Aremo Shitai Koremo Shitai Onna no Ko ni Mietatte

Not long after my CARDiac experience, my dad brought home an Apple ][+, which came with a schematic that revealed the inner workings of the machine in ways that I found visually striking, if significantly less accessible than the CARDiac:

https://downloads.reactivemicro.com/Apple%20II%20Items/Hardware/II_&_II+/Schematic/Apple%20II%20Schematics.pdf

(For me, at least. For the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang, it was the start of a journey that turned him into one of the world's virtuoso reverse-engineers and science communicators):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/09/quantity-break/#so-many-chips

The Apple ][+ did very little when you took it out of the box. It came with a few floppies' worth of demo programs, and we bought a few more down at the local computer store, but most of the programs I ended up using with that machine were ones I typed in myself, from magazines I bought at the corner store (I spent half my magazine budget on Cracked, Mad and Crazy, the other half on computer magazines full of BASIC program listings).

Typing in a program, keystroke by keystroke, was another Fingerspitzengefühl-generating exercise. I wasn't much of a typist, so it was slow going, and of course I made a lot of typos. What's more, BASIC had already fragmented into several dialects by this point, so even a correctly typed program could fail to run until it had been adapted for the BASIC that shipped with the computer. Getting a program to run on my computer required me to hone my typing skills, but even more so, my problem solving skills.

After months of this, I (re-)invented the debugger, from first principles, coming up with lots of little tricks and gimmicks (many of them horribly inefficient) for identifying and solving my programs' errors. In later years, I had lots of opportunity to work with real debuggers, created and maintained by trained programmers who'd forgotten more than I would ever know about writing code, and my own cack-handed efforts to build my own version of their tools conferred a confidence and intuitive understanding that I could not have achieved otherwise. Figuring out the need for a debugger and then rolling my own (crude, inefficient) one made all debuggers more legible to me.

I think that "legibility" is an underrated trait. If a system is legible to you, then you have a superior basis for understanding it, improving it, and making it work again when it breaks down.

There's an old joke that goes, "physics is applied math; chemistry is applied physics, and biology is applied chemistry" (I've also heard versions that start with "math is applied philosophy" and carry on to "sociology is applied biology," etc). While this isn't entirely true, there's something profound in it: we understand and manipulate our complex reality by wrapping it in abstractions that package up a writhing, shuffling, vibrating machine inside a smooth, serene membrane with a sturdy and easily grasped handle. You could do chemistry using the tools of physics, but it would take hours to perform the kind of calculations a chemist does in seconds (just as it takes an eternity to add one and one with a CARDiac).

Nevertheless, there are times when it is useful for a biologist to think about chemical processes, and for a chemist to think about interactions at the level of physics, and for a physicist to do math. The membrane and the handle are essential, but sometimes you have to decap the sealed package and inspect and manipulate its internals directly. Problem solving, improvement and maintenance all require the ability to move up and down the stack of abstractions to figure out where to stick your probes and stage your interventions.

This is where legibility comes in. Interacting with physical processes improves your mental model. In Broad Band (a magisterial history of women in computing), Claire Evans talks about how the first programmers were women who did the "unskilled" labor of physically cabling components together, developing powerful Fingerspitzengefühl, with such high-fidelity, trans-abstraction mental models of the machines' operations that they became the world's best programmers and debuggers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/13/data-protection-without-monopoly/#broad-band

My early adventures in programming were so powerful and instructive because nearly all the programs I interacted with on my Apple ][+ were written in BASIC (not just the ones I keyed in, but also the demo software and much of the packaged software we bought). That meant that I could get a listing of any program I was using, peeling open the membrane to look at the machinery underneath. I could even laboriously trace the operations of that program using my toy debugger. This, too, was legibility: the ability to flip between the effects of the running code, and the instructions themselves (and then to mentally map those instructions onto the movement of cardboard tokens in my CARDiac).

