July is Disability Pride Month.

These are some of my characters with disabilities. Series with disabled main characters include Clay of Life, the Draft Dawgs thread in Arts and Crafts America, Daughters of the Apocalypse, Frankenstein's Family, Monster House, The Moon Door, P.I.E., and Walking the Beat. Polychrome Heroics has a bunch, but they are scattered around various threads; some are ordinary disabilities while others relate to superpowers. You can ask for more disabled characters in any relevant prompt call. Today's Poetry Fishbowl theme is "Weaponized Incompetence and Malicious Compliance."

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This is today's freebie. It was inspired by a prompt from torc87. It also fills the "I tried being reasonable. I didn't like it." square in my 7-1-25 card for the Western Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the series One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis.

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Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! Today's theme is "Weaponized Incompetence and Malicious Compliance!" 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 activists, rebels, traitors, exes, abuse survivors, refugees, runaway youth, slaves or other captives, slavers, housemates, siblings, parents, teachers, clergy, leaders, bosses, employees, superheroes, supervillains, teammates, alien or fantasy species, failure analysts, ethicists, other people who get into untenable situations, protesting, dragging your feet, breaking things, causing problems because you were told to, planning, throwing in the towel, escaping, running like someone left the gate open, adventuring, hitchhiking, quitting school, divorcing, disowning, betraying, teaching, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, expecting the unexpected, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, slave ships, slave quarters, abusive homes, trails, sailing ships, campervans or RVs, distant lands, the forest primeval, prehistory, liminal zones, schools, residential school-concentration camps, homeless shelters, hotels, churches, sharehouses, campfires, laboratories, supervillain lairs, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, stores, starships, alien planets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, other places where the intolerable happens, unhappy relationships, crappy jobs, educational abuse, responsibility without authority is abuse, protest rallies, slavery or captivity, locks or chains, travel mishaps, sudden surprises, the buck stops here, trial and error, intercultural entanglements, asking for help and getting it, 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:

Western Bingo Card 7-1-25

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

Weaponized incompetence has two modes:
* One is shirking a fair share of work by pretending to be bad at it: for instance, copper-digging men who try to con women into doing all the emotional labor. (Take care to distinguish this from people who don't know how to do things because they were never taught, or people who are genuinely bad at a category of thing.)
* The other is a form of activism, and indeed, one of the leading forms of resistance in slavery: doing work slowly, sloppily, breaking tools, playing dumb, etc. It's exactly how black people got a reputation for being stupid and lazy, because their ancestors were unwilling to be exploited and fought back in subtle ways.

Malicious compliance is following an order to the letter, expecting that to cause problems. It is a form of protest most often used when pointing out a flaw or proposing a better solution would be ignored or even punished.


Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One is developing its own neurovariant culture after rebelling against the Galactic Arms.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past, touching on slavery and rebellion.

Not Quite Kansas includes demons, who are masters of malicious compliance.

The Ocracies has a wide variety of countries crammed together, each with a totally different government. Sometimes people leave their homeland to find something they like better.

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

Peculiar Obligations mixes Quakers and pirates, among other things. It's another setting where people strive against slavery.

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. The supervillains are the most likely to practice weaponized incompetence and malicious compliance. Among the more relevant threads are Danso and Family, Dr. Infanta, Fortressa, Iron Horses, Shiv, and Trichromatic Attachments.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

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Here is my card for the Western Bingo Fest over in allbingo. The fest runs from July 1-31. (See all my 2025 bingo cards.)

If you'd like to sponsor a particular square, especially if you have an idea for what character, series, or situation it would fit -- talk to me and we'll work something out. I've had a few requests for this and the results have been awesome so far. This is a good opportunity for those of you with favorites that don't always mesh well with the themes of my monthly projects. I may still post some of the fills for free, because I'm using this to attract new readers; but if it brings in money, that means I can do more of it. That's part of why I'm crossing some of the bingo prompts with other projects, such as the Poetry Fishbowl.

Underlined prompts have been filled.


WESTERN BINGO CARD

Bad Girls	Resist Oppression	"The Wayward Wind"	The Harder They Fall	Captive / Slave
Close-knit Community	"He’s all hat and no cattle."	Buffalo	"Cool Water"	Gambling
"Put me down!"	Dodge	WILD CARD	Redemption Story	Silver / Gold
"I tried being reasonable. I didn't like it."	Firefly	Defenestration	Immigrant	Horse
Black Hats / White Hats	I'll Get My Revenge	Independent Woman	Sunrise / Sunset	Emotionally Constipated Man

New study finds apes feel more optimistic after hearing laughter, indicates 'evolution of positive emotions'

Laughter — closely tied to language and a sense of humor — has long been thought to be uniquely human.
But in a new study out of Indiana University, researchers have discovered that bonobos, the closest living relative to human beings, along with chimpanzees, tend to be more optimistic after hearing similar vocalizations during play with their fellow apes.


I imagine that the people who mistake laughter for uniquely human have never had a cat look right at them, shove something of a shelf, and then laugh.  Animals I have observed laughing include cats, dogs, horses, goats, and multiple species of birds.

Today is partly sunny, humid, and hot.  It drizzled yesterday evening.

I haven't fed the birds yet, but I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.  They've put a good dent in the thistle seed again.

EDIT 6/30/25 -- I fed the birds.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 6/30/25 -- I refreshed the mosquito dunks.

I refilled the hopper feeder and thistle feeder.

EDIT 6/30/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 6/30/25 -- I picked a handful of blackberries.  They're coming in nicely.  :D

EDIT 6/30/25 -- I picked a handful of herbs to make a skillet scramble for supper.

I've got a few peas ripe in the new picnic table garden -- enough for a stir-fry maybe.

EDIT 6/30/25 -- I sowed 3 pots with mulberries.

Now it's starting to drizzle again, so I am done for the night.
 

Sex swap in seconds: The fish that takes charge and changes gender

Remove the top male spotty fish and, within minutes, the next-in-line female morphs into the tank s new tyrant charging and nipping rivals while her body quietly begins a weeks-long transition to male.


Sex and gender are more fluid than most humans realize. Transition is a natural and normal process.

acelightning / acelightning2  has passed away.  She has been a supporter of the Poetry Fishbowl for years and offered up some insightful prompts.

Today is cloudy, muggy, and hot -- but considerably less hot than the past week. Today it's 81°F which is hot but "be careful not to overdo yardening" not "stay indoors until it cools off" hot.

I fed the birds. I refilled the thistle feeder. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches plus a pair of mourning doves.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 6/29/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 6/29/25 -- I walked around the yard. I picked a few mulberries but there aren't a lot left. I picked a few black raspberries. That season is almost over too. :( The blackberries are starting to ripen, though, so I can start on those.

Wild bergamot, black-eyed Susans, narrow-leaf mountain mint, and purple echinacea are blooming. Yellow coneflower and cup plants have flower buds. Most of the Asiatic lilies have already bloomed, but some are still going -- I have several varieties.

EDIT 6/29/25 -- I was going to pick blackberries, but it started raining. :/