* You do not do a smol summon to all the trickster gods you can dig up sigils for simultaneously and go "HAAAYYYY I'M A SEEKER" for similar reasons to why you do not post publicly to facebook, twitter, and 4chan simultaneously going "HAAAYYYY PARTY AT MY PLACE HERE'S THE ADDRESS" while @-ing a few choice contacts. That is how you get more infosec d00ds than you know what to do with on your lawn and hacking your launderizer; similarly, you don't necessarily want a certain redhead and a certain fan of well-targeted fruit to take up camp in your pineal gland without that you thought things through very, very carefully beforehand.

* I can, in fact, still use coffee as a divination aid.

* Does anyone know a deity or two who might be associated with shit sandwiches and/or lemonade? No, seriously. The deity who is your boon companion when you go "Well, this is certainly a shit sandwich that I have here!" and/or also the entity for "Welp, these are some lemons; I guess it's time to find a big pot and some sugar." Asking for a friend.

* Tumblr is great for creating new mythology. However, anything that tumblr says are true historical fax, double-check that with other sources.

* 90s web design is not an immediate disqualification for a pagan informational website. Presence of information which can be easily debunked via actually qualified historical sources, however...

* Libraries are a thing.

* Divination can be super helpful at some things, but when you're doing it for yourself, you're going to get a lot of internal noise from what you're wanting to happen. Thus, divination is a reasonable way to explore what you personally in fact actually want...

* For fuck's sake, do not get a tattoo on your actual body honoring Bacchus without thinking things through super carefully.


or, in other words...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Don%27t_We_Get_Drunk
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/deadkennedys/toodrunktofuck.html

There was some question of my sanity early Sunday morning. The roommate therefore is polling my sanity. I cannot vouch for how sane other people think I am.

I was supposed to have gone to work today to get together with Snarky Lady. She was going to touch base with me on the damn database project. The end is in sight, I think. However, Grandma Cinderella told me that unfortunately she was out sick. So I poked a little bit more at what I could do, then submitted my timesheet and left. (I was about at the regular work week length of time already; there was overtime authorized for phone goons so we could get away with coming in extra too.)

On my way out, one of the random co-workers (the guy with the Hawaiian shirts who got that abused kid on the survey and we called in the Guru to retrieve the phone number because in his utter state of shock he'd neglected to write it down) asked me if Snarky Lady was going to be in. I told him she was out. He asked me if I could contact her to tell her that $DUDE had been shot in the stomach three times and was at $HOSPITAL, because he knew that she was kindly disposed toward the guy. (Yikes!)

I wound up at AZ Mills mall, given that Darkside was out with some friends when I called before work this afternoon. I wandered around, talked to Dawn, talked to amberfox (that was on headset while en route, and featured things like the badly-placed stoppage to traffic from some random cop), and wound up poking through both music and rocks. I now have my OK Go fix, and Vash now has a supplemental string of undyed howlite looped around the rearview mirror, and a full elemental-color set of different semiprecious stones stowed in the bin.

I still had time to waste before picking up the roommate. Darkside wasn't back yet. Fry's Electronics had just closed. I got dinner, then washed up at Target. I went in desiring to obtain a PS/2 keyboard for the Bigass Old Gateway and its ilk, and to blow an hour or so before heading over to the airport on the surface streets with the window down and the stereo cranked.

I came out with, well... ( Technology. )

I'd likely get a debugger error, incidentally. I realized after I was done that I had left something out from the example I'd been copying. It's been on my mental list of "things I want" in the "and a pony" category, but then I noticed that a) they're no longer pony-priced, and b) this upcoming month is one of the odd-months-out for insurance.

Group was hot tonight. Even the non-smut was excellent demonstrations of love in action, which was the general idea. It ranged from sweet to torrid to quite explicit indeed! The brownies were a huge hit. samurai_ko keeps the secret recipe to herself; if I want to duplicate them, I'm going to have to experiment. I discussed the properties of the fudge that resulted in The Late (tardy, not dead) Mr. Potter having a close encounter with the hospital. (He thought he could have a whole piece. He thought wrong.)

I am never ever ever ever going to read that piece around Darkside. OMG no.

One of the things I sometimes have to do is act out the blocking to see if it makes sense. If I'm stuck for "what happens next", I get in character and act out the blocking. This can result in me playing more than one character at the same time. In situations like this, though, it results in me leaning back in my chair, tilting my head to one side, and gasping sort of like the fish out of water, because Mike is nibbling on the protagonist's neck, and I doubt that they are actually going to make it out of their clothing, like, at all.

