I tend to believe that the difference between us and them is that we don’t compromise our principles for temporary convenience. - Charles Stross

I’m wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility—woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I’m told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.

No, Bob," she says tiredly, "mutually assured destruction is not a reasonable basis for a marriage. Sooner or later one of us will get overstressed, there'll be an argument, and it'll be the kind of domestic that starts with thrown crockery and levels up to grenade launchers."

Our trains are not ambushed by dragons, suicide bombers, or chthonian tentacle monsters. Frankly, given the quality of the postprandial conversation, this is not a net positive.