flowerysong

The miscellaneous new or new-to-me music from 2017 that stuck with me, ranked using a rough bubble sort. I was going to tag some of these NSFW, but I can't be bothered. Best just to assume the worst and avoid listening to any of them with your granny.

(There are rules for this list. I'm not going to tell you what they are.)

Honorable mentions: Hayley Kiyoko, Hey Violet, and Feist.

Dishonorable mention: Taylor Swift. 1989 was in heavy rotation in my car for a long time, so I expected something from Reputation to make it on here. It didn't.

Click here for a mostly-complete Spotify playlist

23: Pogo - Grow Fonder

I love the texture of this song, and it extensively samples one of my favourite Disney films.

22: Medusa In My Knickers - I Like To Move It

MIMK describe themselves as "blackwave", and I'm not enough of a genre wonk to know what that is. (Danceable post-punk with black metal influences?) I have a soft spot for the Reel 2 Real original, and this cover is tons of fun.

21: Transviolet - Bloodstream

Smooth electropop to slide into your mindstream.

20: Ivy Levan - Hot Damn

No one wants cold damn, you know.

19: Miss Eaves - Thunder Thighs

Body positivity without any (all too common) accompanying negativity. Nice wobbly beat.

18: in love with a ghost - i was feeling down, then i found a nice witch and now we're best friends

Chillwave? Ambient? Whatever. We're best friends now.

17: The Regrettes - Ladylike / WHATTA BITCH

Riot grrrl punk with a surf rock edge. (I heard that that girl Lydia is nothing but trouble.)

16: The Mowgli's - San Francisco

Upbeat hippie pop.

15: Ghosted - Get Some

Sometimes you just want to get some.

14: Woodkid - Run Boy Run

Sometimes you just need to run.

13: St. Vincent - Pills

The ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all.

12: Miss Eaves - Hump Day

Innuendo? What innuendo? We're here for the flow and the beat and also maybe the innuendo.

11: Dune Rats - Bullshit

Take 90s pop punk. Add Australian stoners. Shake well and serve.

10: Eric Nally - Believe

It's not Foxy Shazam, but I don't need it to be; I just need Eric to keep believing in himself and occasionally releasing music that I like.

9: Beatrice Eli - Girls

Just gals being pals.

8: Barns Courtney - Glitter & Gold

I am all about that driving rhythm.

7: Alex the Astronaut - Not Worth Hiding

I don't go in for a ton of contemporary folk, but this song hit me right in the feels.

6: The Regrettes - Seashore

I heard that that girl Lydia is seventeen years old.

5: Halsey - Bad At Love

Just Halsey being Halsey.

4: Kesha - Rainbow

Kesha is too precious for this world.

3: Paramore - Hard Times

That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow. How shall we find the concord of this discord?

2: MØ - When I Was Young

I was so much older then.

1: Halsey - Heaven In Hiding

The Arcana Tarot playing cards by Chris Ovdiyenko are pretty unique. The basic deck is 52 dual-suited but otherwise standard playing cards plus four of the major arcana (The Fool, The Tower, The Lovers, and Death), and comes in dark and light variants. Most partial tarot decks focus on the major arcana, so it's kind of nice to have one that doesn't. The imagery is based on the Smith-Waite deck, though like the Marseille the pip cards aren't illustrated.

The third deck pictured is the expansion deck, which is actually two half decks (dark and light) containing the remaining major arcana, the four Pages, two Jokers, and several gaff cards (for sleight-of-hand tricks.)

The cards are standard USPCC playing cards and handle beautifully.

This heart-shaped relationship spread was inspired by one I found out in the wilds of the internet a few years ago, which I shamelessly stole and twisted into something that made more sense to me.

This set of Elder Futhark runes in hematite is from RJ Rock Shop. Hematite, an iron ore, has long been one of my favourite minerals and I was quite drawn to this particular set. They're well-made; while I can't speak to the longevity of the paint in the rune, the runes are engraved so in the worst case you can repaint it if it somehow flakes off. There's something sublimely satisfying about gently shaking a bag of rocks so I really enjoy having these around.

