Category: Fantasy

Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/1/25: Best of Twittersnips 2024 (Magic Items)

My favorite Twittersnip magic items of the year 2024, chosen from my Twitter feed.   2024 Magic Items (Best of) Athena’s Purification Tonic: Drinkers receive wisdom and strength (+2 each) like that of the Greek goddess. Lasts for a few hours. Physical components are an owl feather and gorgon blood. Beetle Slippers: Made of wool …

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The Fall of Númenor [Reading Challenge 2024]

The Fall of Númenor by J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. by Brian Sibley William Morrow, 2022 [ #23  Pixies and Dryads and Elves, oh my! : A high fantasy ] I am backposting this review, as I finished the book only a few days before the end of 2024. Let’s hope 2025 is a little …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 12/25/24: Ghosts of Christmas Past

A blast from the past! Past years, that is, of random Christmas names for songs, scents, foods, and characters.   Randomgen Christmas names from years past Species of Santa German Christmas Cookies Christmas Traditions Around the World Christmas Cocktails The Best of Twittersnips (Christmas) Christmas Songs Christmas Characters Christmas Scents Santa’s Elves Santa’s Bad Elves …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 12/4/24: Tolkien’s Wizards

Since I just finished watching The Rings of Power on Amazon, and am also reading Tolkien’s compilation The Fall of Numenor, I’ve a mind to talk about Tolkien’s Wizards. First off, there weren’t that many of them. There are only three as characters in the main trilogy: Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White, and Radagast …

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The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon [Review]

The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon by Moira Greyland Castalia House, 2018 The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon is the book that grew out of the 2014 revelation that fantasy and science fiction and fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her own children and knowingly protected and facilitated her husband Walter …

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Vision of the Goddess

Very Maxfield Parrish, no?

AI Art Adventures: Homemade Halloween Costumes

In 2018 and 2020 I posted lists of randomly generated Halloween costumes and I thought it would be fun this year to see what Midjourney came up with for those prompts. Most were variations on ” [person]  dressed as a [randomly generated thing] , homemade costume,  candid, casual photo, Halloween setting –c 15″. The –c …

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The Convoluted World of Ruwenda

Technically its name is “The World of the Three Moons” but the country the series revolves around is called Ruwenda, so I’m going call the world Ruwenda as well, similar to how “Narnia” refers to both Narnia the country and Narnia the greater world around it. The purpose of this post is to give some …

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Golden Trillium [Review]

Golden Trillium by Andre Norton Bantam Books, 1993 Golden Trillium is the third book in the Trillium series of fantasy novels, which debuted, with much fanfare, in 1990 with Black Trillium. Since that’s over 30 years ago, I’ll recap the project here. Three respected female writers of classic SFF, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, and …

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AI Art Adventures: Fiddler on the Ref

After a year or so mucking around on Midjourney I’ve only recently begun using the –sref and –cref functions. What are these, do you ask? Well, they are offshoots of the basic reference pic users can paste into their /imagine prompts. Midjourney calls them Imagine URLS. As the user’s manual says, “Imagine URLS can be …

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