#(correspondence)

[theoutcastrogue]

New unbeatable crime strat.

Be a beekeeper.

Capture queen bee and put her in a cage pendant, to be worn as a necklace.

Allow the hive to attend to her, forming a beard of bees over you.

Enter heist target and do the heisting.

Exit heist target.

Return home, making sure nobody is following you.

Replace queen within hive.

Enjoy your swag.

It's perfect. Who's going to be able to identify you from behind an entire hive of bees? And who's going to try to stop you when even just making too much noise will result in a violent swarm of angry bees appearing in tge middle of a public space? No one, that's who!

I will try this at the first opportunity, nothing can possibly go wrong.

[mournfulroses]

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Susan Gilbert featured in The Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Keeping a suspense file gives you superpowers

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

Two decades ago, I was part of a group of nerds who got really interested in how each other managed to do what we did. The effort was kicked off by Danny O'Brien, who called it "Lifehacking" and I played a small role in getting that term popularized:

https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

While we were all devoted to sharing tips and tricks from our own lives, many of us converged on an outside expert, David Allen, and his bestselling book "Getting Things Done" (GTD, to those in the know):

https://gettingthingsdone.com/

GTD is a collection of relatively simple tactics for coping with, prioritizing, and organizing the things you want to do. Many of the methods relate to organizing your own projects, using a handful of context-based to-do lists (e.g. a list of things to do at the office, at home, while waiting in line, etc). These lists consist of simple tasks. Those tasks are, in turn, derived from another list, of "projects" – things that require more than one task, which can be anything from planning dinner to writing a novel to helping your kid apply to university.

The point of all this list-making isn't to do everything on the lists. While these lists do help you remember what to do next, what they're really good for is deciding what not to do – at all. The promise of GTD is that it will help you consciously choose not to do some of the things you set out to accomplish. This is in contrast to how most of us operate: we have a bunch of things we want to do, and we end up doing the things that are easiest, or at top of mind, even if they're not the most important things.

GTD recognizes that you can be very "productive" (in the sense of getting many things done) and still not do the things that you really wanted to do. You know what this is like: you finish a Sunday with an organized sock-drawer, all your pennies neatly rolled, the trash-can in your car emptied…and no work at all on that novel you're hoping to write.

You can't do everything, but you can control what you don't do, rather than just defaulting into completing a string of trivial, meaningless tasks and leaving the big stuff on the sidelines. Organizing your own tasks and projects is a hugely powerful habit, and one that's made a world of difference to my personal and professional life.

But while good to-do lists can take you very far in life, they have a hard limit: other people. Almost every ambitious thing you want to do involves someone else's contribution. Even the most solitary of projects can be derailed if your tax accountant misses a key email and you end up getting audited or paying a huge penalty.

That's where the other kind of GTD list comes in: the list of things you're waiting for from other people. I used to be assiduous in maintaining this list, but then the pandemic struck and no one was meeting any of their commitments, and I just gave up on it, and never went back…until about a month ago. Returning to these lists (they're sometimes called "suspense files") made me realize how many of the problems – some hugely consequential – in my life could have been avoided if I'd just gone back to this habit earlier.

My suspense file is literally just some lines partway down a text file that lives on my desktop called todo.txt that has all my to-dos as well. Here's some sample entries from my suspense file:

WAITING EMAIL Sean about ENSHITTIIFCATION manuscript deadline 10/24/24 WAITING EMAIL Russ about missing royalty statement 10/12/24 WAITING EMAIL Alice about Christmas vacation hotel 10/8/24 10/20/24 WAITING EMAIL Ted about Sacramento event 8/12/24 9/5/24 10/5/24 10/20/24

WAITING CALL LA County about mosquito abatement 10/25/24 WAITING CALL School attendance officer about London trip 10/18/24

WAITING MONEY EFF reimbusement for taxi to staff retreat $34.98 10/7/24

WAITING SHIPMENT New Neal Stephenson novel from Bookshop.org 10/23/24

This is as simple as things could possibly be! I literally just type "WAITING," then a space, then the category of thing I'm waiting for, then a few specifics, then the date. When I follow up on an item, I add the date of the followup to the end of the line. If I get some details that I might need to reference later (say, a tracking code for a shipment, or a date for an event I'm trying to organize), I'll add that, too, as it comes up. Creating a new entry on this list takes 10-25 seconds. When someone gets back to me, I just delete that line.

That is literally it.

