#cancer season 2022

[daportalpractitioner]

mercury in cancer • july 5, 2022 - july 19, 2022

mercury is the planet of communication, intellect, and cognitive function. when placed in the sign of cancer, our mental focus is being turned inward - focusing on matters of the home, our family, our ancestors, and who we've always been on a cosmic level. cancer energy is very nurturing, allowing us to use this transit as a time to learn how to communicate directly without aggression. this also is a time to prioritize our mental health, especially during an emotionally charged season like cancer season.

how to alchemize with mercury in cancer:

connect with your ancestors through meditation

keep your lifestyle simple. filter out everything that is bringing chaos to your life.

journal prompt: what keeps your innerg stuck in the past?

process emotional trauma through solitude

journal prompt: what are you still holding resentment about when it comes to your mother?

there's medicine to receive from learning something new

hold yourself accountable for your shortcomings of reacting instead of responding out of emotional imbalance

utilize this time a gestation period before birthing something nu in leo season

keep it real with yourself as you enter the void - don't fall into the rose-tinted glasses rabbit hole

spend some time in your imagination

[freshmoviequotes]

Sanctuary (2022)

[fandomohana]

Night fourteen, October 14, 2022. Tremors 3. 🎃👻🐛🧨 This is a special one, tonight is dedicated to my dad. I miss you, Fatboy. 💙

Header credit goes to the fabulous, @animatedglittergraphics-n-more 💙

[authentickay-88]

July 9th-Bday dinner 2

[nocturnalbitch-faced]

My birth month just keeps getting worse:

- medical emergency of my dad

- uncertainty at work

- seb vettel retiring

Ughhhhh, just give me a break.

It seems like falling for (the ever lovely) Joe Quinn isn't enough to counter all these bad juju.

[luminescentbite]

Check out my Instagram for Leo new moon readings for all the signs!

[jjongslight]

28.

28.

You have been eye-opening and life changing in so many ways. 

You have brought me the closest to death, so much so, I had to let go of my pride and rigid beliefs to allow myself to heal.

The shift from utter fear and despair to acceptance and growth is why I am still here. 

28.

You have been fucking out of this world.

You’ve made me connect to parts of myself I never thought I would fully actualize. You have opened the doors to so many new experiences, because there was now space for them. 

You’ve left me with a quiet confidence and renewed sense of self I am still in awe of.

I feel more settled than ever. That’s why I am still here.

I am proud.

I am amazed.

I am me.

I am ready.

28.

You’ve thought me a lot, so as I say goodbye, I also say thank you.

Thank you for everything. The good, the bad and everything in between.

[3oclockoccultis]

Collective Reading for Gemini & Cancer 2022

I never really asked myself what I really wanted out of life, until Gemini season came. I accurately predicted how my Taurus would go and I’m continuously reaping the benefits. And since we’re in Cancer season, it’s shown me how I need to cater to my need

I hope you all had a wonderful Taurus season, I know for me it was life changing. I got a promotion, I learned a lot about myself, and found the value not only in material wealth but in desire. I never really asked myself what I really wanted out of life, until Gemini season came. I accurately predicted how my Taurus would go and I’m continuously reaping the benefits. And since we’re in Cancer…

[daportalpractitioner]

venus in cancer • july 17, 2022 - august 11, 2022

on july 17, 2022 at 8:32 PM CST, venus, the planet of relationships, aesthetics, pleasure, the female archetype, and harmony among other things has entered the sign of cancer. cancer rules our home, comfort, family, motherhood, the womb, nurturing, and protection. during this time, our relationships are going to feel a lot more like home and we are going to be gravitating towards engaging with the things and people that make us feel comfortable and safe. this is a good transit to bring more harmony + ease into your family and home. prioritize your time and home and cuddle with your favorite person (or pets). this is a time where we should be honoring the divine feminine more than ever, showing our utmost respect for the energy that brought us to existence in the first place. this transit may feel like a time to slow down, get tucked away, and focus on building something solid that can bring in success later on.

this is a favorable time for water placements (cancer, pisces, and scorpio) + taurus and virgo placements can really use this energy to create financial opportunities for themselves; this is a dynamic time for cardinal placements (aries, cancer, libra, capricorn) - whether it will be a good transit or not depends on your perspective!

how to alchemize with venus in cancer:

hold yourself accountable + release your fears regarding how you show up for yourself

take the risk of coloring outside of the lines if you wanna make money in your sleep

spend time in your introverted innerg to receive crazy downloads

don't run away from your relationship issues

embrace the unexpected changes

use the inspiration to create an experience more aligned to who you are

tap in with your community + be vulnerable enough to create a support system

boldly claim who you are

[jukeboxofjellycat]

El crédito corresponde a Killer Quake del Facebook.

