"You’ll realize that no matter how many times you drift with someone, you still have to say 'I love you' at the right moment." — Guillermo Del Toro in the Pacific Rim commentary
noun, plural grandfamilies 1. a family in which one or more children live with and are raised by their grandparent or grandparents: Grandfamilies exist because of absent parents, and the circumstances behind that can vary greatly from one case to the next.
Origin: First recorded in 1960–65; grand ( def. ) + family ( def. )
Example Sentences “I hear from the grandfamily caregivers that they don’t want to be a part of ‘the system,’” Keith Lowhorne, vice president of kinship with the Alabama Foster and Adoptive Parents Association, said in the report. From Washington Post
Gentry said she hopes more grandfamily communities like hers pop up around the country so residents can provide support for one another when resources are not readily available. From Seattle Times
More older Americans are finding a haven in the “grandfamily housing” communities sprouting nationwide. From New York Times
There are at least 19 grandfamily housing programs with on-site services across the United States, financed by a mix of public and private funding, according to Generations United, a nonprofit focused on intergenerational collaboration. From New York Times
Projects are underway in Washington, D.C., and Redmond, Ore., and lawmakers in the House reintroduced the Grandfamily Housing Act, which would create a national pilot program to expand grandfamily housing. From New York Times
Come one, come all, to the Kame Game Shop! We've got some new stock in today of some of those booster packs that everyone is talking about! Inside each booster is 8 cards, with at least 1 holographic... I guess you guys call them special cards.
As a promotion, I'll let you pick one pack from my current stock! But only one, since we have to leave some for the paying customers... Here's what I have at the moment!
AVAILABLE PACKS: Red, Yellow, Green, Gray
Sometimes we get in other packs in, so stock might change every week... get them while they're still available!
Last round's answer was Piccolo from Dragon Ball and Sonetto from Reverse: 1999.
Kotori is the designer for µ's, and she works hard to make great costumes for each and every performance. But sometimes costumes she makes for fun get mixed in with costumes she makes for µ's. Can you figure out who is actually supposed to wear these?
My workplace requires the use of LLM as AI, so I pay particular attention to how it comes up in my hobbies. Every day is a chance to learn more than I knew before.
Ben: I don't think I'll be replaced by AI; I'll be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI. Richard: You'll be replaced by PeiPei. PeiPei: Follow me! Richard: If you can't beat them, join them, right?
So today while scrolling in the break room I came across this post on how part of the process of becoming a good writer is learning how to appreciate the mechanisms of writing, which OP separates from the actual content of the story. This not only encompasses shit like making decisions about sentence structure and word choice, but even the very act of sitting down to touch one's pen and paper/keyboard/writing app/etc.
And as I read it, I thought about all the fics that I've written that I personally find subpar even after rereading them numerous times. And what do these fics tend to have in common? I found that they were kind of a slog to actually write, like I didn't have enough motivation to sit and write them even though I was digging the plot/charas/tropes/etc. Which goes back to what OP was saying about how people who don't appreciate the mechanics of writing tend to be poorer writers. Since I was less invested in the mechanics of writing, I put out work I found to be lower-tier, or something along those lines.
But then OP said that if one doesn't enjoy writing something, they don't have to actually *write* it. Rather, they can draw it, animate it, speak it out loud, or use some other creative means. (OK, the speaking out loud example was the only one they actually put, but you get the idea.) Which got me thinking in two directions at once.
For the first direction, I kept mentally coming back to a comment I received a few years back, saying I wrote the piece in question like "a web animation". Now, I've talked about this before, but that initial comment combined with the Tumblr post I'm talking about here made me think about once again how a reason (not *the* reason, but one of them) why I write is that I can't really draw. Or at least, I can't draw as polished enough as a lot of fanartists I follow. So I tend to translate a lot of my ideas into writing, even though on some level they'd be more suitable as a drawing or some other visual media. And it's that mismatch that makes me less keen on the mechanics of writing for some of my works.
