lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


In my reading of Game Of Thrones fic, I developed an urge for fic where Elia Martell Targaryen (why some married women are only referred to by their maiden names and some are always only referred to by their married names, I do not know) and her kids don't die. It would be interesting to see what it would change!, I thought. Surely it doesn't need to change a huge amount necessarily, but it would great to see it!

And so I went looking and found a bunch and it turns out.

It turns out that when you want fic where legitimate claimants to a throne survive, you get a ton of fic about Targaryen restoration. You get so many fics that are love letters to the Targaryens.

I don't care about Targaryen restoration! I don't like the Targaryens and see no reason why I should! (Except for Aemon, the Targaryen maester who is still alive at the Wall, I allow that he's really intruiging.)

Also I will admit the first time I saw the pairing of Jon Snow/Rhaenys Targaryen, I had a full blown "why? why the fuck?"

But yeah I get it, if Jon Snow is her long lost half-brother, then it's true Targaryen heritage to ship them. I don't see it, I don't even like the ship, and it's interesting how I have no problem whatsoever with Jon Snow/Sansa Stark, who were raised as half-siblings, but my reaction to Jon/Rhaenys is "I'm completely uninterested in reading this". Also I'm not really into Jon/Daenerys.

Maybe it's the whole enforced-incest of the Targaryens? IDK.

But also.

Reading the fic.

Okay so I am never going to read the books, I have long since been warned off from all the grimdark rape, and I am never going to watch the show, ditto.

I did not realize how small the amount of time the Targaryens have actually been ruling in Westeros. They only showed up like 300 years ago???? In a setting where people are like "my family has been ruling in this one spot for 10,000 years" or whatever, the Targaryens are new kids on the block who showed up with dragons, conquered everyone, had several (!) really bad rulers, constantly married each other (in violation of the local religion, and no one else was allowed to copy their behavior because they're special), seemed to do very little marrying out to the locals because who needs to shore up support, dealt with civil war/rebellion, lost their dragons, had a really fucking awful last king, and then, surprise, they were overthrown.

And you want those folks back? You are nostalgic for the wonderful days of the people who showed up five minutes ago and were generally terrible?

Also blowing my mind was, okay, I had been told over and over again that Baratheons all look a certain way since time immemorial and so that's why obviously if you look into it, Cersei's kids can't be Robert's.

But the Baratheons were founded as a new house by a Targaryen bastard. The looks of the Baratheons are the opposite of the Targaryens. Also this is also only like 300 years ago, and Westeros seems to enjoy a society where there are several pathways to ensure that only one or two of your sons are allowed to have children (maesters, the wall, endless wars).

So all this is kind of amusing from a "reading fic without knowing canon" perspective, the slow unfolding of, oh my god, what is going on in this canon. But also the mismatch of people who have actually read/watch this canon and what they want to write (Targaryen restoration, Targaryen incest) vs. me who has not done that, and what I want to read.

But actually what I want to write is a fic where Jon Snow actually is Ned Stark's bastard. Ah, yes, I see here that "Ned Stark is very honorable". Uh-huh. Well, he had an affair with a woman who is a sex worker/laundress/woman who was interested before his marriage and then, because he is so honorable, he took the child in and raised him, rather than leaving Jon Snow to live in poverty.

This explains nothing about why Ned Stark wouldn't tell Jon Snow about this mother but I'm sure we can come up with something (the mother was already married? who cares).

But I'm not writing this, entirely because I have no idea of a plot to go along with this. Oh and also I'm not reading/watching this, but I wrote an MDZS drabble without reading the book/finishing the show.

The Poison Drips

Oct. 23rd, 2025 04:40 pm
rocky41_7: (bg3)
[personal profile] rocky41_7

Turning over in my mind how Astarion and Cazador are mirrors of each other and it's sooo interesting. Like, Astarion when the PC meets him is on a kind of precipice. The PC can either encourage him to continue on the path he's on, resentful that other people might get help when he didn't and willing to do anything to make himself feel safe (might makes right, etc.), or can push him back in the direction of being "good," caring about others and keeping his worse instincts under control.

