Veni, Vidi, Vici

"I came, I saw, I conquered."

I would love to be able to end on this quote, but it kinda sets a few things in stone that should still be concrete. We came to Quest English 8, we were helped to see in Quest English 8 through 9, but the last part is what gets me. "I conquered" almost feels defining in that we are done, finished, complete. But we are not.

The entirety of this class has taught me so much about so many topics, and I'd love to say that I remembered everything, but I have not. And so i have not conquered, I have learned, but I have definitely not conquered. So when you ask what's next, there is many possibilities. Even if any of us managed to remember everything of the immense load that we learned, there would still be an infinite times that of information to still learn. 

But the thing that will vary all of us and where we go next will be based on each of our own free choices. My choices will be different then everyone else's, and so I will explain my aspirations. I wish to become a competitive CS:GO player for Fnatic, go to The University of Texas, and major game design. And so I will end with this, "What do you want to do next: Something good, something bad? A bit of both?" ~ Starlord, Guardians of the Galaxy.

Learning Project: Animation Reflection

This project was awesome, all things considered. It gave me the chance, excuse, and motivation to learn animation. I had been putting this off for some time, so thanks for the deadline. Not only did I learn about how to animate, but I learned a lot of things on the subject of creativity. I learned about how to make characters, storyboards, and inside jokes among other things and that you could incorporate these things into many other topics and creations.

Beginning the project was probably the toughest part to start with, but with time the toughest thing was realizing what else I could have done with more time or different topics. I do not regret choosing and finishing this project on animation, but i do regret not being able to have choose more project topics. Learning how to YoYo and play CS:GO like a pro being among those topics I left behind. However, now that I have learned that I can take the time out of my schedule to learn things like this, I have no doubt of being able to pick up these lessons and topics as skills in the near future. For instance, I have just recently started a CS:GO team with a couple of friends, and we have begun to play together and practice. With taking the time to 'break the ice', so to speak, I have unlocked many paths in front of me. This including some dreams and aspirations to become a CS:GO pro player for Fnatic or other teams, a famous YouTuber, or someone that people would look to for guidance and comfort in some way, shape, or form.

This project has definitely shown me that if you put your mind to something, you can do it against all odds. In this day and age where people are negative and discourage each other consistently, it is a comforting and convenient lesson to learn at my age. This lesson can also be strengthened by looking at role models like CS:GO player Olofmeister who isn't afraid to sign stuff and talk to fans who others players might just find annoying, or Animator Edd Gould who wasn't afraid to animate up to his death in 2012. These people set there minds to something, and got it done despite the odds or things against them.


To sum things up, this project has taught me a few things. Among them being that deadlines are my friend, if you put your mind to something you can do it, and that many people have already achieved greatness, so why can't you? Even beyond just this project or things similar, these are great lessons to have learned for my first year of high school.

One Good Thing: LotF

God leads me everyday on the journey of life, and when people tell me that I am believing in something that doesn’t exist, I laugh and turn away from them. Because the odds of all the topics that we are learning and discussing all of a sudden being some of the most prevalent things in my life even before we started reading Lord of the Flies isn’t just coincidence, it’s purposeful. Things in my life happen for a reason, and this is what helps me get through the worst of times. It is one of many of my morals, and it is part of my very being. My morals shape my soul, they define my beliefs, and they fill the cracks and crevices in my life. The worst periods in my life are cushioned, the worst people in my life are forgiven, and the worst things I’ve done are learned from and left behind in my past.

Immediately with not only reading the book, but looking at the cover, I received not only a bad gut feeling, but one of those shivers you get once in awhile at random times. But like I said previously, I believe in a lot of things, but coincidences are very rarely things I even begin to consider. For myself, I tend to have shivers if I am in the presence of something sinful. At first sight of the cover, I thought it was a just a large fly with a fat boy on the cover. But as soon as it was explained to me that this fly wasn’t a normal fly but was in fact Beelzebub, then that Beelzebub was another translation for Lord of the Flies, and even worse was that Beelzebub was another name for the devil. In that moment I had no doubt as where the shiver had come from.

