Grigory Lukin.com

Saturday night.

The most exciting development in my life: I’ve officially given up on Tropico-1. Heh. That 20-year-old video game well and truly kicked my ass. Games developed in this day and age are far more user-friendly and thus less challenging. I wonder how folks in 2021 would react if the same sort of game came out and refused to let them win unless they spent several evenings (or 12-14 consecutive hours, whichever) trying to beat it.

New distraction from the overwhelming and constantly encroaching boredom: the good ol’ 7 Days to Die, aka the greatest zombie game ever made. I already know how it’ll turn out: either my character gets eaten alive after I dump quite a few hours into her, or I’ll accomplish the badass state of a bike-riding zombie slayer and run out of challenges. The latter should take maybe 50 hours of gameplay.

…who could’ve predicted that the end of the world as we know it would be so goddamn boring?

In covid news, more good news from Israel: those who received both shots of the Pfizer vaccine saw a 98% in fever or breathing problems, and were 98.9% less likely to get hospitalized and die. That is downright amazing. Israel is on track to be the first country in the world to get fully vaccinated, and thus they’re everyone’s giant guinea pig. (If they all develop mRNA-induced superpowers, the Middle East geopolitics will get even stranger.) There’s no lack of negative covid news, but there’s more and more positive stories coming out every single day. I’m trying to focus on those… There’s essentially nothing a person can do unless they’re a hospital worker, so we’re all just unwilling passengers on this apocalyptic ride. Can’t change a thing, so might as well concentrate on the light at the end of the tunnel, eh?

Enjoy the second half of your weekend, y’all.

Friday night, whoop-whoop.

I live in a snowglobe… We get a bit more sunlight every day: today, sunset was at 5:55pm. I logged off a little early, did some reading in bed, and watched the giant fluffy snowflakes outside my window. It was still light, and something about that particular snowfall, slow and lazy but relentless, contrasted with everything I own crammed into one small but warm studio, really made it feel like I was watching this from inside out, from within a very strange little snowglobe. It might as well be, given how predictable my routine has become, eh. Still, it was a rare treat to see a tiny bit of nature while the sun was still up. (Give it up for the relentlessly sliding personal standards, folks!)

That Tropico-1 game is still kicking my ass. I’m quite tempted to just quit it (it’s growing more frustrating than entertaining) but there’s not a whole lot else to do for mindless fun, and that soundtrack is pretty amazing.

In covid news, there’s another good update about the Pfizer vaccine. A study determined that the Pfizer vaccine is still highly effective after just one dose, and that it can be stored in regular freezers for two weeks. (The ultra-cold temperatures required for Pfizer made logistics a huge challenge. More so than usual, in any case.) There’s no official word from Pfizer itself (their recommendation has always been two doses), and it’s unclear how effective just one dose would be long-term compared to two… Nonetheless, that sounds almost too good to be true, especially after all the other false starts and setbacks, but I’m allowing myself to get excited about the rare good news. It’s quite a treat in this dark winter, eh.

Have yourself a safe (and hopefully sunny) weekend, y’all.

Thursday night.

Just spent almost four hours filling out a very long questionnaire about my taxes while also looking up all sorts of numbers. Life was easier once… With luck, this will be it. It’s extra painful since I know I’ll end up paying a lot in taxes, so it’s not like there’s a pot of gold at the end of this particular twisted rainbow. Heh.

Today was the much-awaited congressional hearing with the big wigs from hedge funds that started the Gamestop affair, as well as Keith Gill, the average guy who taught himself stock analysis and was among the first to notice how undervalued that stock was. I listened to some of it in the background while working: some congress-critters were ruthless and insightful, while others accused redditors of being Russian and/or Chinese robots. That right there makes me suspect that the main outcome of this whole saga will only make regular investors’ lives more complicated.

It was pretty funny to watch the congress-critters fumble with their technology: the hearing was held remotely, and there were so many issues with their microphones, the feedback echo, random people screaming “WHO ARE YOU AND WHY ARE YOU HERE?!” in the background, etc. Didn’t help that quite a few of them had crappy Internet connection and no microphones. At the risk of sounding like a complete tech bro, if someone at work had that many easily preventable issues, they’d never live it down. In the US, that’s just another day in the federal government. Heh. It’s quite telling that the person with the best microphone and camera setup was Keith Gill, who (until just now) made less money than anyone else on that call, and who also happened to be the youngest person at that hearing. I’m sure Millennials will be terrible with new technology 50 years from now, too, but come on – at least ask your local IT people to show you which buttons to push, eh?