This affordance was repeated later on the early web, thanks to the "View Source" function that came built into every browser, acting as a velcro tab for the membrane that separated rendered web pages from their underlying instructions. In my early years as a web developer, I copied, pasted, adapted, probed and traced HTML in ways that would have been instantly recognizable to the younger me, keying in those BASIC programs and ripping apart the commercial software on my computer.

I read somewhere that the Bell Labs scientists who created the CARDiac were worried that, thanks to transistorization, the next generation of programmers wouldn't understand the physical, material processes that unfolded when their programs ran, and that this would mean a loss of legibility and intuition and Fingerspitzengefühl. I can't track down the reference now, but it stuck with me, because the CARDiac is such a perfect way of preserving those virtues.

Modern computer science curriculum includes some chip design for just this reason (just as chemists study physics and biologists study chemistry). But there are plenty of programmers – better programmers than I ever was or will be – who taught themselves and never had a CARDiac or gave much thought to chip design. They work at different layers of abstraction and in different ways to solve different problems. Maybe they could improve their art by tinkering with FPGAs, but there's always something even the most skilled artisan can do to round out and incrementally improve their craft.

In the same way, there are plenty of programmers – better ones than I ever was or will be – whose journey started at higher abstraction layers than a teletype terminal or a CARDiac. Maybe they started with a browser's View Source, teasing apart other people's Javascript to create weird Myspace customizations. Maybe they tweaked a programmable block in Minecraft. Maybe they modded a Scratch game. Or maybe they recorded macros using Applescript or Hypercard or Visual Basic to automate a routine task, only to later open up the source code generated by the macro recorder to make fine adjustments.

Whether you're pasting source from Stack Overflow or recording a macro in Excel, you are just one operation away from unwrapping the membrane and exposing the code beneath it. And with the modern internet, with Wikipedia, with endless tutorial videos, you are one further operation from penetrating the high level code to get at the code beneath it, and the code beneath that, and the code beneath that, all the way down to the bare metal.

Which brings me to vibe coding. As I've written, there's a world of difference between writing code for production and writing "personal software" that solves a problem you have. Whatever deficits that code has (due to the fact that you're not a skilled programmer) are offset by the fact that you're the one making the tool (which means your needs aren't lossily filtered through a programmer's understanding of those needs):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/15/vernacular/#hypercardian

There's nothing wrong with code that solves your problem, even if you don't know how that code works, even if it breaks in a couple of years, even if no one else could maintain, extend or debug that code. Personal software is fundamentally different from software made to be used and maintained by others:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/02/canonization/#operate-iterate-improve

Higher-level abstractions are necessary. Moving tokens between the slits in a CARDiac is a powerful exercise, but eventually you want to do something more substantial than adding one and one, and so you need to package up the mechanics of computing inside a membrane with an easily grasped handle (knowing that you can always open the membrane if need be).

The more automated code you generate – macros, pasted Javascript, Minecraft blocks – the greater the likelihood that you will be failed by a readymade, prefab component. At that point, you have means, motive and opportunity to open the membrane and start tinkering with the internals, and every time you do, you have a better chance of making a realization that improves your grasp on the whole system.

In S1 he definitely thinks she's a naive idiot, but even then, he's showing a degree of interest in her, and it seems to be entirely about her; it's not just because Alastor is helping her for unknown reasons. It catches his attention when Valentino mentions that Angel is with her, he refers to her as "little miss bleeding heart", and he even directs a comment at her while watching the hotel crew prepare for the Exorcists' attack ("Oh, looks like your little hotel didn't work out so well"). It could just be that he, like most sinners, is offended by her idea of "saving" them, but with the added context of S2 it feels almost personal to me.

It's also worth mentioning that Vox actually didn't think Alastor was helping her at first. As soon as he calmed down from the revelation of Alastor's return, his primary concern was keeping the two of them from making a deal, which implies that he assumed Alastor's interest was entirely self-serving. So his own initial interest in her wasn't due to jealousy.

