Prometheus - Interactive Astrology, and More!

One massive, and super exciting announcement, plus another smaller announcement. Because what's the fun in just one announcement! Announcements should always come in pairs, that's what everyone in marketing will tell you.

Prometheus

I am SO excited to share the project I've been half-secretly working on for a few weeks now, that I'm kinda peeing a little. Just a bit.

This project was incepted after a confluence of factors made it clear that it was a fate not to be avoided. The factors were:

• My good friend, astrologer, and spiritual ally: Alice, pushing me to learn astrology, for years, even though I had seriously dug in my heels
• Quareia (the magical curriculum I study) having a lesson on astrology, which I couldn't skip
• Reading a few books, mostly recommended by Alice
• A Rune Soup episode with Austin Coppock that got me excited
• Casting my own natal chart, by hand, and thinking, "that wasn't so bad"
• Trying a bunch of different software, both online and off, and being mildly to severely disappointed
• Remembering that I know computermancy

All of that led me to the realization that no one (I know of) has looked at astrology through a modern UX lens. What happens if you make astrology an interactive experience? Upon having this thought, an image of Aughra from the original Dark Crystal popped into my head.

This is how to know when... that's what.

It was also clear that most of the tooling I looked at was geared toward horoscopes and related features (obviously good and important), but not so much about election finding. As a mage, this was a particular area of interest.

So I spent a few days putting a proof-of-concept together to see if I could even. And it turns out, I can.

Now, if you are into astrology, or maybe even if you aren't, you are probably having some mixed reactions looking at the above. I hope that at least some of the reaction is, "oh cool". But you are probably also noticing a whole shit-load of stuff that is not there. In fact, if I tried to list what isn't in Prometheus at the moment, this post would be VERY long. Patience. I'm working on it.

There's a "how" piece I also want to briefly cover. Most modern (or even not so modern) astrology software uses another piece of software, under the hood, from a company called AstroDienst (many of you will know their site: astro.com), called the Swiss Ephemeris. The Swiss Ephemeris does a whole lot of really cool shit and uses planetary data from NASA's JPL that is literally used to put rovers on Mars. Talk about accurate! If you are using astrology software to put a rover on Mars, this is definitely your jam!

After plotting my own chart by hand, from a good old-fashioned ephemeris, like everyone did back before fancy software, I started thinking: what if I pull an entire old-fashioned ephemeris into a modern computer's memory and use modern reactive programming techniques to plot a chart at 60 frames per second. Thus, what you see above.

To say this is an early prototype is a massive understatement. It is still months away, at least, from something I would even remotely call an alpha. I tend to keep most of my larger projects under wraps until I have something that is pretty close to ready to share. I'm doing Prometheus differently, and sharing as I go.

Which brings me to my next announcement.

Subscribe

The final, much smaller, announcement is that I've added the ability to get email updates from Hall of Doors. This kind of goes hand-in-hand with the above as I plan on providing semi-regular updates sharing my progress on Prometheus.

If you are interested, sign up in the footer.

Why The Name

One of the books I read, while trying to push through whatever mental block I had against astrology, was Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas. If you are not familiar with this book I'll just say that it is controversial in some astrological circles. I also agree with most of the criticism, which I will cover in another post, as it directly relates to my own fears of approaching astrology with a "IMA GONNA INNOVATE THIS" Silicon Valley douchebag bro mentality. There was a lot I got out of Cosmos and Psyche though, and one thing in particular that VERY strongly resonated with me: understanding the influence of Uranus through the archetype of Prometheus. That hit me like a lightening bolt.