hey babes

[Tempestas]

i joined this forum in 2009 as a wee 13 year old and as this weekend has been nostalgia-themed, i decided to come check out my old lurking grounds.

hi, im agender and i use ne/nym/nis/nymself pronouns. things have changed in the last six years; i'm a freshman at reed college, a studio art major. lately i've gotten into the local resurgence of chaos magic and i'm super interested in certain aspects of some guy named alestair crowley.

i will talk day and night about danny phantom, and tarot.

ask me anything, shoot me a message; i'm chill and procrastinating homework.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

Where's THD to greet you properly?

Hey, magnum opus is an interesting concept, but I didn't entertain it for too long.

Can you recommend some rituals that give you control over your will?

 

[redbaron]

Lol Aleister Crowley.

I guess I'd have to ask why you actually take him seriously?

 

[Tempestas]

@redbaron, do i have to take him seriously? to take him seriously might imply i take myself seriously, and that's asynchronous to my jam. or maybe it would be more true to say i take all of my jokes seriously. it's sort of both.

and i'm not gonna lie; i'm pretty new to all this stuff, i'm just a beginner with a bit of experience and a lot of pain i'm wanting to apply it to. i believe it's all gotta be real personalized-- if you wanna chat about the nature of the will you're controlling, and about how it is you visualize your will (and this doesn't necessarily mean in a literally visual way, but at least in a sensory way that you might be able to communicate) and the obstacles you come across, i'll see what we might actually accomplish.

 

[Brontosaurie]

what does agender mean to you?

 

[SpaceYeti]

I expected to come in here and see a request for nude selfies that were getting posted, or something, with a title like "hey babes".

Well, have fun in college. It's dumb for the first while. Oh, but you're an art major. Have fun with that.

 

[TBerg]

Welcome. Have fun pursuing your artistic talents. I am not very good at art, but I admire those who are.

I am not for gender pigeonholing, and I resist it myself in my personal life, but I don't do the innovative pronouns. Sometimes I use neuter pronouns that already exist. Sometimes I feel feminine and sometimes masculine. I am glad that you try to be yourself, though.

 

[Cognisant]

Chaos magic, also spelled chaos magick, kaos magic or kaos magick, is a postmodern and post-postmodern magical tradition which emphasizes the pragmatic use of belief systems and the creation of new and unorthodox methods.

Oh that's cool.

Personally I'm a fan of how Shinto animist sensibilities can be applied pragmatically to machinery, making maintenance a periodic ritual rather than something to do when it stops working.

 

[Teffnology]

I read Blue Like Jazz which is about a Christian and his life at Reed College. I also watched the movie they made about it.

Curious if this got brought up at all during orientation. I am sure the campus has a lot of similar type stories and media connections but that is the one I am familiar with besides Steve Jobs dropping out and auditing classes there.

It sounds like an epic place to be. What have you liked and disliked, so far about being there?

 

[Tempestas]

@cog: My favorite part of the chaos magic wiki has to be the photograph of the hooded figures skyping the other hooded figures. It's fantastic.

Spoiler

As far as gender stuff goes; basically I figure, as this is a forum where everything is written and you can take time between responses, I went with introducing myself using the weirder pronouns; unlike irl, you don't have to worry about conjugating in real time or any of those stressful things. I chose these ones because, while I tend to use "they" in most aspects of my life (else people freak out), there's something to be said for being able to control and edit your established ways of thinking. I certainly balked at odd pronouns at first but now I've really unlearned a lot of cisnormativity and it gets easier to respect people's personal choices because I don't assume anything. (It's one thing to say you don't assume, and another to struggle through actually unlearning it. Which is not to say I'm perfect, to be clear). I chose this set specifically because there's an aspect to "they" which is impersonal, and ze and hir are too close to the she/her set for my liking.

To me, agender is like, gender isn't even a question; like in a generic robot, or in an immortal space being, etc etc. My presentation tends to be more masc to offset my physical structure which tends to present as femme, but I'm not against femme. So in that way my presentation is sort of genderfluid. Part of me wants to be a sort of non-entity observer on all things, so I tend towards neutrality. There are a lot of exceptions to that but that feeling still exists.

