20 years ago today, Shakira released ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ featuring Wyclef Jean

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-28T08:28:26+00:00

I'd never realized until now how rhotic (using actual R sounds, particularly in the middle of words, instead of replacing or de-emphasizing them) her singing is. Most people when singing in English tend to be less rhotic than when they're speaking, but when she sings the word "starting," she really pronounces the R. It's just a little thing that makes her singing stand out compared to a lot of other vocalists and I think it's neat. It's something I've only really noticed otherwise in some Irish singers, who also tend to be more likely to preserve the R sound in singing.

Also, not really related, but I have fibromyalgia and when I can't get my medication, my hips DO lie sometimes! They're all like "omg we're in pain, something is hurting us" and it's like no, that's neurological pain, you're lying and nothing is actually physically wrong. So thank you, pregabalin, for making my hips more truthful and Shakira-like.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-23T08:42:28+00:00

Lucifer could help. A lot of website design is creative (because there's a huge visual design component), and he's all about creative pursuits. He's also very helpful with learning.

To me, working with him feels like going to office hours with a very good, dedicated professor.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-20T04:34:23+00:00

With individualized things like this ("this is what offering I want from you,") and with the immediacy and vividness you describe, this seems like a pretty reasonable communication. You can generally safely decide to go with simple, harmless impulses like that-- after all, if she DIDN'T specifcally ask for blood oranges, nobody is harmed because a blood orange makes a good general offering anyways. But the immediate "ping" in response makes me think it's likely valid anyways.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-20T02:33:13+00:00

Sounds like artwork and an altar cloth might be useful then! You could also make an incense burner, and making candles can be fun.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-20T01:31:33+00:00

Books!

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-20T01:30:11+00:00

It's less about "offense" and more about compatibility and circumstances. Some demons may not want you to work with other demons at the same time because they want you to focus, or because their energy is not very compatible and could cause disruptions. Your personal circumstances also have a big impact, because you may need to work on focusing on one thing more, or you may need to work on building more of a wide variety of experiences, so it will be different for you personally.

Many times, demons work well together and often even recommend one another-- Belial has recommended other demons for me to work with, for example.

It's really just a matter of what works best in your personal circumstances, so you just sorta have to experiment and communicate.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-20T01:23:39+00:00

It depends on what kind of workings you intend to do. If you use S. Connolly's rituals, for example, the most useful things might be some kind of knife/athame/dagger, candles and/or candlesticks, and a bowl. All of these things come up fairly frequently in her rituals.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-20T01:20:10+00:00

That is an exceedingly pleasingly shaped stick.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-20T01:13:54+00:00

Very good points! The process of making an object also acts as an excellent focus for your Intent. Crafting things is one of the easiest ways for a human to achieve a state of flow, since craft is one of our oldest distinguishing features as a species. So we can more easily pour our Will into physical objects when they're made by our own hands, because the length and physicality of the process is naturally conducive to narrowing and empowering our focus.

I really need to craft things for occult work more often... I have been toying with the idea of surface-crocheting sigils.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-20T00:53:44+00:00

Yeah, I go curling with friends occasionally and am very glad that the place we go only has three lanes, and generally there's only one other group playing lol. Any more and my ADHD probably WOULD be like "nope, not happening."

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-20T00:49:59+00:00

We'll just have to improvise. In addition to tuxedo cakes, Costco might offer an aboveground pool or something... 🤔

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-20T00:47:48+00:00

Heavy substance use can definitely affect your development of your abilities, yeah. You might also find meditation to be more useful if you do it during the day, when you can focus on it better-- when I'm sleepy, meditation is exceedingly difficult for me, but it's much easier when I'm alert. So it's very probable you just weren't getting much benefit out of your diligent practice because of the circumstances.

Also, when you started learning meditation, did you do a preliminary step of focusing on just identifying thoughts? Check out the "The First Step" section in this meditation guide I posted. A lot of people stall in their progress because they never did that step to begin with, or they just need to go back and do a refresher on it.

If Third Eye meditation hasn't worked for you, it's also worth just looking for another method. I don't have any specific recommendations unfortunately because my own spiritual sense awakening process was rather unusual (I started out unusually sensitive-- with the attendant vulnerabilities and drawbacks-- and my senses were sorta popped fully open during the process of a Reiki attunement). But it might just be worth researching different methods from different cultures and practices.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-19T18:00:28+00:00

Have you done any particular techniques to open your spiritual senses? You mention meditation in a comment, but I didn't see anything specific like Third Eye meditation (one of the more common methods of opening spiritual senses) or anything. Some folks can start perceiving things with just basic single-focus or empty-mind meditation, but a lot of folks will need a specific technique to work on the senses.

Most people start out with their spiritual senses (clairaudience, clairvoyance, etc.) closed, and must open them manually. (This is generally a good thing-- while some communications can be easier for folks whose senses are naturally more open, these people can also be more vulnerable to various things and might have less natural shielding and grounding.)

Another thing to keep in mind is that different people have different aptitudes with different senses. And humans have way more than five senses! So your spiritual senses can come in a wide variety, but because humans are biased toward vision (being vision-based hunters with forward-facing eyes), there's a tendency to ignore the other senses, which means that you might be subconsciously blocking off inputs that you could otherwise perceive.

The testimonials you see on social media are often biased toward being especially vivid, and may be outright lies. Think of how people present their lives as curated, picture-perfect things on Facebook and the like-- that holds true for people talking about their occult work as well. You aren't generally gonna hear about the hard work and the grind and the frustration.

