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*Warning: Some uncomfortable discussion on city government finance and salaries.* Northampton, MA is a small city of about 31,000 people in Western MA. Around May of each year in preparation for the budget hearings, the Mayor’s Office publishes a detailed budget book for review by the City Councilors and the rest of the public. This…
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“I wish I was a Buffalo” (Very Short Fiction)
I wrote this very short work of fiction based on real-life at a literature group meetup. Each participant suggested one random and optional word to use. The only word I used was “bear,” which was my word suggestion. I have been moving words and numbers for most of my life.… More ⇢
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“Jason Dreams of Fame” (Very Short Fiction)
For this week’s literary group, the prompt was “Writing Under State Repression – Write a poem or scene about oppression and loss of freedom.” I thought about the attempted 2024 self-coup by President Yoon in South Korea (https://cityuntangled.com/2025/10/19/the-south-korean-self-coup-of-2024/). I decided to write a very short piece of fiction based on… More ⇢
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Sharing this Blog on Social Media
After some unpleasant experiences on Facebook in 2025, I permanently deleted my Facebook account in June of 2025 and have been trying to stay away from social media. I realized social media is one medium for sharing this blog, like it or not, so while still staying away from Facebook,… More ⇢
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Some Usability Improvements
The blog now has over 30 articles. Some of them are very brief, but some of them are over 20 pages long, when printed on letter-sized paper. I thought it would be a good time to make some usability improvements. They are: I understand there are issues with color contrast… More ⇢
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Dealing with Narcissism and Misinformation in Politics
*Warning: This one will be upsetting to some people since it deals with very dark aspects of people in political settings. And yes, it’s very long, so there is a Summary section. If you are involved in any kind of political activity, whether working for a public or private organization;… More ⇢
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Three Bad Poems
For this week’s literary group, the writing prompt was “Very bad poetry.” I had a lot of fun with writing three bad poems. When it was time for me to share, I was laughing at my own writing, so I asked another person to read it. I continued writing and… More ⇢
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Political Tension 07: Wrapping Up this Series
*For a list of all the articles in this series and other political articles, please go here: https://cityuntangled.com/category/politics/. This article will be the last one in this series to help me relax and edit past articles, mostly to fix grammatical and spelling errors. I will probably shift into publishing more fictional… More ⇢
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“The Sun Lord” (A Very Short Poem)
In one of the literary groups I have been going to, this week’s exercise was to write something about character motivation in 20 minutes. I stopped writing poetry in my 20s, but I decided to give it a shot. There were no rules on formats, so some people wrote prose… More ⇢
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“Disappointing Paths” (Very Short Fiction)
I have been going to a few writing groups. One of them had an exercise where each person drew a random card from a deck of oracle cards and wrote based on the card, utilizing the shared list of random words people came up with. My card was “Path.” Here… More ⇢