Category: Uncategorized

There’s this little kid that is my cousin. For a long time, I figured he was around Bien’s age but no, he’s just morbidly obese. Apparently he’s four years old which I’m not sure I entirely believe. If you’ve ever seen the guy you’d know what I’m talking about. Whenever he came over he’d just eat a lot and watch Cocomelon or whatever kids are watching nowadays, probably some British dude with dyed hair that yells too much. Also, it could be due to his (alleged) young age but I find him to be a bit slow. I tried to play rummy with him and he just did not get it at all. It’s not as if I dislike the kid. I just feel pretty bad for him. He’s already overweight, acts a little oddly, and he’s being raised by an iPad. His sister, is about the same. I find her a bit annoying because she’s starting to go through that moody phase, though she’s still only a bit older than Bien. She’s not overweight like her brother. That’s really the only good thing I can say about her.

Their dad, I don’t really talk to. But I don’t like him much. He’s never spoken a word to me and I don’t have much of a say in this but I don’t think the kids are being raised properly. A few years back I woke up to the sound of this guy screaming like someone had just stabbed him in the foot. The neighbor had come over to complain about the dog barking too much, and the guy answered. At first it started off normal with the guy nodding to the complaints, and then he started screeching and yelling about how he was always telling our mom to take better care of it and how is kid (the obese one) was allergic to dogs. It’s perplexing how he didn’t have the social awareness to realize what a psychopath he looked like. The neighbor was probably expecting a civil discussion and was met with some middle-aged dude suddenly ranting about nothing at all. They were visibly uncomfortable and awkwardly pretended to agree with the guy’s grievances and quickly left. On the brightside, there were no more complaints about the barking. It’s hard to believe he’s my uncle, and a bit frightening to know that we share the same genes.

On the opposite side, my aunt is a lawyer with two normal kids. The older one is pretty standard and the younger one has recently started to talk and run around. They seem to take care of their kids well and probably have a bright future ahead of them.

I have about fifty billion aunts so I don’t know most of them. They don’t really hang around as much as the aunt I mentioned above so I won’t talk about them. All I can say is that they don’t like me very much. Whenever I’m around they pretend I don’t exist. Granted I was pretty annoying since I last saw them. As for their personalities, I think they’re all pretty shallow like my mom.

All in all I don’t care for my mom’s side of the family. Half of them would rather pretend I’d died three years ago and the rest I don’t like. The little kids are way too young to be any fun to hang around. I tried to get them to play video games with me, and they were too stupid to understand any of it. The same thing happened with rummy and poker. They’d just do whatever I did (they checked every round) and eventually got bored and walked off. So I could only watch them play tic-tac-toe or run around with plastic guns screaming and making shooting sound effects with their mouths.

There’s too many people on my dad’s side of the family. I don’t know them, so I won’t bother. They’re more of strangers to me anyway. Maybe that’s wrong to say but it’s the truth. Whenever I see them I don’t think of them as family members, but just as “those guys.” I see them about once a year and we never exchange more than a greeting. My dad gets mad because I can’t say how they’re related to me or what their names are. It’s not as if I live with the people or something so I don’t see why I should know much beyond my immediate family and closer relatives. I’m sure they don’t really care for me much either which is okay. I don’t know them and they don’t know me, and the world goes round. It shouldn’t be such a big deal.

At school I sit with these three guys.

The first one was there since the beginning of the year. He’s sort of a nerd who watches anime. Just imagine a guy who gets bullied a lot and you’ll picture him. Our school doesn’t have any bullying problems, which is probably why he hasn’t learned to stop being so socially awkward and learned to stop being a total cheeseball. Well, I don’t dislike him. I don’t really like him either. I don’t think he’s funny (though he probably thinks he is) and he’s kind of slow. School-wise he’s on the smarter half of my lunch table but I hate it when people think grades measure intelligence. I wouldn’t really care about him being dumb since I don’t care about stupid people, but since he has good grades he acts really pretentious. By that I mean he uses words he doesn’t know the meaning of and will argue the dumbest things out of ignorance. So of course yours truly has to put him in his place. I think most of our discussions just involve me telling him off for saying something ignorant, and him just deflecting by repeating a sarcastic “sure” so he can save face and not reveal that he’s a total moron. Also I’m fairly certain he’s racist. There’s a black guy at our table and he’s always making black “jokes.” I don’t even think you could call them jokes because it’s mostly just in poor taste. His zingers include “Shut up you’re black,” and that’s about it. He probably thinks it’s real funny. I don’t think racist jokes are the worst thing ever because they’re just jokes, but it raises a few eyebrows when you target them specifically at a single person in the group. I told him to knock it off several times, and he would respond by saying that he was joking, which is the equivalent of “it’s just a prank bro.” It’s irritating but I won’t push him on it because I don’t want to look like a total arse.

