peppermintfables

duckprintspress

An image with text that reads 2/28/26 11am - 5pm Indie Book & Comic Expo. Text below this shows a wizard in a blue hat and ropes with long white hair, a pipe between their lips, reading a yellow book. They sit among simply ruins and a bird perches beside them.

The last day of February, Saturday the 28th, come find us and 50+ other upstate New York authors, comic makers, indie publishers, and more at The Shirt Factory in Glens Falls! This awesome event is organized by Black Walnut Books and Beldame Books. You can shop the local small businesses in the building, and find all of us at our tables throughout the hallways. It’s gonna be a great time.

(and I promise I’m not gonna get sick this time if I can possibly help it. )

downstrife

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

Current Mood: determined

ysabetwordsmith

These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Poem: "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds"
Poem: "Embrace My Fate"
John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds Order
Poem: "The Spectrum of Your Being"
Early Humans
Birdfeeding
Vocabulary: Bricolage
Today's Adventures
Science
Birdfeeding
Meteor Shower Calendar
Philosophical Questions: Life
Edible Landscaping Order
Meme
Photos: House Yard
Water
Birdfeeding
Books
Follow Friday 2-20-26: Active Communities on Dreamwidth Winter 2025-2026 A-I
Energy
Birdfeeding
Community Thursdays
Photos: Flowerbeds
Books
Birdfeeding
Hard Things

Safety has 49 comments. Food has 53 comments. Wildlife has 39 comments. Food has 67 comments. Robotics has 146 comments.

Last week's half-price sale in Not Quite Kansas went well. All sponsored poems have been posted, so you can find those via the title links on the sale page.

The 2026 Rose and Bay Awards are now open for excellence in crowdfunding. It's time to vote for your favorite projects!

The award period for eligible activities spans January 1-December 31, 2025.
The nomination period spans January 1-January 31, 2026.
The voting period spans February 1-February 28, 2026.

These are the handlers for the 2026 award season:

Art: gs_silva Nominate art! Vote for art!
Fiction: fuzzyred Nominate fiction! Vote for fiction!
Poetry: gs_silva Nominate poetry! Vote for poetry!
Webcomic: curiosity Nominate webcomics! Vote for webcomics!
Other Project: curiosity Nominate other projects! Vote for other projects!
Patron: fuzzyred Nominate patrons! Vote for patrons!

"The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds" belongs to Not Quite Kansas and needs $34.50 to be complete. Raymond and Gideon get attacked on the way home from research.

The weather has been variable here. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a large flock of sparrows, several starlings, one male and two female house finches, one female and two male cardinals, a mourning dove, and a fox squirrel. I flushed the great horned owl from the ritual meadow when I went out there. A skein of geese flew overhead, going north. Currently blooming: crocuses.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

These are the notes for "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds."

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

This poem is spillover from the October 2020 Creative Jam. It was inspired by a prompt from

wyld_dandelyon. It also fills the "demons" square in my 10-1-20 card for the Fall Festival Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with

fuzzyred. It belongs to the series Not Quite Kansas.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the more detailed warnings, some of which are spoilers. It includes feeling lost, an unprovoked attack, hellhounds, violence, gore, unexpected rescue, playing with prey, fatally injured opponents, minor injuries to main characters, awkward discussions, willing sacrifice, intimate magical healing, and other challenges. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward.

This microfunded poem is being posted one verse at a time, as donations come in to cover them. The rate is $0.25/line, so $5 will reveal 20 new lines, and so forth. There is a permanent donation button on my profile page, or you can contact me for other arrangements. You can also ask me about the number of lines per verse, if you want to fund a certain number of verses. So far sponsors include:

fuzzyred,

355 lines, Buy It Now = $44.50
Amount donated = $10
Verses posted = 13 of 118
Amount remaining to fund fully = $34.50
Amount needed to fund next verse = $0.25
Amount needed to fund the verse after that = $0.75

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Here are the notes for "Embrace My Fate."

