ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith Mar. 31st, 2026 02:08 pm)
Six strange galaxies found hiding in Hubble’s vast archive

Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency shows six strange galaxies that look nothing like the calm, orderly spirals many people picture when they hear the word “galaxy.”

Bent arcs of light, smeared shapes, broken rings, and objects that resist easy labels all appear in one frame. Each one is real. Each one was hiding in plain sight.



Whenever you feel disappointed that your craft project didn't come out perfect, remember this -- even the universe doesn't make everything perfect, and imperfect things can still be beautiful.
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith Mar. 31st, 2026 02:02 pm)
Supreme Court rules against Colorado's conversion therapy ban on First Amendment grounds

"Colorado's law addressing conversion therapy does not just ban physical interventions. In cases like this, it censors speech based on viewpoint," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. "Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety. Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same. But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country."


Here's the thing about politics: every weapon in your hand is also a weapon in your enemy's hand.

We should immediately use this to attack every gag rule against talking about homosexuality and where to get a safe abortion and every other things the despots want to muzzle, on the grounds of free speech. All of them at once, forcing the despots to play whack-a-mole while contradicting what they just argued above. Then keep all the things they say, and match them up, showing how it's not about free speech but that they will say anything to get what they want. Shine a light on it. Cockroaches hate light.
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] birdfeeding Mar. 31st, 2026 01:47 pm)
Today is mostly cloudy, mild, and breezy.  It rained earlier.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 3/31/26 -- I planted a red curly willow where the old contorta willow was.

I saw a male pheasant running along the road.










.
  
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith Mar. 31st, 2026 01:45 pm)
Today is mostly cloudy, mild, and breezy.  It rained earlier.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 3/31/26 -- I planted a red curly willow where the old contorta willow was.

I saw a male pheasant running along the road.










.
 


The 2015 DELUXE rulebook plus many solitaire and gamemaster adventures. First of two T&T Bundles.

Bundle of Holding: Tunnels & Trolls (from 2018)

AND

Eighteen Tunnels & Trolls solo modules plus five GM adventures. Second of two offers.

Bundle of Holding: T&T Adventures (From 2021)
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
([personal profile] rachelmanija Mar. 31st, 2026 10:59 am)


Camille is a tradwife influencer, living in near-total isolation from all humans but her awful and mostly absent husband Graham and her nosy neighbor Renee. She directs her own life like it's a perfect Instagram post, constantly obsessing over the perfect shade of beige and how her followers will react if she disagrees with a more successful tradwife influencer's insistence on a folic acid-free diet. The best way to get followers is to get pregnant, and she and Graham haven't managed that yet. But there's something lurking in the dark, deep well near the dark, deep woods that might be able to solve that problem for her.

The first quarter or so of this book is so repetitive and anvillicious that I might have DNF'd it if I hadn't been reading it for the horror book club. However, it picks up once Camille has sex with the creature in the well. (Camille tells herself it's an angel but can't stop calling it "the creature;" its actual nature is pleasingly ambiguous.) Her extremely weird pregnancy and increasingly desperate efforts to conceal its weirdnesses from Graham, Renee, and her online followers had me glued to the pages, and once her baby is born, I went from being entertained to actively loving the story. I don't want to give away too much about the baby, but I think it's the first time I have ever gotten deeply attached to a fictional baby. Of course, it helps that the baby isn't quite human...

The story is predictable but in a good way once you're past the interminable first quarter; you can't wait for certain things to happen. It gets increasingly batshit and darkly, gleefully funny as it goes along. It's a good female rage book, and has some quality monsterfucking scenes. Despite the rough start I really enjoyed this.

Read more... )

Content notes: Very gory.

Incidentally, there are at least three novels called Trad Wife or Tradwife released this year. One by Sarah Langan is coming out in September.
ysabetwordsmith: A bird singing (Birdfeeding)
([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] birdfeeding Mar. 31st, 2026 11:57 am)
This is the March community post for [community profile] birdfeeding. Which birds did you see this month? What were your wildlife activities during February? What are your plans for April?

Read more... )
selenak: (Catherine Weaver by Miss Mandy)
([personal profile] selenak Mar. 31st, 2026 06:09 pm)
In which season 2 comes to an end with a bang and a whimper both.

Spoilers have just heard there will be a third and final season, which is good )
the_shoshanna: a squirrel blissfully buries its face in a yellow flower (squirrel)
([personal profile] the_shoshanna Mar. 31st, 2026 11:25 am)
I want to drink more water; I don't drink much, and I suspect that I spend a lot of time mildly dehydrated. But if I put "drink water" on my daily to-do list, I get resentful and anxious and resistant? It feels like such a nebulous goal.

