We got nine new people last week as a bit of an emergency. They won't be staying for long, a couple of weeks max, and simply need a place to stay while waiting for transit to Germany. Suffices to say, things got more chaotic. Apologies, there have been problems along the way.

Many of you reached out, but consider directing your help to official channels instead of us; they have a broader, deeper reach. Below is a post I made with a compilation of charities and funds:

I'll try to keep it up to date. Consider pinning it, if you can.

Chess:

am_Unition correctly solved last week's puzzle, here is the link to his comment.

I decided to move chess into their own thing, give it a look, and feel free to suggest problems/improvements/ideas. It'd be cool to have a periodic analysis thread, and I'd hate to see anyone feeling excluded.

Other life-stuff:

IIRC, only c_hawk heard it on meetup, but one of my recent papers caused folks in peer review to contact me with a professor in England because we essentially wrote the same paper coming into it from two different areas of mathematics. It's been an extremely fruitful discussion and one of those circumstances where it isn't a stretch to say I learned more in the last couple of weeks than during the entire master's program. I'm still processing, glad to have the experience, hoping it won't stop when the paper is published. It also steels my desire to leave for studies abroad -- there is a lot for me to learn here, in Poland, but because it can no longer let me experience such a drastic change in approach or point of view, it simply won't do as much for me.

One of the options is Neapol, again. Really. Since undergrad, whenever something piqued my attention for more than a semester, that city usually ended up on a shortlist of related centers. Adsorption/interface effects in ultrafast optics? Neapol. Dark matter in non-commutative general relativity? Neapol. And now they do some impressive topological matter stuff. For what I care, they focus their efforts on physics and pizza, and that's some Platonic convergence in my book.

We finally had a game as a whole group, and it's been glorious while transitioning from scenario finish into a late-night Battlestar game. Still can't figure out how such a terminally-boring series spawned a board game that's this much fun, but miracles happen. Anyhow, in D&D, we're advancing really fast, but that's intentional. Slow enough to let beginners learn the rules, fast enough to get out of the "dies in two unfavorable rounds" hell of early levels. I'm really, really glad we don't have casters in the team.