Today is the biggest day for Ellipsus since we launched in 2023... 👀
Back then, we began building Ellipsus out of a simple belief: writers deserve a place to create, collaborate, and share their work without handing over their words, their data, or their creative process to bad actors and Big Tech—a promise that matters now, more than ever.
Nearly 600k writers and counting are writing on Ellipsus because of this promise. We see everyday how writers are rejecting Big Tech's data mining model in favor of tools that respect user privacy and reflect our values.
We’re a small full-time team building, maintaining, supporting, and improving the tool every day. And to keep doing that sustainably—without compromising the promises that brought people here—we’re introducing Ellipsus Plus.
Plus is a set of optional features on top of free Ellipsus, designed to help fund the continued development of Ellipsus for everyone, free and paid; while helping us stay independent, ad-free, and working to improve the tool well into the future.
That means the Ellipsus you know is staying free: you can keep writing with unlimited documents, drafts, collaborators, and core features. Free Ellipsus will continue to receive updates, improvements, and new features too, including major work already planned (like offline syncing and native apps).
Plus features have been designed alongside community feedback, our pricing shaped by our users around what felt fair and sustainable.
Every Plus subscription leads to ultimate ownership of the tool. Not metaphorical ownership, but real ownership, including all future updates to the Plus plan. No endless subscriptions. Once you’ve paid, it’s yours. Really.
Our introductory Plus features are designed to be fun, creative, practical, and help you get the most out of the tool! We really hope you enjoy them.
Here’s a quick overview:
Custom themes
Make your writing space feel like home with custom themes! Use any colors, gradients, images, or .gifs you love. Share with friends and readers. The choices are infinite.
Writing Insights
See insights into your writing process and spot patterns faster across ten AI-free metrics—like vocabulary diversity, sentence length, sentence rhythm, word frequency, and more. Writing insights are opt-in only, and run on local data, so your text never leaves the editor.
Customizable Snippets
We all love snippets! Now you can give your words an extra personal touch. Customize your snippets with media backgrounds (GIFs, images), fonts, text colors, and custom themes—you can even add byline credits for authors and characters!
Emboss
Emboss is our AI-free proof-of-work layer for human writing. Show your readers the time, labor, and love that went into your work. Instead of relying on unreliable “AI-powered” “verifiers” that judge a piece after the fact, share your writing journey, with authorship metrics that help inspire trust. You can also show how your work evolved with snapshots of your version history. Emboss is fully opt-in.
We hope you’re as excited about Plus as we are! Try Plus free for 7 days, no payment required. You can read more (and sign up!) on our Plus page.
Again, there’s tons more to come, and we can’t wait to build it for you. Free or paid, Ellipsus is going to keep getting better. Thank you for your support.
Have questions about Plus? We’re hosting an “Ask the Team” doc where we’ll be answering your burning questions. Please make comments there!
Now please, go forth and explore!
creating an altar to yourself: an exercise in manifestation and passive control
recently my best friend told me about a change he made to his personal practice that completely revolutionized the way he felt fortune flowed for him. i've seen people talk about creating an egregore of themselves or their alter ego, but this approach is uniquely secular and occurred completely detached from this online space.
and what was it he did? well, he created an altar to himself.
and i know what that sounds like, but hear me out. this isn't so much an altar of worship or reverence--at least not in the way we think about those things--it's a passive spell that runs in the background, an act of self-care for his past self, boosting his self-confidence for his current self, and manifesting the person he wants to become.
WHAT IS AN ALTAR TO THE SELF?
This temple can be created from a very wide variety of items, but most often includes things that are meaningful or attractive to the person. For me, this includes crystals, trinkets, bones, flowers and herbs, pictures or drawings, sigils, and salt or ash. My friend also has a little statue that represents him, self-affirmations, and a devotional jar of beads in his.
I was introduced to this idea as not just something to help improve my self-confidence, but also as a way of shaping my future self. Each crystal will have its own meaning or trait that I'm is hoping to embody, and I can move them closer or further away depending on what I need more in the moment.
And even if you didn't care for a spell like this, from a psychology standpoint, this absolutely seems like it could be a productive exercise--especially if you're a more visual person.
HOW TO MAKE THE ALTAR
For this I'll introduce two different methods, one that I employed, and one that my friend employed.
My method:
Start with your favorite color(s) and maybe even an aesthetic (like cottage-core, dark academia, etc.)
Choose items that represent those colors or aesthetics, for me this would be green, pink, or purple crystals, naturey trinkets, and drawings that combine the two
Include things of great importance to you, even if they don't fit in the aesthetic, and try to make them look right
Arrange everything in a visually appealing way (I'll give some examples of this later)
But what my friend did was kind of the opposite, building the altar from the top down with things that were important to him, and just making it look good from there.
You've probably noticed that I make a big deal about the visual appearance of this altar, which is on purpose. I believe that it is of great importance this altar is appealing to you, since it's supposed to represent you, and it's supposed to represent your interests. If you don't really care as much about things being artistic or aesthetic, that's okay! As long as you can look at it and go, "Yeah, that's the vibe, that's what I want for myself," then you've done it right.