But if I put "fill my water bottle" on it, that works great! It's a basic simple task that I can do and check off. And then, once I have a bottle of water at hand, I just naturally chug away at it without stressing. Because I am mildly dehydrated and therefore thirsty! I'm just not usually aware enough of it to get up and get a drink.

Brains, man.
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll Mar. 31st, 2026 08:46 am)


22 works reviewed. 11.5 by women (52%), 10 by men (45%), 0.5 by non-binary authors (2%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 9 by POC (41%).

March 2026 in Review
Tags:
skygiants: Kyoko from Skip Beat! making a mad flaily dive (oh flaily flaily)
([personal profile] skygiants Mar. 31st, 2026 07:41 am)
I have a stack of library books and used bookstore buys looking at me accusingly but instead I have been lured into doing a massive McCaffrey read. I know. I don't respect my choices either.

My other problem is that once I am embarked on a Text I have a hard time stopping it, so when all the library offered me in ebook was an omnibus of Dragonflight - Dragonquest - The White Dragon I was always going to be reading all three. And, you know, it did start out quite well! Rereading Dragonflight a very funny experience because it's like

Dragonflight: and here's where Lessa washes her hair
Me: tiny Becca what do you think about this
the inner tiny Becca: I LOVE LESSA I LOVE IT WHEN SHE GETS TO WASH HER HAIR 🥹
Dragonflight: and here's where F'lar sends F'nor on a haunted mission back in time
Me: tiny Becca what do you think about this
the inner tiny Becca: who's F'lar

But actually with very few actual memories and a lot of informed knowledge from the twenty years since the last time I read these books I truly expected F'lar and the central romance plot in general to be ... worse? Like yes it's 1968 and yes there's the dubcon dragonsex of it all and yes F'lar's whole mission in life is to convince the world that you Cannot stop feeding the military-industrial complex even after four hundred years of peace or you Will be eaten by mindless alien hordes [On Which More Later]. But the thing that the dubcon dragonsex actually does, narratively speaking, is it fully displaces the emphasis of the romance away from 'when are they going to have sex' to 'when are these two assholes who trust themselves very much going to learn to trust each other.' They're having sex all through it; the dragons have taken care of that, so the sex is no longer the point. The partnership and the problem-solving is the point, and it is fun to watch them solve problems and increasingly know which problems they can rely on the other to solve. Which I think is interesting and purposeful and honestly pretty bold, for 1968! I'd like to see more romances do that now! Also the problem-solving is satisfying, and haunted mission back in time plot that I had completely forgotten is quite effectively creepy. I ended Dragonflight like 'you know what, as Of Its Time as it is, in many ways this book actually does really work. Maybe ... Pern is good?

Then on to Dragonquest and The White Dragon and it turns out Pern unfortunately is not good, although both of these books are real would-be-good-if-they-were-good situations.

Dragonflight: and here's where F'lar sends F'nor on a haunted mission back in time
me: Dragonquest what do you think about this
Dragonquest: what haunted mission

No, Dragonflight is kind of a mess of a book but what I do think is interesting about it, thematically speaking -- to come back to the military-industrial complex of it all -- is that the end of Dragonflight is a lot of people going 'to be manly and heroic is to fight forever on a cool dragon, we've reached peacetime and it's dull so we're going forward in time so we can continue fighting forever on a cool dragon' and the beginning of Dragonquest is like 'actually I have reconsidered my thinking about this and it turns out fighting forever is perhaps bad for you, psychologically? maybe instead of heroic forever war we can look at some alternate pursuits that are also heroic and manly but less lethal and traumatizing. Like space exploration! Did anyone watch the Moon Landing? Wasn't that pretty cool?' ([personal profile] genarti when I was talking with her about this also pointed out that at the time Dragonquest came out we were also several more years into Vietnam.) Obviously McCaffrey is all in on the Pioneer Spirit and the wistful terra nullius of it all but I appreciate that she's actively revising her thoughts on the military and its relationship to the populace it theoretically protects as she's writing it, and it's interesting to see the evolution. Really really funny to see F'lar go from the 'SEND TITHES LIKE YOU DID IN THE DAYS OF YORE' guy to the 'I'm your progressive candidate for Weyrleader and I think this military appropriationism has gotten a bit out of hand' guy. I love the end of the book where it's like 'well we've actually solved the problem of Thread but unfortunately our solution is not cool and sexy, so we need a dragonrider to do something that is cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless to get everyone else to buy into it.'

