Fandoms: (deep breath): 9x Immortal X-Men 7x Angel's Egg 3x Barbarous, Galaxy Princess Zorana, King of Dragon Pass, misc silent film posters 2x GRIS, owl photographs 1x American Girl: Josefina, The Dark Tower series, Lord of the Rings (Frazetta illustrations), Monstress, Pip & Flinx, The Power FantasyTigress Queen, Transformers: Worst Bot Ever
The front door of FAME Recording Studios carries a boast that might sounds exaggerated until you learn who actually walked through it. A sign proclaims: “Through these doors walk the finest Musicians, Songwriters, Artists and Producers in the World.”
Among the hundreds of artists who have recorded at the studio over the last six decades are Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Duane and Gregg Allman, Jason Isbell, and Demi Lovato.
Founded in 1959 as Florence Alabama Music Enterprises, FAME started off above a drugstore in the city of Florence before owner Rick Hall moved it about 15 minutes away to Muscle Shoals, and then to its current Avalon Avenue home. From this modest building came records that helped define the “Muscle Shoals sound,” a swampy, deeply felt blend of soul, R&B, pop, country, and gospel grit.
Hall’s roster of studio musicians also earned a devoted following. The Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, or the Swampers, as they were known, played on hundreds of classic recordings, and became a significant part of the appeal for artists looking to record at FAME.
Part of the studio’s magic was the community’s distinctive identity. Muscle Shoals was not New York, Detroit, Memphis, or Nashville. It was a modest Alabama town where artists arrived looking for something more than just polish. Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On” brought early success, and Jimmy Hughes’s recording of “Steal Away” was the first hit recorded at the Avalon Avenue location.
Then came the legends: Wilson Pickett, Etta James, Clarence Carter, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin, whose first Atlantic session at FAME produced “I Never Loved a Man” and helped redirect her career. The place is not frozen in amber, either. FAME still operates as a working studio, with modern artists continuing to record there.
What makes FAME special is not just celebrity residue. It is the surprising compression of American music history into a plain-looking studio in a town many listeners had never heard of. Step inside, and the myth somehow looms larger: These two modest rooms changed the trajectory of music forever.
Shinto is sometimes called the religion with 8 million gods, as it does not only honor nature spirits, but also deceased people of importance. A notable example is the Hippocrates shrine in Kyoto, but the Seimei shrine is more closely connected with Japanese history.
Abe no Seimei was a historical figure who lived around the turn of the last millennium working as an onmyo-ji, or fortune teller and astrologer to the empirical court. His life is connected to many divine acts of magic, which gave him the nickname 'Merlin of Japan'.
The temple dedicated to him is located in the north east of Kyoto, on top of his old living place. He was asked by the emperor to live there, as it was believed that evil often came from the north east. After his death he was quickly deified and a shrine was erected on the location of his residence, likely so that he could continue to protect the court from evil even after death.
These days the shrine is quite popular due to several popular culture appearances of lord Seimei, as well as due to his connection with academic success. Amongst foreigners the shrine is popular due to the pentagram logos, which give an interesting contrast with the traditional designs.
Most of today has been devoted to proctoring a lab practical exam, which is rather tedious but necessary. So while I sit around, I've been working on tackling a handful of orders for miscellaneous items. For instance, I noticed some of the tape supplies at the boathouse have been running low, so I searched around for some duct tape on McMaster-Carr's website.
And lo, that's how I learned that Nuclear-Grade Duct Tape is a Thing that Exists:
"The Story of Puccini & Turandokht" — Puccini turned this Central Asian heroine into a Chinese princess; if readers ask for it, I may devote a separate post about how this happened
Concrit welcome! Comments adored! Credit appreciated! Take and use as many icons as you like. If you want to know whose textures and brushes I use, take a look at my resource post.
