#i lost my first tag but i said in that i wrote a 700 word thingy abt jeanne d'arc

[kuredd]

If i continue like this ill become a french history expert

[thisliminalspacedaydreams]

Hi, probably weird question, but can you offer any tips on how to co-write, like two different authors working on the same fic? How does that work?

hello there is actually nothing i would rather do let me give you the unabridged version because I think people romanticise it and it's important to be real. I'm going to give you all of my experiences and why I did it and which ones worked and which ones didn't.

HERE IT IS :

2-Let's start with @greenvlvetcouch who was my first duo writing experience. I was heavily part of an online thing at the time and I met him there, and we somehow (I genuinely can't remember how but I think it was me) ended up DMing about something, which actually pretty quickly evolved into me throwing a concept idea into the chat, and it just took off. We ended up losing our minds over the library scene from God Eater and that was that. I had read Zar and Jude's fic where every 15 min they switched (I think??) and I'm not a "minute" writer so I suggested to Green we did 700-1200 words each and pass it back. I also have a background in theatre, and I am part of a improv group in my city so improv games was part of my curriculum and I've always LOVED IMPROV GAMES, especially in small groups. (this is relevant for later). That's how God Eater was written. it happened very organically. We wrote it all in four months, in a doc, and didn't talk about publishing it until we realized that actually it was going to be a thing we were super proud of, that we would want to post it. The writing experience itself had none of the stress of "what if it's bad". We just wrote until we were done with no expectation. There were a lot of inconsistencies we fixed when we were done and TA-DA.

Since then Green has been a writing partner for a lot of published and unpublished works. We have several projects, some which we started and never finished because we lost the interest, some that we might publish, we don't know. I think he and I are aligned on the fact that writing is meant to be this fun thing and if the joy isn't there when writing, then the project dies. We had a LOT of really cool fun projects that only lived inside our mutual DMs and I think it still makes them real and great. They just weren't tangible enough to see the light of day. Green and I's writing process isn't *super* involved. We rarely fangirl over each other's works. I think we've reached a healthy balance of we *know* we love each other's writing, so we don't need to tell each other that. We will when a line slaps particularly well but other than that we mostly just hype the story up which is our way of saying we love working together.

Which is a perfect segway into inthesquare and I's writing process (hi I still don't know if I can tag you so imma send it to you after).

2-I'm currently writing a story with her, and our start was very different. I read this fic from hers and lost my mind. I cried and was very upset, it was such a great story, so I left a comment (as one does). What would you know, a few days later I get a comment on my fic about how she freaked out because she liked *my* work. So we literally met the most organically way possible: through ao3 comments. Then the normal pipeline happened: Tumblr, then Discord, then Whatsapp.

I wrote one fic that felt very much like something she would do and asked her to participate and add bits and bobs, she said yes, I was overjoyed. And then a few months ago I popped in and was like... *you like myths, right?* and TADA we have the amaranth hymns.

The writing process with us is very different. We each write until we're done with a scene (which usually ends up capping at 1500/2000 words-ish). We are posting as we go, we have 0 plan, zero foresight, we're just hoping for the best, rocking with a Pinterest board and voice noting each other at 3am going "hey do what was this thing you wrote and what does it mean?" "oh cool" "and so does this mean that X? Cuz we need to Y then" "Yes, right". We're problem solving as we go, and I think we're both kind of unbothered and unstressed about it: the story will write itself, we're just along for the ride. We also don't really hype each other up (a little ya know, when a line slaps), but we *do* talk about the fic itself a lot, which I think is our way of showing our engagement. We talk about the fic because we like writing it (I have a point to make later on bear with me).

3- You remember how i LOVE improve games, right????? WELL. There is a game called the "yes" game. A scene starts, you have a theme and a concept and you can't backtrack. Whatever the person throws your way you have to work with it....hence the "yes". You can only move forward, never back. That's how Raise Hell was created. I asked a bunch of my friends if they wanted to create a frankenstein fic, some said yes, some said no, and Raise Hell got started. I knew all of these people beforehand, so that made it easier. We still want to finish this fic but ya know, life got away from us.

What ended up happening is that there were no "writing" rule aside from : you must write enough to propel the next person. Give the next person *something* to work with. So what accidentally ended up happening is each person ended up writing a chapter.

Now let's talk about the rest:

As stated before, I love writing with people: I have the bandwith to work on numerous fics at once (it keeps my brain fed and entertained, I like the community of it), I like it, and thus I seek it.

But I think (and THIS is my point) that people romanticise it and it can stress people out. This is what I mean:

I started writing fics with several other writers because *I like it and I seek it and it brings me joy*, but some writers didn't like feeling like they were one in a lineup.

I wrote 30k with a writer and then the story died and we never picked it back up.

I have had two people I was writing with tell me they didn't like it because I wasn't 'involved' enough (by this I think what they meant was that I wasn't showing enough hype and enthusiasm for their writing).

I had one person tell me that our writing didn't match up and it felt weird and they didn't want to continue.

I have had one person tell me I hurt their feelings because I made them feel like their writing wasn't good enough by the way I edited.

I think it's important to mention that co-writing *is* a skill and it's not something that will work for everyone.

I have a graveyard of fics and a few friendships that died because of that, too. I'm not a big hyper. I do edit a lot. I show my enthusiasm in ways that perhaps isn't obvious enough. I don't praise other people's writing that much because in my mind, the fact we're writing together is proof enough that I love their writing, but that actually isn't always enough.

And I think the difficult part of all of this is that writing is a very personal endeavour. When you expose your guts to another person and they do not react the way you want them to, it's not very easy I think to say "Hey, you hurt my feelings because you didn't tell me you loved this and that". That's another layer exposed and because talking about hurt feelings is hard and uncomfortable, sometimes it will drag on and take proportions that lead to broken friendships.

So you do have to be careful.

...But I also don't know how, in the sense that *before* you start writing with someone, you won't *know* how they will react to the duo process.

What I'm saying is it' a gamble and actually I have lost more than I have won, BUT I still don't regret trying. I personally have had good experiences every single time. I have grown and I have learned.

I know for instance that writing with Green and Inthesquare is a great experience because we approach writing in the same way and we are all very confident in our own writing. We like how we write. We like how the other person writes. We know that, we don't feel the need to say it.

But I think I tend to forget that some writers (even really good ones!!) can feel self-conscious about their own writing and need more praise than what I give.

So bearing all that in mind here is my advice:

-Talk about what you need from the experience BEFOREHAND. How much hype, can I edit, how much editing can I do, etc etc. When green and I edit our works, we fully destroy each other's parts. We will go in and add and remove a LOT, to the point where it really becomes kind of undetectable, who wrote what, because we're in each other's lines everywhere. This isn't something that will feel good for everyone. When I write with inthesquare, we *barely* edit each other's work. The separation is much more obvious, and I don't really know why this is? It just is? We just kind of never edited the other person's part. And it works really beautifully, too. My point is these are two very different approach yet there isn't one better than the other, it's just different.

Some people do not like when you tinker with their writing too much. Some people do not like when you tinker with their writing at all. Make sure you know what each person is comfy with.

-Decide on a plan: are we writing each for a set amount of time? Of words? Are we each doing a chapter? The only rule is the one you make up.

-Don't put pressure on the work. See where it goes. If it dies, let it.

-I would advise against posting as you go if this stresses you out. That way if the story doesn't finish, no stress.

-Start with someone who you feel very confident writing with. Someone you know, who knows you, where the communication canals are OPEN. You're gonna need to be able to tell each other if someone does something that wasn't appreciated.

Not all co-writing will end up with a fully fledged fic. Not all co-writing will end up being a good experience. If the person you really want to write with doesn't want to write with you, don't take it personally. It just do be like that.

But I'm the kind of person who really has come to love it, and while I'm a lot more picky now with who I write (because I'd love to like, not lose more friends), I think I will always seek it out, especially with the people with whom it's been a success before. I love, love, loveeeeee writing with my friends. I find it so rewarding and fun and great and I have nothing bad to say about it. I just really, really love it.

And if you've made it till here just know I have ONE fic I wrote with 2 other writers that we published under anon. and it's just out there. Doing its thing.

[tecchous-thicc-buttocks]

what do you like doing in your free time?

why is your name clenched buttocks (I wanna know the reason, pls its so funny lol)

what are things you're good at? (own it babe) (and i don't mean 'babe' in a weird way - just gotta clear that lol)

do you have a best friend?

do you write OG stories and/or fanfics?

one thing you hate about yourself

one thing you love about yourself

do you want a pet? if so, what pet and why

(pls at this rate, its sounding like an interview, so sorry 😂 i'm just...i have a lot of time in my hands and i decided to do this for no particular reason)

fave type of music?

what made you like bsd? and did you always like it? (cause for me, i didnt like it too much at first but it grew on me the second time around)

have you read the bsd light novels and what's your fave light novel if yes?

any pet peeves?

what's your 'ideal' partner (do you have a type like Kunikida or are you fine with anything as long as you're having fun)

Would you rather be single and rich or taken and with a normal salary?

are you happy with where you work/study?

what's your dream career?

what's the app you use the most?

would you rather draw or write?

*** (P.S just pick the ones you want to answer) **

i think im going to look like a weirdo asking so much questions but whatever. at least we dont know each other HAHA i hope you have a good day. <3 and also i love your analyses. just keep posting what you like. i find some of your posts funny lol

good day.