[theveryworstthing]

A quick obituary, if y'all don't mind.

In 2018 my cat Lace died. it was sudden and mysterious and she went to one of her favorite spots to do it alone. She was buried just before a big hurricane at the beginning of summer. a little bit later me and my mom took a road trip to Georgia to see family, and I was inspired by the life and death i saw on the side of the roads to draw the 24/7 Haunted Roadside Diner comics.

In 2022 my cat Coup died. it was a long fight through 7 months of cancer that ended with me holding him at the vet as he took one last big jump after months of losing the ability to do so. he was cremated just before a big hurricane at the end of summer. a little bit later me and my mom took a road trip to Georgia to see family, and I was inspired by the life and death i saw on the side of the roads to draw more 24/7 Haunted Roadside Diner comics after not thinking about them for years.

They were total brats to each other most of the time and they could never agree on anything, but they were my friends for almost half of my life and they called truces to sit on my bed together and comfort me during the Bad Health Times or the Bad Emotions Times. I didn't realize that I was repeating history a little bit until I was almost finished redrawing these first 5 pages, but I think it's funny that even though they tried to go out as they lived, as fussy little opposites, that I started really healing from both of their deaths creatively in the same way.  So here's to the prettiest girl in the world and the baby boy. I probably could have gotten weird enough emotionally to write about roadkill ghost stories on my own, but y'all made it way easier to get there.

I redrew the first 5 pages to fit in better with any future 24/7 HRD comics I want to do (and generally flex my improved art/writing skills), so I’ll be posting one of those a day for the next few days. I've got 5 more pages and some illustrations planned for spooky season (October/November) along with some Downtrodden stuff so y'know. Nature is healing.

Hopefully I'll have more to post soon. the future is lookin' lonelier without my small grey guy, but it'll still have bright spots I bet. I hope.  

[authentickay-88]

July 8th-Birthday 1

[bcofl0ve]

new austin butler fan? start here!

hey there girl/pal/buddy/friend! welcome to the crazy train the endearing mad house that is the austin butler fandom. i joined the party after seeing elvis 2022 with my dad on a whim opened my third eye and have adored austin ever since. if you have any questions please please send an anon or send me a message, but i hope this post is useful as well!

media

congrats, i have a hyperfixation on being an update blog which means i have a masterpost of where to stream everything he's ever been in since he's started acting!

my personal favorite thus far is shocking no one, elvis 2022, but i'm really excited for everything coming out in 2024!

interviews

if you want to get to know austin the person outside of being an actor, i highly recommend checking out his episode of the marc maron podcast. content warning for talk about losing a parent- austin's mom who passed when he was 23 from cancer, and some allusions to domestic violence re: a step father. but that to say it's imo the most personal interview austin has ever given (and it makes me cry when i listen to it). i linked to apple podcasts but it's also on spotify!

austin's first ever interview from when he was 16 years old (article)

long- and personal, interview/profile via esquire from 2024 (article)

ruthie’s table interview - 2021 podcast with his good friend, chef ruthie rogers. some very sweet childhood talk in here.

austin butler drives greg williams back home (austin going back to his home town and visting his childhood home and elementary school)

austin butler plays with puppies - what the title says

in conversation: baz luhrmann and austin butler (article) - a very funny joint interview where baz and austin talk about filming elvis

austin butler @ the oscar nominees luncheon - the interviewer is jason kennedy, a long time buddy of austin's who also knew his mom. this was my favorite interview of awards season.

