davidd's A Doll A Day Challenge 2020

[dargosmydaddy]

They’re a pain if you wear glasses, though, because unless you position your glasses just right they will fog up.

I have yet to master this, and it's driving me nuts...

[davidd]

Is John Wayne advertising a store or a touristy place?
Our grocery store has finally decreed masks required, & I was thinking last night that at least they hide the under-the-breath muttering when people annoy me... 

John Wayne stands in front of a popular restaurant called the Cowboy's Smokehouse. There are several other similar figures of western movie stars around town.

Are cases getting worse even in rural Canada? 

I guess that's one... perhaps the only... advantage of mask mandates. If masks work as well as mask advocates say, shouldn't this thing be under control by now? Many places have had mandatory mask requirements enforced by heavy fines in place for months, but virus infections keep increasing. And no, I'm not trying to start an argument. I'm legitimately asking, because while almost every day I hear that "masks work," I am seeing little supporting evidence from the numbers.
It's more like "nothing else is working, so we'll force everyone to wear masks so it looks like we're doing something, and then we'll tell them it works."

They do that, they also keep your nose warm in the cold weather. They’re a pain if you wear glasses, though, because unless you position your glasses just right they will fog up.

I have begun wearing a bandana, just like John Wayne and Triv are wearing in the photo from yesterday. I have the top folded over three or four times. It creates a tight seal above my nose and across my cheekbones, just under my eyeglasses, and my eyeglasses no longer fog up. The bandana is draped in at least two layers, and pulls up tightly to my face if I inhale quickly. To me it seems more effective than the cloth masks, even though 'studies' supposedly indicate that a bandana is the same as wearing no mask at all. That simply cannot be true. Otherwise, why did cowboys wear bandanas in dusty conditions? Why do allergy sufferers wear bandanas? Why do firefighters working on wildfires wear bandanas? And if a bandana can keep dust, smoke, and pollen out, it can keep you from exhaling droplets when you cough or sneeze. And if my eyeglasses are not fogging up, I'm obviously not breathing deadly virus-laden air from my asymptomatic infection directly up in to my own eyes to re-infect myself. And if the bandana "balloons" up when I exhale heavily, that means it's holding in a lot of potentially deadly virus-bearing micro-droplets. 

Also, if bandanas don't work, why do they qualify as "face coverings"? Why are all the requirements for general "face coverings" rather than for medical grade masks effective against biological contaminants? One might say that... well, anyway, I'm mostly wearing a bandana these days in situations that call for a mask, and I feel it provides adequate protection for those around me and likely more protection for me as the wearer than do most ill-fitting cloth masks.

Plus, it looks kinda cool in a stagecoach robber kind of way.

I think you in Oz should all be wearing iron Ned Kelly helmets! Now that would be super cool!

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I put a new body on my Tærra Symmes character, and slightly revised her wardrobe. The new body offers considerably more stability and more points of articulation.

4 September – Tærra Symmes (Kumik 16-84 head on TBLeague S27B body)

[Elfy]

She’s a real Lara Croft type, isn’t she?

[neon_jellyfish]

Whether it leads to the hollow centre or not, it is a cool cave!


As for masks / bandanas - homemade masks and folded bandanas should really work equally well. In Czech Rep., we have to wear face coverings and not professionally made surgical masks because we had (and to a degree still have) troubles supplying those to medical staff, let alone plebs, so they couldn't really make mandatory something no one could get their hands on.

The masks seem to be working to a degree here - we had low numbers of cases when they were mandatory everywhere, then we had a summer mask break (which was a good thing, if you ask me, we had a very hot summer and many people would have collapsed wearing a mask, clogging hospitals), and the numbers are going up. We are gradually returning to masks now. But Slavs might be more resistant to the virus than other nations in EU (no definitive results on that yet, but it seems increasingly more likely), so it's probably not just masks.

The problem I often see is people not wearing them properly (like not covering their nose or having huge gaps around cheeks), so that's as if they weren't wearing them at all.

But yeah, your bandana should be fine the way you're wearing it, the shape, or pattern, doesn't matter when you manage to wear it so that it doesn't let air out through openings. And in two layers. That seems to be an important detail - coronavirus can apparently 'seep' through one layer (even that slows it down, so it doesn't spread so far), but two layers will stop most of it.

I'm back to roleplaying as a bank robber / ninja, so I'm having fun with it.

[werepuppy]

Ahhh, I can't help but wonder what she might find in a cave that looks like that. So much wonder to discover. Or horror. But adventure either way!

[Lejays17]

Triv looks like she’s getting excellent instructions from the best.

[Lejays17]

Spooky cave she has found there.

[Alliecat]

The problem I often see is people not wearing them properly (like not covering their nose or having huge gaps around cheeks), so that's as if they weren't wearing them at all.

This... or sticking their fingers into them, or hanging off their ears, or down around their neck, or ... or...  

Are cases getting worse even in rural Canada? 

No, just that they finally decided to let 20 people in at a time instead of 10, & the "rules" are based on square footage & come from head office.  The general idea has been to wear a mask if you can't distance.  There have been less than 200 cases in the whole province, total.  Probably because mostly, people have been following the mask/distance guidelines.  As to why cases in some places are climbing, it sounds like it's because of all the people not doing so.  Had to work at an advance poll today (stupid decision to hold provincial election in the current conditions) & was shocked how many people (like maybe 85-90%) came in with masks, their own as opposed to those we had available, given all the whining some people here are doing about them.  That said, having to use one as a worker was a PITA, and probably utterly useless as we had them onoffonoffonoff 5700 times in between voters, because they are so annoying.  Then again, there are like 4 (?) active cases in the whole province so (my mantra) "It's probably fine"

Anyway, these are fun photos!  Are there 2 different kinds of seamless bodies...?

[davidd]

Thanks for the update on the virus situation in NB, alliecat. Good to hear about places with so few cases. It's similar here if you go county by county. The state as a whole has a large number of cases relative to population (but the lowest death rate per case in the entire U.S.), but it's all up in the big city of Salt Lake and the suburbs. Out here in rural Nowheresville, despite thousands of tourists passing through, the number of cases has been negligible and nobody has died. I've been wearing a bandana even though most locals have given up on the mask thing; like neon_j, I put on a bandana and a western hat and imagine I'm a notorious train robber every time I venture out.

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5 September – She's spooky when she smiles

I still don't understand the smile thing. It's weird.

[Elfy]

Yes, it does kind of make you wonder exactly what she's smiling about.

[Lejays17]

It is a spooky inward smile - it does make you wonder what she’s thinking about.

[neon_jellyfish]

I want a haunted Smart Doll, too!

It really looks as if you had both the classic and the alternate versions of Kanata. Light can change dolls' ex?pressions slightly very often, but I've never seen a difference THAT BIG. Therefore, she must be haunted!

[werepuppy]

Ahhh, but I like this spooky smile. She looks like the sort who would get along well with the Addamses.

[davidd]

I want a haunted Smart Doll, too!

It really looks as if you had both the classic and the alternate versions of Kanata. Light can change dolls' ex?pressions slightly very often, but I've never seen a difference THAT BIG. Therefore, she must be haunted!

I am beginning to agree with you about this doll being haunted. I made a point of checking her again in the morning, and she was definitely not smiling. 

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6 September – Tezca channels The Second Doctor while Lipoca... who knows what she's up to?

[Alliecat]

Maybe she’s been playing with Photoshop…? She does look like she’s up to something. The Dals look like you caught them in the middle of some very complicated project.