(# you asked and i delivered) (# just me looking for an excuse to use this line) (# cause you said you wanted more questions in your other post TT) (# also ik this isn't a real tag but i wanna be ✨creative) (# fan behavior? idk anymore lmao) okay bye mwa <3

KHJDKJKSAJDGKJSFKG I LOVE THIS I LOVE YOU I WILL BEGIN ANSWERING NOW

i have no free time. I either overwork myself or sleep. however, assuming that i've got a sliver of time to do something, I swap from one obsession to the next <3 rn it's going for insanely long bike rides and turn down every road I feel like until I'm lost,, and going to the gym like an absolute maniac bc i want my arms to be the size of a regular adult's legs

my username is what i desire in life. it is was I strive to be worthy of. it is beauty and life itself, it is the culmination of the universe's most wonderous accomplishments all squished into two raging enormous, gargantuan muscular earth shattering sea trembling ass cheeks 😩😩 (BUT in all seriousness I chose this bc I felt like having tecchousthiccthighs wasn't quite as pleasant??? eheheh buttocks is a funny word)

MY TALENT IS SAYING ANYTHING THAT CROSSES MY MIND TO STRANGERS i've been on this spree lately where I just straight up call anyone pretty when I run into them and HOLY MOLY PPL ARE SO CUTE ABT IT this is your sign to compliment someone today ✨✨ but nah baby i'm good at everything it's a curse ngl (U CAN CALL ME WTV HUN IT'S OK KJKDJFKJS UR SO ADORABLE WHAT)

no best friend bc i can't do commitment and bully friends that get too close to me 😍😍 BUT i'm gonna tag @bellyjellyfish for being my one and only and somehow not hating me thru my unironic "uwu" phase <33

I wrote a 700 page story when I was 12 and it remains unfinished bc I kept rambling and there was no plot 🕴️I love writing but abandon a whole lot of works bc I dream up the rest of the plot and go "oh well why write it now i've been there done that" I DO WRITE FANFICS 👁️👁️ I have a wp account where i wrote a bunch of awful stories and it still stands to this day! (no i will not disclose it don't even try me grr)

I hate how sexy I am 😭😭😭😩😩😩🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵

I love how sexy I am 😳😳😳😳🥶🥶🥶🥶😜😜😜😜

I WANT A TARANTULA I WANT A TARANTULA I WAS A CHILEAN RED KNEE TARANTULA AND I WANT ONE SO BADLY OMFG I've always liked spiders but the ppl I live with would absolutely kick me out if I got one??? once i live on my own i'm def buying two cages so that whenever I have guests, I just put out the empty cage, hide the real one, and be like "oh no what happened to billy my tarantula, he escaped again :(" just to wreak havoc

(HAHA NO IT'S OK I USUALLY DO THIS TO OTHER PPL SO I APPRECIATE U SM LOL SLIDE INTO MY DMS BBG)

fav type of music is classical bc i'm edgy and not like other girls 🤩🤩🤩 something about la campanella just hit so hard when I was like 10 that I have taken it and ran, but I do listen to rnb a lot, never in just one language tho bc sometimes english sucks my d

I liked bsd as soon as I saw ranpo's silhouette in the first episode, I was like "him. I want him 🏃‍♀️" but it was solidified in my head as soon as I saw natsume bc 1) he's hot AF IT'S NOT FAIR I WANT HIM 2) I had been reading his irl works and fell in love, so I started exploring other bsd authors and it introduced me to gogol (i'm so in love with his writing style it's not ok) soooo yeah :)) I started reading bc someone (you know who you are) liked chuuya and I haven't looked back since, tbh it's one of my favs just bc of the characters and their depth

I've read all the light novels I could get my hands on, and I have to say stormbringer FOR THE ONLY, SOLE REASON THAT I AM IN ABSOLUTE LOVE WITH ADAM

pet peeve hmmmm idk??? i'm chill with everything except pickles I hate those mfs, but if I had to chose smth it would be when someone shoves a ship down my throat (it's me i'm bitches go stan satosugu rn)

no ideal partner! I'm aro fyi, but also I feel like I'd be chill with just abt anything?? if u match my energy, we can be partners in chaos and i'll feel understood, and if you don't, I get to learn abt a different kind of lifestyle and get to have someone sane to hold me down (or to corrupt), so either way it's a win. I find culture to be incredibly attractive, speak a language I don't or tell me about a tradition of yours with a wholesome smile and I'd move mountains for you 💖💖 teach me abt something that you're emotionally invested in and an expert, and I'm literally yours <3

haha i don't ever wanna be in a relationship so i'll take being rich,, but honestly it ain't about the money, i'd want to have a normal salary and be taken, but it just ain't my vibe ?? dunno how to explain erm-

dream career is racecar driver YOU TRAVEL ACROSS THE WORLD TO ICONIC DESTINATIONS YOU GET PAID INSANE MONEY AND YOU GO VROOM VROOM VERY FAST WHILE CONSTANTLY ALMOST DYING WHAT ELSE DO I NEED IN LIFE????

app i use most is my local library app bc i'm constantly trying to renew my books that are incredibly close to being overdue 🫡 but nahh i don't use my phone that often it still irks me i'm actually a 60 year old gilf who hates technology and complains abt kids these days

I CAN'T DRAW BUT I ALSO CAN'T WRITE YOU'VE GOT ME AT A DEADLOCK BRO??? if it's which I would rather be GOOD at, i'd say drawing bc imagine thinking abt something and just printing it out on paper??? yall fr got some magical talent omg

WHAT IF WE DO KNOW EACH OTHER THO??? WHAT IF WE'RE ACTUALLY NEIGHBORS??? CHILDHOOD FRIENDS??? YOU NEVER KNOW AND YOU PROBABLY NEVER WILL MUAHAHAHAHA i'm gonna stop now but ty for all your questions and have a wonderful day, darling <33

[onepintobean]

either/or

slow burn or love at first sight //

fake dating or secret dating //

enemies to lovers or best friends to lovers //

oh no there’s only one bed or long distance correspondence //

hurt/comfort or amnesia //

fantasy au or modern au //

mutual pining or domestic bliss //

smut or fluff //

canon-compliant or fix-it //

reincarnation or character death //

one-shot or multi-chapter //

kid fic or road trip fic //

arranged marriage or accidental marriage //

high school romance or middle aged romance //

time travel or isolated together//

neighbors or roommates  //

sci-fi au or magic au //

body swap or gender bend //

angst or crack //

apocalyptic or mundane

Thank you for tagging me, @ileadacharmedlife! I loved reading your opinions!

I know some of y’all have already been tagged but I’m nosy and very curious about what everyone likes reading, so I’m tagging @basiltonbutliketheherb @bookish-bogwitch @takitalks @sapphicflaaffy @anonaxolotl, if y’all wanna play (no pressure)! 😄

Details on some (most) of my choices under the cut!

(._. whoops I wrote 700 words about my favorite tropes instead of being productive)

slow burn wins every time. I wanna know exactly what’s convincing them to get together! I need the pining or else I don’t care.

fake dating. Look. There’s no contest here. Fake dating wins every time, in every category, against every competitor. There is nothing better than the forced proximity of fake dating, especially coupled with strangers to lovers or enemies or lovers. What’s better than getting to read about characters being stupid and in denial?

I love fake dating enough that I have read fics fandom-blind just because I ran out of ones in my fandom. I could go on lol

No shade to all y’all who like secret dating, but I haven’t been able to read it, especially if it has to be a secret from everyone. (it’s so stressful!!) But maybe I should give it another shot?

Enemies to lovers. This one is soooo finicky. I LOVE it, but they both need to be equals. They both need to give as good as they get (or just not even actually be enemies). But when it’s done right, literally nothing compares.

Only one bed. This one is just good. Plus I keep a soft spot for it in my heart because I had a ‘there was only one bed’ moment with one of my best friends (hiiii Julia if you’re reading this), back before we really knew each other. It’s incredibly effective for speedrunning good old fashioned strangers to friends 🥰🥰🥰🥰

(Also it of course loses to long distance. Another one that I personally just can’t read.)

I love a good amnesia fic, but they also always make me weirdly sad? The amnesiac version of the character exists and is loved, but in order to have a happy ending to the story, this version essentially dies via having their memories returned. 😭 (if you love amnesia stories but they also make you sad, you should check out A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. It’s the second in the series, but it does stand alone, if you’re not looking to commit to two books just for one trope.)

Mutual pining. I usually prefer getting-together over established relationships, and mutual pining is so so good when it's done well. I love it when both characters make themselves miserable for no good reason! Dramatic irony my beloved. (Plus I love it because this swings back around to my thing for fake dating LOL)

Road trip. My beloved! Really this is just a vehicle (…no pun intended) for forced proximity and there was only one bed situations. I usually shy away from kidfic because when the vibes are off, they’re very off. But I’ve read (and since lost 😭) some great kidfic in the past!

arranged marriage. I haven’t read too many arranged marriage fics, but I do like this one as a subset of fake dating but with higher stakes. A solid political arranged marriage between two rival kingdoms is a perennial fav

high school romance. I’ve seen so much hate for high school romance and high school AUs lately, but I really don’t get it. There’s something to be said for all the restrictions that high school places on characters. Situations become even more complicated when your time and freedom are so limited, and you're under such strict observation. Plus you get so many diverse character dynamics, and all these people are forced to interact even if they never would outside of a high school setting. It really suits ensemble casts! I'm also just a fan of coming of age stories in general.

time travel. All that about forced proximity and I didn’t even pick isolated together? Unfortunately, time travel is one of my top favorite things. Especially if the time travel is question is a timeloop.

But of course, yes, I love it when characters get stuck. You get to know people so quickly when you spend all day with them, especially in a high-stress situation!

roommates. oh my god they were roommates.

(look, I'm back at it again picking the higher level of proximity in the forced proximity options!)

body swap. ugh, there’s so much value in a good body swap. Reckoning with personal identity. To be forced to see yourself through others’ eyes! AND to be obligated to love yourself because you love the person who’s currently inhabiting your body.

angst. Sometimes I just want to be sad on purpose! What can I say, I love catharsis

[pies-writes-and-more]

PIES’ FIC RECOMMENDATIONS FOR MAY 2020

So I’ve never done one of these fic recommendations lists before but I really want to share some of the amazing work that I’ve read this past month! I’ve definitely read a whole ton more but I was dumb and didn’t think to like draft this list and then just keep adding to it... so I’m just attempting to go through my tags LOL please be patient with my dumbass. 

