The Final Thought: Extreme!
Welcome back one and all to the last blog post on blog44.ca/sepausd. My time in PLP and high school has come to an end, and it has truly been an honour speaking to you fine internet people.
For this last PLP project, we took a look at all things extreme, fitting, considering whatever current news story you’re most interested in. Specifically, we investigated cults, high control groups with dubious religious rhetoric. I was pretty excited to start this project, as cults have always been something that fascinated me. We started off by investigating what are cults and how do they control their followers? To do that, we watched a TED talk given by Allison Mack, an actress who was a former-member of NXIVM, a cult that promoted itself as a motivational self-improvement group targeted mostly towards women, but was secretly a front for a highly disturbing sex-trafficking ring. This, along with other videos we watched were extremely impactful in showing me the disturbing and powerful ways charismatic individuals can manipulate people in the most extreme ways possible.
After that, it was time to start our own projects. Considering this was the last project we would ever do for PLP, Mr Harris gave us basically no restrictions. We could research any cult, and present our learning in any way, as long as we connected our topic to any previous project we did this year, either horror, feminism, or terrorism. One cult that stuck out to me during some surface-level research was Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult that used acts of terrorism to trigger the end of the world. I decided to focus on this angle for my project, while also connecting it to the topics of accelerationism and modern-day terrorism. For my final product, I decided to go with something basic but bold: an essay. This may seem pretty boring at first but I’ve gotten really good at writing essays this year and I thought it was the best way to pack a lot of information into a semi-dense format.
During the production of this final project, I felt like an absolute machine, grinding through sources for my annotated bibliography and cranking out what we youths call “straight fire” for my essay. I am really proud of my final product, I feel like it shows a sophisticated understanding of multiple diverse topics and synthesizes the information fluidly.
And with that, the PLP and Inside Sepaus’s Skull experiment has ended. I am beyond grateful for the opportunities this program has given me, and I hope you all enjoyed reading all 68 of my thoughts over the last 5 years.
Enjoy your day internet people. Sepaus Out.
