Your weekly dose of moonlight, mystery, and mildly organised chaos.

It's Sunday on the canal and it's raining. Not particularly dramatic rain — at least not all the time. It's the sort that falls gently for a while, then pours, then pauses, then pours again.

Pours and pause.

There. That's easier to write than it was to explain to the voice transcription, which was having absolutely none of it.

Right now it's quite gentle, and I'm watching the rain falling onto a spider's web outside. The droplets are catching on the threads and it's rather beautiful. It's one of those quiet, grey canal days where nobody has any particular desire to go outside if they can possibly avoid it.

Except Merlin, obviously.

Merlin doesn't care about the rain. I think he finds somewhere reasonably sheltered on deck, curls up underneath the bench and then periodically wanders back inside soaking wet. This generally means one of two things: he wants food, or he's decided to sit on me and use me as a towel.

Usually it's the food thing.

Sabre takes an entirely different approach. He'll venture outside for two or three minutes, establish that yes, it is indeed still raining, and come straight back in again. He regards wet weather as something that should really have been sorted out by management by now.

So everybody is chilling aboard the boat this afternoon. Rain on the roof, rain on the canal, animals tucked into their respective comfortable places.

And the Formula One is on.

I don't particularly enjoy Formula One. I can make "NNNNNEEEEOOOOWWWW" noises myself and annoy everybody for considerably less money.

So while the cars go round and round and the rain pours and pauses outside, I think I'll retreat into the slightly quieter world of Dark Moon Rocks and tell you what's been happening this week... 🌑

Welcome to the Dark Moon Rocks Weekend Newsletter — with more things to make you think, wonder, and hopefully smile.

Pull up a chair, pour yourself something hot, and come and join us.

The Moon is up. The kettle is on. The radio is waiting.

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Join me in the Laboratory of Chaos…

One of the joys of this job that I've apparently volunteered myself into is that every now and again I get to build something completely new.

Not too many new things these days. Stroke brain has taught me that if I invent seventeen projects before breakfast, I spend the afternoon staring at a wall wondering why my head has gone on strike. So I'm trying to build one brick at a time.

This week's brick is a big one.

I've finally decided I want a place on the internet that actually belongs to me.

Substack has annoyed me for quite a while now. I know it's a popular platform, and yes, there are 34 lovely people on my mailing list over there — in fact, if you're reading this newsletter, you're one of them. But it occasionally locks me out of my own account, and I keep finding myself thinking, hang on... why am I renting space in somebody else's house?

Patreon is all right, but it's a bit... porridge. Perfectly edible, but not exactly exciting.

So after a lot of brainstorming with ChatGPT, a few cups of tea and the occasional descent into Terminal, I've started building DarkMoonRocks.com on my own server using WordPress.

Now, WordPress is a pain in the neck. Anyone who's ever used it knows that. But it will be mine.

That's the important bit.

I'm hosting it myself on DigitalOcean, which means the monthly cost is about the same as paying another platform, except I get far more freedom. It will become the home for my writing, my library, my newsletters and, eventually, a community built around Dark Moon Rocks instead of somebody else's rules.

It's going to take a couple of weeks to put together, and oddly I'm really enjoying that process. I discovered I rather like poking around in terminals, configuring servers and making mysterious computer things talk to each other. Apparently that's become one of my hobbies now.

The radio side is actually quite simple. listen.darkmoon.rocks becomes the doorway to the live station and schedule. Music and podcasts live on the radio's On Demand pages. The main website simply becomes the front door that points people to the right rooms.

I've looked at Ghost, Circle, Skool and just about every other shiny platform people recommend. Ghost is lovely... until it starts asking for more money. Circle is expensive. Skool just doesn't feel like me. In the end I realised I'm basically rearranging the internet furniture again.

I freely admit this is one of my personality traits.

The Facebook advert finished this week, and rather unexpectedly... it worked. I got called an AI pervert and various other colourful things in the comments, which I can live with. The reach went up, the page became much more active, and more importantly, I started seeing actual people finding the radio.

Mixed in amongst them are what Facebook cheerfully labels crawler bots. My AzuraCast analytics now show listeners from places like Ohio and all over America sitting there for forty-five minutes at a time with names like "Facebook Crawler". It's a little difficult to know whether they're listening to the Morning Show or just inspecting the plumbing.

Either way, hello Ohio. 👋

It was also a tough week personally. I only managed three live Morning Shows because hospital appointments and assorted life admin took rather large chunks out of me. I've decided that's allowed. The station survived perfectly well without me broadcasting every morning, and this weekend I'm giving myself permission to slow down and recover a little.

Meanwhile, Canal Tao is still quietly growing.

I'm still finding stories on my daily walks. I haven't written today's yet because I'm deliberately having a quieter Sunday, but I'll probably end up walking down to the lock regardless of the weather. I genuinely enjoy wrapping a little piece of Taoist wisdom around something completely ordinary that happened on the canal.

One unexpected side effect is that Canal Tao has sent me back to the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. I'm reading it again, but much more slowly this time. It's funny how a book changes depending on where you are in your own life. Passages I've read dozens of times suddenly make sense in completely different ways.

So perhaps that's this week's experiment.

Not building another platform.

Building a place where all these little stories can finally come home. 🌑

It's been a quieter week on the radio side of Dark Moon Rocks. There isn't a new podcast this week, and I only managed three Morning Shows rather than my usual five. Between appointments and everything else going on, this was simply one of those weeks where life took up rather more space than usual.

But that's one of the nice things about what I've built: the radio doesn't disappear just because I'm not sitting behind the microphone.

Everything is still there On Demand, the station is still broadcasting, and I've spent a little time moving the furniture around behind the scenes and sorting out how the music flows.

