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Today is sunny and mild.

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, a catbird, a starling, and a young fox squirrel. I heard a blue jay screaming but didn't see it.

I put out water for the birds.

I put out the flats of pots and watered them.

EDIT 5/19/25 -- We went shopping. I have 2 new water pans for the giant pots, 4 new large-ish pots, and 2 bags of composed manure. I still need to get more of the Evergreen potting soil, though.

EDIT 5/19/25 -- I took a few pictures of flowers.

I've seen two young fox squirrels chasing each other.

EDIT 5/19/25 -- I trimmed grass where I will put one of the giant pots.

EDIT 5/19/25 -- I filled the giant pot with half composted manure and half potting soil, then planted a pot of 2 zucchini plants.

EDIT 5/19/25 -- I trimmed grass where I will put the second giant pot.

EDIT 5/19/25 -- I filled the giant pot with half composted manure and half potting soil, then planted a pot of 2 straightneck yellow squash plants.

EDIT 5/19/25 -- I watered the giant pots and the picnic table garden.

EDIT 5/19/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 5/19/25 -- I sowed Shithouse Marigold seeds in the new giant pots and several others that didn't already have marigolds.

I watered the marigold seeds and some other plants.

I saw the first bat of the season! :D

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

Current Mood: busy

alisx

🎵 From Ashes to New, “Panic“

Leave a comment.⁺

vriddy

I'm not sure how long this is going to last, but I moved all of my on-going fanfic projects to Scrivener as well. I already started using it for my original projects, but for fanfics I used to find it too intimidating. This may well happen again, but for now I'm cherishing the organisational flexibility it allows. It's Just Great (tm) XD

I'll go back to 4thewords if I get too stuck in my own head again (defeating monsters and completing quests just works so well to kick me out of the 'Thou must write something Good or you will waste your time, nay, the entire world's time!' kind of block.) The recent weird bug that resulted in some data loss in many files has been such a pain to manage, even if I believed I recovered everything I needed. Between the hurt/comfort series, fics I drafted last November and still need to edit, and some other things I have going on, it's just been kind of messy to try to find all my files again and making sure they're whole. Scrivener is refreshing in that sense (easy to find things!), but may not help with the "getting stuck in own head" issue... I suppose there's always changing the font to Comic Sans and bright yellow font on neon green background or something to test, etc, if/when that happens again 😆

Note: even with the helpful AO3 Scrivener template that was shared with me, copy-pasting directly into AO3's Rich Text Editor doesn't work and I lose italics and other formatting. However, this Tumblr tutorial from zaharya (and the follow-up tutorial) appear to have resolved the problem for me, so I'm happy with the current status. I only posted a couple of things with it so far though, so tbc!

I'm enjoying working offline more. The only thing I'm missing at the moment is a good thesaurus program that would work offline, too. The one integrated with Scrivener doesn't cut it for my needs.

I want to talk about some stuff going on in my writing again, but because I didn't really share much especially around the orig novellas in January, my brain seems jammed about new thoughts and related posts until I get that stuff out first. I guess I'll attempt to summarise soon, so I can share the fresh stuff again XD

Any of you also using Scrivener for fic? How do you find it? Any tips? I'm still not 100% how I will organise projects over time especially with the many one-shots, but I'm looking forward to testing out various ways!

Current Mood: content

scifirenegade

But in English, thank Yetaxa.

First, something serious.

Come on, Baby, Be My Tiger, a great essay on the many (three! why are there three??) versions of The Indian Tomb. It touches on the films' placement in German film history and orientalism/fetishisation/racism. A good read, recommended.

EDIT: Did you know, a lot of Germans thought Eschnapur was a real place?

And now, the silly.

Lost Media (TM) nowadays is all about stupid meat apps and American game shows. But the real lost media is all the Connie fan fiction hosted on the old Conrad Veidt Society website! From 1998! It predates the earliest known fic by over 10 years! (There are earlier Casablanca fics from the early 2000s, but, ya know, his character...)

One even seems to be FP1 fic! (The other is RPF?? I think??) No idea who the authors are, and appears no other fics were added.

Current Mood: absolutely knackered

kiya

Back to three lunatics and a paladin.

Dramatis Personae:

Viepuck, noble-annoying brat with a boss
Izgil, the moonlight guy
Celyn, who thought "well, that happened" about a lot of terrible things honestly
Robin, who needs a vacation

When we left off we had done a bit of cleanup in Peydon and were getting ready to deal with larger events.

( So we actually managed to get a night's sleep. )

ysabetwordsmith

Our theme this time was "Ethical Supervillains." I wrote from 12:45 PM to 3:45 AM, so about 13 hours, accounting for breaks. I wrote 3 poems on Tuesday and another 3 later in the week.

Participation was up considerably, with 6 comments on LiveJournal and another 41 on Dreamwidth. A total of 12 people sent prompts.

Read Some Poetry!
The following poems from the May 6, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl have been posted:
"The Care and Feeding of Supervillains"
"A Lens of Ice"
"The More Bizarre It Gets"
"Ruling from Beneath"
"Show My True Colors"

Buy some poetry!
If you plan to sponsor some poetry but haven't made up your mind yet, see the unsold poetry list from May 6. That includes the title, length, price, and the original thumbnail description for the poems still available.

