End-of-year 2021

Here we are, then: year 2 of the pandemic is drawing to a close, and we're looking at a third year of masks, restrictions and deaths.

I did my previous pandemic diary in August, when it looked like we were experiencing a fourth wave. Since then, we certainly have been: we've hit records for daily infections and hospitalizations, and the pandemic isn't even nearly over. The omicron variant is spreading like wildfire and we're looking at possible lockdowns again.

This is what I wrote in February.

Right now, I'm afraid we're going to be presenting Act 2 of this fallacy: to spare our hospitality industry some short-term loss, we've abandoned suppressing the pandemic - which means the long-term losses are going to be much greater than they would otherwise have been. In money and in lives.

So far, Finnish pandemic policy has been a weird ride. First we were very slow to take any of this at all seriously; we even had officials telling us that Finland won't be affected at all. We were very late to recommend facemasks or anything like that. Then our government did take action, and as a result of that, the total deaths and economic damage are still of a different order of magnitude than, say, Sweden. But now it looks like our social democrat-led government has decided that the hospitality business is more important than national health, and we'll all be paying for it.

We're also making a fairly big bet on the vaccination program being a success. If it isn't, we may still be dealing with this pandemic next year.

I think at this point it's safe to say we're heading into the third year of the pandemic, not least because the vaccination program hasn't worked out the way people were hoping. In our case, there are two failures. First, obviously, is the potentially disastrous parochialism and greed that left the pandemic running wild in poorer countries, which is going to keep birthing new wonderful variants for as long as we have Greek letters left.

The second failure is a national one. Our government had decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that an 80% vaccine uptake would be enough to reopen society. The trouble with this is that 20% of our population is still over a million people. It very much seems to me that this was exacerbated by overoptimistic messaging that once everyone gets vaccinated, everything will go back to normal. We even loosened mask mandates and other restrictions before actually hitting the 80% mark, and have been inexplicably reluctant to reimpose them. This fall, infection and hospitalization graphs can look like anything, and apparently we still can't interfere with the sacred right of the restaurant business to host karaoke nights.

I didn't expect a crisis would play out with a government first taking strong and decisive action, and then seem to completely lose the plot as the situation continues.

At this point I'm wondering how many more years we can stretch this out to if we keep failing to actually eradicate the virus. Even if we end up taking stronger measures next year, in the summer case numbers will fall, everyone will once again decide the pandemic is over and we'll start reopening everything. And then everyone acts shocked when it's October 2022 and case numbers are rising.

I want to be wrong about this.

**

Luckily, there are other things in life. Obviously the pandemic continues to prevent us from boardgaming as we'd like to, and Here I Stand by email continues; we've been in the fifth turn since May!

In matters Warhammer, last year I talked about my ongoing efforts to finish projects, and I have indeed finished some! I painted my machine cultists, and a Mechanicus Knight to go with them; a bunch of Deathwatch and tanks I had lying around; and my Necrons. The number of unpainted miniatures lying around on my desk, and unopened boxes on top of my bookshelf, is trending downward. Most importantly, finishing things has been very satisfying.

Luckily, I'm feeling quite alienated from a lot of the new GW products. I think the new orks/orcs are mostly terrible; they've ditched the iconic GW orc look and replaced it with something that just looks like an uninspired knockoff of the deeply silly Peter Jackson fantasy movies. The new Kill Team Sisters and Tau somehow manage to make both factions look bad. The trend of putting characters on higher and more complicated bases is incredibly silly.

I could go on, but suffice to say that there's a lot in the current GW aesthetic I just don't like, coupled with the fact that they're doing more and more effectively monopose plastics. I've also become thoroughly disenchanted with the way so much of what they do is now built around new box mania, where everybody in the social media community goes completely bananas over whatever the latest big box is, queues up in the online store to preorder it - and then you never see a single model out of that box ever again after the unboxing video.

On a more positive note, my three regular readers will have noticed that in October, this blog transformed into a Blood Bowl blog, and I'm not even a little bit sorry. On the contrary, I'm delighted that we got so many people to either try Blood Bowl for the first time or get back into it. Next year, we'll try to have a proper yearlong league! I was also very happy that so many people wanted to play, because it gave me a reason to finish painting several teams I had started or at least primed.

I'm not going to stop buying miniatures; collecting them is my hobby. But I am trying to narrow down the amount of projects I'm working on, and concentrate on the ones that make me happy and the ones that are actually likely to hit the tabletop. I'll be showing several of both off next year, I hope. I'm going to try practicing a sort of project management from now on, where I not only have a limited amount of projects I'm working on, but I'm also not buying anything new for a project until I've finished what I'm working on now.

Last summer, I started work on a truly long-term project: my model railroad layout. I hope to be able to provide some updates next year.

And speaking of projects, I did finish my Let's Read series on the Lord of the Rings. I still can't quite believe it's done. It was fun enough, though, that I did decide to continue it. Stay tuned!

**

In personal matters, I have to say I'm damn tired of this pandemic. I've been quite depressed and lonely, made worse by a frankly strange episode this fall when several of my friends cut me out of their lives altogether. On the other hand, I've been quite lucky to have at least some work teaching history to business school applicants. Last spring, we taught remotely, and quite frankly I hate it. Alas, with the pandemic continuing into next year, it looks like we'll be remote next spring as well. It's exhausting and frustrating, but better than nothing.

The trouble is that teaching is a terrible profession to be in right now. As I've said before, the notion regularly peddled in the English-speaking world that teachers are valued and well-paid in Finland is a total lie. For many of us, our job prospects are terrible. As the rural population shrinks, so does the school network, which means that for most subject teacher positions, there are dozens of applicants, many of whom have years if not decades of experience. I haven't even made it as far as a job interview for a single public sector position I've applied for, and I'm not sure if I ever will.

So a priority for next year is figuring out what to do for a living. This is really kind of annoying, since I like teaching history and according to the feedback I get, I'm good at it. Unfortunately, our public school system doesn't care if we're good at our job, it only cares about years of experience accumulated. It's not exactly fun to discover that no-one cares if you're any good at being a PhD student or not, and then go into teaching and find out that no-one there cares either. You start to wonder what the point is.

To end this part on a positive note, though, at least I've been able to find some work. Last summer, I even spent two months working full-time as a sort-of project manager, putting together material for polytechnic prep courses. This coming spring, pandemic situation permitting, I'll be giving two lectures as part of a series on the history of heresy; one of them is on Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings. Later on, I'm very much looking forward to delivering several lectures on environmental destruction and history with my colleague. We're in the middle of a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis, and we're trying to do our part to fight them. So there's lots to look forward to as well.

**

So, once again, I hope the two or three people who read this blog are well, and that everyone has a lovely holiday season. One day the pandemic will end.