The Wordsmith's Forge

This poem came out of the August 15, 2017 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from lone_cat, bairnsidhe, readera, technoshaman, and we_are_spc. It also fills the "safe" square in my 7-31-17 card for the Cottoncandy Bingo fest. This poem has been chosen in an audience poll as the free epic for the September 5, 2017 Poetry Fishbowl meeting its $200 goal. It belongs to the Kraken thread of the Polychrome Heroics series.

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This is so exciting!  BBC has introduced a new pidgin service to make news more accessible to African viewers.  Click any of the article thumbnails to see an example. 

Because of my linguistic coprocessor, it's very easy for me to hack a pidgin if I know any of its main antecedents.  So for instance, I can clock "don" as the past-tense marker: "BBC Pidgin don start today" = "BBC Pidgin started today."  Take a look at the new materials and see what bits of grammar and vocabulary you can identify.  \o/

Meanwhile over in Terramagne, I bet their BBC offers a whole bunch of different overlays like this.  France probably does too, because they spawned a lot of colonial languages, including the Haitian French that Saraphina speaks.  Hmm, I wonder how long it'll take Aidan to catch onto that resource, because he's not much of a TV junkie.  But an hour of French-national Haitian French overlay would be good practice for them, and a nice change from the much scarcer pure Haitian programming.

While researching a poem, I found this page about the Holocaust.  Scroll down, and below the main article in brown there is a little red box with a thumbnail summary including illustrative icons.  If you just read the highlighted keywords and their icons, you get "holocaust, systematic, state-sponsored, six million Jews, Nazi."  That's a brilliant nutshell for people who may not be verbal or fluent in English.  While I rarely see it in local-America outside of resources designed for people with special needs, it's quite common in Terramagne, although it usually appears above the main article to serve as a quick introduction.

mirrorofsmoke has a detailed post complaining about the inaccessibility of the popular chat program Discord for vision-impaired users.  It's not just inaccessible, the company is being obnoxious and basically doesn't feel that it should have to accommodate people with disabilities.  Please nag Discord to make its program accessible, and spread the word.

There's a new Molly Beans strip, called "Mollyworld." What this really is: a discussion of who should pay the spoon for that conversation. Greg finds vocalization easier and more rewarding, while Molly prefers typing.

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This is spillover from the February 7, 2017 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from siliconshaman. It also fills the "Friends in Low Places" square in my 12-1-16 card for the iPod Music Shuffle Fest. This poem has been sponsored by janetmiles. It belongs to the series Polychrome Heroics.

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This poem is spillover from the January 3, 2016 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from janetmiles, mdlbear, and redsixwing. It has been sponsored by janetmiles.


"Heisenbugs"


In the febrile gap between
letters and numbers live
the Heisenbugs.

They bring the déjà vu
of things seen again and again,
a glitch in the matrix; and
the jamais vu of things
never seen before.

They perch on the tip of the tongue
and crunch numbers before
they can be summed,

words before they can be recognized.

They make the misconceptions
and the mistaken readings,
the lexical gaps and overlaps.

When is it fog, and
when is it a cloud?

Oh, wait, the word in the list
was humility, not humidity.

They live in computer programmers,
and thereby get into computers
and programs, far more fatal
than the wing of a moth.

The next thing you know,
December is January and
we're left wondering

how the glitch stole Christmas.

* * *

Notes:

Déjà vu  is an eerie sense of repetition.

Jamais vu  is an eerie sense of unfamiliarity.

Tip of the tongue is a sense of almost knowing something: the query activates the correct memory packet, but it fails to make the transit up to the conscious mind.

The first computer bug was an actual moth.

And the Asshole of the Year Award goes to All Romance e-Books. 

My partner Doug tipped me to WolframAlpha, a search engine that calculates things and answers questions.

There's a music video coming out of my poem "Origami Emotion," and a preview of that inspired my partner Doug to go looking for the poem online.  And it's everywhere.  This one has definitely escaped into the wild, passed around by word of mouth and blog and newsletters in a way that makes me suspect this one just might make it down to deep time.  This is a thing I value more than copyright.  This poem, flying around the world on its own wings.  <3  Apparently it's quite popular in sermons across multiple religions.  As an interfaith worker, that makes me happy too.

If you want to see the results, just google "Origami Emotion Elizabeth Barrette."