#(the atoms in past stars became us so they could witness things through our eyes)

[ghostsandmirrors]

girl (neutral) help; I started thinking about betelgeuse (the supergiant star) and now I can't stop thinking about space.

[astrallines]

The Crumbling Tower of 2020

Notes on the Triple Conjunction

Hello friends. What follows is a short introduction to the incredibly rare and historical astrological conditions of the year 2020. This was written with the intention of accessibility first and foremost; I believe it’s important that people have some idea of this moment in a historical context, and the tools to evaluate the themes and stories that are emerging currently and in the near future. To my eyes astrology is at its most useful when it is neither prescriptive nor prophetic. It is foremost a tool of psychological midwifery; reading the meaning of the world and its events.

So it’s in my interest to be painting in broad strokes. If you want concrete predictions or exact dates for orbs of conjunction now and in history, then there is a vast field of mundane astrology for you to Google. The myths I’m unfolding here are only for context and consideration—I hope you find them helpful.

Also, there will be a major western bias in my evaluation of history, which sucks, but that’s the milieu I grew up in and can speak to, and it remains the information most easily available. But of course astrological conditions are affecting the entire world. We can still trace the vibe through western examples.

Our Axial Moment There are two incredibly rare astrological events happening this year. One event is the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sign of Aquarius. These two planets come together routinely, mechanically, every 20 years. But the rhythm of their waltz is such that each meeting takes place in signs of the same element for 200 years at a time. So when they conjoin in Aquarius, in the last weeks of 2020, that will be their first time together in an air sign since the 14th century.

Since 1802, all of their conjunctions have been in earth signs. (Much more on the significance of this later, but some may already notice this 200 period’s coincidence with the industrial revolution and the age of capital). In the 200-odd years before 1802, they would join every time in fire signs—and for the 200 years before that, water. One waltz more brings us back to the 1300s and 1200s, the previous epoch of air signs. Returning to the present day, we should realize that since an age like this persists for two centuries at a time, it is essentially impossible for someone who witnesses such a transition, to have ever even known anyone who witnessed the previous transition. That is, the 100 year old person in December 2020—even if they had, as a newborn, shared a breath with a 100 year old person—would not reach far back enough in history to have even a dim, second-hand knowledge of the epoch of fire (1603-1801). These periods are effectively the frame edges; the curtains around the drama of the world stage.

Rare as it is, the other historical aspect of the year is much rarer: the fact that Saturn and Jupiter will also conjoin Pluto in Capricorn before they dance their first step together in Aquarius. Though these 3 will never occupy the exact same degree together, they will come very close, on and off throughout 2020. Of course a triple conjunction of planets will always occur in more unpredictable intervals than any pair of planets because of the 3 separate orbits. Famously—well, famous among astrologers—it last happened in the sign of Capricorn during the founding year of the city of Babylon, 1894 BCE.

History of the Elemental Epochs Because the Jupiter-Saturn synodic cycle is so regular, and because we didn’t know about outer planets til the 18th century, the dance of these two planets through the elemental stations is by far the oldest astrological tool for determining epochal periods. It has long been assumed to be the basic attitudinal/affective backdrop of the zeitgeist. (Now that we know about Pluto, we have a new vibecheck every 12 years! But isn’t it funny that generations didn’t have names until we noticed Pluto in 1930?)

I would be remiss not to mention that there are overlaps between these periods. For instance, Jupiter and Saturn were briefly conjunct in an air sign (Libra) for a few months in 1981. So toward the end of each epoch, humanity gets a little multi-month preview of the coming age. 1981 and the transitional period is a whole other topic in itself, but that’s all I’ll say here.

Even though these elemental ages have been observed for so long, we don’t have a ton of historical examples to draw upon to get a sense of the nature of a particular epoch. As for the air age that we’re entering into, we can refer to the high medieval period as the last instantiation, but to get a third example we have to go into history 6 centuries before that! Soon the world starts to look so different from the current day, that we have to stretch the imagination that much farther. So let’s just a get a brief summary of the previous cycle through the elements.

Earth 1802-2020

This is the epoch we are still in as I write this. It began during the industrial revolution, and the earth themes are undeniable. Human begins have had a resolutely atomic understanding of the universe; materialism is rampant; and it feels that capital and capitalism are catalysts of most human drama. We take things literally and concretely: instead of speculating about other realms, we want to drive our spaceships to big slabs of land like the moon and Mars. We have discovered how to build and make so much STUFF!

Fire 1603-1801

This period is famous for the enlightenment and the French and American revolutions. The time of great sparks! Reason, brilliance, luminance ... self-validation and self-determination. This is really when human beings began to appreciate the value of the idiosyncrasy of a particular thinker. “THIS dude’s contribution” etc. Rights, laws, freedom, were all in vogue. “Here I am!” say the fire signs.

Water 1425-1602

Just as materialist scientism was born out of the liberating thought of the enlightenment, so were the insights of the enlightenment enabled by the world-broadening discoveries of the renaissance. During the water epoch, everyone was sailing everywhere, being introduced to new cultures, and the “new world” was reached by the Europeans. At home, classics of antiquity were being rediscovered and the world was broadened in that sense. Shakespeare was poppin off in a big way. The concept of the stage is essentially water; water is the idea that there is an affective component to reality at all.

Air 1226-1424

Is it a coincidence that the least widely known stage of the cycle is the one we are now entering? Or is that just the nature of history, as it fades further into the past? This period was called, in the West, the “high medieval” era. It was marked by civic demarcations that more or less persist to this day—the previous few hundred years saw constantly changing borders, but now people grouped more firmly into ethnic or national identities drawn to territories. This is also where we got chivalry and the first real rights for women in a long time. And there was the discovery of an actual social life and leisure. “Hanging out” was invented, thank God.

