M Thomas Apple Author Page

Science fiction, actual science, history, and personal ranting about life, the universe, and everything

Booooooring

February 22, 2024
MThomas

What bores you?

What doesn’t?

OK, I guess I’ll play along…

  • Boring people
  • People who talk a lot but say very little
  • Morning “news”
  • Talk shows
  • Game shows
  • Most TV, to be quite honest
  • Pop music. Of any era.
  • Dancing
  • Politicians
  • Business people
  • Pointless paperwork
  • Activities that require no thought or skill
  • Card games (seriously…sorry, I just don’t get the attraction)
  • Long lists about boring things (hey!)

Daily writing = this is necessary

February 21, 2024
MThomas

Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite drink?

Coffee. Hot and keep it coming.

This is the prompt that never ends…

February 13, 2024
MThomas

Daily writing prompt
What were your parents doing at your age?

“I’ll take ‘Barely Surviving’ for $100, Alec.”

Easy question. Easy answer.

February 7, 2024
MThomas

Daily writing prompt
Do you need a break? From what?

LIfe.

I need a break from life.

Just let me hide in a cabin in the mountains with coffee and WIFI and a laptop for writing.

That’s it.

A writing prompt that almost answers itself

February 4, 2024
MThomas

How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

I would say “yes.”

How?

Failure influences my perspective on life.

Successes influence my perspective on life.

Deaths influence my perspective on life.

Births influence my perspective on life.

Travel influences my perspective on life.

I would list the above five as “significant events” in life. But “the passage of time” is a little more vague.

Four years doesn’t seem like a long time to me now, but it sure did when I was 18.

Even six years doesn’t seem all that long now. But to my daughter who graduates from elementary school this March, six years is half her life.

My perspective on this question is that it’s the people in my life that have changed my perspective.

Even my daughter gets this. She wants to visit Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the US again because, as she put it, “a little piece of me is still there.”

But that’s just her perspective. Or is it?

From C64 to Mac Plus – All Hail the ’80s PC Geeks!

February 1, 2024
MThomas

Daily writing prompt
Write about your first computer.

My father got a Commodore 64 (“C64”) in the early ’80s and I learned how to type on it. Not sure exactly when, but at some point in probably 1986 or 1987 I had saved up enough to get one of my own.

Green monitor. No color. The only computer wherein the disc drive would argue with the CPU (bc the disc drive also had a CPU of sorts). 5 1/4″ floppies. Constantly switching discs in and out to load programs.

I created music (a maximum of four different sounds at a time). Learned BASIC and “machine language” and created very simple programs by copying endless pages of code from a magazine my father subscribed to (he also joined Commodore Users Group, or CUG, and got software to teach us how to type, how to write prose, and how to create family newsletters, all of which led me to eventually run my college newspaper in the early ’90s).

I played endless hours of Bard’s Tale, “Summer/Winter/World Olympic Games” (so old that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page for this series), “Sid Meier’s Pirates!,” and Strat-o-Matic baseball games (I had played the 1983 season with my father on paper, then got the 1985 season and input all the data by hand into the C64 program).

Having used my mom’s (and grandfather’s) manual typewriter for junior high school essays, I found it much easier to use the C64 to typed all my high school essays, which were printed out on my dad’s dot-matrix printer with the connected paper sheets. (I had a lot of fun separating the sheets and tearing off the hole feed strips on either side of the papers.)

I later got a C128 in college before borrowing a friend’s Mac Plus to write my senior project (our version of an undergraduate thesis).

And of course wasted hours and hours on the first version of Civilization (any Civ fans out there?).

See, back then, people like me were endlessly mocked as “computer nerds” and “geeks.”

And now you all have a tiny handheld computer that you carry around and play with 24/7.

Welcome, fellow nerds! We took over the world! Hah!

This

January 31, 2024
MThomas

Bloganuary writing prompt
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?

No. Way.

I have arachnophobia in the first place and can’t even stand those little spiders that jump all around.

I came in the house once after working in the garden and realized a spider had gotten stuck in my hair (probably from weeding under the tomato plants).

I feel freaked out just writing about it.

Just.

No. You couldn’t pay me enough to do this.

OK, I just *had* to answer this prompt…

January 23, 2024
MThomas

Bloganuary writing prompt
List five things you do for fun.
  1. Write (duh). I mean, this is obvious, right? (why does WP have an AI function now? I blog. Why would I want NOT to blog? Or use AI to blog? I don’t get it)
  2. Read (duh). OK, read sci-fi and fantasy. And history. Especially ancient history.
  3. Cook (seriously — I started doing this when I had to be separated from my family in 2018 and I found that it helps me calm down, eat healthier, and actually enjoy experimenting a little bit)
  4. Play guitar (need more time for this — I find it more enjoyable to play bass but playing my faux-Gibson is more enjoyable bc I can actually play a whole tune lol)
  5. Go on long, long walks by myself around the hills and mountains near my house so that I don’t feel so guilty about the Irish coffee waiting for me when I get back…

Wondering now if I should write the “five things I absolutely hate to have to do but generally have no say in the matter” or if I should wait and see if there is such a prompt…

Night Owl here 🦉

December 5, 2023
MThomas

Are you more of a night or morning person?

I’ve always been a night person. My brain just doesn’t shut off after dark.

If anything, it gets more active. That’s why much of my writing is done in the wee hours, when the rest of my family is fast asleep.

I began to develop this habit probably at least partly staying up to listen to Mets games on the west coast on late night AM radio.

Yeah. That dates me.

I would meet…

November 23, 2023
MThomas

If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?

If I could meet an historical figure, I’d like to meet Plato.

Of course, I wouldn’t be able to understand anything he would say, since it’s all Greek to me.

So maybe it’d be better to meet Nikola Tesla.

Preferably before he went a little cuckoo and ended his days feeding pigeons in Central Park.

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