#informed opinion

[tornadoquest]

This goes for all points on the spectrum.

[babal-on]

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

Harlan Ellison

[tallat-of-thralls]

Hexes and Curses

I'm going to briefly gloss over their terms then talk about my opinion on them and my personal experiences with them.

Hexes

They're typically a short term and foul exchange. I have worked with people whom have been hexed before or were suspected of being hexed. Hexes are easily dispelled once configured. De-hex programming first figuring out what derivative the magic is.

Common sense would imply lunar magic, jar hexes, and hex bags. These are the most popular forms. The two latter can be diffused, destroyed, and cleansed. Lunar magic, is a form of celestial magic. It can be redirected or dampened using deflective wards and sigils or drawing upon it rival celestial body (draw on the sun to dampen lunar magic, that sort of thing).

Most hexes are annoying as hell. They aren't usually powerful enough to cause serious harm or be passed genetically.

My favorite 10 hexes include:

The Wet Sock Hex : They will have the worst luck with socks. From always losing them to stepping in moisture when wearing them.

The Untucked Shirt: Clothing Will always look messy and disheveled. Wrinkly shirts, pants ride too high, skin rubs, always missing a button when buttoning, ruffed collar, shoes that come untied all the time, unappealing bulges, etc. (This is top 3 favorites)

Burnt Toast: They will burn at least one meal a day. Mostly breakfasts like toast or dinners like rice.

Pox Upon Thee: There skin will feel like its constantly crawling, tickling, itching, rubbing. It will make them scratch and pick.

Weakened Fuel: Decreased energy from fuel sources such as calories, vitamins, fertilizers, gasoline, diesel, etc.

Tasteless Spice: Everything will taste off or bland until they add more spices then it will taste too much like that spice. (My favorite.)

Sour Breath: No matter how often they brush their teeth their mouth will always taste mildly like bile.

Apathy: Tempts people with laziness. This one can trigger depression so i suggest to lay off the apathy, use it only in mild doses particularly towards rude or aggressive customers.

Bursting Bubbles: Never a moments peace, something will always come up that forces the person to have to deal. Whether its a buzzing sound, weird chills, pets acting up, etc.

Constant Glare: no matter the sitting position or modifications, their vision will be unsettled by a glaring light source or they will be distracted by their own reflections in the surface they're working with.

Truth be told, they are all minor inconveniences.

And obviously, this isn't all of them. Think of hexes as reverse minor spells. To be creative, imagine the most annoying convenience you can imagine upon yourself and apply it to your hex work.

Magickal being associations: Fae (fairies), demons (low tier imps), certain mischievous dieties

Want to know how to do my fave hexes? Just ask. They're pretty simple. Most have small load times and quick runs.

Curses

Curses are long term afflictions that can be passed genetically through bloodlines or even familial associations. Sometimes its for specific person over a life time.

Because of how long magick has existed, one might argue there may be a curse upon almost every bloodline. Thats just speculation. Some curses will dilute over several generations thus becoming innocuous quirks of the family. Like bacteria and viruses, i feel some curses go a long way in shaping the bloodlines reputation.

Still, i feel that under certain principles, you shouldn't curse a bloodline to effect unborn innocents. That's my own moral opinion on it. If youre morally flexible and understand the self consequence of some curses. Whatever. I dont want to hear about the backfire.

I wont be listing any curses. I dont like casting them intentionally. Many curses are cast by "accident" using uncontrolled anger, impulsive desires, envy, resentment, overall toxic emotions.

Curses are harder to break than hexes. It truly depends on the caster, the intent, desired effect, and how it can correlate to the person or bloodline.

Many curses shouldn't be removed, for as i said they could be instrumental in the development of the bloodline. Or, this particular person/bloodline shouldn't have it removed.

Dont feel obligated in curse breaking, many witch bloodlines exist to propagate certain family curses while other bloodlines sworn to break them. Dont get yourself accidentally mixed up in this family feud. Both sides will turn on you faster than you can understand the curse business. Dont be a hero but also dont be particularly villainous. Both have consequences.

Magickal being associated: angels, djinn, devils, demons (high tier), Fae , draconic

I have met several people with curses. My husband was one of them. His was a family curse inflicted upon him and his siblings by a methed out gypsy bitch. How many licks does it take to get to the core reason for these curses? Is the curse dispelled? The world may never know.

..........

I feel that ignorance to these kind of magicks breed infection. You dont have to practice them but know that protecting you and your close ones requires knowledge of the more taboo subjects. (I suggest researching religions and taboo practices. National geographic has good documentaries on these topics.)