With the missing information filled in, I started connecting the dots. So many sins are committed in this book, including but not limited to gluttony, envy, greed, sloth, pride, and wrath. The only sin of the seven sins that I don’t see present on the island would be lust, but I’m sure with time and thought you could argue that lust is present as well. With all of this sin, it would be easy to simply connect it all in the point of “sin is really prevalent”. But that would be too easy, considering that characters like Roger exist in LotF. Instead, I will do my best to point out the best in this book, proving that no darkness can withstand light, and that at least some good morals can be taught from this book.

There is no character in this book who has not sinned in some way or form, but some have sinned less than others. Everyone took part in Simon's death, and what a gruesome death that was, as when Simon tumbled down to the beach everyone “...surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore” (Golding 153). For a book lasting roughly 208 pages and being read by ninth graders, this is pretty descriptive, more descriptive then I would have liked. But it is necessary to show that everyone committed murder, but not only murder but a brutal, horrible killing of man.

Why do I point this out, you may ask? The morning after Simon's death, the book continues with Ralph, Simon, Sam, and Eric at the beach by the pool. The mood is solemn, and Ralph keeps bringing up Simon, while the other boys have already have seemed to make peace with his death already. After bringing up his death multiple times, Piggy, Sam, and Eric finally manage to get Ralph to stop bringing up the subject, but only after making excuses, as “Memory of the dance that none of them had attended shook all four boys convulsively. ‘We left early’” (Golding 158). The one good thing that I pull out of this is that Ralph felt guilt. It shows that he is human, and guess who made us human, with these tendencies such as having guilt? God. It shows that we as humans can recover through learning from our mistakes and finding forgiveness in ourselves and our savior. At the root of ourselves, when everything else is eroded away, there will always be God.

Moving forward in the story, to the point where savagery has clung to most of the boys and has seeped into their minds, everyone seems to have lost their minds as they all have joined Jack's tribe and appointed Roger as the person to torture people. Sam and Eric have been captured, and Roger and his evil tendencies have been put into use to teach them a lesson on obeying Jack. Not much is written about that part, but it seems that he did some pretty wacky things. With Ralph being the only presumed kid who hasn’t joined Jack's band now, he proceeds to sneak close to the ‘castle’ and climb the wall where Sam and Eric are.

Even after being tortured by Roger, Sam and Eric risk their necks by providing Ralph with food and information. Quietly, “Ralph felt a chunk of meat pushed against him and grabbed it” (Golding 190), as someone was heard to be coming to check on Sam and Eric. Quickly climbing down the surface of the rock, Ralph “...tensed again. There were voices raised on the top of the castle rock” (Golding 190). Obviously, Sam and Eric still have good in them, as they would not only have ratted Ralph out to Jack, but they wouldn’t have given him food and at least some reassurance of safety the next day in a plan to keep him alive. Not only does this teach good morals of loyalty to friends, but it also strengthens my previous point of God being at the roots of anyone and anything, not to mention showing that he can light the way back to road of life from the many dark paths that some of us may have taken a wrong turn into.

Taking into account that there are numerous bad things being obvious in this book, I hope that I have not only provided myself with the truth that even ‘absolute’ darkness would be terminated by light and love, but you as well. No one deserves to live life without at least one good thing. And I hope this blog has shown that it may take work and elbow grease to find that one good thing among the bad, but that it also shows that they exist and are prominent when realized in full extent.

