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Turning of your video in Zoom calls is UNACCEPTABLE

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Turning of your video in Zoom calls is UNACCEPTABLE

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Hello everyone, welcome back to another daily edition of The Quarantine Occasional. If you're new here, make sure you hit that subscribe button at the top of the page to know when my next page of words comes out! Now, for today's edition.

Let's get something out of the way. Some people need to have their cameras on. It's as simple as that! However, these people are in the minority. These are the people who's computer will literally crash if the video turns on, the people who's sick grandma is in the room with them, or their parents are having a fight, or there is an emergency happening. But I can tell you with full certainty that 90% of the people with their video off just do it because they want to. And it makes distance learning harder than it has to.

You see, in in-person class, no one can turn their video off. They are stuck in the class. But on distance learning, people use that oppurtunity and take advantage of it. I can admit to being one of those people in the past. These people are on their phone while class is happening, or on a different call while class is happening. Again, I have been one of those people. But when I am the only one with my video on every single time, it gets harder to think of it as a class. Because if you aren't there or engaging, what's the point of being on Zoom? The teacher can just attach a video to Google Classroom.

Here are some screenshots as evidence of my Zoomitude: (Zoom solitude)

In this meeting with 13 participants, I changed it to "only show video participants." this is what I ended up with.

You see, when people decide they'd rather do other things than engage in class, it doesn't make me or the teacher feel very good. And, even as the only person with video on, I often get off task, scrolling through reddit or discord instead of focusing on my classes.

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How I get my work done - the seven apps/things you NEED to have/do to get your work done in distance learning!

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How I get my work done - the seven apps/things you NEED to have/do to get your work done in distance learning!

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Hey everyone! Just as an update, I'm trying to post daily now, so make sure you're subscribed to be the first to read my posts! Now, on with today's post!

As you all know, I am in school. I'm not telling you where, what school, or what grade I'm in, (7th lmao) but I do suffer from the same problem everyone else does. Procrastination and distraction. This is a big problem for me, as there are so many shiny and moving buttons to click that take me to seven reload sites and suddenly I'm seeing what I think is hentai? Anyway, I'm very susceptible to clickbait, and I need to stay on track! So, with a bit of research and way too many Chrome extensions, I have found a list of things to keep me on track!

AdBlock- best ad blocker: most people have these anyways nowadays, but this is the one I use. It's completely free and open-source, and is a Chrome extension that completely changed my life. It blocks all the ads, and although some sites say "please turn off your adblocker to support our site" I know that if I do, I'm gonna end up on a different website. (by the way, do not use their VPN, any VPN that says it's free is going to steal your data.)

LoFi hip hop radio: beats to relax/study to: this is a live stream that has been going for four years by an unknown person named ChilledCow, and is a 24/7 radio of lofi music. ChilledCow and their anime girl (pictured above) have kind of brought back LoFi music/trip hop to the internet, and I have this playing in the background while I work, however, not without:

Clean up YouTube - remove YouTube recommended, comments: this is literally amazing. I don't know about you, but as someone who is susceptible to clickbait, the YouTube sidebar is a real problem. This just removes the sidebar, the up next, the comments, even the description/channel name so that there are no distractions, just the video. I use this when watching videos for school, or when listening to LoFi hip hop.

BlockSite - stay focused and on task: this allows you to block specific sites, or even block everything except certain sites! I mainly just use their focus mode, which allows me to set study periods without having to touch buttons. It also has parental control features, where parents can set up password protection, site blocking, and keyword blocking, making it a good blocker for Chromebooks so kids don't see stuff to make them wish they hadn't clicked that ad that told them "click here to see fun!"

MAKE. A. SCHEDULE.

