The Stratagem’s Archive

Category: Daily Prompts

  • If You Gave Me A Blank Page, This Is What I’d Start Writing About.

    What do you enjoy most about writing?

    “Oh, writing, please don’t forsake me now.”

    Writing Has Been Enlightening and Liberating

    This is a tough question for me because I like to write about a lot of things. In my “About Me” page About The Stratagem’s Archive: The Debriefing Area:, in my “Homepage” The Stratagem’s Archive: You Begin Here:, and even on my post pages, I’ve written that I’m just an average dilettante who likes learning new things, see what outcomes I get, and share what I’ve learned here.

    I like to write about things I find interesting, even if my knowledge is incomplete or bare, as it gives me an opportunity to bridge my personal gaps.

    However, if I really had to pick something, then I would say that I like writing D&D story prompts, like in my most recent post D&D Stories I Won’t Get To Use (Yet): Idea #1:

    It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to writing a story that combines world building, fantasy and/or sci-fi, potentially horror, using real life inspiration, and many more elements without it becoming a book. Many D&D stories eventually become books, though it’s not the main reason why I write these kinds of stories myself.

    I’m a gamer and a bookworm looking for recommendations – books, games, cartoons, stories, movies, writing, and other media I could get ahold of – are things I hold dearly. Being imaginative filled my days and D&D, when I got into it at the end of 2023, gave me a chance to share the ideas I kept to myself and refine them over time with other people.

    I’ve ran a few of my own home brew stories before I had to put D&D and GMing on pause. My first story was called, “The Golden Chest of Lady Ahn’ket”, it was supposed to have been a one-shot, but I didn’t know how long a one shot was supposed to be and it took roughly a dozen 2-4 hour sessions to finish.

    I could share more about this story as part of the “D&D Stories I Won’t Get to Use (Yet)” series I’m building. Although, I have used this in game with people, I wanted to refine my first story and, hopefully, share it other people.

    Although, I had to quit with the group I played with on Discord because my schedule wouldn’t allow much free time as before, but I would love to get back into playing and running games.

    In conclusion, D&D stories and prompts are what I like to write the most. They can expand in many different directions and you’ll never know where the players would take it. They’ll derail all of your hard work, but that’s why it’s great how flexible it can be, and how flexible I need to be, to keep moving forward with the story.

    If you like D&D, I would love to know what kind of stories you’ve played, what elements you’ve found fun to play, or if you have recommendations for a novel GM. Let me know in the comments down below, and I’ll see you in another post. Thanks!

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  • What Do I Love About Where I Live?

    What do you love about where you live?

    “A Mastermind’s always thinking!”

    What Makes My Home Special?

    Where I live is the only place I’ve ever known; I’ve lived alongside the ocean all of my life and besides the mountains, so you could say I live directly between the sea and the mountains. I’ve lived in the “country”, though it’s not purely country like the mainland, but it is for us because it’s far out of the way of any tourist attractions.

    It’s also considered “ghetto” and, people outside of the state need to understand that “paradise” has its own share of troubles, has a lot of issues. I remember, before moving out, that our neighbors were climbing their fences one night and called my dad. My parents and I went out looking towards the neighbor behind us’s property and our next door neighbor said he saw 2 kids climbing on the roofs of people’s garages to get into everyone else’s yards.

    We’ve had issues with the surrounding distant neighbors, but kids sneaking in the dead of night and trespassing into other people’s properties? That was a new and terrifying development.

    We’ve had fires, water mains breaking, rolling power outages, cops and fire fighters and EMTs showing up at random times throughout the day and night that it was normal.

    My city literally only has one way going in and one way going out, there’s no other way to get to it unlike the other cities that are connected by the highways, freeways, and backroads. So, getting home would take between 2-3 hours before, maybe longer, because of traffic and the long traffic lights. Though that was before I moved to a different city, but it was home.

    Renting in a different city is different because I don’t have the luxury of my own space as before. Don’t get me wrong, I’m renting a studio and I have the place to myself, but having neighbors just less than a feet away from my door is stressful.

