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Blogging with different ideas. |
| Ultimate Adventurers Group" |
| Word count: 793 For this section of The Ultimate Trinket contest, we have to write a blog and have it focus on one of three pictures. Instead of the pictures, I have decided to write about the story I wrote to go with the second picture. I normally do not have too much of a problem, making up a story when I have interesting pictures to work with, but I will admit nothing came to me on these three, except for things too depressing to discuss. Over the past couple of years, too many things have happened in the world to tank everyone. At 71 years old I have seen almost everything which has happened, but different names have been given to them. I’m still trying to wrap myself around the “woke” stuff. Now when I got to an age where I first started noticing “adult” happenings. I was still protected in my own little world. I had a family who cared about me. I lived in comfort and I had friends to talk to about whatever we thought was important. I lived through a recession where money was tight. Filler was added to hamburgers to make it possible to sell at the same price, but still, give people something to eat. We didn’t have the internet to jam the rest of the world down our throats. You could trust news anchors to tell you the truth without trying to swing the story one way or another. It consisted of “the facts and only the facts”.  The first picture isn’t too bad. I tried to think of it as a boy taking his pet for a walk. Bang, a side story pops up in another “channel” I am viewing, and the picture which was reasonably happy goes sideways. In my mind, I now have a boy taking his pet to the market because his family needs the money to survive. Our world tends to color our outlook. We can all see the same picture and have multi-faceted outlooks on what the photographer is trying to tell us. Are we being shown just a snippet of a different life? Are we being shown the hardships of different places? Maybe the picture taker is trying to convey how not everyone in the world is constantly running to and fro.  I used the second picture to write the story for this section of the contest. I enjoy reading and writing science fiction and this video-scape was easy to drag there. The contest designer was still holding true to keeping life below the happiness bar. This whole part of the contest is supposed to make you think about life. I have had too much of this part of life surrounding my being at the moment. I want to escape, hide, cover my head or whatever other metaphors you can come up with to not deal with it.  The third picture was the worst to try and deal with. At the moment I’m having a very hard time even looking at it and writing about it. I just want to take these too youngin’ into my arms and spirit them away somewhere safe. Somewhere that would wipe the frightened looks off their young faces. I’m even having to write this section in bits and pieces because I can’t view the picture for any great length of time without sinking into the quagmire of life. I know the photographer is trying to show how adult-inflicted wars are hurting parts of the different squabbling counties that have no say so in what they want to do in life. Their world consists of just trying to survive and be someplace safe until the adults come to their senses. They don’t understand how a piece of land is important enough to kill and destroy the world they are trying to obtain. They don’t understand abstract ideas like, freedom, oppression, and ownership of the larger piece of Earth’s proverbial pie, which means you have to blow things up and scare the bejeebers out of everyone, so some person higher up in the food chain can trump their chest and say “look what I did”. We are supposed to use these blogging sections to tell how we feel. Well in this section of the contest, I am feeling depressed, sad and like life doesn’t care. I am feeling like I should take the family and climb into one of the old bomb bunkers so many people built in the seventies. I want to figure out how to protect my loved ones but have slowly realized it is impossible. I am not high enough in the world's hierarchy to make a difference. I just have to sit and wait, hoping the elite come to their senses before they do something stupid. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Word count: 786 War Affects the World I am sure out of my comfort zone here. I know the directions for writing this blog say we are to pick one of the words listed above and write about it, but they are so intertwined I am having difficulty following the directions. Fair warning, I generally stay away from all of these categories. They don’t help with the general day-to-day depression surrounding me. Hopefully, I will be forgiven. I don’t have any personal experience with war, as in fighting in one of the armed services or being in a war-torn country. My experiences all stem from others I know about. My father was in World War II. He actually went into combat for the first time on D-Day. There is a very famous World War II with appears in magazines and books. It shows about thirty men jumping into the water off the back of a landing craft. They are all headed to the beach. On the right-hand side of the picture is a man carrying a gun, his large backpack tied up with rope and wire. That is my father. He maned a bazooka most of the time. As he got to the beach he was shot in his lower left leg. The fighting was intense and it took a long time to push the enemy back. With all the casualties, my father spent close to today before anyone found him among the others injured or killed. It was a week on the beach trying to stay alive with the other lucky men around him before they could get him on a hospital ship headed to the United States. Through various forms of transport, he ended up in Sibley Hospital in Washington D.C. They were able to save the leg, but he was told he would never be able to walk on it. There is a saying my grandmother used to use. “Good things come about by bad things happening.” My future mother worked at Sibley Hospital. Through her duties to help the injured with basics and some rehabilitation the nurse and the army man fell in love. Between the two of them, they were not going to take what the doctors said as true. Through dance t my Mom taught my