SeeDarkly™

I've started to notice that I'm having a lot more trouble regulating my emotions recently, since things started to get really stressful back in March. All of the red flags are flying (binging Skyrim, difficulty keeping my composure at work, struggling to remember words mid-sentence, impulse buying, interrupted sleep, etc.)

I'm taking some time off from work after this week. I'm going to have to probably fight not to spend the entire time playing Skyrim, because Skyrim is where vacation time goes to die.

However! I am reading books! I am nearly finished with Lewis Spence's Druids, Their Origin And History," after which I am going to finally try to work on his other book The Magic Arts In Celtic Britain. Which Robert Plant claimed was one of his inspirations for the song Stairway to Heaven.

And the reason for so many Druid Books is the result of the fallout from seeing the film Sinners. And the paradigm of colonized people spreading colonialism like a virus - or like vampirism. Can those of us whose ancestral culture was repressed or assimilated into white supremacist Mayo Monoculture still reclaim some aspects of it? Especially when mostly what's left is a bunch of hazy impressions, and occasional intense spikes of longing for something that people struggle to define in words?

Or as Robert Plant wrote it in Stairway To Heaven, "There's a feeling I get when I look to the West, and my spirit is crying for leaving. In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees, and the voices of those who stand looking." Yes, I know those lines are also very evocative of the Lord Of the Rings, which was a huge influence on Led Zeppelin's entire discography. But yeah.

(Maybe if someone could express it in words, it would lead to the paradigm shift I've been waiting for my while life.)

I feel like I should also acknowledge at this point that Led Zeppelin became famous in part by adapting Blues tunes written during The Great Migration, which is important in context with the influence that Sinners has had on me since I watched it, and the themes of cultural appropriation within the film.

Anyway, there have been times when nonfiction books have been incredibly difficult for me to get into. It happens whenever my ADHD flares up really badly, and it's gotten worse since I've been addicted to the internet. Learning to be able to focus on one thing for a long period of time is crucial for any kind of Occult practice, and it's something that I've struggled with as I started to become "extremely online."

So, I deactivated by Bluesky account. Not only to save my brain's ability to focus, but because the brainrot there has been especially bad these past few weeks. It's worse than the last post here where I swore to quit Bluesky.

Listen, Joe Biden was certainly not perfect as President, and he made mistakes. One of those being that he did not step aside and hand the reins to Vice President Kamala Harris the moment he realized he was impaired. And I realize that some of this is happening because some hack has recently published a book about how he apparently had dementia equal to Reagan in his second term, etc. But when I see people who I formerly regarded as "sane and well-adjusted" claiming that Biden is literally the worst President ever, and that his term was, in the words of one, "America's lowest point" - when Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were also people who recently held that office, and Trump is literally shipping people off to concentration camps - it just proves to me that my worst fears about the detrimental and deleterious effects of algorithmic "fast social media" were all justified. Like to the point of asking these people to draw a clock, and post the results on their feed.

Whatever. I'll miss seeing takes from Faine Greenwood, but yeah.

I've been tempted to switch back to Reddit, but that was just as much of a dopamine skinner box. The point is not to switch to a different skinner box or echo chamber, but to abandon skinner boxes and echo chambers entirely. When I find myself going "I need to curate my takes to conform to the consensus of the Group Mind," maybe it's time to sever my connection to the Group Mind entirely.

ETA: And an interaction I had a short time ago on Tumblr kind of clued me into something: the first generation of kids who essentially grew up on Web 2.0 social media were indoctrinated to the black-and-white "You love pancakes? So that means you hate waffles, right?" type of discourse, and that's the only way a lot of them know how to interact.

I keep forgetting that Mastodon even exists. But I don't want that to turn into another skinner box. I guess let's see how long I can keep this up.


"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune

Then the piper will lead us to reason

And a new day will dawn for those who stand long

And the forests will echo with laughter."