As if I couldn't stop eating them before, now you give me BACON flavored one. GAHHHH

I know! They were already addictive, but the bacon ones? Gaaaah! Good thing my son bought them with his own money, or I would have eaten the whole box by now.

"Smoky" is one of my weaknesses.

Recency bias, interesting! Maybe go back in time to a character who's exhibiting one that's currently out of favor?

That could be interesting!

Glad you're hanging in there as the job (*sniff*) fades off. I sure hope you find something else soon.

Thanks! It's not so bad. I feel like I should be more stressed, but it's been coming for so long that I'm just like, "Okay, what's next?" Which makes me feel very Bartlett-y, and that is always cool.

Looking forward to seeing what you do with the prompt!

Ugh, the current topic! D: Maybe the following thoughts will help?

My first thought was something about a phony psychic who seemed to have powers because they were predicting something about a trend that happened to be occurring, until one day it didn't, and they were exposed for being a fraud. Or else they just happened to correctly predict things until one day... not so much.

The other thing I thought of, which is just silly, is the story of the Thanksgiving turkey that we learned in, like, elementary school. From what I remember, the turkey thought it would keep living because each day it was allowed to live but then Thanksgiving happens, and the trend of not dying is broken.

Maybe something about an evil high school clique leader who has a major popularity fall after high school and isn't prepared for college life because they mistakenly think things will continue to be socially like high school, but they're not Top Dog in college? Or else they fall during high school because one of the unpopular kids gets revenge and exposes an embarrassing secret of theirs?

ETA: I can also imagine a story about a bisexual person who gets into a relationship with someone of either the opposite or same gender, and everyone assumes they're straight/gay rather than bi now because of who they're currently with, never mind that you can be in a relationship with one person and still be bi.

May I say again how this topic is terrible?

Edited at 2014-06-04 02:52 pm (UTC)

You know, if YOU say a topic is terrible, I know it is!

Because you always have a gazillion amazing ideas for everything, and if the topic thwarts rather than inspires, I feel as if I have ultimate objective "No" on it!

I'm sure people will find great stories to write with it, it's more that I'm struggling to find either a story that I think would be any good and/or one I actually want to write! For someone else, that might be completely easy, but this one isn't doing it for me. Funny how individually these things strike us.

I'm going to ponder on your ideas, because the awesome is always embedded in them and I've used them many a time! ♥

If you didn't see it in the Green Room, I posted an idea there about an oppressive dictator who thinks they'll stay in power forever but gets overthrown by an actually effective rebellion (as opposed to the ineffective ones they've dealt with in the past).

I hope my ideas will be helpful even if the topic wasn't the most inspiring one in the universe. I'm glad they've been so useful to you for previous topics. ♥

I have nothing for the topic either, but think of a pendulum in that things never stay static. If something goes down, it must come up, like real estate prices. Or...the more things change, the more they stay the same? That could be an interesting tack. Maybe you could revisit a piece from, say, last season?



Edited at 2014-06-04 11:09 am (UTC)

To add to this comment, if you DO decide to revisit a piece from last season, I'd totally want to see something from the SATED verse. It would fit the topic because the SATED people want things to stay the same and probably want to pretend that their world was what it was always like?

Or else you could do something from the transition period where modern society was apparently going along just fine and people didn't expect that to change and the SATED people to take over? Or do a piece about a threat to the SATED way of life, like a rebellion or something like that?

Hee-hee-hee! As soon as I saw Kizzy's comment, I was pretty sure I'd see this response from you. :D

I wonder if other people like the SATED universe as much, though? Every now and then I feel like I can go back there with a prompt and do something awesome, and not retread or feel like I have to re-exposition the whole thing. But that part is tricky.

I'll think about these, too. Thanks so much for your awesome ideas!

I like the pendulum approach. I wonder if I could work that in a way that would make the prompt obvious to readers? That's always the issue.

I like the pendulum approach too. For some reason it's screaming "fiction" to me, but now to think of an approach...

See, this is where I wish I had something like alien_writings's imagination!

Edited at 2014-06-04 06:31 pm (UTC)

Actually, "recency bias" is not a bias toward recent trends. It's a very specific psychological testing term that refers to the subject's tendency to remember the beginning and the end of a series but not the middle. :-)

From what I understand, the definition you use here is Recency Effect. Though, in my research I have seen one or two articles that use the terms interchangeably.

Oh, I'm not bringing it up to show off my immense store of knowledge!! :-) I'm bringing it up because halfshellvenus noted she was struggling with it, and I thought perhaps she'd have an easier time writing about selective memory. :-)

lol Just making sure the definition that was being used and talked about in the work room wasn't wrong. I am having a hard enough time with this topic as it is! ;)

Yes, I've had the same thoughts. I know they are different things, but since the prompt IS also just words and doesn't have to suit the popular meaning (of this recently invented term), I can see Recency Effect being a legitimate interpretation of the other.

And the other is a LOT harder to work with. Urgh.

I saw n3m3sis43 talking about Recency Effect in the Work Room, and that seemed a LOT more workable that recency bias.

Plus, they're closely-related enough that I think you could do either one.

Thanks for chiming in!

The Recency Effect version makes me think of a fictional president whom everyone remembers as the Best President Ever^(tm) because the beginning and end of their term(s) were successful-seeming, but the president in question was actually mediocre to terrible during the majority of their presidency and nobody remembers this because of the Recency Effect.

For some reason, this topic is kind of making me think of political things, which is sort of odd as I'm not usually that political a writer.

In a non-political direction for the Recency Effect version, you could do the same sort of plot about some entertainer or sports star whom everyone loves even though they had terrible scandals and/or terrible performances/scoring during the middle of their career? Nobody would remember the terrible things because of the Recency Effect.

Maybe these thoughts could possibly spark something?

Ahhh...between selective memory and what you said upthread about not remembering the middle of things...hmmm...

Yep, this is definitely screaming "Idol Meta" to me. Now, whether I choose to write on that is a whole other story.

It's called Recency Effect, but it is a type of cognitive bias. So I think it fits. But no one ever accused me of sticking too close to a topic. XD

I'm still not over the last season of Buffy. Oh Spike. D:

There's so much I hated about it. I didn't like the Spuffy thing much, but also the sudden appearance of the Slayerettes (Yes! Let us crap all over our own 'there can only be one' canon!) and the heartless and pointless deaths of several favorite characters... ugh.

There was nothing to love there, though I know some people do. :(

any flavour of ritz cracker is gift to the world.

It's horrible when the final season is ballsed up, because there's no fixing it and that's how you'll remember your show.

The Herbed or Vegetable Garden or whatever Ritz are surprising good, but damn-- the Bacon-Flavored is epic.

It's horrible when the final season is ballsed up, because there's no fixing it and that's how you'll remember your show.
Exactly! And if you loved it enough to own DVD sets, how weird is it to have all of these open-ended season finales leading to the last season and still be thinking, "Yeah, but you should really quite watching on this S6 cliffhanger here. And probably not buy the last disc set at all." :(

BACON FLAVORED RITZ. HOMG. THIS IS NOT A THING I NEEDED TO KNOW.

altho i'm glad i do now. :D

i keep reading it as "regency bias" and it just makes me think of romance readers trying to convince each other that their favorite time periods make the best novels. from what i can understand it sounds kind of like expecting to the same pattern to be repeated over and over, and then the pattern breaks.

"Regency bias" was how I first read it too, since 'recency' is not a word in my universe!

That would be much more limiting, though.

Bacon Ritz! I'll bet they're calling to you now. :O