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Posted by Amanda

https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2025/09/cover-awe-tarot-and-intimacy/

https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/?p=151021

Welcome back to Cover Awe!

The Divining Sky by Jill Tew. The silhouette of two people in dark purple, a man and a woman. The man has a high collar and spiky hair. The woman has big curly hair in an afro style. In the bottom of their figures is an orange city scape and a fuchsia woody mountain with two figures on top.

The Dividing Sky by Jill Tew

Cover art by Jorge Luis Miraldo

From Squee Me: I don’t know if you feature books that aren’t out yet in Cover Awe, but I spotted this gorgeous cover on NetGalley and am submitting for your Cover Awe consideration!

Sarah: That is really stunning. I love the use of color and silhouettes. And the contrast! Urban sky alongside mountains, trees and giant ass birds – gorgeous.

Lara: I’m a total sucker for landscapes superimposed on people’s silhouettes.

Savor It by Tarah DeWitt

Cover art by Liza Rusalskaya

Amanda: I like how the couple is interacting, instead of having the two illustrated figures on a nondescript background standing feet apart from one another.

Sarah: Wait, they’re touching? They’re not hanging off a letter or floating into nothingness in a corner? Is that…allowed?!

The Lovers by Rebekah Faubion

Cover art by Sarah Maxwell

Amanda: I love the tarot card design!

Sarah: I LOVE the tarot reference and the backdrop, the color palate – this is exquisite. And so smart given how popular astrology and tarot are at the moment culturally.

Wish You Weren’t Here by Erin Baldwin

Cover at by Bex Glendining

Amanda: Their outfits and luggage communicate so much.

Sarah: You’re so right. This cover is telling me so many things without using any words, but also not only relying on body language. I know the setting, elements of the conflict and the characters? Seriously. This is superb.

AND AGAIN they aren’t floating off into space glaring at each other while dodging a random cup of coffee and a bird.

https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2025/09/cover-awe-tarot-and-intimacy/

https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/?p=151021

pennyarcade_feed

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2025/09/01/clientele

New Comic: Clientele

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2025/09/01/clientele

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dine

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siderea

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1882100.html

0.

With all the eager discussion of the possibility of Trump dying in office, I am in the delicate and unfortunate position of not actually being in favor of it.

Don't get me wrong. I, too, would enjoy to seeing something very bad happen to Trump. What I'd best like is him getting his just deserts – ideally being arrested, indicted, tried, found guilty, sentenced, having appealed, the appeal failing, appealing again, having that appeal fail, petitioning the POTUS for clemency and it not being granted, him being duly executed by the state as the traitor to the Republic and the Constitution he was proven to be. I'm not generally a big fan of capital punishment, but I am in fact willing to make exceptions; he seems to think he's an exception to a lot of things, and here I would agree with him.

But that's not going to happen, not in this time-line, and it's probably for the best that it doesn't.

Perhaps he will simply keel over dead, and I confess I will take at least a little bitter satisfaction in it.

And it's certainly not that I don't wish us all to be spared even another moment of this Trump presidency. Of course I do.

Alas, as much as I hate to crush the pleasant fantasy of us being redeemed by the deus ex machina of artheriosclerosis finally doing its job and carrying off our oppressor: Vance is worse. Much, much worse.

1.

( It's perhaps understandable that you would not realize this.... Read more [6,770 Words] )

This post brought to you by the 219 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

silveradept

Because the state of Mississippi has no idea what protecting children online actually entails, and are instead hoping that queer content will simply disappear off the Internet so they don't have to see it, but are threatening fines of $10,000 USD for each time a minor accesses something the state considers age-restricted, which goes far beyond the official and still-in-force Miller test for obscenity, Dreamwidth will be temporarily unavailable in the State of Mississippi starting September 1, 2025, and lasting until the State of Mississippi is injuncted against enforcing their overbroad and unsafe law. Because the state requires not only age verification of minors, but permission slips obtained and then all of that identifying information and documentation to be retained, along with special flags set for minor accounts that will make it obvious to a casual profile viewer that they're looking at a minor account (and therefore a possibly very juicy target), Bluesky has decided they are blocking Mississippi from using their service until Mississippi can be told that their law is overbroad, unconstitutional, and does the opposite of what they want it to do. The reason that this is happening in the first place is because despite at least one Justice saying outright that the challenge to the law was likely to succeed on the merits, the Supereme Court of the United States allowed it to go into effect because the conservative majority (or Justice I-Like-Beer-and-Boobies himself) said that the plaintiffs hadn't demonstrated sufficiently that they would be hurt by the law. Which sounds much more like an encouragement to Mississippi and others to pass these laws, even if they are eventually shut down, than someone taking into account the likelihood that the law will be judged unconstitutional and permitting preliminary injunctions to stay in effect while the case is argued, so that the state doesn't get the opportunity to try and collect its fines.

