An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for May 2, 2021

Hey, hey! It’s the first Omnium Gatherum for May 2021, so I’m opening this one again, on the blog and on Patreon, to all Patrons! So, howdy all Patrons! Thank you for your ongoing support!

Also, I’ve gone back and made public all the Omnium Gatherum posts from April 2020 so, after a year of being exclusive on the blog to Patrons, everyone can see what was posted then. So, a year from now: howdy everyone!

It looks like I was doing these once a week back then, and started doing twice weekly the following month, May 2020. These have definitely continued to evolve over time, and I keep in mind ways I might switch things up in the future. One recent change is that there’s a new way to get Omnium Gatherum posts via email as a supporting Member of the free Newsletter, for those that want that option. I’ve also wondered off and on whether I should try to split all the topics I include so that perhaps I do the more tech and geeky stuff somewhere other than on the library blog. I’m not sure yet, but it has been something I’ve wondered about doing. Maybe that will happen, but not quite yet or now!

Speaking of exclusive, as an addendum to my recent Patreon post about new merch for May, the ongoing experiment this year continues apace, and I note that brand new Sticker fulfillment has continued to expand, and also note that additional fulfillment has begun for the Mini Print, with people earning these for May after their own 3 month milestones!

I’ll be starting to pull together the next postal mailing this month and get that out toward the end of May / beginning on June. That’s also when I’ll be sending out the magazines and ritual kit from the Femme Occulte giveway. Oh, wow, I also need to get ready with all the stuff for the call for submissions to Magick, Music and Ritual 16 that I post at the beginning of June. And, I don’t know that I’ll have enough to put out another Zine in July, but I’ll start to think about that in earnest now and put things I have into the layout to see how many pages I have and how many I need to fill. So, lots to do soon, along with all the regular activities!

Well, that’s the Patron updates for the month that come to mind! Did I forget something? IDEK! As a reminder, I’ve moved most of my general thoughts and non-Patron updates over to the free Hermetic Library Newsletter, so do consider subscribing over there for weekly updates and fun, if you haven’t already. I’ll let you decide for yourself if you want to subscribe, instead of adding you, but you can check out all the previous issues to see what it is like. Hopefully you’ll find it as interesting as I think it is? I mean, yeah!

As always, thank you for your ongoing support of my work and helping to keep Hermetic Library going. If you’ve questions or concerns, or ideas about what would make your experience as Patron better, let me know!

