covid has really made me realize that most people don't have very good risk assessment or sense of scope, especially when it comes to statistics. part of it is definitely a knee-jerk aggressive response to the word even being said, but a lot of the arguments i hear seem predicated on some kind of belief that Low Percentage equals safe, because that's how people talk about things generally.
putting aside for one moment that the percentages are most likely a lot higher than they think, and that the risk of long-term complications after catching the virus is cumulative--i think people have sort of lost sight of how unprecedented covid actually is, because it's so easy to go back to normal life. covid is the first pandemic in the age of super fast and easy plane travel. covid is the first pandemic in the age of humanity's numbers being over 8 billion.
no one is claiming that your risk of catching covid after going out unmasked just once is high (with the exception of peak season during the holidays). in periods where transmission is low, that risk could in fact be negligible. but you aren't rolling that dice once. you're rolling it several times a day, every day. have you ever played a gacha game where the odds of pulling a SSR were 0.5%? did you ever pull one, or did you know anyone who did? how surprised would you be if you were able to pull one after pulling for 10 hours a day nonstop every day? would you really be particularly surprised?
despite all this, you may not catch covid more than once a year, or maybe even every two years. if you're looking at a time-frame of 5 years, that's pretty good, isn't it? the odds of developing severe, permanent complications from one or two covid infections isn't That high. except... why would we look at time-frames of 5 years? we're in the fifth year of the pandemic and this virus has evolved fast, so the research is obviously laser-focused on year to year changes and working with the timeline that it's got. but i don't know about you guys, i anticipate living about 60 more years. do you think, knowing what we know about cumulative damage, that catching covid 60 times will be completely fine for our bodies? hell, what do you think catching influenza 60 times would do? post-viral syndromes have existed long before covid.
vaccines will never be able to catch up to the rate of the virus' mutations if they keep being tailored to specific variants, and it complicates things for developing effective treatments too. this is because this is a virus that circulates every day among essentially 8 billion people. statistically, it's inevitable that a random mutation somewhere will be successful and then begin to circulate. the fact is that 0.5% (a completely arbitrary number) of the global population is a massive number of people. it's 40 million people, more than the population of many countries. but it can be that amount again and again, because there's nothing preventing continuous reinfection.
no other statistics deals with this kind of situation. you can't use that ordinary benchmark or logic to think about covid. because this is in fact an unprecedented situation. and when new situations arise, people have to adapt and change their behaviour. but that's something that humans really hate doing, unfortunately
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2nd part for amnesia trope
So for Gil's POV. So what I was thinking is he was a gangster and he is somehow to blame for Thena's memory loss, it was because his enemies targeted her and got involved in a car crash. He left her in the hospital (but of course he paid everything and sends flower everyday) because he thinks that she's no good and she's in danger everytime she's with him. But he still knows how Thena is doing and where she is so when he knew she was finally discharged he started and somehow pretended to be a shop owner (he bought Thena's favorite coffee shop) so he could see her everyday.
He can remember it clear as day: the worst day of his life.
Just like how Thena remembered it, he was in the car with her.
He ended up at the museum to get some information on a competitor. He didn't know who he was meeting or what they looked like--part of the whole confidentiality of being an informant.
So, he hadn't blinked twice when a gorgeous blonde walked up to him and asked if he was lost. He had stated he was looking for some information on the Trojan Horse.
He was looking for information on someone within his gang who he suspected was acting as a double agent, he meant. She thought he meant the literal Trojan Horse, which apparently was a specialty of her major in Greek History.
She had given him a full tour of their exhibit about ancient Greece. He never did catch his informant, instead letting himself be dragged around the museum by this blonde lady excitedly telling him about intricacies of Greek politics in war times. And he never interrupted to tell her about the misunderstanding.
She was so excited to tell him about everything, and he was excited to be around her when she was so cute, even if she was a nerdy bookworm.
She was Thena, they got to eventually. She had just started working at the museum. He asked if she was a tour guide and she outright laughed at the suggestion. She wasn't a people person, by her own declaration. She worked as a researcher, with a friend of hers. Her other friend was in charge of the tours. He thought she was plenty personable, but apparently he got the special treatment that day.
He hadn't meant to get attached. He hadn't meant to see her again at all. He couldn't afford such things. But he ran into her on her way home from work one night, stopping by a cafe he frequented for its pastries. He had a bit of a quiet love for baking and proper pattiseries. Thena also loved pastries, he came to learn.
She frequented the shop, having tried everything from their canales to their mont blancs, to their dacquoises--she knew even more than him. He asked if she baked at all for herself and she laughed at him again (he really wasn't used to people being brave enough to laugh around him, in his line of work). She said she was no baker at all, just an admirer.
An admirer--that was what he was becoming, much to his own dread.
