Writing Pro

Today I went out to check on my mom's store and also clean out our rental apartment. The last people that lived in our apartment were so messy.

 There was tons of sand and food on the floor, the fridge was also filled with half-eaten foods and drinks, half-eaten icecream, two half-drunk cokes, opened sparkling water, milk, like 15 bags of fast-food ketchup, you get the idea. They were ill-mannered too, so that's the cherry on top of their deportment (membean word).

 We brought some paintings that we didn't need from our apartment to my mom's store so that maybe she could sell it for something rather than have it gather dust in some closet. They were thinking maybe $5 each, but you should see the size of those things, I think $20 or $15 is about right for a painting of that size.

 Also, today I started taking my writing classes, from now on it'll be on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next umm 3 or 4 weeks I don't quite remember. Today in class our teacher, who's name is Jodi Miller, taught us some different types of essays and had us write of a few of our own.

 It's easy to follow along in the class but I think she gives too little time to write, she only gives 5-6 minutes to come up with and write a paragraph that meets her requirements. Of course, this isn't for a grade or anything but it feels bad to not be able to finish the assigned work on time. 

However, even though she didn't read mine out loud, once she privately messaged me that I did a good job. "Way to go!", she said. Yay! Basically what I did was that she told us to write about when we were ever in a pickle and at that moment in time I just couldn't think of one, so I wrote that I couldn't find a pickle and that was my pickle. Boom.

Not mad, disappointed

Today I basically spent my whole day grinding my summer reading book, i started yesterday but only read about 20 pages. The book itself isn't long, 180 pages, so i read the remaining 160 pages today. And to be completely honest, it was a really good book, one of the best that I've read. There was one poem, and I'm not completely sure if it exists or not, lemme check real quick... Yes, it is an actual poem. Let me recite it to you, completely from memory. I took the time to read it over like 5 times and memorized it. 

Nature's first green is gold

Her hardest hue to hold

Her early leaf's a flower

But only so an hour

Then leaf subsides to leaf

So Eden sank to grief

Dawn goes down to day

Nothing gold can stay

that's it, it's short but it's deep, profound one might say. The name is Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost. 

Then when i was talking with one of my friends from school she told me that the summer reading is optional, so we didn't have to read this summer for English. Wow. Im not mad, but disappointed. I could've spent my time today to read my Spanish, which is indeed mandatory and super boring too. 

Also my brutal force in math helped me solve another problem once again, i needed to list all the numbers 300 down to 1 that had no common factor with 30. I got it right first try, at the end i listed out 80 numbers from the 300, which makes me think that if i had even messed up one number, the whole thing would've came out wrong. Thank you brutal force, by not letting me down today. 

The Economic Machine

Today Psi recommended to me this video by a youtuber called Ray Dalio and he talks about what he calls, The Economic Machine. Now, what is the economic machine? Well, according to Dalio, it can best be represented by this simple graph:

As you can see, this graph is more of an overlap of three lines, representing productivity growth, long term debt cycles, and short term debt cycles. The usual cycle of money-making is productivity, income, and spending. 

Keep in mind that this is without credit, so no borrowing and no lending. When there wasn't any credit, the only way to increase income was to increase your productivity. But, when central governments and central banks come into the picture, credit is born.

A credit-worthy person can ask to borrow money from the central bank and in turn use that to increase their productivity, which increases income, which increases spending. One person's spending is another's income so the more people spend the more people earn, thus people borrow more and prices go up, this is called inflation.

Eventually, it reaches a point where people are borrowing and spending way more than they earn, and as interest rates increase and debt piles up, people cannot afford to buy that much anymore. Spending goes down, so income goes down, and the bubble pops. Prices go down as people struggle to pay their debts, their financial assets such as real estate and stocks crash, making them non-credit-worthy to borrow money from the banks, this is a recession. 

Worse cases there is a depression and then the government and banks need to step in to print money, redistribute the money, cut spending, and cutting debt. The thing is, the former is the only inflationary action, and the three actions following that are all deflationary actions. But, if you print way too much money, things can get out of control and it might start a malicious cycle. 

There was some other stuff, but I don't have the best memory, that's all for today. cyaaa

Normalizing?

