i've interpreted the stratification of the virus narrative as reaching a consensus around a few different themes:
- the lockdown cannot end until there is a vaccine
- the lockdown must end because the economy
- whether the country that you're living in mandates the mandatory wearing of masks in public, or not.
i'm not a fan of the economy. i don't understand what it is, and i've been told too many times that it is more important than anything else on the planet. we spoke to my partner's family the other day who were noticeably happy to tell us that you could now buy a single, temporary face mask (i.e. with a lifetime of four hours) from local pharmacists. these masks cost a mere total of £1.99. i commented that this sounded like extortion to me, and my partner's mum said that it was just supply & demand. is this the economy? i never know whether the economy is all the money that the population has (which is something that i can understand), or whether it is all those percentages and numbers that have been perpetually falling ever since 2008.
on masks, i'm kind of undecided. i don't really understand what the scientific consensus on them is. the WHO seems worried to tell people to wear them. in the online world it seems that, generally, they're regarded as a necessity. i don't really see a path forward until governments start handing them out to people. they're too difficult/expensive to get hold of for normal people.
the topic of vaccinations has become more pivotal to the entire narrative in recent weeks, both in the media that i consume and in the conversations that i observe taking place in the "virus" chat at work. i guess it was to be expected, since the pandemic shows no sign of abating. at the start of the two week period (12th April) there were murmurings of the possibility of lockdowns being lifted. but over the next fortnight, the scale of any return to normality has been significantly reduced. it appears widely accepted (almost) globally that i'm going to be condemned to documenting my time in this diaristic format until a vaccine for the virus is discovered.
coming to terms with the permanence of the situation has been a bit of a struggle, personally. i realised out earlier this week that, if this goes on for another year, then i'll have been in confinement for between 3-4% of my entire life. i wonder now whether this percentage will continue to rise much higher, whether we'll ever really return to normality. whether people will ever really be able to travel to see us in lisbon. whether it's inevitable that we'll catch the virus at some point. i'm not sure whether to be worried about the virus itself, i haven't really been worried for my own health really. but there has been more discussion over potential long-term impacts, and it's difficult to know what to believe.
as a final remark, i'm starting to drift away from my primary sources of news on the matter (i.e. the guardian & twitter). the onset of absolute uncertainty has rendered day-to-day updates kind of obsolete for me. even worse, my twitter feed a large critical mass of people hailing from tech & academic science (or both). these are two groups of people that are very comfortable issuing stark warnings and long threads on a large range of topics. stark warnings, long threads and animal crossing. animal crossing started as something that i was fairly curious about, to the extent that i was interested in playing it myself for the feeling of sociable relaxation that it promotes. but now i try my best to avoid any form of content making references to it. i haven't muted it yet, but i've considered it. i came to terms with how crap my twitter feed is a while ago, but the occasional gold-standard meme has meant that i've done very little to remediate the situation. i'm also not totally sure whether the twitter feed is the problem, or whether it is me.
april 12
i took part in the first iteration of a quiz along with both of our families. as a singleton, with my partner as quizmaster, i managed to come a respectable second place, in spite of a comprehensive music section (which is usually my achilles heel). i spoke a little with my family but the awkwardness of the zoom call meant that that the group dispersed pretty quickly.
around the writing process, we played some catan and watched an episode of westworld. i'm still undecided on westworld, i don't really understand how we've got to where we are. i think there was, perhaps, a more interesting narrative around the sort of society that engages with the idea of a westworld. instead, we seem to be focusing on the guy from breaking bad helping a robot move vast sums of money around. maybe i'm being a bit unfair. i haven't watched anymore as the "you're not in the uk" police have caught up with me and i'm not really in the paid-for vpn market.
april 13 -> april 14
the bad weather had truly set in. both nights rain pummelled the thin roof above the building extension where our bedroom is situated. this inevitably lead to a sequence of restless nights. during the day thunderstorms and lightning were becoming increasingly common. both days passed without any incident beyond sitting at a desk and a lot of typing.
i started watching the new episodes of limmy's homemade show. i haven't watched much comedy in a long time. i used to watch a fair amount. i've watched the entirety of seinfeld and the office (us) twice, as well as finishing parks and rec, community, peep show, etc. over the past few years, the stuff that limmy puts on twitter and twitch has become the only comedic content that i consume. this isn't a point of annoyance, i think i've just realised what i like. and it's a man from glasgow showing me around his house. i thought the new show was really good. excellent lockdown television; potentially a sign of how more shows will be turning out in the near future.
