Blaugust #25: Blogging in a Time of Corona

I thought I was so incredibly original when I started using the tag #loveinatimeofcorona on all my Instagram posts back at the beginning of the pandemic. Now I see it everywhere. And I saw it everywhere on Instagram, too. But now it’s everywhere.

The header image was captured from a video by Dr. Panda called “Coronavirus Outbreak — How to Protect Yourself“. It’s a really good and informational video explaining the pandemic and its origins to children.

Today’s Blaugust prompt is from UnwiseOwl at Leaflocker, who asks:

With the pandemic, we are going through an unprecedented time. In what ways has this shared global event impacted your content creation?

I mentioned yesterday that I don’t consider what I do here to be content creation. I’m not trying to lure people to my website so that they can be monetized. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a content creator; I have been one in the past, might do it again in the future. It’s just not what I’m doing now, and as such, the pandemic hasn’t affected my content creation all that much.

It has affected me as a blogger, though. I wasn’t even blogging before the pandemic. Most of the stuff I shared, I shared on Instagram.

March 13th, 2020, was the last day any of us could work at the office. After that, we all were forced to work at home. That meant that I didn’t have to commute to work, or commute home, or get dressed, or shower, or do anything, really. All I really had to do was be online with my work laptop somewhere between 8:00-8:30AM, ready to work, headset on.

This gave me loads of free time in the morning to waste on the internet. A couple months prior, I’d started getting West Karana back in shape. I’d gotten all my passwords sorted out, started upgrading the WordPress and the theme, but had put it aside. I’d been posting a lot on Instagram, but very little of that was about gaming. I’d been playing a lot of games and wanted to start writing about them again.

I found out when I went to log in one day that my site had vanished and was now replaced with some click farming site. Luckily, I had another site that I used when I needed a back end server for some web apps. I’d originally made the “Chasing Dings!” site for a new comic (called Chasing Dings!, natch) that I never got around to writing.

(I had built sets for the comic in EverQuest II; it’s the reason I have so many homes in that game. WK had a few Chasing Dings! comics and I may end up sharing them again here eventually).

Anyway, I was pretty upset when I found WK was gone, and I griped about it randomly on Twitter one day. Belghast invited me to the Blaugust discord just around the time when Blapril 2020 was starting, and so I began blogging again, fitting it in before work each day.

I would probably not even be blogging at all if it weren’t for the pandemic. All that said, I’d rather the pandemic hadn’t happened, or it had been controlled better.

We were told it might take as long as a month of lockdown before it was safe to return to work. Then it was Easter. Then it was Memorial Day. Then it was Independence Day. Every time the government announced a new target date for when the pandemic would be essentially over, we all made plans to come back to work, then be disappointed when those dates would come and go and everything would be worse than ever.

It’s looking like the pandemic will never be over and we’ll never be allowed back in the office. Death and existential dread are real because our government has decided to just stop worrying about it and hope a miracle happens someday. Until then, the government is fine to let as many people as possible get infected and possibly die.