Clueless Northman

Oh well mine is truly mediocre but it doesn't seem to affect me so that's probably fine. It's usually between 95% and 97% and it's quite common that level goes down to 94%, and of course can go up to 99%, but I'm rarely at 98-99 - at least not when resting, of course if I just exercised it'll jump up. My cousin's husband got this last, after shortness of breath, sore throat and fever. Took him a few weeks to really recover it, but other than that he was basically fine at this stage of illness. Hopefully, it'll be the same for you, with of course smell and taste coming back faster.

Bought one last April at my local drugstore, they thought they were all gone but had just gotten a new supply. Since they had plenty around, I bought one for my 75+ mom the next day, so that she could check herself every few hours in case she unluckily got covid. Even though I didn't have covid, I checked every day for months to have a good idea of my normal range and my extremes/outliers. Also interesting to check the pulse. I always knew my mom has a very slow pulse, but it turns out that mine is slightly slow as well, I'm always below 65 when lying and usually below 60. Heck, on mornings, I can make the pulse-meter alarm ring if I just woke up, because I can be at 48-49 pulses/min.

Get well soon. Good luck! And as said above, being able to check oxygen levels every few hours might be useful, for you and your sister, to make sure they don't drop. With covid, you might not notice it. No idea how it'll be with covid vaccine for me, but so far when I had quite typical reactions (light fever, sore arm/shoulder mostly), it took a few hours before symptoms appeared. Sore arm usually lasts the longest, but never beyond 2 and a half day.

What I massively disliked in the bits of the "newer" expansions I tried (mostly from Forgotten Empires, I think) was that they were way too scripted: you had to go to place X with a more or less fixed amount of troops, you had to do some specific actions before being able to access another part of the map. I never found a glorious map where you basically had a starting base, should build it and have proper defenses, and had direct access to the whole map like you were in a multiplayer game, and like you had in the bulk of the original AOE2 campaigns. Does this still happen, and which campaign should I try, that would come close to what AOE2 actually was?

The only Hearts of Iron I played was 3, but usually it went quite historical. I would assume HOI4 isn't worse. In 3, unless you tried to actively undermine other major powers, most countries ended up within their historical sides, the only differences happening in Latin America. Some early WWII events happened fast or were strangely delayed, the most common difference was the invasion of Norway, which didn't happen half the time, and Norway and Yugoslavia/Greece invasions rarely happened in a similar relationship to the 1940 France campaign. That was probably caused by the triggers used to code these events. Of course, as a human player, you can go bonkers, like USSR invading or annexing Turkey and Finland before 1939, Italy puppeting or annexing the Balkans, or Germany going straight for Leningrad by seaborne invasion, and the more you acted ahistorically, the more ahistorical the general course of the way, if only because major powers, first of all the US, would come closer to war earlier than normal. I once played Canada and had a lot of fun landing in Africa and taking back countries and colonies that had gone to the dark side, eventually shipping the bulk of my troops to Morocco, having a tough day defending against Germany counterattack, until the US seized the opportunity and sent mass troops to free all North Africa. When it came to HOI3 Spain, odds probably favoured a bit the Nationalists, but I would still assume the Republic wins 1 out of 3 times.

Shit, I hope you'll get better soon - assuming you're not already back into shape. This makes me wonder if it means that you would be at greater risk of suffering a cytokine storm, had you gotten covid before, or if such a reaction to a vaccine has no relation with that risk.

UK (mostly) variant is taking over the continent, that's a fact. The real unknown is what will happen when it will be 80% of all new cases, will it still grow exponentially or will current measures limit its spread nearly as much as with the previous type. I tend to assume that when people are mostly locked down, the transmissibility of the virus can't change much - the reproduction rate varies greatly when it is not hindered. What I'm also wondering with the plateau or going up across Europe is if it's just a temporary artefact due to weather (for instance) or lockdown fatigue, if it's the new variants that will considerably increase new cases, or if it's something else. Spanish Flu had a 1st peak, a huge 2nd wave, and a quite big 3rd wave, way lower than 2nd but still bigger than the 1st one. I'm curious to see if the pattern will mostly be repeated. That said, a 3rd wave would actually start later than the 2020 1st wave, so even in this case, I can't see it be as bad or worse than March-April 2020, spring will slow it down eventually. So far I still assume it's more statistical noise, but we'll know if it's damn serious or just a small increase (like happened for Christmas in some areas) in a week.

Moderna has production sites in Belgium, Spain and Switzerland, I think, all part of the big assembly line, basically. I don't think any site can produce the whole product on its own, which is a shame, but I suppose it would mean downsizing production for months if they wanted to fix it. So, Europe is where most of EU vaccines will be made, I don't think there will be much imports from the US or India in their case. Yup, but plenty of big names have just entirely stopped researching and producing vaccines. Switzerland is supposed to be big in pharma, but they sold or outsourced their entire vaccine R/D. Yet they still should be able to produce components, if not whole vaccines, if they were told to.

Apparently, they're not - as you noted. With their mindset, we would've lost WW II, and very badly. Plenty of grandstanding pols, including the Trumpster, said this was the greatest crisis since 1945, that it was akin to fighting a war and other claims. Well, turns out they still acted as if it was a nothing-burger. Were they serious about the war comparison, then they would've turned the society into a war economy with war emergency powers over private companies. They shouldn't have asked nicely in 2020 if pharma would like to produce vaccines, it should've been an order with specific targets, stressing that failure isn't an option, shifting entire parts of the manufacturing capacities of European countries towards vaccine production. They failed utterly because they are useless pols without any idea willpower, totally blinded by their neo-liberal ideology that "private business Good", shouldn't be limited or forced (or taxed!) in any way. This sick ideology has now been proven once again to be an abject failure and a murderous one.

