Giant Glowing “Oracles” Use AI To Whisper Philosophical Musings on Life and the Future
Led by artist and founder Nimrod Weis, Australia-based ENESS is a multidisciplinary team that explores the intersection between the virtual and physical world through playful public art. Their latest installation, titled The Whispering Mountains, features “AI-filled,” hill-like creatures at the foot of The Remarkables, a stunning snow-capped mountainscape in Queenstown, New Zealand.
⚠️ Next Saturday 14 is the last time I’ll give I Ching readings for free, the Chinese oracle present in social accounts during the last years. So, this is a good opportunity to Take the Chance! From 20 to 21 h NYC: here, in Telegram and Twitter. Join!
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✨ Ask the Oracle!
Our monthly meeting for Tarot readings begins at 20 pm NYC on Sunday 28: just for 1 hour! Available here, in Telegram and Twitter, for all kind of questions. Join!
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✨ Take the Chance!
New meeting for I Ching readings for free in February 15 from 20 to 21 h NYC: a special oracle answering all kind of questions. As usual, I’ll be more than willing to share with all of you oracular readings. Join!
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So here’s where it starts. Like I mentioned last post, I noticed myself talking out loud to myself on long drives in ways that I only tend to do when there’s something brewing or bothering me. Most of the time, though, there’s a sort of undercurrent or throughline to it that leads me to what’s up; but this time, it was odd things. Memories from many years ago, largely unprompted and unbidden; scattered and unrelated things. Things from more recently that have been lingering and leaving their marks, but that have almost nothing to do with the rest. Yet, nonetheless… there’s always an underlying emotional throughline. I still don’t know what it is, precisely, but I know that it’s there. Somewhere.
Tracking back the emotional trail, I think some of it must have to do with the revelation I had a couple weeks ago with that sort of theme in one’s characters: that echoing theme of loyalty and betrayal and faith and grief. Something unresolved in there. In a way. Not on the nose of it, otherwise the throughline would be clear, but something more indirect. I did have a followup revelation, during one of those conversations in the car - not the greater thing that I’m still chasing, but something that must be a part of it.
It has to do with… Well, with priesting, and with LARP. With the way that I work so hard to make it something worthy; with the way that those players who have grown up under my care through to adulthood have begun to turn out, and how terrifying it is to see what forces of nature they are. The way that the game, and the community, is a garden that I tend and toil in with the hopes of plant some good in the world. The way that the whole thing sometimes feels like one long, sustained prayer to the world; and the way that the kind of work I put into it sometimes feels more like a blood sacrifice on the altar than just sweat and tears.
The revelation was simple. It’s because it’s me. It’s because, somewhere inside of me, I work so hard to make this thing worthy to make up for the fact that it is mine. That it is me. Which is a terrible thing, and so simple at the same time. The sense that there is something so fundamentally unworthy in me that I have to spend the rest of my life making up for it. There are like three or five poems for this, somewhere - something about repenting on your knees through the desert by Mary Oliver, and the story to tell without being in it from Richard Silken. The poems don’t matter - the point is that, regardless of the truth of it, that’s the big driving motivation beneath it all. It’s love too, sure; but mostly it’s repentance. For being whatever I am. For daring to breathe and continue to live on the face of this world. For being here, at all.
There’s the motif of a chain. When I watched Conclave with Asterism, one of the passing motifs among many that I enjoyed was the way that the chain of his pendant - the one he wore before sequestering - was a chain, hanging around his neck. Good gods, but if I were as many priests in past lives as it feels like I’ve been, at least half of them must have been catholic. Of course that motif appeals to me. That’s half of what the game world is about - is power as a duty and duty as chain and that chain as a burden that must nonetheless be borne, and the bearing of it as a sacrifice in its own right. I am here, and I am what I am; and therefore, I am a burden that must be counterweighted. Whatever it takes; however long it takes. Sigh.
Let’s be blunt. One of the things that kept echoing back to me during those solo car conversations was what a marvel it is that my scars are as invisible as they are. I looked a while, the other day; and even though they’re lighter now, the ones on my feet are still there. The ones on my hands and forearms never scarred in the first place, and I’m eternally grateful for that. It was the way that, for so long, what I misunderstood as part of the depression was actually that deep understimulation and existential boredom that the pain was able to soothe; and the way that, towards the end, I watched myself start to do it just because I was bored. I said that classic line to my therapist at the time - “I can stop any time I want” - and she said, okay, prove it; so I stopped. Because for once that line was true. But I never got any actual, like, coping mechanisms to process the pain another way. I just toughed it out and suffered, and through sheer force of grit and will haven’t done it since. Like the grief, that pain never got smaller; I just grew larger around it, and became more able to bear it. These days I understand it more, and I have ways to mitigate it before it happens; but I still don’t have ways to actually manage the feeling when grows beyond that. I just bear it.
The thing is, I don’t know why that’s related. I don’t know why that came back in the midst of all the rest, because it’s been years since I’ve really had to think of it. I haven’t been suffering in that way, nor to that depth. And yet.