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• Starting tomorrow, May 3rd: “Get the classic novel Dracula delivered to your email inbox, as it happens.”
• Online events by Treadwell’s through June
• “Ritual Knotting – Cords to Strengthen Your Life’s Energy.” Also “Privacy Magic: Banish Space Invaders.”
• “Your Church Is Not Your Religion“—”A church is a religion-club; a group of interested, even passionate folks who want to pursue a spiritual work. People join churches because they are identified with or interested in the related religion, or because of their neighbors, or families. Like any club, just the interest in the topic may or may not be enough to bind a group of strangers or acquaintances into a creative circle. The same problems that attend a local arts group or little-league will exist for attempted churches. Rules, by-laws, budgets… there’s more work in doing a Church than just having a religion, and no degree of spiritual growth makes people suitable to keep the books. Joining a religion-club is not the same as joining a religion, nor is leaving the club equivalent to leaving the religion.”
• “Wirral lord who decapitated his own portrait causing a huge scandal. The damaged painting will be at the centre of the Lady Lever’s new Augustus John exhibition when the art gallery re-opens” Mentions Augustus John, William Butler Yeats, and more. About “The Last Bohemian: Augustus John” an exhibition “exploring the iconic artist and his time in Liverpool”, at Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight Village, Wirral, CH62 5EQ, UK; May 18–August 30, 2021.
• Deus est Homo: The Concept of God in the Magical Writings of the Great Beast 666 (Aleister Crowley) by Henri Bogdan, Aries. Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 21 (2021)—”Despite the centrality of the concept of God in Christian theology and Western philosophy for over two millennia, little attention has been given the concept of God in twentieth-century occultism in general, and in the writings of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) in particular.”
• “Album review: Cruelty – There Is No God Where I Am. Brit hardcore quintet Cruelty unleash hell on brutal, hectic debut, There Is No God Where I Am.”—”When the world suddenly ground to a halt, it would have been easy for them to fade away into obscurity. Instead, they used it as an opportunity to get to work on their debut full-length and crack open a book (namely Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Law, from which this opus takes its title).” About “There Is No God Where I Am” by Cruelty.
• The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, due November, 2021—”A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.” Also The 1619 Project: Born on the Water [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Renée Watson, illustrated By Nikkolas Smith, due November, 2021—”The 1619 Project’s lyrical picture book in verse chronicles the consequences of slavery and the history of Black resistance in the United States, thoughtfully rendered by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and Newbery honor-winning author Renée Watson. ”
• The Poem is Telling Me I Remember from Creative Growth Art Center, edited by Lorraine Lupo—”The result of Creative Growth’s first poetry program, The Poem is Telling Me I Remember is a chapbook that features poems collectively composed by Creative Growth artists during 2019–20. The poetry program consists of unique collaborative writing workshops facilitated by poet-in-residence Lorraine Lupo and guest poet Kostas Anagnopoulos. Poems featured in the book are beautifully illustrated with art from the Creative Growth Studio. Proceeds from sales of the book support the program.”
• “Lesson From the Old New Deal: What Economic Recovery Might Look Like in the 21st Century.” Excerpt from Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet—And How We Fight Back [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] by Kate Aronoff—”This damning account of the forces that have hijacked progress on climate change shares a bold vision of what it will take, politically and economically, to face the existential threat of global warming head-on.”
• “PAIN Activists Say They Were Followed by Sackler-hired Investigators.” More about Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher]—”A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing”
• “Jane Austen quote encoded in a polymer.”—”Using a novel molecular-data-storage technique, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have encoded a quote from Jane Austen’s classic novel Mansfield Park in a series of oligomers, which a third party could read back without prior knowledge of the structures that encoded the passage.” Also “A Jane Austen quote encoded in plastic molecules demonstrates the potential for a new kind of data storage.”
• “Frost manuscript up for auction.”—”A copy of Robert Frost’s renowned poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” written in the poet’s own hand will be auctioned next week by a New York–based dealer.”
• “These are the 50 best-selling books of all time (on Amazon).”
• “These are the 5 (er, 10?) best parentheses in literature.”
• “More significant for our purposes is the line of stylized, iconic illustration of Priapus. … The essential point of the herm image, in all its variations, is synecdoche: the part, not the whole. The god is reduced to the phallus, symbolizing fertility, abundance, sexual potency, or simply male power. As a symbol, no matter how earnestly the desired result is implored by the worshippers, Priapus remains unthreatening to humans. His role is the passive one, theirs the active.”—Raymond B Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher] quoted at Summum Bonum.
