All parents please report back. My children lost their damn minds.

Link

For best effect, followup with:
Rednex - Cottoneye Joe
The HampsterDance Song
Eiffel 65 - Blue

Also known as : Half of a middle school dance playlist from the 90s. Just need Macarana and Mmm Bop to wrap it.

Last year I inquired how one might take sea passage across the Atlantic. The realistic answer is that there are various ocean liners and transatlantic cruises traveling multiple times per year, none faster than 7 days and many taking closer to 10 or 14. Repositioning cruises, when the ship is being moved from one region to another and you just tag along, are infrequent but the cheapest option.

In February, I will unavoidably be in the United Kingdom. I am flying there, but have not purchased a flight back yet. I am thinking about taking a ship in repositioning from England to the US Eastern Seaboard as there is very conveniently one such ship leaving a couple days after my event is over. That would probably be Southampton to Miami (from there, I would take a train home) and would take 11 or so days, zero of which are at intermediary ports.

I was thinking about a ship over a plane because the last time I flew it was like my ears got blown out for an entire day afterward. I don't know what it is about my sinuses but they have never handled flying well. My height makes the experience particularly cramped and unpleasant and I have gotten sick on every plane I have taken in the last six months. It's the most miserable thing I do to myself on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, all the research I can find on passenger ship emissions seem to indicate that it is worse for the environment on a passenger-mile basis than flying that same route, at least as far as cruise ships are concerned (there is zero research on emissions from being a passenger on a container ship). As of 2006, the Queen Mary 2 ocean liner supposedly emits about 0.43kg CO2e per passenger-mile, compared to 0.257kg CO2e for a long-haul airplane. But emissions estimates vary so ridiculously widely that it is a little bit hard for me to take these figures seriously:

Emissions factors for individual journeys by cruise ships to or from New Zealand in 2007 ranged between 250 and 2200 g of CO2 per passenger-kilometre (g CO2 per p-km), with a weighted mean of 390 g CO2 per p-km.

That's literally an order of magnitude. I think there is some guessing going on here. To translate from p-km to p-mi, that's ~402–3545g CO2e/p-mile or a weighted mean of 628g CO2e/p-mi. I would speculate that a repositioning cruise (which spends no time in intermediary ports because it is specifically supposed to get somewhere efficiently) would be on the lower end of the spectrum. So, honestly, while worse than an airplane in terms of gaseous emissions, it's not... that much worse. From the way articles seem to talk about cruise emissions, I would have thought it would be at least an order of magnitude. (For reference, the difference between a train and a plane is about an order of magnitude.) Which I guess it can be based on the higher figures there, but I am pretty sure that that is derived from non-direct routings (port visits apparently contribute massively to emissions) or from luxury behaviors (i.e. having an enormous stateroom and other amenities that decrease space efficiency).

One may notice that those sources are almost 20 years old. There is more recent research on cruise ship emissions, but the non-academic stuff all seems to cite the Queen Mary 2 statistic (not sure where it even originated). I attempted to discern what cruise ship emissions looked like 20 years ago versus today, but was unable to find any specific information about passenger-mile emissions year-by-year. I don't have institutional access to most journals anymore, so feel free to share if you know anything.

There have definitely been new environmental regulations since 2007. In 2020, some new regulations limiting high-sulphur fuels went into effect. But sulfur dioxide is more of a health concern; it isn't a greenhouse gas. It's toxic to marine life too, and all other life, but wouldn't be considered in a passenger-mile CO2e emissions figure. Apparently the regulation has encouraged more ships to switch to less toxic liquefied natural gas (LNG) fuels rather than the literal bottom-of-the-barrel sludges they've traditionally burned (maybe a 20%-ish improvement at face value), but most ships have just installed scrubbers to continue using the same fuel and emit fewer horrible particulates. Apparently a switch to LNG, while favorable for human health, does not really reduce GHG emissions due to increased methane output.

Aakko-Saksa et al. 2023 seems to be the most comprehensive journal article I can access that covers current strategies in reducing greenhouse gas emissions for ship engines now and in the future. It mainly talks about fuels and technical stuff about engines I don't understand. This paper remarks that the switch to LNG could still be positive; it suggests a 30% reduction in GHG emissions compared to diesel fuel but a 6–23% reduction depending on how much "methane slip" happens; the IEA thinks it's 10% or less. That's still a meaningful reduction, though there is quite a lot of variance. The authors' takeaway is that there could be a significant benefit to switching to LNG and then blending that with greener fuels at increasing proportions over time.

