Blade II

Spoilers included

I didn’t watch this to celebrate spooky season or for any other particular reason.  When I have insomnia on Saturday nights, I open my Plex app and hit shuffle.

I’m sure I watched this some twenty years ago but remembered pretty much nothing.  And now I know why.

There is a voiceover in the opening sequence that catches you up to speed with the plot which is corny but useful for a random viewing.  We get introduced to the big bad, and Blade frees his mentor Whistler from some sort of vampire stasis.

The movie, as you can imagine is mostly fight scenes (which bore me), leather, toxic posturing, ‘magic’ science gibberish, and a new animalistic enemy that hunts vampires.

Best part is that it cured my insomnia.

Andrew from the Library

During, but not necessarily because of, the pandemic, I stopped providing freelance tech support and consulting.   Reasons to remain personal. And since 2017, I have not been available through the Victor Farmington Library (cuz I needed dental).

Today I met with Bianca from Legacy at the Fairways Assisted Living and Greta from the Library and we put into motion plans to utilize a grant given to the Victor Farmington Library for providing tech help to the elderly.  I will be available alternating Saturdays at the Legacy and conversely at the Library from 9am-1pm starting in December and regularly in 2022.

I will be available by appointment only at both.  The grant is limited and I have a spouse whose company I enjoy so if no one signs up, I’m not showing up.   I charge the Library by the hour so once the grant money is spent, we will see if there is enough demand to get a new grant or figure out some other way to pay me.  Legacy will historically not pay me out of its corporate coffers.

To make an appointment at the Legacy you have to be a resident.   To make an appointment at the VFL you have to call 585-924-2637.  No library card needed, no residency or age limit check.  Mask required.

I know my way around Windows, Android, Chromebooks, and Kindle.  I am proficient at iPhones, iPads, various printers, Google Homes, and Alexis. I have never owned a Mac, which means I’m going to take a little longer to suss it out.  My Google Fu is strong.  Linux?  seriously go home and do it yourself.   All Apple hardware problems should be taken to your nearest licensed Apple expert, which I am not.

Most importantly I am patient, experienced, and calm.  No question too small.  I can walk you through email, social media, bluetooth and Office.  I am not your therapist or your buddy.

So once again, I will be know in the halls of the Legacy as “Andrew from the Library”.  I have been called worse.

How to journal

I won’t lie, I didn’t always enjoy reading this book. So often I was having huge existential crisises, pondering pain and humanity’s systematic cultivation of poison to “relieve” said pain.

Spoiler, so was Henry.  But he did the work & made the painful diary entries.

Fuck John St. John. This is the example.

You have found the website of Andrew Ceyton DBA Ceyton Books & Consulting.

I do not sell books from this site directly. You may purchase books from

Ceyton Books at Amazon,

or

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I avidly swap books at Paperbackswap and Bookmooch.  Come swap with us!  If you’re new to it, feel free to contact me for pointers.

I also swap, albeit not so avidly, at CDSwap and DVDSwap.

For book reviews, come be friends with me at GoodReads,  if you want to to explore my personal library, the place to go is LibraryThing.

This site is for random writings, links, and whatever else personal websites are used for in this 3rd decade of the 21st century.  Enjoy.

“How do I leave a comment?”

weary person knocking at old castle door

This is not a high traffic site. I don’t post in full thoughts, I don’t have many visitors. Which is as it should be. But every couple of months, someone will actually use the Contact Us page to ask how to comment. Usually, late at night. So I ignore them.

I have the comments disabled because I weary of deleting spam. Whether it’s bad products, porn, or techno-fascists, subversives, state actors spewing bile, I don’t care to deal with it.

As with all things, this too will change. I am undergoing life churn and should be posting more and will possibly be seeking out actual correspondence. Or I might just randomly open/close the comments. You will have to be logged in to a WordPress account and your comment will have to be approved.

Cheers.

Magick in Theory and Practice

“Hey, Zaphod’s just this guy, you know?”

I find it important to avoid hero worship, to always remember that Zaphod’s just this guy. Part of my being a Thelemite is to avoid the lazy trap of becoming a Crowleyite. Uncle Al was very human. Of course, another trap is letting someone’s flaws convince you to disregard everything else about them, see Miles, Lovecraft, Allah (Clarence 13X), Ye, etc. Of course, YMMV, there are artists that I will avoid wholesale because of their stupidity. Looking at you Lydon.

I first read this book first over 30ish years ago while I was tussling about with a Thelemic boy-toy and my beatnik roommate had a copy. I was (and am) well-read and had a foundation in mysticism and meditation, with a healthy (?) skepticism. I was a hungry spiritual seeker and wanted to KNOW dammit! I knew Crowley by reputation, especially from Colin Wilson’s The Occult, yet had not yet given the devil his due.

Needless to say, most of this book went over my head. Oh but I Got IT! I wasn’t sure if Crowley and Thelema were the Way but I was willing to try.

Back to 2021, I have kept Thelema close. I have also become an adult with a disposable income and have started updating my Uncle Al collection. This was a fun re-read, insomnia at 3am (eternal) on a Saturday, I took over the couch and read this all the way through, stopping for coffee and breakfast, smooching the wife et al. Oh, it’s a completely different book than that young man in Queens read so long ago.

A few years ago, in my effort to finally become an adult, I took some advice from Rodney Orpheus’s writing and rewrote the LBRP to my own ethos. This re-read helped me understand why it was working and gave me clues to rework the Hexagram rituals.

