(Insert Scary Movie Here)

Hello, Internet.

About two years ago, a friend of mine called me up (or, more likely, texted me) to ask if I wanted to go see a movie. The movie she had in mind wasn’t one I knew much about, except that it was a horror film, it was directed by comedian Jordan Peele, and it was called Get Out.

For the first half of the movie, I was completely enthralled – and horrified. Somewhere towards the latter half I lost track of the plot, not really comprehending the events that rapidly spiralled out on the screen.

Get Out stayed in my peripheral vision in the following years; I heard that it did well, and that Jordan Peele since directed another horror film called Us, but I didn’t think about it too much otherwise.

It was called back to the forefront of my attention last week when we watched it in class, and this time I was much less confused – but just as enthralled.

The setup for Get Out is this: an African American man, Chris, and his white girlfriend, Rose, are planning to visit Rose’s parents for the weekend. Her parents don’t know that Chris is black, as Rose claims it won’t be a big deal because they aren’t racist. Chris is wary, but he agrees to go meet them for the weekend anyways, and so the two set out on their way.

Before any of this happens, however, the movie opens with a seemingly unrelated scene. We see a man walking alone at night. He’s black, fairly young, making his way down a suburban street. He’s clearly uncomfortable, muttering out loud that the area is “a hedge maze”, and saying in a conversation over the phone that it’s “creepy”. A car slows down, apparently following him. Noticing this, he turns around and starts walking in the opposite direction, proclaiming aloud, “Not me. Not today.” He checks behind him to see if the car has turned as well. It hasn’t.

Instead, it’s completely stopped, doors open, Run Rabbit Run playing on the radio. A man in a mask appears, strangles the first man until he stops struggling, shoves him in the trunk of the car, gets in, and drives away.

This scene, like the rest of the movie, is informed by current American events. The man walking is uncomfortable even before the car slows down and starts following him, and not without reason. Suburbs like the one he’s walking through are often predominantly white, and it’s not uncommon for black men to be reported to the police, injured, or killed by racist white people who see them as a threat – like in the case of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen year old fatally shot for, it seems, being a black man in a suburban neighbourhood. Unlike in other horror films,where the suburbs are seen as a safe place being encroached upon by killers, here the suburbs themselves, and the regular inhabitants thereof, present the danger.

As the car drives away, the sound of Run Rabbit Run fades out, and a few string chords take its place as the scene transitions to the title sequence: shots of the forest along the road to Rose’s parents house, accompanied by a Swahili song called Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga. The lyrics, translated to English, are as follows:

Brother,

Listen to the ancestors.

Run!

You need to run far! (Listen to the truth)

Brother,

Listen to the ancestors

Run! Run!

To save yourself,

Listen to the ancestors.

They seem to be encouraging the listener to do the same thing as the movie’s title: get out. However, the eerie music is quickly replaced as the title sequence ends. This time, Childish Gambino’s Redbone plays as we are finally introduced to Chris, Rose, and their prospective road trip. The song’s hook of “stay woke” seems to be both another warning that something dangerous is going to happen, and an ironic nod to the non- nblack people throughout the movie who think that they’re being “woke” while actually mistreating Chris.

So, Chris and Rose are driving to Rose’s parents house and they hit a deer. They pull over, and Chris gets out to take a look at the dying deer, lying a few feet off the road. He looks at it; it looks back at him. They seem to have a moment of solidarity.

Cut to a policeman standing by the car, telling Rose to call animal services in the future, not the police. Rose apologizes, and then the policeman turns his attention to Chris, and asks to see his driver’s licence. Rose protests, saying Chris wasn’t driving, while Chris attempts to politely comply with the police officer. Eventually, Rose gets the policeman to back down and drive away, and Rose and Chris continue driving.

This is another scene that very blatantly comments on a major issue in America: racial profiling. Police will wrongly stop, accuse, hurt, or kill people of colour (usually black people) without proper cause, often not facing serious consequences.


Once they’ve reached Rose’s parents’ house, we are introduced to her father, Dean, and her mother, Missy, and quickly learn that the rest of Rose’s relatives are going to be there for the weekend as well. At the same time, we meet Walter (the groundskeeper) and Georgina (the maid), both black. Both of them act strange throughout the day, speaking and dressing very formally, and in a style reminiscent of the 1950s.

We learn that Dean is a neurosurgeon, and Missy is a hypnotist, who later hypnotizes Chris to get him to stop smoking. While he is hypnotized, we learn that his mother was killed in a car accident when he was a child, as he sat at home watching TV.

Chris has various conversations with Dean and Missy, as well as Rose’s brother Jeremy, who arrives that night. All three of them appear initially to be, as Rose said, not racist, but through a series of microaggressions it quickly becomes apparent that they aren’t as progressive as they think. Chris has a similar experience with Rose’s extended family, with many of her relatives fixating on the fact that he is black, and making insensitive comments. Eventually, Chris finds the one other black man there (save for Walter). His name is Logan, and like Walter and Georgina, he speaks formally and dresses in outdated clothes – including a hat reminiscent of the one worn by Emmett Till in this well known photo of him.

Chris, a photographer, snaps a photo of Logan with his phone, not realizing the flash is on. When it goes off, Logan suddenly freaks out, grabbing Chris and yelling at him to “get out”. He is led away by some other relatives, then comes back, calm again, and apologizes, saying he had a seizure. Chris and Rose go for a walk, while Dean leads the other relatives in a game of bingo that is eerily reminiscent of a slave auction. Chris decides he wants to go home because he is feeling creeped out, and Rose agrees to go with him. Meanwhile, Chris sends a picture of Logan to his friend Rod, saying he recognized him, and Rod identifies Logan as being a man named Andre who disappeared a few months earlier.

Chris and Rose are packing up to leave when Chris finds a box in the closet with a stack of photos of Rose with different black guys, generally looking to be ex boyfriends, despite the fact that she had told him he was the first black man she had dated. Chris becomes more urgent to leave, but Rose can’t find the car keys – and then it’s revealed that she actually has them, but isn’t willing to give them to him. She and her family stop Chris from leaving, knock him out, and he awakes tied to a chair, watching a TV.

On the TV, a man explains that the family has invented a procedure called the Coagula: a way for someone’s consciousness to be transferred into another body, while keeping that body’s original consciousness dormant. The family has been abducting young black people and transferring the consciousnesses of elderly members of the family into the younger bodies to preserve them. Walter, Georgina, and Logan – who is actually the man we saw kidnapped at the start – are all elderly members of Rose’s family inhabiting young, black bodies. While the reason given for them using specifically black people is that members of the family thought they would be cooler or stronger, it would also be easier for them, as things like the abduction in the first scene go more easily unreported than if a white person went missing in the same spot.

