Nicholson Baker, in a very detailed, measured report on the origins of covid for New York Magazine:

What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed.

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Nevertheless, I think it’s worth offering some historical context for our yearlong medical nightmare. We need to hear from the people who for years have contended that certain types of virus experimentation might lead to a disastrous pandemic like this one. And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become.

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A vast treasure was spent by the U.S. on the amplification and aerial delivery of diseases — some well known, others obscure and stealthy. America’s biological-weapons program in the ’50s had A1-priority status, as high as nuclear weapons. In preparation for a total war with a numerically superior communist foe, scientists bred germs to be resistant to antibiotics and other drug therapies, and they infected lab animals with them, using a technique called “serial passaging,” in order to make the germs more virulent and more catching.

And along the way, there were laboratory accidents. By 1960, hundreds of American scientists and technicians had been hospitalized, victims of the diseases they were trying to weaponize.

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In 1977, a worldwide epidemic of influenza A began in Russia and China; it was eventually traced to a sample of an American strain of flu preserved in a laboratory freezer since 1950. In 1978, a hybrid strain of smallpox killed a medical photographer at a lab in Birmingham, England; in 2007, live foot-and-mouth disease leaked from a faulty drainpipe at the Institute for Animal Health in Surrey. In the U.S., “more than 1,100 laboratory incidents involving bacteria, viruses and toxins that pose significant or bioterror risks to people and agriculture were reported to federal regulators during 2008 through 2012,” reported USA Today in an exposé published in 2014.

In 2015, the Department of Defense discovered that workers at a germ-warfare testing center in Utah had mistakenly sent close to 200 shipments of live anthrax to laboratories throughout the United States and also to Australia, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and several other countries over the past 12 years. In 2019, laboratories at Fort Detrick — where “defensive” research involves the creation of potential pathogens to defend against — were shut down for several months by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for “breaches of containment.” They reopened in December 2019.

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And yet the sole bioterrorist in living memory who actually killed American citizens, according to the FBI — the man who sent the anthrax letters — turned out to be one of the government’s own researchers. Bruce Ivins, an eccentric, suicidal laboratory scientist from Ohio who worked in vaccine development at Fort Detrick, allegedly wanted to boost the fear level so as to persuade the government to buy more of the patented, genetically engineered anthrax VaxGen vaccine, of which he was a co-inventor. (See David Willman’s fascinating biography of Ivins, Mirage Man.) Fauci’s staff at NIH funded Ivins’s vaccine laboratory and gave $100 million to VaxGen to accelerate vaccine production. (The NIH’s $878 million contract with VaxGen, however, was quietly canceled in 2006; Ivins, who was never charged, killed himself in 2008.)

“The whole incident amounted to a snake eating its own tail,” wrote Wendy Orent in an August 2008 piece titled “Our Own Worst Bioenemy” in the Los Angeles Times. “No ingenious biowarrior from Al Qaeda sent the lethal envelopes through the U.S. postal system. An American scientist did.” What confirmed Ivins’s guilt, according to the FBI, was that there was a genetic match between the anthrax used in the killings and the strain held at Fort Detrick.

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Why, out of a desire to prove that something extremely infectious could happen, would you make it happen? And why would the U.S. government feel compelled to pay for it to happen? […] These gain-of-function experiments were an important part of the NIH’s approach to vaccine development, and Anthony Fauci was reluctant to stop funding them. […] Gain-of-function research came roaring back under Trump and Fauci. “The National Institutes of Health will again fund research that makes viruses more dangerous,” said an article in Nature in December 2017.

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But I keep returning to the basic, puzzling fact: This patchwork pathogen, which allegedly has evolved without human meddling, first came to notice in the only city in the world with a laboratory that was paid for years by the U.S. government to perform experiments on certain obscure and heretofore unpublicized strains of bat viruses — which bat viruses then turned out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones that are most closely related to the disease. What are the odds?

