dailyprompt

Criticize By Creating.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
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If we truly look at we humans have achieved over the centuries, what we have created, it has been a reflection of how we wish to improve things.

A sculptor looks at stone and wishes to make it in a different image, an artist finds a way to decorate a blank canvas, a writer empowers imagination through words on blank pages – and we all decorate time. In fact, we regularly graffiti the tyrannical walls of time with our creativity.

We criticize by creating, our every invention a way an attempt to improve upon what already exists – or we would not create it at all.

Too often we get into a spiral of criticizing things without actually making things better, like over-exuberant sculptors working on sandstone with a sledgehammer, when maybe what we should be doing is simply building something different.

Sadly, it is not as easy these days to build great things- large companies seem to have sucked all the air out of the room in many contexts – but it doesn’t stop us from creating the small things, the little things that make the big things, the words that make the sentences that make the paragraphs.

I often have to remind myself of Michelangelo’s words: Criticize by creating.

Unwinding After A Day: Mostly Writing.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
How do you unwind after a demanding day?
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What an odd writing prompt for me on a Sunday, which is when I unwind for the week. Sort of. Kind of. Maybe.

After a demanding day, there’s a few different things I do.

I go find something else to occupy my mind. It could be staring off as the sun sets, leaving the human presences in the valley of my view as insistent dots of light. Some move, some stay still. I’ll pick one and try to understand why that dot of light exists. It’s like staring at the stars which I cannot see because humans are littering the landscape with their candescence.

I might play some Starcraft, though some of the random teammates might have me wanting to cut off an ear and move to the South of France.

Most of the time, though, I write – not for publication. There’s an exercise called free writing where you start with something and just run with it, following trains of thought. I try to compose my internal visual language to a symphony of letters and punctuation. I’m one of the apparently rare people whose internal dialog isn’t like other people – I do not think in words, I think in what I can best describe as moving images that I communicate through the common labels of words and metaphors.

When I started free writing in the late 1980s, it was a conscious act and it was hard. I would stare off into the nothingness around me and try to find ways to communicate what I knew. Now, it has become second nature through what seemed at the time heroic effort.

It’s not for everyone. It keeps me centered. During periods when I don’t do it, I can appear garbled in my head to others because I haven’t figured out how to express things. Most times, the things I express never see the light of day, only to become tools or parts for writing other things.

I smile when I hit ‘select all’ and delete, or rip out the page and crumple it up. It’s an odd thing I don’t expect people to understand, but it works for me.

How I use social media.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
How do you use social media?
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It’s not often that I respond to WordPress.com writing prompts. “How do you use social media?” popped up, and using the WordPress.com reader I started looking through the responses.

That’s the key thing for me when it comes to social media – looking for things of worth, people with good ideas to discuss, etc. It’s about finding pieces of a puzzle that doesn’t have a picture on the box to refer to.

Scrolling through the responses, there are the few that mention making money, like the old advertisements in the back of 80s magazines with the get rich schemes. The way to make money off social media is telling people how to make money off social media. The way to make money off a product or service is to have a good product or service and not shoot one’s self in the foot when marketing it.

I don’t use social media to make money. I don’t use social media to be popular. What I do use social media to do is explore other perspectives, but in an age where everyone and their mother is training artificial intelligence, I am leery of social media sites. Even WordPress.com has been compromised in that regard, though you can take action and not be a part of it.

Unknowingly, many people are painting the fence of generative AI, giving the large companies building and training generative artificial intelligences the very paint and brushes that they need to sell back to them. It confounds me how many people on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are going out of their way to train artificial intelligences.

This is why I have gone to Mastodon. The Fediverse offers me some protection in privacy. I post links to social media accounts to stuff I write, but I only really interact on the Fediverse, where I feel more secure and am less likely to paint generative AI’s fences.