Terraces made of bricks and rebars? Does the blue paint keep the terraces from falling? How? Why?
What’s something most people don’t understand
Tag: dailyprompt
Superstitions
I grew up in communist Bulgaria. When I was ten, the Wall fell, and the floodgates of civilization opened—bringing a tsunami of dubious beliefs with them. We got the best of it: horoscopes, psychics, poltergeists, fortune tellers, obscure religions, Eastern spirituality, hippies, numerology, the Knights Templar, UFOs, Kashpirovski—you name it, we got it blasting on us from the TV screen and the newspaper stands. Even the army believed and started digging a hole, guided by a psychic, who promised they’ll find an alien aircraft.
I was no stranger to all that stuff. I read books on horoscopes and checked mine daily. I hoped aliens and poltergeists were real. But one by one, those beliefs faded away. The aliens never landed and I could read anyone’s horoscope and it would feel as accurate as mine. Today, I see these all as thinking errors, used by clever people to farm wealth.
Am I 100% free of superstition? Maybe not but pretty close. Show me proof that any of this works, and I’ll gladly change my mind.
Fluff
Probably not a cat but I mostly take photos of cats and birds, and our very persistent Jay rarely visits these days.
Let’s say, the above photo represents me when it’s 10pm and is my reading time.
What is one question you hate to be asked?
For me, the most hated question is any opener that leads to someone asking for money. For example:
“Do you have a watch?”
“It’s three fifty.”
“Lots of good things will happen to you—I can see it. Let me read your palm.”
Whenever strangers ask questions like that, I instinctively pick up my pace and don’t respond. For some reason, the most common one I hear is about the time—or, more specifically, whether I have a watch.
It’s trickier when people ask for directions. That one still fools me sometimes.
“Hey, how do I get to the National Theater?”
“Right this way,” I say, pointing in the right direction.
“Do you want a flower for health?”
I don’t mind when people ask for change—it’s their job. But using trivial questions as an opener makes me a worse person because I might end up walking past someone who genuinely needs help.
Since I aim for 10,000 steps a day, I have plenty of encounters with strangers—maybe once or twice a week. Most of the time, it’s just people struggling to find something that’s supposed to be there according to Google Maps but isn’t.
Which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why?
I miss the idea of IRC.
IRC is a technology that gives us a decentralized networks of chat servers, allowing people to meet like-minded strangers. It used to be (maybe) the most popular way to chat online before ICQ and Skype changed everything. I spent years of my life there as a teenager and young adult.
Unlike email, IRC didn’t age well. The whole thing started falling apart due to limitations of how big channels could be while remaining usable. Also, spam, hacks, profanity, botnets, and ToS violations invaded. IRC is still alive but with a low number of daily active users.
We now have Discord and Slack but they suffer one little flaw. They’re for-profit companies.
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