About Exit 30
The design of this site at first seemed to be half serendipity and half pronoia (or more accurately, half pronoia and half serendipity). I knew when I started this project that I wanted to get away from a dark background and I was thinking of creating something that represents our culture in a post apocalyptic state as if someone stumbled across the remains of our civilization in the desert a thousand years from now. I started designing with the idea of traveling through the desert with road signs that could be taken to have multiple meanings. Soon after this, I began to suspect that I was being guided because I found hidden messages in the graphics of this design that I did not intend. It was as if I had thrown out 15 pennies from the top of the Stratosphere in Vegas and that they all landed heads on the sidewalk 1100 feet below.
In an era when the internet effortlessly gives information at face value and attention spans can be measured in milliseconds, much depth is lost that robs one of that "ah HA!" moment that makes everything fall into place. I was thinking about how some say that the obvious and literal should be taken at face value, but the modern expository journalistic style of writing was not always practiced; from invisible ink to the Bible Code many will see, but not perceive, and hear, but not understand. In a post apocalyptic world, would our civilization be interpreted literally? How would others later on interpret us? Things are not always as they appear. Even on this page that you are reading now, there is much hidden that does not naturally appear to the casual reader... (for instance, why Exit 30?) ... think visually and you might get it. Think technically about this page and you might learn a lot more. Well I'll tell you as an example. In the graphic above you are at mile 66 and it says that Exit 30 is ahead. This means that you have 36 miles to go. What is there 36 of in astrology? Decans (or faces) which are the 36 "appearances or liknesses". Get to mile 30 where you take the exit and you symbolically arrive at what is available at face (decanic) value having covered the "36". So following that, what happens if you don't take the exit? Hint: "30" is also the circular period of Saturn and it represents the boundary between ignorance and enlightenment. The holy grail is "15" which is the center upon which everything revolves (the Sun). To reach it you have to go 15 more miles which is of the nature of Mars (circular period of Mars is also 15). It is a sign of pilgrimage. Both the greater and lesser years of Mars (66 and 15) are on either side of the road which are the spear bearers that mark an "X". Making it to 15 is difficult. I shall not spoil the rest of it for you, but this is just the tip of the iceburg and you should keep in mind that I ran into this by accident! Much of this was unintended, but fell into place very naturally once I got on track.
The same happened in the design of the Delphic Oracle logo when I chose it. Interestingly enough the location pictured in the photograph above (a place called Ash Meadows at the California / Nevada border near Death Valley - edited of course) is where I first came up with the name for Delphic Oracle in 2003 (last Sunday in March). I did not intend for the "D" to be replaced with the Moon glyph, though I did choose the Sun glyph for the "O". It came to me later that the Moon fit in perfectly for the "D". Just lucky? It happened again with "The Lost Horoscope X-Files" logo, where I was again (Vegas) and that Interstate 15 just happens to run through Vegas towards Los Angeles (Selegna Sol is Los Angeles spelled backwards and closely resembles the Latin for Moon / Sun - Selena / Sol). The glowing black disc with the "X" in the middle is supposed to represent a total solar eclipse. Eight years after designing the logo "The Lost Horoscope X-Files", I ended up living near area 51. It might as well have been the Twilight Zone. Then I was trying to center the "X" and the road in the graphic and it stubbornly refused to be centered. It was at that point that I realized that it was meant to be slightly off to the right. There is a lot more in the header of all the pages to this site than meets the eye to the causal observer, yet I only intended half of it. Someone or something is guiding me.
There was another bizarre incident regarding the reversal of Selegna Sol = Los Angeles spelled backwards. Back in 2006 I was logging onto the web and thinking about the reversal of the Moon and Sun in Latin and wondered what would happen if I typed Delphic Oracle into Google backwards which is "Elcaro Cihpled" and at first I thought nothing of it because Google came up with the "Did you mean: Elcaro Chip Led?". Remembering that Los Angeles was one letter off I clicked on the link and it brought me to the website laweekley.com (Los Angeles Weekly) where it was talking about a gambler in Vegas with the last name "Elcaro" who became the "chip leader". These days the search has changed. I guess with strange luck like this, I should use this search mirror.
Someone asked me what I used to design the graphics and for the most part I used Fireworks but sometimes I use Paint Shop Pro. Fireworks has the advantage of allowing you to work within "layers" so that you can imbed parts of photos, etc on top of each other. I use Dreamweaver (or Notepad) to do the site itself and CSS to manage the display. The rollover effect in the header where the sky evaporates is purely a CSS technique that replaces images.
The design of the Delphic Oracle logo (besides my choosing the name and the Sun and Moon replacement letters) was a collaboration between Ellen Black (for the Apollo playing the Lyre photograph), a guy named Brent who colored it (I never met him) and Meredith Garstin who chose the Moonglow font and did some editing.
On this page (in the blue attractions sign on the left side of the road) are links to my reference material. This section is just beginning as I have more than 1000 pages to reformat so keep checking back for new sections that will be added here (transits, planets in houses, articles, etc). - Curtis Manwaring
