The Pnictogen Wing

I don't use the tools of the Internet (and computing tools in general) nearly as effectively as I'd like, because of all manner of tedious traumatic associations getting in the way. It's less of a pain these days and more of an annoyance, like trying to function with a high degree of resistive loss.

(I find myself acutely aware of how slow are the processes of organic life and thought. One can almost imagine the molecules bashing into each other and everything else until they finally struggle their way towards reaction, like a June bug hitting every wall in the room on its way out the door.)

I've gotten reasonably quick at finding certain things in limited domains. I'm old enough to remember a long period of time when research meant a lot of tedious chasing through records and catalogues, and some of that vestigial skill comes into play with Internet searches. All the same I'm still inclined to get discouraged easily, because there's just so much trash. The techbros think that AI assistance is the solution to the problem they themselves have created, and weirdly, I don't entirely disagree—but I'd want my AI assistant to be a completely autonomous agent, a robot friend like Turing, not a server bank run by Sam Altman.

Search engines have been abominably stagnant for the last couple of decades. Everyone took it for granted that there's only one way to do it: a little text window that you put keywords into, and you're supposed to see everything that matches. The process is now hopelessly corrupted in practice, not the least because some bright spark in the technology sector decided that it was a bad idea to return few to no results from a search, even if that was the literal case, because it was "inefficient" and it made the product look like a failure. Why not pack all that wasted space with spurious results, things that might be sorta related if you squint hard enough? And why not slip in some advertising as well? So now search engines are worthless, but more to the point: they're all basically the same, operating by the same stagnant principles.

Why not sieving instead of searching? What if I want to see what the filter rejects? That's how any process chemist would do things—you don't throw the filtrate or the raffinate away, that shit could be valuable, because maybe there's some juice left to squeeze out of it. Maybe there's a search engine that works by a seiving principle, in which you can see both the hits and the rejects, but if it exists I don't know about it.

Personally, though, I have to develop more patience with trawling through huge masses of low-quality information. There's like a dozen old-fashioned professors (at least) hollering inside our headspace at all times about the disintegration of academic and informative writing styles, and in some more distant corner Livia Drusilla is thundering about the contemptible state of modern rhetoric. And I admit it's been fun sometimes to wear the borrowed robes of the academic communities I've passed through. But plaster saints are plaster saints, and grumbling about how much better things used to be is a waste of time. Sorry, Prof. Williams &c.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Mathematical integration is about measuring areas and volumes, and as it turns out, that seems to be roughly what plural "integration" is about. The Pnictogen Wing has been disordered and dysfunctional as a plural system to the degree that we've been uncertain about our own boundaries, both internal and external. That's what identity is all about: deciding what lies inside of you, and what lies outside. In the past, when we were far more at the mercy of our impulses and our chaotic perceptions, we rarely felt like we ever had time to get any perspective on the chaos. Now we have the time (and the duty), and as a result we feel at once both larger and smaller. For once we get ourselves fully mapped, then unity is within sight: having a single cohesive perception of oneself as a multiplicity is but a step away from regarding oneself as an individual.

It's been tough on Kris, our host, who has been so painfully slow in learning how to function without being totally dissociated from events, a passive onlooker letting me (or someone else) fumble through the business of dealing with the "real world". Spend too long feeling totally lost, and...one gets too used to it. To be an individual, discrete and contained, is to be small and overwhelmed. Fuzziness and lack of definition feel protective. The mental fog is infuriating but also soothing.

I'd like to say to you, Kris, that I have faith in you.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I, or the Pnictogen Wing rather, has been grappling with a lot of serious questions about the nature of the collective. We haven't been exactly efficient about it, and we've been stumbling along with a lot of unanswered questions about ourselves. For such a long time, we were consciously aware of almost nothing. I remember dimly how much of our early life (in the present timeline) was spent in a kind of wide-eyed daze, doing what we were told and otherwise acting upon our impulses, and I think other people noticed that we had something considerably less than a full-fledged personality. School supplied us with our best approximation of a sense of self and place in the world, and after we moved to Seattle we soon came to feeling lost without it.

In the mid-2000s I discovered the furry subculture, after catching some tantalizing clues about it—most of them contemptuous. A key moment came from an incidental conversation at some drunken party, I recall, in which a couple of acquaintances described furries with such theatrical disgust that I was immediately prompted to think "maybe there's something in this." I suppose it's almost a reflex. Tell me about something forbidden and you'll get my interest right away. Thanks to furry subculture we developed our first sense of self who seemed...distinct, self-assured, a genuine expression of something we wanted. We weren't just a default person any more. We stuck with that first unicorn fursona, Monoceros, who then became Monophylos, for a long time. Mono's still with us, though he "died" for a while, or lost confidence in himself, or something. Our memories aren't the best. I wouldn't call Mono a "fursona" any more; he went galloping off in his own direction many years ago.

In mid-2016, though, we experienced an extremely disruptive event—something halfway between a lengthy hallucination and a gnostic vision, in which we were taken with extremely intense and ecstatic sensations that we interpreted as evidence of a dragonish sense of self. We were...let's shall we say, strongly influenced the people we loved and admired at this time: roughly in 2015-ish we started taking far more notice of otherkin subculture and making otherkin acquaintances, so the idea of being "dragonkin" was already in mind. The dragon vision was both overpowering and vague, and it ended up disrupting our lives and our sense of self quite badly. Other disruptions followed and we're still sorting out the mess but beyond doubt, the dragon vision (if that's even what it was) completely upended our sense of identity. When we created our fursonae Monoceros and Monophylos, we felt more or less in control of the details, just like anyone trying to decide what their fursona or OC ought to look like. This new sense of draconic identity did not feel like that. It feel like something powerful but unknown had taken charge of us, like Apollo descending upon the Sibyl, and what did that actually mean for us?

At the time we felt like it was almost necessary to change our online identity to that of a dragon, but...how, exactly? It felt wrong merely to assign an appearance and colors and so forth. Our first avatar representing the change was a quick sketch of a dragon head containing a '?' mark. Meanwhile we weren't sure what to do with Monophylos. We tried to convince ourselves that it was time to move on from the unicorn, but then Mono split off into a distinct sense of self with their own voice, which is what pushed us toward embracing a plural sense of identity. It didn't seem unnatural. Wasn't literature full of examples of people with a sense of duality, even if it was only a private sense of having an inner dialogue, like Shinji talking to himself in Neon Genesis Evangelion? It takes being inside Leliel to awake Shinji to the possibility that he's more than one person...

...huh. Maybe the dragon vision wasn't a dragon.

There was more I wanted to say and the tale feels extremely incomplete but I think that's enough for a post.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Every profession has that one piece of semi-mainstream media that gets everything correct about them even though it's absolutely not the norm. Doctors have Scrubs, lawyers have My Cousin Vinny, hackers have Hackers. What's yours?

the closest thing we've ever had to a profession was "chemist" and if there's a good movie or TV show about chemists (no I don't like Breaking Bad) I don't know about it.

we're also DID plural, so we get to be represented by stuff like Split. yay!