The second one joined a month or two into the year. I knew him in the seventh grade, and he’s just sort of there. He’s a total geek for video games. He’s usually playing on his phone during class, but whenever the teachers says anything game-related he stops being shy and starts talking on and on. I asked him what kind of music he listened to and he told me that he listens to video game soundtracks. Part of me feels bad for him. The other part of me think’s that he chose this lifestyle and deserves whatever he gets. As for funniness, I don’t think he’s super funny. He’s funnier than the first guy who has never made me laugh, but I wouldn’t call him a comedian. He’s more so the guy you tell jokes to since he laughs pretty easily. Aside from video games he’s also a Discord user. Everyday he laughs purposefully and obnoxiously loud so we’ll ask him what he’s laughing at and he can show us a crappy meme he saw in Discord. I never ask because I think it’s kind of cringe how he tries to get us to look. The first guy always bites though and lets him show off the crappy meme. After we don’t laugh the second guy always acts like we’re the ones without a sense of humor.

Third guy joined around halfway through the year. I’d argue he’s the most important one in the group considering he’s the most extraverted. Whenever he’s not around the other two nerds will just sit on their phones the whole lunch period waiting for someone else to talk first, that or they really were planning to play on their phones for a whole fifty minutes. I’ve always been annoyed by people who will sit on their phones during social outings (family gatherings don’t count) so I sit in front of the tapping the table and giving them an irritated look. Then I’ll try to start a conversation and they’ll reply in the most boring, lame way possible that makes it impossible for me to carry on the conversation without barraging them with questions. The third guy is actually funny and doesn’t play on his phone, so we actually talk then. His jokes are pretty vulgar and low-class but it’s still humorous. He’s not a nerd like the other two so I’d say he’s pretty alright. Out of all of us though, I think he looks the most like a nerd, which is pretty ironic.

Marvel only has like two good movies, that being Spiderman 3 and Star Wars. The rest are an absolute abomination. They’re an insult to movies and anyone who makes them and anyone who watches them. They’re an insult to anyone who exists, really, and even to everyone who doesn’t exist. That’s how awful Marvel movies are.

First off, Marvel is such a dumb name for a company. What the hell does that even mean? It’s just a verb. Imagine if Nike was called Run, or if Disney was called Watch. Truly a dumb name. At least it’s not as bad a name as DC Comics. I don’t even think the DC stands for anything, and if it does, it’s probably for some dumb crap.

Also, I hate Spiderman. I also hate spiders in general, but I hate Spiderman particularly. His suit is so dumb and stupid. How am I supposed to believe that a teenager is swinging around in New York City? It’s just so unrealistic. And apparently all these sheeple are too moronic to notice this. We are at a low in human society where we have become desensitized to seeing wackos dress up in Halloween costumes and pretend to have super powers. These are supposed to be “serious” movies mind you. Like, they expect you to cry at this stuff. How could I cry at a guy wearing a spider costume (that doesn’t look like a spider by the way) who calls himself Spiderman and take him seriously? Imagine if you saw that nutjob in real life. You’d file a restraining order, that’s what you’d do. Now, look at a good movie, like the Titanic, which is a very grimly realistic movie because it depicts the real life event of the Titanic. When Juliet pushed Leonardo da Vinci off the door I burst in to tears, it was so emotional. The Titanic earns this scene though. The emotions build up over the course of the film and really sucks you in.

