Earlier this year for Bloganuary I talked about how I see July as basically the epitome of Summer. Adding onto this with today’s writing prompt, my favorite holiday is probably July 4th, or Independence Day, here in the States. However, it’s only my favorite holiday because of the timing and not 100% for what it represents, because that has been used for some measure of political manipulation.
Anyways, in more detail, it is my favorite holiday because it’s hot outside, you can stay out late, there are fireworks (when used responsibly and respectfully), and we do lots of grilling and water balloon fights. My family has an absolute blast around this time every year.
The last time I used a tent was several years ago. My parents had to travel out of state for a work conference, and they needed someone to stay on the farm to care for the horses. Rather than drive down from home every day for a week or staying in my parents house, I decided to camp out in the tiny little “forest” behind their house. My brother decided to join me as well and set up his own tent a little off from my own.
We camped out for a week, cooked food over a small fire, and bathed in an unused 500 gallon plastic watering trough that I fixed up. (A tank heater failed to shut off correctly over the winter and melted a hole through the bottom.)
I’ve always been a night owl, no matter how much I’ve adjusted to working daytime hours. I’ll take a nap after work or just be up late on the weekend and I’ll hit a period where I feel incredibly productive or focused, and part of that is because of the way I perceive the world. Night time and very early in the morning is peaceful and quiet. The world is still. Nobody is around to bother you. No extra effort to block out the distractions.
With the creation of emojis, humanity has come full circle and returned to its ancient roots of communication, and we have an amazingly well developed understanding of how to communicate via language. Yet emojis, unlike ancient cave drawings and modern spoken languages, can offer extremely complex messaging that people’s minds can rapidly digest.
And we use them for jokes and to troll our friends.
Or maybe that’s just me and my friends, I don’t know. I use a very small selection of built-in “emojis” on our phones. Typically just the standard smileys or whatever is default for Messenger reactions, plus the Flex emoji because my Magic group uses it a lot.
Where I differ in all of this is on Discord because I can use a much wider variety, and they’re also much easier to customize and design. In fact, here’s a sample!
My latest favorite is the last one in the Favorites section. The evil plan smile has been used a lot in the last couple weeks.
So many to choose from and this is only a very small amount that is available to use to express ourselves.
Anyone who has been following me on my journey of getting back into the swing of a consistent writing cadence might already know a few things I like talking about.
Video games and related media are a big thing for me. I could talk about strategies and tips/tricks or even just the history of games all day. With the exceptions of Racing and Fighting genres, I’m familiar enough with most of the rest to talk about (or at least understand) a huge variety of games. On console vs PC, how are they played, niches and tropes of the stories, design and functionality of game mechanics, the subjects run deep.
I’ve also spent roughly the last decade immersing myself into Magic: The Gathering, and I love talking about almost all the same subjects mentioned above because they’re just that similar! It makes it easy to jump from one to the other. There are almost 27,000 unique cards in the game and millions of people who play. This leads to a massive variety in deck designs across multiple formats as well as so many different play styles. I will add that I don’t play competitively and so I never really pay attention to that aspect of the overarching global Magic community. I just love playing the game and reading up on the stories/history of the characters and the worlds they come from.
I’d say those are the two biggest topics I like to discuss. I’m big into anime and manga as well, but I just don’t discuss it with many people or very often. Same goes for books and movies/TV. Occasionally a conversation drifts towards one of these topics and I can just go off on fun little tangents.
So, if you like the same topics/subjects as I do, maybe we can spark up a conversation about it someday.
When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?
I’m seeing a trend in the prompts lately, and you might think it would have gotten easier to answer them after being introspective of my life to cover the variations on risks and regrets. Well, it’s not any easier today than it was the last couple of times.
On the subject of “risks” I would hazard to guess most people will have a similar understanding or underlying assumption, and that is risks can have consequences. Sure, there are usually positive outcomes in the form of rewards, too, but we don’t think of the consequential outcomes as being a simple negative with zero detrimental impact toward ourselves. More often it is that consequences are hurtful and/or scary.
With all that in mind, I honestly can’t recall the last or most recent time I took a risk that held a potential consequence that could be detrimental to my life or livelihood. So, the latest risk? It was probably last year when I finally took my motorcycle out after getting it running again. Every time I go out on my bike I have to remain vigilant because I’m just a squishy sack of meat, blood, and bone that would lose in a fight against a four-wheeled vehicle. I don’t want to be a meat crayon, so I try to minimize the risks there by wearing protective gear.
Anyways, it worked out fine, no accidents or hospital visits, and I’ll very likely be taking my bike out again when the weather finishes warming up around here.
I’m not great with money, but I’m not BAD with money either, I’ve just chosen priorities that don’t allow me to live an excruciatingly frugal and bland life. I like to have fun and enjoy my (occasionally expensive) hobbies. Sometimes, though, life throws something at you that you can’t pass up.
Aside from the odd lottery ticket here or there when the jackpots are enormous, I don’t typically gamble. No video lottery or keno, no bingo, no casinos, etc. The risks involved in gambling just aren’t worth it. I have my retirement savings through work that are technically stocks/funds, but I consider the stock market to be gambling. Unless you have a shit ton of money to spread around and still live a comfortable life, it’s not a viable source of income because there is too great a chance of losing it all. So, for a long time now I’ve never really put much time or money into the stock market. Until the GameStop craze happened a few years ago.
