• 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 been a gradual process, accelerating after the "Renaissance" and the consequent Protestant Reformation, but Christianity has pushed all sense of mystery, of fundamental unknowability and mystic paradox, out of itself. These days the typical Christian ideologue pretends to be the very incarnation of Facts and Logic: they've copied and coöpted the snide rhetorical pose of "rationalists" so completely that Christian extremists are successfully posing in public as the truest possible defenders of Science and Reason. To be a hardline Christian today is to be certain that you have all knowledge, all the answers that matter.

It is fundamentally impossible to banish uncertainty and doubt and mystery forever from a religion, especially from one that makes claims as improbable as Christianity's claims about itself. No free human being is obliged to believe in God, or a Son of God, or in one Book that pretends to tell the entire story not merely of humanity or the Earth but indeed the entire Universe—for to the most committed Christians, nothing meaningful exists outside the story told by the Bible, and thus such Christians feel free to redraw the Cosmos into different shapes, ones in which Earth is all there is and the rest of the heavens are reduced to a backdrop. Such reductive explanations for things cannot help but be dissatisfying to most human beings. In seeking to purge all mystery from the world, the Christians have instead posed us with a bigger one: how can we believe that one book of stories, partly incoherent, its exact contents a matter of constant dispute, somehow sums up all of existence?

Mysticism and esoteric spirituality isn't content with limiting our understanding of reality to a single text. Christian mysticism does exist still; it used to be a flourishing occupation in fact, but the visions and revelations of mystics tend to clash with rigid interpretation of religious texts and doctrines strictly enforced. Hence Christianity has slowly banished mysticism from itself, and made it a forbidden subject—I suggest that this is partly why Christians tend to be attracted to pseudoscientific twaddle, especially racist twaddle. Pseudoscience tends to wear a cloak of mystery, posing as the One Truth that They don't want you to know; Christians who are dead certain about God and Jesus and their formulae for salvation have therefore transferred their sense of mystery to science and other things that the rest of the world regards as certain and trustworthy. Their fundamental sense of the solidity of reality is not the same as that of outsiders. We doubt the Bible; they doubt that people who disbelieve the Bible are in fact real people.

It's a dangerous mindset. It's a frightening problem to confront: how do you communicate with people who would rather blur the lines of reality itself rather than let go of their religious formulae?

~Chara



JuniperTheory
@JuniperTheory

okay it is fascinating though how all these "here's a wholesome game where you play as a small business owner" rely on like. an endless flood of customers just Existing, none of them having any characterization, none of them presenting any problems, just faceless guys

like, every single shop management game i've played EVER does this. i'm not sure this is a bad thing? i'm curious about it though. fascinating thing. is that just necessary?


pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

one of the worst things about capitalism is that it sells "running your own business" as the key to riches (and practically the only respectable way to make it in life, aside maybe from becoming some variety of officially-uniformed killer) and one of the crucial assumptions is that If You Build It They Will Come: there's somehow an infinite pool of customers out there ready to be fleeced by you, and if you haven't pulled them in, then welp you're just not trying hard enough! after all it works in video games, doesn't it?

and then there's the even more destructive corollary: not only is there an infinite pool of customers and you just need to wait for the right suckers to come along, there's also an infinite pool of workers also ready to be fleeced by you.

yeah, thumbs down to this garbage. EDIT: if you listen to even a few scraps of cryptobro talk it's full of assumptions about potential customer bases that seem like they're reasonable—"imagine if we take just ONE PERCENT of these billions of dollars!!"—but are simply empty daydreams based on that false assumption that there's always customers out there and you just need to "work harder" to pull them in.

~Chara



Aleister "The Beast" Crowley, that is, not Crawly / Crowley from Terry Pratchett and/or Neil Gaiman. I wonder which one of the two was responsible for Crowley. In general, when it comes to "Good Omens", I assume that Pratchett wrote the good bits and Gaiman wrote the bits that aren't so good, and I think Crowley's in the latter category.

Anyway we have reason to believe that Aleister Crowley's 1917 roman a clef supernatural thriller, Moonchild, has some personal relevance. Our partner Kaylin's of the opinion that we shouldn't waste a single millisecond on Crowley's bullshit but we feel like it's inevitable that we should at least confront the guy's legacy. We use the "Thoth" tarot deck sometimes and have Crowley's book on it, though I tend to credit Lady Frieda Harris with what's good about the deck. And this Moonchild book casts a long shadow: self-taught rocket scientist and Thelemic occultist Jack Parsons was entranced by this book and it inspired his infamous 1946 "Babalon Working" (q.v. https://sci-hub.se/10.1163/15685276-12341406) which, so far as I can tell so far, was carried out at Parsons's headquarters in Pasadena (less than a mile from Caltech) with the assistance of L. Ron fucking Hubbard. Such rituals, I suggest, have lasting consequences even if they look like mere comical failures from the outside.

This review of Moonchild (https://archive.is/Lr7ac) doesn't seem at all promising. Apparently much of the book is taken up by Crowley's labored fictionalizations and piss-takes on numerous real-life persons—A. E. Waite features as a bumbling villain, William Butler Yeats (who humiliated Crowley in the ridiculous "Battle of Blythe Road" at the London headquarters of the Order of the Golden Dawn) also figures as a villain, and Preston Sturges's mom Mary D'Este helps support the improbably amazing hero of the piece, who is of course Crowley's auctorial self-insert. I think I'm going to have to find an annotated copy if I'm to make sense of this farrago. Maybe Kaylin's right and I'm wasting my time.

~Chara of Pnictogen