• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


It's slowly becoming plain to me just how much of the iconography and symbolism of magic reflects the simplicity of underlying symmetry and geometrical simplicity, breaking through the superficial confusion and chaos of the observable Universe for a moment, showing its power. The most convincingly magical-feeling scenes from popular entertainment tend to be those with an appealing plainness and directness of symbolism. Overcomplication and overelaboration (like you get with excessively lore-heavy depictions of magic) dissipate the magical sparkle. The best symbols are the most symmetrical ones: spheres, cylinders, lines and planes, orbs, discs, Platonic solids. Think of the octahedral Angel in Neon Genesis Evangelion, or the spheres of destruction that Tetsuo produces about himself in Akira.

There's a joke about Fate/ Heroic Servants, that if they're Saber-class they shoot lasers, rather like Sir Arturia Pendragon is doing there in that second picture. Yet the image makes sense. The sword is something like a half-line, with a fixed endpoint but pointing towards infinity. Hence the magically superpowered Excalibur projects a beam of damage, which can especially be seen in Fate/Zero, where I think she levels a hillside at one point. (Just what do the poor ordinary citizens of Fuyuki City think happened afterwards?!) In the same film, we see that Alexander the Great's Noble Phantasm is basically a sphere, a bubble Universe into which he can draw enemies. He does that to Gilgamesh, who deploys Enuma Elish—another directed weapon, like Excalibur, and thus he can easily pierce the sphere. The attacks easily yield to geometrical interpretation.

With this in mind...the seductive allure of nuclear science and weaponry to so many nerdy minds becomes much clearer. This, too, is a domain where everything's reduced to simple geometry. In processing nuclear materials, as with no others in industry, the exact shapes of containers and pipes and ingots of metal are of paramount, life-or-death importance. The bombs themselves are even simpler. One starts with a spherical explosion (the first phase in the Teller-Ulam design) and then shapes that round a cylindrical fission stage, and...one can take that further, as Tsar Bomba demonstrated. The Russians actually won the nuclear race, though nobody openly admitted it. They demonstrated that an arbitrarily large fusion bomb could be constructed. Tsar Bomba was so absurdly successful that the Russians knew ahead of time what they'd done, and mercifully encased their Doomsday Device in lead so that it wouldn't destroy the bomb crew. (Why do I have a feeling that if the U.S. had done it, they simply wouldn't have given a shit?) And after that there's a general sense they noped out of the nuclear pissing-match altogether. They'd hit the upper theoretical limit of nuclear deterrence, i.e. complete obliteration with one bomb, and that was it for the rational and practically-minded Russians.

The United States would not have done that. It's withering to my vestigial sense of American pride and patriotism to know down to the bottom of my soul that the U.S. would not have stopped, if they'd ever managed to figure out the arbitrarily cascaded fission bomb.

Heaven help us all. This danger has not ceased; it's never gone away. It's only quietly worsened. There hasn't been honest U.S. political discourse about nukes in many decades. The proxy war on nuclear power only made it worse of course.

May Allah have mercy on us all.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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