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National Use Your Gift Card Day 2024

If you haven’t already done so, today is National Use Your Gift Card Day. Go get some shopping done on someone else’s generosity.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Marriage is an act of will that signifies and involves a mutual gift, which unites the spouses and binds them to their eventual souls, with whom they make up a sole family – a domestic church. ~Pope John Paul II

For me, Kelly is the gift that keeps on giving. She is a limitless gift card of love and kind consideration for me and our kids and our fuzzies.

In return, I only need to be a limitless gift card of unconditional love for her and our kids and our fuzzies. Not a bad trade. Not bad at all

💙 Awesome Wife | Awesome Life 🤍

That being said, there’s nothing so pleasing as knocking over a pile of random papers that have gathered on your dresser and finding that there’s an unspent gift card underneath.

It’s like getting a Christmas present or a birthday gift all over again. Happy Unbirthday! Time to go find something to splurge on.

I don’t have any unspent ones that I’m aware of, but it’s just as well since it has snowed again ☃️ and it’s not ideal shopping weather.

It’s stay home 🏡 and drink some ☕ cocoa weather. Huzzah! That’s my idea of a fantastic weekend.

Pocket-sized Happiness

What Happens To Unspent Gift Cards?

It stands to reason that unspent card balances would eventually be recouped by the companies who issued them, but I was quasi-surprised that certain states dip in and take a chunk.

Note that I’m only quasi-surprised, because go figure. It’s the nanny-state’s version of finding spare change in the sofa. What surprises me is that I hadn’t considered this particular flavor of post-modern socialism.

In a fair and just society, the five year cutoff could probably rolled back to seven years and the entire unspent balance reverted to the retailer.

That irritates me, so I’m going to stop thinking about it. Here’s a comical little Christmas song about gift cards to distract me.

“Gift Card” – Funny Christmas Song

💳 Squirrel! 💳

Okay, that’s better. Let’s get back to the better side of gift cards.

These pocket-sized icons of happiness are an excellent gift option. Some people bemoan the lack of creativity, but this actually supports the creativity of the recipient.

If you know someone well enough to know that they’d like this thing or that, you’re going to get it. If you’re obliged to buy something for someone whose preferences you don’t know, you generally cannot go wrong getting them a gift card.

If you know them well enough to know that they prefer a particular restaurant or retailer, great. Get one of those. If you don’t know what they want or where they go, you can’t go terribly wrong getting a card for a store with a wide variety like Walmart or Target.

All things being equal, getting a prepaid Visa gift card is just as good as cold hard cash. They can spend it where and how they want. 🤑 Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

What You Do With It

Your talent is God’s gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God. ~Leo Buscaglia

I’ve always been a fan of reciprocity. I try to give more than I get. It doesn’t always work out that way, but I do try.

So, as I mentioned previously, I think I’m reaching the final stages of my ❄️ long Winter‘s nap ❄️. I’m getting antsy to get back to work on The Sentinels.

Before I give in to the impulse to get back to the writing, I still want to catch up on some outstanding research and unwatched entertainment.

Despite how badly it’s getting excoriated by the never-Disney trolls, I enjoyed the first two episodes of Echo and I’ve enjoyed the first 3 episodes of What If? Season 2.

Yes, Disney has gone bananas with the DEI crap and Kathleen Kennedy’s feminist mind vomit, but I really don’t mind Echo or What If? at this point.

I’ve been giving some thought to the video in Wednesday’s post.

Yes, I put those in these posts as much for my own benefit as I do for your entertainment. Jus’ sayin’…

What she suggested was that once you define a theme (since you can define a theme for each plotline), the trick is to restate that as an inverse in order to define the misbelief of central character of that subplot. Having circumstance and the character’s own reactions to the friction caused by their misbelief drive them to a resolution is an interesting approach.

It has a lot of potential to enrich the character development I’ve already got for the series. I’ll have to see if I can tease out the themes I’d like to address. This can be a bit tricky since I’m primarily a “discovery writer” or “pantser”.

What has worked for me for the Holiday Season Serial Romances will need to be adapted to a longer and more in-depth series like The Sentinels.

I flatter myself to think that the former are not as formulaic as the Hallmark Christmas movies that inspired them. Whether they’re determined to be formulaic or not, I do have some standard parameters for my Holiday Season Serial Romances:

• They take place at Christmastime, but they don’t necessarily need to occupy the entire holiday season.
• The primary characters are normal people (“normies“) with normal lives and who do normal things. Jeb might be considered an exception, Even though he has super strength, he elected not to become an active member of the superhero team.
• Somebody is falling in love. They might not want to. They might not expect to. They may not see it coming, but it’s going to happen.
• Somehow, some way, there will be a reference to or a visit from at least one of The Sentinels.
• One or more of the “normies” who populate the story will have some kind of familiarity with, interest in or casual friendship with one or more of The Sentinels.
• The stories are generally safe and clean. I’m shooting for PG-13. I don’t think I’ve gone off target yet. I don’t want to get a lump of coal in my stocking. Santa’s 🎅🏻 watching, after all.

The Sentinels don’t need to have the same constraints. This series explores a completely different set of expectations. Much like a cop drama or action thriller, it’s going to be a lot less sanitary, depending on the setting.

Genteel people will retain decorum. People in rough neighborhoods and career paths will speak and act accordingly.