Reality itself received a major patch update: we invented mechanical clocks, which caused people to relate to the passage of time in a totally new way. We used to just slice up the sunrise-to-sundown period into 12 equal parts; now hours were a constant length throughout the year. Common folk had glass windows in their homes for the first time, and the elite even wore glass in front of their eyes to correct their vision. Music became much more complex, as people had more time to take it seriously and form theories. People could go to libraries; for the first time ever there were more books in cities than in monasteries. Cities were finally the place to be. We invented the compass, the game of chess, and the printing press. The astrolabe, like the compass, allowed us to orient ourselves to something that was formerly hopelessly abstract (the stars). Most of this cool shit came from the Arab world, which was flourishing.

Air Epoch 2.0 That’s the historical overview. Obviously there is much, much more there for any anthropologist or history of philosophy ass person. But we are beginning to see some idea of the relation between the qualities symbolized by the elements and the respective periods. Now we can begin a more informed speculation.

The movement from the previous earth age to the previous air age seems to be one of dramatically more complex social relations. Less emphasis on the riches of a kingdom, and more emphasis on its culture, civility, and sophistication. Abstract things became the treasures. As we look to our own incoming air epoch, it is easy to envision a world that places more emphasis on networks instead of objects. Social media, gig economy, and blockchain all appear to be prefigurations of this. In terms of philosophy, it no longer seems very radical to conceptualize oneself as part of a universe whose essential composition is not defined by particles (nouns) but relations and processes (verbs).

What Was Babylon? I ain’t no student of ancient culture. Until a few months ago, I didn’t even know Babylon was where Iraq is. Of course I think it would behoove all of us to research as much as possible the previous instantiation of this astrological aspect, but I also think it’s valid to speak about its cultural impact through a layman’s osmosis.  As far as I can tell: what is Babylon best remembered for? The miraculous hanging gardens, the Tower of Babel, and the law code of Hammurabi. Hammurabi’s code, inscribed onto a stele about a century after the founding of Babylon is celebrated as the first known written laws, some 190 edicts long—and by the estimation of modern scholars, supremely humanitarian for its time. What is the modern equivalent of the ancient innovation of codified laws? Hard to fathom, but something for us to consider as the new age dawns.

More famously, there is the story of the Tower of Babel. A persistent image of human hubris, even today people respond to the tower motif as a symbol of defiance of God or of nature, and it is routinely invoked when artists and pundits comment on the ecological folly of industrial enterprise. Human beings tried to use their intellectual capacities to reach the position of God. Without reading the Bible, I can tell you that the punishment for this was the diversification of languages. All of a sudden people couldn’t speak to each other, because there were so many ways to speak.

Today we take for granted the many languages of human beings, so what is the modern equivalent of this event? Taken as a metaphor, the variation of languages could represent a variation of worldview. Styles of interfacing with reality. Because the element of air is so closely associated with concepts like perception, the structuring of thought, communication, and virtual realities, we might imagine that in the new age we will begin to understand just how deeply diversified our mechanisms of interpreting reality are. Phenomenology seems like a pretty fringe field in our current world, but AI is certainly not; and content creators have increasingly brought phenomenological themes to the center of their work over the last couple decades. Just as the previous air epoch (12/1300s) saw the advent of movable type, perhaps we will soon develop novel means of recording our impressionistic realities.

Finally, Babylon was host to the famous hanging gardens. Supposedly built by king Nebuchadnezzar to please his wife who missed the natural beauty of Iran, it is still unclear whether this wonder of the world ever existed in physical reality. In any case, the story is relevant: a ruler, in the midst of tremendous infrastructural expansion, and with it the inevitable subjugation of nature, finds that his greatest cultural influence across the centuries is ecological restoration. Looking at these three legacies of Babylon together is rather interesting: the law code stele, though purportedly divine in origin, is unquestionably real to our materialist sensibilities—you can go and see it. The Tower of Babel, taken from the Bible, was probably not real in the same fundamental way; though there was without question a great ziggurat in Babylon, the Biblical account is not literal. The hanging gardens is the most mythological. So between the three we have different concentrations of myth and historical fact.

Second Second Life I write this in the first few weeks of social isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. There is much more to be said about the connection between this unprecedented social condition and the imminent radical astrology—maybe the subject of some other essay. But off the dome, we can see plainly the defaulting of Capricornian things: governments, businesses, economies, and social infrastructure. Without much of a choice, we are withdrawing our energy from the material to which we are accustomed. We’re cooped up in our houses, where the merciful currents of the internet continue to draw us on, to operate in cyberspace as normal. New social functions and vocabularies are already emerging as we are forced to reconsider the online networks that have seemed so toxic for the last few years. People find themselves operating “peer to peer” out of necessity. Some “inessential” products may no longer be available on amazon, but your neighbor might have them. More importantly, people are reaching out to each other for nothing more than human contact. We’ve been wringing our hands about the importance of human connection, but capitalism—through spectacle or stranglehold—has drawn us away from putting it first.

Social service is (along with certain essential aspects of the internet) ruled by Aquarius. Saturn, governor of concern, has already ingressed into this sign, but will retrograde back out in a few months; and then at the end of the year, it will be joined by Jupiter, who greases the wheels, expands the potentiation of Saturn’s concern, and affords prosperity to those who take social service seriously. And together they will inaugurate the new age.

