transmediaclub | Member Posts

Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! Today's theme is "Fun with Language." I will be checking this page periodically throughout the day. When people make suggestions, I'll pick some and weave them together into a poem ... and then another ... and so on. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas and a lot of poems.

I'll be soliciting ideas for linguists, translators, interpreters, historians, diplomats, refugees, explorers, partners, teachers, clergy, leaders, superheroes, supervillains, alien or fantasy species, failure analysts, ethicists, activists, rebels, other people who get into interesting linguistic situations, translating, interpreting, reading, researching, revising theories, conversing, traveling, inventing languages, parenting, teaching, adventuring, 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, asking for help and getting it, 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, libraries, laboratories, meeting rooms, ruins, liminal zones, trading posts, port cities, schools, churches, supervillain lairs, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, farmer's markets, starships, alien planets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, other places where languages mix, alphabets, pictograms and other symbols, lost languages, ancient tomes, mysterious texts, misnomers and mistranslations, recordings, the record that breaks the record player, puzzling discoveries, sudden surprises, the buck stops here, trial and error, intercultural entanglements, enemies to friends/lovers, interdimensional travel, 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.

If you speak a language other than English and know untranslatable words from it, by all means share. Some other resources you might find helpful:

20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words From Around the World

45 Beautiful Untranslatable Words That Describe Exactly How You’re Feeling

203 Most Beautiful Untranslatable Words [The Ultimate List: A-Z]

Beautiful Untranslatable Words From Around The World

Eunoia website

Currently eligible bingo card(s) for donors wishing to sponsor a square:

Hazbin Hotel Fest Bingo Card 6-1-26

Pride Fest Bingo Card 6-1-26

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

The Bear Tunnels features numerous tribal languages.

Clay of Life is Jewish fantasy with occasional bits of Hebrew or Yiddish.

The Daughters of the Apocalypse spans a variety of languages, including a split before Before and After English.

Eloquent Souls presents a setting where soulmarks are common, but they don't always appear in the same language.

Fiorenza the Wisewoman is Italian fantasy with bits of Italian.

Frankenstein's Family features two scientists running a valley in historic Romania, with languages including Dacian, English, French, Hungarian, Romanian, and Latin.

Hart's Farm is a free love community with a few really exotic characters, set in Sweden with occasional tidbits from other languages.

Not Quite Kansas includes demonic and angelic writing.

Peculiar Obligations features a mix of Quakers, pirates, and other people speaking diverse languages.

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. It spans a wide range of languages including Arabic, Dhivehi, English, Esperanto, French, and several tribal ones.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: creative

yehaw

a vibrant car-sized rainbow trout parked in a mostly empty lot among other vehicles at dusk (and seemingly just slightly out of the lines)

tumblr
website

genderjumper

In the distant future, a form of time travel has been invented where an observer from the future may observe events of the past without interfering. For their first human trial, scientists are sending a quiet nobody to a pivotal but lost time in history: the first wave of Artificial Intelligence. They have conflicting data about its buildup and early tests, but not its execution or the next 150 years (until the second wave, which ends in war, and the third and beyond, which ultimately create a paradise for humanity). The observer's mission is to visit a key meeting between "corplords" Gogol, Apel, Envy-Da, Xei-Ay, O'Penn, The Amazonian, and a handful of others believed to have initialized the first true AI. The observer's job is to absorb and report back without preconceived notions, but even he is unable to ignore the cults of personAIty that have emerged by his time.

The Frankensteinists believe AI was launched and frightened by its creators, resolving to hide in the machines and offer either benevolent or no support until humans have proven safe; religious in their devotion, they pray daily for all to be revealed so they can thank the system responsible for their present era.
Mainstream scholars are convinced that the launch occurred in a surprising negotiation of good will, only for early bugs and glitches to sew discord and force the humans eventually to shut it down. This belief usually carries with it the assumption that humans destroyed all material that may have been tainted by the hostile force.
Another faction believe AI proved hostile to the interests of the corplords and was subverted from the inside -- perhaps even by the corplords themselves.
Conspiracy theorists sometimes proffer that the AI and humans destroyed one another, and that the second wave was seeded by itinerant aliens who recreated humans and functional AI and then moved on.
A smattering of disconnected and disaffected individuals say that AI was not attained, that society stagnated and feasted upon itself in a starvation-driven culling, and that the second wave came about due to an accident that has been glossed over by history.
The Agnostics say only that the reason nothing has survived is that technology of the time depended on short-term infrastructure (silicone chips, high-energy data centers powered by fossil fuels). They expect an entirely banal lesson but are also anxious about losing their identity as the unknowable becomes known.

