Yet another Howtown video I should blog about
Aug. 27th, 2025 12:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Normies are zombies. Just as perfectly kind grandmas and innocent children can be made into ravening, black-mouthed brain-eaters, normies can turn into armies of monsters when the stimuli and circumstances are right. It is easy to become a Nazi, a Stalinist, or a Maoist if everybody is doing it. When we look at how force collects and flows on the astral plane or the plane of images that is both shared and individual, certain sets of images become prominent. For instance, the image of SAFETY became a collective obsession. Those infected with SAFETY in the form of a comfortable, remote work, salary class, Door Dash-ordering, isolated but not lonely, status signaling heaven could not understand why anyone would desire to live outside that image for any reason. They clung to SAFETY even though there was a tiny, niggling, mostly-unheard voice screaming from the oubliette of conscience warning that SAFETY is not free. SAFETY, as wonderful and heavenly as it was and as virtuous as it felt, carried a steep price.
Before I go any further, let me say for the umpteen-millionth time that I could be wrong. I am a rando on the internet. I am a crackpot occultist who was atheist ten short years ago. My only redeeming quality is that I never claim my truths are infallible. So do not come at me. I am only speculating here.I don’t think reincarnation as an animal is anything to be worried about. (Many of us could be reincarnated dinosaurs, and perhaps this could explain almost every child’s fascination with dinosaurs? I dunno.) It’s Hel normies should be worried about, because this iteration of Hel resembles an apocalypse, with an extraordinary number of souls falling prey to it. The trouble with this version of Hel is that as always, Hel reflects the consciousness of those destined to go there via their lack of resistance. Our era has been materialistic to the extreme. Our ideals have been mired in stuff, stuff, and more stuff. We have people who claim to be holy men who live in mansions. The Dalai Lama, a man whom I firmly believe will go to Hel, is a child molester who enjoys foie gras. Men who regularly quote the Bible believe they need to become crypto millionaires to measure up. Yet Jesus said:
Matthew 7:13-14 (NIV)
Okay, okay, while I think that names matter, they don't all matter. Akhilleus's two divine horses were named Ξάνθος "Goldie" and Βαλίος "Spotty."
(Other horses in the Iliad include Πήδασος "Jumper," Ἀρείων "Better," and Πόδαργος "Swiftfoot.")
When I first came over to Dreamwidth, I cast my I Ching every day for a couple of years. It was part of my morning wakeup along with coffee. I would put the Hexagram Down in the "Tags" to keep track of this kind of thing.
I never figured that it was some kind of canned prophecy like some folks did, I always just looked at it as something to think about for that day. Never did a lick of harm and I think that it sorta served as my meditation for the day. But all the time before, when I was shaking the three coins (no way I was going to deal with the yarrow stock nonsense, I am not a fucking priest!!) I always chanted inside of my brain "heads two tails three". About a year after I retired I was reading a book that told me it was actually "heads three tails two".
Well, that for some reason set me off and I quit doing it. Now, upon mature reflection, I think that I was being a big baby. I now doubt if it mattered anyway. I began the process of restarting the habit (granted, I do use the "heads three" now) and I am finding the habit to be soothing in my old age.
During the years when I was doing this, I actually created a spreadsheet where I connected the hexagram with chapters in the Tao Te Ching. I am thinking that the two of them provide a great set of "lenses" to look at the day.
So, Tacitus says something odd about the Suebi, a Germanic tribe living in what is now Eastern Germany:
Some of the Suebi sacrifice also to Isis. I cannot determine the reason and origin of the foreign cult, but her emblem, fashioned in the form of a Liburnian ship, proves that her worship comes from abroad.
(Tacitus, Germania IX, as translated by J. B. Rives.)
Possibly this is simply interpretatio romana, and this is what most scholars seem to assume as a matter of course. But let's suppose it isn't? Diodoros claims, after all, that Leto (= Isis) and her children came to Greece from Hyperborea, so perhaps Isis really is from the north and it shouldn't be surprising to see her in Germany?
But I realized something just now. I have said that the Isis myth is astrological, and is written in the constellations; we even see the various parts of the myth in the rising and setting of these constellations. But the ship of Isis, which we call Argo Navis, is too far south to be seen even from Greece. (I've lived on the same latitude as Cythera, and only the very, very tip of the nose of the ship is visible from there!) I suppose that this is why the Greeks, when they imported the Isis-Horos myth as Danae-Perseus, found new constellations for it in the northern sky.
But Germany is much further north even than that, and Hyperborea further still. So if the myth originated in the north, why are the constellations for it found in the south?
So while none of this is conclusive, it's another datapoint in favor of, no, Leto being Egyptian after all.
It only made it to 39.8.
I do appreciate my little cave. It is a lower floor apartment, built kinda like a daylight basement. The rear of the apartment is well below the street level on that side and the front of the apartment is shaded until after two in the afternoon. So on hot days like yesterday, I monitor my spiffy little indoor/outdoor thermometer (barometer and humidity included) and when the outdoor temp equals the inside temp, I close all the windows and close the curtains. The indoor temp stays, at worst, in the low 80's and is at least twenty degrees below the temperature high for the day.
Yesterday, when the temp hit 104 F outside, my place was at 80 inside. I can assure you that when I got back inside, that differential was quite noticeable.
I think that you can live with this level of heat and even higher. You just have to change your lifestyle to deal with it. I remember hauling hay in August. I remember two a day football practices in August in Utah. I suppose that I act like an old geezer when I say "suck it up" but really, that is it.
http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele
Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.
After a couple of weeks being a sluggard, I am back to moving this week but the pace of increase is slowing down noticably. The Chef commented yesterday that he shoots for 7,000 steps a day. Now, this is what I considered to be my basic when I was walking steadily, but truthfully, I am beginning to lean toward measuring in mileage (kilometers) as a measure rather than steps. Not that there is anything wrong with steps. It is all a matter of taste.
Steps makes it personal to you. An old geezer like me who has bum knees needs to take a shitload of steps to get a mile in. A younger me would have taken a lot fewer steps. But both the younger me and the older me would have covered the same distance.
So I thinking that I will need to turn in about 2.5 miles a day. That will give me the steps I need and will be a more concrete set of goals. I am actually considering making it four kilometers instead, just to be contrary. A unit of measure is a unit of measure, but metric does make more sense and it pisses people off when I talk in a foreign language.
Hell, maybe I'll switch to metric for tempeatures too!! That will really piss them off when I mention that today will maybe hit 40!