NOTE: Since I only started doing this recently, a lot of my recommendations are gonna come from a lot of my mutuals but I’m always open to hearing more about other fics!!! If you’ve got an incredible fic that you are super proud of or if you think that I should read something you’ve read, PLEASE SEND IT TO ME! I’m really big on StevexFem!Reader, BuckyxFem!Reader, WandaxFem!Reader, CarolxFem!Reader, and Stucky fics!!!

If you do end up reading these fics, please tag me if you reblog them or comment on them!! I’d love to see your guys’ reactions :) 

ANYWAYS THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE HAVE CRUSHED MY HEART WITH AMAZING FICS, RUINED MY IDEALS OF WHAT LOVE IS, AND/OR BROKEN MY HEART WITH ANGST ONLY TO REVIVE IT WITH SOME FLUFF. I love you all so very much.

PS. if these links dont work for some reason, please let me know so I can update this list because I was very distracted halfway through making this so it might not be perfect!

1.Walpurgis Night by @anika-ann​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “In which Steven volunteers to find a long-lost princess of Starkerbürg. (Fairy Tale AU)” I have no clue why this fic is not given more goddamn attention because holy shit yall, I have never been so grasped by a fic before. If you love medieval/fairy tale type things, you will love this fic. And if you don’t, you’re gonna love it anyways because @anika-ann​ writes SO. FUCKING. WELL. 100% fluff and love.

2. Abs Aren’t Always the Answer by @its-not-captain-america​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “Steve asks Y/N what girls are interested in, trying to impress her. Several shirtless pics later it’s not working.” Y’all want hilarious shit??? What about Steve Rogers always trying to take his fucking shirt off because he has the DNA (and the body) of a stripper? JK that’s not the actual reason but this fic is so funny, I died reading the first 700 times (and the 701st time too... and every time after that). 100% hilarious.

3. Challenge Accepted...? by @anika-ann​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader ”Steve’s never been good at quick decision-making when it came to his own safety. After one particularly horrible experience, you find a way to remind him every day to think twice the next time he’s faced with a tough choice. He is not amused.” Steven Grant Rogers you stupid dumb hoe lol. That’s all I’mma say about this fic because it speaks for itself when you read it haha. Banter is iconic in this fic. 100% hilarious.

4. A Matter of Trust by @anika-ann​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “You and Steve get to go to a mission together after a while; free drinks, partying, dressing-up nicely, stealing blueprints, the usual. You might even enjoy this as a couple.“ This time it’s Y/N that’s kindof a stupid dumb hoe but like that’s okay because when Y/N is a stupid dumb hoe, it’s not as stupid or dumb as when Steve does it. There’s a bit of a carry on between Challenge Accepted...? and this fic! So I would suggest reading that one first and then this :) 100% hilarious.

5. For a Smile by @anika-ann​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “You see him run past every morning. So you smile, because he looks like a nice person. How could he not be when he smiles back and the world stops for a while to pay respect to such beauty?” So you know how Disney movies totally screwed over some of our perspectives of how guys were gonna come and sweep us off our feet? Yeah. This fic did it too. I’m still waiting for my fairytale fucking moment like this fic but if it never happens, I’ll settle for just reading this over and over again LOL. 100% F L U F F and LOVE.

6. Grease and Pearls by @anika-ann​​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “All you know is uptown; fancy clothes, expensive cars, jewellery outshining one’s personality and exhausting dinners with family acquaintances and business partners. Your life is all planned out; one day, you’ll marry Howard Stark’s son and you’ll be the golden couple adored by press.” This 3-part series slayed me. Like honestly, I’ve never been so torn apart before. Y’all lucky that if you read it, you get to read all 3 parts right away whereas I had to sit and wait for my heart to be torn apart and then stomped on. (Jk anika i love you you know that). Super amazing thing I love about this fic: it’s got links to the dresses that Y/N wears (super cute btw) AND it’s got two different endings so you can decide!!! 100% ANGST and 100% FLUFF? At the same time??? Because of the two endings?!?!?!? NOTE: part 2 got some steamy smut in there so 18+ readers only. I had to take a cold shower after reading it like goddamn.

7. Be Alright by @kayteewritessteve​ ​| Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “Steve goes through a bad breakup, but a sweet voice and a friendly smile helps him realize he can begin again, and that he definitely should.” God this fic. I can’t with this fic. It’s based on the Dean Lewis song Be Alright, which is already one of my favourites, but this fic, ugh, Kaytee knows how to hurt you that’s for sure. It’s so pure and so wonderful. 100% SAD but like it gets better promise.

8. Cold Feet by @anika-ann​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader

“After two months of dating, you’ve come to a conclusion as exciting as well as a bit irritating: Steve Rogers is a perfect man. He simply has no flaw.Or does he?” Mother. Fucking. Adorable. I dunno if there’s anything else to say except that anika really knows how to make me wish I was Y/N adsoifhosd. 100% F L U F F

9. Hot Chocolate by @vodkaxtonic​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “Steve gets sick and Y/N takes care of him, which involves a lot of Steve’s whining, hot chocolate and cuddles.“ Steve Rogers is a little shit who won’t just accept that he’s sick and needs to be taken care of BUT IT’S SO CUTE AND THIS FIC IS THE BEST!!!! 100% FLUFF!!

10. Home by @evanstush​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “It’s been 2 years since the last battle and it’s now Morgan’s 7th birthday, and well, Tony being Tony, he prepared a small party for her little girl, inviting everyone from the team, including you.” Hnnnggg this fic. Okay so. I love @evanstush​ with all my fucking heart because she’s always been so supportive of me and my fics. That being said I WAS NOT EXPECTING HER KIND ASS TO HURT MY HEART LIKE THIS. But again, it’s okay because it’s got fluff guys. 50% ANGST and 50% FLUFF. Well like it’s 100% both but like I have to split it haha.

11. Cocktails by @writeyourmindaway​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “ ~i really don’t know what to write i’m sorry~ DRINKS!” That’s okay, darling, I’ll write the summary you. HILARITY. WONDERFULNESS. THE WORD BLOWJOB WRITTEN SO MANY TIMES AND IT’S FUCKING GOLD. This is so funny i love it haha. This fic killed me. I should’ve seen it coming (hehe) but i didn’t lol. 100% HILARIOUS.

12. Unadulterated by @writeyourmindaway​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader No summary for this one but again, I shall do the honours haha. It’s part 2 of ‘Cocktails’ and this one is just as adorable and hilarious as the first part! Steve is a cheeky little soft boi and the flirting just makes me feel all sorts of ways <3 100% ADORABLE.

13. Water Wars by @writeyourmindaway | Bucky Barnes x Fem!Reader “The team finds a new way to unwind” I love fics where you just see the team get to be normal people!!! Plus haven’t we all thought about how the Avengers would are in a water fight? Is that just me? Don’t have to fantasize about it now because @writeyourmindaway wrote it for you :D 100% FLUFF.

14. Slow Like Honey by @heli0s-writes | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “The gossip that buzzes around in the teacher’s lounge is that sweet, sensitive, divorcé Steve Rogers is hot-for-teacher. His daughter’s first-grade teacher, to be exact.” I binged this whole fucking series. 8 parts of PURE. EVERYTHING. I have never so badly wanted a happy ending in my fucking life. This is an amazing series with so much love put into it, you can tell. I really can’t explain this fic because you really need to just go read it to know how amazing it is. NOTE: Part 4, 5, and 8 have some serious love smut in there so 18+ readers only please. UGH. I love this fic so much. I will continue to keep daydreaming about it and thinking about it all the time. God I love me some Dad!Steve. 50% FLUFF and 50% ANGST (which seriously tore my heart out like I cried).

15. You Make My World Spin by @anika-ann | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “After the Battle of New York and all the mess Tony gets involved in later, Pepper believes he is in a need of an assistant slash tech genius. Enter you. While Tony is not amused by Pepper’s idea at first… he soon warms up to you.” So many insanely wonderful references in this fic, it’s hilarious. Also, Tony being a little shit LOL. Such a hilarious fic!!!! 100% AMAZINGLY HILARIOUS.

16. If You Stumble... by @anika-ann | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “If you stumble…make it part of the dance. In which you ask Steve what your date would look like if you lived the forties. He decides to show you instead. There are few flaws, holes to see through to glimpse beyond that illusion. But what life would be besides boring if everything was perfect? Perfect dress. Perfect date. Perfect gentleman…?” So my dumbass was so excited to read something that anika put out that I didn’t realize this was part 2 of a 3 part series lol I’m dumb yes I know. Anyways, this is part 1 so please don’t be like me and read the first part LOL. ANYWAYS, this was so fucking wholesome. This is definitely one that I need to read again and fully read in order (she’s got part 3 on her AO3, I believe) but ugh. I love the idea of Steve dating in this century, comparing things to how things were done in the old days ufglasodfhsd. I love it. Amazing. 100% FLUFF (I think because well my dumbass hasn’t finished but this part was fluffy :3)

17. @wxstedhexrt‘s poems | Read Them Here! | Steve Rogers x Bucky Barnes I don’t think Destiny ever gave me a summary of these but (and Destiny, please correct me if I’m wrong in how you want these to be portrayed!) I believe they’re poems written throughout the whole Steve and Bucky timeline. She’s used the Winter Soldier’s words and turned them into a gorgeous set of poems. 100% My favourite thing in the whole fucking world. 

