Taste Differences

Most people who are reading this blog right now won't know what the term "scrilla" means. But most of you will know the word "open-minded". The truth is, these two words go hand-in-hand. See, I have many friends who listen to (I won't use the word ghetto because it's directly racist) "street" rap that definitely isn't..... Mozart. Here is an example of a very popular song that I often hear at my friend's house.

I'm not forcing you to like this song, or even understand it, but I think people who read this blog will just be perplexed at the first noise this video makes (sorry, grandma). But seriously, this truly tests your open-mindness. If you can listen to this song, and at least try to understand why over 3 million people listen to this, you can say you're truly an open-minded person. Most (or at least me, at the age of 13), would shut away this song immediately, almost to the point of being offended by the artist's musical expression. But because I have friends that I care about, and that I support despite our cultural taste differences, I don't judge them for listening to this music. So that's what I'm trying to get at. Please don't judge others because of their tastes. I used to do this, and it's really not ok. Be open to different EVERYTHING!

P.S: "scrilla" means money, in rap slang, if you needed to know

P.S.S:  Really sorry about my "Discovery Challenge", will probably be up by tomorrow

P.S.S.S: Have a good day !

Robin Williams and Suicide

So one of the most appreciated actors of all time, Robin Williams, died a week or two ago. Let me start this blogpost by saying that he was in fact, a great actor, and will be missed. That being said, I mean no disrespect to Robin Williams himself or his family by saying that suicide is never a healthy, reasonable problem-solving measure and that it is SELFISH. I've seen many posts arguing that suicide is your last inalienable right, that people's lives should be in their own hands, etc. There's even people who are suggesting policies of legalizing fatal doses of barbiturates for people who want them.

Here is a post on reddit in which the poster defends suicide.

"Our society has deemed that suicide is illegal, immoral, selfish and should be stopped by any means possible once identified as a possible outcome. People are placed in a position where they must defend their sanity in order to prevent being locked up, restrained and/or drugged.

This causes a conflict for anyone who chooses to commit suicide while trying to minimize the negative impact on their friends and family. If a person were to make arrangements to end their life in a way that did not leave a mess, arrange to have their body removed, and arrange to settle their financial obligations prior to committing their final act, they would then be targeted for incarceration, restraints and psychological testing and at no time allowed to do what they could have done in secret.

What we are saying is that the only rational way to commit suicide is to hide it from society which necessitates leaving an extreme amount of burden on those remaining."

The problem is that the vast majority of people who commit or attempt to commit suicide are under the influence of something, be it severe mental illness, substances, anger, whatever, that they would not have chosen to kill themselves if they were not in those circumstances.

It's often said that people who try and fail to kill themselves often are thankful they were not successful. I have a very good friend who tried to commit suicide, and he is thankful he didn't. My friend, and everyone who has attempted suicide, realize their suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

This is why we as a society do our best to treat those people and help prevent them from killing themselves. Same reason why, when someone comes into the hospital in an obviously altered mental state, they can have procedures performed without their consent, because they are obviously not of sound mind to be making decisions for themselves.

Again, I mean no disrespect to Robin Williams. If you have ever thought about suicidal thoughts, please please call the suicide hotline: 1-800-273-8255  or chat someone online: https://www.imalive.org/

You're not alone :)

Discover. Underated, un-seen, or just not loved enough; My New Challenge

So the other day I was having a conversation with one of my good friends who is a HUGE moviegoer, and we started to talk about underrated films. I started to name some of my favorite underrated movies; Rushmore, Drive, Rubber, etc. My friend, knowing a lot about films, said those were OVERRATED to his standards. He then started to name movies I had never even heard of, truly undiscovered films. So then I started to think and think and I came up with my new challenge and project: "Discover."

Discover is going to be my new thing for my blogspot. I'm going to watch 13 of the best underrated movies ever made and review them for my blog. My goal is to bring these poor unloved movies back to life for others to enjoy, like yourself. There will be a schedule for these movies so you can watch and discuss these films with me. SO. The first movie we will be watching and discussing will be The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. This film will be reviewed on MONDAY. So you have the whole 3-day weekend to watch it.

I mainly got my list of movies from a reddit thread in /r/TrueFilm, but my friend recommended me some of them. WATCH AWAY!
See you on monday.

Anger and Aikido

If you don't live under a rock, then perhaps you might have noticed that there's a lot of angry people right now. Everyday that I read, listen, or watch the news, I just see people getting angry over each other and terrible, disgusting things happen. The missouri shooting and its protests, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, disputes over feminism and racial status, and more that I would rather just not name. I recently took a decision to enroll in Aikido classes (a martial art) and while the class' main objective is to learn self-defense, it has also taught me about my mind, body, and spirit.

And while yes, I love to show off my awesome ninja moves to my parents and my friends, there's also a simple and natural philosophy to Aikido that follows many of the same beliefs as Buddhism. These include harmonizing with, rather than confronting, the attacker, acting decisively and being present "in the moment", and letting techniques flow naturally by being in tune with the universe. My instructor always tells me to take these ideas further than the mat. Wether the attacker represents a homework problem or a mugger, Aikido (for the three classes that I've been to), has taught me valuable life lessons about the mind, body and spirit. 

Now that I'm done being all "Zen" and philosophical, what am I getting at? Well, all these angry and sometimes nasty people we often see in the news and media should all calm down and learn some lessons from aikido. 

shibarakushite kara!


(I have no idea what that means)

Felicidad!

I made this neat little video for the organization my mom works for.
Check them out, it's a super cool org that helps spread happiness and solutions to challenges through creative mediums and tools.

http://felicidadparatodos.cl/

I know it's kinda short and lame, but I only had like 2 hours to make it

Remember When this Blog Was Meant to Help Aspiring Writers?

Yeah, me neither. But recently I found a website that was so tempting to post and goes back to the true roots of this "blog", so I am sharing it with you today. The website is called Hemingway, after the magnificent writer and journalist. The purpose of the site, as described by itself, is to "make your writing bold and clear". You paste something you've been working on and the website automatically highlights words, sentences, and paragraphs that are unclear, hard to read, and other errors. The site even calculates the readability of your work through an educational grade system.

To try it out, I pasted in what I've written above. Hopefully my writing isn't TOO atrocious.

Here are the results:

Hmm... Interesting. The readability of my writing is 8th grade-level. I'm not sure as to feel good or bad about this rating, yet the website tells me "good". I have written a sentence that is a tad long, and ironically, it's the one where I'm explaining the grammatical errors. A few adverbs here and there, but other than that, I feel like I did pretty well. I'm not sure If I would use this for school essays, but it is definitely a good tool for learning about sentence structure and making your writing "clear", which is the ultimate goal for the site.

So basically don't take any writing advice from me if you're older than 12.

Here is the website, peace out!
http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

EAGLESMERE 2014

Hey all, so as you may have noticed: ITS SUMMER! For a week, I went to my friend's lake house and we had tons of fun. Here is a neat little video I barely edited (sorry!)