Flying in the inbetween spaces.

36/NB. Eclectic witch and dragonkin. Home of my Dragon Magic Book Reviews and occasional musings on dragon magic that isn't DJ Conway-flavored. Anything I say about my craft/spirituality is based on experience and UPG, so don't take it as fact. NOT an RP/ARG blog. Anti-AI content.

[liminalwings]

Welcome to my tumblr. I'm Salaiek (you can call me Sal or Sala, it's cool).

This blog is mainly focused on witchcraft with a little bit of otherkin (dragonkin) stuff, and honestly whatever catches my attention because it's also my main blog.

I'm over 30, non-binary with little preference on pronouns (they/them works fine if you need me to be specific), pansexual. I'm online at no set schedule because sleep is just a suggestion.

Witchcraft things: I've had an interest since I was a wee child and got into Wicca through a family friend when I was 8. I studied and called myself Wiccan up until I was 16 when I finally decided it wasn't really my thing and moved more into Chaos magick, energy work, and general witchcraft. I've interacted with spirits/entities and energies basically for as long as I've had my interest in witchcraft; some of those entities are dragons. I've been slowly working on integrating my draconity with my practice, but it's not been easy. I've dabbled in a lot of adjacent interests as well. Not super into astrology these days, but for those who are and are curious: Pisces Sun, Gemini Moon, Libra Rising.

Dragon things: Similarly to witchcraft, I've felt non-human also pretty much all my life (to parody Maybelline, maybe they're born with it, maybe it's Autism). I didn't figure the dragon thing out until about fifth or sixth grade, before I ever found out about otherkin. It is a purely spiritual belief, a combination of 'past life' and 'current soul influence' reasonings. Of my draconity, I'm a four-winged dragonish critter that comes from somewhere other than this Earth (I could not tell you if it's another planet or another 'realm'. It's just... not here, but similar). I was part of a clan-based species with simple human-like intelligence, and did not have magic or any sort of breath weapon. We were basically animals. The image at the top of this post is me (drawn by me).

Tags of interest:

Dragon Magic Book Reviews- I track down dragon magic books and be salty about it, mostly.

Dragon Magic- Original and reblogged posts about dragon magic. I am a nerd and enjoy writing mini-essays for myself. Sometimes people are under the impression they're interesting and helpful.

Dragonkin- reblogs and original writings either directly or tangentially related to my personal draconity or draconity in general.

Herbarium- An old project that I may pick up again in the future. I had made it a personal mission to familiarize myself with the 'weeds' and other plants growing around me and learn about their physical and magical associations. It was also an excuse to use a calligraphy pen. Unfortunately I did not cite sources for my info. My bad.

Witchcraft and Witch Tips- self-explanatory really, tags for general witchy reblogs I found helpful.

Sal draws- I draw! A few years out of practice, but trying to ease myself out of major burnout.

Ask box is open, feel free to send me something!

[ahmnorhein-zkn]

Repost, now do your honors.

[mornington-the-crescent]

June 1st

[breelandwalker]

Listen, marketing-as-exploitation discussions aside, Rainbow Capitalism is, has been, and continues to be the canary in the coal mine of social acceptance for the queer community.

If you’ll all pardon my Americentrism for a moment, the amount, visibility, and flamboyance of Pride merch available in clothing, home goods, and comestibles stores is a DIRECT reflection of how safe it is to be queer in public in the United States.

How? Simple. Out groups aren’t profitable. If you’re not “acceptable” in the current social climate, big franchise businesses will not market to you. (Prime example - Look how quickly Target dropped all their Pride merch after having been wall-to-wall rainbows every June for almost a decade prior.)

Sure, capitalism sucks and being viewed as an exploitable marketing demographic isn’t a fun concept.

HOWEVER.

The grim truth is that being normalized enough to be considered profitable by corporations IS A GOOD THING in terms of the barometer of social acceptance.

Same thing goes for smaller businesses that throw kitschy Pride events or even just put a token rainbow flag in the window or somewhere inside the shop. That’s a level of acceptance that DID NOT EXIST thirty years ago, and I can tell you because I was there.

The fact that we can scoff and bitch about being an exploitable marketing demographic nowadays means we have made GIGANTIC strides since the 1990s. It also speaks to the fact that the drive and the conversation surrounding LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance are continuing. And getting louder.