18. The Lonely Tree by @sarahwroteathing​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “You have a favorite tree which you make sure to pass every day on your way to class, but one day you find you’ll have to get used to sharing it with a friendly art student.” Holy shit guys this 15 part series was so amazing. It’s 100% PURE FLUFF and PINING and gorgeous. Holy shit. Like I screamed reading the whole goddamn thing. Amazing writing by an amazing human being with some awesome humour haha.

19. @sinner-as-saint​ responding to an anon request? Amazing. | Bucky Barnes x Fem!Reader Request: May I just spice up your day with the thought of best friend/roommate bucky being jealous when you bring someone home HOT. AS. FUCK. Holy shit. It’s such a short little list of things that Bucky would do but ugh. I was dying reading it. I love me some jealous Bucky smut. 100% angsty fluff? With smuttiness ;) 18+ readers please!!

20. @alloftheimaginesblog​ prompted fic | Steve Rogers x Reader (I could be wrong here but I believe the gender of the reader is never specified? But the ring is a woman’s ring so?? @alloftheimaginesblog​ pls correct me if you want!) Prompt: Finding an engagement ring in one of their drawers. So fucking fluffy I needed a cavity filled after ugh. I loved it so much it was just a gorgeous piece of writing. Steve is a little piece of poop for not hiding that ring better I mean come on, you’re telling me you couldn’t have punched a hole, put the ring there, and then cover it up with like a cabinet or something??? jk i still love you steeb. 100% fluff!

21. Laser Tag by @stargazingfangirl18​ | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “You play laser tag with your boyfriend Steve and his best friend Bucky. Since you’re just a plain ole civilian, you gotta use what non-Avenger skills you have to avoid losing. Hint: those skills involve Steve and kissing.” Iconic. Everything. Wonderful. There is nothing I love more than Steve Rogers being a little sucker for making out with his girlfriend even when there’s a competition. 100% fluff!!!!

22. Under the Rainbow, Draga mea by @binkysteebnpewter​ | Wanda Maximoff x Fem!Reader I don’t think there’s an official summary ( @binkysteebnpewter​ pls correct me if I’m wrong) but my summary is this: GAYNESS <3 I love me some wlw content so when I saw this pop up on my dash, I couldn’t NOT read. It’s soooo good. This is a Social Media AU and the amount of meme usage in there I- it’s fucking wonderful. It’s still in progress though so you guys will have to pine after this relationship with me. I FUCKING LOVE IT. 100% GAY LOVE <3

23. A Fic in which Peggy Carter plays wingwoman because these two idiots are in love with each other but they can’t see it so our Queen needs to throw it at them by @1she1hulk1​ (please note I made this title by myself because I don’t think there was a title LOL @1she1hulk1​ lmk if you want me to change this xD) | Steve Rogers x Fem!Reader “the plot is bacially you and Steve go to see Peggy and she tells Steve to finally make his move” Peggy Carter is a fucking Queen and she knows that Steve is falling for you, because he just won’t stop fucking talking about you LOL. Anyways, this is a super cute fic!!!! Please go give it some love because this human being who wrote it doesn’t think she’s a good writer?????? Crazy. 100% FLUFF!!!!

OTHER FICS THAT DESERVE MENTIONING!!!!

So because this is my first recommendation list on this site, I know I’m definitely missing some amazing fics that I’ve read but never saved (I’m a terrible person I know). So I’m just gonna add them in this list here because they deserve love and attention too!

@wxstedhexrt​‘s poetry. Period. End of story lol. JK. So the ones that I’ve read that are on Destiny’s tumblr aren’t all fandom related (besides the one that I posted above) but they’re still really amazing. I’ve never felt so captured by poems before (mostly because i’m stupid and don’t understand a lot of poetry). Ugh anyways I love her poems so much so please go check them out! CLICK HERE FOR BEAUTY <3

Alright so I know a lot of you guys know @kayteewritessteve​ but if you don’t, she’s this super amazing writer with INCREDIBLE series. (CLICK HERE TO SEE HER FULL MASTERLIST). But one of my most favourite series by her, and one of my favourite series of all time, is: If Only You Knew “You arrive home one day to find a wedding invite for two of your best friends from high school. You knew this day was going to come eventually, but even with that said, you weren’t prepared to return home. At least not after 7 years of avoiding Buckhannon, West Virginia. Or rather, avoiding him; your ex-best friend and the secret love of your life. But maybe it was finally time to face your past, to face him and everything else that happened on that horrible night.”  This 18 (plus an Epilogue) part series will literally have you screaming at your screen being like WHY YALL CANT JUST TELL EACH OTHER HOW YALL FEEL?!?!?!?! 75% angst (because Kaytee likes to hurt us) and 25% fluff BUT the fluff is SOOOOO worth it so it’s like 100% angst and 200% fluff (i was never a mathlete). NOW since, we’re on the topic of Kaytee’s writing, I’d also like to mention: Love and War  “In a harsh medieval world, you set out on a perilous quest that will lead you onto a forbidden land. A land ruled and controlled by a ruthless Warlord King, one who does not look favourably upon trespassers of any kind, and punishes all with an iron fist. You may not know exactly where this quest will end, but what you do know is you will forever be altered by it. And that knowledge alone is what truly terrifies you the most.” so I read this while Kaytee was writing it about a year ago and holllyyyyyy shit. Okay. So. Listen. Fantasy? Check. Romance? Check. Amazing writing? Well it’s Kaytee so yea obviously check. I want to list more things but I don’t want to give it away! This is a 15 part series (plus an Epilogue and Outro) but it goes by so quickly once you’re stuck and waiting for more!!!! 

[yessadirichards]

Sharapova ends a career that was stuff of Hollywood

PARIS: From the shadow of Chernobyl's nuclear wasteland to international super-stardom and from penniless arrival in the United States, without a word of English, to estimated earnings of at least US$300 million.

For a long time Maria Sharapova's story was the stuff of Hollywood dreams, a testament to the power of one individual to make it, whatever the odds, whatever people think.

A drugs ban in 2016 and persistent injuries cast a shadow over her career and on Wednesday, with an announcement in Vogue magazine, the 32-year-old brought her eventful career to an end.

"How do you leave behind the only life you've ever known? How do you walk away from the courts you've trained on since you were a little girl, the game that you love," she wrote.

"Tennis — I'm saying goodbye."

Sharapova shot to international fame as a giggly 17-year-old Wimbledon winner in 2004 -- the third youngest player to conquer the All England Club's famous grass courts.

She would go on to win the Australian and US Opens while claiming two titles at the French Open, despite famously likening her movement on Roland Garros's crushed red brick to a "cow on ice".

Siberia-born Sharapova first picked up a racquet at the age of four in Sochi, where her Belarus-born parents had settled after escaping the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Overnight celebrity

Spotted by Martina Navratilova, she was encouraged to move to Nick Bollettieri's Florida academy, the proving ground of Andre Agassi and Monica Seles.

Father Yuri and the seven-year-old Maria left for the US in 1994 with just $700 to their names.

Yuri took odd jobs like dishwashing to finance his daughter's dreams although visa restrictions meant mother Yelena was back in Russia, separated from her daughter for two years.

Sharapova made her professional debut at 14 in 2001 and by 2003 reached the world top 50. She won her first tour titles in Japan and Quebec.

Then in 2004, her Wimbledon final triumph in straight sets over Serena Williams made her an overnight international celebrity.

One year later, she became the first Russian woman to be ranked number one in the world while, in 2006, she won her second major at the US Open.

But in 2007 and 2008, she began her long, on-off battle with shoulder trouble.

She still had time to win the 2008 Australian Open before a second shoulder injury. But in 2012 she captured the French Open to become the 10th woman to complete a career Grand Slam. She added Olympic silver to her resume that year.

Her 2014 French Open title was another high after a dispiriting injury low.

More injury troubles followed before the bombshell announcement of her positive test for meldonium at the 2016 Australian Open -- where she fell in the quarter-finals to Williams, her last match before a 15-month suspension.

With Williams, she endured her most testing rivalry -- on and off the court.

The two famously exchanged personal insults over their love lives when Sharapova began a two-year romance with Bulgarian player Grigor Dimitrov, a rumoured previous suitor of the American.

Sharapova had previously been engaged to former Los Angeles Laker Sasha Vujacic.

Commercial Jackpot

She may have been unlucky in love, but Sharapova hit the jackpot in her commercial affairs.

She once signed a contract extension with Nike worth a reported $70 million and Forbes calculated in 2016 that she had made more than $300 million over her career from playing and endorsements.

"Beauty sells. I have to realise that's a part of why people want me. I'm not going to make myself ugly," she said.

She owns luxury homes and made a lucrative career as an entrepreneur.

In 2012, she launched her own line of candy, 'Sugarpova', and during her suspension, signed up for a Harvard Business School course.

For 11 years before her doping ban, Sharapova was the highest-paid female athlete in the world, said Forbes. When she was suspended Tag Heuer cut off talks over a new deal and Porsche and Nike suspended promotional plans, though they did not sever their links.

When Sharapova returned in 2017 her world ranking had disappeared, leaving her at the mercy of wildcards into tournaments.

Those free-passes irked many of her contemporaries already suspicious of the Russian's aloofness.

Troubled by her shoulder, she struggled to recapture her best form.

When she lost in straight sets to Donna Vekic in the first round of the Australian Open in January, the writing seemed on the wall.

"You realise that you're not immortal, you're never going to play this forever," Sharapova said. "At one point, life goes on and there's a lot of things to look forward to."

"You have family, children, other business ventures. To me, that doesn't make me sad, that makes me excited."

In her farewell note in Vogue, she wrote: "In giving my life to tennis, tennis gave me a life. I'll miss it every day."

[mikemortgage]

The Latest: More than a dozen arrested on looting charges

WILMINGTON, N.C. — The Latest on Florence (all times local):

6:30 p.m.