My favorite way of handling any hex directed towards me is 10fold deflection. Make a sigil or snare, charge it back up the best you can and return to sender. Sometimes it doesnt work, practitioners that hex often know to put a diffuser if their problem child ever returns to them. Point is, the hex is then nullified or not your problem anymore.

To help out a friend, use banishing, cleansing, and/or purification rituals to dispell hexes.

Curses requite a shit ton of work. You have to know the source, the back story, the intent, and how it is intertwined with the fate of the cursed. If a curse is fated, then you or your friend are s.o.l.

..........

There you have it.

This is my take on curses and hexes based upon my understandings. I havent included my family knowledge just because the details in it can be worked in reverse to create powerful curses/hexes.

Remember, sometimes its better to act than to cast. The consequences are usually manageable and blatant if you act upon your own will. Manipulating forces around you can cause reactions that are unforeseeable, unpredictable, and not always managable.

To put metaphorically, if i have a bag of garbage i dont whine about the garbage and pray that some one makes it go away. I grab the bag, lug it to the dumpster, and toss it out. I may get leaked on but its better than having rotten garbage on my floor.

If there are any questions, feel free to ask;

AethyrSecretary 🌙

[raisingsupergirl]

You Don't Know What You Don't Know

In today's information age, everyone's an expert. Broken dishwasher? Just YouTube it. Wondering who that actor is? IMDB it. Want a DIY chicken coop? Google it. Trying to find an unending stream of #fakenews and fear mongering? Log into Facebook. The problem is, well… we don't always know what the actual problem is. We see the symptoms. We know what we want—the end result—but we're not always sure how to get there. And a quick Google search is all we have the patience for before we jump to conclusions and then blame someone or something else for our failure. Take my recent plunge into fishkeeping, for example.

I've always been an animal lover. I think it's innate in all of us, but not everyone has the right disposition or upbringing to appreciate animal/plant husbandry. As for me, I grew up in the Missouri wilderness surrounded by ponds, cliffs, streams, fields, and forests. Sure, I spent my fair share of time on the Super Nintendo System, but being in the great outdoors was engrained in me from a young age. And more than that, I learned to appreciate the other things out there. I kept just about every animal you could imagine at one time or another (dogs, cats, birds, fish, lizards, frogs, newts, rodents of all varieties, snakes, chickens, geese, goats, a squirrel, a ferret, a raccoon, and even a short-tailed opossum, off the top of my head), and though I was pretty irresponsible with most of them (ignoring for a second that I should have just left them where I found them in nature), I loved nurturing them, and I kept most of them alive. So when my city-girl daughter said she wanted a fish for her fourth birthday, a little piece of my past reignited, and I… may have gone a little overboard.

First, my mom still had the 35-gallon aquarium she bought me for my birthday a couple of decades ago. Back then I just winged it. I didn't have Google. I didn't come from a long line of aquarists. I just filled the thing up with well water, a cheap bag of gravel, a log I found floating in my pond, and the cheapest fish I could find at my local Walmart (yes, Walmart sold fish back then). Of course the tank was full of algae and dead fish in no time, but I kept at it, and eventually I had a few fish that didn't eat each other, but ultimately it wasn't what I knew it could be, so I set the fish "free" in my pond and put a snake in the tank instead.

I used the tank again in college with similar results, only this time I had a filter, did occasional water changes, and had just a few friendly fish, so it was much more successful, though still very "low tech," as they say in the hobby. Since then, I've matured (please hold all sarcasm until the end), and I've learned the value of researching something before attempting it. The change started in physical therapy school when I spent countless hours dissecting and writing scientific papers. It was the literal worst, but it taught me so much about the world. Rather, it taught me how to learn about any particular aspect of the world. You see, in these classes, we weren't allowed to just read the abstract and regurgitate the experimenters' assumptions. We had to read every line, go back and read every line of the sources they cited, and then, once we understood every word, we could start forming our own opinions on the subject. And believe it or not, I rarely found a paper that wasn't skewed toward the writer's desired result in some small way.

