Jan. 12th, 2026 01:41 pm

Call for Themes

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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
We've reached the end of scheduled themes for the Poetry Fishbowl project. It's time to brainstorm some new themes! These are a few that I've jotted down earlier, ones that I've thought up or people have suggested, to give you an idea what kind of stuff might be suitable:

* Activism and Collective Action
* Arts and Crafts
* Doomsday
* Escape
* Festivals and Faires
* Give Me a Reason
* Immigrants and Refugees
* Magical Girls
* Mermaids
* Peacework
* People of Color
* Plants and Flowers
* QUILTBAG
* Unicorns
* Unique Titles
* Veterans
* Whump
* Worldbuilding


What other themes would you like to see me write about? What would you like to buy? Suggest them in a comment below this post.

Read more... )
Jan. 12th, 2026 10:28 am

January 2026 Magpie Monday

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[personal profile] dialecticdreamer
Welcome to the first Magpie Monday prompt call of 2026!

Today, I’m taking up the loose threads of stories that needed more development, a next step, or to highlight an element that the reader simply enjoyed so much that they want more.
Read more... )
Jan. 12th, 2026 02:48 am

Diversity

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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Mattel adds an autistic Barbie to doll line

NEW YORK -- Mattel Inc. is introducing an autistic Barbie on Monday as the newest member of its line intended to celebrate diversity, joining a collection that already includes Barbies with Down syndrome, a blind Barbie, a Barbie and a Ken with vitiligo, and other models the toymaker added to make its fashion dolls more inclusive.
[---8<---]
For example, the eyes of the new Barbie shift slightly to the side to represent how some people with autism sometimes avoid direct eye contact, he said. The doll also was given articulated elbows and wrists to acknowledge stimming, hand flapping and other gestures that some autistic people use to process sensory information or to express excitement, according to Mattel.

Jan. 11th, 2026 11:41 pm

Poem: "The Five Books of Woodslore"

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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This poem was written outside the regular prompt calls. It fills the "In the Wilderness" square in my 1-1-25 card for the Public Domain Day Bingo fest. It was sponsored by a pool with [personal profile] fuzzyred.

Read more... )
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[personal profile] dialecticdreamer
Breaking Bread and Breaking an Impasse
By Dialecticdreamer/Sarah Williams
Part 2 of 2, complete
Word count (story only): 1061
[Monday, May 11, 2020, late afternoon]


:: The Teagues’ preparation for a dinner guest is interrupted. Part of the Edison’s Mirror universe. ::




Conversation lagged for several minutes.

Garegin shivered, swallowed, and turned to Aidan. Curiosity slowly brightened the depths of his walnut-brown eyes. “What were you talking about, something with onions, earlier?”

Aidan nodded, accepting the distraction. “There is an enormous supply of onions at the food bank because a shipment was made in error, and they are taking up so much room that other goods cannot be stored. I mentioned making pickled onions, which I can do if I have the large crocks. The vinegar would have to be purchased as I don’t have a month to make it from scratch, which is disappointing.”

The younger man leaned into the idea as if it were a life raft on a stormy sea. “Have you ever used canning jars?”
Read more... )
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Snowflake Challenge 6: Recommendations

Top 10 Challenge. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

Every challenge we try to make at least one rec post, and each year, we try to find a new way to make it fun for everyone. This year's attempt:

The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favorite show, top 10 characters in your favorite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

Can't think of 10 of anything? That's okay, 10 is just an abstract. It's totally up to you.



A gold snowflake ornament is nestled amidst pine boughs

Read more... )
Jan. 11th, 2026 07:39 pm

Magpie Monday Tomorrow!

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[personal profile] dialecticdreamer
Tomorrow is the first Magpie Monday prompt call of 2026! Already!

So, to get the year started off on the right foot, the theme will be Loose Threads.
Read more... )
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Jan. 11th, 2026 06:09 pm

Politics

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[personal profile] thewayne posted this hilarious but astute quote:

"No one wants to go in there when a random f***ing tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country."
-- oil industry investor, about Venezuela
Jan. 11th, 2026 04:52 pm

Today's Cooking

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For his birthday, my partner Doug requested Mom-Mom Bessie's Coconut Molasses Pie from Taste of Home More Easy Everyday Cooking 2024 page 254.  So that's in the oven now.  :D

EDIT 1/11/26 -- The pie is done and quite tasty.  My partner is please.  \o/  It resembles a shoofly pie, so if you like that, then this is worth a try.
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Jan. 11th, 2026 04:45 pm

Science

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New form of 'artificial metabolism' converts CO2 into biological building blocks

Researchers built the Reductive Formate Pathway, called the ReForm pathway, to convert CO2 into acetyl-CoA outside living cells. Acetyl-CoA is a small but essential molecule your cells use to turn food into energy. When your body breaks down carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, it often funnels the results into acetyl-CoA. From there, acetyl-CoA carries a tiny chemical package called an acetyl group into the citric acid cycle, where your cells “burn” it. That process releases energy, and your body captures it to help make ATP, the main energy currency that powers cellular work.

