(under construction - all of these have to be written)
Pearl Chambers at the College of Geographic Sciences. Little old lady with her hair in a bun with knitting needles, perfectly comfortable arguing about Unix filesystem layout philosophies and TCP/IP packet sizes.
Usenet
Usenet was a social network built in the 1970s, years before Mark Zuckerberg was even born. soc.motss was the international queer newsgroup. These are people who I have shared intimate secrets and fun with since about 1982 - and have met a few times at international gatherings.
Include story about Lorne Rozovsky describing a dessert, me posting it there, Mara Chibnik identifying it, and me getting the recipe and making it.
The big Usenet cookbook
Story about doing the presentation to Parkview with Jim Saunders: "... west indies." "Jamaica?" "No she went of her own accord." "... indonesia" "Jakarta?" "No we went by air."
Theremin lessons
I would never have been able to have a theremin teacher - there are none in Canada. When Covid came, we all got zoom, and world master performer and teacher Lydia Kavina switched her lessons over to Zoom - from Russia. When the war started, she moved to London and somehow got her mom out of Odessa. Without Covid I would never have been able to get lessons.
In 1992 I put Roswell's bookstore catalog on line. Why isn't Roswell the rich one instead of Jeff Bezos? Why aren't I as rich as Jeff Bezos' head tech?