You can be cynical about it if you want. But I will take a store that puts out lip-service rainbow merch over a world that pretends we don’t exist any day of the week. Because that will always mean something.

Sincerely, An Elder Queer

[stormwaterwitch]

Rabbits Rabbits Rabbits

Reblog this on the first of the month for good luck all month long!

[dumbbbunnnyy-deactivated2021021]

[ororium-z]

Happy Pride!

[tieflingkisser]

[nariarts]

Longtime readers may be aware of how much I relish an excuse to bully a company, so I'm sharing the wealth;

Clothing company Patagonia is currently sueing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparable” harm to their brand.

To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.

So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.

I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because sueing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile. Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.

They're claiming they're sueing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.

In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.

Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'

I think they have a twitter and tiktok too!

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[commiescummie]

i’ll literally never have enough of that dylan b hollis dude cause like. hes a college student who just.,.blew up on tiktok. he has the soul of a man who has lived for 60 years in the body of a twink. he cooks and is surprised every single time. he goes CINAMIN everytime he uses cinnamon. he has the kitchen of a 60s house wife and cooks like hes going to kill someone

[teacupfulofstarshine]

other favorites include

- “moo juice!”

- E G G - G I E

- BUTTER GO BRRRRRRRR

[only-in-movies]

- Floof powder

[angryalliterations-deactivated2]

F I R E

[xanthumn]

[agoddamnedrayofsunshine]

Other highlights:

“It doesn’t tell ya how to eat it, so I don’t know if I need a knife and fork or if I need to tie my hair back” (about the very phallic looking candle salad)

“This pie is referred to as a chiffon. Now what does that mean? It means it was written by a white person.”

“We take our can of Spam and we cry :)”

“This doesn’t need salt it needs help!”

[zwoelffarben]

“I’m going to assume we have the same size package, although the last time I assumed that I wound up stunned and quite self-conscious.”

[acfan120]

“DEMON BABY!!”

(x)

[cd-call-official-blog]

“Nothing says the holidays like AMBIGUOUS MEAT!”

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I’m blindsided by authors using ai in their works. how can readers and writers tell if the writing is ai generated?

I’m gonna assume writers know whether or not their own works are ai because they either write them themselves or have ai write for them.

but as for readers (or writers who read other writers’ works), no, you can’t tell unless the writer themself says their works are ai generated. anything else is witch hunt, speculations and possibly wrongful accusations — all of which harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.

so if at any point you think an untagged work is ai and if that bothers you, quietly click away. but you can never know for sure based on vibes. because everything ai writes, a human writer does. that’s what ai was trained on and what it was trained to mimic.

I’ve already talked more about this here, here, here. and more on my other blog @writingdose here and here.

[littlepagodatree]

You can notice certain telltale signs in some of the writing, such as short sentence stacking and usage of "not x not y but z" structures. But you have to be familiar with AI writing styles to be able to notice that.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I’ve been writing “not x, not y, but z” way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve read works that have “not x, not y, but z” in them, and I’ve read those works way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve also been using em dash way before gen ai became a thing, and I’ve seen em dash used in so many written works way before gen ai became a thing. I know for a fact some human writers actually prefer short sentence stacking too.

every “ai telltale” is something humans write before, otherwise ai wouldn’t have been able to mimic it in the first place. because it needs human-made works to mimic on.

when I say ai witch hunt, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more, “not x, not y, but z” and em dash are one of the main things I’m talking about.

[seananmcguire]

As I saw someone say recently, when you start declaring "obvious tells," from punctuation to sentence styles, to be proof of AI, what you're actually spotting is trace amounts of the original source material.

[traegorn]

I tested some "AI detectors" by putting a paragraph I had just written into it.

It confidently told me it was 80% AI. Which, y'know, it wasn't.

Because I literally wrote it directly into the AI detector.

AI is trained on a lot of fiction. It mimics the way we write fiction. Most of the "obvious tells" I've seen listed are common ways things are written in fiction.

[nitashinori]

That post about death note being "everyone's first anime" (untrue statement) made me curious and now I want to gather data for science

Can you reblog this and tell me where are you from and what was your starter anime?

