Shadows, Shadow Play

Toying with a simple pen and ink depiction, I was trying to convey the messages of Mercury in its apparent retrograde pattern, and what that means, how it plays out, and what the future holds by way of looking at the past.

The timing is what interests me. The messages have largely been familiar, and while my earliest teachers talked about how “Mercury in retrograde is bad,” I’ve grown to understand it is a natural time, and can be useful.

The image, I started with a simple line drawing of the alchemical glyph for Mercury, the symbol I associate with the planet. It looks like a Venus — or female — symbol with a little set of horns sprouting from the head. It is supposed to be a winged helmet, associated with Hermes, the messenger of the gods, later known as Mercury. Although somewhat distanced, Loki is similar in form and function. Personally, I like the character Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream as a mercurial fellow. That symbol, though, a simple line drawing, small circles, stick coming out the bottom, a cross bar, then, the little ears on the top, again symbolic of Hermes’ winged helmet. Mercury had wings on his sandals.

“Fly monkeys, fly!”

Sorry, wrong mythos. Anyway, the glyph? Venus with little antenna, for communications.

Shadows, Shadow Play

June 13, Mercury arrived at 16° Cancer. Mercury crawls up to 26° Cancer, turning retrograde on 6/29. Mercury retrogrades back to 16° Cancer on 7/23, staying at 16° until 7/28. Mercury doesn’t arrive back at 26° Cancer until 8/24 (coincidental with the Sun going into Virgo).

Shadows, Shadow Play

I’ve got a pepper plant thriving with my abuse, overwatering, drought, too much attention, no care, and similar inconsistent behaviors. It’s about two feet tall, and the shade in the direct sun is negligible, but as the afternoon light dips lower on the horizon? That plant can cast a shadow up to a few feet long if only for a short time. The shadow is ephemeral yet still exists. It can appear longer, taller than the object causing the shadow itself. The shadow of Mercury can extend well beyond the known limits of the actual, observed retrograde. This Mercury in Retrograde?

the Portable Mercury Retrograde

Underneath the Hood

Behind the scenes. The stage crew at work. Executive producer, bottle washer, boom operator, key grip. All of that, and more? Chief code cowboy. But first? Blast from the past.

Underneath the Hood

What is the magic that makes this work? Have to believe in magic, to begin with, and the rest is easy. Prompted by a marketing e-mail from a small operation, it detailed the costs, the materials, the labor, and then, the storage, shipping, all of that. From growing in the dirt through the process of refining, and onto a finished product, handcrafted, the details, the individual steps — everything was illuminated in glorious, painstaking detail.

Underneath the Hood

I stumbled onto WordPress around ’08. It was the third or fourth “blog motor” I toyed with, first running my experimental weblog, and then, porting the horoscopes over to the motor as it made more sense from a technical perspective. Better delivery system. More control over the output. Seemed most “future-proof,” at the time. The WordPress motor (software) seemed quite modular, and that offered a way to customize the appearance so it didn’t look like a WordPress site. Even better.

Underneath the Hood

What’s missing from the answer to what’s “underneath the hood?” The original point wasn’t about the software, but the inner-workings. That remains a little more of a mystery. More magic, less technical. I write in an online editor thing. Hooks straight into my various WordPress installations. As simple as can be, that’s what’s underneath the hood.

Underneath the Hood

I write on the screen. The place I type turns that into a weblog-style entry, and that material gets posted.

Underneath the Hood

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It’s not the quantity of the errors, it’s the quality of the errors?