There are many proposed ways to decarbonize the industry. It is not clear to me which of these have been adopted recently. The industry seems to have some interest in decarbonizing, or giving the appearance of having interest, as Norwegian claims to want to "reduce GHG intensity by 10% by 2026 and 25% by 2030, compared to a 2019 baseline with intensity measured on a per Capacity Day basis." And they are actually thinking about it: they have ESG staff and a 2022 ESG Report lays out a few relatively specific and achievable metrics (or so it seems to me, a layperson and a landlubber):

We were very excited to announce in early 2023 that two of our Norwegian Cruise Line newbuilds, expected to be delivered in 2027 and 2028, will be re-configured to accommodate the future use of green methanol. Green methanol is a fuel that we see as a promising future solution. Compared to conventional fuels, it can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 95%, nitrogen oxide emissions by up to 80%, and all sulfur oxide and particulate matter emissions.

Environmental goals:

• Reduce GHG intensity by 10% by 2026 and by 25% by 2030, compared to 2019 baseline, and pursue net zero GHG emissions by 2050
• Decrease fleet-wide fuel consumption of boilers per day by 2% annually, compared to 2016
• 100% of fleet equipped with Waste Heat Recovery by 2027
• Increase the percentage of our fleet with shore power capabilities to 50% by 2024, 70% by 2025, and 100% by 2035
• Increase the percentage of treated wastewater compared to untreated sewage discharged by 2024, compared to 2019
• Reduce bunkering by 4%, as compared to 2019, by 2025
• Decrease the total volume of sludge offloaded fleetwide by 5%, compared to 2018, by 2023

Green methanol is apparently a real thing. The figures Norwegian uses are lifted directly from the Methanol Institute. It does seem like methanol production capacity is increasing and is on track to continue increasing, according to this source. If a cruise ship uses about 250 tons of fuel per hour (91250/year), and current green methanol production is just shy of 1 million tons/year, then if all of that production were directed toward cruise ships then it could fuel about... 11 ships. Hmm. If by 2027 production increases (generously) by an order of magnitude, that's still only about 100 ships, or less than 1/3 of the total fleet worldwide across all cruise firms. Better than nothing...?

Norwegian claims to be "on track" for all of these metrics, especially fuel consumption, but of course they will say that. I can't really figure out what their "-50%" and "-80%" figures mean and I suspect they mean nothing. Frankly most of these commitments are ridiculously insufficient, though it isn't reasonable to expect revolutionary changes to happen in just a couple years. I think we should take these commitments with a grain of salt, but it does make sense from an operational perspective why industry would be interested in improving their own efficiency, especially to avoid potentially crippling regulations from governments who they can clearly see are honing in on emissions.

From what I can tell, many or most of the emissions are not just from the transportation itself (i.e. the burning of fuel for the purpose of moving mass from point A to B) but rather from the hoteling aboard the ship (12x more emissions than land-based hoteling) and from other luxury-related activities. Intuitively, if we know how energy-efficient it is to transport goods by sea, this should come as no surprise: if we're comparing fuel costs, it simply takes less fuel to move objects by water than by air. This is why ferries have so few emissions per passenger-mile. Ship fuel is particularly nasty stuff as far as human health is concerned, but many resources appear to primarily emphasize the non-fuel waste produced by these enterprises. So the CO2e emissions of cruise ships would seem to originate not just from fuel but rather from the inefficiency of human habitation at sea. Norwegian is at least vaguely calculating multi-scope emissions (p. 15) with, for example, "purchased goods and services" apparently making up ~21% of total emissions in 2022 (fuel itself is about 55%, and "fuel and energy-related activities," whatever that means, being another 12%). I assume "capital goods" (18% of their emissions) are the emissions from the ships themselves, which is more of a decarbonization question for manufacturers.

There are also significant non-GHG environmental impacts due to operational procedures taken by cruise ships. Wikipedia has a whole page on the environmental effects of shipping (not just cruise ships, but they are included). Waste dumping, noise pollution, etc. Those externalities are different than the externalities produced by airplanes; same idea, but apples to oranges, so I don't know how to compare them.

Anyway, this is all to say: greenhouse gas emissions from cruise ships are pretty rough. Given the relative lack of information on repositioning cruises specifically, the age of much of the data, and newer emissions reductions which are maybe not yet reflected in the literature, I am going to speculate that such a trip has an approximately equal GHG impact as a long-haul flight, assuming a typical stateroom and a direct voyage. On average, it probably works out to somewhat more emissions, though I personally think ships have a clearer (easier/faster) path toward net-zero (ish) emissions than airplanes given the limitations of each mode.