[12izzy3]

Webcomic Recommendations No One Asked For:

I......... Spent 2 hours putting together a list of my webcomic recommendations, with summaries and reviews, because I was reworking my blog... And really I don’t think anyone ever goes directly on to my blog proper, so it feels kind of foolish to have that there where no one will see it, so I’m actually going to post it as well:

Webcomics are honestly just so tight, and there’s such a vast variety of them that there’s something for everyone, if not a few somethings for everyone! I’m personally all about indie games, but if there’s another indie market that I feel like the internet has created a space for it’s comics. After I started writing this I realized I have a uh… Lot of recommendations. Also, I may be an idiot for not using the author’s own summaries???

Regularly updating:

KILL SIX BILLION DEMONS - A comic about a college girl, Allison, given mystical powers beyond her understanding, and thrust into a celestial world filled with angels and demons, where the lines of good and evil are blurry at best. With the help of friends she meets along the way, she must navigate her new powers, and save her boyfriend from forces that would destroy existence. Kinda dark thematically (with very rare and minor gore), but a great comic if you love action, fantasy, and fantastic art. One of my favorites.

AWFUL HOSPITAL - Another one of my favorites. After her child becomes terribly sick, and doctors tell her that there’s nothing that they can do, a mother wakes up in a mysterious, otherworldly hospital. She must navigate this confusing and sometimes horrifying hospital to save her child and get home, and on the way, she makes many odd friends and unknowable enemies, and learns that her child’s sickness may be part of something larger. This comic is funny, has cool action, a unique format, and lots of great, though ghastly, character designs.

GUNNERKRIGG COURT - A coming of age story about two girls, Antimony and Kat, as they try to find their place in each other’s lives, and the two clashing worlds that surround them, the massive technological complex that is their school and home, Gunnerkrigg Court, and the forest across the river, where magic and fantastic creatures thrive, under the watchful eye of the trickster god Coyote. Another great one for if you like fantasy, but is usually a lot lighter, with a peak of intensity about equal to… Like, Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, I think. I’ve only gotten into this one pretty recently, but it’s good.

PARANATURAL - After his family moves to his dad’s old home town, Max discovers that he has magical powers, and becomes part of the Paranatural Activities club at his school, a group of students and their adviser who all have magical powers, and use them to protect the populace from ghosts, as well as investigate the many magical mysteries of the town. This comic is great, and mostly focuses on action and comedy. The art is a very colorful cartoony style, and the characters are drawn very… fluid, rubbery. The best way to put it is that the artist has really put a lot of effort into making characters consistently as expressive as possible, and that good old Disney/Looney Toons/Tom & Jerry stretchiness makes for very good visual comedy.

HOUSEPETS! - Another one of the earliest webcomics I ever read! Housepets is… largely a comedy comic, following the lives of anthropomorphized pets in a small neighborhood. They go on adventures, and live the fun yet complicated lives of an open society of people with unbelievable amounts of free time. However, sometimes there are bigger drama/adventure arcs, which are really good! A lot of the times amazing art or cool action are what draw me into adventure stories, but I just think the plot of this comic can be really good and surprisingly deep for a humor comic. And it’s still loose enough, and in the newspaper comic style that you can usually jump in very often (not every strip, mind you but in pretty small arcs) without feeling like you’ve missed a ton. Long too, lots to read, recommend.

STAND STILL STAY SILENT - SSSS is a comic that takes place 90 years after the end of the world. A zombie-like virus with strong mystical qualities has wiped out not just human, but much of the world’s mammalian life. In Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, and Denmark), in spite of the virus, society continues to exist, and most people live normal, happy lives. Our comic follows a research team, formed on a hairstring budget to travel into the infected zone, collect information on the virus and state of the fauna there, and, secretly, to collect books to sell back home. A great fantasy adventure drama that updates very often, and has really good art.

CUCUMBER QUEST - In spite of order this is actually the last one I’m writing, and I’m tired, so I’m going to copy the book one summary from Amazon:

What happens when an evil queen gets her hands on an ancient force of destruction? World domination, obviously. The seven kingdoms of Dreamside need a legendary hero. Instead, they’ll have to settle for Cucumber, a nerdy magician who just wants to go to school. As destiny would have it, he and his way more heroic sister, Almond, must now seek the Dream Sword, the only weapon powerful enough to defeat Queen Cordelia’s Nightmare Knight. Can these bunny siblings really save the world in its darkest hour? Sure, why not?

Cucumber Quest is good, the art is colorful and bright, all of the characters are relatable and real, including the villains, there’s cool adventures sequences and plot, and it’s a very fun comic. There’s humor and love and struggle in the comic, and it’s very well done.

GIRL GENIUS - Girl Genius follows Agatha Heterodyne, up and coming mad scientist, on her many adventures to save herself, her friends and the world if it’s along the way. It’s hard, however, competing with an entire world of mad scientists, as well as the Heterodyne legacy, one filled with chaos and bloodshed up until recently. I like Girl Genius a lot. It doesn’t move through the story very fast, but there’s a lot of solid world building, and more importantly, very intriguing sci-fi action and adventure happening inside of that world! I’m also pretty sure they do a radio show or podcast or something with additional Agatha adventures on top of the comic.

SUPERNORMAL STEP - After leading a life as a drifter after the death of her father, Fae is pulled into an alternate world where magic is real. There, she tries to find her place in life, master the magic that the world around her runs on, and get home to plain old earth in one piece. Lots of cool action, every character has really got their own style of magic. I can honestly tell you that it’s good, but I read it over such a long period of time that it’s got a pretty vague impression in my head.

