Christopher’s Pencils n Junk

In my journey of learning Japanese, I have moved onto my second section in my unit! So now I am learning to introduce myself to others and say things like, “I’m Chris, nice to meet you.”, or, “Hello, good evening”. I have also just gotten better at remembering the simpler words like water and rice. When it comes to my struggles, I still have not been doing well at writing or remembering the individual characters. It is still just so difficult to remember each detail as a lot of them look very similar with only subtle differences. To help with this, I am just going to be doing more practice with learning the individual characters than usual so I can become more familiar with them. I will also be doing some of the extra practice that you can do in the course to further improve my skills. When I come back to learning, I will be reinforcing my memory of various words to introduce myself. Anyways, bye bye!

My favorite room in my house is my bedroom. When h you walk into the room, there is my bed in the front left corner and a window as tall as me above it. Right to your left when you enter the room, there is my desk with my computer, and past that is my dresser. Also to the right is my closet with all of my coats and random knick knacks. The first reason I like it is that it is quite cold. When I open the window, even in the summer, it lets the room get nice and chilly, which I like. Secondly, the bed is really comfy! I have a bed that is really cozy and is super comfortable with the right sheets. The bed is also just a nice place to chill on when I am reading. The third reason is really one of the things that matters a lot. The third reason is that this is where my computer is. Because I live a fair distance from my friends, I spend a lot of time on call and playing online with them. We play various well known games such as Roblox or Minecraft, but sometimes I play other things with them as well. It’s nice that I can just play with my friends like this.

I have made a decent amount of progress on learning Japanese and hope to learn a lot more this week. Firstly, I have started to learn a few more of the individual characters and can recognize them. I know a few more words and can say simple things like, “he’s nice” or, “she’s cool”. Also I can count to one! The only thing is that i still struggle with writing the Hiragana characters exactly. This hopefully wont be a problem when I move on to Katakana which has much simpler characters to write. Paying complete attention and practicing at home has helped me tremendously and i feel I can learn a fair bit before the presentation day. I could still practice more though and pay more attention which i am working on. I also find it helpful to say the words out loud while I put them in. When I return to practice after this, I well do some more practice on describing people and ordering food before I learn to introduce myself and practice ordering other foods. Anyways, I have to return to practice. Bye bye!

I was just thinking about what games I am going to play when I get home, probably with my friends. I mean, recently I started playing a Minecraft mod pack called Into The Betweenlands that has the base mod as well as some quality of life mods. Right now me and my friend are in the dreaded Sludgeon, a towering building that lays in the Sludge Fields with a dungeon below that goes deep into the ground. With worms coming out from the walls and many traps in the halls, it is a dangerous place to explore. We know that there is a boss battle at the bottom of the dungeon, but we are not prepared enough for that battle and we will return home once we get to that floor as we are already struggling to get through to that area. To prepare, we will go deep into the earth to mine out the strange ores that are in that dimension. Most likely valonite, a strong gemstone that can create many tools to aid us in conquering the monsters and bosses that dwell in the swamp like dimension. One of these tools would be a humble sickle so we can collect ingredients for various concoctions. One thing we will most likely make is repellent to keep our home clear of unwanted guests. Everything else I do not know as we still need to get to the bottom of the Sludgeon. Anyways, bye!

For my 20% project, I am trying to learn as much Japanese as I can. Right now, my accomplishments are the fact that I have a few words memorized in Hiragana, and I learn that verbs go before the noun. My struggles right now are memorizing the characters of Hiragana themself, as some are very similar to others in appearance. It’s is also just difficult to memorize the more complex design of the characters when it comes to writing them. An adjustment I made that actually really helps a lot is saying the phrases out loud while translating them. This helps me remember the specific words that I am learning in this unit. This also helps with the different character that i was struggling with earlier. When I go back to learning Japanese after writing this blog, I will move on to learning to introduce myself, along with ordering food.

If I could invite three people to dinner, these people would be Nico V., Albert Einstein, and Mozart. I would invite Nico as he is one of my best friends and I feel like I could tell him anything. I would invite Albert Einstein so we could talk about science, and maybe he could teach me some simpler things I still do not know. And finally, I would invite Mozart so he could maybe use the keyboard I have to play some nice music. Also, we would be eating at my house. We would be eating sushi and ramen for the main food, as well as mochi ice cream for dessert.

My dream job is to be a game programmer. My first reason to become a game programmer is because I want to make people happy. Nowadays there are a lot of triple A games with very little effort put in and many micro transactions. I want to be one of the indie developers who can make quality games for people to enjoy. My second reason is that I want to make a good game that I can play. There are a lot of game ideas that I want to play but there are no existing games like those ideas. So I also want to make games just so I can play them as well. My final reason is that I could work from home. I don’t have to go to somewhere to work, I can just stay at home and work on my games, and the best part is I wont have a dress code or uniform! I could even be in a blanket burrito.

Living on an abandoned island is lonely. I first arrived here when I was Shipwrecked during a storm, it all happened so fast. The island itself is in the shape of a crescent with the land more raised in the middle, with coconut palms dotting the shore. When it comes to company there is the crabs and my friend Coco the coconut. My daily routine is scavenging the shore for any washed up trash, you’d be surprised by how much junk gets washed up. I’ve found so many sandals and bottles the I could make another island! My routine is quite boring and all I do is find fish to eat while making repairs to my shelter. Sometimes I play tag with Coco, he’s really bad at all the games we play. After I catch the fish I can make a meal to end the day.

Invisible for an entire day! So many things I could do but there are three that take priority. The first thing I would do is take from my cousins candy stash. I live with one of my cousins and they always steal my snacks and candy so I have to put it somewhere they can’t reach it. They however, have their own stash of candy that sticks out like a sore thumb. So I would just take about a quarter of the candy and leave the rest as they never took that much from me. Second thing I would do, steal $200 in steam gift cards from GameStop. That’s $200 of free games! I could buy any title that was on my mind and still have a lot left over! Third thing I would do is pull funny pranks on my friends. These pranks could be whoopee cushions, fake bugs, and just poking them when they can’t see me. It’s usually pretty funny when you see someone’s reaction to seeing a huge spider on the table when they were just there 10 seconds ago. These are all the things I would do if I was invisible for a 24 hours. As a bonus, if it was on Halloween I could be the Invisible Man!

In January, I read The Martian by Andy Weir. The Martian follows astronaut Mark Watney when on his sixth sol on mars, there is a huge sandstorm and he is presumed dead and abandoned. He has to use his wits and resourcefulness to survive until the next Ares mission arrives so he can escape mars. Also, this book has a lot of swear words, so if you don’t like that, this isn’t the book for you.

What i really liked about this book is how it is as realistic as possible with how everything is scientific eg. in order to grow crops, you need the bacteria in the soil. Even with some serious moments, the main character, being the comedian that he is, makes the book pretty funny with his logs.

My favorite character was Mark Watney as he is resourceful. This can be supported by the quote, “On to idea number two. Tape! I have duct tape in my toolbox, Let’s slap some on and see if it slows the flow”. This proves that Mark is resourceful as he uses what he has to its full potential.

My favorite quote is, “But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out.”. This is my favorite quote as I find it to be true. As the quote says, this might not always seem true but it is as everyone wants to help everyone.