Chris is repeatedly knocked out through the use of the sound and image of a spoon clinking in a teacup, which Missy used to hypnotize him. He escapes by putting cotton in his ears, and fighting the family members one on one, until he has killed all of them except Rose, who is upstairs. She hears the commotion, and comes downstairs with a rifle, attempting to kill him. He gets in Jeremy’s car (the same car from the beginning of the film) and tries to drive away, but he hits Georgina and, feeling guilty about not having saved his mother as a child, decides he can’t leave her. He puts her unconscious body in the passenger seat, and she wakes up and attacks him. He fights her off, and is still pursued by Rose and Walter, when he uses the flash on his phone to bring Walter back to his senses, at which point Walter shoots Rose and then himself. However, Rose is still alive, and as Chris is attempting to kill her before she kills him, a police car pulls up. It seems that Chris is going to be killed by the police.

It turns out that the driver of the police car is Chris’s friend Rod, a TSA agent, who has been piecing the whole thing together based on what Chris has told him. The two drive off to safety, and the film closes.

While I was writing this post, I pulled up a copy of the film’s script, which had a few differences to the actual film, most notably in the opening scene and at the very end. Instead of just focusing on Andre walking alone at the start, the scene is interspersed with scenes of a white family preparing to go to DisneyWorld:

A perfect suburban house with bay windows and a front lawn. The SHAW family. Caucasian and warm – RICHARD, 34; NANCY, 30; JOSHUA, 6; and MAY, 4 – eat dinner inside. Richard reads something on his tablet illuminating his face.

JOSHUA: Which one are we going to?

RICHARD: The one in Orlando.

NANCY Disney World.

JOSHUA: Tony said that Mickey is not really Mickey; it’s someone else in there.

RICHARD: Mickey’s Mickey.

JOSHUA: Tony said Mickey’s face doesn’t move.

RICHARD: That’s right. Mickey’s always happy.

EXT. SUBURBAN STREET – CONTINUOUS The driver carries Andre to the car.

JOSHUA (O.S.): Why?

RICHARD (O.S.): Because he hasn’t aged in 100 years.

It’s chilling. Then and again, pretty much everything in this film is chilling, as it conveys a very present fear: racism in America, specifically internalized racism by people who claim to be “woke”. Much of the tension throughout the film is built up through examples of everyday racism, until it’s eventually revealed that everything is part of a bigger, more sinister operation.

As for the end of the film, the script has the whole police-showing-up thing played much more grimly, ending with Chris getting arrested and going to prison, as Rod still searches for evidence of what really happened. Chris, however, is happy knowing that he was able to defeat Rose and her family.

Get Out is a modern and innovative film, but it still has similarities to the roots of horror. Like in Frankenstein, it shows someone being outcast by society for the way they look – and, in the original ending of the film, Chris is literally penalized for killing the people who were attacking him, much like Frankenstein vows revenge on his creature for his actions. They have similarities from a science fiction angle too, with the horror of someone playing God and essentially controlling the body of another person, via reanimation in Frankenstein and the coagula in Get Out.

Overall, Get Out was an excellent and creepy film that I really enjoyed watching, even if it took me a couple tries to fully understand the plot.

Anyways, until next time –

Toodles.

(Insert Awesome Horror Movie Here)

Hello, Internet.

I would like to ask that, for a moment, you cast your mind back to the late 1970s – specifically 1970s America. A lot of change was happening. Serial killers such as Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were terrorizing the country, the Vietnam war had ended, Apple and Microsoft had just gotten their start, Roe v Wade had recently legalized abortion, Richard Nixon had resigned after the Watergate Scandal, and after years of fighting, the Equal Rights Amendment had been ratified. If you were a conservative in America, you were probably pretty afraid. If you were pretty much anyone else – a woman, a person of colour, a queer person, or just someone who was fighting for a civil rights movement – things were perhaps starting to get a little better (except for, of course, that whole serial killer thing, which wasn’t good for anyone).

Meanwhile, a lot of cultural events were reflected in pop culture. Apocalypse Now portrayed the horrors of the Vietnam War, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest focused on the institutionalization and mistreatment of mentally ill people, One Day At A Time centred around a divorced mother raising her children, and Black Christmas, a horror movie about several young girls being murdered, has a young, pregnant protagonist who is planning to get an abortion.

In 1978, inspired heavily by Black Christmas, director John Carpenter released a movie called Halloween.

Halloween is a simple movie: a six year old boy murders his sister, is locked up for fifteen years, escapes, and kills four more people. Meanwhile, his doctor, Sam Loomis, tracks him down to attempt to stop him from hurting anyone. For a slasher movie, it’s relatively bloodless; there are only five deaths, only four of which are onscreen, two of which are strangling, and one of which is heavily obscured. There are no fountains of fake blood, or gruesome torture sequences. Even if the creators had wanted to include these things, they didn’t have the budget for it.

Halloween was made for about $300k, provided by producer Moustapha Akkad. This meant many of the actors were not well-known, and that the cast and crew were generally underpaid, and most of the props and costumes were decided by what could be obtained cheaply – most famously, the mask worn by Michael Myers is actually a mask of William Shatner that was altered to look scarier and less human, costing the crew less than five dollars. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, was hired in the lead role of Laurie Strode, giving the film a lot of publicity. Most of the film was not gore and violence, but just shots of various characters walking or driving around, talking, and being teenagers, while the movie’s score played in the background, never quite letting the audience forget that something terrible is about to happen.

The score was composed by John Carpenter. It’s sort of a weird piece – it’s in 10/8 timing (each measure is composed of ten eighth notes, which is fairly unusual), which makes it sound slightly off kilter and very distinctive; it has a very high melody juxtaposed with low synth chords, which sounds unnatural and alarming; and there’s an ominous ticking sound throughout the entire thing that is reminiscent of a clock counting away the seconds.

It’s incredibly effective. In fact, the audio is a large part of why the film works. Aside from the score, which has now become iconic, you can hear the sound of Michael breathing through the mask throughout the film (which is essentially the only sound he makes, since he never speaks). At one point, we hear a character being choked to death over the phone (a scene that would later be referenced in the opening of Wes Craven’s Scream). Once Michael starts attacking Laurie, we hear the scream that gave Jamie Lee Curtis the title of “scream queen”. All of this together is terrifying.

