A dump was made of the server’s PostgreSQL database and preserved for posterity and even potential future resurrection. The dump contains the full history of every group carried by the server at the time of its closure. This includes a considerable quantity of detailed domain knowledge unavailable elsewhere, particularly as it relates to the use of the SOGS ecosystem itself.

I can’t quite remember when I launched sog.caliban.org, but it was one of the first third-party SOGS on the platform, back when the server was still written in Rust.

With the PySOGS rewrite, the future of SOGS had never looked brighter. PySOGS sported a myriad of powerful new features, functionality that for the most part to this day still hasn’t been implemented in the Session client.

Alas, over the last few years, we have seen the open group ecosystem slowly reclaimed by the virtual jungle. For several years now, it has been all but disavowed by its creators and custodians, whose silent abandonment of the software has allowed the associated ecosystem to languish, fester and decay to its current state, whereby it is now little more than a sordid haven for the very worst elements of society (to wit, paedophiles), policed by a few dedicated souls determined to save humanity from itself.

The creators of Session are now consumed by a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save their own skins and keep the lights on in the Melbourne office. To this end, an unwieldy full 180° U-turn is being executed to abandon Session’s underlying private cryptocurrency, OXEN, and rejigger the project atop a new ERC-20 token with a public ledger, SENT.

Apart from the obvious privacy implications suggested by such a move, the focus of all OPTF resources on this one task has brought the already imperceptibly slow development of their user-facing software to a standstill. As a simple example of this, just consider how many years the Session community been waiting for the critically necessary reimplementation of closed groups.

That’s not the worst of it, however.

In the process of the switchover to SENT (which can be viewed as analogous to a stock split in the traditional equities market), the creators of Session have made the brazenly unethical and heavily lambasted decision to treat themselves much more favourably than the loyal community that has supported them and kept their operations afloat all these years.

OXEN holders will receive an allocation of SENT from a finite pool after the transition. The finite nature of the SENT pool is only the first catch, however. One must actively stake OXEN on the service node network during the transitional phase in order to qualify for the automatic conversion of that OXEN to SENT afterwards.

Those who elect for whichever reason not to participate in keeping the network afloat, perhaps because (like me) they have already incurred heavy financial losses that they wish to limit, will receive nothing at all. In the brave new world of SENT, they must find their own way to rid themselves of their now defunct OXEN, which itself has already become quite the challenge, as OXEN has been delisted from just about every cryptocurrency exchange over the last couple of years, due to the lack of interest in the currency. This lack of interest can again be attributed to the OPTF’s failure to properly develop and promote the OXEN currency.

Session’s creators have engineered this pivotal moment in an attempt to erase their chequered financial past and print a vault full of brand new currency for themselves. If they are successful, the subsequent market capitalisation of SENT will be much larger than that of OXEN, the chief effect of which will be that OXEN holders will see significant dilution in the value of their positions in the transition to SENT.

What we are witnessing here is the misappropriation and redirection of value from the community to the coffers of the OPTF. In simple language, we are being robbed.

The OPTF is marketing the transition to a public token as essential for the project’s survival, but even if that were true, nothing is forcing them to allocate a vastly disproportionate share of the newly minted currency to themselves. That is an entirely voluntary decision made for purely selfish reasons. It is theft, pure and simple. They know it and we know it.

With no revenue streams to speak of, but a payroll of handsome salaries to maintain, the well of money generated by OXEN’s initial coin offering (cf. IPO) in 2018 is now running out.

With bankruptcy looming ever larger on the horizon and still no monetised product in sight, a new way of replenishing the depleted runway had to be devised. Well, why not just mint a new coin and do it all over again. After all, it worked once, so why not twice?

Hopefully the wisdom of the old adage ‘once bitten, twice shy’ will prevail amongst the user base here, but the cryptocurrency universe is a fragmented and capricious one. Even cryptocurrency aficionados by and large still haven’t heard of OXEN, so there is ample scope for the OPTF to attempt to jettison the past and simply start anew with a fresh wide-eyed community of exploitable investor fodder.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the OPTF has launched its SENT discussion and support forums not on Session or Telegram, but on Discord, a platform that is anathema to most privacy advocates.

With their negligent treatment of SOGS, the glacial pace of Session’s development, the consistent lack of pre-release QA, the apathy shown to critical bugs and service interruptions, the failure to capitalise on real-world events to promote and grow Session, and now the unethical treatment of their investors, the management behind Session have shown themselves to be a self-serving band of crooks and incompetents.