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

This poem is spillover from the October 6, 2020 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from

librarygeek. It also fills the "How do you want to do this?" square in my 10-1-20 card for the Fall Festival Bingo. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with

fuzzyred. It belongs to the series Not Quite Kansas.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the more detailed warnings, some of which are spoilers. It includes feeling lost, sorting through a lair acquired by combat, reference to past abuse, cursed artifacts, damned souls, worry, magical body modification, restraint for safety, awkward emotional discussions, and other challenges. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

I picked out what I wanted from John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds. This catalog has the Safe Seed Pledge, meaning everything is non-GMO/toxin-free. My partner Doug further notes that they have the best, easiest ordering system of all the catalogs we use. Call up the Smart Order Form and when you key in the product number, the rest autofills, tells you if it's still in stock, and lists the price. \o/ Somegeek earned their coffee today!

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

These are the notes for "The Spectrum of Your Being."

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

This poem is spillover from the September 1, 2020 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from

librarygeek. It also fills the "How do you want to do this?" square in my 9-1-20 card for the I Want Fries With That! Bingo fest. This poem has been sponsored by a pool with

fuzzyred. It belongs to the series Not Quite Kansas.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the more detailed warnings, some of which are spoilers. It includes feeling lost, a headless chicken running around, a fight with bit character fatalities, moderate injuries to a main character, messy medical details, an imprisoned demon, torture, binding magic, demonic healing, and other challenges. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Homo erectus fossils in East Asia rewrite the timeline of human migration

A new analysis dates three Homo erectus skulls from central China to about 1.77 million years ago, making them the oldest securely dated hominin fossils in eastern Asia.

That older age shifts the arrival of early humans in the region back by roughly 600,000 years and compresses the timeline of how quickly our ancestors spread across Eurasia.
[---8<---]
The same layer holds stone tools and animal remains, tying the skulls to a specific moment nearly 1.8 million years ago rather than the younger dates long cited.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today is cloudy and cold.

I fed the birds. I've seen a large flock of sparrows plus one female and two male cardinals separately.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I planted 3 peonies 'Sorbet Mixed' under the apricot tree. The mix includes white, light pink, and dark pink. These cost $14.98, so about $5 a root. That's a great bargain for peonies, which average $20-30 each and catalogs and the high end is downright exorbitant. So if you want peonies, look for cheap ones at home or garden stores this time of year. Due to the unseasonal warmth, the ground here is unfrozen, so I was able to plant them immediately. \o/

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I labeled and mulched the new peonies.

I put out a fresh cake of peanut suet.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I started the process of trimming dead stems from the wildflower garden, which is going to take a while.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I did more trimming in the wildflower garden. I discovered a little wildflower putting up leaves, probably echinacea, possibly penstemon or something else.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I did more trimming in the wildflower garden.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- We hauled in the potting mix bags from last night.

I've seen a fox squirrel in the forest garden.

EDIT 2/22/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

dolorosa_12

I'm really tired, and don't feel in any way prepared for the upcoming working week, but I've been trying to mitigate that with a very lazy Sunday. I had grand plans to plant the first of the spring seeds and start germinating seedlings in the growhouse, I had plans to go out for a walk with Matthias (the weather today is gorgeous), but instead I've spent the whole day vegetating in my wing chair in the living room, watching the tail-end of the Winter Olympics from the corner of my eye, watching Olia Hercules cook borshch on a BBC cooking show, scrolling around on Dreamwidth, and so on.

Matthias and I saw Marty Supreme at the community cinema earlier this week, and we'll be heading out to see Hamnet tonight, so it's definitely been a film-heavy time by our standards. I'm anticipating a lot of cathartic crying tonight.

I've continued to make my way through mythology/fairytale/folktale retellings recommended by you on a previous post. This week it was Girl Meets Boy (Ali Smith), a slim little novella in conversation with Ovid's Metamorphoses, concerned with fluidity in gender, gender presentation, sexuality, and so on. It felt very, very, very of its time and place (the UK in the 2000s), but that's not to say that its specificity was a bad thing.