Of course, the audio isn’t the only thing the film utilizes to create a sense of horror. Another strong point in terms of style for Halloween is camerawork. In particular, the scenes from Michael Myers’ perspective – one extended POV shot at the beginning that puts you inside the killer’s head while he stabs his sister to death, and hides the fact that he is a six year old child until after he has murdered her, and several shots throughout the movie that show his perspective as he watches characters from behind hedges or outside windows, all with the sound of breathing in the background.

While the audio and camerawork lend themselves to the terror of Halloween, they are only supporting factors in the thing that truly makes the film scary: the fact that it could be real. When Halloween was released, slasher movies weren’t really a thing the way they are today. There were a few– Psycho is a sort of early template, and the aforementioned Black Christmas – but they wouldn’t be popularized until after Halloween’s release. What was common in horror movies prior to this was the supernatural: demons and possession, or monsters such as vampires and werewolves. It was all fantasy. Halloween shows a terrifying scenario that is very much a reality: a human being, a child, doing great evil. It’s a very naturalistic movie. The setting of Haddonfield, Illinois doesn’t exist – it’s a classic Everytown, America. It could be any town. It could be your town.

The characters in the movie feel real as well. Debra Hill, Carpenter’s wife at the time, co-wrote the movie, and she and Carpenter wanted to make sure that the teenagers acted and talked and dressed like real teenagers. The women weren’t meant to be meek and void of personality and essentially there to be viewed, as women were often portrayed in movies – they were given agency, desires, and in the case of Laurie Strode, enough resourcefulness and willingness to fight to fend off a killer using a knitting needle, a coat hanger, and his own weapon. The movie has sometimes been interpreted as misogynistic for killing off all the female characters who are shown drinking and having sex, while allowing the more conservative, booksmart, virginal Laurie to live and defeat the villain. However, this was apparently not an intentional commentary, and John Carpenter, Debra Hill, and Jamie Lee Curtis have all mentioned that the characters are meant to be realistic teenagers, not a portrayal of what teenagers (or women) should or shouldn’t be. (Not to mention, Laurie is shown swearing, smoking pot, helping her friends to shirk their babysitting duties in favour of using the empty houses they now have access to for their own enjoyment, and it’s mentioned that she has a crush but has trouble getting a boyfriend – she’s not exactly trying to be angelic, she’s just a little dorky). The idea of teenagers being killed for drinking or having sex would be portrayed more explicitly in Friday the Thirteenth, a copycat slasher film released in 1980, and the idea of an innocent final girl surviving would be echoed in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street, and deconstructed in his later movie Scream.

Another thing that made Halloween scary is the utter lack of explanation for Michael’s actions. He doesn’t seem to have a specific motivation – in fact, he doesn’t seem especially motivated at all. He walks slowly, he shows no emotion, he kills people at random. At one point, upon finding a dog that Michael has killed, Loomis says simply, “he got hungry”. Seemingly, then, Michael is just acting on his whims. He isn’t killing people out of a need for revenge or to make a point, he just sees people and decides to kill them. Brad Miska’s article The Boogeyman, Fear, and Responsibility – A Close Analysis of ‘Halloween’ (1978)  suggests that Michael is killing characters who “(throw) off their responsibilities in a way that reminds him of his first victim” – but he identifies his victims, stalking Laurie and her friends, long before he sees them shirking their babysitting duties, suggesting that he didn’t have a reason to kill these teenagers specifically. This reflected the serial killers of the era, who would kill people seemingly at random, often horrifically.

A running theme throughout Halloween is characters asking for help and being ignored. Sam Loomis desperately tries to convince anyone who will listen that Michael is armed, dangerous, and heading for Haddonfield to kill more people, but is constantly told he’s overreacting. Laurie tells her friends that a man in a mask is stalking her, and they laugh it off. Tommy Doyle, the boy Laurie babysits, sees Michael and tells Laurie that “the boogeyman” is watching him, only for her to dismiss it as childish fear. When Michael is chasing Laurie, she screams for help and bangs on a neighbour’s door, and the neighbour is seen looking out the window and consciously deciding to ignore her. These are all examples of a very real human behaviour: the tendency to ignore bad things, to sweep them under the rug and look in the other direction rather than getting involved. Not only could the events of Halloween happen to you, but nobody is going to help you, or even believe you, if they do.

Halloween also harkens back to themes present in some of the earliest horror stories that we still enjoy today. For instance, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.

Like Halloween, Frankenstein has a villain who is quasi human, isolated from society, feared and rejected, and, eventually, a merciless killer with little to no empathy for his victims. Both stories make you wonder what it means to be human – and whether or not being human automatically means you have humanity. Both stories allow you to see from the perspective of the antagonist as well as the protagonist, although Halloween does this to create horror, and Frankenstein does it to raise questions of morality. In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein abandons his creation and refuses to comply with his demands for a partner once he realizes the creature is capable of doing evil; in Halloween, Sam Loomis attempts to treat Michael for seven years, and then gives up, and focuses on keeping him contained instead. Both Loomis and Frankenstein dehumanize their respective charges, referring to them as “the creature”, or “it”, or “the demon”. Although the creature eventually learns to speak French, he has no formal education, and for the first part of his life he doesn’t know how to communicate at all, much like Michael, who has been silent, locked up, and heavily drugged since the age of six.

Of course, there are some pretty significant differences between the two stories as well. Frankenstein gives an immense amount of focus to why the creature does what he does; he speaks eloquently and attempts to reason with people, and although his actions are terrible, you sympathize with his situation and his feelings. Michael Myers is given no such motivation, and thus, no such empathy – his demeanour is cold, he is silent, and he wears a mask that makes him look more like a blank slate than a person. While much of the horror of Halloween comes from how real the events feel, Frankenstein is a work of science fiction, and although it may feel plausible to the reader, it’s not nearly as grounded in reality as Halloween. Halloween is also much more recent, so the fears – the people around you not being who they seem, injustices being swept under the rug to keep up the appearance of happiness and wholesomeness, bad things happening for no reason – are still pretty relevant today.

Halloween has its flaws, and it isn’t as scary, as novel, or as effective for a modern audience as it would have been when it was released, but it is altogether a good movie with an iconic legacy, and arguably the best slasher movie to date. That being said, it is a few days into November now, so we’ll give Halloween a rest (after all, the Black Christmas season is rapidly approaching).

Toodle-oo.

