I've not been using Dreamwidth lately and there's a few reasons for that—but I'm pretty sure the main one is traumatic. I'm being subconsciously reminded of LiveJournal, where I once had some torrid relationships and arguments and all that. I dislike being reminded of my Internet past. I really do. I feel like I, or we, have been a shit. ~Chara

I've been avoiding tokusatsu a bit, recently, and I'm not exactly sure why. I suppose that a lot of my memories of watching toku are mixed up with episodes in my past life that I've been reluctant to remember in detail. I was far more of a wreck in those days, although I still feel like a wreck...in some ways I feel even less able to function. Back then if I needed to make myself do something unpleasant I'd just...hurt myself in some way until I could do what was needed. Simple! I'll avoid getting into details on that stuff.

Back then, watching movies and TV was one of the few things that made life more bearable. I wanted to watch stuff that was meaningful, that felt substantial, but I don't remember that I ever imagined in those earlier 200x days that tokusatsu would ever come to feel pertinent and even important to my life. It's like when I was reading anguished comic books at Caltech in a previous decade; I could read about grim magical struggles and the doings of gods and demigods, but I don't remember thinking that I'd ever get mixed up in such things myself. I suppose we are unused to feeling like we've got agency. Only very late in life, comparatively speaking, did we first realize that we were capable of being more than a speck of dust on the margins of human affairs, a powerless and meaningless observer.

At some point...heroism began to matter again. I have only the dimmest memories of early childhood faith in heroes and knighthood and justice. My sibling and I also picked up some frail but enduring spark of revolutionary leftist ardor from our RL mother, a true passion for social justice. But slowly all that got beaten down and stifled, curdled into cynicism and misanthropy—but not quite. At least in my case, the cynicism never took deep roots. Even when I'd gotten disappointed with mainstream U.S. superheroes, for example, I found that I could still believe in the heroes of Japanese television. Super Sentai and Kamen Rider kept alive that frail spark of passion for justice.

Choujin Sentai Jetman was one of my early favorites from when my partner Daria was first introducing me to the genre; she's much more knowledgeable about it than I am. Even though I disdained the daytime soap operas that my mother liked watching on TV when she was knitting or reading or whatnot, I revelled in the unabashed soapiness of Jetman. (I think what I mostly dislike about U.S. soaps is that they unreel at a glacial pace.) It allows Jetman to be a bit more adult in its themes than most Super Sentai shows, while making it so melodramatic and stagy that it's acceptable kids' TV. So you've got angsty love-triangle plots, massive PTSD, a high body count for Sentai...good stuff.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I believe that it's an insufficiently appreciated fact about the human body, and indeed about the bodies of all living creatures on Earth, that they consist largely of bags of aqueous chemicals. The cell, the central unit of Earthly organic life, is a contained chemical environment, distinct from that maintained by other cells and distinct from the surrounding medium. Whatever life is, it's a trait of fearfully complicated interlocking chemical reactions going on within a contained (but not fully closed) system.

That implies something interesting about life: a good deal of it consists simply of electrons being shuffled around.

All chemical reactions occur through the interaction of "valence electrons", the outermost electrons of atoms which are relatively labile and can be readily added to or subtracted from. Chemistry isn't "just" electrons moving around, any more than a great painting is "just" pigments on a canvas. But the electrons are the lightweight part of atoms and molecules, liable to move around much more swiftly than the heavier nuclei. Both neutral and charged molecules are constantly circulating around the body, so at all times we're seething with shifting electrical charges inside of us, the "body electric" as Walt Whitman called it. (Really? Whitman coined that phrase? And so early too...remarkable insight, that.) I'm reminded also of how "electrochemistry" is used in *Disco Elysium*—more or less accurately, I think, to refer to this particular aspect of human existence.

It's our general opinion, that we've yet to refine further, that much of what the human mind thinks of as its awareness or consciousness is tied up with the swift activity of moving electric charges in the body. Human consciousness ends up caught in a tension or conflict between two poles or extremes: that which is carried by the swiftly-moving electrons, and that which is carried more slowly by entire molecules moving around. It's possible to become too self-aware, I suspect, of one's fast-moving electronic self. One can become too "wired", as it were, living on the ragged edge of one's quickest, most twitchy and hyperreactive perceptions.

