Just a random life update. – Winnie Bell

Many writers and artists like to keep their next big project secret until it’s ready to launch. This is a wise decision. Although I’m not very smart. Also, anyway, you can’t trust what I say about my “next” project, because I keep changing my mind.

Etirataro Art Project

Yes, in theory, in my mind, I’m still working on it Advance tarot cards. However, I haven’t made any progress since the last Etteilla update. I have completed 39 out of 78 cards 0f. Yeah, about the halfway point.

This is just a first draft.you may remember My SKT projectafter I “finished” the first draft of all 80 cards, I pretty much went back and redid most of them.

One of the reasons I’ve been procrastinating at this point is a ridiculous superstition: I have no “good” cards left to draw. Yeah, yeah, don’t say there are no good or bad cards in tarot. I also towed the party line.

But just talk to any tarot artist and they will Tell.you.Uh, but actually there is yes From the artist’s life experience, there are things like lucky cards and unlucky cards. Just like when you read a tarot card, life experience often reflects the meaning and energy of that tarot card. Let me tell you very quickly, you will start to become superstitious and believe in good cards versus bad cards.

I was afraid of having to make some less interesting cards.

At SKT, as some of you have witnessed, I work at a pretty fast pace, so even when I deal with a “bad” card, it only lasts a few days. But for my Etteilla deck, each card took me several months.So if I start a “bad” card, it’s moon The energy of this card must be dealt with!

The Tao Te Ching (& Wen Shi Zhen Jing)

I also translated and annotated the Tao Te Ching and conducted research on the commentary about The Tao Te Ching (TTC) covers every dynasty in China’s thousands of years of history, tracking the evolution of how the text is interpreted.

I think one of my personal strengths is spotting patterns, whether it’s spotting questions on law school exams and legal fact patterns, or reading a lot of tarot cards, or seeing noteworthy sentence structures and phrase transitions in the Tao Te Ching. It is also reflected in the Five Classics, including the Book of Changes. (Oh, and one more perk of working on the TTC back The I Ching clearly sees all the I Ching references and influences in TTC. This is already cool.

Discovery mode completely opens up another dimension and context of understanding for TTC.Because then you can apply logical tautology, synthesize, say, every reference Wu “Wu Wei” in the text, or every reference to all things, stillness, or even Tao, and leads to exciting insights into these principles.

I have talked about “Wen’s True Classic” here (also known as Guanyinzi), a legendary TTC-adjacent text said to have been written by a janitor who received the teachings of Laozi and later became the Tao Te Ching text. There is an implicit understanding that TTC leans more toward external teachings, while Guanyinzi leans toward esotericism.

According to legend, the gatekeeper first memorized Laozi’s works, and then studied the Tao Te Ching himself to gain the Tao. After gaining the Tao, he wrote the “Wen Shi Zhen Jing”.

Since both books are fairly short, it wouldn’t be crazy to combine the two into one book project.

I haven’t quite figured out what I want to do with the final working product. At this point, I’m not keen on releasing it the traditional way unless I can retain full control, oversight, and veto power over all parts of design and production, full stop. I’m equally not enthusiastic about personally putting in the work required to independently publish a book like this.

@#$​​%^&* novel

For those of you who have forgotten that I wrote a novel at some point, yes, you’re not the only one; it seems like I forgot too. I mean. I’m still real, real Want to publish a novel and earn a novel writing badge.

I love writing historical fiction where the plot is driven by characters and events from the historical record, as realistic as possible, and then where there are holes in our historical record, that’s where I fill in the plot with fantastical stories and magical explanations .

But I’ve found that writing a novel requires more mental bandwidth than any other type of creative project. So as new shiny objects tempt my magpie mind, the novel moves lower and lower on the to-do list.

educational videos

On a different note, has anyone else noticed a change in the tone of my YouTube channel? I don’t just mean me and the themes I upload. I’m talking about the comment section.

The channel has maintained a slow and steady growth rate for 8 consecutive years, and the number of subscribers has remained below 20,000 during these 8 years. Then just last year, its subscriber count exploded to 40,000.

The top line graph above shows that as of last year in 2023, I have numbers just above 20K, and then you see a sharp spike in 2024. It soared by 12K in less than 4 months. And I still don’t quite understand why.

Oh yes, I know, people with YouTube channels are supposed to pretend we don’t care about our numbers and pretend to be highly unconcerned about such trivial matters.But I would say caring is just a human thing; just “middle of the road” meaning not caring also a lot of.

Also, for those of you who have a YouTube channel, you know how that section in your YouTube dashboard lists other channels that your subscribers watch? For a long time, I knew all the other channels because they were my friends. This means that this is a close-knit online community.Now suddenly all the other channels have names I don’t recognize or yes huge The only pipe I know of as everyone else knows of them.

Of course, at first, like everyone else, I did an excited, happy dance. It felt good to be seen. But it didn’t take long for the bubble to burst and people to realize the negative impact of visibility.

The wisdom of the golden mean in all things is so profound that it is difficult to comprehend. It’s tough when you feel like you’re putting in a lot of effort and getting nothing in return. When your popularity is at a moderate level, you are generally popular and highly regarded. That’s the sweetest part.but when you are considered also see and also Talk about, for some reason, when the public turns against you and now you’re overhyped and you don’t deserve all the attention you get and people pick on your every flaw. Even a reasonably foreseeable spelling mistake will be taken as solid evidence that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

When I post videos, I feel like who I’m talking to changes. Instead of making a video and sharing it with a small group of the same old, same old people sitting in a circle in a well-lit room, it now feels like standing on a stage with a dazzling spotlight burning at the top. head. When I looked outside to see who exactly I was talking to, I saw nothing but emptiness. It’s dark and you can’t make eye contact with any familiar faces.Oh, and you only know There are people who will look you up and down, keen to interpret everything and anything you say in the worst possible way, and oh, of course, the power of the evil eye increases exponentially as you start getting more exposure. The bigger your ratings, the more hate watchers you’ll get.

It’s rewarding when people contact me or comment on how my film content has helped them develop knowledge and understanding of these topics. But do the rewards outweigh the negative consequences of being a content creator? I have no idea.

Being an optimistic person is a privilege because it means that the people in your life and your experiences are generally positive, and because of what you lost you also gained back, you can see that the glass is half full of. When you have to experience a real loss, there is no way to recover, no way to compensate for the pain you have suffered, and you have the misfortune of experiencing irreversible negative social interactions, you think the glass is half empty. People who can withstand such misfortune and still remain optimistic are rare, and I know myself well enough to know that I am not a rare bird.

My real-life face-to-face interactions put me in a good position. That’s why I always have faith and hope in people. I want to continue to have faith and hope. Sometimes I wonder if recurring negative online social interactions might dampen this optimism. Do I really want to stay and risk that optimism being eroded?