This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, May 5, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "Older Scenes and Forgotten Characters." I'll be soliciting ideas for characters we haven't seen in a while, dimensional travelers, time travelers, man out of time, alternate self, historians, futurists, explorers, inventors, quantum mechanics, quantum physicists, mad scientists, partners, teachers, clergy, leaders, superheroes, supervillains, teammates, alien or fantasy species, failure analysts, ethicists, activists, rebels, other remnant characters, revisiting older scenes, filling in details, missing scenes, learning from the past, moving on to the next scene, researching, revising theories, 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, 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, older storylines and series, the multiverse (quantum physics), the multiverse (F&SF), landing pads, world portals, liminal zones, schools, churches, libraries, laboratories, supervillain lairs, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, starships, alien planets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, mysterious storms, crystal balls and other magical scrying devices, chronoscopes and other technological scrying devices, psychohistory (academic), psychohistory (science fiction), puzzling discoveries, sudden surprises, travel mishaps, the buck stops here, trial and error, weird food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, intercultural entanglements, asking for help and getting it, strange loops, fix-its, enemies to friends/lovers, 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.
Among my more relevant series for the main theme:
An Army of One features the autistic secession in space.
Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.
If you're interested, mark the date on your calendar, and please hold actual prompts until the "Poetry Fishbowl Open" post next week. (If you're not available that day, or you live in a time zone that makes it hard to reach me, you can leave advance prompts. I am now.) Meanwhile, if you want to help with promotion, please feel free to link back here or repost this on your blog.
Humanoid robots are getting a new gig as baggage handlers and cargo loaders at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport—part of a Japan Airlines experiment to address a human labor shortage as airport visitor numbers have surged in recent years.
The demonstration, set to launch in May 2026, could eventually test humanoid robots in a wide range of airport tasks, including cleaning aircraft cabins and possibly handling ground support equipment such as baggage carts, according to a Japan Airlines press release. The trials are scheduled to run until 2028, which suggests that travelers flying into or out of Tokyo may spot some of the robots at work.
This marks the latest foray for humanoid robots after they have already begun pilot-testing in workplaces such as automotive factories and warehouses. Most robotic productivity so far has relied on robotic arms and similarly specialized robots that perform the same predictable tasks on assembly lines and in warehouses. By comparison, humanoid robots face a much stiffer challenge in dealing with more open and unpredictable work environments, and it remains to be seen whether the latest robotic software and hardware will be up to the task.
When Flo was about seven, we went to Hawaii for a week. She kept a journal. Each day had a drawing, a description, and she summed it up by finishing "It was fun." I went to Tampa (and environs) for three days and nights. I saw Arthur's aunt, his sister, BTS, 60 thousand other fans, and an art museum. It Was Fun. I have mentally composed three posts. Sometime soon...
(And do we in fact have to invoke Wollstoncraft even if she did publish a travel journal???)
Article tends to argue that it was partly in the cause of maintaining an aura of the feminine in spite of their masculine pursuit and partly in order to dissociate from the shadow of Wollstonecraft (which also loomed among suffragists, do admit).
Maybe.
And maybe they were invested in being Not Like Other Gurlzz and therefore not identifying with the Struggles of Their Sex.
Or maybe they were doing that thing whereby if a lady-person does something notable in one sphere, she had to balance that out in some way by not being an all-rounder, or doing careful respectability-maintenance, or whatever. (Translating Greek and being able to cook....)
Also, surely C19th British women explorers (wot no Isabelle Eberhardt?) were a very small group - not enough for a subset to be designated 'many'? Do they include e.g. missionaries or those women like Isabel Burton who followed their husbands?
Though humans have a strong desire to be an individual, slightly stronger is our innate need to not be alone. Humans are not solitary creatures, so why do we try so hard to act like we are all just individuals with no ties or connections to those around us? Author Marie Vibbert wonders if we wouldn’t all be better off as a hive mind in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Multitude.
MARIE VIBBERT:
Over 11,000 tons of discarded clothing lie in the Chilean desert. These are garments that never sold, from low and high brands, and almost entirely made of petroleum-based fabrics: rayon, polyester, acrylic. It’s a major environmental problem. The clothes catch fire, leak chemicals and microplastics, and just… keep coming.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, they are looking for new, industrial applications for wool because this renewable clothing resource that doesn’t spontaneously combust sits rotting in warehouses, unable to compete with the subsidized price of polyester.
