Archives: Humanities

BREAKING NEWS: Halifax got ANNIHILATED in 1917

I didn’t think anything interesting ever happened in Nova Scotia. Like, it’s one of those provinces (50% of the provinces) that I mostly forget exists because nothing has ever happened there that seemed interesting. Also, the world revolves around me and where’s I live which is Vancouver so Vancouver is obviously the most important Canadian city.

Well, I must have been wrong because holy crudshack did Halifax get crazy in 1917. Things really BLEW UP there. Heh.

No, but like 2000 people died it was pretty bad. And 2000 people dying is like, a HUGE deal back then. If I heard an explosion caused 2000 deaths today I would probably just be like “another awful day in 2016”. Unless it was in Canada because as I said before, I live in Canada and the world revolves around me.

I don’t really want to just regurgitate information to you, so if you’re interested in all the exact details of what happened with the Halifax explosion. Here are a few links:

Also here’s a song someone wrote about it:

For our assignment, we had to work in groups to create a news report about what happened in Halifax that day. Since my group was just me and Matthew, we did a breaking news report. We didn’t have a whole bunch of people so we weren’t able to a newsroom-esque video.

https://youtu.be/HkhzVwNS_zM

 

 

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A Canadian Solider in Europe

One of our assingments this week was to create a te a journal entry from someone who fought in World War One. At first, I wanted to try and find someone related to me, but that turned out to be a no go, as my mom didn’t know and my dad just started talking  about the Boher war as if I would have no idea what it was and pretending it was a lot more interesting than it actually is.

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So then it came time to find a solider of my own, so I scowered Canada’s war memorial sites for a good solid man with lots of information. It was really difficult to find a good one, and it actually took a couple of days to do. Eventually, I found George Ashton. I was able to look at his birth and baptism records along with his registration forms for the military.

He didn’t have a very exciting story from when he wa sin the war that I could see, so I decided to use what I knew about him to write a journal entry from before the war began.

I knew his parents names, that they were farmers, that George was a baker, and that they lived in Warden, Quebec. There were a couple things I took creative license with, like the fact that I really didn’t have any confirmation that he had siblings. I just kind of assumed that farmers from the 1800’s would have more than one kid…

Anyways, I hope this is readable, cause I put it on fancy paper.

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My Near Death Experience With Video Editing

In September, our class learned about nuclear war.

It was terrifying, but of course I just kind of had to ignore that part and stop being dramatic. Cause I had work to do.

Ensues an adventure/nightmare/learning experience that almost made me drop out of school to become a burger flipper.

Okay, I’m being dramatic again.

The actual trip we went on was great and informative and really fun. Instead of telling you everything we did, I’m just going to insert a really fun looking video that hopefully tells some kind of narrative and lets you know what kind of things we did on the trip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ494qDxiTU

CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS

Once we got back is when the real trouble began. We had to make a video, and this video caused me a lot of pain and suffering. My group and I (Spencer, Stanfield, Luciano, & Matt) handed in our final draft a week after everyone else because of our busy schedules and technical difficulties. First of all, it was a lot of editing. I had to fully edit the movie 5 or 6 times, and of I’m being honest, I’m like, barely happy with the results.

The first video we made was a scratch video, so we knew we were going to have to reflim everything we were doing, and we were 100% okay with it, because it wasn’t very good. We were just trying to get formatting down. It ended up not looking great, tbh. You can click here to view it.

The second draft was when things got serious, so I brought in my DSLR camera to film everything nicely. That took about two days. Then, I had to actually start seriously editing. I did my best, but I wasn’t able to complete it how I wanted it in the time I had. I didn’t have the interviews in place, and the editing was only finished for like, the first third of the video. Click here to see what ended up being handed in.

The third draft was when all hell broke loose. I spent hours working on this thing, and THEN IT CRASHED and I had a breakdown and everything was awful.

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It actually fixed itself the next day, but it was still traumatizing. I was completely drained of everything I had in me. I finished the video, and then I did my best to forget the whole thing ever happened. In fact, here is a poem from the book Teen Angst Poetry that really represents how I felt in that period of time. Anyways, here is the video we ended up with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEq_feT_2rw

What I’ve learned from this experience seems to be what I’m learning time and time again: effort doesn’t always mean anything. I put literal blood sweat and tears into this project, and it still didn’t come out like I would have hoped. Meanwhile, I can put pretty much no effort into something and it will turn out great.