Every day, or sometimes a couple of times a day, I will just run my eyes up and down this list and see if there's anything that's unreasonably overdue, and then I'll send a reminder or make a followup call. In the example above, you can see that I've been chasing Ted about Sacramento for months now (this is a fake entry – no plans to go to Sacto at the moment, sorry):

WAITING EMAIL Ted about Sacramento event 8/12/24 9/5/24 10/5/24 10/20/24

So now I've emailed Ted four times. Maybe my email's going to his spam, and so I could try emailing a friend of Ted and ask them to check whether he's getting my messages. But maybe Ted's trying to send me a message here – he's just not interested in doing the event after all. Or maybe Ted is available, but he's so snowed under that he's in danger of fumbling it, and I need to bring in some help if I want it to happen.

All of these are possibilities, and the fact that I'm tracking this means that I now get to make an active decision: cancel the gig or double down on making sure it happens. Without this list, the gig would just die by default, forgotten by both of us. Maybe that's OK, but I can't tell you how many times I've run into someone who said, "Dammit, I just remembered I was supposed to email you about getting that thing done and I dropped the ball. Shit! I really was looking forward to that. Is it too late now?" Often it is too late. Even if it's not, the work of picking up the pieces and starting over is much more than just following through on the original plan.

Restarting my suspense file made me realize how many of the (often expensive or painful) fumbles I've had since the pandemic were the result of me not noticing that someone else hadn't gotten back to me. In essence, a suspense file is a way for me to manage other people's to-do lists.

Let me unpack that. By "managing other people's to-do lists," I don't mean that I'm deciding for other people what they will and won't do (that would be both weird and gross). I mean that I'm making sure that if someone else fails to do something we were planning together, it's because they decided not to do it, not because they forgot. As GTD teaches us, the real point of a to-do list isn't just helping us remember what to do – it's helping us choose what we're not going to do.

This is not an imposition, it's a kindness. The point of a suspense file isn't to nag others into living up to their commitments, it's to form a network of support among collaborators where we all help one another make those conscious choices about what we're not going to do, rather than having the stuff we really value slip away because we forgot about it.

I have frequent collaborators whom I know to be incapable of juggling too many things at once, and my suspense file has helped me hone my sense of when it would be appropriate to ask them if they want to do something together and when to leave them be. The suspense file helps me dial in how much I rely on each person in my life (relying on someone isn't the same as valuing them – and indeed, one way to value someone is to only rely on them for things they're able to do, rather than putting them in a position of feeling bad for failing you).

Lifehacking gets a bad rap, and justifiably so. Many of the tips that traffick as "lifehacks" are trivial or stupid or both. What's more, too much lifehacking can paint you into a corner where you've hacked any flexibility out of your life:

https://locusmag.com/2017/11/cory-doctorow-how-to-do-everything-lifehacking-considered-harmful/

But ever since Danny coined the term "lifehack," back in 2004, I've been cultivating daily habits that have let me live the life I wanted to live, accomplishing the things I wanted to accomplish. I figured out how to turn daily writing into a habit and now I've written more than 30 books:

https://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html

A daily habit of opening a huge, ever-tweaked collection of tabs has made me smarter about the news, helped me keep tabs on my friends, helped me find fraudsters who were trying to steal my identity, and ensured that all those Kickstarter rewards and other long-delayed, erratic shipments didn't slip through the cracks:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota

Daily habits are superpowers. Once something is a habit, you get it for free. GTD turns on decomposing big, daunting projects into bite-sized, trackable tasks. I have a bunch of spaces around the house – my office, my closet, the junk sheds down the side of the house, our tiki bar – that I used to clean out once or twice a year. Each one was all-day, sweaty, dirty job, and for most of the year, all of those spaces were a dusty, disorganized mess.

A month ago, I added a new daily task: spend five minutes cleaning one space. I did the bar first, and after two weeks, I'd taken down every tchotchke and bottle and polished it, reorganizing the undercounter spaces where things pile up:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=37996580417%40N01&sort=date-taken-desc&text=tiki+bar&view_all=1

Now I'm working through my office. Ever day, I'm dusting a bookshelf and combing through it for discards to stick in our Little Free Library. Takes less than five minutes most day, and I'll be done in about three weeks, when I'll move on to my closet, then the side of the house, and then back to the bar. A daily short break where I get away from my computer and make my living and working environments nicer is a wonderful habit to cultivate.

I'm 53 years old now. I was 33 when I started following Getting Things Done. In that time, I've gotten a lot done, but what's even more relevant is that I didn't get a ton of things done – things that I consciously chose not to abandon. Figuring out what you want to do, and then keeping it on track – in manageable, healthy, daily rhythms that bring along the other people you rely on – may not be the whole secret to a fulfilled life, but it's certainly a part of it.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo.txt

[astra-ravana]

Planetary Days And Hours

Magick is at its best when performed during certain days and hours of the day. These time periods are associated with the seven celestial bodies in our solar system that we can observe with the naked eye. The associations are as follows:

A magical day is measured starting at sunrise and ending at sunset. Each sunrise and sunset period is divided into twelve equal parts, resulting in a (roughly) 24-hour day. Depending on your location relative to the equator, the planetary hours you calculate in your area may be longer or shorter than conventional hours.

