(trigger warning: everything)
“She was half dead with fatigue, but he could feel the beat of her heart, could listen to her panting, and he grasped the grateful edge of a "Thanks" reaching from her mind to his.”
…
“As he buried his face in the pillow, he caught an image of the Lady May.
"She is a cat," he thought. "That's all she is—a cat!"
But that was not how his mind saw her—quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, wordless and undemanding.
Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her?”
-Cordwainer Smith, the Game of Rat and Dragon
I’m in no state to continue the CYBEROCCULTISM project, at least for now. I hope you’ll forgive me.
I never wrote about her on here. I wanted to protect her. She was my baby. I thought on the off chance an enemy magician could somehow harm her through the ether that it wasn’t worth the risk. It’s been one week now since I lost her, so I guess there’s no point in that anymore.
I’m really not okay. I’m still on medication, but I’m really not okay. I took her in when she was six weeks old. She had been a dumpster find. Her mother had left her behind as the runt, along with a larger brother for whatever reason (who is still alive and normal sized). She was so small she fit into the palm of my hand. She never got bigger than you’d expect from a “teenage” cat, even as she reached adulthood. She never grew into her eyes or fangs, either—she looked like a vampire bat from beginning to end. The most precious one you’ve ever seen.
She understood anything said to her and would converse at length in response—not in the psychic sense Cordwainer Smith (Instrumentality of Mankind) always wrote of, or, well, that too, but not only that. She would verbalize the most passionate, heated, emotional rants! She always had to tell you how she was feeling, and wanted to talk about it. And you damn well better be ready to listen, and to give feedback!
I had set my custom iPhone alarm for 8AM to get ready for work. I wake up to a missed call from my mom from 7 AM and frantic pounding on the door. “[She]’s dying,” she says. It doesn’t make sense, doesn’t register—she’s only eight years old, perfectly healthy—but somehow she aspirated on a hairball and it went systemic. I raced as fast as I could to the hospital my aunt had taken her to (at this point I was living basically down the street with my boyfriend and his two dogs, coming over to do laundry and karaoke and see the cats and such—they couldn’t join us in the apartment). I get there and they can’t tell me what fucking room she’s in while my aunt’s calling me telling me I have to get there NOW if I want to say goodbye. I manage to get in just in time to see her sprawled out on the table struggling to breathe, face caked with vomit, one eye physically stuck closed (the one closer to the bed).
The doctor tells me she can still hear me. She tells me she’s about to die. I kiss her and tell her she’s my beautiful princess, my precious, my baby girl, my everything. It’s still not registering that it’s real. To change only the tense from a quote from Cordwainer Smith’s The Game of Rat and Dragon:
I could feel the beat of her heart, could listen to her panting, and grasped the grateful edge of a "Thanks" reaching from her mind to mine.
Then, there’s nothing. I hear my aunt say something to the effect that she’s dead, but it’s like hearing somebody’s screaming echoing from the other side of a cathedral. I’m a stranger inside my own body.
The doctor unplugs her from the medicine drips and steps out. She sets down a modified doorbell and tells us to call when we’re ready for her to continue.
I didn’t know it was possible to physically feel your heart break. The chest pains haven’t gone away. They’ve gotten worse. I keep Googling the symptoms of heart attacks, it’s so bad when it hits. I keep reading about a thing called Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, or broken heart syndrome. It sounds like what I’m feeling, but if it was that I don’t know how I’m still alive. Maybe I’m not.
I picked her up and held her. She’s always complained slightly upon being lifted out of sass, even when asking specifically to be and requesting it. For the first time ever, she gives no resistance. Her head flops to the side completely freely. Her right eye is frozen open. Her other eye won’t ever open again. Her mouth is stuck open, her tongue frozen between her teeth. She’s still so small, so otherwise healthy looking. She’s still warm.
I dance with her. I laugh, I sing, I tell her all the things I always tell her and would have given anything to have had time to tell her one last time. It had been several days since I’d been back home for any significant time to really spend quality time, and I would give anything to go back and see her again the night before… I moved heavy equipment in for a family member but rushed back home because the next day my boyfriend’s dog was going to the vet for worrying symptoms. I was going to do laundry the next day after and hang out with my baby girl. His dog was fine. The next morning at 9:50 my baby girl was dead.
She feels so comfy and warm in my arms. When she settles into them like this, it’s always been with a purr. I instinctively lean down for one and a face scrub and see only the frozen tongue, the frozen eye. The warmth is fading. I can’t handle letting her go cold while I’m holding her. It would be too much. I don’t know if it’s been twenty minutes or half an hour but I know the warmth is going to run out and I don’t think I’ll be able to keep breathing. It’s already getting harder. I can feel myself dying with her.
My boyfriend gets there in time to see me dancing with the corpse and losing my mind. I lay her down and go to drive home, but he won’t let me. He says I’m too upset to drive. He’s right, of course. I am. But I say I can’t face to come back to get my car later. I can’t come back to this place. Not ever again.
He won’t let me go, hugging me, weeping, begging me. I’m shrieking, using all my strength to break free, feeling her body start to cold in the room down the hallway I’m currently one step at a time trudging through with a grown man wrapped around me. I don’t care if I die, I say, weeping. And I mean it.
I break free and get to the parking lot. He sits in the driver’s seat so I can’t leave, seeing my nearly suicidal desperation and grief blindness. I scream and beg and weep until I have no voice, “if you love me, you’ll let me get the fuck out of this haunted place! You’d know dying would be better! My baby is dead! My baby is dead!” He weeps, and begs me to understand, that he loves me, that he can tell I’m losing it and would probably die on the way home, and he’s absolutely 100% right but that doesn’t even matter. I want to die, in that moment. I would give anything to. I can’t live without my baby.
My phone dings with work. I don’t give a flying fuck. It dings again. I want to smash my phone. The chest pains get worse. I park at the apartment. I walk. I don’t see anything. It’s a haze. It’s a fog. I somehow end up there even though I started walking the opposite direction. The concrete stair at the bottom starts to move. I watch dizzily as it zooms away, further and further away, as I get smaller and smaller, being consumed by it, feeling myself get sucked in. I nearly fall over but my boyfriend catches me. I’m babbling incoherently. I make it to the bathroom inside and the pattern in the floor starts doing the same zoom out dance. I feel myself get so small and it get so large. It spins a bit, just a bit, just enough. I almost fall over backwards into the sink.
I don’t know how long I stumbled around screaming “Shut up! No she isn’t!” interspersed with weeping spells on the floor holding her collar and making it jingle and making it imitate her, forcing myself to believe she was there, to feel her, to hear her, to pet her. I make my fingers tap the ground in the rhythm her tail would when she was happy, which was so, so often.
It’s bliss, and I won’t let the part of my mind that knows better live. It isn’t allowed to breathe. Until it does. “Please open your eyes, baby,” I keep begging the thin air in the ground where I’m laying, petting nothing. The delusion is starting to intersect with the trauma flashbacks. On and off it would work, then I’d hear “SHE’S DEAD YOUR BABY IS DEAD YOUR BABY IS DEAD SHE’S DEAD” from the growing chorus of my own thoughts and the dizziness would come back. I’d become all too aware of myself holding the collar, meaning she wasn’t there, meaning they weren’t lying. But they had to be. Because if she’s dead, I have to die too. That was always the way it was going to be. I couldn’t live without her. And so it was back to the first phase, and so on.
I thought this took about half an hour. My boyfriend, worried out of his mind, finally told me I’d been doing this for six and a half fucking hours.
The chest pains. Oh god, the chest pains. Stabbing, dull. Heavy, pinching. Mostly in the right side, center and right, so no heart attack, likely. Maybe. Who knows at this point? I’ve been sure I’ve had fifty of them at this point. Maybe I’m having one right now writing this. It fucking feels like I am. And I’m not actively suicidal but I’m not sure how hard I’d cry. Hah! Maybe I won’t even get through this paragraph. If there’s nothing after this, know it was published posthumously. Thanks, babe.
I’ve gone in and out of sanity and clarity and dissociation since. My medication doesn’t do anything anymore, it feels like. This is all too much for it. Neither does weed. It doesn’t make the image of her eye that won’t open go away, of her frozen tongue. The days that followed didn’t get much easier, if at all. I’d have an hour here or there of dissociative or half-dissociative clarity, but it would start coming through. I’d have a notebook in front of me and start writing, let’s say, but then my hand absentmindedly starts writing and then before you know it I’m filling up pages in illegible begging for her to come back, that I can’t live without her.
I call out of work sick, day after day. I try to make it to speak at a conference but can’t stop feeling violently ill. I make it just in time for just my presentation and it goes well, I get through it, but then on the other side of it all it hits me like a tank again, and I’m in the floor again, weeping, dissociating, remembering, begging, halfway between reality and whatever hell this has become. My baby girl who fit into the palm of my hand is dead.