[littlefingies]

Sorry for us politics posting, but we have until May 22, 2026 to submit public comment to the FCC:

More info from GLAAD:

https://glaad.org/fcc/

They have some good tips about writing a comment and protecting your privacy which, fuck it, I'll just paste here:

Providing an email address is optional. If you have concerns about privacy, you may use your initials or public address in your local area, such as City Hall. Do not use a joke name. It diminishes the comment’s credibility.

Your submission does not need to be long. A single, well-reasoned paragraph is sufficient.

Do not copy/paste a template comment. The FCC values unique perspectives, and an original comment carries significantly more weight in the public record. You can explain why this matters to you without revealing private or sensitive personal information.

Here's what I said:

“Free speech is a fundamental American freedom. I do not need a warning about seeing queer people, much like I do not need a warning about women, veterans, or any other group of people.”

Here's the link to submit your comment by May 22:

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express?proceeding%5Bname%5D=19-41

[hiiighpriestess913]

Y’all I’m being so serious when I say this: go to the library for witchcraft reasons.

You can usually find books on witchcraft, yes, but there’s also field guides on local foraging and wildlife, cookbooks, books that teach you how to craft and DIY, books about environmental protection and stewardship, books on how to use herbs medicinally, books about other religions, cultures, and spiritual practices. My favorite local library even has a seed swapping program and fantastic resources to research your own family history!

Go to the library for witchcraft. Please. :) <3

[slewfootwitch]

If you aren't sure what to look for when looking for material that is not explicitly "witchy", check the bibliography of your well cited witchcraft materials. The reason that it can be so easy to rely on witchcraft specific books is that the information in them is a witch-flavored retelling of information from academic, historical, folkloric, botanical, and other extra-disciplinary sources. It can be very comfy to allow someone else to digest the raw information and apply it to witchcraft for you. But it's not always the best route.

[khajiit-reads]

Emergency Comms

Hey all. I lasted a while on my job being all I needed (and it being the all consuming force of my life for a while), but right now we have literally only $30 left to afford food, gas, and other things like diapers for two weeks for my entire household. I got paid today and *almost all* the money had to go away to bills and other mandatory expenses. The same applies to my roommate who also got paid today, but he's got literally nothing left.

Comms are open as always, and I'm pushing them as an emergency thing. Any support in any way will help a lot. We have some food that *may* last for two weeks and plan on going to any pantries we can until the next paycheck comes, but we need gas so I can get to work and back, as well as the other things.

Thanks as always, everyone.

Blooming Phoenix Divination's Readings

Readings Open! Click to see Blooming Phoenix Divination's reading menu.

[tevruden]

Oh, wyrm?

[halogen-insertlastparthere]

guys plz let it be me

[dragonwolfandkitty]

Trying to get this to be me (Dragonkin).

[transhuman-priestess]

the way teenagers are treated these days is wild. when i was a teenager we were all watching porn, jerking off, and going to horror movies with 3000 gallons of blood. Nowadays they make kids get a permission slip to watch anything darker than Barney the Dinosaur. Insane.

[transhuman-priestess]

Every year we infantilize teenagers more and more and act surprised when they grow up to be terrified, angry, emotionally stunted adults.

[genderkoolaid]

& then for some reason people fixate more on "ugh these teenagers just want to be treated like babies!!! teenagers are to blame for the rise in puritanism!!!!!" than how this is a very obvious example of ageism and the increased control over a socially vulnerable and exploited group

[absolxguardian]

I think a commonly overlooked part of this coddling is that it teaches kids and teenagers to be afraid of things they don't need to be afraid of, which is exactly how they end up as "puriteens". I remember as a child being terrified to change the channel on the tv because I had ended up with the impression that seeing even seconds of an R rated movie or tv show would give me nightmares. And then as a tween every time I saw swearing I felt sick to my stomach because I had been taught such a thing is bad and harmful. I think I would have suffered less if I hadn't been raised with everyone around me acting like mature media was so bad. By the time I was a teenager I had figured out this was bunk, but understandably a lot of people don't. By making this whole system worse and stronger you have teens who have been told that seeing explicit or dark media Will Harm Them, and so they act in ways that would be appropriate if it really was the info-hazard it's implied to be.

[headspace-hotel]

^^ never heard anybody specifically talk about this but yeah. parents acting like sexual or any "dark" content in a story or show was going to put bad things in my head that were going to be there permanently just gave me a deeply distressing sort of contamination anxiety

[frightfullytreeish]

reblog to slowblink at your mutuals