From an amateur fencer: look how the dominant fighter barely does any flourishes--it's all to the point flow

#PennedPossibilities 991: "Tell us about your work in progress. What is the genre or genres?"

Unamed 1: Space opera. A prequel of sorts to the Belle Epoch trio, because Sonata's foul-mouthed eco-warrior needed its own space.

Unnamd 2: SF. A highly unreliable narrator relates highly […]

#WordWeavers April 20. What is your MC’s relationship to obtaining and preparing food?

Renny spent his whole life in unimaginable privilege. "He had never even buttered his own toast."

On the Kintsugi he is expected to take turns cooking, with predictably disasterous results.

Chapter 45 of Atraxian Blue (https://
books2read.com/u/b6ElAx) is up at
http://mathling.com/books/index.html

It's a corpse!

In which Renny does something moderately clever and rather brave to help save the day.

It was his fault there were in this mess anyway.

#scifi #writing #AtraxianBlue […]

Gonna spend the next two years spamming every elected Dem about the concept of "damnatio memoriae." Chisel his name off every inscription. Build over the various Trump Towers like they're Nero's Golden House. Remove him from physical memory, not to forget but as a sign of disrespect to the man.

You are not using your exposed ceiling beams to their best advantage. Here in Jean Lurçat's atelier/museum, you can see what happens when an artist decides all the world is a canvas. Ceiling beams decorated with fantastic and elaborate painted plants and animals in white, a fading red, yellow, and black. Spikes. Swirls. Something strange everywhere you look. Look there: a fish with wild spines in amongst some vines. And there: a shield-shaped face, the brow wrinkles forming a small tree. Lobster-like creatures battling in a row. A snake. A what? Pot of gold? Flower bomb? Gourd? Friends, he did this kind of thing on tapestries too. Tapestries! Photographer: me

#SilentSunday #Photography #HumanArt

Black cat peers out from under a Persian rug next to a sliding glass door that leads out to a redwood deck. The sun shines over her the hump, casting dark shadows. She is so very sneaky. No one can spot her. Not at all. Photographer: me Cat: Nyx

#Caturday #Photography

The mighty huntress waits for her prey, completely hidden from view

Well, dang. I get why #draft2digital wants to add account activation fees to defend against the slopstorm, but adding the account maintenance fee is nasty and probably means worse is to come. Unless my books start selling at several times the current rate, I'm going to get dinged. Sigh.

Out now! Dourian Black

https://books2read.com/u/brnz9M

Renny struggles to turn the path of House Dourian. He struggles with his addiction. He struggles with his relationships with his wives. He struggles to continue his work as a muralist. Then someone tosses him off the edge of the Overlook […]

Available now at your favorite digital store! Atraxian Blue by Mary Holstege

Chapter 44 of Atraxian Blue (https://books2read.com/u/b6ElAx is up at
http://mathling.com/books/index.html

Hiding

In which Renny panics, lost in bitter memories of the past

#scifi #writing #AtraxianBlue

At the base is a Voronoi partition over a Poisson sampling of the interior (plus a sampling of edge points). Extruded 3D with varying depth/thickness + tllt (all driven by fBM noise), then scaling down around centroids. Stereographic projection.

Vermont, over a blue background. Little cells of green glass, just starting to splinter.

Vermont, less extreme

Texas on a black background, with irregular glass prisms of various sizes falling away from it. An explosion of glass, perhaps, caught in the moment when it expels outwards.

#GenerativeArt interlude

Fun with maps

Texas, fracturing

#XQuery #SVG #KML #CreativeCoding

We stand on an unpaved drive curving to the right towards a two-story winery building made of thick block of stone with red tiles on the roof. On the grass ahead and to the right are various white sculptures of birds made of bits of defunct winery equipment: a turkey and a couple of cranes and something more complex and harder to identify further on. We're looking from a small rise out across the vineyards. A large tree looms on the left. The sky is a lovely eggshell blue with soft streaks of high clouds. A stand of bright orange poppies blooms along the edge of the drive. They just finished the crush yesterday and the whole place is redolent with the scent of grapes beginning their fermentation. There were celebrations last night; people are moving a little slowly. Later we will sip wine in the shade and eat cheese and sausage. A lovely morning in France. Photographer: me

#SilentSunday #Photography

LLMs are chaotic systems with strange attractors

aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-...

Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses - Nature Human Behaviour Despite their great diversity, human languages are shaped by recurring grammatical universals. Verkerk et al. show that about one-third of the proposed universals hold cross-linguistically through analyses of the Grambank database.