I also read The Swan's Daughter (Roshani Chokshi), a lush, surreal fairytale of a book in which the titular daughter (one of seven sisters born to a power-hungry wizard and his swanmaiden wife) finds herself caught up in a competition to win the hand of the kingdom's prince in marriage. Chokshi's previous books have been very melodramatic and earnest, and she's relished the opportunity here to shift the tone to something much more humorous and knowing, while still digging into her favourite big themes: the tension between love and vulnerability, genuine love requiring an embrace of uncertainty, and the interplay of love and monstrosity made literal.

It reminded me so much of one of my very favourite books — The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (Patricia McKillip) — although the latter is portentous and serious where Chokshi is whimsical and humorous that I picked up the McKillip for yet another reread. I've written about it here before, so suffice it to say now that it remains an incredible book — sharp and perceptive, devastating and beautiful.

I'll leave you with this fantastic link to a Shrove Tuesday tradition in which contestants dressed in costumes race through central London while flipping pancakes in pans. It's as delightful as you might imagine.

kalloway

On Wednesday, my father pulled up a flyer on Facebook for a nerd-show next weekend and incredibly nearby. Even though I have a fairly strict no-winter-shows rule because, uh, weather, this is close enough and cheap enough that I figured if I get a table and nothing comes of it, I at least got to hang out with other nerds for a few hours. Anyway, got a table, lol, and will spend some of this weekend/coming week sorting out some stuff to take. This looks like it might become ~monthly and if it takes off and I can maintain a table, it'll really help the clear-out. (The only other table I have booked this year is Semmex and that's not a personal table. I also don't want to spend every weekend this year trying to sell my stuff but I really do need to do the cleanout. Blrgh. Blrrrrgh.)

Finished up the KO GM and it's... okay. Some parts sucked to build but overall it's fine. I was thinking he needed a friend and was looking up other GMs and then suddenly remembered maybe I had one in the back of a cabinet? Sure enough... It is a very old HGUC kit and the nubs have yellowed like I've seen on a lot of old Gundam Wing kits. Since this GM has probably been in the back of the cabinet since being built, I can only assume it's age + plastic quality. Anyway, the GMs can be slightly messy friends, lol.

Going to work on the Destiny Astray today and maybe get the body done this weekend? I'm hopeful. IDK what my next kit will be but it will be Bandai so it at least will go together without extensive modification and/or pain.

ysabetwordsmith

Sunday Word: Bricolage

bricolage [bree-kuh-lahzh, brik-uh-]

noun:
1 a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things.
2 (in literature) a piece created from diverse resources.
3 (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork.
4 the use of multiple, diverse research methods.

Definitely useful if you like upcycling.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today we went to the Crimson Market and made a few other stops.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Scientists just mapped mysterious earthquakes deep inside Earth

Scientists at Stanford have unveiled the first-ever global map of rare earthquakes that rumble deep within Earth’s mantle rather than its crust. Long debated and notoriously difficult to confirm, these elusive quakes turn out to cluster in regions like the Himalayas and near the Bering Strait. By developing a breakthrough method that distinguishes mantle quakes using subtle differences in seismic waves, researchers identified hundreds of these hidden tremors worldwide.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Today is partly sunny and chilly.

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 2/21/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I put out more birdseed in the hopper feeder.

I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

Tomorrow is the last day of the half-price sale in Not Quite Kansas.

fuzzyred is running a pool that will close later today, so if you want in on the quarter-price sale, now's the time to make your selections. If you're still shopping solo, the sale as a whole will close Sunday night.

Current Mood: busy

duckprintspress

Ever wondered how Duck Prints Press picks the themes for our anthologies?

