The Wordsmith's Forge

These are the notes for "The Care and Feeding of Supervillains."

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Maybe you think capitalism is a shitty system from top to bottom. Maybe you think it just has some flaws. Maybe you're curious about alternatives for their own sake. Maybe you've noticed that money is only useful when there's enough to go around, and no matter how you cook the books, you cannot run 90% of the economy on 10% of the wealth. Whatever your reasons, here are some ways you can fight against capitalism, if you want to tilt at that windmill...

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The Poetry Fishbowl is now CLOSED. Thank you for your time and attention. Please keep an eye on this page as I am still writing.

Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! Today's theme is "Ethical Supervillains." I will be checking this page periodically throughout the day. When people make suggestions, I'll pick some and weave them together into a poem ... and then another ... and so on. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas and a lot of poems.

I'll be soliciting ideas for supervillains, superheroes, supernaries, blue-plate specials, wild young things, tricksters, contraries, rebels, adventurers, damsels/gentlemen in distress, mentors, historians, explorers, partners, teachers, leaders, teammates, ethicists, psychologists, folklorists, activists, queerfolk, other responsible rebels, using superpowers, building gizmos or super-gizmos, doing magic, breaking rules, refusing to stop just because solving a problem is illegal, exploring new territory, upsetting predictions, inventing things, trusting your best enemy, twisting tropes, flipping stereotypes, expecting the unexpected, researching, revising theories, parenting, teaching, adventuring, asking for help and getting it, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, experiments changing paradigms, adapting, improvising, troubleshooting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, coming out, running away from home, going off the rails, subverting fate, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, other fantastic activities, supervillain lairs, Triton Teen centers, SPOON bases, the forest primeval, underwater, underground, liminal zones, schools, kitchens, campfires, libraries, laboratories, apothecary shops, makerspaces, farmer's markets, foreign dimensions, other phantasmagoric settings, radical activism, radical trust, The Care and Feeding of Supervillains, gizmos or super-gizmos, zoomwagons, zipcycles, dirgecraft, dendropolycarbonate, magical artifacts, quests, enchantments, potions, reversals, contradictions, conundrums, puzzling discoveries, sudden surprises, inventions that change everything, time travel, travel mishaps, the buck stops here, trial and error, polarity, weird food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, intercultural entanglements, enemies to friends/lovers, interdimensional travel, lab conditions are not field conditions, superpower manifestation, the end of where your framework actually applies, ethics, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.


Currently eligible bingo card(s) for donors wishing to sponsor a square:

Colors Fest Bingo Card 5-1-25


Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

The Adventures of Aldornia and Zenobia is about live happy lesbians in a quirky fantasy world.

Monster House is suburban fantasy with a diverse household, where the line between truth and fantasy isn't always clear.

The Moon Door explores a women's chronic pain group and lycanthropy.

Not Quite Kansas has a helpful demon.

One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis follows Shaeth as he works on becoming the God of Drunks.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all trying to get along and figure out how to make a functional society. Antimatter & Stalwart Stan are a cross-cape couple, and Antimatter essentially does science-based magic. Aquariana knows Steel, a supervillain whale; and the Kraken thread crosses this one with Thalassia. Berettaflies shows Stylet trying to clean up his act some. The Big One features several supervillains helping out during and after the earthquake. Calliope stumbles into partnership with the supervillain Vagary. Cuoio and Chiara are principled supervillains. Dr. Infanta is a supervillain or superhera depending who you ask. Fortressa is a supervillain with an all-female team. Officer Pink features centaurs and mystic shifters. Pain's Gray belongs to a gang of supervillains in Motor City. Shiv is surprisingly ethical despite his rough past. In Trichromatic Attachments, Tarnish is a supervillain.

Quixotic Ideas is contemporary fantasy where magic integrates with modern life in positive ways.

Or you can ask for something new.

Boost the signal to reveal a verse in any open linkback poem.

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Just in case the American foodstream experiences disruptions, here are some recipes for field corn and soybeans, two huge cash crops. Field corn may be ground into cornmeal or nixtamalized into hominy. Soybeans are most often used to make tofu but there are other options.

