On January weekend mornings, when it’s too cold to get the kids outside to play for any real length of time, we all end up cooped up together in the house. More so this year, with COVID cases as bad as ever in Vermont and nowhere indoors to take them to blow off steam (the ECHO Center aquarium is a favorite). By the time, I’ve got my daughter down for her nap, I’m drained — physically, but more so emotionally.

Nearly a year ago, my family went from separating to work and school each morning to permanently cloistered together, with varying degrees of rebellion against the demands of sheltering in place with small children. We have been back to regular childcare for months, but the slow pace of vaccination and the B.1.1.7 variant loom over my partner and I. The prospect of once more trying to keep each other and the children sane while nominally keeping up with our full time responsibilities often greets me when I wake in the middle of the night.

Factorio has been released. If you were looking for an indie real-time strategy game based around building automated manufacturing systems while under attack by bug-like aliens, this is your opportunity! I’ve only played part way through the tutorials, but this is one of the most addictive games I’ve seen in years. My first exposure to Minecraft may be the last time I get this sucked into a game. If I decide to buy a copy, I’m also certainly going to have to pair with a Beeminder goal to put an upper bound on how much I can play it in a day.

I downloaded TikTok, curious about anything that draws the ire of narcissitic authoritarians. What I found browsing the public feed (I did not make an account) was random Americans, playful and goofing off, in 30 second increments. It was like everyone in the country was getting silly at a party with their friends and I was being teleported between them. There’s no doubt that it was a horrible attention sink that had to come off my phone immediately, but I have to admit, there was something beautiful about it.

Years ago, I stayed with the family of a college roommate for a weekend. While browsing their bookshelves, I came across a slim little book that drew me in: To Know a Fly by Vincent Dethier. As I recall, I sunk into an armchair and read it in a single sitting. Dethier was an entomologist and the book is an irreverent memoir on experimental methods available on a shoestring budget. I got my hands on my own copy recently.

Although I am anxiously awaiting the results of a COVID test and generally feeling exhausted and rough, today was actually good. Sitting out on the back patio in the heat, reading Laura Dassow Walls' wonderful biography Thoreau: A Life kept me distracted from my aches and gave me plenty of reason to keep myself hydrated. There are worse ways to spend a day.

Ada Palmer published a delightful, sprawling essay on comparisons between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Death / Renaissance. This morning, I needed to read this paragraph very badly (emphasis mine): This year, 2020, this is the first time in the history of this planet that any species has faced a pandemic knowing what it is, and how to take effective action. We aren’t taking perfect action, and we absolutely should be criticizing and condemning the many flaws—some small, some huge—in how it’s being dealt with, but there is real, efficacious action we can take.

Peter Heller’s novel The Dog Stars is narrated by a man named Hig bunkered up at Colorado airport nine years after a pandemic has killed ninety-nine percent of humanity, including his wife. His only companions are a bloodthirsty survivalist he shares the airport with and his aging dog. So maybe not the absolute best reading choice for the times. On the other hand, maybe exactly what I needed was a meditation on continuing to live through collapse.

Nadia Eghbal on being basic as a virtue: And I like engaging with ideas, too. I’ve just come to see it more as work than leisure. So instead, my coping mechanism has been to aggressively seek the anti-intellectual: to embrace the basic in my life. Ordinarily, Saturday is a day when I put a lot of energy into denser, more philosophical reading and try to do some writing while I am free of the crush of meetings during the week.

I just finished reading Octavia Butler’s novel Mind of My Mind, in which an immortal spirit that preys on human minds breeds telepathic humans together to produce more satisfying fare. Before the telepaths learn to control their power and shield themselves from the thoughts of other people, they are tormented by an unbearable flood of other people’s emotions. Last week, I was scrolling Twitter and caught myself thinking “That’s a dumb tweet, why the hell did person I follow like that?