Hold Your Head Up: Hope and Fear

As mid quarter is fast approaching, the amount of music that I listen to per day has gone up immensely. Working on projects late into the night, I always have an earbud in my ear or a headset on my head. Rap is my favorite genre of music lately, and it has gotten me through a lot in the past year. Swim meets, tough projects, or even when I'm just feeling unmotivated or in need of something to get my head in the game. With rap being my favorite genre, I obviously listen to Eminem, but Macklemore has grown on me immensely as of late. People who base opinions off of one of his newer songs, Thrift shop, may think that he is a corny grown up who never matured. But he's not. I was intrigued after hearing him on the radio one day, so I looked what albums he had made on Google. His album The Language of My World stood out to me, so I started listening to it and realized he had much more talent than some of his newer songs showed.

Song number six, Hold Your Head Up, lasting four minutes and twenty-five seconds, became my favorite song and is still in my top three. Now, you might be wondering what this song has to do with hope, fear, and a little more than half a dozen pieces of literature. As soon as I started doing that teenager thing, where you zone out while listening to a song and don't pay attention to anything, I noticed that this song is filled with lyrics that are or are almost polar opposites of one another. Light and dark, burden and blessings, truth and lies. This song has it all. So as I'm listening to it, I key in to one line Macklemore (2005) sings specifically, "The brighter the light, the darker the shadow". The number of things you can obtain from this line of text is immense, but I derive one point specifically. The greater something you could earn is, the harsher the consequences for failure can be.

Say you have a math test. You have a decent grade, but if you aced this test, your grade would increase to an A. But guess what, if you don't do well on said test, then your grade would plummet to something beyond repair. There is a correlation between reward (light), and failure (darkness). It is the same when you are in a life in death situation. If you have a gun pointed towards you, and the person is about to shoot but gets distracted, what do you do? Do you lunge forward to disarm the man and possibly save your own life, or do you stand still and pray he has a change of heart? Well, some might say hope for life causes you to lunge at the man, while others might say fear of death would cause you to lunge forward.

To me, “Wool” by Hugh Howey made the biggest impact on me out of the stories we read. I finished the book at 10 pm at night, and I particularly remember just sitting there questioning truth, goodness, hope, fear, and censorship. Thinking back to that thought process, I remember being particularly caught up on why Holston had acted the way he had. Looking more closely, it seems that hope was the main affecting factor out of the two (hope and fear being the two). Like when Hugh Howey explains that “The first year without her, Holston had waited, buying into her insanity, hoping she’d come back” (22). Hope is what caused Holston to wait an entire year for his wife after she had cleaned the outside view. Then when Holston began to think about going out to find her, hope was still what caused him to do so. But even if fear had been replaced with this hope, the ends would have been similar or the same.

Well guess what, this entire time we have been debating as a class has been about the wrong things. This entire time we have been debating about which is more powerful, hope or fear. Don’t get me wrong, they are both completely different things, but we end up with the same or similar result(s) from either or. What we should be discussing is in what situations is hope more prevalent, and in what situations is fear more prevalent. Basically, in what situations does either take over? They end in similar ways, but when they take hold of us and how they do so is what I think we should be more interested in.

Starting with hope and then leading to fear, I would like to bring up my favorite story of the many we read. Kurt Vonnegut’s “All The King’s Horses” covers a game of chess (which is one of favorite board games) gone awry when a group of sixteen Americans become POW and are forced to duel a man by the name of Pi Ying for their lives. Colonel Kelly is not only one of the men captured, but his wife and two kids are there as well, making this situation all the more dire for him. Both Pi Ying and Kelly are the players deciding action, and both of them have 10 minutes to decide each turn.

An hour into the game, Kelly comes across the choice of sacrificing his son Jerry to save the rest of the group. Being a soldier, Kelly has been taught to be tough in these situations, his fear has been replaced with training, and so the only thing that is left is hope. Vonnegut explains hope in war and life in general when he states, “When human beings are attacked, x, multiplied by hundreds or thousands, must die--sent to death by those who love them most” and that “Kelly’s profession was the choosing of x” (17). It’s tough to think about this decision, being that he is sacrificing his son because of the hope of life for the rest of the remaining group. That same hope being the thing that I have repeatedly directly and indirectly correlated with light and goodness. Being the Christian I am, I will always do my best to focus on the positive in life and further in my belief of hope, but that doesn’t mean sacrifices aren’t necessary.

