Hey Ma, I’m on the Internet!

  To me, the most important thing a parent can do for his/her teen is provide a foundation for success. At our age, we’re independant enough to do our own laundry and cook our own food and such. When we were very little, we needed our parents to survive, then we needed our parents for comfort. Right now we need a chance to make it somewhere in the world. They provide us with a home and help put us through college/university so we can do something big with our lives.

  We also need our freedom. At our age we want to stay out late, and hang out with our friends, and all the other things us teenagers are doing nowadays. Lots of parents know better than this and want us to study or something. A good parent can find a balance. We need priviledges, but we need some restrictions too, or we’d end up dead in a gutter or something.

  And while not the most important, we also need our space. Right now, our harmones are all out of wack and we’re moody and hate everything. The last thing we want is our parents sticking their heads into everything. As a teenager myself I think I speak for all of us when I say parents need to mind their own business. Looking out for us for the greater good or not, it still makes us want to kick in a door and that’s just how it is.

Don’t do this. Seriously.

  A parent needs to teach their kid about life’s lessons, and how to live alone. They’ll sympathize with us over love, loss, and what is what like when they were our age. “When I was your age…”

  A great parent does all these things well, but is also there for the worst-case scenarios when we do resort to their oppinions (no offense, but talking with your parents is always awkward). They have to be all knowing- or at least as far as we can tell- give us plenty of priviledges as rewards for doing well, and privacy, then I’ll consider them a good parent and as such will respect them enough to listen to them.

What I want to know:

10. How to cook something that isn’t Chef Boyardee. A guy can only eat so much Beefaroni.

Yummy.

9. How to balance my chores. Inbetween work, cooking, school, grocery shopping, etc. I’m not going to have a lot of time for vidya games.

8. How to sharpshoot. I’m sure that in some point in my life this will be important. >_>

7. How to edit photos proffesionally. It’d be a neat skill to have.

6. How to overclock my computer. Just because.

5. How to fly. It’s rediculous but I will find a way.

4. How to play vidya games at a proffessional level. And yes, you can actually make a living this way, and yes, it is considered a sport, just like chess. Physical activity isn’t what makes a sport a sport, it has to be a game of skill. There are games of skill, therefore video games can be considered a sport. There are even leagues. I’ll just have to wait until the general population sees things the same way I do in this regard.

3. How to animate. This is a big one. still drawings will only get me so far.

2. What jobs don’t require math that still pay well. I hate math with every fiber of my being, and I certainly don’t want to do it for a living…

1. How I’ll leave my mark on the world. I don’t want to live a quiet life unnocticed, I want to do something big. Something fresh, something that will forever change the way people view the world around them. Like Martin Luther King and Albert Einstein, I want to be truly revulutionary.

  Culture isn’t an easy subject to tackle for me; I have a British background and I can’t think of anything that defines the British culture that my family still embraces. We’re more of a Canadian family now, and with that comes a whole new set of traditions and taboos and such.

  “Patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance,” -Wikipedia

   Problem is, I can’t think of any parts of Canadian culture that is exclusively Canadian. As a whole, we seem open to new ideas and embrace other cultures from all over the world (like the Ancient Greeks, sort of) and because of this the Canadian culture is like a mixing pot for every other culture on Earth.

  But what makes a culture? Food, language, beliefs, religion, and literature seem the most prominent to me.

  Food is my personal favourite. The food of a culture shows what cooking materials were available and cooking traditions. Social gatherings like harvests and Thanksgiving are often based around food. In fact, humanity as a whole depends on it. We worship it, rely on it for survival, and our economy is mostly driven by it- it’s the largest market on Earth because it’s obviously in demand. As Canadians, we share a lot of our culture specific foods with America and our respective countries of origins.  A Ukrainian food, for example, such as perogies is shared with family friends, who in turn pick up the dish and further spread it throughout our country until it becomes a common meal in the Canadian household.

  As the cultural mixing pot, Canada again is very diverse. Languages from the First Nations, Europe, Asia, and all other continents are present (albeit uncommon) but our more popular languages have a prominent historical background in the development of our country. The French and the English fought over this area for ages until the land became known as it’s own country, Canada. Because most of the early settlers were French or English, they’ve become the most prominent languages. Other languages such as Chinese are less common, but they’re still here and spoken by immigrants who embrace the culture of their homeland.

  The most obvious Canadian belief, to me, is choice. We can choose where we live, what jobs we have, where to go, who to rule, and who to worship. We don’t force our beliefs on others. Everyone is equal and everyone gets their say.

  Religion is more personal than the others. Religions don’t really mix too much, but we generally think that everyone can choose their religion for themselves. We don’t force our religions on each other much. We can worship what we choose.

  No one seems to mention literature. Literature is very important to culture: it shows the midset of the people, what they strive for, what they believe in, and where they stand in the particular era in which it was written.