(Insert Awesome Canadian Here)

Hello, Internet.

So, you remember last week’s Crucible-related blog post?

This is another one of those. Today I’ve chosen the prompt “Read “How to Spot a Witch”. Write a paper or create something similar to this essay on how to spot a _________. You fill in the blank: example: How to Spot a Liar. How to Spot a Surfer. Etc. ”.

 

I knew from the beginning of this assignment that this was a prompt I was interested in completing, but it took me a while to come up with an idea for what I wanted to write about how to spot. I knew I wanted it to be something integral to my own life– something that was a part of my own identity.

The thing I eventually decided to write about was How to Spot a Canadian.

Now, you hear a lot of stereotypes about what Canadians are like, and as a real live Canadian citizen I am here to tell you that almost all of them are, at least in my neck of the woods, pretty much 100% accurate. So, without further ado, here is how to spot a Canadian (with evidence from my own experiences).

 

#1: Check what they’re wearing. This one is pretty straightforward, so I won’t spend too much time on it. Canadians are known for wearing three things in particular: toques, flannels, and double denim (or, as it’s been dubbed, the Canadian Tuxedo).

Now, I’ve always figured the reasoning behind Canadians wearing toques is pretty obvious– it’s cold here –and I associate flannels largely with the iconography of lumberjacks, which were a big part of Canada’s early history, but I had to do a little bit of research to find out what was so Canadian about double denim.

As it turns out, it’s an interesting story, and it centres around a non-Canadian: Bing Crosby. Way back in the 1950s, Bing Crosby attempted to stay in a hotel in Vancouver. However, they denied him a room. The reason why? He was wearing denim, specifically, a pair of Levi’s jeans, which didn’t meet the hotel dress code. When Levi’s heard about the incident, they decided to create something that would meet the dress code: a tuxedo made out of denim, or a “Canadian Tuxedo”.

As a Canadian, I have of course repped various Canadian looks, although flannels are my favourite.

 

#2: Find our their favourite coffee chain. Whenever I travel to the states and end up telling someone I’m Canadian, no matter the context, I almost always end up getting asked one question: do you miss Tim Hortons?

As much as a small piece of my soul dies every time I hear this joke, I am a fan of Tim Hortons. I would happily eat Timbits for every meal, not to mention I’m pretty much dependent on coffee to make me a (soft of) functional human being, and Tim Hortons can provide a solid cup of joe.

Tim Hortons is, of course, a piece of Canadian iconography all on its own, but it also ties into another very Canadian thing: hockey. See, Tim Horton (or Miles, as he was actually named), the founder of Tim Horton’s, was a hockey player. Not just any hockey player, either– he was actually considered one of the 100 greatest NHL players in history. He played for twenty four seasons, and might have played more if he wasn’t killed in a car chase at the age of 44.

#3: Find out their favourite sport. To continue from above, another thing Canada is well known for is hockey. While our national sport is actually lacrosse, hockey (or specifically ice hockey) is sort of the unofficial national sport of Canada. Hockey was invented in Windsor, Nova Scotia, and has since become a beloved part of Canada’s culture.

I play hockey, and have from the age of seven, although I have fond memories of playing family hockey games from an even earlier age. If you’ve read about my love of potatoes, you may also know that I spent a lot of time as a child hanging out in hockey rinks while my family members played hockey– one of my sisters and both of my parents are hockey players, and my mum actually played her first hockey game the day I turned one.

I love playing hockey, and consider myself incredibly lucky that I have the opportunity to play. This week, I get to play hockey seven times, and I can think of no more enjoyable way to spend my time.

However, a lot of people prefer not playing hockey but instead watching it, whether on TV or live in a stadium. In elementary school, we were regularly bribed to read more books with the lure of tickets to see the next Giants game. It’s not uncommon to see people wearing jerseys bearing the name and number of their favourite hockey player. In 2011, Vancouverites started riots, which did 5 million dollars worth of property damage, following the defeat of our hockey team, the Canucks, in the Stanley Cup– one example of various similar incidents across Canada.

One person who perhaps should have gotten a nod in the Canadian fashion section is Don Cherry, longtime announcer for Hockey Night in Canada, and the owner of many a unique and eye catching suit.

#4: Listen for Canadian vocabulary when they speak. Canadians are known for using a couple of specific words: “sorry” and “eh”.

I say sorry a lot– in fact, I almost didn’t register that this comic was making fun of Canadians until the punchline, considering that this is an interaction I could reasonably have (probably in a Tim Hortons).

That being said, I don’t apologize quite as much as the folks over in Toronto, where they actually had to pass a law to protect people who say sorry too much. This law, called the Apology Act, essentially states that saying sorry isn’t a direct admission of guilt, the way it might be considered in a court of law other places, because people in Canada frequently apologize for things that were not actually their fault.

There’s also, interestingly enough, a song called Sorry by Canadian singer Justin Bieber.

As for the word “eh”, it tends to be true of less Canadians than the whole overapologizing thing, and you mostly hear it used ironically to make fun of Canadian stereotypes. However, I personally use it unironically, albeit somewhat infrequently, and I do hear it used by other people, so the Canadians-saying-eh stereotype might not be completely untrue.

#5: Offer them maple syrup. Earlier this year, we went on a class trip to California. While there, we worked with buddies from a school called High Tech High. We were encouraged to bring a small gift of some kind for our buddies– I brought a coffee crisp, a chocolate bar available in Canada but not in the United States.

When I gave this gift to my California buddy, he politely thanked me, and then said, “I got you something, too,” before proceeding to pull an entire jug of maple syrup out of his backpack and handing it to me. I didn’t actually get to keep the maple syrup, seeing as it’s ridiculously expensive, but it was an interesting nod to just how much much maple syrup is associated with Canada.

Maple trees are actually such an important part of Canada’s iconography that our flag features a maple leaf. We also have a hockey team called the Maple Leafs. Even our pennies, back when we had them, featured maple leaves.

The most important part of the maple tree, however, is not the leaves. It’s actually the sap, which is what’s used to make maple syrup.

Back in 2011, and ongoing through part of 2012, a heist took place in Quebec. This heist lasted months, and involved the theft of the equivalent of almost 9 million dollars, a value higher than that of any other Canadian heist.

The thing that was being stolen, as you’ve probably guessed by now, was maple syrup.

There’s a Canadian tradition of pouring strips of maple syrup onto snow and letting it freeze into a semi-hard candy, known as snow candy, which is then eaten on a stick. This can be a difficult thing to eat, seeing as despite being frozen, the candy is still incredibly sticky and wont to get stuck in the hair of the person eating it.

