Yeah theoretically, since no one would give me a test come hell or high water, I went to yoga the first day I had symptoms and proceeded to go jogging for the first week. About day 4 or 5 I landed an absolutely splitting ear infection, which became the principal symptom that concerned me until reading about an Australian kid with a splitting ear infection that ended up spending a month in a Wuhan hospital with COVID. That was probably 11 days in, and right about the time I noticed my lungs were burning. Things were downright unsettling for a week or two afterward and then I realized that I was feeling minutely, but consistently and incrementally better.

Anecdata of 1 but I've seen a lot of people comment that they, too, didn't think too much of their COVID infections the first week. I didn't start taking advil until a week in; nobody was bathing me in the blood of virgins and transfusing me with unicorn phlegm or whatever.

I dunno. I'm so 'round the bend that I watched that prepared Trump video four times last night to decide if it was a deepfake.

- There's a reverb tail to the audio that you are less likely to get on an open balcony facing a field. It's a room 'verb that's really handy for pasting over bad edits. If you recorded Donald Trump's audio and wanted to get rid of everything that wasn't pure awesomeness, that's how you'd do it - have him say what he's gonna say in a medium-sized, dead room and then cut shit together, pasting room tone over the cuts

- There's a shadow under his chin that swims around a bit. Sometimes there's a neck fold that seems to shoot out of his collar and head towards his right arm. And the depth of field on his head is different than the depth of field on his body, and there's a weird rotoscope-lookin' halo on the fringy hairs above his ears.

- Sometimes his face is a frame or two behind his head, as if it's tracking but not quite. And the defining line between his jowl and his shirt is substantially sharper than the dividing line between his blazer and his shirt.

I fuckin' hate that it's pushing me this far into tinfoil hat territory but if I had him record that monologue, and then I didn't like the way it worked out, I absolutely would have had him saying stuff inside, make the audio the way I wanted it and then deepfake Donald Trump's healthy face onto Donald Trump's unhealthy face. It would be easy compared to the deepfake stuff you usually see and if they had more time it'd look a lot better but if they had more time people would wonder what took so long. And you could never question it openly, and whatever tomfoolery you uncovered would be waved away as garden-variety post sweetening. You could legit have a body double sell their story to the New York Post and the White House could still wave it away because obviously, Trump said all that shit.