Dad to walk again. He retained some of the shrapnel in this leg but he was able to get around. The other experience I had with war, was my husband and his stint in Vietnam. A judge in his small town in Massachusetts decided to clean up the town. He did this by sending any man, young or old, into the service. My husband, nineteen, who grew up on what would have been considered “the wrong side of the tracks” got caught along with seventeen other men in this scam. He was there for sixteen months, but those months hung around for many many years. He came home with no downtime or decompression from being in an area where you had to be on your guard at all times to walk through an airport and being called a “baby killer” by peace advocates of the early 1970s. He also was presented with the symptoms of major Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). His nightmares were bad sometimes. PTSD affects not only the serviceman or woman but family and close friends. Once I was pulled down behind a bed in our bedroom and told to stay down because the “enemy” was trying to break into the house. Another time I was thrown into a doorway because a car backfired. I thank the Veteran's Services for helping me get through the worst of the trama. War is bad, this I will agree with this. After everything is said and done though sometimes the aftermath can be worse. I agree to fight for land, wealth, and status is ingrained in the human makeup, but you would think with the progress in understanding the world, they could come up with a better way to decide these matters other than saying let's see how many of the “other side” we can kill or maim. I wrote a story once where if one area declared war on another, spies were sent to both areas by the opposing people. Each country, (I used islands in my story) had one week to discover who the spies were. The first to discover the spies won the war and would be allowed to run the “island” for a period of three years, with the deposed king, held by the winner in confinement. At the end of the three years, the loser would get his country back. For my story, the situation worked. I wonder if … no I guess not. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Word count: 757 Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. -John Lennon It was difficult picking the saying I wanted to use for this challenge. I am not someone who puts my life out there for everyone to gawk at. So many of the choices would require too much personal information to be passed around. I had a relatively easy beginning in life. I grew up on a farm but didn’t have a lot of chores, basically only the ones I choose to do. Although I had two brothers and a sister, I was the oldest and spent very little time with them. Because of this, I became an introvert. I knew how to act with adults but not with people my own age. At an early age, I could plan a proper Tea Party and Garden Party. Lucky me. My childhood dreams and plans for my future consisted of being an astronaut, a writer, a wife, a mother, and owning my own hotel. My ideas of what these possible professions required came from books and what I learned in the months I was in school. We moved to Florida when I was 13 and I found out what was going on in the real world. Don’t get me wrong not all of my dreams changed. Life kept moving forward. I started working on my dream plans seriously, in High School. I took all the courses I would need such as Science and Math. I even trudged through Latin because it is the basis of most of the Scientific and Mathematical terms. Latin was not easy. I figure the only reason I passed was that they needed the desk for the next year's students. When my major league college plans fell through, I switched to thinking about what I would need in business. Junior College offered what I could afford. I focused on secretarial duties and accounting possibilities. Accounting was a lot easier than Latin. One hitch was shorthand. Attempting to learn shorthand only strengthened the knowledge I am not proficient and will never be proficient at anything requiring a different way of expression which is not plain English. Life gave me a man to love and the pendulum of life swung in a different direction. Yes, I still found something to study, (always learning something new is a necessity in my life). Planning became figuring out how to work (two paychecks were needed in the world of the recession) and taking care of the needs of my family. I loved my husband dearly, but he was not much of a hands-on type of person. He worked and did what he considered fatherly things, but in the world, I flourished in, the woman took care of home and hearth. Plans needed to be put in effect to get through the days. It was my responsibility (and I admit looking back on the time, I took a lot on myself which I could have delegated out) to make sure the three children made it to school, to sports practice, get their homework done, baths, and family chores. Luckily my husband loved to cook, so meals were contrived by him for the most part. Still, life moved forward, swirly around the edges of my accomplishments, setbacks, and plans. The children were growing and attempting to spread their wings. My husband started to get disability because of problems he suffered in Vietnam. Attempting to keep planning a life the children could thrive in and still keep my sanity, because almost impossible. My husband moved us from the city to rural America to help with his anxiety and to give the children a better atmosphere to grow up in. My planning started to include the plans for grown children. Their lives swirled into the mix of my life. I still tried to make writing a strong point. The fanciful days of living in a big way, traveling, meeting interesting people, and experiencing out-of-this-world times floated off on clouds, evaporating over the horizon of age. Life never gave up though. It still allowed me to trudge through, many ponds of quicksand. It constructed an occasional bridge, some very rickety, to let me keep my proverbial feet dry. Life let me make plans with some hope of being able to check things off the list, now and again. I recommend for most people's sanity, they cut back on planning and work with what is in front of them. Save your planning for a possible Bucket List of hopes and dreams for the future. ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| [Embed For Use By Upgraded+] Music Video 3:: Earth by Lil Dicky Word count: 1074 (does not include words in the link section) The Earth in Flux Before today I never heard this song, so I thought I would start off with something new. It is interesting. The scenes start off as live-action, showing some of the things happening in what I am taking as a medium to a large city. The inhabitants of the “real” world are taking life for granted, not worrying about how their actions affect the world around them. They barely pay attention to other humans. Different groups, like with any other mammal groupings, are shown. Like is writing, starting off with impact for the first few seconds is accomplished very nicely in this piece. Environment Soon we are taken into an animated world through the pages of a very old book, a metaphor for wishful thinking we could start over again from some unknown point in the past. Different types of animals around the world are introduced to show us how they should be considered part of the world and not taken for granted. A zebra is shown, and then a lion cub is there eating the zebra. Through the demonstration of animals' lives, the writer explains how different species depend on the chain of life and death. The song also mentions the fallacy of the scientist saying we only have 12 years to save the planet. Now even I realize they are not saying the planet is going to blow up or something in 12 years, they are saying that is the point we will reach where turning the human destruction of the world will become too hard to turn around. In the article, We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN by Jonathan Watts Global environment editor, published online October 12, 2012, (link is below) he states the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.” From what I have read this is still a popular belief. I have also read scientists say the Earth goes through climate cycles of warming and cooling. These cyles can take thousands of years to manifest differences. I personally fall into the people of the earth who follow this train of thought. Wind turbines were shown to help foster the idea we don’t need fossil fuels. I have one question though. What happens if the possible global warming takes place and there is not enough wind? Also, where do the batteries the wind turbines charge come from? What are the countries who can’t afford the turbines, or don’t have the availability of a wind gust area supposed to use? When I was growing up the big thing was to build dams which would use the water to run the engines to power electricity and other things we need. Geo-political An eagle carries our narrator around the world, making comments on different areas. I don’t agree with some of the comments made as they travel, but this is a free world at least in my neck of the woods, so disagreement is allowed. I personally have lived through several of the events which are mentioned. The trip on the eagle is the most political part of the story. How are the political issues of the video creator/narrator shown? The narrator travels along the great wall of China and hand slaps the Chinese characters saying how much we love them. He then flies farther along and tells Germany we forgive them? What are we forgiving them for, this makes no sense? Along the way, he says how Russia is cool. This is not so much true in today's society. I have been unable to find the date of the original publication of this film. Some of the present-day theories are involved in the storyline. The young man and most of the character actors/singers are young so it is understandable some of their thoughts. The whole montage is a modernization of a song from my generation called We Are The World, with a video backing. (link below for the song). I do commend the contributors on their attempt to show people the possibilities which can be taken advantage of and to give some renewed hope. Medical He also mentions the possibility we are a simulation. This is a possibility that can never be proven or disproved, but like other “swirling human thoughts” can get people talking, which can be a good thing. In December of 2021, Star Talk did a YouTube video on “Are we living in a simulation?” ( I have put a link below). It discusses the possibility we are not the first in the line of simulations, but a simulation of the inhabitants of another simulation. It is a fun and interesting thought process to try and get through. Do we really exist or don’t we? There is a definite belief in the legalization of drugs, with Marijuana being held up as a minimum example. Religious Beliefs The narrator shows himself standing on the planet looking out and questioning the existence of a higher being. An echo is used to demonstrate possible emptiness. In the video is also the Christ the Redeemer statue located in Rio to show some other beliefs. (Link below) I will give the narrator accolades for showing both sides of possibilities in all sections of the storyline. Some General Thoughts and Beliefs I get the feeling the narrator believes we are the only inhabitants of the universe. To hedge his bet though he talks about Aliens visiting earth and taking Leonard Decapio away. Personally, I think it would be beyond egotistical that we are the only living beings in Billions and billions of star clusters. Remember we only see the stars, not any planets which may be orbiting around each one of the small pinpoints of light. I know I have missed other metaphors which are peppered through the piece. The artwork and animation are beyond reproach. This being said it is not a video I would watch more than once if I didn’t need to come up with examples here. I am a firm believer in recycling and trying to take care of our environment, and do what I can in my own small portion. LINKS We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exce... Song: We Are The World https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tFP1zcsNjAtsSgwNDVg9BIoT1VILEpVKMlIVSj... Are we living in a simulation? https://fb.watch/dp-GM_36ZX/ Statue in Rio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_the_Redeemer_(statue) ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
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This is a lovely share with some wise advice at the end. And it fits the prompt well! Thanks for sharing your experience.
