Heliotroph☀️🍇

I play Pontus. I play the Seleucids. I prefer the Scipii to the Julii. I like it when Romans are blue instead of red. Ever heard of the Galatians?

They made the knife look like a knotty dildo complete with little butthole tickler and nobody ever even commented on it at the time because they were too stunned by everything else about the movie

Janus sees forward from the beginning of time and backwards from the end of it. But both moments are the present, and it is all in a circle

@ManyATrueNerd "but the bronze age was actually a golden age for piracy"

Every bloody pirate game is always in the Golden Age of Piracy. Give me a pirate game in a Barely Even Bronze Age of Piracy - I want to sail around in an utterly obsolete rotting galleon in the 19th century, being pursued by deeply confused ironclad warships.

@PalmyrPar Nahhh gigasicily and sideways Australia would be so sick

Wow, that sucks ass. Even our continents are better-shaped than other planets. Earth is the best.

@FirmLanding Well, it's amplified, and it's intense mental work which has effects and virtues on its own. Singing can also incidentally introduce elements of breath work

@Heliotrophy Effects are different to just listening to music?

Music is not just a drug but an entire class of drugs with effects varying from downers to uppers to even mild entheogens. People abuse it, but it's certainly a better vice than the alternatives. My main principle for consuming music is to listen to things based on how you want to feel, not how you do feel. You can summon some joy and levity essentially out of thin air with music like Japanese jazz or good classical, instead of wallowing in dense & low emotions which is what the most popular dreck does

@FirmLanding In what way? It's just the active way of participating in music

@Heliotrophy How about playing instruments?

@JRuebl47185 @daatdarling For some reason people really really hate the idea that the cosmos does have a moral order and virtue matters to the efficacy of your practice. Apparently all the yogis, saints, magi, etc, were missing that because they weren't open-minded enough or something

@daatdarling Chaos Magick people are just a bunch of leftists who jerk off to sigils just to find a 20 dollar bill on the sidewalk. Most of them need to perform the ultimate magickal act and get a real job.

Chaos magick is a methodology and underlying philosophic approach to magick, it is very much not the same thing as experimenting or being eclectic or syncretic.

As a pagan, there are two wolves inside you. One is an open minded syncretist who recognizes on some level that when christians rag on you, what they're really doing is using you as a prop in their own internal dualist spiritual cultivation and that for them, in that incarnation, in that circumstance, that could be what their soul needs. The other wolf is a normal wolf and it wants to raid monasteries

@Svetisl36976741 @unimaticus @PortoValhe It's good to hear Taylor might get some love outside the anglophone world!

@unimaticus @Heliotrophy @PortoValhe I am currently working on Slovak translations of Thomas Taylor, but I would like to continue with translating other, more ancient works. ,@Heliotrophy your compilations are of immense value and inspiration. I recently bought your book on Julian, which is fantastic...

So; I am currently collecting the works of Iamblichus into one volume, along the same lines as I did with Julian. I am able to compile all the most important works, De Anima, De Mysteriis, and Protrepticus. But there are two parts of his broader collection on Pythagoreanism where no public domain translation is available. These are his commentary on Nicomachus' introduction to mathematics and his survey of the general mathematic art. I could conceivably produce a translation of both of these through AI. If I were to do so, I would check the results against the existing copyrighted translations and also release the results into the public domain, if wikimedia will allow it. But I would just first like some feedback on if any of you have an ethical problem with this, or if you feel these two works are not important enough for the trouble and would prefer for the compilation to just recommend and direct the reader towards the copyrighted academic translations

@EPButler @PortoValhe Interesting. The tools may be better since then, they advance pretty quickly. I will have to figure out a decent workflow to keep it on track by working in chunks

@Heliotrophy @PortoValhe The AI kept wandering off the text and hallucinating. Eventually, I determined that the problem was the PDF. An HTML text would be helpful, but I couldn’t locate one.

@345marcel Ionic as in negatively charged?

Ionic magnesium chloride is crazy. Can’t believe I haven’t heard of it and tried it earlier. Literally hits instant and lets my brain fly. Big fan now over the other forms. Plus it’s sourced directly from nature.

@PortoValhe Sadly it's been quite a while since I've been stricken by the muse in that regard. I fear I might not get it back until I move to a better place or climate

@Heliotrophy You've been doing excellent work, mate. Pythagoras, the Hymns, Julian... still waiting on the 2nd volume of the Hymns.

All of the translators I read are pretty emphatic in their forewords and intros that even the best translation can't capture all of the richness of the original :/ but I'm my experience a decently faithful translation is sufficiently edifying as long as you also read good secondary sources about it or about it's context

@Heliotrophy I feel like it's better than nothing, but I don't think ai will catch the subtleties a top tier greek scholar would

@PortoValhe I was really surprised to find no such compendium even exists yet. Especially considering all his works are pretty short on their own, sometimes unfortunately because of missing parts though

@Heliotrophy Better than nothing and buying from a fellow Pagan just tops it off.

@Politzania10 And hopefully it will be just as edifying 🙏

@Heliotrophy I will buy it as i did your book on Julian

I'm glad to hear this from you since I value your opinion on this. I suppose mostly I am trying to minimize the risk of fallout from people who will come across it and immediately be hostile because of the mostly baseless environmentalist narrative about it. Such people make it hard to sus out what the real acceptable/ethical use of the tech should be

@Heliotrophy I would much rather see the AI translation than not have it. I think a kind of disclaimer like this on it is more than sufficient so that people know it may be off. We've been reading translations going back 100+ years which are arguably worse than what AI can do.

@gwyrain So far, testing it has been encouraging. And it's even more seamless than dealing with scan and OCR errors when transferring text that's already in english

@Heliotrophy Since AI translation is still spotty, a trick Ive noticed people so is to use the translation to provide a chapter by chapter summary of the content. This way info gets across without needing a "true" text to text translation But maybe AI gets there soon

I use the Seven Body model because it explains so much and is expedient for understanding religious experience in all its dimensions. But the one body people neglect is the 4th Psychic body, which is vital for maintaining positive mental health and directing your life.