Assassin's Creed 2 (THIS IS NOT A REVIEW)

Assassin's Creed was an amazing game when it came out. It surprised so many people with its amazing graphics, game play, and limitless possibilities. I never owned the game, but I was always eager to play it whenever I was at my friend's house. I didn't really know much about the storyline because I never did mission's. All that I knew was that you played the role of a man in the near future. He works for scientists as a test dummy who enters this virtual-reality chamber that allows you to experience medieval times through the eyes of an assassin. The group of assassins that the main character is a part of kills only corrupt government officials and helps peasants that are abused by knights. At my friend's house I never did the missions for story mode. I just messed around by killing guards. It was also pretty fun just to run around the small towns and climb giant buildings.

Assassin's Creed got many great reviews. Its review scores ranged from 9.5 to 10 out of a possible 10. Currently, the sequel to this great game should be coming out soon. But, this makes me and my fellow gamers wonder, how can they possibly make the sequel equivalent, if not better than the original? I watched the trailer and some game play footage, and I was in awe. Both the trailer and footage showed that this time, the group of assassin's are in the Renaissance era. Now this is great. If my parents wonder why I bought the game, I might be able to make them overlook the fact that the game is rated M and say "I find this highly educational because I'm learning about the Renaissance in history class." The other thing the trailer revealed about the storyline is who the assassin's are enemies with. Now they are against the corrupt Roman Catholic Church (which I am learning about in history class). In order to improve game play, the creators have added new tools, new weapons, new combat features, and Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine (its a glider). All of this is making me extremely eager to play this masterpiece of a game.

Alameda Weather

The weather for this past week has been really strange. I have seen cloud filled skies with no rain, cloud filled skies with rain, and sunny skies with rain. When it rained, it would sometimes be really warm. The day can start sunny, take a turn for the worse, and strangely it could end up being sunny again.

I have not been enjoying this very awkward behaving weather. It can be so unpredictable that news weather reporters are completely off with their morning forecast. I go to school ready for some rain, and then end up coming home with my clothes (sometimes even thick "waterproof" jackets) wet inside and out evenly through all articles of clothing. Once I reach my house I just throw everything into the washing machine (because my momma told me to) and take a very warm shower. Because of the terrible weather and school, that ten minute shower is the highlight of my day.

Yesterday was the most amount of rain I had ever seen produced in an hour. The streets of Alameda had enormous puddles resting near the clogged storm-drains. I remember in the last half of sixth period, when the rain began as a light, almost unnoticeable drizzle. Everyone gathered near the windows completely surprised. People said things like, "Darn, it's raining." Now In the last ten minutes of class I remember hearing a rapid "pitter-patter." As I gazed at the window, the amount of rain left me speechless. All of those "goshes" and "darns" had changed into reactions like, "HOLY CRAP!!! WHAT IS GOING ON?" By the time class was over and I had already been soaked by the single minute I spent in the rain in order to walk over to my locker, I was finally able to take in the impact rain has on Alameda. As my friend (he gets a ride with me back home because we are neighbors) and I walked it to my mom's car, we saw giant pools of water on both sides of the street. Cars that were really low to the ground almost had water at the level of the doors. A lot of people were asking their friends if they could get a ride with them, while others waited out of the rain (under entrances to buildings or just inside) to be picked up. I have never seen Alameda in this much chaos before.

For the Love of Math

I can't believe that math was a subject that I use to enjoy. I was actually a pretty good student. I was a student that usually got A's and B's. I think that the reason to my success in the past was because of my great teachers and my desire to succeed. Ever since I accepted the fact that I was a mathematically advanced student (yea right), I had teachers that pitched every lesson in a way that us students would learn easily. They went over all of the homework assignments to see what our strengths and weaknesses of that chapter were. If we did not understand a certain section, they were willing to put of the section's test for a few days so we can spend extra time on reviewing that and other sections. Reflecting on my history with math classes, it made me notice a trend. Whenever I have an entertaining/good teacher, I always do well.

On the other hand, whenever I have a difficult teacher, I struggle quite a bit. I remember in sixth grade, I thought that I was stupid. I always got C's and D's on my math tests. But, one day I got an A+. I guess that might have been motivated by this to try harder. Even though my teacher made us work a lot in class, I would try my best to score high whenever an opportunity arose. For some reason, this year is a little different. I'm not entirely sure, but I'm slowly starting to lose that motivation to work hard. In HPpre -calculus, I get a lot of homework every night. Usually, I hardly understand the lessons, which ends up with me not doing a lot of my homework problems (every night). For some reason, for the first couple of tests and quizes I was able to get A's and B's. But just last week, I barely got a C on a test. I mean I was pressed for time and it was sort of long, but I made many foolish mistakes. I switched numbers around in the answer and I did the hard problems (which I only got partial credit for) instead of the easier ones. This made me wake up and realize that summer vacation is over and I need to start working harder. Hopefully before progress-report time, I'll be able to raise my grade.

