Astroworld: Darker Than You Think

The Corporate Media is throwing an epic hissy fit over ordinary people looking at pictures of the Astroworld stage set and seeing exactly what the producers are showing them. I don't know why they would care, never mind go to bat for a singer that doesn't exactly have a sterling reputation in the business. 

And most certainly isn't what you'd call a feminist.

I Want to Get High, So High(erside).

  

Hey, Carlwood-man, hey, what you say? Gimme some of your bandwidth. Hey.

Pseudo-Science Friday: Some Say in Ice

Bundle up, folks in the lower 48: looks like Old Man Winter is a climate denier and is sending a massive blast of arctic air our way. Probably a conspiracy to make our new climate czar look stupid. Well, more stupid.

Hey Big Tech: deplatform Mr. Icicle already! He's too much!

Who Said It: Joe Biden or Aleister Crowley?

I have to say, some of Joe Biden's speech last night seemed awfully familiar. 

Like, what's this whole "Light" thing about?

Trailer Trash: Belial, Baphomet, Betty and Veronica

OK, this looks...ungood. 

I'm holding out hope that the actual series will be double-plus-good, but this trailer is not filling my heart with warm waves of optimism and anticipation. The first series was so interesting because it always seemed like it was perched on the precipice of batshit insanity and could fall off at any moment. 

This just looks kind of dull and ordinary.

Supernovas and Star Sorcery

The glowing Orb is officially a thing. We keep seeing it in odd places, most recently this enigmatic music video from Ariana Grande (with a guest appearance by Nikki Minaj, who seems to be fraying a bit at the edges lately). 

Shimmer Me Timbers: Annihilation Reconsidered

Well, in the grand Secret Sun tradition I am finally getting around to posting my thoughts on Annihilation, the recent(ish) sci-fi film starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tessa Thompson. 

The TL;DR? I liked the film quite a bit. But I probably would have liked it quite a bit more if it were fiction.

The Royal Scam: Fire on Babylon

OK, this is going to be some hit and run Synchromysticism. There's a lot to sort through and I don't have a lot of time so let's do this. Feel free to expand and expound in the comments section. I'll try to revisit this story if I can spare a few.

But yeah, this thing just keeps on shootin' out the synchery, so much so that I wonder what we're really seeing here. I get the feeling it's going somewhere weird and dark.

2018: Same Great 2017 Taste, with 33% More Apocalypse!

"Some people are falling for it." Of course they are, because those mannequins don't look anything at all like oversized action figures. And the bumpkins and naifs who attend the Consumer Electronics Show aren't used to seeing these kinds of exhibits, right? 

But hey, you gotta push those antihuman memes so what's a little white lie for the cause?

Uncle Sam's Secret Sorcerers: Manic Satanic

The thing about Never-Ending Rituals is they never end. And you never know where and when the next phase of it is going to pop up. 

Postcards from Vega

I think I've seen this episode already... 

Secret Sun Picture Parade: Technology's Lucifer

It's Beginning to Look a Lot like Mithras.

I've been ranting on about Mithras since I opened this blog and lo and behold, Bloomberg finally premiere their new SPACE headquarters with the enclosed Mithraeum, smack dab in the middle of the Never-Ending Ritual. And a day after the Grand Lodge of England posted video of the Tercentennial at the Royal Albert Hall on Halloween.

I'm sorry; is this actually the real world or am I in some kind of Audrey Horne coma and am lucid-dreaming old Secret Sun posts all night and day?

Kevin or Las Vegas

Kevin Spacey in Se7en

Is it just me or do you feel like some malfunctioning AI has taken control of reality and is using current events for a game of symbolic charades?

Or maybe the intelligence that runs the simulation we're trapped in stepped away from his desk for a moment and his idiot kid-- you know, the one that dabbled in symbolist poetry and absurdist theater in college before he developed a really bad Percocet addiction -- took the controls. 

"Las Vegas, Which Kept Not Their First Estate in Heaven"

Listen, I don't create the syncs, I just record them. This isn't a rabbit hole anymore, it's the Marianas Trench. It's absolutely bottomless. I'm not even going to try to preface any of this- it's too huge. This is what I got and I can't even try to pretty it up.

And yes, I realize this is all completely nuts. It's absolutely insane. No question. But did I mention it's 2017?

Secret Star Trek: Infinite Bellicosity in Infinite Conflagrations

I really don't know where to start.

I watched the two-part opener of the new Star Trek series and I'm still wondering if I didn't hallucinate it all. I'm still wondering if I didn't have some weird flashback and find myself in an alternate timeline where Star Trek was created by John McCain and Lindsey Graham instead of Gene Roddenberry.

Chaos Magic vs. The Robot Revolution

There are two divergent streams at work in the Idea-o-Sphere, currents that are not only divergent in size, strength and assumption, but are in fact antithetical. 

Twin Peaks, Mulholland Dr. and the 17 Enigma

David Lynch and Twin Peaks return this May. It appears there will be 17 episodes in all, if the series clocks in at 18 hours and the first episode is two hours long. A cast list comprised of 217 actors has been announced.

The Secret Sun on THC

It's been nearly a month since Greg Carlwood and I tore into it for three hours, covering all kinds of ground and any number of different topics. 

Happily, Greg was able to make some sense of it all and banged it all into a fairly-coherent 2 1/2 hour chat.

Even Stranger Things: (Real Life) Eighties Horror

Stranger Things works a lot of well-tilled plots, familiar riffs from countless 80s horror and (predominantly) sci-fi films. But it also taps into real-life horrors that were playing out in the media in the early 1980s; the highly-publicized abductions of children,  the rise of conspiracies over child trafficking, organized pedophilia and government coverups and the role of 24-hour TV news in feeding the fear over what seemed like a new plague descending over the country.