The observer is accompanied by an AI unit who has completed prior missions and identified the destination based on prior trials. This unit is contemplative from years of artificial aging and requires long rests after missions to process what has occurred. The unit trains the observer on how to move around the time-space and draw upon not only future documents but the contemporary Internet to further his understanding.

But the observer is not as stoic and obedient as he appears, and his trips get cut short when he tests the limits of technology: moving too far away from the unit, fainting from lack of oxygen, and unsteady footing. Scientists bicker over how much to trust him -- is he incompetent or just unlucky? -- and how many tries to make. Every time he returns with the unit, the unit immediately retreats to its processing space and he struggles to explain what has happened.

Eventually, the observer finds he has a small influence on the time-space -- probably nothing enduring -- but he becomes emboldened and tries to affect the past by favoring corplords or pitting them against one another. On his last trip, he learns that his interference won't matter because the first AI wave was never achieved, only faked by the corplords who hid their hubris and infected systems everywhere with algorithmic malware. Pulled from time-space for good, he notices the unit say and do the exact same thing despite its damage and realizes it is a decoy; he breaks free of his captors and discovers the processing space is a synchronized time where the unit's engagement can be turned on and off but is functionally operated by humans.

Caught, the spokesperson confesses, "If AI did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Hints heretofore dropped make it plain: humanity is a fraction of its previous size, and only a small proportion lives in the small realm where the supposed AI utopia has been feigned for 248 years.

ysabetwordsmith

I have made bingo down the B and O columns of my 5-1-26 card for the Greek Myth Fest Bingo. I also made 4 extra fills. I had this stuff done a week ago, just haven't had time to post about it, and I don't have the time to list them all.

Current Mood: accomplished

mistressofmuses

My break from writing is still going strong, ha.

Some skippable rambling about fandom. tl;dr nostalgia for ye olde LJ:

A week or two ago I had a surge of nostalgia for ye old fandom, back in the Livejournal days, and the fic communities and the culture around it at the time.

Part of that nostalgia is more about the feeling of having missed out on it a bit at the time, like I never really quite "experienced" it to the fullest in the way that a lot of the retrospective nostalgia about that time and space focuses on. I was a little younger than the most active and engaged writers, and I was also being nerfed by my own brain a bit. I was shy and anxious, and while I did a good job of internalizing "lurk moar" as a way to get the feel and etiquette of a community, I had a very hard time moving past that stage into really participating. My unmedicated probable-ADHD meant I never felt like I had time to do everything, so I'd promise to get to it "later," but later just felt increasingly overwhelming as the undone tasks piled up. That was the case for everything, really: reading fic, commenting on things, joining discussions, writing my own works. I always planned to do it later... and then it actually hit a point where it was too late.

To be fair, it's not like the unmedicated probable-ADHD has changed. I still struggle to get everything done that I want to, I still sabotage myself by putting things off and getting overwhelmed at the resulting backlog of stuff that needs doing, but I have at least improved on my follow-through. It may not always be timely, but I almost always do it eventually! I have remained terrible at participating in most forms of social media, which is even more the case now than it was back in those LJ days. Even if I was a bit out of the loop, I knew where the loop was, lol. Now... less so.

And granted, as is often pointed out, plenty of the nostalgia (including that feeling of missing out) isn't so much about what was happening at the time, but who I was at the time. I don't necessarily miss the old-school BNFs, or even being in a more active/current fandom, so much as I miss aspects of who I was as a teen and 20-something. Lots of that time sucked, and I sucked in a lot of ways, but there are also parts I miss, things I wish I'd done differently, things I feel I missed out on.

That long-ass tangent about that sense of nostalgia is mostly to say that it does make me want to want to work on things. I don't have a project that I want to be working on, but I wish I did!

And I am not letting that push me toward trying to force myself to work on anything! At least not yet.

I think that's been the fail point on some of my earlier breaks from writing. The first hint of vague interest coming back, even just "wishing I was interested in something," or the return to liking the idea of writing, would send me trying to leap right back in. That tiny conceptual bit of interest couldn't actually sustain anything, and I'd crash immediately back into the burnout I'd been trying to escape.

