Asian giant hornets have come to the United States! Obviously 2020 wasn’t going bad enough already these 2 inch long hornets prey on honey bees. Chopping off the honey bee’s head then proceeding to feed the bee to its young, these murder hornets could be the next big plague for the US as it still deals with coronavirus. Honey bees are an important part of the US’s ecosystem, pollinating many plants we need to eat to survive. So if these hornets multiply and spread throughout the country, we could end up facing tons of destroyed crops. However there is hope, scientists are now on the hunt to eradicate these bee’s before too much damage is done.
Star wars is an epic space-opera that was created by George Lucas. The franchise quickly turned from one off movie, to a prequel trilogy, to a series of novels, to a tv franchise, to a series of video games. Even a sequel trilogy that was not well received. May the 4th is a day that star wars fans have claimed because it sounds very close to the famous Jedi line “May the force be with you.” However this May the 4th has been a special one. As the last episode and series finale of the long running tv series “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” has come out. I have yet to watch it but have heard it is a good one. Unfortunately on the flip side of all of this May the 4th has fallen on deaf ears for most of the fan base, as the not well received sequel trilogy filled with gender politics and woke media has turned many fans away from it. Mark Serrels of CNet writes that fans don’t want to worship at the altar of star wars anymore, and the new movie The Rise of Skywalker is to blame. The sequel trilogy was definitely a rushed, only having a year in between each movie, unlike the former movies having several years between them. There is good news as disney is setting out to fix the mistakes they made at their first go at the trilogy by making a plan in order to come out with higher quality star wars media.
The days of isolation feel like they have all blended into one incoherent span of time. I don’t think I have left my house in 23 days (that is a total guess I have no idea how long its been). I ended up getting very sick a week into isolation, thankfully it ended up being a severe case of strep (which the first doctor I spoke to mis-diagnosed as covid :/). But after that was all said and done I had to find stuff to do besides doing my school work. Currently I have a job wokring on a website for Marist that i’ll work on for 4 hours per day. I also have been training for 4 hours a day for the hopeful next rowing season in the fall after this is all over. After doing both those activities and getting my school work done, myself and several other Marist IT student workers have created a second life in minecraft in order to not go stir-crazy. So far it has been working. I present the fake port royal, my second life while quaratine is going on.
Going stir-crazy is what happens when you become mentally unbalanced due to prolonged incarceration. The covid-19 virus has halted the world and has caused the world to go into isolation. This has been going on for a while now and it has caused people (and some pets) to go stir-crazy. However there are ways to avoid this, or at least help make it manageable. Making a daily schedule and starting a journal are both great ways to prevent from going stir-crazy. Even being more productive by doing projects you have been putting off. Or maybe you can make a funny video about how your pets are going stir-crazy! The sky’s the limit when you have tons of free time.
Pangolins are truly a mysterious creature. They are thought of as reptiles, but they are actually mammals. These mammals have a shell of scales and will curl up into a ball to defend themselves from predators. There are four species living in Africa, and four species living in Asia. The enjoy sandy habitats, and tend to stay close to water sources. Pangolins walk on their hind legs with their short arms in front of them. Almost like a modern day mix of dinosaurs. How they reproduce is similar to how humans reproduce, needing one male and one female. Their lifespan in the wild is unknown, but in captivity they live for about 20 years. They cost about $350 per kilo. This has caused them to be one of the most trafficked mammals in the world, and has also put all eight species on the endangered the species list. All eight species are protected under national and international law. But still illegal trade of these mammals are still growing. These animals are a delicacy in China, where the cornona-virus first started, so it is very possible that this virus came from illegal trade of these animals.
The song “Ain’t it Fun” by Paramore is a song that starts off with Hayley, the lead singer, giving a person a reality check about the real world. She talks about how its gonna be hard living in the real world, but that the person she is singing to can do it, and that everyone in the world has to. Now this song came out in 2013 and has nothing to do with the current corona virus. But I think the lyrics can be related to our current situation in 2020. Her lyrics telling you that lifes gonna be hard for everybody can be related to social distancing, but since its not all about the one person that person needs to suck it up which can be related to people who are disregarding the stay at home orders.
