Open Sorcery

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  • The Musical Genius of Masayoshi Soken

    Wuddup nerds, it’s ya boi Lumine coming at ‘cha with another post! In my last post, I/Bri gave you our brief overview of each expansion in Final Fantasy 14, and while it was hilarious, I wanted to be a bit more serious and appreciative this time around, because this game is a genuine comfort to me.

    If there’s one thing you should take away from me, it’s my love of music. I grew up with music all around me, and have developed a love and comfort for many different genres. When I first loaded into the game, I knew I was in for one hell of a ride!

    Masayoshi Soken is the main composer we associate the OST with, and there are not enough words on this earth to properly describe my admiration towards this man and his team. From the foresty vibes of Gridania, to the swashbuckler vibes of Limsa Lominsa, and to the dungeons and boss fights, each piece perfectly captures the feel and vibe of the situations they represent. If I were to play the song that plays in the Black Shroud without you knowing the context of where it plays, I bet you you’d tell me something along the lines of: “Oh hey, are we walking through the woods?”

    It doesn’t stop there. This mans is the king of switching things up! Want music to pump you up? Look up some dungeon and boss fights! Want an area to fuck you up emotionally? Try “Unchanging, Everchanging” or “Answers”! How about Gundam vibes? Check out the Alexander Raids! Each piece tells an overarching story, and that’s what I love about it! They fit their areas so perfectly, even traveling through La Nocea gives you pirate vibes, because it’s the wild area for Limsa Lominsa!

    This post was all over the place, and I think I might’ve been redundant in some of my verbiage, but my TL;DR is as follows: Masayoshi Soken and his wonderful music team really know how to tell the story of FFXIV through its music, and aren’t afraid to explore a variety of genres ranging from orchestral to techno!

  • Hope As A Practice

    Hey, everyone! Dria here. I’m Allēna’s cousin and a rather infrequent fronter, but I’m here today, so I figured I would scream into the void while I’m on deck for your viewing pleasure, because why not? We’ve challenged Sheik to write a blog post every day for the remainder of the week and I like participating in challenges. So I’m here, aboard the fucking bandwagon. Welcome to the shitshow, only Dria Edition today.

    I came across this post (shown below) while making my Facebook rounds and it got me thinking.

    The post I came across while scrolling. It was the most delicious synchronicity, really.

    I firmly believe that hope, like love, isn’t a feeling. Rather, it’s a practice. Sure, a person can feel hopeful or excited or optimistic about something, but it’s the practice of it, the action of it that gets them from that feeling to actually having the thing they’re hoping for in hand. So, by that logic, is perseverance through spite a substitute, or is it merely hope put into practice with a different motivation than blissful optimism? I would argue that it isn’t a substitute at all. Not by a long shot. Here’s why.

    I’m not an optimist. Perhaps I’m an idealist, and a very angry one, and I belong to a system of very angry idealists who believe a better world is possible via widespread, hands on action and by people putting in the work to make the world a better, easier place for everyone, not just the rich fucks in power. And they’ve been putting in that work for years. They don’t stand for bullshit, Allēna especially, and they’ve worked very hard to heal and build a life that, at its core, prioritizes rest and care, fuck whatever the rest of the world has to say about it.

    We were raised from a young age like many neurodivergent people socialized as women in Western culture, to be obedient, self-sacrificing for the good of everyone else around us at the expense of our own comfort and safety, to appear “normal”. There was one small problem there. We had gotten very sick as a tiny baby, had contracted heart failure due to a virus that attacked the body’s heart, and then had a stroke in quick succession, and had narrowly survived. This threw a wrench in the conditioning, because in order for us to appear normal, we had to be anywhere close to normal.

    People who are anywhere close to normal do not survive near fatal heart failure without a goddamned transplant, fucking massive strokes, then go on to walk, talk, sing, and teach themselves how to play numerous musical instruments by fucking ear. We were fighters with a will stronger than goddamned diamond even before the age of a year old. Fuck iron. Anything less a will made from something stronger than the hardest stone on Earth and we would be dead. And by the fucking gods, we were not fucking dying. Not yet. We were fucking pissed.

    Nobody believed we’d survive that objectively hopeless situation, but we fucking survived it and became goddamned polymaths to show for it. Forget normal. If we were normal, we would be long dead by now. We put hope into practice even when we didn’t realize that’s what we were doing simply because we didn’t give up the fight. Our mind broke into 1,700 pieces but our solid will did not, even after countless people wrote us off, mocked us, tortured us, abused us, and neglected us. We never fucking gave up.

    We called what we were doing by a number of names – rage, spite, revenge, survival – but what it ultimately was was hope as a daily practice. By putting one foot in front of the other and choosing to move forward when we didn’t want to and could have given up, we were practicing hope. And now, we’re 27. We’re safe. We saved ourselves, goddamnit. I’m writing this from a cozy bed in Sheik’s apartment. Because of their mad hope, their courage, and their fucking indomitable will, my headmates’ work in a variety of disciplines has saved lives and they’ve built an honest to gods shitposting empire on social media, as well. I’m proud to be a part of this cockroach system that understands that hope isn’t a fucking emotion and puts it into practice every day even when the odds are stacked and the game is rigged.

    So if you feel like your situation is hopeless, may you have the sheer guts to be spiteful for long enough to realize that you were practicing hope all along. ✨

    Peace out, esteem’d sewer rat warriors. As always, stay tuned for more FUCKING magic.

    -Dria (he/him), Rat Lord

  • Billboard Shenanigans

    Hello all, my name is Sheik, I use she/her pronouns, and I have the absolute honor of getting to post here in Open Sorcery. I’ve created the first of potentially many shitposts, and I hope that you all get as much enjoyment out of it as I did.