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For more than 15 years, coronavirologists strove to prove that the threat of SARS was ever present and must be defended against, and they proved it by showing how they could doctor the viruses they stored in order to force them to jump species and go directly from bats to humans. More and more bat viruses came in from the field teams, and they were sequenced and synthesized and “rewired,” to use a term that Baric likes. In this international potluck supper of genetic cookery, hundreds of new variant diseases were invented and stored. And then one day, perhaps, somebody messed up. It’s at least a reasonable, “parsimonious” explanation of what might have happened.

This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.

I hope the vaccine works.

But I'm doing my best to move toward being someone I like, despite everything all the time.

I carried a digital camera everywhere starting in around 2002, and have tens of thousands of photos from the last two decades from WAYYYY before everybody carried a camera everywhere with them all the time.

I didn't realize that the Photos app had loaded all of my old photos onto my laptop until it popped up a "New memory for you from 2012!"

In October of 2011, I went to Los Angeles with my friend Alex, attended a play put on by Mark Z. Danielewski, and wound up getting to have brunch with him. We explored the city by way of House of Leaves, visiting locations from the book and feeling a great many things.

I was in the long drawn out process of breaking up with one of the great loves of my life, who I maintained a level of friendship with until last year when I finally pissed her off enough by being too depressed and literally broke to make it to an event. I was just reconnecting with the next big love of my life; that was messy for a while. The two of them work together now, and neither one likes me very much. I was a pain in the ass!!!!!! I had no idea what I was doing, except trying to do my best and be as sweet and thoughtful as I could be. It fucks me up to see pictures of the past, when the feelings those moments held have never really gone away.

The pictures show me that I'd just met Jace, that Tony was back in town visiting, that I had just moved into the apartment complex where I worked and began that strange stretch of my life. That Mimestein, my sweet first cat, was still alive but didn't live with me anymore. That I had just gotten the glasses I still have now, 8 years later, because I haven't had vision insurance in almost a decade. I just got some this month; if I can figure out that it's safe to go to an optometrist, I'm going to get ten new pairs of glasses to make up for it.

My pictures show me too much. It's almost impossible for me to enjoy my memories after 2004; I stumbled forward from thing to thing, a dazed creature, slowly losing the innocence I had unfortunately retained for so long, that I still retain too much of, but which shifts in and out like a mirage.

The worst thing they show me is that I used to care about my day to day life in a particular way that I don't now, which was to take pictures of things before pictures were ubiquitous, to see and want to capture the people and places I loved, to translate my lived experience into art and song in a way I rarely do anymore. I have become more skilled, more efficient, more valuable, and overall a better person; but it scours a deep canyon of sharp regret to look directly at the things I lost mostly because I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and was reconstructing myself after a pretty commonly fucked up conservative childhood and the dead star gravity collapse of my last year in high school.

Jacob's recital. My blood approves. Impossible breakfasts. Book from Noam. Mugs I don't own. Four Eyes first show. Shitty little desk. Jurassic technology. Dandelion finger. Essays not yet defeated. Marketing reform. Floral exploration. Literally too much for my trauma-stunted depression-addled mind to handle, and yet it kept moving, calamitously, beautifully, and I guess it's normal enough for things to end. But I never wanted what happened to end. I was just so afraid. And I'm so sorry to everyone I wasn't coherent enough to hold on to.

Everything I ever went for, I treasure. The losses sustained through fear of following through or of disrupting what was a pretty pathetic status quo are things I really can't bear to even hold in my mind for long enough to reconcile.

After being under-employed for most of the last two years, I have a steady part-time job and some freelance work that means I can afford to pay somewhere less than $800/month for rent. There are places in Athens that would fit my budget, but none of them are available in my research until the summer or fall because of the fucked-up school-based leasing schedule that rules the entire town. I also still don’t have a car, so until I get one, it would be a major pain to go too far out from a central location.

What do I do if I literally can’t find a place I can afford to live in this town? Moving to another city would almost certainly be more costly, and I don’t want to do that anyway. I’ve been fortunate to have a few different people let me stay with them rent-free (or rent-deferred) at different parts of this year. I don’t have any potential roommates at the moment, which is the only way I’ve ever afforded to live anywhere in my adult life.

