Tag: dailyprompt

My first impactful books

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the first book you ever finished and still remember to this day?
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The first was a comic from a series called Daga (Rainbow). My first Daga was number 14, and I don’t think I was able to read when I got it. The Daga series featured stories from popular books, including the entire Hobbit, from start to finish. There were also lots of space stories, things you can try to draw yourself.

Then came children’s books, like Pinocchio, Alice, Pippi, and so on. Then came pirates, adventure, the Wild West, Dumas, and Jules Verne. By the age of 10, I was already in the hundreds of books finished, but there was no Goodreads, and it’s difficult to say for sure. My mom would frequently bring me fresh books from the library.

There were several milestone books that had a big impact on me:

  • Pippi Longstocking – for its unlimited re-readability and for showing true friendship.
  • Winnetou – it’s difficult to say what I saw in this one. I guess it was a certain moral superiority in the main characters that looked appealing at the time.
  • The Three Musketeers – the first half is just so satisfying, with imperfect characters following their paths and accepting the present.
  • The Lord of the Rings – for the depth of its world-building.
  • Foundation – for introducing me to the world of truly great science fiction.

Now that I look to my book reviews, I still read Fantasy and Sci-Fi, occasional adventure/pirates, and some of the folks who published Daga keep impacting the gamebook genre to this day. Lost interest to the Wild West.

What if…

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments
Daily writing prompt
If you had an unlimited budget for 24 hours, what would you do?
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Given that:

I’d try to build a vault full of gold and enjoy it for a bit, think Uncle Scrooge.

This little fellow doesn’t know the concept of money or budgeting, and appeared to be happy.

Bad choice of words

~ Veselin ~ 18 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What’s a word or phrase that annoys you?
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I’ve developed an allergy to using the right buzzwords in the wrong order, or overusing them with the intent to convey a false sense of expertise. I wrote an article about this and pinned it to the right menu on my blog a few years ago but I’ve been observing this phenomena since the beginning of my engineering career.

I believe experts should explain difficult problems without resorting to lingo, adjusting their language according to their audience. If they don’t, we can’t really distinguish an expert from a bullshitter.

Our hyper-contextualized multimodal AI orchestration layer leverages adaptive quantum-inspired neural synergies to optimize scalable human innovation.

Update on the new writing prompts

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

I kept an eye on the new writing prompts that we shipped last week. I was curious to see if people like them or not. Also, some of these are just a little bit unorthodox and may not be to the everyone’s liking.

So far:

Best writing prompt:

What’s a thing you were completely obsessed with as a kid?

Worst new writing prompt:

What’s the most interesting local custom you’ve encountered?

And the first unusual one is today’s prompt:

What are the biggest benefits of minimalist living?

I’ll have to post a true answer to this one but so far, the origins of it have only been hinted on my blog. Books create clutter. I have many. They take up living space. It’s kipple. As Philip K. Dick says:

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself.

So my wife discovered Marie Kondo and thanks to her book, I was able to get rid of half of my clothes and a sizable portion of the books. But we are losing this battle.

Today’s writing prompt is invited by our family’s battle with books, clothes, fitness devices, and toys nobody plays with. Old Apple devices and their fancy boxes. Chargers. Cables.

Daily writing prompt
What are the biggest benefits of minimalist living?
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New Writing Prompts

~ Veselin ~ 10 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What’s a moment you wish you could freeze and live in forever?
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Faust broke his contract with Mephistopheles by asking time to stop. It’s a funny blogging prompt to appear today… so let me explain why it shows up, to the horror of everyone who expected the usual May 4th writing prompt and instead sees something new (OMG, it’s Star Wars Day).

I used to rely on writing prompts quite often because I’d run out of blogging ideas. After a 365-day blogging streak, they started repeating. Then, after 730 days, they repeated again. I wanted something fresh, so I began collecting prompt ideas in a spreadsheet, aiming to gather 730 fresh ones. I sourced them from good posts in the Reader, brainstormed with AI, the Sunshine Blogger Award, and picked some from the engagement threads on Reddit. I got to around 400–450, then started cleaning them up aggressively and eventually finalized a list of 366.

My colleague Tess then improved them by rewriting those that weren’t in proper English. She deleted the weakest ones. What’s left is this new batch of writing prompts.

They’re not perfect. I had some goofy and fun ones that didn’t make it to the final list out of concern some of you may find them inappropriate. So here we are.

We have a hackathon called “Radical Speed Month,” where we can ship cool changes without going through the usual approval process. I wish I could dedicate a few more days to this idea but I count my minutes because there are other areas that also need love and are at least as fun.

I hope you like the new prompts. If not, I take full responsibility.

PS. The results of the prompts API call is heavily cached and the new batch of prompts may appear to you within 24h.