Tag Archives: dailyprompt

PROMPT: 20 Years

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Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?
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I think cell phones will be replaced by cheap cyborg implants that fulfill the same myriad functions and more. Just as we were convinced that we were being given a great benefit with social media, when — in fact — we were just handing over our attention and data on the cheap. This time we’ll be signing away a great deal more — we’ll be meat puppets for the billionaires, carrying out consumption function programming as ignorantly blissful as Cypher from The Matrix. Welcome to the Cyber-Sheep economy. BAHaaaaah.

Proviso: People (me included) are shite at forecasting. We call broken clocks “genius” based on those two times a day they are right, but forecasting genius is just selection bias plus Mrs. Cleo pseudo-psychic tactics (be vague, sound specific.) Also, remember we are always one nuclear winter away from flint knapping being the prevailing mode of technology.

PROMPT: Read More

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Which book have you read more than any other?
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孙子兵法 (i.e. Sun Tzu’s “Art of War“) or Hamlet, perhaps. It would have to be something short, important, and that bore new fruit upon revisit.

But, in truth, it’s not a score I’ve kept. I just know there are few books I’ve re-read, and exceedingly few that I’ve read more than twice. There are too many good books to get stuck on any of them without great cause.

PROMPT: Lifelong Learner

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Are you a lifelong learner?
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I aspire to be, but in the immortal words of Monty Python, “I am not dead yet!”

PROMPT: Habit

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What’s one habit that has improved your life the most?
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Getting up every morning.

PROMPT: Chapter

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What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years” — and what got you through it?
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Chapter 7. Chapter 8.

NOTE: Incidentally, I would not title a chapter of my memoirs “The Hard Years,” so as to avoid the assumption that that was when I worked in porn. People would either skip said chapter… or skip to it.

PROMPT: Sequel

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What’s a book you think deserves a sequel?
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I think sequelization is a pox upon the literary world. I would hazard to say that anything good I’ve ever read was a standalone work. Seldom does the “resolution-to-hook” ratio lead to a satisfying, let alone illuminating, reading experience. A popular book series is far more likely to end like the television series Lost than to pull all its outstanding narrative strings together coherently.

Unless you’re talking nonfiction, in which case I would be open to another volume of The Complete History of the World at some point.

PROMPT: Villain

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What villain actually had a good point?
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Heath Ledger’s Joker [The Dark Knight (2008)] has a monologue that goes: “Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan’… even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all part of the plan…I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.”

It is definitely true that our psychology allows us to accept tens of thousands of deaths from drug interactions or auto accidents, but then we will go to outlandish extents — billions upon billions of dollars — to avoid the possibility of a couple of terrorism fatalities. We would use resources much better if we were not so panicky about uncertainty.

PROMPT: Anywhere

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If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
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I could happily live any number of places — e.g. several places in Southeast Asia, the Caucasus (particularly Georgia — though with language concerns,) Taiwan, and South America spring to mind. As long as it’s neither brutally hot / humid most of the time nor Winter more than three months a year (and isn’t pricey,) I can probably learn to love it.

I would point out that if this is a forever and always deal, I’m not in. I don’t want to / plan to live any particular place for the rest of my life.

PROMPT: Chaos

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Is a little chaos actually good for us?
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A little of every kind of stressor is good for us. A human is a system of antifragile systems. Our bones get denser if we load them. Our muscles get stronger when we cause microtears in them. And our minds can cope with a wider variety of experiences when exposed to a wider variety of experiences.

PROMPT: Lesson

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What’s a lesson you’ve learned recently that shifted your perspective?
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Just because a message has merit does not mean there is benefit in its delivery. For example, telling a person who is on fire and mad with itching not to scratch or telling a person to not be a jackass when their core nature is jackass. Saying such things will not nudge the state of the world and can only release the puff of hot air that creates chaos — like Edward Lorenz’s proverbial butterfly in Brazil that causes a tornado in Texas.