Has anyone done a manga where we learn that the most important job of the Emperor Naruhito (or any previous emperor of Japan) is heading up a secret magical task force or team of vampire-hunters or something of that sort? Maybe I'm just rehashing Shinkenger here. ~Chara

A great many important members of the Pnictogen Wing are killers in some way or another, and some are guilty of terrifying crimes in their pasts.

cw: talking about the criminals and murderers of the Pnictogen Wing

I feel like I could tell a lot of stories about my life but that they'd all be just a bit south of really interesting, if that makes any sense. I feel as though I've managed to see a lot of different things but in a sort of...incidental way. I have never felt central to anything in my life, that I can recall, until I realized that I'd somehow managed to become the center of a household.

I once saw Stephen Hawking for example! from a moderate distance, in 1993 perhaps. He was maybe fifty yards ahead of me, rolling past on the central walkway through the campus of the California Institute of Technology, probably on his way to a symposium at the Caltech Athenaeum. (I don't think I ever got to peep inside there myself.) I watched him go by and...that's basically it, that's my Stephen Hawking story. I'm sure that a lot of ex-Caltech students can tell similar stories of seeing someone famous for a few moments, from a distance, maybe in a lecture hall. Once, and then never again.

I am curiously at peace with this marginal sort of life. I remember once being convinced (mostly, I think, because I sense my RL parents were pushing heavy expectations onto their children) that I would become someone really great, like all the heroes of science and art and culture that I was reading about in childhood. At one time I imagined being a composer like Mendelssohn or Schumann, or a marine biologist (that's a rather common wish I think), or a great experimental chemist like Curie or Pasteur. As it turns out, I'm not great at anything, except being permanently irritating and refusing to go away and be quiet.

Spent too much of my life being told to shut up. Do I need to shut up now? Is it time for me, once and for all, to stop talking?

I've never been any good at knowing when to stop.

~Chara of Pnictogen

are there OTHER eugenicist "Simpsons" episodes aside from the "Simpson gene" one? yecch ~Chara

Haha, it's "The Simpsons", it's "satire", but the "joke" is that eugenicism is real and there really is a heritable "dysgenic" factor that leads to inevitable dullness of the brain, but it's not expressed in women so THAT'S good! hilarious!

Fuck that noise.

I couldn't help but notice that the "Simpson gene" supposedly doesn't assert itself until mid-childhood. Homer and Bart (for the purpose of one episode) were supposedly brilliant in early childhood and then got dull-witted, like all the Simpsons men do! Because genes. But I find myself thinking: if there's any likely explanation for kids suddenly seeming to get "stupid" in mid-childhood, it's not gonna be "genes".

~Chara of Pnictogen