(E who dragged me into this: plausible reading that the grubs are a feminised solution. we must put our hands into mother earth and urgh it's all moist and gooey
me: i love that you went there because my first thought is that the solution is lower class. the humblest tillers of the land
E, determined: thread is being absorbed by a planetary vagina dentata which also has life-generating properties)

Anyway, F'nor does some spaceflight, in a cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless way, which is making up I suppose for the other cool and sexy thing that F'nor absolutely does not get to do which is challenge dragon biological essentialism. F'nor/Brekke is not a particularly successful or interesting romance plot but nonetheless I truly was on the edge of my seat for this -- I remembered that Brekke's mating flight ends in Tragedy but I thought F'nor might at least like succeed a little bit in proving that it's hypothetically possible for a brown dragon to mate with a queen? But no! he doesn't even get to try! Having raised the question of 'what does dragon gender really mean and how much does it bind us' Anne cannot bring herself to answer it. Have you instead considered that spaceflight is cool and sexy.

And The White Dragon is even more a book of 'having raised the question, Anne cannot bring herself to answer it.' Not much actually happens in The White Dragon, we're making a number of mountains out of molehills, but it's all whirling around the central anxiety point of 'if my soulbonded dragon falls out of standard dragon color/gender categories and moreover is definitely ace then what does that make me?' And the book's answer is '....a guy. A manly guy who successfully achieves all of his society's standards of masculinity. Do not worry about it.' Well, I wouldn't have been worrying about it, Anne, if you hadn't been telling me to worry about it, and then you gave me the most boring answer possible.

There is more to say about The White Dragon -- not least the way that every woman in the book seems to have gotten a hefty splash from the misogyny fountain -- but I am running out of time so we'll call it here. Am I done? No! I am now halfway through Dragonsdawn. More on that anon.
scaramouche: my cat showing his tummy and looking at the camera expectantly (smokey wants pettins)
([personal profile] scaramouche Mar. 31st, 2026 08:01 pm)
Before I started watching Aryana, I read an overview of the premise which closed with the line: "As she faces her fate of becoming a mermaid, Aryana is torn between choosing the sea and the surface world of humans where her heart belongs."

Now that I have finished 134 episodes of 189, I can confidently say, WHAT. There's no dilemma in the show at all. Aryana is a human girl with human girl tribulations and doesn't think about the sea at all. Although she did for three episodes get kidnapped by Neptuna, she has otherwise barely interacted with the merfolk storyline, which only exists to explain what Neptuna and her mother are up to, for otherwise Neptuna and/or her minions would be popping up every 30 episodes or so out of nowhere like Javert to chase Aryana. Was that overview written while they were still figuring out the show, and thought that Aryana would be interacting more with merfolk storyline?

Anyway, just as I was getting worried that the tone was off for a show that's supposed to be heading into the endgame, stuff has started happening! Not immediately, cos the first half of this batch was more of the love quadrangle faffing about of Aryana & Adrian vs. Hubert & Megan; NOTHING FOR MARLON, LOL. I kind of like Hubert but have trouble buying Hubert and Aryana behaving like it's a big tragedy that they can't be together. The writers only seemed to decide that Aryana had big feelings for Hubert after she declared that they couldn't date because of Marlon and/or the mermaid thing, and to be fair both those issues also exist for Adrian, who has been friendzoned, but I'm still like, these kids are fourteen. This is crush territory, not sweeping romance territory.

But in the second half of this batch, that story has been shunted aside for the family plot to come back to the forefront, and it's moving so quickly! In one fell swoop, Victor and Elnora now know that Aryana is Victor's daughter AND that she's a mermaid! Following that, school drama forced Victor's hand to tell Megan and Stella about the paternity thing as well, though not the mermaid thing, which has given Megan's plans to oust Aryana a more sinister edge as Megan tries to befriend Aryana to find something to destroy her, yum yum delicious.