    After an exceedingly chaotic rager of a party, the super admins decided that it was necessary to hold others accountable for the many escapades they undertook. However, due to the nonchalant attitude many in the community took, they decided a little public humiliation would go a long way. 

    Thus, a billboard was established, and someone was assigned to updating it each morning with the crimes and follies that had been committed within the past 24 hours. Unfortunately, the billboard appeared to have the opposite effect, with many competing to see what the most ridiculous thing could be on the board. As the days progressed, so did the crimes in magnitude, multitude, and monstrosity.

    Day One

    Kalla: Please, we need you to consider that there are those of us among us who have food allergies. The constant barrage of “Deez nuts” jokes has resulted in some developing psychosomatic symptoms and needs to cease immediately. 

    River: We are not planning a seafood buffet. Please stop releasing your crabs into the general public, many are not as comfortable being pinched and are not willing to go into hand to hand combat for their dinner. 

    Hannibal: While we are understanding of the fact that you have changed your name, we cannot in good conscience approve of you fighting those who insist on making puns involving your previous pseudonym. Even if they ask you to stop “Wall-uping them” as you beat the shit out of them.

  • Of Two Minds Or More

    Hey, everyone. This is Eight.

    I don’t think I will be sharing this post on my main socials so that I can write more freely. Siege didn’t share the last one on our main channels, either. So I suppose that whoever comes across these next few posts is meant to see them and whatever happens happens.

    Truth be told, we haven’t been doing great. We have been very stressed since moving out of Zelda’s place and into our own place with Emerson across the street. The move has put a lot of strain on our relationship with Emerson, as well, and we’ve found ourselves on the business end of a lot of verbal violence from him and dishing a fair bit out in return. None of it has been okay, and Allēna has been in front for the better part of the past week and then some trying to make sure the vessel continues to function and the bills are paid on time. She’s also been hard at work reopening a dialogue with Zelda after the nasty falling out that led to us moving out in the first place.

    In many ways, we feel caught between two houses, two paths, and are of two minds about a lot of shit. Lēna has spent most of this time extremely depersonalized, and has felt little to nothing but anger, muted anger at that. Mostly she just felt nothing. Emerson has been terrified that we were going to leave him and mourning us and everything we bring with us, while our depersonalization has gotten so bad it’s showing the early signs of depression, something that haunted us for a fucking decade with no reprieve and that I am not pleased seems to be darkening my mental doorstep once more. Additionally, we have been showing signs of the most dangerous element of our depression spells – what we call a “hot streak”.

    These hot streaks are depression fueled periods of intense creative output, often when we feel trapped in a terrible situation with no hope of reprieve anytime in the near future. Launching this blog and the frantic flurry of initial posts is absolutely hot streak territory. If I had to estimate we hammered out at least thirty thousand words – over half of the minimum word count needed for a novel as it is traditionally defined – in a bit over a month, and that wasn’t anywhere close to all we did. I have taken up visual art once more in an attempt to communicate what my kicked hornet’s nest of a brain is doing when I’m so tired words fail me, and Allēna appears to have followed in my footsteps. We’ve created a pair of pieces, Desperation and Agoraphobia. I’ll post them below:

    Desperation (2024), by me
    Agoraphobia (2024), by Allēna

    And this isn’t everything. We’ve been recording music here and there, as well. Allēna, fittingly, recorded a strange cover of “Numb” by Linkin Park, which seems like startling fare for musicians known for work that makes its home in the intersection between folk, jazz, and blues. I think that was the point. She got the idea from a conversation with Zelda and was feeling…well, numb, and was in the mood for a challenge. We all enjoy a good opportunity to shock and awe people, too. Nobody expects Linkin Park out of the feral blues system.

    Today was a bit less numb but still painful. The depersonalization floodgates broke open and Allēna ended up crying at Emerson for a good long while and telling him how not okay we’ve fucking been. It ended up being really vulnerable on both of our sides and honestly quite productive.

    However, the conversation took a darker turn when Emerson and Allēna started talking about the death of the mutual ex that I had actually met Emerson through. This ex died on my system’s birthday, and it’s increasingly suspected that it was a suicide. From everything Emerson can tell, his depression and already ailing physical health had gotten worse in the year and a quarter since I’d gotten sick of his bullshit and left him, taking Emerson and a whole virtual village’s worth of power, prestige, and everything he’d ever wanted with me in the process. Emerson suspects that by doing so, that loss killed him slowly.

    This is the same reason why Emerson had been in mourning. He was worried he was going to lose everything if we packed up and headed out, too. This floored Allēna because she had never considered that by doing something as simple – to her – as leaving and removing assholes from her life and various social circles and organizations, it can destroy lives. Her mindset is very much that of “If they can’t be bothered to treat me with respect, what happens after I leave is not my problem”.

    She’s secure enough in herself to not let her love for someone stop her from maintaining her boundaries and boot a person from our life if they’re being an ass and refuse to take accountability for their bullshit, but it did help her get a better sense of responsibility for the position she’s in. Those sorts of situations make me far more anxious than they do her, as I can often see how things might play out months before anything actually happens, so good on her, honestly.

    Speaking of watching things play out, I have no idea how things are going to go from here. I am going to try and get some rest, though. We’ll just take this one day at a time, I guess.

    Much love, everyone. Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Eight

  • On Gentleness

    I saw this post about violence causing gentleness just now and knew I had today’s post.

