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[acesolaris]

[acesolaris]

Im gonna be so real can yall actually talk about ways we can support trans women in the UK instead of giving all the attention to fucking JKR. I already know that Harry Poter sucks, I wanna know how to actually HELP people. Something something you have to love the oppressed more than you hate the oppressor

[acesolaris]

Endlessly funny to me that I, a sex-repulsed aromantic asexual, have infinitely fewer hangups about sex and sexuality than the average heterosexual Evangelical. The thought of having sex myself makes me feel nauseous and I don't enjoy porn/most erotic content, but I am enthusiastically giving allo people who enjoy that stuff two thumbs up and defending their right to goon. I am pro-sex and pro-gooning, just not for me.

That's why it's also funny to me that a lot of aphobes and exclusionists act like asexual people are the ones driving purity culture and sexual repression. Like I'm pretty sure it's actually the religious fundamentalists who WANT to have sex/masturbate/etc but have been repressed about sexuality to the point where they think they'll go to hell if they experience sexual pleasure or desire outside of an extremely narrow context.

[acesolaris]

Hi Anon, your message was lengthy so I copied in your question:

How do you engage in a conversation/relationship with a spirit that wants to teach you and help you learn, but you don't know where to start?

I generally recommend starting with day-to-day needs. See if there's anything going on in your life that magic could help you address. The following focus more on spirit work than sorcery but I think the ideas are relevant:

find some stuff to do magic about (feat. practicing sorcery is fun and good)

Okay, so you want to practice every day?

If there's nothing immediate in your life that you can think of working on, try pursuing a power or ability you've always wanted. Acts of impressive magic sometimes have to be planned seasons ahead. Could there be an artifact or ritual you want to create that may require months of planning?

Besides topics of focus, and creating rituals or tools, personal skills are also ripe for the picking: have you always wanted to learn to hedge-ride, do a type of energy work, talk to ghosts or animals, or finally learn how to properly consecrate a poppet? Reach towards your dreams.

Halloween is right around the corner, the time is now to start considering what it might take to plan a major ritual. In that vein, many witches enjoy a bioregional devotional calendar - you start preparing this at any time of the year, of course.

Additional tips for communicating with a spirit that can be a bit intimidating to speak with:

I don't mean this to seem so transactional but tips for being a proactive employee can really apply here. It's like running into a problem at work and needing to ask the boss.

Have 1-3 clear topics of focus for the conversation.

Sort out for yourself if these topics are just for sharing, or if you have specific questions you want to ask. If so, have a couple of questions prepared.

Bring your own solutions to the table. Prepare your own first steps.

Be prepared to defend your interests. If a spirit asks you to explain your interests, will you take that as a sign that the spirit is curious and wants context, or will you interpret it as a spirit tearing you down and challenging your ideas?

Perhaps my best piece of advice always, for approaching any teacher of witchcraft (corporeal or otherwise), is to bring your own solutions and steps to the table. It demonstrates something about your own level of investment in your practice, and provides extremely helpful context about your mindset and current abilities.

I have not yet met a teacher, spirit or otherwise, who actually wanted to spoon-feed information into the wide-open beak of a baby bird, but many who are delighted to meet a student with the most batshit idea to parkour from the pine branch to the park bench yonder and steal what definitely might be a peanut.

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WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!

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Just in case!

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YouTube is implementing an AI policy that tracks your watch history and determines your age with it. The only way to be able to continue watching the videos you want on YouTube if you've been falsley flagged as a minor by their AI is to give YouTube your government ID. This is being implemented in the US right now. It is essential to rage against this and put YouTube in the fucking ground if they continue with it—that may be the only way to make them backtrack. But damn isn't that hard to do when responding to this announcement with a polite but negative comment flags you for violating community guidelines and bans you from even posting it?

[acesolaris]

The first asexual person I met outside of the internet was a 65 year old woman.

I’d been interning with her as an artist/executive assistant for some time. To put a long story short she’d developed a tremor that kept her from doing a certain amount of studio work, so in between sending emails and invoices for her I’d chip in and help with line art or drafting on longer projects. A lot of it was the two of us sitting in her basement studio, doing our own thing, waiting for the phone to ring. We got to talking a lot. I’d just moved across the country and was still finding my footing.