I’m not sure exactly why I can never feel satisfied with projects like this. Sometimes it’s almost like the more I work on something, the worse it gets. Maybe that’s because I have a higher expectation for things I spend a long time on. I can always confirm that they are objectively worse. I even think that 2 minute video at the beginning ended up better than this video that I spent at least a dozen hours on. Working hard doesn’t mean anything when your end result looks like it wasn’t worked hard on.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop working hard on stuff, it just means the world is unfair.

Agh.

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Mid(dle School) Life Crisis

World War One was a tragedy. It was a war that caused millions of deaths and changed the world forever.

It was also an insane catfight.

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I don’t mean like, the fighting in the trenches and all. I give my highest respects to all the soldiers who fought during WWI.

‘Cause I’m talking about the governments.

Most of the countries really only entered the war because their friends were in it. It’s the perfect example of “If your friends all jumped off a bridge, would you?”. It turns out that for most of these countries, the answer is hell yeah. I still think this Arthur video sums up pretty much what was going on that made WWI happen. A simple case of insane chaos.

But I know I can’t just hand in a clip from Arthur from 2003 as my assignment (as much as I would like to). So I have theorized that WWI began because the strong sense of nationalism coming from multiple countries caused alliances to weaken. This means, pretty much, that everyone thought they were better than their neighbours, or deserved more, or thought things were becoming unfair. This made me relate them to children because kids tend to be so immature that they think the world needs to be 100% fair.

Well, at least, that’s my opinion. To support that, here are some real actual diary entries that I totally didn’t make up.

Originally, I was going to make a bunch of diary entries for each country, but after finishing the first batch of entries, I realized that I probably only had enough time to make one more batch (writing them all out and pasting them on sheet things took about 2 and a half hours per batch). I decided to start with

I decided to start with Austria-Hungary, because I feel like their animosity towards other countries was very spread and affected nearly every other country. They were pissed at everyone and their government was falling to pieces, and yet they were still making awful decisions (honestly me). They sent Franz Feridnand to Serbia even though EVERYONE KNEW it was an awful idea. They also knew they shouldn’t start anything because they didn’t want Russia coming after them. So at first, they just tried to ignore Serbia.

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Meanwhile, Serbia was being moody. I gave Serbia a different font from the rest of the countries because I kind of felt like they were the emo kid. Like, going around talking about how nobody understands them and all that. They were pretty new as a country, and were mad that nobody was taking them seriously (kinda like North Korea is today). They actually ended up being the country that started all this mess, though. Franz Ferdiand got shot in Serbia. But would the war had happened otherwise? Probably. Serbia was just the moody emo kid who put the bullet in the gun (and forget to click the safety).

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The issue may have stayed in the Balkans, like everything else that had happened in the Balkans had, but Russia and Serbia were actually pretty good friends. If Russia hadn’t have cared enough to get involved, then the war might not have happened. Oh, and Russia was bitter towards Germany, who was friends with Austria-Hungary, so there was also that motive.

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Then, because Germany thinks they’re better than everyone, they have to get themselves involved. There’s not a whole lot to say about them. They were acting all high and mighty, which made a lot of people not like them. Germany honestly needed to calm down for like, the first half of the 20th century.

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England and France got involved because, as I said before, EVERYBODY HATES GERMANY.

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And then Canada joins in because “When Britian is at war, Canada is at war.” – Sir Wilfred Laurier

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And Italy is CONFUSED. Kinda like me at this point tbh.

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THEN ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE. Once Franz Ferdinand gets shot, and Serbia gets invaded, everyone needs to stick their nosey little fingers in it. Everyone was too proud and protected their friends when they shouldn’t have, so everything goes to crap.

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War is dirty, messy, and bad. I blame nationalism for most of this. If everyone wasn’t so damn proud, maybe stuff like this wouldn’t happen. I think it shows in history that too much pride can be dangerous, and that’s what happened with WWI, WWII, and a whole lot of other wars that I don’t know about because Canada doesn’t do much war.  Pretty much my thesis on all war is that pride is the killer.

I’m looking at you, America.

 

 

 

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What if Canada Opened Our Doors to Everyone?

In the Laurier ages of Canada, we were practically begging people to come on in and take our land. We needed the people to fill up the land that we didn’t want to be taken by America (of course we took no regard to the people who had been living on those lands for hundreds of years).

We used an open-door immigration policy to fill up all that space. It worked, for the most part. We were able to bring in enough people to claim the land as Canadian.

