Pandemic Positivity

BESW

14:32

Jennifer Burke's knitting patterns on Ravelry are all free until March 29th ((11:59 US EST).

Pokémon Go temporarily won’t make you leave the house due to coronavirus (Polygon article)

The National Gallery of Art is going to be conducting room-by-room tours online

How to work from home - well. 16 tips from a remote worker (Linkedin article)

Young Jean Lee will be teaching a free online playwriting workshop on March 22nd from 1-4pm ET

Josh Rickard has a collection of amusing backgrounds for web conferencing

I'm glad last year's Correspondence Jam exists! Correspondence jam is for epistolary games! What does that mean? Any game where the main mechanic is players writing letters back and forth! This can mean a game played through dms, through email or shared documents, through snail mail, or any other message sending system!

in RPG General Chat, 16 hours ago, by BESW

Solitary Games Sale A sale hosted by Sohkrates. Grab some dice or some playing cards and get ready to tell your own story. Hack the rich, explore the stars, make first contact, or make your own world from scratch.

An amusing Tweet about responsible behavior during the pandemic.

nitsua60

14:50

In day 1 of home-schooling, we managed to put together a brass trio version of "Don't Stop Believing." My new personal project is to get good enough at recording/mixing/editing on the home computer s.t. I can record and upload for y'all to see.
I don't remember the last time I was so happy =)

5

BESW

"Stuck at Home? These 12 Famous Museums Offer Virtual Tours You Can Take on Your Couch (Video)" (travelandleisure.com article)

@nitsua60 I'm here for this.

"Here's a fact thread of things that change when you're confined in one place for a long time, especially with others," Twitter thread by Kathy E J. What to look out for and how to cope with it. Doesn't sugar-coat the potential for challenges but is solution-oriented. A couple of the points have content warnings.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW is the WashYourLyrics website PP approved?

NautArch

@nitsua60 ha! That's awesome.

I just came up with our daily schedule last night. We'll see if it lasts a day :)

We are trying to come up with more games/activities, so I'm hoping we can share things we find here.

nitsua60

@NautArch We've already got some adjustments in the works. Both art and music "periods" need to be a bit longer.

BESW

I'm not familiar with it, but so long as it's uplifting/empowering?

NautArch

14:59

@nitsua60 Ooooh, I didn't even think about music. duh!

BESW

Hipster Viking Amy shares some insight from her therapist about acknowledging anxiety and finding outlets for it without feeling guilty. (Twitter thread)

→ 1 message moved to Trash

Abhas Kumar Sinha

@BESW Why?

AncientSwordRage

Wash Your Lyrics lets you choose your own hand-washing song (Wired Article)

BESW

@AbhasKumarSinha That is not comforting, empowering, or uplifting. And don't tell people "I told you so" here either.

→ 2 messages moved to Trash

Abhas Kumar Sinha

@BESW okay. Sorry then..

AncientSwordRage

15:05

@AbhasKumarSinha The chat desc is "a cozy-things-only social distancing support group"

Abhas Kumar Sinha

okay okay... I'm sorry.

AncientSwordRage

BESW

@NautArch @kviiri May I make you room owners here, please?

kviiri

@BESW Yes ^__^

Feeds

BESW has added kviiri to the list of this room's owners.

NautArch

15:14

@BESW of course

Feeds

BESW has added NautArch to the list of this room's owners.

BESW

Thank you both.

Carcer

15:29

@AncientSwordRage That really depends on the song you choose

AncientSwordRage

@Carcer true....

doppelgreener

I get a lot of difficulty working in an office setting, so hopefully this working from home means more energy left at the end of the day :)

i'm gonna use that to practice some drawing. i've got some habits re: how i spend my day that i need to update

AncientSwordRage

@Carcer I don't listen to music much, but I'm sure there are more upbeat songs

nitsua60

15:55

In a bizzare bit of "returning to pre-industrial times," some of you may know that I run the bell-ringing guild at my local church.
Well, a bunch of my recent graduates have had their campuses closed, and two of my newest learners are faculty kids.
That means that I've got five teenagers, competent ringers all, locked into their rural little New England town, who're going to get tired of Netflix right around when their isolation periods end.
We may just stun the ringing world =)

Inside a Bell Tower: Change Ringing at UChicago's 17th century Mitchell Bell Tower.