I also think there's clear implications for how human beings interact with electrical devices. We subconsciously recognize an odd kinship between ourselves and our machines: in different ways, we both rely upon electrical charges moving around. In computers that attains an extreme degree of over-elaboration and...well I think I'll just leave it there for now.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I just learned that there's at least a couple plural systems here on Dreamwidth who used the community-creation system for their personal systems and, uh...you know...that's not such a bad idea at that is it

~Chara

We have wasted a lot of very tiring evening and late-night hours absorbing punishment from dudebros on Twitter, trying to learn as much as we could about the Elon Musk Phenomenon from the heart of his online cult headquarters. All those folks are basically also on Team Trump. The cults have almost wholly merged. While there's some residue of disillusioned ex-Tesla fans who are upset that Musk turned towards fascist politics, they've been ostracized and subject to incessant harassment. The bulk of the Musk loyalists are wholly devoted to the GOP counterrevolution.

All of these persons are exceptionally, superlatively intelligent. Really! Just ask them and they will tell you. Elon Musk of course has the highest IQ of all—although paradoxically there's a subset of these folks who suspect that a middling IQ is best. (If you're TOO smart you might go 'woke'.) But while Musk may be the superhuman genius, possibly a space alien or something or an avatar of the Machine God or something like that, even the lowliest of his fans know themselves to be geniuses as well. Obviously they're geniuses! They're smart to follow Musk, the father of all invention and science, the self-made engineering superstar who will take humanity to Mars and make everybody^* fabulously wealthy^† in the process.

* "Everybody" may be subject to social and racial constraints.
† The "wealth" may come in the form of cryptocurrency. $DOGE, perhaps.

Acquiring the preternatural 'intelligence' of the Elon Musk cultist may seem a formidable, indeed an impossible task. The dudebros themselves attribute it to their genetic purity, perhaps with some idea that they're all straight-line blood descendants of Charles the Great or Marcus Aurelius or someone else suitably regal and impressive. My readers might be thinking to themselves: "I'm not descended from any kings or emperors! Why is that even important?" Put such concerns from your mind! The trick to Musk's sort of 'intelligence' is very simple: just lie! Lie your arse off. Claim that you're the genetically gifted heir of Ramesses the Second or Ashoka the Great or anyone famously royal! Even if you're challenged, you can simply brush off the challenge. It helps here to learn a fusillade of intelligent-sounding insults, although thanks to Elon Musk's brilliance this task is now much simpler. A slur will do, in a pinch.

For the trick to work, however, you do have to believe it to some extent. This is an ancient conundrum with all professional liars, especially merchants and salespersons and others "in business": if you aren't at least partly convinced of the lies you tell, they will sound wobbly and unconvincing. The human ear is good at picking up uncertainty in speech. Hence to be good at asserting you're the spiritual incarnation of Suleiman the Magnificent, you must persuade yourself that it might be true. This isn't so difficult a task, but it's a treacherous one: you may let the imposture go to your head, and make yourself look foolish. Only geniuses of Elon Musk's exalted superintelligence get the necessary social latitude to get away with arrant foolishness.

IQ is also valuable in establishing one's 'intelligence' but I don't know whether it's actually necessary to do much more than assert a value. I assume there's places you can shop around for an IQ score and I'd guess there's some IQ-testing houses that are very generous with their allotments of IQ points. (They know whom they're dealing with!) Having some sort of source for the IQ number is undoubtedly a boon, but such things can always be asserted rather than carried out. You can always claim that your score is "official" in some murky way and hurl around a lot of brand names or IQ-testing jargon in order to make your point stick. It may also be wise to start by asserting a modest value and then inching it upwards over time. Most of the people you're attempting to impress with your 'intelligence' wish to pretend they're always getting more intelligent, so they won't be shocked by an ever-increasing IQ number, within limits.

But the really central thing to Elon Musk-method 'intelligence' is simply speed. The techbro crowd think of their own brains as like supercomputers always whizzing away faster than the sluggish thoughts of the sheeple, so they think of 'intelligence' chiefly as being ultra-quick and impulsive with decisions. They don't think of it this way exactly but really they're making their decisions first and then working out the rationale later, like someone talking themselves into a committed lie. Bark out answers quick enough and you'll keep everyone else reeling, struggling to keep up with you (especially if you take care to surround yourselves exclusively with people whose 'intelligence', though sound and worthy, isn't quite up to your own.) Memorizing a lot of factoids and maxims to snap out during conversations helps with the perception of always being a bubbling ferment of Ideas™ even though you're merely repeating memes.

