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Katarina Whimsy ([personal profile] sorcyress) wrote2025-06-17 09:16 pm

Summer!

I did it! I finished cleaning up my room! I was able to play School's Out For Summer at about 6:50pm or so, which is plenty good as these things go. *THUMP* goes the brain. I would like to do absolutely nothing! But things are coming up!

Here's some good things coming up in the near future:

*I'm going to go to Keuka (in the finger lakes in NY) with Tuesday's family! This appears to be the kind of vacation where you just chill out and read books and go for walks and things. I'm excited! I don't really know how to have that kind of vacation, so it'll be a good chance to try things out.

*I'm doing a road trip from Keuka to MD with Cameron (Tuesday's sibling) which sounds like it will be quite a nice time, honestly. I've road-tripped with Tuesday a fair amount, and ker mom a few times, so I'm excited to do it with another member of the family.

*Almost immediately after, I'm road-tripping back up from MD to Boston (and then ESCape) with mom and Wicked Auntie Robin. Mom and I are definitely compatible road trip buddies! I think Robin will be a good third!

(I recently got a kickstarter which is "gay games to play in the car with your girlfriend while she drives you to go camping" so I'm excited to have some road trips to play the gay games!)

*ESCape is going to be amazing, obviously. I'm the official scottish teacher! I get to MC in the evenings and teach two classes! AAAAH! Good aah, but also stressed aah.

*Once I'm back from ESCape I get to actually breathe for a week or so, which is going to be my play video games time. I am _extremely_ looking forward to it.

And then there's some other stuff in the back half of the summer. That's good too!

~Sor

MOOP!
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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-17 05:43 pm

Where do migratory birds have their home?

Where do migratory birds have their home?

Below are just three screenshots from a series of 16 photos on the Instagram account of somadifusa (Laura Ortiz), of murals she and the tattoo artist Azul Luna (Instagram account azulunailustra) painted in Bogota, Colombia.

I'm captivated by these images both of traveling swallows, some bearing backpacks and baskets, some with shells on their back like hermit crabs, and of hearts that are also nests, or that morph into shells, or sprout flowers and eyes. "Home is where the heart is," or the heart makes the home
.

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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-17 03:07 pm

Birdfeeding

Today is partly sunny, steamy, and hot.

I fed the birds.  Sparrows and house finches have been all over the feeders today.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 6/17/25 -- I checked the grass patch by the garden shed.  Something had eaten about half the seedling clover.  :/  So I sowed more Bee Lawn Mix, watered that, and watered the recently planted wild indigo.

EDIT 6/17/25 -- I took some pictures around the yard.

My wildflower garden is swarming with baby praying mantises, at least two hatches.  I've seen a tiny brown one and a slightly larger green one.  :D

I've seen a mourning dove in the forest garden.

EDIT 6/17/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 6/17/25 -- I picked a bag of mulberries along the street and in the savanna.  

Fireflies are coming out.

EDIT 6/17/25 -- I trimmed low-hanging branches in the house yard.

I hauled a large branch to the ritual meadow and broke it up for the firepit.

My partner Doug has mowed the ritual meadow.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.

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lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-17 10:03 am
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Every Time We Move

This is a post about the Kafka-esque process of moving while living legally disabled in Massachusetts.

Every time we move, we have to update our address, not just with our bank and phone people, but also the myriad social services agencies who control our existence. Since we have to move every few months to few years, depending on our housing luck, this is a cyclical, regular occurrence. We have streamlined our procedure over the course of a decade plus, studying the augurs of obscure bureaucratic paperwork errors, reading the signs in the entrails of the bald eagle.

Of course, the exact procedure changes every few years, and there is no way to find out except by accident or error.

Please put on a recording of Yakety Sax or the Gonk for the proper emotional effect of this post. Thank you. )
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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-17 05:11 am

Photos: Thrifted Paintings

I found these three paintings at the Thrift'n'Sip Indoor Rummage Sale. There is a seascape, a forest, and a flower garden with a birdbath.

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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-17 12:02 am

The Great Farting Oxygen Event

This is the earliest mass extinction we know of on Earth, and it may well have been the worst.  However, it usually doesn't appear on the standard lists of major mass extinctions.