Well, it goes like this:

Every month, we hold meetings on the Press’s private Discord (not to be confused with our public Discord) that anyone involved with the Press (staff, editors, authors, artists, backers on Patreon, and the like) can attend. During these meetings, we go, “hey, we’re thinking about themes for our next anthology! What would you like?” and I take notes of everything that folks suggest.
I take the compiled list of suggestions and share it with staff during our monthly staff meetings. We discuss the options in light of what we had in mind, add some ideas of our own, take away some other ideas, poke and prod at it, and ultimately end up with a short list (generally under ten) of the ideas we like best.
Staff (which includes editors, graphic designers, and others who are involved with higher-end tasks in Duck Prints Press, and who aren’t paid as staff but are for the work they do, and who help me make decisions) then votes on that list, and based on their votes we narrow things down to four to five choices.
And then the fun part starts…

Our backers on Patreon pick the final theme from a short list of options we’ve selected!

Right now, our Patrons are voting on the theme for our next Queer Fanworks Inspired By… anthology. This will be the fifth anthology in this series. Three are already out (featuring works inspired by Much Ado About Nothing, The Three Musketeers, and Pride and Prejudice) and we are in the home stretch on the fourth (featuring works inspired by folklore and fairy tales). The choices that Patrons are voting on for the next one are:

Queer Fanworks Inspired by the Artwork of Vincent Van Gogh
Queer Fanworks Inspired by the Story of Robin Hood
Queer Fanworks Inspired by Dracula by Bram Stoker
Queer Fanworks Inspired by The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer
Queer Fanworks Inspired by King Arthur lore/Arthuriana

Ready to have your say? Become a backer of our Patreon at any level and place your vote! The voting ends on Monday, February 23rd.

Patrons get lots of other awesome benefits too – coupons for use in our webstore, access to our Discord, exclusive sneak peeks and previews, free stories… and that’s just for folks at the $3/month level! And support of our Patreon helps keep the lights on at Duck Prints Press, ensuring we have a steady and reliable income stream to plan around. To those who already support us, thank you!!, and if you’ve read this far, I truly hope you’ll consider it. For the price of a single cup of coffee each month, you can help an indie publisher keep amplifying queer stories and art.

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peppermintfables

December 2025

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Page Summary

duckprintspress - Vending February 28: The Indie Book and Comic Expo at The Shirt Factory in Glens Falls!
downstrife - been a while again
ysabetwordsmith - Monday Update 2-23-26
ysabetwordsmith - Notes for "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds"
ysabetwordsmith - Poem: "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds"
ysabetwordsmith - Notes for "Embrace My Fate"
ysabetwordsmith - Poem: "Embrace My Fate"
ysabetwordsmith - John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds Order
ysabetwordsmith - Notes for "The Spectrum of Your Being"
ysabetwordsmith - Poem: "The Spectrum of Your Being"
ysabetwordsmith - Early Humans
ysabetwordsmith - Birdfeeding
dolorosa_12 - Sunshine on my window
kalloway - (no subject)
ysabetwordsmith - Vocabulary: Bricolage
ysabetwordsmith - Today's Adventures
ysabetwordsmith - Science
ysabetwordsmith - Birdfeeding
ysabetwordsmith - Half-Price Sale in Not Quite Kansas
duckprintspress - Back Our Patreon, Help Pick Our Next Anthology Theme!

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Style: Lettuce for Crossroads by branchandroot
Resources: P r o l o g u e

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peppermintfables

Reading

Vending February 28: The Indie Book and Comic Expo at The Shirt Factory in Glens Falls!

been a while again

Monday Update 2-23-26

Notes for "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds"

Poem: "The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds"

Notes for "Embrace My Fate"

Poem: "Embrace My Fate"

John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds Order

Notes for "The Spectrum of Your Being"

Poem: "The Spectrum of Your Being"

Early Humans

Birdfeeding

Sunshine on my window

(no subject)

Vocabulary: Bricolage

Today's Adventures

Science

Birdfeeding

Half-Price Sale in Not Quite Kansas

Back Our Patreon, Help Pick Our Next Anthology Theme!

Our backers on Patreon pick the final theme from a short list of options we’ve selected!

Ready to have your say? Become a backer of our Patreon at any level and place your vote! The voting ends on Monday, February 23rd.

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December 2025

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Style Credit

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