He'd Have To Mute Everyone

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Macaque is great with kids. #inkmk #legomonkiekid #macaque #mk

This is why Mac shouldn't be anyone's mentor.

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words from starpeace

i cant stop thinking about what happens once megatron leaves with the high guard. imagine this random 19 year old that almost killed your leader is now in charge and he just had the worst day of his life i'm talking mascara streaming down the face chest heaving breaking out in random sobs and you're supposed to be like Can we launch an offensive Can we Please Launch a fucking offensive

Noa just hugging and protecting Mae 💜

A Complete Guide to Runestones

Casting and reading the runes is a popular form of divination in modern new-age practice. It is based on an old Germanic and Norse practice linked with the practice of Heathenry and the worship of Odin and other northern European pagan gods.

Like many other forms of divination, the practice is designed to help you access your intuition or your spiritual senses to bring to the surface truths that you already know in your heart. Your subconscious mind is much more powerful than your conscious mind and has information you simply cannot take in consciously. Practices such as rune casting let you quiet the conscious mind so that your subconscious mind has space to speak and reveal.

You can read more about the underlying philosophy of divination in our post about using the Tarot.

In this article, we will take you through several methods for casting rune stones for divination and how to interpret the runes. At the end of the article, we will also take a closer look at the history of the runes from ancient times to modern practice.

How to Read the Runes

Since rune casting is all about tapping your intuition and divine spark, there is no single right way to use them. Many experienced rune readers have developed their own approaches and shared them, so look around for ideas and inspiration.

But any approach will involve holding a question in your mind and then casting, placing, or selecting stones that will guide you toward a response.

Before you start, there are a few steps that you should take.

Find a set of runestones that speaks to you spiritually – you can shop our runestone collection here.

Connect with your rune stones by spending time with them. This should be physical, holding them in your hands and examining them, and intellectual, reading your guidebook and taking in the meanings associated with the different runes.

Prepare yourself through meditation that helps you to quiet your active mind and let your subconscious mind flow to the surface.

Learn how to ask questions, which should be open-ended, since all things are possible, rather than yes or no questions.

Read our more detailed guide to preparing for a divination session here.

Before every individual casting, you should also cleanse your rune stones of energy other than your own. You can protect your rune stones by storing them with energy-cleansing crystals such as black obsidian, citrine, or amethyst. You can also cleanse your cards by leaving them under the light of the moon for a night or smudging them with incense. You should then hold the runestones in your hands for several minutes before a reading to make a connection between yourself and the runes.

Casting Patterns and Methods

There are many different ways to then use the runes to find answers, but we will go through some of the simplest and our favorites below.

The Three Norns

Hold your runestones while considering your question, and then retrieve the rune stones that seem right either from your hands or from a sack. Place three runestones in a row in a horizontal line. The first runestone will reveal the major causes of your current challenges. The middle stone will represent the reality of your current situation, which we are often blind to. The final runestone will indicate the best course of action going forward.

The Four Dwarves

This casting works in the same way, except that you will place four runestones in a circle, working clockwise from the top. The top rune indicates the main causal factors of your situation. The runestone on the right suggests that you are doing that is influencing the current situation, while the left indicates what others might be doing or feeling. The bottom runestone indicates the reality of what is happening that is currently hidden from you.

Vé Branches

This is a more complex casting that uses seven runestones laid out in a V shape. Start with the bottom rune and work upwards, placing runes on the right and then the left. The rune at the bottom represents the truth of your current situation, and each line represents one of the most likely outcomes. The first rune represents your most likely action, the second your motivation for that action, and the third what the result is likely to be.

Rune Board

Other casters use a rune board. This can be designed in various ways but will have different areas that relate to different elements. It could be past-present-future, cause-affect-outcome, or different aspects of your personality. In this case, when you are ready to ask your question, you throw the runes over the board and make your reading based on where they land.

Individual Rune Meanings

There are many different rune designs, and each will come with its own guide with different meanings and interpretations. Also, as you become accustomed to the runes and grow close to them, you will start to develop your own meanings and associations.

Nevertheless, below are the most commonly accepted meaning for the Armanen runes, the runes most commonly used in rune casting.

