The Crafts: Wixes, Spells, and the Weaponized Placebo Effect

The Pacific feels wilder, at least to me, though note that my experience with the Atlantic is pretty limited.

For me it's not so much the ocean as the kind of beach. Pure sand beaches, like in California, are Wrong to me somehow. I'm here for rocky beaches with shit to climb over and more interesting beach combing.

#also I'm only half kidding when I say I'm an octopus mermaid #some days are otherkin days #and it's pretty consistently TENTACLES WHERE U AT

 

Such ocean-fondness here. /sits here in the middle of the continent.

 

That is. . . exactly the right words to describe the difference for me.

The Atlantic feels. . . lazy almost?

And see, while I like rocky beaches, I LOVE the long sandy beaches. LOVE LOVE LOVE.

But I grew up in So Cal and we used to hang at Seal Beach.

But we also had Dana Point, which is cliffs and tide pools and rocks.

 

Yeah, the Atlantic is kind of the "lol whatever" ocean, at least on the north america side.

My beaches are la push (the infamous twilight beach, lmao) and the point defiance beach which isn't actually the ocean, it's Puget sound. La push is the sandier but it also has the full cliffs at one end; Owen beach is gravelly but also the park forest goes literally right up to the water, so.

Also on that note, I've realized that no one else experiences driftwood quite like we do.

 

Y'know, I do enjoy your kinds of rituals, but I really don't have a connection to biomes. I have a connection to cities. Always have. Like living where the buildings are tall and where everything's either within walking distance or close to loads of public transportation.

I mean, part of it is that things are accessible enough that I do not need to scrape up spoons for a Journey, but also part of it is because I want/need to be in an area with lots of other people to function. I'm a clueless extrovert but still an extrovert. When I had an apartment to myself (it was a summer lease) I barricaded myself in except for groceries for several months.

And it's... I don't know, the aura/awareness that other people are around that does it, moreso than actually interacting with them? I can't not live with roommates, but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

Also old buildings. I like old buildings. They've got History. Someone else can like the old gnarled oaks, I like a street where none of the buildings match and several of them are Old. You can feel the layers of people building and rebuilding their homes as they wanted and loved. (Whereas in a suburb where a homeowners association clamps down hard, I don't feel history. Suburbs are instinctively dystopian to me even though I know full well the people who live there don't feel that way.)

Sometimes when I'm feeling a bit more imaginative/open/metaphorical I think that it feels a bit like the public services are alive. (Not that private services aren't, but they don't have the same feeling to them. Possibly because of my politics. Possibly because I know that they function at the whim of money rather than something more abstract.)

 

I haven't really felt entirely right since we've moved from the beach cities like San Clemente. That area is just where I feel I should be. The ocean there is very familiar. The rocks and coast lines too. It's like leaving old friends, I guess. The one time I've really felt like that since was when we lived in LA. LA has a definite soul to it and one that spoke to me.

 

@Vacuum Energy Huh. Yeah, I'm exactly the opposite - I can't live with roommates, or too close to people, because the awareness that there are other people around is like being constantly tapped on the shoulder. Constantly. Gives me overload. I don't feel a connection with people-spaces, just the nagging awareness that This Is People-Space, Do Not Belong. XP

 

So, I don't like most West Coast cities. Like, LA? I love the area, but that city is just. . . busy for the sake of busy.

I now live in NYC. And the difference? Night and day. I love this city. Like, I hate crowds. Like, have had breakdowns in the middle of them type hate them. And I've only had that problem once in the city. (At a protest. Different energy.) The day to day energy of this city is lovely.

I'm still an introvert and have to stay in pretty often, but hey, one thing at a time, right?

I'm with you here, too. Old building are awe inspiring in so many ways. (Even when they terrify me. And they do occasionally.)

See, I get where you're coming from, but I come from a HUGE family, so I got good at shielding and knowing how to escape.

 

Yeah, always been an issue. PTSD hypervigilance makes blocking things out unpleasant; feels like being half-deaf. And I'm just not very good at it. Not as sensitive as I used to be, but it's still easier to avoid those situations than to always be working at blocking things out.

 

Things like bus-spirits feel like well-trained dogs on leashes (if sometimes balky ones) so I'm fine with them, but the reason I try to avoid places like shopping malls is because they're inherently predatory. Privately owned spirits don't get sustenance from the city substrate (at best, they manage to find some of the mains and tap into them), so even the ones that seem to be in symbiotic relationships could turn at a moment's notice. I am suspicious of them.

Billboards and advertisements are territory-marking. The spirits that feel secure in their place don't bother; the spirits that are feeling insecure and trying to aggressively expand leave them everywhere.

I speak fluent bureaucracy. It isn't pleasant for me but I can do it, which is one thing I seem to have in my favor. Helps that I can see the people who you actually meet in the bureaucracy as... more like attendants than people that you can ask for things directly. Being polite to them is common courtesy; if they can't do anything about the bureaucracy's decision, it's not exactly their fault.

