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from the sign-me-up-for-the-next-hermit-convention dept.
The nation's nerds woke up in a utopia this morning, one where everyone stays inside, sporting events are being canceled, and all social interaction is forbidden.
All types of nerds, from social introverts to hardcore PC gamers, welcomed the dawn of this new era, privately from their own homes.
"I have been waiting my whole life for this moment," said Ned Pendleton, 32 -- via text message, of course -- as he fired up League of Legends on his beefy gaming PC. "They told me to take up a sport and that the kids playing basketball and stuff were gonna be way more successful than us nerds who played Counter-Strike at LAN parties every weekend."
Always look on the bright side of life.
[Certainly an element of gallows humor, but it does offer a different perspective from the incessant drumbeat of gloom and doom surrounding the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. What "positives" have you seen? --martyb]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 15 2020, @04:45PM (1 child)
Imagine your hotel was a country. And you were voluntarily inviting everybody to come party, get out in the streets, and touch each other on the face. Welcome to Thailand!
Songkran - the water festival that draws in stupidly large amounts of tourists is officially still on in many locations. The government has banned tourists from some locations like China and Hong Kong. Notably absent however is every single country with "rich" foreigners who can come splash around their monies. Well except Italy, they finally and reluctantly got around to banning Italians. The official policy for people from elsewhere in Europe is that they're supposed to be under observation and engage in "self monitoring". LoL.
1 month from now, expect the entire country of Thailand to be an ultra hot spot for corona. They're going in for a short term profit that will result in longer term economic devastation. If nothing else, it'll keep life interesting.
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Corona is so interesting. I'm unsure if it's something that in 6 months I'll be looking back as something maybe slightly more relevant than the swine flu, or if it's something that in 6 months will have caused a radical reshaping of our entire world. I have to say that the odds are on the former, but that's only because betting on the status quo is always the safe bet. Increasingly it's looking like we might be headed towards the latter.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 16 2020, @12:20AM
Relevance of corona/covid-19 is already way beyond that of swine flu, if only because of the big market drops. Swine flu [wikipedia.org] apparently reached 10-20% of the global population, which may be a good indicator of how far this one is going to spread.
Tech conferences and conventions as we know them may never recover (good opportunity for VR), there will be a big shift to online streaming, people may be isolating themselves and prepping more from now on, etc. I'm guessing the People's Republic of China will remain intact, but I'm not sure about the Islamic Republic of Iran.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]