To clarify, I don't idolize Crowley or follow his stuff to a T; just that, he's got some real interesting bits that currently I am exploring. Gotta springboard somewhere. (And the aesthetic of it all is a lot of fun. I'm an artist, I can't deny this is a thought I have~)

I haven't read/seen Blue Like Jazz, and it didn't come up during orientation. O-Week was mostly the school being like, "ok here is our honor principle: take care of each other and be safe" and then parading around naked and screaming and performing a symbolic something or other (some people forgot the chant and sort of mumbled so I'm not exactly sure what went down. It was a cool experience nonetheless). Also I think I played pathfinder in my dorm.

I love the people I live with most of all. Pretty much everyone here is really interesting: I'm friends with three other chaos magicians, and some wiccan twins; most everyone is some sort of queer, with a lot of trans kids and like 75% of my building is pansexual; I know one Sorcerer Supreme who wanders Portland at night feeding stray cats and he's the nicest person I've ever met; I just closed a theater thesis (I was the assistant director) that was basically an escape the room game in real life, with all sorts of security cameras and microphones and one person is a huge rabbit head; it just keeps going.

I also really appreciate the canyon. I grew up camping in the mojave desert a lot and going to the lake most summers, so there's something really grounding about the way the morning breeze blows over our Puddle here. I love walking through the canyon at night, careful not to slip through the mud, batting away spiderwebs and then you're out there and you're surrounded by trees and bushes and swamp and it's so real; I love hopping the fence into the rhododendron gardens and watching the unfolding moon above us cast nutria shadows through the water-- or at least, that's what we hope those shapes must be.

Disliked? It's academically rough. I know a lot of people who are away on mental health leaves. There's something about this place that attracts kids with depression and other problems, and the classes are really hard. It takes a toll but we're all here for each other. This is one of the most supportive groups of people I've met.

I'm reading the wiki for Blue Like Jazz now and wow these quotes are fantastic?

My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don't really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it's about who is smarter, and honestly I don't care.

Maybe it's something about the way Reed interacts with your insides, maybe not. I don't know. But something in me is changing, certainly; I was so INTP way back when I frequented this forum, and I was a self-proclaimed athiest etc etc and it was terrible. I'm not great but I have grown and that's what matters to me. My four year struggle with depression forced me to appreciate the significance of emotions and feelings and I feel myself either crossing the line that is INxP or maybe even transcending it; retaking the test proved to be horribly confusing and just incorrect, so I'm in favor of abandoning it as a self label for now is the right time in my life to do so. (The signature is leftover from way back when)

EDIT: Reading more about Blue Like Jazz now; Reed isn't as godless as these summaries make it out to be. There's a common brand of physics major that is the obnoxious athiest, but everyone refers to them as "that guy" in their conference and most of them grow out of it. It might be a generational thing. I don't know a lot of Christians here personally, but I have several Jewish friends and then a smattering of pagans. And I think there are a lot of theists, even if they don't subscribe to a particular religion.

 

[Teffnology]

Thank you for those insights and a validation of my current perception of Reed College. It sounds like an amazing place to be but not without its challenges.

The changing you, part you mentioned struck me the most because that was the central theme of Blue Like Jazz. If it wasn't for the intense environment that Reed provided, his faith wouldn't have been tested the way it was and he wouldn't have achieved his level of understanding otherwise. I last read the book when I was a believer/follower but am curious to see what I take from it now that I have substantial doubts about the Christian church and mostly Saul of Tarsus aka Paul.

Are you guys on the quarter system or semester? I personally could not handle the quarter system when I went to Cal Poly SLO.

EDIT prompted by your edit: I think the author took an extreme stance of painting Reed College as a godless wonderland to sell his book and generate a true dichotomy for the Christian audience he was writing his book for. The Christian Church is the master of "public relations".

 

[Tempestas]

EDIT prompted by your edit:

Haha yeah that makes sense to me.

We're on a semester system, with quarters for PE.

If it wasn't for the intense environment that Reed provided, his faith wouldn't have been tested the way it was and he wouldn't have achieved his level of understanding otherwise.

Reed reminds me in this way of my high school. My high school experience was shitty, and intense, and I have so many problems with it but at the same time, going through that kind of experience forces you to change. My high school (an international boarding school) really forced you to grow up, is the best way I can describe it. I wouldn't do it again, ever, but at the same time, I'm glad I did. Reed is better than that, and isn't soul crushing, haha. But at the same time it does have that kind of intense stress.

