Recently, all I can say for this week is stress. Although I got into the college I want, there is still a lot of stuff bothers me. In this case, I started to ghosting my friends and just wanted to be alone. Every day, I can hear people laughing and smiling. I started to wonder, are they faking it? or are they really happy? I began to hate a feelings of me staying in my room getting sad, at the same time, I hear people outside screaming and busy having fun.
I’ve been alone for a while, staying away from my friends. I have found my favorite time of each day is when I go to the gym. Of course, I felt more lonely at first, then I began to get used to it. Gym is the only place I feel like home right now. It’s the only place I’m really by myself, be myself, and just put all of my stress on the weights. When I’m in my dorms, my roomate always being loud and his friends come to our room all the time. When I’m at the gym, there is only me, and I can put on my airpods listen to music , and really focus on myself. At the same time, the break time between every set, gives me more thoughts of things that bothers me; which I started to feel a lot better beacuse I can deep into those problems. I don’t know why, but there is some magic in those dumbells.
Other than rewatching and still going through Hunter x Hunter and One Piece, I have been pretty invigorated in anime. Although the subculture has not been filled with the best new anime this year, I am finding shows that I am loving. Some of these shows might not be for everybody but they are all unique and great in their own way.
Ranking of Kings
This anime from 2021 is special. It follows a decently simple design with its fable format. This anime is made to resonate with real-world emotions and difficulties that many may face such as depression and hopelessness. It opens up the world to disabilities and the difficulties of trying to work around them. The protagonist in this story Bojji is both deaf and mute, as well as is especially weak in a world sanctioned by power. Despite his setbacks in life he decides to work to become the best version of himself. This feel-good story is accompanied by a unique animation style that is enticing to the highest degree. The show has not ended yet but I am highly anticipating the finale.
9.1/10
Hajime No Ippo
This anime is a story of a rising superstar. A hard-hitting boxing talent is known as Ippo Makuonochi, and his journey to the Flyweight Title of Japan. This show is made for fans of boxing, bringing in-depth details of fighting, training, and experience in the fighting world. It’s a feel-good anime with an almost dangerously optimistic outlook on brain damage in the sport (until it’s explored at the end of the second season). I personally enjoyed this anime because of the evolutions the characters go through. The anime and the sport are both about harnessing talent and power to become something unintelligible. I would definitely recommend this anime to anybody that is a fan of boxing.
9.1/10
Space Dandy
Space Dandy, although not being a show that I’ve recently seen, it is something that I feel I must recommend. This show follows a classic blueprint similar to that of Cowboy Bebop, where a group of three eccentric characters travels through space collecting aliens from around the galaxy. This layout can feel overdone or boring to some, however, I don’t believe this to be an anime based on its plot, but rather on its animation. Every episode is created with a different director, writer, animation director, and storyboard director. This show about “A dandy guy in space” became grounds for many animators to build careers for themselves in the anime/manga world. This mysterious show about mysterious characters makes you ask questions with seemingly no answer other than weird space jibber-jabber, but every episode still finds its way to leave a viewer incredibly satisfied with the 20 minutes they spent watching an episode. The show is fantastic and I recommend it to anybody and everybody (I also recommend not skip the intro song as it is fire.
I got a cold. It came on last week Thursday, with a dry throat. I suffered through two days of school, then went home, where it got much worse. I tried to hang out with a friend on Saturday and just felt horrible and fell asleep. I was in bed from then until Friday morning.
Being in bed all week actually gave me some much-needed rest and relaxation, but the looming stress of schoolwork hung over me, making it less enjoyable. I managed to get my work done, but I couldn’t turn a corner on my cold. I was, and still am stuffed up, even though I feel better now (Sunday).
I pushed myself to drive to school on Friday, an hour and forty-five-minute drive both ways which in retrospect I should not have attempted. I was still sick, so I woke up late, got to school late, went to two classes, and halfway through the third, decided to go home. I did take my important stats test and finalized a journalism story, but it wasn’t great.
photo credit: today
In addition to my fatigue, I got denied from my top school, which sucked. I spent the weekend resting, which was great, and I hope to catch up on my work this week, slowly climbing up a mountain of papers, tests, and materials. 9 more weeks soldiers.
