Sustainability

Sep. 27th, 2025 08:47 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Why Better Is Less

Let’s talk about something that few people talk about. It’s the idea that provisioning quality, making sure everyone has access to what they truly need, matters more than chasing GDP numbers. In other words, it’s not about growing bigger. It’s about growing smarter.

GDP measures production but ignores unpaid caregiving, environmental costs, and well-being, a flaw even its creator, Simon Kuznets himself warned, “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.”

But if we think of provisioning systems as the real things people need, like healthcare, education, housing, and electricity. When these systems work well and are universal, many social thresholds can be met using relatively low resources. Meaning you don’t need a sky‑high GDP to ensure people get what they need.


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Monday, September 15: Belmar Park

Sep. 27th, 2025 07:31 pm
mistressofmuses: Image of nebulae in the colors of the bi pride flag: pink, purple, and blue (Default)
[personal profile] mistressofmuses
We were still in recovery mode from the show on Saturday, and then a late night going out to look for the northern lights on Sunday night, so we wanted something fairly easy, but still taking advantage of the nice weather.

So we headed over to Belmar park, for a fairly short walk down to the turtles, ha.


We did make it down over to the turtle pond area, but the star of the spot was an egret! I love the ridiculously yellow enormous feet. (And a lot of swirly algae, ha.)


Will a day come that I don't take closeups of honeybees? Perhaps, but the day was not this day.


Ten more pictures of insects, spiders, birds, etc.:

Nice dramatic spider web.


Alas, blurry! But a nice bright red dragonfly.

Around here we also managed to actually spot one of the huge, loud cicadas up in one of the trees. Couldn't get a picture where it was visible, but it was nice to see one, ha.


Boxelder bug on some milkweed seeds.


Pretty good-sized spider in a web on the milkweeds.


A couple very big turtles up on their branch.


The egret over by the turtles and the muskrat lodge, hopping from one branch to another.


I really like the reflection. :)


As we turned around to head back, there was a flock of the tragically-named bushtits.


They're such cute little things.


A beefly! I love them. We saw several, but they were frustratingly hard to get clear pictures of.


It was a nice day and a nice walk. :)
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[personal profile] jesse_the_k

Just found a great episode on 20,000 Hz, a favorite podcast of mine.

SUBTITLES ON: WHY IS MOVIE DIALOGUE SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND?

Answer at [community profile] access_fandom, a comm I co-mod where we talk about making sure the full fandom experience works for all of us, no matter how our bodyminds work. Like many DW comms, it hosts useful knowledge going back a while, and is always ready to be revived.

(no subject)

Sep. 27th, 2025 10:44 am
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[personal profile] olivermoss
I'm about two weeks out of the loop on DW. There are replies and comments I want to get to and I'm sorry, but my brain had just been... I don't even know. But I am here, I exist and am trying to muddle through.

Because of how run down I've been, I almost didn't go to the D&D event in the gorge. But, I last minute scraped myself up and went. When Eliot said that he'd arrange a party bus as a transportation option I didn't imagine:





Going helped a lot. But I'm still... I don't know how to describe it. My brain's just suddenly weird about doing things I usually do. Maybe I just need a few weeks and come back to it.

So, I might do random sporadic updates and if I am not replying to comments I'm sorry. I really value the conversations I have here, so I feel bad about just random posts for a bit. Just sort of resetting or something.

Birdfeeding

Sep. 27th, 2025 12:41 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is mostly sunny and warm.

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

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 9/27/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 9/27/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

The cornfield across from us has been harvested.  It's a bit of a wreck though, looks like Bubba Fail the Farmer set his blades too high.

As it is suppertime, I am done for the night.

Oh no kitty cat

Sep. 27th, 2025 07:20 pm
thepasteldyke: A frowning Velvette from Hazbin Hotel (velvette╬)
[personal profile] thepasteldyke
Kalma is looking awfully cute for a cat who is probably (~99% chance) the reason why I can't find the USB I had several unpublished fanfics on

(i know it was on my desk, now it isn't there. Kalma likes to plant his butt on said desk, and thinks everything small is a toy - it only takes one BAP with a tiny little paw and something will be lost in the void)

this is what i get for trying to not have to deal with constantly having to log into private browsing to use gdocs

luckily i don't think i had anything actually important on there but it's a bummer for sure, hadn't had the time to back the latest stuff up yet
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[personal profile] goliathus
I'm determined to befriend my neighborhood crows and luckily there's a few that like to hang out right by my house. I've fed lots of corvids before but I think befriending them will be easier now that I live in the city. City crows are much more used to humans and get spooked less.

I met one today and gave it some dog treats. It was cawing and I whistled at it but tried to mimic the number and frequency of the caws. Then I gave it more food and it made this cute rattling/clicking sound and a funny little "weh" noise. I hope it was a good thing. I think so because it seemed to enjoy the food. Its buddy came over too, tried to give it some food but it got spooked by a car and flew away. I tried to mimic the clicking as well but I don't think I did a very good job, hope I didn't accidentally cuss them out in crow language lol

They're such fascinating animals fr, intelligent and full of personality. Hope I can get to know them.

Philosophical Questions: Effects

Sep. 27th, 2025 12:39 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.

What do you think the long-term effects of so many people being glued to their screens will be?

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Today's Adventures

Sep. 26th, 2025 10:55 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today's activities got a bit scrambled, but we got some useful things done.

