There was, it was called the original Xbox

Sort of…

I’m this way with XIV. I think it’s more common than not. In real life I have to confront unmasked faces every day in the middle of a once in a lifetime pandemic, massive -isms from everyone around me at all times without end, a world that does not give a shit if I live or die or get to work in time (or at all for that matter), and somehow even further alienation from living in the only place affordable to me: rent controlled housing in a way-the-fuck-out-there suburb with a once an hour bus schedule to get anywhere. Life fucking sucks for a lot of people and even having a support network or a decent org or whatever else doesn’t really change that for me — hell a lot of the time they’re just as much a part of the problems, too, with the way things are in this stupid country. It is nice to have this thing that I can return to however frequently or infrequently I want and get lost in an evocative and equally-alive otherworld where at least people aren’t champing at the bit to hate crime me or give me the fucking pox for walking to the grocery store or, even worse, daring to suggest the real world be a little bit different. It is 100% a comfort thing to me, too. I get it. And every now and then new stuff comes along and once every few years a bunch of new stuff comes along and all it takes is spending 15 bucks a month and maybe 30-40 bucks every two years, which is somehow still so, so much cheaper than trying to keep up with the rest of modern gaming.

Do the majority of infections clear completely?

The numbers are still unclear. Keep in mind that HIV/AIDS, TB et al have had a much longer time around to be studied. The researcher I quoted above mentioned studying HIV for 20 years. COVID is only approaching the end of year 5. In spite of its recency, we do still have a wealth of data to tell us how threatening it is, anyway. Being re-infected several times per year is certainly not tipping the odds in anyone’s favor, either.

The safest thing to do is also, thankfully, the simplest: wearing a well-fitting, N95-grade respirator whenever one is away from their home. These types of respirators are, regardless of anything you may have heard, extremely effective at protecting you and others from infecting one another, even one-way.

This is from 2 years ago, but was being discussed as early as 2020.

To be clear, McComsey isn’t suggesting that the viruses themselves are similar. Coronaviruses are not retroviruses like HIV, nor are they sexually transmitted like HIV. But it’s the way they make the people they infect sick that caught her attention. It hides in the body and continues to wreak havoc in the various organ system by driving inflammation and disrupting the immune response.

“HIV patients don’t die from the virus itself. They die from immune activation – from the high levels of inflammation that causes cancer, heart disease, liver and kidney disease,” she said.

“The only reason we cannot cure HIV is because the virus hides where the HIV drugs can’t go in. So it continues to fuel this high inflammation. That’s why somebody like me who has been studying HIV for the last 20 years found that COVID is extremely similar to HIV. It’s a virus that produces a lot of inflammation. We see a lot of conditions that are known to stem from inflammation, and now we have some evidence that it persists in different organs.” McComsey is referring to various published research papers that suggest the SARS-Cov-2 may linger in various organ tissues long after nasal swabs and blood tests come back negative.

If you wanted a more “academic” perspective, this is a study on “Long COVID” from this year.

We used ‘omic” assays and serology to deeply characterize the global and SARS-CoV-2-specific immunity in the blood of individuals with clear LC and non-LC clinical trajectories, 8 months postinfection. We found that LC individuals exhibited systemic inflammation and immune dysregulation.

This tells us that Long COVID manifests as persistent symptoms far after an acute COVID infection and appears to be, in reality, a continued infection by COVID that doesn’t go away, instead hanging out in various organs and constantly challenging your immune system – despite vaccination. Hopefully I don’t need another source to tell you why this is a bad thing.

It is no longer the acute symptoms one needs to worry about. This virus is like HIV/AIDS and will stay in your system long after you are “over it”.

no shimomura :(

Sorcerers et al have always spoken to me, so I beeline for those if no one else is playing them in the group. If magic were real I would be a Shantotto or a Matoya, no question. Leave me alone with my frogs and brooms, all of you are losers. In FFXIV specifically I play the dwarf/gnome race, and small wizards are only a little bit cliche, so Iike being a beefy tank. I am small and fat IRL and if I could swing an axe like that with the rage of a thousand beasts you fuckin bet I would

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Quantity or quality of indie video games cannot carry the state of the medium right now which is absolutely 100% god awful. In the 90s there was only Magic. Now every video game is Magic, but with guns. Or anime.