Just Another Wizard's Tower

bookclub_dw has selected its February title: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.  Drop by that community to discuss it.

I know a lot of folks who feel this way.

A quiet change in everyday foods could save thousands of lives

Tiny, invisible cuts in salt could quietly prevent heart attacks and strokes.

Lowering salt in everyday foods could quietly save lives. Researchers found that modest sodium reductions in bread, packaged foods, and takeout meals could significantly reduce heart disease and stroke rates in France and the U.K. The key advantage is that people would not need to alter their eating habits at all. Small changes to the food supply could deliver large, long-term health benefits.


This is one of those cases where it seems like a good idea at the time, but is not. You have to ask: Why is all that salt there in the first place? Two purposes: 1) It preserves food. 2) It belongs to a category of ingredients -- along with sugar, fat, artificial colors, etc. -- that covers up how terrible most mass-produced and especially ultraprocessed food is.

( Read more... )

Snowflake Challenge: Friending Meme

The post-Snowflake Friending Meme has been such a rousing success that we’ve made it a permanent fixture here at the Fandom Snowflake Challenge, so come and make some new friends!

Just copy and paste the template into a comment; include as much or as little info about yourself as you want.

After you've done that, go through and read other people's comments and either strike up a conversation here, or take your mutual interests to each other's journals and new, shiny friends.


See also the Snowflake Wrap-Up Post with a poll.





Names I go by:
ysabetwordsmith, Ysabet

Other Places I Can Be Found:
Livejournal: https://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/
My Websites: http://penultimateproductions.weebly.com/
http://greenhaventradition.weebly.com/


The fannish platform(s) I am most active on is/are: Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, Weebly


The ways I find my Fandom Joy are: (writing, reading, reccing, betaing, cheerleading/prereading, art, podficcing, mixing, modding, graphics, fanvids, commenting, meta, filk, picspams, etc.)
writing, reading, reccing, reviewing, modding, commenting, meta

Link(s) to my Masterlist(s):
Articles and Essays
Books Written
Love Is For Children landing page
Serial Poetry page
Shared Worlds page

Note that my author site on Weebly is currently being updated, so new landing pages for series and threads are appearing.

I also put a lot of energy into communities. I make lists of active communities for followfriday. One of my recurring posts this year is Community Thursdays. I also run multiple communities:

allbingo hosts a new bingo fest each month. All formats and lengths, all fandoms and original works are welcome. Join us for the Valentines Bingo in February!

birdfeeding is all about birds. If you're into feeding, watching, photographing, drawing, or talking about birds then drop by. Some of us are also into fictional birds ("Crebain, from out of Dunland!") so there's already a tag for that.

crowdfunding is mainly for original work, but some folks welcome fannish prompts because they can use those for freebies. It runs a Creative Jam on the third weekend of each month. The February theme will be "Not Giving Up."

goals_on_dw supports New Year's resolutions and other goals. Currently the most popular is Fannish 50 with 52 participants, so check there to find links to fannish content. Do you post your fannish content here? Sign up for Full Content on Dreamwidth to grow your audience. The tag for signup posts has some for reading, writing, art, and nature goals along with Community Thursdays and other stuff. Additional masterlists appear in the sidebar.

newcomers offers many resources on how to use Dreamwidth and where to find things here. It helps new people get the hang of this platform in hopes that they'll stick around. Established users are welcome to join for supporting newcomers, so if you like making new friends and helping folks, come check it out. Have you written materials that explain how to use DW? You can link or repost them in this community. Do you want to help new users? Sign up for the Dreamwidth Welcommittee.

I'm also an administrator for some of The Freaks Club family of communities including thefreaksclub, tfc_musicianships, and first_nations_freaks.


Fandom(s) I enjoy: The Avengers, Dragon Prince, Good Omens, Harry Potter, High Potential, Jurassic Park, Lucifer, Magnificent 7, Nimona, The Sentinel, Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, Star Wars, Tolkien, X-Men.

My favorite people/characters in this/these fandom(s) are: I am pretty flexible about pairings and often like multiple characters per fandom.

Pairing(s)/grouping(s) I ship within this/these fandom(s) is/are: I particularly like teamfamily.


The type(s) of fanwork(s) I consume the most is/are:
(fic/podfic/art/mixes/graphics/fanvids/meta/filk/picspams/etc.)
Fiction, art, and meta. I like poetry when I can get it, too.