• “William Faulkner probably got rejected more than you.“—”The chart, which is part of the University of Virginia Library’s collection, catalogues Faulkner’s 94 submissions to seven magazines from 1930 to ’31. Of those, he placed a total of 12 stories. To be clear, that’s a lot of yeses! But it’s also a lot of nos.”
• “Bronze Age treasure found in Swedish forest by mapmaker. A man surveying a forest for his orienteering club in western Sweden stumbled on a trove of Bronze Age treasure reckoned to be some 2,500 years old.”
• “Move over CRISPR, the retrons are coming.”—”While retrons were originally seen as simply a mysterious quirk of bacteria, researchers have become more interested in them over the last few years because they, like CRISPR, could be used for precise and flexible gene editing in bacteria, yeast, and even human cells.”
• “Scientists Find Billion-Year-Old Fossil Life, ‘Something Which Has Never Been Described Before’.”
• “‘Pregnant Egyptian mummy’ revealed by scientists. A team of Polish scientists have revealed the only known example of an embalmed pregnant Egyptian mummy.”
• “Egypt archeologists unearth 110 ancient tombs in Nile Delta.”
• “Scientists have cultured the first stable coral cell lines.”—”The cell lines could be used in many avenues of coral cell research, including coral development, coral farming and the impact of climate change and pollution”
• “NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Extracts First Oxygen From Red Planet.”—”The milestone, which the MOXIE instrument achieved by converting carbon dioxide into oxygen, points the way to future human exploration of the Red Planet.”
• “Chinese space firm delivers exoskeleton system to firefighters, enhances performance in fighting grassland, forestry fires.”
• “Climate change and the 1991-2020 U.S. Climate Normals.”—”The influence of long-term global warming is obvious: the earliest map in the series has the most widespread and darkest blues, and the most recent map has the most widespread and darkest reds. Today, the normal annual temperatures across the country are warmer than the 20th-century average virtually everywhere. From 1901-1930, the annual average temperature was mostly colder than the 20th-century average. What’s also obvious in these comparisons is that the influence of global warming on normal U.S. temperature isn’t the same everywhere or during every 30-year period on record. Otherwise, the maps would have transitioned gradually from dark blue everywhere to dark red everywhere. In fact, a few locations do exhibit that pattern of gradual, steady warming from one Normals era to the next. Southeastern Oregon. Southern Florida. You can probably spot others.”
• “‘Climate emergency’: Hawaii is the first state to call it like it is. The 50th state is making history.”
• “Glaciers are melting much faster than expected, study finds.”—”A new study indicates that the speed of glacier melt has “doubled over the past two decades” — far faster than anticipated or previously measured.”
• “How to get salt out of water: Make it self-eject. Crystallizing salts can grow ‘legs,’ then tip over and fall away, potentially helping to prevent fouling of metal surfaces, researchers find.”
• Anti-stars! Are There Anti-Stars Around Us? Answer From the Fermi Satellite. What if some of the antimatter that was thought to have disappeared was hiding around us in the form of anti-stars? Researchers from the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP – CNRS/CNES/UT3 Paul Sabatier) are using the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope to put the most constraining limits ever on this hypothesis. The results of their work were published on April 20, 2021 in Physical Review D.” Also “Counting All the Antistars in the Sky. Analyzing gamma-ray sources leads to an upper limit on how many antimatter stars could exist in the Milky Way.”
• “Flu Has Disappeared Worldwide during the COVID Pandemic. The public health measures that slow the spread of the novel coronavirus work really well on influenza.”
• “The Limits of Colorization of Historical Images by AI.”—”In a post-truth United States, it seems even photographs of the past aren’t safe.”
• “EV chargers fall victim to weird attack that’s worse than Tesla Supercharger ICE-ing.”—”an electric vehicle charging station in Munich fell victim to a prank that effectively destroyed some of the charger’s parts. For their prank, the vandals stuffed some EV chargers at Marklandstraße with raw minced meat. The vandals managed to get the meat into the charging station’s connectors, which meant that some of the material ended up in the contacts of the plugs. This effectively rendered the targeted EV chargers inoperable, as their contacts had to be replaced.”
• “Disney Got Itself A ‘If You Own A Themepark…’ Carveout From Florida’s Blatantly Unconstitutional Social Media Moderation Bill.”
• “Of course Vladimir Nabokov imagined emoticons over a decade before they were invented.”
• “Bombshell Letter: Gaetz Paid for Sex With Minor, Wingman Says. The Daily Beast has obtained a confession letter that Joel Greenberg wrote after asking Roger Stone to help him obtain a pardon.”
