“Politics” is boring and I think about the universe. I think about how the concept of reincarnation was redacted from the Bible. I think about how Jesus never asked to be king. I think about how no one in church talks about Pentecost.

Tonight, I’m on about Saturn’s rings versus the rings of Uranus. Uranus spins on its side and either of its poles spend over 20+ straight years in total darkness or total light.

I think about the monopoly the northern hemisphere has on seasonal holidays.

My brain is like TikTok, but in trains of thought.

Another cognition-crunch recently has been reconciling Western astrology Tropical coordinates with Sidereal coordinates and where things are actually at in the sky.

I wondered if Western astrology is like… a public performance that’s supposed to be the rehearsal for your inner life, which feels backwards and counterintuitive, but maybe there’s something to it… Because when they say, “oh, Uranus just transit to Gemini,” they’re talking western astrology, tropical coordinates (the ones that align Aries, for instance, to the spring equinox on earth(or something like that)) and Uranus has to travel ~24° more to enter the next sign, so up in the sky, Uranus is in Taurus and it’s not even halfway through.

Hear me out about the reverse-rehearsal, though. The trick to the tropical coordinates is that ~2000 years ago, they fit. Adhering to western astrology is celebrating continuity of tradition (which has its place!) and everyone following along is participating in performance. Performance that may, perhaps by design, mentally pre-acclimate you to true-astrological alignment.

The outward performance, the seasons we celebrate together as a humanity are a separate magic from “true-astrological alignment consciousness”™ (because it has to be conscious intent; none of this works with you if you’re not paying attention to it—and why aren’t you paying attention to it?👀 🪱🥫) — one of them is heliocentric-humanity magic, the other is human-cosmic magic. One field is predominantly interpersonal, the other, at least in Western-astrology dominated consensus, I would posture as most influential intrapersonally at the time being.

Then, I worry about society in general and the skill erosion mass convenience has brought on. Mainstream western astrology becomes the low-hanging-fruit cash cow that’ll spit out ad revenues and sponsorships and commissions— whatever you godless animals are doing to “hustle” your way to “financial security”.

People who embed western astrology as identity are missing true-astrological alignment consciousness™ and they’re shackling themselves to a “performance culture” that seriously, seriously doesn’t deserve your best right now.

When we perform, it should be in good health, in wide support, with people who know there’s a deeper story. Right now, everybody lives on the surface. The healthcare system is a nightmare. And since I’ve been laid off and couldn’t return to work after my maternity leave, I found every façadic system of support to be insubstantial and near-intangible. The system is full of ghosts.

While free-floating in unemployment (and not for lack of trying to secure new employment), my brain ticks and tocks around missing pieces, contradictions, bad assumptions, and hope for the future.

In a soon-to-be-written piece, I’d like to introduce my own astrology assimilation as “Butterfly Theory” — it takes two wings to fly, but first, we crawl.

If you have dabbled in western astrology, I would impress that you have been trying to fly with one wing. A wing that models who you could have been 2000 years ago. This wing is precious, but never meant to carry you alone. I invite you to look up or review your sidereal chart.

At time of writing Sidereal-Lahiri I think is more accurate to a fraction of a degree to the internal person ready to shake the dust off. For yourself, not for performance. Not for productivity, for authenticity.

Discover authenticity, move in rhythm with the performance, efficiently acclimate to true-astrological alignment consciousness™, and we the world will to start making sense again.

That’s the jist.

This’ll be another I toss in my “unpolished” bin,

I’m literally meta-astrology rambling.

Most people are niche-pinning, but I can’t niche, I drill into everything.

And politics really is boring. I seriously think they all think they’re “making great television” but we’re mortified.

Political hysteria = views = 💰💰💰= all they really care about

So, go ahead, chrysalize. I want to see you flex. 🦋

I believe in the patience of the rings of Uranus and the beautiful display they might make for us one future day, and how it will stay, in spite of 42 years of darkness, the rings will cast a glow, a spectacle, and remind, when you orient yourself, just so, even on your darkest nights, your halo will reflect the light.

I mean, I asked a primary care physician for a nutrition pamphlet and he told me I was better off asking ChatGPT. 😵‍💫🙃

Resumes now have to:

• give ATS keyword filtering enough “confidence”

• get passed AI detection software

  • and emulate human tone

  • while still being received as ‘professional’

There’s a slippery slope to be acknowledged in what we outsource to machines.

I remember a call to action (CTA) from whoever’s Facebook feed:

“Boycott self-checkouts! Cashiers who depend on their hours for income are suffering from cutbacks.“

Okay, but nobody appreciates earning minimum wage standing at a cash register interfacing with every customer at a surface level with the minimum pass for conversation:

“Hi, how are you doing, did you find everything okay?”