And... like I said earlier in the thread, if anything, I'm an atheist who just happens to really like your type of rituals. This is more of a cool thought experiment that I dip into sometimes than anything. But it's really interesting.

 

Passive margin. The Pacific's got the Ring of Fire all around the edge, but the only tectonism in the Atlantic is way out at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
You should do Science (well, magic science) and go to Iceland to see how the ocean feels there.

The Pacific's the older ocean, too. It's the descendant of the old world-sea Panthalassa, although there's none of Panthalassa's seafloor left (seafloor doesn't stick around long). The Atlantic just showed up in the middle of Pangaea as it broke apart.

And the Pacific's also just damn bigger, which gives it a bigger thermal mass and a larger fetch to create bigger storms.

(also the atlantic intertidal scene is apparently shit compared to the pacific, courtesy of the last ice age and the lack of rocky beaches on the southern us atlantic coast)

#i invest a lot of my identity in Places #so even though i don't really go here in terms of the magic thing #all this is pretty damn familiar territory to me

 

The Atlantic does have a lot of cool shit going on with deep-ocean water circulation, but I think that's a bit deep and big to really affect magic up here on land.

 

I can vouch for the ring of fire bit at least, having been raised in the shadow of Ye Olde Rainier. It seems to net me a weird blend of fire and water for elemental magic bullshit, though I get more fire from my time of birth.

 

Do me a favor and continue to write about this for as long as you like. I'm absolutely enchanted by your views.

I think you and I might be very VERY close in world view and operational maxim.

That is a cool thing to think about. In So Cal we have a lot of tectonics going on. That was life. To the point that when the large quake hit Virginia, I literally though someone was kicking my bed. I didn't even consider "The earth is doing something it doesn't normally do."

On my short list of places I'd like to visit. (The Netherlands is another one on the short list.)

 

The shadow of Rainier is lovely, though. (I miss the Sound. The water is gross, but everything else is beautiful.)

 

That's a pretty accurate summary of it, though ironically the water seems better around Tacoma than Seattle, unlike literally everything else. Tacoma is SUCH a hot mess.

 

Actually, as I'm sure has been noticed by now: I've traveled a lot in my life. I've never left the USA (Well, except for that one excursion to White Rock. . . We don't talk about that), but I have lived in California, Kansas, North Carolina, Texas, Washington, Delaware, and New York, and that's only places I lived long enough or was old enough to connect with it. I connected with a lot of places, and each has their own "profile".

Delaware, for example, is fucking gross. So much of the state is the bad kind of swamp: fetid, dead, unmoving. It made energy work in the state. . . ugly. But there are some OLD buildings (I lived in an early 1900s Sears house for a while. There were two spirits I am certain of. One was just an echo, passed through my room often (The old boiler was in my room), and another one was in the upstairs and was. . . ugly. Dark. I was too new to anything in real terms to handle whatever it was.

But then we moved to a new home. A 1980s contemporary split level. Used to be owned by a Church. It was the parish house, and the pastor lived there before us. By the time this happened, I was comfortable in the ideas of magic and shielding and cleansing and when we moved in, the house was blank. Like no one had ever lived there. It was weird, but useful, I was able to make my little magical corner in my room and I didn't have to worry about conflicting with things.

My mom and I discussed this a few weeks ago, and she mentioned she's never noticed anything spiritual in the house and I kind of laughed and explained. And confirmed that magic isn't one path and a pastor/priest of a Christian religion can totally do things like cleansings. They'd do it differently from me, but they totally CAN do it.

My current place in New York though doesn't have a space that is MINE. Like, I have my room, but there's so much chaos I haven't managed to make my space in a way that would make my natural instincts do their thing.

But this thread has me wanting to break down and REALLY produce some shielding and get back into craft. And this time leverage my affinity with the digital age to improve my spellwork.

Thanks for bringing me back. I missed a bit of me.

 

Haha, no kidding. There was actually a mid-ocean ridge that got subducted there a while back, leading to the San Andreas fault and the Basin and Range extension to the east. There's actually still a bit of ocean plate stuck under North America there (the Juan de Fuca plate up in Washington is the other bit of that plate that's left). Crazy shit.

Also, yessssss, Rainier. I'm going to school on the craton and I am missing proper topography like hell.

 

Aka the tiny bullshit earthquake plates.

But no I've got one for you, the school I went to for a year in south Carolina had the tagline "on a hilltop high" because it was on the highest hill in the town. How tall was this hill, you ask?

A maximum of twelve feet vertical from the lowest point in half a mile to the top, at an angle that would have naturally sloped slowly across three hundred feet horizontally (before road was cut into it). Needless to say, I found the idea of even calling it a hill frankly hysterical.

#west coast problems

 

Okay, my college on a "hill" isn't quite that bad.

#all the trees are so damn short, too #nice rocks, though