Time to try something different. The prompts I was using previously was definitely made for a single person in mind. I had to make too many contrivances to use the prompts for my characters since they don’t take place in current day. Instead, I’ve lately been listening to a podcast called Writing Excuses. At the end of each podcast, they end it with a writing prompt for which the listeners can use and then write about.

I’ve started collecting a few of them and I’ll do random ones for a while. Maybe I’ll start doing the current ones, not sure about that yet. I’ll also try to do more in a week. I spent more time trying to find a replacement tool than writing this week.

Character: Jariq Masters and Sakura Haru
Prompt: Two different characters, two different magic systems...

Jariq tried to calm Sakura down. "You've got the wrong guy, it wasn't me." He waved his hands frantic with refusal. "I just landed here twenty minutes ago. I couldn't have been there!" Sakura frowned. He noted and tried to lower his tone. "I don't even know where 'there' is...."

"LIAR!" She pushed out her arms out in front of her. Where her hands met, a ball of energy grew and shot out at Jariq. To her astonishment, he caught the ball in his hand and saw it slowly shrink in his grasp. After it disappeared, he went back to being submissive. However, she would have nothing of it and shot two at once. He caught both with one hand with an amount of speed that she couldn't follow. "How?" Her arms dropped to her sides. She felt weak and confused.

"Are we okay?" Jariq kept his hands down. Sakura nodded. He slowly backed away and picked up his white dufflebag. As he stood up, he could hear her figuratively boil over. 'Oh shit..' He then had a realization. Being black, his encounter prior to her was a common occurrence, but here, it was especially rare. He could get angered himself about getting racially profiled, or he could try and put out the fire before it got too hot. "The guy you are looking for is already under arrest!" He winced. He already knew she was short-tempered under stress. He turned his back toward her and tried to get the attention of another officer. "Hey Security! Can I get some help here! She is looking for the guy you arrested!" There was no response. He knew they said they were understaffed, but there were only a few pedestrians around that were fleeing the scene. 'Shit!' 
He could feel a chill run down his spine. He felt her drawing a lot of energy in attempts to challenge his ability. To him, it seemed endless. Albeit, he has spent little time with people with skills like hers. "Turn around!" Jariq did as instructed. "Down on the ground!" He shook his head no as he saw her entire body shine with energy. "I said down on the ground!" She extended her right hand with her palm facing him. With no response she shot another projectile at him. His hand glowed for an instant and he slapped the shot back at her. She panicked and then shot like crazy back at him, causing his reflected shot to explode.
Jariq easily avoided her shots, but his concern was for the few people that were still around. They hid behind barriers, but he had no idea which of them could protect themselves if any of them. "Stop it! There are other people here!" She continued to fire. Jariq then circled around her with incredible speed. He started running from behind a trashcan. His speed was so great that the trashcan was sucked into a vacuum and toppled over. 
He grabbed her from behind. Under her arms. "Stop please, you are mistaken." She shrieked and he saw an arch of electricity jump from her head to her shoulder. He let go and tried to run away, but he wasn't faster than light. Electricity shot out her body and shot at him like a lightning bolt. That energy was absorbed as well, but not willingly. His body failed him and he collapsed to the ground.

So I’ve recently finally completed my first coursera course. It wasn’t really a hard subject, but it made me realize that it isn’t something that I should’ve taken likely.

I guess it really depends on whether you can truly make a commitment to a course as to whether or not you will be successful with it or not.

The courses that I’ve failed to complete or even start were nice-to-haves in my view. They weren’t exactly relevant to my goals of expanding upon my education, but they would’ve made a cool looking addition to my resume. Also, I didn’t pay for the signature track for any of these courses so  it was easier for me to be reluctant in paying attention to them. I had no real purpose to learn yet another Scheme language. I don’t really  need to take a course on Public Speaking, I already have enough opportunities to improve on that in my real life. I am also over getting achievement points and don’t really care about Gamification of applications. I’m not sure if a combination of those two reasons or one of those reasons were stronger as to why I never completed those courses.

Considering that I already had a background in using Java, I have several Android devices, and I’ve previously demonstrated at work how to write automated tests for the android web browser, if felt like a natural progression to start understanding native android applications. So when I saw this course come out, I put my money where my mouth was and doubled down on completing this course.

I have to say that overall it wasn’t that hard of a course. Only the last assignment to get a certificate with distinction took a lot of time. Even then, the course was just reinforcing one of the practices I’ll be doing for the rest of my life: learning to read and understand Javadocs. As long as I allotted myself the proper amount of time to read and digest them each week, I knew I set myself to pass the course.

After completing the course, I noticed a loud minority of people that failed to read the instructions on the proper steps to pass the course. Because of their failures to read everything, a number of people failed to get a Certificate with Distinction and would have to repeat the course again to receive full credit.  This revolved around a listed requirement for the final project that you had to review assignments for three of your peers and to also give yourself your own review. Failure to do either would result in an automatic failure for the final project. This wouldn’t cause you to fail the course, but you wouldn’t get the status required to get the specialization. Considering the off and on relationship I’ve had with Coursera up till then, I disagreed with the begging that my peers engaged with. The failure to properly read the instructions showed that they weren’t really engaged with the course, like I was with my first few false starts with Coursera.

I’ve learned a lot as I’ve started this recent commitment to Coursera. Monday, I’ll start my second course to continue on towards getting a Specialization in Mobile Cloud Computing with Android. Hopefully, I continue to engage with it and that I won’t fall into ruts that I have done in the past. Wish me luck and give it a try. Who knows you can find something there that can you can truly engage with?

So what is this site?

In short, this site will basically be a blog with a variety of topics that are about things I do and are interested in.

What can I expect from this blog?

As a gamer, I will probably periodically do Let’s Plays. This is as a result of forcing myself to tackle a number of games in my backlog every year. However, I don’t exclusively play on PC, I don’t have a capture setup for consoles, and some games just don’t work well with OBS (or is that OSB?). If I am currently working on a PC game that behaves, I’ll work a schedule to play them and post them here.  There may also be  dumb stuff that can show up like playing Divekick with random controllers.

As someone that floats between Quality Assurance, Infrastructure, and DevOps. I may post about my learning experiences of taking on new tools and languages (at least new for myself), the limits of which dependent on my host, or an occasional rant that shows my unique disdain for things.

As a future part-time writer, I’ll post my results of writing prompts and mini-novellas related to larger stories that I want to eventually get published. I’m sure that this will be the majority of posts. I have to get started somewhere right?

As someone that delves into the complete random, you can occasionally expect the unexpected. Whether that means cosplay, photos that put my J1 in grave danger, or some art project that I took on without previous training with the skill required (which usually comes back to cosplay).

Anywho, hope you enjoy my meanderings!