This is the chief reason why I want nothing more to do with this project. Incompetence is, to a large extent, forgivable. After all, we are not born with knowledge, and intelligent people can learn from their mistakes. What I can’t forgive, however, is dishonesty. Without trust, we have no foundation on which to build.

The annals of tech history are adorned with great ideas that received terrible execution, and Session seems destined to join them before long. Under the current management, this project is doomed. The current custodians of the project simply do not possess the intellectual or moral wherewithal to see it through to success.

Even if they are successful in executing this coup against their own community, no good will come of it. It will merely postpone the inevitable. It doesn’t matter how much of a runaway you allocate yourself, if you possess neither the will nor the ability to reach take-off velocity. Failure is inevitable. It will just take longer, cost more, and raise the victim count this way.

After many years of broken promises, missed deadlines and excuses, this project’s team has still not managed to launch even a basic monetised product. Session incurs only losses for its creators, hence the management’s concentration now of all resources on the switchover to SENT.

It’s no exaggeration to state that Session continues to exist by the grace of its battle-scarred service node operators, many of whom (like myself) would like nothing more than to sell off our positions in the now practically worthless OXEN currency.

As an incentive to stay aboard the sinking ship, however, service node operators who continue to operate their nodes during the transitional period have been promised an extra allocation of post-launch SENT to mildly offset their OXEN losses.

This bonus is but a drop in the ocean; a tiny, withering carrot dangled in front of starving operators to goad them into continuing to keep the ailing network afloat at their own expense and against their better judgement.

And the ruse is working, because so many operators are so far into the red at this point that they have little left to lose. Every inveterate gambler wants to believe that a miraculous turnaround is still possible, even as his clammy hand lays his last few chips on the green baize of the roulette table.

Never underestimate the power of denial.

With this incentive from the OPTF, we’re effectively being told that they will steal less from us than from others if we agree to be complicit in their robbery. My response to this has been to shut down 39 of the 40 service nodes I used to run. My final node will be decommissioned when its current VPS contract expires.

The whole network is hanging by a volatile thread of delusional FOMO, coercion and resignation; and as we have seen in recent weeks, it takes only a single attacker to put the entire network under heavy strain. The Session network remains highly vulnerable to attack, and I caution users not to put more faith in it than it deserves.

Despite my misgivings, I have continued to offer sog.caliban.org over the last year as a continuing service to the community, a community I enjoyed being a daily part of until my decision to abandon the platform in December 2023.

Because sog.caliban.org was one of the first open group servers, it was disproportionately popular, probably second only to the official SOGS server. As such, I didn’t want to flip the switch overnight and leave the server’s many users high and dry. The SOGS ecosystem offers no redundancy whatsoever, so there would have been no easy way for orphaned users from my server to organise themselves and find alternative servers for their discussions.

Since the announcement on 24th June of the shutdown of sog.caliban.org, no-one came forward to take over the administrative and financial burden of running the server, although one or two people created replacement groups on other servers for a couple of the topics hosted by my server. These replacements unfortunately lack their predecessors’ message history.

All good things must come to an end, and so it was with a still somewhat heavy heart that I finally shut down and archived sog.caliban.org yesterday.

I wish Session’s users well in the future, and in particular in the continuing struggle to protect your digital rights against a determined foe that is gaining ground and encroaching on our privacy more and more with each passing day.

Stallman is demonstrably not transphobic. If you believe otherwise, I wonder whether you have actually read Stallman’s own writings on his use of pronouns, or merely formed an opinion from what secondary sources have reported. Stallman’s stance on the subject is freely available from his own site.

Regardless of Stallman’s position on this issue, a transgender person’s perceived right to be addressed using the pronouns of his or her choice does not compel another person to act in accordance with that perception. In most Western liberal democracies, most people enjoy a very real, i.e. legally protected, right to free speech; certainly to the extent that the speaker’s choice of pronouns is concerned.

As such, rigid adherence to certain constructs of language can, at worst, be ascribed to self-interest, namely the assertion that the existent right to free speech trumps another’s perceived right to be addressed in a particular way. That’s a wholly reasonable attitude to take on principle alone, and garners more weight as one examines the pressure currently being placed on this central tenet of liberal society by regressive elements and their proclivity for cancel culture.