I plan to outline Circle of Fire before November. This also means actually getting motion, rather than just bright ideas, on the hissstorical fic. Which means a half-hour in the morning on it, or something.

Brownies were totally the win. I brought soy milk, it being better-travelable than regular, and better for the tender digestion of lactards than regular. Mmmm, brownies.

After hours brought out the tarot cards and assorted shiny rocks. I realized that I'd missed a call from Dawn, and left a message back. I called V, and shared hugs & love all 'round. I told her the crazy saga of our new lady and her vile ex-roommate. It's the sort of stuff they make movies out of, yo.

There was happy intensive magicgeeking. Yay for magicgeeking!

I think it's been a Naomi night. First Dagger got to team up with Naomi and set the spammer dead to rights. Professional phrasing and venom: Dagger. Research and indignation: Naomi.

Then Naomi got to play with the words with the person with the tag problem. Such fun! She's really getting better with her words! (Read: she's gaining advanced access to the group language library.) She still doesn't have a good time with words when it's just her and things are going all weird and funky and there are too many things to be done, and talking seems like a bad idea, but at least those are now the exception rather than the norm.

In other news of the funky and bizarre, there is scent coming in the window that hits my "This is what Darkside and his clothes smell like" alert. By the Sekrit Language of Scent Omens, that means that he's thinking about me. (Why do I have the Pink-Haired Old Lady's voice narrating my words in my head? Oh, I know. Because I'm tired. [My story's not the norm.])

In elorie's discussion "Dammit, Jim, I'm a witch, not Mr. Fixit," I observed:

My approach to teaching, or needing to teach, is generally "Stop them before they make it necessary for me or someone else to seriously pick up after them ... AGAIN!" Sometimes it's Not My Call, so I have to let it by gently.

The immediate response: Yes, but you really are the EMT, you know?

My first thought: You mean it shows?

Heh. So I am. So indeed I am. And evidently I need to recognize this, because the bulk of my advanced sage advice is aimed at, surprise, someone else in what was aptly labeled the "EMT" school of magicgeeking. The bulk of my experience is located there. If someone not in the EMT calling is in need of a teacher, even desperately in need, it's still not a thing I can do full-time. If it comes to a point where they're in need of an EMT, I will step in, but otherwise I point at the library and the internet and put up a flag for anyone available who does take on students.

A lot of active magic is the inward path of self-discovery and enlightenment. I work on that personally, but I don't really consider that part of it at all suitable to talk about in public. That falls heavily into Religion, which I see as somewhat separate from what I could call Wizardry. And regardless of what religion someone is, if they're spitting sparks and broadcasting broadband angst, that's my department to get all that seen to. So it's my duty to be able to translate "ground and center and shield" into all sorts of different phrasings, because it ultimately doesn't matter the metaphor as long as they can understand it and things get done.

But. It shows that much?

The problem with pretty much any book of philosophy is that unless it was extremely well-researched, and had a team of people looking at it from all sides, there are blind spots. It's the sort of blind spot that leads to dangerous untruths, mistaken assumptions, and things that the author thought were of-course that got glossed over. [Edit for clarification: this is only a hazard to people basing actual real-life magical training off the books, in the same way that one can learn to ground & center along with Talia the Herald.]

The dangerous thing I realized from the Young Wizards books was this: "Wizardry does not live in an unwilling heart."

It makes it sound as if wizardry simply evaporated when the heart or mind was no longer willing to bear the concept of wizardry, leaving, at worst, a nameless sorrow at the bottom of the soul, of the sort that Nita would have had if she'd ditched out her obligation to the Song of the Twelve in Deep Wizardry.

And that's how it may be in the Young Wizards universe. It's an author's privilege to write things as they should be in the universe, not as they are.

The books do cover what happens when a wizard is touched by the Lone Power and goes bad or mad. And that's as so. But in the real world where things aren't so tidy, there's a vast area between believing in the wizardry enough to do things with it and disbelieving in it enough and painlessly enough that it simply disappears as if it had almost never been there. Times it happens that the power, and the potential, are there, but the heart is so vastly unwilling or twisted that actual proper wizardry is nigh unto impossible. When inadvertent wizardry slips out around the cracks, the heart grows less willing to see it, for wizardry is impossible, after all. If an active wizard on errantry comes by and attempts to shake things loose, the results can be worse than Nita facing her Seniors telling her it was all RP, ah, wasn't it fun, little girl? Now go grow up... Much worse. Much, much worse.

