Rereading Rhythm of War and with shipper goggles firmly in place.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Like, they'll combine their nation's flag (or some national symbol) with the rainbow stripes. The Brazilian one haunts me to this day but that's a long story. They're usually done in a quite lazy manner, cause it's not really something you can do super well and not many people try.

But I have just found one that is lazier than the rest! Are you ready to see it?

I SCREAMED ALOUD

He was, in fact, very close to letting himself in whether I wanted him there or not.

I went down and locked the door, then took the video.

Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.

bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.

Married the love of my life at 50.

Got my Class A CDL at 59.

You've got time.

And I clutch the little warm tubes of blood and feel this sick person warming my hands and I think about how kind you might be and how I wish I could hold your hand and how badly, how really really badly, I want you to get better and stay warm and hold someone’s hand again.

And anyway sometimes it’s better to not think so vividly about the people I’m doing tests for. I’m a good little cog in a vast machine of people all trying to heal and cure, and my cog feels so fucking small sometimes. But I hope the blood I prepare for you helps you breathe better and laugh and wake up feeling well rested.