ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, November 4, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "Fairies and Fey." I'll be soliciting ideas for fairies, seelie or unseelie sidhe, the Wild Hunt, elves, other types of fey, Radical Faeries, other queers, tricksters, contraries, rebels, adventurers, mentors, historians, explorers, magic users, partners, teachers, leaders, dark lords, superheroes, supervillains, teammates, fantasy species, activists, other unusual fantasy folk, doing magic, doing things backwards, causing mischief, breaking rules, caring for the land, exploring new territory, meeting new species, upsetting predictions, twisting tropes, flipping stereotypes, expecting the unexpected, teaching, adventuring, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, adapting, improvising, troubleshooting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, coming out, running away from home, going off the rails, subverting fate, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, other fantastic activities, Underhill, faery rings, the forest primeval, underwater, underground, liminal zones, castles, ruins, dungeons, dragon lairs, schools, kitchens, campfires, libraries, apothecary shops, supervillain lairs, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, farmer's markets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, other phantasmagoric settings, faerie magic, unusual magical systems, magical artifacts, enchanted musical instruments or weapons, quests, time periods other than medieval, governments other than monarchy, dragons, unicorns, enchantments, potions, reversals, contradictions, conundrums, puzzling discoveries, sudden surprises, fey time distortions, time travel, travel mishaps, the buck stops here, trial and error, polarity, weird food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, intercultural entanglements, asking for help and getting it, enemies to friends/lovers, interdimensional travel, superpower manifestation, the end of where your framework actually applies, ethics, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

The Adventures of Aldornia and Zenobia is about live happy lesbians in a quirky fantasy world.

Clay of Life is Jewish fantasy about a blacksmith and a golem.

Dragonsilk is about trauma and recovery.

Hart's Farm is a free love community with a few really exotic characters.

Monster House is suburban fantasy with a diverse household, where the line between truth and fantasy isn't always clear.

The Ocracies features all the political systems other than monarchy.

The Odd Trio is about a family consisting of a dwarf, an elf, and a human.

P.I.E. is urban fantasy about paranormal investigations,

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all trying to get along and figure out how to make a functional society. Eric the Elven King has interdimensional refugees. Officer Pink features centaurs and mystic shifters. Vybra of the Broken Angels specializes in fantasy sex and often dresses as a fairy.

Practical Magics is low fantasy with a prosaic focus.

Quixotic Ideas is contemporary fantasy where magic integrates with modern life in positive ways.

The Ursulan Cycle is genderbent King Arthur.

Or you can ask for something new.

Boost the signal to reveal a verse in any open linkback poem.

If you're interested, mark the date on your calendar, and please hold actual prompts until the "Poetry Fishbowl Open" post next week. (If you're not available that day, or you live in a time zone that makes it hard to reach me, you can leave advance prompts. I am now.) Meanwhile, if you want to help with promotion, please feel free to link back here or repost this on your blog.

New to the fishbowl? Read all about it! )

Poem: "The Clearest Signal"

Oct. 27th, 2025 09:42 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Damask smiling over their shoulder (polychrome)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This poem came out of the October 2025 [community profile] crowdfunding Creative Jam. It was inspired by prompts from [personal profile] dialecticdreamer and [personal profile] readera. It also fills the "Broken" square in my 10-1-25 card for the Fall Festival Bingo. This poem is posted in exchange for the City Engines stories that [personal profile] dialecticdreamer has been posting about Frank the Crank and belongs to that thread in Polychrome Heroics.

Read more... )

Today's Adventures

Oct. 27th, 2025 08:43 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today we went shopping for Samhain supplies.