There have been a few new songs added this week, including Pixels of the World, and I'm experimenting with giving new releases more prominence in the rotation. Older songs still come around regularly, but the newer ones should appear more frequently for a while before gradually settling into the main library.

I'm still playing with exactly how I want that to work. I actually listen to my own radio station quite a lot during the day — partly because I enjoy it, but also because it's the best way to hear whether the whole thing flows properly. There's a big difference between looking at a schedule on a screen and actually listening for a few hours to see what turns up.

So, no enormous radio developments this week. No shiny new podcast. No escaped project requiring immediate containment.

Dark Moon Rocks Radio is simply doing what I built it to do: playing.

If you fancy disappearing into the Dark Moon for a while, have a listen. You might even catch one of the new songs before I've finished moving the furniture around again. 🌑

Operation £30 remains an ongoing scientific experiment. The laboratory mice have not yet produced £30.

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We're beginning this week with a very young Moon. Dark Moon was early on Friday 11 September, at 4:27am BST, so tonight the Moon is only a slim waxing crescent, gradually returning to the evening sky. By Friday 18 September it reaches First Quarter, when we'll see half of the lunar disc illuminated.

That makes the next few evenings rather lovely for simply watching the Moon grow. Look towards the west after sunset and, if the British clouds cooperate, see how soon you can pick out that thin crescent. Each evening it will hang around a little longer and become increasingly obvious.

There's also something slightly more unusual happening on Monday 14 September, although it's a tricky one to see from Britain. The Moon passes directly in front of Venus, an event astronomers call a lunar occultation. The interesting part for UK observers is Venus reappearing from behind the Moon at around 11:30am BST. Unfortunately, that means we're talking about a daylight observation rather than a nice convenient night-time spectacle, so this isn't really one for casual naked-eye watching.

September itself is becoming much friendlier for stargazing. Darkness is arriving earlier, the long summer twilight is disappearing, and we're heading towards the autumn equinox on 23 September. Later in the month we've also got the Harvest Moon and Neptune reaching opposition on 26 September, so there's plenty coming.

The first appearance of the crescent after the dark Moon has carried ideas of renewal and beginnings in many cultures. There's something wonderfully simple about it: the Moon disappears into darkness and then a tiny silver edge returns.

In modern magical and astrological traditions, that waxing period is often used symbolically for building rather than releasing — beginning something, feeding it, adding to it gradually as the Moon itself grows.

Which feels rather appropriate aboard Dark Moon Rocks this week, considering I've apparently decided to build myself another corner of the internet.

Astrologically, there's another interesting little thread around Monday: the Sun forms a sextile with Mars on 14 September. In astrological symbolism, the Sun is associated with identity, direction and conscious purpose, while Mars represents action, drive and the willingness to actually do the thing. A sextile is traditionally considered a constructive relationship between the two.

I'm not suggesting the planets are personally telling me to configure WordPress servers.

That would be ridiculous.

But if you wanted a symbolic theme for the week, a growing Moon accompanied by a little push towards purposeful action isn't a bad one.

And for everyone who doesn't care about astrology at all: just look west after sunset and find that tiny returning Moon.

Sometimes the sky doesn't need to mean anything to be beautiful.

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A quick update from the financial wing of the Chaos Laboratory.

Operation £30 remains... Operation £30.

The little counter hasn't moved this week, which is absolutely fine. This whole thing was always an experiment rather than me standing here rattling a digital collection tin at you. Operation First £10 proved that somebody could wander from something I'd made, find the shop and actually buy something. Now we're simply seeing whether we can do it again.

I'm also gradually bringing more of the things I've already created into one place rather than constantly inventing something new. There are books, personal readings, digital creations and graphic design services in the Dark Moon Shop, with more of the archive still to come.

If you've reached one of life's strange crossroads and fancy another perspective, the Dark Moon Oracle is open for personal readings. I don't use cards to tell people what they should do — they're much more interesting to me as a way of exploring patterns, possibilities and the things we sometimes can't see when we're standing right in the middle of them.

And if you simply fancy supporting Dark Moon Rocks, have a wander through the shop and see if anything finds you.

Meanwhile, Operation £30 continues.

Apparently money, unlike new projects, does not spontaneously appear when I leave the laboratory door open. 😂

contact me…

And that's about it from Dark Moon Rocks for another week. A slightly shorter newsletter this time, because this has been one of those weeks where real life demanded rather more attention than the Chaos Laboratory.

There were fewer Morning Shows, no new podcast and not quite as much creating as usual. But I'm beginning to realise that doesn't mean nothing happened. The radio kept playing. Canal Tao kept wandering along beside me. A few new songs appeared. And I started building a proper home for all the writing, music, stories and assorted strange things I've accumulated over the years.

Perhaps that's enough.

I'm trying to get better at allowing quieter weeks to be quieter weeks, rather than immediately deciding I should somehow make up for them. Things don't stop growing simply because I'm not pushing them every five minutes. Sometimes you build. Sometimes you create. Sometimes you spend Sunday watching rain collect on a spider's web while the cat uses you as a towel.

And apparently sometimes you have to listen to Formula One going NNNNEEEEOOOOWWWW in the background.

Thank you for reading, listening, sharing things, sending messages, buying something from the shop or simply quietly following along while I rearrange the internet furniture yet again.

I'll be back next week with more radio, more Canal Tao, probably more music and whatever else manages to escape from the laboratory in the meantime.

Until then, take care of yourselves. Notice the small things. And remember that you don't have to be constantly moving forward to still be on your way.

Much love,

Kate Silveness
Dark Moon Rocks 🌑