BuzzFeed is known for its clickbait and quirky news updates. But, occasionally they use their large following for good use. A video titled “Would You Steal $5?” is a perfect example of that good-doing. A simple message is put across as it begins: “What is considered stealing?” The narrator lists different scenarios in which someone has $5, and each scenario shows another situation classified as stealing. But at the end, it’s revealed that the $5 is a symbol for consent. In simpler terms, without consent you are stealing from someone.
What is consent? Most claim to know the answer, but in reality, not many do. Consent is defined as permission for something to happen or agreement to do something. Mostly, consent refers to situations involving any romantic or sexual interactions. It seems simple enough, if one or both members aren’t up to doing something, then both have to accept that they shouldn’t be doing whatever that is. Yet somehow, rape and sexual violence is still all too common.
No one knows the severity of rape culture. On average, 288,820 people are raped annually in the U.S. alone. That is one person every 2 minutes. That number surely disgusts many, yet rape is still a taboo subject. Why is it that consent isn’t taught at all schools? Sex Ed is only mandatory in 24 states, and not all of those have to teach consent. No wonder the headlines are filled with reports of rape and violence against women and men.
Consent is honestly so simple. If you or your partner is uncomfortable, drunk, unready, or unwilling, don’t have sex! If someone says no to anyactivity, don’t do it! It’s simple, really.
On November 2, the 2016 Country Music Awards were held. Usually filled with the many familiar faces of country music, this awards show’s 50th year was different. In a surprise performance, Beyoncé, accompanied by the Dixie Chicks, shocked fans with a performance of her song “Daddy Lessons.”
This performance didn’t come without controversy, however. It surprised many that Beyoncé, usually an R&B artist, would even release a song like “Daddy Lessons.” The song itself has been hotly debated on whether or not it should even be considered as country. This debate intensified when the song wasn’t nominated for the CMA’s song of the year, causing an uproar from the Beyhive, Beyoncé’s fan base. Whatever your opinion may be on the song, one thing is certain: Beyoncé knows how to change things up.
Her career started when she was in Destiny’s Child. She left her Texan girl group behind and started her affluent solo career 20 years ago. Throughout her time in the music industry, her voice and style have changed immensely. She’s shifted between R&B, pop, and now, is dabbling in country. Her song “Daddy Lessons” is rich with new instruments and its lively tempo is something the Beyhive has never heard from their favorite artist. She continues to shake up Hollywood with her cryptic songs and surprise albums.
On Wednesday night, Beyoncé’s performance just reinforced her skills. She transgressed through genres, something that not many artists know how to do. Her first country song was performed at a country awards show. With many different options, the show’s curators chose her, as unlikely she may be for the position. She didn’t disappoint, as shown by the audience’s loud cheering at this unique performance. So, whether or not you like Beyoncé or her work, there is no denying she knows how to shift between genres of music.
The impending doom of Monday morning lurking around the corner, homework piling up by the minute.
How about waking up on Sunday and thinking it’s Saturday? The stomach drop when your phone blinks with “Sunday” is the equivalent of reading the saddest book ever, twice.
And, even though Sunday mornings are bad, nothing is worse than Sunday night.
The first time he saw her was in an airport. A Petri dish of festering emotion and sickening crowds. He’d caught a wisp of her trailing at the corner of his vision, it was only a glimpse, but as he straightened himself back to forward, he knew she wasn’t just a figment of his travel addled mind. As he took a breath and grabbed his bag, a woman in a tight pencil skirt and a ponytail that seemed to pull at even her toes, came and rammed into him, sending him rocking back onto his heels, his brain rattling around like a drunk entering a dark apartment.
He continued toward his connection flight. Through the stifling heat and the crying couples, the chauffeurs with the fancy polysyllabic names spewed across expensive card stock, the pilots walking around with more purpose in their gaze than the entirety of the travelers bulging around them. The click of heels, the swish of slippers and everything fuzzy. He hated flying. He hated the people rushing around like plague bacteria happy to infect the next and the next. He wished he had a storm of anesthetic to clear away the sappy couples, the reuniting, the departing, the people too important to even breathe.
The people with screaming kids were especially bad this time. He flew all the time. He flew in winter. He flew in summer. He flew in spring and sometimes he even flew in autumn. He found his terminal, it was crowded, with lines already formed and spilling out into the walkways. Making irritable people even more irate.
“No Todd I told you it was 6:30. How long has my mom been stuck in JFK?” A pause. “No Todd it’s not okay, it’s not okay at all. She’s eighty! And she’s been stuck in JFK for five hours!”