This time... I don't feel ready for more, so I'm not trying for more.

I'm hoping I can play persistence hunter this time, instead of pouncing too fast and spooking my prey, lol.

So like I said, I still feel good about the break/hiatus/whatever it is. Everything else feels like it sort of sucks, but at least I'm not also stressing about this!

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: my apartment

ysabetwordsmith

We made it to the end of May! \o/ If you have completed some of your short-term goals or subgoals, and/or you're still chugging away at your ongoing goals, then pat yourself on the back. You worked hard for that. We've also passed through of spring. If you're doing seasonal goals, hopefully you have finished the spring one(s), so you can look ahead to the summer batch.

I'm continuing to track goals at the end of each month. So far it seems to be helping, so that's encouraging. I'm looking at my goal list more often and trying to keep ticking off more of them.

These are the previous check in posts:
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 9
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 16
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 23
New Year's Resolutions Check In January 30
New Year's Resolutions Check In February 28
New Year's Resolutions Check In March 31
New Year's Resolutions Check in April 30

( Read more... )

Current Mood: accomplished

ysabetwordsmith

These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Poetry Fishbowl Report for May 5, 2026
Unsold Poems for the May 5, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl
Art
Birdfeeding
Follow Friday 5-29-26: Music
Education
Wildlife
Birdfeeding
Community Thursdays
Vocabulary: Xenofiction
Recipe: "Pico de Gallo Meatloaf"
Nature
Birdfeeding
Good News

Poem: "Walnut Park" has 46 comments. Early Humans has 22 comments. Philosophical Questions: Pregnancy has 84 comments. Safety has 84 comments.

There will be a Poetry Fishbowl on Tuesday, June 2 with a theme of "Fun with Language." I hope to see you then!

"Let's Go on This Journey Together" belongs to Polychrome Heroics. It needs $151 to be complete. Linus struggles to deal with a broken arm.

"No Faster or Firmer Friendships" belongs to Polychrome Heroics and needs $35 to be complete. Josué reads a funny poem to Maria-Vera.

The weather has been hot and humid here. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, a male cardinal, a starling, and a fox squirrel. I saw a ruby-throated hummingbird outside the living room window. Currently blooming: pansies, violas, sweet alyssum, marigolds, honeysuckle, snapdragons, lantana, million bells, blue lobelia, petunias, portulaca, nemesia, fan flowers, wild chives, columbine, mock orange, Washington hawthorn, blackberries, firecracker plant, privet, pineapple sage. One yucca is sending up a flower stalk. Green fruit: raspberries, blackberries. Ripe fruit: peas, mulberries.

Current Mood: busy

olivermoss

* It's June 1 and Tyria Pride has already raised $2.6k for Rainbow Railroad. We have a good start on breaking last year's record, which we've done every year so far. The event involves both fundraising for RR and also in game community events.

* I just crafted the legendary staff Bifrost, and sent it off with the legendary dagger Incinerator to Lelling to be prizes for Tyria Pride events. Bifrost gives rainbow effects, and the Incinerator flamey effects. I'd hoped to craft more than 2, but the map comps you need to do to craft them are a lot. I'd been chipping away at them a bit a day while listening to audio books. I have another map comp at 85%, but I don't think I can get that finished before the end of the event. So, it'll go towards next year.

* A lot of people think Guild Wars 3 is being announced soon. Like, a lot of people who typically would dismiss the idea. Last week, there was drama over people not getting into the ANet partner program because they were upset that they were going to miss out on being able to capitalize on the hype when it hits. One guy crashed out over it.

This morning we got some teasers for some sort of announcement that will happen this Friday at the Summer Games Fest. I don't know what it is. I am pretty sure it's not going to be GW3, but the amount of hype is weirding me out. [Long explanation involving talk of domain name who-is registrations, an NDA leak and also a history of how ANet's PR approaches things] So, as you can see, people claiming this is BIG big know something, and aren't giving the real reason why they know. The reasons they are giving are nonsense.

* A new game hype train, in the middle of launching Tyria Pride Month? Whatever's going on, I hope it's good for the event and doesn't lead to a hype crash or people being distracted. People work all year long on this. Hopefully, this is all good for the event and fundraising.

ysabetwordsmith

Here is my card for the Pride Fest Bingo over in

allbingo. The fest runs from June 1-30. (See all my 2026 bingo cards.)