So now we get to the heart of things—you don't know what you don't know until you know it. And you won't know it unless you put in the time. We're living in an age of instant gratification. Because there's so much information out there, we only have time to skim. Otherwise we wouldn't have any time to actually live. I recently ran across an inspiration quote by science fiction author Robert Heinlein's character, Lazarus Long:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Sure. Easy for Lazarus to say. As his name suggests, he was over 200 years old and counting at the time of his above quotation (and that's to say nothing of Heinlein's, uh, colorful political and philosophical views). But even still, his words are a nice sentiment, and they resonate with our current zeitgeist. We all want to be experts at everything, but we just don't have the time to do it. So we become Jacks-of-all-trades, and masters of none. And thus, with the dehumanizing help of social media, we get into a lot of stupid fights.

But I digress. Back to my aquarium example. Giving in to my excitement and desire for my daughter to experience thy "joys" of fishkeeping, I reverted to the impulsiveness of my youth. And of the twelve fish I bought those first few months, I killed half of them. Why? Because I didn't take the time to learn about taking a new tank through the nitrogen cycle. I knew nothing of ammonium, nitrite, or nitrate. I didn't know how to promote bacterial colonies in the filter media. And when I decided to add a few live plants to the mix, I didn't know the difference between submersed and submerged, or that PetCo didn't care about selling you "aquatic" plants that would die 100% of the time if completely under water. And that's saying nothing about water pH, alkalinity, fertilizers (NPK, micronutrients, root tabs versus liquid fertilizers, etc), carbon (CO2) availability, substrate differences, etc., etc. I just thought, "these are pretty" with dozens of plants and fish from completely different, delicately balanced ecosystems around the world, and then expected them to flourish when crammed together in the petri dish that was my, er, my daughter's aquarium.

I'll be the first to say that I suck at chemistry. It was the only "C" I received in college. Too many dry facts and things I couldn't visualize. Too much like math. But over the past few months, I've forced myself to dig into the periodic table and the chemical processes of dozens of elements and compounds in order to BEGIN understanding the aquatic world. I'm still so far away from having a solid grasp on the process, but at least I now know what I don't know. And that's a start. And it's a valuable reminder of the ignorance of mankind.

As a physical therapist, it often baffles me when my highly intelligent friends and family don't understand their own bodies. These people are experts in their fields. They're fluent in areas that I'll never even begin to understand. And yet, they can't figure out the simplest causes of their own various aches and pains. And thus, they become easy prey for fad diets, snake oils, and cure-alls. In health and fitness, especially, our connected, opinion-fueled society is playing the willing victim. Like politics and philosophy, we all know there are problems, and we see "experts" offering their solutions constantly, and social media algorithms are feeding into this problem by inundating our news feeds with like-minded (no matter how wrong) individuals. We think, "Hey, everything I see reinforces my ideas, so the must be right!" But really, we're still living in the same high-walled isolation we've always lived in. We just have weapons that can shoot farther now.

So remember, if you haven't spent hundreds of hours researching and forming your opinion, you're probably not right. Maybe you have an idea. It may even be a good idea. But life is complex. It spans millennia of philosophers, scientists, and soldiers. Even if WebMD says you have terminal cancer, you should still probably see an actual MD before you throw in the towel. Because, contrary to Lazarus Long's inspiring sentiment, humanity can still find value in specialization. Life is rich and deep, so take the time to dig.

[qupritsuvwix]

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[empahla]

Do You Have An Informed Opinion?

That last one is brutal. Do you have an informed opinion? Are you sure? Do you know what an informed opinion is? Did you build your opinion from the ground up, or is it the opinion you were taught from birth? Indoctrination is a popular word these days. Did you adopt familial and cultural opinions whole cloth, or have you made revisions? Do you challenge established opinions? Not just other…

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[adsiey]

my stan twt acc. tl's so messed up....

I know we all have different perspectives in a certain matter but I do hope we all make it a habit to be responsible on the information we'll be sharing, or we shared. especially if there are new details presented— facts, figures or whatsoever.

it takes time to have an 'informed opinion' and sometimes it'll really be tough/difficult to fully grasp the whole new information we'll encounter. so basically, if you are given fact-checked details, correct or support your previous judgement. initial opinion? cool. but let's educate ourselves and don't be a source of misinformation. be responsible and share the informed ones.

I really do not know what to say anymore as I am still at the midst of processing all things out but instead of choosing someone to side on, I preferred and chose remain neutral as possible as any hasty judgements, can hurt both of sides. well, this is just for me. this is may way of thinking holistically—looking at the bigger picture–as I don't wanna be sharing stuff that'll fuel to an 'allegation'. and I think it'll be better to wait for the official statements that will clear things out.

p.s. I ain't sure if I am making any sense, as my past actions are really something before. but I am, step by step, learning from it and trying to be a responsible and eventually become a better person.