Astarion spends large chunks of the game castigating Cazador for his senseless cruelty, for his selfishness, for his derangement. Astarion also frets about being or becoming a monster. If the PC tells him during their first meeting that the parasites will turn them into mindflayers, his response is a dejected "Of course it'll turn me into a monster." 

And yet, the moment Astarion grasps that he might seize control of Cazador's ritual of ascension, that he might sacrifice his vampiric "siblings" to obtain the power Cazador sought, he is immediately sorely tempted, even eager. When it becomes clear the ritual necessitates the sacrifice not only of Astarion's six spawn siblings, but also the seven thousand victims Cazador has been collecting in the basement for centuries, many of whom Astarion himself delivered unknowingly to their fate, Astarion hesitates only slightly in his desire to complete the ritual himself.

If Astarion is ascended via Cazador's ritual, he almost immediately follows in his master's footsteps. Some of his first dialogue after ascending is about feeling that every other living thing wants to serve and be controlled by him, the vampire ascendant. If he follows Cazador's path, he becomes Cazador. 

Astarion was tortured for centuries into the person he is in the game. He admits to the PC that he barely remembers his life before being a vampire. The person he was before Cazador entered his life is almost entirely lost to him. After centuries of being on Cazador's leash, Astarion barely has a thought that doesn't revolve around Cazador. Minthara correctly points out that as long as Cazador lives, Astarion will never truly be free, because so much of his mindset continues to center his old master. Whomever Astarion might have been if Cazador had never touched him is a mystery, even to Astarion himself. He is now what Cazador made him, but the PC can encourage him to grow beyond that.

By choosing to ascend, by following in Cazador's wake, Astarion essentially rejects the chance to become something else--he accepts that he is what Cazador created and he will become what Cazador wanted to be. If an ascended Astarion is permitted to leave the Szarr mansion alive (ie. the PC doesn't turn on him with the Gur), he revels in his power and in the Reunion Party scene brags about being the "puppet master" of Baldur's Gate. If the PC is in a romance with him, he may agree to turn them into a vampire spawn, but refuses to make them a full vampire, for vague reasons that almost certainly amount to not wanting to have someone around who might even possibly compete with his power.

Astarion thus shows that he has the capacity to be just like Cazador.

By extrapolation, then, Cazador may have once been like Astarion.

The team learns by exploring the Szarr mansion that Cazador was turned by a vampire named Vellioth, who treated him horrifically. Simply by interrogating Vellioth's skull--which Cazador keeps in his bedroom as a gruesome memento--you can hear about how Vellioth murdered Cazador's friends in front of him when he reached out to them, made him spend eleven years impaled as punishment for a failed attempt to kill Vellioth, and how they both laughed when Cazador finally succeeded in killing his master. Clearly, Cazador is what Vellioth made him, down to the scroll of rules he recieved and then imposed on Astarion and the others, and compared to his old master, he may even view himself as lenient with his own spawn. (Astarion can remark that "even his precious rules" weren't something of Cazador's own invention, which shows how much of Cazador and particularly of his presentation as a vampire is made up of Vellioth. And yet--if romancing an ascended Astarion, he almost inarguably delivers the same set of rules, albeit phrased a little gentler, to the PC. Thank you to corgiteatime for the link!)

Who was Cazador before Vellioth? We don't know, and Astarion doesn't either, but the hints we gather in the Szarr mansion suggest Cazador's journey to his present monstrous state was not very different from Astarion's own path to the climax of his personal quest.

(Pure speculation, but Astarion suggests Cazador took special pleasure in tormenting him among the other spawn, and if Cazador saw something of his own pre-vampiric self in Astarion, I think it tracks that he might then in turn feel particularly hostile towards Astarion, perhaps resenting this reminder that he used to be something else, before Vellioth.)