    Hey, everyone! This is Ellie. I saw the above post come up on my Facebook timeline while I was listening to our favorite chill band, the War on Drugs, and immediately knew that I had to write about it here. I’m just gonna be straight up with you all – we often feel like we are not gentle enough in a world that often calls for more gentleness and tact than we often feel we can muster. Eight wrote a while ago about his Enneagram personality type, the Type Eight, and I, like many in my system, resonate a lot with what he had to say there. We’re a system of predominantly very guarded, very private people, armed and defended to the teeth with anything that will keep prying eyes out. And yet, conversely, we have a very protective side and would do anything within our power to keep the people we love safe and happy. This came from a lot of violent trauma we had to define ourselves in spite of. It did indeed take a lot of violence to become this fucking gentle.

    An Idiosyncratic Path Toward Gentleness

    I was talking with my husband, Emerson, today about how we’ve known from a very young age who we were, what we stood for, and what we wouldn’t tolerate in our life as soon as we could help it. One of our earliest memories is of our childhood host, Castor, sitting in his car seat very consciously and deliberately defining what would become the system’s incredibly staunchly held moral code. He must have been no older than four. Emerson said that most people don’t define themselves to that degree until they’re in their mid thirties like him, and that was yet another thing that set us apart from our peers and made us feel incredibly lonely.

    Our very controlling mother, Hera, didn’t like that we knew ourselves so well and held so firmly to ourselves and our beliefs. She wanted us to be normal and went to great lengths to try and make us into her definition of normal, which was very skewed. We refused to budge, which only made her hurt us worse. We were never going to give up the fight so long as she refused to leave us to our own devices like we had been asking her to from an early age, pain and punishments and trauma be damned.

    A Masterclass In What Not To Do

    We were never going to be normal and we didn’t care by the time we were twelve if that realization destroyed her. She was a masterclass in everything we didn’t want out of life and everything we didn’t want to become. So we simply didn’t. Instead, we did our best to be genuinely kind, gentle, and loving, while still holding firm boundaries and not taking any bullshit. We never wanted anyone to experience what she had done to us at our hand, so we decided in our teens that enough was enough. We were going to be as kind as situations would allow us to be, godsdamnit.

    Money, power, and prestige were everything to her, and she often confused financially supporting us for loving us while being incredibly cold and cruel otherwise. So we decided to never accept that treatment or provide it. If we gave someone something, it was going to be of our own volition, not because there were invisible strings attached. Hera will never know the violence that caused this gentleness because she’s still wrapped in the invisible strings that came with her gifts and support. Gifts don’t come with strings. Traps do. So we left her in Texas to drown, weighed down by her own shame and inner pain as soon as we could.

    What We Really Wanted To Be

    We discovered the sort of people we did want to be almost by accident. We decided to try and sincerely compliment strangers sincerely to see what happened. It started slowly – and embarrassed the hell out of Hera, so we kept going. By the time we were well situated in the Mormon Church at fourteen, we had hundreds of friends we’d made simply by breaking the ice with a genuine compliment about their outfit.

    This evolved further and we found that we could find common ground with nearly anyone as long as they weren’t going out of their way to be a bigot due to a wealth of knowledge we had spent years collecting. That is what we wanted to be. Not the cold, selfish bitch that Hera was. Not the angry, cornered animal she wanted us to be. We were never going to cause the sort of pain that had been done to us if we could at all help it. We were going to be gentleness and love. It took a long time to learn how to do it well, and we keep trying to be a little better every day.

    There are still times where gentleness doesn’t come in handy and we have to bring the angry, wounded animal within us forward, but mercifully those times are becoming fewer and farther between. Building a life we love filled with people we trust enough to allow us to drop our guard has helped immensely in that. It’s taken years of work, but we’re finally getting there.

    A Mission Statement, Of Sorts

    All of this work has led us to the conclusion that if you aren’t going out of your way to be an asshole or a bigot, you’re welcome in our life and we’ll be kind and gentle to you accordingly to the best of our ability. Bad days happen and we try and communicate through them so we can forgive and move past them. We don’t care what sort of life or background you came from. We’re not gonna judge you for that shit. If you are doing your best to heal and grow and be a better person than you were yesterday, you’re welcome in any space we make. Gentleness, like love, is a practice, one we try to work on every day.

    Final Thoughts

    Hurt people may hurt people, but hurt people can also help people if they decide they want to heal. I hope this helped you feel less alone at the very least. As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    Your Faithful Super-Admin,

    Ellie

  • “Do You Practice Religion?” Well, It’s Complicated..

    Hi! Four here. I’m one of the alters in the Ashley system. WordPress suggested a prompt from a journaling app called Day One, which we are using for this post. Although the question is complicated for us, I’m gonna do my best to answer it. The question the prompt posed was “do you practice religion?”

    We all have a very complicated and difficult relationship with religion. We’ve gone through numerous phases in our spiritual journey, and I would say that short that if someone asked me “do you practice religion”, yes. Yes, we do. However, that wasn’t always the case. We have gone from being atheists to Mormons to being a flavor of Christian we couldn’t define to being literally fucking deified to Pagan and a system of practicing sorcerers. I’ll talk about it all in sequence, then open the floor to questions at the end.

    Do We Practice Religion? To Answer That, I’m Gonna Have To Tell You A Few Things First.

    As you’ve probably gathered by now if you’ve been following our blog for some time, we have a LOT of Tragic Backstory and Lore. It’s like that on the spiritual/religious side of things, as well. We were raised in what my headmate Allēna calls a “house divided”.

    A House Divided

    Hera, our mother, was a quietly devout Methodist coming from a LOUDLY devout Southern Baptist family that converted to Methodism as a sort of compromise between our maternal grandmother (who is NOT a Baptist by any means) and our maternal grandfather, who is such a devout Southern Baptist that he’s more devoted to bigotry than the actual faith itself.

