hidden figures!

This is my review for the movie Hidden Figures!! Enjoy. It's really educational and profound.

yellow

I am fifteen, Asian, born in Rochester, New York.
Born in a household with three siblings and a single parent.
I wonder if it's that simple?

In a home with holes in the walls and cracks in the tiles,
all one witnessed was myself and my Irish twin brother
jumping off beds, stairs, and our two story home.

Mother finished high school but never went to college.
The sister who went to college dropped out,
and the other dropped out of high school.
My father, to make it better, dropped out in fourth grade.
I wonder if it's that simple?
Growing up in a household, being Asian.

Awards, report cards, and expectations fall on me
as my brother sits on his homework
while playing games on his PlayStation3.
Drained from my hobbies,
there's less time in the day to relax.

My world is in my phone,
much like my family whose eyes
look at screens more than each other.
It's the only way to burn time,
exhausted from work and school
in order to go back and repeat the process again.

The tiles are still cracked.
My three dogs make new holes in the walls.
The life that ever breathes from my home
is that of the characters on the screen,
both ones with voices and letters on keyboards.

i love web surfing

Surfing the website, I found these links:

1) Owl Purdue Online Writing Lab
- So this website is really helpful in learning additional techniques for your stories and how to improve. It's a great resource that also teaches you how to cite work and shows frequent grammatical errors that you should avoid.

2) CNN
- This news source can be really biased politically. The link isn't a direct link to the front page, but an article that others have seen as, "biased." This isn't good for a news source because opinions and emotions don't matter toward the actual report of the event. They also have the "fake news" tagline attached to them.

3) Most to Least Trusted News Sources
- The link will send the reader to a study based on how the general population of America trusts news sources. The Economist and BBC are the top two sources that people tend to trust more than others.

4) Kongregate
- Since I've mentioned y8 too many times already, I'll just use another gaming website. Kongregate also has its wide variety of games spanning from PVP, tower defense games, adventure, etc.

5) Metacritic
- Metacritic has ratings and reviews for many pop culture platforms. Games, televisions/movies, and music are at the top of the website if a viewer is interested in reading articles from those genres.

6) Periscope
- I didn't want to use extremely popular social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, or Youtube because that's basic. Periscope is a way to broadcast your daily life in real time. People can come into your livestreams and watch what you're doing.

7) Increasingly Verbose Meme
- This meme starts out with a picture with a catchphrase. It starts to get worse. The picture gets uglier and the catchphrase is changed into a more specific, longer way of saying it that ultimately leads back to the beginning.

The internet has lots of things to offer guyyysssss

was i ever a nerd or what

Growing up, majority of people thought I was a nerd even if they didn't tell me this personally. I didn't really care if they did. My usual reaction is simply blowing it off and denying it but I'm just messing around. I pretty much fit the classic definition minus the fetish they have for computers. Just kidding! Their obsessive love for computers.

I played games growing up. That's all I did. I stayed away from my young female classmates and I didn't necessarily bonded with them very well because they didn't relate to the things I liked. I was mainly friends with guys because they played games. I also tend to have better than average grades... I know that sounds super egotistical but I'm just bringing this up because people who have called me nerd in the past point to my grades as the first reason.

I didn't "come out" as a nerd. I just let that name stick by me loosely but I don't denounce or accept that name. It's just how people see me but it's not in my power to change opinions.

my bae the internet

B. What was your first encounter with the internet like? What are some things you remember using the internet for then? Describe your relationship with the Internet compared to other forms of mass media: radio, television, film, books, etc.

My first encounter on the internet, as mentioned previously, was games on y8.com. As a kid, I found websites that were demographically aiming for children so I found myself on websites like Pokémon, ... Roblox, any other gaming website, etc. To sum it up, at the time I thought the only purpose of it was to play games. That's all I've ever known as I moved up from the DS.

My relationship (ooo) with the internet is much more romantic than any other form of mass media because I use the internet more frequently. The more I found myself using it, the less with others. I never really used the radio. I stopped watching television altogether after discovering YouTube. I wasn't a huge fan of films. I read books less and less (except for this class, you guys make sure that I read a handful of books).

In conclusion, I'm in love with the internet and the internet loves me :)

computers made me love again

1) Describe your first experiences with computers and the internet. A. What was your first computer? What did you use it for? How did you react to it? Describe your memory to the best of your ability.

I can remember my first time using the internet. The first computer (laptop) I've ever used was the one that my neighbor's sister brought over when I was about seven or eight years old. The neighbors has a son that's my age, so when we were young he would come over to hang out. When his sister brought it over, their son acted pretty intelligent about it and made it seem like I was inferior because I didn't know what it was, but okay. The first website I ever went on was y8.com. I don't know if that website is still relevant and popular anymore. He pulled it up because it's a website full of games that ran easy with the laptop. One of our first games was an RPG/Adventure game and we (the son, my brother, and I) had so much fun taking turns on that game. I honestly thought the laptop and the internet was the next best thing. Prior, I mainly played games on my DS and Gameboy but this was a huge step up. Overtime, I would beg my mom to let me go over to their house so we could play more games on that same website on the actual computer they had at home. I won't lie, I was selfish about it but oh well. I was eight.

