COVID is still here.

Tens of thousands are hospitalized with it and hundreds are still dying every day. Which is a vast improvement over where we were, but it's also frightening that it keeps mutating into new strains that keep this plague ongoing. The good news is that the most recent booster is still effective enough to be worth getting, providing added resistance to these new mutations.

Which brings us to this video.

Horrifying. But also riveting.

This is a good time to plug one of my favorite books of 2022, Immune by Philipp Dettmer If you haven't read it yet, it's worth your valuable time.

Remember yesterday when I said that I had a fever for 30 minutes, then a sore arm, then nothing else from my booster's booster to my COVID booster?

If only that had been the end of it.

I woke up freezing three times in the middle of the night last night. It's kinda a haze, but I did remember the first time very well because I was shaking so much that I fell over when I got up to grab another couple of blankets. My teeth were chattering so much that I thought they would break.

I've had "chills" before... but never like this!

I woke up tired from lack of sleep, but otherwise feeling fine. Except the wildfire smoke was heavier than usual today, which was really tough on my allergies. I ended up leaving work at noon because my head hurt so bad that I couldn't concentrate.

And now I'm at home with three air purifiers running while I watch YouTube videos. Like this interesting one from 2019 by one of my favorite content creators... Marques Brownlee...

I actually have a very early model Mac. This makes me want to drag it out and play with it again. It's still remarkable to me.

I stayed up last night to see the first episode of Andor on Disney+... and immediately wanted to watch the other two episodes that were unleashed at the same time. Except I was way, way too tired to attempt it thanks to being more than a little wiped out by the booster for my booster's COVID booster. At least I'm guessing that's the reason. I had a fever for about a half-hour, then my arm was sore... and that was the end of it. Which is weird because I was warned that the side-effects would be worse than previous boosters.

But anyway... back to Andor...

I finally got around to watching Episode 02 and 03 today... and they are epic.

Cassian Andor is easily one of my favorite characters in all of Star Wars, and it was a forgone conclusion that I would enjoy this series if they A) They didn't change the character for no reason, B) They had a story to make it worth my time, and C) They spent some money to make it actually feel like Star Wars.

Thankfully, Disney+ put their money and talents where their mouth is and completely crushed it. Especially in that mind-blowing third episode! And enough can't be said about Diego Luna, who is talented to begin with... but really bought his A-game to this series. It's like he knows that his character is beloved and wanted to give it everything he got.

And we have nine more episodes to go.

It's the middle of a 3-day weekend, but I won't let that stop me... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• There Be Dragons Here! We're three episodes into House of the Dragon and I'm fairly impressed. Not so much for the show, which is okay and I'm certainly enjoying it... but because anybody who has read Fire & Blood already knows what becomes of all these characters, and that's kind of exciting. At least we think we do. Heaven only knows that they could change events in order to drag the show out and have it end in a pile of shit like Game of Thrones...

In the books... this period in Westerous history which culminated in the disastrous "Dance of Dragons" war, was actually quite cool and interesting. If they stay faithful to it, the HBO series could have a great ending. If not? Well, strike two, I guess.

   
• POWERRRRR! In Amazon's absurdly expensive competition for the above, The Rings of Power, we've returned to Middle Earth (last seen in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit trilogy). While watching the first two episodes, I was confused. What in the heck is this supposed to be? We're in The Second Age, which is fine... but it's not feeling very "Tolkien." Nor does it seem to be coming from The Silmarillion (Tolkien's book of stuff that happens in the First, Second, and Third Age). Sure, you've got Elrond and Galadriel, but not in a form that they're recognizable. At least not to me...

Not knowing what to think, I ran to Google to find out. Turns out that Amazon didn't buy the rights to The Silmarillion at all. All they got were the books which have already been made into movies, including the appendices, which is where the concept for Rings of Power came from. But the actual story? Pulled out of their asses. The show is visually stunning. The acting is great. And the story doesn't suck. I will absolutely keep watching. But, it's like, WTF? You would think that the Tolkien Estate would want for the series to be close to Tolkien's vision as possible. But I guess not. Money speaks louder than Elvish, I guess.