Astarion lives in perpetual fear. Fear of Cazador, fear of being controlled, fear of being hated and despised by those around him, fear of having to face up to his own actions. His desire to seize on the ritual of ascesion is out of a desire for safety--one of his lines about wanting it is about how no one will ever control him again. Is Cazador's desire for it dissimilar? Rifling through his corresondence in the Szarr mansion shows he is eager to control Baldur's Gate and grow his own power, but of course he wouldn't admit to rival vampires that there is buried in there any desire for his own safety. It is not unbelievable that even centuries after Vellioth's death, even as a true vampire now himself, Cazador is still chasing some sense of safety. It is also a preview, I think, of an ascended Astarion's life: the fear that will never leave him as long as he continues to walk in his master's shadow. Astarion believes that ascending will excise that fear--but I'm sure Cazador believed that becoming a full-fledged vampire would make him feel secure, and here he is chasing the ritual of ascension. 

Astarion and Cazador are two sides of the same coin, two stones in the same path begun by Vellioth (although, truthfully, probably even before him, by Vellioth's master and that vampire's master, and so on). Astarion can continue down that same road, chaneling the abuse he recieved from Cazador into his own cruelties, or he can end that terrible lineage by refusing the ritual, by refusing to become what Cazador wanted to be. Cazador represents the monster Astarion can truly become, the worst of Astarion's impulses and instincts, but when the PC meets him, Astarion is not yet too far gone--he can be turned away from this. For Cazador, it's much too late. 


Ted Lasso Drabble

Oct. 23rd, 2025 06:22 pm
senmut: spooky cat on a jackolantern (General: Halloween 3)
[personal profile] senmut
Costume Party or read at SquidgeWorld (100 words) by Merfilly
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Ted Lasso (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Keeley Jones, Ted Lasso, Rebecca Welton
Additional Tags: Drabble
Summary:

Keeley manages to coordinate them, even if they didn't think to do so






They hadn't coordinated their costumes, to Keeley's intense frustration. A few words whispered into Coach Beard's ear seemed to have done the trick.

Rebecca was going to be washing the hair gel out for days, she thought, but she had to admit that she made a striking bride of Frankenstein. Ted looked like he was appreciating it while she enjoyed the way he brought his quaint charm to Bela Lugosi's classic Dracula.

"A pair of monsters walk into a bar…" Ted quipped, having met her at the pub for the costume party.

"Let's go have a monster mash," she replied.
[syndicated profile] lois_mcmaster_bujold_feed
The 15th Penric & Desdemona novella, “Testimony of Mute Things”, is uploading today. I will add links to each of our five vendors as they emerge. (After uploading, vendor pages can populate at anything from an hour to a week, depending.)

Vendor-page copy:

Testimony of Mute Things

Note: in the internal chronology of the Penric & Desdemona tales, this story falls between “Penric’s Fox” and “Masquerade in Lodi”.

A contentious Temple conclave brings sorcerer Learned Penric and his demon Desdemona, in support of his superior Princess-Archdivine Llewen of Martensbridge, to the disputed Carpagamon border town of Occo. There, the uncanny pair will tangle with dangerous new intrigues and old histories, that will test their magical skills, their wits, and their hearts.

***

Cover art again by my very old buddy Ron Miller – his website is well worth visiting, jammed full of art and other treats. https://www.black-cat-studios.com




As I hope people will construe, this is technically a prequel, but as usual written to also stand alone for any folks who stumble across it ala carte.

Amazon Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FXHBQJM5

Barnes & Noble Nook: TBA

Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/testi...

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/test...