austin giving his publcist kate an honorary oscar - also from the oscar nominees lucheon press junket, so sweet! we love his ginger publicist around here (:

austin and lisa marie presley joint interview - lisa adored austin, and he mentioned in a different interview during awards season that when he was at graceland she took him upstairs for *3 hours*. if you're unfamiliar with the presleys, that is point blank unheard of for someone that isn't a blood relative. lisa passed away in january 2023 just two days after watching austin win his golden globe, and is very very missed. (lisa and austin at the globes)

another little lisa and austin interview, my personal favorite because of the hug!

so who's the girl?

austin is currently dating kaia gerber and has been since december of 2021! i'm working on a masterpost timeline of their relationship which will likely take...a while. but in the meantime the basics are that they like to make out in public while also being quite the private couple.

here is a very cute little video of the two of them after the elvis premiere at cannes and my favorite deuxmoi sunday spotting of all time- someone saying they were making out *in face masks* in line at erewhon.

like i said, they are veryyy private but that means the little tidbits we get are a treat! austin 'gushed' about seeing her walk in a celine show here, and here's a little clip of his smiley little self in the front row.

the two share a dog milo, who is the shining baby boy light of ausitn's life and came up no short of two billion times when austin was doing press for his ysl campaign this past summer. we love milo!

(and i also love that austin wears his gf's clothes sometimes, king!)

misc fun stuff

austin is close friends with ashley tisdale, and has been since the two of them met filming the movie aliens in the attic in new zealand in 2008. he's 'uncle austin' to her little girl jupiter, and they're also distant cousins!

speaking of aliens in the attic, 300 years ago in 2008 austin ran a little blog for his fans throughout filming which is just the darn sweetest most endearing thing to me. you can read the entries that i pulled from the wayback machine here and here.

some other austin-isms that i love

his habit of wearing shirts inside out

how everyone that works with him gushes about how kind he is

this little video of him when he was four years old

his dear sweet publicist kate having to hand hold his golden retriever self on track

the 27 he has tattooed on his wrist bc it was his late mom’s god number

and so many other things that would take me too long to list

if you have any questions that this post doesn't answer pls slide me an anon or a direct message! happy to have you here! <3

[gumjrop]

The Weather

This week we see a sharp increase of COVID in all regions, likely due to increased travel around the recent holiday long weekend and dropping temperatures that bring a lot of gatherings indoors. As the holiday season continues, we remind our readers to use layers of protection — such as ventilation, air purification, masking with a KN95/N95 or better, and testing via PCR or NAAT or testing serially with rapid antigen tests — to protect themselves and their loved ones both during travel and at your holiday gatherings.  Repeat COVID infection has serious implications for everyone, not just the elderly or those with preexisting conditions. Even if you experience a mild case, COVID is a vascular disease that causes multiple organ damage, autoimmune conditions, inflammation and immune system dysregulation that you might not necessarily experience at the time of your infection. It’s important to note that if you or your loved ones have experienced previous COVID infections, you may have entered a high risk group for severe effects and hospitalization without realizing it.  Some people may feel worn down by the current state of the virus, by fatigue of lack of resources, or from the energy spent protecting one’s self from an infection; with increasing wastewater levels and the onset of a new dominant variant this week, now is really the crunch time to stay strong and endure. For those who have stopped precautions, we invite you to return to masking and other levels to minimize transmission. This is the most important time to return to masking to protect yourself and others.

The Current Wastewater Viral Activity Map shows viral activity by state. As of 12/02/23, many states are reporting “very high” to “high” COVID levels with 5 states reporting low levels. Seven states reported no data. The CDC currently rates our nationally reported COVID wastewater viral activity levels as “high”.

Levels are at an incline in all regions, but the Midwest takes a strong lead with a viral activity level of 10.94. This is a wastewater value that surpasses all readings for the Midwest in the past 2 years, and is the third highest of any reading since the onset of the Omicron variant in January of 2022 where we saw the highest levels of spread we have experienced in the entirety of the pandemic. Current Midwestern wastewater levels were surpassed only by a viral activity level of 13.02 in the South on 12/31/2022 and of 11.79 in the West on 07/02/2023. As with Biobot data, the most recent two weeks (indicated by gray shading on the graph) are subject to change due to reporting delays. As we enter the cold and flu season when many in-person gatherings are held, we encourage you to continue monitoring local reports for a more accurate measure of levels. Also, please continue to use and support others in using layers of protection. And as we continue to report on advocacy successes, remember that our actions and voices can enact change — this level of unchecked spread is unacceptable and we must demand better resources and protections from our policy makers!

