MANNAZ & WYRD

July for Loki is a concept/idea of taking the month of July to honor Loki originally presented by Galina Krasskova. While I do not support Krasskova and in fact actively avoid her writing as she is a well known bigot and folkish (see here for more on this), I do like the idea of July for Loki and the celebration of the helical rising of Sirius.

Why July?

Loki is a deity of fire and flame and I have always felt his presence closest at the height of summer when the sun blazes like fire in the sky and as someone who lives in the Norther Hemisphere, July and August are when I would consider summer to be at it's hottest. In these months I can feel Loki's excitement and energy, so what better time is there to honor him?

What is Lokabrenna?

Lokabrenna is the Scandinavian name for the star Sirius. It translates to something close to "Loki's Brand" or "Loki's Tourch." Lokebrenna can also be referring to the helical rising of Sirius and is often considered to be the marker of the height of summer's heat.

How to Celebrate

There is no set way to celebrate July for Loki or Lokabrenna. The idea is simply to honor him in someway during this time. Weather that is every day of the month of July or once a week. You can also opt to do just one thing at some point in July to honor and recognize Loki. These things don't need to be huge blots and can be a simple as lighting a tealight candle in his honor or sharing some of your morning coffee with Loki. July for Loki isn't about following some big dramatic tradition. It's only really been around since 2012. It's more about being mindful and taking the time to recognize, spend time with, and honor Loki! That being said, one way you can celebrate is by dedicating Lokabrenna to him.

When is Lokabrenna?

Lokabrenna is a celestial event and therefore doesn't have a set date. In addition the date and time will be different for everyone based on their location on Earth. It generally takes place during in late July/early August.

How to Calculate Your Personal Lokabrenna

I posted about this a few years ago here, but I wanted to share again. For anyone who's interested in finding their personal date for Lokabrenna, I used the info from this post from the Lokean reddit thread, but here are the important instructions: https://in-the-sky.org/ephemeris.php - set type to Any and Object to Sirius and make sure it has your area or a town/city within 50miles/80km of where you live, then find when it changes from "Not observable" -> a time, meaning its observable, e.g. for me it says "05:48 until 05:49", since the heliacal rising is when the star is finally visible after being hidden by the sun for a season, we want the first day it is visible. i set the date for somewhere in July and then selected 100 rows of days and scrolled until i found a time in the "observable" column as mentioned above. (via. r/lokean)

discussion for the cosmology nerds (like myself); By most accounts, we consider Ymir the first being. He is what all (on Midgard and possibly Asgard, or more) comes from. At what point does the Yggdrasil factor in? It is the place in which all things are connected, and there is an implication that it is Alive, given that being chewed on by dragons may or may not kill it. It is a big, universal tree, yes. But it is...a tree. So, alive? Was it thrust into being when Muspelheim and Niflheim collided (my theory). And so it is one of three beings that were created from that clash, including a most beloved Cow...

I haven't seen anyone talking about this and just wanted to make a quick post on here.

Akihiro Miwa recently passed away peacefully june 20th, and was not only a drag queen and a queer icon, but also the japanese voice of Arceus in the movie Arceus and the jewel of life, as well as the witch from Howl's moving castle and Moro from Princess Mononke.

This is because there are two parts to memories - their encoding and their recall. The encoding determines their availability, their recall determines their accessibility. The reason why trauma memory and childhood amnesia are different is in this distinction. Trauma memory is often encoded differently, bypassing to the limbic system where it is stored as intrinsic memory. It can’t be recalled because it was never encoded. Childhood amnesia, however, seems to indicate that the memories are encoded, but we lose access to them as we age. This is most likely due to the development of brain structures that fundamentally change our encoding and recall of memory as we get older.

You are also not immune to specific forms of propaganda.

You are especially susceptible to propaganda that says:

"Think of the children!"

I don't care if you don't have kids and never want them, I don't care what form this line takes. I don't care about your political leanings. "But the children!" is designed to tug at your heartstrings. It is the foot in the door.

No matter who you are or what your beliefs, there will be a time when someone will try to use harm to children as a way to convince you of something.

And you are susceptible to it. Small, defenseless humans. It's okay. It's natural. But you might not even realize it's happening.