Since other AZ production locations are basically India and US and these countries seem keen on keeping a lot of that production for their own big vaccine needs, I wouldn't trust AZ guarantees at all. At this point, the EU should really shift to ask and pressure to make the vaccines public and lift the patents. Heck, as we see with collaborations with Sanofi and others, even then it'll take months to have the production lines ready. EU should've joined other countries in 2020 to make this a precondition - but these idiots were all about how International properties are oh so important, as if tens of thousands of human lives (even more, tens of thousands of human lives of their own fellow European citizens) were worthless by comparison.

I think you're correct about how India developed vaccine manufacturing: the West lost interest because it's not profitable enough. That drugs that need to be taken for life is way more interesting to pharma than cheap vaccines is a key reason why the "This is a plot from Big Pharma" theory is just pure bogus. And when it comes to producing vaccines, this shit is turning into a sad sick joke, truly: EXCLUSIVE-AstraZeneca to miss second-quarter EU vaccine supply target by half - EU official | Reuters These scumbags don't just underdeliver in 1st quarter by 2/3, they're also going to underdeliver by 1/2 in 2nd quarter. Goddamn, EU really needs to get its shit together and approve other vaccines - even Sputnik it if comes to that and they can at long last provide solid and convincing data to EMA (not sure why this hasn't happened yet, whether it's EU that's suspicious or not interested, or the Russians who don't or can't deliver official data).

Come on. You obviously missed the memo: It's dodgy data when it's about Sputnik or Sinopharm. When it's about AZ, it's great and you or the media just can't understand how good they are.

I don't think this is actually "breaking the game mechanisms". Morrowind shows you at your very arrival at Seyda Neen what magic and enchantment can do, with the mage dropping dead from the sky. IlyaP: The trick is, to be able to put more powerful enchantments, you need higher gear, Daedric being basically the top. You of course also need the best soul gems with the biggest mob's souls caught in them - say, Golden Saints for instance.

Mankind Divided is basically Human Revolution without much change to gameplay, features, similar world. 80% of the game occurs in one quite big city (Prague) instead of you travelling across the world. And it was obviously designed as only the first half or first third of a series, which makes it massively annoying, because there's no genuine climax with a feeling of a job well done, no genuinely satisfying ending - you've just done what would be the questline of one chapter of a regular Deus Ex game. In this regard, it's a bit like Mass Effect 2 whose main plotline is basically "assemble a team and when you're done, go there and beat these baddies", which once again is usually just a part of what a RPG questline is supposed to be, there's no "let's save the world for real". 153 days in Morrowind, that's already a lot. Lots of fast travel or sleeping maybe, because I can't see how you'll only have play 41 hours. About dropping loot, it works well in Morrowind as well. Creeper usually has a huge pile of expensive junk at the end of my playthroughs Now, about Shivering Isles, the Isles are quite insane with plenty of reasonably funny bits and quest, which are quite different from the standard Oblivion quests, it's the only place that doesn't look like a generic European medfan area (something you don't have at all in Morrowind), and the final parts of the main quest, including its conclusion, are really good, but that would be quite a serious spoiler.

I'm re-reading it once again. Though in a post-covid world, I'm not sure about some of the details about the superflu. I think it should be asymptomatic for longer, because most people show cold symptoms in less than a day and are in deep shit in less than 2 days - both Covid-19 and Ebola tend to show this isn't the best way to propagate a virus. The thing seems to be suspiciously contagious as well, way beyond any known disease, I'd say. Last but not least, I'm doubtful about the "lethal in 99.5% cases, the 0.5% aren't hit at all, they don't have any symptom, nothing", because in cases like Black Death and all the plagues of old (Athens, Antonine, Justinian), a lot of people died, but a lot of the survivors were exposed to the disease, got it, had it rough, and survived. Of course, that's nitpicking. I'd love to hear King's take on his virus now, and if he'd change some of its features. I said "re-reading", but that soon will be just "reading". I got the extended version and began to read it 25 years ago, assuming it was basically how a deadly virus kills nearly everyone, how it occurred first, how the pandemic happened and killed billions, how survivors fared and how they reacted and lived once it was over. Then after a few hundreds of pages, it began painfully obvious that the pandemic wasn't the story but was merely an extended setup, and this annoyed me to no end. When the whole story was basically groups of survivors peskering each other with some magical dudes manipulating them, I kid of lost interest and stopped halfway through. (something else also should've caught my mind at the time, otherwise I would've read it to the end, most probably that was when I entered university and had access to the insane amount of books in the uni's library). That said, the first part is impressive, and specially eery now, when reading how people have common symptoms and don't react until they're awful, how it spread across the US, how people and officials react ("oh gee a nothing-burger, I just got a stupid cold" for most of the former / "Oh shit, we're fucked, no one will notice this is bad until it's too late, thinking it's just the common cold" for the head of project Blue), how weird is the city when most things are closed and there aren't people left in the streets, and specially the chapter that tracks down contacts across a dozen individuals, from the initial spreader to people far away.