The first hour of the day is always that of the planet the day represents. The hours then repeat infinitely in the following order: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon.

* Power hours; ** Witching hours

The first, eighth, fifteen and twenty second hours are called power hours. These are the hours in which the seven-planet cycle repeats. Notice that the cycle resets after the twenty fourth hour with the power hour of the subsequent day.

The two hours after the final power hour and the twenty third and twenty fourth hours are called the witching hours. (Conventional hours place the witching hours between midnight and 3am, or 3am to 6am) These hours are favored by black magicians for casting baneful magick.

Use these tables to reference ideal days and hours when scheduling your spells. The finer you tune the time of the ritual, the more potent your magick will be.

[frost-mothit]

Correspondence Embroidery

My friend @slightly-sigilant designed a correspondence sigil based on the correspondence symphony my guy keeps trying to perform (to the detriment of my guy, cause the crowd seems to violently dislike it).

I loved it so much I embroidered a patch of it.

Translates to "all things as they are already perceived, eternally"

[watchoutforintellect]

Beware feeling you’re not good enough to deserve it. Beware feeling you’re too good to need it. Beware all the hatred you’ve stored up inside you, and the locks on your tender places.

Audre Lorde, from a letter to Pat Parker in December 1985

[fathomlesslyqueer]

Ok, so... I made something goofy.

BEHOLD

THE WHEEL OF CORRESPONDENCE

THE PREMIER METHOD OF DIVINATORY EPISTEMOLOGY

The funny thing is that I've tried this with people few times and it actually gives pretty hilariously relevant answers. Not saying that it's 100% perfect, but something about correspondence just rubs people the right way, y'know?

BUT IT IS, OF COURSE, 100% PERFECT

Reblog, comment, or send an ask to PONDER THE WHEEL

[humanbyweight]

do you think cicadas and wasps could be friends

Most animals have a fundamentally different experience of the world than we do, so the possibility of friendship between insects is a difficult thing to judge.

I think we can safely rule out friendship between cicadas and all the species of wasps that want to eat them. That still leaves tens of thousands of species of wasps that have no direct ecological relationship with cicadas, in what we will call the "kind of maybe plausible friendship zone". I think their friendship might go something like this:

wasp: *cleans wing with foot* cicada: wasp: *sniffs air with antenna* cicada: wasp: cicada: Å̷͉̕Å̷̳͝A̷̫̭̒Ả̷̢̺̓A̵̢͒̏A̴̛̬̿Ä̴̯A̵̰̓̆A̷͈̔ͅÄ̵̡́ͅA̷̟̬̓A̷̭̓Å̸͔ͅA̷̘̰͐A̶̦͝Ȁ̸̦̝A̸̻͆A̷̬̽͊A̸̠͊A̴̮̎A̷̗̬͒̋Ǎ̴̰̳Ǎ̶̛͇A̷̩̣͗͌A̴̮͘ͅÃ̴ͅÀ̵̫ wasp: big shake :0 !!! cicada: wasp: *checks underside of leaf for aphids* cicada: *falls off leaf*

[andromedasdomain]

𓆩♡𓆪I made a little graph for you, guys.𓆩♡𓆪 𓆩♡𓆪You can print it and put it in your grimoire if you want.𓆩♡𓆪

[32bitterra]

if you're up to do requests, could you do Raz interacting with a couple campers of your choice? i think my favorite part of the first game is the different conversations with the different campers, and i also really like the way you draw em ^_^

I don't normally take requests, but I like Raz and I like the campers. I can't turn down the chance to draw them.

[queerletterclub]

Would you like to join a queer letter writing club?

I've had enough interest that I'd like to start this.

If you would join please dm this blog or @callisteios (my main blog) to let me know. I will require a name and an address for your partner to send your letter to

How it will work:

you will sign up with your details, once a month you will be matched with another person. Both of you will be expected to send a letter in that month to each other.

Once that's done that's all the club requires, if you want to continue your conversation you're free to, if not then don't. Next month you'll be given a new partner to send a letter to, and repeat.

Content:

Whatever the hell you want, transcribe your hinge profile, write a poem, talk about your job, draw a picture, send a pressed flower, describe your first experience being queer. go wild

Why?

