Writing Prompt

He stared wordlessly at the googles in my outstretched hand. “You will need them” —” Why?” That is the only response I get before he turns around and runs toward the storm.

Down by the river, next to ab big rock, there grows old sagebrush. His branches reach towards the sun.

A dark fog is rising from the river. It is fast-moving and covers a lot of the river border already. In front of it, he sees many critters fleeing the fog. And this looks like a good option for him as well now. He does not want to be eaten by a dark fog today.

Not every idea needs to be monetized.

The boy had an uncouth aura – ready to start yelling and hollering at any moment.

He’s sitting at the table, listlessly pushing his shrimp from one side to the other. Missing the comradeliness of a nice meal with friends.

Today’s word Joyrider – reminds me of the first-ever Album I’ve received as a child, a cassette from Roxette. Joyride was not my favorite song of it, but I still remember listening to the song many times and trying to make sense of the lyrics ;-)

Will robots be humanity’s new servants in the future?

I like the nicknames concept – to freely choose a name for yourself and define your own identity.

The person is covered with bruised and lacerations, most of them fresh. In a low voice, he whispers, “beware the porks.” And drops over, Hans is not sure if he died or is just unconscious – but it does not matter at this point as his chances to survive his injuries is rather small.

Amazed, I star the dark grey blob under my kitchen table – and it stars back. It slowly creeps in my direction and touches my outstretched hand. It is cool to the touch, feels like metal but not any metal I saw; it could be zirconium, but I’m not sure. What is more impressive is that it is alive!

It looks like there is an issue with my daily writing prompt automation mechanism. It stopped working the other day, and I just looked at it now and noticed that repeating the calendar event just lost the Alert, which should open the AppleScript. I have no idea how this could happen.

The wind is howling and drives the rain into my face. I hurry along the dark road past a delicatessens store. I would love to look at the window and wonder how everything smells, but there is no time today, and with every additional minute, I get wetter.

With the current weather, I would love to hole up and drink hot chocolate.

Some days later, Hans is walking down the street towards the town center when he hears an angry outcry. Walking faster, he soon reaches the source. A crowd has gathered, only leafing a small space in the middle where a person huddles on the floor.

I’ve never liked to use dogears to mark the position in the books I read.

Today was outrageous – rain and wind all day, and all the snow is gone.

Back in his workroom Hans starts thinking on an old bike. He found it on an earlier journey. But so far was unable to find new tires for it. But at least he found some brake cables now and can start fixing the brakes. Having a bike would greatly expand his scavenging operations.

The last task is to bring the popguns he found in the abandoned city to the family living down by the river – and hopefully earn a small lunch in return. They have four little kids, and not the best situation to be in these days. They found a girl and her younger brother abandoned by their parents and decided to take them with them. And have two girls off their own. He’s sure they will be grateful for the new toys.

“Sorry, I cannot give you more than four rabbits for these items,” says the trader from the corner store. “Admittedly, these are in excellent condition, but overing four is already more than I would over anyone else!” Hans reluctantly accepts the trade, he would have wished for more, but he should be able to trade three for some other needed materials.

Hans’s new bunkmate is a strange fellow! He met him two days ago and offered him some space in his hovel. He’s not yet sure if it was the right decision, but you need to take some risk nowadays not to be alone. At least he’s a pretty good guitar player – so free music each evening.

Plan your spending carefully so that your viaticum covers the whole month – then you don’t need to come back in the middle of the month to ask for more!

Another one of these strange and, I suspect, old words. I think nowadays you would use allowance instead. But I’ve learned something more at least :-D

Timber Framing needs a lot of pegs to fasten your project together.

Unhappy, he looks at the label of the smashed toy he just unpacked. It is totally broken. Unfortunately, the item was nonreturnable.

I think I will need to rework my daily prompt word generator. It generates some bizarre words for me Oo.

We punctilious filled each gap between the igloo’s snow block to make it nice and sturdy.

I love the new widget feature in iOS 14. It should have been there a lot sooner.

Sometimes I need to suppress my smarty-pants side ;-) But at times, I don’t want to.

Protohistorians have an exciting job – puzzling out about a culture without having any written documents from them. Just be researching the output of other culture’s history research.

Looking out of the window: Big snowflakes are falling from the sky. The snow brings a tactful mood to the day, hiding the ugliness of the world. I love these moments of silently falling snow.

The beat started slow and got steadily louder and faster. Now everybody is enraptured by it and dancing to the beat. The light is flashing in sync, and the party night will never be over.

I leave my books usually unannotated as I don’t appreciate writing in books.

At home, Hans’s first action is to take a shower – cold only, washing all the dirt and grime of his journey away. It was quite a change for him from long steaming showers to short cold ones. But after some time, you get used to it, and it is still better than no shower at all.