There was a handyman she had over occasionally — he was a personal friend who enjoyed her company more than she enjoyed his. She didn’t dislike him by any means, but he definitely had feelings for her that she didn’t reciprocate. One day, after he’d come over to repair something-or-other and left, she and I started talking about relationships.

She asked if I had a boyfriend. I told her I wasn’t interested in being in a relationship with anyone and that I’d never had a desire to be in a relationship. Admittedly, I was bracing for the “You’ll meet the right person someday” response. I knew it generally came from a place of care, but it never changed how much I dreaded to hear it. I really respected my mentor and I was prepared to nod along to whatever response she gave me. Instead of anything I expected her to say, she just kind of nodded and said, “Me neither. I think I’m — what’s the term — asexual?”

I was ecstatic. I told her I was asexual, too. I saw her sigh in relief, the same way I did. I couldn’t believe it.

We didn’t get much work done that day, we just started talking about our experiences. She’d been married once when she was younger and even during that period of her life her disinterest in a sexual relationship didn’t change. She had a roommate after graduating college who confessed to having feelings for her and she had to tell her “It’s not that I don’t like girls, it’s that I don’t like anybody.” The roommate harbored enough bitterness over this that they had to split ways. Her mother told her that she would quote “rather have a gay daughter than a daughter who didn’t fancy anyone at all” unquote.

I didn’t have nearly as many experiences as she did, but I was able to share my own for the first time. I shared how it was easier to say I was taking time to work on myself than to say I had no interest in being in a relationship. We talked about the words “You’ll meet the right person someday” and “You’ll know when you’re in love” and “Don’t worry, one day you’ll meet some guy that changes everything.” As if something was broken.

“I’ve been alive for sixty five years,” my mentor told me, “and I’ve never felt like I was missing something, even if everybody told me I was.”

Currently, my mentor lives with her parrot, her cats, and her backyard-wildlife pals in a house that she owns. She makes art and hosts community art groups and volunteers at care homes and is the most self-fulfilled woman I’ve ever met. And she loves her life. She loves the people she knows and they love her, too. If I could be half as cool as she is when I grow up, I think that’d be pretty amazing.

“Asexuality” isn’t a problem to be fixed or a phase to grow out of. Sometimes you’re fifteen and sometimes you’re sixty-five. I knew in my heart that older asexual people existed but it changed me completely to meet one. We were here before and we always will be.

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I saw a sign at a nearby village advertising a "veillée", a storytelling evening, which sounded intriguing, so I went out of curiosity—it turned out to be an old lady who had arranged a circle of chairs in her garden and prepared drinks, and who wanted to tell folk tales and stories from her youth. Apparently she was telling someone at the market the other day that she missed the ritual of the "veillée" from pre-television days, when people would gather in the evening and tell stories, and the people she was talking to were like, well let's do a veillée! And then she put up the sign.

About 15 people came, and she sat down and started telling us stories—I loved the way she made everything sound like it had happened just yesterday and she was there, even tales she'd got from her grandmother, and the way she continually assumed we knew all the people she mentioned, and everyone spontaneously played along; she'd be like "And Martin, the bonesetter—you know Martin," (everyone nods—of course, Martin) "We never liked him much" and everyone nodded harder, our collective distaste for Martin now a shared cultural heritage of our tiny microcosm. She started with telling us the story of the communal bread oven in the village. The original oven was destroyed during the Revolution; people used to pay to use the local aristocrat's oven, but of course around 1789 both the aristocrat and his oven were disposed of in a glorious blaze of liberty, equality, and complete lack of foresight.

Then the villagers felt really daft for having destroyed a perfectly serviceable oven that they could have now started using for free. "But you know what things were like during the revolution." (Everyone nodded sagely—who among us hasn't demolished our one and only source of bread-baking equipment in a fit of revolutionary zeal?)

The village didn't have a bread oven for decades, people travelled to another village to make bread; and then in the 19th century the village council finally voted to build a new oven. It was a communal endeavour, everyone pitched in with some stones or tools or labour, and the oven was built—but it collapsed immediately after the construction was finished. Consternation. Not to be deterred, people re-built the oven, with even more effort and care—and the second one also collapsed.