The suppression of free speech has far-reaching consequences for the whole of humanity; the inflexible use of pronouns affects a much smaller subset.

The waters suddenly become much murkier when one examines the fact that large corporations with (socio-)political agendas have, in recent years, become more powerful and influential than even national governments and heads of state. This is an alarming and undesirable development, since said corporations are not subject to any third-party oversight or regulation, and there is no independent process of appeal against their summary judgements or the imposition of punitive measures.

This grave situation has steadily worsened over the last decade as the reach of these companies has expanded and gone largely unchecked by governments who either cannot see the danger rising before them, or find themselves without any existing legal recourse to combat it. The unfettered growth of this influence has emboldened these corporations to reach increasingly harsh and arbitrary judgements against selected users, whilst making proportionately diminishing efforts to justify their actions.

In many cases, governments have been not merely ineffective at curtailing this rise in influence, but instrumental in it, by misguidedly conferring on these corporations an editorial responsibility for the utterings of their users that no mere carrier or publisher should either want or be forced to bear. Historically, we have not demanded of the postal service that it take responsibility for the missives it conveys, nor of telecommunications carriers that they intervene if controversial and challenging ideas are sent over their cables and airwaves. Corporations like #Facebook and #Twitter are essentially no different, and should enjoy and be bounded by the same status, because to confer more is to endow them with a power that they can abuse, have abused, and will continue to abuse.

The rise of these corporations’ influence has seen the town square, where we are free to gather and engage in public debate, controversial or otherwise, slowly undergo a paradigm shift from the physical world to the virtual realm; the crucial and essential difference being that access to the virtual town square is not without encumberment. It is not a public forum, and access to it is granted, tolerated and revoked at the pleasure of said corporations.

This grim development has been further catalysed by the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, which, in many parts of the world, has resulted in the actual revocation of the right to public assembly in a physical space. In much of the world, including the so-called free world, the actual town square no longer exists as a hub for the free and unhampered exchange of ideas. The ability to express one’s thoughts is now largely confined to the virtual realm, and the freedom to wield one’s voice in that expression is now, in no small part, at the whim of corporations run by megalomaniacal billionaire ideologues.

When the arena in which public debate takes place shifts to new ground, discourse in that new territory needs to be afforded the same privileges and protections it enjoys elsewhere. This is not currently the case, and our right to free speech is under extreme duress as a result.

Never a day passes now without new cases documented of “hateful” people having the right to voice their “problematic” thoughts and opinions suppressed. And with “hateful” and “problematic” being such subjective concepts, this is an extremely slippery slope on which society now finds itself.

You may have cause to celebrate the downfall of your particular chosen foe today, but when the tables turn tomorrow and it is now you or those you advocate in the sights of these corporations’ guns, who will you turn to then?

Thanks to the pioneering work of Richard Stallman, Android has a freely available kernel that can boot it, and companies like Samsung are forced to release their augmented kernel source code to us every month, so that we can build — using Stallman’s compiler — a working custom recovery like TWRP.

Richard Stallman is currently under coordinated attack by the cancel culture mob. They have him firmly in their sights and have set their hearts on trying to get him removed from the board of the organisation he founded in 1985, and which has been his life’s work.

The reason for the attack is that Stallman is alleged to hold views that are “problematic” in the eyes of his detractors.

My own stance is that to even engage in debate of Stallman’s views would be to lend credence to the notion that they are somehow germane to the work that Stallman does in support of free software. I contend that they are not, which is not to imply that the accusations leveled at Stallman would otherwise require intellectual or moral contortion to refute. They would not. Stallman’s views, even if they were relevant, have been grossly misrepresented.

The attempted silencing of free speech is always painful to behold, but this ill-conceived attack on Stallman is particularly stomach-turning, given how much of his life he has devoted to the freedom of others, including those who accuse him now.

His contributions to free software and his consistent, uncompromising commitment to his beliefs regarding software freedom have made millionaires of others, including many among his accusers now, while Stallman himself continues to lead a life of subsistence.

#Android would not exist if it hadn’t been for Stallman.

Without Stallman, we would not have the assurance that important software like #Magisk will continue to exist long after the project’s creator has moved on.

Without Stallman, #TWRP would not now exist.

Were it not for Richard Stallman, most of the cheap electronic appliances and gadgets in your home would simply not exist.

Without Richard Stallman’s groundbreaking work, the world would be a different and much worse place.