In covid news, Pfizer has begun the first-ever study of covid vaccines on 4,000 pregnant women – in the US and all over the world. It’ll take them even longer than usual to get all the data from the study, make sure the babies are fine, etc, but if all goes well, hopefully that’ll be enough to dissuade some of the least rabid anti-vaxxers.

I hope y’all have a bit more fun with your taxes than I did, eh.

Wednesday night.

Online, there are wild videos about the situation in Texas. One shows a line of people waiting outside to fill their empty buckets from a spigot. Normally, that’s the kind of footage you’d see from some war-torn country. Instead, it’s from Houston: some of them no longer have running water in their homes, while others are under the water-boiling advisory. In another world, I didn’t leave Fort Worth for Tampa in 2014. In that world, I might be standing in a line just like that one… Elsewhere, people are posting pictures of buckets filled with snow that they brought inside to get some fresh water. All of that is utterly insane.

I’m getting secondhand anxiety just reading all this news from the US, just getting updates from my many acquaintances I’d made while living in all those places. I can’t even imagine how bizarre it would be to actually live there. Just in the last year alone, there were unprecedentedly blatant police shootings, mass protests, half-assed covid shutdowns, nameless masked thugs that kidnapped protesters, equally nameless thugs with guns standing guard in Washington DC, a rogue postmaster general who actually tried sabotaging his own postal service, an election that went on for days before getting called, half a million covid deaths, the attempted coup on January 6th, and now the polar vortex that sent Texas back to the 19th century… And I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things. After all of this is over, some countries will come out with improved reputations (way to go, Vietnam!), many will be unchanged, but some will never be able to regain their previous prestige…

I may have finally acquired all eight documents I’ll need to file my very complicated taxes. (Being a Russian-American-Canadian is hard, eh.) I’ll still have to plug in all those numbers and answer a very long series of important questions, though. I wonder if I declared myself a sovereign citizen and made them prepare my tax bill for me, would that save me some headache on the balance? (Especially if I copy a certain president, hire a sleazy lawyers, and pay only a small percentage of the total. Heh.) I’m joking, of course, but I really do wish there were a much easier way to just set it and forget it – the way I think other industrialized countries do it. Oh well.

In covid news, they’re starting to organize vaccine trials on children, ages six and up. All the previous trials were on adults. In a way, we got extremely lucky that children are mostly (but not always) unaffected. If covid had affected them as severely as adults… The world would’ve been an even more depressing place, then. It’ll be months before any coherent and consistent conclusions come out of these new trials: if kids do get vaccinated, it won’t be anytime soon, and they’ll likely be at the very end of the line. Still, the more we learn about this damn thing, the easier it’ll be to defeat – here and now, as well as with all the future variants.

Stay warm, y’all.

Tuesday night.

I miiiight be starting to fill the boredom abyss with some online shopping. In the local geological Facebook group (can you tell I’m a nerd?), someone posted breathtakingly beautiful pictures of a potassium hexacyanoferrate crystal. Turns out, he grew it all by themselves, though he did say it’s hard to get the exact mixture and conditions. I went ahead and ordered a bottle of potassium ferricyanide: it’s usually a niche chemical for photographers, so the delivery might take a while…

Growing crystals is a weird hobby: you get better at it as you go along, but a lot of is luck, and you absolutely have to be patient. I tried it for a while a few years back, but patience wasn’t my strong suit back then. Then again, I’m even worse at taking care of plants or yeast starters (rest in peace, Clint Yeastwood), so growing a little crystal bro is probably the least harmful option. Who knows, maybe I’ll finally create something beautiful.

The polar vortex is hitting the US even harder than I’d thought… Like many others, I’ve only just learned that Texas apparently has their own power grid, one that’s not connected to the rest of the country. Combine that with good ol’ deregulation and lack of extreme weather preparations, and that’s a really bad situation. Millions are without power due to rolling blackouts. One of the two reactors in a Texan nuclear power plant had to be shut down, possibly due to the cooling system’s water line getting frozen. I’m trying not to read the articles that merely list everyone’s misery (that’s a rather macabre type of clickbait), but just the headlines are disturbing… Failing hospital equipment, people having to burn their possessions to stay warm, etc. How many compounded systemic failures can civilization take?..

At work, there’s some excellent news at long last. It should become official in a couple of weeks. Until then, it’s just quiet celebration. (Incidentally, my emergency mini-bottle of champagne had just 2.2 glasses worth. They ought to make 3/4-sized bottles, eh.)

