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Last February, it came to my attention that Watcher of the Dawn was trying to transition from snarking about the various Golden Dawn orders to setting itself up as the new Augoeides. Since the big Golden Dawn flame wars seemed to have died down, it was understandable that they might be looking to do something else. But as I said at the time, this is my beat. I stepped up my posting, both on the weird news side and the serious magick side, and it appeared that I won quite quickly. Watcher was back to only a couple of posts a month by last May.
But it looks like they've decided to try again. In April, the posting frequency jumped back up and the site is posting some of the same sorts of stories I have on here again. Thankfully, the "World's First New Age Tabloid" tagline is gone, because that was a lie. I was here first, folks. And while Augoeides is much more than a New Age tabloid, with serious magick articles and the like, a lot of my weird news and religion news posts certainly count as exactly that kind of subject matter. The monetization angle looks to be gone as well, which is smart. As I pointed out last year, there's no way to make any serious money blogging about the occult.
And I joke, sort of. It's not like Augoeides is the only paranormal blog in the world, and there's certainly room for more than one. But I also can be stubbornly competitive when I put my mind to it, which generally works out better for my readers. After all, who doesn't want to see more posts and more content? So that's what I'm going to do - I'll see if I can step up my game a little more here and vanquish Watcher once more. You know, in the metaphoric sense. Tracking down articles to post every day or even every other day takes time and effort. I'm used to that. But are they? Last time it seemed like they ran out of steam pretty quickly.
To be fair, there are some areas that Watcher could conceivably cover that I generally ignore. For example, I don't cover a lot of scandals involving religious leaders because they usually don't touch on the topic of "spiritual technology." It's not that, say, stories about religious leaders engaging in the sexual abuse of children or parishioners aren't important, but there's also not much to say besides pointing out that such leaders are simply awful human beings - and I shouldn't even need to say that since it's so obvious. But it does fit with Watcher's previous "scandal sheet" aspirations, and I would think that widening the focus from the Golden Dawn to religion in general would yield a lot of stories that I probably won't cover here.
As far as mainstream Christianity goes, one of my biggest targets is the "Prosperity Gospel" movement precisely because I think their tech is hopelessly broken and simply can't work. If you donate money, God isn't going to magically give you more. But prosperity preachers keep trying to convince people that this time, for sure, it will work, when as a magician I know that it never will. Also, the blog has become more political since the presidential election, in part because I really dislike our current president, but mostly because his administration seems determined to enshrine religious discrimination into law under the guise of "religious freedom." I've been fighting against that bullshit for years, and I'm not about to give it up now.
At any rate, Watcher, game on. Again. Let's see if you can keep up this time.
But it looks like they've decided to try again. In April, the posting frequency jumped back up and the site is posting some of the same sorts of stories I have on here again. Thankfully, the "World's First New Age Tabloid" tagline is gone, because that was a lie. I was here first, folks. And while Augoeides is much more than a New Age tabloid, with serious magick articles and the like, a lot of my weird news and religion news posts certainly count as exactly that kind of subject matter. The monetization angle looks to be gone as well, which is smart. As I pointed out last year, there's no way to make any serious money blogging about the occult.
And I joke, sort of. It's not like Augoeides is the only paranormal blog in the world, and there's certainly room for more than one. But I also can be stubbornly competitive when I put my mind to it, which generally works out better for my readers. After all, who doesn't want to see more posts and more content? So that's what I'm going to do - I'll see if I can step up my game a little more here and vanquish Watcher once more. You know, in the metaphoric sense. Tracking down articles to post every day or even every other day takes time and effort. I'm used to that. But are they? Last time it seemed like they ran out of steam pretty quickly.
To be fair, there are some areas that Watcher could conceivably cover that I generally ignore. For example, I don't cover a lot of scandals involving religious leaders because they usually don't touch on the topic of "spiritual technology." It's not that, say, stories about religious leaders engaging in the sexual abuse of children or parishioners aren't important, but there's also not much to say besides pointing out that such leaders are simply awful human beings - and I shouldn't even need to say that since it's so obvious. But it does fit with Watcher's previous "scandal sheet" aspirations, and I would think that widening the focus from the Golden Dawn to religion in general would yield a lot of stories that I probably won't cover here.
As far as mainstream Christianity goes, one of my biggest targets is the "Prosperity Gospel" movement precisely because I think their tech is hopelessly broken and simply can't work. If you donate money, God isn't going to magically give you more. But prosperity preachers keep trying to convince people that this time, for sure, it will work, when as a magician I know that it never will. Also, the blog has become more political since the presidential election, in part because I really dislike our current president, but mostly because his administration seems determined to enshrine religious discrimination into law under the guise of "religious freedom." I've been fighting against that bullshit for years, and I'm not about to give it up now.
At any rate, Watcher, game on. Again. Let's see if you can keep up this time.
2 comments:
We apparently worried someone with one of our stories so much that we were taken down by a hacker. We set it up a again and were taken down again. Everyone got depressed and found themselves too busy to write anything. I set everything up again with a more bullet proof structure. Weird... it survived the GD wars and when we started reporting on other groups and writing news it was then the hackers got nasty. We lost all the old content in the hacks too which shows how nasty it was.
There is no competition... we are just interested in the news side and leaving the blogs for people to do in their own time and somewhere else.
Well, I figure a little friendly rivalry is not going to hurt either of us. That's weird about the whole hacking thing. Maybe the reason you never got hit by the other GD groups is that none of their members are any good at it. Either that, or they just didn't care - but I find that hard to believe with some of the personalities involved in the GD flamewars.
Anyway, best of luck to you. I'm going to see if I can channel my irrational competitive urges into writing more and better posts, which is a win for everybody.
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