Oooooh, some pretty fractals to start us off! :)

I wish that I'd known about this earlier. sigh

I need to stick my head into the Forums more regularly.  I enjoy the frivolity of limericks, but haiku can be fun, too, as well as formal.

3 pt...  Chipka     Fog. The moon, adrift

2 pt... beachzz     Red moon brings fear

1 pt...  auntietk    Halloween draws near

Carolly

Congratulations!

It was a small field, but we had nice entries.  Fall with its holidays and seasonal changes can be a busy time.  However more people get inspired by all the decorations and creative displays, so perhaps we'll get a lot more entries this month? :)

andywelder - terragen secret place - 3 points****

**     I have some places like that in Yosemite that I don't share with anyone.****

gunsan - "My Most Secret Place" - 2 points

     that is a very magical cave****
**
**three_grrr - "Nooks and Crannies" - 1 point

******     lots of secrets in a woodpile!****

This was an interesting topic.  I'm a bit surprised that nobody used a diary or hope chest/keepsake box (what kid didn't have a box under the bed or a book under the pillow) but it seems that we'd like to secret ourselves away from a turbulent world.

**

Voting doesn't start until Saturday night, so that ought to mean another piece or two can slip in under the wire. ;)  As long as everything is in place for judging and tallying equally before the voting cutoff, it really doesn't matter if it was the first or the last entry.

We have reservations to go hiking up to Vasco Caves tomorrow... lovely sandstone with indian pictoglyghs in an area that has been kept secret for decades.  However, I'll probably come home and sleep instead of unloading the camera.

I'd like to see a few more entries, so hope that by tomorrow night we do have them.

I think this qualifies as tiny.

And full of secrets.

You can also see a pull-tab...

On the left you can see open shutters.  You can also see the scary tree peeking over the wall. 

All the conical caps lift off.  The broken-topped tower has an observatory.  The pennants are held on with straight pins.  I rumpled them a bit because it is always windy on a mountaintop!

WIZARDS' TOWER

The apostrophe is in the right place, since there are multiple wizards!  Lots of them.  (And servants and apprentices and scholars and monsters and guards and ghosts and summoned thingies.)

Please forgive the multiple photos, and the lack of quality.  I do not have a lipstick camera like Peter Jackson's by which to get inside the model.  There are oodles of towers, detailed inside and out.  On the inside, if you could peek through the 1/4" windows, you'd see that every room on every level is full of stuff: shelves, tables, cauldrons,whether exploding alchemical apparatus or quiet libraries, from the dungeons underneath to creatures under the eaves.  There are wheels and pull tabs so you can change some of the effects.  A few buildings have openable walls or lift-off roofs, but most need to be peeked into to even glimpse a few of their secrets.

So... lets start with the dragon's den inside a stalactite-filled cavern under the mountain....

I'm glad the critter got away!

I took some pictures last night... need to see if anything turned out.

Carolly

Congratulations to three-grrr and what a lovely pick for a theme!  Pity that my dollhouse wizards' castle won't be built for years... because it will have a secret passageway! ;^)  What else, what else....

3 pt.  ...Hotter than Hades ...three-grrr
2 pt.  ...Desert Pool  ...rich2
1pt.  ...prose piece  ...ThunderStone

Honorable Mentions to x-pax for Hiao and rocserum for Fractasia Flame Burst.

These were ALL quite hot.

We're glad that you showed up again... and congratulations. ;)

Glad that you can...

I decided that there was little hotter than a total solar eclipse (flares, surges, beads, glows) involving our very own bubbling hot sun.  So I tracked down a webcam/telescope clinging to a peak on the border of Mongolia offering what was to be the clearest weather.  Totality was set for a bit after 4 a.m. my time, but that wasn't a real problem.  I can stay up.  The telescope operator was from the Exploratorium, working with NASA, and quite professional with his/her filters (stopping down when the glare was too great, or narrowing in on prominent flares).  Safe viewing for both viewers and lenses. ;)

So I sat for a couple of hours, hitting the "print screen" button when really nice bits came into view. 

My intention was to take screen captures into Photoshop and play with them, giving NASA credit for providing the basics, as always.

On my other PC, a screen capture sits on the desktop and I can move it to the Mac for processing.  On this PC?  I have no flibertigibben idea where those screengrabs went.  Both beasties are running XP, so I have no clue why they behave differently, or where those images disappeared.  (If any reader knows where XP hides such things, please tell me.)

I'm so frustrated.  I nabbed a couple dozen nice images of a wonderful eclipse... something should have been workable. 

:(

At least when our caveman ancestors pecked out eclipse images with soot and red ocher, the image didn't vanish into the ether before it could be shared.  Harumph!

Carolly

THAT bad, huh?

blush