“I need you,” I weep in the most pathetic, desperate whine. “Please, please, please, please, please, please, please. Come back to me. Come back to me. I can’t live without you. I need your purr purr purrrr. Your purr purr purrrrr. I need your nosey kisses. I need your cuddles. I need your face scrubs. I need your tappy tappy tail. Please. Please. Please. No. No. No. No. No.” Hours of this on repeat. Hours, again. Hours in the floor. I don’t remember most of them, or rather, it all blends in together.
I try to get my mind off of it. My boyfriend offers to go for a walk to get my mind off of it. I’m fine until suddenly the flashbacks hit. I fall into a walking trance state. I apparently stepped in front of a moving car and almost died. I don’t remember that part. I thought I was just following him still, until I heard his voice echoing so far away, the cathedral again, telling me I’m going too far and the light hasn’t changed. For better or for worse, despite not realizing what was going on until after, I made it.
My dreams have become mundane, but the waking world gets more and more confusing to keep apart. When I dissociate hard enough I find myself slipping into them momentarily, just the feeling and existence of them, not even enough details to recall what or why or where. And she’s not in any of them. I mind linked with her telepathically once when she was asleep, sharing her beautiful dream of being a huge jungle cat in the breeze of the cliffs. It was so vivid—so clear! I’ve never been able to connect telepathically with any being, awake or asleep, or feel so clearly and PSYCHICALLY the love from anything as I could from her. We’d lay for hours, her purring, me just petting her head and back and kissing her little head, her soft warm fur. She was so silky, so clean, jet-black and shiny as anything. Shiny enough to see your reflection in her, she was so healthy. Even when I held her body.
My chest hurts. It still hurts. I made it through work today without breaking down entirely. I almost did. People could tell I’m losing it, but they like me, they care, they’re nice about it. I’m fine, it seems, for much of the day. And when I get home, the day is lovely. The evening is lovely. Truly lovely. Happy! Again, happy, with my man, and my life, and--and then it just hits me.
I go through the videos, the pictures. 511 of them. It’s like she’s there. It’s like she’s there. I keep looping sections. I weep. I weep. My man holds me. I weep. I weep. I loop the purr purr purr. I loop the nosey kisses. I find the video of her walking from the printer strutting around with the paper she figured out how to fold and bring over, so smart and proud, the walk of a genius who knows she is. I loop her strut. I loop it again. I loop it again. I loop it again. I keep going through the pictures, left arrow, left arrow, left arrow, after watching all the videos again. Left arrow, left arrow, and then—no more. That’s all. And there will never, ever be any more.
My chest hurts so, so, so bad. I want to be okay, and there are moments like most of today where I think maybe I can be. Then there’s moments like right now where I’m not sure I’ll even survive. And moments still where I’m not sure I want to.
I’d give anything to have you back.
"RESURRECTION (again)"
I'm sorry it's been so long, but I at least am coming to you in better spirits. My friend was able to get me in with his doctor in our very backed up system here and I was diagnosed again with anxiety and depression (and definitively, again, nothing else) and this time actually given medication for it. I was eager to try it out of desperation, though I didn't have very high expectations. I'm glad I did, as the difference has been night and day. It's like flipping a switch--the hopelessness and desolation is gone and I feel HUMAN again. Capable of happiness again. Of hope, of looking forward to waking up each new day.
I was worried it may have some sort of impact on my magick, but it's been nothing but positive on that front as well. Without my mind in a constant spiral, my focus has been through the roof and I can activate individual chakras in record time/with record ease. It's been a huge boost in every way. The only setback is it kills my appetite, but I'm already a stoner (which seems to fully counteract this impact) so that's... whatever.
I've been making great progress with the bodybuilding after joining a couple of new gyms here--I look great in men's medium again and have found some cool stuff recently, including a dope Sanrio shirt with Hello Kitty all the main characters in my size/department (props to Target, or as my friend and his husband in Seattle lovingly call it, "Gay Wal-Mart" for stocking kawaii stuff in man sizes, yo. It's a look.).
So, what else have I been up to? Uh... job hunting, housework and writing, mostly. I'm working on launching sites for that occult series I've mentioned a couple times (likely through Neocities, for cost--I know, I know, but I'm not paying for it, just using free). I'll link to them and link them back to here, but they're not really an extension of this site so much as a similar occult/writing project. I'd only held off on doing so before with the finished works since I'd once tossed around the idea of seeking a publisher again, but I decided for this stuff I need it to be more graphic, arcane and batshit insane than an editor for any respectable publishing house would allow. I'm very touchy when it comes to the purity of any of my work that involves chaos and any of my actual experience and occultism, so even the slightest changes I'm not really interested in making. I also would rather they be freely available for ease of access. People have enough financial worries without having to pay for all entertainment (I'm not suggesting people shouldn't charge for their art ever or anything--just this isn't my job and I like to offer a free alternative). I've also landed a very demanding but very exciting job in STEM again, so while I have less free time than usual--WHAT A RELIEF. Cause ya boy was OUT of cash.
Also, Street Fighter 6 is great. Wow is it great. Oh, and mobile layout, or alt layout or whatever you wanna call it is on the way. It's cool, or it's gonna be. I'm still working on it, I swear. I was going to do all this in one big update but a friend pointed out that my latest blog post made it sound like I probably offed myself and I do NOT want to give anybody that impression. I'm thriving again for the first time in as long as I can remember. I don't mean to suggest that the medicinal cure is for everybody, I know for some people the side effects are absolutely awful and the impact isn't much or is even negative overall, but--I do encourage you, if you're open to trying it, to talk to a PCP if your normal therapist or psychologist or other similar specialist isn't giving you the option or is pushing you for one you aren't comfortable with. WOW was it a different, and so much easier and more honest, process.
"I was in a dark place then, I'm in a dark place now..."
What a roller coaster this past couple months has been. Told I'm about to be axed at work (routine downsizing horseshit) so I follow chaos into another job that literally just falls in my lap and is much better in every way than my old one. Well, almost. I'm never allowed to have anything go well for more than long enough to make the next bitch slap hurt that much worse, so as always it starts out great and then falls apart in the most bullshit way.
Long story short this secret agent dude who's also the head of some kind of cult declared war because I accidentally ruined some plan he had involving my new job, so he kept stalking me and threatening me all day and nobody in power at the new job raised a finger about it, just told me they were scared of him too and so they weren't going to do a damn thing about it but I could quit if I wanted to. So when it got to where I literally couldn't do the job anymore because he'd just come and sit across from my desk and threaten me all day and try to get me to do random shit to sabotage the company under all kinds of crazy implied threats if I wouldn't... I did! I walked. Flat out quit.
I don't regret it and I'm still angry about it. Nobody could possibly work under those conditions, but I was kicking all kinds of ass otherwise and felt like my life had really started to turn around. I even felt almost "happy" for a couple weeks there! Of course that couldn't last. I'm unemployed, depressed to the point I can barely function. My shoulder is inexplicably painful for some reason so bodybuilding is out as a coping mechanism, and it's too fucking cold to do anything outside or in the shop. On the rare decentish temperature day I've taken to hitting the touge, which is enough to keep my mind off the rest until it's over and I'm right back to laying in bed, paralyzed.
Traffic tanked when I left Neocities, which I figured might happen, but it's still disheartening. I don't regret that either but it may have doomed the site longterm--growth-wise, at least. Which is okay, honestly. The original idea was to be a quality, trippy, absurd, beautiful rabbit hole people stumble across in their deepest dives of the internet, tripping upon it by the sheer force of chaos alone. And that's what it's become, I suppose.
It's not that I intentionally stopped updating for that reason, though. I've just been in hell mentally and in this job. For weeks I did both jobs at the same time and barely slept. Now I've got all the time in the world and I'm so drained and defeated that I can barely make myself do anything. Tonight I finally did some real updating, though!
I've been staying blasted on Satan's spinach to keep myself from feeling absolutely worryingly rock bottom, but in spite of that I've had very little luck on occult matters. My third eye is now well worn in and under my control even without the aid of the meteorite, but I've made no progress in any other arena. Well, I did some more spirit work and managed to create some complicated projections with their own interactable energy fields, but it took three hours of charging, rituals, toking, some questionable magick and binaural tracks to do so and I could only maintain it for about 20 minutes, shakily at that. Still, it's... something. Hoping to have more actual article stuff up soon.
Sorry to be such a downer these days. It's just... tough. Working on the site again feels good though. The first real spot of joy I've had in a couple weeks.
I miss the days when I would fantasize about sex and love instead of suicide.
I apologize it's been so long since the last update, work has been absolutely burying me. I've stil been hard at work with my magick too, though. One of my apprentices sent me a pack of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure tarot cards and I've been slowly starting to learn to use them. Been getting good at opening my third eye--that's the biggest progress, honestly. I can do it on command, though I feel like it could be developed further... I only get actual "eye" seeing visuals in the dark, and only with very powerful spirits and in trance mode. Still can't seem to regain telekinesis.
