Gimmick 2019-10-11 00:07:38

"life" got in the way. I've just not been using my computer as often.

Gimmick 2019-10-12 09:52:15

Picked one up. Now what

Gimmick 2019-10-17 20:24:19

_ring ring_

Gimmick 2020-01-02 15:58:56

I'm honestly not sure at this point. Things have gotten rather busy and the nearest Alliance Francaise seems to be a bit far from me, so I'll have to take a call on whether I should continue learning french or not; much as I would like to, I guess I'll have to learn how to manage my time better before I can continue learning french at higher levels. In the meantime I'm just making sure I don't forget whatever I've learnt by using duolingo and reading some french sites once in a while.

Bonne année!

Gimmick 2020-01-03 05:01:13

I'm more active on NG these days because of vacations, haha :P Yes, all of it was my own writing but there's still a lot of room to improve (I think my French would be at a 3rd or 4th grade level at best).

Not at the moment, I'm currently pursuing my master's in canada, albeit the english speaking part. Much as I'd like to go to Québec for speaking french, the french spoken there is almost like a different dialect, and with a vastly different accent to boot haha.

I guess I should write a new post sometime.

Gimmick 2020-01-05 10:01:53

LOL, that clip sounds totally believable for a japanese game show!

Thanks! My program's in computer science. And as for french around the world, yeah there are regional differences and accents but the most well-known example's probably that of quebec french. I'm not sure what the exact difference is, although the first thing you'd notice is that some words are stressed very differently as compared to standard french.

2013, huh. Feels like only a year or two passed since then..

Gimmick 2020-01-07 12:32:39

Almost entirely software. Us computer scientists and software engineers are not really qualified to handle the hardware aspects of a computer, go figure! That's more the job of computer engineers, heh.

Returned to this comment after a while (didn't even get the notification that you'd commented, strangely enough...) and it seems like the monkey's paw granted our wishes...in that now time is passing by REALLY slowly, but at the cost of the virus, haha

Gimmick 2020-03-21 21:29:11

Merci ! Je viens de me rendre compte que je l'étudie depuis presque 2 ans...mais je reste encore au niveau entre A2 et B1, ni l'un ni l'autre...ça me prendra au moins 2 ans en plus si je dois atteindre le niveau B2 ou C1.

Ce que j'ai compris sur le subjonctif, c'est que les phrases qui parlent de doutes et de sentiments venant du cœur utilisent le subjonctif, mais je sais pas même jusqu'aujourd'hui si l'on l'utilise le subjonctif après le "si", puisque "si" indique aussi un doute (comme "je ne sais pas si elle va/aille rentrer à l'heure)

De toute façon, c'est pas si mal maintenant, je suis fier de savoir que je faisais beacoup d'erreurs auparavant, et j'utilisais le dictionnaire plusieurs fois avant de taper une phrase, et maintenant c'est vraiment diminué et je peux comprendre plus ou moins ce que les youtubers français (comme JDG..) disent :D

Et bon courage dans ton licence de japonais!

Gimmick 2020-03-22 07:21:12

True that :) Although electronics are still my achilles' heel...

Yeah, more or less stuck indoors until this blows over (although I guess time passing by slowly is just because I'm not yet used to this.) All classes have moved online. What about you?

Gimmick 2020-03-22 12:11:38

Ah ok, je vois. Peut-être il n'y a aucun raison ? :P

Hm je ne l'ai pas encore reconnu, je pense que je le regarderai bientôt, merci !

(D'ailleurs, je crois qu'il y a d'autres français(es) ici, j'en connais quelques mais je n'en ai pas vu il y a longtemps...et toi ?)

Gimmick 2020-03-22 17:16:23

Haha, wouldn't you know it. My laptop seems to shock me every time I touch a screw on the case. I blame faulty grounding but god knows whether it's that or coincidental static shocks...

Yeah, I can go outside - no problem there. Just that there doesn't seem to be much of a point in doing so since most places seem to have closed down. Can't go to university without requiring prior approval, (even if I need to go in the first place - the only reason I'd go after classes went online was to go swimming and even that's closed) and the only other place I go to is the store (which I don't need to go too often since I have supplies with me which seem to be lasting much longer than I expected)

Yeah, I guess it's because of the transition from going out once in a while to staying indoors all the time that makes it pass by slowly, because I spent an extended period of time home before and it slowly started to pass by quickly with time.

I really should go for walks and such, and was just thinking of going to the park when the weather becomes better. It's a hassle to go there via public transit and I don't feel like taking an uber heh.

That being said, I'm highly curious of the endgame here. A vaccine will take much longer than this can be reasonably stretched out, and no drugs exist to tackle this. Are the only options herd immunity and choking out the virus?