People realised that something was amiss, and the village council convened. After a lot of serious discussion, during which no one so much as mentioned the possibility of a structural flaw, people reached the only logical conclusion: the drac had sabotaged their oven. Twice. (The drac, in these parts, is the son of the devil.) The logic here, I suppose, was that no one but the devil's own child would dare to stand between French people and their bread.

The next step was even more obvious: they passed around a hat to raise money, assuming the devil’s son was after a cash donation. But (and I'm skipping a few twists and turns of the story here) the son of the devil did not want money, he wanted half of every batch of bread, for as long as the village oven stood. Consternation.

People simply could not afford to give away half of their bread, and were about to abandon the idea of having their own oven altogether—but then Saint Peter came to the rescue. (In case you didn't know, Saint Peter happens to regularly visit this one tiny village in the French countryside to check that its inhabitants are doing okay and are not encountering oven issues.) Saint Peter reminded them of one precious piece of information they had overlooked: holy water burns the devil.

People re-built the oven, for the third time. The son of the devil returned, to destroy it and/or claim his half of the first batch—but on that day, the villagers had organised a grand communal spring cleaning, dousing every street and alley in the village with copious amounts of holy water. The poor drac simply could not access the oven; every possible path scorched his feet for reasons he couldn't quite explain. So he was standing there, smouldering gently and wondering what was going on, when some passing tramp seemed to take pity on him, pointed at his satchel and told him to turn himself into a rat and jump in there, and the tramp would carry him where he wished to go. The devil's son, probably a bit frazzled at this point, agreed without much thought, became a rat and jumped in the satchel, and of course that's the point when everyone in the village sprang from the shadows, wielding sticks, shovels, pans, and started beating the devil's son senseless. (Old lady, calmly: "You could hear his bones crack.") So the son of Satan slithered back to Hell and never returned to destroy the village oven again—and the spring cleaning tradition endured; the streets were washed with holy water once a year after that, both to commemorate this glorious day of civic resistance when the village absolutely bodied the devil's offspring and to maintain basic oven safety standards. (Old lady: "But we don't bother anymore… That's too bad.")

She told us five stories, most of them artfully blending actual local events or anecdotes from her youth with folk tale elements, it was so delightful. She thanked us for coming and said she'd love to do this again sometime. I went home reflecting that listening to an old lady happily tell stories of dubious historical veracity involving the Revolution, property damage, demonic mischief and baffling municipal decision-making is literally my ideal Saturday night activity.

[acesolaris]

thinking about future/alternate world ecology and deciding what animals will be widespread in a speculative!north america. (yes has to be north america cause i cannot become familiar with ecology of anywhere else...)

speculative world where all the animals are dead= bad, implies that current state is hopeless, corrupting the message of the story. speculative world that has been restored to imagined pristine state in the past= overly simplistic, boring, raises questions about how that happened and how people knew what the goal was.

therefore, the goal is to have a vibrant and optimistic but wacky ecology where native animals, dubious genetic engineered versions of animals, novel adaptations and evolutionary developments of animals, and introduced animals are all mixed up all throughout the ecosystem, and no one knows which is which.

I'm trying to indulge my mad scientist goblin brain that says "okay what if we just released every species of large mammal onto the same continent and see what kind of ecosystem they turn into"

And on the research side of things, Texas is the closest we have come to trying this experiment; there are quite large and widespread populations of nilgai, auodad, axis deer, blackbuck, fallow deer, and scimitar-horned oryx in Texas because in the early 20th century we almost made nearly everything extinct so we decided to introduce a bunch of new game species for people to hunt. Meanwhile Florida is having the invasive species battle royale. As per iNaturalist, there are THREE SPECIES OF MONKEYS in Florida. There's hornbills. There's Nile monitors. Not to mention the Burmese pythons and iguanas that are everywhere wreaking havoc. There's capybaras in Texas and Florida. I tried to google capybaras in Florida and all I can find is a news article cryptically stating that they "escaped from a research facility" in the 90's.

What kind of research facility has a bunch of capybaras that can just...escape???

But some of this nonsense turned out to be pretty good for the species in question, for example, scimitar-horned oryx literally went extinct in their native range and are now reintroduced because a bunch of them were still lying around in Texas.