It is this hope that leads Kelly to his actions, as well as the same hope I have correlated with light and goodness in previous blogs, that takes hold in people in situations where they have time to sort through their beliefs and realize that they need to fight to the end. If their beliefs are based on positive emotions and goodness, and they have time to realize this, hope will be the more likely of the two to take hold. But, if they have focused on negativity and emotions such as greed and jealousy, or if they haven’t had time to think about their own beliefs, then they will turn towards fear.

For instance, Kelly’s wife Margaret has no power towards her own survival, the survival or her kids or husband, or the survival of the rest of the group as the game goes on. And as much as she cares about her own life, she is a parent. As my parents often tell my brother and I, they love me and care about me always, and will go to opposite ends of the earth to keep my brother and I safe. When his first piece was taken, Kelly listened as the Sergeant was taken to a back room and shot. Crying out of grief, he looked to his wife for comfort as he usually did, but instead he saw “...the fear and reproach in Margaret's eyes” (Vonnegut 10). His wife had been reduced to a emotionless wreck, trapped in her own world of worry from the fear of death, for her, her family, and the rest of the group.

You may be thinking to yourself, ‘Why didn’t she turn to hope, she had time to think about her beliefs, and she couldn’t possibly be so negative?’ It's because she doesn’t have time to think about it, as she has no control over the game and therefore can’t possibly predict anything as she doesn’t have psychic powers. And when something does happen, she won’t have time to think about what to do as anyone could be dragged immediately to the back room, that person could even be her. And so she had turned to fear, being that the only thing she has time to focus on is the things immediately around her that she can control. Also, with this situation having the lives of her sons on the line, fear leads her to being in an emotionless and hopeless tailspin of infinite proportions.

Major Barzov is a Russian major who stands watch as the game goes, making comments as if the people he is talking to are immature students and he is the professor. As much as I can’t stand him and think he is a butthead, he does make a good point, saying that “There isn’t a grain of luck in the game…” (Vonnegut 15). As much as he is right on luck being non existent, you can also correlate the point to differing between hope and fear, and when in what situations they take hold. Hope takes hold when you have time to mull over your beliefs and realize you need to be positive, while fear takes hold in situations where actions need to be made fast as well as when a person has time to think about their beliefs and realize negativity has always been their go-to thought process.

I have made points such as hope and fear being correlated with positivity and negativity, that we are stupid to arguing about which is stronger and that we should be discussing when and how they occur, and that Barzov is a butthead. Reading the entirety of this blog, you have learned my beliefs, and know that I am set in these beliefs and will be stubborn in the face of opposition.

The Republic: Proving That We Can't See Truth or Justice If It's In Front Of Our Face For The Past 2300 years

Christians have designated the Bible as the book that they have based opinion and beliefs on ever since it was created. The Republic? Well in my opinion, it's the thinking mans bible. Obviously being the huge Christian I am, I believe that everyone should read and do their best to follow the beliefs of the bible, but you can definitely learn a lot from The Republic as well. Unlike almost any other book I can think of, The Republic made me think, so props to Plato for that at least.

But it isn't just that it makes you think, it's what it makes you think about. This book has taken some beliefs that I haven't questioned for years, or haven't had an opinion on in the first place, and completely recreated them. It has made me question the essence of justice, ideas like the "tripartite soul", and how censorship affects so many of our beliefs and customs. For crying out loud, this book has even made me think about a cave for weeks!