Now you can do something in return. Richard Stallman needs your support.

Please consider signing this petition.

If you need more background before signing, please take the time to do your own research and reach your own conclusions.

Paay leeft sinds de onthulling met de gordijnen dicht en durft zich naar eigen zeggen niet meer over straat te begeven. Zo gênant is het nou eenmaal; iets wat we ons allemaal, denk ik, kunnen voorstellen. Maar hoe zit het dan met de beslissing om gisteravond bij Jinek aan te schuiven? De desbetreffende uitzending van het populaire praatprogramma schijnt goed te zijn geweest voor maar liefst 1,4 miljoen kijkers, oftewel 41% van alle kijkers tussen elf en twaalf (het tijdstip wel te verstaan, niet de leeftijd; alhoewel…). Blijkbaar is Paay er desalniettemin toe in staat haar diepgaande schaamte opzij te zetten voor het goede doel: het grote publiek bereiken. Zo veel is er dan ook weer niet veranderd, zou je cynisch kunnen opmerken.

Als daarvoor nog twijfelachtig was hoeveel mensen zich daadwerkelijk interesseren voor de onbezonnen uitspattingen van een BN’er van weleer, wier bekendheid en portemonnee enkel nog gestut worden door het ongegeneerd veilen van het eigen privéleven, dan staat nu toch wel buiten kijf dat het onder een groot publiek er werkelijk nog altijd toe doet. En ja, ook schrijver dezes heeft onbewogen meegekeken, uit sociologisch wetenschappelijk oogpunt natuurlijk.

Bijgestaan door haar advocaat, Johan Langelaar, en tot adviseur benoemde Peter R. de Vries — waarom heb je een adviseur nodig als je al een raadsman hebt? — doet Paay verhaal. Nee, zulke filmpjes maakt ze niet vaker; dit was de eerste keer. De Vries vraagt Jinek of het überhaupt een interessante vraag is. Natuurlijk wel; anders had ze die niet gesteld. Men wil weten of de verfilming op zichzelf staat. Beroepsazijnpisser de Vries heeft het irritant mannetje zijn tot een soort beeldende kunst verheven en wil al te graag aantonen dat hij zijn honorarium voor deelname dubbel en dwars waard is door zich overal in te mengen.

Wist ze dat het werd opgenomen? Ja, dat wist ze wel. Een toch overbodige vraag, want in het filmpje wordt de camera, vermoedelijk een mobieltje, van boven recht naar beneden gericht op de penis van Paays ex-vriend. De filmmaker, kan eigenlijk niet anders worden geconcludeerd, is dus óf die ex-vriend zelf, óf een hoogbegaafd en bijzonder gehoorzaam aapje dat op zijn schouder zit.

Langelaar laat gaandeweg weten dat ze de Telegraaf Media Group, eigenaar van GeenStijl en Dumpert (waar het filmpje voor het eerst is verschenen), minimaal een paar ton gaan proberen los te peuteren, een ongekend hoog bedrag in het nog altijd relatief nuchtere en schoudersophalende Nederland.

Je vraagt je af wie hier nou het meest in de zeik wordt genomen, Paay zelf, de goedgelovige kijker, of straks de rechterlijke macht. We zullen het zien.

Is there anybody out there?

If you are intentionally here, I can’t imagine what brought you.

This blog hasn’t been updated in two and a half years. In that time, the trend of individuals moving material that they once typically would have shared via a home page, blog or something of that nature off the open Internet and behind the impenetrable corporate ramparts of a rotten bunch of wankers collectively known as Facebook has continued apace.

Anyone unwilling to submit to the hegemony of this loathsome company now finds themselves isolated from everything from the narcissistic ramblings of strangers, through the musings and news of friends and family, to perhaps even photos of their own children, placed on-line by their spouse.

The content of the little person has been misappropriated appropriated given away. Talk has never been so cheap, and the transitory has never been so temporary.

That goes some way towards explaining why this blog hasn’t been updated for so long: virtually no-one cares to read it.

That’s only half the explanation, though. No-one cares to write it, either. Specifically, I don’t. I have neither the time nor the inclination to continue to publicly ram my abundant indignation down the world’s throat. I don’t care what you think, I don’t care whether you know what I think, and neither of us is going to convince the other of anything. So, let’s just shut the fuck up, shall we?

Today, however, is something of a momentary exception, because I do have something important to announce to friends and family and, well, I don’t really have another medium primed to do it.

