imhilien

Today is cloudy and cold.  At least the howling wind stopped.

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

I put out water for the birds.

Many of the plants that were sprouting have died from the hard freeze.  :/  Some still look fine though.  At least some of the sprouts in my jug and tub greenhouses have survived.

EDIT 3/17/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 3/17/26 -- I did more work around the patio.




.
 

Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! Today's theme is "anything goes." 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.

Stuck for ideas? You can find prompts by ...
* browsing planned poems for Aquariana and the Maldives, The Big One, Broken Angels, Calliope and Vagary, Officer Pink and Turq, Pips and Joshua, or Shiv. (Some of these I've already done, so they're not all up to date, but others I haven't done yet.)
* browsing my Serial Poetry page for favorite threads or characters.
* browsing series with recently created landing pages: Artists of Destruction, Coracle Shores, Crystal Wood, Strike of the Thunderbirds, The Wandering (on the Serial Poetry page), Iron Horses, Peculiar Obligations, Not Quite Kansas.
* browsing my QUILTBAG list, Romantic Orientations in My Characters, Sexual Orientations in My Characters, Gender Identities in My Characters, or My Characters with Disabilities for favorites.
* naming a poetic form you'd like to see written.
* picking a prompt from my current bingo cards: National Crafting Month Bingo 3-1-26 
* picking some from the Bingo Generator prompt lists.
* looking up fun tropes on Fanlore.
* choosing an unusual word.
* plugging a favorite topic into your search engine and choosing a picture that looks interesting.
* anything short. I could especially use short poems today as other prompts are likely to run long.
* standalone ideas, if you're a fan of that rather than series.

What Is a Poetry Fishbowl?

Writing is usually considered a solitary pursuit. One exception to this is a fascinating exercise called a "fishbowl." This has various forms, but all of them basically involve some kind of writing in public, usually with interaction between author and audience. A famous example is Harlan Ellison's series of "stories under glass" in which he sits in a bookstore window and writes a new story based on an idea that someone gives him. Writing classes sometimes include a version where students watch each other write, often with students calling out suggestions which are chalked up on the blackboard for those writing to use as inspiration.

In this online version of a Poetry Fishbowl, I begin by setting a theme; today's theme is "anything goes." I invite people to suggest characters, settings, and other things of any type. Then I use those prompts as inspiration for writing poems.

( New to the fishbowl? Read all about it! )

The Kotlin Crisis: Earth’s first mass extinction may have been far worse than previously believed

Fossils of the first sea creatures, long assumed to have vanished before a major mass extinction about 550 million years ago called the Kotlin Crisis, have now been found and are providing new details about that time period.

This discovery transforms what once looked like a routine species decline in Earth’s early history into what may be the first catastrophic extinction in animal history.


Second, actually, after the Great Farting Oxygen Event changed the atmosphere from reducing to oxydizing -- almost everything died, except a few archaea that found anoxic refuges and a few organisms that figured out how to use oxygen. But most people forget about that one.

( Read more... )