30: I Discover I Can Be Ambivalent About Pokémon

This week I’m going to be covering an older pokémon game that I didn’t have the chance to experience until I was older, Pokémon Ruby. While the DS Lite had a GBA slot, as a kid I didn’t know that you could put Game Boy games in there and never encountered Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, or Emerald in, say, a GameStop. This game was something I bought for myself last year, as I was curious to try out the gen 3 games but didn’t want to spend over 100 dollars to get Emerald. While this game wasn’t part of my childhood, I’ve been really enjoying it so far.

FUN RATING: 3/5. This has been a pretty enjoyable game so far, although I have had to do a little grinding in order to continue being successful in pokémon battles. Because I’m playing this game on the DS Lite rather than a Gameboy Advance or Gameboy Advance SP, I don’t have the option to do trading between games (plus I don’t have anyone to trade with as all my friends have those games at home rather than at college). This takes out some options for me that I would have liked to have otherwise (looking at you, Kingdra), but it doesn’t really affect my playthrough too much- I can beat the game without extra pokémon, but I think that it would have been more fun for me if I got to explore all the options typically available for players. There’s some quality of life things missing from the older games, such as limited bag space. This doesn’t really put a damper on things either, but a bunch of smaller things that could be fixed kind of add up to decrease the “fun” rating for me. However, there are fun aspects about the game: the plot is enjoyable, I really like the diving aspect of these games (you have to dive to get to one city), and the safari zone is always enjoyable (you can catch different pokémon by yourself without using pokémon in this area, and it’s super interesting). There are slots in this game that were removed in the remakes, which I’m not very good at. There’s also the roulette wheel, which I’m slightly less terrible at (always go for yellow Wynaut). There’s contests you can do with your pokémon as well, for ribbons to put on your pokémon- there’s a whole community on Reddit for getting every ribbon possible on a pokémon.

EASE RATING: 3/5. This game isn’t super easy, but it isn’t too difficult either. I’d say that for ease, this is a middle-of-the-road game. If you grind your pokémon up enough, you can deal with most threats pretty handily, it’s just a little bit of a time sink. For alternate playstyles like nuzlockes (you can only catch one pokémon per in-game route, the first one that appears, and if a pokémon faints in battle it dies and you can’t use it again), this game is pretty difficult- champion Steven Stone is kind of a wall for these challenges, and the Elite 4 is harder than it typically is when you have to be super careful about planning every move you make. Typically, you have to make a strategy when going for the Elite 4 and champion in this game, or you’re going to have a bad time.

REPLAYABILITY RATING: 2/5. This game is not really designed for replays- there’s no new game plus, and you have to delete your save file in order to restart your game, unlike the newer switch games where you can just use another account to play the game starting from scratch. However, I’m giving this two points because you can replay this game, and have a good time doing it. I would probably wait a little bit after finishing before doing more, because I don’t think this is the kind of game you can instantly restart after finishing- I don’t like it enough to play it over and over again without any breaks.

OVERALL: I think I’d recommend this if you don’t mind paying a decent amount of money for a cartridge in this day and age- with the nostalgia from older games, there’s been a price increase since Covid started. It’s pretty much just as good as any other older pokémon game, despite some quality of life problems that were fixed in gen 4 and onwards. Personally, between the gen 4 games and this one, I would probably choose a gen 4 game instead, but that’s just my preference. It’s an enjoyable game, but I don’t know that it’s better than any of the other games. That said, as a baseline the pokémon games are all pretty good quality, and the game still holds up today.

29: Issue Brief Introduction

Homelessness has become a prevalent issue in today’s America, especially due to the affordable housing crisis we are currently experiencing, and the less recent housing crash following the 2008 recession. Homelessness can happen to anyone for any variety of reasons, and it’s unfortunately easy to get into a situation where you are unhoused. However, it’s not so easy to get out of. Even though interviews are supposed to be based solely on interviewee qualifications and whether or not they’re a good fit for the workplace, many interviewers are biased against job applicants if they find out they don’t have a permanent housing situation, and even if a homeless person does secure a job, transportation can be difficult, and shelters often only let people staying the night out at specific hours, which can create conflict with work hours. There should be better support systems in place for unhoused individuals in order to help them get back on their feet.

Quite honestly, I really don’t like this, and I’m probably going to scrap most of it, but here it is. I’m planning on setting this up into a couple paragraphs talking about the relationship between homelessness and unemployment as background info, get into some specific problems faced by homeless individuals when trying to find a job, and what support systems could entail and how it could be possible to create and better them.

