Upcoming Gemcast

Author: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Sun Aug 29 02:27:58 PM +0430 2021

As you can see I have been neglecting Gemini for quite some time. Things got a little hectic over here as I registered for multiple summer courses in a bid to graduate this year. Since the summer semester is extra short, the schedule is tighter, and starting tommorrow I have exams. (It seems like all I talk about on Gemini.) On top of that we have been doing a lot of other necessary things, including hosting my sister-in-law who has come to do her studies at the same university.

Since exams are not finished yet, I wanted to hold off on attempting to do a gemcast, but really I'm not sure if it makes that much of a difference. I especially wanted to do one lately due to the recent development in Afghanistan, even though I covered Afghanistan already weeks ago, before the Taliban took Kabul. The summary of my reaction is going to be something along the lines of, "I'm surprised like everyone else how instantly the Afghan government fell apart, but my overall view on the matter has not changed." Of course, I will go into more detail about that when I do the recording.

In other news, I finally got vaccinated though my university. Overall it seems Iran is lagging behind when it comes to this, which is no surprise given the sanction and other political issues, but now it seems like they are rushing to get it done as fast as they can. We were only given a day's notice to show up for the vaccine on campus, which I happily obliged. In terms of which vaccine was selected, the impression I got is that they were giving whatever was handy, so on that day it was Sinopharm. I'd bet it's the vaccine currently available in the largest quantity here, and I'm perfectly satisfied with it. The booster will be given in the coming weeks.

Among my friends who have been vaccinated, many of whom are medical students or professionals, it seems that most of them have opted for a western vaccine like AstraZeneca. Their reasoning seems to be that "eastern" vaccines (be they Chinese, Russian, or Iranian) are less effective. This may be true, but given the vaccination rates in Iran I don't think it makes sense to be picky. No vaccine perfectly stops infection, but as someone who suffered quite a bit when I contracted COVID last year, any vaccine at all is good if it can at least reduce the severity of the illness. I can handle being sick, but I would have preferred to recover faster and with fewer effects.

Aside from studying, I've been spending my time doing the normal things like chat (in the literal sense) on Clubhouse. Otherwise I have been neglecting a lot of Internet stuff, be it chat/messaging, online forums, and the like. I hardly even browse Gemini nowadays, which is perfectly fine. Who wishes that they spent more time on the Internet? However, now that I come back to it, I still appreciate Gemini very much and am gladdened by its continued existence. The same goes for XMPP, which I'm appreciating even more nowadays despite its small community. I realized that I don't actually like it when a platform gets overly crowded or busy, so maybe XMPP just appeals very nicely to introverts who can appreciate the silence of an empty chat room.

To be honest, I don't really know what I end up doing with most of my time. I haven't played any new computer games lately, though I'm thinking of starting Golden Sun on RetroArch. I've never played it, but I heard that it's good. My sister in law likes to play Streets of Rage 4 with us, which is truly an underappreciated game. My wife and I are still swatching Vikings, which we are already several seasons into, and I'm starting to be convinced that it is one of the best shows we've seen so far. I also just started re-watching Neon Genesis Evangelion because I wanted to watch the new remake movies, the last of which came out just a couple weeks ago. I could just watch the movies and forget about the earlier stuff, but I remember so little from the original series, which I haven't watched since I was a teenager. This time around I read up on the lore, which is confusing but helps the show to make more sense, and the fact that the story has been rewritten multiple times and there are multiple endings has tempted me to watch all of them just out of the curiosity to know what changed.

In any case, expect a gemcast coming up sometime this week. I might even do it today since writing about it has gotten me itching to do something, but I'll try to prepare for tomorrow morning's exam first and see what happens.