Google Play Books: TBA


Updated Penric & Desdemona internal chronology:

“Penric’s Demon”
“Penric and the Shaman”
“Penric’s Fox”
“Testimony of Mute Things”
“Masquerade in Lodi”
“Penric’s Mission”
“Mira’s Last Dance”
“The Prisoner of Limnos”
“The Orphans of Raspay”
“The Physicians of Vilnoc”
The Assassins of Thasalon
“Knot of Shadows”
“Demon Daughter”
“Penric and the Bandit”
“The Adventure of the Demonic Ox”

(“Demon”, “Shaman”, and “Fox” are collected as paper volumes in Penric’s Progress; “Mission”, “Mira” and “Limnos” in Penric’s Travels; and “Lodi”, “Orphans” and “Physicians” are collected in Penric’s Labors.)

Happy reading!

Ta, L.

posted by Lois McMaster Bujold on October, 23

Last Day to Sign Up for 2025

Oct. 23rd, 2025 09:28 pm
[syndicated profile] yuletide_admin_feed

Posted by morbane

There's a new post up on the Yuletide Admin comm regarding Last Day to Sign Up for 2025. Please note that there may have been a delay between that post and this crosspost.

You can go through to DW to check the details:

Dreamwidth Post

If you have follow-up questions, they can be asked in the DW comment section using a DW login, OpenID with another login, or a signed anonymous comment.

yuleswaps 2025 announcement <3

Oct. 23rd, 2025 02:01 pm
kindness_says: (yuletide - swap all the things)
[personal profile] kindness_says posting in [community profile] yuletide
Hello! A few people have been wondering in the Yuletide Discord whether we would have swaps this year... tl;dr it was dicey, but YES!

You may thank [personal profile] morbane (even more than usual ;)) for following up on everyone's behalf; Livi and I had been having an extremely slow/distracted convo about it since early September, but as always, knowing people are waiting on us motivated me LOL. But neither of us will be your primary mod this year! It will be the lovely Helen ([personal profile] patrokla), who started helping out last year. <3

Here is the lil statement I made in Discord, very slightly modified for DW:

Hi everyone! Official announcement (and thank you, Morbane, for playing go-between while we worked things out behind the scenes :)) -- yuleswaps WILL go forward this year, we hope, and we're sorry for the delay!

Indeed I (Kat/Kindness on AO3/[personal profile] kindness_says) had some commitments in Sept/Oct and did not think I'd be able to prioritize swaps this year, and Liviania/[personal profile] anialove is also pretty busy irl atm -- but Helen/[personal profile] patrokla (a great longtime swapper who joined our team last year) is stepping up to give it a shot in spite of their own busyness! We're meeting tomorrow in hopes of getting sign-ups open by the end of this weekend and matches out in early November so as to stay roughly on the usual timeline. Perhaps ambitious, but we will try!

If anybody else was interested in running swaps, Morbane absolutely was speaking for me that we're not offended, and please feel free to DM me comment or email (yuleswaps at gmail) if you're interested in helping out. ESPECIALLY if you are at all code-savvy/great at answering emails efficiently/bursting with ideas for future improvement. <3

You might hear from me again, or you might not! I will def be helping on the backend, for at least this year/as long as I can, and we really appreciate your patience if we're a little slow or clunky this year as we try to sustain/transition. I also apologize to anyone who didn't get fully covered after January (haven't done 2024 cleanup yet... will try if there's time)!

I have LOVED running swaps, well mostly I have anyway ;) for the past 15 (!!) years. Back in the day I did not read coal but was always charmed when friends occasionally sent me screenshots of anons thrilled about swaps, and I similarly really enjoyed skimming like...1-2 years' worth of this discord not long after Morbane emailed me (was very tempted to answer some super old questions but refrained lol). Your enthusiasm has absolutely been the thing to make all the time and headaches worth it.

<3 <3 <3

So that's that!

Love/candy/books/drinks always,
Kat

P.S. For any newer Yuletiders who are interested (or just confused as to what Yuleswaps is), here is last year's sign-ups post, which links to our FAQ, etc. This year's sign-ups post will come soon, if all goes to plan!
oursin: Illustration from medieval manuscript of the female physician Trotula of Salerno holding up a urine flask (trotula)
[personal profile] oursin

(Yogi Tea Bag tags, bringing the woowoo by random bollox generation long before AI started getting in on the act.)

