i write because the the alternative forms of my obsessive insanity are either too destructive or decidedly less sexy.
xgenediagnosis
Raven Darkhölme looks like whatever the room needs. She has spent more of her life in other people’s faces than in her own, and after enough decades of that; after enough cycles of adopting a body, inhabiting it completely, shedding it when the mission ends or the cover is
xgenediagnosis
Jean Grey arrived at Xavier’s school at eleven years old. By that point she had already experienced the inciting event that defined her arc: her best friend Annie Richardson had been hit by a car, and Jean, in the acute trauma of watching someone she loved die, made inadvertent
xgenediagnosis
Logan doesn’t know how old he is. He knows it’s a lot. He has fragmentary evidence; a face in an old photograph, a name carved into a tree, a scar that should be there and isn’t. What he does not have is the thing that most people
xgenediagnosis
Scott Summers was seventeen years old when Xavier found him, already running on the particular fumes of a kid who has learned that being useful is safer than being needy. He had survived an orphanage, survived the street, survived the discovery that his eyes emit a force that cannot be
xgenediagnosis
Anna Marie’s power works like this: skin contact absorbs whatever the other person is. Their strength, their memories, their abilities, their psychic signature. She takes it in involuntarily and it stays, sometimes for hours, sometimes longer. She cannot choose not to absorb. She cannot filter what she receives. She
xgenediagnosis
Erik Lehnsherr survives Auschwitz. That sentence is the entire argument. Everything else; the Brotherhood, the asteroid, the magnetic field crushing cities, the helmet, the recurring cycle of villain and antihero and sometimes-ally; is downstream of that sentence and cannot be understood without it. The X-Men narrative keeps trying
xgenediagnosis
Charles Xavier is celebrated for two things: his compassion and his dream. The compassion manifests as taking in damaged children and giving them a home. The dream is human-mutant coexistence, a future where difference is tolerated instead of exterminated. Both of these things are real. They are also cover
xgenediagnosis
Every X-Men character is a specific answer to one question: what do you do when your neurology makes you illegible to the world around you? Xavier’s answer is mask and assimilate. Build a school, train the mutation into something controlled and presentable, prove you deserve a seat at
tinfoilhats
The scale runs from Tin Foil to Tungsten. Tin Foil is the category where the claim is not only wrong but made by people who have no intention of being right, who’ve organized their entire cognitive architecture around maintaining the claim against all evidence. Tungsten is the category where
tinfoilhats
Science is a method, not a tribe. The method is: make observations, generate hypotheses, test them, publish the data, invite replication or refutation. The tribe is the social structure that decides which observations are worth making, which hypotheses are respectable, and which data gets published. On UAPs, the tribe and
tinfoilhats
The Senate Armed Services Committee doesn’t hold hearings about things that don’t exist. That’s the cleanest starting point for thinking about what’s happened with UAPs over the past decade: set aside every question about what the objects are, set aside every theory about their origin, and
tinfoilhats
In 2011, Daryl Bem published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that landed like a grenade in two separate rooms simultaneously. Psychologists were upset because it seemed to prove something impossible. Physicists were less upset because they knew it might not be. The paper was called