Hermetic Library Newsletter #105

a bit of a journey full of surprises

Howdy everyone! Here’s a public summary of my activity this week ending January 27, 2023!

This week I continued to work on new server Crocell, and decommissioned a bunch more stuff including the HRMTC I∴O∴ social network and RADIO @ HRMTC, and am moving the Calendar, Zine and Newsletter to the main library blog. And, I created a new bit of propaganda and added more tales from Laura Gibbs.

Plus the usual weekly stuff like almanac, propaganda, calendar, zine, updates, quotes, reviews, and more!

And, as always, I worked on various other things on website, blog, and more … Enjoy!

Thank you for visiting and being a guest of Hermetic Library. You help me be of service and make the work of the library meaningful. Especial thanks to each and every Patron and Subscriber for making the work of the library possible!

Unicursal Ultimate God Propaganda from Hermetic Library Office of the Ministry of Information

More big changes

The big changes I’ve been making to massively rethink and economize on absolutely everything I’m doing, pinching every penny and focusing every effort. As part of that, I’m pulling everything I can back into the main library blog. Here’s some of what’s changed this week.

Newsletter

As part of the other changes I’m going to write about in a moment, I’m moving the newsletter again. And, you’re soaking in it! Yeah, I know. Again? Yeah, again.

This newsletter is now a feature on the blog. I will post it as a weekly update with that same stuff as before, and whatever else I come up with for it. Basically it’s just like the web view for the newsletter all along. It’s also available via RSS.

The main difference is there won’t be list-like email delivery. I’ll be posting a point to this library blog-based newsletter to people that are subscribed to the list, and a reminder or two; but that is going away.

The hard truth is that there have been every few new people signing up for the newsletter since I moved it. Overall, with attrition, only slightly more people subscribed for email delivery than there were last year when I moved it. There just isn’t any growth in interest for it, for some reason. So, time to let that idea go for real.

What was the newsletter is now going to be a weekly post on the blog. The newsletter is dead, long live the blog!

That means I’ll be decommissioning the hosting for the newsletter at the end of the month. The same hosting service also is where I’ve been doing the calendar and zine blogs. Very few people subscribed to those via email, so the transition won’t be as big; but, I’ve set these up new on the blog proper.

For now, there’s not going to be an archive of the old newsletters, but I’ll probably just add them to the blog as old-dated posts eventually if I get the time.

Calendar

The first few new calendar events have already posted, and I’ll continue to do that, to the library blog. There’s new category for calendar posts, and I’ve added new about, submissions, and locations pages, that mirror the previous ones.

Zine

I have also migrated a number of posts for the upcoming Aphelion 2023 zine, plus some initial posts from the previous issue, from the zine blog to the library blog. You can check out the previously existing zine category for the new feed of zine posts, as well as pages for information about, submissions, and issues. That means you can already start to follow along with Hermetic Library Zine #6 July 2023 / Aphelion 2023 and Hermetic Library Zine #5 January 2023 / Perihelion 2023.

Omnium Gatherum

I’ve had a moment of clarity about Omnium Gatherum. I’d mentioned a few times that I was struggling over how and if to continue. I am now hitting reset and starting over. I’ve mention some of my thinking about this before, but my moment of clarity was when I realized that only two Patrons have even logged into the blog to take advantage of their exclusive access to OG posts since October last year. One of those Patrons is my mom, and Spiders Mom is an outlier and should not be counted (Hi, mom!). So, it’s clear that OG is not something that Patrons want me to spend time doing.

I am completely changing how I do OG. Where previously, I was providing a juicy, thick stream from the firehose of things that I find, whether they are related to the library subject matter or not; I am now only going to do OG for things that are much more library subject matter focused. Also, I’m going to stop creating a curated post that’s exclusive to Patrons.

I will be posting occasional asides about things I find, and I’ll post them individually to the blog. I’ve already started this, and you can see what that looks like by taking a gander at the last few posts to the Omnium Gatherum tag. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do with the older OG posts yet. I’m going to be thinking about that, but for now, they exist in the same way as the have before, and when the first of the month comes around I’ll need to decide if I’m just releasing for the public all the OG posts from a year ago, more, or what. IDEK yet!

Radio

I’m experimenting with having one or more widgets for RADIO @ HRMTC stations in the sidebar on the blog. Ultimately, I’d like there to be a floating persistent widget of some kind, so that people could start listening and not be interrupted if they move to another page, and even use the player in a popup so they can listen without needing another app whilst going about their day and not needing to keep the whole blog open. Obviously, these stations work in any Internet radio app, that supports open web streams too.

Honestly, after almost a year, I’m still considering what to do with this, and I still think it’s a good idea, but, I mean, how many good ideas have I had that haven’t gotten results? A lot, let me tell you. Ultimately, there will come a time that I need to decide what to do if there’s still not a lot of buzz about it or listeners who support these stations. If I hadn’t been able to get the stations up and running on Crocell, which I did last week, I would have gone ahead and shut them down. For now, at least, however, they continue!