( Federation, Professional Experience, and What Can Be Done )

It also turns out that Tennessee passed a similar, if less draconian, law, and therefore Tennesseans under 18 will be temporarily barred from registering accounts on Dreamwidth until their law can be thrown out, because, in a similar way, people decided that while the law was likely to be axed, somehow there wasn't sufficient showing of injury to injunct the law immediately, so instead it gets to cause damage until rendered moot. So this particular conflict has to be fought on multiple fronts, in places passing laws and in places trying to pass them. Having seen the damage that happens when those places are allowed to pass laws, if your locality hasn't done it yet, it may be worth telling them what political ramifications await them if they do.

Current Mood: angry
Current Music: Lily Allen - Fuck You

silveradept

Let us begin with a promise from the company distributing the movie The Toxic Avenger to erase at least $5 million in medical debt, with each additional million past 5 made at the box office resulting in another million dollars' worth of medical debt destroyed. (The debt itself will not cost $1 million to acquire, as much of the outstanding debt is bought from various debt collection companies for significantly lower than face value.)

If you're looking for something that takes most of the strangeness of a comic book universe and lets it be strange and odd, while also being very entertaining, The television adaptation of The Middleman is available to stream and download from the Internet Archive. There aren't enough episodes of it, and it would do well with a revival, but you can enjoy it for the moment.

If you are on a Typepad-hosted or Typepad-managed blog or service, export all necessary data and assets before September 30, 2025, otherwise all of your material will be inaccessible permanently. Typepad is shutting down, and this is their attempt to allow people to export everything before they turn it all off.

( These always feel like so much happens in such a short time )

Last out, a spiky dinosaur that new fossils suggest may have grown spikes from the neck at least a meter long, in addition to all the other spiny points.

A web application designed to tell you what kinds of animals you are picking up and putting down with authority, based on what weights you tell it you can lift and put down with authority. What Animal Do You Even Lift, Bro?

And a story of stones, and reforging the rings around them as the people who those stones were given to reforge themselves closer and closer to the people who they are. Nate and Lee have a wonderful relationship, and this shows in in so many ways.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: 3OH3 - Starstrukk

skygiants

Sometimes you hit the end of a book and immediately think 'I'd like to read that over again' because there's some sort of big twist that you know will make you experience the whole thing differently, and sometimes you hit the end of a book and think 'I'd like to read that over again' not because of any Major Plot Reveals, but because the book is woven together in an interesting enough way that you want the chance to fully appreciate how all the pieces fit now that you've seen the full puzzle.

This second case was my experience with The Fortunate Fall, a cyberpunk novel from 1995 that came back into print last year and that I did not quite manage to read in time for the Readercon book club (so I extremely appreciate

kate_nepveu's extensive notes on it including the intertextuality with Moby Dick.)

The book is narrated by Maya Andreyeva, a 'camera' -- a cyborg news-reporter modified to provide not just full sensory experience but also associated memories, context, etc. to the viewing public. When the book begins -- well, when the book begins, it has already ended, as Maya tells us; her whole audience has already experienced all the relevant events through her eyes, and now she's telling it to us again, in a narrative that she can control and that's on her own terms, contextualizing only what she wants to contextualize and hiding what she wants to hide. Which is a very fun way to begin a book, by consciously keying you into its distortions and elisions, and for the most part I think the text lives up to it.

