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Found Heaven Review and Analysis -- Lily Rowell

  Marking over two months after Conan Gray’s 3rd album, Found Heaven’s wildly anticipated release, Gray has shared insight into the meaning behind his songs in a Rolling Stone interview. This week’s blog post will discuss a few of my favorites from the album while analyzing Grays’ original meanings from the tracks he mentioned. Conan Gray, if you are not familiar with who he is, is an upcoming pop/indie singer who has had many hits, with his original fanbase being grounded in YouTube with his covers of songs such as Lana Del Ray’s Video Games. Gray had filmed vlogs and many other popular kinds of YouTube videos and then signed with Republic Records. He has produced two other albums and an EP.  The first track Gray mentions is titled, “Forever With Me”. The name is a clue as to what the song is about; a failed relationship. In my interpretation, Gray is reflecting on the relationship, stating that he still feels that this person is and will be “forever with him” for reasons unknown. In
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A Double Review: My Two Favorite Regression Manhwas by Ian

          Throughout the school year, most of my blog posts have been reviews of books I’ve read. Although, I haven’t really talked about any manhwa (basically South Korean graphic novels). Since this is also my last blog post, I decided I should do a return to form of sorts and talk about a regression manhwa I’ve be enjoying recently. But first, what is a regression manhwa?           Regression manhwa are extremely popular in South Korea and there are as many of them as pieces of plastic in the ocean; way too many. The main crux of regression manhwa stories is in the name: regression. Usually, the story starts with a character that has gone through all sorts of hardships, along with having tons of regrets, dying and getting the chance to turn back time to relive their life. This premise in and of itself may sound pretty interesting, but unfortunately, to continue the comparison from earlier: most of these manhwa are garbage. Most fall into the trap of becoming boring, edgy power f
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Are You More Knowledgable Than A Middle Schooler?

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      One of the hardest things about creating a blog post is finding a unique story to tell to our peers. We often find that we've all read the same books because we have similar interests or have been recommended the same things by previous teachers. This can be especially intimidating when the book you want to talk about has already been written about, and in a way that steals your main points! Upon realizing this, I took to Google to find some of the most commonly read books of our generation. Many of these, we've completed by the fifth grade. Can you correctly answer these trivia questions about these adolescent classics?  Legend by Marie Lu     What is the plotline of Legend?  A) In a dystopian world where humans have evolved into different species, a young girl seeks to uncover the truth behind her parrot's mysterious disappearance. B) In a post-apocalyptic society, a boy with extraordinary abilities discovers a secret underground resistance movement while navigating
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My Opinion on Audiobooks by Karenna

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 Before this year I had never tried listening to an audiobook before, and with a 14 hour road trip (each way!) this spring break I decided to download a couple of audiobooks on Spotify to listen to on the drive. I downloaded a couple from 2 different genres-- Imogen, Obviously  (YA), and The Great Gatsby  (Classics?). I chose to start with Imogen, Obviously , and soon began to regret beginning on my audiobook journey. To start, the chapter pacing in this one is a bit slow-- it would likely be fine if you were reading it as a book, but as an audiobook it can get hard to keep track of the chapters, which are ordered by days. The person reading the book started off very slow, but I was able to speed them up. However, the balancing of description vs dialogue was off. The dialogue was too slow, and again, would have been fine if you were reading it as a hard copy, but was a little odd to listen to. Dialogue is also hard to follow, and is clunky when listening. If the book jumps from time to
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Guessing Plotlines of Literary Classics

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     Hi guys, It's Shanna again. While wracking my brain for ideas on this blog post, I realized I haven't read many quote-on-quote 'classic novels.'  I could have just written this on my current literary adventure, but the thought of these unread books stuck with me. So, instead of simply diving into them blindly, I thought it would be fun to take a different approach. I'm going to try my hand at guessing the plot lines of some of these literary classics based solely on their titles, covers, and the vague impressions I've gathered over the years. It's like a literary guessing game, and I'm excited to see how close—or hilariously far off—I am with my predictions. Here, I take 'judging a book by it's cover' very literally. Join me on this journey as I embark on a ‘ whimsical ’ exploration of some of the best-known literary classics—and stick until the end to hear my A Midsummer Night’s Dream prediction, which you’ll just have to wait and see
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Sword Art Online: The Series that (Supposedly) Created an Entire Genre by Ian

            Sword Art Online (SAO) written by Reki Kawahara is one of the most influential pieces of media to hit Japanese (and American) markets ever. Originally published as a Japanese web novel on the author’s own website in 2002, it is often credited with “creating” a sub genre of portal fantasy (fantasy world is accessed via a portal) called “isekai” or “other world” where characters typically get sent to another world (as the name implies). This genre is extremely popular with multiple isekai anime airing every season with even more unadapted manga and light novels (basically Japanese novels; abbreviated LN) being made. So, did SAO actually contribute to the amount of isekai being adapted to anime form or is this all just the Mandela effect? The short answer is it’s complicated. The long answer is…             First I will briefly summarize SAO. SAO takes place in the hypothetical year 2022 (remember this was made in the 2000’s) where VR technology has progressed to the poi
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