The first thing to know is that recognizing a delusion does not come easily- especially if you are not experienced in dealing with them. most people will only figure out that a belief is a delusion after the delusion has passed.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

Do trusted people in my life insist that one (or several) of my beliefs are not true?

Do I have a hard time backing up my beliefs with evidence? (particularly evidence that other people can agree with)

Are my beliefs consistent with my previous experiences? (e.g if you think your friend is trying to harm you, has that friend ever tried to harm you in the past or expressed that they want to harm you? is this a sudden change in character for them?)

Do I know what led to me believing this? (if this belief is new, do you know why you changed your mind?)

Do I have a hard time listening to other people's perspectives on my belief because my belief feels so obviously true?

Do I feel like other people are trying to lie to me or manipulate me when they offer alternatives to my belief?

-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)

-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt

-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint

-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-

Touting the discovery as a breakthrough in understanding the behavioral patterns of the insects, Rockefeller University researchers published a study Friday revealing that mosquitos are more attracted to people branded with the Mosquito God’s rune of punishment. “After several rounds of clinical trials with a control group, we can confirm that anyone marked by the imprint of suffering from Ranggnarr, The God of Mosquitos, is far more likely to be bitten by the insect deity’s loyal worshippers,” said Entomology Department Head Marcus Falwell, advising Americans who plan on spending time outdoors to cover any exposed skin that was singed with righteous flames by the Supreme Winged Being as penance for crimes against mosquito-kind. 

Rang-gnarr is "he who summons those who gnaw"

cool cool cool cool i absolutely did not know that.

i do really like that it's described as a day to celebrate Lokean innovation in modern Heathenry. modern Heathens in general need to be innovative, so. nice. thats neat.

a Bn size is the mean between An and An-1

The US doesn't "have to do things different" for the sake of doing things differently, as your words imply, nor is the sentence above about who uses what paper fully correct, either*.

The reason that the US (and Canada, most of Central America, Chile, and the Philippines) use different standard sizes* from Europe is probably pretty easy to figure out when you think about things like "there's a big fucking ocean between two of those places, but not between all of the countries in Europe."

The standard size of paper, according to the American Forest and Paper Association, comes from the days of manual paper-making, and their assertion that 44" is about the length of the average experienced vatsman's comfortable grasp. So a sheet is 1/4" that length. The US standardized its own paper according to what legacy equipment it had, and keeps those standards because even today, paper tends to not be shipped back and forth between Europe and the US unless it has to be, because paper and books are really fucking heavy, so why should either one of us change our standards? Doing so would require massive amounts of capital investment, and frankly, we like our paper sizes just fine. It's really not to our detriment at all. We don't really import a lot of paper, and in fact, we export a lot of it.

American paper sizes are also half of each previous size, it's just that our base is a rectangle, not a square, uses imperial measurements, and reaches back to measurements based on manual paper-making. Sure, we could spend billions of dollars changing our standards to meet that of countries that don't supply us with this good, creating a massive amount of industrial and consumer waste as everything from paper manufacturing mills and industrial printing presses to plastic binders and hole punches at schools all become garbage, but... why? We also use different standard sizes of snack food bags, based on how our industries developed, but there's no actual reason for those things to be standardized, so why, exactly, should they be? Because it bothers someone who doesn't use our machines and didn't know until today that it was different? That's not a real reason. That's just "haha the US sucks and is dumb and irrational."

No, it's actually super fucking rational when you remember that most European countries are smaller than US states, and we're standardized across the places where paper actually moves back and forth in massive bulk on a regular basis. You know: our own states, and Canada, and not Europe, on account of this being a huge fucking continent and paper being incredibly heavy and expensive to transport across oceans. That's why it's governed by the American National Standards Institute, which also governs or governed stuff like thread standards for nuts and bolts & exposure standards for film. The latter had the ANSI standard become the ISO standard, which is a great example of technology which was developed more recently and more specialized and thus not so deeply rooted and hard to change being much more possible to standardize.

tl;dr: all industrial standards like paper sizes have valid and long-argued reasons why they're like that, and unless you're coughing up the solution for changing something with hundreds of years of built-up infrastructure without breaking all of the industries that depend on that standard, the cash to do it, and the reason why all the old equipment that can't be converted should become garbage... fuck off, man, and leave us alone. There are real problems in the world, go solve those.