Really frustrating morning at work today. And again this afternoon, after replacing the (cold) water filter under the sink, now we have no hot water pressure. Probably the little recirculation pump is gunky or busted after all these years and I’ll just bypass it, but… I have had enough annoyance today.
On the Kemetic Orthodox calendar, today is the last day of the year. The Ancient Egyptians had a 360-day calendar, which is mathematically much more convenient than ours. But that meant they needed 5-6 additional days between calendar years to keep things aligned. The new year began with the heliacal rising of the star Sopdet (which we call Sirius) over the capital. The Nile flood season would reliably be coming within days, bringing renewal to the land in that place with so little rainfall. Those intercalary days were each dedicated to a different major god, and full of celebrations and rituals against misfortune, making it the most important set of holidays in the religion.
I’ve got a couple of days off work next week to celebrate and relax, and a massage chair and float tank session booked for the time when our temple previously did one of its big initiatory rituals. The temple community has a lot of online events lined up.
In modern Kemetic Orthodoxy one of the most anticipated parts of this festival is the yearly oracle, which names the god(s) who will preside over the next year, sets the tone for the festival and year, and gives advice. It is the major communication from the gods to the community as a whole. In past years this has often been relevant in some way to ongoing or imminent world events, and to social and organizational aspects of the temple. Given how things are in the world right now, and the temple in the midst of figuring out its own reorganization, this year’s seems like it may be a particularly weighty one. All the gods in the pantheon are protectors of some kind, all have strength and magic, but their specialties and approaches, and the things they will ask us to keep in mind, vary.
Yesterday was supposed to be for AC maintenance and the gutters… but the gutter team, between the extreme heat and encountering some rotten wood at another job, got delayed again. Rescheduled for Friday, when it’s supposed to be cooler. Fingers crossed. Meanwhile, the basement waterproofing and drainage work is scheduled for the next Friday and Monday (they wanted to do it Monday and Tuesday at the peak of this festival but I asked them to move it back).
My spouse and I went to see Fantastic Four: First Steps last night. It was entertaining, not a disappointment, but we did pick it apart a bit on the drive home. Visually extremely well done, some issues with pacing and directing and weak plot moments and super-geniuses doing some blatantly stupid things. Also they could have leaned in more to both the retrofuturism and the emphasis that this was a slightly different universe. We saw it in the “CinemaX” format which has side projectors for a (sort of) seamless 270-degree view. That felt like a distracting gimmick at times, especially at the start, but I also felt like it worked well at other times. (It probably jacked up the cost of our tickets, and I wasn’t expecting that.) One of the small details I latched onto that I might not have without CinemaX, was noticing that they used standard US style 3-prong electrical outlets in this alternate anachronistic universe. Weird thing to focus on, but when the outlet is 18 feet high and hovering vaguely threateningly where there’s normally just a blank wall, the eyes are drawn to it.
Predictably, the usual neckbeards complained about the gender-swapped Silver Surfer, grumbling about “DEI” and blah blah blah. But Marvel drew her from comics canon, and it made as much sense to the plot as anything would (it is a very silly plot). It was no kind of feminist victory because the entire point was, she was sexy and Johnny Storm lusted after her. She was also badass though.
I’m now reading Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion Tetralogy after it was featured in a couple of videos my spouse watched. It’s not a translation but a novelization with its own spin, the author having added some themes of her own. The Mabinogion consists of four “branches” which aren’t directly related, and in this book the first branch is divided into two “books”. I feel like through much of that first book, we just don’t have enough of a sense of who Pwyll is as a person or what the society is like; he doesn’t even interact with any named characters aside from his horse before he’s already having a very strange encounter with the lord of the dead (who is also kind of a cipher for a while). By the time the second book is well underway things are a bit better.
But I’ll give the author some credit for use of vivid descriptive language, at least in places. And probably for those who haven’t read a lot of folklore translations or maybe certain other kinds of fantasy, the whole thing is pretty neat. I’ll stick with it and see how I feel about it as I go.