I absolutely cannot stress this enough. The only way I can get any work done is if I have a plan, otherwise I'm just gonna procrastinate over and over again and keep doing stupid shit on Discord and messing with the margins on my blog because I don't want to do it. On Monday morning, I go to docs.new (this is a handy shortcut to make a new google doc) and type out my plan for the day. I make sure to include 5-10 minute exercise breaks in between assignments, and an hour or two for Minecraft per day. I repeat the same thing on Tuesday-Thursday, Friday I don't have any assigned work and if I have spillover work i get right to the chase. So again, please, make a schedule. If you use Google Classroom, go to your To-Do List and view your week's assignments, so you can then ration out your assignments throughout the week.

Close other applications: if Minecraft is open and I can see it in my taskbar, I am 500% more likely to want to open it (assessed by doctor Gigi) than if I know oh, it's closed, and I don't want to have to go through all those wait times.

Don't beat yourself up! We all do it. We get bored with repetitive work, and then suddenly we've spent two and a half hours on Minecraft or YouTube. But it's important to forgive ourselves. Try telling yourself, it's okay. I didn't hurt anyone. I won't do that next time. It's really easy in these depressing times to just deprecate yourself over and over, but we need to show empathy for ourselves more than anyone else. It's hard doing distance learning right now. My dad is a teacher, so I've seen it from his point of view, too, and it's really, really hard. But just forgive yourself, okay?

Thank you all for reading! If you like my blog, please do subscribe so you can know when I have more to say, and, yeah! Take care of yourself! Stay positive, test negative!

Best,

Gigi

Currently Quarantined

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A Fire Story by Brian Fies: best graphic novel I’ve ever read

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A Fire Story by Brian Fies: best graphic novel I’ve ever read

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Hello everyone!

Over the pandemic, I have not done as much reading as I would like to have. And by that I mean I have done zero. I really only started reading again a month ago, before that I was on devices so much that I never read. However, I recently got into graphic novels again, and I want to tell you about one in particular. It’s called “A Fire Story.” It is by the amazing Brian Fies, and is about his and his neighbors story of the Paradise fires. I remember during the fires I was on a plane from Sacramento to LAX, and we were worried they might cancel the flight since, as we were flying over Paradise, we saw the fires burning. But back to the book.

He woke up at 1:30, and there was smoke. He and his wife thought they were only going to be gone for a few days, so he lost everything other than two sets of clothes, a faulty backup hard drive of his computer, the cat and dog, Pooh and Piglet, and a couple other items they saw at first. Among other items, he lost every comic he’d ever made, and a book he and his best friend wrote when they were eight that his best friend entrusted to him before he died. I will link to the original eight page webcomic that this book was based off of below. Reading this book, I felt so much empathy for the thousands of people who lost their homes it was overpowering. I felt like I was there, and that takes some pretty descriptive storytelling. I could feel his anguish, despair, loss, in my bones. I wanted to wrap my arms around him in a big hug. All I have been thinking about for the last day is what if this happened to me. And then, wait, this could happen to me. This almost happened to me a few months ago when California was on fire.

"I inhaled my neighbors' lives."

One man fought the fire off of his house single-handedly with nothing but a garden hose for three hours! A firefighter finally joined him, and after a minute said "I don't think we can save this." The man agreed. He took one last photo before the fire consumed his house, the glow of the fire visible tickling the tops of the roof.

The artwork in this book is amazing, considering the fact that the original webcomic was drawn on cheap Target pulp paper with a Sharpie, a pen, and four colored highlighters over the course of 4 days.

I wanted to answer a few response questions, which I will do now.

Write a question you would like to ask the author.  How do you think he or she would respond?

My question: What was your initial thinking when you smelled the smoke, and Karen said something was wrong?

My estimated response: Honestly, I just wanted her to go back to bed. I thought, oh, it's just Calistoga fire, nothing to worry about! Obviously I was wrong. When I saw her expression, though, and Karen told me that she could see the glow, my thought was "we're gonna have to go away for a couple days, the firefighters will hold it off, it's over there but we should get out as a precaution." I didn't ever think it could possible cross the 101, or the river.

Would boys and girls enjoy this book equally?  Support your reasons.