28: Coming Back to my Roots

This week I’m going to be covering an older game I used to play when I was younger, Animal Crossing New Leaf. It has since been overshadowed by its successor with better graphics but less content, Animal Crossing New Horizons, but I’ve come back to the game after over 1200 hours played since that game’s release in 2020. I’m burnt out from that game, so I’m getting my Animal Crossing fix this way. It’s a little more nerve-wracking to me, because some of the quality of life mechanics aren’t there, but I’ve been enjoying it so far. There’s definitely charm to 3DS games. In Animal Crossing New Leaf, you play as the mayor of a town (you become the mayor by mistake, coming off the train on your way here and the secretary, the famous dog Isabelle, simply will not take no for an answer) and you bring it up into a spot on the map. You add to the town museum through catching fish and bugs, unearthing fossils, and testing your luck against finding fake vs real art, you can start public works projects to decorate the town and expand or establish buildings, and grow your relationships with different animals who are “villagers” in your town.

 Exploring another town through Dream Address

FUN RATING: 3/5. This game is more about vaguely repetitive daily tasks than it is about anything else, but that’s okay. It can still be interesting even with that! You have the option to go to Tortimer Island and do different minigames like catching a specific amount of bugs, matching up furniture in houses, etc. You can go online with Club Tortimer and play with other people, but that’s not really advised unless it’s late at night, as you can run into little kids and hackers in equal measure (the 3DS games are not as heavily policed now that the Switch is out). You can also pay 500 of the in-game currency, bells- the cost of a couple shells off your town beach, to go explore other people’s towns in dreams.

 Meeting a publics work project donation goal

EASE RATING: 4/5. This game is pretty easy. It’s not supposed to be a challenge. The only problems you’ll have are villagers moving in on top of your flowerbeds and getting enough money to pay off the public works projects all on your own, as the villagers are very unlikely to help you pay off much of the goal of hundreds of bells. If you’re comfortable with just spending a couple hours on Tortimer island catching rare beetles, and laying down paths where you don’t want villagers to move, you should be fine in this game. Animal Crossing is not intended to be hard, although there have been some frustrating moments.

Getting your luck fortune told by Katrina, the fortune-teller

REPLAYABILITY RATING: 1/5. Some people might not like me for this, but I think this game is not very replayable. You can make a couple of towns, but you have to erase your data. In-game progress is based on real time, so it takes a long time to make real progress unless you want to hack your game, which can potentially ruin your cartridge if done extremely poorly. You can keep going in this game for ages, but if you want to restart it’ll sure be awhile before you get anywhere.

OVERALL: Despite my poor review of some of this game, I’ve actually really been enjoying it. In order to stay on top of the daily stuff in this game, I play for approximately 15 minutes when I have time, and that’s been about the extent of it recently. I’m only about three weeks into this save file, so my Dream Address is incredibly boring, so I won’t be providing it here, but ask me again in a month and I could probably give you something decent to look at. There’s not much of a community left for this game anymore, with many people having migrated to New Horizons, but I’m using this as a way to deal with New Horizons burnout and still get the Animal Crossing content I enjoy. It’s been interesting coming back after so long with new Animal Crossing knowledge and seeing what’s different. I never ended up getting further than a couple of months in this game as a kid because me staying on task for a particular game is very difficult if I’m not hooked on it, but I understand the complaints some players have about the lack of the same furniture from New Leaf- that’s actually one of the reasons I came back to New Leaf. I’ve been enjoying it so far, but I’m not sure how long I’ll keep playing it. I might look into manipulating my town save file to move some stuff around, as Nintendo isn’t super bothered by that anymore, and that might keep my interest for longer.

27: Local Gamer Gets Emotionally Attached to Video Game Character

For this week’s passion blog, I’m going to be covering a game that’s super close to my heart, Night in the Woods. This game stars anthropomorphic cat Mae Borowski (the animal stuff is not touched upon nor is it a part of the game beyond aesthetics, they just have the appearances of animals), who drops out of college, comes home, and struggles to reconnect with friends and family and get back into daily life of the rust belt town that she left behind, all while dealing with mysterious disappearances that may or not be cult-related. Not everything is as it used to be, and as she revisits old memories, she discovers that people are moving on around her.

Mae does not do parties in the woods well.
Mae does not do parties in the woods well. Relatable.