You can also add things like sigils, salt, or ash for an added layer of protection or a "boost" to the magic aspect, which I've added to mine. I also really like bones and don't have anywhere else to put them, so I add those, and I'll throw in some lavender to the salt since that's my favorite herb to use in workings.
WHY CREATE AN ALTAR?
Have you ever felt tired of being subservient to the whims of some external force, of waiting for things to happen rather than getting to decide that for yourself? If you do, this might be for you.
And it's not that this is supposed to snub or push aside worship of actual deities (I mean it can but it doesn't have to), but add to it. Think about it, most of us already have a self-care routine, something sacred to us, that we may even dedicate to our gods. All this altar is meant to do is add to that, to create a holiness to self-love and self-care.
The ultimate purpose of this exercise is to manifest the things you want in life, to design your future self, and combat the helplessness many of us feel when things start to change. It's meant to feed your energy, to form a conduit between you and something physical (which is helpful for those of us that dissociate often).
It is not meant to feed some heretical "fuck you" to the gods or the universe, rather give these forces a framework or "checklist" of things you want. At the end of the day, this is more similar to a spell than making yourself a deity that you want other people to worship.
when i first began working with herbs, i thought rosemary was overrated. it’s not native to my ancestral lands or where i now live, nor had i used it much in the kitchen…
it wasn’t until years ago when my mother introduced me to her own rosemary plant. she also hadn’t had much of a relationship with it (she’s caribbean) until she bought her own and began caring for it, but wow did that relationship grow fast and strong!!
i watched how my mother talked to it. she’d compliment her plant, tell it about her day, and ask it how it’s doing. she’d touch the rosemary, brushing it so its scent would release and fill the room. i could feel how deeply her rosemary plant loved her, and since we’re family, i felt the rosemary begin to love me too.
this is what witches mean when they tell beginners working with herbal magic to build relationships with their herbs.
i shrug at the idea of any herb being “universal,” but because of the relationship i’ve built with the plant, those “universal” qualities feel unlocked for me. the rosemary spirit protects me and my family, and i can sense when it wants to be included in my spellwork, which happens to be most of the time. this can be true with any herb or any spell ingredient. i believe your relationship determines its strength and how versatile it can be. 🌿
There are days when you just gotta write your enemy's name on a slip of paper in black ink, put it into a jar, chuck the whole thing into a garbage bin at a gas station when the clock strikes midnight, and let Hecate deal with them.
‧₊˚ ☽ ⋅ SHARING MY KNOWLEDGE OF WITCHCRAFT (PART ONE)
Moon Magick Witch Tips
Harnessing The Moon's Power for Your Hair
Scent Magick: The Power of Aromatic Alchemy (RECENT)
Storm Water in Witchcraft
Different Types of Clouds in Witchcraft
Apartment Witch Tips
3-3-3 Morning Ritual
Meditation Doesn’t Require An Empty Mind: The Biggest Meditation Myth Busted
First of the Month Rituals
Money Bowl Magick
Cleansing + Recharging Your Protections and Wards
Energy Vampires vs. Dark Entities: Spotting the Difference
5 Signs You're Already Manipulating Energy: Many Do These Daily Without Realizing
Graveyard Etiquette
Understanding Deity Work vs. Deity Worship and Addressing Common Fears
Deities Are Not Pokémon Cards: Stop Collecting Gods Like Trophies (RECENT)
Animal Associations with Deities Tarot Timing: Methods That Actually Work
Journaling After A Tarot Reading
Strawberries in Witchcraft
Don't Fall For These Witchcraft Scams: Red Flags You Should Know
Shedding the Light: Toxic Trends in the Spiritual and Witchcraft Community
Men who have a hung walk are the worst because they never seem to know they're doing it. They just stroll through life with that lazy, unhurried confidence, shoulders loose, chin raised, taking up entirely too much space in your imagination. Every step looks deliberate, like gravity pulls on them a little differently than everybody else.
He walks like his thick, heavy dick is always half-hard and demanding attention. You’ve seen it a hundred times — the way his jeans hang just right, the slight bulge shifting as he moves, the way he unconsciously adjusts himself when he thinks no one’s looking. But you’re always looking; it's hard not to.
Maybe it's the slight spread of his stance, maybe it's pure delusion on your part, but once you notice it, it's over. Suddenly you're watching him cross the room like a detective gathering evidence, trying not to stare while your brain supplies information. The worst part is when he catches you staring, asking you what you're smiling at while you're busy fighting for your life because he just walked across the room like he's being weighed down.
It is even more obvious when he sits down. He drops into a chair, pushes his hips forward slightly to get comfortable, and spreads his legs wide in that effortless man-spread. The thick bulge in his pants shifts heavily with the movement, settling prominently between his thighs like it needs all the room it can get. He leans back, one arm draped over the back of the couch or chair, completely oblivious to how obscene and distracting the whole thing looks.
b) I found the paper they’re citing and it’s actually really sweet and a really cool study to read! not at all too dense
some highlights:
this is VERY sweet
(this paper came about bc they were having trouble identifying participants by ‘traditional’ recruitment methods like posting flyers and contacting LGBT networks/support groups, and also didn’t want to skew the data toward people who would frequent these)
they also tried making profiles on dating sites but…..
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