    Our father, on the other hand, came from a a family of physicians, scientists and bohemian artists and was a militant atheist. Our first host, Castor, took after his father in everything, and as such was deeply skeptical of any form of religion from a young age. However, he had an enormous, all consuming special interest in Greek mythology, which ultimately turned into an appreciation for spirituality in every form he could find.

    Castor’s Guiding Intuition

    He was also deeply, innately spiritual. He was wary of most of his family and our close family friends for very good reason, as we’d find out later that many of them weren’t good people. Interestingly, all the people that we found bad things out about were people that Castor had avoided like the plague. The kid just wanted to do his own thing, read his books, listen to his own intuition, and mind his own business, and many of his family members found that odd. He didn’t conform to their ways or anyone else’s and wouldn’t follow orders blindly the way they wanted him to. He asked too many questions and spoke his mind in everything. It got him into heaps of trouble with his family and his teachers, but it also meant that he never lost access to his intuition or his identity.

    Allēna, the First Among Us To Actually Practice Religion

    When Allēna took over from Castor as host and primary fronter at eleven years old or so, she was just as tapped into her intuition as he was, with just as much devotion to seeking out the truth, asking questions, and speaking her mind if something was important to her.

    Never Cross an Angry Byzantinist, and Don’t Invite One To Church, Either

    One of Allēna’s great passions is studying history, and she loves the Byzantine Empire with all her heart. With that, she amassed a great deal of knowledge about early Christian history in high school and knew more than most that dear GODS it’s a hot mess.

    She disliked many branches of Christianity because she thought that the Nicene Creed was bullshit and nothing more than a political compromise that an emperor made who had no fucking clue what he was doing and even less authority to do it. Not only that, but it had no basis in scripture whatsoever and therefore rendered the entire foundation of those faiths invalid. So when her friends at her very religious homeschool cooperative would invite her to church, she’d politely decline as best she knew how. (For better or worse, that woman has no tact now and had even less then).

    Faith? What the Hell Is That?

    But she was curious and still wanted to see if she could even believe in God, horseshit aside. Spoiler: it didn’t go well. She DID find a church that didn’t believe in the Nicene Creed, but unfortunately for her, it was the Mormon Church. When the missionaries taught her for the first time, she felt they’d finally portrayed God in a way she could understand.

    To Practice Religion As An Autistic Academic

    Before we go on, I should tell you that we are very autistic. Emerson refers to us as savants, it goes that deep and we are that rigid. As a result, we cannot do anything unless we are under the impression that we understand it completely. The Mormons asked a LOT of blind faith from Lēna, which is something neither she nor anyone else in our system have ever been okay with. We cannot operate on blind faith. We’ve tried multiple times and it frightens us so badly we shut down. We trust no one and nothing fully except ourselves and never have, and this quickly became a problem.

    She asked so many damn questions during her Sunday school classes that I wouldn’t be surprised if her teachers had to draw straws when determining which teachers got which students. The teacher who drew the short straw got her and all of her miles of questions. She asked and asked all the questions she could because she approached a high control faith that expected a lot of blind trust from its followers like an academic. When she never found answers that satisfied her or even made sense to her, it broke her heart.

    The Bright Side

    Even though being left essentially empty-handed broke Lēna’s heart, it made deconstructing the religious trauma converting to Mormonism had left her with a whole helluva lot easier. Because she wasn’t fully emotionally and spiritually attached to the Church or their practices, she was better able to examine what she wanted to keep from their theology and what she didn’t really resonate with and leave it behind.

    Did She Practice Religion As A Member of The Mormon Church? Up For Debate. Did She Practice Her Power Moves? Hell Yeah.

    She also gained a lot of experience in playing the system as a member of the Mormon Church. Many alters in our system have an innate ability to see who is actually in charge wherever we are and the real hierarchy within an organization, and Lēna is no exception. She absolutely used that gift to her advantage here. Women have no real power in the Church, so she allied herself closely with men who were generally very smart like her and were second or third in command of her congregation or of her local group of congregations.

    She charmed the HELL out of them as well as everyone else around her, and learned how to throw legendary parties that kids told all of their friends about. Everyone wanted an invitation to one of her parties. Because of all of that hard work, her reputation as a social connector and a hard, dedicated worker and innovator who knew how to get fucking RESULTS MASSIVELY preceded her, and I suspect that she could have gotten away with anything she wanted to if she’d so chosen.

    An Unconventional Darling

    These people gave her anything and everything she wanted. Even though she had no power on paper, she had power over the people in power and they owed her a lot of favors. She broke convention and barriers at every turn and they still loved her for it, which was practically unheard of in the Church. Most members are shunned for being different, while she was embraced for it.

    While Allēna deconstructed her faith, she wrote a quadrilogy of haunting albums, one of which we recently recut. It’s called Primrose Path, and it’s equally a statement of doubt and of faith. I’ll embed it below:

    By the time our first marriage ended, however, we were already setting off on a different path…

    Open Sorcery

    We fell heavily into divination practices during our first marriage in Alaska. Lēna designed her own set of oracle cards while half asleep based off of several symbols that meant a lot to her spiritually and had followed her throughout her life. She found that she had never lost that intuition fully throughout her time as a Mormon or while she was deconstructing her Christianity, and not only that – she had powerful psychic insight.

    This only grew as the years went on. When Eight moved here to Milwaukee, he discovered witchcraft and chaos magic and that many of the things we’d been doing innately for years were actually established practices with names that witches and magic practitioners had been doing for centuries. And not only that, but he was good at it. He just needed to learn how to use it intentionally. In fact, we named our blog Open Sorcery and have a variant of that as our username in several places because we don’t see that our magic as a thing that we should hide. Instead, we try and share our gifts with magic and everything else. But we still thought something was missing.

