Tag: dailyprompt

New Writing Prompts

~ Veselin ~ 9 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.

Complaining

~ Veselin ~ 7 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What do you complain about the most?
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My region is known for cultural complaining. Gather people from the Balkans around a table, and it’s like a championship in complaining. I suspect this bad habit has Ottoman roots. You shouldn’t stand out, to not gather unwanted attention. Misery as camouflage.

For me – not sure. At one point, I read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Carnegie is strongly against complaining. He thinks nobody enjoys listening to that and he’s a smart person. I suspect he’s at least partially right. So I’ve been putting some significant effort to not do that, or at least not as much. Also, some of the most popular subreddits on Reddit are all around people complaining about their relationships. So maybe at least some people find diving into other people’s problems a good use of their time.

Overall, I think have a good capacity to complain, and also a strong desire to not do it. Here, I let myself complain about cars, which I believe are bad for everyone, and about AI overviews of websites, which I believe are unfair use of other people’s intellectual property.

Speaking of heritage, here’s a Sofia classic. Pickled food and cats

What part of your routine do you always try to skip

~ Veselin ~ 9 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can?
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Two things, one controversial, and one not.

Breakfast.

I’m a mild believer in the intermittent fasting. It’s not because of any science behind this diet but rather because if I don’t try doing it, I can eat all the time, particularly sweet things. This can’t be good. I’m sure bad things happen if you eat too often, like high blood sugar, insuline resistance, obesity, earthquakes.

Morning iPhone

I watched the following reel and it deeply touched me. The comedian is also right.

Three Wishes

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
You have three magic genie wishes, what are you asking for?
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This question has one simple answer, that’s likely also wrong. “Infinite wishes” – you actually only need one, and you’re good.

However, if we dig deeper, we don’t want anything to do with the genie. The genie has a way of twisting everything. So meeting that genie means you better run.

“Hello, brave traveler! I will grant you three wishes” – the Genie said
“I wish to live forever.” – the human responded
“Granted.”
“Wow! I’ll never die?”
The genie replies, “You won’t die… but you might wish you could.”

Endless wishes can easily be twisted: the genie might end your life before you even use them, limit you to one wish per century and claim the first wish is already gone. Or they can grant your wishes while corrupting your mind so all you wish for is absurd. To survive a scenario like this, you’d need to wish for something extremely simple, precise, and un-twistable. Even then, it’s far from easy.

Ask for a million bucks, and suddenly you’re buried under a million deer. Try again, specifying dollars, and it’s a million Zimbabwean dollars. Try one more time, insisting on a million USD in cash, and watch the crushing weight of coins flatten you. And whatever you do, don’t wish for world peace. One poof and you’re on Venus, where war has never existed… but life sure hasn’t either. Or Earth is now Venus.

We have in our folklore some stories about the golden fish, granting wishes. The golden fish is a bit nicer than the genie and would sometimes grant them to a very clever asker, although most stories still have unpleasant plot twists. We also have the golden shark, which grants wishes in a bloody and immediate way, but at least the shark is honest and won’t end the world.

Maybe you wish for the genie to implement your other two modest wishes with a good intent and no awful twists.

Writing Prompt: What major historical events do you remember?

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

Most of the historical events I had a chance to live through were negative. Beginnings of wars, Chernobyl, 9/11, major protests, Covid-19. However, I choose to remember good things as well. Every person has at least a few personal holidays. Birthdays are important. I do my best to remember them and social media helps.

My own, for example, I remember like it was yesterday 🤣