In covid news, Ontario’s premier Doug Ford is in hot water yet again… I keep forgetting to mention this, but through it all – the lockdowns, the restrictions, then more lockdowns – Ontario’s workers had no paid sick leave. If you think you have covid, then your choices are to stay home and lose money, or to head to work if you’re feeling lucky. In a TV interview earlier today, Ford said that paid sick days are a “waste of taxpayers’ money.” He lied about (or sincerely failed to understand) the federal program called Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit, claiming reinstituting Ontario’s sick days would be redundant. CRSB reimburses people for lost wages after they get diagnosed with covid. It does nothing for those who show early symptoms that might not be covid. The locals are less than excited about today’s display of his leadership, to put it mildly… It will never cease to astound me how someone like him got elected.

In slightly lighter news, this is pretty funny. My best friend’s younger sister (they live in the US) switched to online classes a year ago, and transferred to a small college in Portland to finish her degree. She never visited the campus in person, and after that college ran into some kind of trouble, she transferred again – this time to Idaho State University. She’ll graduate in two months, having never actually set foot on that campus. The in-person graduation ceremony will be her first time visiting that university. That’s pretty hilarious, and I’m sure there are many others in the same boat. By the end of this, the pandemic will have lasted at least four semesters: millions of college students will be affected one way or another. My own college years were extremely unremarkable (nerd, remember?) but I’m sorry that so many others won’t even get a chance to enjoy that part of their life to the fullest. What a strange world.

Monday night.

Got really bored and shaved off all my hair beneath the eyebrows. To clarify, there’s a site where people give each other dares – because what else is there to do in a pandemic? That dare seemed as good an idea as any. Downside: I feel like a plucked chicken now. Upside: hey, at least I’m feeling something new. There’s not a lot of novelty in this here year of plague.

Today was a double holiday: Presidents’ Day in the US; Family Day in Canada. (A family day right after Valentine’s. Get it? Heh.) A fancy three-day weekend: the Sunday first aid course split it in two, but even so, it’s a change from the routine. (I can’t describe the sheer horror of looking up and realizing that several weeks passed by without you noticing.) Two weeks from now, I’ll have my intro video call with the local search&rescue group, so there’s at least that to look forward to, eh.

An arctic blast swept across North America a few days ago: Canada is snowed in as always, but people all over the US have lost power. It’s especially bad in the south, where folks ain’t used to ice on the roads, and where infrastructure just can’t cope. Whole towns in Texas are without power. Frozen wind turbines can’t supply power to California. It’s a cascade failure. I can’t help wondering how much of that is due to our meddling with greenhouse gases. Would this have happened even if everyone followed the Kyoto treaty instead of treating it like a joke? With any luck, this is a one-off, and there won’t be other arctic blasts like this one for quite a while.

In covid news… I have this log (diary? manly journal?) that I update every three months. It’s my 5-year plan that I started in November 2016. (You can take a boy out of the Soviet Union…) I’m making really good progress toward my November 2021 goal, but the thing that shocked me as I updated it today and re-read the mid-November entry was the jump in the total covid death toll. I had to double-check to make sure it really was that bad. Three months ago, the official (and likely undercounted) covid death toll in the US was 265K. Today, it’s 486K. That’s an 83% increase. That’s 221,000 deaths in just three months. That is terrifying. The news has more or less stopped covering the fact that 3,000 or so Americans die each day. The total is growing higher and higher with all of us pretending not to notice… It’ll likely hit 500,000 by the end of the week. Will that even make the front pages of major newspapers, I wonder?..

And here in Canada, and specifically in Ontario, there’s a covid outbreak in a condo complex in Mississauga, one of Toronto’s suburbs. The condo tower has 1,800 people living and working there. They found a cluster of five cases of the South African variant, B1351. (The current leading mutant strain is the UK variant, B117: it’ll become #1 by the end of the month.) For now, the door-to-door testing is voluntary. If that cluster of five ended up infecting others, and if it’s really that much more contagious than the plain old strain we’ve been dealing with… That’ll be one very, very big cluster.

Stay warm, y’all.

Sunday evening.

Well, this was interesting. A seven-hour in-person demonstration of hands-on first aid, all while maintaining social distancing and keeping our masks on. (The CPR demonstration had us say “Breath one, two” instead of actually breathing into our mannequins’ mouths.) A large room in a Toronto office tower. Ten people: seven women and three men. Most everybody there was either in medical school or a caretaker, so while some of us had our masks off for lunch we’d packed, I think the odds of catching covid were much lower than with a group of 10 average people. It helped that the instructor was both engaging and entertaining. (I had no idea, but apparently having nipple piercings could result in them getting torn off if you die and have to be defibrillated. You’d only feel it if you come back to life.)