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This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, May 6, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "Ethical Supervillains." I'll be soliciting ideas for supervillains, superheroes, supernaries, blue-plate specials, wild young things, tricksters, contraries, rebels, adventurers, damsels/gentlemen in distress, mentors, historians, explorers, partners, teachers, leaders, teammates, ethicists, psychologists, folklorists, activists, queerfolk, other responsible rebels, using superpowers, building gizmos or super-gizmos, doing magic, breaking rules, refusing to stop just because solving a problem is illegal, exploring new territory, upsetting predictions, inventing things, trusting your best enemy, twisting tropes, flipping stereotypes, expecting the unexpected, researching, revising theories, parenting, teaching, adventuring, asking for help and getting it, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, experiments changing paradigms, adapting, improvising, troubleshooting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, coming out, running away from home, going off the rails, subverting fate, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, other fantastic activities, supervillain lairs, Triton Teen centers, SPOON bases, the forest primeval, underwater, underground, liminal zones, schools, kitchens, campfires, libraries, laboratories, apothecary shops, makerspaces, farmer's markets, foreign dimensions, other phantasmagoric settings, radical activism, radical trust, The Care and Feeding of Supervillains, gizmos or super-gizmos, zoomwagons, zipcycles, dirgecraft, dendropolycarbonate, magical artifacts, quests, enchantments, potions, reversals, contradictions, conundrums, puzzling discoveries, sudden surprises, inventions that change everything, time travel, travel mishaps, the buck stops here, trial and error, polarity, weird food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, intercultural entanglements, enemies to friends/lovers, interdimensional travel, lab conditions are not field conditions, superpower manifestation, the end of where your framework actually applies, ethics, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

The Adventures of Aldornia and Zenobia is about live happy lesbians in a quirky fantasy world.

Monster House is suburban fantasy with a diverse household, where the line between truth and fantasy isn't always clear.

The Moon Door explores a women's chronic pain group and lycanthropy.

Not Quite Kansas has a helpful demon.

One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis follows Shaeth as he works on becoming the God of Drunks.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all trying to get along and figure out how to make a functional society.  Antimatter & Stalwart Stan are a cross-cape couple, and Antimatter essentially does science-based magic.  Aquariana knows Steel, a supervillain whale; and the Kraken thread crosses this one with Thalassia.  Berettaflies shows Stylet trying to clean up his act some.  The Big One features several supervillains helping out during and after the earthquake.  Calliope stumbles into partnership with the supervillain Vagary.  Cuoio and Chiara are principled supervillains. Dr. Infanta is a supervillain or superhera depending who you ask.  Fortressa is a supervillain with an all-female team.  Officer Pink features centaurs and mystic shifters.  Pain's Gray belongs to a gang of supervillains in Motor City.  Shiv is surprisingly ethical despite his rough past. In Trichromatic Attachments, Tarnish is a supervillain.

Quixotic Ideas is contemporary fantasy where magic integrates with modern life in positive ways.

Or you can ask for something new.

Boost the signal to reveal a verse in any open linkback poem.

If you're interested, mark the date on your calendar, and please hold actual prompts until the "Poetry Fishbowl Open" post next week. (If you're not available that day, or you live in a time zone that makes it hard to reach me, you can leave advance prompts. I am now.) Meanwhile, if you want to help with promotion, please feel free to link back here or repost this on your blog.

( New to the fishbowl? Read all about it! )

Female bonobos keep males in check -- not with strength, but with solidarity

Study on wild bonobos reveals that females team up to maintain power in their societies.
Female bonobos team up to suppress male aggression against them -- the first evidence of animals deploying this strategy. In 85% of observed coalitions, females collectively targeted males, forcing them into submission and shaping the group's dominance hierarchy. This is the first study to test drivers of female dominance in wild bonobos. The study examined 30 years of demographic and behavioral data across six wild bonobo communities. The study suggests that power isn't solely determined by physical strength. It can be driven by social intelligence and coalition-building by females.


If you want to solve violence against women, or in general, in humans then look at the only known primate group who has already solved the problem.

Here's another example of deporting an American citizen, in this case a 2-year-old girl.  It's not actually a new problem, but the frequency is increasing.