I read on Jezebel that Susan Miller is sick. I had no idea who Susan Miller is until I read the article, and then I was aghast on multiple levels.
Susan Miller is the unrivaled Queen of Astrology. She is known for her affable delivery, her reverence in the world of fashion and, most importantly, her accurate horoscope forecasts which she publishes monthly to her site Astrologyzone.com.
Miller’s monthly forecasts—generating 6.5 million unique monthly visitors—are released on the first of each month as her readers anxiously wait to see, they believe, what their future holds and to use the readings to help guide their real life decisions. Her fans are devoted and some might even say rabid. Many readers will begin to panic if an updated forecast isn’t published on AstrologyZone on the first of the month. If such a horror occurs, the anxiety only increases as the horoscope-less days tick away.
Her…accurate…astrological forecasts? Tell me Jezebel was being sarcastic here. I was sure no hard-headed angry feminist site could possibly buy into that bullshit, but I was wrong. It’s totally credulous. Not a word of doubt. The author claims that she’s just reporting what other people think of her, but does Jezebel normally write about other scam artists in a non-judgmental way? I don’t think so.
The bulk of the article is about her fanatical fans, who are freaking out over the tardiness of their horoscopes, because Miller is apparently very, very sick. They apparently rely on Miller’s prescriptions in order to function, and when they don’t get them, they lash out angrily, blaming her for their neediness. It’s ugly on their side, but let’s not forget that Miller herself (with all sympathy for the physical side of her illness) has built a career on lying to people, and that she churns out drivel on demand for pay, and makes shit up.
Oh, wait, Jezebel is going to ignore that.
Her illness seems to be the primary reason Miller has been unable to deliver her forecasts. However, whether Miller is sick or not, the horoscopes in and of themselves are enormous undertakings. (She also contributes columns to ten international fashion magazines on top of the work published to her site.) Miller says that each individual forecast is about 3,500 words long, which ends up being around 42,000-48,00 words total. That results in 430,000 words per year.
Jon Methven at The Atlantic helps frame the magnitude of the numbers:
To put that in perspective, 430,000 words is equivalent (in sheer volume) to writing Ulysses and Lolita in the same year; or spending the year penning Slaughterhouse-Five, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Middlemarch; or writing the first four Harry Potter books; or putting together nearly all of War and Peace.
Ugh. Now that is an invidious comparison. No, she is not exercising creativity or talent; she’s slapping together a series of formulaic pronouncements from an arcane set of astronomical numbers; she is making authoritative pronouncements about people’s lives on the basis of inappropriate data spat out of a computer. Do not compare her to Vonnegut or Twain or Tolstoy or even Rowling. Her gift seems to be loquaciousness, an ability to babble on in the absence of meaning or sense.
Oh, but she claims it’s science.
“I am getting my information from NASA, doing math and geometry, and I know how to interpret the results. It is not that I make up my forecasts, so I never have writer’s block,” Miller explains. “Readers don’t understand that my IT team doesn’t work just for me. They have their own business and service many clients. I finished close to on time, but it was the Fourth of July weekend and my team was off with their families.”
She looks at numerical relationships between the planets and stars, and then interprets
them…but she’s not making up her forecasts, oh no. So let’s test that. I looked up my horoscope for October. Here is a small part of it (a fraction — she really does go on and on).
This will be a busy month, for it holds two eclipses, and eclipses are important to note, for they are the most dramatic way the universe creates quick progress. The last pair of eclipses (they always come in pairs) arrived on April 15 and April 28, and both were surrounded with extremely tough aspects so back in April, I named them monster eclipses. Although I cannot see all the unique planetary placements and aspects in your chart from where I sit, I will say that you should surely find the new eclipses in October to be easier and friendlier than the April eclipses.
Before I tell you about the eclipses, I need to mention that Mercury will be retrograde from October 4 to October 26, not a time to make key decisions or actions. Mercury will be spending the lion’s share of its time in your eighth house of other people’s money. Take things slow, for this is a month to observe and wait, not push forward on any front. To rush would be to be out of sync with the universe. Do not buy any electronics until November – not a car, not a computer or a kitchen appliance – for later you have a high likelihood of regretting your purchase. If you plan to close on a house, move the date to next month, but when you do, avoid tough day November 12.
