My Blog

Poem- NEED FEEDBACK

At The Carnival

The horses gallop

Up and down they go

Around and around

The bright lights, 

The glimpse of smiles,

catch the eyes of spectators.

The ride fills the atmosphere 

with sparkling faces and dazzle, 

like the jewels on a crown

Effervescent,

Only a memory of a child

Can you tell what I am trying to depict? 

Who

Who really reads my tumblr? I know I haven’t updated for a long time, but what I recently put up, did people read it?

I want to know if it is worth having a tumblr. 

Lyrics from the song, I’ll Make a Man out of You

Let’s get down to business
To defeat the Huns
Did they send me daughters
When I asked for sons?
You’re the saddest bunch
I ever met
But you can bet
Before we’re through
Mister, I’ll make a man
out of you

Tranquil as a forest
But on fire within
Once you find your center
you are sure to win
You’re a spineless, pale
pathetic lot
And you haven’t got a clue
Somehow I’ll make a man
out of you

I’m never gonna catch
my breath
Say good-bye to those
who knew me
Boy, was I a fool in school
for cutting gym
This guy’s got ‘em
scared to death
Hope he doesn’t see
right through me
Now I really wish that I
knew how to swim

(Be a man)
We must be swift as
the coursing river
(Be a man)
With all the force
of a great typhoon
(Be a man)
With all the strength
of a raging fire
Mysterious as the
dark side of the moon

Time is racing toward us
till the Huns arrive
Heed my every order
and you might survive
You’re unsuited for
the rage of war
So pack up, go home
you’re through
How could I make a man
out of you?

(Be a man)
We must be swift as
the coursing river
(Be a man)
With all the force
of a great typhoon
(Be a man)
With all the strength
of a raging fire
Mysterious as the
dark side of the moon

(Be a man)
We must be swift as
the Coursing river
(Be a man)
With all the force
of a great typhoon
(Be a man)
With all the strength
of a raging fire
Mysterious as the
dark side of the moon

Decisions

I am going to make an important decision soon. It’s going to affect everything about my future.

I will have to wait 68 days to know what are my options. How do you mentally prepare for that? I keep distracting myself and tell myself that wherever I go, I will be fine. It’s hard to remind yourself that you are going to be fine.

I hear a lot of things from people who had to make the same choice. I get conflicting opinions. I get confused. I am still confused.

There is not one path to success and success is how you define it. It means something different to every person. But even so, I feel like there is only one idea of success and that is how people define it. It makes me shiver sometimes how people can treat you if you are not part of the norm. People do not like it when you are not predictable. It makes them scared. To hide their fears, they sometimes take the preemptive strike or just criticize you.

I ultimately want to please myself and make sure that I am comfortable with whatever decision I make and hopefully set aside what others might say.

It’s hard. Everything gets so much harder when you get older.

There are so many lessons to learn in life. What would be the most important one to learn?

I wish I was talking Philosophy this year.

Sorry I haven’t updated!

Exercise

People should exercise. They should exercise their body and their brain.

Most importantly, they should do style exercises. Why? It’s good for their body and brain. 

No, I feel that style exercises are important because they test the writer’s capabilities. A true writer should be able to write like other writers while also coming up with a beautiful arrangement of words. Also by writing in other styles, you learn more about writing, about your own style or another way of writing something. Style is typically unique to every writer like a musician’s interpretation on a piece, but to improve, you sometimes need to look and imitate other’s. Indeed the exercise is a great way to make a writer a better writer.

If one does not want to improve writing, then style exercises are useless.

I was confused today when someone mentioned to me that the choice of tense could be part of the writer’s style. I am curious to what examples they mean. Is that something to even think about for a writer? If it’s past, you write in the past. If it’s present, write in the present. Not sure what my real question is, but those words “tense” and “style” have some kind of relationship. Not sure…

If I could write like anyone, I probably want to write like Shakespeare. But writing like him wouldn’t be very useful in this day and age. So my other answer would be Hemingway, short and sweet. I don’t really know how much effort Hemingway spent on his writing, but all the things he has written has the most fitting words. His short sentences have so much meaning in them. I hope to choose better words that fit in the sentence like him.