Authorities cracking down on looting and break-ins in one North Carolina county impacted by Florence say they’ve arrested more than a dozen people. Three of those arrests came after an online undercover sting operation.

News outlets cite Jacksonville police as saying officers saw a broken-out front window at an athletic shoe store but the investigation had to be delayed during the storm’s passage — and until they could contact the owners.

Police say the suspects were using an online app to sell stolen goods to undercover officers. The three were charged with felony breaking and entering, looting, curfew violation and other charges. They say they recovered dozens of pairs of stolen shoes, as well as clothing, many of the items with security devices and tags still attached.

The three men were all given $70,000 secured bonds. It’s not known if they have attorneys.

——

6:30 p.m.

Two interstates closed to traffic in eastern North Carolina because of river flooding from Florence likely will remain closed for at least another week.

Transportation Secretary Jim Trogdon said Thursday that 16 sections of Interstate 40 and Interstate 95 are still flooded, preventing major traffic from getting into and out of the city of Wilmington. While some motorists are using alternate routes to reach the southeastern North Carolina coast, Gov. Roy Cooper urged displaced residents to stay away from areas that still lack power and other necessities.

Trogdon says he anticipates the interstate routes won’t re-open until the flooding recedes on the Cape Fear and Lumber rivers. He says that means I-40 won’t be cleared to traffic until next weekend at the earliest, and I-95’s reopening could be longer.

Cooper says more than 700 roads remains closed. Authorities are warning against road travel in all or parts of 17 eastern counties.

——

5:20 p.m.

Officials in the place where much of the floodwaters from Hurricane Florence will reach the Atlantic Ocean are preparing for a flood like they have never seen before.

Georgetown County Administrator Sel Hemingway said Thursday it is too early to know exactly how high the water will get or how much land will be flooded starting next week.

Water from five different rivers flow through the county to the ocean.

Hemingway says in the worst-case scenario, more than 10 per cent of the county’s 61,000 residents might have to evacuate. Flooding could cut off U.S. Highway 17, the main road north out of Georgetown.

Hemmingway says officials should know more by this weekend.

Authorities planned to start handing out 15,000 sandbags Friday.

——

5:20 p.m.

Officials from several state agencies are urging motorists not to travel in areas of southeastern North Carolina because many roads remain impassable due to flooding and road conditions which continue to change.

The N.C. Highway Patrol and others say travel is not recommended in Bladen, Brunswick, Columbus, western Craven, Cumberland, Duplin, Harnett, Hoke, southern Johnston, Jones, Lenoir, New Hanover, Pender, Robeson, Sampson, Scotland and southern Wayne counties.

Patrol commander Col. Glenn McNeill Jr. says that while some routes are starting to open, motorists should avoid travel in flooded areas unless necessary and should never drive on flooded roads.

Officials say that GPS systems are less reliable in the aftermath of a hurricane when conditions are frequently changing. As such, motorists should avoid completely relying on their GPS systems for roadway information as these systems may re-route them to a road that is closed.

——

4:05 p.m.

At least 41 deaths have now been attributed to Hurricane Florence.

North Carolina Department of Public Safety spokesman Keith Acree says four additional deaths were reported Thursday to the state and occurred in Duplin County. He says a 74-year-old man and his 22-year-old granddaughter died Monday of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a generator that was inside the home.

An 87-year-old woman and her 81-year-old husband also died. Acree said they had been living without power for several days.

The death toll in North Carolina now stands at 31. The other deaths occurred in South Carolina and Virginia.

——

4:05 p.m.

Utility workers continue to work to restore power to North Carolina residents who lost electricity due to Hurricane Florence.

North Carolina’s electric co-operatives reported Thursday statewide outages have dropped to about 38,000, down from a historic high of 326,000 on Saturday.

Duke Energy reported more than 70,000 customers without power in southeastern North Carolina. Of those, more than a third, or about 24,500, are in New Hanover County, which includes the city of Wilmington.

——

1:45 p.m.

Hundreds of roads in North Carolina remain closed due to the effects of former Hurricane Florence.

The N.C. Department of Transportation said on its Twitter page Thursday that nearly 750 roads are still closed. At one point as many as 2,200 were closed.

The closures include sections of Interstate 40 and Interstate 95. Also, U.S. Highway 258 in Kinston was closed Thursday due to flooding, and the department said drivers should plan for U.S. Highway 70 to be closed as the Neuse River continues to rise.

U.S. 70 is one of the major routes from Raleigh to the coast.

The department also said U.S. 421 at the New Hanover County line is now closed.

——

1:45 p.m.

Major flooding on North Carolina’s Little River earlier this week swallowed buildings and forced evacuations. Now that waters have receded, property owners along its banks are returning to survey the damage.

The destruction brought by the flood was evident Thursday in Spring Lake, North Carolina, a town of 13,000 near Ft. Bragg. The banks were littered with bricks and debris from a motel that collapsed after flooding swept the earth out from under it.

Next door, a convenience store owner inspected damage to his shop where turbulent floodwater had knocked down shelves and left silty mud on the walls and floor.

Heavy rain from Hurricane Florence earlier this week caused the Little River to swell well beyond its banks.

Before National Weather service gauges measuring water levels stopped working, it had reached 36 feet (10 metres), a record-breaking major flood.

——

1:45 p.m.

Many groups are helping to feed victims of Hurricane Florence in North Carolina, but one stands out for the sheer volume of meals it has distributed: World Central Kitchen.

The chairman of the New Hanover County commissioners says the non-profit organization came to Wilmington four days before the storm. He says it has provided 90,000 meals so far for shelters, first responders, the National Guard and the people working in the county’s emergency operations.

Chairman Woody White said the group has started bringing meals into communities via food trucks. White says World Central Kitchen’s work has been “remarkable to witness.”

Celebrity chef Jose Andres founded the non-profit, which is best known for serving more than 1 million meals last year in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

——

1 p.m.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster says the state’s financial losses from Florence are estimated at more than $1.2 billion.

McMaster provided the damages estimates Thursday in a letter to the state’s congressional delegation.

Among the breakdowns included in McMaster’s letter is an estimated $125 million hit to South Carolina’s agriculture industry. The governor noted that some of the estimates were based on damage resulting from Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

McMaster has requested federal disaster-recovery funds be made available for 23 of South Carolina’s 46 counties.

He wrote the damage from Florence in the northeastern area of the state “will be catastrophic, surpassing anything recorded in modern history.”

——

10 a.m.

Duke Energy has activated a high-level emergency alert at a retired coal-fired power plant near Wilmington, North Carolina, as floodwaters from the nearby Cape Fear River overtopped an earthen dike and inundated a large lake.

Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said Thursday that the dam containing Sutton Lake appears stable and they are monitoring the situation with helicopters and drones to react to what was called “an evolving situation.”

The lake is a former cooling pond at the L.V. Sutton Power Station and is adjacent to three large coal ash dumps. A landfill at the site ruptured over the weekend, spilling enough material to fill 180 dump trucks. Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury and other toxic heavy metals.

——

8:30 a.m.

A section of Interstate 95 in South Carolina has been closed because of flooding.

The Department of Public Safety said Wednesday evening that the highway was closed in both directions at the 175 mile marker because of high water levels at the bridges crossing the Great Pee Dee River. There are detours available for local traffic.

The decision to close the road comes less than 12 hours after the department had reopened a 9-mile (14-kilometre) stretch of the highway near the North Carolina state line, which had meant the entire highway was open in the state.

——

1 a.m.

Hurricane Florence is still wearing out the Carolinas, where residents have endured an agonizing week of violent winds, torrential rain, widespread flooding, power outages and death.

Frustration and sheer exhaustion are building as thousands of people wait to go home seven days after the storm began battering the coast.

Florence is blamed for at least 37 deaths. That includes those of two women who drowned when a sheriff’s van taking them to a mental health facility was swept off a road.

President Donald Trump visited North and South Carolina on Wednesday, saying the government will be there to help.

But evacuee and college student Evan Jones says he’s just ready for it all to be over. In his words: “I’m trying to get it all out of my head.”

from Financial Post https://ift.tt/2xGuLki via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

[kidsviral-blog]

Is It Time For Us To Take Astrology Seriously?

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/is-it-time-for-us-to-take-astrology-seriously/

Is It Time For Us To Take Astrology Seriously?

In an April marked by angry eclipses portending unexpected change, the ancient, long-debunked practice of astrology and its preeminent ambassador might be weirdly suited for the 21st century.

View this image ›

Illustration by Justine Zwiebel for BuzzFeed

Every Tuesday and Thursday from noon until 7 p.m., Bart Lidofsky pins a small plastic name tag to his shirt (“Bart Lidofsky, Astrologer”) and receives customers at the Quest Bookshop on East 53rd Street in New York City. After I wander up to him and introduce myself — I am there to have my natal chart read — he leads me to a little table in the back of the store and pulls a gauzy green curtain closed behind us. “For privacy,” he says.

Quest specializes in spiritual, esoteric, and New Age literature, but also sells crystals, runes, incense, divination equipment, mala beads, essential oils, candles, pendulums, gemstones, and “altar supplies.” It smells like church in here. You can picture the clientele — people who are comfortable pontificating about auras, people who know how to hang wind chimes. Lidofsky has been performing astrological readings for 20 years, and his bio contains a long string of bona fides: He’s a member of the American Federation for Astrological Networking and the National Center for Geocosmic Research, and frequently delivers lectures for the New York Theosophical Society. Or, as he calls it, “the Lodge.”

After we sit down, Lidofsky asks for the precise date, time, and location of my birth, and spends the next 45 minutes determining, in his words, “how things fit together.”

