Oh it should have been pretty obvious that we could do this but...well, my Catholicism got in the way (ducks a sudden rain of boos and overripe pears from some quarter or other) and has been interfering with our better judgment. Fortunately we have the help of St. Mono, our resident Stoic and currently our head librarian. His memory of the Classics is better than mine.

We can pretty easily distinguish three rounds of theogony, like you find in a number of pantheons I believe:

Primary Age: the reign of the dragons, of which Kel and Pim are the surviving representatives

Secondary Age: the reign of the horsies: St. Mono, Mona Drafter, Alyx Woodward, and I guess Dreamscorcher counts (where are they, anyway)

Interregnum: gotes (this era is very difficult to place in the scheme I admit)

Tertiary Age: humans enter the picture, great heroes. The KFC Gang and their friends

that's pretty sensible, isn't it? doesn't account for everything but it's a start. ~Chara

@pendell talking about Wizard of Oz and the ethereal and eternal appeal of Judy Garland reminded me of someone else like her, another young woman chewed up by stardom, and that's Karen Carpenter. I don't remember all the details but she had a miserable time as a pop star, being ordered around by her mom and her brother, she developed eating disorders, and died young. But what a voice! She elevates the sappy material by the sheer power of her voice. She's perfect for "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" because she totally sells it—you can believe that she's really trying her absolute hardest to project her words out into the Cosmos.

And an unpleasant thought comes to mind: we can believe it, because they were suffering. It's one thing to summon up a hopeful tone of voice when you're feeling joyful or contented. It's quite another to make yourself sound hopeful even when you're frayed to the point of snapping. There's a sort of evil magic, I think, in coercing a desperate person into summoning up the energy to give hope to the people with a stunning performance. They're burning themselves up to do it, and I think we feel that. We sense that we're watching something out of the ordinary, as if a phoenix had suddenly blazed up, lending their fire to the artist's performance.

It sells. You have to admit that. It sure does sell.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Our little Kel is an electron. I mean, xe is also a smol dragony creature with a bag of shinies and some sort of airship xe is working on. Xe used to have a balloon but I haven't seen it for a long while. Kel is a bit difficult to pin down, which makes sense I guess. Xe is a free, self-willed electron! Xe must be very clever indeed to have managed that. One doesn't usually find free electrons which...stick around. Usually they're flying at high speed out of one thing straight into something else, like a beta particle ejected from an atomic nucleus or a thermionic electron flying out of a hot filament. Kel the Purple, however, chooses to be completely free, dancing around from place to place somehow.

Kel is cheerful and curious but a bit lonely. Free electrons need a bit of space around them if they're to survive. In solution they can acquire a protective shell of solvent molecules, with the correct choice of solvent. In solids, unbound electrons can exist within structures that have cage-like structures or layers between which free electrons can find safe harbor. I'm not sure how Kel manages things but xe is very clever. Perhaps xe has befriended some diamine molecules to form a protective shell around xerself, so xe can float around in my wetware somewhere. Kel, how do you do it?

🐉 it's a mystery :} :} :} ~kel

For all I know, Kel's as old as the Universe. For all I know, Kel is THE only electron in the Universe, because there's a bizarre hypothesis that all manifestations of the electron are really the same electron, spread out throughout all time somehow. That, uh...that's got interesting implications for Kel.

Hrm.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Running Mazes and Monsters, which touches upon some personal problems but not very directly, so it's sort of a good, how do I say it...a movie that's good for processing some uncomfortable thoughts without risk of excessive emotional involvement. This isn't exactly Madoka Magica. All the same, there's an emotional center to this infamous scare movie about tabletop gaming, loosely based on an irresponsible book about James Dallas Egbert III (q.v. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dungeon_Master) in which an unscrupulous private investigator claimed that Egbert's mind had been fuddled by role-playing games and LARPing in the Michigan State University "steam tunnels". In the movie, Egbert is transmogrified into an emotionally fragile young man named Robbie Wheeling, who's tormented by guilt about the disappearance of his older brother Paul. Robbie was the last one to see Paul before he vanished and now he blames himself.

Turns out Robbie's had a problem with getting fixated on games, and it happens again at his new college. A spooky LARPing session in some nearby caverns prompts an emotional breakdown and then...a spiritual experience! Robbie had been role-playing a "holy man" and he experiences a vision of being assigned a quest to seek his brother in New York. Now...if Robbie had been able to detach himself from this experience a bit and think about it instead of leaping into impulsive action (haha I've never done THAT!) then maybe he'd have realized, in a more dispassionate and reasoned way, that he had unfinished business with the memory of his brother and at some point he needed to deal with it instead of doing the normie thing and suppressing it. This spiritual crisis, depicted in Mazes and Monsters as horrific or pathetic, a heartbreaking lapse into insanity, actually makes sense.

But normie American culture has forgotten how to deal with ecstatic experiences. Only a few such experiences are permitted in respectable American society, especially if you're living up to conventional masculinity. I could probably tick off on my fingers all the things an American male is allowed to be ecstatic about—sex, violence, money, sports, drink and drugs, certain permissible sources of entertainment...what am I missing? And basically nobody is allowed to have a mystical experience in polite society. There's mystical Christian sects and cults and other such groups on the margins but they're not respectable. Perhaps running into a meeting-room and screaming What if we put LLM superintelligence into washing machines?? is supposed to be an ecstatic experience.

The point is, there's hardly any acceptable way for a normie American to experience a sudden disruption of their life. Nobody is supposed to change much, and sudden changes are always viewed with distaste—even a dead family member isn't supposed to knock you down for too long. As for transformative life change? Forget it! Unless you want to convert to extremist Christianity or an e/acc cult or a crypto scam or something else that's useful in business, you have no options. And even the e/acc cult, though relatively acceptable as cults go, is likely to mean losing a lot of friends.

No wonder gender transition sticks in the craw of conventional American society. The Christian moral panic isn't 100% wrong, you know...they're correct to sense a transformative energy, a magic in the trans community that is fatal to their shrunken and limited worldview, and thus they hate trans people with unholy passion. So many of their other hatreds coalesce into this central hatred. Trans persons are creative, and they hate free creativity. Trans persons are often highly skilled or educated, and they want to hoard all skills and education for their exclusive use. But above all they hate the prospect of change, for their most powerful emotional weapon is: You're stuck here. They have made the whole world into a jail and, like all jailors, they're terrified of escape.

Mazes and Monsters is terrified of escape. The movie is remarkable for somehow managing to evoke a sparkle of urban magic and the richness of imagination even when the movie's overall lesson is CONFORM. One of the college kids, at the start, is restless with his parents' demands on him—go to MIT, go into industry, be somebody!—because he'd like to make video games. By the end of the movie he's learned his proper normie lesson: games are for people who are sick in the head, and money is more important than creativity. As he drives off into the sunset he's bragging about how he's going to make a million dollars in software. What sort of software? (Shrugs) Who cares. Whatever sells, I guess.

(spits)

~Chara of Pnictogen