kiya

Posted by DaveB

https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1466-semifinals-go/

https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/?post_type=comic&p=8738

I tried to come up with a cooler name for Maxima’s sword than “Mana Vore.” It’s not bad, but it’s a little obvious. But the only other option I came up with was “Weave Nosher,” which sounds like farmer named it.

A fair bit of Maxima’s sword training was learning not to swing it around so broadly that she’d hit her own foot. Which wouldn’t be a problem normally, since her base armor is pretty high, but most swords that get swung at her aren’t backed by someone with her strength and speed, either. It’s also a very long sword, long enough that most people would have to worry about bonking it against the ground a lot, but, again, Max can just drag it right through most floor surfaces.

I think this page played out a little better in my head, or my relative inexperience at drawing high octane manga action is showing. Basically, Max comes in for a swing, but kicks a two-and-a-half-bowling-ball sized rock at the dark elf, and it smashes through his shield and hits his arm, moving his sword out of the way to parry her swipe. I think the real shortcoming of the page is that the bottom left panel is too busy. Instead of making the top two panels big, I should have saved the page space for that bottom one. Maybe put the rock past his arm, and just gone with a simpler speed trail showing the impact?

I’m not in the “shonen action” headspace when thinking about page layouts. I’m still more in the “I wanna draw Maxima leaning forward into a swing and have her boob pillowing against her arm” space. But we’re entering the semifinal match now, so I’ll try and… I dunno, read some One Punch Man before I do the layouts for the especially actiony pages? Or some Masahiko Nakihara manga? He did the Cammy and Sakura Ganbaru mangas as well as some other Street Fighter books, and is pretty decent at action stuff. Maybe I’ll throw in some Dragon Half, which doesn’t have good action, but is hilarious.

The thing I do like about this page though, is while Bluce and Gail seem like vapid eyecandy announcers, they’ve hosted quite a few of these and are capable of some fairly cogent analysis when it comes down to it. They do also have a team of researchers in their earpieces as well. Gail didn’t know all those details about the Mana Vore off the top of her head.

Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude! Well, eventually. The nude part of the interview, as well as the version that includes shading will be coming soon. Of course, you can view the interview in the nude now if you take your own clothes off. You know. Technically. Just put a towel on your chair first.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1466-semifinals-go/

https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/?post_type=comic&p=8738

Title: A Simple Flower
Fandom: The Fantastic Journey
Author:

badly_knitted
Characters: Varian, Gwenith, Willaway.
Rating: PG
Spoilers/Setting: An Act of Love, and after the series.
Summary: Gwenith had given Varian a flower when they first met…
Word Count: 624
Content Notes: Nada.
Written For: Challenge 517: Flower.
Disclaimer: I don’t own The Fantastic Journey, or the characters. They belong to their creators.

( A Simple Flower... )

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: my desk

Title: flowers
Fandom: none
Rating:
Content notes:
Artist notes: Also for the

genprompt_bingo prompt plants/trees/flowers and all stock images used for these icons are from publicdomainpictures.net, freeimageslive.co.uk and pickpic.com
Summary: 15 icons

( When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower. )

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I’ve been making overnight oats in jars for the bloke and me since the start of the year, and have experimented with varying ingredients and quantities. I think I’ve finally found the balance I like best, so I’ve carefully documented this below in case I ever stop making them regularly.

Base layer is 3 medium-sized strawberries, chopped into 1cm pieces. For the bloke, 4 tablespoons of oats, for me, 3 tablespoons.
Shake the jar to mix oats and strawberries. This is especially important if using the jumbo oats (as shown here), otherwise I end up adding too much milk.
Add milk to just below the top layer of oats. For him, whole milk, for me, oat milk.
Add full-fat Greek yoghurt. For him, 3 heaping tablespoons, for me, 2. This helps to moisten the top layer of oats, and also gives a smooth layer between the oats and the crunchy bits at the top.
Add Linwoods Milled Flaxseed, Sunflower, Pumpkin & Chia Seeds & Goji Berries. Two teaspoons for both of us. I used chia seeds on their own for a while, but I found that I didn’t much care for their crunchy texture and tendency to get stuck in my teeth even after soaking them briefly in water to activate their mucilaginous properties. This mixture is much nicer.
Add 3-4 teaspoons of pomegranate seeds. These have the right balance of juice and crunch after the yoghurt layer.
Finish with granola. I prefer the stuff that has freeze-dried strawberries mixed in. For him, 2 tablespoons, for me, one.
Put lids on jars, store in fridge until morning. I find these fill me up sufficiently that I’m rarely hungry before lunch, although I often eat a banana around coffee time just to give myself a little boost.