The Ritual Abuse Tarot by Ryan Sheffield is a dark and terrifying Smith-Waite deck inspired by Stephen Gammell's illustrations for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

The deck is currently available in a Print on Demand edition, which I can't comment on the quality of. The deck that I have is from the first printing and came in a very nice tin. The deck handles well, with a faint linen finish and glossy coating on decent stock.

The accompanying booklet contains keywords for each card (with a significantly negative slant to the meanings) and an unnamed variant of the Celtic Cross spread.

The Celtic Cross is one of the most famous tarot spreads and is widely taught as a foundational spread (I blame A. E. Waite for this.) I find it ugly and uninspiring and I don't use it, though that might just be my hipster tendencies showing through.

Today we're taking a break from cartomancy to look at runic divination. Just as any deck of cards can be used for cartomancy any alphabet could be used for divination, but the use of an unfamiliar alphabet has a more mystical flavour.

We might as well get this out of the way: there's no direct historical evidence for the use of runes as a divination tool before the seventeenth century. The closest we get is a passage written by Tacitus (in 98 CE) in which the Germanic peoples are said to put great stock in lots cast by drawing three strips from a set marked with "different signs"; these signs may or may not have been runes, and may or may not have been single runes if they were runic inscriptions.

In the case of the Elder Futhark, an alphabet of 24 runes dating back to around the second century, we don't even have certainty that the proto-Germanic names we call them are accurate, as the names are reconstructions based on records in other languages from centuries after the alphabet was created. In the face of that, clinging to the idea that we've magically managed to maintain a continuity of tradition with the historic divinatory meanings and use of these runes is laughable. Anyone who tells you that you're reading the runes wrong because it doesn't fit their conception of how runes were used historically should be ignored. (There's rather more evidence for their use in magic, but this series of posts is about divination.)

That being said, the modern systems of divination using runes are coherent, fun, and have a nice sprinkling of Germanic flavour.

This set of red cedar Elder Futhark rune staves from Alaska Laser Maid is my oldest set of runes and the ones I use most often. I don't at this point recall if it originally came with a guidebook, and if it did I've long since lost it.

This set comes with a "blank" rune which you can use in your readings or leave out, depending on how you feel about its usefulness (and its relatively recent invention in the 1980s.)

You may have noticed a pattern in the basic divination approaches I've been covering. Once again, drawing a single rune is a good place to start practicing rune interpretation, while here I've done a simple three-rune spread (Dagaz, Ansuz, and Ehwaz) representing past, present, and future. A very promising relationship spread (I see a tall, dark friend in your future.)

There's not a lot to say about this deck; the mini 1889 Lenormand Oracle from ForTheSeekers is like the larger one, but small. (Note that unlike my deck the version currently being sold doesn't have gilded edges, so there may be other differences in quality between the printings.) The mini deck comes with a reference sheet listing keywords for each card (this doesn't fit in the deck box, so it's easy for the deck and reference to end up separated.)

In addition to being extremely portable, the smaller size of this deck makes the Lenormand Grand Tableau a reasonable undertaking even with limited table space. This is a common Lenormand spread where all 36 cards are laid out in one of a few configurations (grand tableaus are done with tarot as well, though 78 cards is a lot to lay out and interpret so it's not as common.) The 9x4 layout is quite popular, though you can also go with 8x4 with an additional row of just four cards, or 6x6, or whatever makes sense to you.

This is the first spread I've covered that uses a significator, which is a card that represents the querent. This is fairly important for the Grand Tableau since it gives you a starting point for breaking down the reading; traditionally the significator is card 28 (Man) or 29 (Woman) depending on the gender of the querent. The gender binary is bullshit so I prefer to either have the querent choose a significator or select one randomly before the cards are dealt.

Alongside the many tarot decks patterned after the Smith-Waite other structures continue to be used such as the Tarot of Marseille; in addition to some differences in imagery there are several other features that distinguish this older style. Perhaps the most obvious is the non-court cards in the minor arcana, which are fully illustrated in Smith-Waite decks but fairly plain in Marseille. The major arcana have occasional differences in terminology (e.g. Smith-Waite's avoidance of Christian terms like Pope and Papess in favour of Hierophant and High Priestess respectively) and a different order, with cards 8 (Strength in Smith-Waite) and 11 (Justice) swapping places.