I will go to sleep and decide tomorrow whether I will fly or sail home, but right now I am leaning toward the sea for this occasion. I am not sure about future voyages yet. We will see.

I've been running Linux full-time pretty much since Valve released Proton. I remember submitting reports to ProtonDB back when it was just a shared Google Sheet! In the years that followed I made it a point to test and report out on different games as new versions of Proton were released and support improved. I thought it important that we have a good data set for what worked and what didn't. Over those years I tested hundreds of games and submitted as many reports to the database.

In thinking back over my gaming in 2023, however, I realized that I fell out of the habit of submitting reports because I'm so used to Proton working that it's stopped occurring to me that it might not.

That doesn't mean that there aren't some games that don't work -- it simply means that the success rate that I used to have (maybe 30-50% on average) has risen high enough that I'm genuinely surprised if something doesn't work (it's probably somewhere around 95% for me now, though that's biased by the types of games that I play). I actually tried to remember the last game that didn't work, and I genuinely couldn't tell you what it was. Everything I've played recently has booted like it's native.

Honestly, I genuinely don't even know which games are native and which run through Proton anymore. I've stopped caring!

I got my Steam Deck halfway through 2022. It was awesome, but it was definitely a bit rough around the edges. There weren't that many compatible games. The OS had some clunkiness. It matured though, and has gotten better. Among my friend group, I'm the only person who cares even a little bit about Linux. If you asked any of them to name three different Linux distributions they'd stare at you blankly because they wouldn't understand the question. Nevertheless, of my friends, SIX of them have Steam Decks and are now gaming regularly on Linux.

There are currently ~4,300 Deck Verified games and ~8,700 Deck Playable games according to Valve. On ProtonDB, ~8,600 games have been verified as working on Linux by at least three users, while ~19,700 games have been verified by at least one user. There is SO much variety available, and the speed with which we've gotten here has been pretty breathtaking.

This was my device breakdown for my Steam Replay for 2023:

• 55% Steam Deck
• 32% Linux
• 10% Virtual Reality
• 4% Windows

The only non-Linux gaming I did was VR and some local multiplayer stuff I have on a Windows machine hooked up to my TV.

I don't want to proselytize too much, but if you have a general interest in gaming, you could probably switch over to Linux full time and be perfectly happy with the variety of games you have available to you. Not too long ago, making the jump felt like a huge sacrifice because you'd be giving up so much -- SO many games were incompatible -- but it no longer feels that way. You can transfer and most of -- probably almost all -- your library will still work! Also, if a particular game doesn't work, there isn't too much sting because, well, there are thousands of others you can give your attention to.

If you have a specific game that you must play, then it's possibly a different story. If you love Destiny 2, for example, then full-time Linux definitely is not for you. The same goes VR -- it's simply not up to snuff on Linux yet. There are other niches too that don't transfer over as well (modding, racing sims, etc.) so, of course, this isn't a blanket recommendation and everyone's situation is different.

But for a prototypical person who's just your sort of general, everyday gamer? It's reached a point where they could be very happy on Linux. In fact, as proven by my friends and their Steam Decks, it's reached a point where people can be gaming on Linux and not even know they're doing that. That's how frictionless it's gotten!

I don't really have a point to this post other than to say it's incredible that we are where we are, and I'm beyond appreciative of all the effort that people have put in to making this possible.

We took the Amtrak Zephyr route across the West. As usual, seats were comfortable. I had done this once before, but not in the Winter. The route between Salt Lake and Denver winds through some extremely remote canyons with no roads. The canyons are narrow and the scenery is spectacular. My mountain climbing days are behind me and this was the next best thing. I recommend the experience but don't expect gourmet food. We brought our own except for one meal in the dining car and that was about the right proportion for us.

I recently took the Amtrak/Via Rail "Maple Leaf" train all the way from New York City, NY, USA to Toronto, ON, Canada. It took about 13 hours each way. I had taken portions of this route before but never the whole thing. There is only one trip each direction per day. It stops at several points in the US and Canada.

I was pleased with the journey even though I would have preferred the train to run at twice the speed it did. It was a beautiful and scenic ride punctuated by a number of historic cities. The Amtrak personnel on longer-distance routes like this are particularly pleasant, funny, and personable.

