Image Credit: The New York Times Turkey (a.k.a. Turkiye), my family's home country, has been devastated in the past few days by a historic 7.8 magnitude Earthquake - that is 32 times the destructive power of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima - with a 7.5 magnitude aftershock the morning after and multiple tremors. The death toll is 11,000 people across Turkey and Syria and is expected to rise to around 20,000 dead. Hundreds of thousands of people (over 190,000) remain trapped under rubble of apartment buildings turned to dust in seconds. All this in the middle of winter snowstorms, forcing families to sleep outdoors while their loved ones, including infants, may still be missing or dead. My relatives were among the lucky ones, but so many others were not.  I have hosted a public fundraiser page with a goal of $500, to the Bridge to Turkiye fund, which is assisting with food, shelter, water, and warmth:    https://secure.givelively.org/donate/bridge-to-turkiye/kahram...

Brown University allows their applicants to submit an optional 2-minute video introduction, meant to be in place of a traditional interview. I am a Regular Decision applicant to Brown's Class of 2027 (that means I'd enroll in Fall 2023). Here is my video introduction. Pssst... if you're reading this blog post: I'll be back eventually to this blog! I promise! Hopefully by the springtime this year. But we'll see. 

Hello, readers! I know it's been a long time. But fear not, my blog has officially returned! What has been going on that caused me to take such an extended break? Well, multiple reasons: a. Eleventh grade was a lot. b. 2021-2022 after I made my previous post has been... a lot. c. I had so many post ideas but not enough time for them until now. d. I was also working on the article linked below:  https://curioussciencewriters.org/articles/2022/06/08/from-virtual-reality-to-goodbye-malady/ From Virtual Reality to “Goodbye Malady!” | curiousSCIENCEwriters : “In a matter of six weeks, you couldn’t even tell he had a stroke.” This is what Arik Yates, a physical therapist assistant, said about a chronic stroke patient who had tried virtual reality therapy… After my article in 2020 about wearable technology paired with machine learning algorithms being used to help counter smoking addiction , I returned to Curious Science Writers for one more article with them! This time, I knew I had to ...

Good question.  To summarize, Weirdmageddon IRL happened. Both before and during COVID. Oh wait, you mean to my blog? Well... My blog has been officially on hiatus for some time. It isn't dead. Stay tuned... :) - Arca "Arjay" Baran ...  Oh wait, too short of a post? You want to know what is coming next?  How about this, I publish my 25 draft posts (not including this one)... As shown below: Ah, but most of those are either empty, or super duper outdated and irrelevant. I don't think I'll be finishing any of them... with the exception of one particular empty post. ;) That's this one:  (Sorry if the screenshot is a bit blurry, by the way.) In the future (by that, I mean either if I'm extremely bored before school is over, or mid-July... the latter seems more likely) my posts will be different than what I've been doing for the past 4 years. I'll try to make them more opinion and story oriented. So, if there's particular current events that I'm...

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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...

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Hello, everyone. This is Arca. I was planning on completing a month-overdue post on my thoughts on that amazing PlayStation 5 reveal event that I watched live with millions of others on June 11th. Instead, I decided to talk about two more recent events. It'll also be shorter than usual. Here we go! Paper Mario Gameplay Shown in Treehouse Presentation Today, and Bakugan Announcement Causes Fan Toxicity Image Credit: Nintendo Nintendo hosted a Treehouse Live presentation, and beforehand explicitly stated that it would only be about the upcoming game (it releases in just a week, in fact) Paper Mario: The Origami King  and also a brand-new game from Shantae independent developers WayForward not-yet-announced at the time for a third party franchise. Then it aired at 1 PM Eastern time and the video dislikes started rolling in. The chat was also very toxic, but it seemed mostly to be from arrogant fans expecting it to be a Direct (Treehouse presentations have literally never been like Dir...

Image collage done by me, but individual screenshots from Amazon and PlayStation Blog . Image credit for game box to Sony, Marvel, and Insomniac.  Hello, everyone. This is Arca, and today I will be doing a news roundup of sorts. This post was originally, as I hinted at in yesterday's post (which you should totally read here ), going to focus on next-gen AAA games potentially all costing $70 rather than $60. Then, two pieces of breaking news occurred. First, yesterday at noon, the book sequel to Ernest Cline's 2011 movie-sparking phenomenon Ready Player One was given a confirmed title, cover, and release date. Then, just 3 hours ago as of the time I started typing up this post, Sony via the official PlayStation Blog showed off for the first time what PlayStation 5 games will have as their cover art design through Spider-Man: Miles Morales . Let's tackle all of those subjects, as well as my thoughts on them, in precisely that order, starting with... Ready Player Two book is ...

Image Credit: EA Motive via Engadget Hey, everyone. This is Arca, and today I will be discussing the announcement, as well as the gameplay reveal, for the new EA Star Wars game coming October 2 of this year, titled Star Wars: Squadrons . It will have both multiplayer modes, a singleplayer campaign, and VR-support on PS4's PSVR (which is great, especially for PSVR owners like me who'd like to be able to fulfill the dream of jumping into an X-Wing's pilot cockpit), as well as PC VR, and will launch on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. It will be a starship combat game with crossplay multiplayer across all platforms, which is great. The game was leaked on the PlayStation store, as I talked about all the way back in March ( http://www.arcabaran.com/2020/03/star-wars-project-maverick-ea-leaked.html ), as "Project Maverick". I watched the initial reveal trailer premiere live on YouTube, and didn't see the gameplay reveal live but watched it a few hours after it premiered (al...

Image Credit: Activision, source , cropping done by Bandipedia Hello, everyone. This is Arca. This post is my reaction to the first new Crash Bandicoot game in over a decade that was announced via livestream a few weeks ago, titled "It's About Time". It will release on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 2, 2020 (the same exact day that a new Star Wars game, Squadrons , will be released). I'm assuming that, even though PC and Nintendo Switch releases haven't been confirmed yet, they'll likely be revealed eventually. This is since there's no reason not to put a multiplatform game on PC, and also since the past few Crash remasters were also released by Activision on the Switch with a bit of a delay (or none at all, in the case of the Switch version of Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled ). Despite the next-generation of consoles, the PlayStation 5 from Sony and the Xbox Series X from Microsoft, literally releasing a month or two after this game releases, b...