Even our money smells like maple syrup. We also have maple flavoured bacon, and maple bacon doughnuts, which are perhaps the epitome of stereotypical Canadian food. In general, we have a larger supply of maple syrup than anyone could ever need.

#6: Try one of these miscellaneous ways to spot a Canadian.

Attempt to pay them in Canadian tire money.

Find out if they, much like my grandpa, ever attempted to keep a pet moose during their childhood.

Start singing this song and see if they know the lyrics.

Or this one.

Ask them about their country’s economy and see if they burst into tears.

Offer them poutine.

 

In order to supplement my understanding of Canadian stereotypes and how they apply to real people living in Canada, I asked three Canadians some questions.

 

This has been a lengthy blog post, eh? I’m sorry about that.

 

Toodles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Insert Stranger Things Here)

Hello, Internet.

So, we’re currently reading The Crucible, a play written in the fifties by Arthur Miller, and set in 1690s Salem– right at the time of the Salem Witch Trials. To support our comprehension of the themes of this play, we were given a series of related prompts of which to choose three to make blog posts about:

1. A major theme in “The Crucible” deals with guilt. Recall a time when you felt guilty about something you had done or said. It may not be as serious as the characters in the play, but it was probably just as real. It can be some recent experience or one that took place in childhood. How did you deal with those feelings? As you look back now were your fears justified, or were you being too hard on yourself?
2. Think of an image from the play and use that image to create a spatial poem or something similar (an image? a photo essay?).
3. Abigail was a strong, domineering influence on Mary Warren. When did the power or control of someone else influence you?
4. Recall a time when you were wrongly accused of something, or of a time when you wrongly accused someone of something. What was it and how did you feel?
5. Abigail took revenge for Proctor’s dismissal of her. Describe a time when you sought revenge or someone sought revenge on you.
6. Describe your concept of heaven or describe your concept of hell.
7. Describe a time when you have felt isolated.
8. What do you feel remorse for?
9. Read “How to Spot a Witch”. Write a paper or create something similar to this essay on how to spot a _________. You fill in the blank: example: How to Spot a Liar. How to Spot a Surfer. Etc.
10. This play is consider universal and enduring because of its themes, despite being written over 50 years ago. What media (movie, book, music, TV) will be universal and enduring that was created in your generation’s time (so far!)? Argue for it.

For my first prompt, I chose to write about a media from my generation I thought would have a lasting impact or still be considered relevant way into the future.

 

A media that I think will last a long time, as you may have guessed from the title, is Stranger Things. Stranger Things echoes the style and setting of a show from the eighties, a feeling which is supported by its also taking place in the eighties. There’s a sci fi aspect that makes it seem almost a bit like a fairy tale, while also giving it a vibe that harkens back to things like Star Wars, Doctor Who, or Star Trek. 

And yet, it’s not geeky or unfamiliar. The cinematography is amazing. The characters are all incredible and very layered, and they feel much like real people. While some of them are built from familiar archetypes, almost none of them are actually cut and dry. The show also puts a lot of focus on developing the relationships between these characters, even in dynamics that seem a little bit odd couple at first; for instance, Dustin and Steve teaming up in season two after being unable to locate anyone else.

The show introduces a type of monster that we haven’t already seen in a hundred pieces of media before this: the demogorgon. Because it hasn’t already been overdone in varying levels of campiness, the demogorgon is a lot more effective than just using a classic monster, while still clearly providing a foil for the human villains in the show. While the demogorgon probably won’t be used directly in other media, it could inspire the designs of new monsters, or new versions of monsters, in other shows or movies in the coming years.

In fact, a lot of things about the show are iconic symbols of specifically this show; the wall with the Christmas lights, for instance. Despite literally being a wall, that part of the show has inspired sweaters, artwork, even Halloween costumes. It’s become an immediately recognizable icon of the show. Stranger Things is chock full of this sort of iconography; it has a large supernatural component, but it also has taken completely ordinary things, such as Eggos, and turned them into a part of the show’s branding. This sort of thing is really effective in making the show long lasting, because small things remind you of it even when you’re not watching it.

Another thing Stranger Things does well is that the show seems to operate within the genre that would appeal to each of its characters, while also being cohesive. The sci fi element I discussed previously mostly centres around the group of middle school kids, who are all big fans of Star Wars, frequently referencing it throughout the show. For the teenage characters, the plot alludes to eighties slasher films– Nancy is set up to be the “final girl”, the one who has to learn how to fight the bad guy that’s killed her best friend. Her boyfriend, Steve, even seems to fit the terrible-boyfriend slasher archetype to a tee. However, while Nancy does end up taking on the villain, both of them have character development that sees them subverting and inverting the roles they would normally play in a horror film, and becoming much more fleshed out characters. As for the adults in the show, while they don’t fit quite as neatly into one genre, they still seem to be in a separate thread than the younger characters. We start out seeing them as kind of burnouts– Hopper, the chief of police with a substance abuse problem, and Joyce, the single mum who suddenly has to deal with her biggest fear: losing her son. However, they both prove to be much more than meets the eye.

There’s a solid chance that the special effects will start to lose their effectiveness with time, but currently there’s nothing in the show to make it look or sound less than first rate. There’s just a new type of movie monster, a character that’s inspired endless Halloween costumes, an incredible score, and some less than subtle product placement. 

Toodles.

(Insert Awesome Summit Here)

Hello, Internet.

So so my class recently attended the BC Tech Summit– a summit where people from different area say of technology in BC both presented onstage and showcased pieces of technology such as robots, 3D scanners, and computer programs.

 

We saw several presenters, two of which I took notes on and did some background research about.

The first presenter we saw, and the first one I took notes on, was Brent Bushnell, the CEO of Two Bit Circus.

Two Bit Circus is a company that uses technology to provide innovative entertainment. They’re based in Los Angeles, but tour around the world. They’ve created things such as the equivalent of a carnival dunk tank with fire instead of water, a cloud that rains tequila, and a robot bartender. Other than Bushnell, their core team consists of Eric Gradman, Kim Schaefer, and Nancy Bennett.