As I’ve mentioned before in the many pages of this site, I’ve got some basic parameters and expectations for The Sentinels as well:

• They take place primarily in Empire City, a fictionalized reimagining of New York City. It’s got 8 boroughs instead of 5 because it’s fictional NYC and because of The Conclave.
• The primary characters are superheroes. There’s nearly a century’s worth of a corpus of work on the topic. There will be plenty of themes to explore.
• There will be 13 books in the primary series representing the steps of The Hero’s Journey, because why not?
  • The 13th step is a matter of coming full circle to a new status quo that is depicted peripherally in the Holiday Season Serial Romances
  • 13 is one of my favorite numbers.
  • Not many people attempt a tridecology
  • Just imagine what the box set will look like 😹
• The series will be partitioned based on the superheroic Ages of Comic Books (Golden, Silver, Bronze, Modern)
  • The Victorian and Platinum Ages don’t particularly feature superhero characters, so they don’t specifically inform this series.
  • Each of the “ages” have particular features, themes and key antagonists to explore.
  • Like the body of superhero stories, each “age” not only builds on the previous but expands almost cancerously.
    • DC spun so far out of control that they had to pull the Crisis on Infinite Earths and The New 52 in order to try to mop up the wild mess of random story lines.
    • Marvel tried to selectively retcon various series through the second Secret Wars series, but in the end the changes were less drastic than DC’s.
    • My Chaos War arc will address some of the themes of runaway story lines, the complete randomonium of the Silver and Bronze ages and the implications of alien invasions
• The characters will reflect the actual demographics of NYC:
  • • There are people in NYC whose race, ethnicity and cultures do not match my own.
    • I intend no disrespect, so I will depict such people as accurately as research can allow me to.
    • All the stay-in-your-lane folks who would tear me apart for including people who I don’t personally represent are the exact same people who would just as viciously tear me apart for only having characters of Western European heritage (my lane). Fuck ’em. They’re going to complain no matter what I do, so fuck ’em anyway.
    • As in real life, there will be people of all demographics in all socioeconomic circumstances. Upper crusty types, street punks, average citizens and drop outs come in every color, cultural heritage and orientation known to humankind. That’s reality. Why sugarcoat it?
    • If somebody wants to be offended that this criminal is from this demographic or that cop is from that demographic is cordially invited to take a long walk off a short pier. Again, I say: Fuck ’em.
• The world is intended to be “real” for the most part, so having real people with real lives dealing with actual superheroes feels like an interesting place to explore.
  • A lot of the tropes and conventions of comic books and of the TV and movies based on comic books don’t play in the “real world”. The Incredibles poked some fun at this in a number of interesting ways.
  • One of my favorite comic book issues is the epitome of this idea. An alien bearing a strong resemblance to Superman with a mohawk comes to NYC in search of some Skrulls. Shenanigans ensue (naturally) and it turns into a superpowered donnybrook. The alien socks Ben “The Thing” Grimm and there are several pages of the depiction of him ripping through downtown traffic like a cannonball through a forest of paper lanterns. At the end of the kerfuffle, downtown NYC looks like a WWII carpet bombing had occurred and Ben says, “Who’s gonna clean this all up?” That is classic superhero comic bookery. That informs a lot of what I expect to address throughout the series.
  • For each of the books in the tridecology, I’d like to put together an anthology of “Collateral Impact” stories that examine the effect of superheroic action on the lives of normal people and will pin a short story to a specific event in each of the books.
  • This is partially in response to superhero shenanigans like the comic book I mentioned above, but also in response to more “realistic” action hero conventions such as high speed chases, running gun battles and all sorts of destructive spectacles that look really cool from the perspective of an action hero story but look really messed up from the perspective of an innocent bystander whose car got smashed, whose pretzel cart got demolished, whose shop window had a perp thrown through it, who caught a stray round from the running gun fight or any of the many logical consequences of the stuff that action hero stories handwave away.
• There is no such thing as superhero fatigue.
  • Superheroes have been going strong in print and audiovisual media for nearly a century.
  • Whether the stories take vigilante craziness for granted or reflect the counterpoint to vigilante craziness with overprotective hamstrung child-friendly craziness, they have been going strong from Max Fleisher’s Superman cartoons in the 40s to the swinging vigilantism of Spider-Man in the 60s to the completely declawed mother hen version of superheroism depicted in the Super Friends in the 70s and back to the increasingly comics-accurate depictions of Marvel, DC and independent IPs from the 80s onward.
  • Even if certain YouTubers are being annoyingly hypercritical of Disney’s deliberate defacing of Marvel, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and even their bread and butter fairytale princesses, MCU content persists.
  • Even if the MCU is suffering in quality during Phase 4, there are still a lot of well-received superhero shows such as The Boys, Invincible, My Hero Academia and many others that people are eagerly watching. So, there’s plenty of room for well told superhero tales.
• There are other things brewing in my subconscious that haven’t bubbled to the surface yet, so stay tuned…

That’s what I’m currently pondering while I convalesce through my ❄️ long Winter‘s nap ❄️. Frankly, I’m mentally exhausted by my day job. The freight train of new work plows heedlessly on. Sometimes I get out ahead of the train. Sometimes I’m looking up as it plows me under. Sometimes, I just need to go back to bed.

Mostly, I just need to go back to bed.

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That’s it for today. I hope you remain warm and safe this weekend. ☕.