I recently had to update from the WordPress mobile app to an app called Jetpack. Perhaps there’s more of a link between jetpacks and writing than is immediately obvious, but none occurs to me. The new app comes with daily writing prompts. Maybe the old one did, too, and I just never bothered to notice. Anyhow, this daily writing prompt thing might just serve to break the old writer’s block. Let’s see:

“What are your favorite emojis?”

No. Fortunately, nearby arrows will allow me to see different ones. Next up:

“When do you feel most productive?”

Whenever I’m ten years younger. Also this weekend; got my office shifted around and reorganized for the first time in ages. Finally assembled a bookshelf and filled it. Sorted and filed bills, receipts, notices, etc. It’s the most productive weekend I’ve had in at least seven days. Alas, doing so came at the karmic cost of my all-in-one desktop breaking down. Nothing lights up. It just clicks like a cheap, loud clock with neither face nor hands. Just voice.

So productivity’s out for the next several weekends. Next up:

“Have you ever been camping?’

The one time I went camping, my favorite player, Jim McMahon, had a season-ending injury on the dirtiest play in NFL history, and the Bears failed to repeat. I learned my lesson, and will never camp again.

This is a downer. I think I’m done with the prompts.

…

This year’s World Chess Championship was just about the most exciting match I’ve ever seen. That’s mostly by default, but also because it featured two players who were far more human than we’ve come to expect from recent champions.

More than a few years back, a former coworker announced that she’d easily beat me at chess because I don’t have a good poker face. I replied that chess doesn’t really have bluffing in the same sense poker does, but it does have gambits. Ding pulled off one of the greatest gambits you’ll ever see at the end of today’s last game. Not an opening gambit, but a risky move late in the game, when he was down on time in a drawish position. It looked like they were going to draw via threefold repetition and go on to the next round of tiebreakers. For a moment it looked like both players were resigned to that, but Ding dared to go for the win. That rattled Nepo. You could see him crack in real time. Ding’s gambit paid off, and will probably have its own name in the books one day.