►

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about ^^

BESW

Nice!

Loyalty Books's Recommended Social Distancing Reads. And they're offering $2 shipping for the rest of the month!

AncientSwordRage

16:36

@nitsua60 campanology!

nitsua60

room topic changed to Pandemic Positivity: A cozy-things-only social distancing support group. See also Coronavirus Chat Zone for unrestricted, wide-ranging discussion. (no tags)

@AncientSwordRage Bring the 17th-C. back, baby!

AncientSwordRage

@nitsua60 needed to refresh to see that

kviiri

I already mentioned this in the main Coronavirus chat, but I'll say it again due to this room's fitting subject matter: the epidemic has inspired unprecedented amount of volunteer activism in Finland oriented towards plain ol' helping one's neighbor. Some do groceries or little maintenance jobs for those who have difficulties arranging for such.

They interviewed the founder of the "Arabia neighbor help" Facebook group. (Yes, there is a place called Arabia in Helsinki)

Also, virtual closeness is increasing --- eg. my company has founded a discord for having "virtual coffee break discussions". They're focusing on being low-threshold, informal fun.

Final note, I worried buying that 13th Age book would've been a waste of good money, because I don't really play RPGs that much anymore and don't know when I get back to it. But it's already paid itself back because heavens how delightful it is to have NON-digital media to dissociate my brain from screen work.

Now i'm off to enjoy it. Take care!

nitsua60

o/

Carcer

@kviiri end of last week I helped set up a mumble server for the engineers in my office so they can have drop-in voice chat and stuff

(we're large enough that the answer to the question "can we use Discord to talk about work stuff?" is "The lawyers/infosec will get back to you in 6-12 months")

AncientSwordRage

16:54

@nitsua60 \\oo/

nitsua60

19:47

I'll offset my recent downer in the other room by sharing this: Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Verizon, T-Mobile, Cox, Sprint are all lifting data caps, increasing speeds, making hotspots free, or otherwise trying to provide equitable access as many students and workers find their connectivity-needs suddenly changed.

KorvinStarmast

@nitsua60 my challenge to you and your bell ringers is to get the bells to do the sound track to Disney's animated Hunchback of Notre Dame. (or just one of the songs) It would be cool to hear what they come up with.

kviiri

@nitsua60 I didn't know bell ringing guilds are a thing! That's really really fascinating!

nitsua60

@kviiri My guild started in 1931--I'm the fourth "ringing master" of the guild in that time =)

(The guild went without ringing master for a few decades in there.)

kviiri

Are the bells you ring school bells, or university bells, or something else?

skullpatrol

in The Ivory Tower, 20 mins ago, by Wrzlprmft

https://twitter.com/StackOverflow/status/1239631312664907779

nitsua60

19:56

@kviiri Though I should qualify: the nearest guild to you (of this style of ringing, at least) is probably Belgium. Or Scotland--my Euro geography isn't good enough to wager a guess as to which's closer to my vague notion of where you are =\

@kviiri We are one of two high schools in North America with a bell tower. (Out of ~48 North American towers.)

kviiri

@nitsua60 Mine neither, although now I want to find out :)

wolframalpha.com/input/…

Apparently they're pretty equally close to me. (Or at least their capitals)

So I reckon, your Euro geography gets a pass!

nitsua60

Woo-hoo!

skullpatrol

Why don't they teach more European history/geo in the states?

kviiri

@skullpatrol Probably the same reason we don't have to memorize the state capitals of the US over here :)

skullpatrol

:-)

kviiri

20:03

I still have a shoddy memory for European capitals too.

skullpatrol

perhaps, the next internet influenced generation will be more global...

kviiri

I was always an academic kid but geography and history rubbed me wrong almost until my adulthood. Geography as-is, history mainly because of how it was taught. That's not to say I underperformed in either, I just... didn't exert myself there unlike with other subjects.

I was always more willing to make inferences than recollections. That's why I liked math, I could apply my smarts to solve a problem I hadn't seen before. But if I forgot when the Treaty of Nöteborg was signed (it's 1323, everyone here remembers that) I had no way of solving the problem. I hated it, despite actually having a pretty good memory. On principle you know :)

@nitsua60 In here and especially Karelia, skilled musicians would wow their crowds by mimicking the church bells on their instruments, if there was a particularly fine-sounding set of bells nearby.