Because...if that's the case, I'd much rather choose to get it and isolate myself for 14 days and not care for the rest than to isolate myself for 14 days and then get it at some point in the future and isolate myself again...at least, from a game theoretic approach. The only problem is that my landlord is old and if they catch the virus it's going to be real hell for them and it's very difficult to truly self isolate.

Choking out the virus unfortunately doesn't seem possible because new cases crop up locally - and even if we went full China and started welding peoples' doors shut, it wouldn't help because all it'd take is one infected person in an airport to start the whole cycle again...

Gimmick 2020-03-23 15:17:16

Yeah it's sometimes scary how fast the brain manages to transition to new circumstances. It already feels like time is passing by faster now, maybe I've gotten used to it already after just a week or so.

Hmm, didn't know about Parkinson's law, but that would explain a lot, haha :p So many days where I wonder how I managed to spend a few hours on reddit or the like...

I live closer to the suburbs at the moment, and despite how much public transit seems to be something to stay away from recently, walking all the way there is just too much of a pain, and I haven't a car nor a bike (not that I can use either!)

Yeah, seems like the best you can rely for is not being in the risk groups and having good immunity. After that it's all down to luck as to what will happen. Even healthy people not in the risk groups kick it, which seems scary - nobody knows when it's your time.

Prolific testing seems to be the only solution to this problem, since mass quarantining people is not going to work without breaking at least a few constitutional clauses and maybe human rights too. Unfortunately, China's attempting to rewrite history with their handling of the situation - as I see it - by calling their handling of the situation good, which it absolutely was not. It could have been nipped in the bud based on lessons from SARS, if they were ever learnt..and we still have absolutely no clue what happened to the Uyghurs in the concentration camps there.

The only things we can hope for in the end are vaccinations and immunity, and that the virus doesn't mutate (although mutations are generally less fatal than their predecessors); that said, though, it has brought about a considerable change in how society is supposed to function - if only for a few days or weeks.

And yes, keeping schools open and borders open definitely will have consequences. Literally every country which didn't shut down borders and kept prolonging it have caught the virus.

Gimmick 2020-03-24 06:58:14

None others, unfortunately. I used to know how to rollerskate but I haven't tried it in over a decade, and I'm pretty sure if I tried it again - especially on the streets - I'll eventually eat shit and regret it heavily. Ah well, thankfully public transit seems to be relatively unused these days (and I don't go at peak times) so it doesn't seem to be too much of a problem.

Yeah, unless you go for a routine checkup you never know what's lurking under the surface. I took a blood test two months ago and I came to know I'm supposedly prediabetic, which would put me on the border of an at risk group if I do catch the disease. I've lost weight since and tried to keep my blood sugar in check by not eating as much as I did before, but I have no way to tell what's up until I get another test done, or whether the first test was correct in the first place, but better to be safe than sorry, I suppose...also, I briefly took those one-a-day supplements but there's really no substitute for getting them through your diet. It also led to me getting fluoroscent pee because of the huge amounts of vitamin B2 and B12 they put in those supplements, so I decided to leave it.

There's two schools of thought about that. One is that exceptions apply during a period of crisis and that the rights granted to you by the government can be repealed for the greater good of society, and the other is that exceptions should not apply even during a period of crisis - or at least, that the number of exceptions should be minimized. I don't have any singular viewpoint on this - which one I choose directly depends on the competency and the benevolence of the government in charge. While all governments can make use of such exceptions to enforce strict social order if need be, it is far likelier that rogue governments do not let go of that power once it is no longer needed, which implies that preventing them from seizing it in the first place is the better option over the long run, depending on which is the better of the two evils - for example, one of the past governments in india declared an emergency (I don't know the circumstances) but then continued to keep the country in a state of emergency until one day when it was finally lifted. If there were more unfavourable conditions, then the same situation could repeat and it would be a huge blow to democracy; as they say, never let a tragedy go to waste. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be the case, at least not yet.

China's approach definitely is commendable, but it's congratulating the "arsonist" for putting out the fire which they most definitely could have not started in the first place. Wet markets involving exotic animals never was a good idea, and if it could have been prevented by having better enforced food safety standards, or even if the city had been locked down before it got out of control (since the center likely knew about the situation when it was widespread in Wuhan and before it exploded), then it wouldn't have spiraled into this mess right now. That being said, it seemed like all countries more or less dropped the ball since they had plenty of time to react as well...

