Another week and another set of music that I currently think is quite fire. This week I got my permit and have been listening to music at quite a high volume while I’m learning to drive. Some of the songs that I’ve been playing this week are the following.
To begin Paper Heart by Ollie is a song that has to be a part of my driving time playlist I’m working on. Ollie is a lo-fi pop/rap musician that sings about generally sad topics and delivers them quite well. The song, Paper Heart, talks about how he’s fragile and that a girl is playing with his feelings and making him feel like he’s under her control.
The next song on my list is Lead me on by Sammy Rash, yet another song about a girl that a messing with a guy’s feelings and screwing with his mind. Sammy Rash is a pop artist that has someone upbeat songs that have a lovely guitar melody and have realistic themes in the lyrics.
Second, to last on my list is a bit of a different song because of the fact that the last two were sad songs that were slow. The song, Let the Bad Times Roll, is an upbeat rock-pop song that just feels good and gets my mood going. The Offspring have been making songs since 2000 and their punk rock/ alternative pop music is just amazing. Although they aren’t underground, they are definitely a great listen.
Finally one of my favorite songs of this week is Fuck Authority by Pennywise, this song has a great electric guitar and beat to it. The song came out in 2001 and I wish that I had had it on my playlist a while ago, but it is sitting happily in my main playlist. Pennywise makes hip-hop rap and rock music and they are just killing it. Their vocalist has a great voice for the genre and the sounds just sound great.
I have a music taste that I wouldn’t consider to be super traditional to what people my age listen to, this being some form of rap or sad/calm music. I find that the music on my playlists falls into the categories of alt, melodic, and relaxed pop. This month at least I’ve been listening to a variety of songs that fall into these categories and then a couple that seeps out into other genres. For this month, I have been listening to a lot of a couple artists’ music that is different than last month.
The first artist is Jukebox the Ghost, who makes pop music that is not what I would consider being traditional pop because of the way that it’s delivered. The music is almost like jazzy melodic beat pop if that makes any sense at all. I stumbled across them while on the Spotify playlist It’s alt-good. I took a liking to their song Girl and found that I like their other music and have put them on my main playlist.
The next artist on my list is SonReal who makes pretty standard hip-hop, rap music but it has a soft feeling to some of the beats of the songs. The song that I found to link me to SonReal was Can I Get A Witness which has a nice beat and a background of a piano. I enjoy the consistency in good beats and relaxed attitudes in many of his songs.
Going into a blast from the past lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Maroon 5 which is throwing me back to my childhood. Specifically, the album that I’m finding a lot of joy in is Songs About Jane. Songs About Jane has a bunch of bangers in its midst like Harder to breathe, and The Sun. The music that Maroon 5 makes is pop-rock/ neo-soul and has lovely beats that are paired with the vocals from Adam Levine making almost every song a banger.
There are many things in this world that can be done to waste time and have little to no value. Personally, my favorite one to do is video games, because of the need to learn how to play the games that I play it takes a while sometimes to get my grip and actually learn how to play the game and be good at it. For example, one game that for a while I had a lot of fun playing was Apex Legends (a battle royale). I primarily played Apex because I enjoyed the mechanics and it was a game that many of my friends played at the time that I was engulfed in it. But shockingly I actually have played more time in a game called Valorant, yes I have played a game more than my 131 hours in Apex. That game that falls under my extreme amount of hours is Valorant boasting 156.5 hours of playtime. Even with all the large amount of hours in the game, I’m still not very great at it but it’s fun and I like to play it with friends making it an enjoyable activity. Though it is enjoyable it is a pretty solid waste of time in the grand scheme of things. I could be drawing or doing schoolwork while it was wasting my time relaxing. But Id suggests gaming to anyone anyways because of the laughs and the hype that you get when you do well in-game.
For this week’s blog, I’m going to go back to the pokemon theme and pick out some of my favorites to share with the readers of this blog.
To start Pokemon are a type of imaginary creature that has been incorporated into games cards and tv shows that have run for many years, starting in 1997. I have loved Pokemon since I was first introduced to it in middle school when a classmate gave me their old 3ds. The game omega ruby (a Pokemon game) was the first game I ever played. Ever since I have followed pokemon and tried to play as many of the games as possible. It means borrowing someone’s Nintendo Switches just to play the game and give it back is worth it to play Pokemon.
