N'wraenomicon

I enjoyed editing the colors and lighting to turn a very plain photo of my new ring into a photo more suited to the feeling I aim for with pictures on this blog. Yes, in case you're wondering, that is a replica of the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings . It took some work to get everything situated for the photo so that the Elvish inscription would show. It isn't obvious and disappears, leaving a plain gold band, if everything isn't just right. At least I don't have to hold it to a flame. So why am I writing about a Tolkien ring on a Lovecraft blog? Well, it isn't really a Lovecraft blog. It's a Yog-Sothothery blog. We can discuss all day whether or not it's fair to identify the Mythos with the name of the man who laid the groundwork when most of the creation has been done by other authors. We can avoid that by identifying it with the most famous Old One in the mythos, but we also know Lovecraft himself wanted it identified with Yog-Sothoth. In ...

There was weird work to be done tonight. I don't talk too openly about these things. I talk more openly, and in other places, about my worship practices. There are parts that are too private, too intimate, so I don't open up about all the details. I will talk pretty openly about worship, though, and one reason is that talking about it is part of those practices. Magical practices, though? I learned a long time ago that there are good reasons for keeping quiet that aren't about asking, "But what would people think?!" I'm not concerned about the opinions. I'd be a lot quieter about a lot more things if that was the case. Unless certain things were constructed for being made public, though, there is vulnerability in revealing too much. As a side note, I will say here that the pictures I take are not of the actual practices. Social media culture, algorithms, marketability...it all encourages us to share what we're doing. Sometimes it's bett...

Math is not one of my strengths. A lot of people say that, and there is a while range of reasons why it may be so. There are serious problems with how we approach teaching math in schools. There's also an "attitude problem". Adults often display an attitude of, "No, it's not fun. Yes, it's hard. Quit whinin' and start studyin'!" That doesn't really encourage children to want to learn. Personally, I think math is fascinating! That's even true after years of adults confusing my dread of doing the schoolwork for not liking math. The biggest obstacle for me is that my ability to understand concepts hits a point where it is impaired by my limitations when it comes to arithmetic. I have a learning disability called dyscalculia. Even if math came easy to me, though, algebra probably would have been something I felt neutral about. It would have been a necessary class to acquire skills to move on to things I found more fascinating. I wish I had be...

An interesting (I use that word a lot, because many things are interesting to me) thing happened twice while I was reading a book recently. The book was Peter Levenda's Dunwich . It's the second book in his Lovecraft Code  trilogy. Would I recommend it to fans of the Mythos? That's...hmm. I don't think I have a simple answer for that. I've been casually aware of Levenda's work for a long time, but hadn't read any of it until just a few years ago. Well...not anything he published under his own name. There was that one special book that pulled me into Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Eastern mysticism, and a lot of other topics I knew nearly nothing about before someone suggested it to me. That was over twenty years ago, which feels longer than it sounds. I'm at a point in my life where "twenty years ago" sounds like just a few minutes and feels like an eternity. Because of that book, I'm going to have a very personal favorable bias about anything that co...

My personal story of an experience with a Lake Monster is absolutely fascinating. Of course, I think it is. Who would claim to have a Lake Monster experience and then wave it off as being too casual and boring? A lot of what makes the story so fascinating, though, is a long trail of details that have revealed themselves in odd ways. Tonight is not the night for writing the entire story, but I have discovered another interesting detail. My Lake Monster experience ties very closely with the aquatic dinosaur Tylosaurus. No, I'm not claiming there's a physical live one out there somewhere. That would be too simple a story, and easily disproven. For now, all that's necessary to know is that this aquatic dinosaur is important to me, and that I recently been exploring thoughts of how Tylosaurus may or may not be some kind of appropriate representation of Father Dagon and/or Mother Hydra. I was reading more information about the dinosaur tonight, digging deeper into how this all co...

This is all going to be kind of vague. I'm writing it more for myself than anyone else. That's what I always do, but it applies even more than usual to this. Things have been recorded with more detail in other places. The way my memory works, I don't even need "more detail" to remember things, so I really just need enough here so that I know what I'm talking about. Okay, that first part alone plays into some things I've been thinking about lately. It's not time yet to write about those things, though. I did some work the other night, and one of the things that work included was the Banishing Ritual of the Old Ones I wrote up last month. There were, shall we say, Other Things involved, as well. And we weren't expecting a big storm that night. I was going to do this work outside. That seems to be a bad plan for a lot of things lately, so it works out that it's my nature to have a secondary Just In Case plan. It turned out I had to do the work ins...