Humanity has a problem. A communication problem that creates wasted effort and wasted resources. Food being thrown out while people starve. Diseases like cholera running rampant when their cures exist. I could go on and on with examples. Why can’t we put our efforts where they are needed? Why do our systems dictate so much cruel irony?
When you look at humanity as a whole, we are tearing ourselves apart, starving ourselves, killing ourselves. We don’t seem to understand that we are us?
These were my thoughts going into a project whose first note was: The Borg, but friendly?
I thought it would be a short story. Something quick. Get in and get out. A hive mind comes to Earth, tries to communicate with humans as a hive, fails, and sees what a mess we are. Nudge the reader toward empathy, toward seeing problems between “us” and “them” as an insufficient definition of “us.” I figured it’d hit about 2,000 words long. But the more I thought about it, the bigger the problem became. How to show the perspective? How to encompass humanity and then move the camera back to show us in perspective?
How do we look, to a hive mind? What would they expect?
Humans are, in many ways, a collective creature. A single human can no more build a skyscraper than a single ant can build a mound. Even writing a novel is a collective act, when you consider that this language that I am using is a vast collection of consensuses on symbols, meaning, and parsing. English, on a certain level, is a stack of inside jokes passed down and expanded every generation.
Beyond that, every work of fiction builds on and reacts to those that came before. I am writing in a genre, science fiction, defined by all the works labelled as such, and in turn defined by the pressures and uncertainties of our society that caused the first authors to write things not of this world, the first readers to like that and want to emulate it, and on, and on.
I was on a panel at WorldCon on Hive Minds in Science Fiction when it occurred to me that an assumption I hadn’t seen tackled yet was that collectivism automatically meant a repression of individuality. It seems an easy conclusion? If my family votes democratically on dinner, my individual desire to eat nothing but spaghetti every night is subordinated. Yet, the four of us are still individuals as we enjoy my spouse and child’s preferred chicken and rice.
Why wouldn’t a hive mind contain room for the individual? Does a Borg stop loving spaghetti once it absorbs the thoughts of thousands of chicken fans? Wouldn’t it be more of a conversation than a dictatorship? If it’s truly collective, why would there be dictators? And, come to think of it, don’t we, as large groups, change our opinions over time? Americans once ate more chipped beef on toast than chicken fingers. We thought the Edwardian S-bend corset and the mullet were a great ideas. We went from loving elephant leg jeans to skinny jeans. Collectively. Like an individual goes through phases of loving fly fishing or obsession with one particular series of books, societies go through a group fondness for orange or dark wood paneling.
At the risk of making this blog post nothing but rhetorical questions, why do we assume innovation is a characteristic of the individual? Why do we assign conformity to the collective alone?
I tried to imagine myself a hive-member. Many advantages came immediately to mind. I wouldn’t have had to gamble on picking a college major; I’d have access to the needs of the society around me to help find work that was needed. I wouldn’t be competing for the access to share my stories, I’d just tell them, and my hive would hear them and like them or not.
Competition is not just the “healthy” activity of small businesses or inventors, of students seeking academic awards. It’s also war. All around the world, humans are killing humans so that they can avoid sharing resources. Humans are defining others, drawing lines around some of their siblings and excluding others, to limit access to resources. Yet to a non-human observer, we are one species, one sprawling community, alike in our needs and wants and behaviors.
And humans can be so kind, too.
In 2023, I had to travel to New York City because I had to get a Visa to attend my first Hugo awards as a nominee, and as I sat in Central Park waiting for my appointment, admiring the unnatural warmth of the post-climate-change day, I saw a middle-aged man patiently leading a group of elderly people. He looked so happy. I dashed off four pages in my journal about him, imagining his life taking care of elders. I wondered why my science fiction stories weren’t as easy or as fun as simple character portraits. I enjoyed the flashes of lives I’d seen in short stories by Mary Grimm or Maureen McHugh, or the prose poems of Mary Biddinger.