That does seem to have changed by S2, since one of his questions to Alastor is "what makes the princess and her crappy little hotel so great that the Radio Demon gives up what little dignity he had left to help out with it". But he also immediately drops that line of thought to pursue a different one, so it doesn't seem like he really cared about the answer. Or he only brought it up as a jab against Mr. Never Helps Anyone, or he was just thinking aloud and came up with something else he was more interested in. Whatever it was, Alastor helping her doesn't seem to be a pressing concern, so I think most of Vox's own interest in her really is about her.

And that interest does seem oddly personal. Because when he goes to Valentino to borrow Angel, he laughingly declares that "the next part of my plan is gonna make the princess kill herself". And the next part that Charlie actually finds out about involves having Angel speak out against the hotel and side with the Vees on live TV. It's one of the few things Vox does towards the end of S2 that isn't even tangentially connected to Alastor, and it is targeted.

At this point in time, Charlie has never done anything to him except bring angels to his rally (which worked in his favor), force him to leave her property, and imply that he could be redeemed. And the only other thing she's done that he might have taken offense to is open the hotel in the first place. He has no immediately obvious reason to want to hurt her specifically, but he clearly does.

And now I need to take a detour to talk about Lilith, because there are some things that have been bothering me for a while. Specifically, the way Vox talks about her, the people he talks about her to, and some of the things he says.

First, he makes the very bold claim, in front of Lilith's husband, that she threatened Heaven. And while Lucifer does react, it's nothing compared to later on when Vox brings up that she's not around anymore. It's hard to say if Vox lied, or if Lucifer just dislikes this insolent mortal talking about his wife.

Lucifer also reacts to "Meanwhile this king thinks all of us peasants should be satisfied with an endless existence of suffering"; his glare actually softens, and he makes his only attempt to interrupt and argue, in spite of his well known (to the viewers) hatred of sinners. This line isn't about Lilith, but it does strike a nerve, possibly because it sounds like something she would have said.

Later, Vox talks about Lilith's desire to attack Heaven while trying to convince Carmilla to help him, and makes his first assertion that he's trying to finish what she started. It's a bit of an "as you know" moment, but it's also a really bad time to lie so brazenly, because it's just asking Carmilla to call him out and turn him down. So either he's not lying, or he knows she doesn't pay much attention to Hell's politics and feels safe making such claims.

He even presents himself as taking up Lilith's cause to Alastor, albeit in a context where he might be talking about the spin he'd put on it ("Just imagine it, a member of the royal family endorsing me as I finish what her mother started"). At minimum, he's very attached to this idea, and he might even believe it on some level, whether because he's gotten lost in his own lies or because he actually interprets Lilith's message the way he's been talking about it.

My takeaway from the scene where he compares Charlie to Lilith, even on my first viewing, was that he hadn't just been using Lilith's cause to further his own goals; to me, it felt like he genuinely respected her as a leader.

And I've only become more convinced of that over time. Because here is Vox, who hates sharing the spotlight and sometimes struggles to do so even with his closest friends, and he's tying his cause inextricably to Lilith's. He takes up her slogan. He repeatedly talks about finishing what she started. He names his doomsday weapon after her. He might have even paid enough attention to her campaign to use her talking points, if Lucifer's reaction to the "endless existence of suffering" comment was because it reminded him of her.

And then there is Charlie, "leading her friends into disaster". Unable to win over a crowd on her own. Her confidence easily shaken. Wanting to help sinners, but in a way that requires them to change. A pale imitation of her mother.

I think Vox's interest in Charlie feels so personal because she is Lilith's daughter, and he sees enough of her mother in her that he wants her to be her mother. But she's not, and he's upset about it.

He attacks the hotel well beyond what's necessary because of what it represents. He goes out of his way to hurt Charlie with Angel because he has something against her specifically. And he absolutely doesn't want to be told that he could be redeemed, because that means she thinks he could be someone better, and it puts the pressure on him to actually do it. Which, I think, is why her face was on the staircase; she didn't try to tear him down like Alastor and Lucifer did, but her vote of confidence triggered similar feelings of being judged and blamed.