Today when my family and I went out to check on the final result of the remodeling, it turned out very good btw, but I just don’t think that there is that much of a difference than before. So anyways, when we were on our way there and also back from the supermarket, we noticed that there were some people that weren’t wearing their masks. Now maybe they’re dumb or maybe they really trust in the rumor that the virus doesn’t do that much harm, however I still think it’s a lot better to wear masks when outside, first of all, you’re keeping yourself and those who are around you safe, secondly, the people you will encounter outside would feel more ensured knowing that you are safe from the virus. But, perhaps, there’s this tiny sliver of a chance that soon, it’ll all go away, and we’ll recall this pandemic as a thing of the past that we have overcome. It would be amazing if school could start like normal so that I would be able to see all my friends and take my classes like normal. Bye!!

Maybe next time

Today was the final day of my graphic design class, well, tbh i didn't learn as much about graphic design as i wanted, partially since i missed yesterday which is when the students were actually supposed to do all the work, like the editing, finding photos and stuff.

 Thus, today the class was just the whole group giving feedback on the logo designs that students did, the students could choose to share the design or not, the people that shared it did fairly well actually. Personally, i think if i had done it, the effect could have amplified, but that's just me. Some were good though, simplistic, easily understandable, those are all amazing traits to have when designing a logo like this. The customer or visitor or investor needs to be able to recognize you right away, at first sight. If they can do that, well then you have truly succeeded as a graphic designer.

 I never made the actual logo and i missed out on all the actions so i was thinking of maybe joining the next class because the same teacher is going to go through the whole course one more time to new students that didn't participate this time.

 So maybe ill just tune in on the third and fourth day to make my design and get some feedback. My writing class starts on the 30th though, so I'm going to have to get my creative juices flowing. cyaaa

remodeling

Actually, maybe remodeling isn't the best word for what we are doing at our beach rental apartment. Maybe it's better to call it refurbishing? So anyways at our rental apt we are changing the floor tiles to a new one since apparently, some visitors said that they were slippery?

 The point is that we have changed the tiles, and the workers should have finished today since we have a visitor that is going to be moving in on Saturday and today is Thursday. However, the workers did not finish and we were there all morning, from like 10-2, well I was there from 10-2, my mom drove me back at 2, made lunch, and went back. They stayed there until around 6:30.

oh wait, do you know something I just realized. I completely forgot about my graphic design class today. NOOO!! wow I wonder what they did in class today, ill just ask the teacher privately tomorrow.

 So yeah, there's that and i had my AoPS class today on Algebra B from 7:30 to 9, it was on arithmetic and geometric sequences. It was pretty easy, i was called on the teacher like at least 20 times or so. But for some people, this content might be inscrutable.

 Sorry I just had to use that membean word. Yes, I also did my usual half-hour of membean, learned a couple of new words. Um i don't quite remember all of them, but I will eventually so ill keep you updated. Byeeee

PS and art

Today was day 3 of my free online graphic design class and today we started to learn the uses and how to use Photoshop. Yeah, we've all heard of celebrities or people creating fake content using Photoshop but have you ever really used it and gotten to know it better? Well, first of all, making yourself or the background look prettier is not the only use of Photoshop, you can also use it to create a lot of cool designs from scratch without a photo to start with. But of course, it would be a lot easier if you did have one to edit or layer together with another photo. According to my online teacher, it is illegal to take a random photo on google and use it commercially to make a profit. So, what people usually do is take a part of that photo, edit out a usable part, manipulate it, and fit it together with other photos that have undergone the same process to ultimately end up with like a collage of edited photos layered onto one another. It looks super cool if you do it right. Also, I held another drawing competition with Psi, but this one didn't really end like a competition since we didn't even finish one drawing. Well, i haven't even finished one drawing, and Psi "kinda" finished it. He made me draw grapes and i found this really cool sketch of a German guy and it had like super-skilled shading that I just couldn't imitate since there is in fact a limit to my drawing skills. So i am like 4/5 of the way done with my fantabulous grape drawing, WHAT how is fantabulous a real word. I told Psi to draw the Eiffel tower and he was struggling apparently. Anyways, when i was shading in my grapes i was listening to like jazz music, Fly Me to the Moon, and other songs and the AC was on and it just felt great. I found a new way to feel very comfortable and at ease so that is just amazing.