This study shows how engineered enzymes, electricity-derived carbon feedstocks, and cell-free systems can be combined to recycle CO2 into useful chemical building blocks, while avoiding the limits of living cells and pointing toward new ways to make materials with lower carbon footprints
.


That's good news for climate change.

However, it's also a step in most food replicator technologies, for those of you keeping an eye on that track.
Jan. 11th, 2026 04:34 pm

Snowflake Challenge

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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
... is running a bit late today, but the mods are on top of it. If they can't reach the planned day host, someone else will step in to post the challenge.

Snowflake Challenge: A pair of ice skates hanging on a wood paneled wall. Pine boughs with a few ornaments are stuffed into the skates.
Jan. 11th, 2026 11:46 am

B5 color theorizing

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[personal profile] sholio
I FOUND IT AGAIN. I read a post on Tumblr a while back on a particularly nicely done instance of color symbolism with Londo on B5, and I finally found it. (More beneath the cut.)

Spoilers for the whole show )
Jan. 11th, 2026 01:05 pm

Science

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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This new imaging technology breaks the rules of optics

Scientists have unveiled a new way to capture ultra-sharp optical images without lenses or painstaking alignment. The approach uses multiple sensors to collect raw light patterns independently, then synchronizes them later using computation. This sidesteps long-standing physical limits that have held optical imaging back for decades. The result is wide-field, sub-micron resolution from distances that were previously impossible.


I immediately thought of how many species have multiple eyes. Vertebrates favor two, but invertebrates often have more.  Spiders run to 8.  Scallops can have hundreds.  Since eyes are delicate and expensive tissue, there must be a compelling advantage, specially for more than 1-2 of them.  I would suspect that greater detail is among the advantages.
Jan. 11th, 2026 01:02 pm

Birdfeeding

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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is cloudy and cold. It snowed a little last night, just enough to leave riffles in the grass and some larger white patches in the fields.

I fed the birds. I've seen a large flock of sparrows, several mourning doves, and a starling.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 1/11/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I've seen a male cardinal.

EDIT 1/11/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I've seen one female and two male cardinals.

EDIT 1/11/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night.
Jan. 11th, 2026 12:39 pm

Art

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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
A friend mentioned Belgian symbolism in art, and when I asked about that, recommended the work of Jean Delville. Fascinating. :D  I'd never seen it before, and it really does have a lot of symbolic imagery.
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[personal profile] sholio
I don't think I posted about this at the time, but there was an absolute odyssey involved in getting the original batch of B5 script books that I ordered.

The original process was this:

I'd known about the existence of the B5 script books vaguely for a while, but hadn't really thought of buying them before. In October, when I came back from traveling, I googled it and found a massive site called "B5 Books" that had authorized editions of all the B5-related books available, which was a lot of them, not just the script books but tons of other stuff as well.

They had closed yesterday.

But wait! They were staying open through the weekend (like 2 more days) because they'd had technical issues. So I splurged and ordered an absolute ton of books (about 2/3 of the total script books out there, mainly focused on episodes I especially wanted to read about). I would have preferred to order just one to find out a) what the books were like, and b) what their customer service was like, but ... closing in 2 days! So I gave them my credit card info for a quantity of books that I don't want to think too closely about.

A month went by.

I got a shipping notice and a tracking number, and and then a box arrived .... with 2 books in it.

I contacted customer service (a bit nervously, in the hopes they'd still actually answer). To their credit, they were very quick to respond; evidently there was a second tracking email I hadn't received for some reason, for the box with most of the rest of the books in it. (They sent me a free digital book to make up for the emotional distress, too - they were really nice.)

This was back in December, and I was leaving on the 13th, Saturday, so I periodically checked the tracking info for the box. It showed up in Fairbanks over the previous weekend, and showed that it was supposed to deliver on Monday.