• NYC (Penn) to Albany–Rensselaer (~150 miles): about 2.5 hours on paper plus a slightly excessive wait at the Albany station (which is quite nice, through located nowhere near Albany proper). I believe this time is used to change the locomotive. This was the most gorgeous part of the trip by far: the train follows the east side of the Hudson River for the entire stretch and you have a constant view of the Palisades across the water. This is the fastest part of the journey. Going north, you want to be on the left side of the train; going south, the right (but it gets dark early this time of year).
• Albany–Rensselaer to Canadian border (~300 miles): about 6.5 hours on paper. Here, the train turns to meet each of the western cities, including Schenectady, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo (twice). This segment isn't as scenic as the Hudson, but it takes you through a lot of farm country, which is nice to look at too. The train's average speed along this route is considerably slower than the southern section. I assume this is because there are more at-grade crossings or some track alignment slowdowns.
• Canadian border to Toronto (Union) (~80 miles): about 2 hours on paper. Not the most aesthetically pleasing section of the route, and dark for me going north. The train runs abysmally slowly in this section both because there are a lot of stops in short intervals and more importantly because there are an absurd number of at-grade crossings throughout the route, plus, I assume, various engineering-based speed restrictions from windy track alignments. But Union Station is a gorgeous building and very easy to navigate. Connections to the UP Express and subway are trivial.

You'll notice that the times I listed don't add up to 13 hours, the full length of the trip (on paper). This was because the train stops for an irritating amount of time at the border, the only part I didn't like, which unnecessarily adds ~2 hours to the trip. What happens is:

1. Amtrak personnel provide you a customs declaration form to fill out about 30 minutes before you arrive at Niagara Falls. Have a pen handy.
2. Train stops at the Niagara Falls, NY (NFL) station for upwards of 45 minutes, nominally so that the border control agents can "get ready" to receive you. Why they did not prepare during the 10+ hours they had all day I could not say. If you're crossing the border, you do not get out here, but wait until the train starts moving again.
3. Train goes to the Niagara Falls, ON (NFS) station in about 5 minutes. Now you disembark with all luggage and walk into the building for security screening. On the Canadian side, they just ask you a couple questions: no complex screening. It took about 15 minutes. Then, for some indecipherable reason, they direct you outside the station and instruct you to walk around and go into the main entrance to wait. (Yes, truly magnificent routing.)
4. You sit in their waiting room for at least 30 minutes with the other passengers. The reason you are waiting is so that they can search the entire train for contraband. When finished, you are ushered back on board. The business class passengers reboard the train (the same train) first, then coach passengers. The rest of the trip is operated by Via Rail. (Note: you don't have to buy anything from Via except maybe if you are starting in Ontario and going to Toronto. Amtrak's ticket covers the whole route from the US and back.)

Going from Canada to the US, the process is basically the same, except that the Americans force you to go through an airport-style bag screening check, which I consider utterly redundant. They also have multiple dogs sniffing you for drugs (I assume). The dogs are cute, but do not touch, for they are deadly creatures hard at work. All the scanning and sniffing and waiting takes at least 45 minutes to an hour. Thankfully you can keep your shoes on. I'm a US citizen with TSA Pre-Check and whatnot, so they don't give me trouble with the security questions, but they have no problem interrogating people for a long time and painstakingly searching multiple bags because the dog thought it smelled a piece of bacon.

It is an incredibly stupid and unnecessary process. Bags are not scanned when driving through the border by car. Dogs do not sniff your belongings and person when driving by car. You do not have to exit your car, take out all your belongings, and sit around in a waiting room for an hour when driving by car. Frankly airport security is faster than this was. It's no wonder this train isn't the preferred method of travel!

Despite the pointless border security, the trip was enjoyable and I will do it again the next time I visit Toronto from New York. It was also cheaper than flying at the time I booked it: ~$134 in coach (minus 10% for my Rail Passengers Association discount! So really $121) vs. ~$185 for a one-way flight (when I was looking). I think if you book far enough in advance, you can get a flight for as little as $90, but you usually have to fly out of LaGuardia or JFK for the cheap tickets, which are the worst airports known to mankind and also are not on the NEC. LGA is particularly hard to access. (I almost always fly out of Newark for these reasons.)

It does take... the entire day, though. So you have to treat it more like an experience than strictly transit. If you have friends in upstate New York, this is a good opportunity to visit for a night or two!

I have been having fun learning about generative AI. All in the cloud -- I got some models on hugging face to work, tried out Colab Pro, and found another cloud provider that runs SD models (dreamlook.ai if anyone is interested).