The BRuT tarot deck by Uusi deviates from the classic Marseille by switching out the Italian suits for the familiar French playing card suits of Hearts (Cups), Diamonds (Coins/Pentacles), Clubs (Wands), and Spades (Swords). It also adds in an advertising triptych (shown above) and nine other art cards that together form a panorama.

This is a nicely satisfying deck with a glossy linen finish and quality card stock. The size is pretty unusual, approximately the same width as a poker deck but notably taller.

Today's deck is The Amanda Palmer Tarot, a Smith-Waite inspired deck where each card was done by a separate artist. I don't love this style of deck construction since it pretty inevitably leads to a major lack of cohesion. While there are individual cards that I love, there are also individual cards that I pretty much hate. This is fine as a collection of art but it doesn't make me want to use it as a deck.

The deck shuffles fine and doesn't look inclined to wear out, though the coating seems slightly off compared to top quality decks.

While tarot is the dominant form of cartomancy it's far from the only one. The Lenormand deck is named after the famous French fortune teller Marie Anne Lenormand (1772–1843). There's no evidence that the publication of this deck was influenced by Lenormand's actual cartomancy methods in any way. The original German Petit Lenormand (circa 1846) was a modified version of a German playing card deck created around 1799 for a game called the Spiel der Hoffnung. She could conceivably have owned a copy of this game and used it in divination, but it's most likely that the publisher took a deck they were familiar with and slapped her name on it for marketing purposes.

The deck consists of cards numbered from 1 to 36 with simple images on each; while the Spiel der Hoffnung had insets of both a German playing card (suits of hearts, bells, acorns, and leaves) and the corresponding card with French suits (hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades) the Petit Lenormand dropped the German-suited inset. Modern Lenormand decks don't always include the inset playing card, and it's rarely referred to in readings.

The 1889 Lenormand Oracle from ForTheSeekers is a high quality playing card deck with coated linen-finish stock and antique gold gilding; it's not quite as good as a USPCC deck but it shuffles and handles pretty well. It follows the original Petit Lenormand closely, having 36 cards with no additions and an inset of the corresponding French-suited card.

The accompanying booklet contains a translation of the cartomancy instructions included with the original Petit Lenormand (including card meanings), a translation of the directions for playing the Spiel der Hoffnung, a list of keywords for each card, a basic introduction to the modern traditions of Lenormand cartomancy, and a glossary of terms.

Some Lenormand users get extremely uptight about the correct way to read the cards, and they'll tell you that it's impossible to do a single-card reading because the cards must always be read as combinations. I believe that this sort of dogmatism is unhelpful at best; if it's possible to do a single-card reading with one deck of playing cards, why would it suddenly become impossible with another?

Today's item is The Raven's Prophecy Tarot by Maggie Stiefvater, the author of The Raven Cycle. Several tarot decks feature at various points in the books and are described to various levels of detail, but this is not based on any of them (so don't expect to see Blue Sargent on the Page of Cups.) The deck does integrate imagery and themes from Welsh mythology (which is also important in the cycle) so it's not entirely disconnected, but the deck is its own thing rather than a novel tie-in.

The deck structure is mostly the same as Smith-Waite, though the older Italian suit of coins takes the place of pentacles. The card stock is slightly thin, though not as bad as some incredibly cheap decks that it's impossible to shuffle without creasing or tearing cards. Overall they shuffle fine, with a smooth finish that slides well and loves to show fingerprints on the dark backgrounds.

The accompanying book talks about the theme of the deck, covers tarot reading basics, and has keywords plus a page or so of text for each card in the deck.

Tarot reading is certainly the most popular form of cartomancy, and possibly the most common form of divination in the US. It uses a specialised deck of playing cards originally used for various trick-taking games; while there are several variations on the structure of this deck, if you pick up a deck at random it will probably follow the Smith-Waite structure. The original Smith-Waite deck was published in 1910 by William Rider and Son of London, having been created by scholar/occultist Arthur Edward Waite and artist/occultist Pamela Colman Smith. (This style of deck is also referred to as Rider-Waite, Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS), Waite-Colman Smith (WCS), and other permutations; I prefer Smith-Waite since Smith created the art and that's kind of an important contribution.)