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Happy birthday,

starlady!

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

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just one thing

We might not have spent the sunset at Marblehead Light if we had known that all five yacht clubs within earshot would fire off a salute of cannons in accordance with the naval tradition of evening colors in season, but on either side of the sudden harbor-rolling cracks of smoke it was a postcard of a sunset in the smelted oranges and wave-mirrored blues of a painted present from, partitioned by the nineteenth-century cast-iron skeleton of the light itself.

spatch had wanted to take me to water after I had spent the previous day in the kind of pain where as soon as it eased off a little I passed out. We ate roast beef sandwiches parked at the Mystic Lakes and drove north once rush hour had died down.

( I've brought silver to set you free. )

Home again with a bowl of noodles, I heard

rushthatspeaks' irresistible report on Tokuzō Tanaka's The Whale God (鯨神, 1962), a radiation of Melville I had known nothing about. Rob and I have not yet caught up on the latest episode of Widow's Bay (2026), but last week when we marathoned the previous three we were delighted to confirm that in its remix of New England horrors, Shirley Jackson had unambiguously entered the chat. Hestia, our own lighthouse, was golden-eyed in the cat tree.

Current Music: Goblin Band, "The Prickle Holly Bush"

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

This year I'm doing Community Thursdays. Some of my activity will involve maintaining communities I run, and my favorites. Some will involve checking my list of subscriptions and posting in lower-traffic ones. Today I have interacted with the following communities...

* Commented on Just One Thing (03 June 2026) in

awesomeers.

* Commented on TV TUESDAY: TV PLUS in

tv_talk.

* Commented on Bees and Silver Slides in

everykindofcraft.

* Commented on just create - vote edition in

justcreate.

Current Mood: busy

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recurring posts

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260603.html

Over 1000 years ago, Persian astronomer

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260603.html

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

booknook (reading!)

Commented on

common_nature (trees!)

Commented on

everykindofcraft (journals!)

Commented on

smallweb (guestbooks!)

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dreamwidth: community thursdays

The following poems from the May 5, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl are currently available. Poems may be sponsored via PayPal -- there's a permanent donation button on my Dreamwidth profile page -- or you can write to me and discuss other methods. There are still verses left in the linkback poems "A Sense of Weather Changes," "The Loving Embrace of Night," "Generations of Cooks Past," "Homefree and Clear, " "One Bite at a Time," "Mishpocha," "Changing Your Nature," and "Besa."

"The Art of Morphological Derivation"
Summary: Words are humanity's most versatile tools.
25 lines, Buy It Now = $10

"Ĉiu Kreas Sian Forton"
Story Date: Evening of Monday, June 6, 2016
Summary: Shiv explores Esperanto words.
64 lines, Buy It Now = $32

The day had gone well, and
Shiv was pleasantly tired.

After supper, people were
gathering in clusters to share
stories or work on things that
didn't involve bending metal.

"Lichengloss"
Summary: It's about the slow struggle of learning a new language.
29 lines, Buy It Now = $15

"Shoutengai"
Summary: Tokyo is famous for its shopping streets.
54 lines, Buy It Now = $20

"Tumbled Voices"
Story Date: Friday, August 29, 2014
Summary: Kenzie talks with Many Tongues about what makes a dialect or a language.
102 lines, Buy It Now = $51

Kenzie enjoyed listening
to the flow of language
around him, even though
he didn't know much yet.

"Zakkyo"
Summary: These mixed-use buildings have commercial businesses on every floor.
40 lines, Buy It Now = $15

Current Mood: busy

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( Scans under the cut... )

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Most recent entry in "back on my Seeming bullshit" is A Failure of Imagination, because dang, I really like "And this is a love song / Even if it doesn’t sound like one / ‘Cause there’s a lot of strange love / That doesn’t fit into the way love’s done".

I've spent the last two days at work slowly working through all their albums I've bought from Bandcamp, which is most of them at this point. This is partly because I was showing Clayton Workbestie my 2013 ipod that I've found and started carrying around, and he responded with something like "I bet it has happier music". I demurred, but added that I wasn't on my Seeming bullshit then, which got a positive "oh hey dope, you listen to Seeming too?" and then I had to pretend I listen to it a normal amount and not approximately 50% of my music by time this calendar year.