These were my notes on Bushnells’s talk:

– LASER BEAMS
– “It’s hard to be like ‘what do you do for work’ but it’s easy to be like ‘I’m gonna kill you next time!!'”
– Rock band
– Whack-a-mole meets twister
– The Okay Go video that everyone has seen that’s cool!
– Nice bow tie
– Chevy car launch (literal)
– Two Bit Circus
– Race Car VR
– Olympics VR
Tequila cloud
– Ikigai
– Grand Challenges
Sustainability Development Goals
– Goal: that sequence from the Lego Movie
– Ayyy a hello world thing
– Bop It was meant to be a remote control
– Make > read
– STEM
– 3D printed dress w/ ink dripping and motion sensor attacks
– STEAM (STEM + art)
STEAM carnival
YEET FLAMBE
– “Home, alone, on average depressed”
– Prescription video games
– Escape games
– Sugarcoated vegetables actually don’t sound good but sure
– “Specialization is for insects”
– Conference crashing
– Getting on a bus –> travelling on $5 a day
– Random input
– Inspire invention
– Stimulating environment
– Secret Nerd Night (it’s like Fight Club for nerds)
– Cross disciplinary
– Intermediate Impossibles (Monty Python guy)
– Mentorship
– Hyper reality
– Intense dragon simulator

The other presenter I took notes on was Valerie Song, the CEO of a company called Ava. Ava uses technology to allow people to grow their own food, year round and indoors. Their goal is to not only revolutionize farming technology but also to allow people to grow some of their own food as a second option to buying that food as groceries. Ava uses a product called Byte, which allows plants to grow easily, without much soil.

These were my notes from Song’s presentation:

– CEO/cofounder of Ava
– Help grow plants w/ robots
– One-time corporate worker
– Entrepreneur
– Solving a problem
– Fireside chat
– Female entrepreneurs
– Parents were entrepreneurs but didn’t encourage it
– Glam vs non glam
– Manage finance
– Stay timely
– Emails
– Lot of time
– Pitching to VCs
– Getting money
– Doing interviews
– First getting money offered
– Pushing through difficult scenarios
– Loneliness
– Independent decisions
– Getting mentorship
– Mentorship program
– Don’t make the same failures as someone else
– “Play” more
– Have hobbies
– Do video games (zombies?)
– Create stuff
– Pick up skills everywhere not just in education

There was also a section of the summit focused on promoting tech-related post secondary education around BC. While I don’t have plans to go to school for anything tech related, I do have an interest in programming , so I looked into a programming program offered by BCIT. It teaches applied software development via languages such as JavaScript, C#, C++, and Swift. It provides skills in “IT systems analysis, requirements discovery, critical thinking, process mapping, documentation, technical communication, presentations, and team work”, a skill set which ranges from very software-specific to generally useful in any part of life. The program also acts as a prerequisite to various more advanced programs offered by BCIT.

I was also able to meet some people who worked in the tech industry, including getting an interview with a Microsoft Engineer.

Toodles!

(Insert Disruptive Blog Post Here)

Hello, Internet.

 

So, as I mentioned in my last post we recently took a class trip to California, specifically San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. We did this trip as part of a social studies unit on disruption, and specifically with some focus on how technology is disruptive.

Now, in order to fully understand what this unit was all about, you need to understand exactly what disruption means. The word disruption has some negative connotations, but in essence it just means something that interrupts or changes something else. A lot of the disruptions that we looked at in this unit were positive.

On the technology side, we focussed on newer technology, and we spent a lot of time talking about Silicon Valley (not to mention visiting it), both as a disruption itself, and as the birthplace of a lot of disruptive companies and technology. Some of the major companies that we discussed that came out of Silicon Valley or have headquarters there include Google, Apple, Facebook, HP, Twitter, Intel, and Instagram. In fact, I made a video about the history of Instagram, and the story of how it disrupted the incumbents of social media at the time.

We also learned a lot about Silicon Valley in general; what it is, what’s happening there, and why it’s such a big disruption. We watched some videos in class to learn about it, as well as watching Pirates of Silicon Valley outside of class time. Additionally, we learned about the history of Fairchild and Robert Noyce prior to Intel.

I took some excellent, relevant and very academic notes on these videos including:

 

– “It doesn’t matter if your name is Jeremy”

– Don’t stalk Tim Cook

– *woot woot suspense woot woot*

– “Fairchild? We’re gonna CrUsH yOu GuYs!!!”

– Parents = obstacles

– TMNT shower curtain

 

…and, you know, a lot of other stuff that actually helped summarize what the videos were talking about. The gist is that Silicon Valley is a place where people go to work on start ups and try to connect with investors, as well as other people to help with their startups, in the hopes of becoming the next big thing. As for the Fairchild video, it explained the history of Fairchild beginning with Shockley Semiconductors: William Shockley discovered the semiconductor while working on the east coast, came over to the west coast to be near his ailing mother, started a company called Shockley Semiconductors and hired a bunch of Stanford students (who were close to geniuses) to work for him, all went well for a little while, and then Shockley’s ego got the better of him and he started treating his employees terribly, leading eight of them to leave the company and go start their own company, Fairchild, led by Robert Noyce. Fairchild would go on to provide important technology to NASA during the Space Race, and to improve semiconductors quite significantly so computers could be made more compact and work better, before the company split and the founders moved onto their own different companies (such as Intel), known as the “Fairchildren”.

 

At the intel museum taking a selfie in the reflection of a wafer

 

Robert Noyce

 

For the end of the unit, we all wrote essays answering the unit question: How has technology acted as a disruption with its creation throughout history?

 

I started out with the thesis that technology is disruptive because it allows us access to information we might not otherwise have. From there, I created an essay outline, during the making of which I got bored and decided to represent each point with a quippy headline/strange nonfiction book title, and a subheading, which were as follows:

 

Intro

Paragraph one: Info we’re given

Trump’s Twitter: an insight into the president’s thoughts (AKA: holy guacamole how did this guy get to be president?)
Worldwide news and the speed that information travels: What allows us to read articles online but Dennis the Menace in print
Anticensorship: internet friends, social media, the blogosphere, and other things that allow us to unveil the truth

Paragraph two: Info we go get

People are hacking, security is lacking: the potential for people to get access to your personal info, people who overshare on the internet and don’t bother with being secure about it, how this could ruin your future job
Tweet, delete, repeat: why deleting stuff doesn’t stop people from being able to access it, and how the public can pull up information from throughout the years in a way they weren’t always able to
Getting the Googley eyes for someone: our innate need to cyberstalk people when we meet them and how this is potentially helpful/damaging

Paragraph three: Info we didn’t used to have

George Washington Is Instagram Famous: posing the question of how different history would be with our current technology
Newsprince: How the newspaper used to lord over us all and what it would be like if the paper was still our main/only source of info

Conclusion

 

Then we were given time in class to write our essays. I didn’t use every point in my outline, but chose some of them to elaborate on, and a few specifically to connect to the book we read for this unit. I ended up with this as my essay:

 

How Technology Has Acted as a Disruption Throughout History

 

Throughout history, humans have developed more and more complex tools, or
technology. This technology changes the way we live; we eat, sleep, think, speak, and act differently from any other animal. In short, technology disrupts our daily lives. One of the things technology, especially more recent technology such as computer, the internet and social media, has interrupted is our flow of information. Technology disrupts how, when, and how much we receive information, allows us to get information that wouldn’t come easily to us otherwise, and allows us to have and share much more information than we did in the past.