And make no mistake, the wizardry will attempt to out. And it doesn't just come as bidden after taking the Oath. Sometimes it's born in. Sometimes it's woken far before any Oath. Sometimes it takes even a half-joking Oath as true and comes on full after the Oath is forgotten in childhood. Who could dream that the fantasy tales you played with your sister as a child could have repercussions in the Real World after you supposedly grew out of them? But no matter how it decided to arrive, it's there, and it's leaking around the blocks and baffles set up in the unwilling heart to prevent accidental magic. And every now and then, accidental magic happens, sometimes with personally or psychologically disasterous results.

In a makinglight thread a good long time ago, a thread started with two dreadfully clue-negative would-be Darwin competitors horsing around with makeshift lightsabres composed of flaming gasoline in fragile glass tubes, someone gave a well-thought "proof" that magic does not exist: namely, if magic did exist, there would be all sorts of people trying really damn stupid spells, and the results could not be disguised as any sort of mundane injury.

I had to laugh. I'm the sort of practitioner of magic who makes it my sworn duty to help mop up after and prevent beforehand just that sort of problem. Mercedes Lackey makes it very clear that Guardians-as-she-writes-them are a fictional entity, made up out of equal parts chivalry, fiction, and decent pagan-grouping research. On the other hand, it's a very useful and tidy way of phrasing something that's equal parts job description and Calling. On the gripping hand, even if she hadn't written about them, something of the like still would have invented themselves. Organization? One might as well herd cats, or computer geeks, or pagans. Call it coalition. Like attracts like, and can be persuaded to stay in loose contact every now and then. Hierarchy? 1337-spiffy magic-users? Competent and self-selecting in networking purposes, rather. And people who get dangerously riled up at the thought of being ZOMG EXCLUDED from any sort of group that may or may not exist that they want to be in are the sort of people who anything calling itself Guardian ought to be guarding against.

Magic as it exists is far more psychological and intangible than fantasy-based magic. Gods and demons work through the physical world, in the little corners left to them by chaos and psychology. That accident-prone drama magnet may well be victim of a self-inflicted Stupid Magic User moment, much like those Darwin competitors were left with nasty burns. It's a lot harder for the competent mage to hand out violation tickets on the highway of Darwin-Potential Magic when the Darwin-Potential Mage firmly believes that magic does not exist. At least you can whap would-be flaming gasoline-in-glass lightsabre duelists over the head with a goddamn physics textbook and arrest them for Doing Really Stupid Shit. It's a lot harder to call an end to the insanity when the person who just magically caused all manner of panic and disorder with a nasty emotional vortex and a 5-point blow to the love lives of all the people within a shout's range is flatly denying that they just did this and that the magic to do it at all, much less sense it, exists.

(Reformatted & cropped slightly for comprehensibility)
azurelunatic: Element. Four [valence] electrons. Who am I?
sithjawa: Dude, you could be silicon
azurelunatic: *snork*
sithjawa: Or carbon, tin, lead, or... germanium. Whatever that is.
azurelunatic: I am a germanium geranium! Ooo, lead. Toxic!
sithjawa: Hmm, if you were germanium, you'd be for semiconductors, it says. You would also keep your luster at room temperature.
azurelunatic: oo. Hmm. Maybe I am a transistor?
sithjawa: Maybe.
azurelunatic: (the well water from home had arsenic in it.) Therefore, germanium doped with arsenic! Transistor!
sithjawa: Yup. Can you be used for amplification and voltage stabilization?
azurelunatic: Yes.
sithjawa: Well then, there you have it.

When I put my headspace into clergy mode, I'm damn near unshockable. If I'm come to as clergy, with confession, or need of ministry, I slip into somewhere above neutral and become somewhat other than myself. metaphorge posted a quote about the universe from Albert Einstein, and I was moved to speak.

I wound up with a better description of the headspace than I've ever had before: pitiless compassion. Mike would call it "grokking", I think. To understand so well that you cannot help to both hate and love and all the other range of emotions it's possible to feel for another human being.

Pitiless compassion. I like the sound of that.