Then look back at Spiderman, which is such an awful movie, a movie that builds up nothing but its own pretentious ego. You can tell the director thought he was real smart for writing the movie. Spiderman is always talking about justice and saving people. The director not-so-subtly shoves this dialogue in to provoke ideas regarding morality and if “goodness” can really be determined if there is a consequence for evil. Of course, the director merely suggests these thoughts and ideas, while having nothing at all to say on them or anything that could add to the discussion. He hopes that we, the audience, will fill in those gaps proposed by the philosophy of the movie, and falsely proclaim him to be a thoughtful intellectual, despite none of the thinking being done by him. I can imagine him telling all his friends about how smart he is. I do not know what he looks like but I think he has a very punchable face. Anyway, I haven’t actually watched any of the Spiderman movies (except Spiderman 3, it’s a great movie I have to say) but this is probably how it goes.

There’s also an issue with the way Marvel writes its protagonists. It seems to be a trend nowadays to make every hero a quick-witted smart aleck that always ends every scene with a dumb quip. For Spiderman, it’s more forgivable since the character was first written to be that way. But why is Hulk, the Big Green, the peak of masculinity, why is he of all people cracking jokes? It makes me so mad. Why does everyone have to be funny? And why do people like these characters? Don’t you ever get bored of seeing the same guy a million times? Look at a good story, like Pride and Prejudice, where the characters are not funny. I hate characters that try to be funny, unless they are funny. Marvel characters are not funny. They are cookie cutter, play-it-safe characters, engineered in a lab to be popular with the masses.

Stanley Kubrick once said, “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.” Marvel movies are recorded, but they are not filmed. They are not filmed because they are not even a coherent thought, or properly written at all. It’d be a joke to even think that a Marvel movie could even be something as rational as a thought. The way I see it, they’re merely a jumble of words, a slew of mismatched imagery and ideas that culminate into a conglomerate of all that is dying within the harsh industry that is Hollywood. It really speaks on the horrors of capitalism when Endgame makes more money than an actual good story, with passionate writers and actors, such as a variety of indie films willing to try something new. Everybody has their own voice, their own story to tell. That’s what makes everybody unique. When I consume any media, I want to understand a piece of the creator. It’s like taking a dip into the twisted mind of a disturbed individual. When you read a story by Edgar Allen Poe, you understand he was a very odd guy. But you know whenever you’re reading a Poe story, even if you haven’t checked who the author is yet. Compare this to the robotic, factory-produced voice of every Marvel movie, or just movies in general. There’s no sincerity in it at all. I don’t get the impression that somebody had the inspiration to tell a tale. They just wanted to make money. Of course, people get very serious when it comes to money, and I am one hundred percent sure that they gathered a bunch of professionals in a room and discussed the best way to get popular trendy reactions with the masses and make bank. Could you even call any Marvel movie an original thought?

To summarize, Marvel movies piss me off because like Disney remakes they are devoid of any soul. Even more infuriating is that they pretend to have an actual personality by inserting the quick-witted protagonists and adding memes to appeal to younger people, so it makes them go “Wow this big company understands mems! They must be one of us. It’s not as if they strategically added memes to make more people interested.” Then people fall for this bullcrap and like, or pretend to like it, or just kind of like it but pretend they like it more than they do so they can feel involved in the Marvel conversation. Marvel movies are just movies. They’re not especially great or egregiously bad. They just exist as the bare minimum. When people piss themselves over Endgame and act like Marvel is God’s blessing unto Earth it persuades big companies like Marvel to keep pushing out safe mediocrity instead of pushing the medium and introducing something new to the table. When that WandaVision thing came out everyone thought it was so cool because it was pretending to be this old sitcom, but it really wasn’t. It was like the epic new satire that nobody had ever seen before. Or at least, it would be the first time you’ve seen it if you only watch Marvel movies. Or Squid Game, everyone started losing it over a cool killing game like it was new. It was not new. But when these dumb companies do it, it suddenly is (I don’t think Squid Game is made by a big company but my point still stands).

Anyway. If you enjoy Marvel movies you are confirmed basic and I am culturally superior to you. If you disagree, cope, ratio’d, L, touch grass, no maidens, obtain dysentery, you have bad taste in movies. ANd worst of all, you drink Starbucks.

Dog

There was a laptop lying around in the bin and I figured it was broken if someone was going to throw it around like that but today I was pretty bored and decided to check it out. It took me a full minute to find the power button (located on the side of the laptop for some reason) and it turned on by some miracle, like a patient’s heart being started by a defibrillator. The screen is a bit cracked, not in hammer smashing the screen sort of way; it’s cracked similar to how it would be if I accidentally sat on it. That’s alright though since the screen is still completely visible.