This session's donors include:

siliconshaman,

fuzzyred,

janetmiles, and je_reviens. All sponsored poems from this fishbowl have been posted. There are 3 tallies toward a bonus fishbowl.

The Poetry Fishbowl has a landing page.

Current Mood: accomplished

thewayne

Oh, my! WHAT A BURN!

Junkyard Dog Vance, or is it Juvenile Delinquent Vance? got all of SEVENTEEN SECONDS in the procession line after the mass. A basic "Hey, how ya doin'? I'm praying for your soul, J.D., it needs it." and a hand shake, then the pope was off to the next person.

Who did the pope spend a lot of time with? He had "extended" private audiences with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Peruvian President Dina Ercilia Boluarte Zegarra!

PERU!

J.D. got snubbed for PERU!

I do so love it when the fickled finger of fate stops and says 'Nah, not your day, bud!' and makes Peru the anointed one to get a nice long gab session with the pope.

I would like to visit Peru some day: Russet did grad work there and they have some great telescopes there in the Andes. Sadly, once we move away from high altitude, it's unlikely that Russet will be able to return to it for any significant amount of time.

Leo, in his previous incarnation as a bishop, had some very choice tweets about the operation of Our Beloved Leader in his first term in office, and in what they were doing thus far in this term, I expect the slight was intentional.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pope-leo-xiv-snubs-jd-vance-as-he-meets-with-world-leaders/

ysabetwordsmith

The following poems from the May 6, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl are currently available. Poems may be sponsored via PayPal -- there's a permanent donation button on my Dreamwidth profile page -- or you can write to me and discuss other methods. There are still verses left in the linkback poems "Delight in Another," "A Sense of Weather Changes," "Ouroboros Insects," "The Loving Embrace of Night," "Generations of Cooks Past," "Homefree and Clear, " "One Bite at a Time," "Stars and Diamonds," "Mishpocha," "Changing Your Nature," and "Besa."

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

This poem is spillover from the May 6, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by

goatgodschild. It also fills the "Grey Area" square in my 5-1-25 card for the Color Fest Bingo. This poem belongs to the Rutledge thread of the Polychrome Heroics series.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the more detailed warnings, some of which are spoilers. It includes bullying, bigotry, theft, a fistfight, frank discussion of superpowers, angst, and other challenges. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward. It follows "Sadness Like a Battle Flag" and "Your Own Blissful Path," so this will make more sense if you have read those first.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

linky

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: calm

alisx

I do still like 5e but this splat has the same problem Sabbat did, which is to say Renegade keeps shying away from the absolute balls-to-the-wall bonkersness of the classic oWoD. “It’s up to your group to decide!” No, fuck you. Give me more stat blocks for aeons-old monsters with ten dots in every Discipline and goresploitation nonsense. That’s what I’m here for, man.

Also, as usual, the fun stuff is unrelated to the main book and shoved into an appendix. In this case, examples for each stat of ideas for Messy Criticals and what we used to call botches back in the day and has a new name now I don’t remember. As well as some general “if failing wouldn’t be interesting”, don’t roll” guidance.

Leave a comment.⁺

ysabetwordsmith

Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents

As Business Insider first reported, the results were dismal. The best-performing model was Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which struggled to finish just 24 percent of the jobs assigned to it. The study's authors note that even this meager performance is prohibitively expensive, averaging nearly 30 steps and a cost of over $6 per task.

Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash, meanwhile, averaged a time-consuming 40 steps per finished task, but only had an 11.4 percent rate of success — the second highest of all the models. The worst AI employee was Amazon's Nova Pro v1, which finished just 1.7 percent of its assignments at an average of almost 20 steps.

While corporations may wish to replace human employees with software, it is not yet feasible for complex tasks. Only the simplest jobs are really at risk.

Current Mood: busy

tozka

Trying something new! (Inspired by Tracy Durnell's blog and

soricel who posted theirs here on DW.)

Fixation of the week
I spent several days setting up and adding over 1000 zines to my new Calibre zine library. I haven't finished loading everything in but I wanted to take a break and do something else for a bit (including writing the how-to guide which is my goal for this week).

Media stuff
Did less book reading and focused more on listening to Campaign 3 of Not Another D&D Podcast. I'm currently on episode 36 and am really enjoying this storyline!

I also want to highlight one of the 8 Bit Bookclub episodes they did: Pillars of Pentegarn, where they go through one of those 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure books. It made me laugh SO HARD I had to keep pausing playback to recover.

Listened to: The Lookers' In Clover which is quintessential late 90s upbeat music you'd hear in teen romcoms.

Currently rereading Good Enough (To Be Good To Yourself) by

jackmischief, a Spideypool fanfic (more Spideypool fic recs here).

Food stuff
Got a $10 DoorDash coupon via one of my Chase credit cards, so I ordered grocery delivery. It was shopped, and delivered in less than an hour! When I order directly through the grocery store (which subsidizes deliveries through DoorDash btw) it ALWAYS takes 3+ hours to get the order, and the last time they didn't even do it at all and I had to reschedule for the next day. Sigh.