Deaths

Percentage of total deaths in the US caused by COVID has risen 25% in the past week. Remember that these numbers are an undercount related to reporting delays in place since the Biden Administration ended the Public Health Emergency. Alarmingly, the current increase in deaths is large enough to show despite these changes.

COVID remains the third leading cause of death according to the CDC in the US. COVID is the highest single cause of death, only second to Heart Disease and Cancer which are both umbrella headings for more specific diseases. We mourn all those who have died due to COVID, and in that mourning, call you to take measures to prevent death and disablement for yourself, your loved ones, and your communities.

Ventilation and Air Filtration

Moving activities outdoors or ensuring your indoor setting has consistent fresh airflow is key to ensuring high quality ventilation. We recommend monitoring carbon dioxide levels and making adjustments as needed. Air filtration is important as well. If you’re looking for a HEPA air purifier or Corsi-Rosenthal Box for your family, it is important to get a filtration device that is powerful enough to change out the air for your particular room size. Clean Air Stars has created a free tool to calculate which filter could be right for you depending on the size of the rooms that you wish to clean and how many people will be attending your gathering.

Testing

Whether you are making the trip home or staying in one place this holiday season, with the current level of spread it is important to know your COVID status before engaging in social activity. Rapid antigen tests are designed to be “the most rapid” at telling those who are symptomatic whether the symptoms they are experiencing are or are not caused by COVID. If you are asymptomatic, presymptomatic, or less than 5 days out from your COVID exposure, using one single rapid test is not an effective way of determining whether or not a person is currently infected with and contagious with COVID. Persons using rapid antigen tests should take at least 2 rapid antigen tests 48 hours apart from one another and isolate in between, in order to avoid spreading their unconfirmed case as well as avoid exposure to COVID during this waiting period, which could produce a false test negative result. Persons who are experiencing COVID symptoms but test negative on an initial rapid antigen test also need to isolate themselves from others, assume they have COVID, and test again in 48 hours. Persons who are asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic who experience 2 negative serial tests must mask or isolate and wait a final 48 hours to test a third time in order to confirm a negative COVID case. For this reason, rapid antigen tests are only ideal to use in preparation for events where the user has a week prior available to test multiple times and isolate. FDA approved home Nucleic Acid Amplification Tests or NAATs are a more sensitive home test option, some brands of which have been found to, with only one test, verify both positive and negative results at 92.9% and 98.7% respective accuracy. NAATs can be a more sensitive, quicker option to use in preparation for events. Another more recent clinical trial found that performing a combined throat and nose sample increased sensitivity for healthcare worker and self-collected specimens. When testing at home with a rapid antigen test, it is worth it to take a combination sample like this one. To ensure the most sensitive results for both symptomatic and asymptomatic cases, get a PCR test. No-cost PCR testing sites that are available via the federal ICATT program can be found via this search tool. Remember to also check for regional offerings such as NYC’s COVID express test centers that test for COVID, RSV, FLU A and FLU B free of cost with results typically returned by end of day, that could be a more convenient option for you. PCR testing is the gold standard if you are making plans to be in a social setting.  If you do not have fast free PCR testing in your area, demand that it be made publicly available by the government at all levels!

Wins

Grassroots organizing group and “Mask Blocs” continue to take to social media encouraging Pro-Palestine protesters to continue to wear masks in their organizing spaces and during protests highlighting historic use of unrestricted and eugenic viral spread as a weapon of occupation and colonization. The National Institutes of Health’s Home Test to Treat program has upgraded its free test offerings and now instead of rapid antigen tests, will provide LUCIRA by Pfizer home NAAT tests can that effectively detect asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic COVID infections as well as Flu A and Flu B. Those who are uninsured or underinsured can sign up for this program to access free NAAT testing, telehealth services, and treatment medications for COVID and the Flu. If your household has not placed a new order for more rapid tests from the federal government through covidtests.gov, you can still place an order for 4 free rapid antigen tests here.    