First of all, technology means we are being given more information, from more sources,
some of which is much less filtered than it once was. A good example of this comes in the form of the twitter account of Donald Trump, the current US president. Until recently, almost anything a president said to the publication large would have to be planned, and usually happened via a public appearance in person or on tv. However, the last few presidents have had access to social media sites that allow them to share any thought at any time, unfiltered and without much planning. Many articles, books, and videos talking about Trump’s presidency have discussed statements from his twitter, which he uses regularly to publicly comment on recent or future events. Trump’s twitter allows us to have an insight into his real thoughts and plans, in a way we haven’t had with many people of power throughout history. A Time article described a series of tweets from the president as “angry, sometimes profane and occasionally misspelled outbursts” that “gave the world a glimpse into what was going on in [Trump’s] head” and “brought to light what it’s like to work for [Trump].” Of course, it’s not just Trump who can now share things unfiltered. The internet allows anyone to share opinions and information on the spot, through social media, blogging, or commenting on existing sites. Groups of people who would not have been able to publicly share their thoughts in the past are now able to in a matter of minutes, and as a result we now have access to new, uncensored opinions and information. People from different parts of the world can easily speak directly to one another and talk about where and how they live. There are tutorials and instructions teaching anyone who wants to learn how to do a multitude of things. For better or for worse, information is being shared more than ever before.

However, not all the information shared with technology is public. At the very least, it’s
not all meant to be public. According to a Quartzy article, “few of us deliberately show our whole selves online or elsewhere, even when we’re trying to seem… honest.”. Many people have private information protected with passwords or other forms of required identification. Others still overshare what should be private information, which can lead to security problems. Sometimes, people overshare and then realize their mistake and delete whatever they posted. However, the speed at which information travels means that just pressing delete doesn’t necessarily ensure something is gone forever. Technology gives people the power to find information even if it’s not immediately presented to them, which can be an issue depending on their intentions. The book Little Brother has a running theme of security, lack thereof, and people hacking or cheating the system with technology. Within the first chapter the main character, Marcus, evades various kinds of security technology at his school by either shutting them down or finding a way to “confuse” them into not working. Throughout the book, Marcus is able to hack into almost anything he needs to– while simultaneously taking extra precautions to make sure nobody can do the same thing to him. While Marcus, as the protagonist, has the right intentions for hacking to get past security, the things he does in the book mirror the not-so-wholesome actions of real life people. As much as technology helps to keep our information safe, it also makes it possible for people to gain access to information that they shouldn’t have.

One of the most significant things about technology allowing us access to information is
the sheer amount of information we are able to access now in comparison to the past. At one point, people got almost all their knowledge of world events from either a newspaper or speaking directly to another person. Learning about things from such limited sources meant limited information, and less chance of misinformation being corrected. With the rise of radio, tv, and now the internet, people are able to find hundreds of different sources of information on the same thing. They’re also able to find information on exactly what they’re looking for, quickly and readily. This allows people to learn much more, make sure what they’re learning is correct, and find multiple points of view on things. It also allows people to easily save or share the information once they have it, so knowledge travels faster, and can be kept accurate for a longer amount of time. Had the technologies we use today been able to exist much earlier, we might perceive history very differently.

All in all, technology is disruptive because it changes our ability to get and share
information, be it information that is given to us or information that we seek out ourselves, and it lets us have information that we wouldn’t have had in the past. Technology not only disrupts how we get information, but also when we get information, how much information we can find, and what information that is. As communicating information is incredibly crucial to our ability to function as humans, technology will most likely continue to disrupt how and when we get information, and how much information we get. Technology could go far enough to make the ways that we share information today seem primitive, but who knows what will happen? That’s not information we have access to yet.

 

Alongside our essays, we were also asked to each create a video, podcast, or puppet show with a partner about how one of the places we visited in San Diego acted as a disruption. My partner and I chose to create a podcast about High Tech High, a high school where we spent time with a grade nine class for a couple days. High Tech High is a charter school that focuses on using project based learning to help prepare kids for the real world, a bit like PLP. High Tech High also works to create equal learning opportunities for students, choosing students to attend via a lottery system by zip code, with more spots available to the lower income areas that typically might not have as nice an education readily available.

 

Art at High Tech High

 

This is the podcast that we created:

 

 

 

So, I’m off to go be disruptive.

 

Toodles.

(Insert Awesome California Here)

Hello Internet,

So, as I mentioned before, we recently went on a trip to California. While we were there we did an iBook about the different things we did.

 

The book included different pictures, videos, and text explaining the places we went, people we saw, and things we learned about, all staying within our theme of disruption.

 

 

 

Disruption!

 

Doing the book allowed us to reflect on the trip and get lots of good pictures and other documentation throughout.

 

Which is important, because we did a LOT on this trip. My favourite thing we did was visiting High Tech High in San Diego. However, we also visited the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, saw the USS Midway museum, wandered around Old Town, ate a lot of Mexican food, took seven kinds of transportation, saw the birthplace of HP, visited the googleplex, looked around the Apple visitors’ center, toured Stanford, spoke with people who work in Silicon Valley, went bowling, chanted something in Spanish, rode cable cars, went to Alcatraz, toured Haight-Ashbury and the Castro, and looked around the official headquarters of Twitter.

 

These were some of my favourite pictures from the trip:

 

Me inside a giant donut at Google

Living the high fashion life

Aboard the USS Midway museum

A hot air balloon that we got to ride in (which was super zen)

Me becoming a fish

Some koalaty sourdough bread at a bread place in San Francisco

Me at High Tech High with a new friend

 

All in all it was a super interesting trip, and I feel like I learned a lot from the experience, about not just disruption but also technology, school, and aircraft carriers. I’m really glad I had the experience of going on the trip.