Some of the other threads are still processing. Grappling with that tension of love and care and being willing to show that love against the fear of what happens afterwards, and the echoes of what happened last time. Against the fear of it being misinterpreted and misunderstood. There are two lines that echo perpetually in the vast chambers of my spirit, one of them Pellinor and one of them Kushiel: Pellinor’s “To love is never wrong”, and Kushiel’s “Love as thou wilt”. Life is too damn short not to tell people that you love them, and not to love the world with your whole heart. Gods, but I would know.
I’ve been thinking of my grandfather more often the last few weeks, as well. I wish he were still here, now that I’m older and can start to recognize the echoes of his spirit in mine. We were more alike than I ever realized while he was still here, and I would like to have been able to talk to him about things. Not the things themselves, but the way of talking about them. Simple pleasures, and the joy of being alive, and those ghosts of love and faith.
That’s part of why warm fuzzies exists. Yes, it’s a tradition inherited from a sillier time and place; but it’s here because life is too short and unpredictable not to tell people that you love them, and not everyone knows and understands that in quite the same way. It’s smokescreen, and it’s plausible deniability, and it’s cover. It’s the hope that it helps someone see light at the end of the tunnel, someday, at a a time they need it most.
Do you see the throughline? I can feel it running through all of these pieces, but I still cannot make out its shape and form. To say nothing of, the vague glimmers I can make out make so little sense in the context of the last few weeks or months. I don’t know for what reason or why now, and I wish I understood it. By and large, I’m happier now that work has started again and I have things to do and a purpose and will to bend myself to; and in the grander scheme, I am steadier and surer than I have ever been at any point in my life, and growing even more so by the day. So why this, and why now?
I don’t have any answers. I just wish I understood. Oh fuck you, I think a part of it clicked. It’s that line - that Love as thou wilt - because I’m not, am I? And that goes against something deeper and fundamental inside me. I can’t, or won’t, because my existence here is a sacrifice; and I’d rather just bear it silently than risk being even heavier a burden than I already am. Because that’s what happened last time, and I can’t face the thought of the same thing happening again. To me, or to anyone else caught on the periphery.
I don’t care if this doesn’t make sense to anyone else and mostly looks like rambling delusional crazytalk, it makes sense to me. Also, I hate it. So thanks for that. The second-worst part is, this looks like it’s about something completely other than it is; and that was the problem last time, too. There are more ways to love than romance, and more ways to care about someone than wanting to fuck them. I just wish our culture acknowledged that.
Time to be haunted by all of that and the adjoining thoughts for the rest of the night or week or however long it goes. Hopefully I’ll work through them at some point. I know the message at this point, more or less; I just don’t understand what to do about it. Gods help me.
Buckle up, folks - I’m tired and In A Way. The problem is, I can’t identify in what way I’m In A Way which is no help for anything. We will simply gather the strings and see where they lead. Please note that I am tired; not drastically so, but perhaps a shoeprint deeper than I ought to be.
One thread, I wrote last night and left in drafts. It was a longer post on the playtest event on Saturday; not my own, but a long-time player’s. It was longer than was useful and can be summed up here. What comes to me on this thread was the practice of standing on my own two feet anyway - be it that there were three or four barriers between me and the field, I stood on them regardless. It was the unfamiliarity of the rules system, the trouble with fighting between permanent GM brain damage and being short amongst the weeds, and it was coming with anger in my heart in advance of a world that never came to pass. It was buying anger from the future, and it was the way that when I was finally not in my own way my fighting was clean. It’s the frustration in not being able to touch that state and capability that I have at-will, because I am myself in the way.
One thread takes place across the days immediately preceding, in company of friends. I do not appreciate slipping control of myself, and this time I took measures to correct accordingly. I disdain the distance. And I disdain the barrier that I myself laid down. I would rather the casual intimacy of careless touch rather than simply quiet glance. It is a rare thing to be in the company of those who are actually on my wavelength - however perverted the cause may be - and it was twice in as many days. I do not feel comfort with vulnerability and intimacy often, and I resent restraining myself regardless of how necessary it may be.
One thread was the poetry I tried to write last night to express these things, and that it would not come. It’s the same block as on the field, and the same as in familiarity. So often I’ve had the urge the last moon, and so little has come of it. Because I am, once again, in my own way. The thread is also in whispers of words more honest than usual, when irony is usually the watchword. It is a terrible thing to love and never be able to tell it. Love is not something I take lightly, and to choke on the merest suggestion of it feels like spitting in the face of the fact that I am still living.
One thread is a story that I have been enjoying a great deal more than I anticipated; the story is Glass Heart. I ought not be surprised, given that a large part of the story is the relationship between an artist and their craft - one need not guess the figure I resonate with most - and about that certain kind of flowing intensity and what it costs. So is it too about a certain kind of artistic destiny that resonates deeply in other ways. It is is all those things, but it also everything else beside it too, which is where the greater share of my surprise lies. Part of it is that it touches that part of me that is him, too, which lends me another gaze with which to appreciate it, forbidden knowledge though it may be.