The first pokemon on my list is Toxtricity (low key form) This pokemon is an electric poison type, the primary reason for this pick is that it is one of my favorite pokemon and that it is powerful. Toxtricity is fast and it can poison enemies with poison-type moves.
Photo credit: Bulbapedia
The second pokemon in my dream team is Salamance. I chose this Pokemon for its dragon flying typing and its sheer power. this pokemon is a large blue dragon that is just super cool looking.
Photo credit: Pokemon. com
The third member of my team is going to be Swampert because he is my favorite pokemon. He’s a starter, this means that it is likely that I would have had him from the beginning of the game. Swampert is a water and ground type pokemon with the ability to learn very solid moves. Mudkip Swapert’s primary evolution was the first pokemon I ever got as a starter and has been my favorite ever since.
Recently there have been some games that have been released or partially released to those who pre-ordered them. Some of the primary games in this category are Call of Duty Vanguard and Battlefield 2042. There are some other games that have come out recently but these are the big two in my personal opinion.
(these are in no particular order of how much I like the game)
First off is Call of Duty Vanguard, this game is a classic Cod (Cod is call of duty for short) it has the basic ideas that show up in most Cods. These characteristics include similar game modes and attachment addons. Gamemodes are as follows Free for all, team deathmatch, capture point, and search and destroy. I look at most Cods as of recently is the Developers just gave the previous game a new coat of paint and called it good, making it not one of my top choices for games.
Image Credit: Forbes
The next game I want to talk about is Battlefield 2042. Battlefield is a first-person shooter or fps for short like Cod but it has its own unique quirks and game modes. To start Battlefield has 3 primary game modes, one is called conquest, in this game mode, you and your team are tasked with controlling as many points on the map as possible while the enemy has the exact same goal making it a fight to the death over point control. The second is called Breakthrough, in this game mode, you and your team have to take points in a consecutive order making your way through the map, because of the points needing to be taken in a certain order it creates more of a centered combat area as opposed to Conquest where it’s just everyone running around. The final game mode is called Hazard zone and it is quite the new idea for the Battlefield franchise. In Hazard zone, you and your team of four are dropped somewhere on the map and are tasked with collecting data drives and extracting via a helicopter to earn in-game currency. Overall Battlefield is built to withstand the abuse that players with put it through because of this it is not made once a year like Call of Duty making the Battlefield games feel more polished.
For this week’s blog, I’m going to discuss my take on the animals I could fight and win, but I like Pokemon and so I’m going to talk about the Pokemon I could beat in a fight. These are just fictional animals and they can use special attacks, I’m just going to set the baseline as just treating them like an animal fighting me not something that can blow me up (for obvious reasons).
To begin, let’s start with an obvious win, Klefki.
This is Klefki, its a sentient set of keys that floats. I’ll lead off with the fact that it’s a key chain what is it gonna do, if I had to fight it I’d just grab it by the keyring and shake it around like a ragdoll. This is an obvious win for me 100% of the time.
Next is a so so win-loss ratio
This is Ditto it’s a Pokemon that can morph into anything it sees, so for example it could morph into me and have the same “stats” as myself. The reason this is a toss-up for a win or a loss is that it can turn into me, I just don’t know if I would win in a fight against myself or if it would even turn into me and create me vs me situation. I’m going to give this a 50-50 chance that I would win.Next is Darmanitan its a fire Pokemon that is 4’3″ so it’s shorter than me but it weighs 204 lb so it’s much heavier than me. I see this fight as a 100% loss for me as it is a giant fire gorilla that could definitely kick my ass in a fight. My tactic for this fight would be to attempt to get it to hurt itself but I really doubt that I could dodge this thing. Second, to last is one of my favorite pokemon Marshadow, this Pokemon is a ghost fighting type. This Pokemon would kick my ass about 70% of the time because it is a ghost, the other 30% of the time I could totally beat it because it’s only 2’4″ tall and it weighs 48 lb. In the situation that I am able to make contact with it, I’d just punt the little thing as hard as I could launching it into space like team rocket (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib084tzN8H0 – credit: Quilifai on youtube). In the event where I go to kick it and my foot goes straight through it, I’m quite so fucked like there is nothing that I can do at all, that’s my reasoning for my win-loss ratio.
Finally Zoroark, this Pokemon comes in at 5’3″ and weighs 178 lb, and is known as the illusion Pokemon. Personally, I look at this fight as a toss-up because I think that I might be able to beat this Pokemon by just straight-up fighting it. I feel like its size and weight puts it in a lower weight class than me making this one pretty even. I do think that the size of these Pokemons arms is quite lacking compared to mine. Im going to give this fight a 50% win-loss ratio.