summer reading

I have yet to start my summer reading and according to Psi, almost half of summer is over so I think I should really start reading. Now not to brag but I'm a pretty fast reader, if I like the book, I could probably finish a book in one day, 500 pages, but if I don't like it and it was mandatory to read it it would take like a month. Actually, that would be if it is in Spanish. Reading in Spanish sucks for me. The words are just so meaningless and superfluous, attempting to enjoy it would result in abject failure and that would just be abysmal. I don't want to beget negativity but it's just true. For the past two years in school we have been reading this series, it's a trilogy and it's insanely boring. It's about this boy who lives in California, CALIFORNIA, why didn't they just write the story in English, and he goes on these amazing adventures out of the blue during vacations, for the last two books he's already explored the Amazons, and found Yetis which is impossible because they don't exist. After i finished the second book last year i just never touched the book again so i don't even know the title of the third book. For English, they give you a suggested book list comprised of 50 books, and this list has not changed for the past two years. So i have already read like 4 books out of the 50. I think I'm going to read The Outsiders this year since i have it sitting on one of my shelves so i don't need to order it. And yea, i will probably have to order a book for next year and i really hope that next next year's Spanish book quality will increase, but at least it wont be from the same trilogy. 

not bad at all

Today was the first class in 5 of Graphic Design. I found the class on this website called Varsity Tutors and tbh I didn't think that the classes were gonna be too high quality since they were free and the website didn't look that sophisticated either. But, the zoom class was actually pretty good, the teacher seemed to know the material well, and the PowerPoint presentation was easily readable and explained the concept clearly. However, there was a slight problem with the time today, I guess it's because there are so many different time zones and it's the first day so they started an hour earlier than what was written on the website. They mentioned that they will fix it next time though so I guess it's not too large of a flaw. Today we learned the basic design elements, which are lines, colors, shapes, space, texture, scale, and typography. The teacher also told us how graphic designers actually make a design, logo, or website, she explained it in 5 steps, we only covered the first two in today's sessions though. She said that she always meets up with the client to discuss and she uses the same questionnaire usually that has all kinds of questions to help her out when brainstorming and coming up with ideas and the design itself. Overall it seems pretty Gucci, and there's like 300 students in the class so yea, it's a large class.

another camp

So idk if you remember but around two weeks back I wrote something about signing up for a camp that had a lot of like very smart kids. And I'm not saying that kids from like regular summer camps aren't smart, but these are like the top of the line, the TA's and counselors are almost all from MIT or Stanford, Ivy League schools so I'm kinda worried that I'm gonna fall behind in the camp. Plus this camp isn't like AoPS where you don't know who everyone is and there isn't video, audio, and you don't need to talk. In this camp, classes are 28 students and there is a teacher with some teaching assistants. I don't quite remember what classes I enrolled in but I know that I put Business, and probably Biology. There are only three classes per day, the first class you could choose between, basically hard math or even harder math. I chose hard math. Then there was business or writing, I think my writing is ok for now so i chose business since that's what I want to study in college. At least for now that's what I'm aiming for. And lastly, there was USACO, which is like competitive programming, Physics, and Biology. The thing about USACO is that you need to have participated in the competition before and that I have not. Physics apparently required that you need to have already studied AP Physics, and well I'm in 8th grade so I haven't even touched physics yet. that only left me with one choice, biology. Today they held an online zoom meeting explaining all the different courses and answering some questions that any of the students had. The teachers also introduced themselves. I think almost everyone that was in the meeting was Chinese, based on last names. And of course, although the stereotype of Chinese students being op in everything isn't always accurate, i have this feeling that that applies to nearly everyone that is going to attend this camp. gulp~

wish me luck

luck

today we played cards once again. my luck was horrible, out of like 15 rounds, I won once. ONCE. I always have terrible cards, and sometimes when the dealer is giving out the cards, I see that I have amazing cards for once, this was my chance to turn my luck around! so when I'm full of confidence and play my cards according to the strategy I already formulated before the game started, the winning play was suddenly shut down. SHUT DOWN. I placed four doubles in a row, usually, that n e v e r happens so that would be my ticket to winning another turn and win the game. Somehow, my dad had four doubles in a row H i G h E r than mine, and i got last place for the nth time. no way. how. how did i lose again? This kept on happening, every single time when it seems like I'm home free. A lightning strike or thunderclap just slams me down and I'm done for. People always say that when a door closes, a window opens. I would really appreciate that window right about now. 