The Smith-Waite deck consists of 78 fully-illustrated cards: the "Major Arcana" are 22 cards numbered from 0-21 and the "Minor Arcana" are four suits (wands, pentacles, cups, and swords) of 14 cards each (ace to 10, page, knight, queen, and king.) The Smith-Waite deck wasn't the first deck to have illustrated scenes on all 78 cards, but it was the first to be widely available. It was also packed with occult symbolism that was further expounded upon in A. E. Waite's The Key to the Tarot, published in 1911. While it's possible to do cartomancy with any deck of cards, the combination of complex illustrated scenes and systematized symbolism makes the Smith-Waite deck (and others inspired by it) particularly suited to the practise.

Reproductions, reprints, recolourings, and redrawings of the original Smith-Waite deck are widely available, but I don't actually own one. The closest I think I have is the Color Your Own Tarot illustrated by Echo Chernik.

This deck is decent quality cardstock and uncoated, which makes it less nice to handle and shuffle than a coated deck but better for colouring on. My deck is not yet coloured because I lack the necessary confidence, but I swear I'll get around to it. Someday.

The small accompanying pamphlet provides some keywords or phrases for each card in either upright or reversed position and a brief meaning of each suit. (A sidenote on reversed meanings: I personally think that 78 cards provide enough nuance on their own, so I normally ignore card orientation completely. As with everything else in divination, there's no wrong approach.)

There are a number of traditional "spreads" (layouts) used for cartomancy, but we're going to start with the simplest form of tarot reading, the single card. Decide on a query, then shuffle the deck and pull a card. People will then either interpret it by intuition based on the art and how they feel it relates to the query, or work off of traditional meanings.

divination, n.: The action or practice of divining; the foretelling of future events or discovery of what is hidden or obscure by supernatural or magical means; soothsaying, augury, prophecy.

December, n.: the twelfth month of the year

Divination December, n.: something I made up as an excuse to show off my toys and ramble.

The prospect of revealing hidden information is an alluring one, and people have come up with more ways of peering into the unknown than you can shake a stick at (several of which involve shaking a stick, as it happens.) I don't put stock in any supernatural ability to foretell the future, but I am a strong believer in the usefulness of symbols and the human ability to find patterns in everything. As such I'm not at any point going to tell you things like "you need to protect your tarot decks from negative vibes by never letting your girlfriend shuffle them" or "locally grown yarrow stalks will have the best attunement to the area's qi", but if you find such practices useful you should by all means carry on.

Most divination techniques rely on some amount of randomness as an input, whether that's blind draws from a set of objects, counting the number of birds sitting on a power line, or observing the direction a stick fell. Another common but not universal characteristic is the injection of nuance and ambiguity to reduce the falsifiability of your augury. Today's method of divination is flipping a coin, which is completely lacking in nuance but has randomness aplenty. This is quick, simple, and gives an unambiguous answer to a single question. For this I use a solid copper coin from Chris Ovdiyenko's Dead On Paper, which Chris personally guarantees to give a correct answer 50% of the time. Divination process: think of a question, flip the coin, and read your answer.

You can of course substitute any coin with distinct obverse and reverse designs, but this one has a nice heft and size which make it more satisfying to flip than standard U.S. coins. Plus, the occult art is much more fun than George Washington's shiny bust.

The first season of True Detective is carried by the strength of the actors. Without the strong performances turned in by Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, and Michelle Monaghan (on the rare occasion she's given something to do) the show would collapse under the weight of the script's overindulgent philosophical soliloquies and metafictional meanderings.

This isn't a formal analysis of the show and I've only watched it once, but I have a few thoughts, some of which might even be meaningful. Spoilers abound.

By then it was late in the day, and Fish Mother told Anansi to stay overnight. Anansi was hungry and Fish Mother kept a barrel of her eggs in the kitchen, so Anansi asked to sleep near the fire. In addition to being hungry Anansi was cunning, so he left one egg behind while he poached the rest in the ashes. Each egg went "pop!" when it was done.

Fish Daughter hollered, "What's that stranger doing?"

Anansi hollered back, "That's just my knees settling down for the night!"

