Who here has read John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces?

It was one of my favorite books in the 1990s and I'm sure I'll love it
just as much when I re-read it (eventually) because I regarded it as a
moral warning, a milepost of sorts: Don't Be Like Ignatius V. Reilly. C.
S. Lewis talked about his moments of Joy or sehnsucht in
Surprised by Joy and I agree with him fully; such moments are
important—and Jack Lewis should have asked himself why he
stopped having them, even though he wasn't anywhere near Heaven
yet. But I've come to realize that there's a logical converse to such
moments: the times when you realize you've strayed too close to the Pit
and maybe you should back away. A Confederacy of Dunces was like
that. Reilly was too familiar for comfort. He was stagnant, soured,
morally and intellectually rotting in place, and as it turns out he also
predicted the future. The Internet is overflowing with Ignatius Reillys
and most of them call themselves "dark intellectuals" or something
similar. At some point in their pasts, as with Reilly, they decided
never to grow up: they chose some moment of dark epiphany to fixate
upon, some moment when they realized they were the only sane person in
an insane world, and they haven't budged a millimeter from that spot
ever since. I remember reading A Confederacy of Dunces in the
mid-1990s and thinking, oh gawd, let us make more use of college
education than THAT.

The "dark intellectual" people and the antisocial techbros who eat up
their stuff love to talk about their "redpill" moments, when they
supposedly realized that feminists had ruined the world or whatnot. Bret
Weinstein, who's peddled TERF diatribe and Sinophobic "theories" about
COVID-19 and is now claiming to be Saving the Republic^TM on a
speaking tour with a bunch of other propagandists, has a particularly
hilarious such moment: when he was fired from a teaching job at
Evergreen State College here in Washington State for being too bigoted,
he declared this was evidence that Evergreen was the secret headquarters
of a vast leftist conspiracy to corrupt all education or something like
that. (He's blithered about this at length and you can learn all about
it on YouTube if you like.) As it happened, Ignatius V. Reilly had a
similar moment: he bused to Baton Rouge to apply for a teaching job at
Louisiana State University, flubbed the interview, and then decided that
this experience was a trip into the Heart of Darkness of modernity.
Reilly would tell this story of dark awakening to all and sundry, and
write extensively about it into foolscap tablets in his bedroom at his
mom's house. Now, though, you can put that stuff on the Internet, and
get paid for putting it there.

If there's any ONE event that gets the "dark Enlightenment" people
worked up, though, it's the endless September, the day when the
Internet was finally too public and commercial a thing to remain the
exclusive domain of universities and .mil accounts and that sort of
thing. There was a long enough interval when the nascent Internet was
the exclusive playground of college students and military contractors
for a pecking order to develop between wise professional greybeards and
clueless college freshmen joining the party late (like I did) and thus
contributing to a September rush of "dumb" and "moronic" newbies on
mailing lists and Usenet. But then when there were enough people getting
Internet accounts through corporate outfits like AOL, round the clock
instead of clustered round the school schedule, that meant an "endless
September" of newbies at all times of year. It's quite clear that
there's a lot of rancid resentful nerds who still think of this as the
End of the World, more or less, the day that the barbarians arrived at
the gates. After all, nobody represents civilization better than a
racist computer nerd still waging Mac v. PC wars.

I'd love to kill this bit of toxic nostalgia stone dead, if I could.
I've experienced a bizarre reversed version of it: I came to hate
computer nerd culture so much that I aggressively took the part of the
unsophisticated user, partly because one of my best friends IRL is a
very old-fashioned gardener born in 1951 who NEVER got used to this
stuff even a bit and still prefers to talk on the telephone. I've helped
him out with computer stuff and shared his anger: why is this stuff so
confoundedly hostile and overcomplicated? It's not fair to make someone
like my friend deal with a labyrinth of bad choices like the modern-day
website or recent Windows versions, much less the fucking smart phone.
(He refuses to get one. Can you blame him?) "Endless September" now
seems merely like the reification of the casual bigotry of toxic
computer geeks, the ease with which they divide everyone up into the
[slurs] vs the high-IQ, more "evolved" human beings, hoi polloi
vs. hoi aristoi.