Because Mercury will be sliding backward in a financial house, you may find that commission, licensing fees, child support, an unemployment check, as four examples, may be held up, so you may need to have contingency plans. The environment will be changing rapidly although you won’t have any evidence that it is just yet. This is a truth you will get to see in time, in hindsight. The priorities you have now in place will change, and that will affect your purchases too. Sit tight and keep reassessing your upcoming decisions and assumptions. I feel almost all emotional suffering that is encountered in life is due to misguided assumptions and expectations. Sharpen those and make sure they are accurate, and you instantly will have a happier life.
First note that everyone born between 19 February and 20 March of any year gets exactly the same horoscope — so the baby born in 2013 and the octagenarian born in the 1930s are all getting the same suggestion to avoid buying a new car. We’re all supposedly having financial difficulties this month (nope, not me — I’m not rich, but I live inexpensively and have a stable income). To argue that someone making an expensive purchase at any time might later have second thoughts is pretty much a no-brainer, a perfectly safe prediction that you can tell anyone anytime.
I am unimpressed. But there are also some predictions for specific days imbedded in there, and since it is now 6 October, I can see how well they match.
October 4 could be a very positive, exciting, and unexpectedly positive day for your career. Money would accompany the prestigious work you’d do, thanks to Mars in perfect sync with Uranus.
That was Saturday. I got up early. I got some writing done over the course of the day, and I updated my grade book with some extra credit stuff some students had handed in. I read a paper on abiogenesis, and quite enjoyed it. I have no illusions that the work I do is prestigious (I was also wondering what prestigious activities the aforementioned hypothetical seven-month old was up to), and mostly what I faced on getting up was a lot of hate mail. No money accompanied any of it, darn it. There were no interesting career developments, either — I’m just plugging along.
I usually avoid this crap, but every once in a while, I run across these signs that the American public is jam-packed with gullible fools — that not only are there people who actually believe astrology works, but there are also surrounding swarms who stay silent so they can reap the profits of the frauds.
Well, there’s your problem. Mars in sync with Uranus indicates you’ll be inundated with bullshit.
I predict your head being occluded by Uranus and you sending me money. Beats working for a living.
The onion:
“Your Horoscopes — Week Of September 30, 2014
.
ARIES: Home is where your heart is, and your lungs and liver too, but despite a monthlong search they’ll never find all of you.
If you think your Saturday was not much like the prediction, think of the ~150000 people who died on that day.
Speaking as a person who is in the process of attempting to put imaginary events to paper, or, I guess, Kindle screen, fucking AUGH!
I’m pretty sure that I write a fairly prodigious number of words over the course of a year too, just in comments on blogs or journally thought-doodles, but none of that counts toward that whole literature thing. Churning out vast piles of letters, even if they make sense and have an impeccable internal logic, does not equal the creation of a novel. Certainly not a collection of novels. I mean, sure, there’s some degree of craft in any collection of words, but it’s not quite the same when you’re writing that the sun will rise in the morning and some things that happen to people on a regular basis will probably happen at some point.
Don’t be silly. Everything seven-month olds do is prestigious. Everything. A couple of months ago, my niece performed her first ever observed deliberate tongue-out-stick at me. Most exciting thing of the evening.
Jezebel is feminist-for-pay, and at best only nominally so. I find its better to think of Jezebel as an ad machine that runs on feminine, a very long-chain hydrocarbon that can occasionally mimic the effects of feminism, but is mostly producing hot air to lift the ad-bearing blimp higher, along with a bunch of by-products that are largely pollution.
Y(L/100km)MV.
Also, I heard Pluto is in a retrograde conjunction with Uranus, but it’s just a dominance display.
Damnit, ‘feminene’, fucking autocorrect.
Jeez, everytime i read something like this, i’m tempted to rewrite my game ai algorithm I’m developing to generate astology bullshit. I think it would be indistinguishable from “real” ones. Then profit.