I will always believe the bible above all else, but nothing can be said about this book not teaching you something what so ever. Everyone can learn something from it, but to me, I can't help but keep thinking about the tripartite soul. It describes how justice would be perfect if Appetite, Reason, and Soul all did their own tasks without interfering with each other. At first, this idea seemed foreign. Justice to me had always been signified by Batman. But as the ball started to roll, I looked back at the previous year of English, realized my idea of truth had matured then, and then accepted the fact that my idea of justice could be improved as well. So like any insane person, I rolled with it.

It was worth it.

Rolling down the hill, everything started to make sense as I got closer to the end, as I went over bump after bump on the way. Perhaps it made more sense after each bump because I was repeatedly banging my head as I got closer to understanding the idea fully, but that's just a metaphor. But seriously, this topic may be tough to understand at first, but as soon as you start to understand it it becomes so much easier.

Appetite is described as physical needs such as food, money, and power. To me, this is physical things.

Reason is described as seeking things such as knowledge, wisdom, and truth. To me, this is emotional things.

Spirit is described as the part that is ambitious and competitive. To me, this is spiritual things.

Until I thought about it in depth, I couldn't really put my finger on what had caused me to attach most of my thought on this book to this one thing. But then it hit me (unlike my rolling metaphor). The tripartite soul is basically a previous version of theories that I possess on things like this. You can go check out the previous blog here. The only difference that I could possibly see is that the tripartite soul seems to be based/created by a person not so devoted to God as I am. This can be represented by the fact that this bases spirit on being not so important as I would deem it to be.

But that is why I can't get over this book, even though it has only been a handful of weeks since reading up to only chapter 7! This book makes me think hard on things I have already accepted, and the things that I seem to have the same opinion as Plato on are only strengthened by this.

Post Blog Thoughts
I would have wrote more about the cave, but I haven't processed the idea enough to put stuff down on this blog. And this only serves to further my point about this being a thinking mans book.




A slightly more detailed description of the three parts can be found here at this blog that I used as a resource:
https://smallsimple.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/the-tripartite-soul-reason-spirit-appetite/

Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Elements In Things Fall Apart

I didn't even read all the topic choices before knowing what I wanted to write about. As soon as I read "What forces are at play?", my mind just immediately connected ruffly 6 or so things together and if I even try to write about anything else, it's gonna be crap compared to a blog on this topic.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe really started to bore me before I reached part 2. But then the story picked up from being about Okonkwo, the boring character and greedy try hard who already has been blessed with amazing work ethic and physical fortune (Including 3 wives, an entire complex with outer walls and inner homes, and strong healthy kids and plenty of food), to Okonkwo, the man banished along with his entire family for 7 years for accidentally shooting a kid. That is two pretty similar Okonkwos if you ask me, one which is rich and renowned for physical well being and anger in frustrating situations (In his body being built and in owning alot of physical items), to one which is now poor again but is still angry in frustrating situations along with being hard working to get back to his previous status.

The only thing that changes in either Okonkwo is how much he owns and where he now lives (Fatherland and then Motherland). Essentially, Okonkwo himself hasn't changed, but what he owns is what has changed. This is where I explain my chiropractors theory, which isn't solely on this book, but on life in general. My chiropractors name is Daniel McDonald, and he believes all things can be placed into 3 categories. These include...

Physical Things - Things you can touch. You can feel it with your sense of touch. It is physical and very real, existing in this dimension. You can control your own physical being.

Emotional Feelings - Things you can feel, but not physically. Emotions, thoughts, feelings are all examples of things in this dimension. You can control your emotional being.

Spiritual Beliefs - This one is the very confusing one, because it is very hard to explain.This includes beliefs, specifically your religion and "spiritual" beliefs, and things you have done for those beliefs. Like the other two, you can control your own spiritual being, this time by choosing what you believe in and what you do/are willing to do for your beliefs.

These three "dimensions" are intertwined and add up to what life is. Life is a mix of everything, and can not be enjoyed or even experienced with out some amount of all three being present and making up what we consider life. The reason that I order the 3 dimensions in this order is that they not only increase in complexity, but in how much they affect your life and your experience.