My first actual computer was from a company called Vaio. It looks like this:

 



My dad bought it for me for my tenth birthday. I instantly fell in love with it because now I didn't have to beg my mom and uncle to let me borrow their phones to play games on! Anyways, I didn't use it for games that much anymore. I spent a lot of my time on social media and Skype in order to talk to my friends. Those days were really enjoyable because they were carefree. I spent lots of time during the week on my laptop lol. Okay, I lied. Now that I'm thinking about it, I actually spent a lot of time playing games on this too.

an article from wired?

Article: iPhone 8 Review: Apple’s Best and Most Boring Phone

Author: David Pierce

Link: https://www.wired.com/2017/09/review-apple-iphone-8-and-8-plus/

This article is about Apple’s latest installment in their line of phones; the iPhone 8. Pierce talks about the new additional features the phone has that differentiates it from their previous successor, the iPhone 7. While he notes that there isn’t any difference in the appearance of the product (no size change… still no headphone jack… etc), there is improvements within the system everywhere else. Especially the further enhanced camera. What makes the new phone boring in Pierce’s point of view is the release of the iPhone 8 alongside the iPhone X. Its counterpart is far superior because it provides more features and does better than what the iPhone 8 does best. Pierce claims that the iPhone X is Apple’s “vision of the future,” not the iPhone 8.

I like this article because it informs me about the latest technological advances in the world. Well, for Apple on the other hand. I know that Samsung already has additions to their phones that Apple is just introducing for theirs. I think any iPhone release is interesting because people go crazy for it. It’s amusing to see people fight for it and have wars over which phone company is better. The article also teaches me more about the iPhone 8 because until now, I wasn’t aware of what was new about it because the only thing that media generally covered was the iPhone X instead. It’s fine though. I’m sticking to my iPhone 6S because I don’t have my own money to buy it. Even if I did, I’m not slapping a thousand for any of these phones. I like my headphone jack.

media technology growing up

I watched television through the actual television. I didn't have access to computers or streaming services such as Netflix at the time. I only got these products when I was about eleven and Netflix just this year. I wasn't an avid listener of music growing up as a kid, but now I use my phone and services such as Apple Music and Spotify to listen to what I like. Lastly, I also use my phone to communicate with my friends through instant messaging, rather than calling. As a kid, I wasn't allowed to go to many places with my friends because my mom worried about me. So, I always relied on my phone since I was eleven in order to talk to them at anytime after school. I should also mention that my family is a thing, and of course I care about them! My phone can reach them too.

These technologies have changed my life because it makes it easier to access the world and continue being social. It developed my knowledge of culture and the popular shows in America. It helped me pass time and not die in boredom. Furthermore, my phone in particular is a great resource for me to go to in order to help me do my schoolwork. Don't worry, I'm not plagiarizing though.

(I don't know why the text is so small, can't seem to fix it)

the beautiful (but harmful?) phone

Hello there, it's been a couple months but I've returneddd to my blog and I'm here to tell you about media products:

A media product I consume on a daily is my phone. It's a device that I can do many things on. I can call, of course, text message, go on the internet, play games, etc. The product is helpful to me because it kills my free time when I'm bored and have nothing to do. I can call my family in the case of an emergency or alert them that I'm okay. I can also call emergency hotlines like 911 when I need their assistance. I can keep touch with people that don't live near me and get responses from them immediately. I can talk to a community of people through my phone about the things I like and enjoy, and form friendships that way. My phone is a really good way for me to stay social and be up to date with the latest news in the world.

At the same time, the phone can be seen as a harmful product in the eyes of perhaps the older generation. It can be harmful in that it takes time away from personal quality time. Many people tend to stare at their phone screen than up to the person they're spending time with because people have a tendency to check their messages as soon as they get one. Since it takes away time, people can miss doing important tasks because of their phone. Eating, loss of sleep, and exercising are some examples. It's also harmful in the fact that staring at a screen too long can hurt your vision. Staring at a screen produces eye fatigue after long periods of time and excessive amounts of that can be extremely irritating.

In my opinion, I don't think phones should be banned. It's beneficial to people if they use it responsibility. If you know you've been losing sleep by staying on your phone, it's your fault, not the phone itself. In order to address the possible concerns regarding the phone, children and teenagers need to be aware that they should prioritize other things other than their phone. Perhaps give them other activities to keep them busy, instead of always reverting back to their cellular devices as a pass time.

and then there were none

For the past two weeks, I've been working on the genre of mystery and now I have an opinion on it. First, we had to read the book And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, a well-known mystery author, in order to get an idea about how to write a mystery story that can reflect the story. The book was interesting and the plot is really cool but I didn't like the simplicity of the deaths. I was hoping for a death to be more complex and wild instead of the author simply killing a character off to go with the poem that inspired the story.

I really appreciate how everything gets tied up, especially in the conclusion when the murderer is finally revealed by the very end. I wish the story wasn't so short because I didn't have enough time to like even one of the characters.

I had the opportunity to write a mystery draft and so I did. My story is different from the plot line of the story in which my character wakes up next to a dead body and gets framed for being the murderer when in actuality the narrator has no recall of doing so. This is the premise but I also added a twist to it... The process was good. It was easier to write because the plot kept me genuinely interested. I didn't stress over what to write. I learned that plots have to be clear and solidified because even a vague story will throw a reader off and they might not like it as much. Information and clues toward a crime cannot be given to the readers because it takes away the appeal of figuring out throughout the novel. I found that I liked writing mystery stories and I hope to write more in the future. Especially over the summer since my ninth grade year in writing is nearly over.