Come share your stories of self-isolation so far

Hey PC gamers, how are you? I hope you're playing a lot of games—I've used San Francisco's "shelter in place" order to dive deep into an XCOM 2: War of the Chosen campaign, because it feels like the kind of game that you can never have too much free time for. I'm not going stir crazy quite yet, but it's been three weeks now since I've ventured further from home than a 20 minute walk in my neighborhood. I've lived in San Francisco for more than eight years, and this might be the longest I've spent without crossing the city to meet a friend for a movie or dinner or to go shopping.

My world is now very small. But I'm healthy, and so far no one I'm close to has contracted Covid-19. I haven't started baking my own bread yet, but I did make a batch of simple syrup this week because I definitely need a cocktail at the end of some of these very long, very strange days.

Beyond the games you're playing, if you're in a part of the world that has asked everyone to work from home and self-isolate to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, we want to hear how you're doing. And what it's been like so far. Are you paranoid about getting sick? Waking up in the morning wondering if you're just stuffy because of allergies, or because you unknowingly picked up the virus a week ago? Anyone using this time indoors to learn programming, or take up the guitar?

We want to hear your stories from self-isolation, the good and the bad. You can come share them in the PC Gamer forums and commiserate with other members of our community, or respond in the comments below. I'll be collecting these stories into an article on the site, with input from the rest of the PC Gamer team.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).