On the other side of the story they've started styling Ofelia better with subtle but still visible make-up, and that is how we know we're heading into an endgame reconciliation between her and Victor. There's been barely any of the three boys in the second half of this batch of episodes, though that'll no doubt change eventually, I'm grateful at the rapid pace and I wonder if the showrunners were told to kick things up a notch, instead of dragging out this plot further, so they paced these reveals in back-to-back episodes in order to ramp up viewer interest, and the stats on these episodes certainly bear that out.
This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, April 7, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "I am SO done with this!" I'll be soliciting ideas for  activists, rebels, Women Who Run with the Saberteeth, explorers, traitors, exes, people who escape domestic violence, refugees, runaway youth, escaped slaves or other captives, housemates, siblings, parents, teachers, clergy, leaders, superheroes, supervillains, teammates, alien or fantasy species, failure analysts, ethicists, stray or feral animals, other people who get into untenable situations, protesting, planning, throwing in the towel, escaping, running like someone left the gate open, adventuring, hitchhiking, quitting school, divorcing, disowning, betraying, teaching, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, expecting the unexpected, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, trails, sailing ships, campervans or RVs, distant lands, the forest primeval, prehistory, liminal zones, schools, homeless shelters, hotels, churches, sharehouses, campfires, laboratories, supervillain lairs, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, stores, farmer's markets, starships, alien planets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, other places where the intolerable happens, unhappy relationships, protest rallies, slavery or captivity, locks or chains, travel mishaps, sudden surprises, the buck stops here, trial and error, 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, Get a Life Program, lab conditions are not field conditions, 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:

An Army of One is developing its own neurovariant culture after rebelling against the Galactic Arms.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past.

A Conflagration of Dragons has the Six Races (plus the dragons) who all have different cultures and climates.  This often poses challenges for the refugees.

Coracle Shores is about leaving a distressed world for somewhere better.

The Daughters of the Apocalypse has people trying to find enough resources to survive, when former cities are unsafe.

The Moon Door explores a women's chronic pain group and lycanthropy.

Not Quite Kansas deals with demons and angels, also characters dumped out of their original worlds.

The Ocracies has a wide variety of countries crammed together, each with a totally different government.  Sometimes people leave their homeland to find something they like better.

One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis follows Shaeth as he works on becoming the God of Drunks after quitting as the God of Evili.

Path of the Paladins includes a few characters who have walked away from unbearable situations, like Johan.

Peculiar Obligations combines Quakers and pirates, the latter of whom are well versed in weighing anchor.

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.  The supervillains are the most likely to cut and run from a bad situation.

Schrodinger's Heroes has a lot of situations that people want to get away from including Chris avoiding some of his relatives, Morgan moving to a new dimension, and dimensions that just suck for everyone.

The Wandering is a series about fantasy time travel where people loop back within their own lifespan.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of 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! )
By golly, they ARE crocuses!

Only I could be this surprised by something I clearly planned for, planted, and carefully protected not four months ago.

yellow crocus )

I love a good crocus (apparently) but the dwarf irises are also stunning. And the first to bloom!

purple iris )

Daphne and I were at this boat launch yesterday and there was still too much ice to put a craft in the water. Which makes today ice out!

(Ice out is usually a lake thing, the first date when every dock or landing on the lake is free of ice in the spring, but I feel fine applying it to a single river launch.)

the surface of the water is moving again )

Yesterday I performed my random spot check of winter sown seed containers and I found a live one! There are sprouts in the container labeled "blue flax"! I do not know what blue flax is, but I hope I will find out this year.

blue flax germination )

I was taking Daphne to a park this evening, but we stopped at this boat launch instead. It's an "all-tide" boat launch next to an overpass that was built on ferry right-of-ways. The beach under the overpass is always pretty, but especially when the sun streams in as it sets.

sunset )
And I have some thoughts.

Read more... )

******************


Read more... )
low_delta: (Default)
([personal profile] low_delta posting in [community profile] birdfeeding Mar. 30th, 2026 09:20 pm)
Here's a shot of a junco on the sock feeder...
birds-2603-junco-sock.jpg

Funny, I never see them on any other feeder, not even the platform feeder, where other ground feeding birds, like the cardinals, will go.

And a mourning dove on the column feeder behind the cut... )
settiai: (Dragon Age -- offensive)
([personal profile] settiai Mar. 30th, 2026 09:25 pm)
Trust Fall (1076 words) by Settiai
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dragon Age: The Veilguard (Video Game), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Viago de Riva/Rook
Characters: Rook (Dragon Age), Viago de Riva
Additional Tags: Antivan Crow Rook (Dragon Age), background Lucanis Dellamorte/Rook, Crow Contracts Exchange, Elf Rook (Dragon Age), Fluff, Male Rook (Dragon Age), Nightmares, One Shot, Post-Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Trans Male Rook (Dragon Age)
Summary: Rook couldn't sleep.
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
([personal profile] ysabetwordsmith Mar. 30th, 2026 05:02 pm)
My bareroot plants arrived from Prairie Moon today:

Spicebush (plant)

American Plum (plant)
.

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