There are many spiritual and magical practices around the world that have been passed down through generations. People who follow these practices are often referred to as witches. Witches have a wide range of skills and abilities, and there are several jobs that may be suitable for someone with a passion for witchcraft. Firstly, herbalism is a popular field that aligns well with witchcraft. Witches who specialize in herbalism have a deep understanding of plants and their medicinal properties. They may create herbal remedies and potions, or work as consultants for individuals seeking natural healing solutions.

‘Strange Magic’: A strangely sexist animated musical

LucasFilm’s “Strange Magic” is a strangely sexist musical with the double standard wider than the Atlantic Ocean. This is beauties and the beasts in which the beasties don’t transform into handsome young princes.

Some of you might remember the 1975 soft rock classic “Strange Magic” by the Electric Light Orchestra which is where the movie gets its title. Yet this movie isn’t devoted to ELO or the 1970s. The movie mixes many different songs, changes a few lyrics and mixes musical eras: “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (1961), “Three Little Birds” (1977), “Bad Romance” (2009) and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” (1968).

This is both a jukebox musical and a “Glee” style song festival. Some of the music is tweaked or stylized to fit into the storyline.

The story places two lands next to each other. On one side is the Dark Forest. On the other side is the Fairy Kingdom. At the border between the two lands, grows a special magical flower, the primrose which can be used by the Sugar Plum Fairy (making a special appearance from “The Nutcracker”) to make a love potion.

The bitter Bog King (voiced by Alan Cumming) has decreed that all the primrose petals should be destroyed to prevent the Sugar Plum Fairy (Kristin Chenoweth) from bringing love to the Dark Forest because “love is dangerous.”

On the other side, the fairies are the aristocracy and the elves are the peasants. The king (Alfred Molina) has two daughters: the eldest Marianne (Evan Rachel Wood) and Dawn (Meredith Anne Bull). Marianne is engaged to marry the blonde, green-eyed Roland (Sam Palladio doing a young Elvis imitation) who, as with the better animated feature “Frozen,” only interested in being king. Marianne is positively blissfully in love and can barely keep away from Roland, coyly avoiding the bad luck of him seeing her dress before the actual nuptials (“Can’t Help Falling in Love”). Just before the wedding Marianne spots Roland kissing another fairy and crushed (“I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”) decides to go goth, but by only darkening her palate.

Marianne’s sister is a ditzy, cheerful blonde Dawn and is ready to fall in love (“Three Little Birds”) with anyone but the elf who adores her, Sunny (Elijah Kelley). Sunny has fallen into the friend zone and he is shorter, darker and stockier than any of the fairies who a light-skinned, slender and fly with butterfly wings. The ambitious Roland hasn’t quite given up his bid for a kingdom and an army; he convinces Sunny that the solution to both their problems is a primrose petal and the Sugar Plum Fairy.

The Sugar Plum Fairy has been imprisoned by the Bog King. Sunny ventures into the Dark Forest, but the Bog King is notified by the mushroom gossip line. He’s unable to stop Sunny from getting the Sugar Plum Fairy from making the potion, but is able to re-capture her and then pursues Sunny. Sunny escapes and having been instructed that any one exposed to this potion will fall in love with the first moving thing it sees, exposes Dawn to the pink potion. Before she can see him, Dawn is abducted by the goblins from the Dark Forest. For the return of Dawn, the fairies must give the Bog King the potion.

Sunny no longer has the potion because a opossum-like creature has stolen it and begun making love connections that were never meant to be. You can probably figure out where this plot line is going. There will be true love found for Marianne and the Bog King, Dawn and Sunny. We’ll learn why the Bog King has turned his back on love and how the Sugar Plum Fairy was involved.

The movie’s tagline is “Everyone deserves to be loved” but that really only applies to the male characters. The female characters we focus upon are stereotypically attractive in the PG animated way–lithe, regular and attractive facial features and good hair. The modern touch is the hair for both fairy princesses is short and one, the brunette, of course, goes goth. I’m not sure how the Sugar Plum Fairy from the Nutcracker is imagined as a bodhisattva and why she is the only fairy that has an East Asian look when the other fairies are Art Deco American/Northern European in appearance. One suspects that Disney’s “Fantasia” was the inspiration for the mushroom sentinels and almost expects they will begin dancing. Yet the East Asian theme isn’t carried over to the fungus at all.

What is delightful is hearing the beautiful voices doing covers of old and new pop and rock songs. Cumming and Chenoweth are both Broadway actors and their vocals are always a delight to hear. Where else would Cumming get to be a hero other than an animated feature.

“Strange Magic” is an animated tale that might give hope to the tall and gawky or the short and dumpy boys. If there’s a moral, then it’s that attractive girls and women shouldn’t overlook unattractive boys and men because good character counts. Take that you handsome golden-haired boys that all geeks making this movie envied during high school.