Read more... )

The Monday Yap: 10/27/25

Oct. 27th, 2025 03:06 pm
haunted_cherries: A screenshot from the manga version of Jujutsu Kaisen of the character Toge Inumaki (toge scream)
[personal profile] haunted_cherries
Song on repeat: Thanks to the lovely [personal profile] volkameria I went through my Bandcamp to see what was new and stumbled on this gem of an album!! Vaporwave music will FOREVER be my WEAKNESS, so I couldn't resist buying the whole album as soon as I saw it xD


Quote on repeat: "And suddenly it's December, and you're not 17 anymore, and you haven't been 17 in a long time." - Margaux Poetry

All that aside:
Read more... )

Back into the fog I go! Take care, and see you when I see you! ❤️

(morning writing)

Oct. 27th, 2025 05:41 pm
elainegrey: Inspired by Grypping/gripping beast styles from Nordic cultures (Default)
[personal profile] elainegrey

Well, that was a thing. I took a long weekend, and there were ups and downs.

Thursday and Saturday night took nice long dog walks  at dusk in the nearby mega-development along trails and lamp-lit streets. Carrie and i went with my sister and her dog on Thursday, returned with Christine on Saturday.

Friday night i saw my niece in as the lead in "She Kills Monsters," which is about the relationship between an older sister and her younger deceased sister, in which the elder realizes that assumptions that her younger sister was cisgender or heterosexual were not necessarily correct. It was a little surreal to watch sitting next to my younger sister, while watching my niece play opposite her girlfriend.

Sunday i met up with my sister and dad at a house he's looking at in between the two of us. I hope he jumps on buying it. [News: he's decided not to move again. Oh well.]

I spent lots of time resurrecting coding environment in my laptop, using mise to handle dependencies and environment along with poetry for python. Had a headache getting my diagramming tool container running. I think i was just (1) trying to run on a port with something else on it and then (2) had conflicts with the development environment user/workspace/folder configurations. Instead i chased the container management system, switching to a new system, and fiddled forever with ai assisted node scripts (i don't know javascript really) to see if there were firewalls etc etc oh good grief. Very cranky making.

And my project was aligning my records of absences with work's. By definition, work is correct for previous years, and it seems the offset errors are in previous years. So i put in offset corrections. But that was fussy and annoying. However, i learned about "frictionless" data manifests. That delights me no end.  In general i am trying to learn to manage things "right" in semi-standard idiom and patterns. Over the past few months i've developed a personal style guide (leaning heavily on work's) and a workspace template. This was the first time trying to get the template running at home, so, yes, some bumps.

CPAP has been stopping in the middle of the night and my ("smart") watch started dying within hours of a full charge. Sunday morning i woke in a terrible mood because i had awakened 03:30ish to a watch with just 3% battery after going to bed with a day and 21 hours of charge. I also woke to no air. I couldn't fall back asleep, so i ended up spending hours trying to factory reset and reconnect to my phone with no luck. I think i found some setting that will fix the CPAP behavior: i didn't know if i was turning it off in the middle of the night myself, but last night i slept well.

This morning i had to fast -- including NO TEA!! -- for a "wellness" blood draw to get a $500 reduction on my health insurance premium. I think it will be worth it. I stopped in the past because it was all very intrusive with lots of participation in online portals that seemed pretty annoying. This year it simply (it seems?) requires a bio-metric screening. What i don't know is if the coaching is triggered by being pre-diabetic or simply a BMI trigger. It doesn't seem that one has to engage with the coaching to get the reduction in the premium. I trust my doctor, i don't need an algorithm. Anyhow, i survived the fasting by not taking my vitamin B in the morning, and beat back the caffeine withdrawal with coffee.

I did get blue and have had lots of self recrimination about not being outside this vacation. But trying to accept my focus. We did have a lovely Sunday dinner with a Quorn roast (mushroom based protein loaf) with home-grown chestnuts among the carrots, onions, and potatoes, and a cranberry relish with  home-grown persimmons and spice bush spices.  I thought i might have overdone it with the spice bush, using all of last year's frozen pulps+sugar. Fortunately Christine still loved the relish, and i was motivated while it was cooking to get this year's second harvest of pulps separated from seeds. (The first harvest went bad in the fridge as i neglected it.) By the time of the second harvest some of the spice bush berries had dried out on the shrub. People often dry them whole, so i had some of those ground over slices of persimmon for breakfast for several days: also yummy.

