One of the most charming things from Choujin Sentai Jetman is this little closing-credit sequence they did with simple stop-motion animation, using what look like actual stone eggs, though I'm not sure from the low quality images. The NW yellow one could be a variety of jasper, the NE dark blue egg looks like sodalite perhaps, the SE blue one could be a lapis stone, and the SW egg looks a bit like a reddish-brown jasper variety. Or they could be made out of plastic, I dunno. Anyway they symbolize the five Jetmen coming together and making one BIG egg together!

🐉 big white eg! {*nodnods seriously*} and it hatches into— {*scratches xer head*} what does it do :o ~kel

Eh, it just sort of fades to white and then there a montage of the squadron, starting with the Commander having a glass of wine or something. I guess it hatches into the promise of the Jetmen!

~Chara of Pnictogen

It's taken us altogether too long to realize that if we had a proper place or station in life, a profession or occupation, it's to be a generalist. Every time we thought that we'd found a career in the usual specific sense that's assumed by U.S. society, we got bounced out of it. As you might imagine that wasn't pleasant to experience. It's meant decades of frustration and anger and self-loathing, racking up a string of failed careers. But even a failed career means experience and it has been of great long-term advantage to us, it seems, to have acquired such a wide variety of experiences, even if they were short and shambolic ones.

But how does one become a generalist? Pursuing a specific career is far more straightforward and well-documented, but there's no discipline or body of wisdom corresponding to generalism, is there? Actually...there is, but the difficulty is that almost all of it is likely to be bogus. For there's one sort of human being most likely to assert that they're generalists, and that's the man of business, the "entrepreneur" or the "founder" or the "investor". Because they're merely interested in success in the conventional capitalist sense, the would-be "founders" of the world are aimless and capricious in their interests, but they're easily persuaded to think that this means they're universal geniuses, good at everything they dabble with. Thus I don't doubt that if I looked for books purporting to describe how to be a generalist, I'd find thousands—and they'd all be terrible.

If there's any truly helpful and salutary approach to generalism, I suspect, it's through spirituality and mysticism. I have encountered the idea that magic or "the occult" can be regarded as the art of arts, the human discipline that really and truly does touch upon everything else. I'm reminded of my one taste of the work of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the famous polymath of the German Renaissance, and was struck to learn that it was very much like an outline of all known human knowledge. If you were a polymath in those days, like Agrippa or Avicebron or Paracelsus, very likely you gained a reputation as an occultist and practitioner of magic. The "Enlightenment" and the severities of the Christian Reformation and Counter-Reformation rather put an end to such notions, and studying the occult became very disreputable and unsafe. But I would like to reverse that trend! =D

We are having a very difficult time figuring out how to get started. It has been an uphill battle of years simply to impose even the most basic of disciplines upon ourselves and internalize them. To put it bluntly, authoritarian U.S. society does everything possible to prevent the establishment of personal disciplines: we're supposed to jump around when we're told and that means we're discouraged as much as possible from having any strongly developed personality or sense of values. Frauds and charlatans have captured this field, each selling their own canned (and poisonous) variation on how to have an identity or purpose, always pitched in commercial terms: this is how to be successful, how to make friends and influence people, and so forth. Another difficulty is that we were never properly taught how to study! U.S. schools give this practically no attention. It's a sink-or-swim thing: the child is expected to figure out how to study on their own. Hence we learned nothing but bad habits and terrible coping mechanisms for our various cognitive and neurological issues...we never learned how to do it correctly.

It really does feel like...Back to Zero, if I may say so (q.v. Fate/Zero.)

~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

I'm genuinely bummed by the end of Cohost. I've tried to be blasé about it, because I'd like to be blasé about everything, able to take the unexpected in stride. And it's not as though there wasn't plenty of advance warning! But rather than make the best use of that grace period I frittered it away and now I feel lost.

I really do like my "safe spaces" when it comes down to it. I feel as if I've not had many in my life. Partly that's my fault; I've been an extremely difficult person to be around, both online and off, and only in the last few years do I feel as though I've become tolerably civilized, though still not up to the best standards.

Now what? I still don't know. Today's been a day of dissociative fog and feeling lost.