about two weeks prior i had ordered a humidifier in an attempt to stave off the dry eyes that would eventually just return to normal without any mechanical aids. the humidifier finally arrived. i decided to try it out but it succeeded only in modifying the air in the room where we work into a choking hazard. so i haven't really turned it back on since then.
on the tuesday, we played catan in the evening. i've slowly started to realise how arbitrary catan actually is. in that, regardless of what resources you have access to, if your numbers come up enough then you'll win. and, i've started to lose interest in the game. this, coupled with the fact that i still continue lose a large percentage of games (which presumably runs counter to my previous sentence).
april 15 -> april 16
the 15th of april will be mostly remembered for the day that the ants (from outside) informed us that we had no chance of preventing them access to the food in our kitchen, contrary to previous hopes. this was disappointing as we lost some more edible food stuffs that we had left unguarded on the kitchen worktop. in a decisively non-vegan response, we conjured a spray made out of water and washing-up liquid that appears to stop (kill) them. over the next two days, i spent a large proportion of time isolating and stopping (killing) the ants, using this homemade spray. it took this long to finally convince them to try somewhere else.
again, the rain happened and the days rolled past almost without causing any ripples in the surface of the time that was spent in return. over the last weekend, we had committed to hosting a quiz for friends on the upcoming friday night. and, with this albatross around our collective neck, we spent both evenings thinking of questions for that.
april 17 -> april 18
after a week of being shadowed by the grey complexion of a sky full of excess water, friday finally brought a better nights sleep and some dry spells. enough dryness that we were able to stand outside for a bit; enjoying a small espresso in a moment of reflection between longer periods of work.
that evening we hosted the quiz with a moderate amount of success, even whilst apparently struggling to find correct answers to all of the questions that we had set ourselves. if you would like to try out the visual round i've attached the question sheet below. you can email your answers to me.
the next day was a write-off due to the exhaustion of the late night dedicated to being a welcoming host. i lay on the sofa for most of it, save for a run that was starved of all enjoyment by a lack of energy and hydration. in the evening we watched kiki's delivery service after realising that netflix now allows streaming the studio ghibli films. up until now i'd only seen four of the films, so we decided to start watching the ones we haven't seen, from oldest to newest.
on the sunday, i awoke with purpose to complete a long-running champ manager 03/04 game with a friend. we had started the game in london over a year ago. unfortunately, we had reached the season's conclusion in less than 2 hours after both failing in our playoff pursuit and we called it a day.
we followed up the rest of the day with a another iteration of the family quiz. in which, as a pair, we fell to a disappointing third place finish after a collapse on the picture and music rounds. as a way of enacting our penance, we went for a long walk to parque eduardo VII and back. the streets were quiet, and so was the park.
on our return, we watched terrace house. i decided that it was about time that i got around to finishing silas marner, so i read for a bit. i am a "one book at a time" person, and i don't really like offering myself the chance to change titles when i'm already midway through a novel. i knew that finishing it was the only way of making it onto my next.
april 20 -> april 21
started the week with more rain. i think it may be boring reading all this stuff about the weather, but i think it's an accurate portrayal of the proportion of time that i spend thinking about it on a given day.
i decided that it was about time that i started having hour long lunch breaks, rather than eating and then hanging around the scene of my work inbox. so i picked up my old friend george eliot and thoroughly enjoyed the 40 minutes after i had eaten. i decided that this was to become a thing that i would do, and declared it to my partner. at this point, and quite rightly so, she finds little interest in these sort of pronouncements -- hopefully one day i will realise.
in the evening, we sat down with some friends to an evening of monday night football: we were surprised with an arsenal vs man utd classic from 2005. i didn't know the score going into it, and so it was almost like watching the real thing. the money from the premier league had long been engrained into the english game at this point, and so the quality did not suffer from the abysmal technique that was preferred in earlier decades. we spoke at length to the backdrop of a man utd victory against an iconic arsenal 11. it made me think that we should do our best to try and do this sort of thing, even when the lockdown is lifted. and then i remembered that we had made that a bit difficult for ourselves by moving to portugal.
the next day, and inhibited by a bad nights sleep on account of more bad weather, i struggled to piece together a meaningful amount of work before going for a dazed walk in the afternoon. we had spoken to my partner's family at lunch since it was her mum's birthday, but i could barely string a coherent sentence together so i spent the rest of the day waiting for the appropriate sleeping hour to come.