I started imagining what it would be like to make enough money to pay more in rent, for a well-lit loft that I could live in by myself, to have enough money to decorate in a way I might like, rather than living in yet another dingy old southern house with a minimum of mismatched furniture that I’ve cobbled together over the last decade from thrift stores and hand-me-downs. It filled me simultaneously with a light of hope, to envision this thing that has never been possible for me, and then the inevitable shadow of disappointment that it will still never be possible. I’ve only briefly been able to fully-embrace anywhere I’ve ever lived as an adult; I’m so tired of having no home, let alone a more-permanent place I can care about and invest in rather than just inhabit briefly and reluctantly.

What do I do if I can’t find somewhere to live?

an astonishing number of apparently-profitable video games for the interactive telephone are simply spreadsheets with interior timers, whose fundamental interactions are so unpleasant that I believe they actually prolong the play experience; they begin with a tutorial, show you how to tap tap tap, and promise that at some point, perhaps once the tutorial is over, they will be fun. before long, there will be so many timers running, completing, yelling that they need to be tapped to collected, tapped three more times to set up the next timer, and then you should figure out whether you have tapped enough of these things to fulfill the “quests” or “orders” coming in or if you need to wait / tap some more first… so many of these running, with playful animations and sound effects, descriptions of items and actions that have no material bearing on the nature of what you do… at no point, not even at the beginning, and certainly not once the workload piles up, is this ever “fun.”

I’m far from the first person to note and describe this. It’s well-known enough to have become a decade-long genre, worth investing a real art budget into, because there are people who want a reason to keep touching their phones when the rest of their reasons have temporarily run out. Or just because a notification has come in, prompting a tap, a wait to load, a reward for returning for yet another day, and a series of taps to collect and wind up the timers again. Laborers on our behalf, these timers, playing the game for us; here, in this game, manifested as servile goblins hatched by you to work endlessly. In others they are dwarves, animals, and humans of varying levels of chibi detail. You set them to their tasks and then go about your day.

What’s the fantasy? What’s the game? Boss simulator, maybe: you do a bare minimum of coordination and ordering-around, and the diligently-employed rake in the cash which you take in full. A goblin can never quit, as a group they can never unionize, they will simply accrue and continue to crank the numbers higher.

None of this feels profound! I just wanted to write it down. I have, for some reason, continues to trawl the iOS App Store’s new releases every week or two for many years now, downloading and maybe trying out hundreds of games at this point. Anything that sounds remotely interesting, mostly “strategic” or “role-playing” games. And I have mostly seen the exact same 4 games released again and again in different guises, with minor variations on theme, polish, mechanical nuance, and budget. As repetitious as console and computer games could be in the 90s and 00s, even now with AAA games converging on the Ubisoft play-slurry format, this is a mind-numbing pattern indicating that, at least as far as the money people are concerned, these are the games worth making for this format. All of this emerging from the coincident market forces of Apple pushing for zero-cost-up-front apps with no “demos” allowed, and the consolidation of wealth away from a majority of people so that even a dollar or two to try a game is treated like extortion, while somehow allowing sunk-cost post-tutorial $4.99 Starter Packs to thrive.

Again, this isn’t profound. You probably know all this. It’s just… frustrating and saddening to me right now, how vast the medium is, that these games are made and promoted at such a regular clip. Oh well. I hope somebody who wouldn’t have made a good living elsewise is able to afford their rent comfortably, something I haven’t been able to do in over a year. I’m thinking about what kinds of game to prototype next, approaching the end of this first big project, and wondering what actions to start with, what will be interesting to me as well as to others, without requiring 5 years of development. That’s part of why I look at new games; I want to know what’s being released, and played, by the vast majority of players who have phones and maybe don’t follow the “big game” news, which seems like a very small portion of the addressable game-playing world.

I can see how these games work. I don’t want to make one like it. But my mercenary instincts have grown while my artistic pretenses have diminished; I need to make something that might make money. I wonder what that’s going to be?

I really love the work Tim is doing with these videos.

Foxy Shazam Is Absolutely Fucking Nuts To The Guts And I Love Them

Apparently I posted this same song with the same excerpt on May 6.

A lot has changed, a lot hasn't. I still like hearing this line.