FUN RATING: 5/5. Man, I love this game. There’s so many fun things you can do, like stealing pierogis to feed baby rats (this is a minigame! It’s super fun and the baby rats are adorable), running around the town of Possum Springs and talking to everyone to get new drawings in Mae’s journal, finding new constellations through “dark stars” in Mae’s neighbor’s telescope and hearing the stories behind them, playing a dungeon crawler on her laptop, the Guitar Hero-based minigame… there’s so much you can do in a given day in this game. Time sort of progresses, but you can do as much as you want before either going home and sleeping or hanging out with Mae’s friends Gregg and Bea, which progresses the story as well. Gregg’s Mae’s best friend from high school who she hasn’t seen in ages, and Bea is in Gregg’s band- her and Mae used to be best friends as kids, but some things happened and they stopped talking. You can choose to reconnect with either of them, and will maintain a friendship with the other character as well, even if for a given day you didn’t choose to hang out with that character.

The aforementioned dungeon crawler. This caused me so much frustration.

EASE RATING: 3/5. The main storyline is pretty much impossible to fail, but you can screw up playing the bass at band practice, choose “wrong” dialogue in some important scenes for Gregg and Bea’s storylines, and you can suck miserably at the dungeon crawler game, Demontower. If you want to get achievements for finishing this and getting the true ending, it’s pretty much unavoidable. Especially if you want to get all of the notebook drawings, which is another achievement on Steam. It starts off pretty easy, but the more you progress in Demontower the harder it gets, and you lose health really easily. The enemies get more skilled, as well, and generally you just die a lot. This one specifically made me have to put the game down and go do something else a couple times, just because it’s so frustrating- it’s caused many people to ragequit it. But if you don’t end up playing Demontower, and you are either fantastic at Guitar Hero-style games or just don’t care how you do, this game isn’t too difficult. It all depends on how much you want to complete in the game.

 Hanging out with Lori, one of the characters you can befriend

REPLAYABILITY RATING: 4/5. There’s a whole lot of different paths you can take in this game. Whether it’s how you choose to investigate the mysterious cult after witnessing the disappearance of someone during Halloween, befriending Gregg or Bea, or getting to know the side characters Lori and Germ (a mouse and bird respectively, who you can encounter around town and hang out with- you can get achievements from this), you can really do whatever you want in this story. If you want to speed through and focus only on the main plot, you’re totally free to do so. If you want to spend ages looking around town and trying to get all the achievements and notebook drawings, you can do that too. I typically fall in the latter category, just because no matter how many times I play, I really love this game and want to revisit everything it has to offer. Getting all the achievements also requires multiple playthroughs, so that’s an added incentive to play again.

OVERALL: The true reason I really love this game, despite the colorful and well-done cast of main and supporting characters, is that I really empathized with Mae upon first playing the game. I first played the game my sophomore year of high school, feeling similarly adrift in life. I had just gotten broken up with, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after school, I was struggling with mental illness, and I felt like the world was moving on without me. I saw my feelings reflected back at me in this game through Mae, and I loved the aesthetics of the game. Possum Springs feels a lot like my hometown, where everyone I knew wanted to get out of it but inevitably seems to end up staying in the area regardless, just because it’s so hard to leave. Mae’s character was incredible, even if I typically love making my own character and their backstory. I felt like it was me playing through the game, even if Mae was her own person with her own story to tell. There’s so much lore around the game, and there’s related games that you can access through the main one. While the characters may be cute anthropomorphic animals, this game also deals with heavy concepts of mental illness, family problems, and grieving. I thought that these were all portrayed in a realistic, believable way, and made the characters seem more “human”- although the story was focused on Mae, you learn about the circumstances of the other characters as you get to know them- things that Mae has missed out on while she was gone, and things she just didn’t notice until things come to light. Overall, this is one of my favorite games of all time, and it has always spoken to me. I’d recommend it to almost anyone (unless you mostly play first person shooter games, then I don’t know if it’s up your alley). I originally got a bootleg of the game off a friend, and bought it around my senior year of high school (and the Switch game my freshman year of college respectively, just because it was on sale and I’m a sucker for NITW), so I don’t have many of the achievements, but I’m working my way through a Switch playthrough along with getting the Steam achievements.