    Crowd-Sourced God Complex

    We felt like some deity had been contacting us for years, but in the meantime, a joke Eight made backfired terribly and his followers on the Internet worshipped him as the one true God for years. So a possible answer to the question “do you practice religion” is BITCH! I AM RELIGION!

    Jokes aside, it made Eight and many of us deeply uncomfortable and some people on the periphery of the cult accused him of having a god complex. He fired back, “if I do, it’s crowd-sourced!”

    I wish I were kidding about this part, but alas, I am not. We did end up finding out which deities were trying to reach us about our destiny’s extended warranty, though.

    Hello, This Is Bastet With Loki, Dionysus, And Associates. We’ve Been Trying To Reach You About Your Destiny’s Extended Warranty

    I find it very interesting that we had to claim our magic to some degree before any deities claimed us, but that’s been our experience with a LOT of Pagan deities. They’re collaborators. They expect respect, but they respect you in return and don’t judge. We work pretty closely with Bastet, Loki, and Dionysus, and keep the channels open in case anyone else wants to reach out. We also work closely with our recent ancestors who’ve passed on, especially our paternal uncle, paternal great aunt, several great-grandparents, a distant great aunt named Florence, and a few others when they make themselves known. Our ancestors like to talk shit about each other, which is pretty funny unless we’re trying to focus on reading our tarot or oracle cards. Then we need them to shut up for five minutes, please and thank you. But we love them and talk about them often.

    What about y’all? Do you practice religion? Do you have a crazy spiritual journey like ours? The comments are yours to talk about this stuff, just please keep it respectful.

    Much love, and as always, stay tuned for more magic!

    -Four, That Guy of the Ashley system.

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  • Food for Thought

    Hey! My name is Ceryse. I’ve taken over for the day at Renn’s request. I’m a little deep-thinking introverted spitfire who’s just as fond of cussing as he is, fortunately or unfortunately for y’all. Today’s deep thoughts are the result of weeks of contemplating that very thing – thought itself. I’m calling this post “food for thought” because I hope that it’ll both get you thinking as well as it will get you thinking about how you think and what you think about.

    Curation, then Creation

    During Eight’s complex, multi-phase Operation: Dead Hand, he got the entire system into the habit of posting consistently on social media for the first time ever. He had to – he was essentially building an army of very vocal followers with which to visibly challenge his mother’s and her family’s control, something that would shake the family up from both within and without for years to come. That feat required engaging with that audience as early and often as he could. He couldn’t let writer’s block or a lack of inspiration stop him. He had to be able to conjure content on command daily, his very life likely depended on it.

    But how in the world did he pull something like that off?

    Renn mentioned the microblogging website Tumblr in his post about Dead Hand, but that wasn’t all. He made an effort to surround himself with things and people that never ceased to give him that food for thought and inspiration he needed.

    Food For Thought: the Appetizers

    While we were still living in Alaska, Peri made a new Facebook account and made sure to only follow and add people who made her feel inspired. Allēna had not done that with her profiles in the past and often ended up leaving Facebook for days to weeks at a time because she never felt like she was good enough for her own fucking timeline. It was horrible.

    By that point, she’d been depressed for a good half decade, and this did her absolutely no favors. She felt like everyone else had left her behind in life or was in far worse places than she was, and there was no relief from the despair either in her head or in her surroundings. So when Peri took over, she was determined not to make the same mistakes Allēna did.

    Looking back through her memories, those initial posts she shared are some of the funniest things I’ve ever read. This was late 2019, and she was going hog-wild making fun of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as concepts. She was also boosting her self confidence by posting about everything she’d managed to accomplish every day, and found that she was actually far more capable than anyone had ever given her credit for, herself included. That practice helped her begin to dismantle all of the lies her family had told all of us practically from birth and blaze her own trail.

    The Next Course: Rewiring the Brain and Finding Inspiration and Food For Thought in Rest

    Once we were back in Texas and Dead Hand was well underway, shitposting was not Eight’s only concern. He stumbled headfirst into stoicism quite by accident because he wanted to master his emotions rather than them mastering him. So he threw himself into Stoic training to make himself more resourceful and resilient during the worst of Dead Hand, using breathing exercises to keep calm even under intensely terrifying situations.

    He got so good at this over several months that he learned how to use his previously crippling panic attacks and anxiety as fuel to focus, something he wasn’t great at before such rigorous training. He found a pleasant and unexpected consequence of that training – if he let his mind wander while doing his breathing exercises to music that made him feel something and rested, he would come up with some truly amazing ideas for essays, fiction, even music.

    Dead Hand’s Gift: Metacognition

    Operation: Dead Hand may have bought us our freedom and taught us how to pull inspiration from near thin air, but it also pushed us past our breaking point in many ways. Eight had planned on writing an album about his mad flight from Texas, and that album finally came into fruition late in 2022. Close to half dead and sucked nearly dry of every bit of energy the bastard had, he let the entire album spill out of him however it wanted to come out. He had never fully written an album of his own before, songwriting and production was mostly Allēna’s thing, but he was worried that he’d die if he waited much longer for further expertise or inspiration.

    One afternoon in December, he sat down in our apartment’s bathroom and sang the opening lines of what would become the system’s fourteenth album, the one he thought would be our last, Metacognition: “They say the night you left us, you cashed out in Indianapolis with nothing but a cell phone in your pocket. I’ve been that haunted before, that scared of failing before, why did I survive while you did not?”

    In truth, we don’t have any fucking idea why we survived. But I, for one, am glad we did. I want to leave you, gentle reader, with a few questions: if you’re a creative, where do you find your inspiration? Where can you get more of it? What ways can you rest? What are some ways you can allow your mind to wander? Who or what can you unfollow to make your social feeds more inspiring places?