   If I could box up 3 parts of our culture, I would box up our freedom of choice, freedom of speech, and our foods. I need my fries, the right to choose said fries, and the right to talk about how great they are. :]

  Commercials used to be so awesome. (And a PS3 vs. NES video for the luls) Note the Donkey Kong and SSB commercials in particular: the former clearly took place in the days where Sega and Nintendo competed for dominance of the video game market, and the other is straight up awesome. But most importantly, watch the Earthbound commercial. NoA invested insane amounts of money into Earthbound’s marketing campaign, but Earthbound only sell ‘well’ instead of insanely well as planned.

  Personally, I choose to blame the slogan “This game stinks!” The game came with scratch and sniff stickers, and they just had to make a pun. The thing is, the intended audience was children who wouldn’t get the sarcasm. (Note that Mother/Earthbound has very mature undertones at parts, and has what is considered some of the best humour in video games and amazing writing.)

  I miss the days of awesome slogans like “NOW YOU’RE PLAYING WITH POWER!!!” and “YOU CANNOT BEAT US.” :[

  I see success as happiness. If I grow up and become an old hermit living up in the Himalayas going without food, water, or social interaction for days on end, but I was still happy, then I would see myself as successful.

  Isn’t that all success is anyway? The end of a pursuit of happiness?

  People who want ritzy jobs and fancy cars and such want these things so they’ll be happy. Success varies from person to person- it all depends on your mindset. If your life is based around your job and what’s in your bank you might see success as a monetary value. If your goals involve being popular you might measure success by the number of friends. For me, I see my success as my overall mood. While I’m not always in a whimsical ‘^_^’ sort of mood, I could still see myself as successful because my mindset is usually content.

  I’m at my happiest- therefore my most successful- after I’ve accomplished something. Drawing a high quality picture, doing well on a test, saying something witty or clever, these all make me feel good about myself (or for the last example a cheeky feeling). I’m pretty vain with the way I see myself, so when I do good I feel happy and therefore successful.

  I see my dear sweet Aunt Molly as successful. She is always in a good mood and has a zest for life. She isn’t as successful as say… Bill Gates in terms of money or a sports star in terms of friends and powerful connections, but she is happy. Not sure why, but she just is.

  I’ll be honest: I never really thought about homelessness until this project. I always knew it was a problem, but as typical with the human mind I never paid attention to it because it never presented an obstacle for me directly that I had to overcome. Almost all of the information I collected was new to me.

  I knew nothing about what was being done to combat homelessness until now (well, I knew about basic homeless shelters and welfare, but…). Wet shelters, Trade fairs, buying old hotels and converting them to housing, and other programs were unknown to me until now.

   The magnitude of the problem also hit me like a ton of bricks.  Numbers like 3 million don’t seem so bad unless you use visuals or imagine that in your head. For example, the population of Snow Lake is 1000-ish. Imagine that size of a group in a single area, the multiply by 1000 in turn. Crazy, right? This gives you just 1 million less than a 3rd of the people in the U.S. experiencing homelessness in a given year. Then imagine Asia, with an even more significant homeless population.

   Thinking of them as human beings helps, too. Like soldiers in a war, it’s easier to kill if they imagine that the fellow man they’re killing are actually horrible monsters instead of real people with real lives and emotions. It’s easier for us to ignore the homeless if we imagine that they aren’t real people, but rather shaggy critters inferior to us, the great and almighty business men. This is a horrible way to think, but it makes it easier for us to deal with the mental stress genuine concern can cause. Realizing that the homeless have families, feelings, and lives is important- They’re still human beings, like you or me.

  The most important part of research is getting over GOOGLE MANIA. We’re all used to resorting to Google whenever we’re interested in a topic of some sort (or just want to google our names… we’ve all done it). I call this GOOGLE MANIA. We need to get over this GOOGLE MANIA when we’re surfing the web for information. Google only has about one sixth of all the information on the web, therefore we’re only using one sixth of the material out there.

   Web searches are a great way to find information, though. Web searches like Technorati and Dogpile are two of my favourites because one is dedicated to blogs and compiles info from other searches respectively. After you find great sites, use the popular RSS program to track the new posts so you don’t have to memorize URLs or go through the same process of searching for them again.

  The best way to research a subject is to use many different forms of media. Books, TV (non-fiction, of course), my good friend the Internet, and the radio are all sources of information.

   What I’m trying to say is, the single most important lesson I’ve learned about research itself is to use everything at your disposable. We also learned not to trust everything we read online, as the internet is full of liars who get kicks out of tricking people into believing something false. :<

 Kirby is far too cute for his own good. Yet he goes on killing sprees on a weekly basis, sometimes for things as minor as taking his cake. This video strikes the balance between adorable and deadly.