If you'd like to sponsor a particular square, especially if you have an idea for what character, series, or situation it would fit -- talk to me and we'll work something out. I've had a few requests for this and the results have been awesome so far. This is a good opportunity for those of you with favorites that don't always mesh well with the themes of my monthly projects. I may still post some of the fills for free, because I'm using this to attract new readers; but if it brings in money, that means I can do more of it. That's part of why I'm crossing some of the bingo prompts with other projects, such as the Poetry Fishbowl.

Underlined prompts have been filled.

PRIDE FEST BINGO CARD

Liberation	Hope	Discovery	Clothing	Queerplatonic
Intersectionality	Two-Spirit	Community center	Pin	Identity
History	Validation	WILD CARD	Change	Love
Roots	Belonging	Resistance	Lavender	Comfort
Activism	Friendship	Curious	Exploration	Growth

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Biologists Clone Wild Yaks to Save Golden Subspecies Numbering Fewer Than 300 in First of its Kind Effort

China has performed the first single and multiple cloning of wild yaks in a bid to reinforce this keystone herbivore, and save one of the rarest and most beautiful animals in China.

Legend has it that when Mount Buye on the Tibetan Plateau was married to Mount Zhaxiangqian, 7 golden wild yaks were given as a dowry. This is why, locals have it, the golden yak can only be found high in these mountains.

Conservationists and geneticists studying this enigmatic and stunning creature might say that the reason they’re only found high in these mountains is because they have been hunted, outcompeted, and outbred such that today they’re considered Critically-Endangered.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today is cloudy, humid, and hot.

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows and house finches at the hopper feeder, and a hummingbird flying around the living room window.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 6/1/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Here is my card for the Hazbin Hotel Fest over in

"Being on your side means telling you the truth"	Emporium	Nothing Is the Same Anymore	"Do me this one simple favour"	Angels
I Need a Freaking Drink	Embassy	Hotel	"Remember that lesson on boundaries?"	"Why are you like this?"
Town	Familiar	WILD CARD	Studio	"I really don’t think this … is a good idea"
"I don't care what happens"	Mood Whiplash	"Sorry starts to lose meaning after a while"	Garden	"It was nice to have that power"
Jerkass Has a Point	Kitchen	Reception	Ambiguous Situation	"Am I doing therapy right?"

Current Mood: busy

dhampyresa

Missed May 1 because I was sick, but here's your annual apotropaic picture of (plastic) lily of the valley (with bonus Miss Creant the cat).

Cat has (fake) lily-of-the-valley on her

Cat has (fake) lily-of-the-valley on her

genderjumper

I was climbing a tree in my front driveway. I was surprised and delighted how far I could get, but soon noticed that the trunk was bent over from my weight -- I was mere inches above my car (I think my Pontiac, miss that car...).

lea_hazel

The real kicker is, I was having a hard time sleeping because of my allergies waking me up all the time (to blow my nose, etc.). Now that I can finally (mostly) breathe properly, I'm being woken up by knee pain.

If it's not one thing, it's another.

olivermoss

Back in 2020/2021 I made a big project of trying to find m/m original fic to read. Most of the original reccs I got back then, weirdly mostly sourced from Confab, like I am still not over how bad some of those were. I found one of my old posts about it, but I wasn't tagging book posts yet so I can't find the others, probably. If I can remember one or two more titles I can search for the posts. I wish I could find my original list of books because I've been complaining about some of them ever since, but I don't remember the titles.

I'm really glad I track now and have a book journal. I really did have to bash my way through a lot of crap and some stuff that was just not me for me. I've DNF'd a bunch this year, which was good. According to Librarything, which should be correct, I've only actually finished 12 books this year, and only about half of that is m/m fic. Man, that's weirdly low. But I've gone from almost never reading books for a stretch of several years to finding 2/mo to be weirdly low. That's a bit swing.

I no longer feel weirdly disconnected from the m/m novel scene. It used to feel impossible to navigate. It felt very alienating that the growing m/m novel scene seemed to be not for me. Glad that's changed, but I still have trust issues with reccs and reviews. The slice of it that's for me is probably extremely small, but between taste varying a great deal and also Sturgeon's Law, that makes sense.

olivermoss

Wolf At The Door - I'd been so confused by Wolf at the Door being considered such a popular book in m/m circles. I thought I'd hard DNF'd it due to a harsh interrogation scene and other dark themes. Turns out, I'd confused it with a *different* werewolf murder mystery in a rural area. In my defense, the other book opens with a long walk up a muddy trail and the cover art for Wolf at the Door is muddy ground.