ATOMIC ROBO - Robo is a skilled an dedicated scientist. He’s also an atomic robot built and raised by Nikola Tesla. Atomic Robo follows the titular character on the many adventures of his life, from WWII to the present. As the head of Tesladyne Industries, Robo is dedicated to researching the outlandish, the weird, the impossible! And when the world calls on him, he and his Action Scientists defend it from giant monsters, cosmic anomalies, and mad science. Atomic Robo is great if you love action, robots, monsters, humor, and velociraptors duel-wielding uzis. Highly recommended.

DUMBING OF AGE - As the title would imply, Dumbing Of Age is a pretty standard coming of age comedy! Starring a wide cast of likable and complex character, DoA follows a group of college freshmen as they learn more about themselves, and grow beyond the bubbles that they were raised in. I think the underpinnings of the comic are pretty strongly on humor, but there’s a lot of drama, and conversations about meaningful things too. There are lots of varying depictions of drama, depression, anxiety, and the ways people deal with pressure, and fear. But there’s also a lot of love and friendliness. It’s a good comic, and probably the only solid slice-of-life on my list.

MANLY GUYS DOING MANLY THINGS - This comic follows The Commander, a bio-engineered super soldier sent back in time to run a temp agency. This particular temp agency specializes in reintroducing particularly brutish video game, comic, and movie protagonists back into normal polite society. Duke Nukem isn’t much of a man for customer service, however. Later on the comic drifts more toward Commander’s personal life. (So slice of life, but with a buff, and actually surprisingly sensitive and forward thinking, super commando from the future.) Has been in a bit of a slump in terms of updates recently, but they still happen.

GRRL POWER - Sidney, a slightly hyper nerd who works at a comic shop, stumbles upon an artifact that gives her a variety of superpowers. After being exposed, she becomes a member of the government’s brand new super hero organization. This comic is a lot of fun, with some cool superpowers and super fights. Lots of humor, very consistently, in any given scene. Sadly, it is a bit fan service-y, though in the grand scale of things it’s not the worst offender (though definitely the worst you’ll see on this list).

SWORD INTERVAL - This is a pretty new one for me, but it’s great. At some indeterminate point in the past (potentially as far back as the civil war, if not farther), the earth became exposed to monsters and magic in ways that it wasn’t before. Humanity still exists and survives, but plagued by supernatural forces. Our main character is Fall, a very new monster hunter, who after years in witness protection, has decided to track down and kill the Hierophant, the powerful monster that killed her parents. Sword interval does a lot of really cool fantasy stuff, with new takes on classic monsters, and magic and monsters in settings that we don’t often see them in, out in the open in present day. It’s something I wish we could see more. Good action and art, particularly character design.

BACK - Abigail is back. From the dead? From a very long sleep in a box underground? She doesn’t know either. She doesn’t know a lot of things. What she does know is that she’s got two guns, is nearly indestructible, and is prophesied to go north to the capital and end the world. With the help of the young cleric Michael, who supplements her absolute lack of all knowledge and common sense, Abigail fights her way through the kingdom, and past the kings many superpowered deputies. Back is cool, back is funny, and sometimes has some good action. I wouldn’t consider it one of my favorites, but it’s a comic I started and I’ve kept up with, so that’s saying something.

MARE INTERNUM - Not very long yet, and I only recently read it, but Mare Internum is really good. I don’t want to spoil it too much, honestly, especially because it’s so short, but it’s a sci-fi adventure comic about being trapped, underground, on Mars, and finding life there. The art is great, the story so far is well written, and the dialogue is good. I really don’t want to spoil it, but there are some great concepts in it and you should read it.

OPHIUCHUS - A very new comic about an ancient stone guardian who is whisked away to another, far off world. Here, he is employed to help two of this world’s denizens defeat the blight that has corrupted and destroyed their once almost utopian world. The art for this is really good. The comic is not currently long enough to comment on much else, but it seems interesting, sci-fi with a touch of fantasy.

Slowly Updating:

AVA’S DEMON - Ava’s Demon is about a girl, Ava who has spent her entire young life haunted by a ghost that torments her, before finally making a deal. The ghost, Wrathia, will help her become a normal girl, with friends and a normal life, but first, Ava must track down the ghosts of Wrathia’s most powerful allies, and help her dissolve the massive interplanetary empire that is TITAN. Ava’s Demon is amazing. The story is good, but I think the comic’s greatest strength is absolutely stunning and polished art. Strong recommendation.

THE PROPERTY OF HATE - RGB is a self-described monster, a sharp dressed man with a TV for a head. However, he’s looking for a hero to guide on a quest. RGB whisks our young protagonist, the Hero, to a world that exists beside our own a world completely fueled and inhabited by our creativity, our stories. RGB protects the Hero from these dangers, guiding her on a mission unknown, through a world that, although mystical, seems to have lost its hope.

HE IS A GOOD BOY - Slow but large updates. This comic follows the life a sentient acorn, Crange, after the death of his parent (a tree) to a lumberjack. Crange is kind of a bit of a loser, and stumbles around his world of sentient rocks and bugs getting into all sorts of trouble and hijinks. These hijinks almost always result in someone’s death, which Crange is impressively unphased by. HIAGB is fantastic, in my opinion. The art is great, the humor is great, especially the visual comedy, and the story is good. However, it gets real dark, and gory. But if you’re fine with that, it IS a (dark) comedy comic, and a good one.