Birdfeeding

Oct. 27th, 2025 01:17 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is cloudy and cool.

I fed the birds.  I've seen several sparrows and house finches, two goldfinches, and a male cardinal.  :D

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 10/27/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 10/27/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

I am done for the night.

Horror fiction class tonight...

Oct. 27th, 2025 11:17 am
chicating: I have a new dragon (Default)
[personal profile] chicating
trying to pretend that an intellectual expansion makes up for my lack of passion(want a thrill, but feel so guilty...so many people have such bigger problems.) But I'm not totally wrong, right--we wouldn't have endorphins and oxytocin and stuff if we weren't all built to want to use them somewhere.

Feathering the Nest

Oct. 27th, 2025 12:44 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
[personal profile] dialecticdreamer is hosting Feathering the Nest today, with its standard theme of fluff and comfort.  Leave prompts, get ficlets!

Worldbuilding

Oct. 27th, 2025 12:30 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Alien Anthropology: Towns without Farms

Explore diverse Neotect cultures thriving without agriculture on the planet Tira 292b. This video examines nomadic and sedentary societies, showcasing unique adaptations to varied environments. Observe how these sapient beings navigate resource scarcity and seasonal changes.

This video not only does a great job of showing how Neotect aliens develop culturally, it uses examples from diverse human cultures and technologies. I have a suspicion that it was made by someone who, like me, learned history and social studies by getting kicked out of those classes for saying "The book is wrong."  It is an unusually astute example of a creature that "thinks as well as a human, but not like  a human," which is my favorite kind of alien.  :D

I advise establishing a secure anchor before rappelling down into the rabbithole.
oursin: A cloud of words from my LJ (word cloud)
[personal profile] oursin

But I am so, so fed up of people who use 'silver bullet' when they mean 'magic bullet'!

Silver bullets kill things, werewolves, mostly, right; or just generally Bad Guys when fired by the Lone Ranger.

Magic bullets Do Good - like curing sifilis, thank you Ehrlich and Hato, they are targeted remedies.

Also, however hyperliterate I am myself and have been from a young age, I don't think it's the panacea proposed here: There is a silver bullet for childhood happiness: a love of reading.

Just because she (and I and I daresay many of you who are reading this) found our happy place in reading, doesn't mean it's going to be that for all children.

I am entirely there for emphasising the role of pleasure in reading, for

meeting children where they are. It means allowing children to read books that might be perceived as too old and too young for them; it means relishing your child’s love for comics and heavily illustrated books

and not gatekeeping and niggling about what they are reading.

But I don't think this is For Everyone any more than Going Out and Playing In the Nice Fresh Air.

And on that, I really liked this: Children should have a right to play in the streets, alleys, pavements and car parks of their neighbourhoods. Refers to a letter about children playing in streets, etc, rather than in designated playgrounds and parks:

It assumes that children should be “taken” to designated play spaces, rather than allowing for the possibility that children should be able to access playable space without adults. And, finally, it fails to acknowledge that parks and other green spaces afford only certain kinds of play, and that children demand – and deserve – diverse spaces for diverse forms of play, not just ball games, swings and slides.

[livre] Il pleut des poèmes

Oct. 27th, 2025 02:30 pm
malurette: (parapluie)
[personal profile] malurette
Titre : Il pleut des poèmes - anthologie de poèmes minuscules
Auteures : varié, présenté par Jen-Marie Henry et Zaü
Langue : français
Type : poésie
Genre : contemplatif ?