CAWT camp

So as I have written before I have signed myself up for various virtual summer courses that have yet to start and well my dad came up to me today and asked me to do another one. This one is pretty special though, there's a fellowship which means they basically pay you to go take classes and well who doesn't want to get paid? However, there are limited spots and they usually go to students that go to the school which belongs to the host university. Anyways, this year since it is online, they give a bit more clemency (membrane word) which means like more lenience when deciding who gets the spots. They give out the list of who gets the spots tomorrow so it was really urgent for me to do it today. Right now Psi is struggling to decide whether or not he's gonna do it because he's not sure if the fellowship thing is a scam, frankly, I'm not too sure myself, my dad was my only source, and it's not 100% reliable all the time so I guess you need to decide on your own risk. You need to fill out this questionnaire that contains all your information and in that questionnaire, there were two particular questions where you needed to write like a paragraph that's less than 250 words, I don't know if I'm gonna get picked but whatever, if I don't, then, their loss. The questions were, describe why you are interested in this camp, and tell us what career you would like to pursue. It took like an hour to write those paragraphs but I'm pretty happy with what I wrote. 

Self-learning

Hmm. Well, I have just gotten back from a great meal, and I will have an AoPS class in approx. 45 minutes. I uh, today I had my usual Python class today, but now it's more like a study session than an actual like class. My mom studied computer science in college but not Python, so after I already learned all of the basic stuff that is like usable in all computer languages, there's just a different way of writing it but it's the same kind of logic. The point is, now she doesn't have anything left to teach me on Python, and we sorta learn it together during the "class" so it's more like having a study buddy learning alongside me than a teacher giving me information as my superior. And she also told me that in a couple of weeks she's going to start getting back to work at her job so she won't have enough time to give me classes anymore, and that is why in the last two classes our main focus is on how I can self-learn. That way I can still absorb, imbibe new information when she's busy at work. Also, this skill can be used on multiple occasions in the future so it's a big plus for me. I also tried making an educator Membean account so I can create my own class and prank people into thinking that was the actual legit one. However, I think it didn't work, and even if it did I don't think it's gonna last. Rn I do have an account under the name that I registered as and I made the difficulty really high so I would get really hard words that I don't already have, although I made it successfully it's like a trial so it'll go away after a time period of like a week so yea. Ill find some other way

Dentists are dumb

Today we left the house and went to the dentist at the mall, and I also learned the difference between a dentist and an orthodontist, the thing is an orthodontist specializes in braces and a dentist only cares about your teeth itself. I go to a dentist, but they also take care of my braces which were taken off last year. Now I wear this retainer thing that I'm supposed to wear 24/7 but we all know that's never gonna happen, I even came up with this amazing excuse that is actually half true so it makes it sound a lot more realistic because I can also describe the sensory feelings which makes the whole thing seem a lot more personal instead of some random out of the air excuse. So yea, it hurt a lot still, they have this instrument that is like a drill and the thing is the person drilling my teeth was like in a conversation with another person doing the same thing to another patient, and maybe they said a joke or something I couldn't tell because all my mind could think about was how much pain I could tolerate without going crazy. Anyways the point is, she starting laughing, LAUGHING, so her hands were shaking and the drill just went everywhere that weren't my teeth. Blood was flying everywhere, corpses on the ground, bombs in the distance, ok I'm going overboard, but it hurt sooooooo much and I could taste the blood beneath my teeth, there was also this blinding light on top of my head so I couldn't make out her expression if she was worried or laughing with glee... I hope it's the first one. I finally got outta there in one piece and with an adjusted retainer but you can still count on the fact that I ain't gonna be wearing it for long, not after that kind of torture.

Friends AHOY!

Today I finally got to see my friends again, Psi, Rama, and uhh another friend I shall name Beam. First I stopped by Psi's to pick him up and together we drove down to Rama's place since it's the biggest place out of all of our homes. We predicted that Beam would arrive before us since he usually arrives early plus he didn't make any stops before coming. However, we were wrong, we got there and were greeted by smiling Rama, haven't seen his face in so long, ever since school ended. We played a bit of ping-pong and I have gotten really good at Chinese style which is the pencil hold I think they call it, before I used to suck at forehand swings but my backhands were super consistent, however now with this new way of holding the paddle my forearm technique is amazing but sometimes backhand is too strong and hits it out of bounds. After like 3 matches, Beam showed up and we played some more then we played this game called four-square for like two whole hours. We were all exhausted by the end of that. So we refueled a bit by eating a very scrumptious Arabic meal of chicken, and this special rice with onions and lentils that tasted good compared to regular no-taste which rice. Then we played boathouse since we had four people and following that some card games which were all really fun. We also played some hide and seek and my first spot was godly yet I was the first to be found cuz I was closest to where Rama was counting down. The second game I completely tricked the others, I had a really good spot which you need to parkour to get to and I was writing in the chat to trick the seekers into thinking I was within the house when in reality I was behind it in this little path where there were lots of flowers and plants but no actual road. I came out by myself eventually cuz they probably would have found me if it went on any longer, plus the bugs were really annoying as well. At the end, we just sat by the pool and talked a bit about, well about everything I guess, Beam was saying how the movement is starting to get kinda dumb and he just sorta went on rambling about it when the rest of us just sat at looked at one another. lol It was really fun overall, and I hope we can do it again sometime during summer break.