But in terms of the second direction, I also started thinking about my more recent stuff that I enjoyed the process of creation for, and a big part of that is probably because they relied on less traditional "writing" structures. Rift of the Neighbor-Posting was the one that came to mind the most, but Still, My [[Bait]] Draws You Near was also up there.
So I guess my takeaways are either: start buckling down and appreciating the actual writing process, or branch out and do more creative work that doesn't involve traditional "writing". Both of which might be easier said than done, but if I nail them, then im gonna be a better and happier creator than what I used to be. hell yeah. Or something
Took me long enough, but here's The Best Albums of 2025, in no particular order.
Fragile Wings by Cave Sermon This album is gorgeous melodic metal that has been adequately melancholy for what has been a pretty crummy year. Its filled with so many layers and each time I walk away from the album I'm always like "fuck, I really like that one".
In Penitence and Ruin by Tribunal Melodic, baroque-inspired doom. Hell, they got a fuckin harpsichord (a favorite of mine tbh). The album deals in themes of deep betrayal and an inability to trust. I actually got this one on vinyl because it reminds me of my divorce. It feels like a dirge played for my old life. tbh i was shocked this came out in 2025 because i feel like i've been playing it for over a year.
Gift Songs by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma A deviation from metal, this is an ambient album. I got a copy of the record in the mail from A, which was a really unexpected present. The record became heavy rotation, especially when I had folks over and wanted to put something chill on. Its started becoming an album that I can listen to and feel a little grounded even while wallowing in whatever emotion is consuming me at the moment. Definitely an album I didn't expect to fall in love with, but its there now.
Empty by Bongripper Stoner/sludge metal that Clara and I saw live (I thought they opened for Panopticon but I just looked at the show I saw them at and idek how we heard about the show and wound up going. maybe Clara knew them and wanted to go?) and they ripped. My gf always puts this album on when we have sex at her house lol (Technically this album came out last year, but I discovered it this year so who cares?)
Raw Blood Singing by Insect Ark Experimental doom/noise metal. I caught them opening for Fórn and was so immediately smitten. I love discovering new bands that I love from watching the openers. This album is expertly crafted with just a wonderful doomy prodding along. Again, this album released in 2024, but I found them in 2025 so Just Deal With It.
Flickering Resonance by Pelican Lyric-less post-metal from one of the best to ever do it. I think a Pelican album was in my top albums last year or maybe the year before. Everytime I listen to this, I feel like I journey along with the melodies. I got to hear this album live at their homecoming show in Chicago and it was really awesome. I was nearly front and center!
Watch It Die by Home Front Another post punk masterpiece from one of my favorite bands. Like most hipsters, my pal A said that it wasnt as good as their last two albums, but I think they're dead wrong. They keep their post-punk bite that I think a lot of similar coldwave/goth/new wave bands don't. I want my post punk to have emphasis on the punk.
Circle Breaker by The Taxpayers When Clara and I first started dating we were both listening to the Taxpayers on heavy repeat. They're kind of a cabaret style folk punk adjacent band. It feels like a cross between world/inferno and defiance, ohio. Hell, she and i almost broke up at a taxpayers show (long story, but mostly it was on me). Still, this album became our grief album through both Mille's and Snowball's deaths.
PL*NET F*TNESS by Pacing Do you remember the first time you heard the Moldy Peaches and then played the Juno soundtrack on repeat for forever and even though that movie had some FUCKED UP SHIT to say about abortion and a woman's right to choose, the sound track was good enough that i tolerated the movie and, oh gods, ok I've gone too far. Pacing is like the moldy peaches in a way, but way more digital. Still the bleeding honesty, gut wrenching lyrics about death, and the sweetest saddest song about cancelling a planet fitness account for a dead family member.