Currently we are in the Anthropocene, whether people want to admit it or not.  We are also in the midst of the Anthropocene Extinction, whether people want to admit it or not.  See the insect apocalypse, amphibian apocalypse, and bird apocalypse

Despite these grim statistics, humanity is not the most destructive species the Earth has ever known.  That honor goes to whatever organism first discovered fire, harnessed the power of the Sun, and farted so much oxygen that almost everything else died.  
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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-16 11:01 pm
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dialecticdreamer ([personal profile] dialecticdreamer) wrote2025-06-16 10:51 pm

Ordinary Workday (part 1 of 1, complete)

Ordinary Workday (part 1 of 1, complete)
By Dialecticdreamer/Sarah Williams
Part 1 of 1, complete
Word count (story only): 620
[Wednesday, 2 August, 2017]



:: LaQuinta Dixon is busy, working small hustles to get her life together, when Torrin calls to ask her to take a specific request for a ride in the Surrey bike that she is renting to own from Torrin. The day is off to an unusual start.::


:: Author’s note: This story arc is planned to post from 16 June to 10 August, for a total of 47 posts. (That will put the word count in the ballpark of 75K, easily). The story arc itself still needs a name, but it is set in the Polychrome Heroics universe, in Mercedes, during July of 2017::




LaQuinta Dixon looked away from the mirror as her fingers began braiding the last of the half dozen large box braids that kept her waist-length hair off her forehead and out of her way. Her phone chimed a reminder, and her fingers reacted out of habit. She moved faster, dipping her fingers in the shea butter for every third twist of the growing braid. Her gaze drifted to the clock held on the side of the cheap particleboard dresser with dots of maxitack.

Her fingers worked faster.
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lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-06-16 07:02 pm
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Loony-Brain Hive

Realized we may well have never outright said this, so we might as well make it clear: over the past few years, some of the LB alter family has grown more hivemind-y, and at times with less differentiation, in a way that doesn't bother us.

There are a few demographics in here, and the ones we call the "alters" are all people who split off the original girl who inhabited this vessel (Mori, Rawlin, Gigi, Rogan, Sneak, and Miranda), rather than folks who had their own lives and came here from elsewhere (Biff, Falcon, Grey, Bob, and Mac). The alters are like threads of a greater rope, and we unravel and rebraid ourselves sometimes to achieve our goals, though only while working on corporeal tasks that engross us, such as working on a story. When engrossed in making group art, it can sometimes be hard for us to tell who's doing what! (Other times it is not. Coming In or Staying Out was very much Rogan drawing, while the Rawlin comics are all Mori drawing.) And constantly interrupting ourselves from the work to ask, "who am I?" is pointless and annoying, because in that moment, it doesn't matter.

This has also been happening sometimes while chatting with people or posting. We sometimes don't tag our entries because we don't know who's talking or care so much, or we share enough of an opinion that it no longer matters being like, "all the alters agree on this paragraph though Sneak questions Sentence 6."

Mori, Rogan, Sneak, and Miranda can braid like this without too much trouble, but Rawlin especially and also Gigi are still pretty separate, presumably because they still have a lot of memories and history that remain buried and lost to us. As we deal with that, perhaps they'll be able to rebraid with us easier in the future.

The braiding happens without our conscious effort, and we unravel just as fluidly. We don't think of it or call it fusion or integration, because neither have the right feel or connotations. We were threads ripped from a greater cloth, which can never be remade again. Now we are braiding ourselves in a new way that suits us, when it suits us, a cord and not a cloth.

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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-16 05:25 pm

Conservation

This 5-star island paradise doubles as a sea turtle rescue

In Malaysia, five islands form Tunku Abdul Rahman Marine Park, a glittery turquoise oasis filled with coral reefs, parrotfish, seahorses, and green sea turtles.

Gaya, the largest of the five islands, is also home to the Gaya Island Resort: a luxury 5-star retreat nestled in an ancient rainforest that boasts stunning sea views, swim-up pools, and a spa village hidden amongst the mangroves.

