Saturday, July 22nd, 2017 

Lifestyle tips for witches

I see a lot of blog posts about tips for incorporating witchcraft into your daily life, and honestly, a lot of it is fluff and garbage. Here’s some actual tips that can honestly and actually improve your practice.

Meditate daily. It doesn’t have to be for long, 10 minutes is great. I find doing it right before bed really helps me get to sleep easier.

Read. If you read regularly, every once in a while instead of reading for pleasure read an occult text. In addition, I find even pleasure reading can help you improve visualization abilities.

Observe. Take a moment out of your day to just observe everything going on around you. Focus each of your senses and observe that moment in full clarity.

Daydream. Honestly. It helps with visualization. If you get really into it, let your brain go to autopilot and observe where it goes.

Make a sigil. You don’t even have to cast it right yet, save it for later. The process is easy and it takes a few minutes out of your day tops. When you forget what it means, cast it on some other day by your preferred method.

Automistic writing. It can be fun. Keep a journal of whatever you write down and see if you can pick out any symbolism or themes within it.

Divination. It’s easy as hell to do a simple divination daily. If you don’t have time to interpret it, record your results and go back later.

Take a moment when you wake up to dwell on your dreams. If you’re feeling particularly saucy, keep a dream journal.

Bathe. It’s not related to magick, but it’s relaxing and nobody likes a stinky occultist. No it won’t magically cleanse you, but it certainly will physically.

Keep track of the planetary days and hours. If the moment strikes you, do a little something in the hour and day of a planet you want to have more influence on you.

Do a daily banishing ritual. Either design one yourself, or choose one that resonates with you. Once practiced, a banishing ritual takes 10 minutes tops. Do it before bed or when you wake up.

These are all easy things, they don’t take much time or energy, and they go a long way towards helping improve your practice. Instead of taking your regular routine and pretending it’s already inherently magical, take the miniscule time and energy to fit a few of these into your day. It’s honestly not hard at all.

a velvety skeleton friend here to bring you financial luck this october 🔮✨

I’m sick of being broke. I want fluffy towels. I want cool T-shirt’s. I want pretty dresses. I wish I could wear something different than everyone else, I don’t want to look like everyone else. I want to have bough money to buy lipgloss or a Frappuccino without thought. I want a horde of toki dokis in my arms. I want statues and collectibles. I want hardcover editions of my favorite books. I want to afford being a issue by issue comic fan. I want to buy pins off Etsy.

I want to buy video games and dlc. To buy as many books as I want. I want to have food without a worry about how long it’ll last to my next paycheck. But no. I have to save, save, save, to pay for books for stupid classes I don’t want to take but are required to get my degree so I don’t have to work retail.

I have to save in order to pay for my meds because health care in this country is a joke. Oh, and pay out of pocket because my insurance doesn’t cover behavioral assessments.

This whole summer I bought myself an eight dollar my little pony for nostalgia, a 14 dollar kuchi kopi, and bought a single twenty dollar book.

What I Can’t Say To My Brother

You are fundamentally a bad person. You are furious. You are selfish. You are a liar. You are a gaslighter. You are a thief. You are misogynistic. You are queerphobic. You are racist. You are intolerant. You are abusive.

Everything has been handed to you. You do not have to try to succeed in anything. You’re athletic, charismatic, talented, pretty enough to look like every leading man in an action flick , and every body wants you to succeed. I grew up hearing and watching everyone fawn over you. Kids at school would make friends with me just so they could come over to the house to hangout with you.

“Deven’s so smart, you know when he was little he spoke Russian and Spainish?”

“Deven’s so handsome he should be a model!”

“Deven’s so good at fixing computers!”

Your life could’ve been astronomically better than mine. But you couldn’t even do the bare minimum of effort or pretense of it to even coats on by. You’ve pissed every opportunity away. Every ounce of goodwill people have given you, you’ve sucked it dry.

The money you stole to party with your rich kid friends (who you also mooched off of to the point they stopped talking to you) almost made our family homeless. Every girlfriend you’ve ever had would sheepishly admit that you bragged about stealing money from me to pay for the date and would slip me a twenty from their purse as an apology.

Every girlfriend you’ve had you also drove to have an emotional breakdown. You purposely went after women with emotional problems and no support structure so you could bully them. These were women who wouldn’t know what a real healthy normal relationship is supposed to be. You did that on purpose.

You claim our mother is the person you love the most in the world (after yourself). You take money from her (you steal from her on occasion).The few times she tried making boundaries you guilted her and blamed. Our mother, the one parent we share in our blood, the one parent who actually stuck around for you.