Anyway, when not the book but the story begins, Maya has decided to put together a series commemorating the anniversary of a major [future]-historical tragedy, and has just gotten assigned a new screener for the project -- a sort of editorial figure who sits in between the camera and the audience, filtering out bodily functions and bad words and anything else that could be trouble for the network. Because of the amount of time they spend immersed in the heads of their cameras, screeners tend to become rapidly very enthusiastic and romantic about them! Maya's new screener Keishi is a beautiful and mysterious young woman who is, indeed, very enthusiastic and romantic about her! And definitely not keeping any secrets about her skills, her identity, or her reasons for being there working with Maya, no sir.

In true noir mode, Maya's initially normal-seeming historical research into a tragedy that's as long-ago and terrible and world-shaping for her as the Holocaust is for us ends up leading her increasingly out of the bounds of conventional society down a dangerous rabbithole, at the end of which lies forbidden knowledge about the world, forbidden knowledge about her own past, and forbidden knowledge about a really sad whale. And, following along with her, we as readers gradually start to piece together not only the particular dystopian shape of the world -- the parts that Maya already knows and the parts that Maya doesn't -- but also the shape of the story, the themes that it cares about and that have actually been driving the plot this entire time: embodiment, censorship, the atrocities we commit to end atrocities, and the power and beauty and absolute hard limits of queer love, just to name a few.

I don't know that everything about the book has fully aged well. I understand the well-meaning failure mode in cyberpunk that leads an author to posit a Monolithic Utopian Isolationist Africa when the rest of the world has gone to dystopian shit, but I think it is a failure mode. I also admit that I thought the entire grayspace digital-world sequence was a little bit boring. But for the most part the book is not at all boring, it's interesting in the way that only a book that actually trusts its readers to be doing an equal amount of work as they go is interesting. I did not in fact actually then read the book over again, upon hitting the end, because it was extremely overdue at the library [and I had five more equally overdue books on the pile] but I expect I will do so sometime in the nearer rather than the further future. Maybe I'll have the chance to hit another book club.

marycatelli posting in

girlgenius_lair

Yes, of course, run along

fanhackers_feed

Posted by fanhackers-mods

https://fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/793458772752416768

This week I want to do a bit of a review of fan studies work on everyone’s favorite hellsite, Tumblr. Key works include a tumblr book: platform and cultures edited by Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoch (University of Michigan, 2020), tumblr by Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin (Polity 2021), and the Roundtable on Tumblr and Fandom that Lori Morimoto hosted in the Symposium section of TWC.

Today’s excerpt will be from “Tumblr Fan Aesthetics” by Louisa Stein (published in The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, Routledge, 2017.)

From the start, some key elements of Tumblr appeared to align well with fannish concerns. From its initial entry in 2007, Tumblr offered users the ability to share visual images, still and moving, combined with limited text, in what seemed like a fresh aesthetic, although in truth it had evolved from prior platforms Projectionst and Anarchia (Alfonso). With its unfamiliar and somewhat opaque-to-outsiders interface, Tumblr felt less policed in comparison with fans’ perception of LJ after Strikethrough. Tumblr’s seeming illegibility to outsiders, while a deterrent for some fans, also functioned as part of its appeal. Like LJ, users navigated Tumblr via hyperlinked interests, but Tumblr’s user-driven tagging practice seemed more excessive and disorganized, sometimes even put to expressive rather than organizational purposes (e.g. a hashtag might read #ilovethisshowsomuch). Tumblr seemed to offer a coded public, in which individual authorship was subsumed into the collective, and within which transgressive meanings could hide in plain sight.

