Hello, everyone, this is Arca. It's been a while, but yesterday I celebrated my 16th birthday! Obviously I wasn't able to go see a movie with my friends after going to a restaurant for dinner as I usually do, but I devised a fun way to make up for it with Discord. Discord has both text chat, audio and video features, and features a way to stream one's screen to multiple people at once... so in other words, it was perfect for a virtual movie-watching party! If you said that no new Star Wars movie was releasing this year, well, luckily, you'd be incorrect. The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special was a short 45-minute movie on Disney+ that released last month, but I held off on watching the pseudo-time travel/Christmas movie parody until my birthday party!  So, to start from the beginning of the day, I woke up, ate some pancakes, and then was greeted with a surprise! I had gotten a birthday wish from the person who plays my favorite Star Wars (and possibly fiction in general) c...

(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 Source Today is one of the best days of the year, in my opinion. What started out as a joke several decades ago based on clever wordplay of the day May 4th and the iconic phrase "May the Force Be With You" is now still getting fans worldwide to come together to celebrate the galaxy far, far away! Regardless of what aspect of Star Wars you grew up with or love the most, today also has lots of ways to celebrate. The first, and best way would be to watch the series finale(!) of The Clone Wars , which released today instead of on a Friday as usual. I haven't watched that yet, but will soon. Another way would be to watch a brand new Disney+ docuseries about the making of The Mandalorian , which also had its first episode released today for while we tide for its Season 2 to be released this October. Yet another, another way would be to rewatch (or maybe watch for the first time) Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker , since it hit Disney+ today. Either to watch it...

Image Credit: Nintendo The coronavirus continues to dominate the conversation just about everywhere, from the first confirmed case being found in Turkey to several cases in the very county where my high school is located and even being mocked on Saturday Night Live. But, are you prepared to put all of that aside to celebrate everyone's favorite fictional plumber (not including Luigi)? I knew you would say yes! Videogames at their best, just like any form of entertainment, are great escapism. I can escape the constant aching of all my body's joints causing me great difficulty even bringing my books up a flight of stairs (thanks, home town tennis tryouts yesterday-- just like that piano evaluation, literally every single other Edublog was talking about it at the same exact day of the month like it's some sort of physiological body pattern), to grab two joysticks and some buttons and let a red-hatted mustachioed man run, jump, step on really big turtles, or be an ...

It feels like every single post I make nowadays is about a celebration or special event, since I never get time for anything else, but I don't want to complain about that this time. Why? Since it's the most wonderful time of the year, and my favorite winter holiday: My birthday! To say that yesterday, my birthday (the post publish date says my actual birthday day December 12, even though technically I'm writing and publishing this the day after, December 13th) was a bit unusual would be an understatement. I woke up, ate some eggs and breakfast, and then walked to my bus stop. Pretty normal. Then, I slipped on some ice on my way to my bus stop, which is two streets down (I got back up and was fine). Then, I went to school and my first class was English. We spent most of our time in class reading. Again, also pretty normal, except that this time it was under the label of  hygge - A Danish tradition for having fun. So in other words, some people were allowed to bring in ...

Hey, guys! This is Arca, and tomorrow is the day to celebrate a very special occasion. Is it that Spider-Man is back in the MCU? That's true, but not what this is for. Brand new Joy-Con colors? Also true, but I wouldn't make a brand new video premiere on my beloved collab channel, The AABO Show, just for that. It is that just like how my blog recently turned 5, The AABO Show turned almost a third of a decade old, or 3 years old (plus one month)! To celebrate, my little brother Onur edited together a tribute "Megalovania" mashup video that incorporates some of our favorite memories and best moments spanning all the way from our channel's Season 1 (2016), to Season 3 (2018), and includes even a few things from Season 4 (2019)! Plus, it's all in the sync of the music and includes a few very important announcements at the end (courtesy of Onur), so this isn't something you'll want to know! For the first time in the channel's history, this video ...

Image credit: Microsoft/Mojang As my childhood crumbles and fades away, I have had to say goodbye to many of the things I formerly held dear. Angry Birds? Irrelevant. Gravity Falls? Ended 3 years ago (yeesh, time flies). Google+? Shut down. Hotel? Trivago. But one of the biggest phenomenons that defined my childhood was the game Minecraft. The first version of the game was released exactly a decade ago on May 17 (two days ago, this post is slightly late), and know I guess I know why adults constantly say that they "feel old" whenever an aspect of their childhood is brought up. To think that Minecraft , of all things, was released 10% of a century ago... it's hard to wrap my head around just how much of my life it has been around for. This post serves as a sort of trip down memory lane of all the things that Minecraft has done for the lives of me and other kids worldwide, as well as a reflection on what made it so special and what exactly is next for the game. I, ...

So, today I woke up, and I was still 13 years old. That sentence sounds weird unless you are aware that today is my birthday. In that case, I was actually enthusiastic to wake up super early in the morning and drag myself to school (for once), since I knew that in a matter of hours, I would finally reach a milestone in my life. I would turn officially have been alive for 1.4 decades (AKA 14 years old)! So I ate a pretty average breakfast (an egg omelet, some cheese, and cereal), and then rode the bus to school. I was excited about my period #1 class since, in our school, we have a video livestream every morning. I wasn't really excited about the livestream announcements themselves; they're nothing special, and in my opinion, absolutely not at all better than my elementary school's DDN (which I was the cameraman of, so expect no bias whatsoever). But our Star Wars fanatic teacher, Mr. B, typically puts some song during the break when it is loading, for all of us to list...