Funny Signs

Yesterday, while I was waiting for my teacher to open up the classroom, my friend noticed something inside the school that I had never seen before. At first I laughed, then I found it to be a cruel sick joke. It was a handicapped sign (the one's with a guy in a wheelchair) pointing to a set of stairs. It said elevator, indicating that one has to go down the stairs to use the elevator. How the hell can a person in a wheelchair go down the stairs? And secondly, why would he use the stairs going down, just to use the elevator to go back up? This made no sense to me at all. To make things even worse, there wasn't even an elevator at the bottom of the stairs. It just lead to an exit. The laughter ended when another person that was there at the time (and had seen the sign) said, "they don't care about them." I found this a bit true because if the school really cared, they would have removed that misleading sign.

While all of this was going on, it made me think of the time my brother and I were ridiculously bored. It was during the weekday, we both finished our homework, and we had no idea of what to do to entertain ourselves. Like all other bored children, we turned to the power of the internet. I don't know how we stumbled upon the subject, but we ended up googling funny/hilarious signs. What we found made us laugh like maniacal idiots. I think the pre-boredom state of mind made the pictures seem funnier than normal. These stupid pictures were funny because some seemed to contradict themselves like "0% OFF SELECT ITEMS TODAY." Others had sneaky messages at the bottom hidden in small lettering. Looking back at this occurence made me notice that I do really stupid things to keep myself entertained (but I'll save those for another blog post).

Tatem Blog Post

(6.) “Yeah, I just found out that Cleopatra was a Black woman.”

“What?”

The first student went on to explain her newly learned information. The second student exclaimed in disbelief, “That can’t be true. Cleopatra was beautiful!”


(7.) What had this young woman learned about who in our society is considered beautiful and who is not? Had she imagined Elizabeth Taylor[5] when she thought of Cleopatra? The new information her classmate had shared and her own deeply ingrained assumptions about who is beautiful and who is not were too incongruous[6] to allow her to take in this new information at that moment.



I annotated this text by underlining key phrases like, " That can't be true. Cleopatra was beautiful!" I also underlined other sentences such as, "Had she imagined Elizabeth Taylor[5] when she thought of Cleopatra? The new information... and her own deeply ingrained assumptions... were too incongruous[6] to allow her to take in this new information..." I drew an arrow pointing back to the phrase about Cleopatra being beautiful and said in my own words that this was a racist comment. The actress/portrayal of Cleopatra was beautiful. There is no possible way that this student would have known what Cleopatra really looked like because she died a long time ago. I believe that this paragraph is important because it showed an example of prejudice with wrong information (which I wrote right next to the paragraphs).

Classic Rock

My cousin and I were once discussing how music has changed so much. We both came to the final conclusion that the quality of music has changed greatly. He had thought that it has slowly been degrading and backed up his idea very well. He said that great expertise in music started out with Beethoven conducting large orchestras of highly skilled musicians. Then, he talked about how bands were formed next. They were all still greatly skilled musicians, but there were fewer members and they usually had solos to show how experienced they were. And now comes the modern age day of rap. Mainly all that makes it good is the lyrics and bizarre dances. There are usually only a few members, and it's just a guy expressing his feelings with a poem backed up by some other guy making a bunch of strange noises (sometimes not even using turn-tables).

Now go back a bit, and you are in the age of classic rock. Big names like Queen, Guns n' Roses, Led Zeppelin, and Journey come to mind. Now these were some really great bands. Everyone played an important role from singer to drummer. Their sounds would just work together perfectly. And in the majority of all classic rock songs, there was a big solo where a member of the band's choice would have their moment to shine by showing the reason why they are a famous professional musician. Nowadays, many bands have singers that sound alike due to new-age technology that alters their natural voices and tries to create a "perfect" voice. This does not make any sense to me at all. Why would somebody want to change someone else's voice if that is what made them famous in the first place. Looking back at classic rock, you can see a wide variety of different sounding voices. Freddie Mercury's voice and Axl Rose's voice sound nothing alike. The guitarists and drummers also were what made classic rock so great as well. Slash from Guns n' Roses was an expert at what he did. Sweet Child o' Mine (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-qx47-C2Q0) takes my breath away every time I listen to it. Watching John Bonham's solo to Moby Dick (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed5YvFkcR7g&feature=related) leaves me speachless by being suprised that someone can get that good at playing the drums. Looking back at moments like these make me think about what has happened to the music industry.