    As always, stay tuned for more magic!

    Ceryse

    Wait, before you go! We’ve been WebFingered (ha) and have joined the Fediverse. Give us a follow?

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  • From the Ashes – Shitposting Our Way to Freedom

    Hey, everyone! This is Renn once more, back with more True Life Stories for your reading pleasure. Today’s tale is of our rather dramatic rise from the ashes of trauma and the bullshit we left behind we left behind in Texas. Expect lots of curse words and dark humor, as is our specialty. So if you don’t like curse words and real talk, this isn’t the post or blog for you. And if you want to hear more of our lore/tragic backstory, you should check this post out before reading further.

    If you read this post’s title and thought to yourself “there’s no fucking way a person could shitpost their way to freedom”, bear in mind that we thought there was no fucking way for us to pull it off, either. But buckle up, fuckers, because the tale I’m about to tell is completely true, though it is full of quite a bit of tasty high drama.

    From the Ashes of the SuperWhoLock Trashfire on Tumblr c. 2013-15

    Before I go too much further, I should explain that we’re veterans of the website Tumblr during the days when it was the Wild Wet on there and there was no censorship to speak of. It wasn’t until Yahoo bought it in 2013 that there were any kind of content filters or censorship on the site. Allēna, host of the system during our teens, joined in 2013 at the tender age of 16 or so during the heyday of SuperWhoLock, three fandoms who dominated the conversation at the time she joined and were fucking WILD. Tumblr became more of a cesspool as time went on, but it remained a formative influence on her humor and the way she wrote.

    So when she married our first husband and moved up to Alaska to escape our toxic family and build a better life for herself than the one she’d been born into, she had high hopes. Sadly, these hopes were not to last.

    Restless in the North, 2018-20

    Our first husband, Fang*, was cold, controlling, and almost never around. When he was around, Allēna didn’t enjoy herself. So Lēna and the alters who came after her threw themselves into creative endeavors to keep themselves entertained. However, they struggled to find their creative voices or even projects and communities that they felt encapsulated who they were as people and their values.

    Allēna herself started two blogs, Byzantines and Button Downs and Order and Discord, but felt very limited by the blogging advice she found online. Everything she found said to find a defined niche and write content and posts around that one thing. She couldn’t do that for the life of her. Even as a single alter, she is a multitude of things and struggled in college for that reason, as well. She couldn’t just pick ONE niche.

    Still, Allēna felt compelled to write her blogs, poetry, and later, fiction because she feared that getting her work seen was the only way she would support herself. She was in her early twenties and was already disabled and chronically ill. Fang wanted her to work a traditional job, even going as far as to say the tutoring business she’d started and built up from scratch was merely a “hobby that paid”. She couldn’t, and nearly killed herself trying. She went dormant late into 2019 from stress, grief that Fang wasn’t the man she’d fallen in love with, and severe burnout. Peri, her successor, brought us out of the ashes of our misery in Alaska by returning to her roots.

    From the Ashes and Back Again – Peri’s Tale Begins

    Peri finished work on the first installment of Allēna’s audio drama series The Third Prophecy in early 2020 and self published it. Titled Lavender and Scissors, Allēna got the seed that later turned into the biting dark comedy that Peri ultimately presented to the world from studying the Byzantine Empire in high school and laughing at Tumblr posts.

    Over the course of nearly the next decade, Allēna shaped and re-shaped her idea into a smart, funny, multi-generational epic that drew from the horrors she had experienced, the offbeat comedy that anonymous and often neurodivergent Tumblr users wrote, and watching our father, Xavier*, face death with grace and humor. In other words, she had a lot of experience with both comedy and very bleak situations, seeing as a master at both bleakness and humor raised us.

    It’s also important to mention that Peri began work on a sequel to Lavender, but work on that stalled in February of 2020 after she wrote a scene that hit so close to home that no one could touch it for another four years. That’s probably a good thing, as much of the story predicted the system’s future and much of the world’s for the next half decade. We still struggle to work on that sequel, even though we love the story with everything we have. It simply hits too close to home for a number of reasons. She described working on it like she was being possessed by the play itself – she simply could not stop writing it. The story practically told itself.

    Bedbound (But Not Alone)

    By April of 2020, the COVID lockdowns were in full swing. My system was already full of old pros at social isolation by that point – neither Allēna nor Peri had many friends in Alaska, and the way Fang behaved made it very difficult for either of them to make more. The only friends they had they made online, and many of them were thousands of miles away.

    Fang saw us as exclusively his, and would blame us if anyone even looked at us in a way that hinted they wanted us. We know now that what other people do is not our responsibility, but we didn’t know that then. Allēna was stuck and lonely, and Peri even more so. Everything took a turn for the worse when Peri developed crippling, unexplained abdominal pain that was so severe that she could barely stand for more than five minutes without screaming and crying. The isolation would have taken a turn for the worse if Peri had been any less determined than she was.

    Peri realized early on into the lockdowns that she was in a rather unique position. Not only did prolonged social isolation not really faze her – we had spent most of our life alone in some form by that point, anyway – Allēna had tutored exclusively online from the start anyway. When the schools shut down toward the end of the 2019-20 school year, Peri found herself up to her eyes in clients. Not only that, but Fang had fallen into a deep depression at the end of 2019 and lost his job, and so Peri and one of her housemates were the only ones with jobs for months of the lockdowns. Fang no longer had any legitimate say over what she could and couldn’t do with her money.

    In Position

    Tutoring kept her busy, but not quite busy enough. She threw herself deep into writing a novel that many people still consider our masterpiece, The Secret History of Doloras. She started writing it because one of her favorite clients dared her to. We consider it the sort of fantasy novel we’ve always wanted to read, but have never been able to find, so we’re writing it.