The Spiritual Sound by Agriculture Never has a metal album entirely summed up about how i feel about *gesticulates wildly* but I'm mad, I'm trying to find peace thru it all, and I'm here to make a bunch of fucking noise about it. The guitars can be surprisingly almost midwestern emo at times (it comes with the blackgaze trend i think) but then just punches you with a wall of noise. If you think deafheaven went too far into shoegaze, you'll like this.
This poem was written outside the regular prompt calls, inspired by a discussion with a_natural_beauty. It also fills the "WILD CARD: Denial" square in my 2-1-25 card for the Valentines Bingo fest. It has been sponsored by a pool with fuzzyred.
If you're motivated by banners, take a look at ALL the things you can earn. All you have to do is comment with what you've earned - it's all on the honor system. I'll make a banner for you no matter how long ago you earned it! You can also just grab one of the generic banners (not available for all colors or color/style combinations). Need help figuring out what banners you've earned? Try the Auto Counting Tracking Sheet
Seven books read so far in 2026, but five were rereads, one was already 3/4 done, and all were audiobooks. I finished rereading the Enlightenment trilogy and confirmed my recollection that it was a delightful and satisfying romance, but I decided that the narrator was just OK. I've now picked up the audiobook for The Great Mortality by John Kelly and realized the narrator was the same person who read the Will Darling Adventures, but under a different name, so it was nice to hear a friendly voice tell me about GRUESOME DEATH AND THE END OF THE WORLD. Last night I also started a new-to-me romance because I didn't want to fall asleep listening to the apocalypse--A Shore Thing by Joanna Lowell is a trans m/f romance set in the late 1800s, and it's cute so far, but I fell asleep so haven't gotten to the romance yet.
I checked some dead tree books out of the library as well, but the text was annoyingly small, so I may not read the 800-pager (K-Punk by Mark Fisher, known to me only because of Capitalist Realism). My second attempt at Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is going faster now that I'm no longer trying to read the Middle English. First thing I noticed was that King Arthur was young and vigorous, unlike the film adaptation with Dev Patel.
It's been well below freezing all day, and the only time I've spent outdoors was the pair of bike rides to and from the gig location, which itself is barely a 20 block ride. It was more than enough for my fingers and ears to get uncomfortably chilled, though I take it as a point of pride that continuing to mask up means my nose and mouth are just fine. I'm still thinking often on how safe I am for this cold snap - a safe place to sleep, hot water, layers to bundle up. Mostly, the tiredness comes from having rearranged a fairly sizable home library's substantial fiction section, up and down a stepladder, picking up armfuls of books over and over, and it's not digging a ditch, but between hours of that and the cold, I'm feeling pretty wiped.
I think next time I go, I'll bring a canned coffee with me. See about heading this off ahead of time.
As always, you can interpret the prompt literally or figuratively, in whatever way works for you.
Each work created for this challenge should be posted as a new entry to the comm. Posting starts now and continues up until the challenge ends at 4pm Pacific Time on Sunday, February 1st. No sign-up required.
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Also, keep an eye out for the next ffw_social post, which will go up in the next couple of days. If you haven't joined the ffw_social comm, it's never too late to come and check it out. (Posts are locked, which means you have to join to see them.)
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The conference was interesting, if maybe 1 panel too long (it ended at 4:55 pm, but the last panel was...not great, imo), though the lunch options were, to me, appalling. (Many people ate and enjoyed the sandwiches but there was not one that I would eat. I made do with salad, chips, and cookies.) My boss and I both felt validated by some things being mentioned that we already do and some that we are planning to do (if the new board chair approves), so that part was good too.
It was hard to get up (it was hard to sleep, knowing I had to get up 90 minutes earlier than usual), but I did it. I also saw two fun signs on the way: "Lube Entrance" and "You can ship anything." As devildoll said when I told her, I'll take AO3 tags for $200, Alex. *g*
Now I'm going to try to stay awake for another hour and then go to bed because I am le tired.
George Saunders — whose gorgeous novels and essays are a kind of jungle gym for playing with your assumptions rigorously and sensitively enough to grow the agility of perspective called empathy — explores this equivalence with his characteristic precision of mind and grandeur of heart in a wonderful interview on The Daily.