As many long-time readers are aware I wrote a blog a while back ranking how I felt the people in journalism would perform in our class smash tourney, this ranking list was quite controversial and amongst the class has labeled me as some not to good things. But as it turns out I am relatively good at reading how people will perform.
E.H.
N.J.
A.K.
C.C.
H.L.
Z.D.
S.H.
B.M.
E.S.
The list above was the previous list below is the actual ranking
N.J.
C.C.
Z.D.
H.L.
E.H.
F.A.
E.S.
B.M.
A.K.
I’d like to point out that I was not perfectly accurate but it was pretty damn close for a majority of the people in the tourney (S.H. didn’t play). For starters, I put C.C. under N.J. and that was true Z.D. beat H.L. which I will admit was wrong but I didn’t expect H.L. to lose. E.S. was accidentally given a bypass of the first game by me so B.M. didn’t get to play but I think they would have lost. F.A. was a wildcard in my last ranking and he lost his first match so not much to say there. E.H. was a bit weird because he was the person that owned the switch and he was the expected winner, I think he would have won if he picked his main not duck hunt. Overall I think that most everyone had fun and would play again.
Over the weekend I had an awful cold. One of those colds that just shut down both your brain and your respiratory system to the point that playing video games or doing anything that’s not lying down feels like a chore. So instead of doing my ritual video gaming I did something totally out of character and actually sat through not just one but three movies. Long ones too. Over the course of Saturday afternoon, I watched Marvel’s Eternals, The Dark Knight Rises, and Joker.
I started with Marvel’s Eternals, one of the first Marvel films in years to get a trash rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Going into this movie, I was already expecting this movie to be not that great. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but this movie fully exceeded my expectations. It is not a good film. First of all, they bring in an entirely new group of heroes who are supposed to be immortal and help birth planets but they’re pitifully weak for the task they’re put up to. Secondly, they implant a completely new villain who was nowhere to be found in any other marvel movie despite being seemingly pretty abundant in the world, so much so that an entire group of heroes was created to fight them. Not only that, but the whole point of these heroes’ existence is to help life flourish throughout the universe and then continue to neglect a situation in which Thanos tries to wipe out half of all life. In general, this movie suffers from a pretty unrelatable cast of characters and more plot holes than the entire franchise so I really don’t understand how Marvel pulled off such a mediocre film after such a reigning decade of great movies.
Photo Credit: The Cosmic Circus
The next movie I watched was The Dark Knight Rises which was a long-overdue viewing experience for me. I had seen the first of the trilogy at a very young age and then watched Dark Knight multiple times throughout my life because that movie absolutely slaps. I honestly don’t know what I was thinking about not watching Dark Knight Rises for so long I mean Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are awesome. Although this one doesn’t have as compelling or coherent of a plot as the one preceding it, Dark Knight rises is a very good-looking and well-shot movie with a pretty moving plot for a DC/Batman movie. Christopher Nolan does a great job of blurring the line between good and evil to create a tangible dilemma that Batman/Bruce Wayne has to face throughout the plot. Although this movie doesn’t live up to its predecessor, it is a great continuation of the trilogy and a good way to cap it off.
Photo Credit: Slant Magazine
Joker was the last movie I watched and this one was a very different story. This movie is straight-up depressing. This movie is a fantastic example of the direction that DC needs to take to be taken seriously in Hollywood. This movie takes Gotham, a city that is very prevalent in the DC universe and makes it a very tangible, and very depressing place with deep-rooted economical issues that caused an uproar of poverty. And it doesn’t just show that by having a lot of crime. There are living in rundown apartment buildings, suffering to find a living, and even budget cuts in mental health institutions. Instead of Gotham just seeming like a playground for Batman, it is now a mirror of the depressing reality that is living in poverty in a city, the neglect of the U.S government to fix these many problems such as mental health and care, and the empty promises by those who are wealthy to fix all of this. This whole film completely flips the Batman story on its head. Now you have this horrible and unsavable town in which people are doing whatever they can to help themselves out of this crushing situation that they didn’t even cause. It makes all the people previously beaten into a coma by Batman seem almost innocent for their crimes compared to the heinous neglect of the lower class by both him and his father. By the end of the movie I was kind of waiting for them to kill Bruce’s parents because, in all honesty, Thomas deserved it. Overall, this movie is the direction that DC needs to take with their films because this is a clear improvement over everything they made after the Dark Knight Trilogy.