It seems like there should be more scientific data collected on these bizarre introductions but the only thing the news article was able to say about the capybaras was like "they could be considered an invasive species...if they start eating people's crops" dude what about the ECOSYSTEM

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So the Youtube boycott starts tomorrow, and the biggest issue people have (including me) is a YouTube addiction.

Now, maybe addiction ain’t quite the right word, I don’t think I’m gonna get any YouTube Withdrawls or anything, but I watch a lot of YouTube and it’s gonna be hard to stop so suddenly.

SO HERE’S SOME TIPS !!!!!

Find YouTube alternatives! There are indeed other video sharing platforms you can use. (Glomble!!)

If you have a streaming service, start watching a really long show. I use YouTube for background noise, but a TV show could do the same thing.

Listen to music somewhere else! Spotify and Pandora and Audiomack are all nice. Spotify kind of sucks actually, but it’s there if you need it, y’know?

Use your newfound free time to invest in a hobby! Start learning to cook! Go to the library! Start sewing or crocheting!

Use your newfound free time to get a workout routine (if you are able to work out.) Go on walks! Get a gym membership if you want!

Play more video games. Obviously many people can’t afford the Cool Games, but there’s always Roblox !!! Or like. Candy Crush !!! Idk !!!!

Yeah, boycotting YouTube is gonna be hard, but it’s absolutely worth it in the name of anti-censorship-ness. People might try to tell you “it won’t do anything” but that is STUPID! Don’t give up! Boycott for as long as you can! It may be hard to stop watching YouTube when you feel so dependent on it, but you have the power to do it.

Even if the boycott doesn’t work, I don’t want to support a company that makes decisions like this, and I definitely don’t want to have a mental dependency on a social media platform. This is your chance to stop.

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One of the books I recommend everybody to read is Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. It rewired my brain and I mean that in a really physical, tactile way.

One of the main topics of the book is Indigenous Australian information technologies. Indigenous Australians don't use written language. They have different information technologies. Not inferior. Different. Yunkaporta demonstrates the very basics of how these technologies work, and you immediately feel your brain do something you had no idea it could do.

It feels like he's walking inside your house, gesturing to a wall that was always there, and then walking right through it, demonstrating that the wall was never there in the first place.

In a written-language-based society, children grow up learning to communicate by written language, and it shapes the way their thoughts and memories work. But there are other information technologies that work very, very differently than how written language works. The very idea of ideas is fundamentally different.

The author re-iterates that writing these things down into a book mutilates the idea because writing makes you think and understand a certain way.

I think everyone should read this book because basically everyone is brainwashed nowadays to believe that human cultures follow a linear progression from being dirty cave men in the woods, to settled agriculture, cities and written language, to smelting iron and writing on paper...and it's totally wrong.

Some cultures used writing, others didn't. Writing is not a "later stage" of "advancement," it is just a different technology, and it has advantages and disadvantages.

Same with agriculture. Yunkaporta explains that there were indigenous Australian people that tried settled agriculture in the distant past, but that culture collapsed. The ecosystem just isn't good for settled agriculture.

Same with metal working. Something that pisses me off is people calling indigenous North American cultures "stone age." First of all, they made plenty of things out of copper. Second of all, they didn't NEED bronze or iron. Mining is back breaking, dangerous work, and smelting involves so many unhealthy fumes. Maybe the labor and impact upon society and the environment just wasn't worth it for them.

Colonization has made a monoculture of thought. Monoculture is in the essence of colonialism. Not only does colonialism literally replace diverse agricultural ecosystems with sameness, it also replaces human diversity with sameness.

And replacing human diversity with sameness, enforces sameness upon the ecosystem, because everyone is forced into using the same machines, consuming the same resources, valuing the same aesthetics, eating the same foods, playing the same sports, raising the same animals, wearing the same clothes, living in the same houses.

Just think about it. If two cultures live next to each other and have different cultural foods and clothes, for example one eats fish and berries and wears wool and the other eats chickens and roots and wears linen, their foraging and agricultural practices are different, so more biodiversity can exist, and they aren't using the same resources, so the resources are more sustainable. If EVERY culture eats the same food and wears the same clothes, they are all putting strain on the same resources, and every area will have the same agro-ecosystem, eliminating biodiversity.

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