THE LAST HALLOWEEN - One Halloween, the darkness opens up, and monsters pour out from the seams between our world and theirs. Approximately 7 billion monsters, in fact. Mona, a young girl and horror fanatic finds herself thrown into a world of chaos and horror, on the run from her own monster, and forced to look for a way to save the world, with the help of ghosts, zombies, vampires, and even monsters themselves. In spite of the fact that this comic can be VERY dark, I think one of its big hooks is humor and likable characters, on top of great art and plot. I really like it. This comic maybeshouldn’t be on the slow update list, but the artist is just picking up speed after a long hiatus, so…

ROMANTICALLY APOCALYPTIC - The apocalypse happened, and Charles Snippy missed it. Humanity was wiped out in a war against it’s own, ever-present AI, and Charles Snippy, a scientist/tour guide without the implants made it out alive, only to wander alone this is until he meets Zee Captain, an ever positive, gender question mark, maniac who wanders the wasteland with their insane assistant Pilot. Snippy, Captain and Pilot wander the wasteland, facing off against monsters, raiders, and the laws of physics in a mind warping and illogical adventure.

On Hiatus:

DERELICT - Like a surprisingly large number of comics on this list, in Derelict, the world has ended. A strange Miasma travels the world, killing billions, and bringing with it gargoyle-like monsters who fear the daylight. However, the world goes on, in a small, broken way, and our story follows a scavenger in this new world.

HELVETICA - So, you die, and then what? Well, life goes on. This is what Helvetica learns, after he dies and reemerges into an afterlife that seems shockingly similar to the world of the living, with work, pressure, responsibility, danger, and just plain old boring life. Except everyone is a skeleton. Helvetica is very resistant to accept this new life in death. This one is pretty short so far, and hasn’t updated in a while, but it’s good.

VIBE - Hasn’t update in a year and a half, but what’s there is good (Honestly, it’s super sad it hasn’t update, I like it a lot). Vibe follows Baron, a young shaman, a spiritual master who is able to expel negative emotions (bad vibes) from the human body. Only those emotions then become monsters, who a shaman must fight to complete the process! With the help of his Loa (they’re like familiars), he navigates life as a teenager, and his increasingly complex and dangerous life as a shaman. I really like this comic. There’s a lot of very cool and dynamic action, and the artist makes great use of a ton of bright colors.

THE ABOMINABLE CHARLES CHRISTOPHER - This one hasn’t updated in about a year, but what’s there right now is good. Charles Christopher is a Sasquatch, living in the woods on the edge of society. Though he himself is fairly soft, and simple, the wilderness around him is full of anthropomorphized animals who go about shockingly human social and professional lives. The comic follows Charles Christopher as he interacts with the world of these animals, and becomes tangled in a vast spiritual quest.

POWER NAP - Hard to know exactly where to put this one. It’s currently VERY slow updating. Power Nap takes place in a world where the majority of mankind is reliant on a drug that allows them to live 24/7 without sleep. However, there are those who are allergic to the medicine, who live their lives out of sync with their peers, protected by the government, but effectively second class citizens. However, in a sleepless world, over-saturated by virtual reality, the human subconscious has found ways to seep into reality.

THE FANCY ADVENTURES OF JACK CANNON - I want to start this out by saying this comic is probably dead, without a 100% resolution. However, it’s currently 492 pages, and a LOT of the storyline covered in that span was resolved. Such that, if they’d wanted to, I could’ve seen the author wrapping it up. I digress. Jack Cannon is about a kid moving to a new school, where he finds the bullies are able to hack reality. Somehow immune to hacks, Jack fights the bullies, and in doing so, puts himself on the stage of a worldwide battle against hackers. Lots of really cool action in this, one of the first few webcomics I read.

Complete:

HOMESTUCK - If you’re here, you are probably at least aware of Homestuck. It’s about a bunch of goofy awkward teen friends who get sucked into a cosmic (video) game, with the fate of the universe at stake, but you know, they’ve still got that teen angst. Time travel is involved. It’s a very long, fun, and dramatic comic which is heavily influenced by RPGs and point and click adventures.

THE ADVENTURES OF DR. MCNINJA - The pressures of being a doctor AND ninja are immense, but on either front, you can trust that Dr. McNinja is the man for the job. Born into an Irish ninja family, Dr. McNinja longs for a life where he can do medicine in peace, but finds himself constantly pulled into a string of action packed adventures, fighting giant monsters, bandits riding velociraptors, and dueling radical interdimensional kings. This one if fairly long, a bit over 1800 pages, but it’s really good and well done. Again, there is a lot of both action and humor (I’m big on that), with some surprisingly meaningful and well-done story arcs in spite of how silly the premise is.

REMIND - This one is about a girl who lives in a lighthouse on the edge of a town whose main draw is the “Lizard Man” legend that her own father made up. However, after her cat one day starts walking on two legs and talking, claiming to be one of many said lizard men, they both go on a journey to discover the truth. This one was OK. The story and sci-fi elements are both alright bot not great. But it’s not super long, so if you have the time, maybe read it.