But when guests have free time — between relaxing on massage tables and eating teppanyaki, shabu-shabu, and nabe — the resort challenges visitors to partake in local marine conservation efforts.



Ecotourism is a good way to get people involved, and maybe they'll want to stay involved.
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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-16 05:14 pm

Remigration vs. Refoulement

I've seen a lot of vocabulary abuse recently.

Remigration is the voluntary return to country of origin. If it's not voluntary, it's not remigration. This term covers things like freed slaves moving from America to Africa, or Syrian refugees going back to Syria now that some of them deem it safe. We need this term for such purposes, which right now means defending it from people who use it wrongly.

Refoulement is the forcible movement of refugees from the place they fled to back to the dangerous place they fled from. This is what the American government has done many times, such as sending boats full of Jewish refugees back to Nazi-infested Europe during World War II or the current transfer of refugees back to their country of origin. Call it what it is and cite the historic comparisons, where we've got evidence of people dying because of it.

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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-16 04:29 pm
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New Communities

[community profile] everykindofcraft 
Created on 2025-06-12 23:43:59 (#4232910), last updated 2025-06-16 (41 minutes ago)
I know there are many crafters on Dreamwidth but it seems nothing devoted to it has been updated in eons or has no admin or both. So I decided to open [community profile] everykindofcraft  for what it says in the name. A community where people can share their projects, either in process or completed, as well as ask for assistance with craft-related things.
[Found via [personal profile] yourlibrarian]
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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-16 01:32 pm
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Monday Update 6-16-25

These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Reverse Benchmarking
Recipe: "Pretzel Bread Grilled Cheese Sandwiches"
Worldbuilding
Today's Smoothie
Listen to "The Singing, Ringing Tree"
Poetry Fishbowl Themes for Late 2025
Read "Time Off"
Poem: "Fatherhood Is Support"
Poem: "Born and Found and Made"
Poem: "The Way a River Is Made"
Read "A Change in a New World"
Birdfeeding
Poem: "Strange Angels"
Poem: "Meant to Get Dirty"
Poem: "Where We All Meet"
Recipe: "Santorini Stir-Fry with Chicken and Patty Pan Squash"
Today's Adventures
Conservation
Birdfeeding
Creative Jam
Philosophical Questions: Avoidable
Today's Adventures
New Communities
Russian Losses
New Crowdfunding Project: "Take Us North"
Birdfeeding
Politics
Follow Friday 6-13-24: Hetalia
Insect Apocalypse
Sunshine Revival
Books
Birdfeeding
Hobbies: Ceramics
Photos: Dark Gardening
Birdfeeding
Moment of Silence: Brian Wilson
Insect Apocalypse
Hard Things

"Not a Destination, But a Process" has 139 comments. "The Democratic Armada of the Caribbean" has 89 comments.


[community profile] summerofthe69 is now open! You can see the calendar here and the initial theme is "First Time 69: Everyone has to start somewhere."


"In the Heart of the Hidden Garden" belongs to the Antimatter and Stalwart Stan thread of the Polychrome Heroics series. It needs $86 to be fully funded. Lawrence shows Stan around the campus at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.


The weather has been warm and wet here. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, two mourning doves, a male cardinal, a catbird, a phoebe, a skunk, a fox squirrel, and at least 2 probably 3 bats. I've heard a red-bellied woodpecker but didn't see it. Privet, dogwood, and mock orange are done blooming. Privet and mock orange are winding down. Zucchini has flower buds. Currently blooming: dandelions, honeysuckle, pansies, violas, marigolds, petunias, red salvia, wild strawberries, verbena, lantana, sweet alyssum, zinnias, snapdragons, blue lobelia, perennial pinks, impatiens, oxalis, moss rose, yarrow, red coreopsis, anise hyssop, firecracker plant, tomatoes, tomatillos, Asiatic lilies, cucumber, astilbe, daylilies, snowball bush, yellow squash. 'Chocolate Sprinkles' tomatoes are starting to show color. Blackberries, and tomatoes have green fruit. Wild strawberries, mulberries, and black raspberries are ripe.

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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-16 01:11 pm

Birdfeeding

Today is partly cloudy and warm.