It's got me curious about trying to run something locally (mostly stable diffusion/dreambooth, possibly ollama).
I currently have a Thinkpad T490 with 16 gb ram and the base-level graphics card. I haven't actually tried to run anything locally, on the assumption that it would be extremely slow. I saw that you can get an external GPU, though I also saw some reports of headaches trying to get external GPUs up and running.

I am curious what a workstation might cost that could do a reasonable job running local models. I am not a huge gamer or have any other high performance needs that are not currently served by the Thinkpad; not sure I can justify a $3000 workstation just to make a few jpgs.

I would be happy to buy something secondhand, like if there was a good source of off-lease workstations.

Alternatively-- if you have a similar computer to the T490 and do run models locally, what sort of performance is reasonable to expect? Would it be enough to buy some more RAM for this laptop?

Thanks for any advice!

I doubt I'll find any new ideas, but maybe someone here has one. I'm running out of places to turn, with no solution.

I have been in a fight with Fitbit support for a few weeks now over their push to migrate everyone to a Google-linked Fitbit account. I'm pretty sure what I've found is a rare edge case of a bug, or rather, an unaccounted for set of conditions when trying to migrate.

A long time ago, 2017 I think, I created a Google-linked Fitbit Account (via oauth, "Login with Google"). I used it briefly and then stopped, and completely forgot about its existence.

In 2022, I got a Pixel Watch and created a new/second Fitbit Account with a different email address, as I did not remember I had a Fitbit account already and I wanted to use a masked email address through my personal domain.

With the push to migrate all Fitbit accounts to Google accounts, I decided to try to do so last month. When I attempted to migrate my second account to a Google account, I got an error that I already had an account registered under my Google account. So I logged in to that old 2017 Google account and initiated its deletion. It told it me would take 30 days to delete it, so I waited 31 days.

31 days later, I tried to migrate my second account to a Google account. When I try to do so, I get an error:

Can't use Fitbit with this Google Account
This could be because you're using a Google Workspace account, or because your account is supervised.

My account is neither a child account, nor a Workspace account, it's a standard (adult) account I've had for something like 16 years.

So I tried to see if my old Google account was perhaps not deleted after all. I tried to log in to my old account via oauth (Sign In > Continue with Google), and I get a different error:

Sign in again to continue
Since you deleted Fitbit from your Google Account, you’ll need to sign in again as a new user.

I suspect that what happens when I deleted my old/original Google account is that it wasn't actually deleted, but made inactive with some "deleted" flag, but the account hasn't been purged. As a result, I'm unable to migrate my new account to the same email address I used for my old Google account.

Reaching out to Fitbit, they continually put the blame on Google for reporting my account as a workspace/supervised account, and the only solution they'll offer me is "You should create a new Google account". Google has also been unable to help, but that doesn't surprise me, as I don't think it's an issue on their end. Requests to Fitbit to escalate my case to a higher tier of support and/or someone from some type of database team have been stonewalled, and I think that Fitbit support has now just stopped responding to me entirely.

Does anyone have any idea where I could turn?

Edit2: I'm a mac user who doesn't understand how windows explorer works. Leaving the post for some hapless mac user who may come along. Windows explorer doesn't report how it is traversing the directory tree, leading to some confusion about where the search result is, which happens to be waaaay down in a zip of a mac application installer I had inadvertantly archived on the Windows disk. I would ask any windows users, how do I make powershell ls | select-string "text" behave like ls | grep "text" on unix?

edit3: Also, why the fudge would windows explorer search find <weird characters>net but not dotnet when typing 'net' into the search box?

So I download the occasional, um, linux distro installation video. I use a vpn and private firefox windows for most.

I'm doing some clean up today, and find a file with a bunch of strange characters, including the text characters, "net." "M⌐⌐v├▒├┼⌐▒net" is the filename listed in the properties window. Inside are a series of .ase files with mostly unrecognizable names.

I don't see the filename when doing an ls in powershell of the directory reported in explorer.

doing ls | select-string "net" in powershell results in an unending peristalsis of weird text like you might get from a binary file viewed in a text editor. I do notice, however, that some of the text might be from inside a zip file. But why is select-string searching inside the zip file? ls seems to ouptut only filepath information. Upon further investigation, the zip file is several directories down, it appears adding | select-string to ls makes ls travel the full tree. Wut?

And when I say undending, I mean it kept going until I hit ctrl-c.

Any ideas to what is happening here?

Incidentally, I opened one of the ASE files by right-click->view file in notepad+, which never launched.

Edit: lots of edits.