Now there. There is a relationship that is moving fast, slipping down a slippery slope. It’ll be done in three months tops. He put an earbud in and turned his attention to another airport conversation. His own.
“No, mom, it was delayed. I’m still in Dallas.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes I’ll make it back in time.” It was getting dark. His head was rattling with every breath he took. “Thanks, bye mom, I love you.” He was going to hang up before she said anything else. He did.
He could psychoanalyze himself, he was cynical, very much stuck, but he wasn’t going to do that. There was no fun in that.
Photo Credit: The Telegraph – Rex Features
There was a blip. It seemed as if someone had set the world back a half-minute or badly spliced an old movie together. He blinked. Pursed his lips to one side. That was definitely sleep deprivation and yet, there, there was that baby’s cry again. He inclined his head toward the sound but it was gone, lost in the cacophony of other airport noises. He turned back to forward, only to move six inches forward and hit another abrupt stop. He really hated airports. He ran a hand through his hair making a bad situation worse.
“Oh for God’s sake, how long can this take?” A stranger breathes out. He was a small wiry man with the barrel chest of a Doberman pincer. A contradiction in every sense of the word. The man was innately untrustworthy in his eyes, yet somehow he couldn’t help but agree with the man, a vaguely troubling notion. He shoved the other earbud in, content to cease in his airport judging.
By the time he reached the back of the plane he had exhausted all of his music, which wasn’t saying much. He had very little music, and even less photos. He didn’t have much of anything on his phone, in fact.
He was in the farthest row back, cramped by the window, stuck between life-preserving plastic and the man with the dog’s chest. He could feel it, this flight was going to be obscenely long.
Have you heard of hand, foot, and mouth disease? I’m from Japan, and there it’s called 手足口病, meaning exactly “hand, foot, and mouth disease.” 手=hand, 足=foot, 口=mouth, and 病=disease.
This disease was very famous in Japan, because we learned in history class that it was a dangerous disease that killed a lot of people in the past. My Chinese friend told me that it was famous in China too, and that it killed a lot of people there.
This virus is currently going around Ojai, but it’s mild and no one has died from it. In our school, since it’s a boarding school, it has spread very quickly. I googled this disease and found out that it’s more common among young children, not teenagers. It’s very odd that it is going around OVS and Ojai.
When it was spreading around the most, we had parents here for family weekend, meaning that parents came to our campus. Our school has students from all over the world, so parents from China, Japan, Germany, and many more places came. In the near future, if we hear that these countries are getting the disease, sadly it might have come from Ojai.
This weekend, I voted as an American citizen for the first time in my life.
I was with my family in a restaurant when I was filling out the ballot. The waitress saw me voting, and came over to our table and started talking to us about her opinion. She told us she wasn’t voting because she didn’t like either one of the candidates. She said that a woman should not be a president because women are emotional, and that Trump is crazy.
If I only had the information she had, I would probably choose not vote either. But we need to really do our own research and get the right information, so we can make intelligent and informed decisions about who to vote for. Every vote counts and our future is in our hands. We cannot let a single vote go to waste. So please everyone, if you are eligible, please VOTE!
In the 21st century, digital security has been one of the weakest points in countries and companies worldwide. Digital security has been emphasized during this Presidential race, with Hillary Clinton’s emails being leaked. But just how far can the U.S. implement digital security? The answer is bleak, with billions of devices connected to the Internet constantly, and with little to no security being applied to the majority of these DVRs and routers. This mass of technology with no security has been the worry of many computer experts.
These worries were fulfilled on October 21st, when a massive attack brought down a large company that monitors and routes Internet traffic called Dyn. With the fall of Dyn came the fall of Netflix, Twitter, and Etsy as well, for a few hours.
This attack was coordinated by using thousands of hijacked devices that spewed millions of nonsensical, invalid messages on the servers overloading them. This attack is known as DDoSing. These attacks will only become more often and voracious with a new software that’s becoming global.
Photo Credit: welivsecurity.com
(Here are the regions of the U.S. most heavily impacted.)
A botnet-creating software called Mirai was used to create this massive attack. Mirai first infects the home computer through emails, and from there spreads throughout all devices connected to the router, and these viruses remain in the hijacked devices. Even if the virus is deleted from your computer, there may still be dormant viruses across the house, waiting for a command.
Now, major websites have crashed, and there seems to be very little stopping this new charge of infection and DDoSing. Major companies have already recalled some devices that have minimum security, but there still remains many more devices defenseless. The rush to keep up with technology and stay ahead of viruses and attacks will be the largest struggle this coming century. This may just be the start of more problems demanding new solutions.