It's not like they even respect that era of computing anyway, not
really. Oh they still spout out sentimental glurge about it but in
reality they're happy to have left it behind. It's safely in the past
for them, like Napoleon or Julius Caesar, and therefore safe to
mythologize.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I won't go into icky detail, and it's not as bad as we first feared—Kris, our host, gets especially panicky about stuff going wrong with their body, and we have a lot of phobias and panics about doctoring and medicine and such. But we have persistent dermatitis and I gotta tell you I've never felt more sympathy with the idea of having a robot body. Ugh, look at this thing.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I came up with a doozy. holy heck can I actually write this?

get this. an argument that Michael Mann's Heat is an illustration of entropy. Entropy catches up with Neil McCauley at last, literally. "heat" gets him

his whole life is dictated by pure calculated risk—it's actually impressive to see how well it's enacted. de Niro never misses a note, so far as I can tell, he always does seem totally rational, making risky but reasoned decisions, and...well his luck runs out. his last impulse turns out to be a BAD one and down he goes

~Chara

Kotomine Kirei.

For a long time I was terrified this guy was in our system somewhere. It seemed to make too much sense, because of our Catholicism, but as it turns out we never had THAT sort of Catholic experience (you know the one I mean) so we think we're safe, though I admit that I'm still a little afraid he'll pop through a doorway unexpectedly. In earlier days Sir Mordred or someone else would probably have just spitted him immediately but we don't want to do things that way, especially because I feel like I do kinda understand parts of this guy. We do have some things in common, enough to worry me.

Nasu Kinoko might have some Problematical™ issues but I've got to say, he's spot on with his insight into the Catholic mindset (and a lot of other things). He's got this guy clocked, and is superb at depicting that kinda...awful, self-absorbed, navel-gazing thing that corrupted Christians are really good at, like the most important thing in the world was that he Fell. Kirei's hypocrisy is on point: he can put so much energy into Christian invocations (used as magic spells) that gosh darn it it almost sounds like he MEANS it! When he fries old man Matou in the third Heaven's Feel movie it's almost epic—but it's still fucking Kotomine Kirei. I've never seen a better depiction of such a hollow person, hollow but still self-aware enough to know that something is dreadfully wrong with him and he needs answers.

He actually envies Emiya Kiritsugu. Just...yeah. You know what, though? I kinda do too.

In Fate/Zero there's a kind of labored but still interesting scene that cross-cuts between briefings: Kirei's learning about Kiritsugu and coming to some rather doofy conclusions about the guy but ones that are very consistent for a fallen Christian. It's how they all talk, like they can see into the sicknesses of everyone's soul with their laser vision. (The last Heaven's Feel movie supplies the counterpoint: Kirei admitting in retrospect that he'd been totally wrong about Kiritsugu but that, much like neutral Flowey, he still just doesn't get him.) Meanwhile Kiritsugu is learning about how Kirei started out as a promising candidate for priesthood but ended up bouncing around whatever shit jobs the Church gave him—sounds a bit familiar eh?—and then he kinda bounced through magical study as well, not responding to ANY particular discipline. It horrifies Kiritsugu, which is a bit funny considering what he himself thinks of being a mage.

But I was like that too, for so long. I think of all the different subjects I tried, always with genuine interest, but then some trauma would fling me out of them. The one lucky break I got, Classics, hasn't been practically useful yet although I've always valued the sense of academic grounding it's given me. It actually meant a LOT to see a humanities professor touch (however briefly) upon mathematical or scientific concepts that I knew from a different angle; I could see instantly that the two perspectives squared with each other. Hence I can actually say that I have an alma mater and...you know, that's pretty cool. I don't think a lot of people get that from college these days.

And it was never enough either. I'm not sorry I didn't take up the subject academically, in grad school, which would have been a terrifying dead end, especially now that it seems like celebrity-minded Classics professors are all moonlighting as fascist propagandists. But what else was I supposed to be doing if not that? It's a bit strange to think that we finally, FINALLY, could come to the conclusion that it always had to be "generalist", because that's the only way to study magic. It really was true; we had to learn it the hard way. Magic really is the Art of Arts, which touches in some way upon every other human subject including the ones that haven't been invented yet. But we've had a devil of a time chasing after its study, for reasons that are only slowly coming into sharp focus.

Studying magic requires total humility and self-knowledge, and that's why Kotomine Kirei always crapped out at a certain point—he hit some wall within himself that he refused to tackle. He's plainly got that neurosis you see in failed Christians so often, that endless preoccupation with the question: "well if it was WRONG then why didn't GOD stop me?" So Kirei remains "a dog of the church" as Matou Zouken gleefully points out, still doing their offices, still skulking at a churchhouse that never seems to have anyone in it except himself, almost like he needs the sanctuary still to feel safe. I'm glad at least I didn't make THAT mistake. When I burned out on Catholicism I just left.

I really like mapo tofu now, though.

~Chara of Pnictogen