Also, for whatever reason Grammarly is installed on this thing. I don’t know who uses Grammarly aside from illiterate high school students trying to write an essay. According to Grammarly, my writing is 5/5 on the friendliness scale. I was thinking about downloading it to help with my Wattpad fanfiction but now I know it’s a total sham.

After downloading some updates I booted up Roblock to see the thing I was most interested in: the performance. I suppose I could check somewhere to see the specs but it’s all gibberish to me and I’m not a nerd. (My assertiveness scale was at 2/5 but it jumped to 5/5 after I wrote “nerd.”) A few weeks ago I was looking at some PCs since the laptop I use is over a decade old and can’t even run block games. There were a bunch of people discussing the specs of each PC and it all sounded silly to me since I was just trying to play Adopt Me without any lag. The way I understand it, the bigger the numbers, the better it is. I could try to search up what it all means but I’m just trying to play video games so I don’t think it’s all too important.

Anyhow the laptop seemed to fluctuate between 40 and 60 fps while running the block game. It was a little disappointing really. I was sort of hoping for a clean and consistent 60 fps the whole way through. Still, it’s a lot better than the dinosaur fossil I usually use, the one that struggles to even reach 30 fps.

Of course, I still have to test if it can run a more intensive game. Hopefully, it can but I’m not sure it will. At the very least I want it to run Source games.

For a long time, it seems like everyone’s owned a decent laptop aside from me. I went to a friend’s house a while ago—mind you, we were still just idiot fifth graders at this point—and he had this rainbow goliath PC with two monitors. At the time I didn’t realize how impressive it was but now I’m pretty jealous. Vinh has a pretty good PC and several laptops that run a lot better than mine. TQ had a pretty decent laptop from what I remember and I’m sure they have a computer as well. Even that bum Bien has a better running computer than me. At school, this guy asked me if  I had a PC and I told him I didn’t and he called me a liar. I asked him why I’d lie about something like that and he said, “I don’t know, you just look like you would own one.” I thought it was a little strange to associate people with hardware but the message was pretty clear.

At this point, Grammarly has completely given up on what tone my writing has. The screen is just blank now. My words must be too advanced for them.

The last thing I want to say about this laptop is that the CTRL button is in a very awkward position.

I have midterms this week. I’m not too worried about it aside from ELA and science.  During 4th period my ELA teacher gave us a mock test and about three questions in I thought This is dumb because the questions seemed too open ended. There’s this story about a fish that was probably written by a toddler and there’s a part where it says that the humans started to grow thick and dense like seaweed or something like that, I don’t really remember. And the question asked what they meant by that. It seemed pretty open and closed but the two answers I had narrowed it down to were “A: The human population was increasing” and “D: The humans started building more buildings.” And I thought it was dumb because these pretty much meant the same thing if you think about it. I mean building more buildings implies an increasing population and vice versa. A lot of the questions were like this and I started thinking that it’s not fair to ask what the author intended if they’re not going to clearly spell it out. And some people might interpret things in different ways. That doesn’t make them wrong.

In science class I’m also pretty annoyed because the teacher doesn’t actually teach. She just shows us a powerpoint and reads off of it. And the thing about biology is that you have to learn about cells which is dumb. I’m fine with ecology and stuff because I can actually see those things but learning about cells is like learning about something that doesn’t exist. So I have to rely on these drawings of cells that artists provide but everyone draws them differently. And if you want to search up what something is they won’t ever give you a straight answer, they’ll just say that so and so is made up of pneumiocynclitis or whatever. And so you have to search up what that is (even though it never came up in class) and then the process is repeated. Real stupid.

I have to go to this snowboarding boot camp. It’s real depressing. I was feeling alright yesterday but now I feel dreadful. My dad is vastly overestimating my abilities and he probably thinks I go around grinding on rails or something. I’m not that good. Actually, I’m below average but because everyone else in the family isn’t too great he’ll keep doing dumb stuff like this. All I do is go down the hill and turn sometimes and apparently that’s enough to warrant sending me to a camp I don’t want to do. It’s a boot camp for doing tricks, if you can believe that. The last and only time I tried a trick I ended up spraining my wrist and I had to borrow Vinh’s wrist bracer. And now I have to hang out with these insufferable bums and try to do a flip with them. It really pisses me off that I keep having to do these things. Just when I think things are going fine. I had four days off of school next week and my mom’s Christmas present which still hasn’t arrived yet should be coming soon. I couldn’t really think of anything that was bothering me so I was pretty content. But then someone, anyone, just has to come along and screw everything up. I find it very stressful. This happens a lot and I started thinking that the way to avoid stress is just to stop caring. But it’s hard to just snap your fingers and make yourself completely empty. I wish I could, but unfortunately I can’t.