 

26: “Just Get a Job”

In my civic issues blog this semester, I’m going to be covering the lack of support for, demonization of, and issues that homeless / unhoused people face in America. For this particular blog, I’m going to talk about the idea that many people in society have that homeless people can “just get a job”, and why this isn’t necessarily true.

Homelessness and unemployment are often related to one another. According to a data analysis paper published by the University of Southern California, in a survey conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the top reason given for homelessness (by unsheltered homeless adults), at 46%, was unemployment or financial reasons. Unemployment or financial trouble often means a lack of stable income, which can make it hard to pay bills and rent on time – making it difficult to keep living in a place of residence. If you’re behind on rent payments for too long, you could get evicted from your place of living, or have your house foreclosed by the bank and auctioned off if you got a mortgage for it from them and are unable to pay it back.

Just because people are homeless does not mean they don’t want to work. According to the same survey previously mentioned, while many adults experiencing unsheltered homelessness are unemployed, a fair number of them are actively looking for work- particularly those with families.

In a perfect world, the “solution” to homelessness  would just be to not be unemployed. Find a job, get stable income, and get enough money to get back into housing. However, it’s hard for people who are homeless to get a job. According to an article published under the University of Melbourne in Australia, some problems that homeless people face are “the stigma associated with being homeless, a greater difficulty in maintaining hygiene, a lack of proper time structure and frequent moves. In addition, many people struggling with homelessness often also struggle with other factors including low education, high levels of mental stress, poor physical health, problematic drug use, low self-esteem, poor ability to cope with stressful life events, and difficult family environments.” Another issue is lack of affordable housing- prices have gone up in the economy, and wages have not risen to match. All of these issues can contribute towards not seeming like an ideal job candidate in an interview. Interviewers may also ask for a phone number or an address which can be difficult to provide. Not everyone can afford a phone plan, and even if someone does have a shelter address to give, it can be embarrassing for the interviewee to reveal that they are homeless. Once the interviewer knows that their potential hire is homeless, they may not react favorably, either. Not everyone has a bike or a car, either, so it can be hard to even make it to interviews or to work.

Even if a homeless person does get a job, actually keeping the job comes with its own set of issues. As an example of some struggles homeless people face after having gotten a job, one Pittsburgh shelter volunteer noticed that although a man had gotten a job and had to report to work at 7 am the next day, the shelter he was staying at did not allow anyone to leave before 6:30 am, with no exceptions. His trip to work would be an over an hour, making it impossible to get to work on time. His two options would be to either be late to work and making a poor impression on his coworkers and manager, or to sleep on the streets at night. Neither of these options are favorable. The same issues that people face while homeless that can negatively impact a job interview also still apply at work.

While getting a job may seem easy to the average person, there are a lot of factors at play. When homeless, people do not have the same advantages as housed job applicants / workers, and they have to work very hard to get the same opportunities. It’s a lot more difficult than some people think to “just get a job” and get back on your feet.

Sources:

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-grim-cycle-of-homelessness-and-unemployment

https://socialinnovation.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Homelessness-and-Employment.pdf

https://www.mercyvolunteers.org/2018/07/homelessness-and-job-interviews/

 

 

25: In Which I Get Sucked into Another Pokémon Game

Yeah, I got Legends Arceus (along with everyone else in the Pokémon community). I actually waffled back and forth between getting it and not getting it, because I already had Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and at first glance they looked to be pretty similar.  I will admit that I had a bit of a grudge against the game because Game Freak shunted production of the Diamond/Pearl remakes towards ILCA, who had never made a whole game before, in order to work on this game. However, I saw a bunch of my friends enjoying it, and I eventually caved when I saw someone said that it gave them more enjoyment than they’d had playing a game since childhood. I’ve been pretty obsessed with this game, to the point of where most of my free time is going towards it (I’ve been trying to manage this so that I spend less time on it, though).

Managed to get him up on the roof

FUN RATING: 4/5. I’ve been enjoying this game so much. I think there are some parts are just fine, but there’s nothing I hate. I’ve seen some people rag on the graphics as PS2 level graphics, but I think that they’re fine. It’s not a PC or PS4/5 game, the graphics aren’t going to be fantastic. I really appreciate them introducing the quest mechanic in this game, and I’ve been doing all the side quests and sort of ignoring the main quest. While there’s not a huge range of things like the pokémon contests in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum, there’s so much ground to cover as this is sort of an open-world game. The introduction of alphas (larger, stronger pokémon) and outbreaks (I assume outbreaks are related to swarms in games later in the Pokémon timeline) is also a nice set of mechanics to play around with. When your team all faints, you don’t black out, either- although I wish you could just fight a pokémon with your bare hands, as some of us were led to think in the Legends Arceus trailers, you CAN ride around on pokémon mounts and catch things in pokéballs without a usable team.