The polite person answers, “yes, thank you, I’m doing good, how are you?” Anything beyond that exchange is unnecessary inconvenience or social flexing.

There are some humans who appreciate this as it helps to satisfy their social health requirements and they would be disgruntled at the “invasion” of self-checkout as the predominant closer to the shopping experience, and in my opinion, this is selfish.

Denying progress for the sake of clinging to the status quo… among other things, is selfish.

Instead of arbitrary pushback on every advancement, it is our responsibility to develop maturity.

Without preaching like I have any authority on maturity, let’s discuss reality.

COVID-19 set the precedent for an inflation which has not continued to justify itself in 2026. Yes, there are tariffs obscuring the economics; yes, global trade is hell right now.

1. We have huge problems with the amount of dependence we have on other countries’ resources.

2. If not, we are paying what we paid because we set the expectation that we would pay for it.

   1. ‘Supply and Demand’ is still taught in public schools, but this doesn’t represent reality.

In January 2021, some hedge funds against GameStop got shafted. 2 things happened:

1. People with a lot of money expected to accrue a lot more money, and didn’t.

2. People, perhaps with less starting money, with many different educations and backgrounds stumbled into sums of money that had the potential to boost their class thanks to the chaos of Wall Street.

Nobody says this out loud, but people with lots of money who count on their bets as “sure things” are not good sports when they lose.

And if you think, “why does that matter, they can’t do anything about it.”

😂😂😂

If you don’t understand how much our institutions are built to cater to the rich… public school did you dirty.

(because of course it did)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substack

Let this be a “bite the hand that feeds” demonstration. Just to set the tone.

https://sacra.com/research/substack-at-45m-year/

Let’s just focus on the 94-employee representation they had in 2022.

$19,000,000/94 ≈ $202,000

And that’s if it’s distributed evenly (and of course it’s not, and of course it gets re-invested back into the product(and of course that product is working on its own advertising product(I’m so tired of the commercialist regime (this is a war)))).

It’s not “publicly traded”, but potential investors still buy or sell shares through secondary marketplaces for private securities, such as Hiive, Forge Global, EquityZen, or Nasdaq Private Market. The company was valued at roughly $1.1 billion following a $100 million Series C round in July 2025.

They’re still playing the game, just at a level more inaccessible than “the common man’s stock markets” … and they have to keep looking like a great investment.

This regime’s status quo:

-Ad revenue

No other business model matches its “hustle”…

and it’s nauseating.

This is an unstoppable force until people start opting-out.

… alternatives look a little like this:

https://youtu.be/rrKSy5C3Two?si=WGL1wKxvsG5Xoyjb

Migration becomes the necessary inconvenience (read: evil, lol) to escape inhospitable conditions.

With inequality skewed across the board, there’s major challenge in acting in solidarity and migrating together.

We operate with a lack of foresight about what we’re trading away for convenience and gratification now.

We operate without base levels of trust across any node, sector, and junction of civilization.

We trap ourselves in the idiom, “better the devil that we know, and not the devil that we don’t.” This is justified. What safeguards do we have in place that migrating from one YouTube to the next won’t render the same conditions that required us to move in the first place? Migration isn’t free. Even digital upheaval creates a cognitive tax.

As a species, at least, from my perspective, in my country, we have been onslaught with requirements for adaptability like has never been seen before. And with so much pressure and survival anxiety, we don’t have much room to breathe to stop and ask: “what are we adapting for?”

I was in 7th grade when my history teacher instructed us to bring a floppy disk to save our PowerPoint presentations. The next year, we were using USB. The save icon hasn’t even been forced to adapt to times-changed. 💾

it’s basically a double standard. 😂

Back to “trust” because something else occurred to me. Without “base levels of trust”, we actually outsource it to branding.

You can make $1+ million by starting a company, establishing a recognizable logo, accruing a verifiable customer base, and selling off your name to the highest bidder who stands to gain, not just from devouring competition, but piggybacking off of “homegrown” or “black-owned” vibes that vanish overnight, but no one doubletakes to notice.

The value you actually created: 0.

You achieved nothing. You accomplished nothing. You served no purpose but to churn for the existing regime. Thank you for your service 🫡

Since the Industrial Revolution, “having money” has been made synonymous with stability, safety, and security which are human needs. “At what cost?” is a question that doesn’t often make it into circulation.

I guess I’m running out of steam (sorry for the meta-commentary) and I’m going to close out here before I think myself to death about polishing this.

I kindly leave you with this think-bite:

If humanity was tasked to harmonize community with technology, what kind of institutions and constructs, cultures or efficiencies would emerge?