Anyway, are we at all surprised by Millions exploited by ‘menopause gold rush’ amid lack of reliable information.

(Query: how far is lack of reliable information due to its being overwhelmed by menopause quackery, murmurs historian of medicine.)

Millions of women are being exploited by a “menopause gold rush” as companies, celebrities and influencers take advantage of a “dearth” of reliable information on the issue, experts have said. Healthcare companies and content creators saw menopause as a “lucrative market” and were trying to profit from gaps in public knowledge, women’s health academics at University College London (UCL) said. Researchers called for the rollout of a national education programme after finding a significant number of women do not feel well-informed about menopause.

You know what? I think part of this can be put on to the decline in the good old trad women's magazines, which had a) health columns written by pseudonymised health professionals b) agony aunts prepared to Do The Research and having a stack of helpful leaflets written in conjunction with qualified experts.

Brought to you by someone who was devouring her mother's magazines pretty much from the time she became literate and therefore encountered the concept of menopause decades before it became of personal relevance.

And what still gets very little play is what Stella Duffy points out in this piece:

while everyone in my research talked about physiological and emotional difficulties in the transition, once they were out the other side – even while dealing with workplace discrimination and the caring demands of their loved ones – all of them also described postmenopause as time of thriving and growing. We’re not done yet.

Margaret Mead mentioned this, but I'm not sure the 70s feminist discourse around 'croning' did a lot of favours to the idea of what happened after the pause.

[personal profile] karios posting in [community profile] yuletide
Are you interested in text adventures, CYOA, Twine games, or other sorts of interactive fiction? Do you want to let your writer know you'd be happy to receive something along those lines? Are you looking for someone to write IF for? This post is for you.
 
 
(I copied and pasted this directly from last year which was also copy pasted from previous years. Let me know via comment or discord ping if any of the links broke or anything else needs editing.)
 
 
What is IF?
 

Interactive Fiction (IF) covers everything from text adventures through to visual novels, by way of all sorts of experimental works. It can be mostly a game, or mostly a story; it can be a way to immerse the reader, or to play around with the concepts of storyteller and audience; it can be an exploration of chance, or of fate; it can be a straightforward story, or something else entirely. From Healy's post:
 
 
[IF] is a term used for games which are made up primarily of text, like Adventure, Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and other text adventures, or more experimental hypertext works like My Father's Long, Long Legs, or even visual novels. Interactive fiction these days is generally divided into two groups based on how you interact with the game: parser-based IF, and choice-based IF.
 
 
Parser-based IF, more commonly known as text adventures, are controlled by typed in commands, like "GET KEY", "OPEN DOOR", "GO NORTH", "LOOK UNDER BED", and stuff like that. Not every command you type in will work, though, so they're hard to get used to if you haven't tried them before. To make things easier, here's a card of most of the common commands. Some good parser-based IF to try first would be Ryan Veeder's So, You've Never Played a Text Adventure Before, Huh?, Admiral Jota's Lost Pig, Andrew Plotkin's The Dreamhold, and Adam Cadre's Photopia.
 
 
Choice-based IF is simpler; you just pick from a number of options. This can be done through hyperlinks and other clicky selections, though more rarely you may have to type a number from a list. Good examples of choice-based IF include Anna Anthropy's Star Court, Alan DeNiro's Solarium, the various games hosted by Choice of Games, and most every given visual novel.
 
 

Writing IF for Yuletide

 
IF is considered opt-in for Yuletide - please don't write it for people who don't want it. If you aren't sure whether it would be welcome or not, ask a mod to check with the intended recipient.
 
You are still required to follow the normal rules, such as focusing on requested characters (unless the recipient has said you needn't include them all).  

It can be hard to figure out what word count an IF story really is - what you've written is full of code that doesn't count, and what your recipient sees may vary in length depending on their choices. If you're posting to the main collection, try to overshoot the minimum requirement a bit, just to be on the safe side. Say a minimum of somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 words. Or probably about 10 to 15 minutes play through.
 