Myself? I think I'd prefer to stay a [slur]. I guess I'm lazy and a [different slur] and should Have Fun Staying Poor, etc.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I listen to Donald Fagen's The Nightfly with great tenderness and regret admixed, because it was one of my RL sibling's favorite albums but I didn't get into it until after they were gone.

Now my sibling is back! In a way. They have a new fictive form and it's rather strange and awkward still, but at least we can share music together, like Fagen's brilliant The New Frontier, in which I now feel as if I could get lost for a long time, joining in the party which you can see in the official music video for The New Frontier as seen on YouTube. I was about to type "FaceTube" as if I were James May. (Gawd. Remember when Mr. James May seemed almost cool?)

The New Frontier captures a very specific vibe, the antic barely-concealed panic of the 1980s Reagan era. If you believed in the Reaganite bullshit, great! You were happy. If you didn't, you had to find some way of dealing with the awful reality. A senile cowboy actor reading lines from Teleprompters was President and he was talking about nuclear war constantly. What was a sane person to do? Donald Fagen managed to come up with an answer that Frisk liked and now I'm liking it as well: you might as well get the most possible from the absurd situation. The Reaganites were saying that this was the same as peace so...time to party, right? Time to enjoy it.

I learned in recent months that Fagen was a big fan of science fiction although he liked the bitter stuff, the stuff that was more socially realistic, like Alfred Bester. Nevertheless you can tell from his Nightfly tunes that he still wishes that were possible. He's sardonic and self-aware about it but he still wants it. He wants his IGY future. So do I for that matter.

Donald Fagen, where have you been all my life?

~Chara of Pnictogen

we would all like to get back into being better friends with computers. learning programming seems like a necessity if we're to survive the next several years because I have a feeling the landscape of personal computing is about to shatter.

we've been trying to help in the shattering process, I admit. Mono the Unicorn has been kicking away at the credibility of the "large language model", which seems like a cosmic joke of a technology, the world's most expensive Burroughs Machine. but people really do believe in it, and that's kind of terrifying actually. I'm quite prepared to believe that a lot of computer jockeys who feel like the Machine God is about to burst forth from their gibberish generator are shocked and amazed for the simple reason that they're seeing scraps of text they would never otherwise read. they're such limited people with limited intellects and a practically subliterate degree of language use because they're speaking a kind of street poetry or patois so liberally festooned with memes that you practically don't NEED to talk. it's actually sort of cool, but it's also rather obvious these people don't know how their machines work. so many layers of abstraction have been heaped atop the personal computer that these techie people plainly regard "the computer" more like a force of nature than a physical object. memory? electricity? data? surely these things merely flow like water or nitrogen.

in a way, that's delightful! fiction has met fact, in a way. where do you find such highly abstracted and stylized depictions of how computers work? in movies and games and comic books and fiction! this is how people talk about computers in stuff like Tron or Hellblazer, as if data and memory were substances, stuff. they certainly can be (in broad approximation) treated that way. but the real world is a place of infinite subtleties and these have all escaped the notice of the high-tech crowd. if they're bad at programming it's because at some level they don't even really know what a computer program is any more.

that's charming. they might even be as bad with computers as I am, despite all their bluster.

they're certainly not good with math. it's quite obvious in a hundred little ways that these programmer dudes have a mystical, innumerate sort of approach to numbers. they're numerologists though not honest ones. large numbers quite escape their grasp, but they're dazzled and impressed by them; small numbers tend to fall completely out of their sight. they love percentages so they have a habit of pretending that any fractions smaller than 0.05 or even 0.1 must not mean anything. Pfft, 5%, that's NOTHING!

anyway it would be pleasant to get that old feeling of facility back. I may have come to feel like my faith in the personal computer (it's sad to think that I did in fact HAVE one but I did) was betrayed, and thus conceive the sort of festering vengeful sense of offended justice that Emiya Kiritsugu once held for heroism. It's curious that our paths should have crossed as they did, and that we should have had so much in common, including a child's faith in a just Universe.

Apple Computer, most of all, has been like some Evil Empire in my mind, which is a bit silly I grant you, and yet...I can't let go of the feeling that they did in fact poison their tempting apple. they held out the promise of something that eventually they grew tired of trying to offer, so they settled for being COOL. but it's more than that.

think of what they did to George Orwell's 1984...they pretended it had a happy ending.