My poor mother had to give up her dreams of travel and further education, of making beautiful art, all so she could give birth to a pitiful man like you. She was sixteen and scared out of her mind. She was hurting from a father that abondomded her as well, and you fucking play on that with your POS dad’s behavior. You use your fear of abondomenr as a fucking excuse.

You dare try to lecture me. You dare try and take some sort of moral authority and intellectual stance. I only speak to you at family functions out of the bare necessity to not hurt our poor grandmother’s feelings.

How fucking dare you try to explain the origins of storytelling and myth. I’m a fucking English Major with a concentration in creative writing my thesis is based around archetypes. I’m not taking intellectual or academic sources from a man who got a full ride to college but flunked our his first semester because he didn’t show up to class and didn’t do homework.

You only showed up to take tests. (College students who do this have the brains to check the professor’s attendance policy and grading system to see if they can pass and get away with it.) You also didn’t have the spine to tell our parents what you were actually doing, you would drive up to college and sleep in your car, like the jellyfish you are.

It took everything I had in me not to tear you down with a few sentences. You have to feel like the smartest person around. You dared to say you were, “The Muhammad Ali of Knowledge.”

Every memory of you cornering me and screaming at me to agree with you and your shitty pints. You would t let me leave til I said you were right in between choking back sobs burned in me. You and your need to control every body around you.

I could’ve destroyed you. Just a few flippant words, because let’s be real, what we say causally is usually what devastates others the most.

“Relax, you’re only my half-brother.”

“So, how smart do you have to be for your dad to finally give a shit about you?”

“What’s it like to have a dad that doesn’t love you?”

But I didn’t, you know why? Because I’m not you. That would’ve been a Deven move.

Queer Composers

For Pride Month, I would like to share a list of some of my favorite queer composers. Being queer doesn’t matter when talking about the music, and there is no other commonality that pairs these composers together. The point isn’t to say that queerness makes their music more valuable or influences their music, rather the point is to recognize diversity, and to acknowledge queer visibility. I understand the people who scratch their heads or roll their eyes at the idea of bringing up queer composers, and to them I say the point is simply to recognize their existence, because prejudices and biases through time have worked on erasing or revising history in order to keep hidden this aspect of the human condition. You could shrug and say “Who cares if Tchaikovsky was gay?” and I would say, “You’re right, it doesn’t matter much outside of biographies, but if you acknowledged Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality in Russia you could be arrested for “promoting gay propaganda”. I am also motivated by a comment from a friend who admitted they think the concept of “Pride” for anything you cannot control is “idiotic”. My response can be summed up as, when a group has been shamed for years for their identity, they will be ready to sing about it from the mountaintops when it is accepted. In other words, it is not about who is better or worse, rather it is the opposite of shame, and hopefully putting a human face on something that a lot of people only consider in the abstract.

In no particular order, here is some cool music by some queer people;

Tchaikovsky: Possibly the greatest composer in Russian history, and one of the greatest composers in general. Pyotr Illych Tchaikovsky wrote in multiple genre, from symphonies to concertos to ballets, chamber music, opera…and while he can be criticized for the way he develops themes, his music is melodic and passionate and brimming with life. Among my favorites are his fourth symphony, the second piano concerto, the first orchestral suite, his piano trio, and his concert fantasy.

Poulenc: One of the members of Les Six, a group of Modernist French composers who were reacting against “overblown” Post-Romantic music, and methodical 12-tone serialism, Francis Poulenc can be described as a “neo-classicist”, sometimes his music resembles Stravinsky. The music tends to mix two unlikely moods: goofy, fun melodies and rhythms, and solemn religious contemplation. Cosmopolitan and Catholic, Poulenc was able to juxtapose opposite ends of the spectrum of the human condition; our vulgarity and profanity, and our spirituality and the desire for divine connection. My favorite works by him are his Organ Concerto, his harpsichord concerto “Concert-champêtre”, the concerto for two pianos, the cello sonata, and his Gloria.

Smyth: An English composer and an important figure in the Woman’s Suffrage movement, Ethel Smyth was a Post-Romantic who wrote powerful music lively with the British sense of nobility and strength. In the same ironic tragedy Beethoven went through, Smyth started to lose her hearing from 1913 onward, and so she gave up composing in favor of writing. While that is a shame, she left behind a good handful of orchestral and chamber music. My favorites by her are the overture to one of her operas, The Wreckers, her serenade which is kind of evocative of Brahms, and her gargantuan Mass in D Major.

