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

we would all like to get back into being better friends with computers. learning programming seems like a necessity if we're to survive the next several years because I have a feeling the landscape of personal computing is about to shatter.

we've been trying to help in the shattering process, I admit. Mono the Unicorn has been kicking away at the credibility of the "large language model", which seems like a cosmic joke of a technology, the world's most expensive Burroughs Machine. but people really do believe in it, and that's kind of terrifying actually. I'm quite prepared to believe that a lot of computer jockeys who feel like the Machine God is about to burst forth from their gibberish generator are shocked and amazed for the simple reason that they're seeing scraps of text they would never otherwise read. they're such limited people with limited intellects and a practically subliterate degree of language use because they're speaking a kind of street poetry or patois so liberally festooned with memes that you practically don't NEED to talk. it's actually sort of cool, but it's also rather obvious these people don't know how their machines work. so many layers of abstraction have been heaped atop the personal computer that these techie people plainly regard "the computer" more like a force of nature than a physical object. memory? electricity? data? surely these things merely flow like water or nitrogen.

in a way, that's delightful! fiction has met fact, in a way. where do you find such highly abstracted and stylized depictions of how computers work? in movies and games and comic books and fiction! this is how people talk about computers in stuff like Tron or Hellblazer, as if data and memory were substances, stuff. they certainly can be (in broad approximation) treated that way. but the real world is a place of infinite subtleties and these have all escaped the notice of the high-tech crowd. if they're bad at programming it's because at some level they don't even really know what a computer program is any more.

that's charming. they might even be as bad with computers as I am, despite all their bluster.

they're certainly not good with math. it's quite obvious in a hundred little ways that these programmer dudes have a mystical, innumerate sort of approach to numbers. they're numerologists though not honest ones. large numbers quite escape their grasp, but they're dazzled and impressed by them; small numbers tend to fall completely out of their sight. they love percentages so they have a habit of pretending that any fractions smaller than 0.05 or even 0.1 must not mean anything. Pfft, 5%, that's NOTHING!

anyway it would be pleasant to get that old feeling of facility back. I may have come to feel like my faith in the personal computer (it's sad to think that I did in fact HAVE one but I did) was betrayed, and thus conceive the sort of festering vengeful sense of offended justice that Emiya Kiritsugu once held for heroism. It's curious that our paths should have crossed as they did, and that we should have had so much in common, including a child's faith in a just Universe.

Apple Computer, most of all, has been like some Evil Empire in my mind, which is a bit silly I grant you, and yet...I can't let go of the feeling that they did in fact poison their tempting apple. they held out the promise of something that eventually they grew tired of trying to offer, so they settled for being COOL. but it's more than that.

think of what they did to George Orwell's 1984...they pretended it had a happy ending.

~Chara of Pnictogen

description: this is a snippet from Twitter of Marc Andreessen ('pmarca' on Twitter) quote-tweeting Ashlee Vance ('ashleevance' on Twitter) passing along an item from 'AutismCapital' that reads: "VC the other day told me, 'We lost several really good founders to ayahuasca. They came back and just didn't care about much anymore.'"

Yep. yep yep yep yep

(there's more but I'll spare you)

~Chara