Tag: dailyprompt

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

~ Veselin ~ 9 Comments

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

I believe information exists without observers. A human noticed that we can burn fossil fuel to drive ourselves around instead of riding horses at some point. By that time, cars might’ve already existed for billions of years in galaxies far, far away. We just didn’t know about them. Uninventing cars wouldn’t make them go away, it will only postpone their appearance. They will reappear because they can satisfy the demand for fast transportation.

So removing inventions sounds pointless to me. Certain human behaviours or use of the inventions – sure! I’d make people commute by walking or using bicycles, for example, but I wouldn’t uninvent cars. Cars have legitimate use cases.

Same with other things like nuclear weapons or multi cookers. All of that can be described with numbers, and all numbers already exist.

Do you play in your daily life?

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
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I do some football with the kids in warm months. I also play some bullet chess. I used to play more but kind of gave up my favorite 5-minute blitz games after my second kid was born in 2018. Don’t miss it, TBH. 1-minute chess is sufficiently good and the game ends before it becomes boring. I have no defined time but I sometimes alternate chess with reading after everyone is in bed.

I avoid playing addictive video games. I’ve been addicted to mobile or computer games several times in my life and do not enjoy it. For example, I got addicted to the Bulgarian MMORPG Imperia Online around 2005. Woke up at 4am every night to manage my armies. This pissed off my wife so much that she gave me the talk. I stopped immediately and it was empowering, gave me the tools to interrupt emerging game addictions on demand, which I used a couple of times in the later years.

In 2011, at a company meetup, I met two of the authors of Triple Town, a highly addictive mobile game. They explained how gamification works and how the drops are optimized for producing small amounts of dopamine in your brain to hook you up. I didn’t believe at first and tried their game. Surprise, surprise. I got addicted to it and had to use my painful tooling to stop it. So, whenever I feel the need to play a new game, I try to find puzzle-like games rather than games where you collect items, merge groups of items, or raise stats.

The last game I tried to play was Puzzle Star Battle. It is very difficult, though, I couldn’t solve a single 10x10x2 puzzle.

My own sports team

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
If you started a sports team, what would the colors and mascot be?
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Given my current limited interest in sports, I would do a hiking club. White and green.

My grandmother was a founding member of the tourist club Sarnena Gora, Stara Zagora (in the mid-50s) and remained a member until she passed. I associate these colors with her former club. I was also a member but lost my membership card several decades ago. Of course, there’s no point in establishing a club like that – tourist clubs already exist and carry over 100 years of tradition.

The Perfect Space for Reading

~ Veselin ~ 7 Comments
Daily writing prompt
You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?
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The perfect space for reading for me is my bed. I can read some and fall asleep. Most books make me sleepy, and the ones that keep me awake make me happy. It’s a win-win.

As for writing, I’m not sure. Last time I wrote a book was before Internet was a thing. I’ve tried writing some short stories after but, let’s say, I couldn’t figure out the right space. Maybe I need something appropriate, like a medieval castle with a Rapunzel tower.

Currently reading Infinity Gate, an unusual sci-fi that has good and bad moments. I hope it gets a separate blog post.

Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?
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So good that I answered the reverse writing prompt 10 months ago! Biggest challenge over the next months? Nailed it!

The hard answer is – dealing with uncertainty without dwelling on the endless negative outcomes. I need my imagination to be helpful.

To translate this unnecessarily complicated sentence that contains the word “dwelling” (who uses dwelling?), imagining versions of the future is a tricky beast. We can plan for it, we can dream about it, but we can’t really know what’s going to happen. So I do my best to not picture future versions of myself and to avoid the Fortune Telling Thinking Error but I try to set some personal goals and chase them.

Apart from my fortune telling negative predictions, I set myself a bunch of personal goals about 1 year ago (November to January):

  • 10k steps on average for a year (a New Year resolution)
  • Use Jetpack Mobile for reading (since November 2022)
  • Blog daily (since mid-January)
  • Visit Cherni Vrah (from 2022)

I plan to write a summary about these goals in January but I’m quite happy with myself. My goals were not ambitious enough.