Szymanowski: A Polish composer from the first half of the 20th century whose life can be seen as a narrative of seeking identity. Karol Szymanowski started out writing in the Post Romantic German style, with dense textures and a lot of chromatic modulation, but he was losing interest in this idiom quickly. He was inspired by Persian poetry he came across, and started writing in an Impressionistic way focusing on Mediterranean cultures, influenced by Greek and Roman mythology, Middle Eastern poetry, and the atmosphere of the Mediterranean as being a diverse mixing of cultures. Later in his life, he decided to look back at Poland for inspiration and finally found his “authentic” Polish identity in music inspired by the folk stories and Catholicism of Poland. My favorite works by him are his nocturne and tarantella for violin and piano, his song cycle the Love Songs of Hafiz, the third symphony, and his Stabat Mater.

Barber: It’s possible to say that Samuel Barber’s music is a good representative of American culture…a diverse mix of differences that complement each other. He took after jazz and blues, and after experiments in tonality heard in Europe and other American composers like Charles Ives, and he took after Romanticism with deep and powerful music. My favorite works by him are the Adagio for Strings which is heavily inspired by Mahler, his piano concerto, and Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

Copland: Another great portrait of America, Aaron Copland was considered one of the quintessential “American” composers of the 20th century, despite the combined factors of being gay, Jewish, leftist, and inspired by Russian and French modernism. All of those were seen as outsiders of the general American public. Even so, taking after Stravinsky, Copland’s music is full of spaciousness and open chords, melodies that range from longing to folksy and fun. My favorite works by him are his clarinet concerto, violin sonata, fanfare for the common man, and his ballet Appalachian Spring.

And if you reblog this list, feel free to add any of your favorite queer composers and share their music, their names, their faces.

this is the money dog, repost in the next 24 hours and money will come your way!!

Hey kid, look at me.

I want you to T-pose. Turn your right thumb up and your left thumb doen and look at your right thumb. Move your arms up and down a bit until you feel a nerve running from your armpit to your palm. Now turn your right thumb down and your left thumb up, and look at your left thumb. Keep your chest facing forward and your shoulders back. Move your arms again until you feel that nerve again. Keep alternating between these two for a minute, or look at each thumb thirty times each.

Now sit down. Put your left hand firmly under your left buttock, palm down. Keep your shoulders back and put your right hand over the crown of your head, very gently pulling it to the right. Do this for thirty seconds, then do it again but with your right hand under your right buttock.

These are stretches for the nerves in your arms, and are very good for people who sit behind a computer a lot, or fibre artists, or you name it. Do them daily. They will hurt in the beginning, but keep doing them, even after the pain has gone, or it will return and you'll have to start all over.

summer drive

By the way, you can improve your executive function. You can literally build it like a muscle.

Yes, even if you're neurodivergent. I don't have ADHD, but it is allegedly a thing with ADHD as well. And I am autistic, and after a bunch of nerve damage (severe enough that I was basically housebound for 6 months), I had to completely rebuild my ability to get my brain to Do Things from what felt like nearly scratch.

This is specifically from ADDitude magazine, so written specifically for ADHD (and while focused in large part on kids, also definitely includes adults and adult activities):

ADDitude

How to Sharpen Executive Functions: Activities to Hone Brain Skills

Executive functioning skills range from working memory to cognitive flexibility to inhibitory control, and beyond. They power our daily func

Here's a link on this for autism (though as an editor wow did that title need an editor lol):

Kenneth Roberson, Ph.D.

Enhancing Executive Functioning Difficulties in Adults with Autism

Practical Strategies for Enhancing Executive Functioning Difficulties in Adults With Autism - Living with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as

Resources on this aren't great because they're mainly aimed at neurotypical therapists or parents of neurdivergent children. There's worksheets you can do that help a lot too or thought work you can do to sort of build the neuro-infrastructure for tasks.

But a lot of the stuff is just like. fun. Pulling from both the first article and my own experience:

Play games or video games where you have to make a lot of decisions. Literally go make a ton of picrews or do online dress-up dolls if you like. It helped me.

Art, especially forms of art that require patience, planning ahead, or in contrast improvisation

Listening to longform storytelling without visuals, e.g. just listening regularly to audiobooks or narrative podcasts, etc.

Meditation

Martial arts

Sports in general

Board games like chess or Catan (I actually found a big list of what board games are good for building what executive functioning skills here)

Woodworking

Cooking

If you're bad at time management play games or video games with a bunch of timers

Things can be easier. You might always have a disability around this (I certainly always will), but it can be easier. You do not have to be this stuck forever.

Antonio's Route

Spoilers for anyone who hasn't played his route, Diego's or Vanessa's yet!

Finaly! We get some confirmation for the multiple hints that MC isn't a normal human!

Besides the bombshells dropped about the MC's parents and ancestor we knew the family wasn't normal but now we have something even bigger.

Also, I would like to name Antonio MurderVamp Husband.