It sort of reminds me of band camp. I hate band camp. I’m not going to explain why because I don’t want to think about it, you wouldn’t really get it, and I know you don’t actually care. Just know that it was really awful. I wanted to kill myself and I wanted to run away or something because I didn’t want to go at all. And I thought about this for a while but I decided even if I brought my own money I’d run out eventually. There was also the issue of where I’d stay. I figured I might head into the direction of the woods but sleeping with a bunch of bugs crawling around didn’t seem very appealing and I’m pretty sure you have to be at least16 to get a hotel room. I don’t look that old, and I don’t think hotels accept cash anyway. Anyway. There’s this song they played during attendance at band camp. It’s by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And now whenever I hear that song I get this really sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and all these terrible memories start filling my mind. It’s like when I lived in Florida and school made me depressed. I would have done anything to stay home. And on the way to school my grandpa would turn on the radio and these crappy pop songs would play. It was always the same songs and now in my mind they’re associated with Florida and school and I hate hearing them. If you want to know the two songs that kept playing on the radio that really make me sick are that Sunflower song that was in the Spiderman movie and Lucid Dreams. All I can think of when I hear them is something depressing. Nothing in particular, really. Just a depressing mood starts filling me. It what I imagine PTSD would be like. I’m sure you don’t actually understand the feeling I’m describing or you probably think I’m just being dramatic.

I don’t like people. I don’t like talking to them either, to be honest. Sometimes they’ll say something like “The food today was pretty good.” And they’ll look at me like they want me to say something. I’m at the point now where I realize not talking or just nodding makes people think you’re an antisocial arsehole, which even though I am, it’s the impression you want people to have of you when say, you’re picking partners for a project and nobody wants to talk to you. So of course if I don’t want to be shunned from society I have to respond. But with what? It’s a real stupid comment to make and all I can really think of to say is, “Yeah, the food was pretty good.” But that sounds really lame and it makes you seem awkward because the conversation just ends right there unless the person you’re talking with actually has a good sense of conversation flow and know how to keep it going. Most people don’t. I think my conversation skills are alright. This might seem to contradict this entire paragraph, but it’s true. It’s just that I don’t want to use them. I know I’m supposed to agree/disagree with the person talking about food and segue that into a larger conversation by discussing something related to the topic. But why? I already said I don’t like talking to people and why would I want to have a long conversation with someone I’m not even close to? I don’t want to discuss my favorite foods and restaurants with some person, but to continue my facade, I’ll have to pretend that I do. And that’s the main reason I don’t like talking to people: I have to pretend. It’s very mentally draining and I’m not a very good actor anyway. But if I want to fit in with all the rest of these phonies I have to be one too. And it’s even worse when it feels like I’m the only one trying and the other person just keeps saying dumb stuff because they’re even more socially inept than I am. Why do I have to pretend to smile just so I give a good impression to someone I don’t care about at all? Just so I can fit in? It’s real depressing.

The prime example of this is in ELA class. We were reading To Kill a Mockingbird (my teacher said we have to underline book titles) and at the end of each week we’d discuss it with our group. Now, I’m under the belief that you can usually tell what kind of person someone is just by looking at them and their body language. And just by a glance I could tell all my group members were socially awkward around strangers. None of us knew each other. There was about ten seconds of silence and everyone was looking around awkwardly waiting for someone to say something first. After observing the situation I concluded that this was just going to continue on unless someone did something, so I said “So, who wants to go first?” with this fake as hell smile on my face. My plan was to, if they were still too shy to speak up, volunteer to go first and discuss my thoughts. Then if that still didn’t encourage them, I’d egg them on with some banter. Luckily I didn’t have to do anything like that because someone volunteered. It annoyed me that I even had to do anything like that in the first place.

Anyway. I’m just complaining to myself right now. It’s real depressing.