    I could play with my dogs, let them run around in the yard without much problems, I could eat as much ice cream or chocolate shakes if we had because my city has a dry heat to it. Even with a nice breeze, it would carry heat instead of cooling us down, though privacy was ensured from people we didn’t like.

    Our neighbors were good, we’d help each other out, I’d pick mangoes from our tree when they bloomed and make sure to share. Our neighbor’s wife would offer us mango bread in turn, she’s good friends with my grandma, and it was nice. We didn’t expect anything, though it became a ritual.

    I’ve visited a decent amount of places over the years in my lifetime:

    • California
    • Texas
    • Texarkana
    • Las Vegas
    • Colorado
    • South Korea
    • Japan

    Even though a lot of places were nicer than where I lived, it never felt like a place that I could call home. Everywhere else, though this isn’t to say it’s true, felt disconnected. It didn’t feel like a place I could call or make it a home because I’ve never stayed long enough to explore that possibility.

    I do miss living near the ocean and smelling the salt being carried on the breeze, seeing the white haze on an early morning drive because the water churned up so much salt, and getting a nice view of the night sky because there isn’t as much light pollution.

    I miss my family as well, I do what I can to visit and keep in touch, but when I was presented with an opportunity to experience independent living, I took it. They won’t be around forever, so learning what it’ll be like without them will be a lot, it is a lot to think about, so I better do what I can and appreciate and irritate them while I can.

  • Positive Emotions, You Say?

    What positive emotion do you feel most often?

    Throughout the entirety of my personal journey – betting on myself and moving ahead with projects I had postponed – I hadn’t been gripped with a shadow of “positive emotion” in a long time.

    I sat with the emotions I usually feel: anger, resentment, bitterness, and regret. But beneath them was something else, something subtle, and fleeting, yet it made itself known.

    Pride.

    Resilient.

    Persistent.

    In the moments where my demons surface, beneath their screams and shouts is something quieter; when it seems all of the work I’ve been putting in to build something I can call my own, to live my life on my own terms, is for naught, it whispers, “keep going.”

    These emotions: my pride, my resilience, and my persistence will channel my anger and regret into something better, beautiful, and enduring for my life to matter.

    “Make it count. Make it matter. Move forward.”

  • I’m Afraid of Wasting My Potential — So I Learn Everything I Can, While I Can.

    How do you plan your goals?

    An Unstructured Structured System

    My goals undergo a process; it often comes from a place of spontaneity: listing every curiosity and skill down on paper, researching the amount of time and resources I’m able to free up without forfeiting my current lifestyle or neglecting my current obligations, and doing a process of elimination.

    More often than not, my plans are born from a place of mild obsession. I hate feeling small, weak, worthless, useless, and always at the mercy of someone else because of their “position/place of authority.”

    To put it simply, I carry a few questions with me everyday. It scratches the surface of my awareness to the point I’m physically on auto-pilot, but mentally overstimulated and calculating:

    • How Much Time Do I Have Left?
    • How Many More Opportunities Do I Have Left To Explore?
    • How Many of My Curiosities Will I Be Able To Satisfy?
    • Will I Be Proud of My Life If I Stay Where I Currently Am?

    These aren’t the complete list of questions, but they are the most important. I had spent the first 2 decades of my life hiding, playing video games to numb the pain, to hide the fact that I was not gifted with much skill, brains, or strength. I could easily acquire skills and experience quick in video games, unless you’re playing any FromSoft game, but I refused to do the same in real life.

    I decided very recently to change my narrative, and it’s a hit or miss some days. Starting a blog was born from a long wish to write and share when I have no one who would sit and listen in person; I’m learning to code, despite having had an awful experience in university with zero exposure or knowledge prior, to be an opportunity to overcome self-imposed limitations; Allowing my mind to wander and become distracted often leads to adding fuel to my personal fire.

    What Are My Reasons For Planning Things This Way?

