50books_poc | Member Posts

A sample issue of New Edge Sword & Sorcery, whose 2026 funding drive goes live today.

New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine: Volume I, Number 3, edited by Oliver Brackenbury

mekare

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

mekare

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

ysabetwordsmith

This year I'm doing Community Thursdays. Some of my activity will involve maintaining communities I run, and my favorites. Some will involve checking my list of subscriptions and posting in lower-traffic ones. Today I have interacted with the following communities...

* Commented in

common_nature.

* Posted "National Craft Month Bingo Fest" in

crafty.

* Posted "Homes for Birds Week" on

datahoarders.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Thanks to

nsfwords, the series Daughters of the Apocalypse is now up to date. \o/ You can browse that page to see if you missed anything.

Current Mood: busy

ursamajor

I have plenty of half-drafted posts on tap, but right now, all I can think is DAWSON'S DEAD?!

It's as if invoking Dawson's Creek in my last post for the first time in forever caused it, sigh. Definitely feeling my age today since he was only nine months older than me.

(Cancer, apparently; I don't tend to keep up with celebrity news, but I found out because

phamos818 posted about it on FB. And apparently he's, like, only nine months older than me and has six kids.)

Current Music: the years pass by and now he has granddaughters

juushika

Title: mulberry down!!
Author: Nicole Kornher-Stace
Published: 2022
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 60
Total Page Count: 563,705
Text Number: 2130
Read Because: chatting with the recipient of an exchange fic, published online but had to track this down via the Wayback Machine
Review: I live in longing, and it's no small part of that draws me to portal fantasies; the longing here—a second person narrative about a "you" haunted by dreams of another world and the other—is bitter and consuming, vengeful and weaponized, and profoundly evoking; I adored this, each word. Genre inversions are more common and less shocking than people writing those inversions seem to think; frankly, these themes are to some extent present in all portal fantasy; but who cares, because there's a reason the genre elicits them and I always crave more. The confrontational, internet speech-style and unusual address is vibrant, intrusive, and demanding, and this has teeth where other takes of the genre don't; call it wretched, wrenching.

... and it's kind of hilarious to read from within the alterhuman community, because ... I just know these people: parallel lives, hearthomes, soulbonds, we got it all, and in the protagonist's search for the explanations or even possible connection the oversight feels oddly glaring, which isn't how I normally feel when my little community of weirdos goes rightfully overlooked.

Current Music: A Beautiful Life - MarieMarie

ysabetwordsmith

These are the notes for "The Tranquility and Beauty of the Winter Landscape."

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

kaberett

a shelf fungus at the base of a tree, shading from brown in the centre via rich orange to pale yellow at the edge

a clump of purple crocuses, nestled between tree roots

a clump of snowdrops, with the green tips of the inner petals clearly visible

(Which last I took in part because A only discovered last week that many snowdrops have decorative green bits on their frilly inner noses, courtesy of a waist-high planter outside one of our local pubs!)

ysabetwordsmith

This poem came out of the March 4, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from

zesty_pinto. It also fills the "Mountains" square in my 3-1-25 card for the Tolkien Bingo Fest. This poem has been sponsored by Anthony Barrette. It belongs to the Rutledge thread of the Polychrome Heroics series.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today is partly sunny and chilly.

I fed the birds. I've seen a flock of sparrows.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/11/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I refilled the hopper feeder.

EDIT 2/11/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I saw several starlings foraging in the grass.

I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

conuly

How much do you love me, a million bushels?
Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more.

And tomorrow maybe only half a bushel?
Tomorrow maybe not even a half a bushel.

And is this your heart arithmetic?
This is the way the wind measures the weather.

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

Link

james_davis_nicoll

The revived May 2022 Neon City Overdrive Bundle featuring the fast-playing cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game Neon City Overdrive from Peril Planet.

Bundle of Holding: Neon City Overdrive (from 2022)

ysabetwordsmith

Good news includes all the things which make us happy or otherwise feel good. It can be personal or public. We never know when something wonderful will happen, and when it does, most people want to share it with someone. It's disappointing when nobody is there to appreciate it. Happily, blogging allows us to share our joys and pat each other on the back.

