The Lesser Bot is a twitterbot that is writing a machine-generated grimoire, complete with summoning runes, which is timely, given that we’re entering the age of demon-haunted computers.

“The Lesser Bot of Solomon offers you endless pages from a text in the style of Ars Goetia and the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.”

№ 576 Chancellor AGMAHMAL, DEMON of: ‣ mordantly queued litheness ‣ subdivisions

№ 573 Senator SABAZMONUS, DEMON of: ‣ alcoholically positioning cutthroats

№ 571 Councilman BALZILSUM, DEMON of: ‣ presidential ascendancy ‣ whetstones ‣ preventive solos

№ 567 Saint BARETHOS, DEMON of: ‣ riposting footraces

№ 559 Deputy ABTZO, DEMON of: ‣ infected contaminators

№ 565 Saint ABAN, DEMON of: ‣ navigators

http://boingboing.net/2016/06/12/twitterbot-that-produces-endle.html

In the NYT, a pair of behavioral scientists describe a forthcoming Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes article (Sci-Hub mirror) that studied the effect of mindfulness meditation (a trendy workplace moral-booster) on workers’ motivation and performance.

Turns out that people who meditate are less motivated: “Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity –  states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project.”

People who had meditated were more focused, but they didn’t perform better than their less calm, more anxious colleagues, because “their lower levels of motivation…seemed to cancel out that benefit.

During the heyday of psychedelics, the prevailing conspiracy theory explaining the criminalization of “mind-expanding” substances was that the boss class realized that people who could perceive greater truths would be unshackled from meaningless materialism and the need to work to attain status goods. Whether or not that was why regulators acted to ban psychedelic substances (an act that former UK Drugs Czar David Nutt called “the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo”), there certainly seems to be a correlation between discomfort and anxiety and your willingness to work hard for someone else’s enterprise.

Mercury in Cancer - Neptune in Pisces - Jupiter in Scorpio “Don’t touch my heart with bare hands” 

Does it feel like your emotions have already won? You didn’t even realise a battle had begun, you woke up in the middle of the sea. Trine aspects are considered ‘positive’ and ‘easy’ because it facilitates free-flowing, accessible, and collaborative qualities between planets. But the danger is also here, because it can cause us to just give up, relinquish power, and run away…. rather than stay and fight. 

Old wounds arrive on shore, the memories and feelings you thought you threw out to sea. Just wondering how you found your way back here. Every focal point of ‘feeling’ is activated by this alignment. The physical body is a three slide water park. High pressure liquid stream of emotions pump water back and forth in emotive cycles Unsure where to move next. A nervous butterfly tummy (Mercury in Cancer), hormonal and gastric balance points (Jupiter in Scorpio) and rationality, lucidity (Neptune in Pisces)

Now that Mercury is finished in Gemini, the logical mind is strained and exhausted. Mercury in Cancer is the emotional mind, when it contacts Jupiter in Scorpio, the ‘wise’ and ‘higher mind’ melts into this emotional mind, so be cautious of the trickster voices speaking with false rationality  We have grown quite accustomed to Neptune in Pisces now. We should know  that we will never receive all the answers we want and we need. Just to accept the invalidation of having experiences that nobody will believe. Time is immeasurable, you’ve woken half way through the dream. Are you making yourself sick over something that doesn’t exist? 

“This was fun. This scene right here, at this point, we are drunk. Nicole brings out that Cuervo 1800, beaming, thinking she’s brought the best tequila ever [laughs]. And, uh, we got a little snoggered.”