Sometimes you get exactly what you chaos and you don't know how much it will torment you. Long story I don't want to get into, but it among other things pushed me into a pretty bad depressive bout recently that's coincided with being swamped with work as well. I got a few days off work and instead of even being able to relax through it or enjoy myself or be productive, I ended up kind of falling apart for several days and hitting one of my lowest points in recent memory. I'm fine, just got to that level of hopeless for a couple days where even getting out of bed feels like a monumental task. I've been pulling out of it, but it's made me reevaluate a lot about my life.
This bit isn't really occult or about the website and is just obnoxious webmaster blogposty stuff, so feel free to skip this paragraph and the next to skip past it. But anyway, for one thing, I think I need to find a different job, even if it doesn't pay quite as well. I'll have to make a lot of sacrifices to get by if it comes to that, but I need to switch to SOMETHING because this job is just... all consuming. I can't keep pulling 12+ hour days where I'm essentially tied up in work from before 9 in the morning until 10 or later at night. The weekend isn't long enough to make that lifestyle worth it, I end up just recovering from the week over the weekend too exhausted to do anything and then by the time I've got enough oomph back to be productive on anything else, it's Monday again and it all repeats. And every hoop I jump through, every impossible mountain I climb, the goalposts are just moved even further and with even less reward. I'm apparently physically capable of it, if only barely, but how can that be worth it? Even if I have to back off to a less speedy weekend touge car or something, at this point I feel like I'm just working for the sake of being alive to be able to go back to work.
I love aspects of the work, but it's too much for one person and it just keeps piling up. People keep quitting and I'm taking on their workload too without any additional pay or recognition and being asked for even more in every other area at the same time. And again, seriously, my entire week is gone to shit anyway, which makes the rest pretty much pointless. There's nothing to do before 8:30 AM or after 10 PM, not after COVID shut half of everything down and made the others roll back their closing times to old person hours. "Oops, 5PM! Time to hit the hay, there's no way anybody would work until 5 and not have had a chance to come by yet anyway, right?" Meanwhile I'm smashing my first bong at 10:15 PM going "phew, what a day" before getting up at 8:30 to start it all over again. Nothing is open during my living hours, nobody does anything, it's the time everybody else is asleep or winding down to sleep. Including me, but my schedule is so unhealthy I end up trying to reclaim hours I feel like I've lost during the entire waking day by staying up stupid late doing things like writing this.
I got back to productivity pretty quickly though, I know the website doesn't show it but I've been pouring most of my off-the-clock dev time into a JavaScript game I'm making from scratch and pretty excited about. I may host it here, but I doubt it, honestly--I might want to use it as a portfolio piece for a future dev job or something and I'm not sure I want to direct potential future employers to my site of Japanese cartoons, weed imagery, and an occasional mention of casual ghost fucking. "Yeah I made the sites for these companies, programmed these games, these mobile apps, and--did I mention the time I had to stall the Men in Black to help a beautiful interdimensional dream invading alien entity escape them in the astral plane?" There's one for the Special Skills section, boys! And he reads auras, too? Hire that oddly beautiful, wizard-looking man!
I also started a badass occult novel I probably WILL host here, but I've only gotten the planning done. I wanted to write it for Nanowrimo but that ship sailed before it even left the port because I had the idea for the JavaScript game and got a little obsessed. I have very little to show for it yet, sadly, but I do have a working graphics engine and a large chunk of the sprites and animations done/scripted, and the novel is largely written in my head already. I've just had trouble getting in the mindset where words flow like... fuck, I don't know like what. Like I said, I've had trouble getting in that zone.
I've also had trouble hitting trance mode, but I think it's largely exhaustion from my schedule and the fact I had a headcold most of the week and killer allergies for the rest of it. Sometimes you just can't catch a break.
Thanks for reading... just felt the need to put an update in here somewhere since it'd been so very long. I apologize for that, I think about this site all the time... just been absolutely drowning in everything else. I'll try to get some actual new interesting content up next week at the latest.
Well that didn't take long--less time than I expected honestly.
We're back online with everything intact--I'd never thought to look into hosting options with the company I'd registered the cyberoccultism.online domain name through before (NameCheap), but I finally did and found I could get 20GB storage instead of 50GB on the lowest plan for about 52 cents less monthly than I way paying at Neocities. I didn't have super high hopes, to be honest, but while it took some getting used to the Stellar control panel, I've found I honestly prefer this setup. My stats are much more detailed, I have much better control over every detail of hosting, and there's no social network bullshit to have to deal with. I've had issues with that platform for a long time, I just was hesitant to pull the plug due to the price.
There's a need for some overhauls. I no longer have a queriable API to make the hits counter work, so I'm figuring out a way to calculate it and manually update the values each time until I find a better solution that still lets me use my custom counter images with the proper color shifted versions that work with my magic door code and such. It's a pain in the ass in the meantime, but it still serves both its overall purposes: to capture the exact vintage web aesthetic mash-up of eras I aim for across the site, and to give the viewer a rough idea of how many people have visited before them.
I'm also working on a Spotify app to integrate that would theoretically allow me to add a player on my site that lets you listen to whatever I am. I'm not positive I'll be able to get it working, but this host's control panel has a way to natively host Node.js applications, so it seems like it's worth a try. I had a bit of the code for it figured out before anyway.
I also need to bring back the links section in some fashion. "Neocities Mutuals" doesn't seem very appropriate anymore and I'm not a fan of the page's design before, but I would love to have some sort of directory of cool sites that wraps in a lot of my old favorites from Neocities and other sites from beyond, including one of the ones that many many years ago inspired this site... or the lingering memories of it did, at least.
I based the "vibe" of the original vision for this site around very hazy memories of a paranormal site that blew my mind when I was a kid and introduced me to occultism, and refused to look at it again until I had finished the site to make sure I wasn't too directly inspired by it. That site is The Supernatural Zone (I know, I should've waited for the links section, but I need a blog entry too). When I finally looked back at it, I was shocked it was still online all those years later; I didn't even have to use the Internet Archive! That was crazy to me, because I had first started browsing that site in... holy shit... probably 2003??? 2004 at the latest.
The exact elements I took inspiration from should be immediately obvious... the space-y gif background and the neon green text and accents, really, but something about that sci-fi vibe with paranormal true stories made the site seem equally magical and eerie back in the day and I wanted to capture that sense of uneasy wonder I felt back then. That site was my portal to the entire realm of the unknown, my only one before my own experiences started happening. I wanted to possibly be that website for somebody else, and to create a surreal website that feels like something one would see in a dream and obsess over once waking up until they could make it real. The DNA of several dreams where that was exactly the case are also present, and I feel like that is one goal the site has already achieved and surpassed. I want it to feel otherworldly, like it's from another timeline or dimension or reality.
I also have to give a shout out to Slimy from SlimySomething for giving me the excellent suggestion of starting a changelog page to keep track of what is added and changed in each update, since there's no way to backtrack on a "profile" anymore on this hosting provider--expect that in the next update for sure.
A bit of apology before I go on to the original unedited content of what was the last thing remaining on the Neocities domain before I pulled the plug and let the site go offline until finding a new host: I worry that this implied some sort of animosity with the users I would regularly interact with on Neocities, and that is not the case. There were several who apparently for some unexplained reason suddenly took issue with me, but the only users I had any real beef with were the ones I never really interacted with but saw constantly in other people's feeds and on the global site drama that my attention was always being drawn to. I have no issue with the regulars, any of them. I hope I hear from them again, honestly. This was aimed primarily at the ones I didn't interact with but who I watched try to drag down the entire site with them. Anyway, the original text:
The CYBEROCCULTISM project has ended. To the real ones, thank you for your support. May all of you find enlightenment, or at least yourselves, in this simulated hellscape in which we are all trapped. I wish you all the best.
I guess I owe at least some kind of explanation. This has honestly been a long time coming. I thought initially Neocities was truly a resurrection of the Geocities spirit--but I've come to realize it's nothing like that at all. It's a mix of tumblr, facebook, twitter... it wants too badly to be a social media site. Because of that, there is constant uproar and drama, and it's never where it's justified. This is a platform I've watched alt-right propaganda sites rise to popularity on, see them over and over throughout my feed, even on seemingly innocuous pages, and nobody cares. You click in and read what's being pedaled, what's being pushed on these sites that show up in everybody's "feed" and followers... everything from calls to act against certain minority groups to literally just manifestos of violent Neo-Nazi sentiment. And not just a little bit. Some of them have nazi in the fucking name.
So you have a platform that's a breeding ground for fascism, but at the same time is full of the most pointless and self-consuming drama from the rest of the community I've ever seen in one place since I quit social media. Whether it's because somebody said the wrong thing about an anime character, followed somebody without realizing they'd posted something unsavory at some point in the past, or simply failed to notice fast enough that somebody they followed had been collectively ousted from the community for one of those similar reasons, there's always somebody being blamed, fingers being pointed, something to stay one step ahead of.