~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

Silly question, right? U.S. Atheists might scoff and say God (meaning the Christian God in this context, for American atheists generally don't think further than that) never existed in the first place so the question is moot—and yet I daresay it's atheists who tend not to think about the logical implications of their own statements. If God never existed then why do so many human beings feel as if God exists? Atheists tend not to understand that Christian faith isn't merely an outrageous assertion shouted out in defiance of the void. Christians (some of them anyway) believe that they have empirical evidence of their faith: they think they've seen faith rewarded, and therefore have more reason to believe. There may be irreligious reasons for this but no atheist I've run into seems very interested in them, not in any serious or analytical way. Rationalbro discourse on religious belief is mired in pseudoscientific chatter about evopsych and "memetics"; the attitude prevails that because religion isn't "real" (even though plainly it is, even if gods aren't) there's no point in talking accurately about it.

There must exist some physical entity that is equivalent to "God", not as an omniscient and omnipotent creator of everything, but as a thing that motivates belief. Even if God is merely a thought, thoughts ought to be explainable in material and physical terms, for thoughts are hosted on physical beings. If God is a "meme" then what is a meme, exactly? Every scrap of writing I've ever seen on memetics takes zero interest in the underlying mechanics of memetic existence. They take "meme" on Dawkins's authority, I would guess, and therefore feel safe in speculative blithering about psychological and social implications (in spite of their profound ignorance of both psychology and sociology.) What is it, exactly, that compels the human phenomenon known as belief on faith—belief without visible reason?

"It's irrational, it's not important," seems to be the general answer offered by U.S. intellectuals. American (and "Western") authorities have plunged down a deep rabbit hole—one that, ironically, C. S. Lewis predicted would happen in his monograph The Abolition of Man, and wrote into a fictional novel called That Hideous Strength. Science and academia, Lewis feared, in search of perfect "objectivity", would discard the idea that human emotions were meaningful, and thus discard morality and ethics as well. If pain itself is meaningless then there's no objection to hurting people as long as inflicting pain can be construed as "rational" and "objective". And this is indeed what has happened. Jack Lewis, on this point anyway, was entirely correct.

Long story short, there's been—at least in those levels of U.S. academia which gain access to the popular press and prestige—no serious inquiry into what "God" is, not as a spiritual or metaphysical entity but as a human phenomenon. Needless to say, the fanatical and hypocritical Christians scattered throughout American professional life have probably been knocking everyone away from studying this, for their own safety: their "faith" is not one that withstands scrutiny of any sort, much less intellectual analysis, so they've been methodically spoiling and spreading chaos through intellectual disciplines that they wish to regard as theirs for protective reasons: psychology and psychiatry especially, but also philosophy, evolutionary biology, history, and many others.

Obviously belief in the Christian God is not wholly dead but I sense that there's a massive collapse in general Christian faith incoming. Christianity in general, as a source of public influence and political pressure at least, has been shrivelling up for the last several decades, if not the last few centuries, though lately the process seems to be considerably accelerated. (Acceleration is intrinsically good, as we know. /s) The 1960s and 1970s led to a definite recrystallization of U.S. Christianity around purely secular values, especially anti-Black bigotry and other such collective hatreds. The U.S. media, conditioned into reflexive deference to Christians, have refused to put two and two together when it comes to the obviously political and secular nature of the Christians who dominate Republican politics, maybe because deep down the U.S. media doesn't want to accept the profound implication, i.e. that a huge mass of purported Christians, people with an extraordinary amount of power in the United States, has in fact lost their faith and won't publicly admit it. To them, I suspect, God is dead, though they're in denial about it.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Think we're gonna cut short our movie and go to bed. We had All the President's Men going, helping Mono and me through some Twitter stuff, but then it got to the line where Jason Robards bellows:

God damn it, when's somebody gonna go on the record on this story?? You guys are about to write a story that says the former Attorney General, the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in this country, is a crook!...just be sure you're right.

It's a great moment but now it makes me seethe with anger: remember when that MATTERED? Remember when that sort of thing was actually shocking?

Bluh. We should sleep.

~Chara