the extremities of fear

one of the horrible ironies I've come to realize about the difficult relationship between my older sibling and myself, which I'm starting to remember in better detail from past decades, is that we were both maximally *afraid* all the time, but our addled brains went in two completely different directions with it. and I rather wonder why that might have been. I went towards total dissociation; Frisk went towards the far less pleasant option, extreme paranoia.

cw: mental illness, dealing with extreme emotional pain, paranoia vs. dissociation

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maundering about computers and the web browser, writing posts out in external editor

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

cursed (Fate/Zero, Fate/ fictive issues)

We have a genuine issue. We have a LOT of genuine issues, and we're trying to work out how serious they are.

One issue is that we seem to be laboring under a number of curses. Now it might seem ridiculous and superstitious to a reasonable reader that we should speak in terms of curses, but not only am I superstitious and ridiculous, I also think that it's sensible and even healthful to think in such terms. The alternative is locating ALL of one's faults within oneself. But curses might come from outside or inside. Someone in our headspace could be cursing us, or someone from outside could be doing it. Thinking in such terms, therefore, has given us some flexibility—some ability to rationalize situations that otherwise would seem like intolerable deadlocks.

At least one such curse seems to come from without, and it pertains to Irish hero Diarmuid ua Duibhne, who is NOT to be found in the Pnictogen Wing (at least the bits we're aware of) but who clashed violently with two of our most important headmates: Sir Arturia Pendragon, formerly the King of Knights summoned in the Fourth Grail War portrayed in Fate/Zero, and Emiya Kiritsugu, the rebel mage and mercenary who summoned her. They had a very difficult relationship in Fate/Zero which we are now in the process of reconciling. But both Arturia and Kiritsugu were cursed by Diarmuid ua Duibhne because of the cruel trick which Kiritsugu played on Arturia in order to humiliate her (as we think)—but this gets into spoiler territory so I'll halt for now.

This is a novel situation for us. Curiously, we have received hints that Diarmuid would like to reach out to us and is kindly disposed, but his dying curse seems real enough and it's been interfering with my ability to study up on Irish mythology, which is a major lacuna in our cultural library. We've read up on a number of Mediterranean and European pantheons but we're very weak on Irish lore, even though I'm very slightly Irish (I can't remember how many generations back) and feel an inclination in that direction. Obviously we need to study a bit, if nothing else.

~Chara of Pnictogen