Not necessarily partial immunity, just that natural selection dictates that it's more beneficial for the virus to spread without killing its host so that it can take its own sweet time propagating through the population. In that lens, herpes and the common cold (which is also a coronavirus!) would be one of the more "successful" viruses since it does very little harm to us and it isn't regarded with enough detail to warrant a cure (which there is none, in fact.) It's also the reason why the more deadly viruses are due to zoonotic transmission - they've evolved to their original host (e.g. pigs, birds, bats, etc.) and so when it mutates and crosses over, there's going to be enough differences that it can "unintentionally" wreak havoc on the new host (as unintentionally as an inanimate virus can, anyways.)

We just have to hope that it doesn't mutate often - which people say it can't, since it has only one RNA strand instead of 4 or more like the common cold, which means there's not enough room for mutations that are different enough to evade the immune system. And if it does end up mutating often, we have to also hope that it doesn't function like dengue**, otherwise it could be enough to collapse society as a whole. Thankfully, from what we know about the virus, it doesn't seem to be the case.

Yeah, exponential growth's a hell of a drug.

**Dengue's a really interesting case: there's 3 or 4 variants, and if you get one strain, you get near-lifelong immunity towards that strain. However, if you get any of the other strains, you're going to be fucked thoroughly, because of "antibody-dependent enhancement", where the viruses are _just similar enough_ to be mistaken by the immune system as being the same, but different enough to not be actually neutralized by it. As a result, the virus supposedly infects the macrophages which tried to digest it in the first place, and this causes it to spread even faster, and it spirals out of control from there.

If that happens with the coronavirus, then everyone who was infected the first time around would get life threatening illness the second time around, which would be doubly scary since 1 in 5 infected people had no symptoms at all, on average. It would also mean that a vaccine to the coronavirus would have to be accompanied with a long list of "terms and conditions", effectively making it useless. This may most likely not be the case, but I'm no biology major and can't say.

Gimmick 2020-03-26 07:34:48

Yeah, I remember it being kinda out of place seeing people here and there at uni using it just two or three days before it closed down, although in retrospect it is a practice that we should adhere to more often. The misinformation about masks doing nothing propagated to prevent mask hoarding probably did more harm than good, not to mention that we probably should have had more mask production in the first place, even if they were surgical masks. Other asian nations such as south korea and japan seem to have the practice of using masks more widespread than others, and japan seems to have largely dodged the coronavirus on paper (although it might explode eventually, who knows) whereas south korea got unlucky due to patients 31 and 36 (or lucky? since they were able to curb it by tracing these two individuals' contacts...)

Personally it feels hard to comprehend that we're in a pandemic right now. I've been cooped up inside for about a week and a half now, and gone out only once for groceries. Although a true "post apocalyptic" scenario is more animated with the sounds of nature than you expect, there's definitely a sort of eerie stillness in the air - less so since I'm not in india anymore, but if I were, then it would be amped up 10x since the entire place is on lockdown with police given free license to thrash anyone on the streets (and they say american cops are bad!)

Yeah, diet's definitely the best way to manage both blood sugar and vitamins' and other essential nutrients' uptake. I've recently switched to brown rice and eat a diet largely composed of beans and rice, and cut out a large majority of the chocolate I used to binge on earlier, so in theory my A1C should have already decreased by a large amount or should hopefully decrease in the future, not sure. I'm considering a test but I think I'll just leave it for later given the current, eh, climate. Still not sure how to navigate the "family doctor" system here, and never really bothered to, and now kinda regret not doing so. Ah well. [That looks like a rather precise vitamin regimen that you've got, looks interesting. I'm hoping I get enough vitamins through my diet, and certain things like milk seem to be fortified with vitamin A and D so I should be good on those fronts. Recently taken to eating a bit of fruit every now and then, too - did you know orange peels contain a lot more vitamin C than the actual pulp? As for the immune system, well there's only so much you can do to boost your immunity, and the best thing is to just minimize your exposure - apparently there's a possible correlation between the initial coronavirus viral load and the severity of your symptoms, which is why many people seem to be asymptomatic carriers and some healthy doctors who tend to patients falling sick and dying of it...]

Yeah, the US seems to be a bit of an outlier in...well, almost everything haha. The guns, the individual freedoms, etc...although I did hear about how sweden wasn't taking too many large measures against the virus like other countries did, what do you think about that?

The talk about it being engineered seems to be nothing more than a conspiracy theory at this point. It seems to have stemmed from a natural evolutional process and seems to be too complex to be engineered, and seems to be rather roundabout if it was anyways - there's good reasons against it being engineered. It seems far more likely that bats just kept getting on sick and sold in wet markets until someone got sick from it, whether it was due to active governmental involvement or some group of people farming bats with nary a care for food safety (and knowing china's past incidents with food, I'm more inclined to go with the latter, even if that seems less plausible than pure chance from bats which were hunted instead of raised.) Besides, what's the point? When China's running concentration camps left and right and committing atrocities in neighboring nations, and the whole world turns a blind eye, what's one more virus on the plate? Even if they straight up came forward and said they engineered the virus, nobody can or will hold them to task simply because the whole world (or those with power) seem to be beholden to china in some way or the other.

