This is one of the funniest Google Ngram results I've ever come up with. "Paradigm shift" from 1960 onward. It's rising monotonically! (That is to say, its slope is always positive over time, never levelling out or falling.) Basically everyone's been more and more excited about a "paradigm shift", even though Western society's basically frozen in its tracks, unwilling to budge a single micron from its money-making principles and commitment to authoritarian leadership. Mainstream culture has been furiously amplifying nostalgia and tradition and political reaction. People openly wish World War II would come back, practically...and yet somehow there's rising excitement over shifting paradigms. It's wacky.

~Chara

I feel, at last, like I understand something that other folks probably regard as quite obvious: the reason the "normal" people are so vindictive about identity and "identity politics" is because they have, in fact, no sense of identity. They might even be waking up blank every morning like Harry du Bois after a blackout, piecing themselves together with the help of their own papers and records and everything, and that's why the notion of changing any of that stuff offends them so much.

I, we, all of us have struggled with identity, "impostor syndrome", and everything...it's taken a while. We feel like we're finally stitching together a satisfactory sense of self. It took a while. Self-loathing was my predominant emotion for so very many years....anyway, if there's a large collection of people who are all "normal" in approximately the same way and they're all reliant upon external information for their sense of self, then...what does that make them?

I have a hypothesis to propose, a metaphysical one: some clever entity set up a false Heaven in order to make instant salvation possible, or the illusion of it rather.

(cw: wacky blithering)

There's an unanswered question in the back of my mind. Among many, of course. This one is a bit...unpleasant to think about. Because the question is: "Why, of all the fictive fathers I could have identified with and felt the most compassion for, did it end up being Emiya Kiritsugu?"

Not Asgore. I have very complicated feelings about King Dad, sorry to say. But, yeah.

I fear we have too much in common.

~Chara of Pnictogen

It suddenly occurs to me that alien-contact hypothesizing, at least everything that I've encountered in my various trawls through popular American Internet culture, tends to be excessively preoccupied with looking for deftly encoded signals. I've seen notions about how aliens might transmit mathematical series (prime numbers, say) that would be unlikely from an inanimate source. Well I don't know about that, but I'm wondering someone else: what about the carrier wave? Wouldn't that be remarkable in itself—a radio signal confined to a narrowly defined band? ~Chara

(btw I got to see Lily Tomlin act that in Portland, 2005 I think. now that was special. I like to think we're very very distantly related because of the similar surnames)