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

I was cogitating earlier about a pattern that you see in right-wing media circles frequently. Most of the propagandists enjoy an individual sort of celebrity, even if they're operating out of some organization.

cw: lengthy discourse on patterns of organization among right-wing propaganda figures, with Charles Murray as a particular example

there's something so forlorn about dollar-store merchandise that I feel aggrieved by it. cheap paper feels so thin these days, like they've figured out how to make it out of the absolute minimum of recycled pulp. and no I'm sorry I've never thought that writing on an electronic tablet was anything like the same and I've had some very tortuous thoughts about why that should be the case that aren't about just...UX issues. directly altering a physical medium is...significant.

I'm so happy that Kel got into those cheap plastic discs from the dollar store. I was a bit worried at first; they seemed a meager sort of gift, but Kel really took to them. I wish I could say that other dollar-store toys looked as promising.

~Chara