thepnictogenwing

[thepnictogenwing]

I'm rather glad I never developed a taste for this place. Lots of people seem to be fleeing for Cohost. I rather hope Mx. Toby Fox (@fwugradiation) moves there, though I expect not. ~Χαρά

#tumblr exodus #cohost

[thepnictogenwing]

[thepnictogenwing]

yet another test

test test test test

[thepnictogenwing]

test test

test test test

[thepnictogenwing]

predictable

[thepnictogenwing]

haven’t been using Tumblr; political Twitter activities recently

for reasons we’ve been heavily engaged with Twitter on both of our accounts, [at]KrisAtLarge and [at]PnictogenHorses, for the last few weeks; we’ve felt that our polemical writings were political useful there. in particular we’ve been attempting to weaken and assist in discrediting the pseudo-journalistic conspiracy that Elon Musk has gathered round himself on Twitter, of which “independent journalist” Matt Taibbi has been the chief spokesperson. the purpose of the conspiracy is fairly clear: Musk (presumably in conjunction with Republican allies, unseen) has been hoping to exploit Twitter data for scandalmongering against Democratic politicians and attacking the credibility of federal law enforcement; Taibbi has been hard-selling the narrative that all FBI investigations of Trump and Republican corruption are mere political witchhunting.

both Mona Drafter (of “PnictogenHorses”) and I have been furiously attempting to undermine Taibbi’s public front. we like to think we’ve achieved something there, although of course lots of people on Twitter have been assailing Taibbi and the Musk faction; it’s impossible to say whether our own efforts have been in any way decisive in eroding Taibbi’s credibility.

all the same...we feel (for unclear reasons) that we’re not likely to achieve much more along these lines. that’s not to say that the Pnictogen Wing will be leaving Twitter; there’s other reasons to stay. but we are thinking of leaving Twitter political activity in the hands of another of our headmates, who can (we hope) present a more substantial front than can be established by an escaped video-game character or even by a unicorn engineer.

we feel like our whole Internet / social media posture needs to be revised from root to branch, but we’re at a loss as how to proceed. old habits are hard to kill.

~Chara of Pnictogen

#social media #twitter #politics #elon musk #matt taibbi

[thepnictogenwing]

can I tweet this way?

~Kris

[thepnictogenwing]

bleh

[thepnictogenwing]

honestly those tuna croquettes are one of the more reasonable "weird old '50s recipes" things I've seen. not sure why they ought to be conical, though. why not make flat cakes and shallow-fry them?

but I think there might be more to this "digestible" business than meets the eye. for one thing, other brands of shortening touted their digestible credentials (see this old ad for "Spry" shortening, featuring folksy homespun wisdom from folksy homespun "Aunt Jenny").

and then I found this: an article in the Montreal Gazette about the history of commercial shortenings, and the search for a lard substitute. and here's the thing: there was a massive marketing push against lard, a campaign fuelled by crackpot health experts who inveighed against animal products in foodstuffs on moralistic grounds: https://archive.is/wXG9J

hence I suggest that "digestible", as a marketing codeword for shortenings, simply means "contains no lard". it's an indirect swipe at purportedly "indigestible" animal byproducts.

~Chara of Pnictogen

(via File Photo)

#shortening #spry #it's digestible! #marketing #lard

[thepnictogenwing]

SOULs, colors, Super Sentai, and Determination

despite being an “Undertale” fictive I’m not very knowledgeable about a lot of things that are common knowledge to much of UT fandom, especially the UT fanwriting community, who have built extensively on what fragments of information about the workings of the “Undertale” universe can be gleaned from “canon”. heck...I’m not even entirely sure what “canon” is these days; there’s a lot of ancillary UT material from Fox that I’ve yet to see. what I know—imperfectly at that—is the game itself.

and in the game, there’s some mapping of human virtues onto colors of human SOUL. the virtues get named explicitly in the “Ball” minigame and they pop up in the fight with Omega Flowey. I don’t remember the catalogue off the top of my head, but I do at least remember that red SOULs have the virtue of Determination.

that might seem purely arbitrary. there’s no obvious “logical” reason why the color red should stand for “Determination”, or why any of the other colors should mean what they do. yet the symbolic association is there, and it’s not unique to “Undertale”. other fictional worlds, in various ways, both direct and indirect, map particular human virtues onto particular colors.

because I’ve been watching a lot of Super Sentai lately, I’m especially reminded of how Sentai squadrons get color assignments that tend to line up with personality types. the tropes are so reliable that they can be made fun of, cf. the Sentai parody show Kanpai Senshi After V.

Red is almost always the leader; the only exception I can think of at the moment is Kakuranger, in which Red is more like the chief lieutenant of the true leader of the squadron—the White Ranger, Tsuruhime. (but Kakuranger is a somewhat eccentric member of the Super Sentai canon.) there’s a range of personality types and leadership styles for Red Rangers, but a particularly common style is the hotheaded, impulsive Red: a go-it-alone sort of hero, who tends to think with their reflexes and their “guts” while the rest of the team rolls their eyes. but this sort of Red Ranger is respected as a leader for one big reason: they’re the most determined. over and over, they get themselves in way over their heads, and get clobbered, but they simply will not drop; again and again they stagger to their feet and win through sheer persistence and luck.

