apparently today commemorates at least two events of strong personal interest to our system. it's Kaname Madoka's birthday, and the day that the Elric Brothers left their childhood home in flames behind them, resolving to become state alchemists (3 October '10 in the 2003 FMA series, which I confess I prefer.)

good luck, Madoka and Edward and Alphonse. ~Chara

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

I have wasted altogether too many years of my life learning to get used to how right-wing gasbags and their fans talk about...everything. I really hope that this is a skill that might have practical uses—and maybe it has at least taught me how to be more even-tempered overall, because the purpose of right-wing gasbags is to inflame the emotions. The best of them achieve an almost perfect separation of form from function: while talking the most arrant sentimental drivel they mimic the dry professional mannerisms of Oxford dons lecturing on art history, and this excites adulation in their fans and outrage from honest academics. 95% of right-wing bloviation, at least, consists merely in schooling oneself to be snobbish and aloof and oblique to the point of being impossible to understand except by the initiate. They love to cite each others' work as if they were quoting Isaac Newton or Thucydides.

And they all feel, so very very strongly. It's honestly all they have to offer, despite their pantomime of intellectual activity and rational discourse: what matters most in right-wing bloviation is feelings. They wish at all times to convey the impression of a mild-mannered scholar being suddenly and abruptly jolted into awareness of tremendous injustices, and therefore to be excused for any indelicacy or sloppiness of rhetoric. The fact that these people have spent their entire lives being abruptly jolted into outrages, declaiming repetitively in one column after another, seems to escape everyone's notice. They've done it so often they probably don't know they're doing it any more, no matter how trivial the pretext for their latest version of O tempora! O mores!

I would guess that all of them have some sort of grand origin story, too. I only know this in any detail for a couple of the right-wing pundits. James Lindsay, the infamous "ConceptualJames" on Twitter, was supposedly "radicalized" into fascist noisemaking because as a Ph.D. mathematician (supposedly) he was so outraged by the nonsensical blithering of academic theorists that he planted obvious fakes into a variety of low-rent academic publications who'll take just about anything without scrutiny, and that "proved" of course that feminism &c. are nonsense. (His career now consists of asserting that Marxism is gnosticism, or something.) Bret Weinstein, the lesser sibling to better-known fascist ideologue Eric R. Weinstein and currently leading a charge to "Rescue the Republic", was a teacher at Evergreen State College here in my home state of Washington, a school with a rather poor reputation for its loosey-goosey experimental methods. Bret was too bigoted to keep the job, got sacked, and then constructed a whole Ignatius V. Reilly narrative about how Evergreen was the evil nexus of Woke Education or something. Charles Murray's story is pretty well known because popular biology writer Stephen Jay Gould (who knew Jeffrey Epstein, by the way...worrisome, that) and other biologists tore his "Bell Curve" work to shreds, whereupon Murray slunk into semi-hiding behind a number of think-tank jobs.

All of these people, to the last person I would guess, are professional failures in some way. That's where academic cranks usually come from. There might be a few who are truly self-invented, rising up from nowhere, but most have credentials of some sort, and have gotten themselves busted out of legitimate jobs and professions, so now they subsist on "wingnut welfare", i.e. the massive streams and smaller rivulets of cash always trickling down from unseen corporate benefactors and flowing into a variety of propaganda institutions and powerful "influencers" and friendly corporations. They lean doublethinkfully on their credentials too: while lampooning and mocking mainstream academia as hopelessly corrupted by "cultural Marxism" and whatnot, gleefully claiming that college education is now worthless, they nevertheless pretend that somehow their degrees are proof of excellence. Christians are especially good at this game, for they always regard themselves as sui generis within organizations that (in their view) ought to be grateful for their presence.

We have not mastered the art of approaching these people. Mono can knock them to the ground easily enough (horses, you know, they're pretty BIG) but they get back up again. One of our headmates is offering their services! His name is Peter—you may have heard of him—and in another life he once ruled the known world.

~Chara of Pnictogen