Alpha buizel vs Normal buizel

EASE RATING: 3/5. Not particularly difficult until you get to the boss fights of Noble pokémon and the postgame fight (while I have not done this one, apparently it is notoriously hard). I don’t want to spoil the postgame fight too much (unfortunately I did get it spoiled for me, but that’s what happens when you go on Twitter), but it’s supposedly similar in difficulty to the Cynthia fight, and it’s normal to lose at least once. However, aside from those particular fights, I think the game is not too difficult. At the beginning of the game, you should definitely avoid alpha pokémon you see (they are large and have glowing red eyes) because they will mess you up, and badly. Most alpha pokémon in the first area, Obsidian Fieldlands, are around level 40. Once you hit around that mark or are in the 30s with super-effective moves, then it’s safe to challenge them.

Current team favorites

REPLAYABILITY RATING: 2/5. A lot of the quest objectives and doing things to fill out the pokédex are pretty long and complicated. I don’t know how much I’d want to try to complete the pokédex multiple times, to be honest, not to mention actually perfectly filling it all out. There are also 108 wisps to find among all of the maps available, which is a difficult undertaking without guides. While you can go run around in all of the areas and keep catching pokémon for as long as you want, eventually I think you’d run out of things to do in the game- however, it’d take a long while before you got to that point.

OVERALL: This game has a couple shortcomings, but it’s really interesting and a fun new take on the Pokémon series games- it’s even made it into the mainline series. You can tell that Game Freak put a lot of care and work into this game with all of the features and quests that you can do. You can put all your pokémon out, and they even have idle animations (sleeping Crobat is elite, it’s insanely cute). Shiny hunting has also been made easier with outbreaks, and people have been finding so many shinies with the visuals becoming available in the overworld (makes me wonder how many shinies I passed without knowing it in Sword and Shield). There’s some player customization options that weren’t really available in BDSP (the Diamond/Pearl remakes that came out a few months prior), which is always nice to have. Although there’s low replayability, I think I would recommend this to players just because it’s so expansive. It’s fun, can hold your attention, and has a wide variety of things to do that is sure to keep you occupied for a long while.

sleeping crobat. love this guy.
Sleeping crobat. Love this guy. Bet you can’t tell what my favorite pokémon on my team is.

24: I Only Have Room for One Gacha Game

For the first game I’m reviewing this semester, I’m going back a little bit into the Pokémon franchise with mobile game Pokémon Masters EX. I don’t typically enjoy gacha games, just because I know I’ll get a little too into the pulling mechanic, but I’m having a lot of fun with this one. I think the key is to only spend a little bit of time playing it every day. For people who are new to my blog, I rate the fun I had playing, the difficulty level, and whether or not I consider it replayable out of five in each of these categories. Typically a three is average, and I adjust for things that are good or bad, rather than either “meh” or a mix of both. Obviously what I rate something may not be what you consider it to be, and I encourage anyone who played the games I’m reviewing to chime in with your own experiences in the comments! You can also read tags for my more casual commentary on the game.

Battle Screen
Battle Screen

FUN RATING: 3/5. This game has a bunch of things to do, but you might not be able to finish all of the battles available to you if you aren’t a little over the recommended level. I felt a little confined to the main story, and like I had to finish it before I could go through the other events. The scout system where you pull for different sync pairs (sets of trainers and pokémon of different levels of power) is really exciting, but once you get past the first few sets of achievements, it gets a little hard to get enough gems for the 11x scout. However, this game is definitely addictive and I spent a solid couple of hours playing it the first weekend I had it. Making up different strategies for teams is super enjoyable, and it’s not too hard to get strong team members if you don’t mind waiting a few days to get the gems required for the larger scout.

Gems are expensive. For reference, for an eleven times scout, you have to pay 3000 gems.

