Fiction: Conversations with ghosts

This month's Words for Wednesday prompts are provided by  Alex J. Cavanaugh which is hosted at Elephant's Child's blog over here. Last week's prompts are: specter, mountains, puppies, nature, cockamamie, burnt and/or carving, zombie, dongle, foliage, candlelight, crapulence. This weeks prompts are: sword, hogwash, cactus, ghost, silver, rivers and/or spirits, potato, nincompoop, indigo, gemstones, learning. I couldn't fit in 'rivers.'

Fiction: Conversations with ghosts

"You're a specter. You're dead. Get over it."
    "What do you mean I'm a specter? What cockamamie are you spewing? Do pigs fly now? Are mountains falling down? Has mother nature brew her tops and the world ended?"
    Seventeen stared at the slightly transparent ghost for a few moments trying to decide if she should answer the dumb questions or just punch him in the nose.
    "Ow!" He rubbed his nose. "Why did you punch me? And why did I feel pain and yet it was almost as if it didn't...happen." He looked up at her.
    It wasn't a nice feeling to touch a ghost but sometimes Seventeen have to make a point. Certainly the cold feeling was not nice. She sat back down and picked up the burnt toast and took a small bite. If only she could go to Tony's for breakfast.
    "Answer me!" The ghost furrowed his eyebrows.

Seven Things : Just some thoughts

bonkers (color version), 2023, digital

01 - Review words/phrases I found quite amusing: (1) Rage-delete. Someone wrote in a book review they had to 'rage-deleted' an ebook because they hated it/got offended by it. I can understand this but seriously, when you're trying to delete a digital file which is you pressing down or poking at the screen several times, it's not as satisfying or as fast as throwing a physical book across the room because your e-reader will pause and ask you if you really want to delete the book. It's a safeguard so you don't accidentally delete a book but really unhelpful when you want to 'rage-delete' a book. I'm sure amazon would love to remove that option so people will have to re-purchase books.  (2) Badbutt - it seems badass is too much like cursing to this reviewer so badbutt it is.

02 - Youtube (which is owned by google) will now not allow you to use ad blockers so if you want to see videos for free, you have to allow ads. If you don't want ads, then, you have to pay 12 dollars a month which is just a bit too much. If they cut that in half, I would actually consider paying. Technically youtube is not free because people have to pay for wi-fi and electricity, it's not really that free but no one thinks about those things, do they?
    So far, the ads are okay but for some odd reason, they keep showing teeth or toothpaste ads which I really, really wish to never see. It's the one reason I started using ad blockers. I just hope they will not remove the 'skip ad' option because some ads are really, really annoying.

03 - Does a book lover always have to be reading? Can you love books and not do much reading? I still haven't been reading much and it's not a terrible thing. I didn't fall out of love for reading books, I'm just at a pause. I believe if you can't enjoy a book, you simply put it down. If you don't want to read, you simply not read. I'm just waiting for a good book to come along and put me back to my reading journey.

04 - I switched google email account for my Blogger blog but now I can't change the background of my comments to the light blue I always had no matter how I tweaked the template. So now my comments has a white background just like readers who leave comments on my blog. I know it's a small matter but I like to be identified as the blog owner responding to comments.

05 - Digital photography is great until you have to sort through 500 photos to pick out 50 or so and then it's just so damm too much work. Sometimes I have to do this for work. Often, I thought of blindly choosing photos by picking the first or the last 50 photos but that's kind of not doing the work so I don't do it but it really takes a lot of patience for this task which is especially annoying if they send you the notice to do this at about 4 pm and you have only an hour to do it even though it takes about 2 or more hours to actually sort the photos. And then, you have to resize the images for web use so, yeah, technology, really fun. At least most of time, it's 300 photos instead of 500.

06 - I now enjoy listening to a lot of music in Mandarin. Before, I kind of disliked listening to Mandarin songs because the sound of the words weren't appealing to me for some odd reason. This could be a side effect of watching one too many Taiwanese dramas because they played music all the time. But it could just be me. I don't actually understand Chinese all that well so most of the time, I don't know what the lyrics mean but I think you can enjoy music even if you don't understand the language. But I did look up some of the songs. Youtube had a lot of videos where Chinese songs are translated to English which I appreciated a lot.
    And album cover arts? They are increasingly getting amazingly ugly and even grotesque. At the iTunes store, I once saw a cover with a guy's head between someone's naked legs covering their private parts - is this what people called good album cover? I think I prefer a bland headshot of the artist instead.

07 - Who likes daylight saving time? There's all kind of explanations for this but no one seems to like the idea. I think I prefer more daylight in the winter, not in the summer. Every time we have to set our clocks forward or backward an hour, it screws up my sleeping pattern and then it takes me a month to adjust. It's too bad I can't just move to a country with no daylight saving time which there seems to be many.

What's on your mind these days?