All Al’s foibles and pomposity seemed larger, almost like self-mockery, to be treated as blinds.

I look forward to re-reading his rest, although I will take it slow.

The Shadow in America: Reclaiming the Soul of a Nation

A collection of essays based around the Jungian idea of a shadow self, the dark part of all of us.

There is this idea that as we work on ourselves, work to become blessed, enlightened, closer my God(dess) to Thee, we become better people. We correct ourselves to become pure beings of light.

This is obviously a one-sided, zero-sum idea. It is born from the idea that is Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil, Light vs. Dark. Aristotelian dichotomy fed through Manicheism that somehow went from a proclaimed heresy to current Protestant orthodoxy.

This essays in the book discuss, from various points of view, the dark shadowy parts of our nature, from the deeply personal to our issues as a nation.

I’ve read this once so far, sitting serving on a Grand Jury during the government shutdown. I wasn’t that impressed at the time but the concept has kept with me. Sure, it is in part because we are watching America simultaneously confront and celebrate its Shadow self. Watching grown men punch teenagers in the face for asking that they wear a mask, racist vigilantes condoned on network television, children dying in cages, and large aspects of our democracy dismantled.

It will be a while before I can come back to this book objectively, if ever, through no fault of its own.

4 legged spiders

I love an incongruous thought twixt seemingly unrelated media. This time it started with the film Ator: the fighting eagle, a sandals and sorcery yawner that even Rifftraz couldn’t make interesting. But I watched it enough to know that the bad guy was the Spider Lord. You could tell he was a bad guy because, duh, spiders.

The next day I read through P.K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. In order to show use the android’s lack of empathy they take a captured spider away from their dimwitted host. “Cut off it’s legs ad see if it can crawl with only four of them”. While they sit and watch a TV celebrity (an undercover android) declare that empathy is a hoax, the android Pris is at the kitchen table with a pair of scissors, mutilating what could be the last spider in the building.

1st repeat of a theme is happenstance, the 2nd is coincidence….

My next read, Under the Green Star by by Lin Carter, a classic Burroughsian fantasy. I’ll talk about it more in my DAW reads. The pertinent part to our thread here is when the hero fights a a giant spider to save the obligatory princess. The spider is a monster, an “albino vampire”.

—and the 3rd is a communication…

“The Bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s conception of a giant, intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive…..Their warriors are smart, skilled, and aggressive—smarter than you are, by the only universal rule, if the Bug shoots first. You can burn off one leg, two legs, three legs, and he just keeps on coming; burn off four on one side and he topples over—but keeps on shooting. You have to spot the nerve case and get it . . . whereupon he will trot right on past you, shooting at nothing, until he crashes into a wall or something.”

We have in a short time random media introducing the spider as a loved pet, then a helpless mutilated plot device, a fierce adversary, and then our ultimate inhuman enemy in an interstellar war.

The last quote is from Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, a novel I am struggling philosophical with as I re-read it three- and a-half decades since my first time through. It is Heinlein at his most right-wing, hiding behind ‘hip libertarian’ language. But notice the image of the 4 legged spider brought back. Here again the android, in this case Heinlein’s military mouthpiece in his power-armor, mutilating the spider. It’s ok for our military hero though, he has an alien opponent whom he has further ‘othered’, calling them “Bugs”.

This is what dehumanizing, ‘othering’, does. It is us giving ourselves permission to ignore our empathy so that we may create 4 legged spiders, ultimately dehumanizing ourselves.

Androids among us

Just finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by P.K.Dick for the first time. One of his more solid novels.

The theme of empathy is threaded throughout, being the main difference between humans and the Nexus 6 androids. The androids at one point declare that empathy is a lie, a myth that humans perpetuate to oppress them.

It is not difficult to look at this through eyes accustomed to our modern circumstances. We’ve all seen the arguments about masks. My wife and I watched the PBS interview with Dr, Fauci and one of the questions he was asked was about anti-vaxxers. There is a concerted effort to quash empathetic action so the privileged are not inconvenienced.

This got me thinking about the nature vs. nurture. Some humans, eg. sociopaths, psychopaths, the deeply autistic, are born without empathy, while others are programmed by propaganda. Ultimately this what the Black Lives Matter is in essence, a cry for empathy.

Charlie and the Golden Meme

I have been thinking a lot of the various memes that Roald Dahl created with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They are referenced often, probably more than the old favorite The Wizard of Oz.

My wife and I have been steadily making our way through the multitude of seasons of the Amazing Race. There is Golden Gnome ticket in one season, another a contestant compares a ballon ride to the Glass Elevator bursting through the top of the factory.

A random episode of Travel Man, with my hero Richard Ayoade. They are about to climb up a medieval tower, and the guest references the same Glass Elevator.

Of course, The Office episode with the Golden Ticket in the paper.

In the first episode of the show Hannibal, the analogy of the golden ticket is used to describe what a serial killer is looking for in his victims, that spark of life that for a moment satisfies his desires. It is properly Qabalalistic interpretation, where we must dive from Malkuth into the Tunnels of Set, seeking out the sparks of light lost at the Tzimtzum, when the retreat of Ain Soph from the world shattered the vessels and scattered the light.

Most of the references of course are made from a merely popular culture level, informed by the Gene Hackman movie and possibly the Depp/Burton version. I’m not sure, I tend to be removed from the popular and cinema-informed.