Maybe I would have to control my patience and let the right words come to me or just learn how to write concisely and find the words that say what I want to say.

Now Shakespeare. There is something about this man that makes me think, how could someone do what he has done. I can’t compare him to anyone else in history…not yet as there are still millions of people that I haven’t heard about. Reading Shakespeare is a pain, but the meaning of his words are worth every strange spelling and phrase that looks unmanageable to translate to modern day English. I love his crazy symbolism and his twisted characters. I would not want to write in his English but maybe write in the humorous way he does.

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How did an Italian Plumber Become a Superstar?

This is a special blog about video games. People who have read “How did an Italian Plumber Become a Superstar?” can find more information about the games discussed in the paper and additional facts about the rise of video games. 

While things were bad in the video game console market, Atari, a video game company introduced another game that became a popular, Pac-Man! When asked what his main goal was in the design of the game, Toru Iwatani, the creator of Pac-Man, explained to “a game that would attract female players in the hope of reviving arcades as popular social meeting places” (The Rise of Video Games, Discovery Channel)

The character Donkey Kong had been originally Mario’s first arch nemesis. The game, Super Mario Bros., was introduced with new characters that had their own history. Also read pages 35-51 for a full analysis in Power Up by Chris Kohler. 

Space Invaders was such a phenomenon in Japan that it triggered a 100-yen coin shortage.

Sega was a rival to Nintendo. The rebellious blue hedgehog, Sonic competed with an Italian plumber.

Although video games started as a leisurely pursuit, it became a lucrative vocation not only at game industries but also on online virtual worlds. Gamers with high level of expertise have made money at tournaments and through virtual business transactions. In Dallas, Texas, professional gamers enter a world class tournament every year to win cash and prizes. Online gamers who make money through virtual business transactions are called game farmers. How exactly is a mystery.

Video games have caused a worldwide epidemic of video game addiction; most of its victims are of the youth.  Some kids actually find the video game environment more comforting than with their friends and family. Centers to treat video game addiction have opened in China, Korea and in Canada. There, gamers are encouraged to play sports, slowly weaning off video games.  

Some of the popular video games, like Doom and Tomb Raider, were so popular that Hollywood based film and TV on the made. Vice versa, great movies became great video games. For example, Star Wars unleashed many kinds of video games in the star wars galaxies.

 Some games educate people and reveal the harsh realities of war and worldwide conflicts, like the video game that was based on Darfur.

Mario was called Jumpman before he came to the United States.

Video game music composers have more restrictions than classical composers. For the allotted time for a battle, a composer has to write only several minutes of music. He is restricted from writing lengthy works of theme development.

  In my opinion, the music on Mario’s soundtrack not only motivates the gamer but also cheers Mario on in his quest.

With the rise of video games and technology came the rise of a new genre in music. Once video games expanded their storage capacity, wide varieties of music compositions were released, many of which were great works of music. These great works were then able to compete for the Grammy awards in 2000.  The genre is hardly distinguishable from music played in concert halls and in fact are played in those same halls. 

(Highly) Recommended for further reading: Power Up by Chris Kohler

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Question

Are we turning in our rough drafts tomorrow? or we just doing peer editing?

Glad my question was answered before class. Thanks guys

5 random things about me

1. Yoshi is my favorite dinosaur

2. Whenever teachers gave me a book, they gave me The Wizard of Oz

3. I used to do tons of sudoku puzzles in middle school

4. Knitting used to be a habit of mine

5. I am not a fan of Windows Vista

My Dream to Be a Bartleby

Ignore the title.

So what do I want to study in college or major in? …  To be frank, I don’t know. I know I am going to college in about a year and two months, but honestly I don’t know. The problem is that I like a lot of things. I could probably find something I like in any major, except English. So hopefully in college, I will narrow down my interests. Thought I would probably study some psychology and math. Well, if I was in a life and death situation, I would major in mathematics and political science with a minor in music. I imagined that I would write proves and essays about governments. I would also imagine that I would be writing long essays, extremely long essays.

If I could write a paper on anything, I would write about food. Food is essential to living. Food is an art too.