Without further ado, let me say that the world was made a slightly better place this week by the addition to its ranks of a girl, henceforth to be known as Lidewij Linnea Imogen Saga Macdonald.

Lidewij made her grand entrance at home, attended by her sister, two brothers and, of course, her parents, at 20:59 on 03-03-2014. She weighed in at 3.770 kilos and is thriving, in spite of the chaos she has been born into.

Since Sarah and I have no plans for a fifth child, this could well be the last entry that this blog ever receives.

Eloïse is back at school, but now a fully fledged eersteklasser. The transition was painless; enjoyable, even. All of the children in the higher years assembled in the eurythymy hall and sang to the new eersteklassers as they entered the room, crossing a symbolic wooden bridge in the process. It was a touching sight and another poignant reminder of the inexorable march of time, those grains of sand slipping ever faster through our fingers, our children growing, ripening, finding their way in a world that is ever more alien, inhospitable and unlikeable to their father. The older they get, the more they learn to cope with and take their world for granted. The older I get, the more out of step I feel with the world I live in, as if this planet and I have deviant orbits, and I am watching myself become ever more tangential to the society I nominally inhabit. Sometimes, my family feel like the only tethers binding me to this earth.

With school come all of the extracurricular activities that fill the weekly calendar, leaving scarcely enough time to do groceries and eat meals. Even finding the time to shave, shit and shower can be a challenge now. At least two of those activities can be deemed non-essential and indefinitely postponed.

Ilias continues to thrive, his incarceration in the hospital now little more than an anecdote that I still recount almost daily to those we haven’t seen since his birth. It’s interesting to gauge the reactions, which run the gamut from those who think the doctors saved his life, to those who think that the integrity of our family was violated by a bunch of arrogant bastards in white coats.

Florence and Mike returned to Providence a week ago. I can’t thank them enough for the support they gave the children and me while Sarah and Ilias were being wrung through the medical mangle. I don’t know how we would have coped without them.

We delayed going to the hospital to pick him and Sarah up until the afternoon, so that Eloïse and Lucas could attend a clay modelling activity at the VUmc‘s truly amazing Kinderstad facility at 15:00.

Kinderstad has to be seen to be believed. Just about every kind of toy imaginable can be found there, from building blocks to a Nintendo Wii, from football to fancy dress, from finger paint to a gigantic two storey slide, from the cabin of a real aeroplane to a suite of Apple Macs for making movies, from television and Internet to complete DJ suites for mixing records. There is so much to see and do that the children who come here can forget, even if it’s just for a short while, that they’re sick.

Kinderstad isn’t just for sick children, though. Brothers and sisters are welcome, too, which is good, because Eloïse and Lucas can get a lot more out of the place at the moment than young Ilias. Even children returning for out-patient treatment at the polyclinic are welcome.

We didn’t want to deny Eloïse and Lucas their last real opportunity to play there, so we took our time in getting to the hospital. Sarah was in no real rush to leave, anyway. It was her seventh day in residence there and she had grown used to her temporary surroundings, perhaps even enjoying to some degree the peace and quiet of her enforced pseudo-solitary confinement.

After Eloïse and Lucas finished up in Kinderstad, we went to the hospital’s dispensary on the other side of the road to pick up Ilias’ prescription, enough Amoxicillin for another four days of treatment, making for ten in all. He gets it three times a day, orally, via a syringe.

With that in the bag, we left the building and, without looking back, headed home to resume normal family life. The coming days will see us gradually putting this experience behind us, learning whichever valuable lessons we can from it, and retaining whichever peripheral benefits there are to be gleaned, such as the new-found willingness of Eloïse and Lucas to be put to bed by their papa.

The last week has been a stressful, hectic experience. With nary a moment to draw breath, the time has flown by surprisingly quickly. It’s hard to believe this all began last Wednesday. At the same time, I paradoxically feel as if I’ve been making the journey to the hospital for several weeks. Ilias’ sojourn in hospital hangs like a black hole in the firmament of my memory. In time, we’ll look back on the photos of him with a tube stuck in his tiny head, shake our own head and say, ‘Remember that?’

Thank you to everyone who has written with well wishes and kind words over the last few days. Your concern was and still is much appreciated. In particular, I must thank Sarah’s folks, without whom I really don’t know how I would have coped. They fed the family and looked after Ilias’s siblings while I was at the hospital with my baby boy and his mother.