BRUTAL

So in math, there is a way of problem-solving that people sometimes called brutal force, it involves a lot of trial and error and not that many fancy formulas and that sorta stuff. and surprisingly, i'm amazing at it, so today while doing my AoPS (Art of Problem Solving) homework for my number theory class some of the problems were really hard to understand so i just took the little things that I did get and try out all sorts of values to try and find the correct answer. if you know a bit of math, you should know that number theory problems are the ones you should least use brutal force on since there are usually very large numbers that a normal person couldn't possibly calculate by hand and even less when there is a limited amount of time.

 Talking about limited time, right now I am writing this as I am running on a machine which is part of my daily workout that I agreed on with my parents. I also agreed to write my blog every day before 11 PM so that's why I'm writing today's blog on the run to try and multitask. However, rn my arms are really huRTING oops caps lock just enabled on accident, anyways i used brutal force on a bunch of problems today and being as experienced as I am in brutal force, I solved almost all of the ones I attempted to do. 

There was one problem which i just did not understand at all so i posted a question on the message board that should be responded to in the next 30 min and i guess we'll have to see how that turns out later. cyaaa

new potential direction?

Today I was looking at some piano related vids on youtube and I found this guy that was doing like jazz improv and well it sounded amazing and I couldn't believe he was doing it all on the spot, like freestyling on the piano. so I looked into a bit more and watched some tutorials on basic jazz chords and improv and there was one person that was critiquing or explaining performances that Charlie Puth played, not an official song but like for fun. And the performance was really good and it just had a different taste than what I usually play which are like classical pieces. not that classical pieces aren't as good but this was just different and I wanted to try it out. So the YouTuber was saying a lot of like musical jargon that I didn't really get so maybe it's a lexicon (membean word) for improv so I never got in contact with it. Either way, he made it sound like it was just pure awesomeness and after that, I learned four basic chords of jazz piano according to this other youtube video and also a scale called the gospel scale, it's kinda weird but it makes me sound like a pro, at least to people that aren't familiar with this area. Maybe I'll look into it even more later on and become a jazz pianist and still maintain myself as a classical pianist too. That doesn't sound bad at all. I feel like I've used sound so many times in this blog and I really should find some synonyms, like I keep erasing it trying to find another way of saying it but end up just retyping it. Oh right, synonym.com is a very good thesaurus is you ever want to find a synonym, i use it a ton and its design is simple so it's easy to use. This content is not in any way sponsored by synonym.com but it's just a suggestion.

bots are kinda cool

So as I have mentioned before, I have a discord server for my ninja.io clan and although I don't play the actual game anymore I still manage the server. We have like 20 something players now if I'm not mistaken and just the other day one of the people that joined our server invited me to his own server and I joined just to learn their management rules and all that. I realized that they had a lot of bots in their server that helped around with stuff and helped maintain the server more active. So today I spent a lot of time finding and figuring out how to use these bots and which were the best. At the end, I have 2 music bots, one welcome bot, and one activity bot. The music bots can play music into voice channels in the server so that the members will maintain to be active while listening to music. And the activity bots will keep the members hinged with a lot of activities like pictures and other stuff. it's really fun and well maybe you should try it out sometime. 