So NASA has a moon landing program called Artemis. This program is going to take the next group of Americans to the moon, including the first woman and person of color to ever go to the moon. Today, the Artemis rocket was rolled out onto the launchpad from the vehicle assembly building. In the coming days, the crew will practice loading and unloading fuel from the rocket and go through a full launch procedure known as the “wet rehearsal”. The first launch of this rocket will be uncrewed ahead of the crewed launch to the moon to bring the first astronauts to the moon since the 1960’s. When Artemis I launches in 2024 it will go farther than any human-rated spacecraft ever. It will go 40,000 miles past the moon carrying testing equipment and data measuring devices to see how humans will fare in the Artemis spacecraft. Once Artemis II launches it will carry humans on a 4-6 week journey to the moon and back.
Albert Camus, a philosopher, once said “accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.” Camus is stating that there is meaninglessness in life, but we must accept that fact, and despite its meaninglessness we must not become depressed. The only real answer to the newfound meaninglessness is acceptance, and with the acceptance of lack of meaning one cannot become depressed or stressed. Every situation no matter how difficult or troublesome it may seem, becomes simple. All that is necessary is to simply live, it is not a necessary reaction to feel that the task is useless or difficult, because everything is useless regardless. Camus talks about the “Myth of Sisyphus,” a greek myth in which a king is condemned to roll a rock up a hill for eternity. Every time he pushes the boulder all the way up the hill it rolls down again, forcing Sisyphus to start over once again. Camus stated that if Sisyphus simply accepted his menial task as absurd and fatuous that the task would no longer have ay level of difficulty, all that is left for Sisyphus to do is to push the rock and live his life.
So we started boys volleyball recently. It first boys team at the school in like 20 years which is pretty cool. But honestly, I’m loving it. It’s so fun like genuinely and the games just don’t seem long enough. I’m a starter too which is really cool. We had two games this week, one against SCVI and one against Pilgrim school. We beat SCVI which is pretty cool because I don’t think we were really expecting to. But we played Pilgrim today and we definitely knew we would lose but we put up a good fight. It was honestly some of the best volleyball we’ve played ever. Which I guess isn’t saying a whole lot seeing as we’ve only been playing for a couple weeks but that’s beside the point. I got home and took my shoes off and my toes are literally bleeding from playing, that’s how hard we were trying. Pilgrim was definitely the better team though, but they have had a boys team for a long time. We genuinely were improving as we played the game and it was frickin awesome. We have two more games next week and I can’t wait to see how we do.
For many people anime is one of the genres of tv that they enjoy watching on a regular basis. For me, it’s the same, but I specifically like anime for the amount of variation of shows that are available to watch. For example, you could want to watch a sporty kind of show and throw on some Haikyu, an anime about volleyball and the main character’s struggles with succeeding. But if you aren’t feeling that and you want something more fantasy or like magic you could put on something like Konosuba or The Worlds Finest Assasin. These two take place in a world where the main character is reborn and has a goal to achieve that was set by a goddess at the beginning of the show. But hey maybe you prefer more romantic-type stuff and want to watch a heartwarming love story. If so then Toradora, A Silent Voice, or Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop are your thing, all are different takes on ways that love can come to be. For example, A Silent Voice is about a deaf girl that is bullied, and eventually, her bully falls in love with her when she gets older. Well if that’s not your vibe right now and you want to watch a dystopian future show then Sabuki Bisco or A Certain Magical Index are my two top picks. Sabuki Bisco is set in a world where a disease called Rust is running rampant with no cure. There is a group of people that use chemicals to grow mushrooms that can cure the rust but people think that they are terrorists because the mushrooms destroy stuff. Finally, if you are in the mood for blood and gore or horror then High Rise Invasion, Corpse Party, and The Future Diary are my picks for you. High Rise Invasion is about a world that was created to decide the next god amongst the people put in the world. There are people with masks that attempt to drive the people without masks to suicide by jumping off the highrises. All of these are examples of why I like anime, and that is the freedom to watch what I want when I want to and for there to always be something that will fit the genre I feel like watching.
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