Star Trek: Relaxation

[dieastra]

Hey, annejack, are you still around? I have a new picture for you!

"Jim, you're too tense, you need to relax, you have some awful knots in your shoulders!"

"I can't, those pesky Tribbles are everywhere!"

(This picture was made for the prompt word "relaxation")

Comments

[dieastra]

Thank you! See, I already have reached November 2019, when we were still blissfully unaware *sigh*

Did I ever tell you about German TV series "Sloborn"? It is about a pandemic and they finished filming in November 2019, the script was just speculative at the time. It aired somewhat in Spring this year and I saw an interview with the actors, where they felt like déjà vu, when everything from filming then started to happen in real life - the mask wearing etc.

In the show, a ship is arriving from South America on a North Sea island. In the beginning it all feels so eerily familiar - there are news in TV and radio about a virus somewhere on the other side of the world, but nobody pays attention to it, just living their lives. And later ignoring all the warning signs because of course it would not come here, to this remote island.

I think it was just six parts and I really enjoyed them. I wonder if we will get a second season, as I would like to know what happened to some of the characters.

Many said, they would not want to watch it but for me, watching fictional characters is less scary than watching the real news?

[hamsterwoman]

See, I already have reached November 2019, when we were still blissfully unaware *sigh*

Haha, tempting to stay there, in the simpler, blissful time :P

It aired somewhat in Spring this year and I saw an interview with the actors, where they felt like déjà vu, when everything from filming then started to happen in real life - the mask wearing etc.

No, you hadn't mentioned it but I can imagine how freaky it would be. And actually I had a similar experience with a book this year -- Sarah Pinsker's Song for a New Day, which was published in September 2019 and has two timelines, one in which the world descends into a pandemic and another that picks up like a decade later, in a world that basically got "stuck" in social distancing mode. I read it this summer, and it was a really odd feeling -- definitely that sense of deja vu, but also "hey, that's not how it was!", when of course there was no "how it was" when the book was written. But, yeah, I didn't find it offputting like I thought I might.

[dieastra]

I once watched a TV documentation about five ways how the world would end one day. Asteroid, Grand Canyon vulcan exploding, black hole, don't remember the fourth but pandemic also was a possible way.

So it would make sense that there are TV series and books about it, as well as politicans preparing for it (or at least they should have, as it turns out, they did not take it seriously either) when there has been talk about it happening sooner or later for years.

Yes, the maker of the TV series, now knowing how it really was also said he wished he would have done the end differently - there the military are the bad guys and the people resisting are the good guys, which is a bit dystopian and not the message you want to put out now.

I remember having been to the cinema in the Nineties for the "Outbreak" movie with Dustin Hoffman. One TV channel dared to air it recently and I recorded it but haven't watched it yet. I do remember a spectacular scene where an infected man went to the cinema and they showed how his aerosols were spreading when he coughed. I bet everyone in the cinema held their breath at this scene ;)

I also had to do a double take when I watched Star Trek Voyager this year and they encountered a species that was suffering from a kind of plague for decades. She says the sentence "Congregating in groups is strictly regulated. It's considered to be a threat to public health."

That show is from the Nineties, 25 years ago! And I watched that episode right during the first lockdown in March. That felt eerie ;)

[hamsterwoman]

there the military are the bad guys and the people resisting are the good guys, which is a bit dystopian and not the message you want to put out now.

Nod. Yeah, actually, the author of the book I mentioned had something similar happen, too -- a large point in the book is that people are social distancing past the point where it's necessary, because the government just put those regulations in place and never took them away. And when I got to hear the author speak afterwards, already during Covid, she was saying, "I keep having to explain to people that I'm not against social distancing -- social distancing wasn't a thing when I wrote the book!" (and the circumstances are different -- they're not in the middle of an active pandemic at that point)

I remember seeing Outbreak! And L watched Contagion with her bio class the previous year, and also kept thinking back to it frequently in the early days of the pandemic.

as well as politicans preparing for it (or at least they should have, as it turns out, they did not take it seriously either) when there has been talk about it happening sooner or later for years.

I obviously can't speak to politicians, but I do know that, like, from a Business Continuity Perspective, it's really hard to prepare for what's actually going to happen. At work we've had what we thought was a pretty robust Business Continuity Plan program that we've been pushing on all our suppliers, even harder since the Fukushima earthquake. But with all the work put into it, there were still things in this pandemic that nobody had prepped for, like entire states or countries shutting down (California, Malaysia), commercial air traffic plummeting all of a sudden, etc.