But. I also think his interest in her is similar to his interest in Alastor, in that he sees the potential for something more, and part of him wants to pursue it. Because he knows some of what she's capable of. If he kept the focus on Adam after Alastor fled, he would have seen her trying to fight him, and "risking [her] immortal life for sinners". She stood up against Vox himself after being pushed the right way.

Something else that strikes me as odd is that Vox really doesn't try very hard to stop her from giving her presentation. After his attempt to kick Baxter out of the system fails, he just sits there and lets her talk for an on-screen minimum of forty seconds before he tries to interrupt. And the only explanation I can come up with is that curiosity got the best of him; maybe not so much about what she had to say, but about how she'd handle herself in front of a crowd when it was on her own terms.

People struggle to deal with characters who get your hopes up and can't keep their own end of the deal and Charlie is distracted for personal reasons so it makes sense that people lost their minds cause the human's lives are in real constant danger. But Charlie is basically an immortal nepo-baby with NO purpose. Emily is JOY itself and has Sera to guide her and the structure of heaven is built to support her job - she doesn't have to create a place to do it and hope it works. It just isn't fair to tell Charlie she should be told no or she needs to be hurt or humbled because she hurt herself through a thousand nos before anyone else believed the humans could be saved.

She is not able to compensate for her character or lack of lived experiences but she also doesn't matter to the universe in the same way everyone else does. Lucifer and Lilith made her and she will be in hell for all time and she is nothing to no one except them. I truly feel like she is the spirit of forgiveness and mercy itself - as that is what Lucifer and Lilith likely needed and her birth symbolically reflects that they deserve - but she is just meant to be around forever. Her parents problems ARE her world and she is just as clueless as when she and Vaggi where throwing those fuckers off buildings in season one to bond (she did try and stop that) but the point is she literally CAN'T understand the people she WANTS to help and so she is constantly able to do so much damage to them.

There is a duality to Charlie's hotel that people don't wanna let be there: it is GOOD and it is BAD at the same time. In S2 E1, people think the hotel is lame and then they leave and get fucked up and some of them come back because its fucking hell and maybe the fact that anyone would try and offer some safety is a huge deal for anyone vulnerable. It is bad because as we see at the end of S2E8 people like Angel will be trapped in emotional, physical, and mental dynamics that prevent them from even making it to help as well as things like Vox's mind control literally taking away their ability to have free will. Charlie's system operates on CHOICE because the immortals believe that human choice and free will is the key their fate but free will isn't as simple as just doing what you think is right. I think Alastor's whole character will prove that free will is a lot more complicated than immortals think it is.

In the anime Death Parade (12 episode masterpiece) they explore the idea of an angel not being able to understand the human soul it judges a lot and from a lot of complex angels and I think it's almost an extension of Lucifer's punishment that Charlie realizes saving the humans is the right thing to do and something she must push for at all costs despite the fact that out of EVERY OUT CREATURE IN ALL OF THE SHOW Charlie has been the least amount of places. She's unlike the other sinners in hell as she doesn't know the same fears and pains and needs and she's unlike any of the heaven fallen. She's is a hellborn whose father hates and idolizes heaven and whose mother resents and dreams for humanity but she has more in common with Loona but with none of the culture. She doesn't seem to have a relationship with fucking hellborns!! It's so sad. Charlie could take a season off and work for Blitz and it would literally heal most of her issues, honey those are your people!

I can't take it, it's just so good. Angel Dust is the one who is being harmed emotionally and physiologically here and specially because he though these two people would be more protective of him and in both cases they were not as wise as they seemed. Husk also regresses cause he fails and embarrasses himself and Angel is on his way out the moment Vox walked in that door.

But Charlie is ALSO a tragic character here because her need to be SEEN and LIKED by hell is the most human thing about her and it's her pride that literally keeps getting in her way. In S1 they tell you she's avoiding her daddy issues but her indirect way of trying to bring her mom back by proving she can be a good leader for hell (and then she ends up on TV saying another sinner is stronger than her mother....) makes her think this risk is worth it. Imagine you are in hell and your survival comes down to the fact that one immortal personally thinks you deserve it and you just gotta hope she can achieve it. It's crazy how Charlie can't save the humans if they don't save her - or if she doesn't save herself first.

