TSS#49 – Playing chess with pigeons

This is my 101st post on this blog ever since its creation at the end of July. And this post is about Corona. Woohoo.

In today’s Stray Sheep, we’re talking about some annoying bits regarding the lockdown and my situation right now.

I’m healthy. I’m safe. I’m fine. Overall, I guess. Lately, I’ve been feeling more exhausted than usual and I’m getting tired all the time, which is why I’m occasionally going out to jog around the blog for a bit, take a break, and then do a couple of sprints, just to stay in shape. Going for a five-minute walk to the grocery store (up-hill but still not that hard) results in me being out of breath, which is bad. Like, really bad.
Hence, I’m starting to do a bit of training at home.

Taking walks more often, jogging and sprinting are great ways of doing things right now to keep up the stamina. My stamina never was great, so I’m mostly dead when I come back home.
Apart from that, I’m trying to for a few situps and pushups as well as a bit of weight-lifting before I go for a shower. And I don’t do that to be healthier or whatever… that’s mostly just me trying to be a bit more comfortable in my own body. Another reason for me doing that would be the fact that my girlfriend actually started training a bit, too, so I don’t want to end up with smaller arms than her at the end of the lockdown, haha.

Jokes aside, what’s being annoying right now is the fact that people are spreading a lot of conspiracy theories, fake news and overall rumours. It’s really bad. Some people are saying that Bill Gates and WHO have the patent on COVID-19 and that they deliberately spread it to stop Trump’s victories and to profit off of a vaccine… and as with every lie there’s a bit of a true in there: They actually own the patent to a lot of Corona-viruses but mostly for their way of creating a vaccine with the World Health Organisation owning the patent while Bill Gates is funding it. So, there’s a bit of a hoax right there.

Just the other day, someone got into a discussion with me because I “believe in global warming and climate change”. “Global warming is not a religion, but sure, guess I’ll have some fun with this guy”, is what I thought but, at some point, they started to bore me and right when I was about to stop discussing the matter, someone else hopped into the discussion, claiming that “weather” and “climate change” are too pair of shoes and that humans cannot affect the climate at all.

And while that sounds quite stupid (especially with no sources to his statements and with no PhD in bullshittery), it got better when he said that the German government is trying to control the population by lying about the pandemic and creating fake news (“Lügenpresse” is the German word for it and it’s generally considered nazi-jargon but “fake news” is the correct translation for it) to keep “rebels” and citizens in check.

I would have expected that he’d ramble about his lord and saviour on the dark side of the moon but the discussion didn’t get that far as I reported his remarks on “jews controlling the refugees and other things to get rid of the German race” for hate speech.

Today’s lesson:
Don’t play chess with a pigeon. It’s gonna throw away all the pieces, then shit on the board and walk of triumphantly.

Apart from that a whole bunch of students at my university are still waiting for the passwords to the online-classes they are about to take. A bunch of people are being really annoying by asking the same questions in one of our WhatsApp groups.

I feel like a bunch of them are just wanting to reassure themselves but when the same people are asking the same questions and getting, again, the same answers. They either want attention or are getting bored while on lockdown. If the password for a class isn’t online already, then it will be put online at a later date. Just point 1 and 1 together, and you’ll get your answer. Or scroll up in the chat.

Regardless of that, the quote about the pigeon applies here, too. I got labelled as a someone who’s unfriendly and they ended up “roasting” me with a very lame response… So I didn’t answer to that anymore. Yikes.

And again, I don’t need to take part in conversations and I can surely just ignore chat messages or leave groups like that but when people speculate that the system’s not working or when people are throwing out fake news about the semester getting cancelled and other stuff without “definite prove” as in “the password still isn’t online” (despite the semester not having started yet)… I don’t know. There’s something in me that just kind of has to tell them off.

I just have to tell them not to do that as they are clearly seeking attention and as they are clearly trying to confuse others by spreading false information, especially when there are freshmen in the group that aren’t well-informed yet. And in the end, they shat on the board and felt triumphant but I got my goal, too, as they are shutting up for now.

So that’s it for today’s post. People are being stupid right now. Don’t be stupid. Stay home. Stay safe. And don’t shit on other people’s chessboard.

Cheers.