Take Action

If you are out protesting this weekend or planning your trip home to visit family for the holidays, connect with your local COVID advocacy group to pick up high quality masks for yourself and to pass on to those around you. This Tuesday, December 12th, the director of the CDC and the American Medical Association are hosting a virtual fireside chat to discuss Fall & Winter Respiratory Virus Season (prior registration required). We encourage you to attend. You might ask the CDC why they aren’t ensuring precautions in healthcare settings? Or you could ask why they’re relying on a reactive, vaccine-only approach instead of layers of protection to proactively prevent COVID?

[floatingcatacombs]

Bandai Taketh Away

12 Days of Aniblogging 2023, Day 1

Last year I wrote a post extolling the virtues of Birdie Wing, 2022’s breakthrough “how the fuck did this get made” mafia golf campfest. It’s the little show that could, animated on a shoestring budget to an audience of maybe two dozen extremely online yuri fans who tried their hardest to get literally anyone else to watch it.

It was almost certainly a financial failure for Bandai Namco, whose hopes for kicking off a VR-focused franchise fizzled in real time during season 1. But the resulting anime was a blast, a shoujo sports melodrama where literally anything could happen.

Birdie Wing took a few seasons off between its cours, during which Bandai Namco’s second lesbian anime of the year began airing: Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. My jaw dropped as I watched the first episode recreate Utena’s setup beat for beat, including the female main character taking another girl as her fiancé. It’s a gutsy move which set my expectations high. G-Witch was my introduction to Gundam, and the highs of the first season were amazing. Even if I had some occasional complaints with the pacing, the cliffhanger ending and narrative ambition left me very excited for more.  

Season 2 of Birdie Wing was set to fill the gap between cours of G-Witch, but ~something~ happened behind the scenes. It ended up being delayed to Spring 2023, where the two shows would air together. Great! That means double the lesbians. Or…zero?

Fair warning: From here on out I will be both a hater, and a spoiler.

Both seasons start without a hitch. G-Witch finally pops the safety bubble of its setting, with a terrorist attack on the academy followed up by an episode from the viewpoint of Dawn of Fold soldiers trying to survive a retaliatory crackdown from the Spacians. It pulled no punches with its violence and war orphans and trauma, a good sign for the struggles that awaited the main cast. Meanwhile, Birdie Wing continued to pay tribute to old-school Class S after its boarding school arc by involving its cast in a nightmare incest soap opera concerning Eve and Aoi’s parentage and the sins of the previous generation. Both are great developments for their respective shows, suggesting plenty of good stuff ahead.

Unfortunately, this is when both of these shows begin to fall apart. Eve and Aoi manage to beat the incest allegations, but afterwards their relationship just…stops. Their chemistry all but dissipates, the homoerotic rivalry giving way to their personal relationships with golf instead of with each other. The plot keeps the two of them apart as much as possible, devoid of the angsty longing from season 1, as the girls each succumb to a different form of golf cancer (even without the gay-baiting, at least Birdie Wing is still insane).

For G-Witch, a much more ambitious anime, this decline manifests as a creeping realization that they’re simply going to drop most of the open plot threads. The show takes its sweet time, even as it becomes clear that it’s barreling towards a finale at 24 episodes. The long-awaited plot twists are handled fine, I guess. But any sense that the show is aiming for greatness fades away, as it simply tries to drag itself to the finish line, buckling under its own weight. What we see on screen is what we get, and you’ll have to fill in the blanks yourself to really be happy. The Earthian-Spacian conflict ends up as mere set-dressing, and characters who clearly had intertwined backstories never even get the chance to interact. The obvious examples are the man who killed Suletta’s dad in the prologue resurfacing and that never really coming up, and everything to do with Chuchu and Nika’s backstories. I’m not here to nitpick, but it’s a shame that everyone’s characterization is left so thin. G-Witch really feels like it was meant to be a full 50-episode series, and I’m led to believe that this trimming down happened during production, as there’s just no other reason to set so much up without resolving it.

At last we reach each show's conclusion. Birdie Wing is saddled with a final arc full of professional tournaments, which is always going to be weaker than the dirty mafia golf on a conceptual level. The timeline begins to rapidly accelerate and suddenly we’re skipping ahead months, and then entire years. We don’t get to see most of Eve and Aoi’s final game, or even the period of time where they reconcile. An enduring friendship and rivalry is implied at the end, but it’s nowhere near the mutual obsession that the prior season depicted. Not an ounce of queerbait remains, even for the terminally yurigoggled such as myself.