Because it's nice to receive a letter in the post. because it's exciting to connect with new queer people. to connect with people you might otherwise never meet. because it's fun!

[greenwitchcrafts]

September 2023 witch guide

SEPTEMBER 2024:

September 2023 witch guide

Full moon: September 29th

New moon: September 14th

Sabbats: Mabon September 23rd

September Harvest Moon

Also known as: Autumn moon, falling leaves moon, song moon, leaves turning moon, moon of brown leaves, yellow leaf moon, wine moon & Full corn moon

Element: Earth

Zodiac: Virgon& Libra

Animal spirits: Trooping Faeries

Deities: Brigid, Ceres, Ch'ang-o, Demeter, Freya, Isis & Vesta

Animals: Jackal & snake

Birds: Ibis & sparrow

Trees: Bay, hawthorn, hazel & larch

Herbs/plants: Copal, fennel, rye, skullcap, valerian, wheat & witch hazel

Flowers: Lily & Narcissus

Scents: Bergamot, gardenia, mastic & storax

Stones: Bloodstone, chrysolite, citrine, olivine, peridot & sapphire

Colors: Browns, dark blue, greens & yellows ( Earth tones)

Energy: Balance of light & dark, dietary matters, employment, health, intellectual pursuits, prosperity, psychism, rest, spirituality, success & work environments. Also cleaning & straightening mentally, physically & spiritually.

Technically, the Harvest Moon is the Full Moon closest to the September equinox around September 21st. The Harvest Moon is the only Full Moon name determined by the equinox rather than a month. Most years, it’s in September, but around every three years, it falls in October.

In September, the Full Moon is the Corn Moon from the Native American tribes harvesting their corn. It can also be the Harvest Moon, which corresponds with the Anglo-Saxon name, while Celtic and Old English names are Wine Moon, Song Moon, and Barley Moon.

Mabon

Also known as: Autumn Equinox, Cornucopia, Witch's Thanksgiving & Alban Elved

Season: Fall

Symbols: Acorns, apples, autumn leaves, berries, corn, cornucopia (horn of plenty), dried seeds, gourds, grains, grapes, ivy, pine cones, pomegranates, vines, wheat, white roses & wine

Colors: Blue brown, drk red, deep gold, gold, indigo, lead green, maroon, orange, red, russet, violet & yellow

Oils/incense: Apple, apple blossom, benzoin, black pepper, hay/straw, myrrh, passion flower, patchouli, pine, red poppy & sage

Animals: Dog, goose, hawk, swan, swallow & wolf

Stones: Agate, amethyst, carnelian, lapis lazuli, sapphire, yellow Agate  & yellow topaz

Foods: Apples, blackberries, blackberry wine, bread, carrots, cider, corn, cornbread, grapes, heather wine, nuts, onions, pomegranates, potatoes, squash, vegetables, wheat & winw

Herbs/plants: Acorn, benzoin, cedar, corn, cypress, ferns, grains, hazel, hops, ivy, myrrh, oak, pine, sage, sassafras, Salomon's seal, thistle, tobacco & wheat

Flowers: Aster, heather, honeysuckle, marigold, milkweed, mum,passion flower& rose

Goddesses: Danu, Epona, Modron, Morrigan, Muses, Pomona, Persephone, Sophia & Sura

Gods: Esus, Green Man, Hermes, Mabon, Mannanan, Toth & Thor

Issues, Intentions & Powers: Accomplishment, agriculture, balance, goals, gratitude & grounding

Spellworks: Balance, harmony, protection, prosperity, security & self confidence

Related festivals:

• Sukkot- is a Torah-commanded holiday celebrated for seven days, beginning on the 15th day of the month of Tishrei. It is one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals (Hebrew: שלוש רגלים, shalosh regalim) on which those Israelites who could were commanded to make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. In addition to its harvest roots, the holiday also holds spiritual importance with regard to its abandonment of materialism to focus on nationhood, spirituality, and hospitality, this principle underlying the construction of a temporary, almost nomadic, structure of a sukkah.

• Mid-Autumn festival- also known as the Moon Festival or Mooncake Festival, is a traditional festival celebrated in Chinese culture. Similar holidays are celebrated by other cultures in East & Southeast Asia. It is one of the most important holidays in Chinese culture; its popularity is on par with that of Chinese New Year. The history of the Mid-Autumn Festival dates back over 3,000 years. The festival is held on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunisolar lunisolar calendar with a full moon at night, corresponding to mid-September to early October of the Gregorian calendar. On this day, the Chinese believe that the Moon is at its brightest and fullest size, coinciding with harvest time in the middle of Autumn.