1ère parution : compilé en 2003
Édition : Rue du monde
Format : album à l'italienne, 50 pages



(prêté par [personal profile] flo_nelja qui l'a trouvé à la Braderie cette année)

Exactement ce que ça dit : de très courts poèmes, auto-contenus, une phrase ou deux ou trois, style haïku ou aphorisme ; quelques proverbes chinois aussi.
Arrangés par thématiques ; météo, paysage, saison, animaux...
et avec de jolis illustrations peintes.

La plupart sont effectivement jolis, certains surtout vers la fin me parlent un peu moins, mais c'est toujours intéressant à lire.
flo_nelja: (Default)
[personal profile] flo_nelja
Usually I do'nt write sex pollen in realistic canons, but this one had incredible prompts, like "erectile dysfunction treatment experimental druc has sex pollen effects", so I had to try :D

Title : That's not what performance looks like
Author : Nelja
Fandom : Succession
Characters/Ships : Tom/Greg
Genre : Smut, dark comedy
Summary : Greg has been taking some experimental drugs, and they have side effects.
Rating : NC-17
Disclaimer : This doesn't belong to me!
Word Count : ~2300
Warnings : Consentement douteux,

( Link to AO3 )


And my gift, a Doctor Who one, Three/Delgado!Master, trying to approach a Fuck or Die situation with lots of politeness and lots of denial.
Peer Review by Melime (4205 words)
While working on an experimental compound, the Master is accidentally exposed to its fumes and suffers the consequences. After failing to deal with the problem alone, he has no other hope but to ask the Doctor to review his notes and suggest a solution. Both reach the same conclusion indepentently, the only way to cure the Master is by provoking an orgasm while in telepathic contact with a healthy mind. What's the Doctor to do but to help?
flo_nelja: (Default)
[personal profile] flo_nelja
Catégorie : Pour nous qui avons besoin de souffler (Nature - Ecologie - Conscience - Espoir - Paix - Poésie - Solarpunk)



Un livre sur le deuil. Chaque page a, à droite, une images de quelqu'un qui lui fait penser à un être cher perdu, et à gauche, quelques petites lignes poétiques sur les circonstances. Quand on passe la page aux UV, on voit la fantôme de la personne perdue, comme un souvenir.

Il y a une première partie, qui fait environ un tiers du tome, qui a une continuité, sur un vieux monsieur qui a perdu sa femme. La seconde partie est constituée de pages indépendantes, même si certains personnages y sont plusieurs fois.

J'ai pleuré plusieurs fois, ce qui était certainement le but poursuivi. Trigger warnings pour toutes sortes de morts, petits enfants, animaux, etc. Si la description vous tente, le livre vous plaira certainement (si elle ne vous tente pas je comprends)

Monday Update 10-27-25

Oct. 27th, 2025 02:41 am
ysabetwordsmith: Artwork of the wordsmith typing. (typing)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Books
Birdfeeding
Moment of Silence: June Lockheart
Today's Adventures
Birdfeeding
Philosophical Questions: Privacy
Recipe: "Apple Pie Cookies"
Birdfeeding
Friday Five
Follow Friday 10-24-25: Jpop and Jrock
Affordable Housing
Activism
Advice
Birdfeeding
Today's Smoothie
Photography
Birdfeeding
Mad Science
Cuddle Party

Trauma has 31 comments. Affordable Housing has 55 comments. Robotics has 91 comments.


"An Inkling of Things to Come" belongs to Polychrome: Shiv and needs $191 to be complete. Maiara and Arthur discuss taking notes.


The weather is cool and fall-like now. It dribbled a bit on Saturday but didn't amount to much. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches. I saw a downy woodpecker vigorously drilling insects from the dead stems of cup plants. Currently blooming: dandelions, marigolds, petunias, red salvia, verbena, lantana, sweet alyssum, zinnias, snapdragons, blue lobelia, perennial pinks, oxalis, moss rose, firecracker plant, tomatoes, morning glory, cypress vine, sedum, violas. Tomatoes, ball carrots, and groundcherries are ripe. Fields are about 3/4 harvested.

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