Having searched all of the buildings, Hans prepares to travel back home. This journey was a success when not in the way he planned it initially. At least Hans found some items to sell or barter with. He soon will need to start another journey to find the answers he is seeking.

There were also some books for sophisticated people – nothing of value today; although the images were lovely to look at, the books were too heavy to haul back.

The world looks a lot more cheerful when everything is covered in snow.

Life is a lot more relaxing I you try not to continually overreact to all the bad news happening in the world.

Under the bathmat, in the first house of the village, Hans finds gold. A loose floorboard is hiding a bottle of rum and a box of ammunition. He has no use for both, but they will fetch quite a lot on the market back home.

The dancers are moving with the rhythm of the music. I stand next to it, too timid to join in, but my feet start tapping with the rhythm anyway. The beat gets faster, my feet tap stronger, and my arm and hand join as well. There is a moment I nearly stand up and join. But it is over as soon as it was there, and I keep observing.

He tries to move on to other thoughts as he does not want to reopen old wounds – life now is hard enough nowadays – and pondering further on it will not change the past. Only some more steps until he reaches the edge of the village.

Walking past the rock, he starts, once again, pondering about his deceased partner.

He got seriously ill shortly after the event, and without any modern medicine, he had no chance of survival. In the end, Hans realized that his partner must have had tuberculosis and he was quite lucky not also to have gotten it himself.

I’m not too fond of parties where a lot of people mingle with loud music.

Walking past a broken section of rock, Hans sees some freshly broken off rock. It looks like the stone is faulting in this area. Luckily it is only a short part of his way, and he is nearly down in the valley.

I just learned that friseurs is also an English word, although an old one. It is from the mid 18th century: French and means hairdresser — the same as in Swiss-German.

Having completed the investigation of the multistory ruin, Hans starts walking again. His next goal is the little village at the bottom of the hill. He estimates around one day of walking to reach the bottom of the valley. Hopefully, it contains some useful loot so that his expedition was not entirely in vain.

I never diddle as in cheating when writing a test.

There are also some fountain pens and some decayed paper. It reminds Hans of the copyist he shared a hovel for a short while. He is wondering where she now is. He has fond memories of that time – it was the first time he found some form of peace and safety after the change.

When watching This Old Tony on Youtube, I expect him to use driftpins once in a while.

While inspecting the tower, Hans did not find anything of note. It contained mostly refuse and once genial children robots but useless in today’s world – not for the lack of children enjoying toys – more because the batteries needed for them are no longer working.

Having even letterspacing in your fonts helps a lot with readability.

He stood at the corner in the city and tried to distribute his pamphlets – I think about the end of the world. Not many people were paying attention to him. And he looked more sad than crazy. So I started talking to him.

The end of the year is the time to do you’re retrospections. I will need to do mine as well. It was a year with a lot of change for me.

After a day’s walk, Hans has reached the destroyed tower. Not much of it is still standing. It is too late to investigate the building today, so he starts creating his camp for the night.

Soon a fire is burning, and he warms up the leftovers of the rabbit he hunted – a treat it was a long time since he last caught one. They are seldom nowadays, and he is not the best hunter.

The experts were working on finding out how the retroreflectors could have caused the event. But they never found a suitable answer until the end. At some point, nobody was paying them anymore, so they stopped working. As a result, nobody knows why the light reflection started the process, only that it was most certainly the beginning of the change.

Since early morning he heard music in his head. Some are slow others have fast tempi. He misses music a lot; the only way to experience music nowadays is to have someone play it to you live or create it yourself.

In the before times, he was responsible for creating individualized software solutions for his many clients. But then everything changed, slowly at first but gaining momentum with every passing hour. Only a few realized the impact of this change, so most tried to live on oblivious, that life as they know it was over.

Hans was in neither group of people; at some time, he realized that something has changed and started to react. Too late to keep his easy life but not too late to pay with his live.

If he had an internal combusting driven car Hans could get to his destination way faster and would not need to walk – but where is the sense in this. The journey is the destination, like life.

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Ownership, especially landownership, is an interesting concept. How did we define to whom the land initially belonged? One moment there is land belonging to nobody, and then somebody comes and decides it belongs to him now.

He was walking for days without pausing. His body is tired. He is weary of this journey and hopes for an interruption – anything to give cause to make a break – but nothing is happening.

It is morning, and he awoke half an hour ago with an ugly headache. But today, he will finally reach his destination. So he is still content with the day and eats his meager breakfast.

The fog has lifted; Hans looks over the rolling hills. On the horizon, he sees the mountains – his ultimate journey’s goal – but today, he won’t reach them perhaps tomorrow. He shoulders his pack and starts walking down the crest.