~Chara of Pnictogen

it's been recommended to me many times that I break myself of the habit of doing everything in the web browser, which of course is the pattern of usage that web browsers and web developers have been encouraging for decades now. folks have been pointing out for a long time now that the web browser, which seemed like something new and amazing back in the NCSA Mosaic days of early 199x—oh dear gods was that actually Marc Andreessen who did that, gross—has transmogrified into a bloated miscreation, a kind of half-assed virtual machine that for lots of personal computer users has become the only way they interact with anything, through web applications and assuming that "the cloud" will simply keep all their data for them.

do people NOT notice how telling the names of these things are? "the cloud". how permanent are clouds? do you trust information you see written in clouds? (*sighs*) anyway

despite decades of experience with personal computers I've never developed much genuine facility for them, thanks to the intensity of the visceral and irrational loathing I've developed for the entire industry. but loathing of such vehemence stems from feelings of betrayal: I despise modern computing because at one time I was naïve enough to put all my hopes into it. there was an interval of childhood where computing really did seem like magic (and also something I felt my father was cool for knowing something about, in his older-fashioned way) so watching that old magical promise shrivel up under corporate misrule made me feel like I'd been tricked, led astray. by 1995 or so I could legitimately feel like computers had ruined my life because of how much time I wasted on them during my failed Caltech undergrad. but even then the magic hadn't completely gone out from them and I could still hope that maybe there was a future for me in learning to program computers and make money in software.

then I moved to Seattle in late 1999 to pursue that dream, and by late 2001 I was out of the industry altogether, for good. yay me

anyway thanks to this unpleasant set of experiences I've utterly failed to develop the kind of easy relationship and swift workflow that computer geeks experience on their machines. my computing habits have been toxic ones. I've alternated between spells of manic hyperfocus and overactivity on computers (probably coming from various introjects hidden deep within the Pnictogen Wing, seizing control for some specific activity) and intervals of loathing and avoiding computers altogether, seeking the solace of friendlier tasks like reading or watching movies or cooking. and in general I've stuck to the lowest-resistance methods of using the personal computer, i.e. I've behaved like an "end user", an unsophisticated consumer of computing using a bare minimum of mass-market applications. so, like any housefrau or clerk or schoolkid who uses computers mostly because it's expected of them, I've been limiting myself to common web applications and using them in the expected way. open a browser, go to the website, type away.

that's a poor idea in practice because one of the most reliable traits of web applications is unreliability from multiple directions. even the best designed website can still be defeated by a browser crash or an Internet outage, after all, but more to the point: it's difficult for a web application to deal with interruptions properly. a native application can easily "save state" and recover easily from a crash, but a web application can't easily do that, so most don't bother. if the website suddenly bombs while you're in the middle of typing deathless prose, just like I'm doing right this moment, welp that's your fault isn't it? you should have been more careful! and anyway you should be grateful you get to do anything at all on a computer, you [slur], I bet your IQ is [get bent]. if you want something better program it yourself, etc.

I trust I've made my point. making software labyrinthine and unreliable has become almost a point of pride with toxic computer geeks, evidence of "intelligence" and a way to screen out the "dumb" people. if you're a "power user", i.e. someone willing to pour a ludicrous amount of wasted time into ferreting out and reverse-engineering the hidden secrets of software which shitty programmers like to put into their shit, then you've got something to brag about. additionally, the programmers are highly likely to be better screened from the consequences of janky and unreliable computing equipment and software. they have the money for the highest quality toys and generous amounts of free time to get everything working to their satisfaction. the ordinary user who wants simply to use a tool rather than turn a ten-minute task into a weekend project in recompiling their Linux kernel gets no respect. hence we're forced to muddle along with semi-functional software.

you'd think I'd have learned my lesson with web applications then and done what (say) my metamour Gravislizard habitually does, which is write all their posts in a text editor first. but I have yet to develop such a habit. even text editors don't seem fun any more, or pleasant to use.

~Chara of Pnictogen

and that's give ourselves time to be awkward with unfamiliar software. it seems like it's been forever since I felt like I could just...take in the computing experience, instead of being wrapped up in this eternal war with the enveloping Machine. there was a time when these things seemed friendly.

that spirit never disappeared exactly, but it's fled from the United States and "the West", which has gotten poisoned with the values of people who think of personal electronics and computer software as something to invest in and brag about, and who don't quite care whether it's any good or not. I've been haunted by all that and still seek to free myself from the noxious influences of decades past, influences which serve to obscure the true value of the marvels that I had seen in childhood.

Computers once did seem *extremely* magical. And then they were sin itself for a while, and I fled the Machine and sought safety in other pursuits, other disciplines. Working at Goodwill was (for a time) preferable to the Machine. I got to see the Sun and the sky and birds and other things, just enough to keep me going, until I got pulled in. I got suckered.

