Author Archives: Torres H.

AP Human Geography As A Freshman In High School, Is It Worth It?

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So, last year I was a freshman at my high school and I took the college level course: AP Human Geography. After taking the national exam at the end of the school year, I remember thinking to myself: “was that year’s hard work all worth it?”

First of all, lets talk about the benifits of taking this rigorous course:

  1. Pushes you to really focus and do work – Due to the pacing and toughness of this course, it really forces you to lock in during class time and also study times because if you don’t, you will be very behind
  2. Develops time management skills – The amount of vocabulary, notes, and concepts that you will have to review constantly is absurd, and it will seem impossible at first, but this allows you to use your time management skills to figure out your priorities.
  3. College credit – If you get a good score on the national exam, It will count as some college credit, letting you skip some classes when you get to college.

Now, for the negatives:

  1. Limits your free time – due to the amount of studying required, you will have decreased free time at home
  2. The class can be very frustrating at times – A lot of times you will not understand or remember the concepts, and it will leave you very angry and frustrated.

After all, is the class worth it? In my opinion, yes, because the all the negative aspects that personally experienced could have been easily solved by better time management skills

-Torres H.

Airpods Incident

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Recently, I lost my airpods at a shopping mall, and it wasn’t like how most people would lose them. Here is what happened: I was in a changing room inside a clothing store about to try on some new pants, and I was planning to keep my airpods and phone in the pocket of the pants I was already wearing for convenience sake. However, when I was putting the pair of pants onto a clothing hook, my airpod case (with the airpods in them) fell out out and dropped on to the floor. Now, this next part is my best guess, because I did not see exactly what happened: The airpod case hit the floor which caused it to open, and the impact from the hit also caused the two airpods inside to scatter out, and into the changing room next to mine. Because the airpods were now in the next room, the person in that room took advantage and stole the airpods.

I still had the case, it was just when i got to the car that i realized my airpods were not there. I even went back into the changing rooms to look for them, but obviously they won’t be there because the person in the other room took them.

This is a lesson I feel like everyone should learn from, because airpods are not cheap. I would recommend getting a cover case for your airpods (the kind that you can strap on to your belt or something), and even better if you get one with a locking mechanism.

If i would change one thing about the airpod’s design, it would be to have a lock built in to the case, rather than just some magnets. This would have 100% prevented me losing my airpods.

-Torres

Subnautica: A Horror Game In Disguise?

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The amazing game of Subnautica is marketed as an underwater survival/adventure game. However, there is another aspect within the game that is not listed: Horror. Horror is an essential component of making Subnautica what it is.

Now, Subnautica does not use jumpscares, or blood and guts like you would expect in any other horror game. Instead, Subnautica uses a few aspects that i will talk and elaborate on.

The first aspect i would like to talk about is the fear of the unknown. The game just dumps you straight into a alien planet you are unfamiliar with right from the beginning. Phychological research has proven that humans have a strong tendency to repel things that they are not familiar with, and sticks with the things they are. This unknown planet aspect causes the player to have thoughts about dangerous creatures they don’t know about that wants to kill them.

The second aspect would be progression. In the game, you have to visit specific points on the map in order to progress further into the game. When you go to the locations, you will already be overwhelmed by the fear of the unknown, but to add to that fear, the developers of the game decides to put the most dangerous creatures in the entire game patrolling the places that you are forced to go to in order to progress further into the story. This will give you a feeling that there is always something big and dangerous chasing you, no matter where you go.

The third aspect is thalassophobia. If you don’t know what that is, it is the intense fear of large, and deep oceans. This aspect kind of overlaps with the fear of the unknown, but it also has some characteristics of its own. For example, if you’re swimming in an ocean on Earth, you can say that there may be a few fishes underneath you, or maybe a few sharks (no biggie right?), but you can be pretty sure there WILL NOT be a giant 100 meter long leviathan swimming in the same waters as you. But on an alien planet? Who knows what will be in the water?

The fourth and last aspect i will elaborate on is ambeince and sound design. It is common knowledge that the deeper you go in the water, the less light there will be, and in Subnautica, you are required to go deeper in order to progress. Now imagine this: You are 900 meters below the surface, your oxygen is running low and you are trapped in an seemingly endless void of dark waters, trying to find your orientation and your submarine. You hear a roar in the distance. You look around, attempting to find the source or the roar, but only to find nothing but pitch blackness. Words cannot describe the amount of fear and panic you would be in. Adding to that scenario, a creepy soundtrack of ambience voices, and faint clicks starts playing. Subnautica has tons of different soundtracks, and theyu are unique to every biome, reflecting the amount of threat the biome posseses. For example, in a safer area, the music would be light, peaceful, and happy. But when ytou start to go into a more dangeorus area, the music wil change into a creepy, and mysterious white background noise.

Obviously, these four aspects i have listed are not the only ones. There are many more that are designed to play with your mind, and to bring fear into you. A beginner player may be absolutely overwhelmed by fear, and may be tempted to delete the game, or try to forget about the game (that’s what i almost did haha), but if you keep playing, you will soon learn to overcome and look past the fear. Once you do that, you will see the true beauties this mysterious planet has to offer.

-Torres H.

Subnautica

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Subnautica is a survival game that takes place on an alien planet called 4546B. The planet is covered almost 100% with either shallow or very deep ocean. This amazing game contains many different types of fauna, flora, and locations for you to discover.

It is the late 22nd century, and humans have began to colonize space. The Aurora, the large spaceship you are on, was assigned a mission to construct a phasegate for hyperspeed space travel. While performing a slingshot maneuver around planet 4546B, the Aurora experiences a large energy pulse (basically a laser beam) coming from a mysterious source within the planet. Only half of the 50 lifepods aboard launched, as the other half were completely destroyed. 9 of the 25 lifepods launched made it to the planet, but only one was undamaged. You are the one in that lifepod.

With the backstory out of the way, now lets talk about the game content. After landing in your lifepod, you have to immediately find resources on a planet you are unfamiliar with in order to survive. You can craft many different things with one machine due to the insane technology they have in the 22nd century. In some point in the game, you will receive radio S.O.S. signals from the other 8 lifepods, but by the time you get to the pod, the survivors have already been killed by the planet’s creatures.

In the game, you can craft submarines that aid in you in going deeper into the ocean, which is one of my favorite aspects of this game. However, my absolute favorited thing about this game would be the biology/ecology within it. There are vast biomes that contain many unique creatures and plants that has specifically adapted to that biome for them to survive, from things like fins for them to swim faster, to plants removing pigments due to the lack of nutrients in an area.

Now you may be asking: How do you escape the planet and go back home? Well, you’re going to have to play the game on your own to find out 🙂

I simply cannot tell you every single little thing about the game in this one article because there are just way too many. But there are many different lores and aspects to the story I didn’t cover, so I 100% recommend you to try this game on your own, especially if survival games are your type of thing.

-Torres H.