the map is the territory

Gather the Spell

The spell is hidden as fragments of four lines in the source code of a group of websites, marked by the sigil of a comet: ~~*.

Let’s begin, with a prelude from solarpunk.cool

In your terminal, type:
$: curl -L solarpunk.cool/magic/begin | grep "~~*" -A2 | tail -2 >> begin

(This has been our most complex invocation^▣ and needs to be typed exactly to work properly, so double check what you typed before pressing enter.)

We can check it worked with our trusty cat:
$: cat begin

You will see:
Earth water fire airwithin me all things are there

Next, we gather from the earth and coolguy.website:
$: curl -L coolguy.website/earth | grep "~~*" -A2 | tail -2 >> earth

Gather from water and angblev.com:
$: curl -L angblev.com/water | grep "~~*" -A2 | tail -2 >> water

Gather from fire and our home solarpunk.cool
$: curl -L solarpunk.cool/magic/fire | grep "~~*" -A2 | tail -2 >> fire

Gather from air and apileof.rocks
$: curl -L apileof.rocks/air | grep "~~*" -A2 | tail -2 >> air

We end the spell by returning to solarpunk.cool
$: curl -L solarpunk.cool/magic/end | grep "~~*" -A2 | tail -2 >> end

Lastly, type:
$: ls

you should see;
air begin earth end fire water

We’ve gathered the parts. Now we can cast.

Here’s a breakdown of what we’re doing:
curl -L solarpunk.cool/magic/begin => curls the source code from that url, the -L means “follow redirects” which just ensures we get to the actual if the server needs to redirect us (e.g. move from http to https).
| grep "~~*" -A2 :: Then, we pipe that code to grep which searches for the line with “~~*”. Adding -A2 means we return the line with the comet and the 2 lines After.
| tail -2 :: We take these three lines of text and pipe it to our spirit tail. We haven’t used tail yet, but what it does is take a stream of text and a number, N, and returns the last N lines from that stream. Here we are asking for the last 2 lines, which means we’d keep the two lines of the spell and let the comet disappear.
>> begin :: lastly, we take these two lines and condense them into the word begin, saved as a file in your .spells folder.
That’s a lot! but it’s also so little! So much with so little!⌧
I never get over this, that the command line is words charged with words, energy paused in place as a name. This feeling gets lost in the ui, where all files have the look of computer copy paper. When it’s just text, I find it overwhelmingly beautiful. That’s all, a lil bit of author earnestness!⌧