Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 10:50 pm
Here's a list of NaNoWriMo replacements.  These are good options if you're fed up with the old NaNoWriMo.  However, plenty of people are still doing that, so if you have enjoyed it, you can just keep writing a novel in November.

Looking for other activities?  [community profile] goals_on_dw has lists of Writing and Art activities that include November options.

Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 10:20 pm
We went up to Champaign today.

Read more... )
Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 01:09 pm
Today is mostly sunny and cool.

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

I put out water for the birds. 

Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 09:50 am
Isabell the draconic alicorn laying down on a rug and looking through various scrolls.
Welcome to our hoard of Alterhuman Zines


Welcome to Alterhuman Zines! We're working to archive the wonderful creativity of the alterhuman and nonhuman communities - zines in particular!

We do this by hosting a library of all of the zines we've managed to get our claws on that:
  • Were made by an alterhuman or nonhuman
  • Are about alterhumanity or nonhumanity

Our entries are categorized alphabetically by author on our browse page. Each entry lists when it was published, by who, includes a description of the contents and links to the original source (along with an archived version from our hoard for your convenience should anything happen to the original.)

We encourage you to download your own pdf copies from our archive!

Browse the archive
Tuesday, October 21st, 2025 01:03 am
When you craft with variegated yarn, it can cause color pooling. Some people dislike this, but planned pooling may be used to create fancy designs without switching yarn.  A friend tipped me to some websites for it.  If you'd like to play with the concept there are many online colourpooling generators/planning tools: https://magicneedles.in/blogs/guide-more/what-is-planned-pooling and https://mathgrrl.com/crochet-color-pooling/ are both great, and https://plannedpooling.com/ is the original.
Monday, October 20th, 2025 11:49 pm
This poem is spillover from the June 4, 2024 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from [personal profile] dialecticdreamer. It also fills the "Public Places" square in my 6-1-24 card for the Pride Fest Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with [personal profile] fuzzyred and [personal profile] mama_kestrel. It is an alternate universe crossover of Polychrome Heroics and Schrodinger's Heroes.

Read more... )
Monday, October 20th, 2025 11:30 pm
This poem is spillover from the September 5, 2023 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from [personal profile] dialecticdreamer and [personal profile] see_also_friend. It also fills the "Adversary" square in my 9-1-23 card for the Story Sparks Bingo Fest. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with [personal profile] fuzzyred and [personal profile] mama_kestrel. It is an alternate universe crossover of Polychrome Heroics and Schrodinger's Heroes, based on the Edison's Mirror dimension created by [personal profile] dialecticdreamer -- she's currently running a story arc in that, so check it out.

Read more... )
Monday, October 20th, 2025 11:20 pm
Tonight I made the blueberry muffins again.  This time I added a teaspoon of freeze-dried lemon powder.  The lemon flavor is there, if subtle.  I may try this again with honey instead of maple syrup.

Straight out of the bag the lemon powder is intense, sour, and surprisingly floral.  It lacks the bitter notes I was expecting, as it comes from complete lemons peel and all, so if you want that you'll need to use fresh zest.  Advantages of the powder are that it's not overwhelming, it's dry rather than wet, it's not so acidic that it's liable to curdle things as fresh lemon juice can do, it can't spill, it should have good shelf life, and unlike lemon extract it contains no alcohol.  I'd like to explore more uses for this.  One suggestion was making lemonade or stirring it into tea, and yeah, it does smell like lemonade powder.  If you like sour flavors, you could certainly use this as a dusting ingredient for candies or cookies.
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Monday, October 20th, 2025 10:45 pm
This poem is spillover from the May 6, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from [personal profile] fuzzyred , [personal profile] see_also_friend, [personal profile] labelleizzy, and [personal profile] wyld_dandelyon. It also fills the "Riot of Color" square in my 5-1-25 card for the Colors Fest Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with [personal profile] fuzzyred and [personal profile] mama_kestrel. It belongs to the Shiv and Big One threads of the Polychrome Heroics series. It follows "Babes in the Pineywoods," so read that first or this won't make any sense.

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Monday, October 20th, 2025 09:13 pm
This poem came out of the October 1, 2024 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from [personal profile] siliconshaman. It also fills the "Energy" square in my 10-1-24 card for the Fall Fest Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with [personal profile] fuzzyred and [personal profile] mama_kestrel. It belongs to the Shiv thread of the Polychrome Heroics series.

