Tag: half-penny thoughts

  • Half-penny Thoughts — 13nov25

    …something had happened to him in his late twenties that seemed to manoeuvre him away from other people, not just his friends, but from the normal course of human affairs. He’d begin to catch people exchanging glances whenever he spoke up in group situations; or they would be half smiling when he entered the offices and warehouses he worked in, but he never stayed for very long before he moved on to something else equally unsatisfactory. Invitations to join others lessened, then ceased before he was thirty-two. Only damaged and insecure women seemed to find comfort in his company, though they had little interest in him besides his being a confirming presence. By thirty-four he was lonely. Lonely. Genuinely.

    …[U]nless he was talking to Hutch alone, his every attempt to start a conversation in the group had been treated like an ill-thought-out statement, or just ignored. No one even tried to pick up the threads he started. Most often there would be a silence and then the other three would fall back into whatever natural camaraderie they had rediscovered.

    ~ Adam Nevill, The Ritual: A Novel

    Luke’s thoughts are relatable. Very much so.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 06nov25

    Why is it that some of us are not allowed to be “not okay” in some manner or another? Why is it that we always seem to be the ones who have to be available?

    And when we happen to be less than rosey, why do so many people act like it is less important than their own trials and tribulations?

    Yeah. I know. There is no real answer to that question. Therefore, comments are closed. Food for thought is all, as meager a fare as that might be…

  • Half-penny thoughts — 04nov25

    Except for romance novels (where it is, after all, the focus and intent), I feel sex scenes in fiction almost never add to the story and almost always pulls you out of the story as a reader.

    Or, maybe it is just me.

    It could very well be me.

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  • Half-penny Thoughts — 30oct25

    A couple of thinks on the cheap have occurred to me over the past few days.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 28oct25

    selective focus beige and brown goat
    Photo by Sơn Bờm on Pexels.com

    Isn’t it time to retire the concept of the G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time)?

    I mean, how does one even begin to objectively quantify that in order to support such a statement?

    The biggest issue is that whenever someone says such a thing, is that it is always presented as fact when it is absolutely pure opinion. You can’t quantify such things and it is usually a tactic to bully someone into thinking as you do.

    “Be one of us now….”

    The acronym even rubs me wrong. Goats everywhere are offended by it. “Appropriation!”

  • Half-penny Thoughts — 27oct25

    As I am reading The Chronicles of the Black Company, a blurb on the back struck me as being something of an important statement when it comes to stories and how they are written.

    “With the Black Company series Glen Cook single-handedly changed the face of fantasy—something a lot of people didn’t notice and maybe still don’t. He brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff was like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.” [emphasis mine]

    – Steven Erikson, author of the series: Malazan Book of the Fallen.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 29sep25

    I made it to my fourth crochet row on a non-project (no goal other than getting more comfortable with crochet) before everything got really ugly and went terribly wrong. That’s progress beyond just beyond getting a foundation row more than five loops long. I won’t be crocheting any afghans soon, but it is progress.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 16sep25

    Have you ever started reading a book and find the descriptions of the backdrop to be too rich in the details? While in which the characters seem far too paper-thin and inauthentic?

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 12sep25

    While I do have other regrets in my life, I think those that cut deepest are those times that I acted cruelly or unjustly to someone as a defense mechanism against all the times that people treated me cruelly or unjustly in my youth.

    I was bullied most of my childhood, by extended family as well as by my peers.

    By my mid-teens, I was starting to be mean to certain people with the justification was that then I was doing it before they could do it to me, especially when we started drifting apart after being close. Always “as jest”, of course. Plausible deniability…

    By my late twenties, I wouldn’t even let most people get closer than superficial interactions with me.

    There are people, both living and deceased, that I wish I could apologize to for treating them the way I did. But how to find them? Even social media is useless for finding some of the people most owed an apology. And not everyone wants to hear an apology from me anyway. Those are the kinds of knives I used to stab people.

    And while I try to not live in the past or in regrets, I do wish I could at least try to repair as best as I am able those moments where I was unnecessarily mean to another person out of avoidance of risking feeling pain myself.

    Instead of avoiding pain, I now carry this poison with me with nowhere to set it down.

    You have to laugh at the irony.

  • Half-penny thoughts — 11sep25

    woman holding pills
    Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

    One thing that has nagged me recently is the concept of blue pills and red pills.

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