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

Kicked off twitter

Their note, in part?

Hello Kramer Wetzel, Your account, kramerw, was reported and has been suspended for violating the X Rules. Specifically, for: Violating our rules against inauthentic behaviors.

I appealed, and still got stuck with inauthentic behaviors, so I’m not longer active on twitter. Pretty sure no human actually reviewed the material. This feels like an automated response to an automated response. I filed one appeal, when I searched for the terms, I found this is a common complaint. OG users are being urged to upgrade to paid.

Hint: I don’t get $4 worth of business in a month from twitter.

I haven’t been active on twitter in years. At one point, and I can’t even reconnect the dots to figure out where this originated, but the various softwares I employ, part of the appeal was that it would automatically post to social media, including twitter. Publish once, get distributed to all the current social media platforms, which, in turn are nothing more than scrapers and content machines themselves. Repurposed user content, repurposed.

GIGO¹

The current arrangements, the technical side as near as I can make out? My horoscopes generate an RSS feed, and then that feed feeds the mighty maws of the machines — all the social media that I’m interested in, or have any attachment. The suggestion was, read it online, the suggestion was that AI was employed to turn semi-dormant accounts into paid accounts. Frankly, I’m not interested. The problem, I suspect, originates from some of my own automated software, and at this point, try as I might, I’ve yet to isolate the offending pieces. Buried on the website, though, there’s an automation that stills tries to post to twitter.

Kicked off twitter

Not worth the battle. What is the aphorism? “Don’t pick a fight you can’t win?” Funny, I should take my own advice, as I’ve long suggested, the nature of electronic media is fickle, at best. Influences wax and wane, platforms have come and gone, and the big secret, which isn’t really a secret? Build a personal platform that defies the little eddies and savage riptides of the various vicissitudes on the seas of the inter-webs. Sounds a tiny bit like bitter grapes, but the last times I checked twitter, it was mostly a miasmic mire of focused hate-speech, with little basis in reality.

Kicked off twitter

As of this writing, when I post a horoscope, and I can schedule a few weeks ahead of time, but when a post goes up on the WordPress-driven site, it also gets pushed to Linked-In, Facebook, and that would include insta, threads, Mastodon, BlueSky, and “others.” Not even sure what’s what, these days. Weighing Substack against WordPress, I was hoping to find a way to send a weekly newsletter to substack via WordPress, with no real luck. The two are almost, not quite, but almost competing formats. Different discussion. Looking back over the reputed “inauthentic” behaviors? The only pieces of mine that got posted to twitter was the weekly horoscopes, and those only hit once a week. The weekly e-mail version? That was all that got posted. No theories, no unsubstantiated rumors, and none of my universal daily asides. My current horoscopes have been obviously not written by AI, and therefore, authentic as can be. The aforementioned newsletter? It usually contains one to three typos that get corrected after publication. Makes this authentic as can be. No AI. Not even Microsoft English. I suspected a software tool suggested that unpaid users could be converted if threatened with expulsion and exclusion. I really have to follow my own advice.

Kicked off twitter

In its inception, at the beginning, the original format for twitter? It was attractive, especially to a verbose person like myself. The original recipe was limited to 140 characters per post. Keep it tight, concise, and to the point. Like the sharp end of a stick. Looks more like a cartoon caveman’s club, these day to extend that reference.

the Portable Mercury Retrograde

Kramer’s short to-do list:

1. Remove twitter pointers
2. Nuke “follow me at” pointers
3. Remove “@kramerw”
4. Clean up contacts

Looks like that free account on twitter was 17 years old. Does this smell funny to you?

1. IYKYK ↩