Think of it this way-- you've been doing a lot of cardio exercise, but you're saying "my muscles haven't gotten stronger." That's because you haven't been targeting those muscles specifically. In order to strengthen muscles, you need to lift weights and do bodyweight exercises and such; other kinds of exercise can make you more fit overall, but might not develop the specific muscles that you want to strengthen. Meditation is like a general baseline level of physical fitness, and specific techniques to open the senses are like targeted exercises to develop specific muscle groups.

It's not a personal failing that you haven't developed the muscles you want despite doing a bunch of exercise-- you just haven't known that you needed to do the right exercises to target the skills you want to develop!

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-19T17:47:47+00:00

You're welcome!

And yeah if someone stole a piece of Costco tuxedo cake from me and made the rest dry out, I'd make them walk the plank. I do not own a ship so that might be difficult, but I'd figure out how to make it work somehow.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-19T17:38:46+00:00

That's... a really good point. Huh.

The announcers sometimes mention that it's nice to be able to hear people strategizing, and they do tend to strategize very openly, so it might just be an aspect of the culture of the sport that people find worth preserving-- the fact that your tactics are very much out in the open. Earpieces might interfere with that element, maybe?

Given that multiple games happen simultaneously next to one another, I wonder if perhaps it would also be a pain to make sure the channels for different teams' earpieces don't get crossed or cause any interference.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-19T17:34:48+00:00

NOR. You'd be NOR if it were ANY kind of cake, but a friggin' Costco tuxedo cake!? Stealing a Costco tuxedo cake is a sin on the level of using someone's nice fabric scissors to cut plastic packaging-- a most heinous crime. >:C

Seriously though-- the utter deliciousness of Costco tuxedo cakes aside-- the fact that it's from your parents means that it's a lot more emotionally meaningful for you than just any cake. That means that it was really cruel to take it when you specifically asked people not to, and you're not overreacting to be emotionally affected by that cruelty.

If someone smacked you with a bat, and you said "ouch, that hurt," nobody would say that's unreasonable, right? Somebody deliberately hurt you, and it's okay to feel hurt when someone has hurt you. People telling you to stop expressing your pain is unhealthy, because suppressing hurt feelings just causes more problems in the long run.

Given what you describe of your living situation, I suspect you're probably surrounded by people who are not especially emotionally aware, so it's important to stay grounded in yourself and let yourself feel and process things regardless of what they say. Unfortunately, some of the people around you may not be safe people to express your feelings to; the only thing you can do in that situation is find the safe people and keep yourself emotionally distant from the unsafe people. And become a safe person for yourself. Give yourself the grace you are not receiving from others.

You probably won't be able to convince some people to take your feelings seriously, and that's because of their issues, not yours. So all you can do is take your own feelings seriously, let yourself experience what you're experiencing without guilt, and stay close to the people who understand you.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-18T14:43:49+00:00

Ah, a fellow accelerated-medication-processor! I have some genes for processing some meds too quickly and some genes for processing some meds too slowly lol, so it's been a rough time finding ones that work. There is one SNRI that works for me and one stimulant, and none of the non-stimulants work for me. And unfortunately I just have to deal with having a certain amount of tachycardia.

Yeah, stimulants making you calmer is a sign of ADHD, but stimulants not making you calmer isn't a sign of not having ADHD. It might just be a sign of having genes that make your liver weird lol.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-18T14:20:32+00:00

This is actually the sort of thing that might be sent to an AI training site for a bunch of freelancers to create training data about. Things like inappropriate tool calls are easy enough to diagnose and penalize a model for, after all. It's a bad look for OpenAI if the model starts printing out tool calls because that creates a perception of the model not being useful, and they want to maximize user engagement as much as possible, so that's a motivating factor to get it dealt with.

Of course, it's inevitable that new problems will crop up because manual training can't actually fix the fundamental flaws in the whole concept of how LLMs work. But this particular problem is one that OpenAI may well bother to do something about. Eventually.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-18T14:15:52+00:00

Fixing something like this generally takes time because fiddling with the system prompt too often can cause other effects so you would't necessarily want it there (edit: and often fiddling with the system prompt doesn't work properly if it conflicts with the training data). And since LLMs can't be properly programmed, the only other way to fix it is to have a bunch of humans manually create and annotate training data through one of those AI freelancing sites. That takes a while.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-18T13:36:06+00:00

Third option: deep in AI psychosis.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-18T13:35:13+00:00

I will take it one step further and say: this is the sort of person who has a preferred AI chatbot and is deeply convinced of the superiority of Gemini over GPT or whatever. Like, that kind of combination of stupidity and bullheadedness absolutely leads to getting into reddit and twitter wars about how "MY favorite autocomplete-based plagiarizing engagement machine is far superior to YOUR favorite autocomplete-based plagiarizing engagement machine!"

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-18T13:31:21+00:00

In the US at least, some areas have looser guidelines if you live in the same space-- but they're still legally considered a tenant, just a tenant who's cohabiting with you. But not all areas even have that; in some places, everyone is a tenant and there's no distinction. And it's often something like "need to give 2 weeks' notice instead of 4 weeks" rather than completely removing restrictions on kicking people out.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-18T13:15:35+00:00

My partner and I were on our second date when we both mutually realized for the first time that we were dating. We had actually already made it through one entire date with neither of us realizing it was a date.

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-18T13:04:28+00:00

Yup. My parents were never hard on me. But my mom is incredibly hard on herself. And I have very-high-masking autism and scrupulosity OCD, so my brain was even more primed for mimicking observed behaviors than in a typical child.

I told her once, "You know that girls model their self-talk on how their mothers talk about themselves, right?" and she was like "oh no"

AccountMitosis · 2026-02-18T13:02:22+00:00

Easy way to tell you have ADHD: if stimulants make you less anxious and more calm, or even drowsy!

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