Today is 16th Sestia, 12AS...a Eponaday

"Eponaday is The First Day. Epona is a very ancient Celtic Goddess of Horses. She is chosen because The Horse is central to Amazon Culture. She starts off the week with the symbolic 'getting back in the saddle'."

"Let us look at the structure of the week itself. The First, Second and Third Days are the 'official' Work Week for business, school, etc. On the Weekend, the Fourth Day is half and half; morning and early afternoon for finishing up the Work Week and the late afternoon and evening for playing and partying. The Fifth Day is not a religious holiday per se, but rather meant to be a day of relaxation and reflection."

Addendum D [Calendar for A New Matriarchy]

Life in The Desert

~It is presently 49° and 44% humidity. It didn't make it out of the low 80's yesterday. Obviously, the weather is weird. Not that I'm wishing it, but we really should be bakey bakey everyday now. Soon enough I suppose. They're talking 97° on Tuesday.

Random

~I finally took a Flexy around 11am yesterday. I'd done what I'd needed to do and could freely crap out. Since then I've probably slept about fifteen hours collectively. Flexy's put me out like a clubbed baby seal, which was largely the point. The muscle relaxation is kinda like the gravy.

I did two long sleep sessions punctuated with windows of food, supplements and meds. Such kept my body chemistry chilled during the bouts of sleep, allowing it to have its proper restorative effect.

I'm still a little spacy right now and that's okay. That will be gone by this evening. This is also why I am so judicious in my consumption of the things. I have no intention of building any sort of tolerance for them.

I do feel much better. The comfort of sleep and lack of achiness is lovely and I'm going to flow with that for the rest of the day....

'In Other News'...our Internet connection is sucking dicks of dogs.

Life in The Desert [redux]

~It is presently 90° and 4% humidity. That's a shift of 51° up and 40% down since quarter after seven this morning, hectic even for the desert.

Nebs Sez

"I agree that the dividing line between Steampunk and Dieselpunk is more one of World View than Technology per se, though obviously the latter is The Key Element.

The first decade or so of the 20th Century is really an overlap of the two. Steampunk slowing fading out and Dieselpunk rapidly moving in. But I would go so far as to submit there is a dividing line that is very clear.

Geographically it can be placed at The Latin Bridge in Sarajevo. Temporally it can be placed at around 11am local time on June 28th, 1914. That is of course the time and location of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip, the event that sparked the First World War.

In some ways we of the present cannot understand how WWI totally changed the psycho-emotional landscape of Europe. We have grown up in a world where Technological Total War is a 'fact of life', where Area Bombing and Death Camps are simply What Men Do In War. Our collective awareness is steeped in these things.

But WWI created such a profound change as to reach Metaphysical dimensions. Note that Carl Jung thought he was going mad in 1913/14 because he was being tormented by 'apocalyptic nightmares' that suddenly made sense when the war broke out.

The Great War utterly destroyed the somewhat naïve Victorian/Edwardian belief in the unalloyed benefits of Progress and in its aftermath Europeans – and to a lesser extent Americans – split up into the Cynical, the Opportunistic and the Fanatic, all marching on the road toward the greatest Dieselpunk Event in history; the Second World War.

And that War, in which all sides behaved monstrously out of the sheer necessity of survival, is the one shaped our modern world view and therefore created a psycho-cultural distance from the Pre-WWI mindset that is almost unbridgeable.

It does however, as I proposed above, give us a very clear dividing line between the two genres. I firmly believe that any discussion of the relative outlooks of Steampunk and Dieselpunk one must, at the very least, pay attention to which side of the Latin Bridge ones outlook actually originates." ..comment on Steampunk and Dieselpunk: A Comparison – Part 2