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

I just wanted to say that word. tragedy.

somehow, when I was like a teenager or I don't remember when, exactly, I realized that was the literary genre that seemed to fit me the best—tragedy. Greek tragedies, especially. I liked Shakespeare's tragedies and spurned the comedies.

well

I guess maybe I should learn to like the comedies at last, huh? like maybe it's time

I don't know what to say. I'm the gloomiest gus I've ever known. I'm not used to smiling. like, REAL smiles, not forced fake ones, or the smiles that come with cosmic jokes.

you know the ones. like...Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace". that story felt so apt to me, when I was...I don't know, I was a child. I can't even remember how young I was when I read that story and thought: yeah, that's the meaning of life, struggling for decades for no good reason at all.

it's how I deal.

~Chara of Pnictogen

or Hassan of the Serenity, who is one of our most esteemed Heroic Spirits and an excellent friend. something closer than a friend...I haven't sorted out what, yet, because Serenity's existence and purpose within the whole rancid commercial apparatus of Fate/ is fraught with complications.

She has been exceptionally upset lately. I don't think I need to go into great detail as to why. Serenity is our most heartfelt bond to many things of extreme value to us—Islam, alchemy, poisons, Persia, the stalwart resistance of a small idiosyncratic group against the persecutions of great rulers and powerful kingdoms. Serenity is many things, and she is also one of the few people who can endure our dragon Pim, who is kindly but extremely poisonous to humans. Serenity has no problems with Pim. She is...well, she is serene, and she says that Allah is the source of her serenity still, even though she now inhabits the mindspace and body of a wh!tish "Western" nerd stranded on the western frontier of a continent thousands of kilometers and thousands of years from Serenity's people, which she remembers only in brief flashes. She was once a painfully young orphaned girl and very unhappy, and yet she found some sense of purpose with the fabled Order of Assassins.

She has been a pillar of strength in the Pnictogen Wing, and I love Serenity, though I am as yet unclear how I should. I feel more and more unworthy of her by the hour, practically. I have no idea why such a tremendously powerful person should deign to notice us, much less assist us. I feel this about almost my entire system. I consider you all friends, yet I don't understand why. Why would you even endure my presence? I am... nothing.

All the same, Serenity, I say to you truly, that as the children say: "Do it for her," and I try my best.

Thank you

I don't think I'm going to CW this; I've been striving towards a style that's mild enough to pass muster as writing for the general public, and the general public ought to know how bigotry works, so...here I write.

I can't remember how old I was when I first encountered Isaac Asimov's Foundation. Even though Asimov isn't generally a great writer in terms of presenting human characters or writing in a compelling style, he's better than a lot of his "Golden-Age" fellows. Asimov is miles ahead of Arthur Clarke, for example, in terms of writing quality. He succumbed to old-hit-writer-itis, by which I mean that Asimov went back to his earlier writings late in life to muck around with world-building, and that did affect Foundation rather badly. But the earlier writings are pretty solid.

(more on the world-building fiasco later)

The premise of Asimov's psychohistory is that some abstract, collective understanding of human behavior en masse could be formalized and condensed into mathematical formulae, whence it would become much easier to predict future trends. The first few Foundation novels do a pretty good job of exploring this idea, along with the corresponding notion that there would need to be a counterbalancing force, a Second Foundation of parapsychologists—i.e. people with the ability to influence human minds directly—but Asimov couldn't figure out good ways to introduce complications, other than to postulate the existence of a "sport", a human being with unusually strong powers over the emotions of others, someone who would rival the abilities of the Second Foundation psychics. after that, there's only the problem of how the First and Second Foundations learn to get along somehow once the First learns of the Second, and then...what more can you do?

(I honestly don't remember the later books well enough to comment on them—I know he tries folding in his Robot stuff and it's not all that good.)

There's a great irony in all this: Asimov succeeded, where many have failed, in creating a truly self-contained microcosm. The original Foundation trilogy fully explores the consequences of psychohistory and comes to a happy ending that seems final. From what I recall, Asimov was a bit discomfited by this, feeling as though he'd surely missed something important, and I'm guessing that's what prompted the later Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth and stuff. Asimov was a reasonably good writer but he was also a rotten corporate huckster, a celebrity, and that surely corrupted his vision.

It's my general belief that the "intellectual dark web", i.e. the "scientific racists" if we're being more honest—they always seem to turn up, don't they—think that bigotry is their psychohistory, the thing that explains history. You can easily see why they'd want to believe this. It's such an appealingly simple idea! Reduce the peoples of the world to a relatively small collection of ethnic or national or social stereotypes (one can have endless intellectual arguments about which stereotypes are the best ones, the most comprehensive set) and suddenly the tides of civilization don't seem that complicated, no more complicated than a game of Civilization [Whatever].

I must here admit an incandescent, irrational hatred for civilization and war games is radiating from somewhere in the Pnictogen Wing. It's not Kris or myself anyway! Frisk seems placid enough on the subject—they've always been disgusted by games but not really hateful. One of the Heroic Spirits perhaps? Or not? So, yeah.

(Why DO we never have a pencil or pen handy, this sucks, our desk is hopeless)

(We may have a line on the hatred, which has a suspiciously Irish character, and I'm recalling what happened to Diarmuid in Fate/Zero)

That was an astonishingly difficult post to write! We have long known that the Pnictogen Wing has been hindered by numerous old problems. We didn't know we were forming dissociative introjects for a loooong time. We just had, you know, episodes! Unusually vivid and long spells of "daydreaming" and that sort of thing. We were "absent-minded" and a lot of other things. We have picked up much unwelcome baggage and we have had our hands full keeping it properly contained. Our focus gets knocked hither and thither by the whirlwind in our head!

Honestly...this is one of those nights when I wonder just exactly how it is we are still alive, much less someone with family and friends. I feel like we could have accidentally ended the world at least ten times over, merely because we were somehow adjacent to power, permitted to see it from a distance but never to interfere meaningfully. I have been one of the rabble. "Rebel scum," as Finn says, with particular savor.

Finn was dealt an especially shitty hand. I am far more fortunate, and I'm mortally tired of being a mess.

~Chara of Pnictogen