annoyances

pop astrology and house misunderstanding

i was reading this article on pluto retrograde this year and it reminded me of some shit that i've noticed for a while now that's pissed me off consistently.

so, every time that these types of sites make a whole big list of the way "x event" will affect every sign, they basically identify a different area of life for each sign to be impacted in. these are based on the idea of houses, first house is personal life, sixth house is work, stuff like that.

what these sites always always fucking always invariably do is, they tell you to look for your sign based on your birthday (ok, so we're working with sun signs, pretty standard stuff), and then for some fucking reason they treat your SUN PLACEMENT as your first house and base their interpretation of whatever transit they're talking about as if your houses proceed from your sun sign.

AND IT'S BULLSHIT!!!!!!! the "solar chart" house system is fucking NEVER used its a NOVELTY. there's a just as ridiculous "moon chart" house system and its arbitrary!!!! you're telling me fucking everybody born in the same sign, re: solar charts, or like, same couple of days re: moon charts, has the same fucking house setup? the houses, in every REASONABLE system (placidius, equal, whole sign, etc.) are based on the time of birth. hour always matters, in some cases minutes can make a difference in what house a planet is in. AND THATS NECESSARY FOR THE FUCKING HOUSE SYSTEM TO WORK! obviously not every person born at the same time in the same place is going to have an identical personality. but the nuances introduced by considering what planet is in which house, and ESPECIALLY what house a transit takes place in, matter a whole fucking lot on the individual level for astrology! like my fucking god it is stupid to base this shit off sun signs. it takes the "overgeneralisation" problem we already have with sun sign based astrology and cranks it to the fucking max.

the best way to approximate your houses in a situation like this is to use Whole Signs, which takes your Ascendent (based on time of birth) and makes that sign the first house, then the next sign in the procession (like Aries - > Taurus) is the second house, et cetera. Lot easier to do on the fly than Placidius (which measures based on midheaven angles) for a layman. But noooooooooo not everybody knows their birth timeeeeeeeeee wahhhhhhhhhh how are they supposed to know what their ascendant is......... Fucks sake man. It just ruins the entire thing because usually these transit "analyses" are no deeper than "you're gonna experience power dynamic shifts in.... (checks notes, 10th house) your career!!!!" or "you're gonna be more experimental in..... (uhhhh 5th house) your art and self expression!" and its just the most basic shit that is blatantly fucking wrong if you're basing it on sun signs. Always go to the sign of your ascendant if for some god forsaken reason you're on these types of sites, ignore the birth date guidelines.