I'm not a bigot by any means so I never real ran afoul of these pockets of the site, but it's still a full time job to keep up with the rest of it. People get torn down for just failing to unfollow somebody they just followed back at one point months ago. Projections about what your neocities connections mean about you as a person become commonplace. I don't have the time or desire to keep up with all the horseshit to begin with, but I begin to feel like I have to, lest I accidentally be portrayed as something I'm not due to one of the over 100 sites I've followed when most of them I was simply following back and many I have no idea what they stand for because I followed them early on because they had a cool layout before they even added any content.
It's truly the worst of both worlds. A place where I see my feed constantly, even on the walls or whatever you call it here of people I get along with well, constantly peppered with quips from sites that openly profess violent hateful ideology towards minorities, including minority groups I'm a part of. The official Neocities rule seems to be as long as content isn't blatantly illegal, it's allowed. I'm against government internet censorship, and I understand why some hosting platforms choose to be hands-off since they would have to otherwise monitor every single page that is uploaded, but Neocities isn't just a hosting service and I'm tired of pretending that it is. It's not a new Geocities, it's another form of goddamned social media that's being used to tear people apart, tear each other apart to posture to one another, and to spread hateful, bigoted ideologies. This is the shit I left facebook, twitter, tumblr, mastodon, discord because of, and here it is again.
And that's where Neocities' neutrality falls flat. I understand hosting providers and file hosting sites not monitoring anything beyond reports of illegal activity, but social media is held to a higher standard. Facebook is complicit in actual genocide--Google it. That's not hyperbole, that's not "OH THEY TOOK DOWN MY PROFILE IT'S LE GENOCIDE!!", actual honest to god fucking ethnic cleansing. Social media in general is also rightfully credited with the rise of the "alt-right" and the current wave of neofascism spreading through Western society like a wildfire. When you have agents of groups that support actual terrorism and hate crimes spreading their ideology through comments, following, links sections, "timelines" or "walls" or whatever... at some point, you can't responsibly just throw your hands up and say "oh, whatever." Neocities wants the traffic and the addiction factor of social media but none of the responsibility. Geocities was one type of online wild west. 8chan was another. Neocities sounds more like Geocities but looks a lot more like 8chan.
I tried to hold out until I could afford a better alternative, but I don't feel right anymore paying for this service and my site won't function without Supporter features. In addition, I've lived my entire life--magick, relationships, friendships, hobbies, everything--by a simple code. If something gives me good vibes, I stick with it. When those vibes turn bad, I bail before anymore damage is done. Neocities doesn't give me good vibes anymore. Sure, there's an addictive dopamine hit every time you get a follow or a like, just like social media, but there's more to it than that.
The past few times I've logged on after spending hours updating and adding new content and pouring my heart and soul into it, I've found every single time that I've lost followers, with no explanation. Sometimes I've even been blocked. Always from people I've thought I was cool with, have followed for months, usually who followed me first, who I put on my button wall and tried to support and promote at every turn... but one by one, they're gone. No explanation. That may not seem like a big deal, and objectively it isn't, but this site was the most intimate reflection of who I really am as a person, so every time that happens it feels like a direct rejection of who I am as a human being, as a person. That I was worth being involved with in some official capacity until for some mysterious reason, I was suddenly no longer worthy of being associated with. Maybe I followed the wrong person. Maybe somebody disagreed with my take on a magick element. I don't know. But it drains me. It sucks the fun out of it. It brings me back into the constant chase for higher numbers that mean absolutely nothing that makes social media such a hellhole.
I didn't think I was getting into that kind of culture here, I thought it was just webmasters supporting each other and keeping an eye on cool new coding shit being done across each others' sites, but clearly I was wrong. And in and around this all I'm seeing the fascists, even the ones I've blocked, popping up everywhere in my feed, the same people who openly proclaim ideology that I know would lead to me being executed for my sexual orientation and spiritual beliefs if they had the authority to do so. I started to dread logging on every day. I'd hope to see somebody saying they enjoyed a new article I'd spent every waking free moment (of very few given how insane my job is) perfecting to the best of my ability, and instead finding more and more people silently turning their backs on me, openly proclaiming and spreading fascist propaganda, cutting down their fellow webmasters for seemingly no reason while turning a blind eye to the platform's slow turn towards a new hub of fascist propaganda and spreading hateful rhetoric in anticipation of what those groups see as their hopeful coming civil war when the people like me will all finally be killed.
I just wanted to make the best damn website I could dream of and share my deepest thoughts, fears and experiences with the void, and possibly help some new magicians out along the way. Instead I found an abyss that grew darker and deeper with every passing day and even started to sap my joy of magick. I want to be very clear that it's a minority who I'm talking about here--many, many of you were genuinely supportive, amazing people who I was proud to host a website alongside and looked forward to interacting with whenever we were fortunate enough to cross digital paths. I'll miss those of you a lot, though I'll still check in on your websites, just not through Neocities directly. Cyberoccultism is not dead forever. All the code and content are backed up in full and at some point I'll resurrect it with so many more features and content it'll make your mind spin, it just... won't be here. And it won't be soon. I don't have the time or the funds to make that happen right now. Whenever it does happen, it'll be at the same domain name... just not the same host.
I'll probably get rid of everything here including this current rant in the next few days, but for those of you who were always supportive and pleasant and delightful to be around, I felt like I owed at least an explanation, and a thank you. Genuinely. The good times here were some of my best on the net. I've just seen the direction this place is taking now and want no part of it--in participation, or in funding. I try to put my principles above everything else in life. When I realized what atrocities Facebook was committing and allowing, I deleted the account, even though I lost touch with hundreds of people who refused to communicate in any other way, and I still stand by that decision. When Amazon's worker rights violations started dropping, I deleted my Amazon account and stopped ordering from them for anything, as difficult as it can be to maintain that these days. Seeing the darkness that is using Neocities as its breeding ground, and how it ties in to the current horrifying turning political tides in this country, I can no longer keep turning a blind eye here either, even if it means foregoing a home for CYBEROCCULTISM until something else can be arranged.
Never stop programming reality--you have the power to do anything you can envision. Use that power for good, and never stop training it. The fabric between worlds is growing thinner right now. Use it to your advantage.
Godspeed.
There's an inexplicable terror and frustration about being the most powerful magician I currently know ("know" as in correspond with--not counting various enemies I've been unfortunate enough to cross paths with). There is one other I feel is on par with me, my sole graduated apprentice who I've bestowed the official title of Cyberoccultism Wizard upon--but that's not the same as somebody who's well above my level. I say this all not to brag about being "the most powerful"--I am far from the most powerful magician out there and I am fully aware of it. I have infinite hills to climb and I know it. That's not my point. The point is that my mentor is dead, my archnemesis killed him, the entity-level being I'd learned much from in a brief amount of time has at least for the time being retired from magick entirely, and so... if I get in over my head, MUST learn a technique I do not know, have a specific goal I do not know how to meet--I am shit out of luck.
I genuinely despise it. I think I may be rare in that way. It seems like especially online every magician or psychic or wizard or witch or whatever seems to boast how they are the most powerful! They are basically a god! They have it all figured out! Well, first of all, I doubt that all very much--anybody who would claim they know everything and are the most powerful clearly know even less than I do--but there's a glee about it they have, an excitement, that they are the BEST! The best they know! The best in the world! The best on the website! The best on the chatroom! Wowza, they're the BEST!!!
I don't begrudge them that. I don't believe them, but I'm happy that they find comfort in their skill and ability and find confidence in it, though I am concerned they will be eaten alive somewhere in the magickal world for their hubris. Ego is a dangerous thing in magick. Do not mistake my statement at the start of this blog entry as ego. It's not that I think I'm in some top tier. It's that the more powerful tier of magicians I knew either retired, got murdered, tried to kill me, lost their minds, or a combination of the above, so that leaves no allies at a significant and comfort-giving skill gap above me to rely on and learn from.
I'm still trying to improve, by myself--damn, do I try. The amount of rituals I create, that I do, the precision I apply, the hours nightly even on nights I got no sleep spent seeking and sometimes finding extradimensional omegle partners in the ASTRALNET... but the fastest way to improve quickly is to learn from somebody who's far above one's level and have them help lift you up to theirs, and I've done that until I was equal and then trained another magician to reach the same height. But there's still no hand high enough above in my situation to lift me any higher now, and I'm running out of ideas of things to try to succeed in the realms of magick where I've hit brick walls trying.
