For about two years I worked full time in the computer industry. I worked in quality assurance for two computer game companies (including Disney Interactive) and then taught basic computer operation, graphics and 3D animation at USC. Later, I returned to QA (quality assurance) at another company and also did some customer support. When you help consumers, to keep track of how you spend your time, you keep a record of each call and how you handled it. There is an abbreviation often seen in the record: RTFM. Without going into details, it basically means that the consumer could have avoided their problem and not wasted our time if they had just Read The Freakin' Manual. (The "F" doesn't

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Philip H. Farber, author of Brain Magick: Exercises in Meta-Magick and Invocation. When I was younger I took a perverse pleasure getting into religious arguments. While I’ve always tended toward agnosticism and never felt very strongly one way or the other about organized religions, I took it as fair game that anyone coming to my door trying to convince me to join their religion was a ripe target. I was often amazed at how proselytizers could ignore simple logic and profess faith in what I considered to be pretty far-fetched ideas. It was fun, but I eventually grew out of it. These days, the dialectic between religious zealots and

There are certain initiations we all go through, whether they are formal or not. Birth is an initiation into this life. Death is an initiation into the next. Puberty is an initiation into adulthood, and many cultures have puberty rites. Going through serious ailments or experiencing the death of a loved one is an initiations into understanding the true nature of a limited life span. One of the most important initiations is the choosing of a life partner, symbolized by the ritual of marriage. This is going to be a brief post because, by the time you read this, I will have gone through the first step of this life-changing initiation. We're doing it today at the courthouse with a few

This is the concluding section of lesson 6 in my series on basic magick. In this lesson I've so far covered the following topics: Why the LBRP Matters Secrets of the Kabalistic Cross More Secrets of the Kabalistic Cross Sounds of the Kabalistic Cross Understanding the Formulation of the Pentagrams The Names that Charge the Pentagrams, and The Formulation of the Pentagrams As a brief recap, so far you've performed the Kabalistic Cross and the Formulation of the Pentagrams. You now return to the center of your magickal circle (just east of the altar, if you have one) and face to the East. Filling you with energy vertically is spiritual energy from the Divine. Mixing with