One example became a piece of its own: youtube.com/watch?v=MV5ZOJaflSs

KorvinStarmast

@kviiri I loved maps and geography as a kid, and had in 6th grade social studies the requirement to know the names and capitals of all countries in Europe one quarter, all of the ones in Asia in another quarter, all in South America in the next quarter, and the last quarter Africa. But that was in the 60's.

kviiri

@KorvinStarmast Yeah I probably know the quarter of all those too... oh wait.

KorvinStarmast

Of course, my older brother and I were in a never ending series of contests with one another on who had memorized more, and who remembered the song lyrics more perfectly.

We even competed on who could sing without error Gilber and Sullivan songs.

And we still do that stuff over the phone with each other-hilarity ensues as our aging brains drop a detail here and there and we both try to remember, without the internet, if we got it right.

skullpatrol

20:21

today, it would be google-fu competitions :-)

kviiri

@KorvinStarmast Song lyrics do stick with me quite well. Sometimes a bit too well

If I remember a bit here and there it's a guaranteed ear-worm as the reconstruction engine of my brain tries to find the missing bits.

skullpatrol

or hack-a-thons...

V2Blast

@nitsua60 Looking forward to this! :D

@AncientSwordRage I don't know how many would find Rage Against the Machine "positive" but I think they posted one of these memes with the lyrics of one of their songs on their own Facebook page :P

skullpatrol

see here for more info

AncientSwordRage

20:43

@V2Blast I'm sure since would

KorvinStarmast

@V2Blast In other great news, our friend who is an airline pilot returned home from a trip and had to get tested. Just got the news from her husband: all clear, so far. Positive news is nice.

kviiri

@KorvinStarmast Wouldn't that be negative news, now? :)

KorvinStarmast

@kviiri OK, it's a positive negative? X^D

V2Blast

lol

Carcer

@V2Blast you might be thinking of twitter.com/RATM/status/1237036386886303744 and the twitter account is run by fans

doppelgreener

21:02

Eric Campbell is starting up a communal story-telling RPG on Twitter. “Isolation can be difficult. Anxiety & depression thrive when we feel disconnected. So let's play a game.”

Some of you might know Eric from Geeks & Sundry.

Carcer

21:38

rockpapershotgun.com/2020/03/16/…

BESW

21:57

room topic changed to Pandemic Positivity: A cozy-things-only social distancing support group. Be extra careful, we're fragile here. For unrestricted, wide-ranging discussion: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/105510/coronavirus-chat-zone (no tags)

"How to run a remote design team: Practical steps for collaborative success," a collection of resources by DigitalArtsOnline. Some of this is good stuff for organizing TRPG groups too!

nitsua60

@V2Blast Holy wow, the first recording attempt (of 4 bars) sounds horrible. But it's a good proof-of-concept: individual instruments are being picked up well and sound fine. But multitrack recording with only visual (not aural) feedback is making our timing sound like, well, a 3rd-grade band not watching their conductor.

BESW

"The Bird Museum," a free itch.io project where you wander through a virtual museum showcasing a random selection of over 1000 bird arts by people from Twitter.

user15026

curls up this room is helping.

BESW

22:15

Oh, another useful collection from last year: Discord RPG Jam. We’re already playing RPGs & chatting with our game friends on Discord, why not make some RPGs specifically designed to play on Discord?

2

trogdor

22:27

all for that

user15026

Ooooh yes

nitsua60

22:58

@NautArch So, edits include longer music and art periods each morning and... we got slammed today with work from all three of the kids' teachers. They sent home packets on Friday. Then they had a full day in school without the kids, and apparently decided those kids needed about five times as much work as they'd originally been given.

=(

BESW

The word "caremongering" did not exist on the morning of Friday 13 March. Yet just three days later what started as a way to help vulnerable people in Toronto has turned into a movement spreading fast across Canada. (BBC article)

NautArch

23:27

That's bonkers, but we've so far haven't really gotten anything from the teachers (that I know of, maybe the wife does)

But the kids had a great day with the first schedule. My son asked for less creative time and i countered with a music Period.

nitsua60

Hard GM move! I like =)

NautArch

Hahaha!

V2Blast

23:59

@Carcer Ah okay

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