Open Sorcery

Month: July 2026

  • a post 2 days in a row? Holy fuckin shit?!

    Well it would seem that clearing out the spam comments may have helped fix whatever was breaking the site, or it cleared up on its own. I’m reminded of a meme where it’s like “can you lick the science? Programming: nothing else has made the code work, so you may as well try…”

    I am an absolute garbage programmer but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that over 2000 spam comments waiting in the queue will slow down your site’s processing time, lol. So that’s fixed, AND I have a spam blocker in place now, so hopefully that’s less of a problem going forward. Ugh. If I never have to see “503: no server is available to process your request” again, it’ll be too goddamn soon.

    Speaking of programming, and people far more skilled at it than I am, I am hoping to see my dear friend Beany this coming week, one of the smartest people and most gifted programmers I know. She also happens to be out of work and in search of a job, so if any of y’all know of an open position in programming, broadcast engineering, or audio, please let me know in the comments and I’ll pass it on to her.

    It’s been over a year since I’ve seen her and I miss her so badly…

    I don’t entirely know what I’m doing for the rest of the week. Perhaps a poetry thing tomorrow called Memory Café that happens monthly that a rad poet here puts on, and then workshop on Sunday. Saturday’s activities are TBD. Emerson also found a swimming hole that’s semi-local, so we might go to that sometime soon when it’s not pissing rain.

    Wish me luck and pray that I don’t die.

    I leave you with this photo of Véra baby that Emerson took:

    -Allēna

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  • the moment hits you like a cannon blast

    // title taken from “vanish canvas” by erra

    Hi, all.

    I’m so sorry for my prolonged absence. This site has been down for an extended period of time and I’ve been unable to post. I’m making use of its uptime to post while I can, clean out spam comments, update plugins, what have you so that hopefully it’s down less frequently.

    It seems like nothing and everything has been happening all at once. I feel like I’ve been in a deep cocoon in my head since late June trying to make sense of who I am now after the last five years or so. I have been taking an extended hiatus from posting videos on social media due to burnout as well as explicit and detailed threats on my and my system’s life. Going viral like this in January was somewhat accidental, and I never truly intended to be a public figure of this magnitude, despite how inevitable it’s seemed since for pretty much our entire life.

    So we’ve been resting and trying to make sense of where our life has gone, as well as where as it’s going now. I love Milwaukee and I fully intend to stay here for as long as the city and its people will have me, something I would never have said back when we started this blog, and we have some interesting things in the works, like an interview on the radio on October, a workshop in November, and a feature already lined up around our birthday next year.

    I’m not sure when we’re going to get back into making short form content. When the time is right or we have something funny to say, we’ll jump back in. But now doesn’t feel like that time. I don’t feel funny anymore. I feel like a character in some lost Christopher Nolan footage, or something. (Hi, Mr. Nolan – if you read this, please consider setting and shooting a film in Milwaukee!!)

    Okay, maybe I feel darkly funny, at best – which is our specialty.

    Stay tuned for more magic, which is coming.

    -Allēna

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  • MY BLOG! IT LIVES!!

    Have this performance of “Hurricane Lazarus” from Poet’s Monday this week to celebrate:

    -Allēna

  • prompt: royal purple reflections

    they say tyrian purple is the noblest burial shroud
    but I am not noble, nor is anything I have done
    so cover me in cornflower blue and fuchsia
    after casting me into the flame –
    do not sanitize me by simply

    calling me a queen
    or a conquering hero, save your pedestals
    for a less complicated man with fewer ways
    to him, bestow your blossoms upon a son
    more fortunate than I

    instead of rendering my life a clean, monolithic stroke of heather gray, give me what I’ve always
    wanted – know me for all my flaws
    for all my ugly sides that never caught the
    light quite well enough to photograph

    know who I was beyond what I offered you
    what I made, know me when I bent,
    when I broke at half-right angles,
    know the loves that haunted endless 2 AMs
    know what made me explode, twisted glass pane

    was I, on days when I woke up and wrote about the juicy plum afterlife that was always
    close enough to almost taste, know what blessings I ate, not just the sins, know the kings
    I broke, not just the kings I made

    and know that I bled crimson into the dirt
    and into the lake in the process of building
    my own once and future lavender throne
    not blue – no amount of my father’s blessèd
    lunatic foresight and stubbornness could make me

    anything more or less than human
    anything more or less than flawed
    anything more or less than myself
    no matter what I did
    no matter who I would move into position

    -Allēna 7/19/2026

  • Today on failing my way forward:

    I learned how to make a bootable USB drive in order to repair Emerson’s laptop. In other news, I better understand why my ex-husband, Fang, was so goddamn cranky all the time. I got very pissed off while doing this project and named a folder “fuckass bitch program”….

    -Allēna

  • OH! I drew this the other day and I forgot to post it.

    So here it is.

    I call it The Passenger because I sort of blanked out and drew this piece while listening to “The Passenger” by Iggy Pop on repeat? So here you go.

    -Allēna

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  • Look, kids, ANOTHER heatwave!

    It reached OVER 100°F outside today and it was not pleasant for Emerson and I AT ALL. Wisconsin can handle subzero temperatures just fine, but we eat shit in the heat, ESPECIALLY since a lot of apartments and houses here don’t have central air conditioning and were built in the 1940s or earlier. I’m starting to wonder if my lingering nausea that I’ve been experiencing has been due to heat exhaustion. Emerson has been doing worse than me. We had to leave Linneman’s early last night because of the heat.

    Wish us luck, pick a god and pray for us, send us good energy. Whatever gets us through the next few days…

    -Allēna

  • If you are seeing this, especially if you are queer and/or trans:

    Congratulations on outliving

    LINDSEY FUCKING GRAHAM 🎉

    (and possibly Mitch McConnell, because there’s no fucking way that the photo of him and Elaine Chao that his office released yesterday was legit)

    -Allēna

  • I finally managed to post again on Patreon today.

    I was bored, so I put together two posts, and I’m so proud of the promo image I made for one of them that I’m going to put it here.

    No part of this image was made with AI. This is all human nonsense.

    I am debating on a shower. I will take my leave of you now.

    -Allēna

  • I wonder if the exhaustion of the last couple of days was human error,

    ie. I wonder if I forgot to take my H2 inhibitors because of bullshit object impermanence. Today was still difficult fatigue wise, but I had therapy and that helped. I also DEFINITELY REMEMBERED TO TAKE MY FUCKING MEDS.

    If I have, in fact, forgotten to take them for the past couple of days, that’s definitely something to put down in my hypothetical future snarky memoir How to Win At Life because go me, F for my brainhole. Huzzah. Object impermanence wins again. Fuck my gay ass life 🤣

    -Allēna