• Thanksgiving- This is a secular holiday which is similar to the cell of Mabon; A day to give thanks for the food & blessings of the previous year. The American Thanksgiving is the last Thursday of November while the Canadian Thanksgiving is celebrated in October

• Festival of Dionysus- There were several festivals that honored Dionysus, the God of wine. It was a time of fun, games, feasting & drinking wine.

Activities:

•Scatter offerings in a harvested fields, Offer libations to trees

• Decorate your home and/or altar space for fall

• Bake bread

• Perform a ritual to restore balance and harmony to your life

• Cleanse your home of negative energies

• Pick apples

• Have a dinner or feast with your family and/or friends

• Set intentions for the upcoming year

• Purge what is no longer serving you

•Take a walk in the woods

• Enjoy a pumpkin spice latte

• Donate to your local food bank

• Gather dried herbs, plants, seeds & pods

• Learn something new

• Make wine

• Brew an apple cinnamon simmer pot

• Create an outdoor Mabon altar

•Adorn burial sites with leaves, acorns, & pinecones to honor those who have passed over & visit their graves

Many cultures see the second harvest (after the first harvest Lammas) and equinox as a time for giving thanks. This time of year is when farmers know how well their summer crops did, and how well fed their animals have become. This determines whether you and your family would have enough food for the winter. That is why people used to give thanks around this time, thanks for their crops, and animals, and food. 

The name Mabon comes from the Welsh God, who was the son of the Earth Mother Goddess. However, there is evidence that the name was adopted in the 1970s, and the holiday was not originally a Celtic celebration.

Some believe Night and day are of equal legth and the God's energy & strength are nearly gone . The Goddess begins to mourn the loss she knows is coming, but knows he will return when he reborn at Yule.

Sources:

Farmersalmanac .com

Wikipedia

Llewellyn's Complete Book of Correspondences by Sandra Kines

A Witch's Book of Correspondences by Viktorija Briggs

Mabon: Rituals, Recipes & Lore for the Autumn Equinox Llewellyn's Sabbat Essentials

[mournfulroses]

Anaïs Nin, from a letter to Henry Miller, featured in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

[annies-scrapbook]

what are gnomic utterances?

things that are surreal in a very particular way. you know when you turn a piece of embroidery over and see all the chaotic tangled threads on the back that are still sort of in the shape of the design on the front? or when you're playing a glitchy video game and you accidentally clip through a wall and and see the hollow backsides of what was supposed to be the scenery? 'gnomic utterances' is my tag for things that make me feel like that about reality

[astra-ravana]

Getting Dirty

According to stone tape theory the soil, stone, and wood around us preserve an imprint of our history, a record of sorts. Soil is important, it holds the residual energy of a place and preserves it forever. Practitioners can tap into the qualities of various types of dirt to integrate those energies into their work. The different types of magickal soil are as follows:

Crossroads Dirt: Decision making, road opening, luck, success, opportunity, opens doors to other realms, offering to Hekate and other crossroads deities

Highway/Railroad Dirt: Movement, relocation, travel, speeds up any working

Cemetery/Graveyard Dirt: Healing, protection, prosperity,luck, love, baneful workings, assistance from the dead, offering to death deities

Backyard Dirt: Purification, protection, peace, workings with/for the home/family, traditionally collected from the four corners of the yard

Enemies House Dirt: Hatred, animosity, revenge, conflict, used in baneful casting

Bank Dirt: Drawing money, prosperity, good fortune, good luck, security, used in mojo bags

Hospital Dirt: Healing, health, and  recovery as well as sickness, injury, and illness. Intent is everything.

Casino Dirt: Good luck, chance, change in circumstances, chaos, loss, ruin, intent matters

Bar/Pub Dirt: Confusion, delirium, accidents, distraction, fun, chaos, seduction, short term

Schoolyard/Playground Dirt: New beginnings, joy, optimism, playfulness, protection of children

University Campus Dirt: Knowledge, memory, intellect, intelligence, wisdom, higher consciousness

Market Dirt: Business, income, networking, wealth, community, communication, commerce

Banquet Hall Dirt: Celebration, love, communication, togetherness

Forest Dirt: Nature, balance, abundance, peace, serenity, the element of Earth, offering to nature deities like Cernunnos or Pan

Courthouse Dirt: Justice, legal issues, cases resolve in your favor, binding, banishing, punishment

Prison/Jail Dirt: Imprisonment, entrapment, restraint, binding, banishing, punishment

Murder Scene Dirt: Death, destruction, devastation, used in the most potent and wicked curses and baneful workings

[theangel-aziraphale]

// Just really wanted to draw angel Aziraphale as this one pigeon picture I have :3 double winged angel