So tempting.
I read two different astrologers’ horoscopes for myself every morning, and snicker. It’s a fun diversion, if nothing else. And nothing is what it’s worth. Sheer entertainment. I knew astrology was bunk way back in junior high, when my peers were trying to convince me it was all real and true and accurate.
birgerjohansson, The Onion has horoscopes? I must check this out, it sounds like another fun read, and it can’t be any less accurate.
Having observed a few eclipses (both lunar and solar) I didn’t know they could be “friendly” or otherwise. Unless that refers to the time of year (late January, or the height of bug season, would definitely count as “unfriendly”).
Temperaments for the month:
Eclipse, Churlish
Tide, Quizzical
Sunset, Snarky
Sunrise, Thoughtful
Rain, Ebullient
Eruption, Considerate
Notice the weasel words, though: “could be a very positive, exciting, and unexpectedly positive day for your career. Money would accompany the prestigious work you’d do” This is how she can call herself (or, others can call her) as having “accurate horoscope results”.
It’s almost as sleazy – heck, it’s every bit as sleazy as watching inerrantists handwave away bible errors.
Taurus, contemplate domestic turmoil.
Aquarius, abandon hope for future plans.
I am not sure about eclipses being unfriendly, but supermoons sure can be – they kept happening when it was so overcast here that it would have been hard to track the location of the sun, much less the moon. I live someplace that is almost guaranteed to be overcast whenever anything interesting is happening in the sky. : (
And I am with Athywren equating that dribble with actual writing makes me feel stabby … really, really stabby. I bet seeing her version of geometry would make my head explode out of shear frustration.
“Her…accurate…astrological forecasts?”
Exactly. You know you are living in the best place on earth, when you notice that witches are revered and climatologists are proponents of questionable science… when jesus rides the vegetarian Tyrannosaurus gets tax incentives, and evolutionary biologists and paleontologists are wasting tax payer money… when Archaeopteryx sighting proves the bible, and a 3rd grader has to fight adult politicians to recognize woolly mammoth as a state fossil… nice, very nice!
I’ve actually heard woo-inclined people blame Mercury being in retrograde for their devices malfunctioning. Once I was trying out a new yoga class– I enjoy yoga, but I’m very picky about teachers– and the instructor was having trouble getting his ipod to work with the studio’s speakers. “Well, Mercury’s in retrograde,” he explained in all seriousness. “Causes all kinds of problems with with electronics.” His class was ok, but I never returned. The overt bullshit is just too distracting when I’m trying to stretch.
Saturday was positive and exciting for this Piscean, for I officiated at my nephew’s humanist wedding. It was also really cold, I did it for free, spent over a thousand dollars to travel with my family to the wedding, and it has nothing to do with my day job.
Well, two of the words were uncannily accurate. I’m sold.
“Feminene.” Brilliant.
Did you know it’s mined from the same sources of ore that produce Feminum, Wonder Woman’s bracelets?
This, again? I remember way back when this phrase first hit, and assholes everywhere were using it to excuse asshole behaviour, “oh Mercury is in retrograde!”
Okay, I looked up mine out of curiosity. That was a whole lot of words signifying nothing. I did get this sentence, though:
My oh my.
430,000 word in a year? Pffft. As long as we don’t care about quality and content, a graphomaniac can crank that out in a week.
John Horstman:
:looks up, reads about graphomania: Well, I’ve learned something new today.
“Tell me Jezebel was being sarcastic here. I was sure no hard-headed angry feminist site could possibly buy into that bullshit, but I was wrong.”
The Gawker sites are self-consciously and unapologetically tabloid. They seek not editorial consistency, but whatever gets clicks, which is why you can have a rant against the NFL in one post and a celebrity gossip summary in the next.
No, it’s not. She’s writing formulaic dribble and so it should be compared to formulaic dribble. Luckily, I have written formulaic dribble and so know exactly how hard that is. I will compare her writing to my experience writing erotica professionally, which is far less exploitative and far more honest work.