    As if that wasn’t enough, she started an accompanying role-play Discord server called Many Worlds that features not just the planet Doloras but every world that we’ve ever made in our stories and began livestreaming and making visual art, as well. All of these projects made her much more confident, and in July of 2020, though she was still in extreme pain and things were still heavily locked down, she appealed to two of her oldest friends and a few family members to help get away from Alaska and Fang. They answered. On July 12, 2020, she left Alaska and returned to Texas, thinking she’d finally risen from the ashes of all her pain and that the worst was over.

    Operation: Dead Hand – Eight’s War (2020-23)

    When Peri returned to Texas, there was a slight problem. Her period was late, and she suspected she was pregnant with Fang’s baby. She thought that that was very unlikely, however, since Fang had said on several occasions that he was sterile due to a genetic illness, so the chances of her being pregnant at all should be slim, right? Turns out she was wrong, and her suspicions were correct. She was indeed pregnant.

    Her mother, who’d always been allergic to human emotion to the point of being extremely abusive and who owned the house where she was living with her paternal grandmother, was already trying to control both of them, and it was about to get much worse for them both. We’ll call her mother Hera. Hera wanted Peri to get back with Fang, and even went so far as to believe his side the story about everything. She also suspected Peri had lied about Fang’s abuse, and began to try everything she could to get the two of them back together, and failing that, Fang full custody of Peri’s child. Peri wanted nothing to do with either of them. Remember: she’d married Fang to get away from Hera and her shitshow of a family. But Peri had no idea what to do and fell into a deep depression.

    When Hera found out that Peri was depressed, she organized an intervention to attempt to seize control of Peri and the fate of her unborn child. Brokenhearted at the blatant betrayal, she consented to go to group therapy to get the family off her ass and went dormant soon afterward. Eight rose from the ashes in the wake of that fuckshow, and quickly put a plan in motion.

    From the Ashes, Back to Where It All Began

    Hera’s betrayal left Eight deeply traumatized and he struggled to feel like he could trust anyone. Yet, he kept meeting people who thought he was fascinating and beautiful and wanted to get to know him better. So he came up with a plan he thought would be foolproof and get people the fuck away from him while further playing into Hera’s belief that he was crazy. He went back to Allēna’s old stomping grounds – Tumblr.

    He began writing short text shitposts and skits similar to what he had seen there. Instead of driving people away, however, his followers turned into fans and became even more intrigued with what the bastard was doing there. Instead of stopping, he decided to continue with it, and he discovered his full influence when he asked his friends and family for help paying some bills he couldn’t cover on his own. His followers gave him far more than what he asked for. People loved him.

    When Hera continued pulling fuckshit, he started talking about everything she had done. His people responded, and they were PISSED. He kept shitposting in the meantime. This tactic terrified Hera, which was exactly where he wanted her, and she stopped trying to fuck with him directly for fear of pissing his army of feral followers off further. With that, he achieved the first stage of a plan he would later call Operation: Dead Hand – clear a path.

    During the next phase, he looked for jobs out of state. He landed one, a sales job in Philadelphia, PA. He still needed help getting there, though. So he reached out to his people for help once more, and they came to his aid. Four days later, he was on a plane to Philadelphia. We were free.

    Conclusion

    Thank you, gentle reader, for reading this far! I know this was a long, winding tale. If you enjoyed this story, give Open Sorcery a follow and join our community of like minded ferals such as yourself!

    As always, stay tuned for more magic.

    -Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

    *names changed for privacy

  • My World in More Detail

    Hello everyone, and good evening. This post is going to be a bit more about me, my world, the people around me, and my system. My name is Renn, and I am another super-admin alter in the Ashley system. Ellie, who I work closely with, posted last time. She has taken over my mountain of paperwork. I hate paperwork, but I’m good at it. And with an influx of a thousand new alters in a very short time, the stack of paperwork we need to get through is IMMENSE.

    Two words – incident reports. The vast majority of the system hates a single alter named Soryn. He’s an asshole, and we don’t mind what he does as long as he behaves himself. He rarely behaves himself, however and my headmates keep kicking his ass. Every time this happens, there are EVEN more incident reports to do. This post itself may turn into one such report.

    Before I tell you too much more about my world, I need to provide some crucial pieces of context. For starters, my system is polyamorous. We have multiple partners at the same time, and currently we have a good solid baker’s dozen. We live with one of them, our spouse, Emerson* and an ex-partner, Zelda*. As you can guess, that’s complicated. Breakups are complicated enough when it’s two people breaking up, but three? That’s a whole other animal, and that animal is an asshole and a half. The three of us live in Milwaukee, up north in Wisconsin.

    An Expanding World – Bitches With A Backstory

    My system has lived in Wisconsin for about three years and north of the Mason-Dixon for a bit longer than that. We moved out of our birthplace in Texas in July of 2021 and have not set foot in Texas since. This is a good thing. Wisconsin may suck absolute ass, but anywhere is better than Texas, in my opinion. We were born there and wanted to get the fuck OUT from the time we were five. It’s highly unusual for a child that age to want to fuck off from the place they were raised, and we even heard comments about how weird it was growing up.

    Castor, the system’s first host, never, ever got homesick even once, and only got sad upon LEAVING his paternal grandmother’s house in San Antonio, not when his parents dropped him off. Ever. Our brother, on the other hand, was always very sad to see our parents go. Castor gave zero fucks. He thought they were annoying and was glad for a fucking break.