He returned to the coffee shop. Not to see her, but because he wanted to try these amazing pastries Thena had raved about. And he just so happened to run into her there--a few times, actually. One saturday morning he ran into her without the time crunch of having to be at the museum.
Before he could stop himself, he ended up blurting out, "care to join me?"
She did. She sat down across from him, hands clasped around a cappuccino mug, eyeing the little gateau on his plate.
He handed her a fork, and they shared the few bites the tiny serving offered. Even now, he can barely remember what it tasted like; he was far too distracted by the beautiful smile on Thena's face.
They started running into each other more...strategically. They both knew exactly what they were doing, but also didn't bring it up. He had his own reasons for not wanting to get too involved with the beautiful blonde. She seemed to think he was being coy, or maybe even shy.
He was a ruthless gangster. He wasn't shy--isn't shy.
He asked her to dinner. And then dessert--he asked her if there were any other places in the city that had a dessert to compare to their usual place. She said that she wouldn't know, having not lived there as long as he had. So he invited her to find out.
He should have known better.
She was driving them, because then he could put the directions into her phone gps for her. They were talking about what place to try for dinner. And then a truck t-boned them, knocking them straight off the road.
Thena was barely conscious by the time they stopped rolling. Gil was able to rip his seat belt off of him, cutting through hers with his knife once he was free. She was in and out of consciousness the whole time, dead weight in his arms. But even as she started slipping away, he just held her tighter.
Gil pulled her from the wreck, carrying her away from it in case her car had been tampered with as insurance. It was a standard move in the business, and if she had been targeted because of him, he guessed that his enemies would stop at nothing. Surely they wouldn't draw the line at cutting her gas line after deciding to try and kill an innocent woman.
Thena was rushed to Eternal Mercy Hospital, found leaned against a tree after first responders were called to the scene. They were informed by a passing witness that he had seen the truck that came out of nowhere and wrecked her car--that he had seen the woman pull herself from the wreck and drag herself away as he called the ambulance.
The witness left no name.
But it was the same anonymous caller who made sure that any treatment Thena needed was paid for in full--that she had the very best care possible and that there were always fresh flowers by her bedside as she recovered.
The hospital had no obligation to ask further into it, and Gil was grateful. Supposedly they couldn't tell him how she was doing because he wasn't her family or emergency contact, but whatever. The bastards who had pulled her hit and run were long taken care of, he had made sure of it.
He also made sure that he would never be connected to Thena again.
It was for the best, he said. He couldn't be so selfish as to endanger her for his own happiness. They were lucky she wasn't seriously injured this time, but he wouldn't take the chance of her getting hurt again.
The closest he came was to let himself see her again--literally see, just witness from across the street. Just to say goodbye, in a sense, he told himself. Just for a little closure before he let go of the only woman he had ever loved.
He bought the coffee shop--their coffee shop. He bought it as it was, fired all the staff and just...sat there. He practised his own pastry recipes for his own entertainment, but he definitely wasn't operating a functional cafe. He just wanted to see her walking down the street, on the way to museum.
Just one last time, he kept telling himself.
Then she walked right in.
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The straight woman is unsatisfied with straight studio porn. She wants to get off to something in which the actors actually emote and show passion beyond canned moans from the women and, at best, vacant grunts from the men. She turns to gay porn. She knows it's not "for her," but neither was the straight porn, and at least the actors look like they're enjoying themselves. And for a short while she is satiated by Sean Cody et al, but she runs into the same problems she had to begin with. She was not looking at sex but a simulacrum of sex, trapped in Plato's cave. Unsatisfied, she turned to vintage gay porn, harkening to a time when most gay bars still had darkrooms and reliably smelled of piss and Amyl Nitrite. Here was the real thing, in all its animalistic passion. But she still couldn't immerse herself in the fantasy. She wanted the media to engage with her own imagination and meet her half-way, rather than having it spoonfed to her onscreen. She turned to yaoi, with its elongated figures reminiscent of mannerist portraiture, then bara, including hardcore BDSM scenes. But the tactile sensations depicted in the pages didn't do justice to their real life counterparts. She turned deeper into her own imagination, this time reading erotica. No, not the poolside paperbacks sold at Barnes and Noble. The good shit. Why then, was she still not satisfied? She dug deeper, searching for the true meaning of eroticism. She studied the psychoanalysis of Freud, the cultural criticism of Susan Sontag, the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde. She took vacation time and flew to Europe, starting at the caves of Lascaux to explore the human urge to create, then traversed the Camino de Santiago on foot, along the way meeting a 56 year old carpenter from Burgos named Andrés, with whom she had an explosive affair. They both knew it couldn't last, which made them cherish each other's touch all the more. Upon flying home, she gave up. If her search for true eroticism never bore fruit this whole time, why would it now? It would take years before she stumbled upon the answer by pure happenstance: dubstep.
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