[mychristopherstokes66world]

but the problem is that they're ALL connected. There's no ONE starting point to narrow in on and build a case from the ground up. NXIUM is connected to Fiji water which is connected to the Bromfmans which are connected to the DNC which is connected to Libya and Syria which is connected to CEMEX which is connected to the Trilateral Commission and CERN, which is of course connected to the US Government and its private sector investors like First Principles Inc which financed NXIVM and so on and so forth. Then other MKULTRA shit like Tavistock, Manson, Hubbard popped up and they had a relationship with Jet Propulsion Laboratories which was connected to Steve Paddock and then my bells really started ringing.  My thesis is that the totality of their connections IS the one thing that is worth narrowing in on. Once the broad relationships are established then it will be much easier to explain the smaller details of who does what and where they fit in the hierarchy. Before we found Comet Ping Pong we needed the Wikileaks to break pizzagate, and once the connections were in place regarding David Brock, John Podesta and James Alefantis, Comet Ping Pong was an inevitable discovery. I will, one day. It's just truthfully too much to do at once, and people will ignore the information overload. And inevitably I'll get a couple minor details wrong, I'm already finding out so much today that I didn't know before, I'm by no means an expert. But I think the other thread does a good job of connecting them but you have to do the work yourself to see it. I get that normies won't, so that's why I'm trying to build to that point but I don't know if we're there yet.  For example, I had no idea Manson's lawyer had any affiliation with Tavistock or any of this shit. I just briefly mentioned Manson because I was talking about the occult methods of mind control and I knew he was connected to Jack Parsons. That triggered another anon to dump a bunch of information on Manson's background that I never knew about. And that process has repeated itself over and over through the past two threads so I have faith that the connections will become more and more apparent the more we dig into it

mkultra programs never ended

now they have super ultra advanced tech which can literally fuck up our brains

Finally some people who will appreciate this information. Check out this patent that was filed by Keith Rainere

http://bit.ly/2FtCMxQ

http://bit.ly/2ZJkdgU

>Determination of whether a luciferian can be rehabilitated

This goes so much deeper than sex. Do you really think the satanic elites need a cult to acquire underage sex slaves? Absolutely not, they can get whatever they desire on demand. They don't need Keith or his cult for sex slaves. What they need from Keith is the information from his Mind Control experiments. 

Due to the restrictions placed on the State after the Freedom of Information act, secret government programs like MK Ultra and Monarch Programming had to be transferred to the private sector where citizens can't legally sue for declassified information. I believe that NXIVM is sponsored by the CIA's private sector affiliates and is a front for running experiments on using sex to brainwash people and turn them into compliant citizens. This would help explain any connection between Rainere, Alefantis, Podesta and the Clintons. NXIVM is a government mind control program, not just a simple sex cult. Keith Rainere is a Crowley-like magician who uses physical and mental stimuli to reprogram people according to his desires. This manifests right now as "Have sex with Keith" but it could easily spiral into "Kill this person for me" the way Manson did (who was also a chaos magician likely affiliated with the government and L Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons, but that's a different story).

Thomas Petersen Co-Founder at First Principle worked on a project called Ghostnote: "Already one of the most talked about productivity apps. Featured on ProductHunt. Ghostnote adds contextual notes to almost anything on your mac. Add notes & todos to folders, applications, open documents, even websites. Think about it as post-it-notes for your OS."

Website: http://bit.ly/1F4PIk1 (visually very similar to First principle LLC website)

I am not really tech litterate but I wonder if it could have been used as a backdoor/spy app.

wo concurrent conversations, I know, but here's another doozy. David Attenborough and Cemex own a nature reserve together. Are you telling me that one of the world's worst polluters and the Bono of nature shows have a private patch of land where the elite can party away from the prying eye of plebs? Not bad for a Mexican cement company.

https://thedevilman666.blogspot.com/https://www.facebook.com/groups/qanonreports https://twitter.com/CIACLOWN1 https://www.bitchute.com/channel/ciaclown16661 It doesn't matter what you call it, manipulation of mental realities through language, glyphs and rituals is a real science that is being employed to make us feel powerless, anxious, and dependent on the stimuli that the elite feed us to control our personalities.  Chaos Magic has a uniquely Crowleyan focus on ritual, but it's based on the same Hermetic principles of the Mind that Gnostics and alchemists study. The author of the Secret describes it as "Mental Alchemy". Magic is the manipulation of perceived reality through your Will. Hermeticists believe that the All is Mental in nature, so if you can change a person's mind then you can change their physical reality as well. It's more complicated then that, but you know the basics. Funny enough, The All is Mental is the FIRST PRINCIPLE of the Hermetic Kyballion. It's neither a good or bad thing, no more than "technology" can be considered an evil thing. The principles exist and can be manipulated. Meme magic is right hand path white magic, that seeks to use these principles defensively in order to protect our fragile sense of personhood from psychic warfare. The elites, gnostics, Masons, Jews, satanists, whatever you want to call them, want to use these principles to apply left hand path BLACK MAGIC to control OTHER people. Right = Defensive, Left = Offensive. The government has cozied up with occultists in the past, but they've demystified the process by applying the scientific method. What we are now witnessing is black magic on the grandest scale ever seen - Collective Mass Hypnosis thanks to the likes of Rainere and the other DOD experiments Rainere connects to.  There's also ritual sacrifice, Goetia, and Theurgy but I wouldn't describe that as much as magic as I would Summoning. If you play D&D, it's the difference between a Wizard and a Warlock.  Speaking of the Secret, it was first popularized by Oprah who we now know was in deep with John of God