 

Think of the hardest game genre. For some people, it’s puzzle games. Others, rhythm games. While these are all hard games no doubt and require years of dedicated practice to master, I think that fighting games are the most difficult, with not even a single other genre even coming close to the level of commitment it requires. And while there’s a multitude of reasons why this is so and I could probably write an entire essay on the topic, I want to focus on an aspect of the game that is often overlooked by newer players: mind games.

First off, let me explain what intentionality is. When most people start playing a fighting game, it comes as no surprise that they’ll start mashing every button wildly. This makes sense. They don’t know how to play, so really, slamming every button is really the only option to make sure attacks are coming out. A strategy like this might work against another new player, but obviously it’s not the most rewarding feeling to win because you pressed a bunch of buttons randomly. After all, the satisfaction of winning comes from using your own skill to beat a tough opponent. So how does one get to the point of using skill it win? It’s a long and complicated journey to become decent at a game, but the very first step is this: actually learning what the buttons do, and when to use them. Once the player has mastered this, they’ve reached the point of intentionality. This is when the player knows what action they want to perform in the fight, and will press the right button accordingly. No more randomly smacking buttons. Now, does this mean the player has become decent. That would be a hard no. Knowing what you want to do and knowing what you should actually do are very different things. For example, maybe you want to hard kick a guy in the face, but maybe the better and more correct option would be to block the kick he’s about to land on you. Figuring out the best option in fighting requires studying the basic fundamentals of the game like spacing and punishing. Again, I could write a whole other post on these other fundamentals, but the most important one in my opinion would definitely be the mind games aspect.

A part of the reasons why new players get spanked so easily is because they develop habits. It’s important to mix up your game, but for a new player, if they see a strong move they like, chances are they’ll use it again and again. When a player develops habits, it’s easy for the other player to read them. Reading the other player is essential while fighting, and is part of what makes it intense. Not only are you occupied actually whacking each other, you’re also busy trying to figure them out, and predicting what they’ll do next. Reflexes and reacting to your opponent are important, but I’d argue that prediction and being able to tell what they’ll do next is more useful. Let’s say a player likes to throw fireballs. They do it again and again in the same pattern. If their opponent is any good, they’ll be able to pick up on this and react accordingly. The next time the player throws a fireball, the other player will be able to predict it, and jump over while smacking the opponent. Of course, not every habit is so easy to figure out, but that’s the fun of it. Noticing small tells and what the opponent likes to do in certain situations is gratifying. It’s sort of like poker. The problem is that new players aren’t likely to recognize their bad habits and will keep getting punished for what they’re doing, and they won’t understand why. Reading habits and eliminating your own is part of becoming a stronger player.

Once you’ve smacked a guy around enough times for his bad habits, there’s a chance he’ll learn and try to mix it up. This is all part of conditioning. They got a negative response from an action, so he’ll stop doing that action. Bringing back the example from earlier, after the player gets punished for spamming fireballs, maybe he’ll stop using them. This isn’t a bad thing by itself, but players tend to make the mistake of never using the move again. And when you’ve scared a player into not ever using one of their moves, you’ve pretty much already won.

There’s a lot more to say on the subject but I’m sure you’re not actually interested. To get good at a fighting, you actually have to want to get good. It’s not just going to happen. Obviously I’m not saying you have to master all these fundamentals as soon as you can. Learning is a gradual process, and the most demotivating part of learning fighting games is that you have to get spanked by better players literally hundreds of times before you can get better. Nobody likes to lose, but it’s part of the process, which is a big turn off for some people. Anyhow, the best way to learn is to play and slowly learn more about the fundamentals. You don’t start learning how to walk by running. And even if you have no interest in fighting games, you can still apply these fundamentals to other games. In chess, you want to figure out your opponent’s plan, in baseball, you want to figure out the next pitch, and in soccer, you want to predict where the ball will be kicked into the net.

I had to go to Arizona this Thanksgiving and I had to miss a day of school for it. That’s pretty annoying because then I’ll have to do make up work on lessons I didn’t attend. I’m sure my dad is trying to set some sort of record because he keeps doing this for no apparent reason other than to ruin my attendance and besmirch my record with an unexcused absence. Once Christmas comes round he’ll probably makes me miss a week of school so I can miss my midterms and then make them up later, which gives me make up work on the classes I missed while I was taking the midterms.