Meanwhile, G-Witch dedicates some of its precious final minutes to a fight with Lauda (Jesus Christ is the Schwartzette is wasted on him), and just like Birdie Wing the two girls at the heart of the show barely get any time together as the end draws near. They ultimately opt for a Macross-Symphogear ending in which Suletta pilots a Gundam that shoots gay rainbow lasers and defeats her mom with the power of love and friendship. That’s fine! But that’s the ending for a show that didn’t happen! In its last act G-Witch retreats into its shell, unable to commit to the moral weight of the world it had built up. Laughably, the epilogue time-skips to a neoliberal utopia where Miorine solves the earth-space conflict through her sheer girlboss acumen. Suletta and Miorine’s gay wedding is implied at best, and an after-credits message states that this is the conclusion of The Witch from Mercury as a story, prematurely killing any potential follow-up.

The rest is history. Kadokawa redacts an interview to remove references to Suletta and Miorine being married, Bandai releases a statement that their status at the end of the show should be left up to interpretation, and everyone is mad forever.

What happened? Both of these shows fell apart at the same time, and both in a manner that defused their implicit queerness. Birdie Wing was always a bit of a trainwreck even at its best, so in a vacuum I would have just concluded that the production ran out of steam, unable to live up to its earlier writing. But the timing of Season 2’s delay, combined with the corporate meddling that affected G-Witch, makes me downright conspiratorial. Something went down at Bandai Namco, and it led to them ordering their productions be revised halfway through to scrub out all the gay shit and play things safe. I wouldn’t be surprised if this occurred at the same time as G-Witch was trimmed down from its initial 50 to 24 episodes with no chance of a continuation. It’s also not too much of a stretch to imagine Birdie Wing receiving a “stick to sports" mandate and Yosuke Kuroda subsequently phoning it in. I don't know how else to say it: there's no reason to do an incest fakeout if you're not even going to follow up on it afterwards once you've gone through the difficult work of exonerating them.

Witch from Mercury was a commercial success (it sold a shitton of gunpla, at least!) so it seems like a surprise that Bandai Namco would clamp down creatively in such a destructive way. Or maybe not. This may be the first female-led Gundam, but in a lot of other ways it’s fairly restrained as far as Gundams go. Perhaps BN decided that G-Witch had to be a balancing act to please everyone, preventing the creative staff from truly swinging for the fences in the end. Of course, that backfired horribly and they ended up pissing off himejoshis and regular mecha fans alike. I know it’s something of a fool’s errand to expect undeniable LGBT representation from anime, but when you begin with an explicit Utena homage, I expect better.

This has all been a bit of a downer, so I wanted to end things by sharing the anime I watched this year that actually gave me what I wanted out of those two shows.

Watching through the original Mobile Suit Gundam made me realize just how conservative G-Witch is in a lot of its storytelling. 0079 is a deeply radical show for its time, and still would be if you made it today. The unhesitating depiction of war and death through the aesthetics of a 70’s children’s show is particularly bold, and even the parts of the anime notorious for being overlong successfully reinforce the overall mood of the work. Amuro’s transformation from innocent child to unrelenting psychic soldier is as inevitable and upsetting as it should be, and even with all the “filler” the script feels much tighter than the G-Witch, which ambles around with side stories that don’t resolve and characters that don’t go anywhere. Imminently watchable. I love that the mommy issues in Gundam go all the way back, and I'm also starting to understand why you fuckers have been arguing about Char Aznable for 40 years.

you.

I also watched Kakegurui this year, which served as a great alternative to Birdie Wing. It doubles down on the best parts of that show – mostly-female cast, high stakes gambling, dubious lesbian rep – with an all-consuming sleaze to it. Grab some friends who aren't easily scandalized and try not to worry too hard about gaze or the intended audience, and it will be a hoot. The production values are great, even if most of it inevitably goes to girls making upsetting faces. The first opening in particular is an animation highlight. Of course, this is a MAPPA production, so they’re far too busy flaying their workers alive in the pits of hell to ever get around to another season. May their company unionize or perish.