EASE RATING: Depends on if you buy gems. 4/5 if you do, 2.5/5 (wow! Decimals! I didn’t want to give it a three) if you don’t. Some areas of the game, like the Battle Villa, where you battle for as long as you can in one streak (which I believe ends when all of your three pokémon sync teams have fainted), are super difficult even for higher level players. The Legendary Arena, where you can fight legendary pokémon for rewards and medals, is another series of long, hard fights. However, the main story is pretty easy if you use the manuals you have to level up your sync team to their level caps- you can finish battles in a few minutes, even if you don’t have the recommended typing. In higher level / difficulty situations, you really do need the correct strategy and proper strength/weakness pairings to take out the opposing team without suffering losses yourself. However, spending money on gems means you get more incubators for reward eggs (you can sync with the pokémon that hatch from these eggs) and more exclusive scouts (these work like Genshin Impact pulls, where the things you get are left up to chance), some with guaranteed five star scouts (these are the highest level of scouts you can get, and their percentage of being pulled is often very low, happening once or twice at best per eleven scouts). These overpowered units you can get make gameplay a lot easier, as they tend to be incredibly powerful in early game scenarios. You can just turn on auto and let your phone sit if you’re so inclined, and you’ll probably still win (I watched a friend do exactly this). However, gems are pretty expensive, so you should probably avoid purchasing them as a rule.

Skip tickets

REPLAYABILITY RATING: 2/5. You get the option to replay the main story in hard mode after beating it in normal mode, but other than that, you don’t have a whole lot of options for playing things again aside from just deleting the whole app and not linking any accounts to it when you redownload. Aside from the extra difficulty, this game actually works for you to not have to replay the game at all- with skip tickets, you can bypass training entirely. You get skip tickets for completing medals (which act as achievements) and for completing certain areas. You also have the option to do co-op after getting to the first main story interlude, but I haven’t done enough of this to form a real opinion on it (most of my friends are far more powerful than I am, and I wouldn’t want to drag them down in co-op). Overall, this isn’t very replayer-friendly.

OVERALL: Sure, this game is pretty basic. It’s a gacha time-suck for sure, but I really enjoy it.  I think what I get most out of it is playing it with other people and the sense of community I get from a small group of friends that also enjoy it. Getting the scout you’ve been trying for for a week is super exciting, and I love sharing this kind of excitement with other people. I’ve leveled up my sync pairs as much as I possibly can, but I’m still having fun with it- it doesn’t automatically guarantee a win, I’ve still lost a couple, and I just have to come back with a better strategy and typings than before. It’s a little bit to get used to, because pokémon only have one main weakness in this game, and it differs between the pokémon. Trying to use a fire move on a grass-type and having it not be super-effective sure was disorienting, but it’ll tell you at the preparation screen before the battle what weaknesses to aim for, so you get the hang of it pretty quickly. If you already play a gacha game, I would not recommend it. If you already spend money on one, I guarantee your wallet cannot handle a second- honestly, I would not buy any of the paid gems on offer just because they’re crazy expensive. However, this game is friendly to players who don’t want to spend any money, and you can go really far with just what the game gives you. I think the main thing that gets people to spend money is probably frustration, because you keep spending thousands of gems trying to pull this one character before their banner ends, and then you don’t get them. I tried for ages to get one character, Sygna Suit Red (because his EX form is super cool),  and I was just lucky that his banner came back in a couple days (it shows up when you first get the game for a couple days, and it was pure chance that it came back up again for a week or two shortly after the end of the first one). It genuinely almost got me to spend money on gems for him, but one look at the gem prices and I was immediately reversing that decision. Primarily, I just enjoy collecting all the cool-looking character designs. I’m not really here to win, I just like getting trainers with drip.

23: Rough Draft of “This I Believe” Speech

In my opinion, most people have this perception that the people who stay in your life are the only ones that matter. They’re the most loyal, and they’re the “right” people to have by your side. However, I think that things that don’t last are just as important as the things that do. I believe that not everything is going to work out, but those experiences are just as valuable.

During quarantine in 2020 and 2021, there was a resurgence in playing video games that were typically older or came from a place of nostalgia. One of these games was Minecraft, which I had played in elementary and middle school. With its rising popularity because of streamers like Dream and Technoblade, that gave it a larger player base. All of this combined with my freshman year of college being one of relative isolation, with only a few local friends to my name, hooked me right back in.

And you know what? For a little while, it worked. I had a small close-knit group of friends on the main server I played on (it was only for people my age, which was another bonus), and we called almost every day. My best friend had started playing with me, which brought it more into “real life”. We started to branch out to other games, and then just video and audio calls for hours.