   
• GAH! MY GOD! WHAT DID HAPPEN TO MEN?!??? (here's a link in case TikTok is being a dick)...

I've heard this so many times in my life. "WHAT'S HAPPENING TO OUR MEN?!" It's such a laughable question to be asking. Harry Styles doesn't represent "all men" any more than a landing craft full of men during (assumably) D-Day does. Or any more than the alarmist snowflake in this video does.

   
• Booster for my Booster's Booster Booster! The minute it's available to me... "If you have had your primary series, with or without any number of boosters, you are eligible to get a bivalent booster this fall, as long as it has been at least two months since your last COVID vaccine."

   
• ZOMFG!!! I do not even know how to respond to this (here's a link in case TikTok is being a dick)...

Now, I love mayonnaise. It's one of my most favorite foods. No stupid-ass "factoid" like this woman is spinning would make me reconsider. Which is why I'm sharing this, because Dan Fisher's measured response is all that needs to be said.

   
• Your Sexism at Work! Yeah. Not enough people are talking about this: Grey hair: Fine for George Clooney but not Lisa LaFlamme?

   
• Food! GAH! I AM IN LOVE AGAIN! This woman’s cooking TikTok is the best thing on the internet right now (here's a link in case TikTok is being a dick)...

Seriously, go watch her videos. She's absolutely lovely, has amazing recipes, and her videos are wonderfully entertaining.

   
• Safety. A quick and important read if you own an iPhone: How to Hard Lock an iPhone to Prevent Unauthorized Biometric Access (I don't know how this works on an Android phone, but you should find out if you own one).

   
See you in seven.

Yesterday I got a notification that I was now eligible for a second Pfizer Booster. A booster for my booster, I guess. Now, I am 1000% in support of getting "touch-up" vaccinations as efficacy fades, so there was never a question as to whether I was going to do this... I was just waiting for the word to be given.

The minute the text arrived, I went rushing to my local County Health website to make an appointment. Only to find that I didn't need an appointment. This didn't shock me, because all three times I went to get vaccinated, there was hardly anybody there.

What did shock me is that they are only offering vaccinations one day a week. Every Friday from 10:30 to 4:30.

I thought that surely there would be a line if we're down to one day a week... but nope! There was one guy who had already got his, and once he left I was alone.

Interesting to note that I only had to wait for five minutes after this time.

Didn't end up turning into a lizard person this time (again, darnit!), but there was some good news. Zero side-effects...

• Vaccine #1: Fever for 2 hours. — Sore, stiff arm for 2 days.
• Vaccine #2: Sore arm for a day.
• Vaccine #3: Sore arm for 2 or 3 hours.
• Vaccine #4: Nothing. I thought I might be having chills... but that was me forgetting that I turned off the heat weeks ago, and it ended up being a *very* cold day today. So... never mind. I guess the fourth time around my body is so used to the vaccine that I'm not going to have any side effects. Yay.

And so... until next booster, I guess.

I was told that I would "probably die in 6 or 7 months" after I got my first COVID vaccination.

Well, as of today it's been 7 months. Apparently I'm going to need all your thoughts and prayers to live through the night. Though since I went back for the second vaccination and went back for a third time to get a booster... maybe I don't deserve to live?

"Well, shit, I'm alive. The COVID booster didn't kill me. So I guess I have to go into to work."

Zero side-effects from the third Pfizer shot. Which worries me a little bit... how do I know that it did anything if there's no side-effects from my immune system getting charged up with COVID-fighting instructions? Though I didn't have side-effects the second time either (only the first, where I had a fever for three hours and soreness in my arm for three days).