Fanwork tropes/clichés I enjoy are:
I listed a few favorite tropes here. I also enjoy afterlife, alien sex/gender dynamics, alpha / beta / omega, amnesia, anthropomorphic, asexuality / aromance, canon divergence / fork in the road, disabilities, enemies to friends/lovers, fixit, fluff, gen, hurt/comfort, genderbending, kink, mpreg, racebending, relationship repair, sedoretu, sex, skin hunger / touch aversion, soulmates / soulbonds, time travel, trauma and recovery, troll romance / quadrants, wingfic, and xenolinguistics.
Recs on Dreamwidth or sites other than AO3 are welcome for any of these: canon, fanwork, original, yours or anyone else's.
If you are into these things, a lot of them appear in my fanwork and original work.

The type(s) of fanwork(s) I consume the most is/are: (fic/podfic/art/mixes/graphics/fanvids/meta/filk/picspams/etc…)
Fanwork tropes/clichés I enjoy are:


Non-fandom things I enjoy: (hobbies, interests, job, etc.)
I am a professional wordsmith with writing, reviewing, editing, and other activities.

I enjoy activism, birdwatching, cooking, crafts, ethnic studies, gardening, gender studies, history, intentional community / neighboring, linguistics, magic, Paganism, science, spirituality, thinking, tikkun olam, and worldbuilding.

I love talking about big-picture issues and deep topics. I care about S-risks and X-risks. I never stopped asking "Why?" and "How does that work?"


I post/want to post mostly about:
* Reading (22,659 posts)
* Writing (21,144)
* Cyberfunded creativity (18,816)
* Poetry (16,722)
* Networking (14,504)
* Fishbowl (13,153)
* Fantasy (11,644)
* Weblit (8,006)
* News (7,948)
* Personal (7,486)
* Poem (7,358)
* Nature (7,252)
* Science fiction (6,686)


Other things I want to share about myself:
One thing I am good at: Language. I have a linguistic coprocessor in my head. It takes up space normally devoted to other stuff like facial recognition. But I can learn new sounds, hack any language I can hear or read, pick up words without half trying, write poetry in languages I don't actually speak, and build model languages for fun. I am linguistic SillyPutty.

Other things I want to share about myself: I fly my freak flag proudly. The mainstream has never been a good fit for me and is rapidly moving farther away. If you are a fellow freak and/or the mundanes frequently say you are not human, my blog is probably a good match for you. If you like the direction the world is going at present, you probably won't like my blog.
I post daily, often multiple times. If you are frustrated by low activity on Dreamwidth, here is an area of high activity. If you are easily overwhelmed, this may not be the blog for you.

People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.

I'm dropping in a different topic today. Recently I posted an article and a video about a cow performing versatile tool use.  It turns out that cows also have prehensile tongues, and having a manipulatory appendage correlates with both tool use and intelligence.  Does this information change how you feel about cows?  How they should be treated?  Your choices to use cow products such as milk, meat, and/or leather?  Why or why not?  Discuss.

Gray wolves are hunting sea otters and no one knows how

On a remote Alaskan island, gray wolves are rewriting the rulebook by hunting sea otters — a behavior few scientists ever expected to see. Researchers are now uncovering how these coastal wolves adapted to marine hunting, what it means for land–sea ecosystems, and whether this ancient predator–prey relationship is re-emerging as sea otters recover.


My best guess is that the wolves prey on sea otters during brief times the otters come ashore. Maybe on ice, which can work rather like land, but there is a lot less ice now than there used to be. It's hard to image a less-marine-adapted predator catching more-marine-adapted prey actually in the water. Then again, if that's happening, it would push the otters to move into waters the wolves can't reach -- which is one way that semi-aquatic species become fully-aquatic species.

The 2026 Rose and Bay Awards are still open for excellence in crowdfunding. Today and tomorrow are the last days to nominate your favorite projects and patrons. If you have not yet done so, please do that now.

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! (4)
Fiction: fuzzyred Nominate fiction! Vote for fiction! (3)
Poetry: gs_silva Nominate poetry! Vote for poetry! (3)
Webcomic: curiosity Nominate webcomics! Vote for webcomics! (3)
Other Project: curiosity Nominate other projects! Vote for other projects! (3)
Patron: fuzzyred Nominate patrons! Vote for patrons! (3)