abyssinian abbey

What are your rituals or traditions for starting off a new year?  

New Year's Eve/Day have an interesting role in my life.  This is the ONLY holiday I celebrate.

I left Xmas and Easter and all those Christian holidays behind long ago; I won't celebrate the 4th of July or Veteran's Day or any other patriotic parade hell.

New Years, though, now that's a holiday.  The only widely-celebrated holiday that has absolutely no religious or political significance! When I figured that out I lumped my birthday and Xmas into it.  When I used to have close friends I'd get presents for New Years instead.

Now, in this lonely post-relationship age in which my friends circle split up and moved away, and I was left literally totally alone and nearly lost it completely, the presents have gone away, but the date has even more meaning.

I perform heavy postpaganist Choronzonite rites during this 24 hour period, a totally arbitrary change of the fourth number in a date, that's the only thing that happens on 1 January.  But it's the time people stop and think about endings and beginnings, taking stock of what is had, what has gone away, what is wanted to have come.  Then there's the OTHER thing people do on New Years: Get intoxicated, and of course, even though drinking's not my way, intoxication is one of my favourite things.  Sometimes I can pull myself through a near-suicidal depression just remembering that if I were to do away with myself, I'd miss the next psychedelic trip I'd take some day...usually once or twice a year.  It used to be fairly common for that to happen ON NYE.  Will it this time? I'm leaning away from it, wanting to see if I can actually carry my resolutions through, first. What are those?

To be frugal.  To get out of the house owned by the family of my ex (god I hate calling him that) and find my own apartment, somehow.  And learn to live without hope of ever having sex or love again because quite honestly, after a relationship in which you get all your desires answered for in one person - a thing that VERY rarely occurs - it's too hard an act for any half-there affair to follow. 

2008 is all about becoming the sort of person I'd find attractive myself, because I'm going to be the only one who can love me, now: me, and a xenodimensional entity, a chaos god called Choronzon who is sort of an imaginary surrogate partner and guardian demon combined.  It kept me from breaking down through the pain of '07 but it is a bit silly to be married to it, which I'd considered myself, partly as a gimmick for the music project of the same name, but totally serious as well..  Perhaps this year I'll be more circumspect and private about my comminglings with this incubus...they'll happen, but I won't shout from the rooftops about it.

I think it is time to go now and witness the sunrise while sitting in a lotus under the Tetrahedraat, a three-sided triangular bamboo-pole tetrahedron-form open-air one-person temple to Choronzon, in which I sit whilst facing a west window (too bad not an east one, for this sunrise related purpose.)

I'll sit there in Indian style and recite the sacred New Years rites I've recited twenty-four times before, and joyously partake of herbal treats that are a tonic for the mind, body and its currents. 

I will not force myself to love life, or to try to find love.  That was how I screwed me up last year.  This year it'll be reversed: I'll let love find me - the non-sex-related kind, and learn to share stories and jokes, and entertain people, learn to think about making them happy, instead of focusing on my dismal trite misery, begging others to come and make me happy, and at the same time, holding them at arm's length if anything even seems remotely flirty.  By 2009 I dearly hope I succeed.  Choronzon is very sure I will, and he's ALWAYS been right, for the twenty one years I've had this entity gift me with its presence...so that's a good sign!

So there, Vox holiday nuts, this one time, I get to join you.  Will be a year before I do again....Have as much better a year ahead as I'm shooting for, unknown compatriote reading these words.  Astalabyebye.

What's the best book you read this year?

Definitely Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, the famous grandpappy of cyberpunk.  Though it was - for me, and most other Gibson fans - those early "Sprawl" books like Neuromancer and Count Zero that warmed me to his work, and the later interweaved series, which wove together Idoru, Virtual Light and All Tomorrow's Parties into an intensely satisfying brew of near-future speculative fiction, that kept that warm spot hot, I'd have to say Pattern Recognition is now my favourite by Gibson.

It's not cyberpunk at all, really. It takes place in a believable present-time.  And the lead narrative character, a woman of indeterminate age named Cayce Pollard, has a very odd defect which is also the ability upon which she makes her living - or possibly, dying...

She has what I'd term a strange relationship with corporate logos.  Would, that is, if it were not so similar to my own syndrome concerning them.

One gets the idea that people on Vox are SO very into holidays.  I wonder why that is.

If you could easily choose to live in another country without all the red tape and legal stuff, which one would you select and why? 
Submitted by Matthew 25.

Aw, that's an easy one.  Holland.  Amsterdam!

Why? Take a wild guess...

(((inhalation sound)))

 (((cough)))

Five, six seconds later...

(((exhalation sound)))

I guess it's a lot like Amsterdam in San Francisco, what with the clubs...

And the fact that both Holland and San Fran are going to probably be half-submerged in melted polar iceberg water in about 20 years.

Can this be done? I can't find a way to do it anywhere. 

I think a few of the Vox themes look good but the overwhelming majority are far too cutesy, or "upscale-ish", or just plain straight looking for my tastes - anything that isn't is cartoonish and seasonal.  I use the Personalized option, which gives me an easy way to use my own header - which I do like.

Only problem is, all the black-backed pages use blue link text and I don't like blue.  It's just not my colour.  I am wondering if there's any way to change this.

If there's no way to change it on one's account, perhaps I could design a theme that breaks the "it looks like it was designed by and for yuppies" rule...so I came here to find out how.

(I intend no insult to those who like that sort of thing.  I just don't find it appealing personally, to use on my own blog and profile pages.)

-Xenotrope

Choronzon_-_Contraverse

Choronzon

From our collection of "escapes" - tracks that are not quite "releases" yet, which manage to bust out from the Choronzonic lab before being totally finished, sometimes as a way of letting us, and Choronzon, know that they ARE finished.  Sometimes, Choronzon hunts down the "escaped" track and brings it back into the lab to be tortured by editing devices some more; as often as not, this ends up fatal for the track.  Although sometimes, it is made better and lives on as a release.  This one probably is finished on its own.

Okay, is it too much to ask...

...to have a way to um, change the link colour to something other than this revolting baby blue? All the dark black schemes have these revolting baby blue pastel links and there is no way to change them.  I absolutely detest these templated layouts, the Sucks-Apart Standard "Expressive" template that was so ugly they had to smear it all over Livejournal AND Vox.  As if maybe the two services MIGHT not benefit from not having the exact same templates, or should I say the exact same ONE template with a lot of different revolting headers, most of them nauseatingly CUTESY or the sort of kitschy-koo-krap you find in suburban industrial-park offices.  When I choose a scheme called "Personalized" I expect to be given the means to choose the text and link colours! It's...so basic.  This IS 2007 and in a few breaths and heartbeats and eyeblinks it'll be BAM! 2008.  This was something people could do 10 years ago.  Come on you people, this should be fixed.

Another beef.  I distinctly have chosen to NOT receive email bulletins from Vox. I still get them like clockwork every week.  Did they make them mandatory and kind of forget to tell anyone, or did I miss that clause in the mountain of legalese that constitutes a typical Sucks Apart EULA?

These guys used to have me pissed after their ex post facto changes to Moveable Type ruined a blog I'd been doing with a friend for years by refusing to allow multiple authors if using an already-free old MT version.  For a while I relented, since SA seemed to be not ruining Livejournal...but reports keep reaching me that reek of unreasonable censorship, mass deletions after one insane irate complaintnik writes a single letter of religious indignation and offense at SOMETHING that a minor MIGHT happen to see...How fucking sad, how fucking...typical.

I was thinking of shunting my as-of-recently-shut-down Livejournal to this site, but it's lookin' pretty dubious, kemo-sabe...