almost late

Right now it is currently 10:45 PM in Atlantic Standard Time, and I have now yet finished writing my blog for the day. oof I might not have enough time, I still haven't thought about what to write about so that is certainly not good at all. I just left the living room where we are projecting movies onto a screen that is usually kept hidden. Before that, we played a bit of cards, and YES that is correct, this time the lights were not out and we played cards anyway! That's an improvement since last time definitely. Also um right my mom signed me up for like an online summer camp, actually, it's more just like a newspaper but in a group chat. So the point is that you go onto this social media app and join their group chat with like teachers and assistants and like 40 other students and almost every day of the week they send some little courses like videos and articles in the chat and us students need to read it and sort of reflect on it. That's about it I think, it hasn't yet started and my mom told me to just take care of it myself so I'm the one in the parent's group chat and today the teacher asked me if my "child" was in the chat. Well, I thought the parent chat was the group chat so I said yes without really paying that much attention to what he actually wrote since I was busy with something at the time and I don't recall what it is now. But after reading it again after I was done with whatever I was occupied with at the time I realized that he had thought that I was the "parent" of the student. So well instead of telling him that he was wrong I just decided to go with the flow and pretended to be one of my parents which honestly I've had a lot of practice with. He totally bought it and I still haven't said anything because I think it might be mandatory to have an actual parent in the group chat and well my mom told me to deal with it on my own so yea. I don't think he'll ever know though. 

DON'T SPOIL IT

Is the market crashing?!?

Today all the stocks were down by quite a lot. Amazon was down like 80 dollars, Tesla, by like 40, and another one of my stocks was also down by 40. From 1-2 o clock, I was just selling all of my stocks, cutting my losses, and shorting lots of other stocks. It worked at the end, but my losses were still more than my gains, but I didn't have time to buy to cover on my shorted stocks. This means that if by opening time tomorrow, all stocks skyrocket, I'm gonna lose a whole lot of money and I will probably regret my decisions of today, but let's just hope for the best. Also, I scheduled with Rama and we set a time where a couple of friends can go over to his house and hang out for a day, that's amazing cuz I haven't seen them for like three months so it'll be great to see them again. Membean, my vocabulary enhancing website also gave me pretty cool words today so maybe I will try to incorporate them into my own vocabulary in the near future. 

books or a library??

As I mentioned yesterday today we went to visit a very good friend of mine that is leaving, they told us that they were gonna give us some books that they didn't need anymore and couldn't take with them. ok... Only when I got there did I realize it couldn't be considered as "books", it was more like I'd say over 100 books and well, I'll never finish all of them even if I stay up all day 25/7 just reading and we all know that's never going to happen.

 I'm a bit tight on schedule today and I haven't figured out yet how to post photos from my phone onto my blog, because I'm writing on a computer right now. But, when I do I will remember to post a photo of just how many books there are, right now just sitting in the living room. It took a whole HOUR to take the book upstairs, we live in an apartment and well, it's pretty small so there's no elevator, we live on the top floor so I need to climb 4 flights of stairs every time to bring a portion of the library from the trunk of the car upstairs.

 Anyways, oh right when I first got there, my friend, didn't even come out and greet me, I mean, c'mon at least say hi before going back into your room. So I had to go inside to bid my farewells, when I finally made it to her room after evading her parent's line of sight I was greeted by a pretty empty room since the last time I came. She was sitting at her desk doing problems and well I tried to lighten the mood in there. I did come bearing gifts so that's an icebreaker at least, first I gave her a pack of cards, and also a rubix cube, but not any rubix cube, that was the first rubix cube I ever had so it had sentimental value too. Oh and for the finale, I also gave her a very state-of-the-art pocket-knife that came all the way from Boston, and the thing about my gifts is that they can all be useful even after a long time. I mean giving food isn't bad for a party but parting gifts need to be able to last a long time cuz otherwise, it doesn't serve as a remembrance of all the memories that they made at that place. 

We were in an intense card game when her father came in and well, I wouldn't say scolded but just told her to stop playing around and keep on working on the problems cuz she had some online test coming up soon. The tension in the room was pretty high so I left the room, good thing I gave my gifts early or I don't think I would've had the chance to if I had waited. I wanted to talk to her a little while longer but in their house, the patriarch is like god so well I don't stand much of a chance against god now do i

wait. I just remembered that I gave her my blog URL so she could be reading this right now, oh well if you are, i just wanna say, have fun when you get to your new home and definitely keep in touch. 