My advice is buy the soundtrack and wait for the movie to come out VoD.

Strange magic rule 34

Francis Knight’s novel FADE TO BLACK ( UK | US | ANZ ) and the just released BEFORE THE FALL ( UK | US | ANZ ) are set in Mahala – a towering, vertically-built fantasy city. It’s a place that has long relied on magic, but is fast becoming mechanised – and now the first prototype guns are appearing. Francis Knight discusses below just what the introduction of arms can do to a world – fantasy or otherwise . . .

Whenever a significant discovery or invention appears, everything changes. Not always in foreseen ways either. I don’t suppose Edison or Babbage ever thought that their discoveries/inventions would mean that you’d be here today, reading this on a PC or pad. Did Edison consider that electricity would be used to carry out death sentences? Would Babbage have continued if he’d known the end result would be Rule 34?

Unforeseen consequences abound in history. If I invent this, it will make life easier for everyone! Only then, a war, or a revolution or plague, people being people, or even just a lack of imagination on the part of the inventor means that it all turns out rather differently.

The same thing goes for guns. Yes, many fantasy worlds use just swords/siege engines/whatever. But what happens to warfare when guns are added to the mix? Are they what people expect? Possibly not. The inventor of the Gatling gun noted that more died in war of infection and disease than gunfire. In 1877, Gatling wrote: “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine – a gun – which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.” And of course, that worked wonderfully. (more…)

Police Procedurals, the Internet and Porn: Charlie Stross on RULE 34

The Orbit Team
June 12, 2012

The B-format paperback of futuristic crime thriller RULE 34 has been released this month

Rule 34 of the internet is, “if it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.”

(Please do not attempt to test this rule using Google with safe search switched off. That which is seen cannot be un-seen . . .)

It’s hard for us to remember today that mass adoption of the internet is less than twenty years old. Although the first routers were switched on in 1969, the net remained a toy for academic and computer industry researchers for its first twenty years. I first met it in 1989, in the course of a computer science degree; even as late as 1993, the idea that one might get internet access in one’s home was kind of outlandish.

It took the invention of the world wide web – which many people today mistake for the internet – to make it visually accessible and appealing to the masses. But in the following 20 years, it became probably the most pervasive single communications medium in human history, extruding tentacles of connectivity into our pockets by way of smartphones, infiltrating our working lives and our dreams. Not to mention our nightmares.

Back in 2010, contemplating the idea of writing a police procedural novel set perhaps ten or twelve years in the future of the internet, I found myself trying to get a handle on police practice and computing. Policing in the 21st century UK has been changing bewilderingly fast; the Home Office has, over a decade and a half, been engaged in a project of systematically replacing the main body of our criminal law (which accreted over centuries) with a properly designed, fit-for-bureaucratic-purpose replacement body of legislation. Similarly, the practice of policing has undergone successive upheavals, both in response to scandals of injustice (corruption and the fitting-up of suspects for crimes they didn’t commit) and in an attempt to grapple with maintaining order in a rapidly changing society. But policing the UK is an enormous job. You can’t get a handle on it by talking to any one person; they can only give you a worm’s eye view of what they’re involved in. In actual fact, the various British police forces employ around as many officers as the armed forces have soldiers, sailors, and airmen: and the range of activities they’re involved in is extraordinary, from handling specialist poison-sniffing dogs (used in the Scottish borders for protecting endangered raptor species from farmers and gamekeepers) to guarding nuclear reactors – by way, of course, of the Saturday night public order circus at pub chucking-out time.

Kibitzing on the anonymous blogs of working cops, you run across all sorts of illuminating rants about the day to day irritations of the job: from the best type of boots to wear when pounding the beat all day (German or Dutch paratroop boots are the business), to the headaches of the modern desk sergeant’s end-of-shift hand-over (passing your colleague the personal mobile numbers of all your constables, making sure you’ve got the correct logins and passwords on the various databases you need to update with every incident), and gripes about IT services. IT services? Well yes: policing doesn’t revolve around scraps of paper any more, the back end is as heavily automated as any other large cumbersome enterprise – and this was in 2010, remember. It’s all a far cry from the police procedurals of yore . . . by which I mean 1990.

So where, I wondered, was policing going in 2022? And, more to the point, what is policing going to entail in the world of the Internet of Things – when 3D printers have become as pervasive as personal computers in the late 1980s, so that dreams and nightmares that currently only exist on the net can extrude themselves into the physical world? What’s it going to be like, when organized criminals (whose business acumen is usually so poor that they turn to crime because they can’t compete in legitimate markets) finally begin to catch up with modern business processes? And what sort of police are we going to need to maintain order in such a chaotic and rapidly changing world?