A practicing Buddhist and a writer whose core subject is how to love the world more, Saunders considers the parallels between Buddhism and writing as instruments of kindness honed on awareness and attention:
We have thoughts and they self-generate and dominate us. We mistake those thoughts for us. In both Buddhist practice and writing, you have a chance to go, Oh, those are just brain farts. They’re just happening spontaneously, and I didn’t actually create them, and I’m not sure I really want to take ownership of them. At the same time, they’re affecting my body. So you have to just get clear for long enough to recognize them as being separate from who you actually are.
Kindness, he observes in reconsidering his now-classic 2013 meditation on the subject, is something both greater than and simpler than niceness — a stilling of that “monkey mind” just long enough to consider what is most helpful to the other in a given situation. (Few things are more moving in this culture of opinions tattooed on the skin of the self than to see a person change their mind or evolve their perspective in public.)
Literature, Saunders insists, can quiet our habitual thoughts just enough to invite “a little more empathy, a little more engagement, a little more patience,” effecting “incremental changes of consciousness on the part of the writer and the reader” — changes that have to do with unclenching the fist of story and certainty that is the self and hold out to the world the open palm of curiosity. He identifies three awarenesses we must eventually attain in order to wake up from the core delusions that keep our lives clenched, that stand between us and kindness:
You’re not permanent.
You’re not the most important thing.
You’re not separate.
There are Buddhist precepts, but they are also the rewards of great literature — something Saunders captures beautifully in his introduction to the collected stories, essays, and poems of one of his own favorite writers, Grace Paley:
A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is as about as close as we can get to modeling pure empathy.
[…]
The world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe, what we need is to be reminded to love it and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.
Showing us how has been his life’s work, whether or not Saunders realized it along the way — we are always insensible to our own becoming, bud blind to blossom. Two decades before he came to the question of kindness directly, he shone a sidewise gleam at its substrate — the relationship between storytelling and unselfing — in his prescient 2007 essay collection The Brainded Megaphone.
Given that narrative is the neurocognitive pillar of identity, the story we tell ourselves about who we are comes to shape who we act ourselves into being, who we become in relation to the world. This fundamental vulnerability of consciousness, Saunders observes, can be and is exploited, but it is also what gives storytelling its transformative power:
In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act… Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.
The point, of course, is that beneath the constructed idea is the world itself, just as beneath the self — the scaffolding of ideas upon which we construct our experience of reality — is the soul, that loose and baggaged word we use to hold something immense and pure: the elemental essence of being. In our culture, there is no greater courage than to strip the armor of ready-made answers and face the world as naked soul, blank as a question; to discover rather than dictate who we are and what this is — this brief burst of astonishment and anguish that we share before we return our borrowed stardust to the universe, wasted if seduced by certainty, wasted if shorn of kindness.
Saunders offer the simple, intensely difficult remedy:
Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die.
The great writer’s gift to the reader are not better answers but better questions, a greater tolerance for uncertainty, a mechanism of transmuting confusion into kindness, and at the same time a way of seeing the world more clearly in order to love it more deeply. I find Saunders’s generous words about Grace Paley to apply perfectly to his own writing:
Reading Paley will, I predict, make you better understand the idea that love is attention and vice versa.
[…]
What does a writer leave behind? Scale models of a way of seeing and thinking.
[…]
Paley’s model advises us to suffer less by loving more — love the world more, and each other more—and then she gives us a specific way to love more: see better. If you only really see this world, you will think better of it, she seems to say. And then she gives us a way to see better: let language sing, sing precisely, and let it off the tether of the mundane, and watch the wonderful truth it knows how to make.
donating = loving
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honestly kind of wondering what last-minute twist they'll pull to try to make us regret voting forgive for kazui, though honestly given the moral judgements i've seen on irl milgram (r/aita) there's a chance they're just gonna go with the Fandom Accepted Kazui Backstory
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