Anyway I had to go with grandma who kept pestering me dumb questions like which way to get through “skeerity,” as she calls it. She’s flown a multitude of times by herself before so I’m not sure why she keeps asking. We went through skeerity and then sat on our bums for a while. There was a detour flight to Chicago, which was very irritating, because I hate Chicago. After grandma used the restroom we got on the plane and did nothing for an hour. Chicago was very crowded and as I had expected everyone was very rude. This one bum even walked right into me and just kept walking. He didn’t even glance at me. And the thing is, he could have just walked around me because where we were it wasn’t crowded at all. Once we got to the gate I had to stand for about an hour or so since all the seats were taken. The flight was very long and boring and I wanted to shoot myself. I couldn’t sleep because the seats were uncomfortable and my neck hurt.

In Arizona we had to stand around for a bit. I figured Khoi’s dad was picking us up but they weren’t because they were getting on a flight. Turns out this other person was picking us up. Why they didn’t just come together, I don’t know, but after Khoi’s gang arrived we had to wait about ten minutes for the other person to arrive. Then I watched them eat tacos or something and then I sat in a stranger’s car for an hour. I was listening to my playlist which is very excellent by the way. I listen to some pretty bopping songs like Plastic Love and Cherries Jubiles. Japanese City Pop is objectively the best genre of music and if you disagree you are wrong. American music is awful, and the few good songs you get bored of after a while. I suppose eventually I’ll get bored of city pop and then move on to bossa nova or something. Then the cycle continues. That’s how my playlist evolves.

Anyhow. At the stranger’s house there were some other kids and they made me go to a tea place for whatever reason and then I had to sign up for a secret santa thing which is something you’d expect some ten year olds to come up with, not fully grown adults. And I’m pretty sure the way secret santa works doesn’t involve making a wish list. You’re supposed to guess who your secret santa is based on the gift they give you. But if you come up with a wishlist and they give you the thing you asked for, it really could be anyone and you have no real way of guessing anything. On a sidenote I had to make an email account for the thing to work. It turns out I’m the only person in existence who doesn’t have an email. I figured only adults with jobs had emails mainly for work, but apparently these nine year olds have one too for whatever reason. I’m not exactly sure who’s emailing a nine year old, aside from kiddy diddlers. So far I haven’t gotten much use out of my email, other than finally verifying my Roblock email after eight years and making a Runescape account.

The next day we probably did something but I don’t really remember. I think we played four square and badminton except everyone was bad.  There was also this one show, Love is War, that we watched. It’s about a depressed man who tries to escape a psychopathic murderer. I also met tq’s “friends,” but to me it seemed more like she was the annoying little kid of the group. There was also this hotpot place. I had sushi there. This bum Angel picked off all the fish though and put it in a grotesque pile. And some moron decided it was a good idea to put wasabi on everything. Who the hell even likes wasabi, it tastes awful. We also went to this place and walked around for an hour for no apparent reason. On the last day I bummed around and then played badminton with the neighborhood kids who were all very bad at badminton.

So that’s pretty much it. I could have went into more detail but I don’t feel like it.

Avatar is the worst movie I’ve never seen. The movie was directed by James Burger, who is a convicted felon and was also the director of box-office flop, The Titanic, which to this very day is still scathed for being an inaccurate portrayal of how big the ship was. One of the weakest aspects is how the alien creatures are presented. They shamelessly painted the actors blue. This is extremely offensive to the indigenous people of Avatar. Also, the blue aliens are ugly. I do not want to see these ugly creatures singing and dancing on the screen for three hours. Yes, that’s right, three hours. This egregious atrocity demands three whole hours of my time. I cannot believe some braindead morons really paid money to see this film. They should be paying me to watch it. This movie has gone down in history as the biggest box office failure of all time, grossing a measly $2.58 worldwide. Despite these low gains, the film still gained a profit, as the budget consisted of only four cents and a McDonalds coupon. So all in all Avatar was a great movie, I loved it, my great grandmother loved it, and its a good kids movie. 10/10

I was going to write about that dystopian novel 1984, since I had just read it, but to be honest I didn’t find it overly interesting so instead I’ll discuss The Catcher in the Rye, which I found more enjoyable. It’s about a depressed guy stumbling around New York drunk, sneaking into bars and being robbed by prostitutes. That’s pretty much what happens. There’s not much plot, nor is there really much character development save for the end. Really there’s no recurring characters except for the main character’s family. Everybody else are just people the protagonist meets along the way. They never show up again, which is a shame, because some of them are pretty entertaining.

