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

what a strange expression, huh? Variety loved its pithy if slightly difficult to understand jargon, meant to be as concise and snappy as possible, because in show biz there's no time to hang around. everything's go, go, go! so it's all about clipped utterances and snappy turns of phrase.

"Wall Street lays an egg." Well, a zero looks sort of like an egg, so that's one way to think of it. Wall Street was suddenly out of gas. Zip. I'm suddenly reminded of how "goose egg" is another tasty euphemism for zero.

You know that Muslim mathematicians had to introduce this simple concept to "the West"? It blew their minds. I think maybe it still does. Gosh there's a symbol for nothing! Makes you think don't it! Maybe nothing is anything, or whatever.

But eggs are also a beginning, as we all know, and zero is a beginning as well. The humble number-line has to start somewhere, so it grows outward from zero, so to speak.

One of the things that's been haunting me from the last several weeks has been listening to Elon Musk, on his "Adrian Dittmann" audio ramblings (Mono got blocked by the way! probably my fault because we've been doing some two-headed shenanigans from time to time, partly to evade censorship, but yeah 'Adrian' doesn't like old Mono), bringing up zero. I don't remember what he had to say about zero (are you kidding me?) but I certainly remember just how...particularly empty that felt. I think zero haunts Elon Musk. Uh, Adrian Dittmann rather.

Well I've been haunted by zero, too. "Back to Zero", at least. We have unfinished Fate/Zero business for sure. Someone's come knocking, with serious business: Diarmuid ua Duibhne. We are really weak on this Irish lore so...studying means a lot to us now, and that's a pity because we have been struggling with terrifyingly bad traumatic issues involving study.

~Chara of Pnictogen