Best. Ritual. Scheduling. EVER

[baxil]

Time to close the books on Pcon 2010, which means sharing the awesome and never-before-told Sunday evening anecdotes!

1: I chose that day to wear my Three Keyboard Cat Moon shirt. Although I did not achieve spiritual enlightenment, I did procure the following unsolicited testimonial: "The 3-Wolf Moon T-shirt is only surpassed in manliness by

Comments

[athelind]

Ah, synchronicity.

I am wholly in line with Pop Culture As Ritual right now.

You see, when I was in the process of moving out, I realized that I needed to get my head together, and brought with me a box full of books to "feed my head" with "Things I KNOW, but need to LEARN". Books about philosophy, about General Semantics, about thinking and feeling and reaching into the spiritual life of the world.

I've picked them up, started them, and put them down again, each in turn. None of them were speaking to me.

thoughtsdriftby, as it turns out, has the entire run of Babylon 5 on DVD. Since I haven't watched the show since its original airing, I started plugging in a disc every now and then and watching it, a few episodes at a time.

And that spoke to me. Mr. Straczynski's "novel for television" has been telling me the story I need to hear right now -- it resonates with my life and the choices I have to make.

And that's why an anecdote about a pop-culture ritual about Destruction and Responsibility that culminates with the revelation that "I'm Here Already!" just got plugged into my LJ Memories.

[baxil]

I think that, in a subtly profound way a lot of people miss, Pop Culture magic is the most honest magic there is in our culture. All of the various reconstructionist and historical magical traditions draw from symbols that used to be central to the cultures in which those people (and magicians) were embedded, and now those symbols are basically arbitrary because we (as educated, suburban, technological, thoroughly modern beings) have only tangential connection to what they used to represent.

Magic that draws from our modern myths can seem silly on the surface, but it's telling the same stories and working with the same archetypes and enabling the same psychological transformations as it ever did; and by giving those things to us in terms of something we truly can resonate with, pop magic is part of a proud and relevant tradition going all the way back to magic's first roots.

(Of course, this isn't 100% of what I believe; I take my draconity and its embedded spiritual system seriously, and I deal with that on a different level from how I approach the pop-culture work. But there's a reason I ended up at the Discordian ritual that night rather than any of the other dozen equally profound rituals that were running throughout the evening.)

Increasingly, both my players and I have been finding that the Fireborn game I'm running is spilling its mythic content out into our real lives. (As with so many other things, I need to write up a post on this.) So I definitely hear you about the B5 resonance.

Thanks for the +memory. :)

[ext_30283]

So given my current run of LJ commenting and that I'm not sure my email on this topic made it past your spam filter due to an errant choice of keywords on my part, I'm going to be inconsistent and post it in this thread anyway and let you do what you wish with it.

Mainly, this brings up a question I may have asked before, but if so, the answer has been lost to the mists of time. Something I'm curious whether you've considered at all, given some of your other interests. In deference to the topic, I will present the idea in Jeopardy style, albeit slightly bogotified:

“I'll take Modern Ritual Equipment for 400, Alex.”

“Aleister.”

“Those are the same word.”

“Fine. This floor-mounted device has a pattern of glyphs that can be used in the creation and performance of predetermined, complex patterns composed of simple, energetic motions that must be performed precisely to obtain a desirable result.”

“What is a dancepad?”