According to Write or Die, I average around 29wpm when I’m writing fiction. I seem to be about average in my daily output when I compare myself to the other professional writers I know.
This is a job that’s paying all your bills, so you don’t just do it when you feel inspired. (Also because no inspiration is necessary.) It’s actually far harder on the body than most people realize to write consistently for hours, so let’s say four hours a day are spent actually writing, with the other four hours of your working day spent on stretching your hands and being kind to your body. So 4(29 * 60) = 6960 words a day. That’s about two monthly forecasts, according to the numbers above. (The math doesn’t add up for the monthly forecasts and the yearly word count cited, so I don’t know WTF is going on there.) In about seven days of writing four hours a day, an entire month’s worth of work is done.
Writing 430,000 words–of, once again, formulaic dribble–would take around 62 days of writing for four hours a day.
For a year’s worth of work.
This is not a great novel. This is not someone’s heart’s passion. I know a number of erotica writers who do a million words a year–that averages to less than 3000 words a day for their primary source of income–and that’s about the level of thought her work requires. And at the end of the day, the erotica is still giving people more realistic expectations out of life and is better value for their time and money.
TMM @ 24:
I went and read my ‘forecast’. It contained a great deal of repetition, and just a cursory comparison with PZ’s showed that a lot of the same shit ends up in more than one ‘forecast’.
Iyeska @ 25, yeah, I figure her real “writing process” involves slapping a couple of templates together and then doing search and replace as needed.
@Iyeska, flos mali (#20):
Got to admit, there’s nothing more powerful than a solar eclipse during a full moon! Well, except maybe a lunar eclipse during a new moon…
I particularly like this complaint. It reminds me of the same argument made by Cicero, long enough ago that people should have taken it to heart by now:
I went and read my horoscope. I am most amused by this prediction;
Gee, a surprise pregnancy might be exciting or tense, depending on my plans? This is a prediction? If I have a surprise pregnancy it would involve post menopause parthenogenesis, which would indeed be exceedingly surprising.
great quote monad!
uncle frogy
Richard Smith @ 27:
Oh, this astrological logick is so complex!
Sounds to me like the best comparison would be to the Book of Mormon. Lots of repetition and filler and an attempt to sound like you’re using jargon in an authentic and responsible way. Fail.
I thought the example PZ provided was interesting, given that it’s been years since I read what’s supposed to pass for “serious” astrology. If you look at the tiny little readings in the newspaper they’re always general pap and advice which is either trivial, obvious, trivial and obvious, or true-if-you-look-for-it. Nothing specific, just general things like “don’t lend money to strangers” or “today is a good day to get to those things you’ve been procrastinating over.” “Try to let go of unnecessary resentment.” They probably take them from boilerplate self-help books. Might do some minor good, does little harm (if you ignore the gateway drug into woo part.).
Plenty of that thing in Miller — but with additional specifics which are worrying. Don’t buy a refrigerator? Don’t close on a house? Make no big decisions? Wait, this sort of crap can really screw someone’s life up. This can get dangerous.
From my most recent horoscope:
But…but…but…HOW DID SHE KNOW I’D NEED MY ID AND PASSPORT TO TRAVEL!!!!!!
Often I am asked if I have ever encountered something that I could not explain. What my interlocutors have in mind are not bewildering enigmas such as consciousness or U.S. foreign policy but anomalous and mystifying events that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural. My answer is: yes, now I have.
MY SKEPTICISM IS SHAKEN TO ITS CORE!!!!!
This is from the article and made me laugh:
Yes: by all means avoid sending out negative energy when you’re whining about something stupid.
Oh gee, I just love vague bullshit that’s applicable to anyone at any time. Here’s part of my “forecast”:
I’m reasonably sure I’m going to continue having money issues. It’s an ongoing concern.
I don’t have a lover and I’ve been single 11 years. Given that I don’t go to gay bars anymore (one of the few places in Pensacola to even meet other people that one can be reasonably sure are gay or bisexual; I don’t go bc I’m too broke), don’t use dating sites, and don’t have a car, I can’t imagine this is going to change anytime soon.