Tumblr’s reblogging logic, in which a user could easily “reblog” any post they find onto their own dashboard, with or without the addition of notes, resonated with fan practices of return, recirculation, and transformative reworking. Posts on Tumblr could be reposted tens of thousands of times, giving them the weight of community-held beliefs or community-hailed icons. This recirculation and reworking of cultural meaning meshed with fandom’s valuing of transformative reworking and repeating of tropes and beloved images. Tumblr’s particular brand of reblogging also resonated with fandom’s emphasis on a multiplicity of interpretations and affective returns to beloved media objects. Moreover, retumbling suggested a copyright stance that embraced the collective creative repurposing of already existing media, a core value for much of fandom (Rodrigo). Indeed, Tumblr’s emphasis on collective authorship yielded a sense of power in multiplicity, including the power to evade cultural policing.

https://fanhackers.tumblr.com/post/793458772752416768

delphi

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lassarina

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icanhascheezburger_feed

Posted by Ayala Sorotsky

https://cheezburger.com/10544432128/dealing-with-the-heat-in-style

shipperslist

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calimac

Box score:
1st. Poiesis Quartet
2nd. Arete Quartet
3rd. Quartet KAIRI

And so it's over. A couple hours after the end of last night's final concert of the Banff International String Quartet Competition with all the competitors, the three finalists were announced. (The one time I saw this happen in person, the director just got up before a microphone at the campus bistro, where a lot of us were hanging out for the evening.) That led to a concert this afternoon with each of the three finalists taking a long set, and then after a couple more hours of cogitation, the formal announcement of the three-place results, this one on the concert hall stage with a lot of applause and handing out of certificates.

In past years, the finalist round has consisted of a full performance of a major Beethoven or Schubert quartet, but this year they moved the ad lib round into that place. Each finalist had 45 minutes to play whatever they wanted for string quartet, subject only to the provisios that 1) they had to include at least three different composers, 2) at least full movements, no excerpts, 3) nothing they'd previously played during the festival, 4) though they could choose works by any connecting principle or none, they had to write an essay explaining why they'd made that selection. These essays were distributed to the in-person audience as program inserts, but if they made it onto the website, I couldn't find it.

So here are the finalists, what I thought of their earlier performances, what they played in the finalist round and how it came out.

First place, winner of the 2025 competition, is the Poiesis Quartet, and I have to say I'm very pleased. I thought they were by far the best of the three finalists. Particularly fine were their outstanding Brahms and extremely good Bartók. I also liked their playful Haydn and their dramatic Beethoven. The only thing I found disappointing was their 21st century selection, which they may have played well but which was not interesting music. They were at least the most interesting looking of all the competitors. They eschewed standard concert wear entirely, and their dress and grooming were ... well, this photo gives a good idea. They also use more gender-neutral pronouns than all the other competitors put together. They're Americans who are all graduates of the Oberlin Conservatory, and it's been suggested they may have picked up some of their style there, or maybe that's the appeal that's the reason they went there.

Poiesis's finalist recital was also all living 21st century composers, but it came out very differently from the earlier round. All four of these works were very interesting, even at times captivating, if not ingratiating. Two of them were basically quiet. Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate is a composer of the Chickasaw Nation, whose work I've heard done by the Oakland Symphony. His Pisachi has some fast and dramatic sections, but is mostly slow held notes with a strong folk flavor perhaps inherited from the composer's people. An even more hushed piece titled Phosphorescent Sea was well described by its title. Its composer was Joe Hisaishi, much older than the other composers on Poiesis's list and best known as the house composer for Hayao Miyazaki's films. Brian Raphael Nabors, an African-American composer who's also going to be done by Oakland, offered the first faster piece, a quartet that's brisk and snappy, bristling with colorful effects. The Seventh Quartet by Kevin Lau, Canadian of Chinese birth, was also fast and lively if less colorful than Nabors. These were all strongly and intelligently played and well sold by the Poiesis Quartet.

Second place goes to the Arete Quartet, two women and two men from Korea. They did a fine Schumann, and I also liked their clean and elegant Haydn. They did a lively job on their 21st century selection, but I disliked the piece. But I found their Schubert wanting in coherence and their Berg bloodless and enervating; they got very bad ratings from me for those.

For the finalist round, Arete picked a more conventional 20C program, Britten's Three Divertimenti and the same Janáček First Quartet that Kairi and Cong already did. Arete went even further than Cong on this one, building up the dissonant squawks and sounding as if the consonant passages existed only to increase the contrast. And to provide a third composer, Arete played the Mozart movement whose weird introduction gives the K. 465 quartet the nickname "Dissonant."