I’ve noticed that immigration is a touchy subject now in Canada, with all the refugees we’ve brought in. It seems like it might have been just as a touchy subject a hundred years ago when the government invited a whole bunch of people in.

But what would happen if we did what they did back then, and just kinda opened up our doors? I tried to figure it out. I wrote a script

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and I have made an accompained video to futher explain my understanding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmPjj33y3z0

 

This video was actually very simply made. I used the Explain Everything app to make the video, and was able to make clear visuals that help enhance what I had written in my script.  My one issue that I often have with this app is I’m not sure if you can do the animations sepretely from when you’re recording your voice. If you can, I’ve never been able to figure it out.

Either way, my EE skills have improved a lot from when I first used the app. As I continue to use this app throughout the year, I hope that I can begin to understand more the features avaliable to me so I can make videos with better animations.

 

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Hip Hop My Way Outta Here

In the time since I have last posted, the class has done some more civil rights stuff, and we’ve moved on to music of the same era. So like, country, blues, rock n roll, all that jazz (jazz too, I guess, if you’re in New Orleans.

When thinking of an idea for my next reflection, I wanted to see how the music genres we listen to today have come about, and what they all came from. So I looked at some wikipedia pages and a couple timelines to try and link them together. It too me quite a while to get an actual coherent timeline of my own, and it was really messy (the struggle of using actual paper).

I then found an app to make it pretty, cause it was not.

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When making it, I added the origins of each genre, as in what race created it. I found it interesting that mixed music inspired black music, but white music only held country and classical. I would assume this stems from the fact that music has always been a staple of the culture of black americans, in religion, hardships, and entertainment, while white americans could usually take or leave music up until a certain point in time.

Another thing I found interesting was that I couldn’t really find anything on some of the genres we have today. It’s almost like music like dubstep and electronic music came out of nowhere. And while I can find when and how genres like pop were created, theres no indication as to when pop music went from what it was created as to… like, this.

I also wanted to find a way to experience all the different kinds of music. The best way I could think of was to sing them, so that’s what I did. I skipped the slave songs, because there’s no way I could sing a slave song, they’re hard to sing alone, and it felt kind of wrong. I did my best to go in order, but it was kind of hard after awhile. I stopped once I got to disco, hip hop, and rap, because I couldn’t find any of those kinds of songs I could play on ukulele. I then piled clips of all the songs I learned together.

Oh, and for the love of god, I am sorry for how out of tune the soul part is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oRQQZ1R6LA

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Document Face Off: How Important Was The Civil Rights Act of 1964?

ULTIMATE FACE OFF

The other day my dad weirdly asked me what I thought what the most important human rights document ever written. After I didn’t answer him, he answered himself, with the Magna Carta. This whole, one sided conversation was weird, and I did my best to forget about it until the other day, when I was reading about The Civil Rights Act of 1964. After that, I was reminded of the dreaded conversation and decided to actually look up the Magna Carta, because I had no idea what it was.

Once I realized what the Magna Carta was, I was firstly confused why so many people cared to crowd around it when I was at the archives museum in DC. Then I started listing all the reasons why all the civil rights documents seem wayyyy more important. Especially The Civil Rights Act of 1964. THEN I looked up to see if people agreed with my point, and they did (just read the first sentence of this article). So this is going to be the theme I go with this week.

Modern society would not be the same without the Civil Rights Act. Without us outruling systematic oppression and discrimination at the time that we did, our society would have an ever worse power imbalance than it already has.

This is versus the Magna Carta, which was written in 1215. The reason I bring this up is I personally believe that in 1215, nothing important could have ever been signed. I think without the Magna Carta, not much would be different. Because of the fact that people were generally really stupid until AT LEAST the 1800’s, figuring out the rules of justice even, like, a century later probably wouldn’t have made much difference.

Because of the fast-progressing nature of the 20th century (I mean, we got common household electricity in the same 100 years as space travel), even putting off The Civil Rights Act of 1964 for 5 years could have deeply harmed our society. It would have prolonged our protests, both against and for equal rights and integration. It could have also possibly prolonged other issues like LGBTQ+ rights.

Without the progression of civil rights being exactly where it was, North America would not be what it is today. I mean, there’s already SO MANY AWFUL THINGS IN OUR CONTINENT. If we didn’t have important documents like the Civil Rights Act signed when they were, things would be SO. MUCH. WORSE.