I think one of the funniest things about reedies is that one thing we all pretty much have in common is no reedie thinks they're [adjective] enough to be a reedie (good enough, smart enough, etc etc). Everyone's got impostor syndrome, and they think they're just faking it long enough to pass at all, let alone well.

 

[TBerg]

Your use of gender language, in more ways than mere pronoun invention, is actually what makes me fear it as a general worldview. It is not that we can't see masculine and feminine characteristics in all people in varying degrees, but the fact that those in the vanguard of Queer Theory seek to decouple their novel terms from anything that could be tied to the past, meaning that they are not the result of deep historical discourse about the dual nature within each member of humankind, but the cheapening of the meaning of nature. I think that the result is that, since terms can be subject to mere invention sui generis, then we can be manipulated in whatever way those in elite institutions pursue in the course of cultural programming. Your remarks about editing (read: redacting) thought and being a robot seem to add evidence to my criticism.

When we give license to cultural programmers and do not say that they are engaging in the deletion of history and the deep knowledge that comes with the historical terms, we are essentially handing over all of our discourse regarding human complexity in exchange for politically motivated language for which there is exponentially less understanding. Whether we like it or not, the survival of our species is "intimately" (pun) connected to the survival of the traditional language regarding love and marriage. If we tell people that "partnership" is merely a matter of an amalgamation of a fuck buddy and best friend, then we should not expect a faithful relationship that produces a child adjusted to survive and thrive in their environment. We should expect the slow or not-so-slow extinction of our species. Now the OP may not have said all of this, but you can see how adding this part of modern culture of which we are all a part could be deadly to the reproduction of our species.

We can see where a greater amount of political correctness takes us in terms of demographics. Wherever you see a more leftist culture, such as in Western and Northern Europe, you can see more old people and fewer young people and a declining birthrate. It is essentially demographic suicide and the elevation of hedonism or epicureanism in opposition to socially contractual obligations.

I myself am the product of leftism, and I have collected the hedonic joys of modern life, but it ends with me. I will not teach leftist licentiousness.

 

[Tempestas]

meaning that they are not the result of deep historical discourse

oh my god change someone hold me

If we tell people that "partnership" is merely a matter of an amalgamation of a fuck buddy and best friend, then we should not expect a faithful relationship that produces a child adjusted to survive and thrive in their environment. We should expect the slow or not-so-slow extinction of our species.

this is in fact my biggest fear-- the eventual destruction of the human race because the gays are gonna ruin everything. and worst of all, they're gonna ruin marriage, which is the most sacred of business contracts.

i know that all those kids of divorcees i grew up with are much better off with parents who only ever saw each other as business partners than parents who--god forbid-- were best friends. or the reasonable parents who saw each other as business partners in raising a child, hate each other, and instead of getting a divorce, stay together and are driven to fighting every night because they can't stand the other person. there is not a single child who dislikes fighting parents, as long as they know that their parents have entered into the contract. 8 year olds love contracts. and they grow up to be well adjusted adults 100% of the time.

cultural programmers

incredible

for which there is exponentially less understanding

i know, i know. the world is a scary place. it's alright, we can get through this together, and i won't hold this stuff against you.

 

[TBerg]

You portray my argument as anti-gay. I am in fact anything but anti-gay. I was the first one I knew who supported gay marriage and full honor for gays in the military. I am also partly gay and transgender myself. It is only that I am anti-leftist, in that I do not believe that minorities have the responsibility to criticize the majority until the majority accedes to the imposition.

I think, rather, minorities have suffered a lot of trauma from the majority and that they have rightly criticized the infliction of such trauma, but their criticism sometimes trespasses upon a wholesale rejection of majority culture. That's because of the inspiration of the Critical Theorists, who attempted to reduce any of the virtues of Western Civilization to utter depravity. They did this so that Westerners would lose confidence in their traditional institutions and adopt instead a Marxist philosophy of egalitarian socialism. Gramsci called it the "long march through the institutions."

Now, some of your statements regarding marriage seem to have become disjointed by losing negation or an affirmation somewhere in a sentence. If you could reiterate your remarks, I would be appreciative. And I would appreciate you not reducing my arguments to caricature and innuendo. Do you really think that leftist innovations really are tried and true testaments of human society? Do you really think they carry as much meaning as a tradition that has existed for thousands of years?