Third place goes to Quartet KAIRI, which I'm not going to use the capital letters on all the time. This group consists of four men. They're Japanese or Chinese by origin, but they're all studying in Salzburg now, so they consider that their home base. Their best performance was their thick and resonant Haydn; they won a special prize for the best Haydn performance of the round. Their Mendelssohn and Schubert seemed to me adequate but not the outstanding work you expect here, and their Janáček First was the opposite of Arete, attempting to dampen down the dissonance in defiance of the composer's intent. Their 21C piece was a piece of retro modernism of the sort I find undesirable.

Kairi's finalist round, like Arete's, consisted of two standard 20th century works leavened with a little Mozart. One of the pieces was Landscape by Toru Takemitsu, whose shows its old modernist character by making its sound sheets full of stringent dissonance. Tate and Hisaishi don't do that. More to my taste was Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, but I had a harder time parsing their slow and gentle approach to the outer movements. The Mozart was two movements from K. 575, one of the Prussian Quartets.

jazzyjj posting in

awesomeers

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!

brithistorian

“Great art is somehow already in the future, showing us a place we haven’t arrived at yet. Not just to entertain us but to make us grow.” — Jan Younghusband, in Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of the Velvet Underground (Dylan Jones), p. 173.

cornerofmadness

Wasn't sure I was going to have a good day out. Woke up to a blood sugar of 400. Sigh. Took my insulin. Had breakfast with my soccer team, the New Boys veterans (which I was only half right. they are mostly from Jamaica but are US veterans, this team is out of MN)

I first went to the The Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center and plaza area It is in a neat old section of the city. It's oddly enough run by the National Park Service (and is free) and I got there just in time to join the ranger on the tour of the next door building which is the last remaining Wright Brothers' cycle shop. (Henry Ford took most of their stuff to his museum in MI) There was only one bike of theirs in there.

The whole downstairs of the center was their story from being printers/would be newspaper men (they gave out a freebie paper duplicated from theirs. I have yet to really look at it) talked about their bishop father and their sister Katharine (who now has a historical mystery series based on her which wasn't half bad)

Turns out Orville was friends with Paul Laurence Dunbar, a poet laureate who is first generation post enslavement (both parents were slaves). He helped Paul set up a paper for the Black community (which failed) and to get his book of poems printed. Paul sold them from the elevator car he was the operator for (which I'm surprised that they allowed him to). He became insanely popular, You might know a few lines of his if you don't think you know him.

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—

There is also a parachute museum in here too. I did not know that people (including some early daring women) parachuted out of hot air balloons.

Froom there I tried to go to lunch. Two roads were closed, my GPS knew one was but not the other and kept circling me back so I gave up and thought 'i'll get something on my way to the air force museum.' Turns out that was closer than I thought with zero fast food (or any food) in between. Guess I'll be over paying for museum food (10$ hot dog/bottle of water)

So it's been forever since I've been to Wright Patterson: the national museum of the air force . I was meant to go two years ago to the steampunk ball...only I ended up in the hospital with cancer. Sigh.

Let me say this up front: if you're in Dayton, see this (unless you hate planes). It's free. It's enormous. And right now the AF is giving Trump the biggest middle finger. They are not following the party line to remove women from military records (ditto people of color). Hell they're doubling down on it. I have never seen this much women's history in a general museum before.

If I lived closer I'd come more often. There is too much to see. WAY too much. I would love to read all the placards etc (Yes I wanted to be Edalyn Clawthorne, I'm Lilith. Sigh) If I was closer I'd come and see just one section until I saw it all and then move on.

You begin in the beginning with Orville and Wilbur again and some of the European balloonists and gliders. What struck me as unmeasurably sad was in less than a decade we went from taking our first flights to dog fighting over Europe (and their big WWI display)

This gives way to WWII which is a huge, incredibly packed area. Again they have not hidden the Tuskeegee airmen (and there was an all Black all female group as well but my brain has lost their names) they did big write ups on flight nurses (who also flew supplies which is also what the all black team was doing) but since they flew supplies they couldn't use the Red Cross symbol meaning anyone could/would shoot at them.

Now my sugar is dropping so I go for that bad food.