Before I leave, Lidofsky — who wears a robust white goatee and small wire-frame glasses — hands me his business card. It is pale blue, and features a photograph of Saturn alongside all the pertinent contact information. “Feeling lost in a difficult world?” it wonders in extra-large type. “Help is available.”

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Until recently, I thought of astrology, when I thought of it at all, as frivolous and nearly embarrassing — a pseudoscience unworthy of consideration by serious people. I’m sure I felt at least partially implicated via my age and gender: A short screed in an 1852 edition of the New York Times called astrology’s audience “women and girls who are compelled to struggle as a living,” and declared the practice more odious than “the dozen other species of street swindles for which our city is famous.” In the late 1980s, when a former chief of staff published a provocative memoir claiming Nancy Reagan relied on a San Francisco astrologer to, as Time magazine put it, “determine the timing of the President’s every public move,” Ronald Reagan had to publicly insist that “at no time did astrology determine policy.” It was a major humiliation. Even the celebrity astrologer Steven Forrest has acknowledged his field’s dubious image. “I am often embarrassed to say what I do… Astrology has a terrible public relations problem,” he wrote in an essay for Astrology News Service.

But then there was this sense — suddenly, on the street — that astrology had credence. A 2013 New York magazine story claimed that “plenty of New Yorkers wouldn’t buy an apartment or accept a new job without an astral okay.” An occult bookstore opened on a dusty corner of Bushwick and was rhapsodically covered by the Times (its name, Catland, referenced a song by the British experimental band Current 93; its location in Brooklyn indicated a certain kind of culturally conscious clientele). People were talking frankly about their aspects. They knew which planets are in retrograde; they were jittery about eclipses. And it turns out what I’ve been observing anecdotally in New York — among my undergraduate writing students at New York University, in the press, between the otherwise high-functioning attendees of Brooklyn dinner parties — is supportable, at least in part, by statistics. According to a report from the National Science Foundation published earlier this year, “In 2012, slightly more than half of Americans said that astrology was ‘not at all scientific,’ whereas nearly two-thirds gave this response in 2010. The comparable percentage has not been this low since 1983.” While this sort of acceptance isn’t unprecedented, it’s still a curious spike. Astrology is gaining believers, and has been for a while.

In some ways, these numbers jibe with some broader cultural shifts: Whereas an astrological dabbler may have previously glanced at his horoscope in the newspaper while swirling cream into his coffee, there is now a vast and endless expanse of websites featuring complex, customized forecasts, some further broken down into insane and arbitrary-seeming categories (on Astrology.com, for example, you can consult a “Daily Flirt,” “Daily Home and Garden,” “Daily Dog,” or “Daily Lesbian” horoscope, among other variations). There is more access to astrology, just as there is more access to everything: A person can shop around, compare their fortunes, wait to find what they need.

When I speak to a former student, now 22, about the increase — it seems likely it’s at least in part attributable to her and her peers — she describes astrology’s mysteriousness as its most alluring attribute. She reads her horoscope every month, faithfully. Its inherent fallibility, she says, is precisely what makes it fun. For her, astrology is about feeling the strange thrill of indulging something (vaguely) supernatural, but it’s also about getting what she is really after, what we are all really after now: actionable, interactive information. These days, there aren’t many problems Google can’t solve. Except the problem of what happens next.

While folks her age are hardly the first group to feel the draw of the unknown, it also makes sense that a generation that came of age with the whole of human knowledge in its pockets might find the ambiguity of astrology a little welcome sometimes. For people born with the web, information has always been instantly accessible, so astrology’s abstruseness — and, ironically, its promises of clarity regarding the only real unknowable: the future — becomes appealing. This generation’s predicament, as I understand it, has always felt Dickensian: “We have everything before us, we have nothing before us.”

But then I’m reminded, again, that inaccuracy, or, at least, a belief in the fluidity of truth, is at the heart of the present-day zeitgeist: Our news is often hasty and unverified, our photos are filtered and retouched, our songs are pitch-corrected, our unscripted television programs are storyboarded into oblivion, and most everyone shrugs it all off. Astrology might not offer the most accurate or verifiable information, but at least it offers information — arguably the only currency that makes sense in 2014.

In that way, astrology seems perfectly positioned to become the defining dogma of our time.

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The earliest extant astrological text is a series of 70 clay tablets known collectively as Enuma Anu Enlil. The originals haven’t been recovered, but copies were found in the library of King Assurbanipal, a seventh-century B.C. Assyrian leader who reigned at Nineveh, in what’s presently northwestern Iraq. (Some of the tablets are now held by the British Museum in London.) The Enuma Anu Enlil contains various omens and interpretations of celestial phenomena, and accurately notes things like the rising and setting of Venus. According to the historian Benson Bobrick, the Assyrians at Nineveh had distinguished planets from fixed stars and figured out how to follow their courses, allowing them to predict eclipses; they also established the lunar month at 29 1/2 days.

By 700 B.C., the Chaldeans — tribes of Semitic migrants who settled in a marshy, southeastern corner of Mesopotamia — had discerned that the planets traveled on a set, narrow path called the ecliptic, and that constellations moved 30 degrees every two hours. In his book The Fated Sky, Bobrick explains how “the twelve [observed] constellations were eventually mapped and formed into a Zodiac round (about the sixth-century B.C.), and the signs in turn (as distinct from the constellations) were established as twelve 30 degree arcs over the course of the next 200 years.” As early as 410 B.C., astrologers had begun making natal charts, noting the exact alignment of the heavens at the moment of a baby’s birth.

Bobrick eventually suggests that astrology is, in fact, “the origin of science itself,” the practice from which “astronomy, calculation of time, mathematics, medicine, botany, mineralogy, and (by way of alchemy) modern chemistry” were eventually derived. “The idea at the heart of astrology is that the pattern of a person’s life — or character, or nature — corresponds to the planetary pattern at the moment of his birth,” Bobrick writes. “Such an idea is as old as the world is old — that all things bear the imprint of the moment they are born.”

It’s at least hard to untangle the development of astrology from the rise of astronomy, and for a long time, the two fields were essentially synonymous; the divide between the supernatural and the natural wasn’t always quite so entrenched. As Bobrick writes, the “occult and mystical yearnings” of Copernicus, Brahe, and Galileo helped to “inspire their scientific work,” and astronomy and astrology remained close bedfellows until almost the end of the 17th century.

Nick Popper, a historian and author who has studied the intersection of science and mysticism, explains the relationship this way: “In Europe before the Enlightenment, for example, most individuals recognized a distinction between the two. Astronomy was the knowledge of the map of the stars and their movements, while astrology was the interpretation of their effects. But knowledge of the movements of the stars was primarily useful for its service to astrology. On its own, astronomy was most valuable as a timepiece.”

For early modern Europeans, astrology was undeniable and ubiquitous, a guiding force in various essential fields, including medicine. “Every noble court worth its salt had an astrologer on consultation,” Popper tells me. “Typically a physician skilled in taking astrological readings. Many brought in numerous people to help interpret significant events. These figures were [frequently] charged with determining propitious dates, anticipating future transformations, and using horoscopes to assess the character of all sorts of figures. This predictive capacity was not deemed a ‘low’ knowledge, as now, but seen as an utterly vital political expertise.”

Johannes Kepler, one of the forefathers of modern astronomy (he determined the laws of planetary motion, which allowed Newton to determine his law of universal gravitation; Kant later called Kepler “the most acute thinker ever born”), wrote in 1603 that “philosophy, and therefore genuine astrology is a testimony of God’s works, and is therefore holy. It is by no means a frivolous thing.” Three years later, in 1606, he declared: “Somehow the images of celestial things are stamped upon the interior of the human being, by some hidden method of absorption … The character of the sky flowed into us at birth.”

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“There are so many misconceptions about astrology, it boggles me.” Susan Miller, arguably the most broadly influential astrologer practicing in America right now, is sitting across from me at a white-tablecloth restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side wearing a dark blue sheath dress, black tights, black knee-high boots, and Hitchcock-red lips. “The biggest is that it’s for women. I have 45% male readers. People just assume that it’s all women. It’s not.”

She is petite and precisely assembled, but not in a grim, bloodless, Park Avenue way. There is something openhearted about her, a vulnerability that borders on guilelessness. I find her instantly kind. We will sit here together for over four hours.

Miller founded a website called Astrology Zone on Dec. 14, 1995; the site presently attracts 6.5 million unique readers and 20 million page views each month. She released a new version of her smartphone app (“Susan Miller’s AstrologyZone Daily Horoscope FREE!”) late last year; her old app was downloaded 3 million times. Miller is hip to the way astrology functions online, having embraced the web from the very start of her career. She is active across most social media platforms, and fluent in the quick rhythm of virtual interaction, often acting as a kind of kooky, round-the-clock therapist. Offline, she employs 30 people in one way or another, has written nine books, and is aggressively feted by the fashion industry, a community in which she functions as an omniscient, beloved oracle.

Miller was born in New York, still lives in the city, and doesn’t have a whiff of bohemian mysticism about her. Instead, she presents as intelligent and detail-oriented, with none of the candles-and-crystals whimsy endemic to New Age bookstores. (A minor concession: Her iPhone, which beckons her often, is set to the “Sci-Fi” ringtone.) She appears legitimately compelled to help people, and offers an extravagant amount of free services to her followers. Of course, “free services” can be a potentially devious vehicle for other, less altruistic pursuits — and Miller does sell her books and calendars on her website, and frequently pushes a premier version of her app featuring longer horoscopes — but it is very, very easy to read and follow Astrology Zone without ever making an explicit financial investment in it. (Miller insists she makes “pennies” from the non-pop-up advertisements on the site.) I believe her when she says she considers her readers friends.