New Beginnings

Well, stocks are up today, I gained almost 4% of my portfolio. I have most of my stocks in like trendy stocks, you know, Tesla, Amazon, etc. Oh right, Microsoft is a really good stock too, it increases steadily and isn't volatile, this makes it a great long term stock. If I had a real stock account I would totally buy it and just let it rack up money. Anyways, I have a really amazing friend that is leaving my school and going to the states. However, tomorrow we are going to visit their family and perhaps that is the last time we will see them for a long time. She is very talented in many areas such as math, writing, and art too but her parents mostly only have her focus on her studies so she doesn't have much time to pursue her other passions. I hope she will orient herself to her new surroundings since it can be pretty daunting at times. I have this other friend that is also leaving for a place quite far from home, a boarding school that specializes in music and that is the path she has chosen for herself. She loves music though and her piano skills are like off the charts so I'm sure she'll be just fine at her new school. But you know, friend groups and stuff don't have that much to do with their grades and academics. Thankfully, they both have fine personalities too so I'm sure they'll fit in. Good luck!!

Scheme or Skill?

So today at night our power suddenly went out, and we were swallowed by darkness. I took out our lantern thing but it's only bright enough to light up one table, that's when we did something that we haven't done in quite a long time. Play cards. yea it might seem pretty ordinary to you but it seems to me like the only time we play cards together as a family is when electricity is out. Anyways, at one point my father would have won the game, but I bluffed that I only had one card left so he used his joker on me to stop me from winning, however, that was all part of the plan and I whipped out the bomb I had hiding on the edge of the table and took out his joker, then I proceeded to win the game by placing my final card down. The next game I did a similar trick by saying I had cards sitting on my lap while all I had left was the one card in my hand since he thought I couldn't win so easily he let me place down my final card which was a small card, like a seven or six and his expression was priceless when I stood up to show him that there really was no cards on me. BOOM. He had enough of my trickery so my parents said I could no longer hide cards under the table and they must be on the tabletop. I agreed. Now, you know how there's sometimes a double-sided card in a deck? Well, we had one of those in the deck of cards we were playing with and it was right next to the box to my left. I pretended to check my phone for the time and placed my phone right on top of the double-card, then when they were busy organizing their decks I quickly slid a joker in the place of the double-card. At the end of the game, they both thought there was no way I could win but I pulled out the joker from hiding and won once again, and it wasn't against the rules since it indeed was on the table. So, was this more skill or just a no-skill scheme? Also, I really hope we can play more often even when the lights are not out. cyaaaaa

OUR OWN CLOTHING LINE??

Today after my presentation about Benjamin Franklin and talking to Psi about opening a dropshipping business, (which is basically just having the customer pay for a product at retail price and then forwarding their order to a wholesale supplier, finally profiting from the margin), we were planning on doing print-on-demand and then undercutting the market to gain as many sales as possible but then this brilliant idea popped into my head. My school has each grade make their own class shirts, and this is mandatory so I thought we could seize the opportunity and take this sale. However, since we do not live within the states the website we were planning on using would charge us an additional $328.5 in shipping for just 80 shirts. I thought we only needed to pay for the shirt itself and maybe just a little on shipping but I had never thought it would be THAT much, so we gave up on that website and went to try and discover a new one. I contacted a person that had printed shirts for a club I am a member of and she gave me the contact of the printing company she had utilized to print the club's shirts. I really liked the fabric of that shirt so I decided that it was worth a try, however, whoever made the website was probably an amateur since there was no checkout button. Without this, I had no way to buy the shirts that I had just designed. wow. I contacted the person again and she told me that she didn't use the website's designer, she just emailed them directly. Unfortunately, they aren't open on weekends so I need to wait until they are in office hours. However, we did make a google account for our store and we decided it name it Bolton Styles. 

Do not fear, SIGMA is here!!

Today Psi and I spent 2 hours making this amazing website using Google Sites. It's called Sigma International Studies, which is basically like an organization that gives classes to students for free using Zoom. Anyways, we made it look super realistic, and we also advertised it within our own little friend group just to see if anyone will fall for it. Oh right, just so you know it's a prank, we made it just to convince one of our friends what we were saying about International Math Certificates were real, they aren't, so we wanted to make this to persuade him that there really was such a thing. And we got carried away and made this magnificent full-on website that looks a lot more appealing than actual read educational websites which is pretty cool. We even made our own google account so that whoever wished to attend would need to email us and also a survey for them to fill in what classes they want to take and their grade level, and so on. In the end, we only got two people to join, both after constant advertising and also telling them that we had already joined, and it was super exclusive, a limited amount of people could participate, blah blah blah. So, I guess it didn't really work out THAT well but I'm still proud of my very first website.

Guys, if you're bored, be sure to check out this amazing website that gives free classes!! I already signed up, be sure to check it out!