Determination, I trust, has a broader range of human expression than simple stubborn persistence. but there’s something special about heroes whose determination is that basic. and...well, it’s generally the Red Ranger who’s like that in Super Sentai. so what’s with red and determination? ~Chara of Pnictogen

#undertale #determination #super sentai #red

[thepnictogenwing]

ive been rewatching lets plays so. have some sillies.

[thepnictogenwing]

Mae Borowski icons for a dear friend. 💜😺

[thepnictogenwing]

a rumination on the meanings of the stars (if any)

I have this curious notion, entirely unprovable of course, that being from the far North of the Earth does something to your worldview, because of how the sky looks at night.

consider that near the Equator, you can see almost every constellation, almost every star. the entire celestial vault revolves into view, from North to South celestial poles.

but near the North Pole, you see the Pole Star high up, and the entire sky wheels around it—and you don't see most of the stars in the Southern celestial hemisphere. I feel like...growing up with that, and knowing only half the stars in the sky...I think that does something to the human mind. something subtle but lasting.

it's not fashionable to think of the stars as having any effect on the human mind or human behavior. the "skeptical" and "rational" crowd, the Neil Tyson crowd, scoff at the idea that the Moon or the stars or any other celestial bodies can exert any influence on humanity—even though people see all these celestial bodies, use them to navigate, use them for timekeeping...

...so why the fixed denial? why assert that the Moon can't possibly do anything to people, even though it's bright and obvious in the sky--even though the Moon causes most of our tides, and causes the entire Earth to change shape periodically, altering its surface gravity?

astronomy and astrology consider themselves to be bitter enemies, and I don't like that. astrology was based on empiricism—that is to say, the astrologers began with something that they could measure and keep track of, namely the clockwork motions of celestial objects. if the old astrologers thought that they discerned a pattern in human events that corresponded with the motions of the heavens, then they must have discerned that through experience.

"pareidolia", the skeptic might sneer—as if that explained anything at all. "pareidolia" is a neutral word, or it ought to be neutral anyway; the human mind naturally seeks patterns and correspondences in things. it requires effort, investigation and inquiry and above all time and patience, to determine whether such patterns are meaningful.

turning "pareidolia" into a mere skeptical sneer is to say that pattern-matching is BAD, and that humans are fools for detecting patterns or coincidences in things...and that's to the liking of authoritarians, as it happens. they don't want people noticing patterns.

Neil Tyson is an authoritarian; he wants you to think that he and his friends (like fellow sexual assailant Michael Shermer) have everything worked out. they have all the knowledge, all the answers; we the people are meant to be mere passive consumers of their wisdom.. (we're also meant to believe that all reports about their sexual misdeeds are mere lies, and that we're fools to discern any pattern of behavior from Shermer and Tyson—more "pareidolia" at work, they might say.)

Tyson, ultimately, doesn't want us looking at the sky. he doesn't want us to see these things for ourselves, to have our own feelings about the Moon and the planets and the stars; he doesn't want us to derive our own sense of meaning from these things. he and his "skeptical" friends wish to be the sole authorities on the sky.

above all we're not supposed to think that there's anything mysterious or poetical or (heaven help us) anything mystical about the celestial sphere. the "skeptical" way is to reduce everything to mere matter, mere things, mere data: the Moon is only a ball of stuff.

everything's already settled and explained away, in the Tyson / Shermer "rationalist" mindset—the STEM-lord mindset. we're not supposed to have feelings about the Moon or the stars, any more than we're supposed to have feelings about arithmetic, or about electrons.

but what if they're wrong?

what if the celestial vault really is mystical? maybe arithmetic is full of cosmic mystery? maybe electrons bear not merely electric charges, but also divine enigmas?

what if the stars aren't just matter? what if they...matter?

~Chara of Pnictogen

#astronomy #astrology #the stars #the heavens #pareidolia #neil tyson #michael shermer

[thepnictogenwing]

anyone here try using this gemini:// stuff?

we messed about with it a very small amount. it touts itself as a protocol for displaying structured information that's got more features than Gopher but fewer than HTTP. has anyone here played with it? this is a screenshot showing a Linux client for gemini:// called “Lagrange” and it functions much like an old-fashioned web browser with basic features, like NCSA Mosaic.