Read more... )
Monday, October 20th, 2025 02:56 pm
These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Poem: "The First Swath Cut by the Scythe"
Linguistics
Poem: "Finding the Gold of the Spirit"
Poem: "Thresh Through the Complexity of Life"
Today's Cooking
Birdfeeding
Romance
Poem: "Knitting Is a Therapeutic Activity"
Today's Adventures
Vocabulary: Vellichor
Birdfeeding
Science
Creative Jam
Philosophical Questions: Tribalism
Today's Adventures
Today's Cooking
Follow Friday 10-17-25: Joss Whedon
Wildlife
Birdfeeding
Books
Birdfeeding
Food
Gaming
Birdfeeding
Activism
Hard Things

Poem: "New and Innovative Approaches" is featured in today's Magpie Monday by [personal profile] dialecticdreamer. If you like Frank the Crank, drop her some prompts or join the discussion under the poem, which already has 19 comments.

Trauma has 30 comments. Food has 52 comments. Affordable Housing has 55 comments. Robotics has 89 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 much cooler and fall-like now. It rained most of Saturday and was around 75°F that day, then dropped 20 degrees overnight so Sunday was around 55°F. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, a male cardinal, and a fox squirrel. While we were out Saturday, I saw a bald eagle! :D 3q3q3q!!! Currently blooming: dandelions, marigolds, petunias, red salvia, verbena, lantana, sweet alyssum, zinnias, snapdragons, blue lobelia, perennial pinks, oxalis, moss rose, firecracker plant, tomatoes, tomatillos, morning glory, chicory, Queen Anne's lace, sunflowers, cup plant, cypress vine, sunchokes, sedum, violas. Tomatoes, ball carrots, and groundcherries are ripe. Fields are about 2/3 harvested.

Monday, October 20th, 2025 02:46 pm
Today is mostly sunny, breezy, and cool.

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

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 10/20/25 -- We rolled up the hose.

EDIT 10/20/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 10/20/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 10/20/25 -- I planted 10 'Spectrum Sweet Aroma' daffodils in the daffodil bed. I have at least 15 more to spread around.

EDIT 10/20/25 -- I finished planting the rest of the daffodils under trees in the house yard.

EDIT 10/20/25 -- I planted 10 Pink Snow Crocus in the goddess garden.

As it is almost suppertime, I am done for the night.
Monday, October 20th, 2025 02:27 pm
This year's Asexual Pride Week runs October 19-25.

My QUILTBAG characters include many aroace ones.

Asexual Book Lists

Monday, October 20th, 2025 12:56 pm
[personal profile] dialecticdreamer is hosting Magpie Monday with a theme of "hidden expectations or accidental entanglements."

Over on [personal profile] ysabetwordsmith’s blog here on Dreamwidth, a comment on her poem “New and Innovative Approaches,” led to the theme for this month’s Magpie Monday.

Because there’s such a strong tie to Frank the Crank’s write-in election to the Mercedes city council, I’d like to specify that all the prompts remain in or around Mercedes, in the Polychrome Heroics universe. It’s still possible to write a near-infinite range of prompts which connect to one or both of the broad ideas of this month’s theme. Modern society has an enormous number of hidden expectations, based on one’s age, gender, skin tone, ability or disability, and even one’s mental health. How do those expectations affect life as the town is rebuilding after a tremendous, world-changing earthquake? Is it easier to stay, where there are familiar faces and resources (stretched to the breaking point), or to leave, to possibly escape a hidden expectation?
Monday, October 20th, 2025 10:11 am
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
Sunday, October 19th, 2025 11:19 pm
This poem was written outside the regular prompt calls. It fills the "scythe" square in my 8-1-25 card for the Discworld Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with [personal profile] fuzzyred and [personal profile] mama_kestrel. It belongs to the Shiv thread of the Polychrome Heroics series.

Read more... )
Sunday, October 19th, 2025 09:14 pm
New in-browser language app, lang.guru

It's in open beta right now and free to join. It has the usual suspects of Spanish, German, French, some Asian languages, Hebrew and Arabic, a bunch of Slavic languages (I know her from Balkan choir), and more.

If you're tired of the gamification of Duolingo, give it a try!
https://lang.guru .
Sunday, October 19th, 2025 08:48 pm
This poem is spillover from the July 15, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from [personal profile] fuzzyred. It also fills the "Gambling" square in my 7-1-25 card for the Western Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with [personal profile] fuzzyred and [personal profile] mama_kestrel. It belongs to the Shiv thread of the Polychrome Heroics series. This is a sequel to "Renewing a Sense of Community," so read that first or this won't make much sense.

Read more... )