What good news have you had recently? Are you anticipating any more? Have you found a cute picture or a video that makes you smile? Is there anything your online friends could do to make your life a little happier?

Current Mood: busy

conuly

What the hell sort of question is that? Of course I'd pay up! I have money, pride, and my teeth, and of the three, I can least afford to lose the last. Wouldn't almost anybody submit to the shakedown? That's how protection rackets work, after all - everybody does the same math and comes to the same conclusion as I just did.

(Of course, the context was "I think this company was rude to me over the phone, therefore I decided to live without hot water and heating because I have my principles" so, you know, I guess we have different approaches to life?)

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

( Read more... )

james_davis_nicoll

Humanity faces its final threat: the common house cat!

Night of the Living Cat, volume 1 by Hawkman & Mecha-Roots

ysabetwordsmith

This poem is spillover from the February 3, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a post from

elinox. It also fills the "Validate Yourself" square in my 2-1-26 card for the Valentines Bingo fest. This poem is the second freebie courtesy of new prompters

gs_silva,

ionelv, and Laura G.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

pauraque

This is the first part of my book club notes on The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories. I appreciated the editor's introduction, which highlights connections between the oppressive realities of the past and present to the spark of Black speculative imagination—how can things be different, and whose ideas will shape the future? He's written a nonfiction book on this topic, Speculative Blackness, which I would be interested to check out.

Interesting to note that this collection places the stories in chronological order of first publication. We've had a number of conversations about how editors arrange stories in anthologies (similar themes together? most significant stories first and last?) and this is the first time I've seen this approach. It was mentioned that some books the group read before I joined did this as well, but those were more historical overviews that spanned a longer period of time, while these stories are all from the last 25 years. Perhaps the intention is to suggest a new history still being written.

There was also some discussion of the physical book itself having a good design and high quality paper and feeling nice to hold in the hand, to which I could add nothing because I have the ebook.

"Herbal" by Nalo Hopkinson (2002)

( An elephant suddenly appears in a woman's apartment. )

"All That Touches the Air" by An Owomoyela (2011)

( A human colony exists in uneasy equilibrium with aliens who can parasitize and control people's bodies. )

"Bludgeon" by Thaddeus Howze (2013)

( Conquering aliens are persuaded to wager the fate of Earth on a game of baseball. )

"A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i" by Alaya Dawn Johnson (2014)

( In a world dominated by vampires, a human woman collaborates with them to save herself. )

juushika

Title: Private Rites
Author: Julia Armfield
Narrator: Hannah van der Westhuysen
Published: Macmillan Audio, 2024
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 320
Total Page Count: 563,645
Text Number: 2129
Read Because: this review (accurate but sadly not indicative), audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Three sisters, all lesbians, all troubled, are reunited by their father's death while, around them, climate change builds to a slow apocalypse. My takeaway is as with most genre fiction meets literary fiction: I'm not fond of the latter, and when combined both suffer. Very talky about the slow banality of the end times and about grief, sometimes effectively but often overwrought; and I'm not sold on the mystery of the framing conceit, particularly in its resolution. This is fine, but failed to work for me in a mild, persistent way.

(Going to chock this up to audio reading, but I could never tell the older sisters apart. One was a therapist, one was married, one was getting divorced, one was angry, only being Angry™ was rightly the characterization all the way down the line, so they smushed into an angry therapist vacillating between the best relationship in the book and incipient divorce. Oops?)

Current Music: Edge of Seventeen - The Wind and the Wave

kaberett

I actually made this as a protein to go with Meera Sodha's winter pilau, after An End Of Breakfast Dal went really well and for the purposes of using up the chaat masala I made for The Ongoing Cook All The Book Project, freely adapted from a number of recipes (which were The First Few Search Results when I prodded the internet). A is sufficiently convinced that I provide notes herewith in service of being able to repeat it in future.

( Read more... )