If your post to the main AO3 collection is under 1,000 words (e.g. you're just linking to an online playable version elsewhere), please drop the mods a note so they know it isn't someone posting something under the minimum, and provide them with an estimated word-count.




If you're writing a treat, unless it includes over 1,000 words of text and you're also sure your recipient would be happy with it as a main gift, please post it to Madness

Your recipient does need to be able to access what you've created! Please link to a suitable IF interpreter if required, or if possible make a web-playable version.
 

Requesting IF for Yuletide
 

If you would be happy to receive IF this year, please leave a comment below, following this template:
 

 
 

IF Canons Nominated for Yuletide

 
Plenty of IF canons get nominated for Yuletide! While it's still important to ask before writing IF for someone, someone who consumes IF already will probably be more interested in getting it. (Some of these canons were adapted into other mediums, so it's possible that someone who's interested in one of those isn't at all into the IF side of things. Thus why it's important to ask.) Consider requesting or offering one of these if you're interested in IF for Yuletide. For 2025 moontyger thoughtfully composed a list of IF canons in the tagset, available here: Interactive Fiction in the 2025 Tagset!
 
Some IF Tools

 
A * means they can make web-based games.
 

Parser-based

Inform*: One of the biggest development tools for making parser-based IF. Has an English-like code. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Quest*: Another big IF development tool. Has a click-and-point editor with the option to check out the code. For Windows and web.
TADS*: A long running engine for writing interactive fiction, though generally not as easy to use as Inform. The latest version can make web-based games, although they need to be hosted on a non-https address or on the IFDB.
 

Choice-based

Twine
*: Very popular tool for making choice-based IF. Has a visual editor, with some code-y bits for variables and the like. Can be extended with some Javascript passages. Available for Mac and Windows, and Twine 2 is web-based. See this comment for more notes.
ChoiceScript*: Used by the fine folks over at Choice of Games. Uses simplified Javascript to make games. It's very stat heavy. Requires a text editor. See this comment for notes.
Ren'py: Engine for making visual novels. Uses a simple scripting language. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can make games for all those platforms.
Inklewriter*: A completely web-based engine for making CYOA-style games.
 

Community Recs Post!

Oct. 23rd, 2025 09:29 am
glitteryv: (Default)
[personal profile] glitteryv posting in [community profile] recthething
Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fanart/fics/fanvids/fancrafts/podfics/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here

IPDW2025—Minding Dreams

Oct. 23rd, 2025 11:34 am
[syndicated profile] henryjenkins_feed

Posted by Rick Carter

To celebrate International Production Design Week (IPDW) between October 17th-26th, Pop Junctions presents a range of contributions related to the craft of production design, with particular focus on the art of world-building and the creativity and culture of production design practice. IPDW is an initiative led by the Production Designers Collective and involves a calendar of events that showcase production design around the world.

In this contribution, Academy Award-winning Production Designer Rick Carter offers a meditation on the nature of creativity as a practice of ‘dream minding’.

International Production Design Week—Events Calendar 2025

As a teenager in the late 1960s, I enjoyed “turning on, tuning in and tripping out.” But I never in my wildest adolescent dreams could have foreseen the trip that “minding dreams” has taken me on. These dream journeys that I have experienced have been far more wondrous than I could have ever imagined when I was younger.

What have I discovered over this past 50+ years of “minding dreams?” What is it about each one of the dreams that has resonated with me? When you experience specific types of dream imagery over and over again... it’s almost like you’re finding your own water level of subconsciousness. My pursuits and interests as a young person were quite varied. From drawing and painting and writing and traveling and then philosophizing, continuously seeking transcendental experiences, even being on the receiving end of “messages,” which I thought were meaningful to me. I don’t mean weird otherworldly “messages,” I just mean listening to and being influenced by music, especially the songs of the Beatles; to the extent that I, like so many others of my generation, felt I actually understood where they were creatively coming from. I still do.