Hey folks, I have been following The Trevor Project's survey for a few years now and their 2023 one is just presented in a fantastic, easy to read and understand way so I think it's a great resource and worth sharing

The Trevor Project 2023 Survey on Mental Health in LGBTQ young people

BUT, I'm also looking for similar reports focusing on other minoritized populations in particular, or (whether in part or in full) focusing on the age ranges covering college students. I'm struggling to find something nearly so comprehensive, but I'm also not sure I'm looking in the right way. The Steve Fund seems to be a great resource for mental health for students of color, for example, but doesn't have obviously available data like this

Prime has the documentary "Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe" while Netflix is running "Escaping Twin Flames" which were produced by different investigative reporters but take a similar approach to exposing this new group. Both rely on the testimony of ex members of the group to expose the founders power and control and how things changed when the group wasn't working out as they planned.

Apparently the group has a strong presence on facebook and there is also an entire reddit sub for its adherents.

I watched both of these multi part documentaries and was fascinated by the origin and rise of this group. The founders, Jeff and Megan (who now goes by Shaleia) are preying on the desperation of mostly female followers who are desperately seeking their 'one and only true love', their "twin flame". Using a technique of turning all hurts and pains inward the pair asserts they will help heal people who will practice their 'mirroring' technique.

But it starts to get really strange. Shaleia appears to be the one who started with the 'spiritual' aspect of the enterprise and Jeff appears to be the one with a fervent entrepreneurial bent who has turned it into a money making proposition.

They were living in a run down apartment when they began, but now a few years later, have bought a large home with a lake view in Michigan, with Jeff boasting about his Corvette and Porsche in the driveway. Even stranger, they have people living and working in their house to keep their enterprise running. There are shades of other religious communities with a strong 'messianic' leader that have started this way with Waco being mentioned in the documentary. Jeff even suggests, very strongly, that he may be the Christ.

The adherents pay for private or group facetime sessions with Jeff and Shaleia and are encouraged to take their video courses, which can be anywhere from $100 to $8,888. And those who have taken on the role of being life coaches under them are also encouraged to find more life coaches - it seems to be a combination of multi level marketing, religion and some kind of mass delusional 'teaching' to desperate and gullible people.

Jeff and Shaleia encourage people in their group to cut off relationships with anyone who is not supportive of Twin Flames, a sure sign of a cult, and there are several testimonials from hurting parents who are desperate to be back in touch with their children.

And in probably the strangest twist, when very few people were finding their "twin flame" to be responding, Jeff proclaimed that their twin flame already was part of the group - but since most of the group were women, he insisted that several of the women pair up and that one of them was now a "divine male", to the point of asking some to change their clothes, hair and go by a new male name.

It's all quite fascinating, and I couldn't believe that in an age where information on cults and cult activity is so easy to find, that so many people would be sucked into Twin Flames Universe and not see the control and manipulation going on in their lives.

Both are well worth watching but if you only have time for one, I'd recommend Prime's documentary - seems to be a bit more professionally produced.

His wife is murdered in the Bataclan terror attack in 2015. Shortly after, Johannes Baus meets Floriane Bernaudat,
who's fiancé was also killed there. They become a couple, and have to learn what it means to love another.

Written by Katharina Render, last updated Nov. 18th, 2023. Published in the "Christ & World" section of DIE ZEIT.

Translated by @Grzmot

When the breaking news from Israel on October 7th pop up on Johannes Baus' phone, he instantly remembers the moment when he was lying on the floor of the Paris music club Bataclan. Islamist attackers shot into the crowd of people, killing 90 attendees, his wife among them. He felt "incredibly cynical morderous energy" in the room, on the 13th of November, 2015, he tells today.

He can feel this murderous lust today, through his smartphone, when the algorithm puts the Hamas hunt for people into his timeline. Videos of young women and men, who like him then, just wanted to dance, murdered, raped, or kidnapped. Johannes Baus defends himself against this hate. The hate of the terrorists now, and even his own. Under no circumstance must he give in to the hate. Get up and live instead! But how are you supposed to do that, when one of the in total 130 victims in the Paris terror attacks in the Bataclane, the Stade de France, bars and restaurants, was the one for him?

In the past four years as a reporter I've talked multiple times with Johannes Baus and visited him in Paris. When we last video-chatted, I asked the lawyer, who's found his home in the french capital; how does one believe in the good of people, when you were forced to live through the most vile thing that people can do to another? When a stranger, because of his upside-down view of religion extinguishes the love of your life? When he makes jokes with his accomplices during the murdering? When you have to bury your wife in her wedding dress, which she wore five months earlier? I wanted to understand: How does hope work?