First of all, I don't know why gender has to play any role in the enjoyment of this book. It is a wonderful graphic memoir telling the story of a fire that consumed 245,000 square acres of land in six hours. Second of all, what about enbies? This is a very binary question. My reasoning that all people regardless of gender will enjoy this book is this: gender doesn't have any part in the enjoyment of types of media and books. Society tells us "there are two genders, girls and boys, and boys have to like trucks and superheros and girls have to like princesses and dolls." Well, that is is you're a boomer. Nowadays, no one pays attention to gender! People who like history, people who like memoirs, people who like graphic novels, and people who like a good book will enjoy this. I don't think we have to separate by gender.

What do you think is the most important scene in the book?  Why?

I think the most important scene in the book is the opening scene. This scene depicts Brian learning that there is a fire, and scrambling to grab everything. The second scene, where he finds his house burned to ash, is equally important. The entire book is about the fires, and losing his home, so I think that the scene where the fire happens and he actually does lose his home is the most important scene.

Why do you think the author chose the opening line he or she did?  Did you like it?  Did it make you want to read further?

"Around one A.M., my wife Karen snapped awake. The electricity had gone out. "I smell smoke.""

I think that the author chose this opening line because it is the start of the Fire Story, where it all began. I liked it a lot, and it made me want to read further immediately. This is a line that hooks the reader, a line that makes me have so many questions! For example, why did she snap awake? Where is the smoke coming from? Is there a blackout? Why did the power go out? Just from this one line, I am immediately into this book.

Thank you all for reading, and here is the link to Brian Fies' original webcomic, which you can read for free on his blog. It is 18 short, two panel pages long, but I think it is worth reading if you haven't already bought/borrowed the book.

http://brianfies.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-fire-story-complete.html

Best,

Gigi

Currently Quarantined

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Why I don’t like Joe Biden, even though I’m the farthest of leftists

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Why I don’t like Joe Biden, even though I’m the farthest of leftists

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Edit: So Biden is good now.

Edit 2: So I don't like Biden again.

Overview of this article: If we (America) are on a number spectrum, Trump sent us into negative numbers. Right now Joe Biden is bringing us back to 0, and I'm upset that people are celebrating this. Once Biden brings us into positive numbers, I'll celebrate him.

Let’s get one thing out of the way before I start this: I am not a trump supporter. I am not a conservative. I am not even a centrist. Hell, I’m more left and radical that liberals! What I am is a queer, young, hard left radical socialist with some communist and anarchist viewpoints and a critical diverse lens.

Now on to Joe Biden. He is better than Trump in that he does not have a neurological narcissistic personality disorder, but are his economical views in total really that different? At first, yes. He wants the children taken out of the cages. He wants to “build and better Obama Care.” He wants to put in laws to protect queer people and BIPOC against unjust systems. However, he is a catalyst. He doesn’t want free universal healthcare to benefit the lower class. He doesn’t want to defund the unjust policing system. He hasn’t said anything about taking down disgusting porn sites that exhibit rape and promote themselves to young children. He also hasn’t said anything about legalizing marijuana and un-penalizing things like drug use, shoplifting, and pickpocketing. (I’m going to write an article on those soon.) overall, his views are very conservative Democrat. So I don’t know why the liberals are treating him like some kind of god, because he isn’t. He’s the doorstop; he’s the one-point keychain you win at the faire. I think we need to stop looking at him as compared to Trump, and start looking at him without any comparisons, just as he is. Then maybe we’ll see more about what he truly believes.

Again, look out for my next article on whether or not defunding the police is the right way to go!

Best,

Gigi

Currently Quarantined

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Check out an article I wrote about JK Rowling!

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Check out an article I wrote about JK Rowling!

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Hi guys! I wrote an article for Medium about JK Rowling... check it out!

https://geodehibiscus.medium.com/12-year-old-transgender-potterhead-talks-about-jk-rowling-30c939df3a62