Category Archives: Writing

February Word Challenge, Day 8

By lytspeed Posted in February Word Challenge, Prompts Leave a reply

(If you’re wondering what this is about, read this.)

My five random words for today’s exercise are toast, giant, cliff, caper, senator.

Chosen word for free association: cliff
fiscal, sheer, wall, tall, fall, winter is coming

Exercise:
It seems to me that something shifted in 2016. I posted on Facebook in June that it felt like the world was at a tipping point, and that the security of everyday men and women around the world was rattled. It certainly was a strange year, with Brexit and Trump and numerous celebrity deaths flooding the series of tubes that is the internet.

When I wrote that post in June, I think I may have been feeling the looming Zeitgeist; if I had to identify exactly where the tip happened, I would probably have to say it took place on election night. That night, it felt like the world closed itself up, like a roly poly bug, individual nations and people retreating behind their armor and walls, even as talk of even bigger walls burned up the ‘net.

In June, I wrote that if there was ever a time for us to exercise compassion, it is now. I still firmly believe that is the way through our current global debacle.

February Word Challenge, Day 7

By lytspeed Posted in February Word Challenge, Prompts Leave a reply

(If you’re wondering what this is about, read this.)

My five random words for today’s exercise are toast, news, pigeon, varnish, hour.

Chosen word for free association: hour
time, day, second, impatience, missing someone

Exercise:
Ah, to be able to compress large quantities of time. To make a day, week, or month pass in an hour, skipping the down time like a DVR skips commercials. Timeshifting life; when we’ve evolved into transhumans, will we be able to set certain common tasks on autopilot, like a self-driving car, freeing up our brains for more cerebral pursuits? Will we be able to timeshift our lives and filter out the detritus, keeping only the significant portions in storage?

Will we be able to turn off our brains and skate through long periods of missing someone without the agony, allowing our cybernetic circuits to handle our daily life? And if we do, what does that do to our human experience?

February Word Challenge, Day 6

By lytspeed Posted in February Word Challenge, Prompts Leave a reply

(If you’re wondering what this is about, read this.)

My five random words for today’s exercise are order, tile, ladder, sail, shampoo.

Chosen word for free association: sail
jib, spinnaker, solar sail, IKAROS, alpha centauri, Breakthrough Starshot

Exercise:
Twenty years from Proxima Centauri, a swarm of tiny, sail-driven spacecraft break orbit around a used up Earth, riding beams of light, scouting new homes for reckless, feckless humans. EllE, the AI responsible for keeping the laser pulses trained on the sails, recalibrates the aim dozens of times per second, unable to grasp the irony and futility of her actions as missiles rise from their silos around the globe.

February Word Challenge, Day 5

By lytspeed Posted in February Word Challenge, Prompts Leave a reply

(If you’re wondering what this is about, read this.)

My five random words for today’s exercise are composer, coronation, prank, brooch, fax.

Chosen word for free association: fax
alternative, archaic

Exercise:
Watchdogs have figured out how the new Trump administration is circumventing White House cell phone security rules. Conway says they are using “alternative fax.”

(I’m tweeting that one separately, I think.)

February Word Challenge, Day 4

By lytspeed Posted in February Word Challenge, Prompts Leave a reply

My five random words for today’s exercise are frog, shirt, egg, candle, tank.

Chosen word for free association: tank 
The Tank, Rangely, sound

Exercise:
Reverb. Sound, circling and climbing. Sussurations swirl in a space made for slaking the thirst of steam-powered iron dragons from last century, now repurposed to send messages in song.

(This post is a reference to The Tank, near Rangely, Colorado.)