It had started to feel like a colossal waste of energy, fretting over whether or not astrology is “real” — whether or not there are accurate indications of our collective or individual futures contained in the cosmos, whether or not those indications can be massaged into utility by trained interpreters — because the fact is, even beyond our present disinterest in objective truth, reasonable people believe in all sorts of unreasonable things. True love, the afterlife, karma, a soul. Even high-level cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, hinges in part on tenuous scientific presumptions. When I considered astrology objectively — the notion that celestial movements might affect activity on Earth, and that people born around the same time of year share might certain characteristics based, in part, on a comparable environmental experience in utero — it didn’t seem nearly as dumb as, say, waving one’s hands around a crystal ball. Or calling someone your soulmate.

Still, astrology is often (rightly) equated with charlatanism: hucksters peddling snake oil, burglarizing the naïve. As with any unregulated business, there are practitioners who aren’t properly trained, who haven’t done the work and don’t know the math; they will snatch your $5 and spit back some vague platitude about the stars. It makes sense, then, that astrology is so routinely conflated with fortune-telling, mysticism. “People think it’s predestination. It has nothing to do with predestination,” Miller says, forking the salmon on her chopped salad. She is careful, always, to emphasize free will in her readings — when properly employed, astrology doesn’t dictate or predict our choices, it merely allows us to make better, more informed ones. As the astrologer Evangeline Adams wrote in 1929, “The horoscope does not pronounce sentence … it gives warning.” It’s the same idea — in theory, at least — as a body undergoing genetic testing to unmask certain proclivities or susceptibilities: to find out what it’s capable of, to preemptively protect the places where it is softest, most at risk.

Miller has written extensively about the debilitating, unnamable ailment she suffered as a child (“I had sudden, inexplicable attacks that felt like thick syrup was falling into my knee,” she wrote in her 2001 book, Planets and Possibilities), and over lunch, she tells me she was bedridden for weeks-long stretches, and endured bouts of extraordinary, life-halting pain. She describes the problem as a birth defect, but her doctors were mystified by her condition, and routinely accused her of total hysteria. Around her 14th birthday, Miller’s parents finally found a physician willing to further investigate her case, and she spent 11 months in the hospital that year, undergoing and recovering from various vascular operations.

“The other doctors were like, ‘You’re very clever, aren’t you? You don’t want to go to school, and you’ve hoodwinked all of us,’” she recalls. “And you know, my mother and father were on my side. But they were the only ones. I could feel how a prisoner would feel when unjustly accused. It was the most horrible thing. To be in so much pain and to be screamed at!”

To date, Miller has received more than 40 blood transfusions. Although she no longer endures attacks, if she were injured again in her left leg — in a way that suddenly exposed her veins — she could easily bleed to death. As of 2001, there were only 47 other documented cases of her particular affliction on record.

The pain kept her out of high school, but Miller studied from bed, passed the New York State Regents exams, and graduated at 16. Shortly thereafter, she enrolled in New York University, where she studied business. The whole arc is remarkable: a narrative of redemption. I can’t tell whether I find it incongruous or inevitable that a kid who was constantly told her pain was not real grew up to adopt a profession that gets ridiculed, nearly incessantly, for being its own kind of con. It speaks to Miller’s self-possession that she is charitable, always, to her skeptics.

“No astrologer believes in astrology before she starts studying it,” she says. “What I have a problem with are people who pontificate against astrology who’ve never studied it, never looked at a book, had no contact with it. And they criticize it without opening the lid and looking inside.” She pauses. “But I’m not an evangelist.”

Miller is famously available to her readers, particularly on Twitter. The medium suits her: Her dispatches are sympathetic, personable, chatty. Aggressively educated young women, especially, share them in a half-winking, half-sincere way, indulging in astrology’s prescribed femininity and wielding it in a manner that feels almost confrontational. It reminds me, sometimes, of the way women talk to each other about nail polish: as if it were a political act to not be embarrassed by it.

Miller, for her part, spends loads of time answering questions from her more than 177,000 followers, like, “I need to have oral surgery. when should I schedule? Aries w/Virgo rising.” (“Every Aries I know is having oral surgery,” Miller wrote back. “My daughter had it too. Go ahead and have it — think of it as repair work. Good time!”).

Advice like this would be troubling if Miller was not always exceedingly mindful of her influence (she says she would never tell someone not to have surgery or not to get married on a specific day), and it is, in fact, troubling regardless; her readers take her work seriously. She is pestered with inane questions like some sort of human Magic 8 Ball. If there is any delay in the appearance of an Astrology Zone forecast — they are posted, en masse, on the first of the month — people get agitated. The tweets accumulate, and range in timbre from bummed to slightly desperate: “Waking up the first day of the month to find that Susan won’t post for another 24 hours is the worst,” “It won’t officially be spring until Susan Miller posts her March horoscopes,” “This wait on @astrologyzone is killing me,” “Why is @astrologyzone always late? Every other astrology website posts on time but the best.”

Eventually, the forecasts always appear. Miller stays up very late — until 2 or 3 in the morning, most nights — and wakes up at 7 to exercise, screen several news broadcasts (she likes to compare them, to see how certain stories are prioritized), run errands, and, eventually, around 11 a.m., start writing. She generates at least 40,000 words every month for Astrology Zone, and produces detailed horoscopes for Elle, Neiman Marcus, and a slew of international publications, including Vogue Japan.

Anyone who’s ever interviewed Miller has observed that she’s a circuitous, digressive storyteller, and her monthly forecasts are far longer — they’re essays, really — than a typical newspaper or magazine horoscope, which usually contains just a sentence or two of fuzzy wisdom. Miller can be specific in her advice (“I suggest you do not accept a job now, not unless the offer emanates from a VIP from your past. In that case, you would be simply continuing your relationship, not starting a new relationship, and you therefore would be on safer ground during a Mercury retrograde phase,” she cautioned in February), and she calls her work “practical astrology,” which differs, she said, from “psychological astrology.” She wants to be service-oriented. She wants to give people information they can use.

“I can tell right away if you had a harsh father or a critical mother,” she says. “I might mention it. But I’m not going to delve into your childhood and growing up. I think that’s the work of a psychiatrist.” Instead, Miller finds out how certain astrological phenomena have affected a client in the past, and then, when those events are about to repeat, asks them to recall the state of their life at that prior moment. “When I do a chart the first time, there is so much information there. I have to watch your proclivities.”

Miller pulls out her MacBook and opens a program called Io Sprite. She plugs in my birth information, and a pie chart appears on the screen. It contains several concentric circles; the outermost circle is divided into 12 sections, one for each sign of the zodiac. Individual slices contain glyphs representing the sun, the moon, planets, nodes, trines. It is a snapshot of the sky at the moment of my deliverance, and it is the lynchpin of Western astrology.

Besides the placement of celestial bodies, astrologers also consider what they call “aspects” — the relative angles between planets — and use the natal chart to determine an ascendant or rising sign (the sign and degree that was ascending on the eastern horizon at the time of birth; astrologers think this signifies a person’s “awakening consciousness”). The planet closest to one’s ascendant is that person’s rising planet, and is believed to indicate how we approach or deal with other people. Every astrologer will interpret a natal chart slightly differently. Miller compares this to how various broadcasters report the same news, but emphasize or deemphasize certain narratives. She tells me it is important to find an astrologer that I like and trust.

“You have Uranus rising the same way I do,” Miller says, staring closely at my chart. “Your thought patterns are different from everybody else’s. You think they’re the same because you’re living inside of your body, but they’re different. That influences your personality. People will remember you. And at some point in your life you will form a path for people. You will expose something or teach them something that they didn’t know about.” I’m not sure how or if I’m supposed to respond, so I chew on the end of my pen and look up at her like a puppy dog. I want her to tell me everything. Maybe I don’t believe in astrology, or at least not entirely, but I’m also not immune to the lure of whispered prophecies.

Obviously, the personality attributes commonly associated with most signs (and repeated by astrologers) are positive, and if they’re not immediately complimentary, they’re at least forgivable (“secretive,” “stubborn”). In astrology, no one is “strangely shaped” or “sort of dense.” I am a Capricorn, like Joan of Arc and LeBron James, which means, according to Miller, that I’m rational, reliable, resilient, calm, competitive, trustworthy, determined, cautious, disciplined, and quite persevering. “Your underlings see you as a tower of strength,” she wrote of Capricorns in Planets and Possibilities. “And indeed you are.” Meanwhile, I have Scorpio rising at 19 degrees, which means I have “awesome sexual powers” and a set of “bedroom eyes” that, I’m told, will get me “just about anything I want.” Like many people, I find my astrological profile to be spot-on.

The most noteworthy scientific repudiation of astrology was conducted in the early 1980s by a UC-Berkeley physicist named Shawn Carlson. He tasked 28 astrologers with pairing more than 100 natal charts to psychological profiles generated by the California Personality Inventory, a 480-question true-false test that determines personality type. The idea was to figure out if a trained astrologer could accurately match a natal chart to a personality profile. “Astrology failed to perform at a level better than chance,” Carlson concluded in Nature in 1985. “We are now in a position to argue a surprisingly strong case against natal astrology as practiced by reputable astrologers.”

It is a surprisingly strong case, in that I’m legitimately surprised that the astrologers fared so poorly, and then further surprised by my own surprise. I wonder, for a moment, if astrology has become so omnipresent and accepted in America — nearly everyone, after all, knows their sign, and has since childhood — that we’re all unconsciously performing our attributes now. That we have assumed them. This seems bonkers.

I recall Wittgenstein: “We feel that when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.”

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These days, it’s not terribly easy to find a reputable scientist willing to go on the record about astrology. The practice is so heavily disregarded that folks don’t even want to expend the energy required to debunk it. The American Museum of Natural History tells me they do “not have anyone to talk about this.”

