I’m still in a bit of a movie high after watching The Force Awakens. My brain is scrambled by thoughts and ideas about where the next movie(s) will end up going. The comic books that I suddenly feel like I should jump back into after spending much of the year in silent protest at them rebooting the old continuity.
So given the jumbled state of my brain, and the fact that Christmas is literally right around the corner, I figured it was alright to turn this one into more of a Grab Bag than anything else.
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In dealing with all the emojis and reflecting on everyone’s abundant use of shorthand for virtually everything else, I am convinced that we’ve become so advanced in our communication skills that we’ve completed the circle started by the Egyptians so very long ago. They used hieroglyphics to tell their stories, and now we’ve increasingly decided to do the very same.
And this isn’t a commentary from a “you kids, get off my lawn” type thing, but more of a curious nature: if we were to look a few hundred years in the future will they wonder why we seemed to abandon our normal written language?
Or will they be able to read what we have set down at all?
Someone needs to develop that Rosetta Stone for the 21st Century quick!
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Language is a weird and dangerous and sticky and annoying and about a million other things. It should be a living and breathing thing were words should be allowed to evolve from older meanings and new words get let into the lexicon.
But if I have to read one more internet meme where someone is telling me that “irregardless” is not a word and doesn’t mean what you think it means… I might just lose it.
Look, it is all fine and good that you want to hold those old traditions close, but if we were to let “irregardless” into the Real Word Club it wouldn’t be the end of western civilization. There are plenty of words in English language that follow weird rules or seem to not make sense:
Underwhelmed
Inflammable
Literally
Let’s allow somethings to happen and stop telling me how to use or not use the words.
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Inspired by one of the million car commercials where the guy gets a new car as a gift and then keeps reliving the same day…
If you could Groundhog Day one day over and over which day in your life would you pick? (I just know I’m not going to go driving everyday… that novelty will wear off soon enough).
What’s funny is that I think the day to choose for this is a day where you have very little pre-planned. It would allow flexibility to actually be able to do anything you wanted on that day.
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And then to (apparently) further steal from my Guild-Mate’s question books:
If you could relive one day, but the changes you made would ripple back through the present, what day would you pick?
This gets a lot into the whole What If questions that we all deal with and that I’ve written about before. And it could be a very small thing as opposed to some earth-shattering ideal or issue which came up. Sometimes thing/days/changes hinge on the barest of moments… and sometimes we are wrong about what those moments would be in the first place.
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Went to a friend’s 40th birthday party over the weekend. Realized how strange and wonderful that I still have so many connections and friendships with people from middle school and high school. These are the people who know most (if not all of my baggage), who are a part of my stories and vice versa, and sometimes I think when we are able to get together and catch up, all the years disappear and we’re 14 again sitting in someone’s basement arguing about some video game or playing D&D or talking comics or whatever.
And sometimes I think those are the best trips to the past we can ask for.
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John McGuire is the author of the supernatural thriller The Dark That Follows, the steampunk comic The Gilded Age, and the novella There’s Something About Mac through the Amazon Kindle Worlds program.
His second novel, Hollow Empire, is now complete. The first episode is now FREE!
He also has a short story in the Beyond the Gate anthology, which is free on most platforms!
And has two shorts in the Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows anthology! Check it out!
He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com.
Right with you on which day to relive – something that doesn’t tie me down and allows me free choice. If I could change a day that made ripples, I’d only change one that made small, not world history, ripples, like I’d believe in myself and start writing earlier.
And I’m on the same movie high!
“Start writing earlier” is the kind of ripple I can get behind!