Without the Magna Carta, I mean, we probably would have figured out the stuff in there before anything important happened. I’m not saying that stuff that happened in the 13th century wasn’t important, but it seems like the history you learn in school jumps straight from the fall of the Roman Empire to the 1600’s. Plus, I seriously doubt anybody in the 13th century followed the fair justice stuff written in the Magna Carta. If you don’t believe me, just look at the wikipedia page for the century. Nothing but violence and wars. Yeesh.

If you’re going to take anything away from this giant blog post that is just text that I’m not even sure is written in an appropriate style for a school assignment, let it be this: When everyone was the Magna Carta when I was in DC, they should have been crowding around the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Even though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t on display.

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Lynching in America

For the next unit, my blog titles will probably be less humorous. We’ve started learning about the Civil Rights Movement, and making jokes about that just seems….wrong. So yeah, ix nay on the jokes at the moment.

For my first reflection, I decided to do it on lynching. I was interested in the topic because a couple years ago I saw the movie 12 Years a Slave and one of the scenes that really stuck with me was the hanging scene. It made me so uncomfortable, because it was supposed to.

I didn’t really know the significance of that scene at the time, just that it was really freaking uncomfortable it was to watch and how awful it was. When we learned about lynching, my mind went back to that scene in the movie, and just how awful it was to watch on screen. I can barely imagine how depressing it would be to see that in real life.

Along with the fact that people would go out and watch it. They would purposefully go out and watch the killing of other people.

So I tried to do a video on where lynching came from and how it continued to happen into the 60’s. It was kind of hard, because that’s something that’s hard to pinpoint. Luckily, there were quite a few sources I found from the time period that explored the topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT4cBdZTKrk

If you’re interested, here are some of the primary sources I pulled from to make the video.

“Why is the Negro Lynched?” by Fredrick Douglass (1895)

“The Truth About Lynching and The Negro in the South: In Which the Author Pleads That the South be Made Safe for the White Race” by Winfield H. Collins (1918)

Eleanor Roosevelt to Walter White detailing the First Lady’s lobbying efforts for federal action against lynchings letter, (19 March 1936)

A terrible blot on American civilization (1922)

 

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Explain, Like, Most Things

Recently, my class and an assignment where we used the app explain everything to create a YouTube video on how the vote in Canada went from a prick edge to a right. We had about a week to complete this task. First, we had to create a storyboard for how our explain everything would play out. This also had to be accompanied by a thesis. Because my storyboard was pretty much illegible, I had to explain it pretty well, but was still the first person to get the go ahead.

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If you can read the top, the thesis for the video is “The vote in Canada went from a privilege to a right through social pressure and change.” This basically means that through pressure and actions from oppressed communities social change erupted, and the people on top no longer saw these communites as worthless.

After explaining the thesis to my teacher, I began gathering the visuals for the project, and the pictures to use for the animation. This took one class, and the next class I wrote the script for the video. Then, there was only one class so I did the animations at home and we used it for recording.

This was the final product:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSZX4ij6JEI&feature=youtu.be

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I Would Much Rather Synthesize Perry The Platypus vs Doctor Doofenshmirtz

It’s been awhile, blog that nobody reads.

Though here we are, back again, with a new assignment: essays. Which I actually don’t hate, to be honest. I read a lot of personal essays on buzzfeed and other websites that I get linked to from buzzfeed, and I actually don’t mind writing essays.

But then comes planning essays, and it’s like it all gets 1000x worse. Then comes planning synthesis essays, and everything feels like a soggy sock. All gross and uncomfortable. You can’t really take your soggy sock off until you get home though, and the same rules apply here. There’s no way around it, you just have to face the uncomfortable feelings until you’re done with the goal. I had to finish the essay to take off the soggy sock.

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The first thing I had to do was make a venn diagram comparing the two stories we read. I’m not going to post that here because it’s:

a) very boring

b) honestly not that good

c) if you haven’t read both pieces of writing it probably won’t make any sense anyways

Since there’s no point in making you sit through that torture, I will explain my own in the next step. Actual essay planning. Coming up with key sentences and points isn’t all that hard, you just have to use big words and people will believe anything you say. No, the real torture comes with finding quotes.

I’m hoping for the actual exam we have to do in January this will be easier because the stories will be shorter and fresher in my mind, but finding at least three quotes from two long-ish stories proved a difficult task. I pretty much had to read both texts again because I didn’t mark the quotes when I saw them. Granted re-reading only took me about two hours, I could have been napping in that time.

Finally we wrote the essay, which took longer than it should have. Two classes and some time that evening, but I finished it, and here it is for your reading pleasure.

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