From there it's Korea then Viet Nam. I'm now on a mission. I must find the SR-71 Blackbird. I know she's in here. (I found her). I went to their small space collection and stared at rockets. I've been here for hours now. My feet are mad. My knee is suing for divorce.

And then it hits me. I did NOT see a P-51 Mustang in the WWII section. That is my favorite plane (yes I have a favorite). WHERE? WHY? I found docents. They told me the where. The why was it's so big in the WWII area that I just plain missed my baby.

I also love nose art (even if a lot of it is rather sexist) and bomber jacket art. They had plenty. I had fun.

And I was reminded of how Arakawa named most of the main characters after WWII planes

I now have all the books for the holidays for dad, though there is no repeats for the most part (a few exceptions) between all these museums. I should have bought the one about Charlie Taylor, the first airplane mechanic (dad was one in the air force, sort of, doing electronics) There was the books by the former high ranking AF guy who is on all the alien shows (and they were signed!) I got myself fly girls about those early pilots, one on the waves and codebreaking, Katharine Wright's bio and one on all the body snatching that went on in OH in the 1700 and 1800s.

It's now 4 pm and I want to hit the mall. I now remember why I don't go to Ross any more. their plus size collection was like 6 shirts. They did have a Halloween thing I wanted not at a price I wanted to pay. Went to Macy's, took 3 steps in the room spun and I started sweating and shaking. Well fuck. My sugar is cratering. I had to go to the hotel (which luckily is directly across from Macy's)

After I stablized and had some tea I picked dinner. That Blue Juicy Crab place had bad reviews but there is Hook and Reels on the opposite side of the mall doing the exact same thing and now I want seafood. I got and get Joe's Crab Shack vibes. Anyone remember that chain? I think it's gone entirely. I got the crab/shrimp boil which was good but also reminded me why I don't go for this much. It's messy, the shellfish gets cold by the time you crack your way through it and it's overpriced (this was cheaper than Red Lobster's offerings though)

But a half pound of shrimp and half pound of crab really equals about 8 little shrimp and a meatball sized bit of crab. I was hungry when I left so I said let's go get some DQ. There with DQ is Skyline Chili (I don't get them in east OH just near Cinci) I'm like okay lets get another chili dog while I'm here getting my pumpkin pie blizzard. Good call because with my sugar fucking about I'm feeling hungry again as I type this. I'd be looking for late n ight taco bell otherwise.

So sugar aside, another good day

Current Mood: good
Current Music: The Avengers

icanhascheezburger_feed

Posted by Ayala Sorotsky

https://cheezburger.com/10544528384/meowmory-charm

peppermint_shamrock posting in

lyricaltitles

Welcome to the return of the Lyrical Titles bingo event! It will run September through December, though entries will be accepted later.

The challenge this time is bingo, using song lyrics as titles according to the prompts on generated bingo cards. This is a low-stakes, personal challenge, of course; there's no penalty for not finishing or running late.

Link to the AO3 collection for this event. I know with some of our events there were some issues where the collection would not come up automatically in AO3's collection field, but if you use the full name of the collection (LyricalTitlesBingo2025) it should work fine even if you need to manually type in the whole thing.

Prompts:
The following are the prompts that the bingo card will be generated from. Let me know down below if you want a card, and if you want any prompts specifically excluded from it (a card needs a minimum of 24 prompts, but that's the only limit on number of exclusions). Feel free to request a new card at any time through December 2025, even if you've already received one.

1. Instrumental song
2. Sad song
3. Happy song
4. Angry song
5. Romantic song
6. Breakup song
7. Nursery rhyme
8. Slow song
9. Fast song
10. War song
11. Folk song
12. Grief song
13. Pre-1900 song
14. Pre-1950's song
15. 50's song
16. 60's song
17. 70's song
18. 80's song
19. 90's song
20. 00's song
21. Song released in 2025
22. Meme song
23. Song in a language other than English
24. Song that isn't available on mainstream digital music platforms
25. Song from a musical
26. Song from a soundtrack
27. Song from a concept album/rock opera
28. Chart-topper
29. Song with a month in the title
30. Song with a name in the title
31. Song with a color in the title
32. Song with an article in the title
33. Song with a title one word long
34. Song with a title six or more words long
35. Song with multiple singers on the track
36. Song > 7 minutes long
37. Song < 2 minutes long
38. Last line of a song
39. First line of a song
40. Line from the chorus
41. Lyric with "light" or "dark"
42. Lyric with "love" or "hate"
43. Lyric with "red", "green", or "blue"
44. Lyric with "sleep" or "wake"
45. Lyric with "night" or "day"
46. Lyric with "remember" or "forget"