I did telekinesis high off my ass once in Seattle and amazed at a party, apparently it was quite impressive, but I don't fucking remember it because I had to shift into a past life to be able to do it. High five to the one-back dude for helping me out there, but that still doesn't teach ME how to do it. And the books I found written by my past life explain the technique, but in such abstract terms I literally can't figure it out. I think I have it, and sustain it at length, but nothing ever moves. This is more maddening since at one point as a child I was able to use mild telekinesis, but I hardly ever did because it horrified me at the time. I tried to suppress it then, but remember clearly how it was done... it just no longer works. So I tried the past-life technique in every way I can think of interpreting it and get nothing. I try all MY OWN IDEAS about how it might work and it doesn't do jack shit.
I can manipulate aura energy at an impressive distance but that's not the right frequency to move anything physical... or at least it's never been able to when I've tried for hours and hours to no avail. That's such a great word. Avail. I wish I could avail on that. I've given up on pyrokinesis entirely. It's maddening because that's the ONE kinesis technique I've seen visibly demonstrated by other magicians and spirits before, so I know it's fucking possible! It's the one I want the most so it's especially frustrating. If you think it's because I loved Avatar the Last Air Bender as a kid and wished I was Zuko, one, fuck you, but two, you're not entirely wrong. I'm mainly obsessed with it after witnessing the ghost I call the Lord of Flames do it in a spectacular fashion prior to vanishing before my very eyes. I would only use it responsibly, but I would feel fucking invincible. And it can be done! I just can't do it, a-fucking-parrently!!!
Ahem. Sorry. I'm just wildly frustrated by this brick wall I'm encountering. I mentioned a couple of my... eh... 'stretch goals,' but I've been consistently trying a huge set of new advanced techniques I feel like I should be able to do and coming up short on all of them. I've not lost any of my abilities, and the ones I have and keep training continue to level up fine, but to be unable to add onto the main repertoire at all, it's... maddening. Like an RPG where you can "train" your moves to improve them, but your main character stops getting new moves 3/4 of the way through their max level. Then why the fuck did you give it 100 levels if you stop getting shit at level 75!?!? That's kind of how it feels.
I know I'll figure something out and have a breakthrough on something eventually, and the continued growth of my existing abilities shows I'm still improving. The lack of progress and my low success rate on recent experiments just have me feeling like I'm in a slump, and it's got me bummed out.
Oh, fun fact. All these blogs and articles and things I write, I do entirely in Notepad. I don't know why. It just feels right. Yes, even the HTML bits. I do my JavaScript in an IDE but not this...
Sometimes I feel sad for all the memories I've lost from past lives. I had a nostalgic moment about something today and then thought about how bizarre it is that I'll end up in a future incarnation that probably figures out about as much about my (our?) sprawling multilife interdimensional drama as I have, but with no ability to tap into the overwhelming nostalgia for my life that I have for its prior parts already. That made me wonder about all the memories from previous lives I can't access already, and accompanying that comes a feeling of overwhelming loss.
I think of the vague remembrances I've had from past lives. They usually come in the form of overwhelming familiarity with/passion for objects and places and situations I've never encountered prior in this life. Will I look back on this life in that same wistful manner? Which moments would I be saddest to lose? Is it bad there are a lot of people and experiences I'm almost excited to lose all memories of? There are people I've met in this life I know I knew in a past life. It's not something I can put into words well, but it's a unique and definite sensation, a sort of spirit memory recall. Their spirit is remembered, but aside from a general impression and a certainty this wasn't the first time encountering them, I can't remember anything else. Which people from this life will be those people for me next life? It's mindblowing to try to envision. How many times have we been on this ride? Are we all deciding to play on this server at the same time on repeat, or are we imprisoned here?
It's been proven that genetic trauma is a thing, so we know there's a mechanism through which bad memories travel between lifetimes. Is this our punishment? Is this our hell? To live a mix of joy/pleasure and despair/pain on repeat, doomed to be haunted by the bad that comes before but having the good wiped in-between? What did we do outside the simulation to justify that, or is it just torture for the sake of entertainment? Or is it a game or something we chose to play, and we lose our previous memories when we do because being 100% convinced it's real and is our only life is part of what makes the game entertaining? Or did it start as that, but at some point we were just trapped inside indefinitely? Regardless of the reason, I'd do almost anything to be able to access those memories the way I do the ones from this life.
There's a way to access those earlier memories, though. I've done it by mistake before, and slipped into it while in the trance state before while fully lucid and with my eyes open. The memories were of the earliest life I'm aware of, one I'm unable to quantify in terms of years it's so ancient, and were mindblowing. They matched up with what I'd reported during past-life hypnosis that an entity-level sorcerer put me into, though I hadn't recalled anything I'd said during said hypnosis. They were so tangible, so visceral, and I could feel myself loading them from past experience like I do with memories from this life, just... they were from an older version of this spirit's. It started putting every bizarre encounter I've had up to this point into perspective and started to give structure to this insane reality simulation we're experiencing. The worst part is, I couldn't tell you if these memories were from inside the simulation or outside. Perhaps they're from the life that I'm being punished for now if this is hell?
I want to see them all. They're so close I can almost taste them. All the answers that I've been denied in this insane fucking Dr. Strange-ass life I've had thrust upon me by enemies spanning multiple dimensions who seem to remember all those answers about me themselves... they're there. I've tasted of them. Maybe that's the real Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? The walled-off cache of all the truths we've accumulated over these millions of years and countless lifetimes? The glimpses I've had have been so beautiful. I have to see the rest. There has to be a way. I've already done it by accident and in snippets. I'll figure it out at some point... I have to.
An ongoing fascination/research topic of mine is ancient Egyptian magick. My most recent past life is quoted in one book discussing his time spent there (sometime in the 40s-60s, not in ancient times) and training in his occultism there and said no other place felt so much like home, so I've always had a desire to visit someday in this life and to try to understand better how their ancient magick systems worked. Nearly every ritual magick group, text, etcetera claims to be descended from some super secret ancient Egyptian magick group that totally existed consistently in secret and passed down everything over hundreds to thousands of years unscathed, but then mysteriously none of those practices actually seem to go along with... well... basically anything that's known about ancient Egyptian magick.
It's a frustrating subject to try to research as an occultist for this reason, and because the only books that really go into any actual historical detail or don't just make crazy shit up (THIS HIEROGLYPH IS PROOF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS USED LASERS AND UFOS TO BUILD THE PYRAMIDS FOR ALIENS FROM A HIDDEN PLANET IN OUR GALAXY, LIKE ZOINKS SCOOB!) approach the material from a purely archeological/anthropological perspective, inherently assuming that it's all without merit and merely outdated superstitions. Even more frustrating, most of these tomes are from the early to mid 20th century and reflect the dominant Western culture of the time, meaning the authors can't help themselves from simultaneously mocking these ancient priests for their ridiculous superstitions AND saying the reason their practices are so ridiculous is because they go against the very real mystical teachings of the Christian Bible. This is even true of some texts I've found published by scholars and museums. Some even disprove ancient magick by pointing out how it contradicts the objectively true primary sources of... the Old Testament! Yes, really. It's... a lot.
This makes much of this material an absolute slog to get through or make any actual potential metaphysical epiphanies from. Every interesting tidbit or translated passage is flanked with some variation of "those small-brained pagan ancients would do this absurd ritual to communicate with their fake made up stupid idol gods, because they were too primitive to know how stupid it is to pray to statues, and too heathen to realize how it spits in the face of the one true God! That's why Moses kicked their ass in their super real magick fights, because their magick was fake but God's isn't!" In other words, most of these books, even those presented as hard scientific/professional writings, end up simultaneously being too dismissive of magick to be a proper occult resource and too hung up on the religious and spiritual dogma of their own cultures to come across as a truly scientific/secular work either. In spite of these annoyances, though, there's a lot that can be gleaned from these texts that actually attempt to understand based on ancient primary sources and actual archeological evidence how their magick functioned instead of pretending obviously Western magick from the 1800s was, like, totally passed down from ancient Egypt, dude, or that it was, like, totally all a cover for aliens from Nibiru to make us animate their favorite manga for them, or whatever the fuck is up with most "occult" books "about" "Egypt."
Quick disclaimer: I don't claim to be an expert in this, not in this life at least, so know this is all coming from my understanding of books from the 1920s-1970s and NOT A LICK from any firsthand experience unlike everything else on this site, so if I get any of this horribly wrong, sorry! I also don't remember exactly which books any given piece of this came from, as I've spent many nights just reading through PDFs and physical used books both to try to get a decent idea of the material. It's also very possible that at some point some of that info, especially the older stuff, is no longer considered accurate due to later findings/translations, though I haven't been able to find anything to the contrary as of yet. Which is all to say: there's a reason this is a blog entry instead of an article. This is about my thoughts and musings on the material as it pertains to CYBEROCCULTISM, not an attempt to write a scholarly article about the material. Got it? Cool. Okay, moving on.