I have not been posting well, because I've been Fuckin' Busy and also because I've been carefully falling apart with the end of the year. There's a lot of "not now" tasks that are about to come absolutely slamming into "now" and I'm kinda struggling to keep track of all of them. I like dreaming of the world where I can actually track things like todo lists.

Yesterday was a really good day though, up until the part where I fell extremely asleep in a weird curled up heap on my bed with the laptop open:

*I restarted a knitting project that hadn't gone immediately perfect (I am genuinely pleased with myself for a: noticing that it wasn't going satisfyingly and taking steps immediately, so I only frogged a couple days worth of work and not longer, and b: making the project Much Harder for myself in a way that felt extremely satisfyingly stupid¹.)

*We're in MCAS hell, which is awful as always, but at least it's the last of the year, and it is giving me lots of bonus prep time to fuck around in my classroom and do nebulously useful things, like work on my knitting but also *some* grading.

*Also it means I can fuck off to the pharmacy before school today, which was good and necessary.

*Yesterday's DnD went SO GOOD! I both _very badly whiffed_ a roll, and then got to do some fun acting/social stuff and then _very much succeeded_ in the killing blow on the big bad we've been chasing after for quite a while. I have forgotten how much I miss having tanky characters and being able to actually like. Do damage to enemies! Anyways, it was real good, and also it was very funny to casually be like "and of course when Josh and Eve visit Boston in a couple weeks we'll all play in person together" and have both of them *and* Scoop be like "wait, that's an amazing idea". Like, y'all!

*Also watching Taskmaster with Tailsteak was Real Good! It always is, but we've missed a couple weeks in a row for various bullshit, so it was really nice to get closer to caught up. We're really enjoying this season! Which I feel like I say every season, but "do something brave" was _fantastic_. I really appreciate that we're having a season where it seems like everyone actually does want to win!

***

Anyways, I probably have other things I ought to be writing about, but I don't remember them because I am perpetually short-changed on sleep. I hope you're doing well!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Part of me feels I should elaborate, but much more of me feels like, you either get it or you don't.

I decided I wanted to use only half of each colour skein at a time so I unwound every single one of them, carefully so I could find an approximate halfway point, and then cut them there and rewound them. There are definitely both easier and better ways to do this (certainly the best would involve weight rather than length, especially because yarn is kinda stretchy) but it was very satisfying to set up a couple yardsticks taped to my work desk to unwind onto.

The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. by Minas Karamanis.

Alice can now do things. She can open a paper she's never seen before and, with effort, follow the argument. She can write a likelihood function from scratch. She can stare at a plot and know, before checking, that something is wrong with the normalization. She spent a year building a structure inside her own head, and that structure is hers now, permanently, portable, independent of any tool or subscription. Bob has none of this. Take away the agent, and Bob is still a first-year student who hasn't started yet. The year happened around him but not inside him. He shipped a product, but he didn't learn a trade.

Appearing Productive in The Workplace from No One's Happy.

The reckoning will not be subtle. The firms still doing the work properly will be in a position to charge for it. The firms that have hollowed themselves out will discover that what they hollowed out was the thing the client was paying for.

The AI Bubble from No One's Happy.

The reason none of them can stop is that the investment, the revenue, and the justification for the next investment are the same transaction. If Microsoft reduces its OpenAI commitment, it loses one of Azure’s largest customers, the AI revenue line that justifies $192 billion in capex, and the earnings growth that holds its stock price — all at once. The same logic binds Alphabet and Amazon to Anthropic: the equity position and the cloud contract are the same bet, and unwinding one unwinds both.

Funny but serious, Chieng issues an AI warning to grads by Liz Mineo, Harvard Staff Writer.

He continued, “Whatever your chosen profession is, please don’t let AI rob you of the fun part of it. Your generation’s upcoming battle won’t be humans against AI; that’s at least two months away. … It’s going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It’s going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles.”

Quality in the Age of Slop by Sinclair Target.

This blog post is very long and almost entirely about the 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It is also about AI—there will be some juicy takes, pinky swear—but those familiar with ZAMM should consider themselves warned. [...]

Quality is related to caring because once you care, once you are interested, you have a vantage point from which to make Quality judgments. These Quality judgments (e.g. "Is this good code?") are based in part on the romantic mode of understanding and so within the classical mode alone aren't defensible. But they are necessary, because in the moment-to-moment work on the machine, there are thousands of facts you could consider, thousands of alternative threads you could follow, all equally valid in the classical mode, and the only way to make any sense of it all is to apply a Quality-focused version of Occam's Razor.