Toodles.

(Insert Awesome Charter School Here)

Hello, Internet.

 

So, my classmates and I recently returned from California.

Specifically, we visited three places: San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. Right now I want to expand on that first place we visited: San Diego.

Now, we did some interesting things in San Diego. We went to the Safari Park, we saw the USS Midway, we saw Old Town.

(That’s me at the zoo blending in with some cacti)

My favourite thing we did in San Diego, however, was visiting High Tech High , a charter school that uses Project-Based Learning to teach their students. While there, we were each paired up with a grade nine student or two (or four, in my case) who we shadowed throughout the day. We went to classes with our students, ate lunch with them, and at the end of our first of two days there, we interviewed them about life at High Tech High.

I found it very interesting to hear about High Tech High, both because it’s different than Seycove and because in some ways it’s similar to PLP. I also did my main project for this trip on High Tech High, and in the process I interviewed one of the teachers of the class we were working with. Being able to hear what she said about High Tech High in comparison to what the students said gave me some different perspectives on the school as a whole.

 

Me and one of my buddies

 

A wall at High Tech High

 

 

Toodles!

(Insert Awesome Hot Sauce Here)

Hello, Interest,

So we just read a book called Little Brother . It focussed on a boy who got blamed for a terrorist attack, arrested and treated unfairly, and decided to rebel against the government that captured him. Actually, he was a bit of an idiot. The book, however, was enjoyable.

 

 

The book related back to our driving question for this unit, “how has technology acted as a disruption with its creation throughout history?”, and to our ongoing theme of identity.

And it’s about a part of the identity of one of the characters from Little Brother that I’m writing this post now. The book featured a character called Ange who loved hot sauce, enough for it to be a part of who she was. She even spent a significant amount of time building up an immunity to hot sauces which, she explained, ranked high on the Scoville Heat Scale.

You might not be sure what the Scoville Heat Scale is. Luckily, I have an explanation for you:

The Scoville Heat Scale, named after Wilbur L. Scoville, is a basic representation of the heat/hotness/spiciness of different hot peppers, hot sauces, or dishes containing large amounts of said peppers or hot sauce. The literal thing that it’s measuring is a pepper’s concentration of capsaicin, which is the component that makes human beings feel heat.

At the bottom of the scale (at literally zero) would be something like a sweet pepper, which does not contain capsaicin, and therefore isn’t hot. Closer to the top would be certain types of chili peppers that can reach over 300, 000 Scoville units. What this means, essentially, is that in order to make the amount of capsaicin in a pepper of this kind undectable to a human, extract from that pepper would have to be diluted in sugar water by a ratio of 1: 300, 000 units of water. Diluting pepper extract in sugar water and tasting it in order to determine how hot it was is a procedure that was created and used by Wilbur L. Scoville, hence the Scoville scale being named after him. He would usually have a panel of five judges testing the water and reporting back on whether the capsaicin was detectable or not.

Even within one type of pepper, the actual amount of Scoville units can differ based on a few different variables. Examples of these variables include how many hours of sunlight it had while growing, and what temperature it was grown at, how much moisture it contains, and the general chemistry of the soil it was grown in.

A Red Savina Habanero that reached 577, 000 Scoville units claimed the place of hottest pepper ever known, until a pepper was created that reached 1,001, 304 Scoville units, and even that was kicked out of first place by a pepper reaching 2.48 million Scoville units, which is what currently holds the title of hottest pepper.

In order to further aid my research on the Scoville Heat Scale, I decided to try some hot sauce myself. To my knowledge, I’ve never had hot sauce before, and I definitely haven’t had it straight up. I asked a friend of mine to film me trying some hot sauce that allegedly stands around 100, 000 Scoville units to see if I would burst into flames.

A while later, I decided to try the Scoville method of diluting hot sauce in sugar water. I definitely didn’t use enough to fully get rid of the hotness, but it did help tone down the immediate taste and left just the hot aftertaste.

All in all, I’d say I’ve proved to not be quite the hot sauce afficianado that Ange was, but at the very least no smoke came out of my ears. Learning about the Scoville scale gave me an interesting insight into the identity of this character.

Toodles.

Cookies, Careers and Class

So, we’ve been working on health and career. As suggested by the name “health and career”, one of the aspects of this unit is career goals and planning.

Now, learning about this involved a couple of different things. Before you can start thinking about the future, you have to understand how you got to where you are now, so we began by each making a timeline of our lives thus far.

I had some trouble figuring out what events in my life were important enough to go on this timeline, but I eventually decided to go with the points at which I began to do things that I would continue to do for years afterwards.

The next part of our career study was doing a piece of writing detailing the steps to becoming “gifted” at something. There are a lot of things that I’m not gifted at, but I chose to write about baking.

My steps to becoming gifted at baking were as follows:

Step One: Practice. Find recipes, find ingredients, find utensils. Keep trying.
Step Two: Identify what you’re doing wrong. Burnt cookies? Non-buttered pan? Accidentally put whipping cream in the wrong bowl? Understand your mistakes so you know not to make them again.
Step Three: If needed, get help from someone who’s already gifted. Ask questions. Pay attention. Figure out why they are gifted.
Step Four: Research. If you’re still having trouble, try and find out what you need to do to become better. Get as much information as you possibly can, even if you might not need it.
Step Five: Practice more. Apply what you’ve learned. Try out new or more difficult recipes.
Step Six: Get feedback. Find out what other people think of your abilities. If needed, adapt to their needs or specifications.
Step Seven: Don’t give up. Nobody can be perfect at doing something. You will occasionally mess up something beyond repair. Remember that that’s fine.
Step Eight: Take breaks. Learn other skills that might be helpful to you.

That being done, we went on to take some aptitude tests. I found the results to mine a bit confusing and not all that appealing, but taking the tests was interesting.

Now, I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. I have some ideas about what I’d like to study in university, but I don’t know where that’s leading in terms of a job, other than I want to be as financially stable as I can and hopefully do something I enjoy. This lack of a plan or dream made the next part of this assignment kind of difficult.

So, the main part of this assignment consisted of creating a video in which you had to introduce yourself and then tell a fairytale about your ideal future career. I don’t have an ideal future career yet, so I decided to continue down the vein of my writing assignment from before, and explore a potential career in baking.

While I’m not sure baking is actually a career I would be interested in persueing, this was a fun video to make, and it would be interesting to have a career doing something I enjoy.

Toodles!

Skip to toolbar