Items

• 
  2020-05-09

  2020 Daily News report

  Everyday when we woke up, it felt like the news was reporting on nothing but Covid-19 cases. This is how we all felt every morning
• 2021-02-11

  Star Trek and the Pandemic

  Since its release in 1966, Star Trek has been an inspiring and comforting series to millions of people around the world. It is unapologetically utopian and hopeful, and throughout the pandemic it has been of incredible utility to people suffering from isolation and other stress in their lives. Even though the pandemic has had little real impact on my day to day life, Star Trek has still remained my favorite piece of media to immerse myself in to feel a little better about the future. Set hundreds or even a thousand years in the future, Star Trek is a setting where diseases like Covid-19 have been wiped from the Earth permanently, and even unknown alien diseases can be cured and eliminated in just hours of study and research. No one suffers from homelessness or poverty, as replicators have enabled extremely high quality of life for everyone. For me, in a time when not only is there uncertainty about disease but also high degrees of political and societal stress, Star Trek is a breath of fresh air whenever I sit down to watch it. For a time I no longer have to worry about Q-Anon cultists ransacking the capital or about catching the disease. I have seen Star Trek referred to as "competency porn," and indeed that is exactly one of the things that appeals so much in this time of strife and angst. Unlike most pieces of media, Star Trek doesn't rely on failures of communication and other frustratingly real issues to drive its conflict and stories. Instead, each show is focused on extremely competent and intelligent characters who are able to work together to quickly and efficiently solve issues using their pooled knowledge, despite their differences. Through this I can revel in the utopian ideal of the show and believe even for just a moment that we could reach that point ourselves one day, even if for now our society is plagued by the very issues Star Trek posits we can overcome. One could call it escapism, but I think many people would agree that escapism is exactly what people need and want right now due to the ever-present and overpowering feeling of doom surrounding everything else.
• 
  2020-07-08

  “Insufficient facts always invite danger.” - Captain Spock

  A tweet from famed Canadian astronaut Colonel Chris Hadfield and resulting response from Ottawa Public Health. The initial tweet shows three of the main characters from the original Star Trek (Bones, Kirk, and Spock) with medical masks superimposed on their faces and another crew member, wearing the red shirt which is often jokingly said to mark a character for death, in the background without a mask. The response from Ottawa Public Health is the addition of a quote from the famously logical character of Spock: "Insufficient facts always invite danger." This is possibly a reference to those who are claiming masks are ineffectual or even dangerous based on limited or untruthful sources- a section of the population with which the Public Health unit deals frequently.
• 
  2020-05-10

  Damage Report

  This meme pretty much describes every morning for the past three months. Every single day the news reports some wild new thing. First Kobe dies in a fiery crash, then a plague shuts the world down, toilet paper shortage throughout America, people loose their jobs, I (a teacher) am sent home until further notice, some cop decides to murder a man in daylight while being filmed, causing mass protests, rioting and looting in my city, I was just notified that the budget cuts for education in California may cost me my job. Oh, and somewhere in there was the announcement that murder hornets were in the states now and some huge asteroid is going to barely miss us. I have started sleeping in as long as I can. Mostly so I don't have to face the next thing coming my way. I was crying to my mom recently and she told me to get it together, "Honey, none of this is about you. You know that right? This is happening to us all." I keep asking myself if this is even real?