The staff of the VUmc are also due a word of thanks, particularly the nurses (and even more particularly nurse Jansje), who took very good care of Ilias and Sarah while they were somewhat reluctant guests there. They made an awful situation tolerable and we are truly appreciative of that.

And now, back to normal life, whatever that is.

Upon arrival in Radiology and the removal of Ilias’ nappy, the radiologist was surprised to find that a catheter had not yet been placed. After a brief exchange with our nurse, we left with Ilias and made our way to the department where this unfortunate adventure had all begun last Wednesday afternoon. There, two nurses soon appeared and proceeded to insert a catheter into Ilias’ bladder via his tiny penis, an experience that was as gruelling for me as it was for my little boy. Easy to say, I know, as someone who had only to watch, not actually have it done to him, but the experience caused me quite some distress. There’s no experience that compares to the agony of watching your child in pain and being unable to help.

Back in Radiology, the mictie cystogram itself was much less of an ordeal. Sarah and I donned lead overcoats to protect us from the radiation — no such luck for Ilias, of course — and he was hooked up to the bag of contrast fluid, which was then slowly pumped into his bladder.

Sarah and I watched on the screen, as the fluid diffused to fill Ilias’ tiny bladder, colouring it black in the process. The liquid itself had no colour, but whatever it contained showed up black on the screen.

To my inexpert eye, the fluid appeared to remain entirely within the bladder, but I’m not a doctor, so we waited for the end of the procedure. With all of the necessary x-rays taken, the balloon holding the catheter in place was deflated and Ilias began to pee, causing the catheter to be ejected from his body, which denoted the end of the procedure.

We had expected to have to wait until the evening for the results of the test, but they were so unambiguous that we were immediately informed that nothing unusual had been found. The relief and happiness I felt at hearing this news is the greatest I have felt since Ilias was born, almost four weeks ago. I can’t describe how elated I felt.

We returned to the children’s ward and, within half an hour or so, the paediatric nephrologist turned up to discuss the results of the examination.

It was good news, obviously, and meant that, at this point, his infection could be attributed to sheer bad luck. Exactly how it occurred, we’ll never know, but we’re told it almost certainly occurred internally, in the bowel or possibly via the bloodstream, but almost certainly not via a nappy full of excrement, as I had originally thought.

This isn’t quite the ‘all clear’, however. We’re told that the original infection carries a risk of permanent kidney damage, which could lead to a lifelong dependency on medicine against high blood pressure. We won’t be able to establish whether this is the case, however, for a further six months, at which time the nephrologist wants us to come back for a nuclear examination, which involves injecting radioactive liquid into the body and observing how it clings to the kidneys. You can imagine how eager we are to inject radioactive material into our son’s body, can’t you?

Ilias’ infusion needle failed this morning. Rather than place another needle in his body, he has instead been switched over to oral antibiotics. The danger with these is that he becomes sick with diarrhoea or vomits some or all of it out. If that doesn’t happen, there’s a good chance that Ilias will be discharged from hospital Tuesday afternoon, but we’re not counting out chickens until they actually hatch.

Eloïse and Lucas have gone to bed this evening for the sixth night without their mother. Before this derailment of our lives, they had never spent a night apart from her, or even in a different room. They both miss Sarah and Ilias very much, but are proving very resilient in the circumstances. Eloïse tells me she misses Ilias the most, because she has known him only a short amount of time.

Indeed, it’s pitiful that Ilias has now spent a quarter of his short time on earth in residence at the hospital. What a way to start out your life, pricked like a pincushion, pumped full of antibiotics and with a pipe rammed down your pisser. Having a thermometer stuck up your arse several times a day is almost light relief by comparison!

His first three weeks at home now seem distant, overwhelmed by the drama of the last few days and the deep impressions made by his new surroundings, invasive medical treatment and the fears and concerns that have beset us.

My two visits a day to the hospital are now part of the daily rhythm of life. I feel as if I’ve been making that same journey for weeks. Today, I actually only went once, because I stayed from 11:45 to 18:15, so there didn’t seem to be much point in going back.

Tomorrow, Eloïse, Lucas, Sarah’s folks and I will head to the hospital after lunch; possibly for the last time. We hope to hear in the course of the afternoon that we can take Ilias home. I don’t dare focus on it, just in case there’s a setback that prevents it from happening, but I hope that the family won’t have to spend another night apart.