One of the most fascinating parts about reading primary sources from the period is how it's just accepted that magick is real and that the Egyptians kicked ASS at it. They write their own stuff pretty matter-of-factly and everything written ABOUT them from their peers in the ancient world is written in absolute awe and reverence where magick is concerned. They're described as simultaneously being incredibly technologically advanced and as having the most powerful and advanced systems of magick in the then-modern world. While there were ways for the everyday person to participate in their magick, largely through the use of amulets or other artifacts designed specifically for magickal purposes, the most powerful and complex magick was described as incredibly difficult to master and as requiring insane amounts of practice and training. Primarily these roles were taken up by priests, who were simultaneously in charge of the veeeery complex and respected rituals for properly sending off the spirits of the dead to the afterlife AND the masters of spoken magick.
Visitors from afar wrote casually and matter-of-factly about how powerful these individuals were and how astounded they were at watching their magick in action. One popular ancient anecdote I'll roughly paraphrase involves a Pharaoh going on a brief boat ride with two concubines. One of them dropped a very expensive earring off the boat, but the Pharaoh, unphased, simply turned to the priest he'd brought along and gave him to cue to act. The priest spoke an incantation and lifted that entire section of water from the river as a cube, like manipulating tiles on a grid, and the earring was able to be easily retrieved. This appears to be presented not as the most incredible feat of all time by an ancient hero, but as a casual and funny example of how helpful complex reality-bending magick was in day to day life, even in the most mundane situations.
Other cultures would learn and spread many of their techniques, but it seems like this higher level incantation work was too difficult for any but the most dedicated priests to master. These were relatively advanced civilizations in every way, treating magick as a simple reality and a discipline to master like any other, even separate from the religious implications. Even those who did not worship or believe in their "gods" would admit as much. The Old Testament even describes Egyptian priests as having magickal abilities, though of course they are construed as mere shadows of what the followers of the "real God" could do. Not that I'm saying we should consider the Old Testament a legitimate primary source with no bias, at most it gives us an idea of how its authors personally viewed the world, but the fact even hostile religious groups couldn't pretend the Egyptians didn't have some crazy magick shit going down is noteworthy.
With all this in mind now, let us consider the supposed mechanism of these incantations. While the concept of a "name" is a very complicated thing in the ancient Egyptian magickal system, the concept I want you to broadly consider is what is roughly translated as "the true name." The idea is that everything has a given associated series of phonetics--a "name" if you will--that is a unique identifier for it. These are not the same as the "names" people call each other, or objects. So for instance, "water" isn't the real name of water. A priest could not simply say "water" and then become a totally 1337 waterbender. However, let's say the TRUE NAME of water was "Ted." A priest that could perfectly speak the name of "Ted" could then essentially manipulate water in the ways described in the earring story.
This maxim was universal. If you could learn and pronounce the true name of a god, you could control that god, and by extension, everything under its domain. The same was true of people! The name one would use in society was NOT their true name, and while I've never been able to discover the mechanism by which a true name was said to be divined, this was presumably a magickal process as well. If one knew their true name, one was encouraged to never, ever let anyone else know it or its pronunciation, since one could essentially seize control of them through it. Pronunciation was absolutely crucial--it had to be EXACT. The phonetics were crucial. If every single vocal nuance was not absolutely 100% perfect, nothing would happen. For this reason, the everyman couldn't capitalize on this magick easily without extensive training, which was primarily only available to priests. People would attempt to hijack control of the gods this way for their own bidding, but would largely fail due to not having it down juuuust right. These true names were described as being insanely difficult to perfectly pronounce, the only thing keeping the ancient world from utter pandemonium.
This is also presumably why, while other concepts like amulets spread from tourists across the ancient world, this incantation-based true name magick was Egypt exclusive. Even people who spoke the language fluently as a first language couldn't pronounce that true name shit correctly, and the ones that could would have to just practice over and over and over for hours and hours to get it down even once, let alone consistently. There's also the possibility that these true names were totally separate from the rest of the spoken language, which make mastering these techniques even more arcane. It's weird to imagine a society where the ability to get really really good at saying certain words right gave one respect, status, and magickal power, but that's how it is described.
I never just accept anything I can't directly experience or reproduce, so I'm not pretending I know if there was any merit to this idea or not... but for the purposes of this blog post and thought experiment, let us assume that these accounts are accurate. The implications for CYBEROCCULTISM are myriad. You can't tell me that being able to lift water out of a river and rearrange it like a grid doesn't sound like some godmodding debug-mode shit. If we consider magick to be either exploits in the simulated fabric/underlying architecture of this digital reality, OR leftover features from a previous build or a lost mechanic, if you will, this concept starts to make sense. A series of debug commands left in the system with the assumption nobody would stumble across them, or perhaps hidden for when beings outside the simulation choose to "log in" and interact with it? There are many directions this concept could be applied to simulation theory, and the mechanisms described even sound like hacking a video game.
The question then obviously becomes, okay... how the hell did they figure it out? And that's where it gets even cloudier/messier. I've never found any supposed reason, even within the frameworks of belief systems of the time, how these names were supposedly figured out. Okay, so there's a universal phonetic code that means "water" but that isn't the word for the word "water" that, when spoken just so, unlocks temporary debug mode water manipulation powers. Cool. So where the hell was that code discovered? How was the pronunciation first figured out? Trial and error? A sneaky "god," whatever one chooses to view that entity as in modern context, spilling the beans? Does that mean the gods are developer accounts fucking with the ancients? Are they the "players" of the game itself and we're the NPCs? Or perhaps it's all a form of chaos magick--the words have power because the minds of the magicians saying them believe they do, and the repitition is building a ritual to hijack one's own subconscious and manipulate reality as it is created by the collective consciousness?
I don't really have an answer to any of that, nor any one theory that I put above the others. I don't consider it all true, either--not due to any inherent bias against Egyptian magick or anything: given their reputation at the time it can be inferred, if we assume ANY magick has any merit, that they were at least capable of feats that convinced everybody else in the ancient world they had genuine, working, functional, demonstrable magickal abilities. I just stick pretty strictly by my code that I only officially adopt any beliefs that are based in either personal occult experience or, for the "cyber" parts, actual published modern academic doctrine (quantum mechanics, simulation theory, etcetera), building any working theories only based on those. It's certainly fun to think about, though, and I spend a lot of time thinking about it and reading more into it. I do wonder if it's possible to find one's "true name"--as somebody who spends a lot of time trying to contact a certain veeeeery ancient past life and discern that name, I can't help but wonder about such things. Is the first name you have in your first life your "true name"? Is it random? Is it your name from whatever is outside of the simulation!? There's no answers for any of this either, but it takes up a decent chunk of my passive mindspace whenever I remember it.
If you're thinking "okay, well go find some old source that some dark magician made secretly to write the true name of everything down, and become a god," two things. First, of course I've had that thought, what do you think I am?! And second, that would unfortunately be functionally useless, even if it did exist. Modern scholars can translate the majority of what is preserved from various written languages of the time, but the language(s) changed and evolved so much over thousands of years that we really have no fucking idea what any of it sounded like. We can kind of sort of guess what maybe some phonetic elements sounded like by trying to cross reference modern languages in the same areas, but it's pretty much all guesswork. And when you consider that even people who spoke the language fluently at the time couldn't pronounce "true names" without extensive training, practice, and instruction? Forget about it.
We could get a written list of every true name of everyone and everything in the world, along with 100% proof that said magick does work, and we wouldn't be able to do jack shit with it. It would be like aliens 2000 years from now finding Shakespeare's first folio and trying to reverse engineer from it what his drunken belly laugh would sound like well enough to accurately reproduce it to sample for a sick bass drop so accurately that he would recognize as his own laugh if they went back in time and played him their dope deep space dubstep. You'd have a better chance of hitting on one of those true names randomly, if real, by just sitting around all day making random noises with your mouth (please don't actually do this). People who literally heard the priests say it out loud and--for the sake of argument--we'll say also saw the magick work in real time and therefore knew it was the correct pronunciation... still couldn't reproduce it. Priests in training that would hear other priests literally say it over and over and have them copy them... would still take forever to get it right even once. Even if it did work at one point, it's not gonna work again. Not in 2022. Not ever again.
But it's still cool as fuck to think about.
Another disclaimer--this is not a happy entry and is darker and more depressing than the site's usual content. Turn around if you're not in the right headspace for that, I certainly won't blame you.
What nobody tells you about shadow work/ego death/self actualization is that no matter how much you learn to love and accept yourself, you're still trapped on this backwater planet bound to a body that needs more to survive than is intentionally made readily available. I've had interdimensional assassins come for me in the astral plane and I still find nothing in the metaphysical world as frightening or as soul-crushing as regular physical non-magical humans. It cracks me up how fearful people are of the occult when more damage is done every day by oligarchs and assclowns than an army of entities or a society of succubi. I've officially reached the point where the void is less frightening than once-mundane physical existence and that's not a sentence I ever hoped I'd have to write.
