The Wordsmith's Forge

How Earth's First, Unkillable Animals Saved the World
Sponges have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them. And by being the little, filter-feeding, water-cleaning creatures that they are, sponges may have saved the world.

How Volcanoes Froze the Earth (Twice)
Over 600 million years ago, sheets of ice coated our planet on both land and sea. How did this happen? And most importantly for us, why did the planet eventually thaw again? The evidence for Snowball Earth is written on every continent today.





That's reassuring given the poor life choices of Homo sapiens today.

This performance from AGT snagged my attention, in which the contestant turns the audience into a choir.

1) Some people with Bardic gift can share theirs with other people; it's rare but I've known people who could do it.  That's likely part of this.

2) Some people have a gift for conveying abstract ideas visually, which is rare enough, but doing it intuitively like that is really rare and impressive.  Musical scores are precise but take a lot of training to read, especially sight-read without practice.  Creating a visual representation of a song in three voices (high, middle, low) with indications of pitch and duration -- which works well as demonstrated -- is epic.

Business world: "Dammit, I wish we had someone that good with visuals to do whiteboard notes for our meetings."

Music world: "We saw her first."

This video describes an instance of reverse benchmarking in restaurants.  Instead of trying to mimic what other people do well, identify what they do badly and do that  well. 


I routinely use this in my writing.  I look for things that other people do badly or not at all, then I write those things.  Also I never have the patience to wait around for 20 years while other folks work through the whole identity literature process.  New trait?  Trait-having hero!  Done.  This is how I wind up with things like An Army of One (neurodiverse characters making their own culture), The Bear Tunnels (Native American time travelers), The Moon Door (women with disabilities who become werewolves), The Ocracies (everything but monarchy), The Origami Mage and Path of the Paladins (ace heras), P.I.E. (a hera who doesn't fall for a jerk), Polychrome Heroics (superpowers that involve more than crime and crimefighting), and The Steamsmith (a black, genderqueer, British, steampunk engineer).  

Go ahead, throw me prompts for things that nobody is doing well, or doing at all, in any relevant prompt call.  We can fill that gap together.

This cartoon is true, as far as it goes.

But if you think Russia is likely to blink at those losses, think again.

These are tiny figures made from acorns, flowers, and other found objects.

This is one of my favorite Beltane songs.

The survivors of the Shoah remember, because they have seen this before.



Never forget. Never again.

And in case you need a reminder of why.

This video gives a tour of dinosaur art from the beginning to current examples. 

Sea sponges often thrive during and after a mass extinction, as they are more resilient to some stressors and they are filter feeders that subsist on organic particles. 

Aaaaand here we go again.

This is the state fossil of Illinois.  It's so weird that paleontologists are still arguing over whether it was invertebrate or vertebrate.  This is not helped by the amount of assumptions people make about very ancient organisms based on modern ones.  Remember, back then anything was possible, and not all of it necessarily worked well enough to continue.