On the flip side the music video is very light hearted. The video shows her and her band mates on a mission to break as many world records in a music video as possible. This also can be a helpful reminder that despite being stuck at home, you can be creative and find stuff to do that wouldn’t rquire you to go out.
The art film Freedom by Eva and Franco Mattes is filmed entirely in Counter Strike source. The film is done by screen capturing in game footage of Mattes point of view. The film is not a silent film as there are other players talking in the voice chat and you can hear all the different sounds that you would hear in a war torn area which is where the game takes place. However, Mattes does not speak in the video. Instead she uses the ingame text chat to communicate to other players. This results in her not being able to always finish her messages due to getting killed in the middle of her typing a message out to the game.
Throughout the video, Mattes is constantly being killed by other players in the game despite her desperate pleas not to be killed. When she types to communicate she only finishes her sentences and messages while she is still alive. This has a sense of eriness to it because she could be mid sentence, and then all in a sudden be gunned down, leaving her message sitting in limbo as she had never sent it. The way this is displayed could be related to how people who are killed in combat don’t always get to finish what they started, exactly how Mattes wasn’t able to finish her pleas in game.
Another interesting edit to the video is how it is cut and pieced together. For the most part each clip is a new “life”. What this means is every time she dies, the clip cuts. It then picks up a couple seconds later when she has re-spawned. Re-spawning is when you come back to life in a video game in order to continue playing, it’s specifically seen in multiplayer video games where a player may die and need to come back to continue to play. With each jump cut it seems like Mattes is experiencing a brand new life. Each time she comes back and says the same thing, but with the cut it can be seen as multiple people throughout the entire video, different lives throughout the video. Each of these lives could be viewed as different protesters wanting peace, and maybe they met an unfortunate end due to the war going on and you are supposed to attribute each clip to a different time and person. The words that get cut off while Mattes is typing before she is killed can be attributed to how many people and protestors can get cut off due to violence.
Freedom(2010) is a short experimental film created by Eva and Franco Mattes. The film is created in Counter-Strike Source, an online video game based around war where two teams of players fight to find a winner. In the film, Mattes pleads using the chat function for players to “stop killing her” and to “please wait a moment before she is killed” because she is making an “art performance.” At first her pleads go unnoticed which leads to her being killed “normally” by the other players. But as the video goes on the other players start to take notice of what she is saying, most likely becoming annoyed but also seeing an opportunity to “troll” someone online. Trolling is the act of antagonizing someone online for the “trolls” amusement. Some of the players start to tell the other players to wait, as it seems like they are gonna hear her out and see what her art piece is all about. In reality the other players that are saying not to kill her do it themselves. This causes all the players in the game to target her for their own amusement.This goes on for about three and a half minutes of the nine minute long video. They then ask in the chat “what are we fighting for?” Another player then sarcastically remarks freedom before gunning Mattes down once again.
In the next clip one of the players on Mattes’ team tells her that since Mattes is just an artist that Mattes should go “play in paint” referring to Microsoft paint and that Mattes “doesn’t want to be playing this game.” You can start to see some of the players getting annoyed with Mattes. They are trying to enjoy their game but despite it not affecting them, the messages of how she is just an artist annoy them. She then proceeds to once again get killed. The video continues on in the same fashion. Mattes pleading for people not to kill them, and people proceeding to kill her. At a point in the video you hear a player start to yell at Mattes for not helping him fight another player. Claiming that she is once again an “artist” and will not fight. This causes laughter in the chat by other players. The idea of someone not fighting in a game about war is bizarre to them and considered to be dumb by the other players. The video ends with a view of more clips of Mattes being killed, and then abruptly ends.
Algorithms are all over the world, and they can predict and manipulate what we do in our day to day lives. These algorithms can also predict the way we live our day to day lives based on past events. So would an algorithm that picks your events for the day be so different as an algorithm that predicts what you are going to do during the day. The answer might be shocking that they aren’t so different. The prediction algorithm will pick any event that you could do, it could be a random event based on what you have done in the past. The same way that the random algorithm would pick random events. The only difference between the two algorithms is that one has a guide to it while the other may be completely random. But despite having that guide, generally it still may be a random event.
RowLog Inc 