Two months after the terror of Paris, in January of 2016, hope stands in front of Johannes Baus. She is wearing the same hat like his late wife Maud, and knows like no other, what he has been through. She has lived through the same thing. Floriane Bernaudat, then 27, lost her fiancé Renaud in Bataclan. He was 29. The first bullet hit him in the back, the second entered his groin and exited at his jaw. It was five AM when he died, alone in the hospital, while Floriane Bernaudat was driven to the police with other survivors and a relative of hers called every hospital in the area. When
the relative was finally told, that there is a patient who fits the description, he was already dead. Twelve years they were together. Almost half their lives. Two weeks before the attacks, she had chosen her wedding dress.

And suddenly, there is this stranger, who in a Facebook group for mourners, comments on her post about Renaud: "Your message has touched me deeply, I lost my wife in Bataclan. If you want to meet..."

The so-called Islamic State quickly admitted responsibility publicly, and celebrated the killing of innocents as a "holy raid" against the "crusading France". Almost 700 people were wounded by the terrorists. Floriane Bernaudat and Johannes Baus did not suffer any bodily injuries. But the wounds, that the barbaric murder of their loved ones cut into their souls were so deep, that neither of them imagined, the lawyer nor the headmistress of a private university, they would ever heal. How could they keep on living? The day they first meet, they talk about these thoughts. Till the owner of the restaurant closes for the night, that's how they both describe it.

From a surface perspective, a romance begins to blossom here, how only Hollywood could tell it. It would maybe even be too cliché for the authors of TV soap opera scripts. Too much does this story rely on the "all ends well" trope. It's because it's not true. Not quite. Their love does not grow quick and strong, they are not made for one another. The backdrop of their tale is no idyllic Cornwall, but a Paris, where violence and murders still happen.

Guilt, jealousy, trauma

It's no innocent love between the two, like you could see it on the pictures of the two with their earlier partners. Of photoshoots in tranquil forests and colourful sunglasses on vacations. Floriane Bernaudat and Johannes Baus didn't make their love easy. There was guilt. Jealousy. Secret dreams of their dead partners. Lingering trauma. The fear of being the second choice. At some point they looked at each other and honestly asked: What keeps us together? Are we two sinking survivors who just want to drown together, or do we want something more?

The something more is now five and two years old and doesn't know or understand, what brought their parents together. The first daughter the two survivors called Bérénice. A name of ancient Greek origin, which means: The one who brings victory. The second they called Madeline, "The Illustrious".

When the terorrists storm into the concert of the Eagles of Death Metal, Baus and his wife Maud are standing close to the entry. The tickets were a surprise for them. The 37 year old Maud honestly wasn't in the mood, didn't know the band and was tired from work. In the subway still, she was unsure if she wanted to attend. But when she's there, she really likes it, is how Baus tells me. A happy grooving together. Until they hear the bangs. Like fireworks.

Screaming people run into their direction. He searches for her hand and doesn't find it. He jumps behind the bar and in a break of the shooting, runs out through the backdoor into the open air. Later the police tells him, where they found Maud, who was shot in the heart by the terrorists: Supposedly, she was next to him behind the bar. When you ask Baus to go through it by the minute, he remembers many details, for example a fan which he found and "armed" himself with, until he realised just how stupid that is against an assault rifle. To this day the idea of Maud being right next to him does not fit into his head. His memory of her blanks the moment they run and his hand doesn't reach hers. He believes that
his brain is protecting him from the thought that he could have left his wife behind.

That Madeline and Bérénice "the victory-bringer" were born, is a victory over the doubts. The choice to give in to hope, despite everything. Hope for a world, where the girls will live well. A second yes to life, and the opposite of what drove the terrorists of Paris, who sought their salvation in the next life and some of which blew themselves up.

One of the main culprits of the attacks was later caught in Belgium: Salah Abdeslam, 34, convincted to life in prison. Baus and Bernaudat didn't really follow the court case. They didn't want to give the individual any more attention. It's important that the judiciary is doing its job, they say, but at the same time they understand that the case isn't going to give them any satisfaction. A warmer idea to them is the thought that "our story inspires someone or gives them hope, especially to someone who is afraid of terrorism or the general tragedy of life. That would be wounderful. But it would be even better, if a potential suicide-attacker, who is in danger of seeing a nihilistic act of self-destruction as the best alternative to life, became inspired to see the positives of life and take small steps in a good direction."