Thanks for your view.

I don’t have Stripe payments turned on here, and I’m considering setting up Ko-fi more than considering gating content, but I haven’t set any decisions into stone yet.

Please take care of yourself. The best is yet to come. 🌹

This worked better than TodayRSS app’s integrated Apple Intelligence and didn’t require external AI API keys like SmartRSS, which was another popular choice.

There seems not to be:

• Subscription tiers

• Embedded ads

On their website, checking briefly, I could not find easily how to support the creators.

Notably, their “About” section in-app includes a dedication:

“Dedicated to everyone working to save democracy in the United States and around the world.”

So in my honest opinion, they’ve got their heads on straight.

Upon install, it was preloaded with 10 RSS feeds, presumably intricately linked to the creators and their most profound supporters.

However, I have not been forced to view these feeds yet once.

Inversely, I just installed Substack app and I was forced:

• to select (at least) 3 topics that “interest me”

• immediately into a substack-flavor Facebook timeline

…and all I wanted was to write this post to declare the start of my journey.

I have adult-diagnosed autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and there are not many ASD-friendly places on the internet.

Substack force-funneling traffic to … whatever a user might qualify as “interesting” may work very well for their business model and metrics for success, but it doesn’t work for me.

I don’t want to be here anymore than I want to be stuck living in my parents’ house again, without a bedroom door, sleeping on a couch next to my two year old daughter, sleeping comfortably on a futon on the floor next to me.

But here I am.

I mentioned ASD and I would like to leave a disclaimer: the DSM-5 is a catalog for insurance billing codes. It tends very little to the human in desperate need of tools for supporting and understanding themselves. I digress.

I’ll take this opportunity to beg myself this question:

“Where would I rather be?”

Presently, I am assuming Substack is not a headless CMS, so that needs to be addressed.

At time of writing, GitHub is not littered with ads and funneling and I find its current format to be quite palatable.

Not that GitHub is a headless CMS, but I’m working up to that.

Tarot pulls for Instagram would be a slippery slope. It loves to drown your focus and siphon your time away (and try to sell you overpriced jewelry).

👀 did she just say ‘tarot’? didn’t she say she has an engineering degree?

Not yet, but I have a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering.

It was probably as hard as it sounds to achieve. I like math, though.

Anyway, “where would I rather be” —

I suppose, too, it depends on the scope of the question, for sure.

Immediate plans? Might include getting a $5/month VPS on Linode to host a Ghost blog for me; get it set up with MailGun and recruit some newsletter subscriptions.

The 3% (bullshit) Stripe payment processor fee is inescapable. I’ve looked. The closest “hack” I’ve found is establishing a non-profit organization (NPO), obtaining your EIN and getting set up with Zeffy, a non-profit supporting non-profits, and their processor absorbs the (otherwise inescapable) Stripe fee and nudges would-be donors to tip or make an additional donation to support Zeffy and their efforts in covering those costs for non-profits.

Besides that, peer-to-peer (P2P).

(and good luck with that)

I like the idea of Ghost. It’s open-source. It’s available to self-host. It plays well with Docker and I could run it on my raspberry pi.

I know, I’ve tried.

Unfortunately, at present, I’m internet-ing off my dad’s router where who knows how many boys are trying to play Valorant at any given time, and for stability’s sake, the $5/month VPS …may justify its cost… if I can prove to myself that I’m actually a writer.

So, here I am.

Hello, Substack.

My long-term goals are hilariously ambitious and grotesquely altruistic in contrast with reality v.2026

I don’t want to be secretive, but it feels a lot like nobody’s ready to really listen. Which, is fine, I have no control over that, but for all the good in the world and in my heart, it stands to be undone by numerous layers of hypocrisy in every level of civilization from intrapersonal to family dynamics to, oh, surprise, surprise:

• politics

• systems

• wealth inequality

Expanding the list just triggers anxiety and I don’t want to do that.

But many creators do. Creators (not all, I suppose) have income streams dependent upon mass emotional volatility.

You don’t have to think about it if it’s triggering.

I don’t want to trigger you.

If I don’t switch to Ghost, I may try to rig up an Obsidian vault to a Cloudflare worker, but I think that might cost me native RSS.

…which… doesn’t have to be a backwards step if it serves its purpose, but something in my infrastructure plan clicked into place today around RSS.

RSS is the kind of internet … it’s probably still our best toy even though we forget and forgot because we got shiny new toys for Christmas, but RSS isn’t gone *5 second dance break*

and it takes some preliminary setup complication out of the systems in my head.

😮‍💨

Closing out after midnight,

Lauren X Reluna