Her wants for acceptance and willingness from others aren't really at odds with her other core wants and needs to actually help Angel Dust. The news in hell has been Charlie's media her own life, she literally doesn't get the obvious manipulative stuff Vaggi keeps telling her VoxTex is doing because she thinks people will change their mind if they know they truth when it wasn't rational for half those fools to be walking away in the first place.

I feel like you can tell a set up is perfect when the person who would feel the WORST about they mistake they are making is the core reason the mistake is caused. It's why Angel is quick to forgive Charlie in S1 when she arrives at his job. He KNOWS she only wants to help but in S2 he starts to take Charlie's failures as a reflection of his inability to belong. She's focused on Sir Pen - who made it - and we know Sir Pen already made Angel feel like he wasn't suited for change. Charlie causes Angel to leave the hotel and she's falling face first into traps of the person who is taking his free will and compounding his abuse. Putting someone in a position of power when they don't understand can cause so much harm but Charlie isn't taking the position of helping humans for a selfish reason. Even though she wants her mother's approval, she clearly believes that everyone can be redeemed and should be helped and those are her true core values. She simply isn't suited, trained, or able to do many of the tasks involved in her goal and it wasn't until she ended up ( IN HER MIND ) failing so bad Sir Pentious was killed that heaven even tried to start helping her.

Charlie is also being punished in hell by becoming the gear that destroys the exact people she wants to save. Just as her father is punished for his unwillingness to face issues being the exact thing that lets them consume his world and the sinners are punished by being their own worst fates. And like all things, it still makes it worse for Angel Dust because Charlie dangles hope that is constantly told to him can be achieved simply by wanting to change bad enough when what he needs is to not be beaten and mind controlled in motels after working endlessly jobs and eating cigarettes. Even though Charlie only knows hell, she's a princess who is not physically suffering the plights of humanity in the same way and we actually keep being shown how badly immortals like Lute and Charlie react when they do lose loved ones. Charlie has never and may not even be able to experience hunger.

Mind you...Vox is giggling back at the tower cause his HOPE is to make her KILL herself and she is throwing everything precious and vulnerable into the fire because SHE thinks she just needs to work hard enough. She also hates herself and sees her lack of purpose as a reflection of why she is alone and she keeps trying to MAKE herself suddenly figure it out.

I think despite how low Angel's situation is at the end of S2, the reason why it still feels hopeful is because Charlie can finally do her job with the full support of heaven and a functional system is now in place. Charlie got the doors open and she got the rules of the system changed and it isn't fair to her or Angel Dust that he should be the one who pays the price. Heaven watched Angel Dust be dragged and knocked to the ground for protecting Niffty from Valentino and they still said he deserved to be there because they thought the rules shouldn't be questioned.

Charlie's whole argument that pulled Emily to her side in the first place was based on the fact that Angel Dust kept trying to do good despite how every single choice he faced was harder than everyone else's. They don't NEED to drink in heaven. Angel doesn't see Charlie literally showing heaven itself him fighting his abuser and he also doesn't see how he is the reason Cherri Bomb and Husk are healing at the hotel. Both Angel Dust and Charlie's narrative is getting to the point where them trying hard enough isn't enough and it is the system that needs to move out of there way.

Another thing that connects Angel Dust and Charlie is their hidden power. Charlie's make sense: her father's downfall is all about him misusing his power so she treats her like a taboo and already dislikes hurting others. Angel has been convinced he isn't strong while doing every job and hell and taking nonstop abuse. I think that once he is able to escape his mental chains he is literally going to destroy the tower and every fool in it. Between Charlie not saying sorry to Vaggi and Angel losing the hotel, I feel like the story between Angel and Charlie has been building to something that will truly challenge them both.

I just really like that Charlie's story is about trying to help people and being bad it while Angel's is about being a good person despite the entire world trying to tell you that you're not. People are vastly more forgiving for a characters that are intentionally hateful who have passive good qualities than they are of people who struggle and both of these characters get picked apart by the world for that reason.