rst Principle LLC is located at: 1012 Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast Washington, DC 20003 United States https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/0854192D:US When you type this address in a serach engine you end up with AMC Hawk & Associates ,Business Management Advisor in Washington. The weird thing is it seems they dissapear suddenly 3 years ago from a review (pic related) >Magic is the manipulation of perceived reality through your Will Yeah, that's not magic. That's Crowley. The whole will thing he stole from Nietzsche. Nietzsche said the will to mach...later translated after WW2 as "will to power". But German "Mach" is where we get our word machine, to craft. Nietzsche was saying all things that exist have a will to self creation or self preservation as forms, atoms, stars, life, planets... so on. NOW FOLLOW CLOSELY: The ORIGINAL meaning for "magic", it's etymology, was "craft". It came out of the pre-Persian medes culture. They were light worshipers who use to burn sorcerers alive. Zarathustra created Zoroastrianism and said all the gods were fake or more like angels/demons and there is only one god, the Lord of Wisdom (Ahura Mazda) and his symbol is light/fire. But real magic is creative works or craft. This can include: >art >masonry >metallurgy >science/tech of any kind >music >creating religions >story telling  And so on... In ancient times someone who could pull metal out of the ground and make a sword was seen as doing the work of the gods, "magical" and as it became more widespread if became 'common' or not "high magic". So "black magic" = deception, illusion, cult indoctrination... in modern times it's know as black propaganda. Christianity is black magic.  And "white magic" = creativity, technology, arts and crafts, building society, philosophy. In fact philosophy came out of a rejection of the corrupted Zoroastrian magi priesthood of the Greek's enemy Persia. 

 Nobody saw this video the last two threads, but you guys need to see it. If you do really care about this thread, then don't scroll past this video. Back it up and keep it some where. Somebody posted the interior image of this building before but it was empty. Now we see it with scantily clad children retrieving water (?) from separate sinks and pouring it onto the flat circle in the center. I know this video had big significance, but I don't know to what yet since I never saved the image of this room when I saw it, and I should have.

"Will power symbolism" is straight up gnostic escapism bullshit that came out of Christian mysticism (aka Alexandria Egypt and the gay christian-judeans who were fighting with the NeoPlatonists elite because they feared Christianity, so some Christians created an alternative to D&C the elite culture of Alexandria and the philosophy schools). Paul writes to them in 1stCorenthians because they're practicing orgies, incest, and money scams. Pizzagate 101 http://bit.ly/2ZCTTou #Spiritcooking http://bit.ly/2FtKHv7 Newfag rundown on the players http://bit.ly/2ZBT5Am It all started with Hawaii bro and secret pedo media distribution bunker http://bit.ly/2FqV8Q0 Comet ping pong connection http://bit.ly/2ZD308A Comet ping pong was hacked during the election and Anons found this download portal but couldn't get further http://bit.ly/2Fu3KoV On a separate page Anons found pizza menu items in detail http://bit.ly/2ZGh6WX And these pictures. They've essentially been completely blacked out. NSFL http://bit.ly/2FtCKGe Comet ping pong false flag shooter http://bit.ly/2ZD2VBO http://bit.ly/2FwWits #Elsagate rundown http://bit.ly/2ZLt1CH The CIA has been running child trafficking rings since the beginning. Definitely NSFL  http://bit.ly/2FqD9Jl They've been threatened before and they killed a sitting senator and her husband http://bit.ly/2ZLt2qf It's all about the adrenochrome http://bit.ly/2FtJOCO Justin Beiber snaps because he was pimped out http://bit.ly/2ZLt3dN Child actress Heather Orourkes, 5, raped to death by Hollywood executives. http://bit.ly/2FqV7vq Sex trafficking of children on YouTube http://bit.ly/2ZD2XJW More #pizzagate http://bit.ly/2Fs8Gus http://bit.ly/2ZLt4OT http://bit.ly/2FtCKWK http://bit.ly/2ZEV7jd http://bit.ly/2FuNeVK Tony Podesta smocking Trump tweet http://bit.ly/2ZEV7zJ Anderson Cooper slips up, #pizzagate http://bit.ly/2FsxDpO Israel children farming http://bit.ly/2ZD2YO0 Allister Crowley and human sacrifice http://bit.ly/2Fur2Lp

Raniere is tied in with the DoD through various people and businesses. To understand it better, take a look into his schooling. He's 'private sector', of course it's a step further. Look at all of the patents he holds. I only linked the ones I thought to be most interesting, some patents were repeats of patents he already had which I thought was odd.

[cashcounts]

This $42 Million-Dollar Timekeeping Device Runs for 10 Millennia

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in an edition of NOVA’s email newsletter, NOVA Lens, and has now been repurposed for NOVA Next. Sign up for NOVA Lens here (select “NOVA Newsletters”).

Mindfulness gurus tell us to focus on the present, but what if we chose to be much more forward-thinking? How would society function if we saw a year as not 12 months, but a sliver of a century?

That’s the philosophy behind the Long Now Foundation, which has entered the spotlight for its support of a Franklin-esque invention: a futuristic timekeeping device that can last for 10 millennia. This “10,000-year clock” looks like it’s straight out of a Star Trek episode—or the set of Interstellar. The team behind this impressive feat of engineering hopes that the clock will inspire people to think long-term.

The 10,000-year clock, shown here, was first conceived by Danny Hillis in 1986.

Danny Hillis began fantasizing about what he then called a “millennium clock” in 1995, when the American scientist, entrepreneur, and writer penned this column for Wired magazine. Hillis’s family and friends thought he was crazy—but Alexander Rose didn’t. He had heard about Hillis’s idea through his friend, Stewart Brand, one of the founders of the Long Now Foundation and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. As a child, Rose played near the old World War II shipwrecks in the San Francisco Bay—“I grew up literally in a junkyard,” he says—so he has a penchant for building things.

“I went to a [Long Now Foundation] board meeting and met Danny Hillis and started working with him immediately on the first prototype,” Rose said. They completed an initial prototype in 1999, which is now on display at the Science Museum in London. In 2010, they broke ground on the project in western Texas.