Here's the link:

https://sites.google.com/view/sigmainternationalstudies

scheduling ahead

Today my parents went out for a shopping trip at Costco and they don't allow people without a membership card in so I couldn't go with them. In the meantime, I called up Psi and we did 30 min of membean which is a vocabulary learning website. We are on different levels but that's mostly because he started a year or so after me. I'm missing around 150 new words to get to level 5 whilst he's missing the same amount to get to level 4. He's a lot more advanced than most of the grade even though he started behind so that's scary, he might catch up to me if I don't progress along with him. Anyways, we also got into a schism, membean word, about whether or not to use locks for our lockers in school but in the end, we just became noncommital (another membean word). I also played some piano but since I've been writing about it wayyy too much I've decided to put a break to it for a while. anyhow, that leads to the title. Tomorrow, my free day, I've decided to dedicate it to researching on Benjamin Franklin, you know, one of the founding fathers of America, he even became the president but no one even remembers that. So yeah, it's going to be my little project for tomorrow.

SUCCESS

Ok, so I've managed to get through the whole day without touching any videogames, boom!! 

Today I also got to return to my school but only to get back some belongings that I left there, it seemed so deserted, empty, but not abandoned since there were still some faculty there bringing students to their lockers one by one, just in case they forgot their locker combination. Oops. 

Anyways, I forgot how much stuff I had in that locker when I left, I thought that I had cleared out most of the stuff but turns out I was probably already carrying a lot of stuff that day like 3 textbooks and a bunch of other stuff. I also realized that a lot of the books in my locker that were on the book list were never touched, but I guess this year they've got an excuse, you know because of the whole social distancing so we weren't able to progress as rapidly as we would have if we were physically in school. I brought my usual schoolbag, completely empty and yet it was filled up with no space leftover when I walked down those stairs for the thousandth time and struggled to wedge it into our car where my parents were waiting. I wonder when's the next time I'll get to enter that place again, and what will my feeling be when I finally do?

“Wow that was a big jump”

and I replied: "yes but it's a necessary one" Psi I have no way of knowing what will happen later on in the future so for now, I can only control what I am going to do in the present. So I have decided to quit games, now it may not seem like it but that is REALLLLLLLY hard for people like us, at least for me. when I was younger my mom used to limit my game time and I attempted to rebel at every chance I got. But now... it's different. Now, I am the one in command, I am telling myself to stop, I am capable of controlling myself. I had this big realization today, and when I say it, maybe it seems obvious, but if you really stop

and think, imagine...

about death.

and how scary it can be. 

struggling to keep your eyes open, and when they finally give in the world turns black, and your heart stops pounding. No sounds coming from around you, you can't even feel the light emitting from the hospital room beating down on you, and you are just there, surrounded by nothing, and YOU are nothing. 

and THAT is why I have decided to make a change, I am GOING to change the world, I WILL leave behind a mark on our vast universe and although the world will carry on as it did yesterday, and the day before, I will have at least left behind a name, an action, a word. 

so my first step will be quitting games. 

wish me luck

one with music??

today I took my piano lesson with my teacher. It's pretty cool to return back to classes so that I can have a professional to criticize my playing and that's about the fastest and steadiest way to improve. other than that I also figured out how to properly record tracks on my electric piano, idk if that's what it's called or is it a keyboard? Anyways, I tried to play a song and I used two tracks to complete it. Oh right, tracks can be mixed or better said overlapped onto one another so that they come out as one song. I overlapped two tracks today since it's my first time and I was successful in playing Heart and Soul which is a pretty good rock song. Its melody is surprisingly simple yet it's quite beautiful to listen to. maybe you can search it up sometime. Whenever I glance at my whole musical setup it looks to me like I'm a pro musician.

new toy

I got a cool new toy today, actually, it's not new... It's quite old actually, it's a keyboard that we got from our other apartment and since it's electric you can record songs that you play on it so I'm hoping to get to play songs that I wouldn't be able to play with this new addition to my musical front. I placed it on top of my piano with some protection, of course, to prevent scratching the surface. It looks like a pretty professional set-up if I do say so myself. Also, today is children's day in Chinese culture so there's that, it's kinda a break for me today so my mom said that she'd only explain a program to me today for Python class. Little did I know...

usually, classes are supposed to take one hour, and this "little program" turned out to take TWO hours so in the end, it seems like I got the short end of the stick. But I guess I got to learn a bit more than usual so maybe it's kind of a win for me in some sorta way.