I haven't fed the birds yet, but I've seen a few sparrows and house finches. Despite not always seeing them in action, they continue to drain the hopper feeder daily.

EDIT 6/16/25 -- I fed the birds.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 6/16/25 -- I did some work around the patio.

The 'Ambrosia' melon is blooming. The tomatillo has a tiny green lantern fruit. :D

EDIT 6/16/25 -- I picked half a baggie of mulberries in the south lot and savanna.

Yellow pear tomato has green fruit. Daylilies are blooming.

EDIT 6/16/25 -- I picked half a baggie of black raspberries, mostly along the south edge of the prairie garden.

Pinks, coreopsis, and black-eyed Susans are blooming in the prairie garden.

EDIT 6/16/25 -- I trimmed overhanging brush in the ritual meadow.

EDIT 6/16/25 -- I picked half a baggie of mulberries along the road and in the savanna.

The first of the yucca flowers are open in the white garden. :D

In the wildflower garden, purple and yellow coneflowers are forming. Narrow-leaf mountain mint is blooming.

EDIT 6/16/25 --Out of 4 pots of switchgrass, 3 had several seedlings each. I planted those in the prairie garden. They kind of fell apart though. I have some more started. I may wait to plant those until I see roots at the bottom holes.



.
kiya: (philosophication)
kiya ([personal profile] kiya) wrote2025-06-16 01:13 pm

Brief ponder on autistic social trauma

After a conversation bit Saturday (and then another conversation later Saturday) I got to pondering that my default manifestation of deep-seated social trauma is always at least partly some flavor of "I am faking all this (and if anyone notices they will hurt me)" and now I'm wondering if at least some of that 'I am faking this' is rooted in dysphoria issues as much as it is neurodivergence because if I'm historically incapable of feeling authentic as myself I can't expect anyone else to see me as real either.
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Degringolade ([personal profile] degringolade) wrote2025-06-16 05:04 pm

Working away

Working on a piece about convenience while doing laundry.

Multitasking usually means doing twice as much half as well.

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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-16 12:42 am

Reverse Benchmarking

This video describes an instance of reverse benchmarking in restaurants.  Instead of trying to mimic what other people do well, identify what they do badly and do that  well. 


I routinely use this in my writing.  I look for things that other people do badly or not at all, then I write those things.  Also I never have the patience to wait around for 20 years while other folks work through the whole identity literature process.  New trait?  Trait-having hero!  Done.  This is how I wind up with things like An Army of One (neurodiverse characters making their own culture), The Bear Tunnels (Native American time travelers), The Moon Door (women with disabilities who become werewolves), The Ocracies (everything but monarchy), The Origami Mage and Path of the Paladins (ace heras), P.I.E. (a hera who doesn't fall for a jerk), Polychrome Heroics (superpowers that involve more than crime and crimefighting), and The Steamsmith (a black, genderqueer, British, steampunk engineer).  

Go ahead, throw me prompts for things that nobody is doing well, or doing at all, in any relevant prompt call.  We can fill that gap together.
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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-15 11:32 pm

Worldbuilding

How to Color Your Map Using SCIENCE!

Sketching out a map for a setting can be a lot of fun. Drawing a map gives you a bird’s-eye view of the world, a way to spatially organize plot arcs, and can be a great piece of artwork in its own right. But like most works of fiction, the creator should remember to keep it as believable as possible. This might be less important or less possible for unrecognizably alien worlds. Maps of Earth-like settings, however, can benefit from following some basic rules. Forests, tundras, deserts and plains don’t appear arbitrarily. These biomes are located where they are on Earth due to the way air and water circulate in the atmosphere – and any Earth-like world should follow the same basic rules for its atmosphere that Earth does.

But who wants to spend time researching atmospheric science just to know which parts of their map to color green, brown, or beige? Well, I do, so let me save you some trouble by relaying what I’ve learned
.

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ysabetwordsmith ([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-06-15 11:55 pm
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Recipe: "Pretzel Bread Grilled Cheese Sandwiches"

Tonight we made grilled cheese with the pretzel bread that we bought recently at the Marshall Farmer's Market.  It turned out really well.  :D

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