Federico Garcia Lorca, 1922

The moon goes over the water.
How tranquil the sky is!
She goes scything slowly
the old shimmer from the river;
meanwhile a young frog
takes her for a little mirror.

Wisława Szymborska, 1993

Some people--
that means not everyone.
Not even most of them, only a few.
Not counting school, where you have to,
and poets themselves,
you might end up with something like two per thousand.

Like--
but then, you can like chicken noodle soup,
or compliments, or the color blue,
your old scarf,
your own way,
petting the dog.

Poetry--
but what is poetry anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question was first raised.
But I just keep on not knowing and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail.

Megan Fernandes, 2020

Mid-August. The moody Northeast.
Yellow moon undressing

herself in the bay. Shelter Island
all asleep. Turpentine skies

cooled by faint meteors,
a shower of bashful stars.

Virgil, in my ribcage, singing
to the sweet red-cedar scent.

Virgil, in my ribcage, singing.

Tracy K. Smith, 2011

5pm on the nose. They open their mouths
And it rolls out: high, shrill and metallic.
First the boy, then his sister. Occasionally,
They both let loose at once, and I think
Of putting on my shoes to go up and see
Whether it is merely an experiment
Their parents have been conducting
Upon the good crystal, which must surely
Lie shattered to dust on the floor.

Maybe the mother is still proud
Of the four pink lungs she nursed
To such might. Perhaps, if they hit
The magic decibel, the whole building
Will lift-off, and we'll ride to glory
Like Elijah. If this is it -- if this is what
Their cries are cocked toward -- let the sky
Pass from blue, to red, to molten gold
To black. Let the heaven we inherit approach.

Whether it is our dead in Old Testament robes,
Or a door opening onto the roiling infinity of space.
Whether it will bend down to greet us like a father,
Or swallow us like a furnace. I'm ready
To meet what refuses to let us keep anything
For long. What teases us with blessings,
Bends us with grief. Wizard, thief, the great
Wind rushing to knock our mirrors to the floor,
To sweep our short lives clean. How mean
Our racket seems beside it. My stereo on shuffle.
The neighbor chopping onions through a wall.
All of it just a hiccough against what may never
Come for us. And the kids upstairs still at it,
Screaming like the Dawn of Man, as if something
They have no name for has begun to insist
Upon being born.

Muriel Rukeyser, 1944

The bubbles in the blood sprang free,
crying from roots, from Darwin's beard.
The angel of the century
stood on the night and would be heard;
turned to my dream of tears and sang:
Woman, American, and Jew,
three guardians watch over you,
three lions of heritage
resist the evil of your age:
life, freedom, and memory.
And all the dreams cried from the camps
and all the steel of torture rang.
The angel of the century
stood on the night and cried the great
notes Give Create and Fight--
while war
runs through your veins, while life
a bubble of air stands in your throat,
answer the silence of the weak:
Speak!

Yehuda Amichai, 1963-68

They amputated
your thighs from my hips.
As far as I'm concerned, they're always
doctors. All of them.

They dismantled us
from each other. As far as I'm concerned,
they're engineers.

A pity. We were such a good and loving
invention: an airplane made of a man and a woman,
wings and all:
we even got off
the ground a little.
We even flew.

Anna Akhmatova, 1921

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town ;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses--
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

Redirecting novice modders away from bad resources and towards good alternatives seems like the neighborly thing to do, as well as guiding question-askers toward the convention of using Load Order Library or Mod.watch, and Pastebin, for questions about load order or crash reports.

My thought is that such a list could eventually be stickied somewhere that's easy for newcomers to find.

I'll start with a small handful, in no particular order, and hopefully others will chime in with their suggestions. If this gets any traction I'll edit/polish this text body with all recommendations.

I got your beginner's guide(s) right here

So you've decided to mod Skyrim. You are strong and wise, and I am very proud of you.

Maybe you like to read. Here are the three indisputable kings of written guides on the subject, in (my own, subjective) ascending order of complexity.

Note: these guides assume that you'll be following them to the letter, and depending on your level of experience that isn't an awful idea. However, know that when it comes to graphics mods the choices shown in these lists are their authors' own, and you can substitute as you like.

The S.T.E.P. Modifications Guide

The granddaddy of modding how-to lists. The STEP guide will hold your hand through the entire modding process, from the first launch of your game all the way through finishing touches like running DynDOLOD.

STEP is designed by committee to be accessible to readers of any experience level. The site is rudimentary and simple to navigate.

The Phoenix Flavour

A more retail-ready suite of guides, with several versions ranging from "bare necessities" to "modded out the wazoo." TPF is an established walkthrough that has, with the advent of Wabbajack, branched out into fully downloadable modlists. As such, the lists' installation instructions are tailored to Wabbajack users, but the list "The Phoenix Flavor" itself is still a useful reading reference (despite a header that declares itself out of date at the moment).