Although, just now, Crocell got hit by a bunch of crawler bots, including, for some reason, Internet Archive, and it is slammed. I’m looking at these numbers, a kind of random chance to see a stress and load test, and I don’t think I can support enough listeners to make the radio stations successful, even if it weren’t the crawlers. Apparently way fewer people can listen than I thought I could manage using my current solution. That’s not great. And, I may have to give up on Internet radio after all.

To be fair, it is pretty consistently true that very few people listen, and, of those that do, not for very long. All in all, I may end up having to be happy with people listening via Bandcamp and to any of the issues that have been set up on all the digital shops and platforms, where most people listen to things these days anyway. Did I just talk myself out of running Internet radio? Hmm. We’ll see!

But, if it becomes a question of whether to keep the Internet radio going versus having the main site responsive, the main site is going to win, every time, obviously. So … yeah.

As of this moment, I currently have the Internet radio shut down. I may decide not bring it back up. I don’t now think it will survive the downsizing.

Well, composing this little section of the newsletter was a bit of a journey full of surprises.

HRMTC I∴O∴

And, I’ve decided to shutter the library’s entire Mastodon instance with all Hrmtc I∴O∴ accounts. I gave it a year, and only a few people were able to find me. Of those few, there really was not a lot of engagement with my activity. As far as I could tell, no one was following links to the library site, blog, and soever. And, almost no one seemed to be interacting with my posts if they saw them, so as far as I could tell I was just yelling into the void again to no effect. That’s just not a good use of my time or hosting fees.

Now, I also want to talk about the hosting fees, because this played into my decision. First, very few Patrons were following along, or else if they were I only saw one or two when they showed up as new followers in my notifications. So, it didn’t seem like HRMTC I∴O∴ was something that Patrons want me to spend time doing anyway.

Also, here’s the real rub: I couldn’t even afford to be popular. The hosting costs I was paying were already not enough to support the level of activity I was doing. The design of ActivityPub seems wildly stupid to me because it’s an awfully inefficient resource pit where the more popular an account is the more and more resources it takes to just push out updates to everyone. So, I was at the limit of what the instance I was using could even handle as far as my activity and the number of people following along.

Those things and others all came to a head in my mind when I realized that I was a few days out from my billing date for another month. I just decided then and there that the experiment was not a success. In the final analysis, whilst leaving big social was ethically and morally correct, the move away took too much of my time, effort and money for not enough benefit to Patrons or results reaching others.

Big social

Much to my chagrin, I’m back on big social. I’ve restarted posting to all the usual suspects, as loathe as I am to use them. Not much more to say about that, except that when I started posting to big social again, traffic to the blog doubled overnight. I mean … part of that is, no doubt, the novelty and surprise of coming back from radio silence, so who knows if that will last, but, damn. As bad as big social is, and believe me I really fuckin’ hate being back to it for all kinds of reasons, but at least it’s double the traffic, for the moment. I can’t afford to be in the ‘verse and I can’t afford to not be on big social. It’s Scylla and Charybdis.

Almanac

Here’s upcoming calendar and astronomical events, plus the daily Thelemic Tephilah practice for the coming week, January 27—February 3.

Calendar

Follow Calendar on the web and rss. And, if you have a current or upcoming event to share, add it to the Hermetic Library Calendar!

  • Greater Feast of Carolus Magnus, Charlemagne, died on January 28, 814 at Aachen, Germany
  • Greater Feast of William Butler Yeats, died on January 28, 1939 at Menton, France
  • Imbolc, observed February 1 or February 2, a cross quarter day
  • Astronomical Imbolc, February 4, 2:43 UTC, on ☉ in 15° ♒ (Sol in 15° Aquarius), a cross quarter day, which is the evening of Feb 3 here at Hermetic Library World HQ.

Hermetic Calendar Feb 1 Ritual of Imbolc

And, check out these new upcoming event posted to the Calendar on the blog.

Astronomical

  • The sky is throwing a lot of stuff at us lately, innit? But, we’re still green, or at least increasingly bright green comet.
  • First quarter moon, January 28
  • Moon appears to occult Mars, January 30–31
  • Comet ZTF E3 is as close to us as it will get, January 31–February 1
  • Astronomical Imbolc, February 4, 2:43 UTC, on ☉ in 15° ♒ (Sol in 15° Aquarius), a cross quarter day, which is the evening of Feb 3 here at Hermetic Library World HQ.

Hermetic Calendar Feb Imbolc Brigid Sun in 15 Degrees Aquarius

Thelemic Tephilah

I don’t know right now whether I’ll set up a new place to follow the Thelemic Tephilah bot yet. So, there’s no place to follow along at the moment, except for weekly reminders here, or in the Hermeneuticon page for the month.

Zine

Follow Zine on the web and rss. And, if you something you’ve created to share, send it in to the Hermetic Library Zine!

I’ve slowed down posting to one item a week because I’m low on things. I more than filled the previous issue, but now I need more submissions for this current one, if it is to happen, as planned, on Aphelion 2023.

Things to check out at Hermetic Library

And on the blog

All the quotes, reviews, &c. (But not OG, Calendar, & Zine)

Also, elsewhere

  1. Anthology news, January 23 [Followers/Bandcamp]
  2. Anthology news, January 25 [Followers/Bandcamp]

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And, that’s the summary of my activity for the last week. Thanks for following along!

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