~Chara

#internet #internet protocol #gemini #lagrange

[thepnictogenwing]

building a polytheistic spiritual practice from scratch

the Pnictogen Wing was late to developing any sort of direct sense or perception of the numinous. our "third eye" didn't open until we were past forty. there's a lot of reasons for that but anyway the event happened, thanks in part to a torrid and disastrous relationship with an otherkin lover in 2015-16, and we've been dealing with it ever since.

it's probably just as well that we didn't start having direct spiritual experiences until such a late age, when we were old enough and experienced enough. our personality may not have been been that well-developed, but we were at least able to put our gnostic experiences into some sort of reasonable perspective; they didn't blow us completely away. (we suspect that our elder sibling, while still alive, wasn't so lucky in this regard.)

still, we were faced with the problem of dealing with the experiences and the information that we thought we were getting from them. "should we do anything about these gnostic perceptions? should we develop a religious practice based on them?" were the key questions.

in our opinion one isn't "required" to have a religious practice, even if you feel that you've got direct experience of spiritual things. that's the dividing line between "being spiritual" and "being religious": if you're content with simply perceiving these things and reflecting upon them and so forth, then you're "spiritual"; but if you decide upon some course of ritual action, regular prayer, or any other sort of organized activity (even if it's strictly private and personal), then you're "religious". the word religio, in Latin, has the sense of duty, of feeling bound ("religion" is cognate with words like "ligature" and "ligament") so...did we feel bound to act upon our spiritual experiences?

"yes," was the answer to that. in earlier, more desolate years of our lives, we'd sought meaning and purpose and community in religious communities. first we'd tried neo-paganism and the Seattle pagan community of 1999-2001, but we found these things wanting. then we strayed towards Christianity and churchgoing, and went so far as to seek adult conversion to Catholicism in 2004. going to Mass was more satisfying in some ways than the loosey-goosey and mostly unserious activities of Seattle-area Wiccans &c., but the Catholic Church proved unsatisfying as well. (and then there was the fact we'd voluntarily joined a Church that was stinking with corruption.)

our habits were against us. we'd been brought up in an abusive and irreligious family, raised by a cynical burned-out atheistic scientist and a Chilean exile who was a live wire of incandescent hatred for Christianity and Catholicism, which (unknown to us during those 200x years of experimenting with Catholic church) had been particularly vicious to our RL mother during her Chilean years. we had no childhood habits of prayer or churchgoing or anything of that sort. we grew up into the shape of a "skeptical", "rationalist", worldly science nerd, and kept that shape until Caltech chewed us up and spat us out; only then did spirituality and religiosity start seeming like things we'd been fools to dismiss. all the same, neither our early dabbling in neo-paganism nor our later dabbling in Catholicism "stuck". we readily drifted away from both when they came to feel like disappointments.

hence, when we began seriously thinking about building ourselves a private religious practice in 2016 and afterward, we were fighting up a steep hill: our habits were still dead against us, and we had a lot of painful memories of previous failures. but we were very different; we had a newfound sense of determination. and slowly, bit by bit, over long months and years, we built up a pattern of regular religious ritual in our lives. it wasn't complicated or deep; there's been a lot of backsliding and blundering.

but now I can look back upon the last several years and realize that we've come a long way from our irreligious days. we've established daily rituals and keep them up even when we're feeling at our worst; they're not much, but they're something, and that's a lot more than we used to think we'd ever manage. we've established a foundation, and now it's time to build upon it.

~Chara of Pnictogen

#religion #religious practice #spirituality #spiritual experience #gnosis

[thepnictogenwing]

Embroidered snowy steps>

[thepnictogenwing]

I had a sudden thought. a disquieting one

it's about time, and the movie Groundhog Day.

most of us remember that movie, right? Bill Murray plays a sour, self-important TV weatherman who hates doing "Groundhog Day" duty with Punxsutawney Phil every 2 February, so he's condemned to repeat that single day endlessly, starting with the same buzzing of a hotel alarm clock.

funny stuff. it's too bad Murray didn't undergo any gnostic enlightenment while making the movie (or during Scrooged, either) but I doubt that the Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking experience is likely to lead to gnostic experiences. (I suppose it depends on the drugs of choice among cast and crew.)

anyway, reliving the same day over and over must surely be wearying. we see Phil going through the same morning routines, over and over—the same alarm clock, the same encounters with people in the streets, and so forth. it seems intuitively obvious that any of us would soon get tired of having the same few interactions over and over. good thing that never happens! right? (...right?)

but...suppose it wasn't a day. suppose it was an entire year?

how might that go?

imagine Phil again, not a newscaster reporting on a Groundhog Day ritual day after day, but someone in a routine job. like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show or "Mister Anderson" in The Matrix, Phil's a "salaryman", a man of set ways and set expectations.

suppose he wakes up the morning of 1 January 201x (or 202x, or any decade I suppose) hungover and bleary from the night before, having stayed up late for the New Year. Phil blinks his eyes blearily at the clock and calendar and at his personal computer and cell phone if he has them; they tell him it's 1 January 201x. "oh yeah. that's what year it is now." New Year's Day celebrations have him a little muddled but soon he gets enough reminders of what year it is.

and Phil lives out his routine year, ups and downs, then arrives at New Year's Eve. he stays up late carousing, waits until after the year's changed over, finally tumbles into bed and eventually awakes, after uneasy dreams, with the Sun shining through the window and a calendar that reads 1 January 201x. not 1 January 201{x+1}, not the next year...but the same year. the same value of 'x' in 1 January 201x.

...would Phil even notice?

~Chara of Pnictogen

#time #groundhog day