The novel centers around Holden Caulfield after getting expelled from his boarding school. While he’s waiting for Wednesday to be sent home he gets in a fight with his roommate and then runs away. The rest of the book is spent, as I’ve already stated, sneaking into bars, getting robbed by prostitutes—things like that. Anything else I say will only sound like a minor detail, but that’s because the entire book is made up off minor details. It feels more real that way. The book is written in the way you’d expect an edgy sixteen year old to write it, with no long and eloquent prose, just entire pages dedicated to slandering people. I thought it was pretty funny. My favorite joke is probably too obscene for my younger fan base. My second favorite joke is near the beginning. Holden is asking his classmate Ackley if he wants to go see the movies with a friend and Ackley asks who’s going. And then in his head Holden says that Ackley is always asking who’s going. If Ackley were stranded on an island and a boat was coming to rescue him he’d ask who was rowing before he got on. I realize it’s probably not that funny to you. You’d have to read the book to find it funny. Anyway there’s not much else to say since the plot is pretty barebones. The voice of the book is nice. Like a real person’s. Usually the narrator is talking like Shakespeare even though they’re supposed to be a pretty stupid character. Holden says at the beginning his vocabulary is awful and it shows in the writing, repeated words and phrases everywhere. This book was written and takes place in the sixties so I was pretty surprised how relevant Holden’s thoughts were. He calls everyone phonies because they’re all fake as hell and aren’t genuine at all. I didn’t know people were getting upset with the fakeness of the world in the sixties. I thought they were dying in the war. The Catcher in the Rye is supposed to be a relatable book for teenagers. I didn’t find it very relatable. But I found a lot of the points agreeable, mainly on the part about fakers and phonies. All in all, pretty cool book.

We’ve been going through our volleyball unit which is the only time of the year that the girls aren’t whining and refusing to play. One time I took a volleyball to practice serving with my classmate and within a minute all the girls had swarmed us like a pack of piranhas demanding I hand it over. Most of my volleyball knowledge comes from that one show that I haven’t watched, so I don’t know all the volleyball positions like liberal and republican. Not that it mattered where I was playing because my teammates were a bunch of buffoons anyway. I don’t know anything about volleyball and even I can tell that their form is god awful. They all keep setting with one hand and this bum even smacked the ball into my face while trying to hit it over the net. The other team was just as uncivilized and nobody kept the score; the match eventually devolved into the guys seeing how far they could smack the ball past the net. Typically there’d be a least a single girl on the team barking orders and being really finicky about us being in the right positions and rotating correctly. I thought it was annoying then but now I do miss it. All of the girls quarantined themselves to the other half of the gym where they held a professional game. I don’t blame them. I’m not sure if I lost or won the first game because it was total anarchy but I’m fairly certain I won the second game. I didn’t do much. This same guy kept serving for our team with a fifty percent success rate. Then again, the other team was trash as well.

In business foundations my teacher really hates Mark Zuckerberg. He has what he calls the Zuck Tracker and each week he watches the Zuck’s net worth fall. Our class is more like a current events class because rarely do we ever learn from the book (he says it’s outdated in today’s technological age). Most of the time our teacher just shows us whatever is happening currently. For whatever reason he really likes AI and claims it will be the way of the future. When the Zuck dropped a trailer for his latest illegitimate child, Meta, which I suppose is some sort of successor to Facebook, my teacher wanted us to analyze it and how it could impact the business landscape. People say that Mark Zuckerberg is secretly a robot or a lizard. It’s a joke I never really understood until watching the Meta trailer. The Zuck seems more like a reanimated corpse than anything, and I think it would be wise to keep the Zuck far away from any promotional material from here on out. Anyway, I thought Meta was a neat idea, though it doesn’t seem consumer ready at all. When my teacher asked for opinions on Meta, instead of giving insight on Meta itself, everyone just went off on how much they hate Mark Zuckerberg, a sentiment I didn’t realize so many people had. They say he’s super creepy, and I do admit he looks and acts like the kind of guy to try to suck on your toes when you’re not looking.

On an unrelated note Roblock is giving out free burritos