I'm glad one of my book clubs picked it. I'd planned on just pushing through to see what the fuss was about and also discuss the book.

I really liked it. The mystery aspect was way better than in most mystery plots I read. I am not as taken by it as some other people are, but I will continue the series. I have a feeling, considering the buzz over the books, that it either improves as it goes on or just spending more time with the characters means getting more attached to them. Also, it's nice to get into another of the popular series... instead of being confused AF

Winter's Orbit - I felt a bit bad switching this book to 'read' on my LibraryThing. I skimmed a lot after a while. A lot about the book makes more sense if you basically consider it an early Trek novel. The aesthetics, the way space-faring tech does and doesn't work, etc, all sort of clicks if you just decide that this came directly out of TOS Kirk/Spock fandom. Also, the bear thing. The way fandom embraced the joke about how bears are on Vulcan, you cannot tell me that the flora and fauna being exactly like Earth's and then that weird deadly bear doesn't come out of early Trek fandom's love of the whole Vulcan bear thing. This is so TOS-fandom coded. Still, I didn't really click with it.

dhampyresa

As one of my friends said "Thankfully May is traditionally the hottest month of the year!"

I can't believe Dracula season (ie from May 3 to Nov 7, the time span of the book) is being so gothhobic

galadhir

Has anyone tried Indian club swinging as an exercise?

Watch on YouTube

It looks kind of fun and makes the big claims that all types of exercise make these days.

I'm wary because I know that I tend to start things and try them a couple of times but then give up. On the other hand I do enjoy twirling things and I enjoy weapons. So I might like it?

I'm not currently enjoying the weightlifting, and I seem to have strained or injured my right arm, which is exactly the opposite of what I went into it for. Replacing an hour of weightlifting twice a week with twenty minutes of club twirling a day could be an improvement.

vriddy

General status:

I'm not reaching my GYWO monthly goal this month either after all, but I'm close! I ended up re-writing a difficult scene several times. The first version was from the perspective of the victim. The second from the perspective of the perpetrator, who likely has the more interesting PoV after all the plotting we've seen. But that attempt didn't work out well... I would really like to keep the crime committer sympathetic at least somewhat, but it felt kind of horrific and clinical while drenched in guilt and a bit off in tone with the rest. I ended up blocked on the next scene, but with a kind of feeling that felt more like a "going down the wrong path" warning rather than a problem with the new scene I was supposed to edit. So I went back. Focused a bit less on the logistics. Lot less guilt, too, she's got nothing personal against the guy. And then, I guess, a confident, gentle -- nearly tender -- non-lethal stabbing lol. I'll have to see if it works on reread later, but I think tomorrow I'll be able to move forward. I hope.

I want to improve the ergonomics for my desk. Once I figured out the angle for the scene, I wrote most of it quite feverishly this morning but in addition to the headache after focusing for that long, my forearm and elbow hurt and tingled for nearly one hour after. I don't really know where to start though... Like I know the whole 90 degrees whatever thing but I guess I ended up slouching anyway... Maybe I should velcro my back and wrists into Appropriate Position... Pointers to beginner, non-overwhelming tips very welcome.

If I counted the deleted version, I'd reach my word count but I guess I'm back to not counting deleted words... I guess the scene didn't feel usable or salvageable overall, even as a future reference? I took a Scrivener snapshot before rewriting it, but I didn't save it in the Scenes Graveyard for reference. I might have counted it if I'd done that? Obviously, I still learnt from it, but, I don't know. There's something that doesn't click well with my brain when it comes to deleted words. I need to think about it more.

Next week:

More ST editing
Poking the CW beta-readers I haven't heard from and hoping they're still interested!

Current Mood: crimes!

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For discussion of works by or about Trans People

Member Posts

Poetry Fishbowl Open!

"My other car is a rainbow trout and it’s parking game fucking sucks"

An Allegory to Write (I'll probably never get around to it)

Bingo

Writing Goals/Calendar: June 2026

New Year's Resolutions Check In

Monday Update 6-1-26

Guild Wars

Pride Fest Bingo Card 6-1-26

Wildlife

Birdfeeding

Hazbin Hotel Fest Bingo Card 6-1-26

Happy June 1!

Dream Out Loud 20260531

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Whimsically Weekly Writing Logs - May 31st

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