Monday came and went. About mid-week, the tracking info showed that it had traveled out of Fairbanks again. (Why??) I had visions of the box going all the way back to the sender for some reason. Meanwhile, I had planned to spend the last couple of days before I left diving into my new books, but as the week ticked down and it continued to tease me ... I guess not. Finally, on Friday, I got an actual "out for delivery" notice, and then a notice that a "pick up at post office" slip had been left. Also, Friday was our last day of actual mail delivery (we'd put a hold on it until after Christmas that started on Saturday and went for 2 weeks, i.e. about the amount of time that the post office will hold a box - you know, this box with $100s of books in it). I was headed to the airport Saturday afternoon, but I figured it should be possible to stop by the post office on the way.

I picked up the mail.

No slip.

I thought, okay, maybe I picked up an early batch (yesterday's? our mailbox is on the highway and both the mail delivery and our collection of it is kind of haphazard) so when Orion got home a few hours later, I asked if there had been a slip in the mailbox.

Nope!

So now my package is on hold at the post office, I GUESS, with no ability to redeliver and our mail delivery not starting until after the approximate return to sender date. We hunted all around the mailbox just in case it had been dropped. No slip.

I ended up printing out the tracking number and taking that to the post office on our way to the airport, and that DID work and they DID have the box and I got it, YAY. (Orion said that the slip spontaneously showed up in the mailbox when he was headed home after dropping me off, so WHO KNOWS what was up with that.)

Anyway, all of that ended up working out in the end, and I enjoyed the books so much that I went on Amazon to see if I could find used copies of the ones I didn't have. I ordered a few more, and I just checked the shipping info and discovered that one of them - from a 3rd party Amazon seller - was sent via Fedex and supposedly delivered on Thursday afternoon, i.e. 2 days ago.

Guess what I don't seem to have!

Orion says that Fedex often leaves deliveries in random places around the yard - he's found them on piles of construction supplies, left at the door of the shop instead of the house, etc. Inauspiciously, it snowed a few inches last night, so everything is covered with fresh snow. Also, it was dark. Still, we took flashlights and went and hunted high and low in all the places that a package might be, ranging from likely (covered with snow beside the door) to unlikely but possible (at the doors of the various outbuildings like the greenhouse, on top of random vehicles in the yard) to the highly unlikely (at our road sign, in our mailbox). Not a single sign of it! I don't know if it was delivered to some other house, mistakenly marked as delivered when it's actually fallen under the delivery truck seat, or if a very soggy B5 book is going to turn up four months later when the snow melts, but seriously, WHAT EVEN. I've never had a book go missing like this in all the time I've been ordering used books off Amazon!

Anyway, further updates from the B5 script books are coming soon, and maybe I'll have this particular book eventually, or maybe not.
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[personal profile] dialecticdreamer
Breaking Bread and Breaking an Impasse
By Dialecticdreamer/Sarah Williams
Part 1 of 2, complete
Word count (story only): 1204
[Monday, May 11, 2020, late afternoon]]


:: The Teagues’ preparation for a dinner guest is interrupted. Part of the Edison’s Mirror universe. ::




Aidan smiled at the driver as he hefted the large plastic tote full of onions. He balanced the folded jacket that the younger man had given Aidan on his head, then put the bin atop the jacket. “Thank you for the ride, Persia.”

“Just bring a sample of those pickled onions that you were talking about. I’ve never had them.” She waved, then rolled backward down the driveway.

Aidan walked easily to the garage door, but had to set the bin down to let himself in.
Read more... )
Jan. 10th, 2026 05:07 pm

Photos: Contorta Willow

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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
I took some pictures yesterday but didn't have time to upload and post them until today. The night before, a windstorm blew down the contorta willow sapling that used to stand between the house yard and the south lot, near the big maple tree.

Walk with me ... )
Jan. 10th, 2026 02:01 pm

Birdfeeding

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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is mostly cloudy.  It rained again at some point last night.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a large flock of sparrows and a mourning dove.

I heard the owl hooting all night too.  :D

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 1/10/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 1/10/26 -- I put out a fresh suet cake and refilled the hopper feeder.  Sparrows have been mobbing.  There is now a starling in addition to the mourning dove, but he isn't trying to squeeze in there either -- he knows he is outnumbered.

EDIT 1/10/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

It is 5 PM.  The sun has recently set but the sky is still fairly light.

I am done for the night.

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