After the previous stories that I have written regarding my various injuries, they become quite interesting as I left elementary and began middle school. This next injury was one that I could have completely avoided but because I was a stupid middle schooler and I had no common sense. To begin this injury took place in my school’s locker room and was yet again another head injury. Let me set the stage for you, it was close to the end of the year so my school had begun doing swimming for PE, this lead to the need to use the locker room to change in and out of swim trunks. Because we were swimming we used towels and anyone whos anyone knows what an adolescent boy is given a towel and put in a locker room with a bunch of other boys, (if you didn’t get this already I mean towel whips). Continuing with the story, we had finished swimming and were in the locker room changing and I decided that it was a good idea to spin my towel up and whip a kid right in the butt. Thinking back on this decision, it was the worst thing that I could do at the time. After I whipped this kid he turned around and pushed me really hard right in the chest knocking me over onto the ground. At the time I didn’t realize I was hurt other than my head hurting a bit. But about 20 minutes later I rubbed my head and when I looked down at my hand I saw a crap ton of blood, I then rushed to the bathroom to try and see the cut on my head. I couldn’t get a good look at the back of my head for obvious reasons, but luckily one of my friends at the time walked into the bathroom and I had him look at my head to see what was going on under my hair. It turned out that I had cut my head when I fell and didn’t notice until about 25 minutes later. The cut lead to me needing ten stitches and adding another injury to my list.
When I was five I moved into the house that I live in now and when my family moved in we had some friends over. Around three months after we had moved in we decided to have a barbeque with some of our friends from the next town over. While we were doing this the parents were sat inside the house while my friend and I played in the front yard with some soccer balls and other things. We then decided to play with the horseshoes that we had found in the back yard, these shoes were very rusty and not at all safe to play with, but we were little boys so we did it anyway. We began to play our own version of horseshoes where we stood on opposing sides of the field, this was a horrible idea because it meant we were throwing these rusty horseshoes at each other. About ten minutes into this activity me friend threw a horseshoe that happened to line up with my head, not fun. It hit me in the forehead spitting it open and leaving a large gash. But I didn’t know this because I had applied so much pressure to it that no blood was coming out. This led to my mom removing my hand and a fountain of blood pouring out. She then took me to the ER to get stitches and I was sent on my way with a fun story and a scar to prove it.
The events in this story happened after my last story’s events so I suggest you read that one first. After I had healed from jumping into the hot tub. It was a rainy day in my home town, so my PE class was being held in the school gym instead of on the field where it usually was held. We got there and were instructed to take our shoes off so that we didn’t get the floor of the gym wet and slippery, this was a big mistake in my opinion because I kept my socks on. We were doing fun things like dodgeball and just passing the balls, but the problem arose when we started to throw some things in the air and catching them. As I was doing this I somehow made it over to the pile of shoes. I threw the little sheet thing in the air up and ran forward tripping over the shoes and falling forward onto my face. I just so happened to fall right on my freshly healed chin splitting it open again. I remember feeling the sting that happens when I had gashed my chin before. I grabbed it like I had before to keep the blood in but I looked and saw the puddle of blood on the ground and I knew that it was bad. I rushed to the nurses where they called my mom and told me I needed stitches. There is still blood stains on the floor from that event almost eleven years ago.
This was a long time ago before I moved, around pre k time. I was having my first play date with this kid that I still know to this day. My house at the time had a little section in the center where we had put a hot tub. Once the kid that the playdate was with had arrived we went into the backyard to play for a little while. After we played for a little while we decided to go into the hot tub and relax. Me being the idiot that I am then decided to stand on the edge of the hot tub and jump into it, I did this a couple of times and my mom told me to stop. But I didn’t listen to her and I did it again and that was the stupidest thing that I could have done, not because my mom scolded me but because when I jumped in the full force of my body collided with the filter fixture on the hot tub. As I hit the filter I felt the impact in my chin and slam my jaw shut and the stinging feeling took action. I looked down at the water and saw the blood start to disperse throughout the hot tub. I grabbed my chin to stop the blood flow and contain it as my mom rushed me to the car and grabbed a towel on the way out the door. We went to the emergency room and I got my first ever bit of glue to put my chin back together. Now that may not sound like a big deal but I was three so it was to me. But anyway that’s how I got my first major injury.
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