• From the And Then It Gets Weird dept: “Kansas Rep. Mark Samsel arrested for battery after physical altercation with student.”—”On Wednesday, Samsel, R-Wellsville, was substitute teaching at the Wellsville school district’s secondary school. Throughout the day, high school students began recording videos of the lawmaker talking about suicide, sex, masturbation, God and the Bible.”
• “How police and politicians undermine civilian oversight of law enforcement. Civilian oversight is undermined by politicians and police, who say citizens are ill-equipped to judge officers.”
• From December 2020: Three Cheers for Socialism. Christian Love & Political Practice.”—”One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?” [HT Are Americans free?]
• “How Parents Of Trans Kids Are Explaining This Wave Of Anti-Trans Legislation. More than 120 bills would limit the rights of transgender youths. Here’s how parents and therapists are explaining the legislation — and the culture wars — to trans kids.”
• From the Holy Annointing Oil dept: “Jews, Christians, and Muslims Are Reclaiming Ancient Psychedelic Practices, And That Could Help With Legalization. Some advocates are focusing on the spiritual side of psychedelics as a way to decriminalize through religious exemption.”
• “ABOUT ENDLESSNESS. A film by Roy Andersson.”—”A reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendor and banality. We wander, dreamlike, gently guided by our Scheherazade-esque narrator. Inconsequential moments take on the same significance as historical events: a couple floats over a war-torn Cologne; on the way to a birthday party, a father stops to tie his daughter’s shoelaces in the pouring rain; teenage girls dance outside a cafe; a defeated army marches to a prisoner-of-war camp. Simultaneously an ode and a lament, ABOUT ENDLESSNESS presents a kaleidoscope of all that is eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.” Watch “About Endlessness“, official trailer. Also “‘About Endlessness’ Review: Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. Roy Andersson’s latest feature is a somber, exhilarating collection of self-defeating human specimens.”
• Watch “Scannable QR code appears in sky above China’s Shanghai“—”A 1,500-strong drone show created a scannable QR code in eastern China’s Shanghai, in celebration of the first anniversary of the Chinese release of a video game, Princess Connect! Re:Dive.”
• “MJD 59,326.”—”I am considering adopting two rules for projects that I think are very promising for 40+ lifestyles.”
• From the Freeze Dried Ice Cream dept: “Huh, Turns Out Space Food Has Gone From Gross to ‘Pretty Fantastic’.”—”Today, we think of penguins as small-ish, waddling, tuxedo-birds. But they evolved from a flying ancestor, were actual giants for millions of years, and some of them were even dressed a little more casually.”
• Watch “When Penguins Went From The Sky To The Sea.”
• “Goth Chick News: Zombie Takes on The Munsters“—”Rob Zombie, former front man of the heavy metal band White Zombie, and more recently the director of blood-bath trilogy House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects and 3 From Hell, has been tapped to write the script as well as sit in the director’s chair.” “The cast of Zombie’s Munsters will feature several Zombie film regulars, which does nothing to make us feel better about this. Zombie’s wife Sheri Moon Zombie as Lily Munster, was last seen burning another character to death in 3 From Hell. Jeff Daniel Phillips who will play Herman Munster, was also last seen in 3 From Hell being murdered by Sheri Moon Zombie. Richard Brake and Dan Roebuck, additional veterans from Zombie’s prior films, with also star.” “The film is said to be scheduled for a premiere on NBCUniversal’s new Peacock streaming service and open in theaters via Universal Pictures on the same day, though no dates have been provided.”
• Watch “The Underground Railroad“, official trailer. “‘Nothing was given, all was earned. Hold on to what belongs to you.’ From Academy Award® winner Barry Jenkins and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead comes the Amazon Original limited series ‘The Underground Railroad’. Premiering May 14 on Prime Video.” [Amazon]
• “Inkulinati is an ink-based strategy straight from medieval manuscripts, where a rabbit’s bum can be deadlier than a dog’s sword. Become a master of the Living Ink, build your own bestiary, defeat medieval superstars and collect perks to unleash hidden powers.”
• From the Negging dept: “This sex doll rants about how despicable the human race is.”
• “Are You a Social Lubrican or a Social Lubrican’t?”
• Watch “Cyberpunk Interrogation“, launch trailer—”It’s 2065, and you are an interrogator-model android tasked with rooting out deviants among your own kind. You must probe for lies, monitor and exploit emotional spikes, earn the trust of your subjects, and make the final call: release, or destroy?”

What have you been seeing around and thinking about lately? What have you seen that caught your eye? Thinking about something lately, or reading something interesting, or have a project you’re working on? Participate by tagging @[email protected] in the ‘verse with what you’ve got to share. Like, boost, or comment posts by that account to help curate the best stuff for everyone.

This post was possible because of support from generous ongoing Patrons. Patrons get access to Omnium Gatherum immediately. On the blog, this will be exclusive to Patrons for one year, after which I’ll make it publicly available to everyone so they can see what they’ve been missing.