Physical things can affect you in the moment, being that they are in front of your face and that you can touch them. Emotional things can affect you in more moments then physical things, because it is how you act, and you are going to pay more attention to yourself then others. I hate to say that, being that I am pretty much saying we are all greedy and selfish, but humans tend to act just like that. Spiritual things, specifically beliefs, affect you the most as they are always present in your life. This is because physical things may or may not be there, emotional feeling may or may not be present because you may not have that emotion, but spiritual things are always present, being that they will always be present in any situation as they affect your decisions.

These 3 things that make up life are represented well in the book as well.

For instance, Okonkwo's tribe bases peoples physical worth on how much a person owns, shown when the people of the village believe that Okonkwo is clearly cut out for great things and describing him with, "He was a wealthy farmer and had two barns full of yams, and had just married his third wife" (Achebe 8). Notice how he is not necessarily known for being kind or wise, but for how successful he is in how much he owns. Later, this is further increased in understanding when Okonkwo accidentally shoots the young boy, saying that, "In these seven years he would have climbed to the utmost heights. And so he regretted every day of his exile" (Achebe 162). This shows how focused people, including Okonkwo, are on physical worth.

The tribe is also focused on peoples attitudes, shown well on page 4 when Okonkwo is characterized as having "...a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words out quickly enough, he would use his fists" (Achebe 4). The book also states that the tribe characterizes people by there personal gods and chi, but that can be debatable as it could be in the emotional or spiritual dimension.

Comparing both the physical and emotional things in this book to the spiritual side of this book, I immediately make the connection of how the entire climax of this book is based on events which are further based on spiritual beliefs. This is shown through the big scene where Okonkwo decapitates one of the missionary's (Who I believed to be his son, Nwoye), which we are led to believe is done through Okonkwo's shear hatred for the Christians and what they stand for. He beheaded him completely, without any second thoughts, "Okonkwo's machete descended twice and the man's head lay beside his uniformed body" (Achebe 204). My theory is that this messenger was his first son, Nwoye. But even if it wasn't/hadn't been Nwoye, his son who had left his family and father for a different religion, Okonkwo was still described as "trembling with hate" and "unable to mutter a word" for this was how much he despised the missionaries and what he described as their stupid and insane beliefs.

As I have argued, I believe that life itself can be split into 3 things, being physical, emotional, and spiritual in creation or description. These 3 things not only make up life, but they are also the forces of this book since this book is a story with life being in it and being intertwined throughout it.

After Blog Thought
Remember how Okonkwo hangs himself at the end (Crappy ending if you ask me)? Well, I was looking for a quote in the book when I came across a part where he talked to Obierika. Okonkwo told Obierika that he could not thank him enough, and the way Okonkwo could have thanked him kept rising drastically until it came to where Okonkwo could thank him by killing himself. Okonkwo then said, "forgive me", and they proceeded to drop the subject.

At the end of the book, Obierika is the one who explains to the Commissioner about how it is illegal in their culture to touch the body of one of their tribe who has killed themselves. And is it just me, or is Obierika really salty towards the Commissioner and his men? But that is another blog or another day.

Where I'm From (Inspired by George Ella Lyon)

I am from staplers,
from folder and dust.
I am from the yellow, red tiled walls.
(Hummingbird tweets,
buzzes of bees.)
I am from the tomatoes,
the apple tree
whose long gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.

I'm from tree decorating and confidence
from Moon and Barton.
I'm from eating continuously and no doctor visits,
and from watching netflix late into the night.

I'm from truth and stories
and something beautiful.
I'm from Christmas Eve at the cousins.
I'm from Mankato and Germany,
grilled cheese and crepes.
From my brothers scar,
he got from my shovel.
Sorted in order
in the basement,
in the corner,
in the box,
and in the folder.

I am who I am,
and nothing can
change that.

Inspired by "Where I'm From" by George Ella Lyon