The past few days have confirmed that what I set in motion this weekend is indeed a Vibe Shift of some kind. The simple acts of securing dedicated time in the morning and throwing propriety to hell and finding my next job have unleashed massive wellsprings of energy, at a time when I thought I was all tapped out. I have been waking up early, taking care of my neglected body, and Making Things Happen on a variety of fronts.

One thing I zapped through with ease that had been torturing me for years was my quote unquote professional site, a neglected piece of internet property that had outlived its usefulness once I tricked someone into giving me a job in software. Energized with new professional purpose, a site where I can be publicly enthusiastic about tech I want to be paid to learn is valuable. Hell, a place where I can demonstrate that I possess written communication skills is something by itself. So now giammattei.co has joined the pantheon of phil’s web sites, along with a few others. Eagle-eyed browsers may notice some subtle similarities across my body of work.

I was already getting Sun Vibes from the solstice timing, but separately a thought had been bubbling for quite some time about my online presence. In astrology (or my meager understanding of it, anyway), your sun placement represents how you are perceived by others, and your moon placement represents how you view yourself. This has been a useful analogy for sorting the kinds of things I put online; am I doing this to Express My Innermost Self, or am I doing this to be Noticed?

As a geriatric millenial, I spent a lot of time lurking on messageboards, and didn’t really get how liberating anonymous posting is. Once facebook came along I posted party pics and shitposts on main, and it took me way too long to realize that the venue where my great aunt just wants to see pictures of me at the beach and my stepdad wants to argue with me about Obama is not one where I will feel like I have unlimited creative freedom.

So I clammed up. My presence on Meta platforms now is basically a kid pic every 2 months on locked accounts, and I was able to withdraw my presence from there because I finally figured out a big part of the Whole Deal of Online: this shit does not have to be attached to, like, your government identity. Once I followed the Tiger Trail and found people I want to talk to about things that are important to me, it didn’t take long for me to alt up and go to ground. For me it was never important to hide my real name from my new friends. The anonymity was on the other side; if a stranger googles my name, they will find a carefully curated collection of sites and profiles that are all about a friendly software engineer. The rest of this shit isn’t FOR them.

This all congealed together for me as the following thought: there is Sun Phil, a marketable caricature whose online presence has the potential to provide me with massive professional utility, and Moon Phil, where the rest of me (most especially the unmarketable part) hangs out. This is, for the time being, a useful separation, in no small part because it frees me from feeling like I need to be self-aware and ironic and aw shucks when I’m promoting myself. My Sun presence (giammattei.co, my linkedin, my real name twitter account) is a pinhole, showing only a tiny sliver of my personality focused a thousandfold so it shines with blinding ferocity if you happen to be a recruiter or a hiring manager. My moon presence, which is becoming less and less public as time goes on, genuinely does not give a shit about any of that and can concern itself with whatever the fuck it wants to.

My Sun presence has been falling into disrepair as I’ve focused the last few years of my attention on kicking it with the group of buddies I’ve stumbled upon in Moon world, but it’s coming back in a big way. I’ve discovered that part of letting the Sun through is giving the Moon some sensible limits: I’ve freed massive chunks of productivity by limiting activities that I usually pursue with Sagittarian hunger (video games, podcasts) and created containers where I am constantly bumped back into the present moment, and I can dutifully continue constructing a Job Laser that pierces all obstacles in a glorious beam of Leonic splendor.

I was discussing this in rough terms with erstwhile tiger ally Taalumot when he connected it to some life-ruiningly uncanny astrology:

You enter a Sun-ruled peak period from your Lot of Fortune on September 25, which lasts until April 17, 2025…that suggests a big Sun Thing Happening to You this year.

So fuck me I guess!

As I explore life on the sunny side of the rock, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of cutting out things that mindlessly occupy my spare time, and there is one more domino left to fall. Twitter user @phil__harmonic is no more; I have gotten all I needed to get out of it and it has slowly turned into an algorithmic feed for me to consume scene drama and twitter drama and shitposts that I can find elsewhere, in infinite quantity. You’re welcome to follow me on my sun account, where I may be more active now, and if you were into the kind of shit I was posting on my moon account, you will find it in big chunks here and small chunks on my Mastodon. I had a lot of fun on there but the fun was with humans, most of whom I am still in touch with, and “finding exactly my kind of cool people” is not the sort of activity that infinitely scales, so big rips to a real one. If anyone asks, please point them here.