Rules, Guidelines, and FAQ:

All works must be your own and not previously posted.
All works must use either the title of a song or a portion of its lyrics as the work title.
Works have a minimum wordcount of 100 words.
Please indicate the song title and artist in each entry for this challenge. You're not required to link to the song, but feel free to do so if you want!
Work text should be under a cut or linked offsite. Please indicate any warnings in your post.
You can begin working on the fics at any time, but please don't post them until September.

What kind of works are allowed?

All fandoms and original work are allowed. Works must be your own and not previously posted, but do not need to be exclusive to this event - they can also be used as entries for concurrent events. This is a writing focused event, and there is a minimum wordcount of 100 words, and no maximum wordcount.

How many fics do I need to write?

For a bingo, 5 prompts in a line (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal). You can do more if you like, or even go for a blackout (all 25 prompts).

Do the songs/lyrics I pick need to be in English?/Can I translate non-English lyrics?

You can use songs from any language (aside from the "Song in a language other than English" prompt). Titles/Lyrics may be in their original language, or you may translate them if you wish. For that matter, works can be in any language as well.

Do the lyrics need to be incorporated into the work?

No, this event is focused on titles, lyrics do not need to be used in the work itself.

What counts as a "Meme song"?

Any song that's used as a meme (past or current), such as "Never Gonna Give You Up" - Rick Astley, "Angel" - Sarah McLachlan, "All Star" - Smash Mouth, etc. Basically, if there's a "Know Your Meme" page for it, you can consider it a meme song.

What is meant by "Song that isn't available on mainstream digital music platforms"?

Anything that's not available on Spotify, Amazon MP3, iTunes, etc, or uploaded to Youtube by a record label. If it's only on Bandcamp or uploaded to Youtube by an independent artist or random channels, that's fine and can qualify for this prompt. Same if you can purchase the physical vinyl, CD, or cassette from Amazon, that's fine as long as it's not available digitally.

What is meant by "Song from a concept album/rock opera"?

A concept album or rock opera, is an album where the songs are not independent of each other, but instead tell a story that progresses across the album, such as with Pink Floyd's The Wall. Does not need to necessarily be in the "rock" genre.

What is meant by "Chart-topper"?

Anything that is or has been at the top of a music chart. Does not matter which country or year.

Do the "song with ___ in the title" and "lyric with ____" prompts apply to both song titles and fic titles?

No, prompts 29-34 apply to the song selection only - your fic title does not need to include the requirement for the song title. Prompts 38-46 are the only ones with restrictions on the title of your fic, but do not limit the song selection (other than it must have lyrics and, for 41-46, include one of the two words somewhere in the lyrics).

Does the Free Space mean I choose from any of the above prompts, or any song/lyric at all?

Any song you want!

Have fun!

Any questions, comments, or suggestions? Please don't hesitate to ask below! Feel free to tell everyone what album you're planning on using, if you want!

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November 2024

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smartbitches_feed - Cover Awe: Tarot and Intimacy
pennyarcade_feed - Clientele
cywscross in fandomcalendar - Multifandom: Drabble On Ficathon 2025
dine - tomayto, tomahto
siderea - Vance is Worse [pols, US, Ω, Patreon]
silveradept - DW will be temporarily unavailable in Mississippi (and account signups restricted in Tennessee)
silveradept - Getting It Done Before Labor Day - Late August 02025
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delphi - Six Sentence Sunday
lassarina - Tales of Vesperia Liveblog, Part 1
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brithistorian - QOTD: On art and its relationship to the future
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peppermint_shamrock in lyricaltitles - 2025 SEPTEMBER - BINGO

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Style: Ivory Alcea for Mobility by branchandroot
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