Then the server went down. The owner didn’t want to keep it up any more, even though there was a sudden influx of players from a YouTube video spotlight. We had a realm, but slowly players started to drop off without their main source of entertainment. It makes sense! Without the main thing people wanted to do, there was less interest in the game in general. In a month or two, there was only a couple of people left. And then we all started to drift apart.

As most friend groups are, there was some drama. One guy liked another girl, and she didn’t feel the same way. Things went somewhat back to normal, but it wasn’t ever the same as it used to be. We beat the final bosses on our Minecraft realm, and then we all kind of stopped talking to each other. People got jobs and were far less active. The realm subscription expired, and most of us, myself included, stopped playing Minecraft regularly a little after that. We don’t really talk to each other often anymore. I’m still close with the previously mentioned best friend, and we live together now, but we were friends before all of this happened.

Despite this, I don’t think I regret the experiences that I shared with these people even though I’ll probably never talk to them more than once every few months again. I got to experience closeness with other people during quarantine, when I didn’t really have many people there for me, being an out-of-state student who originally knew nobody coming here. I’ll always appreciate the late-night calls with people and the friendships that formed out of it. Was our group doomed to fail because many of these people are online friendships? That probably played a part, but it doesn’t mean that getting to know these people was worthless. Not everything is supposed to work out, and the most important thing you can take away from these “failed” relationships, in my opinion, is your memories and new knowledge. As long as you were, at some point, truly happy, then I don’t see how that can be counted as a loss.

(Obviously this is a very rough draft, and I’ll probably have to do a couple of drafts after this! I have a couple other options I can use if this experience isn’t impactful enough, or I can go into more detail. See tags for me talking a little bit more about some specific things I was unsure about.)

21: New Semester, New Ideas

In terms of my passion blog, I’ll probably end up using the same passion topic I did last semester: video game reviewing! I honestly had such a blast writing all of the reviews and evaluating different games I was playing, and I couldn’t wait to do it again this semester. That I got to play video games for school was also definitely something that made me less guilty about spending my break time playing them.

If I did do any other passion blog, here’s some ideas:

-Going around to different art exhibits around campus and downtown and writing a little bit about them and what I thought about the pieces! One of my Art History classes gave examples of a bunch of different places I could find exhibits, so I wouldn’t have to go back to the Hub every week for something. I probably will be taking a look around exhibits even if I don’t do this- apparently there’s a place downtown that has regular art (visual and performing) exhibits that change often! You can just go in and see something new every time, which is really exciting.

-This one is a little out there, but I enjoy music and curating different playlists for the week. I could make different playlists for occasions or just for the week, link them here, and explain why I put on there what I did. I think this would be super fun, and if I’m talking about every song on a 10-20 song playlist I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to hit the word count even though it’s a little out there. However, if we’re doing the same commenting on other people’s blogs as last time, this could get a little tiring for the people reviewing and I wouldn’t want to make something if nobody was going to listen to it.

Some ideas for my civic issues blog:

-How schools are dealing with COVID-19. A lot of people seem to want students to go back to school, even through Omicron. Some schools are closing, some aren’t. Some schools are making young students pay for tests if they’re unvaccinated, and it can become an easy way to contract the disease. However, some argue that it’s good for students’ mental health to not have classes online again.

-Pressure in high schools for students to participate extracurriculars, multiple AP classes, and participate in sports at the same time all while juggling personal life and potentially jobs. Because of college applications, students often have to take on a heavy courseload and have extra things to “recommend” them in order to have a better chance at getting into the schools they want. Could also look at higher tuition costs in comparison to what it used to cost students.

-Lack of support for (and demonization of) houseless people, to the point of architecture deliberately designed to keep people from sleeping on the ground or on benches. Could look at the lack of support systems here as well, as it’s hard for people to get back on their feet. It can be harder to get a job as a houseless person, and you need a job to get money for food and housing.

Finally, my This I Believe podcast ideas:

–Not everything is going to work out. Sometimes things are supposed to end, and all you can do is enjoy them while you have them. Not every relationship lasts forever. Sometimes you fall out of contact with friends. You lose interest in hobbies. That doesn’t mean that these experiences aren’t worth living. Even if things aren’t eternal, you can still get valuable knowledge and experience during them. Things can make you happy and not last, and that’s okay.

–Try not to assume things about people. You might see someone and not like them at first glance- think they’re uncool or self-centered. However, everybody has their own things that make them interesting, and you might have more in common with someone than you think. You just need to be open to possibilities (and a little conversation).