Stats: call me Iris 🌈 not yet 30, but close... she/he/they, queer as fuck woman* (*formerly a man, formerly an angry teenage girl), 5'9", irish-italian ancestry, US American ☮️🆘️permanent older sibling vibes, writer, artist, currently not working while I recover from health issues, Solitary Wiccan
Motifs: eyes, rainbows, crows, black and/or white cats, willow trees, graveyards, sunflowers, Alice in Wonderland, Sucker Punch, Victorian Era English literature, cryptids, cults, Van Gogh, waterfalls, labradorite, aliens
Colors: earthy green, deep purple, black, rainbow (yes, rainbow is a color, fight me), gold, iridescence
Places: Quakie Aspen forests in the Rocky Mountains, western-themed breakfast diners with jackalopes on the wall, thrift stores, probably being abducted by aliens because I fucked around in the Uintah Basin, red rock desert highways at 3am.
This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.
OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.
And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.
if you pinch out a candle with ur fingers ur SQUISHING ur MAGIC like u sqursh a BUG and it will say WHY DID U DO THAT i thought we were FRIENDS and ur spell WONT WORK
Genuinely kind people don't get enough credit. People seem to think that being nice is just a personality trait, but it's actually a commitment to treat people well, even when it's hard. It's not just being nice to the people you like.
It's choosing to be kind to people when you're in a bad mood, or when they're being annoying.
It's choosing to be kind to people who your friends don't like.
It's choosing to be kind to people who you don't particularly like.
It's choosing to be kind to people who you envy.
I'm not saying that you can't be a kind person and stand up for yourself, or tell someone to fuck off when they're doing something genuinely harmful, but there are a million petty reasons people use to justify treating people badly.
It is a conscious choice, made over and over, often several times a day, to treat people with kindness and respect, even when they make it hard. So appreciate the consistently kind people in your life, because they work hard to be that way, and they really don't have to.
Something that comes up when I discuss kindness with people is that people who I experience as being kind believe that they're just faking it. They don't believe it counts if you're kind to someone who you're secretly annoyed by.
But that's exactly what kindness is. It's making the effort to treat people well when you don't feel like it.
If anything it should count MORE when it's not effortless.
genuine question: If you're kind to people because it is the "right" thing to do and it makes people like you, are you actually kind? Or are you just manipulating people into liking you? (asking for a friend)
You are not the only person to wonder, and perhaps it will help to think of it this way:
Say you are someone who actually doesn't like people and wants to manipulate them, just to be evil. For the sake of your evil scheme, you consistently treat people well and do the right thing (even though this sometimes takes a lot of self-control and not putting your own feelings first), so that people will be manipulated into liking you. Then you are (silently, inside your own head, mind you) like "haha, sucker! Gotcha!"
Then you carry on with your evil scheme of treating people well and doing the right thing, often at your own inconvenience.
That's pretty reprehensible, right? Pretty devious. Just vile, villainous shit. I mean, it might be if you were building up trust to take advantage of people... but are you actually doing that? Or do people just like you because you treat them well?
I think the idea that anything that benefits you is self-serving and therefore bad is pretty wack, tbh. Why shouldn't you also benefit from doing the right thing? Why does it only count if you're martyring yourself for it? Not to mention, there are a lot of times when being kind means putting other people first.
So yeah, my take is that kindness is kindness, assuming you're not playing some long game of deliberately building up trust in order to hurt people later. I hope this helps!
Hey so as the economy continues to get worse in the next few years, gambling companies are going to go extra hardcore predatory as people become more desperate. Yes, even more than they already are. You have to promise me right now you're not going to fall for it. No gambling, okay?
This is going to be especially bad with prediction markets and sports gambling, and it's already really fucking bad. But it also goes for loot boxes, blind box collectables, trading card games, and ESPECIALLY gacha games.
We are seeing this right now with Kalshi's sudden push towards people watching reality dating shows like love island, as they are starting to tap out on their first big market block - young straight men into sports/politics. They are moving on towards young straight women now with the dating shows thing but they will start diversifying into other niches soon!
Do not start gambling. A friend of mine used to work for a bank's anti-money-laundering dept and they'd review flagged accounts for suspicious withdrawals, frequent charges, etc, and sometimes it was fraud but other times it was just severe gambling addicts absolutely hemorrhaging money. It is not worth it!!!
Human relationships are not transactional but they are reciprocal, which I think many of you with your ‘i don’t owe anyone anything’ shtick are too happy to forget
Transactional: everything has to be exactly 50/50 all the time, pay me back for the £5 sandwich or buy me something worth exactly £5, I refuse to make an effort for you if there’s nothing in it for me
Reciprocal: you were there for me when I needed help, and I’m going to do the same for you, it doesn’t matter if one of us needs more or is capable of less, because the point is not equivalent exchange but mutual care
Wind Chimes, Witch Ladders / the Evil in Stillness
A folk grimoire of destagnation.
Those of us with European parents are undoubtedly familiar with the feeling of coming home from some trip, where your parents urge you to run through the house and open all the windows: "air out the house!" You speed around, kicking up dust, moving the air, slowly washing away the strange feeling of stillness that has contaminated your home. Air out the house. "Don't catch the draft," your parent yells up the stairs at you. The draft, of course, is never explicitly acknowledged to contain some ill-wishing spirit that will give you the flu, but everybody knows it does. And the same can be said for that stagnant air in the house, the silence permeating the walls.
The Evil in Stillness
Stillness is not good. Stillness has never been good - we have feared it since before we knew how to make fire. The land going silent, going motionless, going truly still; that spells disaster. Even now, with flashlights and the safety of our home, we are not spared the fear of stillness. None of us are comfortable in quiet forests. But even under our own roof we are not safe: when all is dark and everybody is motionless in their beds, ill-wishes, scary spirits and night-mares roam. And it would seem we can invite them into our homes, purely by leaving it unattended for long enough.