I've never loved myself more, never felt more comfortable in my own skin and aura before, never felt as connected to my past lives and the grand intergalactic interdimensional stage that is this entire forsaken simulated existence, never felt more at peace with who and what I am, and yet every morning I find less desire to wake up than the one before it. Oh, and I'm writing this doped up on prescription painkillers right now (I'm supposed to be on them right now, don't worry), strong opioid shit that makes you all happy and loopy supposedly, so imagine what a bucket of fucking sunshine I am normally these days. I'm slowly losing everything except for my magick, which improves readily but still feels somehow aimless. I'm the go to guy for solving metaphysical problems, but against the myriad mundane problems facing this physical existence it feels like trying to break down a brick wall with a holographic toothbrush. I've seen professional psychiatrists in desperation and not been diagnosed with anything but anxiety (you may think anybody into occultism is a basket case, but that's usually not accurate), it's not "all in my head" or anything... just the crushing weight of life on this foresaken planet grows harder and harder to sustain. That's the conclusion they all come to as well, and guess what? They don't have a fix for it, aside from having me continue to pay them money I don't have to tell me that there's nothing really wrong with me and I'm sane and the world is just genuinely burning around us all and I'm just incapable of being numb to it.
God, though, how I wish I was able to be numb to it. Other people cope somehow. Netflix? D&D? Pogs? I don't fucking know. I just know nothing works. I know people who genuinely love Marvel enough that the fact a new movie is coming out is enough to get them through it all. I love drooling over Chris Hemsworth as much as anybody else, seriously I would die for that man, but it's not enough to just magically solve the rest of it, and I'm genuinely envious of people who are able to do that. I see a lot of people shit on others for this kind of thing, like "Haha! He said he wouldn't kill himself because he wants to see how the MCU ends, what a vapid consumerist loser!"...but I'm just happy to know that others have coping mechanisms that work. Why would I shit on them for it? I just wish I had something that was that overbearingly powerful to "fix" everything. I can make specific rare old occult books magically "come to me," absorb evil spirits with one hand, read minds across hundreds of miles with a proper mindlink connection, communicate effortlessly with astral entities... but that ain't gonna pay the bills.
I find solace in the few loyal friends I have left (nothing more fun than getting constantly backstabbed by everyone in your life who you would gladly die for, am I right?), but 90% of them have fled the area years prior. And, where I used to find my greatest happiness in helping people I care about, I'm just finding they're all as horrified and hopeless as I am if not more and in ways I can't possibly solve or even start to help. Exorcisms? No problem. Can't afford to live anymore? Uh... same, sorry. I try to at least be an emotional support, but, again, not exactly radiating positive energy anymore. I reached out to two of my closest friends today to vent about all this (and a lot more specific stuff that went wrong today that I won't bore you with) and basically got "sorry, I'll do my best to listen but I'm having a breakdown right now so I may not be as good at communication right now as I'd like" from both of them. At the same time! I don't say that as a judgement of course, I would've said the same thing if they messaged me and they were still a huge help, just--three people in two states all at that point simultaneously!? SOMETHING IS FUCKING WRONG!!!
It's not just me, it's fucking everybody, and I'm very aware of that, but that doesn't make it any better. On the contrary, it makes it all feel even more hopeless. "Nobody is happy, nobody can afford to live, even doing everything 'right' nobody will ever be able to afford a house or a family or even just to not have to sell everything they own to pay off a single emergency medical bill, suck it up and subscribe to Paramount+!" And I really try to avoid dragging anything on this site into politics because there's so many other places for it and this is a site about ritual magick, and I'm not the kind of person to be like "you disagree with me on one issue so you're dead to me!" or anything, but since this is the blog section I will say this--it's a scary-ass time to be openly bisexual, and that's definitely not making things better for me right now. I chose a real bloody fucking excellent time to come out of the closet, and I hate how much I keep considering locking myself back in and swallowing the key. There's lots of calling for violence and they don't mean dreamwalking assassination attempts. They mean boom, your head's gone. Pride here got quietly cancelled without a word or any sort of replacement over it all. I'm usually pretty level-headed and "aw come on, that's not gonna happen" but I'm seeing it happen around me, openly. Calls to have me imprisoned. Executed. And it's not like the community here can stop being shitty enough to me about being bisexual instead of "real gay" to help, or accusing me of being transphobic for refusing to switch to the "pan" label. Fuck all of y'all, seriously. This is why I refuse to be a part of any "community" anymore, somehow you get more actual support from randos with no skin in the game than your supposed community and that's fucked up. I'll take non-shitty straight people over y'all's asses any fucking day. Yes, you can be gay AND be a fucking bigot, they aren't mutually exclusive, go to hell.
Speaking of hell, it's times like these I really do wonder if there's some merit to the "this is Hell" theory. I'm not really religious, believe it or not--I spout a lot of mystical prose, and I do believe every word of it, but it's from real experiences I've had and most of those are when others have been there for or at least correlated themselves in detail that goes beyond coincidence (see the whole Aurelia debacle). And, I will remind you that CYBEROCCULTISM as a sect of chaos magick frames the existence of the occult in the lens of simulation theory and the idea of manipulating a digital system, so it's about as grounded as you can get and still be in the realm of metaphysics. That's all to say, I don't believe in "Hell" as it exists in a Christian context or what have you. But the idea that this simulation, or at least this instance of it, exists as some sort of punishment or torture device... I can't say anymore that I can totally discredit it. "But some good things happen!" you might say. To which I say, yes, but... which is a greater heartbreak? To never know the depths of love, or to know it so well it lifts you beyond the physical realm and then have it violently torn away? Which is more merciful, to never have a child or to have one, but watch them die? Or worse, be denied the chance to say goodbye? (I've never had children, to be clear--but that doesn't change the despicable realities others face every day.)
This is an existence of horror, pain, and suffering, interspersed with just enough happiness and contentment to make the gut punches all the more wrenching. Good people die for no reason every day. Children are murdered every day. People are massacred for being born with the "wrong" something, or just not born with the "right" something. Evil people take everything from everyone and inflict as much suffering as humanly possible for the sheer pleasure and thrill of it and continue to prosper in their ivory towers, never to face a single consequence until they die peacefully at an age beyond one you or I will ever reach buried between supermodels in bed, hearts stopping in orgasmic bliss as a final "thank you" from this universe to them for all the atrocities they've committed, and then their offspring will continue where they left off. People like you and me rot in prison doing slave labor for life over smoking a plant while Epstein's customers, after having him silently murdered to cover their asses and their continued atrocities, sleep soundly every night in luxury that you or I can only dream of. Evil reigns supreme, unquestioned, above the law, above YOU. And you still wanna tell me this isn't Hell???
I used to be a professional writer. Not in a past life, though it almost feels like it. I wrote primarily dystopian scifi and made a decent niche for myself in it. I stopped because I became unable to come up with new horrors that could topple those of reality. I briefly returned to the scene with a parody novel, but real life is now so far off the deep end even parody can't outdo it in evil, brutality, or futility. I grew up reading cyberpunk dystopian fiction and daydreaming of how I would rise to the occasion and make the most of the high-tech low-life world if I ever lived in one. It almost sounded like fun! Now I've lived long enough to find myself in that very position and all I can bring myself to do in it is sit in a dimly lit room and stare at the ceiling. To be fair, I'm still functioning--my job's going alright, I take decent care of myself, make a point to hit the gym as much as possible and so on--there's just less and less genuine joy behind the smile, and less and less time the smile comes out at all. I thought about switching to metaphysical horror, but there's no horror in my experience that can live up to those of the mortal plane. I'd talk to the scariest beings in the astral plane all night if it meant not having to wake up again in this plane. And no, don't worry--I'm not suicidal or a danger to myself, or anyone else for that matter. I could never bring myself to hurt, let alone kill, anybody, not even myself. I'm just starting to become numb to the idea of living or dying and to find trouble finding motivation to wake up every morning, and that's a point I never wanted to reach.
If you read this and any of this struck a chord, though, please don't let it drag you down further. Let it remind you that you aren't alone; I think there are more people who feel this way right now than who don't. Stay strong--if I can keep forcing myself to survive this hell planet, you can too. We can still find happiness and carve out meaning in this wasteland... it's just gonna be a whole lot harder than it used to be. However, I don't know about you, but... I have a lot of enemies on more than one plane, and there's no way in hell I'm going to give them the satisfaction of giving up.
There's something so melancholy about old websites that reached their "end." Sure, there's some level of the same when you come across a Neocities page that hasn't been updated in months or years, but somehow that's still recent enough it feels like there's a glimmer of hope there. Maybe they'll update soon! Maybe they'll post that they've started a new site, and be active there instead! But with the sites I grew up with, there's no such hope. Most of them aren't even archived anywhere. Many I only remember in vague snapshots--a section, a page, a graphic, a moment.
