#tecnomancy

[drawnale]

Day 2 Tecnomancy

Ghost zones greatest hunter is 10cm tall.

[new-revenant]

Tecnomancy - Ectoburhaunt Day 2

ugh I thought I could churn this out in less than a day. It has been much more than a day. I also spelled tecnomancy wrong fuuuuuuuge. Context and more mumbling under the cut.

Anyways, Val is learning technomancy, and I thought it would be funny if one of the first things she learns is how to project her instructions onto a wall. She is reading from a foldable tablet(like those weird folding phone with a screen on both sides-I hope you know what I’m taking about). I also used like, no posing references and had no idea what I was doing with the projection thingy. Also, I didn’t know what to do with the lighting. I am definitely going to use references next time.

[death-draws]

Uh oh guys dont let that which you love consume you or anything :/

[the-clari-net]

Okay, let the record show that Sam didn’t intend all of this to happen.

Some (Tucker) would argue that it began when Sam began her journey into vegetarianism, while others (Sam) would argue that it began when Tucker was born, and his stubbornness came into existence.

For simplicity’s sake, the beginning of this situation came in the form of Danny going into the Ghost Zone; he ended up visiting Princess Dora’s haunt. While visiting, Danny noticed that surrounding her castle were several strange plants that stood in the trenches of once might have been a moat.

“Hey Dora, what are those plants doing there?”

Dora looked at the direction he was pointing at and hummed, “Those are special plants meant to guard the castle. Moats aren’t as useful when everyone can fly, you see.” Danny continued to look curiously at the plants.

Some of the plants looked like earthly flowers, with some of the colors harsher and brighter to match with the rest of the Ghost Zone. Something about them gave off an odd feeling in Danny’s chest. Nothing as instinctually frightening as blood blossoms, but they kept him guarded. Princess Dora hadn’t noticed Danny’s silent observations and continued to explain some of their properties.

“You see, for some of the weaker pest-like creatures, these plants are good at disorienting and repelling; similar to how lavender repels mosquitos. Some of the larger ones – like the trees next to the drawbridge – are much more potent and have specific forms of protection. If I whisper a special incantation into the hollow of the tree, the branches can extend and create a barricade of sorts preventing anything to pass through the bridge.”

“That’s a pretty cool way of protecting yourself.” Danny couldn’t help but wonder aloud, “How did you even discover what these plants do?”

Princess Dora perked up at the question, “Oh, I have a book in the palace library that has all sorts of helpful information about these plants! Would you like to see it for yourself?”

What Princess Dora doesn’t realize is that Danny would much rather let her set him on fire in her dragon form than sit in a stuffy library all afternoon. Danny, however, was taught some semblance of manners, and held his tongue on that thought.

“Oh, no thank you. This seems more of Sam’s wheelhouse than mine to be honest.”

“Oh…Lady Samantha?” Princess Dora said coyly, her gentle smile taking on a more mischievous smirk.

“Just Sam, she doesn’t like to be called that,” Danny crossed his arms and tried to look at her sternly for a moment before looking down embarrassed, “and don’t look at me like that,” he muttered.

Dora couldn’t help herself and let out one last giggle before composing herself and suggested lending her book to Danny’s dear friend for a short period of time.

It was a kind gesture for Danny to think of his friend in that moment. After all, Sam had been consumed with upkeeping her greenhouse and trying to expand into growing her own vegetables. She’s spent the last two weeks ranting about fertilizers and visiting libraries and bookstores to see if there were any solutions to her struggling hobby.

At first, her friends would nod supportively whenever she went on her tirades; however, teenage boys are not known for their patience, and Tucker and Danny are no exception.

To be fair, their relaxing weekend was replaced with an early morning visit to the farmer’s market and digging through compost bins collecting soil samples for Sam to take home.

“Sam, I think we’ve managed to bother every single gardener in a ten-mile radius about your gardening issues,” Danny whined. The two of them were sitting in Tucker’s room, waiting for him to get back with the pizza they ordered earlier.

Sam was busy flipping through another gardening magazine and distractedly replied, “And I’m going to keep bothering anyone who might know something about plants until we figure out how to keep my plants from dying.”

Tucker came in at that moment, pizza in hand, and asked Sam, “So if we find a way to keep your plants alive, we won’t need to go dumpster diving for daffodils and daisies?”

“Yeah, basically,” Sam replied.

And so, Danny and Tucker had a new goal in mind. 

--

The day after Danny met up with Dora, Sam received the book.

Tucker and Sam were sitting in the cafeteria for lunch. Tucker was rambling about nanobots detecting fertile soil of some sort. His glasses failing at hiding the dark rings surrounding them.

“I don’t know Tuck…” she mumbled to herself. Tucker was scrolling through his PDA, showing Sam something on his screen, not realizing that Danny had arrived at the table.

“Hey, I might have something for you to help with your gardening. Princess Dora gave me a book all about ghost plants. Maybe there’s some tips for you in there.”

Sam smiled at Danny and thanked him. She then turned to Tucker and sternly said, “Tucker, put away your PDA and eat something!”

