(Above you can see the spooky edits I made to both my profile picture/blog favicon and my personal Discord server's icon for this year!) UPDATED: I wrote this in the morning, but now, in the evening, I updated it at the bottom :)  Hello, everyone! I know I haven't posted in a long, long time. A lot has happened since mid-July. For one, school has continued (in-person, kind of) through hybrid school for many people where I live. I was hybrid for a short amount of time but am now back to remote. Many, many exciting things have also happened. The article I wrote with the fantastic team at Curious Science Writers got published! It's about using wearable smartwatches to fight smoking addiction, a problem that likely affects at least someone you know in your life, like a family member or loved one:  https://curioussciencewriters.org/2020/10/26/going-from-ismoke-to-no-smoking-with-wearables/ .  I know I've talked about technology constantly on my blog, but this article is more...

Image Credit: Nintendo Hello, guys, this is Arca. Last night, I was running down the stairs in the dark after my mom and Onur told me to rush downstairs to see a recently gone-viral funny video of some Italian priest guy who accidentally kept on activating flashy filters while doing a Facebook Live prayer livestream that was being held due to the coronavirus. But on the way to the living room, I made a sharp turn against the white portion of the wall at the very bottom that's pointy at a very high speed. I yelled in pain and skipped on one foot to the nearest couch. Looking at my pinky toe (it's not graphic, don't worry), it was quite pinkish purple and was bent slightly, and it hurt a lot. I had to spend the rest of the day as well as the night putting my foot on ice and struggled to fall asleep. I woke up once, hoping that the night was nearly over, but I looked at a small watch put next to my bed which showed that it was still 2:41 AM. Today, I did my virtual sc...

It's the most wonderful time of the year.... With the gamers all playing and everyone telling you to ride the hype train... It's the most wonderful time of the year! It's the hype-hypiest season of all. With those leaks and rumors and speculative rambling when E3 comes by... It's the most wonderful time of the year! There'll be predictions to make and leaks to debunk and expectations to set... And tales of those failed E3's long, long ago... It's the most wonderful time of the year!  Oh, wait, are you guys reading this right now? Oh, sorry for my singing. It's just that I tend to get very festive this time of the year. *Ahem*. Where was I? Oh yeah, E3 2019 is finally here! The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3 for short, is the annual gaming convention and press conference where gaming studios and developers take the curtains off from some of their biggest game and console projects and announcements for the public! It's no boring selectio...

Hello, this is Arca, and while you are reading this right now, I am in Turkey. Long-time fans of my blog, or anyone who knows me personally, is familiar with the fact that every summer, I go on vacation to Turkey for around three weeks to visit my family and go to the beach. Seeing as I have around three weeks, a decent chunk of which I will be sitting around doing nothing, I decided to not put my time (and WiFi) to waste. To make the most of the summer I have left, I will try to continue to blog as much as possible, even in Turkey. Of course, it won't be as frequent or detailed, but I will try my best to post a few times a week. My blog will still be about my regular post topics, but this time, I will also make a post at the end of each week discussing what I did in Turkey that week. This week, so far, I am in Ankara (the capital of Turkey), and I happened to meet a famous Turkish journalist woman named Ayşe Arman. My mom recognized her at the New York airport, and immedi...