It was so strange to be in a group of people for the first time in six months… I sensed that at least a few others were in the same boat. Even with our faces obscured by masks, and with very little conversation between us, it felt great just to feel that shared humanity, if only a little, if only for a bit. I like to think that once Canada gets vaccinated, I’ll go out every night, every week, for months to come, just paying off this giant debt of loneliness. It’ll take a while to pay it off: the APR on this thing is through the roof, eh.

In covid news, the World Health Organization sent a team of investigators to China to try and find the origins of the virus – but it didn’t go too well. Setting aside the glaring question of why the WHO waited more than a year to investigate (remember, this is the same WHO that stubbornly refused to call this a pandemic for months), it’s frustrating beyond belief that China’s government refused to share raw data on the earliest cases in Wuhan. Both the US and the UK voiced their concerns and demanded more transparency, though there’s no way to enforce that. The WHO’s report on covid’s origins will be released soon, but we already know it won’t be complete.

It’s mildly infuriating that after 2.4 million deaths (thus far, and not including excess mortality), we might never know the full story behind covid’s origin. Last year, multiple scientists said the virus didn’t have the telltale signs of being lab-grown, and I believe them. China’s reluctance to share even the most basic data, though, is fueling FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) among a lot of people. Are they hiding their data just because that’s what authoritarian regimes do, just out of habit? Or are they hiding their data because it contains something uniquely embarrassing that would make them lose face? (More victims than reported, or much wider and longer spread before it finally got escalated?) The odds are that we’ll never know. Even in alleged democracies, whistleblowers can have state-sponsored thugs break into their home and point guns at their family (see Rebekah Jones, Florida’s rogue data analyst) – and I have no doubt it’s even worse than that if someone in China decided to share information with the whole wide world. I don’t see China collapsing at any point in the coming decades (the way USSR had), so once again, that path for leaked classified information is also out. We’ll likely never know for sure what really happened… How weird is that?

Enjoy the rest of your three-day weekend, y’all.

Saturday night.

Another wholesome day spent doing absolutely nothing. Some leisurely lounging in bed after waking up. A quick walk to Tim Hortons. A spot of Spanish DuoLingo and exercise. Hours and hours spent impersonating a benevolent dictator in Tropico-1. A typical weekend day in a pandemic…

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about the CPR class tomorrow, and I seldom lie. At some point, masks will have to come off, and some hands-on CPR demonstrations with rubber dummies will take place. I don’t know how many people will be there or what the safety precautions will be like – all I know is that it’s a day-long course. The one positive factor here is that I assume the kind of people who sign up for a CPR/first aid course are more health-aware than your baseline person, and would be less likely to catch covid. (Yes, I’m aware how shaky that logic is.) Well, it’s either risking this one potential exposure or spending the rest of the year completely devoid of any social life, so YOLO, I suppose.

In the US, Trump’s impeachment trial is finally over. Sixty-seven senators would have had to vote to convict him. Only 57 did. The good news is that seven Republican senators voted based on their conscience. The bad news is that the other 86% of them decided to put the party before the country, and voted in Trump’s favour. This means he’ll get to enjoy all the privileges an ex-president gets, including his own presidential library, a nice chunk of taxpayer money each year, and – most importantly – ongoing access to top secret briefings. I was expecting something along these lines… On social media, people kept posting their reactions to different developments during the impeachment trial, but I ignored them all: in the end, it’s a binary choice. Convicted or not, yes or no. The details leading up to it are as irrelevant as the flowery prose of a dissenting Supreme Court opinion: it does nothing to change the outcome. Good luck, you crazy yanks.

(And a small correction: a few days ago, I wondered why the House hadn’t delivered the articles of impeachment sooner, before the inauguration. It turns out Mitch McConnell, the then-majority leader, had chosen not to call the senate back from its recess, so the whole procedural delay was caused by him. I guess this means I’m finally moving away from my earlier obsession with American politics. Good.)

In covid news, the US has passed a huge milestone – a positive one this time. Over 50 million doses of covid vaccines have been administered in the US, out of the 69.9 million doses that have been delivered. That’s almost one out of every six Americans – and even better if you exclude those under 18. At the same time, the official US covid death toll is currently at 484,000. That does not include the excess mortality, so the true total is much higher: 600 thousand? 700?.. It’s downright bizarre that a country that sabotaged its own pandemic response plan is also vaccinating faster than most countries out there. (Except for Israel: they’ll be the first in the world to get fully vaccinated.) The outlook for Canada’s timeline is still pessimistic, but I’m happy by proxy: roughly 99% of my friends and relatives live in the US, so at least they’re getting their vaccine shots. Incidentally, my Reno friends recovered from covid, though they still have lingering symptoms – the so-called long covid. I hope they fully recover before long…

Enjoy your three-day weekend, y’all.

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. 🙂