Fa – Primal Fire – power of spirit, change, and creativity

Ur – Resurrection – physician’s rune for resurrection, eternity, and continuity

Dorn – Lightning and Thunder – targeting goals, activity, masculinity

Os – Mouth – spiritual power, voice, gaining power and respect

Rit – Ritual – orderliness, primal law, cynical events, rescue from an enemy

Ka – World Tree – power, generation, ability, and artfulness

Hagal – Hail – mother rune represents enclosure and contains potential for growth

Not – Necessity of Fate – karma, future existence

Is – Ego – self-control, personal power, obedience, compelling will

Ar – Leadership – beauty, fame, intelligence, virtue

Sig – Sun Power – success and victory

Tyr – Rebirth of the Sun God – turn a situation around, wisdom, spiritual understanding

Bar – Birth – creative power, becoming, song

Laf – A-rlog – defeat, laws or nature, water

Man – Manking – birth, health, increase, maleness

Yr – Bow – femaleness, nigh, death, instinct, anger, falsehood

Eh – Duality – love, trust, and marriage

Gibor – Gift of Life – cosmic consciousness and divine principle

Where do the Runes come from?

Various northern European peoples used runes as a system of writing. Probably the most widespread runic language was Futhark, used by the Norse people. They used a 24-character alphabet known as Elder Futhark between the 2nd and 8th centuries, which developed into a smaller 16-character alphabet known as Younger Futhark from the 8th century. At around the same time, the Anglo-Saxons and Frisians developed a related Runic alphabet known as Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.

Across all these groups, the runes became less popular with the rise of Christianity, and they were replaced by the Latin alphabet.

The Norse people believed that their runes were more than just a system of writing but rather a tool used to shape reality. The Norns, the fates in Norse mythology, write destiny into the bark of Yggdrasil using the runes. Odin, the most important Norse deity, saw the Norns at their work and was jealous of their knowledge. He hung himself from the World Tree, Yggdrasil, for nine days and nine nights while pierced by his own sword to learn the secrets of the runes, which he then shared with mankind.

In the Norse sagas, many heroes are described as runemasters who can use the runes to heal the sick and destroy their enemies. There are also many surviving archaeological examples of objects inscribed with runes seemingly meant to provide protection or ensure the quality of something stored. But, since the pagan Norsemen left no written records and our knowledge principally comes form later Christain texts, we do not know very much about how the Vikings used the runes.

We do know that centuries later, the Norse people of Iceland combined the runes to create runic staves believed to have magical properties. These are recorded in several magical grimoires surviving from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Some of the most famous runic staves in these magical texts include Aegishjalmur, also known as the Helm of Awe, a symbol of protection, and Vegvisir, also known as the Norse Compass, a powerful wayfinding symbol.

Ancient to Modern Runic Divination

We know that the Norsemen also engaged in divination. Volva were witch women highly respected in society that were often called upon to act as seeresses. That their practices may have included rune casting is indicated by a much older text.

The first-century Roman author Tacitus observed similar witches among the Germanic tribes of his day. He said that the runes were carved into small objects, such as sticks and bones, which would then be cast onto the ground. The seeress would make a reading based on how the runes fell.

But while runic divination seems to have existed in some form for at least 2,000 years, the modern practice dates to the 17th century. Johannes Bureus, a Swedish mystic, was inspired by the practices of his ancestors and made the modern system based on combining the Younger Futhark runes with the Kaballah, a Jewish mystical tradition.

His work was further developed in the 1900s by the Austral occultist Guido von List. This is the most common system used today and is known as the Armanen runes.

[Read The Full Blog Post Here]

To be loved...

Is to be changed

c!Techno makes me so frustrated as a socialist because. Direct action is a good thing! Standing up to oppressive power structures is a good thing! Violent revolution is necessary to overthrow the existing capitalist world order! But c!Techno does not do any of that in S2. Nor does he do much that is analogous to what anarchism advocates for. And yet I'm supposed to see him as a prime example of anarchy in the Dream SMP?

Let's take his 'terrorism'. There are two streams where c!Techno goes to L'manberg and commits 'minor terrorism'. So how does it advance his goal of anarchy? Does he obstruct police action? Does he destroy private property?

Well... no. He tortures one member of the cabinet (Fundy) and one civilian (Connor), gets his items back, causes some destruction (to what I'm assuming is public property) with a wither, and then dips. The entire purpose of the venture is to get his personal property back. You can say that getting his weapons back was essential to his plan to take down L'manberg, fine (and it isn't in the world of Minecraft, where infinite resources are accessible by everyone), but that's still not analogous to, say, the Socialist Rifle Organization's efforts to arm workers, because it all comes down to c!Techno as an individual. Also it's not like his Netherite weapons did the most legwork on Doomsday, plus I don't think even the most die-hard anarchists believe in torturing civilians as a means justified by the ends, and also I don't think Techno's main focus was anarchy in the trips — I think a lot of it was about his personal attachment to his items, which is an established trait of his character. If it was about anarchy, then he should have shown it more explicitly.

