It’s time for my semi-regular Patron Q&A! It’s like a colonoscopy, only more frequent.

I’ll answer any questions anyone might have, but if you don’t ask any, I’ll just talk about the transition from “On Vacation!” to “Jesus, I have so much grading to do!” It’ll be fun!

That doesn’t make me trans, does it? Or bi? I want to be both the winged wild beast and the happy bookreader. I’m intensely envious of both lifestyles.

Wait, why does he soar into the night if he’s got that whole library right there? Maybe he’s visiting bookstores to stock up on new literature.

I need a great big box of these cards.

I’d give the first one to Joe Rogan, who was diagnosed with COVID-19, and thought it serious enough to spend buckets of money on treatments — mostly useless crap — and is now going around and saying it was no big deal

I got up in the morning, got tested and turns out I got COVID. So we immediately threw the kitchen sink at it — all kinds of meds: monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin … everything. And I also got an NAD drip and a vitamin drip, and I did that three days in a row.

Vitamins and NAD will not treat a viral infection. Ivermectin is garbage. The monoclonal antibodies would help, but you know, if he’d been vaccinated he’d be making those himself.

The Food and Drug Administration has authorized monoclonal antibody therapy as an emergency treatment for COVID-19 to fight off severe illness. The FDA has not, however, approved the use of ivermectin, which some vaccine skeptics swear by — despite a lack of scientific evidence to support their claims, not to mention the potential harmful effects of taking the anti-parasitic drug at high doses.

IV treatments such as NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) and vitamin drips are usually administered in an effort to improve general fitness and wellness — though there isn’t much scientific proof to back their efficacy either.

I’m sorry he got better. People might have noticed and done the sensible not-like-Joe-Rogan thing if he’d died.

I’m gonna need a big box of those cards. After Rogan, I’d have to hand them out to everyone in my university administration, and then I’d have to go to the local grocery store and carpet the floor with them, and then walk the streets and stick them in the windshield of every over-sized pickup truck driven by maskless yahoos, and then…

I think there was a mixup at the hospital, because there’s no way a schlub like me could have fathered that gentleman.

How we got here:

I’m ready to play a game.

It’s the end of my first full week of classes, and I need to unwind, so let’s explore strange new worlds on Friday evening. I’m thinking we’ll just take off in our starships from this location in Euclid to a nearby unexplored system and investigate whatever planets we can find…or kill pirates or strafe the surface, if you want to go that way. If you’ve got the game, you know how to use those mysterious glyphs to teleport to a planet I’ll be hanging out on at the beginning. If anyone else shows up, we can talk about what we should do, otherwise I’ll just zoom out alone into the void.

There are rumors of a big new update coming along at some time in the future, so if that drops on Friday or earlier, I’ll obviously have to change my plans.