Previous generations will remember only physical spaces in this way--hazy memories of an old friend's house, dreams of visiting a mall one cannot remember any conscious detail about but that is still mapped out perfectly deep within the catacombs of their subconscious. Current generations have archive.org and "lost media culture" and exist in a world where even a deleted YouTube video can get an obsessive team of experts together to track it down. But those of us who grew up exploring the mazelike "old web" have our mental archives peppered with fragmented memories of digital temples we remember walking in as tangibly as our local arcades and video game shops, but without even the solace of being able to visit the building or storefront where they used to stand. Our grandparents could drive us through the rotting deep-woods plots where they gestured and told us of the wells, the slaughterhouses, the general stores. All we can point to is an endless void in an ever more dystopian and concentrated series of tubes that used to be an endless playground of wonder, constructed by other nerds, geeks and freaks like us. I even learned much about occultism through difficult to find, arcanely-designed websites I cannot even remember the names of now.
I don't say this in a "my generation had it so great!" way, quite the opposite. Groups like Neocities offer the same sort of experience and wonder, and are backed up in digital archives that would dwarf the proud halls of the Library of Alexandria... but my Alexandria has already burned. Sure, lots of bits and pieces were somehow retroactively saved--there are geocities archives with enough to bring back the flavors we remember, but missing enough that it never quites satiates that appetite. But back then things weren't as centralized, and there were countless hosting providers that came and went without a trace. Many I doubt are even remembered. I've googled sites I remember by name and spent tens of hours on in my formative years and found nobody else even remembered them.
To be fair, I'm sure I also led to this sensation for other people, as I've had many sites/projects/stories/games over the years that found at least some attention in their day but are total ephemera without a single sign they ever existed now. Most I cannot even remember the URL for. There existed a post on a forum I used to run seeking a game the user remembered playing "from their childhood" that was made and hosted by me on a Homestead site. Not only is that game gone forever after I lost several hard drives, even the forum it was being nostalgically discussed on has been dust in the wind for over a decade now.
There used to be a quiet optimism about the transient nature of these fleeting human connections and creations... when somebody stopped logging in to talk about whatever the hottest game or anime at the moment was, I assumed it was because they found something even better. They graduated and landed their dream job, and spend too much time driving their dream car around the track or mountain passes to worry about the next racing game, perhaps. Maybe they stopped updating their site about their waifu because they found a real life wife or husband they love even more and started a happy healthy family. Maybe someday, I would daydream, I would be a big shot in some tech company and meet their CEO to find they were somebody I used to spend hours online talking to in the early 2000s, and only vanished becuase their parents forced them to go to CEO School or some shit. There was something poetic and lovely about the possibilities back then. I also spent a bit of time wandering if anybody ever thought back fondly on any of my own digital presence over the years the way I did with others'. The internet was a sprawling labyrinth full of possibility, and there was an optimism towards the future that I miss more than anything.
Fair warning, the rest of this blog entry gets into pretty dark and depressing territory, moreso than I typically allow for the main content on this site, so if you're having a rough time already you can smash that back button and I won't blame you one bit.
Now it's all taken a much darker tone, and I don't know if that's a bad sign about my own mentality or a reflection of the ongoing rise of entropy among humanity in general. There's no longer a wistfulness to such thoughts, even with online friends I've only met and watched vanish within the past few years. No longer do I assume they've found blissfulness or been whisked away on a grand adventure. My first thoughts are usually "I wonder if they died in the pandemic" or "I wonder if they died in a mass shooting" or "I wonder if they died in the war." I've made friends in other countries who vanish forever right around the time I see in the news that their country fell into turmoil. I've made friends online who I know incredibly briefly and who suddenly disappear as soon as I read about a horrifying national disaster or terror attack in the vague area I understood them to be from.
I used to still be able to assume the best, but I'm losing that ability. I've had too many "IRL" friends die, get radicalized, get murdered, and get beaten down so brutally by life that they go off the grid forever and I simply don't know what happened after that. I made a friend my first semester of college who I barely got to know and was looking forward to hanging out with more after break, only to return to find them "missing" and shortly after learned that local police had found them, minus their head. How could I ever assume, then, that people I know much less well, online online, and who appear to be in much more perilous areas or situations somehow have "plot-armor" to protect them that the people I've actually known in person haven't?
I finally stopped spending much time thinking about old online friends for that reason, or other old friends I'd fallen out of touch with at all. I can't help but assume the worst in every situation when I've watched the most atrocious scenarios come true time after time after time with very little by way of the opposite. But every time I see scenes of war, terrorism, natural disasters, etcetera on TV, I think back to the fleeting moments of fun and camarederie I used to feel with online friends from those locations and my chest feels ten times as heavy. There's a natural emotional barrier people tend to build around "the other," especially geographically--"well of course that place got blown up, that's how it is over there. Well of course they're starving to death, that's just how it is there!"
But, while I think that's natural to some extent, and a logical subconscious coping mechanism... I'm always shocked when I hear people shrug off absolute atrocities, even genocides, just because they're "in other places," largely in part because I spent so much time in my youth learning about other places online and making friends with people in every corner of the globe, my eyes aglow with the same wanderlust to hear about their lives and homelands as I get now when I'm interacting with entities from the astral plane. And while I'm thankful for those experiences, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't just a bit jealous of everyone else's ability to just not give a shit about something horrible happening if it doesn't affect them directly. I envy their emotional numbness as I continue helplessly to watch the world burn.
Just like the internet, which used to seem impossibly vast and ever growing, now feels like a tiny central square with a few skyscrapers and not much else, so too does the real world feel impossibly small. This should be a wonderful thing, but unfortunately entropy seems to only grow as the rest "shrinks." There's nary a corner of the world I haven't at some point really cared for somebody in, even if we never knew each other's real names and only wasted afternoons and evenings linked up through the alluring glowing portals of ancient CRTs. Empathy is supposed to be a fully good thing, but there's a tradeoff nobody likes to talk about. There are unfathomably cruel horrors happening somewhere every moment, and unlike previous generations, it's no longer possible to shrug them off or guard against them, because "the other" isn't just an unknown quantity. They're more than burning stick figures on a screen next to the talking heads of the media. Every charred corpse in every war-torn land on a screen takes me back to the sleepless nights of learning about the day to day lives and dreams and souls of the people who lived in that city, town, village, etcetera before it was razed, when it was full of starry eyed kids staring hypnotically through magic tubes connecting them to the starry eyed kid sitting in my own chair in decades past, timezones be damned... and every faceless corpse wears one hypothetical username or another of this or that vanished digital comrade from lost times past.
I swore early on I wouldn't make a page like this, because it seemed so extraneous--what's the point of having all the articles and pages on this site if there's a spot I just write stuff sequentially post after post? But as time went on, I realized that there are countless musings, tidbits, and thoughts that would be a struggle to stretch to full "article" length, but that still warrant saying.
This doesn't replace anything else on the site, and it doesn't mean I'm out of other content to write--on the contrary, I have so much of a backlog on planned articles/oddities/etcetera to write about that it is almost overwhelming! I'd say I only have maybe half of what I have in mind up so far articles wise, and I am always thinking of new ones to add to that list (and having new bizarre experiences that warrant their own articles as well). There's a good chance that something that makes a post on this page will later be expanded into a full article if I think of more to say about it (or the situation evolves)... but this is not a replacement for anything that is already planned to be an article.
I'd feel like I'm cheating you to just rant about the idea of a blog for the first blog entry, though, so here's the bit that inspired me to make a section like this to begin with, an "oddity" that I don't really have enough to say about to write an article on but that I wanted to share. I think I've mentioned it here before, but one of my favorite "artifacts" is an ancient meteorite from a rare crash site with an interesting composition.
Throughout history, meteorites have been treated as sacred for various reasons, and they definitely have a unique and uniquely powerful energy signature. They charge incredibly easily, can hold a shitload of energy, and are easy to draw power from. Anyway, I often use it in late-night rituals as a third-eye awakening/charging tool, setting it next to my bed when I finally stop meditating/astral projecting and go to actual normal "sleep." I lost it for a couple of days, thinking it must have fallen off the bed, but walked into my room the other night to find it smack dab in the center of the bed. I was baffled since I had torn the bed apart looking for it to no avail for two days, and since I would have felt a pretty large fucking rock under me if I'd slept on it, but... there it was. Plain as day. Right in the center.
That's not the weird part though. I'd been having trouble getting any juice out of it for a while; it seemed like I'd drained it to its limits in a couple rituals a few weeks back and it had seemed to hit "zero." I'd kept meaning to charge it again and just not bothered, but when I found it this time, it was--for the first time since I've owned it--at absolute maximum charge(?)! I was thrilled and immediately started drawing from it, but it was so highly charged I hit overcharge far too quickly and couldn't fucking sleep all night. And it still has plenty to spare!
There's no moral to this story, no explanation, I don't even pretend to know what happened with any of it, but it was weird enough to warrant retelling. That's the kind of thing I hope to use this section for in the future, along with perhaps random musings without enough content to warrant a standalone article/page. Keep checking back; I'm sure there'll be more weird shit to read here soon.