Welcome to RULE 34. That which is seen cannot be un-seen. No exceptions!

Crime and Punishment

The Orbit Team
July 15, 2011

One of the major influences on Rule 34 was a throwaway idea I borrowed from Vernor Vinge — that perhaps one of the limiting factors on the survival of technological society is the development of tools of ubiquitous law enforcement, such that all laws can be enforced — or infringements detected — mechanistically.

One of the unacknowledged problems of the 21st century is the explosion in new laws.

We live in a complex society, and complex societies need complex behavioural rules if they’re to run safely. Some of these rules need to be made explicit, because not everyone can be relied on to analyse a situation and do the right thing. To take a trivial example: we now need laws against using a mobile phone or texting while driving, because not everyone realises that this behaviour is dangerous, and earlier iterations of our code for operating vehicles safely were written before we had mobile phones. So the complexity of our legal code grows over time.

The trouble is, it now seems to be growing out of control. (more…)

You need to know RULE 34

The Orbit Team
July 7, 2011

I feel like announcing this with some kind of roar or perhaps a drum roll as I’ve been waiting for this for so long and today is actually LAUNCH DAY! But as we’re open plan and I’m highly unmusical I’ll let this do the job …

Charles Stross’s Rule 34 (UK | ANZ) is many amazing things. It’s a fast-paced Edinburgh-based crime novel set a few years into the future. It also displays lashings of Charles Stross’s wry humour and I enjoyed more than a few winces and chuckle-out-loud moments. Another aspect I really enjoyed was Stross’s extrapolation of our current technology, where our usual gadgets have been moved on a step or three. The BBC’s Click technology programme covered augmented reality just last month, but in Rule 34 it’s a useful, fully-fledged reality.

But perhaps most importantly, I found myself completely caught up in the colourful characters (a detective inspector, a young scalleywag called Anwar and a master criminal showing signs of psychosis known as the Toymaker). There’s not the space here to revel in the bizarre crimes DI Liz Kavanaugh has to investigate (domestic appliances in unlikely places …), or talk about the highly suspicious Eastern European bread-mix young Anwar is peddling. But you can sample for yourselves by reading this plot summary or by enjoying chapter one here. (more…)

Magic, Mystery, and Science : The Occult in Western Civilization

"[P.D. Ouspensky's] yearning for a transcendent, timeless reality—one that cancels out physical disintegration and death—figures into science at some fundamental level.

Einstein found solace in his theory of relativity, which suggested to him that events are ever-present in the space-time continuum. When his friend Michele Besso passed on shortly before his own death, he wrote: 'For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.'" —from Magic, Mystery, and Science

The triumph of science would appear to have routed all other explanations of reality. No longer does astrology or alchemy or magic have the power to explain the world to us. Yet at one time each of these systems of belief, like religion, helped shed light on what was dark to our understanding. Nor have the occult arts disappeared. We humans have a need for mystery and a sense of the infinite.

Magic, Mystery, and Science presents the occult as a "third stream" of belief, as important to the shaping of Western civilization as Greek rationalism or Judeo-Christianity. The occult seeks explanations in a world that is living and intelligent—quite unlike the one supposed by science. By taking these beliefs seriously, while keeping an eye on science, this book aims to capture some of the power of the occult. Readers will discover that the occult has a long history that reaches back to Babylonia and ancient Egypt. It proceeds alongside, and frequently mingles with, religion and science. From the Egyptian Book of the Dead to New Age beliefs, from Plato to Adolf Hitler, occult ways of knowing have been used—and hideously abused—to explain a world that still tempts us with the knowledge of its dark secrets.

They may create herbal remedies and potions, or work as consultants for individuals seeking natural healing solutions. In addition to herbalism, magickal crafting is another potential career path for witches. This includes creating and selling tools such as wands, crystals, and spell kits.

Some witches specialize in making talismans, amulets, or other enchanted items that can be used for protection or manifestation. Furthermore, divination is a common practice among witches, and many choose to work as professional fortune tellers or tarot card readers. These individuals have a heightened intuition and the ability to tap into their psychic abilities to provide guidance and insights to their clients. Another avenue for witches is spell casting services. Some witches offer their services to others by casting spells for various purposes, such as love, prosperity, or protection. They may also specialize in spell removal or energy clearing for those who believe they have been affected by negative energy or curses. Finally, teaching and mentoring is a vital role that witches can take on. Many witches enjoy sharing their knowledge and experiences with others, and may offer workshops, online courses, or one-on-one sessions to guide and mentor those who are interested in witchcraft. Overall, there are plenty of job opportunities for witches, whether it be in herbalism, magickal crafting, divination, spell casting, or teaching. It is important for witches to find a job that aligns with their passions and spiritual beliefs, allowing them to utilize their skills and share their magic with the world..

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