Nations, as they’re called in Canada) elder care folks by February 5th. It’s been moved to February 10th now. Five days may not seem like a lot, but it’s the canary in the coal mine, the first sign of a big disruption. I suspect we’ll see more shifting deadlines. I have this intuition that Canada’s official goal for phase-3 vaccination rollout (literally anyone who wants one) will be shifted from August-September to later in the year – and news stories like this one sure as hell don’t help dissuade me. As always, I just hope I’m wrong. As usual, I probably won’t be.

Good night, y’al.