The book Scythe has a multitude of ideas that we look forward to in the future. No war or crime? Perfect. No hunger and disease? Sign us up (especially now). And not to mention immortality itself and basically not having to think for ourselves. The human race strives to have a society like this in the future, a perfect world, but would a story like this hold up for the next one hundred years? Personally I don’t believe so. Besides the obvious chances of one book in a genre with probably thousands of the same concept rising to the top, I think the social ideas of this book wouldn’t hold up. The reason the people of Earth don’t have a “perfect” society by now is because humans don’t want to get along with other humans, we constantly need something to hate at all times, and the easiest thing to hate is other people. We as a people may say we want to have no war or crime, but we need something to rebel against. In the book, they have something called the “Thunderhead” that regulates and dictates the best thing the human race should do and exactly what they need to use. I doubt we could ever come so far as to let a very advanced AI tell us what to do and have zero people in a state of power or have people in mock power. While I think a massive amount of people don’t want to think for themselves and be told what they should do, there is still a huge number of people who would never settle for having something non-human rule the entire world. While the ideals of Scythe may live on, I don’t believe that the book itself will age with those ideals. 

I have made the executive decision to make this week's project a journal entry on my life in quarantine. I realized that my outline proposal only had to be about my book for week one and feel incredibly stupid that I didn’t realize it, but this is my first step towards changing in. So as i sit in my bed while Chilled Cow’s “lofi hip hop radio-beats to relax/study to” plays on one of my tabs and my mom watches tik tok at an incredibly loud volume all the way up stairs, I finally decided that I would just do some homework today at currently 3:03 of May 9th, 2020. My quarantine has been so incredibly boring and painful that I finally believe that this is true purgatory. My routine rarely changes, I get up at 8, feed my dog, go back to sleep till 10, do all of my homework until 1 or 2, then get ready and go to work at the Norwich Big Y till 8 o’clock, doing whatever I can to fill my time until I eventually go to bed at 12-1 in the morning. I yearn for something to happen to spice up my life. I rarely get to see any of my friends and only get to see my girlfriend for an hour at a time at a park like every other week. During this whole time since school has been out, I have watched and finished probably 6 tv shows and 2 video games, one of them being 130 hours long and the other being about 40. The only thing I have learned is that I feel like an edgy 13 year old again because everything, for the most part, sucks. I’ve played online games with the boys and facetime with my girlfriend nearly every night, but I need to just hang out with someone like the good old days of like 2 or 3 months ago. I’m very introverted and love my alone time, but I can’t hang out with just me and my dog. I’m sick of just hanging out with me, and I love my dog but if she keeps finding random metal objects in the yard that nobody has seen in years and tries to eat whatever it is I might actually lose it. I don’t know what i'm going to do but I will make it through this. I hope.

For this week's project I decided to find 2 songs that I thought had meaning to me whenever I listened to them. The first song I decided on was All My Life by the Foo Fighters, mainly because of one line that I feel like a lot of people can relate to. “All my life I've been searching for something, something never comes, never leads to nothing, nothing satisfies but I'm getting close, closer to the prize at the end of the rope.” The reason I chose this line is because I feel like it it relates to most people lives and right now for me it explains kind of what it’s like to try to find out what I want to do in college and such, searching for what career I want but can’t find anything but knocking things off the list helps get closer to what I want to do. 

The other song I chose doesn't have lyrics but gave me more of a feeling. The song is called Dearly Beloved by Yoko Shimomura. Dearly Beloved, depending on the version, is mainly a piano with some violin accompaniment. It comes from a game I played in my childhood called Kingdom Hearts, and the song itself fills me with nostalgia and also just makes me happy to hear it( I think because it’s associated with a good memory). The song is one of my favorites and I love to listen to it because think it was composed very well.

For this weeks’ project I decided to share my playlist that usually gets me from feeling down to happy or hyped. 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRVW-jvC4sedsnuVkvRN4E3DDTscQGXr9

This link leads to that playlist and only consists of about 1/4th of the songs in the actual playlist on my phone. I chose the songs that showed the progression of the playlist and how my mood usually starts and finishes. The last song in the playlist is a bit of a jump, but I think you will understand the vibe of it if you decide to listen to any of them. The reason behind sharing some of the songs from my personal feel good playlist is because I figured it would be a decent look into a part of who I am. The playlist starts off as pretty angry and then mellows out, gradually getting back to happier tones and finally stopping at being hyped up and happier. I hope you enjoy whichever one you decide to listen to!  

Today I've decided to write about my first technical fight with a stranger. I got this idea from looking at one of those prompts posted about remembering something with a decent amount of detail. I was in 5th or 6th grade at the time and it was during the summer. I was hanging out with Devin and another kid named Nick. We were just goofing around up at the elementary school with some Nerf swords, just running around and having fun on the playground in the back with the dinosaur shaped stuff. Nick had put his sword down to go down the slide when two older kids ( maybe freshman? They were taller than us at the time) who were playing basketball walked up. One of the kids grabbed the sword that Nick had been using and said something like calling it neat and started swinging it around. Obviously we didn’t want them to have it since we didn’t know them so I asked for them so give it back so we could leave. The kid didn’t want to give it back so he told us that if we wanted it we would have to come and take it from him. So me, having played video games and watching movies with these scenes in it told him that I’d duel him for it. And to my surprise he agreed, and told us that if he won he would get to keep the sword, and if I won we’d get it back and they’d leave us alone. At this point I’d like to mention that even though he was older than me, I was confident because of 2 reasons. One reason is because my dad and I (since the 2nd or 3rd grade) had been going outside and fighting each other with nerf swords for a long time. The second reason was because I had what we referred to as the “tricked out sword”. I had a friend on a street I used to live on before moving to where I am now that was older and liked to make or add stuff to pre-existing things, and he had recently gotten his hands on some black electrical tape. This guy took a stick or two and wrapped them with so much electrical tape that he made an actual club that was strong and never broke. So one day when my nerf sword broke when we were playing he offered to fix it. When he returned it the next day he had added a couple modifications with the electrical tape. He patched up the sword and kept it together, but made an actual grip for it so it wouldn’t slip, taped the crossguard up so it was stronger and wouldn't bend like foam, and added some to the last 1/4th of the blade so that when I hit things it would be more durable, slide less, and hurt more. So when this kid actually accepted to duel me on the playground as i was holding that sword, I figured he was either arrogant or just plain stupid. And then we fought. We didn’t have any official rules, it was just kind of whoever could take the most hits, which was could for me because that's how my dad “taught” me, until i gave up from being whapped too many times. So because I knew how strong my dad was, I remember wanting to see how much this kid would hold back on his swing, and he didn't; he swung hard, like if it hit me it would probably cut or at least bruise me even though it was a foam sword. Like most fights, it didn’t last long. He was strong but after his first downswing, he overextended too far and hit the ground since I wasn’t even in range, so I just swung as hard as I could at the arm in front of me. The end of my blade had a couple of sharp tape points and i ended up giving him a small cut that didn’t really draw blood, but he gave up after that and threw down the sword and walked away with his buddy. It was honestly a lot of fun for me since I love to duel people. So after that we grabbed out stuff and went back to Devin's house to tell him mom what had happened, and we didn’t really want to stick around with them playing basketball in the lot below right after the fight. And that’s the story of my first ever duel with a stranger.