In my county here in Central Washington, there's been 102 COVID deaths out of 10,912 total cases since tracking of the pandemic began. Right now they say that 638 people have tested positive in the first half of October. When I check the CDC site, it says that the eligible population here in my county is 73.6% vaccinated and 34 new people have been admitted into the hospital. If it's accurate, that's really good news. Given the number of anti-maskers out and about, I really expected us to be under 50% vaccinated. Some counties east of me in Idaho and Montana are 40-some-odd-percent, which is pretty scary. But not as scary as those counties sitting at 20% once you head over to the Dakotas. Holy shit. It's like a COVID incubater in some parts!

Which is how we end up with COVID variants like Delta, Beta, Gamma, Lambda, Mu, and the variants of those variants. It's all pretty crazy when you consider that the virus will only become more communicable and deadly as it changes to survive.

But that's nothing compared to the heinous level of idiocy coming out of the mouths of pieces of shit like Marjorie Taylor Greens, who is just the worst...

God she's awful. There's really no level to which this horrific excuse for a human being will stoop. I am disgusted to my core.

I'd say that I can't wait for her to get COVID, but you just know that she's been vaccinated. Pandering to her base with this hipocritical bullshit is how she stays in office.

I qualified for the Pfizer booster shot and I leapt on it like a starving lion.

Ever since they announced that the Pfizer vaccine lacked the long-term protection that Moderna offered, I was waiting for my chance. Don't get me wrong... it still does a great job of protecting you from death... it's just that breakthrough cases for the vaccinated can have harsher symptoms than expected. And "harsher symptoms" are something I can't really afford to risk.

And so, I made the appointment at the local clinic's drive-through site (a fiasco in itself, that I'll write about below).

For my previous vaccinations, I went to the mass-vaccination site. For my first dose, barely anybody was there. For my second dose, nobody was there. But at the smaller clinic drive-through, there were at least a dozen people getting shooted. That was unexpected and nifty.

I can hear it now... “Holy shit, dude! You’re stupid enough to get a THIRD vaccination? You’re going to die for sure now!” — Which is what I’m guessing all the people who said I’d be dead by September after my initial vaccination are going to say. Because of course.

AND YES I ASKED FOR DOUBLE LIZARD DNA!!!

UPDATE: SHIT! NOT ONLY DID I NOT EXPERIENCE ANY PAIN OR SIDE-EFFECTS ALL DAY TODAY, I ALSO DIDN'T START TURNING INTO A LIZARD PERSON! THERE GOES MY DREAM OF JOINING THE ELITE LIZARD PERSON CABAL THAT RUNS THE WORLD!!

And now for the absolute absurdity it took to confirm my appointment (which I made by phone this morning).

Holy crap I wish Confluence Health would move away from MyChart.

It is the most inanely frustrating system to deal with. Nothing makes sense.

They send me an email to check in for my appointment. I click on the checkin link button. I then get taken to their website WHERE THEY WANT ME TO VERIFY THE EMAIL ADDRESS THAT THEY JUST SENT THE CHECKIN LINK TO?!? WHAT THE FUCK?!? And so I click the link to be sent a code that verifies my email... AND IT NEVER COMES. So, essentially, I can't check in as requested by email because they can't verify the email? And I know that if I call tech support the solution will be "check your spam folder." It's always "check your spam folder." Like people don't already know to do that by now. And it's not just MyChart. The Confluence Health website is shit too. Wanna login to MyChart? Well, first you have to scroll down and find the MyChart link. Then you go to the MyChart page and have to scroll all the way down the page for the "LOG IN TO MYCHART" link. Why not just put that fucking link at the top of the home page so people don't have to do all this work? Or, better yet, PUT THE LOGIN AT THE TOP OF THE FRONT FUCKING PAGE! They want you to use MyChart to save on staffing costs, but make it a hassle to do so. Which begs the questions... does anybody at Confluence Health use this shit themselves? Of course not. If they did then it would be a hell of a lot less shitty.

At least one would hope so.