    My reasons for planning my goals this way is simple. I’m not striving towards pure freedom, some rules need to remain in place. I’m striving to reduce fear’s hold on me and to expand my options. To use my anger against myself, circumstances, other people that irritates me for something constructive.

    How many of us are living life where our options are limited?

    That is what I want, to expand my options, to release as much anger and rage as I can, one centimeter at a time. The goals I’m striving are for me, for where I want to go, who I want to grow into, and to experience things that I had denied myself and witness and be a part of as many things as I can. True freedom is to have options, instead of having no options and feeling powerless, small, useless,worthless, and a failure.

    These are my goals, my struggles, my process, and my drive. Time is against me, it’s against all of us, and my self imposed deadline is fast approaching. 3 more years, I wonder what I’ll have accomplished by then. Only time will tell, and me!

    For more of my writing and things I’ve been planning, you can check out my other articles below. Thanks!

  • Trite and Vexing Vocabulary

    What is a word you feel that too many people use?

    Many words have been used to the point that hearing it provokes a visceral reaction. I know that I tend to feel myself: tense up, I feel a noticeable thumping hitting the front of my skull, I’m mentally rolling my eyes, and letting out a heavy huff. It’s the only way that I’m able to release the bubbling irritation boiling within me, before returning to emotional numbness, especially when I’m at work.

    The few words or phrases that tends to get a rise from me, in the sense that I want to drop kick whoever is talking, are:

    • Can you go do X? (Either I’m already or about to do it, or the person asking bypasses more than half a dozen people standing around just to ask me? That’s infuriating.)
    • Have you seen so-so? (I’m not getting paid to babysit young adults, no. Go bother the people who’s supposed to be training the new hires.)
    • [S/he’s] not doing anything! (Have you EVER noticed you’re doing the same thing? It’s irritating, nothings going to change, just do your job and leave. Still working on taking my own advice too.)
    • I want to go home already. (Me too, but we have to finish sorting the freight, then we can leave. But that’s wishful thinking on good days.)

    These are other words and phrases I can’t think of at the top of my head, though it does make me want to drop kick people, but it also depends on how it’s being said.

    Think of it like this; we all have our preferences and it will differ from the people we know and don’t know, right? However, have you ever heard one person speaking and their voice is pleasant, soothing, and makes you want to listen more intently? Okay, keep that in mind.

    Now, imagine the most irritating, nail scratching, metal grinding metal, and obnoxious sounding person you can muster and saying the words you absolutely despise and are repeating it over and over again until you start to think your ears are bleeding. That makes those overly used words even more difficult to tolerate.

    There’s nothing that can be done about it, sadly, it’s another lingo, and the best I can do for myself is to tune everything out and do what I have to do. No matter how angry, bitter, and resentful I feel, no matter how much I want to drop kick people, I just have to exist and let go.

    For more posts like this, I have a few recommendation below, and I’ll see you over in the next ones!

    Where Peace Radiates From Most?

    My Life Through An Alternate Lens

    The Little Things Make Me Happy

  • Where Peace Radiates From Most?

    What brings you peace?

    The majority of the prompts I’ve answered since starting my blog had asked similarly, but worded differently, questions, and I had mentioned doing some physical activity. Walking had been my most prominent answer, although it’s true, this brings me contentment.

    Peace on the other hand is different; I’ve lived near the ocean my whole life and, as a kid, I’d used to have to be dragged out of the water to leave. Some people have a strong connection to the ocean: they care for it and in return the ocean would care for us. Not in the same sense as we would care for our family and friends.

    One of my grandma’s younger brother had take shrapnel from a grenade blast when he served in the Vietnam war as a young man. He was on and off medication because the doctors couldn’t remove all of the metal in his body because it would have led to him bleeding to death, so they left the metal in his body. It was until their dad took him fishing one day that, when he was out on the water casting a line, his pain felt far away.