I marveled at the Beatles’ ability to form something that was so much greater than the sum of the individual parts in their music, and to express that so magnificently that the “message” was not only exhilarating, but overwhelmingly resonant when played and replayed again. And most importantly, that I could keep hearing those musical and lyrical “messages” playing in my head over all these years.  I think that my being on the receiving end of that kind of a dream-like “messaging” in the late 1960s, especially from John Lennon, reinforced for me something that I felt I already intuited about the life of many Dream Minders. 

After a Dream is first experienced, each person who “has it” often tries to recall who was in it and what happened…and then perhaps to understand what it was about. But afterwards, what the dreamers are often left with is the memory of images of not just who was in the dream and what occurred, but also where the dream took them, and how it made them feel to be there.

During this process of “minding dreams,” we often like to think we can justify the aesthetics from an “almost” rational perspective, but most of the time we simply respond to what feels intuitively plausible to us. Over the years, I have learned that there is almost always a way to perceive an ethereal creative dream web underlying each dream, so that we later can actually “mind” that area, as in later exploring it conceptually and emotionally.  And perhaps even spiritually.

​I’ve found that this level actually matters to many of the best dreams, which inspire us to find the mysterious aspects that are “there” to be discovered, which we might not at first have seen or realized were “there.”  I’m personally usually looking to experience dream places that feel like they have already existed before I arrived there in my dream.

​What does the process of “dream minding” look like? What does it feel like? What does this emotionally or even intellectually express? Where we go, we take others. And once we show where we are, it often becomes clear that this also fundamentally helps to determine “who we are.”  And this, for me, is the essence of what “minding dreams” is all about. They reflect simultaneously both the sum of what was first experienced, and then subsequently what is shared with other dreamers who can now “mind” the same dream.

Through writing, music, film, painting, sculpture, in a digital or analogue medium, many dreamers attempt to express or re-create their dreams in order to see them “come true.” However, not many are successful at doing this. The fortunate Dream Minders, who truly create from the dreams that come to them naturally, usually have their inner eyes and ears attuned to their inner mind of dreaming much of the time. 

One celebrated Dream Minder once said, “Some of my best dreams are not my own.” His interactions with others in the creative process of “minding dreams,” which have subsequently inspired so many, is located somewhere within the mind space between where he is and where others subsequently arrive mentally.

One of the things that most “Dream Minders” have in common with one another is a deep love of visual storytelling, combined with a great desire to inspire and be inspired by the dreams of others.  Dream visions are not always something anyone can illustrate right away.  Dream Minders can feel that they’re having a vision of a dream before they can fully “see” it. It’s not always an image that comes into view in their mind’s eyes, but almost more of the feelings of a presence in a dream that mysteriously demands engagement and exploration.

There’s always a gap between each one of us, because as individuals we each have our own individual consciousness. We usually feel original and uniquely alone while we are dreaming. But where do those images and sounds, and our responsive thoughts and feelings come from? Surely from somewhere…and, once we express them as dream visions, how are they actually received by other dreamers, particularly in a potentially collaborative process such as “minding dreams?”

​The context of what you're “seeing” or trying to “see” in a dream makes such a big difference in how you perceive it, especially when you’re trying to transform it into something else in the process of “minding dreams.” Sometimes when I'm scouting in my mind’s eye, I have the feeling that actually I'm “auditioning” dream places, characters, ideas and feelings in order to see if they not only want to be in my dream, but can they be in my dream to fulfill a specific purpose.

That means a Dream Minder must have a filter that disregards what they are looking at in a naturalistic sense. We’re only “seeing” it for how it might potentially fit into that specific dream. Underneath this level are other considerations, such as, what is it for or what’s the reason for it to be in this dream?  Most importantly, what is its spiritual purpose in the dream? 