Oh well. I finally got my booster.

I'm assuming that since a ton of people aren't getting fucking vaccinated that COVID will continue to mutate in the anti-vax people and we'll have to get annual boosters like the flu vaccine to handle that shit.

Which ain't fun, but it beats sucking on a tube of horse dewormer.

Earlier in the week the Pfizer mRNA vaccine received full FDA approval... and a stupid as hell new name "Comirnaty." Boy would I have liked to have been a fly on the wall of that marketing discussion. Because I'm sure if there was an actual marketing professional in the room, they would have objected strongly to branding that sucks this hard. The idea is that the name is a mash-up of "COVID-19, mRNA, Community, and Immunity." Well, yeah... it sounds like a mash-up of too many things trying to do too much. Effective branding is simple and memorable... not a random assortment of letters from different words that sounds like something I would say after drinking a bottle of Jägermeister. This drug is helping to SAVE LIVES and they've shit all over it with idiocy that rivals the whole "New Coke" fiasco.

AND SPEAKING OF NEW COKE...

Coca-Cola Company has taken a dump on my favorite sugar-free beverage... Coke Zero. They've gone and "new and improved it" which is to say that they learned nothing from past mistakes and "New Coked" it...

"More delicious?" Are you fucking kidding me? It tastes like shit. It's syrupy, the sweetness is way off, and I'm left with a taste in my mouth that's not at all pleasant. I can't even drink it without food because I don't want to be left with that lingering weirdness on my tongue. But I don't want to drink it with food either. It's an all-around crap product that I hope fails spectacularly. Fuck you Coca-Cola Company, you dumbass pieces of shit. If this is so fucking delicious, then why didn't you change your top-selling "Diet Coke" and leave "Coke Zero" alone?

And the worst part? The can design has changed... but they still have the old 12-pack carton design. Which means I bought 4 cartons of these things without even knowing it. Had they clearly marked the cartons, I would have been more cautious.

Apparently Coca-Cola Company's goal was to create a diet soda that tastes more like regular Coke. Why? If people want the taste of regular Coke, they can just buy regular Coke! Sure it has sugar in it, but it's probably better for you than the chemical sweeteners in diet shit.

Needless to say I am fucking livid, if you couldn't tell.

But back to "Comirnaty"...

I can't help but wonder if the people who didn't get vaccinated because the vaccines were "rushed to release without FDA approval" will now get the vaccine because it's FDA-approved. Probably not. It was just an excuse. They'll find another. It doesn't matter that nothing was actually rushed... that vaccines for coronaviruses have been in research for over eight years... that mRNA vaccine research has been in development for even longer... that all safety protocols were observed and passed in one of the largest human trials ever... and that mRNA vaccines are actually safer that old-style vaccines because all they do is give your body instructions on how to fight COVID by itself, contains no actual viruses, and then fucking disappears... the misinformation campaign has been drummed into people, and that's the end of it. Facts don't matter. Science doesn't matter. Nothing matters except some fucking idiot on YouTube with conspiracy theories that have all been disproven.

We're living in a world where people won't take a safe, FDA-approved vaccine... but will instead wait to get deathly ill from COVID-19 and take horse de-wormer to try and cure themselves. Horse dewormer. Made for horses.

Oh well. According to the dumbasses, everybody who took the vaccine is going to die in three months... in six months... in nine months... any day now... so maybe I'll be lucky and die before drowning in stupid.

And by "drowning in stupid" I mean we get stuck in a perpetual pandemic so the virus just continues to mutate until it kills us all.

And we deserve it.

Well, not me specifically... I got my fuckiing "Comirnaty" vaccinations and wear a mask... but humanity in general deserves it.

God gave us science and discovery so we could understand His miracle of life better... but half of us choose pestilence and death. More often than not in His name. That's an irony that cuts pretty deep.

