Yes, it’s time for another batch of horoscopes for the discerning masochist.
Aries: You go on weight loss pills. Unfortunately, due to a prescribing accident, you spend fourteen months taking a laxative every morning. You mistakenly believe the consequences of this mistake to be a case of understated side effects. You do lose weight, but your electrolytes budget goes through the roof in a desperate attempt to stay hydrated. As does your underpants budget. You commemorate the experience by getting a full back tattoo of the lyrics to “Ring of Fire”.
Taurus: Your employer’s senior management decides it would benefit company morale to appoint an official “court jester” of sorts. You are randomly elected to this position, but it’s decided it would be funnier to not tell you. They tell everyone else. Just not you. You will spend the rest of the financial year being the subject of a dizzying array of practical jokes, from bizarre and offputting work assignments, six hour drives to attend meetings at fictional locations, to custard pies to the face every time you turn a corner in the office. Morale and productivity skyrocket, you are named employee of the year, and receive a substantial cash prize. And another pie to the face.
Gemini: You discover that you are half of a whole “evil twin” situation. Specifically you’re the evil twin. Your parents kept your doppelgänger because they liked them way more than you. That’s why they encouraged you to move out, they wanted your room for them, so they could come out of the attic without the risk of you corrupting them with your general awfulness. You learn this when you make an unannounced visit to your parents to bring them a present, only to find your twin already there. After meeting them for the first time you decide your parents had a point.
Cancer: Did you ever see that movie Castaway? No reason. Anyway, you decide you’ve earned a holiday and book a luxury trip to the Caribbean. You plan to spend two weeks in the sun, in a charming beachfront hotel. Wait, sorry, not Castaway, I’m thinking of a completely different movie. What was it called? Oh, yeah. Alive. That’s the one.
Leo: You become so unutterably sick of hearing LLMs described as AI that you become a vocal critic of them, and their use, both in your workplace and online. After being called a Luddite you look up what the Luddites really were, and to your surprise find yourself agreeing. You go all in on the philosophy, building a modern force of classical Luddite organised labour. For legal reasons I cannot describe the rest of the year’s events.
Virgo: After a mental health episode caused by “fucking bullshit” you decide it’s time for a career change. You consider several new lines of work, before settling on becoming a goatherd in the Cairngorms. Not officially, as such. You just train the wild goats into your personal army and menace passers-by to hand over any cash and snacks they may be carrying. You will not entirely understand how this catapults you to a significant position in The Sunday Times Rich List, and nor, frankly, will they.
Libra: You invent a new type of cheese, which becomes an overnight bestseller. “Big Cheese” objects to the new competition, and you are kidnapped by a… huh…. There isn’t actually a word for cheesemaker. We just call them cheesemakers. TIL. You are kidnapped by cheesemakers, who attempt to send a message to future upstarts in the cheese industry by stuffing you into a wheel of cheese and leaving it to cave age for several years. Their plan to sell the resultant cheese-based-crime to the world’s elites is foiled by your eating your way out. You will go on to sell a best-selling account of your battle with the cheese cartels, ghost-written by the guy that proofreads the copy on the back of cereal boxes.
Scorpio: You learn that all the inconvenient maintenance problems that have arisen recently in your home are in fact caused by a haunting. The spirits of every chicken you’ve ever eaten in there have reached critical mass and amalgamated to become a “megaghost”. This would be a bigger problem if it wasn’t for the fact that it still has the intelligence of a chicken, and is therefore completely incapable of forming any actual plan beyond “wandering around and bumping into things”. You conduct a pity exorcism after the third time it wanders into the street and gets hit by a car.
Sagittarius: You become addicted to skydiving. At the peak of your addiction you are jumping out of planes upwards of a dozen times a day. After your third hospitalisation due to midair albatross collision, your loved ones stage an intervention. The only way they are able to keep you in one place long enough to stage said intervention is to create an elaborate and highly convincing fake aircraft which you believe to be in flight. To escape the intervention you leap out of the “aircraft” and land in a puddle in a field, where you are promptly kicked in the head by a horse, curing you of your addiction and your ability to spell the word blancmange.
Capricorn: Due to a fault with your phone’s navigation app you will spend eight straight months driving in circles around the same roughly three square mile area, stopping only to fill up the petrol tank. You become a local fixture, known as “that fucking idiot”. Your journey will only end when your car’s alternator fails, causing the battery to die, and your phone to reset. You will later refer to this period as the happiest in your life, marred only by your development of a crippling parasocial relationship with several radio personalities, and “that bloody traffic light”.
Aquarius: You finally snap and turn “that” neighbour into a selection of high quality artisanal cured meats. Several police interviews are derailed by your “majestic” charcuterie boards. Due to the lead detective’s side gig as editor of “Charcuterie Gazette” you become trapped in a months long global charcuterie board construction league. You do eventually win a trophy and a premium ham worth several hundred pounds, but in the process you leave a trail of dead, cured, smoked, and processed victims across Europe.
Pisces: In an attempt to be more social you start a local book club. After several meetings you begin to grow suspicious. Firstly none of the members appear to actually live in the local area. Secondly every week when it’s time to select the next book you are unanimously outvoted by the other members to choose Dianetics. Again. Thirdly they keep trying to move the club onto a repurposed coal barge stationed in international waters. Lastly you’re pretty sure you’re either being stalked by Tom Cruise, or he’s filming the dullest movie of his career, set entirely where you happen to be going on any particular day.