Well in a way. Viruses aren't sentient, heh. But on the macro scale, you can see natural evolution play out: if a virus killed its host immediately upon contracting it, then it wouldn't spread effectively. Any mutations that arose by chance (radiation, errors in replication, etc...) - which is infinitesimal, mind you, but multiply it by billions and billions of viral particles and you get a much higher chance - will tend to favor the host's survival so that it can spread faster. In fancy logic terms, if A is "the virus is deadly" and B is "the host is alive", then A => ¬B; since we see that the host is alive in the long run, we can take the contrapositive, so ¬(¬B) => ¬A, or B => ¬A. IOW, the virus gets weaker over time, but it's only because the people in the future are alive long enough to spread the virus - it's possible that the current strain of the virus will be outcompeted by a different strain that lasts in the body longer (with less symptoms) and so spreads for a much longer period of time than the original.

Yeah, we can just hope. Biology is rather interesting when you get into the finer details of it, although I wouldn't want to be one of those in the front line for research into the disease...or would I? I'm not sure. It's exciting but tense at the same time.

Maybe, maybe not. Depends on a lot of factors, and it's too early to tell. Unfortunately, I don't think people will continue washing their hands and maintaining proper hygeine for long after this blows over, though.

Gimmick 2020-03-26 07:39:14

Must be the latent french in you speaking! :D (mange => eat)

Gimmick 2020-03-27 09:31:21

Yeah, part of it seems to be due to misinformation to reduce hoarding (which backfired). Japan not being part of the stats is an outlier, and I'm interested to see where it goes too.

Perhaps you gotta be the change and start wearing masks :P Maybe people will slowly follow suit then...gotta flip the peer pressure against wearing masks to peer pressure for not wearing masks, hah.

I got out of India in January, as this virus was picking up internationally, if I'd had one or two more months I'd have been prevented from leaving. Funny how fast things move and how slow it felt back then...and how much time there was to act and yet have nothing be done. Yeah indian cops are no joke, if they've got something against you then you're gonna be in for some pain. Luckily on average police don't give a shit about most people. Except if you're young and have a girlfriend or whatever in the "religious belt" cities, then you'll be extorted for threat of them "telling your parents" (lol). It's rather funny what conservativeness does.

Yeah, everyone I know who's an international student here says that everything is very sweet here, and I tend to agree - there's a lot of sugar thrown in, sometimes even when it doesn't make much sense. I don't know the way the medical system works in canada, I should look it up sometime. But I think from the name, yes, maybe each individual or family gets assigned to a doctor...

Pesticides are certainly a problem, but if you rinse the orange with water before eating it then it is drastically reduced, to the point where it doesn't pose any significant harm. Fruits should definitely be had in moderation though due to all that sugar. Although green bananas are much much better since they have very little actual sugar in them - it's only when they ripen that it starts to become essentially "sugary compost", as one guy described it. And no, by "initial viral load" I mean the amount of virus that you initially get which makes you sick - so in theory, if you got sick because someone coughed right in your face, you'd be much worse off than, say, if you got it from handling the same thing a sick person did and then touching your eye, or something like that.

Yeah, and in those weeks it really felt like it was something imaginary - "it's never going to get out of china", or "oh it left china but it's not really _here_ since they're quarantined"...and then it was somebody else's problem until it wasn't anymore. I read elsewhere that this is basically the same way we're going to handle climate change, except that if we handle that the same way we do this - ie, ignore until we feel its effects directly - then it'll take at LEAST a decade or two to fix. Making these 6 months look like a pittance in comparison. We're all fucked, and this virus honestly is just giving us a preview of what the future is like, but on "easy mode".

True, but every now and then the stars align and something happens out of pure coincidence, haha. Imagine explaining that though...a house burns down and accounts described a fireplace that was unattended, but the actual cause turned out to be a short circuit? Well, sometimes occam's razor misleads us :p

Oh for sure, I'm on the sidelines as well. But it does pique my curiosity a bit.

Gimmick 2020-05-10 23:31:30 (Updated 2020-05-14 17:44:03)

Merci ! C'est super cool ça, savoir deux langues qui ne sont pas ta langue maternelle et même jusqu'à la niveau B1 ou B2 où t'es plus ou moins indépendant. Combien de temps as-tu pris pour le faire?

Gimmick 2020-05-10 23:33:03

Je peux comprendre 80% avec les sous-titres, sans ça c'est plutôt 20% haha. Eh ben un jour tu devrais passer un examen, même si c'est juste pour savoir quel niveau tu as :p