I missed the window in January of 2021 to get in cheap right before the huge spike in the stock price for GameStop and some of the others that were in the same boat, but I kept watch and found an opportunity to jump in somewhere in the middle. Initially I was going to just be a spectator, but then I got my income tax refund.
Now, I didn’t jump all in with my refund money. I used some of it to chip at some debts and only used a relatively small amount toward the stocks. I invested enough that, should I catch another spike, I could see a decent gain and sell. Then I waited. June rolled around and the spike hit well enough that I decided to not gamble any further and sell. I made enough money in that short term gain to basically equal one of my paychecks at the time. I knew enough about capital gains to know that I would have to declare this on my taxes the following year, and rather than have to worry about it later I just made a payment directly to the IRS for what I believed to be the tax on short term capital gains on the small amount I had “won” from this gamble, and then I was truly done.
It wasn’t a huge risk because I could still financially survive and not worry about incurring losses, but I obviously don’t regret it because I made a little extra money. Not life changing money, but money I didn’t have before. That’s all that mattered.
Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?
I have spent a good chunk of the day ruminating over this prompt, letting it sit in the back of my head while I work and occasionally returning to it to see if any new thoughts come to mind. My dilemma, I’ve decided, is that I have reached a point in my life where the things I don’t take action on I don’t regret. There are plenty of choices I’ve made in my past that have fit the bill but I no longer worry about them because I’ve deemed them as “expired”. Of course, I should clarify, I am referring to important things that no longer matter in the grand scheme of things, or that after a long enough time I realize it was probably for the best anyway.
So instead I’m going to mention something a little more silly.
Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast have been running their Magic: The Gathering releases HARD for the last several years. Some of the products they’ve introduced, specifically their Secret Lair products, have had mixed reception. Some are really good and others lackluster. I’ve only ever purchased one of them because I missed out on the initial release of a particular card (“Atraxa, Praetors’ Voice”, the one I totally didn’t 3D print a figure of to paint.) There have been others that I look back on and wish I had just sucked it up and pulled the trigger on buying. Not many, but there have been some. Honestly, though, it’s just more money spent and I have to rationalize whether it would have really been worth spending on to get cards I may never have played. That’s how I’m getting around the FOMO.
Additionally, the reverse is true for video games. There have been games I bought because of that FOMO that I ended up not playing much. I don’t really regret the purchases, but I definitely could have done something different. Like not buying a game that my friend was all hyped about only to end up barely playing with them at all and moving on to the next big thing.
FOMO sucks. Inaction that leads to regret also sucks. Such is life.
For a long time I used to be nervous about a lot of things when I had no idea of the outcome. Uncertainty can be brutal on the nerves for the naturally anxious.
At some point in the last five years or so I got to a point where I couldn’t afford to waste the time or energy worrying over things outside of my control and to just let things happen as they will (not in a “Jesus take the wheel” kind of way) while focusing on the things I can directly change or control.
Nowadays, the things that make me nervous are time-related. Not the things that will inevitably happen, but the time I spend on various things or how I plan and coordinate activities around each other. If someone sets a deadline or a meeting time then I do what I can to hit those marks, but I always feel nervous that I’m not going to make it on time. This is also affected by my own internal struggle to procrastinate, which is a terrible habit, but sometimes the pressure helps. This is what happened to me with that NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. I started on time and did some work throughout the first couple days, but then work got in the way by chewing through my mental energy capacity to put in the effort until the last hour or so before the submission deadline. Something similar happened with NaNoWriMo last year, but it was mostly self-imposed because I did not actually sign up. I just tried to do it and then got nervous when I wasn’t hitting my word count goals even when I was scheduling time for myself to work. I just didn’t have enough energy at the end of the day and that compounded the nerves a bit.
I’m sure there are other things that make me nervous if I think harder about it but scheduling times for things in your life can be a real bitch and has the greatest impact so far.
Everyone has their own ways of doing things, but there are only so many options. This means that there is very likely to be a way to unwind that I mention below that resonates with someone.
I guess for me it all depends on what kind of demanding day I had that determines what I feel I need to do to properly unwind. Was the day emotionally/mentally demanding, or physically demanding? What level did it get to, somewhere between fairly and extremely demanding, or maybe less?
I’m not the type to go grab a drink at the end of a tough day, but it’s not completely off the table. It just depends on the circumstances. Otherwise, the vast majority of the time I’ve spent unwinding over the years has been the same.
The days that are mentally draining are the days I choose to check out from reality to some degree. Read a book, binge a few episodes of a show, play some chill farming sim games or something of the like. I’ll probably be laying in bed already for some of these just because then if I start to doze off I’m already where I want to be for the inevitable energy crash.
If the day was physically demanding then I probably am doing two things immediately upon getting home. Eating and showering, but not necessarily in that order. Typically on these days I still have plenty of energy somehow, so I’m able to enjoy more of my hobbies. I know it might sound strange, but physically taxing activities don’t drain me the way mentally taxing activities can. Unless it was a REALLY physically demanding day like the first couple weeks of when I worked the overnight shift at Big Red Circles. Then it’s eat, shower, and pass out in bed. No energy crash like the mentally draining days, my body is just ready for sleep.
Fairly straightforward approach to unwinding, I think.
The Dragon's Grove 