Andrew Michael Miller's Thought Backlog
Writer and working Agile professional. Author of Pancho's Fall.
You've had your suspicions from the first day you entered the classroom or logged on for remote learning. There's just something off about your teacher, right? Maybe you're just imagining things, but maybe you are not. The number of signs you have noticed about your teacher that just don't seem quite like normal human behavior absolutely should alarm you, and it's vital that you pay close attention to these things - your teacher may very well be from another planet in disguise.
News flash: the English language has never been a pure language. It is the current result of hundreds and hundreds of years of linguistic mishmash; like other languages it draws from a lot of sources and barely even resembles its earlier forms. Needless to say, time travel would not go well for you and me, even if we traveled back to England just several hundreds of years ago. With that in mind, try and understand that words and phrases, even ones that were incorporated into more modern forms of English, can quickly lose their meaning. Below is a list of idioms and other phrases and their real meaning. You won't believe it when you read it.
Just like in The Matrix (1999), sometimes things we see just don't add up to what we consider the real world. There are certain patterns in our world that seem less like a random sequence of events that we would expect life to be, and more like the work of a software developer struggling against a hard deadline. While others far more intelligent than this writer have covered the topic of simulation theory extensively, the focus of this article is to point out similarities in our lives which seem eerily similar to video games.
Okay, let's just come out and say it, once and for: you caught us. There, happy? We've been watching you for a very long time, and we find your life irresistible to watch, just like in the movie The Truman Show. Every heartbreak, every new romance, every achievement, every failure - we've been right there with you the whole way, and it feels so good to finally be able to openly talk about it.
Sometimes the noise is too much for anybody to handle. Whether you're someone who watches the news and gets discouraged about the world today, or someone who incessantly refreshes Facebook or Reddit every time you reach the end of the feed, your connection to media may be having a huge negative effect on your mental health, especially this year. Yet, like a moth to the flame, you find yourself coming back again and again, even though you know you'll get burned. Maybe it's time to combat this by going somewhere you won't be able to get cable tv or data coverage on your phone. Below are some ideas of better places than the corner of your dark bedroom to spend some time, banging your head on the wall just to feel alive.