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Pigeon Pea Recipes

Sep. 26th, 2025 08:49 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
We found a new international grocery store in Charleston, Amelica & Louky Market. Among the things they had were bags of dry pigeon peas, which I recognized but hadn't seen before. They're similar to black-eyed peas but instead of white or ivory these are light gray or putty-colored. Pigeon peas appear in African, Caribbean, and East Indian cuisines. So I thought I'd look up some recipes for dry pigeon peas.

... aaaaand now I'm hungry again. O.O

Read more... )

New fic meme journal

Sep. 26th, 2025 09:37 pm
soc_puppet: Simply drawn person, labeled "me", waving rainbow pompoms and saying, "Yay! More fic!" (Yay fic!)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
Go check out [personal profile] ao3_isdown! It's a journal that hosts fic prompt memes whenever AO3 goes down.

Prompts for the first meme are open for close to another three hours, as of this post; prompts will be open to fills for another week after the post closes to new prompts.

Anyway, go take a look! I've already made a little fill myself for Avery and Zeek, which I'll cross-post here, uh. Sooner or later, I promise!

Sunday, September 14: Stargazing

Sep. 26th, 2025 07:21 pm
mistressofmuses: Image of nebulae in the colors of the bi pride flag: pink, purple, and blue (Default)
[personal profile] mistressofmuses
On the evening of September 14th, we saw some reports that the northern lights might be visible in Colorado. We saw them last year (first time I ever saw them!) and it was very cool. We decided to head up to the plains to find some good dark areas and see if we could catch them again.

We saw some very cool pictures from other people... almost exactly where we'd been the previous night, driving home from the model show, haha.

Unfortunately, by the time we got up to some truly dark areas, the numbers had dropped pretty sharply. There wasn't much of anything visible, and even using a camera, there was just the faintest pinkish glow. (Not sure how visible it even is in the picture, unless you're in the dark, haha.)


The faintest glow along the horizon, ha.

However, the stars were spectacular! For the first time in a very long time, we saw the milky way. While that certainly didn't show up on my cell phone camera, I was honestly impressed that my cell phone does capture stars at all!


Look at all those stars!


So many stars!


The glow faded from the horizon, but the stars were nice. And the big dipper was right there!


Zoomed in a bit, the big dipper again!


There was also a very dramatic moonrise, which was cool.

As usual, especially with celestial stuff, I swear it was cooler in person, haha. But even though the northern lights wound up being a bust for the night, the stars were beautiful, and I was glad we went out and saw them.
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[personal profile] soc_puppet
I needed to do a five-to-seven minute history presentation for my Intro to Human Services class (with visual aids), and pick a topic from a pre-selected list; I chose the ADA, and presented on Wednesday. I got 100% 😃

Anyway, here's what I wrote, for anyone interested: The History of the ADA (sources linked at the end) )

Side note, one of my classmates picked the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, and her presentation was both fantastic and available on YouTube! Great use of humor to balance out a very dark topic. If you've got about six minutes, I recommend giving it a watch 👍

Progress, progress

Sep. 26th, 2025 08:24 pm
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[personal profile] vriddy
Chapter 3 was sooooo much easier to edit, breezy and took just a bit over 5h. A 3.5k words chapter is sooo much easier to wrangle than a beast that grew to nearly 10k XD Having said that, re-reading beta feedback, a couple of people did say that C3-C5 specifically felt not exactly "slow" but like it was only setup for the rest... This feels like pacing/stakes stuff which I'm too close to the text to easily see right now. I'm hoping that the big restructuring work I did at the start of this round (also based on beta feedback, thanks again!) will help in that the larger story's stakes get raised in a more proper crescendo now, rather than go "grumbles, grumbles, grumbles, SUDDEN FIRE EXPLOSION KABOOM" as they did in the previous draft. Also I'm fleshing out more secondary characters and connecting in small ways various background happenings, and I'm hoping that will also help hold up the reader's interest better. Hoping, hoping.

I'm having a good time and enjoying the process, which is rare enough for editing that it's worth saying! Things are actually quite strange right now. My "lighthearted" project when I need a break is fic for a new-to-me fandom, and so I don't know the characters very well yet. I had a full outline written up in a sort of a draft 0 way, with sentence fragments, bits of dialogue, and so on. When I work on it, I'm making all of this into proper prose but it's very plot-focused and lacking a bit of heart at the moment (I'll fix that in edits later!). So I'm not getting the same catharsis I usually get out of writing.

Meanwhile, a lot of the editing I'm doing right now is possible because I've refined the motivations both of the MC and of so many characters around her. So while I'm only adding a couple of paragraphs here and there, or a sentence to hint at more, there's a lot more heart going into it and I feel like I'm getting the kind of, hm, mental wellbeing boost? deep inner satisfaction? that I usually get from writing.

Additionally, I feel like I'm getting to know the MC a lot better, and the fondness I have for her only grows and grows. It's a nice place to be. I've wondered a few times if I should have gotten feedback earlier, but because of the way this particular story was written, I don't think it would have worked well. The first draft required so many changes including a personality transplant for the other main character so let's not even consider it. After the first round of edits (structural), while I had the plot and main relationship nailed down, the world was utterly empty. I had described no setting. The worldbuilding was barebone beyond anything that directly moved the story. Not a very interesting tale to read, and that would have easily confused what were the other necessary fixes that came up during the actual beta-reading, of the kind I did need an external perspective on.

I'm really, really enjoying what this round of editing is changing in the story. I really hope that when I'm done and have taken a step back, it all looks like well done embroidery on a tapestry, and not like haphazard patchwork on a story corpse 😅 Gently holding this feeling into my palms until I hit the next editing road bump... XD