Biography

Rick Carter is a production designer and art director best known for his work on films such as Back to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Jurassic Park (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Avatar (2009), Lincoln (2012), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and The Fabelmans (2022). He has collaborated with directors such as Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron, and J. J. Abrams and is a two-time Academy Award winner.

Community Thursday

Oct. 23rd, 2025 12:56 pm
vriddy: Hawks peace sign (peace sign)
[personal profile] vriddy
Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Commented on [community profile] getyourwordsout.

Commented on [community profile] anime_manga.

Posted & commented on [community profile] bnha_fans.

Oct. 23rd, 2025 09:42 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] chalcedony_cat, [personal profile] diony and [personal profile] em_h!

Write Every Day: Day 23

Oct. 23rd, 2025 04:44 pm
china_shop: Close-up of Zhao Yunlan grinning (Default)
[personal profile] china_shop
The demise of writing matters, because writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. This is as true for professionals as it is for students. In “Writing Is Thinking,” an editorial in Nature, the authors argued that “outsourcing the entire writing process to [large language models]” deprives scientists of the important work of understanding what they’ve discovered and why it matters. Students, scientists, and anyone else who lets AI do the writing for them will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.

– Derek Thompson

My day 23: I messed around with a new pairing, to see if I can add to my Yuletide offers. (Going by the sign-up summary, I'm not convinced I'm currently matchable.) As yet, inconclusive but promising. I also wrote some of a Dreamwidth post, which I'm sure I'll finish eventually.

We had a howling gale this morning. The trains were cancelled, and everyone had been advised to stay home. It seems to have blown itself out now (*knock on wood*) without any of the expected power outages (*knock on wood again*), and as far as I know, my roof is still attached (*and once more, just to be on the safe side*). Phew!

The tally
Tally )

Day 21: [personal profile] alightbuthappypen, [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] cmk418, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] ysilme

Day 22: [personal profile] alightbuthappypen, [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] china_shop, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora

When you check in, please say what day(s) you’re checking in for. You can join in or take a break at any time; you’re always welcome back. And please let me know if I’ve missed you.
sunnymodffa: Cartoon of 2 seals swimming in a desert oasis (Seals in a sunny oasis)
[personal profile] sunnymodffa posting in [community profile] fail_fandomanon
 
Obviously, the character's personal Suez Canal was wide, wide open... and then the Ever Given attacked.

The Ever Given touched a set of coordinates inside Suez that had never been touched before.
“Oh” Suez said, clenching down and trapping Ever inside him. ”Oh!”


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conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
and since we have a ton of computer mice (mouses?) already I just swapped it out. But I still was bugged by the ton of crud that I know was embedded in my old mouse, so before I tossed it I took it apart to clean the scrollwheel.

So much cat hair, much of it felted, and I'm honestly surprised the scrollwheel was functioning at all. But it was so cheaply made that putting it back together would've been a hassle and a half, so I'm glad I had the sense to just replace it rather than depending on my own repair skills!

*****************************


Read more... )

US Politics: Food bank writing offer

Oct. 22nd, 2025 09:59 pm
petra: Barbara Gordon smiling knowingly (Default)
[personal profile] petra
If you donate at least $25 in cash or in-kind to a food bank at any point between now and the end of the Trump Administration, and you either share a fandom of mine and want a drabble or fannish poetry, or you want original poetry, drop me a comment, and I will write for you.

Repeat customers welcomed with open arms.

Please format your request: Fandom or Original; Drabble or Poem; Character(s) and/or Pairing if any; Optional Prompt.

For example: Sesame Street; Drabble; Cookie Monster/Cookies; Food is not a sometimes luxury.

If you didn't make the donation in US dollars, please check the exchange rate on your donation at a currency converter to confirm that it qualifies. No receipt necessary regardless of which currency you donate in; this is on the honor system.

Please publicize this post.

Once I have received and fulfilled my first request, I will edit this post to add a collection on the Archive of Our Own with what I have written.

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