one of the horrible ironies I've come to realize about the difficult relationship between my older sibling and myself, which I'm starting to remember in better detail from past decades, is that we were both maximally afraid all the time, but our addled brains went in two completely different directions with it. and I rather wonder why that might have been. I went towards total dissociation; Frisk went towards the far less pleasant option, extreme paranoia.

cw: mental illness, dealing with extreme emotional pain, paranoia vs. dissociation

and don't get me wrong. I am not reflexively against nuclear power and one of my major beefs with the militarization of the atom is that it's made nuclear power about a million times harder than it ever needed to be

but just imagine being someone who experienced the initial TMI scare—a child at the time maybe—and being frightened by the accident, and then the place just becomes a tomb after that. and finally it's maybe gonna be recommissioned, finally maybe the TMI reactor can do some good again, and what happens? OpenAI or Microsoft or whoever spreads a lot of bribe money around in Pennsylvania in exchange for a twenty year exclusive deal to power some LLM trash generator.

powering homes? pfft that's not "effective altruism", wasting precious nuclear electricity on the common herd, they just waste it! anyway it builds character to learn to live with brownouts. it's more efficient to channel all that juice into a giant Microsoft-branded forgery machine.

[expletive deleted]

~Mono 🦄

There was a time in my life—gawd fucking dammit I hate to admit it, it's like having a tooth pulled for some reason—when I thought computers were COOL. I pored over computer catalogues the same way I'd read Astronomy magazine or the Edmund Scientific catalogue. Remember when catalogues were how you entertained yourself once?

This sort of thing just makes me wanna shrivel up and die. Ooh wow the PENTIUM! Surely this will make my life better! Just think of how much pure rot I underwent on Pentium computers in one school lab or another, playing games—really bad games, mostly, like DOOM II.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I have very complicated feelings about the Pnictogen Wing hosting Hassan of Serenity (or Hassan of the Serenity, though I prefer the shorter form) simply because...well, she's a young woman who barely remembers a poor and desperate childhood in 12th century Persia and found a place for herself among a fabled Order of Assassins in the Nizari Isma'ili state, and now she's a Heroic Spirit in a deeply questionable gacha game with a taste for sexualizing the youthful. Our system happens to have a lengthy affinity with poisons, especially arsenic, and thus Serenity has been one of our most esteemed headmates.

I have no idea why such a person, who has been ever so gently persuading me to learn more about the Qur'an and Islam and alchemy and Muslim science generally and so many other things, should want anything to do with us at all. She is here, however, and I love her. Kris does too, though we have had perplexing troubles with getting Serenity better settled with Kris (more on that later.) In my imagination anyway she's a bit older now (mid-20s perhaps) and pensive about being so very far from home.

The recent news from the Middle East about the booby-trapped telephones has Serenity distraught and that grieves me. Perhaps we'll watch House of Flying Daggers tomorrow to cheer her up. It's her favorite movie so far and she's quite taken with our OLED TV I must say.

~Chara of Pnictogen