Mobile is just about the perfect platform for turn-based RPGs, where battles tend to take place in contained, small screen-friendly environments and sessions can be as short or as long as you like.... Tagged as:

Apple Music Classical was updated today with CarPlay and Siri support, as well as stability and performance improvements, according to Apple.


CarPlay support was briefly added to a previous version of Apple Music Classical earlier this year, but it was removed just hours later. Starting with version 2.1 today, the app is once again available on CarPlay, as shown in our screenshot below.

CarPlay support provides Apple Music Classical listeners with access to their playlists, library, recommendations, and more on their vehicle's infotainment display. And with Siri on iOS 18.1 and later, users can also search via CarPlay for composers, artists, works, and instruments in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch, according to Apple. Additional languages will follow over time.


Apple Music Classical first launched in March 2023, offering users with a standard Apple Music subscription access to over five million classical music tracks at no additional cost. The streaming app features advanced search functionality, exclusive artwork, extensive metadata, curated listening recommendations, and more.

The app is available for the iPhone and iPad, as well as Android. It is based on Primephonic, a classical music streaming service acquired by Apple in 2021.

Elected Republicans, almost all of them, are in no hurry to stop the disorder. They appear to believe what we're watching is a version of the Rodney King riots from 1992. People saw an upsetting video on the internet, they're angry, and that's understandable. But they'll calm down soon, and we can get back to cutting capital gains taxes and sanctioning Bashar al- Assad. That's their view of it. They are wrong. This is not a momentary civil disturbance. This is a serious and highly organized political movement. It is not superficial. It is deep and profound. It has vast ambitions. It is insidious; it will grow. Its goal is to end liberal democracy and challenge Western civilization itself. This is an ideological movement. The ideas that fuel it have incubated for decades on college campuses. We paid for all of it, by the way. The rest of us were so thrilled that our kids got into Duke that we decided to ignore what Duke was actually teaching them and are continuing to send big checks. That was a mistake. It was one of the greatest mistakes we've ever made. Continue reading →

Censorship is antithetical to the scientific method because it requires free speech and open debate and skepticism Continue reading →

Glenn Greenwald: "So you have huge number of journalists who believe that, they have the right to lie and even when they get caught, they don't care because they know their audience won't hold it against them." Continue reading →

I posted about Situational Awareness at HPT Treasures today. What I didn't say in that post was that I've experimented with a few different methods...

When we wake up to who we are, something happens. We stop identifying with our egoic selves because we realize they are impermanent and only that which is permanent can be who we are.

We aren’t our bodies, we aren’t our memories, we aren’t our thoughts, we aren’t our feelings… We aren’t any of these things, so we stop identifying with them. What happens is that detachment develops. An aloofness or distancing from everything that occurs. We wake up to the fact that life is an extended dream and a relaxation is able to set in. It’s a sense of calm or a feeling that ‘all is well.’

We lose our identity with our lives, thoughts and feelings, so we witness them but we don’t engage with them. We notice them, but we don’t create stories with them. Since we don’t create ... Read More »

The post The Paradoxical World of Spiritual Enlightenment: We are nothing but we are everything appeared first on Enlightenment Podcast.

Learn Spells the Easy Way! Click HERE!

Dear GreyWolf,

I have a dilemma.  I’m out as a witch to my friends, and most of them have asked me to do spells for them.  Last night, I got two requests.  The first came from a friend who’s mom has pneumonia and may have cancer. She’s very worried, and she wanted to know what all she could do, and what I could do.  I gave her some practical advice, told her to pray and to get as many people as she could to pray, and I told her that my husband and I would so a healing spell for her mother, if she got her mother’s permission, which she did.  Her mother is also in the hospital, so she’s under medical care.

The second request is the one I have the problem with.  Another friend had asked me a while back to do a spell to keep her ex from terrorizing her and her son.  I told her to first go to the police, tell them what was going on, and get an order of protection.  I told her that if she followed through and showed that she was really serious, then I would do a spell of protection for her.  She’s in a very sick relationship with this guy, and I really don’t want her blaming me if he ever leaves her for good.  Last night, she said she didn’t want me to do a spell of protection anymore. She wants me to do a spell that makes him treat her better.  I have some qualms about any spell that “makes” someone do anything.  It gets worse though; then as we were doing some other things, she says under her breath, “It’s a sin, you know.”  I said, “If you think it’s a sin, why would you want me to do a spell for you in the first place?”  Then she said, “Oh, it’s not a sin.”  I’ve pretty much made up my mind on the whole business of doing any spells for her, but I don’t know how to tell her without losing a friend.  She’s not very bright, so no conversation we’ve ever had has gone smoothly.  I have to repeat myself all the time and backtrack on everything to make myself clear to her, and even then, I’m not sure I’m getting through half the time.  Anything I did tell her would have to be broken down into its simplest elements.  Any advice you give me would be well appreciated.

Blessed Be,
Spider

Dear Spider,

I really appreciate your high ethical value. It is a sign of competency and strong professional standards that you want to talk through a dilemma. Doctors and counselors do it all the time. The professionalism comes in knowing when to ask questions, not in always knowing the answers–so I applaud you!