The stillness that comes about a home when it has been without inhabitants for long enough can only be solved by one thing: the return of the living. Whether that is people or animals coming by, or the house falling into decay and plants finding their way in. This seems inherent human knowledge - we feel more comfortable in houses that are or were recently occupied. Abandoned houses covered in ivy or inhabited by rodents are far less eerie than abandoned urban structures still perfectly as they were when they were left. Horror movies show little creatures scuttling about in still places when they want to give us a break from the terror.
So, it seems we all know the terrible feeling of stuffy air, stagnant energy, stillness, however you may know it. We all know the vulnerability of being motionless in the dark. To some of us it may seem more relevant than others: those of us who get goosebumps from silence, those of us who experience the fear of stillness in our cultures every day. But we all feel it. To those who fear it as much as I, I dedicate the following magic to alleviate and prevent stillness.
Preventing Stillness / Keeping the Evil at Bay
The universal key to life in a house seems to be moving air. Airing out the house is a great remedy, but it can also be your preventative measure - if safe, keep a window cracked and let the air flow through your house while you are gone. However, sometimes the air moving is just not possible. Sometimes you have to close up the whole house, and trap all the air inside of it. What then?
A popular method that appears across cultures is to have charms in and around the house that are very prone to moving. The movement would scare off the evils and spirits, because it would disrupt the stillness they are trying to inhabit. And the kicker about these charms is that they do not need air to move when they're being used against stillness, because the spirits who come to inhabit the stillness will also make the charms move as they invite themselves in. Silly trolls.
One charm I personally very much enjoy is an adaptation of the Cornish witch ladder. I like to make them as is traditional, but with only feathers going in opposite directions, no stones.
In my home region of Low Saxony it was also common to use both snail shells and egg shells, which are light but associated with magic and protection, in charms. Whether you used them on a string, made a garland, or any other type of charm that moves easy and can be suspended from the ceiling.
Other materials that would lend themselves incredibly well to such charms, the type you hang from the ceiling and let sway in the wind, would be sea shells, small twigs, hollowed sticks and straw, origami pieces, paper spirit crafts, sea sponge, dried flowers, etc.
Houseplants and flowers are another excellent method to keep some of the living present. Especially plants that move throughout the day: those that follow the sun, or whose flowers open and close depending on the light. But any living plants will really do. They will not completely spare you from the stuffy air, but they will certainly lessen the effects of stillness.
A different way to cut through stagnant air is sound. Something that is always producing sound (or only silent when you're not there to see it being silent... supposedly...) is a great way to stop the spirits of silence creeping into your dwelling. That is where a wind chime of any sort may often come in, but there are different ways to do this, such as pipes fastened to catch the wind, so that they howl, or even always leaving the radio softly playing in the background, set to a classical station, like was often done by the richer families I knew in my childhood. This sort of precaution, an auditory one, lends itself extremely well to being outside the house, where the wind enables them to be in near perpetual function. A house that has music coming from it, that appears almost as though it were truly fully alive of its own right, independent of having residents, will always scare away the stillness.
Remedying the Stillness / Scaring Away the Evil
For the most part, chasing away the scary things in the stillness comes naturally to us. We even chase it away, though less effectively, purely by coming home and making our house our own again. But if you are sensitive to it, you don't like it, and you want to get rid of that stagnant feeling as fast as possible, here's some effective methods, to combine or use separately.
Open all the windows, or enough windows/doors to allow air to flow through your house effectively. Both doors on opposite ends of the house are a great option, but so are more-or-less opposite windows, or windows that are directly connected through hallways and open doors.
Play sounds, out loud. Not necessarily loudly, but loud enough that it carries through the house and makes it feel alive again. Music from a speaker, the TV, a laptop with a YouTube video. Even just your own voice singing or talking. If you have no neighbors to annoy you can even bang pots or play an instrument.
Run around, dance, frolic. Visit every room, see how it's doing, move some things around. Shake up pillows and duvets. Fill all the spaces with your presence again.
Make a meal. Cooking will fill the air with the busyness of food preparation and the smell of inhabitants and labor.
Light incense or smoke cleanse your house. Smoke always moves through the air and gives it life back. Smoke is also a great indicator of stagnant air, as in rooms with stagnant air, smoke hangs around, suspended almost motionlessly.
Clean. Sweeping, especially, is a very effective manner of removing stagnation. Some people also like to sprinkle salt and then sweep that from the furthest point of the door, going toward the door, until they have swept all the salt out. A common folk spell to chase spirits off and not have them come back is to sweep toward the door, making sure to get every room, and when you have swept a room and are in the door, say: 'shoo! I'm cleaning here, out of my way! And you had better not track dirt in here!'
There are also those things that you may want to do for safety. Some houses with less modern running water should have the faucets on for a while so the stagnant water is out of the system before you consume it. Things like that often also double as great ways to bring some life back.
However you do it, the life will always come back to a place as long as there are people there. And let us never learn to loathe the stillness: as scary as it is, we can also learn a lot from the spirits contained in it. For some people, a completely still space may be just what they need to talk to spirits, to do divination, to decompress for just a bit. Eerie does not mean inherently bad; 'eerie' is only a symptom of our survival instinct.
I hope you feel inspired to think about the spirits around you, and the role they play both when you can sense them and when you cannot.
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People should use safety pins in witchcraft a lot more. They're literally safety pins. My principle for them is when they're closed, they can provide very powerful protection, but when open, they can bring danger and pain. Now imagine the potency of rusted safety pins.
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