Large scale look at language universals, Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analysis

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02325-z

#linguistics

Chapter 43 of Atraxian Blue (https://
books2read.com/u/b6ElAx) is up at
http://
mathling.com/books/index.html

Attack

In which the peaceful interlude comes to an end, from a surprising direction

#scifi #writing #AtraxianBlue

Small white flamepoint cat sits on a table behind a couch (on a very attractive quilt made of ties) to observe Artemis II splashdown. Her ears are flicked back, though, wary to my approach. Photographer: me Cat: Halki Quilter: Gail Duffy

#Caturday #Photography

Halki has a keen interest in space

Fantasy, not an endless series: just one straight shot. Female protagonist, a little planetary romance, a little romance romance, magic (no wizards), empire, ambiguous antagonists.

books2read.com/u/bPAjVA (universal link for ebooks)

www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-keeper...
(print)

We look over a wall down on the tile rooftops of a town nestled into the cleft between two low hills as well as climbing up them. The buildings are a handsome pale yellow, gleaming in the early morning sunlight. There is a slight haze over the fields and trees off in the distance. Below us is a square with tables set out under a large spreading tree, waiting to provide shelter and comfort from the heat of the afternoon. There is some kind of imposing balisica on the hill to our right, flying -- is that? yes, it is -- the French flag. Later we will sip wine from these hills and snack on the marvelous cheese. Photographer: me Location: Saint Emilion

#SilentSunday #Photography

Man sits on couch with a fluffy grey cat (Dusty) on his lap and a small white flamepoint (Halki) on his chest. Here I am with my lap, no need to share! But no! Photographer: me, looking on with envious eyes

#Caturday #photography

The cat whisperer and his magnetic attraction to felines

Seven-pointed stars in shades of greens are scattered across a deep blue sky. They are reflected in a heaving green and blue sea, the reflections twisted and made strange from the reflection curve.

#GenerativeArt interlude

An experiment with reflection across a curve, reflection along tangent at nearest point

#XQuery #SVG #CreativeCoding

Blue rectangles, a city perhaps, or megaliths. They are eroded, with golden dustings eating away at the edges. It is an alien landscape, though, with several spheres hanging in the sky. A sense of ancient mysteries, and eons lost to time.

Lost alien worlds

A desert scene in soft colours. Rectangles, perhaps a city, but the rectangles have an eroded look, moth-eaten, as the sand shifts around them. The sun hands in a soft pale sky.

#GenerativeArt interlude

Lost worlds

#XQuery #SVG #CreativeCoding

Fossil that looks like an octopus on matrix, about 10 cm long

After my April 1st joke, lets see some nice cephalopod soft body perservation: Here's a proteroctopus fossil from the Jurassic of France, it's possibly a basal vampire squid. Excellent preservation #fossilfriday 1/3

In this image of Earth taken by the Artemis II crew, we can see the electric lights of human activity. In the lower right, sunlight illuminates the limb of the planet.

Another version of the marvelous new Artemis II view of Earth.

This shot uses a shorter exposure, emphasizing the night side of our planet as it eclipses the Sun. 🧪🔭

An image of Earth backlit by a mostly hidden sun, with a bright pinpoint of light to the bottom right of the disk.

The upper right corner of the image shows the blackness of space. Below and to the left lies a slice of Earth's atmosphere, decorated by a squiggle of exhaust plume.

A photograph taken inside a space vehicle, centered on a half-disk view of Earth seen out the capsule's window.

At the top of the image is a portion of the International Space Station. In the center of the image is a mostly lit moon. At the bottom of the image is a fuzzy view of Earth's atmosphere.

🚀🌔 Stunning views from NASA’s Artemis II mission and the International Space Station showcase Earth, the moon and even Venus, captured during humanity’s first crewed lunar mission since 1972. 🚀🌔 Follow all our mission coverage here: spklr.io/6001EyN07

Chapter 42 of Atraxian Blue (https://
books2read.com/u/b6ElAx) is up at
http://mathling.com/books/index.html

Through the gate

In which Renny and Lila have a quiet moment, transiting the gate to Aconthia

#scifi
#writing
#AtraxianBlue

A view across the harbour at Chania with a view of the lighthouse and breakwater. In the further distance, hills. The glass-smooth with gentle ripples and deep blue. The sky is cloudless and bright. It will be a hot day, friends, and we shall enjoy wine and grilled fish anon. Photographer: me

#SilentSunday #Photography #Crete

An orange tabby (Mikong) and a grey (Loki) snuggle up together on an armchair, limbs tangled, nose-to-paw and paw-to-nose. They are deeply asleep as only cats can be. Photographer: Ian Ford-Holstege

#Caturday #Photography

Snuggles