    Whenever I used to go swimming, I would never stray too far from the shore, I would feel at peace in the water. The saltiness of the water would let me float on my back, fill my ears and everything would feel and sound muffled, sand would end of getting into places you’d never want them to be, and I would stare at the sky and let the current take me adrift.

    Being in the ocean, among the sandy shores, that hasn’t been fully contaminated by myriad of sun screen or boat waste, has been healing for both body and spirit.

    Even though I haven’t visited a beach in years, being in a hot bath provides a similar feeling the ocean used to bring to me. That feeling, though fleeting and stretched into infinity, was being able to let go and drift.

    No need to go anywhere, no obligations to fulfill, no noise about being a failure or a success or a nobody or a somebody, just being. Just breathing. Just existing.

    The sea has its rules and ignoring it would lead to disaster:

    • Never face your back to the water, else a rogue wave comes and drags you in.
    • Never fight against the current, go with it until the current calms and you can swim.
    • Take care of the sea, make it better than you found it, and it will care for you.

    Letting go and drifting in the water had brought me peace. It made me wonder if this is what moving on would feel like when my time comes, but I won’t know until I get there. The next time you’re in a large body of water, or even a simple bathtub, drift on your back, close your eyes and let the water envelope you.

  • What Profession(s) Do I Admire?

    What profession do you admire most and why?

    This is a tough question because it seems to me that we can only pick 1 profession to admire and explain our reasoning below. I’m going to be bending the prompt to suit my needs and share what I think instead.

    The professions that I admire are almost all of them, except for the illegal types like: trafficking, prostitution, drug dealing, forcefully indentured and many more that I don’t want to immerse myself in.

    I’ve worked entry level jobs my entire working life. I had worked at 2 separate grocery store chains, I’ve worked at a fresh food restaurant called, “Teddy’s Bigger Burgers”, I’ve been unemployed for 7 months from leaving my first job that I had since high school, and I’m currently working at a warehouse full time and at a rage room part time.

    My reasoning behind admiring every legal profession is that every job does keep society and the economy thriving.

    Yes, though many jobs are essential and necessary, I’m aware that the countless ways we are able to earn an income are less than ideal and to our preference. Myriad forms of employment are also:

    • Dangerous
    • Unsafe
    • Unsanitary
    • Grisly
    • Life threatening
    • Etc.

    However, without the people who have the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fortitude to handle those kinds of work, someone was given the strength to do those jobs, things might have been different, wouldn’t you agree?

    • Teachers
    • Military
    • Customer service
    • Drivers
    • Nurses
    • Paramedics
    • Doctors
    • Veterinarians
    • Business owners
    • Custodians
    • Morticians
    • Programmers
    • Farmers
    • Ranchers
    • Personal Trainers
    • Accountants
    • Information Technicians
    • Hospice care
    • Police officers
    • Private investigators
    • Detectives
    • Security guards
    • Fire fighters
    • Rangers
    • Volunteers
    • Freelancers
    • Chefs
    • Bakers
    • Animators
    • Actors
    • Drivers
    • Bartenders
    • Comedians
    • Therapists
    • Authors
    • Publishers
    • Game developers
    • Architects
    • Spelunkers
    • Historians
    • EVERY JOB THAT LEGALLY EXISTS THAT CAN’T FIT IN THIS ALREADY LONG LIST, BUT ARE ACKNOWLEDGED ALL THE SAME!!!

    Every job is necessary, many are needed, stressful, monotonous, spontaneous, and sometimes thankless. Even though each job might not get the recognition, status, or pay that we believe we deserve, we are able to provide for ourselves, our families, our presents, and our futures.

    That is something we can admire – each job is a stepping stone and learning experience if we ever want to move up laterally in a company or vertically into a different field – we have the capacity to make our own path the best to our ability. We earn our keep however we currently can and strive for whatever we want to achieve in each chapter of our lives.

    If you agree or disagree with my list, share your thoughts in the comments below. I would love to know what you all think about this prompt. Otherwise, I have a few other prompts you could check out below. The archives will be closing now. See you again when we open. Thank you!