The site is a little more whiz-bang than STEP's, and I find it a bit unintuitive to navigate if you don't know what you're looking for.

Lexy's LOTD SE

"Lexy's guide" has been around for as long as I've been modding the game, and it remains the best deep-dive walkthrough for those who want to set up their modding environment by thoroughly following a written guide. As it says on the tin: "It is strongly advised that new modders install everything without deviation."

If you'd like something a bit more conversational, and a bit less click-thru, than STEP, and if you aren't interested in using Wabbajack, then I suggest using Lexy's exhaustive guide. It may take you a day or two. The familiarity that you will have with your modding environment on the other side is worth it.

The site is slick, with a logical start-to-finish structure that makes it easy to stay oriented.

Tome of xEdit

xEdit, known as SSEEdit to Skyrim SE players, is the most important tool you can undertake to learn in order to make your modding journey as painless as possible. My own knowledge of SSEEdit is admittedly wafer-thin and I'm not equipped to provide any information about it.

Those who are may be found at Tome of xEdit and they will be pleased to take you through The Method.

It cannot be overstated that SSEEdit is the tool that will enable you to answer for yourself many, if not most, of the questions that will arise on your modding journey. Learn it and love it more than I have; I wish I understood it better.

xLODGen, DynDOLOD, Grass LODs and how to avoid losing your mind.

The author of DynDOLOD, Sheson, is a helpful fellow who is much, much smarter than me. I believe /u/yausd when he has said countless times on reddit that the official documentation is the absolute best resource for those with questions about the DynDOLOD tools and generating LODs.

But I also agree with every user I've seen gripe to /u/yausd that Sheson's prose is dizzyingly, even impenetrably detailed. My long-term suspicion is that /u/yausd is Sheson, and that he is simply operating on a level beyond that of mere mortals, with (it must be said) godlike patience for our questions.

Gamerpoets, as always, has an instructive video on the topic that will get you up and running in no time. For those of us who prefer a written guide, however, the absolute best that I have found is LivelyDismay's, located here on github. This is a very well put together walkthrough, accessibly written with logical steps, plenty of illustrations, and plenty of hyperlinks in the text for fast navigation.

Like all the other inclusions here, it's not just my personal recommendation to use LivelyDismay's guide; it has been recommended by other users many times over.

Sharing your mod list

Load Order Library and Modwat.ch are two easy-to-use hosts for posting your whole modlist, including your game .ini files. It's helpful to use these instead of copy/pasting your entire modlist as comment text, because other users will be able to see your load order and still be able to navigate the comments here without a wall of text smothering their answers.

I'd love to be told that I'm just misusing Modwat.ch, but in my experience it only seems to post your modlist in descending order, and without a clear presentation of any custom separators that you're using. Load Order Library otoh posts your list in ascending order with separators intact.

Here is my list on both sites as an example. If you click "show inactive/disabled" you can even see all my disabled graphics mods, because I'm running a plain-Jane vanilla game atm:

My list on Modwat.ch

My list on Load Order Library

Both sites are free to use. Modwat.ch requires you to install a small uploader; LOL does not. For the several reasons I've mentioned, I prefer LOL.

Sharing crash reports & papyrus logs

Pastebin is the best way to share any kind of lengthy text document without copy/pasting directly here. Again, this is recommended for ease of navigation by other users who will be trying to answer your questions. A free account is not required to use the site. May I also wholeheartedly recommend using this to post crash logs on Nexus.

Help, I need a video tutorial

You want to watch a video about all this stuff, and somehow in 2023 you've still managed to find yourself in front of a Sinitar guide.

Stop.

Please, please navigate to Gamerpoets' YT channel instead, and bathe yourself in the healing waters of Michael's dulcet voice. In case it needs saying, I am not affiliated in any way.

Disclaimer: right this second Michael seems to be updating a number of his videos, so quite a few are wearing an "Archived" banner. Don't be discouraged. Gamerpoets is the most oft-recommended, universally beloved modding channel on YT. He will get you where you want to go.

How tf do I use BodySlide

We see this one a lot, for good reason. My personal favorite guide that I've found is the HIMBO Installation doc on Nexus, but it's been so long since I've needed it that there may be a far better alternative at this point. LMK if there's one that you like!

So that gets the thread seeded. There's obviously room for many, many more. Hopefully some others will weigh in. :)

edit: added the written guides. Revised the title to make it more obviously useful. Removed some editorial snark about Sinitar.

Thank you @[email protected]

EXTRA CHEESE