Huh. Let's see if this thing is working at all.

 

No Context Friday:

Sorry, needed a place to stash an image.

Vista

Having climbed high
and pausing on the rocks
At the breaking of the slope
I look down on my path.
This hill is high, and higher than some
But most? That would be a myopic sin
And my sight is still clear.

Hidden around the slope's sure shoulder
The main ridge looms behind my modest peak
Between is a concavity water-cut by ruin and wear
The great ancient mountain worn down like a tooth
The softer matter gone, leaving the hard fragile shards
To gum and cut in sharp old age.

The summit lurks somewhere above
A topographic crest, the highest point
The secret of engineers
Spreads open at my feet
Battles are fought at the breaking crest.
For every crag ever so harsh
Plateaus for a moment, a second, a breath
Before sharp drops
Mountains are high and summits higher
But more can be seen perched on edges.

The trail plunges steep
And I marvel at the depths
In such a small place
Paced from end to end not twenty yards
The clearing holds my world enfolded
The wide fields by roaring roads
The narrow cliffs in quiet woods
The wild slopes were so wide, and my path was so narrow.

Just as no life is lost in the living
And no cliff claimed in the climbing
I see the land as I lived it, and own not an inch of it
But what I carry right now.
There are many roads, and I have chosen mine
And I cannot see where it goes from here.
Soon for second winds and the peak, and mountain miles
But for now I gaze over the great valley floor
And think on where I've been.

5/6/02

So, Oliver's put together a Season 9 Bingo card for the last season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. This is my card for the season. Five hits in a row is a bingo, either seasonal or, for the difficult run, a single episode. Some of them are going to be basically impossible - good luck getting the current show-runners to mention Lauren Faust on screen!

Tile rules are listed in hover-overs on the application itself, and also in the game rules, just scroll down.

For those who don't follow Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the artist got together with his much less crazed brother to start doing these civics-lecture comics.  They're kind of great.

So go check out the Weiner Brothers' Law and Sausages. You won't be disappointed.

I've been using this art for one of my current stories, Those Who Ride.  It's a colored sketch from when the artist and I were going back and forth about the commission.  She delivered the final art today. Here it is:

Nice, right?

So there's a review/interview site for MLP fan-fiction called Royal Canterlot Library that selects and features a representative story from a given writer once a week, most weeks.
They chose one of my short stories, A Requiem For Lost Libraries, to feature this week. It's kind of a ghost story, written back in early December during a productive burst that also produced Twilight In Plain SightSo, yeah, that's something of a deal. Thank you, RCL folks!

I'm going through a bit of a dry spell at the moment, but I hope to get something back together, and I still might be able to produce at least a chapter, maybe, before the month's out.

In other news, I've been messing around with commissioning art, including this The Right Stuff reference to Kris Overstreet's Changeling Space Program.

I just wanted to clear out a lot of the old links in the right side... I've been very lazy about that.

So I kinda wrote a thing.  A short mystery novel in the MLP/EqG fantasy setting.

I'm increasingly using this blog for image hosting, sorry y'all.

Don't ask, man.  I just needed someplace to stash a batpony for a couple hours.  Can  you hold her for me until then?

I spent last night setting up a new computer, drinking heavily, and trying not to mourn the death of the republic.

Some rotten kids down the street jeered at me with their hand-drawn Hillary signs as I walked to the polls after work, and I yelled at them that they'd have to live with the consequences of their ignorant foolishness. This morning I spent writing on a project I've been working on since August, every morning more or less - get in a couple of hours, slap together a chapter, and then feed the cats. I get up pretty damn early these days.

 But I was miserably avoiding the dead elephant in the room. I was positive that it was the end of things, the death-rattle in a rictus and a pantsuit. Then I caught sight of a sniveling hipster bewailing fate somewhere online, and I looked up out of my miserable huddle.

The orange clown did it. The horrible harpy conceded. The Senate remains Republican. We may be still crouched upon the edge of an abyss I call "electoral dictatorship", but we're still on the edge. I thought for sure we were plummeting into the depths. Oh, don't get me wrong - he'll screw up from dawn to dusk, and chisel and grift and sleep around with harlots while it's dark out. It's in his nature. Trump will be a monument to bad judgment, ignorance and foolishness. But all of Washington will loathe him with all of their rotten, grasping, arrogant souls, and scheme and plot to undermine every plan, every thing he tries. They'll let him get away with absolutely *nothing*. And Republicans have a proud history of impeaching their own wayward presidents, so rejoice!

 Sing from every mountaintop!

Checks and balances have returned to Washington, torches and pitchforks in hand! I'm listening to 'World Turned Upside Down' right now.

 (I really need to stop campaigning for presidential candidates, it's apparently bad luck. My (loathed, despised, I voted for him anyway) candidate won my state for the first time since I screwed up as a college student and voted for Billy Jeff before the Clintons became a corrupt dynasty-in-waiting.)

Myco beasties are the enemies of all orderly geneological studies.  They make a mockery of proper Linaeusian categorization and study.  The damn things refuse to acknowledge the orderly borders that allow simple speciation or even the sort of distinction that produce coherent genuses. (Genii? I forget how to plurality that...)