My favorite little subgenre of the occult is "Fake Martial Arts" because what if that was the one type of magic that was literally 100% real. I love the idea that there's some dude in a strip mall dojo named Sensei Todd Wayne who can teach you how to kill birds with ki blasts.
new thing i learned just now: in like 400 AD there was a monk named simeon stylites who used to live in a one room cell with a window but too many people kept bugging him for religious advice, so he climbed to the top of a pillar and shackled himself to it until he died 37 years later.
this became a cool new trend to the point where there were enough pillar monks of varying viewpoints that they would scream at each other all day
