u/Fantastic_Network671

Hear me out. I’ve been seeing endless videos about that cruise ship outbreak, and people are acting like it's March 2020 all over again.

First of all, you are not going to get the Andes virus unless you are basically huffing infected rat droppings or physically trapped in a tiny, poorly ventilated room with someone who is actively dying of it. Even though scientists are currently arguing with the WHO over whether it can linger in the air in enclosed spaces, it is absolutely not as contagious as COVID. The mortality rate is around 40%, which is terrifying, but the human-to-human transmission rate is incredibly low.

But here is my actual hot take: A scary amount of people are subconsciously manifesting this into a global pandemic because they are deep in COVID nostalgia.

People obviously don't want a deadly virus. What they want is the pause. They miss that weird, liminal space in early 2020 where the entire world just stopped. No FOMO, no pressure to grind, little work for school. Just making Dalgona coffee, playing Among Us, and sitting in Discord calls for 12 hours a day because literally nothing was expected of you.

Let me know if this is crazy, but I genuinely think that the internet's reaction to this literal rat fever is less about actual health anxiety and more about an exhausted society just desperately wanting an excuse to unplug from reality again.

EDIT: To be clear. I’m not saying people are rooting for a pandemic or downplaying what people went through during COVID 2020. My point is specifically about the internet's reaction right now. There is just a massive disconnect happening where the carefreeness of covid seems to be affecting the situation and the medical reality. It’s about how the nostalgia makes some people think, not a wish for the time of a virus.

I feel like I’m losing my mind at my school. I go to one of those high schools where there are 800+ people in each year, and if you don't have a 1560 SAT and 20 APs, people look at you like you’re actually cooked.

And honestly, it feels like half of this "meritocracy" is just fake anyway. At this point, it feels like T20s aren't even admitting the smartest kids; they're just admitting whoever knew all the methods in middle school. It's the kids who had their entire high school plan mapped out and knew every workaround to inflate their GPA in 7th grade. If you didn't know how to game the course selection system when you were literally 13 years old, you're already behind everybody else.

The worst part is the "big fish, small pond" paradox. Our school as all these resources and APs, which is great, but it also means the bar for "standing out" is in the stratosphere. You’re competing against your own friends for the same 2-3 spots at T20 colleges, and the GPA inflation is genuinely absurd. Everyone is just padding their stats by maxing out on virtual courses to farm easy A's and boost their weighted GPA. And the craziest part? These online classes are APs and literally cost like $500 each if you take them outside your normal schedule. So the kids with the highest class ranks are essentially just paying thousands of dollars to buy extra GPA points as early as possible so nobody else can catch up.

It’s exhausting. You spend four years grinding to have a solid app, only to realize that by being at a school where everyone is a perfect applicant, you somehow look less unique to AO’s.

Sorry for the rant I was just studying for AP exams and realized how cooked I am and that it probably doesn't even matter at this point.

I've done things like AP Calc BC and USACO, and at least with those, you can just grind practice questions and memorize formulas until it finally clicks.

But Lang? It's just raw reading comprehension and having to write three completely different essays that can be on an infinite number of topics. I feel like memorizing vocab or rhetorical devices could help a little, but doing the standard things like timed essays and practice MCQs is a bit trivial because every question is meant to be interpreted differently, so all this would really bring is just testing stamina.

How are you guys actually preparing for this? Any advice helps, because right now I'm basically just reading a dictionary for potential words that may show up.

We’ve all been there. When you first start playing, you're usually pretty terrible. You rack up hundreds (if not thousands) of final deaths just trying to learn the ropes.

Then, you actually get good.

The problem? You go to Lobby 1 to join decent parties, and everyone requires a high FKDR. You might have been playing like an 8 FKDR sweat for the last few months, but your overall stat is still dragging below a 1 because of when you were trash. Then you get denied or rejected from parties based on a number that doesn't even reflect your current skill level, but you don't want to make a new account because you've already invested so much into your current one.

So instead of only having session mods on clients that are deleted when you exit the server, what if there was just an acknowledged additional stat that only counts your fkdr over the past year/month? This way, your account isn't permanently cooked just because you were a. chud a few years ago.

Overall fkdr should still exist, but adding a recent fkdr would actually show your current skill level and fix party finding for so many people.

Thoughts? Are there any real downsides to them adding this?