Currently have 3 weeks left in this housesit so am focusing on using up stuff I have so I don't have to try and cram it into my suitcase. At the moment that's a lot of beans and oatmeal. Made oatmeal no-bake cookies that...sort of came out okay...they're very sweet so the next time I make them I'm going to cut the sugar down a bit.

The price of eggs ($6+ for a dozen) is making me cut way back on them. Normally I'd have two eggs for breakfast, for instance, but now I'm doing one egg and putting more beans on the side (or whatever). It does stretch them out longer!

Website stuff
Added the following pages: Merlin (BBC) fanfic recs, two sticker pages.

Reorganized the zine links page and added a section for anarchist/radical online zine libraries.

Also looked into self-hosting a pseudo-Goodreads thing but I think I'd need a VPS to properly host it for public viewing. Basically I want somewhere to do reading status updates and have it hosted on my website...maybe some kind of microblogging thing would be better?

Looking forward
This week I'd like to write up at least a rough draft of the Calibre beyond fanfic/books guide, as well as catch up on my correspondence here (aka reply to comments) and post a few times to various DW communities.

I'm also JUST starting The Gentleman's Book of Vices which I'm enjoying, but which I definitely got mixed up with the YA novel The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue. Same time period, I think, but different vibes-- the YA book is more of a romp/adventure/romance and the adult book is (I think) more of a normal historical romance.

ysabetwordsmith

Today is mostly sunny and mild.

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

I put out the flats of pots and watered them.

EDIT 5/18/25 -- We drilled drain holes in the 2 giant pots we bought yesterday. I'm wondering if one would work as a water garden, for future reference.

EDIT 5/18/25 -- While working on various projects, I saw a young fox squirrel on the hopper feeder, who has absolutely no sense of self-preservation and stayed put while I walked past within arm's reach.

EDIT 5/18/25 -- I intended to fill up one of the giant pots, only to discover that I'm almost out of composted manure. :/

So instead I moved the flats of wildflowers from the ground at the west end of the new picnic table to the ground east of it, then trimmed grass at the west end so I can later set up the tall planter with shelves.

EDIT 5/18/25 -- I got a bit more yardwork done.

EDIT 5/18/25 -- I set up the tall planter with shelves at the west end of the new picnic table. I haven't put any pots on it yet.

EDIT 5/18/25 -- I watered the strawberry towers.

EDIT 5/18/25 -- I've seen a blue jay and a starling.

EDIT 5/18/25 -- I trimmed brush around the patio.

EDIT 5/18/25 -- I trimmed brush around the barrel garden and a few other places.

I brought in the flats of pots.

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

Current Mood: busy

scifirenegade

Thought these were interesting. All in German. Had to use translators.

Lili Veidt travells to Europe in search of books and plays to be adapted to film. Very interesting. Would like to know if something came of it.

Conrad Veidt being an overly cautious papa.

Current Mood: nervous

vriddy

Fannish person who would like to write more on Dreamwidth but isn't too sure what about?

maevedarcy's got you :D They adapted a fandom questionnaire to make it more multifandom-friendly and the (72!) questions are so good!! If folks in my circles decide to pick it up, I'll be looking forward to reading y'all's answers :D

Link: Questionnaire: 72 Multifandom questions to ask a fangirl

ysabetwordsmith

The theme calendar has been posted for

summerofthe69. Grab some lube and your favorite characters! :D

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Based on an audience poll, "Babes in the Pineywoods" is now complete. Bo-Art and Creamjeans take their leave of the Pineyspooks.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today we went up to visit Dad.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

The

crowdfunding Creative Jam is running Saturday, May 17-Sunday, May 18 with a theme of "Facing Darkness." Come give us prompts, or claim some for your own inspiration!

What I Have Written:

From My Prompts:

Current Mood: creative

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Page Summary

ysabetwordsmith - Birdfeeding
alisx - Music Monday
vriddy - Moving to Scrivener for fanfic, too
scifirenegade - More Links
kiya - [ gaming ] Cursed Towns Are A Dime A Dozen Around Here
ysabetwordsmith - Poetry Fishbowl Report for May 6, 2025
thewayne - JUSTICE! POPE SNUBS VEEP J.D. AT HIS INNAUGURAL MASS!!!
ysabetwordsmith - Unsold Poems for the May 6, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl
ysabetwordsmith - Poem: "A Lens of Ice"
linky - Small Fandom Love
alisx - Finished reading: Gehenna War (Vampire: the Masquerade 5e)
ysabetwordsmith - Artificial Intelligence
tozka - weeknotes (may 11-17, 2025)
ysabetwordsmith - Birdfeeding
scifirenegade - Austrian Archive Links
vriddy - Link: Multifandom questionnaire/question meme
ysabetwordsmith - Summer of the 69
ysabetwordsmith - "Babes in the Pineywoods" is now complete!
ysabetwordsmith - Today's Adventures
ysabetwordsmith - Creative Jam

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