Now, they’re beginning the underground installation of the 500-foot mechanical marvel—yes, underground, carved into the side of a mountain where the clock will be protected from the elements. Visitors will be able to hike to the clock and then descend a secret staircase to see it for themselves. As an extra precaution against wear-and-tear over many millennia, the scientists made the clock out of mostly stainless steel and titanium. Dry-running ceramic bearings (which don’t need lubrication to run) separate the dissimilar metals so that they don’t react to each other. “Those used to cost about $15,000 each,” Rose said. “Now they’re in rollerblades and fidget spinners.”

The clock’s first prototype

Here’s how the clock works. Its energy is stored in a large weight, similar to how a grandfather clock operates. The weight moves as a result of changes in temperature throughout the day. One air tank near the surface of the mountain (above the device) heats up while it’s exposed to the Sun, while another tank is kept cool inside the mountain. The difference in temperature throughout the day (a few tens of degrees) causes the air to move from the hot tank to the cool one. When the surface tank cools down at night, the airflow reverses. The potential energy stored in the lifted weight then drives a series of gears, which regulate the speed of a six-foot balanced pendulum.

While the clock’s partitions of time come from the pendulum, which completes one back-and-forth about every seven seconds, it also recalibrates to the Sun at solar noon. Because of that idiosyncrasy, the clock is more like a calendar, according to Steve Allen, a member of the software team at the University of California’s Lick Observatory. The clock will actually “tick” once a year for 10,000 years, its century hand will move every 100 years, and a cuckoo will emerge every 1,000 years. The musician Brian Eno composed a different chime sequence for each day (listen to some sample tracks here).

But there are a few major differences between the 10,000-year clock and the antique grandfather clock at your, uh, grandfather’s house.

For one, the clock also derives some of its energy from manual labor. When people come to visit it, they will have to wind the clock to make visible—on a set of dials—what the clock already “knows” internally about how much time has passed.

“It doesn’t show you the time that it is when you arrive,” Rose said. “It shows you the time of the last people who visited it, and then you wind up the dials until it stops at the ‘now’ point to see the difference. So if it was 100 years since the last people were there, you would wind it for quite a while.”

In this way, the 10,000-year clock is symbolic of not just long-term thinking, but it also illustrates a fundamental tension in how humans have recorded the passage of time—and how today’s advanced methods of timekeeping still struggle with vestiges of past practices.

For most of our existence as Homo sapiens, time was set by watching the sky (and was aided with a transit circle telescope in later years). The Sun was, quite literally, the ultimate arbiter of time.

“Years ago, if you looked at [fire] insurance policies, they would all expire at noon,” Allen said. “The insurance company could be reasonably sure that someone who witnessed a fire would have noticed whether the sun was on the east side or the west side of the building when the fire happened, and they would know whether [the policy] expired.”

Though the Sun was still supreme, our notion of time began to change gradually in 1656, when Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens invented the first pendulum clock that measured what we now know of as a second. Electric-motorized clocks (late 19th century) and quartz clocks (1927) made time measurement even more precise.

Then in the 1950s, the atomic clock changed everything. “It became immediately clear that they were better than any other timekeeping device that had ever existed,” Allen said. Atomic clocks apportion time based on the vibrations of cesium atoms, and they’re critical to the functioning of GPS, satellites, and more.

But far from being the foremost authority on time, atomic clocks sent our timekeeping systems into conflict. Neither the calendar nor the clock quite line up with each other. The Earth’s rotation is not always consistent (it fluctuates in response to events like earthquakes, dramatic changes in climate, etc.), yet many technologies require unchanging atomic time, so the world was forced to reconcile the two. The compromise, which throws what’s called a “leap second” into the mix, is now known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

“The leap second was the answer, because that allowed you to say, ‘We’re going to keep the calendar day defined by watching the sky. Each second will be defined by cesium. Whenever they disagree, we’ll throw in another second,’” Allen said.

As early as 1999, the leap-second has been in danger of being scrapped by the International Telecommunications Union, an arm of the UN that helps coordinate global communication standards, which depend on accurate timekeeping. Some people felt (and still feel) that the leap second is an imperfect hack to resolve the difference between calendar time and atomic time.

That is, should we adjust our clocks to the Earth’s slowing rotation, or should we drop leap seconds and let atomic clocks be fully responsible for measuring time? So far, the scientific community has failed to reach an agreement on this question (case in point: this 2016 NPR story).

Allen says the 10,000-year clock highlights this very issue (he and others wrote a paper about it in advance of a colloquium held in 2011).

Rose points out that “the 10,000-year clock is one of few devices that tracks natural and absolute time simultaneously.” Because of that, it is representative to many of this debate—this tension—over whether humans should decouple timekeeping from natural cycles.

Jon Giorgini, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was a co-author on the aforementioned 10,000-year clock paper, says he’s impressed by the scale of the project. “Most engineers designing software or hardware build and keep a mental model of the system in their head,” he said. “They observe it in their mind’s eye, take it apart, and ‘watch’ it work. Doing this for a system running over 10,000 years is really mind-expanding.”

Rose says the team picked the number 10,000 because that’s roughly how long it’s been since agrarian civilizations began. “How do we place ourselves not at the end of a 10,000-year story, but in the middle of a 20,000-year one?” he asked. “And if you did that, how would you act differently?”

Climate change and world hunger, for example, are things that we can’t solve in a quarterly report or over the course of a four-year election cycle. But in 200 years, society could make a difference. “It’s a multi-generational effort,” Rose said. “We want to put that kind of thinking back on the table.”