You may have noticed some silence on this blog, considering I have posted almost daily for a while and then disappeared for a couple of months. I’ve already talked about the reasons why in my previous post.
But now that I’ve recharged my batteries and taken care of myself I’m back and my fingertips are itching, since I’ve got a couple of projects I need to catch up on (concerning the tarot, playing cards, magic, Enneagram, geomancy and other stuff. I’ve also got a couple of videos lined up)
In other news, I have finally managed to locate my form responses from the contact section, and I have caught up on all my correspondence. The only exception is the user Sonya: I’ve tried using your email to answer your message but it bounced back with an error message. If you see this post, feel free to contact me again (possibly with a different email) so I can answer your question.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s article, I was away for several weeks to take care of myself. In the meantime people have been sending me several messages over the form. Unfortunately, WordPress seems to have changed something about the interface, so I can’t for the life of me figure out how to read those messages. Bear with me, I am a very special kid, thanks 🫣 I will answer everyone as soon as I understand how
You know the old adage that people who sell solutions need the problem to remain unsolved. I’m not talking about odd conspiratorial crap, like “the government is hiding the secret of immortality”. I’m talking about observable facts.
When influencers started becoming a thing, it was simply a bunch of kids in their rooms talking about stuff they were passionate about. Corporations then smelled the opportunity and ruined everything, as they usually do, by turning them into advertisers.
There is, obviously, absolutely nothing wrong in wanting to make money on the Internet. My mom, who was a journalist, used to say to people criticizing that she made money off of reporting tragedies, that it’s possible to do her job well with professionalism and strong ethics. A look at the Internet today shows me that most people are not my mom.
Whenever you end up in a rabbit hole on a particular topic on social media or youtube, your feed is going to fill to the brim with people trying to part you from your money. Even if they don’t want to part you from your money, they still want to part you from your attention, and your attention is one of the most precious things you have, so you should administer it well.
I’ve already talked about the pros I experienced from reducing Internet consumption, learning again to stay with myself. I’m not some kind of Luddite or Amish. I don’t dislike technical progress. I just think it should serve me rather than the other way around.
I generally try to spend less than an hour a day on the Internet (which, for a Millennial, is quite the achievement) not counting the time I spend working on the blog or yt channel. I’ve found that most days I can safely stay under 30 minutes.
What I’ve noticed in my journey toward reclaiming my own attention is that it is especially easy to spot someone trying to sell you something on the Internet. Again, I’m not saying it is wrong to sell goods and services, and in a way all is fair in love and marketing, but the point is that my aim of keeping my attention to myself and deploying it only for worthwhile pursuits is at odds with most people’s need to make a couple of bucks off of me.
You can immediately spot a youtuber (and probably tiktoker) who is out to get your attention and/or money because they have a distinctive (and very effective) way of serializing even the most minute unit of crappy information they are going to give you. For instance, if you watch a video about fitness, you’ll be swamped with videos all telling you how you are missing out on every possible secret hack.
You will always notice that their way of pushing out ‘content’ is to make it seem as though that video is always going to be exactly the one thing you need in whatever niche you’re exploring, and without which you will utterly fail or be lied to by invisible entities who won’t tell you the truth about it.
That is, until the next video, which will drop 24 hours later, and which will also be exactly the one thing you need and are missing and are being lied to by others and without which you’ll fail. Once you start spotting these trends it becomes almost amusing to see how much sludge can be manufactured with so little actual material.
As I may have mentioned in the past, I have been in therapy a long time. I almost took for granted that I knew all there was to know about the various phases of my life.
Yet recently I was talking to my new therapist about my late teens to early twenties, and I casually mentioned how I had lost a ton of weight in that period. I hadn’t been chubby before, just regular size, but somehow I had convinced myself there was too much of me.
As I explained to her my behavior with food (won’t go into details), she furrowed her brow and said “well, that’s called anorexia.”
It really hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew of course that men can suffer from anorexia too, but in my mind the term had been subconsciously filed away under ‘eating disorders for insecure teen girls’, so it never truly came into question as a meaningful description for whatever the hell I was doing in that period.
While I still feel weirded out by the idea, another part of me is glad that there are still things I need to discover about myself.
I have pretty much stopped making plans for this blog. I’ve realized that the reason I’m so glad working at it is that, while I have a broad vision of what I want it to become, I just follow my fixation of the day in order to get there. I don’t want it to feel like work (because it isn’t).
I know, for instance, that in the very near future I’ll go back to translate Fludd’s Geomancy handbook and other old works, but I don’t want to put a date on it (my husband, a perfect incarnation of the Prussian spirit, would shudder at the idea of not having a deadline).
I also know that I feel the need to explore the philosophical underpinnings of the stuff I’m into, but it is hard to get started as ideas accumulate in my head in no particular order. I know that I’m just waiting for everything to click into place, because I’ve been through the same process enough times to know how it works: you accumulate wood and sooner or later a lightning will strike it (or at least someone will drop a cigarette butt on it)
For a couple of months I have been getting between 35 and 60 individual daily visitors on this blog, which, considering it’s a personal blog with no advertising I am perfectly happy with, especially since I started out with 0 daily visitors a day a couple of years back and it has slowly but steadily been increasing.
So you can imagine my surprise when the other day I check my stats and I see over 1000 daily visits (that is, individual users, not page views). Well, I look into it and I discover that they all come from Falkenstein, a small town in Germany. I start researching people with a similar experience and it turns out it’s a bot or AI thingy (excuse the technical jargon).
The following day, I still had a staggering amount of visitors, but around half. The day following that, the number was halved again and so on. But it is still happening, and it kind of freaks me out, though I don’t know why. I hope it goes away by itself. If anyone knows anything about this kind of stuff and wants to hit me up, I’m all ears.
In other news, I have been having crazy fun with the Bolognese tarot, but soon I will be needing fresh victims, so I’m planning on offering cheap readings within a couple of months.
Finally, although I’ve been getting good feedback from you guys about my youtube videos, I know part of it is also encouragement, and I know I need to improve my craft. It’ll come with time. Still I am grateful for the nice messages!
Say hello to our baby cockatiel. We got him today. He’s 5 months old (doesn’t even have his tail feathers yet). He’s still a little shaken from the journey and from being dropped into the hands of two strangers, but he’s quickly acclimating to the situation. Today or tomorrow I’ll take him out of the cage. Speaking of cage, I realized today that this one is definitely too small. We’ll need to get him a bigger one tomorrow.
I have an interesting card spread connected to this situation that I’ll share in the next few days.
