Welcome to 2022. Does it feel like a fresh new year, the way last year felt like it was going to be a fresh new year?
No, didn't think so.
A year ago, Martok was still drinking the "vaccines will make everything different" kool-aid, for example. Remember all that talk? "Once 70% of the population is vaccinated" then everything will be okay. But then the goalposts kept shifting, and suddenly we were talking about boosters, but don't you dare claim the vaccines aren't as effective as "science" told us it was because that's fake news.
End of June we were really enjoying the end of lockdown restrictions. Yet the moment a dreaded "new variant" comes along we somehow have to reset back to square one. And square one, you'll recall, was "waiting for a vaccine to save us" even as people flat out superior to the likes of Tam and Hinshaw and Fauci were telling you how retarded an idea that was.
And so after a couple of months into the New Year the "2020 won" memes which kicked off in December began to be circulated in earnest, as it became clear that things weren't going back to normal soon: the supply chain was more disrupted than ever, places continued to lock down even harder and openly discussed ignoring the Nuremberg Code because they literally wanted to be Viro Fascists.
Which is another way to say that this felt a lot like a sequel to 2020, rather than a new era. In fact, it's that worst kind, the painfully derivative "we charged you $18 to see the same movie again" type of sequel. So with that in mind, and the extra joy that the "two weeks to flatten the curve" is going to become two years before anything improves, and that you can't reliably expect to book any international vacations or plan large social events for yet another year, it's time to name the year after the year after 2020...
I give you: 2020...too.
Fun science fiction "it could have been worse" notes:
- If John Sheppard had remained in the time dilation field for two weeks starting on March 16th 2020, he would get out on May 28th, 2029.
- If James T. Kirk had been hyper-accelerated by the Scalosians at 12:01am on March 16th 2020 and took the antidote two weeks later, he would discover it was 12:01am on July 15th, 2058.