This point of view is the result of a long process of therapy and intense work with the human condition. It's an attempt to escape the role of a victim which society attributes them with. Johannes Baus doesn't want to be damned to mourn forever. His thoughts are shared by the journalist Antoine Leiris, who put a similar impulse to paper after the attacks. His wife also died in the Bataclan club. The journalist wrote, addressed to the perpetrators: "I will not give you the gift of hating you. Even when it is what you want. To answer your hate with rage would mean to give in to the same ignorance that made you who you are."

"Make it stop"

Floriane Bernaudat likes this perspective, she tells today. If she liked it back then, when she was hiding in the little space between ceilings, which she climbed to from the wardrobe? The biting glass wool which was supposed to isolate the space, but didn't protect her from hearing the execution shots below her in the hall? When she was one of the last survivors to leave the building, and the policemen told her to look up into the air and not down at the corpses? At Renaud's funeral, when she hated the musical arangement, which her late husband would not have liked?

Both find it difficult to give general advice, for example to the survivors in the middle east. Part of the fact is, they explain, they wouldn't know where they would be without each other. At the same time they agree that love by itself is not the answer. But their example shows, that even close to the wounds on their soul, new moments of happiness can grow. Though they point out, it would be a lie to say that it is easy to remain humane after having witnessed so much inhumanity. Just recently a Algerian colleague of Bernaudat's told her that it's beautiful, that she is able to treat him as a Muslim exactly the same how she treats everyone else. There are many people in France, and not just there, who after the terror of 2015 cannot tell the difference between members of a religious group and islamist fanatics.

They want to teach their daughters that. Of course they should also know, that the "first loves of their parents" existed. But now it's too early. For everyone. That's how Baus and Bernaudat think of it. That's why there are no pictures of Maud or Renaud in the little house in the Paris suburbs, into which the family moved four years ago. But what remains still, is the close connection of the parents to their dead partners. The children have four grandmothers and four grandfathers. Sometimes, Floriane says, she feels like Maud and Renaud guided her and Johannes together from
the afterlife. "They are in our hearts, and our hearts told us, what is right".

In October 2017, almost two years after the attacks, Johannes Baus and Floriane Bernaudat marry. At the wedding, they announce that they are expecting their first child Bérénice. Bernaudat wears a dress which is very different to her first wedding dress. The best man of the wedding, Mehdi, was Baus' best man at his first wedding too. "Maud gave me a part of her gentle soul", believes Johannes Baus. Floriane got a little tattoo of a fox on her arm. In French, "renard" means fox, which almost sounds like Renaud, who is now forever under her skin.

She still sees that last image of him in front of her eyes. How he's dancing happily on the Bataclan stage and waves at her, wanting her to come closer. Floriane is standing a little bit away. She's tired and needs a short break, and it's hot on stage. Then the attacks happen, and pure chaos bhreaks out. Shots, screams, blood everywhere. A man, hit, falls on top of Floriane and begs for help. When Floriane sees the shooters reload, she crawls out from under the injured man and runs to an exit. With approximately fifteen others, one of them a mother with a young son, she ends up in the wardrobe for the musicians. A man takes her hand, "I don't want to die!" Someone manages to punch a hole into the ceiling. Bernaudat climbs into it, crawls over electric cable and fibreglass wool, until she can't anymore. She hears phones ring and shortly after shots ringing. She doesn't dare calling Renaud, but writes a message, "I'm in the ceiling, where are you?"

Johannes Baus sits next to Floriane Bernaudat on the couch. The kids are colouring in princesses. He caresses her arm, the arm with the fox tattoo on it. They talk about the Hamas attacks once more. And to the question, what gives hope in the pitch black. During therapy, the myth of the phoenix rising from the ashes played a big role repeatedly. To gain strength even when facing complete destruction. Maybe that's what it's about, says Bernaudat.

Johannes Baus finds his words in songs, which he composes. Music has always given him much. The bass of his songs plays Matt McJunkins, 40, the ex-bass player of the American band Eagles of Death Metal, who were standing on stage on the 13th of November 2015. McJunkins hid with others, in part injured ones, in the room behind the stage and survived there. Baus asked him some time ago, if he wanted to teach him. Now they make music together.

In the song Chaos Rebuild Baus writes in English how it feels when the world falls apart. When all security is lost and you are thrown into chaos. What do you do then? Then, the song goes on, it's your duty to build a new world. In the chorus of the song, Baus gives us a picture of his new world:

Make it good

Make it just

Make it clean

Make it gentle

Make it stop