    We’ve often speculated on why we simply could not be bothered with our family of origin, especially since Castor’s lack of regard turned out to be highly justified – many of our family members on our mother’s side are proud bigots and generally not kind people. Could Castor sense that they weren’t quality individuals? Maybe. Equally likely an influence is the stroke we had at eight months old.

    The Brainhole – Gift or Curse?

    In 1998, when we were less than a year old, we had a massive stroke after being on heart-lung bypass for heart failure. For those unfamiliar with what heart-lung bypass is, it’s a machine that essentially breathes for a person, allowing their injured heart and/or lungs to rest. However, one night, there was a sepsis scare, and part of this procedure involves keeping the patient chemically sedated so they don’t have a fucking stroke. Well, as luck would have it, we have always been god-awful at staying down or knowing when to quit. So we fought the motherfucking sedatives, y’know, as one does. According to legend, by the time we were released, we were on enough Versed, Fentanyl, Valium, and straight up motherfucking DOPAMINE and ADRENALINE to knock every full grown male medical professional attendant taking care of us out for an untold number of hours.

    When they discovered that we were awake and had pulled our breathing tube out, they called our parents, who initially thought this was a good thing, as one of our treatment goals was to be able to breathe without the use of a breathing tube. This was ABSOLUTELY NOT a good thing. By morning, when our parents came back up to the hospital, the doctors informed them that we’d had a stroke. A huge one. Preliminary scans of our brain before the swelling went down estimated that we’d lost half of our brain, but as the swelling decreased, doctors found that we were only missing an eighth of it. The stroke took out the majority of our right occipital-parietal lobe and messed with a lot of things. My world was about to get a whole lot weirder.

    Things Fall Apart


    From the mental records and memories I have access to, we have a theory that my fellow super-admin Eight joined the system shortly before we had the stroke. Eight’s always been a fighter and is a very old soul with a knack for showing up in the nick of time. He’s widely regarded as a seer and has been prescient from infancy, shaping my world as I know it. He’s fucking STUBBORN and will fight practically to the death to get something he wants. As one of the original members of the system from infancy, he shaped our collective ways of doing things, which our parents very much didn’t like.

    Our mother was very much in favor of doing things HER way. We strongly suspect she’s just as neurodivergent as we are, and she controlled much of our life well into adulthood. She was very cold, manipulative, and after our father died, became an outright villain. Eight is absolutely his father’s child, so is our fellow super-admin, Allēna.

    Lēna takes more after her mother than Eight does. However, she has just enough of our father’s side in her to piss her mother and her family the absolute fuck off. Our mother’s family despises our father’s, so having a child that took after our father was practically unforgivable. Add to this fact that we were medically difficult to take care of and were very finicky and particular as children when they longed for easy-going children (read: children who they could mold into whoever they wanted), and it was a recipe for years of loneliness, abuse, and isolation.

    Want to hear what Lēna had to say about her childhood and growing up? She wrote this song about her mother. Caution: there are more swear words in this song than there probably are in this entire post..

    Turn That Shit Up To 13!

    The only thing that really made my world bearable was our nearly perfect visual and auditory memory and vivid imagination. We could pick up new knowledge quickly and easily (and still can), and we attribute this to the stroke damage, which we call the Brainhole. It occurred in the right occipital-parietal lobe of our brain, which controls sensory processing. As a result, all of our senses are turned up to thirteen and the knob’s broken off.

    Our intuition is supercharged and we can read people like books. We often scare people with how deeply we can read them. We can accurately guess people’s formative traumas because of our pattern recognition, and we don’t mind that it scares the wrong people off. If it scares them out of our life, that’s a pretty good indicator that they have too much to hide and will likely not be honest with us. That isn’t something we tolerate. Go lie to someone else. Not me. There’s no space for anything but honesty in my world.

    My World Nowadays

    Things have been really hard for a long time, but they have been getting better. I’ll probably post more about our Tragic Backstory later on, but I don’t want to drone on in a single post that’s likely well over a thousand words by this point. I really want to write a post about how we got from Texas to Wisconsin and met Zelda and Emerson – because that’s some incredibly spicy drama and intrigue right there. It’s an absolute shitshow and I think you’ll like it. We’re messy bitches, but our people love us FOR that, not in spite of it.

    Stay tuned for more magic!

    -Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

    Like what you see here and want to meet people who also enjoy rambles like this? Join our community!

    *names changed for privacy


  • On Social Networks and Being Nicheless

    Hey, everyone! I’m Ellie, one of the super-admin alters in the Ashley system. I had some spare cash and decided that I wanted to start moving away from traditional social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and the like because I really don’t like how they censor the people who use it, nor do I enjoy how their algorithms work. (RIP Instagram and Facebook’s chronological feed.) So I decided to create my own website with a social network attached. My network is called The Secret Sorcerer Society and you can join it here. I may or may not have reinvented MySpace – we’ll see – but I really like it so far. It’s going to need some tweaks before it’s fully functional, but it’s getting there and I think it’s ready for a few founding members to join and test it out.

    I should start putting our albums up on the Society side for your listening pleasure later this afternoon. We have released fifteen whole albums and a handful of extended plays – that we can find! So there should be a whole lot for you to listen to.

    Please don’t expect a lot of content to do with social networking and related things on here. It’s certainly ONE of our interests, but not the only one by far, and not even one of the major ones. We’ve studied social networks for years, but we’ve studied a great deal more for far longer. For one such example, check out our tutoring profile on Wyzant. We’re polymaths collectively and individually and will try and post every day, but we have noooo idea what we’ll cover. That’s part of the fun of it, in my opinion. If you’re neurodivergent, maybe plural yourself, and enjoy some good old fashioned randomness and shenanigans, maybe a little tomfoolery and the word fuck, you’ll be right at home.

    Have a great day!

    -Ellie