to pass the evening, we watched "the last dance" on netflix. a documentary about the chicago bulls, and their quest to win a sixth nba title. i really like basketball documentaries as i know almost nothing about the sport. and it also seems quite exciting. however, i was a bit disappointed when i noticed that it was going to be a talking heads style documentary. the ideal documentary (in my opinion, of course) has as little narrative input, as is possible. i think an unseen narrator is largely fine, and i really like the usage of contemporary footage. i just think that retrospectives from people that were involved can be a bit self-congratulatory. it's not a deal-breaker, just a minor negative. i liked asif kapadia documentaries of senna and amy, as examples of the style that i prefer. but yeah, ken burns vietnam: big fan! even with the talking heads.
april 22 -> april 24
it was a wednesday, so i should have gone for a run in the evening. before i knew it, i had managed to twist the dilemma around long enough that it was time to eat and so it was no longer possible. my mum rang and i spoke to my parents for a little bit, mostly about a show called quiz that they had been watching on itv. a dramatisation of the people that coughed their way to a million pounds on "who wants to be a millionaire". i'm not sure why the story has ingrained itself so deeply into cultural folklore (or whether it is just my family).
in the evening i attended the interim meeting of the crypto forum research group (cfrg), where there were presentations on a number of topics. i don't want to get into the details too much, but there was a question about whether there exists post-quantum constructions for oblivious pseudorandom function protocols. in absence of my active participation at the time, i just want to take this chance to answer in the affirmative with some shameless promotion. i also want to take the chance to ask whether the opaque pake protocol, instantiated with a pq oprf, is also pq? sorry, if this is incomprehensible. i should ask these questions when the chances present themselves, rather than on a personal blog.
i'd humbly taken a hiatus from chess after a few desperate defeats, but i started renewing my acquaintances with the act of losing against my superiors. i'd also been continuing to read at lunch and finally made it to the end of the story by friday. i thoroughly enjoyed it. i've realised that i don't really read with any sort of critical perspective. i usually just accept the fiction at face value, with a few moments where i notice an oblique usage of some basic device. literally like a metaphor, or something of that nature. almost all of the books that i read are fiction. i also struggle to recall a lot of what happens in the books that i read, beyond the key concept and broad plotline. but i do enjoy them during the act of reading, and i think this is enough.
on the friday, my partner finished a little earlier than myself, and had a beer to celebrate. under these difficult conditions, i was left pondering the best way of expressing a cryptographic hybrid proof for some work that i was doing as my friday afternoon task. the best way that i have seen so far uses a tabularised view of the adversary and establishes each of the game-hops (along with the relative assumption) by modifying the view on each row. i wondered whether it would be possible to write some software where you could input all the necessary constraints, and then work through the proof in real-time? has this been done already? i've seen some pretty complicated proofs, perhaps it wouldn't be possible to account for all of the potential constraints? with all of this unanswered, i finished off my working day with a virtual "coffee" hangout with some of the people that i work with. we spoke about turkish delight and tv gameshows.
25 de abril
25 de abril is significant in Portugal as it is the anniversary of the carnation revolution: the people's revolution that overthrew the dictatorship ruling the country for decades. we went for a long bike ride, honouring the day as well as the returning good weather. we made it to the vasco de gama bridge where we sat and ate crisp sandwiches. it struck me that we probably should have cycled to the bridge named after the day itself instead, but i've been there loads of times...
the vasco de gama bridge is the second longest in europe, measuring over 12km. there is a half marathon that i was planning to attend in october that starts on the bridge. but i now expect this to be cancelled.
on the return journey the streets were quieter. when we walked back up the hill to our flat there was music playing and people were on the balconies celebrating. it was a unique experience for someone that grew up in a country that was usually on the side of the oppressor (or the oppressor themselves). a first exposure to a form of nationalism and pride that celebrates the people of the country, without the obvious racism, xenophobia and hate that comes with english patriotism.
in a stroke of genius, we turned a stale baguette into a pile of fried cinnamon & sugar goodness. we finished the day by watching "only yesterday", another studio ghibli film. again really enjoyed; perhaps my favourite of the films that we have seen so far. before we went to bed, we honoured the people's uprising by staging our own rebellion against catan, and we played a game known as dominion. it took much more time to play, but the general play seemed less dependent on the randomness of the environment that the game takes place in. i will report more when we have established more tests of the game's mechanics.