One thread is that I caught myself, three times, holding another’s stance. Each time, I shook it that instant - there are some silhouettes I would rather not wear. One thread is the sigh around the table when the quip I told them they didn’t want to hear dealt the small amount of psychic damage it was bound to - don’t say I didn’t tell you so. One thread is in that I have struggled through writing any of this, because it is nigh-impossible to get one over on me and I know that three of you are reading this. That’s my own fault, for laying the trail; but all gods before and after be damned, I wish that the moment a sliver of myself is laid before others I wasn’t consumed by the urge to pack everything away and run.
One thread is the quiet way that those who know this about me have learned to speak my language, and to afford me the space to be known and understood beneath the smokescreen of deniability. It is in that near-silent thread of communication that is imperceptible to all else in the room. It is in not feeling worthy of that quiet tender care; and not being willing to name it as the love it is, returned.
…
This, my friends, is why we do these oracles. I’m frustrated - not merely in the sense of frustration, but also in the sense of one’s attempt being frustrated by another force. The force in this case being ever my own self. It is named, and it is tamed, and I can no longer remember what else I had to say - only spinning emptiness where frustration was before. There was more, and it was gone, and we will consider it Le Guin’s sacrifice to the darkness.
I am going to sleep now. Gods know, I could use the rest; full night’s sleep that I’ve had across the two. As is my way. As is all the rest.
Ooh, you’re an Oracle, huh… so are like, the visions from the gods kind or the 8 ball kind?
The Oracles of Delphi were too early in our industrious age, the fumes we can make now would put that volcanic ass gas to shame
22 sept. 2025
I’ve often been asked why English came so easy to me, and I never had a full answer. Maybe it was always so I could find you
19 juil. 2025
This friend of my mom, the always-bantering type, was chatting with us earlier and teasing me about getting a girlfriend on a whole other continent. Then he turned to my mom and laughed, “Maybe her next girlfriend will be in Saudi Arabia!”
And without even thinking, I heard myself reply: “There won’t be another one.”
It just came out, in a heartbeat.
No defensiveness, no annoyance - just certainty. A prophecy, a promise, a prayer…
Whether you believe in oracles or not, she’s the future my heart is set on.
In my past relationships, no matter how badly I wanted things to work, no matter how hard I tried to believe we could share a life together, I always felt this uneasy spot in my heart - like a rock in my shoe I kept trying to ignore. I couldn’t imagine my future with them, not really. That future didn’t exist, and deep down, I already knew it.
But with her, I don’t have to try.
The future feels real, like it’s already there. Already waiting. Already known. Just like we know the sun will rise tomorrow, though it hasn’t come up yet.
Une évidence.
I was never religious, but I wonder if this is what faith feels like.
The Supreme Court puts up a good front, but will always cave to Trump because they, as a whole, lack the courage to.
The Democrats were on their way to receive a big chunk of good things, but they ended the shutdown, which will ultimately be in their favor.
Usha Vance’s marriage has been exposed by Nick Fuentes’ racism, and she is in the process of losing the father of her children. She will be in denial about it and try to save her marriage. J.D. Vance does not love her; he understands they are bound to each other.
These are just some oracles I’ve received this morning, and I wanted to share.
![Sept. 10th
Wake up: 5:40am, Lag woke me up. Slept like shit, nightmare. Talked in my sleep, sorry Lag.
Morning group: Still sucks, didn’t fall asleep though. Still being watched over that. Take a picture cunts.
Chore: Inventory- boringgg! Wish I was working with Purity. Got called out and cut- Kate. Man I miss Johnny Cash. Finish 5ish.
Took care of my arms. No inflammation, scabbing and scarring both normal. Small tear in stitches- not serious. (2nd op Juni?)
Dinner: Scrap soup hell yeah. Wish I was in the kitchen so I could make frybread. ->
Frybread: Flour, baking powder, water, salt, little oil. Measure with your heart.
Make into a dough, cover for like an hour. Roll into tortillas and fry til it’s bread.
Bed down at 9pm.
- Tim, watched me during group.
- Alette, made me lose count- not even that serious, damn
- Bandaid, rolled over my foot- apologized
- Lee, being fucking nosy
- Kate, bled me.
[a blacked out rooster silhouette with a guitar outline behind it titled CHICKEN IN BLACK sits in the bottom quarter.]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/aed2dd3890338f9058e2fabd84f37ec2/6586faf1c60b8955-5b/s640x960/a9139a5be7987339e1cd4b65a39406a81cdd5283.png)
ALTA little look into Skylar’s journal for the @flock-of-the-divine prompt, featuring her schedule, a half-assed recipe, and a hold over from her days being made to journal in inpatient- the Pissed Me Off list. Transcript in the alt text
Ocs mentioned: Lagrimal (Lag) @myb0nesandsku1l, Juniper (Juni) @ijustloveyourstupidface, Alette, Bandaid @askdoppelgangerandjeff, and Lee @thecryingcl0wn
“I mean, ‘s not like I can keep it, you might as well.”
My response to the interaction prompt for @flock-of-the-divine. Skylar found a bird skull while gathering and decided to give it to Lexi (@bloody-heartstrings). At least now someone gets to enjoy it.
This is our monthly meeting for free I Ching readings! I’ll be online for the next hour for accurate and trustful answers (NY time).
