• 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)


I am extremely rusty on the subjects of electrical engineering and semiconductors, and I've always had a peculiar mental resistance to learning about semiconductors in the first place. It's a blind spot. There are many regions of science and engineering about which I'm still baffled and given to self-deprecating feelings of "oh it's all a mystery to me I'll never get it". I recognize such feelings to be self-defeating, and therefore one of the priorities of the Pnictogen Wing is identifying and clearing these obstacles to learning.

I know enough physical chemistry, however, not to feel excessively mystified by the inner workings of computers, even though my knowledge is sketchy. Computer "science" (which surely can't ever be a proper science but rather a branch of engineering when fully elaborated, in my opinion) has been so badly organized and badly taught that the current U.S. culture round computers and programming is riddled with irrationality and magical thinking. Computer geeks don't behave like professional scientists or engineers or technicians of any sort. They carry themselves more like artists or lone geniuses, or even mages. They freely blur the lines between their own sense of genius and the tremendous innate superiority (as they see it) of the silicon beasts they feel they've tamed. They imagine their own brains work the same way—but this paradoxically means that their own brains are an opaque mystery to them, a black box with only a few well-defined functions. They think of their computers the same way, in terms of broad abstractions.

I'm striving and struggling towards a better general understanding of computers and programming—we're all afflicted with very annoying traumatic obstructions to learning, but we try. As I do so, I'm fascinated by the notion, which is a logical consequence of the construction and operation of the personal computer, that computer programs do in fact have a physical existence—a rather tightly constrained one, at that. One can dimly envision the physical entities where a program lives on a computer, both in long-term storage and in volatile form. Even though one can't easily say exactly where on the semiconductors the particular electrical signals corresponding to a given program are located, one can say with certainty that there's a sharply defined region somewhere, for that's the nature of computer programs in volatile memory. They're all kept sharply distinct from one another, and it's BAD when things overlap. It's very bad indeed, unless you're playing Core War I suppose.

So there is a ghost in the machine! "Virtual", in this case, also means physical. The virtual worlds have a physical host. Simple, right? Well...I'm not sure that the venture capitalists understand that. And the terrifying thing is, I'm not sure any of the elite computer technicians understand that either. The physical world has vanished from their radar...they betray that fundamental disconnection in a hundred little ways. And honestly it scares the crap out of me.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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