Fish Mother hollered, "Treat your elders with respect, child!"

The next morning, as was her custom, Fish Mother asked the children to bring the eggs to her to be counted. Anansi said, "Let the children rest, I'll do the heavy lifting." He carried the remaining egg to Fish Mother. Fish Mother counted it. Fish Daughter gave him the side-eye, and marked the egg. Anansi carried the egg back to the kitchen, wiped it off, and carried it in again. They continued in this fashion until he had accounted for the entire barrel.

After that, Anansi was quite ready to leave. Fish Mother sent two of her children with him to row the canoe across the river. They were about halfway across when Fish Mother yelled out, "Bring that stranger back here! He's eaten all my eggs!"

The children turned to Anansi and asked, "What did Mother say? We couldn't hear her over the wind."

Presented in no particular order and with no attempt at explanation or justification, this is the new (or new-to-me) music that stuck with me in 2016:

Sick of Sarah - Kick Back

PWR BTTM - I Wanna Boi

Taylor Swift vs. Black Sabbath - Bad Blood vs. Iron Man (DJs From Mars Bootleg)

twenty one pilots - Heathens

TAT - Anxiety

DOROTHY - Raise Hell

MØ - Walk This Way

Elliphant - Club Now Skunk

Miike Snow - Genghis Khan

Broods - Free

Jidenna - Long Live the Chief

MØ - Kamikaze

A Tribe Called Red - Stadium Pow Wow

The Pretty Reckless - Take Me Down

Panic! at the Disco - Victorious

Recently my job involved reading a suicide note.

What do you say after that, as your constructed self on social media? "You are not alone. You are loved." These are not my words, though I could claim them. They are reflexive platitudes. It's a good sentiment, and what good is sentiment? Sentiment and tuppence will get you…wondering why we even still use pennies.

"I am here for you. I love you." These are my words, active words, so they're harder to say. Should I even say them? I'm barely a functional human being; promising to help is for people who can respond to Facebook messages, or say "hi" to people they know, or talk. However—the least I can do is try.

tl;dr: There are some pacing issues and not all of the jokes work for me, but that's par for the course for Ghostbusters movies. It's a fun movie, a funny movie, and I recommend watching it.

Ghostbusters (2016) is loaded with references to the 1984 original, from visual references and injokes to cameos from all of the surviving main cast (with the exception of Rick Moranis, who declined the opportunity), Slimer, and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Despite this, the film manages to stand on its own and doesn't make the mistake of retreading the characters and plot of the original. Erin, Abby, Holtzmann, and Patty may have some parallels to the old Ghostbusters, but they're very definitely not simple genderflips. Similarly, the climax is a paranormal apocalypse threatening to destroy New York City, but it's not Gozer the Gozerian and it wasn't brought about by some long-dead Lovecraftian cultist architect.

Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy, and Kristen Wiig turn in perfectly fine performances, but I predict that the character everyone's going to be talking about is Kate McKinnon's Holtzmann. She's the quietly competent engineer of the team, building everything from a flaky almost-working proton pack prototype for the first time they confront a ghost to an arsenal of diverse weaponry for the climax. She's quirky, fun, and has a slightly odd approach to the world ("You try saying no to these salty parabolas.")

Sadly, the biggest reasons people will be talking about her are not explicitly acknowledged in the film. Holtzmann is both uniquely individual and a frustratingly blank slate, because none of her backstory and very little of her present story is explored. Based on acting and subtext she's clearly meant to be some flavour of non-heterosexual, but there's enough deniability that she can be read as anything from asexual homoromantic to bisexual to het. Paul Feig has intimated that studio interference prevented him from making her canonically queer, which is a sad thing in 2016. We should have canonically queer characters in our summer action movies, not just queerbaiting.

I also suspect, based mainly on something that happens near the end of the film, that Holtzmann is on the autism spectrum. It's not directly addressed in the text, but the delivery of the lines and the content can very easily be read as supporting this interpretation, as can her (now recontextualised) earlier actions. If it is intended it's an awesome thing to have a kickass female engineer representing a population that doesn't see much positive media portrayal, and if it's not intended I believe we'll see it as a popular headcanon among fans who are themselves on the spectrum.

Minor spoilers below...