--

Sam was skeptical, but decided to give it a shot regardless once she got home. However, she wasn’t risking her greenhouse on this test. She took a potted fern in her room and began speaking to it, in what she belatedly realized was ghost speak. (Her pronunciation “gives her a strange accent” according to Danny, but it works well enough.)

The leaves began to turn a bright purple and started making her feel drowsy. “That’s not good,” she thought to herself.

Once she started walking away from the plant and her foggy mind cleared, she suddenly notices that Tucker is calling her. She answers and before she can speak, Sam hears unintelligible screams through the phone.

“Sam! Get over to the gardening club, now!”

“Tucker, what is it?! Is it a ghost?” Sam opens her closet and grabs a hidden box, containing her ghost catching equipment.

“Worse! I think I revived James Amity!”

Sam pauses for a moment, “…the founder of this town?”

“Yes!”

“How?”

“It’s nanobots, Sam! They regenerated his cells!”

“…Hold on I’ll be right there, send me your location.”

“Hurry!” Tucker yells and hangs up, presumably to figure out what to do with a reanimated corpse.

Before she left to go find Tucker, Sam grabbed a plastic bag and took her new ghostly fern and placed it inside. “Well, I hope this helps.”

[tarot-on-a-technicality]

Dedicated Spaces in Tech Magic

Welp, I was in a bit of a funk re: my craft and then I was inspired by a question from @artsiwych sooo... Have some talk about making a dedicated space for your tech magic. I'll try to go back through soon and link resources but this was a 2am mad type-up.

So, one of the nice things about tech magic is it doesn't require much physical space or presence. It blends nicely into your mundane life so if you are living with those who don't support witchcraft or just prefer to not explain an altar to visitors to your place? Tech witchcraft is amazing for that.

This does NOT mean you can get away with not having a dedicated space to practice, however. Sure, I'll do programming work on whatever machine is available, but the serious work? The actual craft of things? I have separate devices, accounts, even separate Discord servers for my bots when doing serious magical work like one would do at an altar. Tech magic may be digital but it is still magic and you need to set it apart from your other digital doings.

There's a number of ways you can do this. I'm going to devide this into both physical and digital elements, so think from both angles to find whichever one fits your budget, means, and workflow.

Separate physical devices

Much like an altar can be anything from a table to an Altoids tin, you can easily keep a digital device set apart for your witchy doings. This can be anything from a USB flash drive to a completely separate computer/device.

If you want to go to the moon, you can do something like I have with my Raspberry Pi Zero W where I can remote connect to it using wi-fi. Have I mentioned the device was $15 for the board and the case? It's a steal of a computer, especially if you have some old micro-usb chargers lying around. You could also use an old cellphone just for magical work, if you like mobile apps. Or you could have a flash drive with whatever setup you wish on it, whether that is a bootable OS setup or just a bunch of files. Think outside the box and do some research on small computers or repurposing old tech. There's a lot you can do on this end of things.

Separate digital spaces

If you are using a device you usually use for mundane activities for magical ones as well, consider setting up a separate digital space for your craft. At the bare minimum, anyone using cloud storage for their craft should consider making an account separate from their primary. But this can be much more complex as well, as it is easy to fall into old habits when using the same space for both mundane and magical activities.

One easy way to do this is to make a second user account on your PC and use it just for magical work. This is a trick I suggest to people who have trouble shutting off their notifications on their main profile, as it isolates you from your usual space. This clear digital line between accounts keeps you on task.

On the other hand, if you have a need to swap back and forth, try a Virtual Machine on your computer. This lets you run a computer within your computer, complete with its own OS. Now, installing an OS on a Virtual Machine can be tricky, especially if your current OS license is for one computer only. If this is the case, Linux is going to be your friend. Find a distro you like and give it a try. Ubuntu is always a solid choice if you want somewhere to start.

Things to consider:

- What sort of mobility does your tech space need?

- If writing code, what languages will you need to write and what apps to compile and process?

- If working with graphics, what physical and digital requirements does your space need?

- Do you want a graphical interface, or a command line interface?

- Do you want to use systems you are comfortable with, or do you want to learn something new in the process of setting up your space? Systems you are comfortable with will ensure less fumbling in the middle of your craft, but sometimes pushing yourself to learn something new creates a build up of energy you can add to your work.

[gumi-botpoidd]

god i want music based superpowers so bad. like tecnomancy

[tarot-on-a-technicality]

the project’s phase 1 begins

Per my last post, I’m increasingly interested in the idea of a website that could serve as a portable altar across multiple places. (I’d do it as an app, but that’d lock it to my phone.) However I am WOEFULLY out of practice with HTML and CSS, and all my Javascript practice comes from Discord bots, so I am unused to making a GUI for web interfaces.

So to ease myself into it, I’m starting with a tarot card portion of my site. This will let me repurpose existing Javascript for the pulls, etc and focus more on the front-end of things. Below is my basic project diagram to help me figure out the moving pieces, so to speak.

[Alt text: A picture of a diagram. The diagram shows how an initial webpage containing multiple variables in an array will use a variety of buttons to tailor the variables to the user’s specifications for a tarot reading. This information will be forwarded on clicking a confirmation button into a second page, that will use various scripts, json files, and images to create a page displaying the results of the reading.]