Category: Culture (Page 11 of 21)

Three days ago, I had my second shot of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. It’s still a little hard to believe that companies rolled out a vaccine in such a short time period. It’s also just…amazing to take the step and see some hope for the future. It takes me a step closer to the end of the pandemic.

Since I updated on my side effects from the first shot, I’ll also say a bit about the second. Like many people, the second shot was rougher for me than the first. I didn’t get the same waves of dizziness and nausea as I did with the first. But I was much more sore and tired. And I had a pretty bad headache. Luckily, these symptoms only lasted for about a day.

That takes us to the next steps. I’m looking forward to a lot of things: visiting my parents, seeing friends in-person, watching baseball. Many of these things are long overdue.

I was reading Nathan J. Robinson’s short article about Age of Empires the other day with more than a bit of nostalgia. Robinson enjoyed revisiting Age of Empires after 20 years. But he took us to task as a society for our obsession with conquest games over cooperative ones.

Robinson draws all the obvious connections between Age of Empires (or Risk, or a million other games) and mindless war. No, players don’t really do anything constructive in these games. They even do destructive things.

Nevertheless, I’ll admit once again that I don’t really need my cultural consumption or choices to line up with my politics. For the most part, I think it doesn’t matter. Sometimes, I think it’s fine to just enjoy something.

Perhaps this is a long-winded way of pointing out that I remember many years of enjoying Age of Empires with my friends. And, more recently, I started playing a game called O A.D. While it’s superficially different enough to have a different title, it’s basically an AoE knockoff. And you can play it for free.

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The COVID-19 pandemic dates to late 2019. But it became a huge problem in the U.S. almost exactly one year ago. And then the world developed a vaccine (actually several) in record-breaking time. As for myself, I got my first dose of the Moderna vaccine a few days ago.

Side effects? They haven’t been too bad for me. My arm hurt for a couple of days, and I felt tired. Slightly less than a day after the vaccine, I started feeling really run down, nauseous, and a bit dizzy. I recovered the next day.

Overall, I’m just feeling…optimistic. Yes, I could still get COVID-19. Yes, that’s a concern. And yes, the world still has many cases (though far less than a couple months ago). Nevertheless, I can see the end of the pandemic. Maybe I’ll start seeing more people in person soon. Maybe I’ll even enjoy some baseball in person this summer.

It seems like something worth celebrating.

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