Winter in Los Angeles — Photo Credit: ImMovingtoLAWinter in Washington D.C. — Photo Credit: HostelsClub
It is almost Halloween, Thanksgiving is only a month away, and fall has technically been in full swing since September 22. Yet, last week it was almost 90 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of Southern California. Spud Fest happened last week at OVS and it was hot enough for people to be wishing they were in the dunk tank or the pool. At the end of Spud Fest, some students were so tired of the heat they had the remaining water and ice from the ice chests dumped onto them.
For some, 2/3 of the year being summer, and the rest being an awkward mix of cold and warm is heaven. But for those who live for the cold, the Southern California fall and winter seasons are not ideal. Currently, the weather in New York City and Washington D.C. is ranging from 50-60 degrees, with rain. Hopefully, Southern California will catch up soon.
Halloween brings with it a lot of feelings. Excitement, happiness, the “officialness” of fall, and the feeling that all those scary things that go bump in the night are real. All of those feelings are expected, but the feeling that isn’t expected but seems to be there anyway, is a certain insecurity and anxiety.
Recently, I have grown even more conscious of my choice of Halloween costume.
Last year I found myself having to explain who I was dressed as to a complete stranger who made a not so delicate reference to my race.
He said to me, with a quizzical eyebrow raised, “Are you, like, an Asian version of, like, Harry Potter’s girlfriend or something?”
I didn’t realize at the time how much this bothered me, but the more I thought about it, the more troubling it became.
Firstly, I was not a Harry Potter character – I had no reference to Hogwarts or Harry Potter on my person. Secondly, unless he was referring to Cho Chang, who most people forget dated Harry, he was referring to Ginny Weasley (Potter). Who is not/was not just Harry Potter’s girlfriend – she was a Weasley and a kick-butt heroine.
But it really bothers me that in order to play a character that I adore or admire, people have to specify that I am the Asian version of them. Admittedly unavoidable because I am Asian, but still bothersome.
As I thought more about this, I started to think of an Asian character I could be. I thought of all the books I have read and all the movies that I have seen. Very few came to mind.
Which brings me to light whitewashing. As I furtively searched for a Halloween costume this year, I found myself not wanting to have to explain to someone that I am an Asian-American dressing up as someone who is just American or just white in general.
So I ended up looking up Asian movie and book characters. It is disappointing that I had to search this in the first place, and almost as disappointing that I found even less.
This whitewashing issue is true for every “not white” race, but I put a stress on Asian because that is what I am.
Here are some examples of some of Hollywood’s whitewashing:
Photo Credit: Hollywood Reporter
I went looking for Asian screen characters that I could play, and the results were dismal. Then I looked for articles addressing whitewashing, and truthfully I found quite a few, but it was hard to find any that were specific to the Asian-American demographic.
I did find one by the New York Times though, which was nice because it wasn’t just about how whitewashed Hollywood is or how lacking in Asians it is. The article was also about how some Asian-American stars who had made it to recognition were fighting back (read more here).
Piggy-backing on the New York Times’ article, the Odyssey also published an article about the whitewashing of Asians in American cinema, stating, “The only difference between this generation’s whitewashing and the previous generation’s whitewashing is the gradual separation from the use of “yellowface.” (read more here).
Now Hollywood just neglects that the fact that the character was meant to be Asian.
But thanks to Buzzfeed, I can at least see what blockbuster films would look like with Asian leads. For example, this is only one of them:
Photo Credit: Buzzfeed
Perhaps part of the issue comes from my own insecurity of not looking “enough” like the people I look up to. But it does make me sad that I don’t find more people to look up to who look like me.
My school has a equestrian program, which I wanted to take advantage of. One year ago, I tried it out for a season. Since my roommate at the time was a rider, I was very excited to learn this sport.
It started out well – I was loving my horse and the sport, but then things started changing. Espada, the horse I was riding, started acting wild, and because I was a beginner, I couldn’t stop his behavior. Espada would kick other horses while I was on him and would try to scare me by jumping suddenly. On the last day of the season, Espada jumped with his back feet and started running. I pulled on him and was able to stop him, and luckily I didn’t fall. But that sudden act brought me to tears. After that, I couldn’t even look at the barn, because I would feel too scared.
Photo Credit: Evelyn Brokering
I wanted to fight my fear, and I wanted to love horses like my roommate did, so this year I tried equestrian again. The first day I was too scared to walk toward the horse alone. Taking small steps each day, I pushed myself to do something I was afraid of. Day by day, I noticed I was becoming more comfortable around horses.
Now it’s been two months since I started riding again, and I no longer have any fear– I am able to walk and canter by myself. It’s the best feeling: to conquer a fear instead of letting the fear conquer you.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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