But we have more opportunity in this part of the world to make good lives, knowing the darkness might drop at any moment.
--me, yesterday

We scrape and crawl each day, hoping to find traction and gain ground.
--an email received today

I've written about Carrie here and Carrie and Dan (briefly!) here. Short version: I variously dated and hung around with Carrie in university. I stayed with her and Dan in 1992 and (with my wife) in 1998. They'd then just had their first child. We met in non-virtual space again in 2018, the year the baby from '98 turned twenty. We only sporadically sent texts or emails but we always responded. That stopped last spring and, conditions being what they have been, I didn't pursue the matter.

I received an email from Dan today.

On a late spring day, Carrie…

The original usage of the word shambles in English was to refer to a stool or table used by a money changer at a currency exchange. The word stems from Middle English schamels (singular schamel), then from Old English sċeamol “bench, stool,” itself from Latin scamellum, diminutive of scamnum “bench." The word is a cognate of Danish skammel “stool,” Dutch schemel “footstool, bench,” German Schemel “stool," and Icelandic skem…

An O'Neill Cylinder is an at present theoretical space based mega structure. Imagine you wanted to live in outer space. There are a lot of considerations. You'll want an enclosed space that you can fill with air so you don't have to spend every moment in a space suit, a source of food and water, and you'll probably want some way of simulating gravity so your bones don't degrade. Any air tight container that you can fit inside will work but the bigger the better for the purpose of both legroom and…