I eventually get in touch with Eugene Tracy, a chancellor professor of physics at the College of William and Mary, who studies plasma theory and nonlinear dynamics, and who recently co-authored a new book (Ray Tracing and Beyond: Phase Space Methods in Plasma Wave Theory) for the Cambridge University Press. Plasma theory — that’s heavy. It posits that plasmas and ionized gases play far more central roles in the physics of the universe than previously theorized. It’s also what’s known as a “non-standard cosmology,” meaning it essentially contradicts the Big Bang, and hypothesizes a universe with no beginning or end. I get a little bug-eyed just thinking about it.

Tracy, who has taught high-level graduate courses in physics and undergraduate seminars in things like “Time in Science and Science Fiction,” acknowledges that science and mysticism now sit in total opposition. “The separation between what we would now call science and religion, philosophy and art, is a very modern development,” Tracy says. “The [early] motivation for studying things in the sky was the belief that either these things were gods, or they were the places where the gods lived,” he says.

Tracy and I talk for a while about Kepler, the last great astronomer who maintained faith in astrology; I am interested in how Kepler juggled his confidences. “He believed that astrology wasn’t working, that it demonstrably wasn’t very predictive. But he believed that it was because they were doing it wrong, not because the field itself was misguided,” Tracy says. “He had that scientific attitude: I need good data to build my models on. But his motivation was mystical.”

I finally tell Tracy that what I really want is a succinct debunking of the entire enterprise: I want to know, definitively, that it can’t work, that it doesn’t make sense. He is gentle in his reply. “Newton’s theory of gravity says that everything in the universe gravitates toward everything else. So that means there is a force exerted upon you by the other planets, by the sun, and so forth,” he says. “Now if you ask, ‘Well, the person who is sitting next to me in the room also exerts gravitational influence on me. How close do they have to be to exert the same gravitational influence as Jupiter?’ I’d say depending on where the doctor stood in the room next to you when you were born, [he] exerted the same gravitational influence [as Jupiter]. So gravity isn’t gonna get you astrology. The argument is that there’s something else going on. And that’s where you get outside the realm of science.”

In the beginning — my beginning, your beginning — gravity was everywhere, and the planets were just planets.

When I ask him why he thought people continued to believe in astrology — to cling to a myth — he likens it to our ongoing interest in science fiction of all stripes. “We don’t want to think of the planets as being empty, that there aren’t stories out there. Just like here,” he answers. “We want to fill the world with stories.”

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I have plans to meet my friend Michael in the West Village on a particularly frigid Friday night. Over email, I convince him we should go see an astrologer or clairvoyant of some sort — you know, just dip into one of those tapestried storefronts on Bleecker Street, slip some cash to a woman in a low-cut top. I anticipate resistance, so I tell him we can get a drink first. We meet at a quasi-dive called The Four-Faced Liar, and have 300 beers. I want to see for myself whether astrology — even when practiced in the most pedestrian, mercenary way — can distinguish itself from all your basic soothsaying rackets.

Sufficiently over-served, Michael and I stumble around the neighborhood. (It doesn’t even seem that cold out anymore!) (It is 11 degrees.) Walk-in astrologers in major cities tend to keep bar hours — they are often open until midnight or 1 a.m., at least in New York — and I suspect a decent chunk of their business is derived from rambunctious tavern patrons on the move and in search of one last thrill.

Street psychics obviously command a different clientele than high-end private astrologers (comprehensive natal readings tend to cost between $150 and $200, whereas most people can only stomach shelling out 10 or 20 bucks on a late-night whim), but the questions are often the same; all of our questions are always the same. Speaking on the telephone one afternoon, Miller tells me that people come to her for many kinds of personal advice: love, sex, marriage, friendship, health concerns, career counseling. “This is the most educated generation in history, and they’re reading me because they can’t get a job,” she says. “But they don’t read me just for solving problems. They read me to get a perspective on their life. That’s another misconception,” she sighs. “There is nothing but misconceptions.”

The promise of “perspective” is an interesting way to think about the basic appeal of astrology. It allows us to step back — way back — and get a broad-view portrait of our lives, to have someone say: “This is who you are.” A person could spend her entire life trying to figure that out (which is to say nothing of the subsequent quest — in the unlikely event of a successful self-definition — to have that identity validated). I wonder if part of astrology’s attractiveness doesn’t have to do with its rote assignment of signifiers. All the clues to how a person should be: rational, reliable, resilient, calm, competitive, trustworthy, determined, cautious, disciplined. It feels like a road map, in a way.

Of course, what people really want to know is the future. It’s supremely annoying, not knowing what’s going to happen to you.

Michael and I procure dollar slices on Sixth Avenue and wander over to Houston Street. We find a storefront with a neon PSYCHIC sign. The establishment is called Predictions, and is operated by a tiny Egyptian woman named Nicole, who immediately beckons us inside. Her card says “Horoscopes,” and I inquire about an astrological reading. She is dismissive of the idea. “They read your sign,” she says. “I tell your future.”

The best part of my 10-minute session with Nicole is when she asks Michael to leave, commands me to squeeze a clear quartz crystal in my left hand, and then announces, in succession, that my sex chakras are blocked, that someone bothered my mother while she was pregnant with me, that things other people find difficult I find easy, that I am destined to be with someone whose name begins with “J,” and that I am slightly psychic myself.

Back on the street, I find Michael deep in conversation with two young, dark-haired women who are both contemplating a consultation with Nicole. They say they are going to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket first, and that if they win, they’ll go in to see her. They do not win. I tell Michael how I am supposed to be with Jeorge Clooney.

We turn onto MacDougal and walk past a building with the zodiac painted on the window. The door is locked, but eventually an old woman — toothless, and wearing a pink bathrobe — appears and unlocks it. Despite the iconography decorating her building, she also denies us an astrological reading. “It’s too complicated,” she sighs. “You have to know what you’re doing.” Instead, she reads Michael’s tarot cards while I sit on a chair with a ripped cushion. The television remains on the entire time. “I don’t look at the past,” she says while he shuffles the cards. “That’s for you to deal with.” She proceeds to tell Michael a few things about his future — two to three kids! — but I’m not listening because I’m thinking really hard about nachos. Before we leave, he asks her if she has any ideas for a cool nickname. We discussed this question ahead of time, back at the bar. “Something with a T,” she says. “And an L.” He decides on “Talon” after a brief dalliance with “Toil.” The next morning, I text him the word “TOILET” repeatedly.

If there is a way to ascertain usable info about the future, I am not sure this is it.

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The question of why astrology has endured — why, of all the outlier theosophies and esoteric theories, astrology is the one that’s remained in the public consciousness for thousands of years, the one with a presence in nearly every daily newspaper in America, the one that’s flourishing online — might just be attributable to the endless romance of the night sky. Find a field out in the country, wait until dark, look up: It is a fast and easy way to find yourself cowed. There is something seductive about the stars, about their beauty and their strangeness, about what they imply regarding the smallness of our existence here on Earth. In his book The Fourth Dimension, the mathematician Rudy Rucker wrote: “What entity, short of God, could be nobler or worthier of [our] attention than the cosmos itself?”

Eugene Tracy suggests something similar during our conversation. “I think for most of human history, the sky has been very important to people,” he says. “And now we live our lives without it. We’re surrounded by artificial light.”

Astrology is, in the end, a kind of mass apophenia: the seeing of patterns or connections in random data. Although it resembles a pantheism and sometimes gets slotted as such, astrology has never struck me as a useful stand-in for organized religion — it doesn’t proffer absolution or any promise of an afterlife, nor is it a practicable ethos — and many astrologers (including Susan Miller, who is a devout Catholic) nurture active spiritual lives that have nothing to do with the zodiac. Astrology, unlike religion, is a deeply personalized, nearly solipsistic practice.

When I ask Dr. Janet Bernstein, a psychiatrist who’s worked in all kinds of contexts (privately, in prisons, in hospitals, in New York, in Alaska), if she has a sense of why so many different types of people turn to astrology, she points out that it often only takes one win — one “right” horoscope — to convert a skeptic. “Humans seem to like certainty and predictability in many, but not all, situations,” she says. “Astrology is just one of many systems that promises some certainty and predictability. Medical research is another. Stock market analysis is yet another. What often happens when one prediction in a system is born out is that the entire system [is] accepted.”

Back at the Quest Bookshop, when I ask Lidofsky if his belief in astrology requires at least a temporary suspension of cynicism — a “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”-type of open-mindedness toward wildly unquantifiable truths — he only shrugs. “I don’t see any logical reason why it works,” he replies. “It just does. Aspirin was the most prescribed drug in the world, and no one knew how it worked until the ‘70s.”

Ultimately, I understand astrology’s utility as a (faulty) predictive tool, even if most astrologers prefer that it not be used that way. I also understand its attractiveness as something to believe in: Here is an ancient art — rooted in the cosmos, the default home for everything divine and miraculous — that promises not only clarity regarding the future, but also a summation of the past. Humans have always been drawn to succinct markers of identity, to anything that tells us who we are.

There is also the assurance of change in astrology: The planets keep moving. The chart always shifts. The forecast refreshes on the first of the month.

One particular story has stuck with me: In July 1609, Galileo discovered that Dutch eyeglass makers had developed a simple telescope, and weeks later, he’d designed and forged his own (improved) version, which allowed him to define the Milky Way as a galaxy of clustered stars, to see that Jupiter had four large orbiting moons, and to reaffirm Copernicus’ heliocentric understanding of the universe. Still, several prominent philosophers, including Cesare Cremonini and Giulio Libri, refused to look through the telescope. Maybe they just didn’t want to see what he saw — didn’t want to challenge one worldview with another. In 1610, in a letter to Kepler, Galileo opined what he called “the extraordinary stupidity of the multitude,” but it’s impossible to say precisely what kept the philosophers away.

I like to think they chose to uphold a private sense of heaven. One that told them exactly what they needed to know.

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