I’m also not going to get pregnant, nor do I have children. I guess that leaves her an out for “creativity”, which could manifest in any number of ways. I could creatively stub my toe walking around the house. Does that count?
@33: Gee, we do all that paranoid check-three-times that we have passports, reservations, flight status, etc, etc. Yet my wife and I aren’t even the same astrological sign. This is what passes for Very Important Advice You Couldn’t Get Any Other Way?
But on October 20 we are staying firmly home. Because we’ve been traveling a lot lately, and a now heartily sick of sleeping in other places. Also, we’d like to stop spending money at that rate.
One pound of crap weights the same as one pound of gold. That must mean crap is valuable!
Iyeska @22:
Me too.
I learned about graphorrhea too.
You’d think she could get a bit ahead of the curve, seeing as all the conjunctions and all are predictable for millennia in advance. Then she really could blame her IT team.
The Onion horoscopes are intentionally quite funny. Other horoscopes, pretty much everyone I know occasionally reads them for unintentional hilarity — we take them as seriously as we take fortune cookies.
I tried adding “in bed” to the end of my 20,000 word horoscope, but it just didn’t have quite the same humorous effect…
monad @28:
Cicero sounds like quite the rationalist there, and elite Romans did have an ambivalent attitude to freelance soothsayers and astrologers. But the irony is that the state apparatus and military hierarchy absolutely depended on haruspicy (the practice of divination via the entrails of a sacrificed animal, especially the liver), and the auspicium (divination via the flight of birds) and there were specific days of every month that were inauspicious, and nobody would initiate any public or legal action on those days. It’s funny how the ancients could sound so modern while still not being able or willing to apply the same principles to other practices that are now regarded as bizarre and stereotypically superstitious.
I saw the original article. I was pretty sure it was tongue-in-cheek.
She should have forseen her illness and pre-written a few years’ worth. After all, the point of such predictions is that they are time-independent.
Or they could have Mark V. Chaney (a markov chain text sausage generator) do the column. Apparently the software that does the “about town” and little league stories is pretty sophisticated.
There is software for generating astrological predictions. So to do a column just fire up the app, belt down some alcohol to fuel creativity, and embellish the output of the software.
Theron Corse @42:
If it was, they did not make that clear enough. A lot of people took it seriously. Perhaps bc in the US a *lot* of people believe that there is a scientific basis for astrology.
This reminds me of a horoscope reader that opened shop in my city about a decade ago. They stayed open for about a month before folding- apparently the stars predicted that they wouldn’t have a successful business plan.
There’s now a homeopathic remedy for such gullibility.
Yes, and it was among the early applications for PC software. I work for a technology publisher and we have in the back-catalog (long out of print of course) a book entitled Astrology for Your Personal Computer from the Apple II/Commodore 64 era. We’ve retained a copy, and I enjoy having it on display; it looks so out of place among the much slicker-looking and more technologically relevant publications we put out now. People get a kick out of it.
@jpatters #13:
Spot on. I believe “Hide Away Folk Family” is actually the theme song of the authoritarian followers.
Seconding birgerjohnson: the Onion horoscopes are well worth skimming from time to time.
Example:
You’ve never seen any of their “Food Babe” articles then
Uh, PZ, I hate to break it to you, but belief in astrology is no less widespread in Europe than in the US. If anything it might be more common, because there are fewer fundies who might consider it the Devil’s Handicraft.
Full of win. :-)
He was a Stoic, so basically some kind of deist. That put him at odds with the state’s traditions.
Thread won.
Andrés Diplotti@37:
Actually, because of the complete insanity that are the non-metric systems, a pound of gold is measured with Troy weight and is 373.24g, while a pound of crap is measured with Avoirdupois and is 453.59g.
Therefore, crap is, uh, more valuable than gold? Or something…
Mars won’t be so perfect after Starship Siding Spring lands on it later this month and the Ancient Mayan Astronauts emerge and start constructing their base from which they will launch the reconquest of Earth. Uranus is, of course, just a decoy. The main invasion fleet is still hiding, probably behind Pluto.