It’s definite: I will not be going to Free Spirit this year. I saw my foot doctor this evening. I’d asked my friends on Facebook for some healing energy, and evidently it worked: The doctor initially thought that the situation was more dire than it turned out to be after he worked on my foot for a…
The next couple of weeks promise to be eventful. My father is in the hospital. It’s serious, but it’s under control. I saw him yesterday, and I’ll probably see him tomorrow. This afternoon, I’m going to give my talk on the history of Nevis to the Irvington Historical Society. There’ll be two sessions, at 4PM and 5PM.…
I spent hours yesterday configuring Sympa and it still wasn’t finished. I spent 30 minutes configuring Mailman today and it did exactly what I wanted. We have a winner! Sorry for the long, boring post yesterday. I’ll keep this to a short boring post today. As you might guess, this sort of systems administration is my life.…
I’ve spent the past 24 hours working on mailing-list software for my private server. In a previous post, I discussed my concerns that LiveJournal, the host of my blog, might “go dark” without warning. My solution is to set up my own blog on my own server, with automatic cross-posting. This means when I write a post…
As a grade-B horror comedy with well-known actors, maybe I should cut this film some slack. As someone who LARPed for 12 years, I can’t. The story of Knights of Badassdom may be new to the general public, but it’s overly familiar to any LARPer, RPG gamer, or SF fan: what if a group of role-players actually…
Once upon a time, a beautiful witch met a handsome wizard and they fell in love. Together they made great works of magic. They created unicorns and searched for mermaids. Many listened to their words: the seekers, the young, the wise, and the learned. And they lived… …perhaps not “happily ever after.” But they lived indeed! Once…
I’m thinking about setting up my own server with my own WordPress blog, mail server, list server, etc. It would free me from the potential vissitudes of LiveJournal. I could share it with my friends (such as sabrinamari) who’ve expressed the same concern about the permanence of LiveJournal. I could even offer a mail server and message…
The theme for the seder this year turned out to be “family.” Three guests, who dearly wanted to come, could not due to family obligations. Of the seven guests we had this year, six of them (once enough wine was consumed) shared trials and tribulations associated with their family. Yes, I was one of the six. The one who didn’t share a family story came to my seder for the first time, and didn’t know most of the people there; they may have kept quiet.
According to David Pogue, the latest version of Dragon Dictate is capable of transcribing interviews. Based on the example in the article, the results are limited. Still, it offers hope that by the time I'll need it for the biography, there'll be some form of software that will let me turn 100+ hours of interviews into text…
In the past few years, modern pagans have started to reclaim their history. As Ronald Hutton points out, pagans have always had a strong sense of “history” (an interest in past events), but not always in “historicity” (understanding what actually happened, as opposed to what you wish had happened).
Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon traces the factors that led to the founding of the modern Neopagan Witchcraft movement. Philip Heselton’s Witchfather focused on the life of one important individual: Gerald Gardner. In other words, Hutton told us about the times, Heselton told us about a life.
Michael Lloyd’s Bull of Heaven: The Mythic Life of Eddie Buczynski and the Rise of the New York Pagan does both. It does it a way that’s engaging to read. I’d never heard of Buczynski before Margot Adler recommended this book to me; now I understand his impact on the Craft.