In the first situation, I would do the same thing you did. Any time I’m doing a spell, I want to get everyone’s permission, and you absolutely had permission to do a healing spell. Studies show that prayer actually works, and I know from personal experience that magic, spells, lighting a candle, and raising energy do too. By not limiting your healing to magic, you are helping the spell to work even better–that is, getting medical care is what she needs too.

As for your other friend, well…I feel sorry for her. It’s like someone asks for your help, and then yells at you for doing it wrong. She wants spells done for her, but she believes it is a sin? She doesn’t need magic, she needs a priest, in whatever religion she feels most comfortable. Your magic is not going to work on someone who doesn’t want it to work or who thinks it is wrong–and I don’t care how good a spellcaster you are! The deeply held beliefs about sin are difficult to get rid of, even for new converts to Paganism, and if she’s not converting and doesn’t plan to address these ideas, she won’t get out of them with your help.

Sometimes, ethically, we have to just say no.

This will be hard for you–you’re gifted and people come to you for help. But we can’t learn lessons for other people. You know she’s in a bad relationship, and even if you try and help–no matter how wrong it is–if she doesn’t want it, it won’t work. Ask any Alcoholic working on recovery–she must help herself first. Likely, she’ll have to hit rock bottom, or find some deeply rooted boundary where going back to her terrible relationship is no longer an option.

But, can you have some sympathy for her? She’d rather be abused than be alone, and she’s living with some serious fear. In scary situations, adrenalin tells us to fight or fight…and also freeze. Even though she knows the way out is just like you said, calling the police and getting a protection order, etc, she still doesn’t see the way out. The question for you is this: can you honor her inner divinity to believe that she can solve her own problems?

Being blunt with people by being direct and addressing problems head on actually honors the inherent divinity in another. It means you believe that they don’t have to be coddled or protected, but can handle things if they just have enough information. By asking her to go to the police, you have done your ethical duty and are not required to do more. (Unless you are a mandatory reporter such as a teacher or counselor, and then it depends on your state requirements, so find out what you are required to report. For example, in my state, I’m required to report child abuse but not adult or elder abuse, and I’m required to report suicidal or intent to harm another. But in a pastoral counseling capacity, I am not required to report anything under most circumstances–KNOW YOUR RULES!). Anything after that, magically, is like throwing your energy down a bottomless pit, or running into a brick wall.

If you did a spell for her, and it worked, she’ll blame you. If you do a spell for her and it doesn’t work, she’ll blame you. Because she has to learn her own lessons. She has to take responsibility for herself and her child. By asking you to do it for her is a way of being passive and she is not learning a lesson. It sounds like, for you, she’s hard to talk to, so it may take her a little longer to learn what she needs to do. I guarantee you that many many people both more and less intelligent than her have figured out what they needed to do in her exact situation. And it doesn’t matter how many times somebody told them what they needed to do–they must choose their own path. You want her to change and have the tools to make it happen, but she has to want to. She has to use the tools for herself. And frankly, some people are not ready to change. But if we, as helpers, hold others to the highest standard they are capable of meeting, they will eventually meet it, and may even thank you for it.

We can’t always do the spells that other people want. Sometimes it is not ethical or in the client’s best interest. I often won’t because I don’t want to get involved in their drama spiral, or I don’t want to reward bad behavior with attention. Magically, if you feel you must do something, you can always do a spell for general wellness and gentle spiritual growth. I’ll do something relatively passive, like light a healing candle in their name. The magic will go where it is needed. You feel good because you’ve done something, which will return to you three-fold, theoretically, and you won’t lose any sleep thinking you’re tied up in an ethical dilemma with a person you really don’t want much to do with.

As a counselor, if I had a client like the one you are talking about, I would do either one of two things: 1) refer her to another clinician, since she is not getting what she thinks she wants with me and we are making no headway. It is not ethical for me to continue taking money from someone who is not getting anything out of services after a reasonable amount of time, if another clinician might be able to do more. 2) close her file, and give her the option to return when she commits to therapy. The Witch and the Counselor are essentially in the same business, we just use different tools to help clients create change. Closing a client file, or refering out to another does not make you a failure in any way. It proves that you are holding their needs above your own. Not every spell will work for every body, nor every therapist for every client.

And now, I honor you enough to know that, with enough information, you’ll be able to figure out the best course of action for you. If I had a client like that, she’d be pushing all my buttons. Good luck!

"To what extent is science a strong-link problem?", Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, 10/30/2024 [emphasis added]: Here’s a fascinating and worrying news story in Science: a top US researcher apparently falsified a lot of images (at least) in papers that helped get experimental drugs on the market — papers that were published in top […]

[This is a guest post by Michael Witzel] A few months ago you published a discussion of whimsical surnames. Since then I have paid attention and have found new ones in  almost every news broadcast. It is said that there are 1 million (!) surnames in the German speaking area of some 95 million people […]

[This is a guest post by Denis Mair]      Cai Xutie was a Taiwanese woman who ran a family farm with her husband in a village near Jiayi in central Taiwan. She was a rice farmer and had never attended a public school. After her husband died in middle age, she sold some of the land, […]

Milkweed fluff and magic gold mica — love how these bookends came out. They actually are magical. ????. In the shop!