Escape The Real

Profiles of Our People

Writing profiles of people we actually know will help in developing profiles of fictional characters. –The Hermit

After my grandma died two years ago, I spent a lot of time flipping through her old photo albums. But, aside from my grandparents themselves or the little-kid versions of my mom and aunt, I didn’t recognize most of the people in the pictures. My mom would sometimes be able to…

Blog Post Title Capitalization 101

Titles are likely the first if not the only thing readers will notice about your blog posts. Are you formatting them correctly, or are you arbitrarily capitalizing words?

From the AP Stylebook to The Chicago Manual of Style to the Yahoo! Style Guide, there are a number of recommended guidelines for title capitalization. The right style for you depends on a few things: the field you’re writing…

11 AP Style Rules Every Blogger Should Know

The AP style guide is what journalists use—you see it in newspapers, on news websites, and often in other publications that work with journalists. AP isn’t the only style guide available (at the ad agency we used the Gregg Reference Manual, which is primarily used in business communications), but it’s probably the most commonly known (others include the Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Style…

Live Long and Prosper, my fellow geeks!

8-Bit Memories

Stay for awhile…..Stay Forever!

Some people are old enough to remember when being called a geek was derogatory and meant that you were probably pale, non-athletic, wore thick glasses, had almost no friends, and were only good at activities that could be done indoors on a chair in your underwear.

Originally posted in 2009.

I’m here to chew bubblegum and kick ass…

…and I’m all out of bubblegum.

The idea for “They Live” came from a short story called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson, originally published in “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction” in the 1960s, involving an alien invasion in the tradition of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which Nelson, along with artist Bill Wray, adapted into a story called “Nada” published in the…

Strangers on a Train.

Two strangers, one rich, one poor, were traveling together. One took an immediate dislike to the other, and verbally abused him for the entire trip. When they arrived at their mutual destination, both made their way separately to the same synagogue, where the abusive man was mortified to find that the poor person he had insulted on the road was a guest rabbi.

By Directed by Alfred Hitchcock,…

10 Types of Posts to Spice Up Your Blog

Sometimes, as busy bloggers, it’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of creating the same old type of content over and over again. We might tend to think that a certain topic automatically means a certain kind of post, but that doesn’t have to be true. In fact, switching up the types of content we write can be very helpful in keeping our blogs fresh and interesting. And that can go a long way toward…

Kids vs Career, Part 2

Photo by Oleg Sergeichik on Unsplash

Choosing between staying home with your children and going to work can be a difficult decision for a mother. Mothers should consider what impact such a decision will make on their children.

What is Your Purpose?

Ask yourself, what is your main intention in considering going to work. Consider whether your family would be financially stable without the…

Adventist Review: What Do We Do With Differences?

A Common Focus

God’s children look at other races through the eyes of Christ (2 Cor. 5:16, 17). Unity is the result. And the power to maintain this unity flows from Christ Himself to His children (Eph. 4:15). The Christ-centered life helps us answer the what-do-we-do-with-the-difference question.

Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, instructs us by word and example on the appropriate use of…

Dare to be Bad

Goal: Write three short stories in six days

Rules: You can (and probably should) make notes ahead of time, but do not start actual drafting until the challenge officially begins. Once you begin writing, don’t stop to think–just write. Finish one story before starting the next. DO NOT edit or rewrite as you go (except really minor stuff)–you can do that once the challenge is over. If you’re…

Things that Tick Me Off.

I’m not talking about stuff that ticks me off in general, but those things that piss me off about running a website like this one.

First of all, let me state for the record that I hate people who comment only to post a link to some funky website so they can make a dime off me or my readers. For the record, if your blog/website/portal is for nothing but making money, I will delete your comment.…

Social Pressure and Social Media

Corporate entities are bowing to pressures from outside sources that don’t want contradictory views expressed in various forms of media. All this will do is make the eventual Orwellian State take over that much easier. Next stop, Equilibrium. Sure, those who were banned are mostly crazier than a rabid dog, but sometimes we need crazy to check the authoritarians.

Yiannopoulos, Farrakhan, Jones,…

What Makes You Happy

“Too many people waste their lives grieving because they do not have something other people tell them they should want. Whether you are happy or not depends to some degree upon outward circumstances, but mostly it depends how you choose to look at yourself, whether you measure what you have or what you have not.”

The Pyramid as a Shelter from the Storm?

The pyramid complex at Giza, and in particular the Great Pyramid, has held a grand fascination for all peoples for millennia. What is it? Why is it? These questions have been dissected, debated, researched, and written about for centuries.

Kheops Pyramid by Nina Aldin Thune – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=282496

I have read every possible writing that…

The Pyramids of Sudan

I just noticed something and had something of an epiphany. The pyramids represented on the US bills are not the pyramids of GIZA as everyone seems to discuss and assume. They are in fact the pyramids of Kush, in what is now Sudan. These were built from around 500 BCE, by the Nubians who eventually became Pharaohs of Upper and Lower Egypt.

One of the pyramids in Meroe, Sudan

Pyramid on the…

I know this is going to be an unpopular series, but mothers who work are actually damaging their children. Now before you totally give up on me from the start, hear me out. After you get done reading this series, you can throw the sink at me if you want to. We’ll start by looking at the life of Sally up and until she has a baby.

Photo by Pepi Stojanovski on Unsplash

In today’s society, life…