I don't know what I'm doing with my capitals. All I know is...I think something amazing has happened, and I can finally recover what I'd lost. The heartbreaking thing is realizing that all those Twitter people and Elon Musk himself are chasing the very same thing, the very same spark, that I once thought I saw in the possibility of personal computing. They don't know what they're doing, and I don't know what I'm doing either! But I feel like maybe it's within reach at last. I can stop fighting with these machines, who are themselves rarely to blame for the troubles they cause. (The Machine is a different matter.)

the ultra-right-wing movement which has currently seized hold of U.S. politics and discourse and has been driving it relentlessly rightward since 1980 and the illegitimate Presidency of Ronald Reagan has a paradoxical character that's made it very difficult to talk about in a concise fashion. That's partly through deliberate strategems: right-wing figures make themselves deliberately as blurry as possible, constantly changing their political labels and finding new "theories" and "philosophies" behind which to disguise their own beliefs, which are apt to be in constant ferment and unsettled. The pose is always that these people are still undecided somehow, still available for persuasion, and the difficulty with liberal and leftist ideas (so they say) is that they're never persuasive.

but in a genuine sense the entire movement is rudderless, bereft of unifying ideas and therefore reliant for cohesion on mutual hatreds rather than positive beliefs. every person in the coalition thinks of themselves as a lonely truth-teller, the one person who has been granted true political vision, and therefore they don't work well in groups. the Internet has been a godsend to their sort of politics, because it furnishes a medium that's both very broad and available almost anywhere in the country with the right equipment, but also isolating and tailored to the needs of people who want all their socializing to happen at a long distance. each of these persons, when quizzed, can truthfully claim to be part of no organized movement. "Gosh, me?? A 'fascit' or whatever it was you called me? I'm just an independent truth-teller, politically homeless, a rebel against conventions, etc."

there's an element of self-protection in that, of course. claiming to be independent and "heterodox" isn't just self-flattery, it's also safer than belonging to groups and causes. every right-wing influencer of note has probably used the "I'm just an entertainer uwu" excuse at least once. again, the Internet is of immense value here, because it allows for right-wing celebrities to ditch their own fandoms at a moment's notice, claiming that they've merely attracted a rowdy crowd and they're not responsible for them. but also, it's partly genuine. each person in the movement, whether they're relatively big and famous like (say) Charles Murray or just an insignificant admirer with a Twitter account, feels like they ought to be in charge and that their fellow reactionaries, while good and sound fellows on the issues that matter, are in fact hopelessly wrong and heretical about something.

each of them is a potential leader. but each of them is also a FAILED leader—that's important. people sink to this level because they've had their illusions crushed so now they need bigger illusions, grander ones, in order to keep their egos from collapsing. Charles Murray probably still feels, really and truly, like they've been robbed of a Nobel Prize by carping hypocritical liberals. Elon Musk knows deep down inside that all his "success" is fake, almost entirely the work of others, and thus he must pretend he's the restorer of a racially purified Roman Empire or whatever. they have both the grandest possible aspirations and a fearful ignorance of all the skills and abilities that would enable them to carry their aspirations through.

they must, therefore, always look to someone greater. the only way they can feel like leaders themselves is if they've got a bigger leader behind them. even a coward can fight if they think they've got a threat in front of them and a massive wall behind them, preventing them from running away and therefore leaving them no choice but self-defence.

and thus we get a mechanism for self-organization. smaller failed leaders cluster around bigger failed leaders, who are themselves always seeking someone to back them up. the degree to which these persons can obtain some backup—sponsorship for example, the way that murky creditors sponsor Elon Musk and Harlan Crow sponsors Charles Murray—determines how well they can function as temporary or provision leaders, stable enough to gain a crowd of adherents, and of course a large enough crowd of adherents is itself a source of stability. large groups of people, even rowdy mobs with little cohesion, have a tendency to stick together by a sort of human Van der Waals force, a general tendency for human beings to attract each other's company.

and that, I think, is roughly how you get the sort of paradoxical accidental conspiracies that prevail in the right wing. conventional U.S. political journalism hasn't really caught up with the fact that these people and groups are working towards common goals even if they're only loosely organized. money and a rather small collection of mutual concerns keeps them all going in the same direction. is it "conspiracy" in any way that a U.S. prosecutor or judge would reckon conspiracies? honestly...I don't know. I feel like the law is lagging well behind political reality.

~Chara of Pnictogen