Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2005 "AS I HAVE SAID, this isn't the first time your civilization has been at this brink. I want to repeat this, because it is vital that you hear this. Once before on your planet, the technology you developed was far greater than your ability to use it responsibly. You are approaching the same point in human history again. It is vitally important that you understand this. Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology rather than your technology being a product of your society. When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself." WE'RE JUST MERE hours from the Capricorn ingress of the Sun, and that's got some personal meaning in this neck of the woods: Winter Solstice is the birthday of PlanetWaves.net. Like most companies we have several charts, including the first horoscope chart from 1995 (miraculously preserved in the file creation time). But Winter Solstice 1998 was the first time I posted a page to the URL PlanetWaves.net. Appropriately, the chart has an Aquarius Moon (flanked by Neptune and Uranus) and a Mercury-Pluto conjunction in Sagittarius. For those curious, I will give a very abbreviated version of the story. I was called to astrology in the peak of my investigative reporting career from the New York Post horoscope by Patric Walker. I had been covering fraud and environmental scandals for quite a while when, one day, after three years of reading this really mysterious horoscope, I simply HAD to figure out how he wrote it; so I bought an ephemeris and each night would take the column apart, looking up the different planetary references. About one year later, I started writing a column called The Navigator in a local paper in New York called Free Time, which column became Planet Waves. Shortly after starting the column, I was invited onto WVKR, Vassar College radio, as a guest. The session went on for about two hours on a Sunday afternoon, and a family in update New York, Al and Paula Sirois, were listening to the interview. They were Web developers -- even in 1996. They called me up and offered a trade, astrology sessions for a web site. That was The Worlds of Eric Francis page (long forgotten, but which I'm about to acquire the archives of and will post to Planet Waves in the next couple of months). Soon after, the column was picked up by AOL-UK, where it ran on Mystic Gardens for about five years. Skip ahead a couple of dozen details. By the fall of 1998, the horoscope was weekly, and I was ready for a more serious Web page. With the help of a friend named Keiko, we figured out the basics of Adobe PageMill and about an hour later, Planet Waves was born (early editions are archived in The Wayback Machine and easy to find). The first page had a thing that looked like a fried egg for a graphic (which stayed on the cover for about two or three years) and the contents page had satellite dish from a stock photo CD that I had fried in Photo shop and unfortunately cannot find. To make a long story short, the besides writing a horoscope and getting things going, the other main thing that happened that basically put Planet Waves on the map was that somebody named Via Keller showed up -- a collage artist from northern California. For the next couple of years (actually, she just sent in some new work) her artistic vision set the aesthetic and made sure we had a readership that was into astrology AND beauty -- and soon after, news. The project has gone through many phases and minor reinventions, but always keeping the same basic theme of The Personal is Political. This was one of the first articles ever posted to the site. http://www.planetwaves.net/thinking.html And there you have it -- Planet Waves is seven years old. I know there are are readers who have been around since the beginning; I hear from you every now and again. To everyone -- thank you for showing up, for supporting the project, for reading so carefully and for caring about the world. I consider the readers of Planet Waves to be a rare breed. You may be wondering why we're doing the 8th annual horoscope in the name of Parallel Worlds; that's because an annual horoscope was one of the first projects early that winter. Here it is, The Year You Don't Forget, the 1999 annual horoscope, published seven years ago this week (with interpretation notes), written in New Jersey. http://www.planetwaves.net/PWH1-1-99.html And here is the second, written in Miami: http://www.planetwaves.net/2000.html For more about Parallel Worlds, the 8th Annual Edition, see this link. http://www.planetwaves.net/charts/parallel_worlds_charts/index_promo.html Reach Via at http://psycherotica.com | ||||||
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