I used to love to climb into a character’s head and walk around, show her worries and fears and daily chores, and then I’d show my work to science fiction writers and be told I had no plot, or perhaps I was “just” a poet. Because of this critique, I chose to wall off the desire to write the way that came most naturally, eschewing character-study and stream-of-consciousness in favor of sentences that “did something.” (My own term.) I began to focus on ideas, on technology, on concrete consequences and violent action.
Eventually, I got pretty good at it, good enough to feel its limitations. I opened up my old “plotless” stories and found them not so plotless, after all. Rather, they reflected my own sense of helplessness as a teen and early-twenties writer, and that point of view was uninteresting to the science fiction editor of the 90s and 2000s, who focused on competent characters moving the plot by choice.
At the young age of 47, I revised one of those 20-year-old “plotless” stories and sold it to a market paying the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association’s professional rate of eight cents a word. Not to brag. (Yes, to brag). In some ways, the genre itself has moved on from rigorously espousing action and certainty from its heroes, but also, I had learned how to structure a story through the mechanics of action, and this helped me see the similar structuring of non-action-based stories.
Part of the literary legacy my writing depends on is science fiction’s desire for logical, action-driven plots, but the origins of this project are the literary flash fiction piece, rooted in character and moment, and my desire to return to it, now that I have proven myself in the plot mines.
Which brings us back to the beginning: How better to show the individual in the collective of humanity than through a series of very short point of view pieces? The result is an introspective novella I wrote in thousand-word chunks around other projects. More than any other book I’ve written, I feel naked in its pages, exposing my deepest, most personal self. I felt free to do this because it was something I thought would never sell: too literary, too experimental.
Well, I sent it to Apex Books and they disagreed. I hope you enjoy, and be kind to my Space Cephalopods.
Title: the same deep water as you Fandom: Wiseguy (tv) Content notes: I noticed the matching pinky rings somewhere around episode 6; otherwise, no spoilers. Challenge: Obstacle Length: ~300 words
I mostly post about: Videogames I'm playing, cdramas I'm watching, some fandom stuff, my writing (fanfic, though I'd like to work on original stuff). Occasional life stuff, but I'm a private person who prefers to keep her online & offline lives separate so it's vague if I do post something.
My hobbies are: Videogames (PS5 & I got a Switch recently), writing, watching cdramas & reading (mainly cnovels these days), I've been watching some videos about scrapbooking/journalling, & would like to try that out.
My fandoms are: SVSSS, MDZS, cdramas, Devil May Cry
I'm looking to meet people who: Share some of my interests, so I can feel less like I'm talking into the void when I post, & give me something to read on my reading page. Would prefer people somewhat close to me in age.
My posting schedule tends to be: Fairly sporadic. I post if I have something to say, which sometimes works out as weekly, maybe a couple of posts within the space of a week, or I might go a few weeks without posting anything.
When I add people, my dealbreakers are: Controversial dealbreaker these days, but I am very much not comfortable with the word 'queer'. I'm bi & I resent it having been made an umbrella term & slung around casually as a cute marketing buzzword, & anyone who has any kind of objection gets shouted down. I have no objection if that's how you choose to identify, but if it's a major part of your vocabulary & is cropping up multiple times in every post, there's a decent chance we may not get along.
Current Location:UK
Current Music:They Might Be Giants - Birdhouse in Your Soul
Hidden inside a cafe, in what was originally a theater, is a detailed collection of socialist era Bulgarian cars. Everything from the Lada to the Trebant can be found in the museum along with other socialist friendly car brands and models.
Alongside the main attraction of the cars the museum also contains a complete history of life in Socialist Bulgaria in the form of toys, hoovers, cigarettes, and memorabilia from the time period.
Visitors can immerse themselves in the glorious past of the Eastern Bloc and also get a shock reminder of how similar life was on the other side of the iron curtain.
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stonepicnicking_okapi - Three Weeks for Dreamwidth: C is for Cyanide![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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fic_promptly - Tuesday, April 28 - Promotion Day Reminder