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links

Nuremburg Worldcon bid withdraws for understandable reasons.

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I read a lot this month given I also was inhaling Heated Rivalry fanfics including re-reading a bunch of the longer ones. I've really been enjoying the fics, and contemplating if there's a way to watch the series without having to experience the "wet mouth noises".

Read

The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man's Wife by Premee Mohamed - what a cool story. Very fairy tale vibes. library e-book
Platform Decay by Martha Wells - Murderbot's no good terrible horrible very bad day. Such big feelings, I laughed so much at this book. I also re-read it immediately. I want to get an omnibus of all the books. Someday when I have more money. library ebook
The Butcher's Masquerade by Matt Dinnaman - these books are getting longer and more complicated. Thankfully, the author does explain things. library ebook
Felix Navidad by Nathan Burgoine - I got this out thinking it was a romance novella and it was at best, a short story. It was sad and queer and soft. library ebook
Real Queer America by Samantha Allen - loved this book. It was definitely aimed at not-queer people but the stories were very good. It was written in 2019 and sitting here in 2026, some of the discussions feel real horrible now. It took me a bit to listen to all of this honestly, sometimes I could only listen for a half hour at a time. But the author did a great job reading her own book and it was nice to think about her and her friend driving all over while I was driving the tractors and things. library audiobook
A Little Village Blend by Nathan Burgoine - another short story romance. basically the structure is meet cute setup, they decide to start dating, first kiss, small epilogue. Very queer so that was nice. But I'm not going to read more because such short stories don't really do it for me. library e-book
The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman - this one was particularly good. On one hand, I know the protag will survive. On the other, shit is going down and even if the protag survives, he might not want to. ~trauma!~ things are getting real epic and I'm really enjoying them. library ebook
A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters - ye olde murder mystery. enjoyed this a lot, a monk who had a wild adventurous youth starts solving murders. there's apparently a billion of them in the series, so I'll probably work through them.

DNF

The King Must Die by Kemi Ashing-Giwa - I think this book was not for me. Interesting premise, I found the protag vaguely annoying so decided it wasn't my jam. Maybe I'll come back to it someday. library ebook

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Going through the Murderbot books in hard copy, as the library holds allow, is a more personally enjoyable experience than the ebook version. It'll take longer to get caught up, and I can't say I mind the pace.

Today was a little better for general tension and anxiety. Some of it came from badly-timed intense coffee, with the rest being at something of a lower state than yesterday for no particular reason I can determine. At this point, I'm happy to take it.

Current Mood: complacent
Current Music: nothing now

Calling In and Showing Up
By Dialecticdreamer/Sarah Williams
Part 1 of 2
Word count (story only): 1106
[Thursday early morning, 16 November of 2017] (15)

:: Jules finds the quietest corner of the house in order to make a difficult but necessary phone call. Part of the Lodestar story arc in the Polychrome Heroics universe. ::

In the corner of the basement which held the washer, dryer, the retractable clothesline, and an ironing board which was put up so seldom that someone had duck taped a small canister of household oil to one leg to make it easier to apply to the hinge, Jules pulled himself to sit on the idle dryer before taking a deep breath and dialing the embassy switchboard.

“Thalassian Embassy. The time is three eighteen in the morning, Pacific Standard Time,” a woman’s voice greeted. “How may I direct your call?”

“It’s Jules,” he began nervously. “I was supposed to be in by seven to work, but I can’t come in until maybe noon, maybe later. There’s a situation with two unusual stray cats, and one obviously needs a vet. I’m --”

The words all ran together as his voice fluttered nervously.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: tired

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Grrl Power #1466 – Semifinals go!

The Fantastic Journey: Fanfic: A Simple Flower

No fandom: icons: flowers

Interesting Links for 04-06-2026

Peak breakfast pot

(no subject)

Just One Thing (04 June 2026)

Did you bring gold? Did you bring silver to set me free?

Dear Podficcer Letter

Community Thursdays

(no subject)

Community Thursday

Unsold Poems for the June 2, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl

The Walking Dead Deluxe #137

(no subject)

Links: The doing is the point

SMOF News, volume 5, issue 41

May book roundup

Intake.

Calling In and Showing Up (part 1 of 2)

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