The days may be getting longer, but don't worry about finding something to read to occupy your time... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Subliminal! Am I the only one who watches movies and television shows where they eat a certain food... then you crave that food? I just watched one of my all-time favorite movies, Ideal Home (for the hundredth time)... where they're always eating Crunchwraps at Taco Bell. Since my Taco Bell is 20 minutes away, I just decided to make them. Mexican Rice, Nacho Cheese Doritos, plus Shredded Mexican Cheese warmed on a flour tortilla until soft enough to fold without breaking... followed by shredded lettuce and tomatoes... flip and brown... flip and brown... serve with salsa and sour cream...

Delicious! More delicious than I deserve on a Sunday morning.

   
• Cooking! And speaking of cooking... I made the Walnut Cream Sauce Pasta I love so much that I got from Martha Stewart's meal service. Double batches get consumed in one sitting. Triple batches last me an additional day. So this time I'm going for a quadruple batch...

Assuming I don't eat it for breakfasts, I think I'm good through Tuesday or Wednesday night.

   
• Victor! The second season of Love, Victor dropped on Hulu. I loved the film that spawned it, Love, Simon and the fact that it is such a great contiuation of the movie... with strong ties to the movie... just makes it work so beautifully. Even if it does stray a little far into teen angst for me from time to time...

The second season is just as good as the first, which is such a welcome surprise. Usually shows like this tank badly after they've exhausted what makes them work. So... yeah... great show. EXCEPT... the amazing theme song, Somebody to Tell Me by Tyler Glenn, is being cut short on the show intros...

WTF?!? HULU, YOU ARE A STREAMING SERVICE... NO NEED TO CUT ANYTHING SHORT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT ON A BROADCAST SCHEDULE!

   
• It's Magneto! Watching all these people claiming to be "magnetic" after getting vaccinated having their worldview shattered when their claims are defeated by frickin' baby powder is both hilarious and profoundly sad. OUR BODIES PRODUCE OILS. THAT'S JUST A QUARTER STICKING TO THE OILS ON YOUR SKIN! YOUR FIRST CLUE THAT THIS IS BULLSHIT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THAT MAGNETS DON'T WORK ON QUARTERS! It all reminds me of when The Amazing Randi used to debunk this idiotic crap oh so many years ago...

Interesting to note that not one person was ever able to prove their "powers" and claim his One Million Dollar Challenge. Not one.

   
• It's NOT Magneto! I am all for poking fun at ignorant people who buy into stupid shit because the refuse to use even the smallest amount of brain power in verifying the crap they see on the internet. Though, like I said above, it's still profoundly sad because truly ignorant people refuse to admit they're wrong, often-times doubling down on their stupidity. But you know where I draw the line? When ignorant people actually attempt to educate themselves and admit when they were wrong. That doesn't deserve ridicule. That deserves admiration and respect...

Now see... this gentleman right here was willing to dip his toe in the enlightenment pool by listening to reason, testing his beliefs, drawing a new conclusion based on evidence, admitting he made a mistake, and coming out on the other side better for it. Like rational human beings do. You don't poke fun at that. Mostly because it's something so many of the smartest stupid people will never do. They're just not that brave.

   
• ADOBE, STOP IT!!! For some stupid fucking reason, Adobe changed the MACINTOSH SYSTEM-WIDE KEYBOARD SHORTCUT TO HIDE THE APPLICATION from ⌘H to ^⌘H. It was a damn stupid decision that no Mac user would ever fucking want. Fortunately you can manually change it back to normal so you don't go insane wondering why the application won't hide when you tell it to. But every once in a while Photoshop will update itself and it will go back to what it was. Shit like this makes me insane. Why in the hell would Adobe change a MACINTOSH SYSTEM-WIDE KEYBOARD SHORTCUT in the first place? Because it seems like Adobe just fucking hate Mac users. Which is pretty shitty when you think about it. It was the Mac that allowed Adobe to build the defacto creative applications they have.

   
And that's all I have to say about that.