Okay, then, what about Doomsday? He destroys the oppressive, evil government of L'manberg, as he's been planning to do for a month! Violent revolution is necessary to overthrow existing power structures, right?

But it's not a revolution. c!Techno is not a citizen of L'manberg. And his reason for destroying L'manberg is, in that moment, not about anarchy. It's about how he feels betrayed and victimized. The dissolution of L'manberg's government in the aftermath of Doomsday actually had very little to do with c!Techno — it happened independently of him after the destruction ended. Yes, it happened as a result of the overwhelming scale of the destruction and the hopelessness that inspired in its members, but that's not exactly analogous to real-life revolution. It's more like if some foreign anarchist dropped a nuclear bomb on America and then the US government disbanded. That's not a revolution, no matter how desirable the disbandment of the US government may be (which, don't get me wrong, I think it is). The end may justify the means, but that doesn't make it a good example of anarchist direct action.

Property damage ≠ anarchism. Property damage as a form of direct action can be a means to bring about anarchism, but Technoblade's goal in his December to-do list was 'Destroy L'manberg', not 'Use some property damage as a means of dismantling the L'manberg government and establish in its place a non-hierarchical community'. The disbandment of the L'manberg government in the aftermath just gave the audience the impression that he was trying to do the latter.

So it really doesn't matter if c!Techno is a 'true anarchist' or not, because Doomsday is not an example of anarchist revolution, even if its purpose was to bring anarchy (which it wasn't, at least not purely.) Horizontal grassroots organization is so fundamental to anarchism and its ideas of anti-hierarchy, and c!Techno's story in S2 doesn't involve any of that. It doesn't matter how much of an anarchist he is in his heart if he doesn't embody it with his actions.

In fact, c!Techno doesn't talk that much about anarchy in S2. I've watched most of his streams from S2 and if I've missed some big soliloquy from his character about anarchy, please let me know, because I've gone through quote compilations from Techno fans and I haven't seen any. I know cc!Techno said that he doesn't want to follow a specific ideology in order to not make people mad, but I'd like to hear more from his character about like. Any ideology at all? Anarchism is such an involved and radical system of beliefs that it would have been cool for there to be some more explicit conversations about it in-canon.

The thing about c!Techno and anarchy is that so much about his ideology is extrapolation that the audience must draw. He's against hierarchy, but he doesn't go much further than that. I've made this joke before, but sometimes I want to shake c!Techno by the collar and ask "Where the hell is the mutual aid?!" (And no, giving items to Tommy is not 'mutual aid' lol. It's c!Techno being a host.) We have the Syndicate now, which is a non-hierarchical organization, but it doesn't function like a group of revolutionaries. It doesn't work to help facilitate revolutions in, say, the Eggpire or Kinoko Kingdom. It doesn't do much of anything, really.

This isn't to say that I think foreigners can't help facilitate the downfall of oppressive regimes. There are historical examples of people having done that, such as Che Guevara. What I'm saying is that c!Techno doesn't do that in S2. He causes a lot of property destruction. He doesn't engage with c!Tubbo and his cabinet to disempower them as leaders. He doesn't work to build horizontal, non-hierarchical systems of governance and mutual aid. He doesn't work to dismantle hierarchy outside of "destroying governments" (which, again, he doesn't do a great job of) because there's not much hierarchy to dismantle in a sandbox world of around 30 people with no entrenched systems of discrimination?

Yes, Minecraft as a medium does make it more difficult to portray systems of power, but it's not impossible. S1 pulled it off with Schlatt, not perfectly, but better than S2 did. The bigger problem is the writing. cc!Techno told us his character as an anarchist, but I'd have liked more examples of him showing us. An anarchist character is such a cool concept and I would have loved to see it played well. But as it stands, I don't think c!Techno is the greatest example of an anarchist. And that isn't because I dislike anarchism as an ideology.

Mikey deserves to have his very own (shit) post because I love him very, very much. This one's for you, Mikey lovers 🧡😎🤙

So I uhhh... I finished the Iliad. I had a lot of fun but there were so MANY weird ass funny moments that I HAD to draw. Enjoy my personal retelling of these bits. (The designs for the characters are very undocumented and definitely not final though).

PART ONE:

Part two over there!