Writing in a Blog Activity: Final Reflections

Final Reflection

I really liked this activity. I think it gave us the tools to express ourselves better than in the other classes' activities. Besides, the fact that our creativity is expressed here on the Internet means that we can always go back to this place and read our texts again and have some fun and memories.

Final rating: 9.1/10

How I started to learn English

How I started to learn English

English has always been an interesting language for me, along with Japanese and Latin. The reason behind this is that, since I was a child, I play videogames, which at that time, were all in English. 

The first videogame I ever played was Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64 console when I was 2 years old. Of course I couldn't even read at that age, but at least exploring the massive worlds of the game helped me to develop many aspects of my brain and intelligence, such as hand-eye coordination, memory, deduction capacity, etc.

At the age of 4, I acquired the game I appreciate the most in my life and I think of it as the best videogame in history: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This was a beautiful open-world adventure game that required more thought than Mario 64 to advance, however, it also required something that Mario didn't: The ability to read and understand English.

I found myself many times stuck on the game because I didn't know what I had to do due to the fact that I couldn't understand what the characters were saying, although at the age of 7 I could read, but obviously, just Spanish. Thanks to this, I started to develop the desire and interest to learn English. Just the idea of learning a new language and understand what the game was telling to me was fascinating, so I started to learn by my own means, from the bottom.

As a kid, I didn't had access to Internet (I didn't even have a computer until the age of 12), and no one in my family knew English either, so I started to play the game with a dictionary by my side. Every time I didn't understand a word, I searched for it in the dictionary. I didn't care if I was advancing too slow through the game, I was happy to actually understand the English words little by little.

Thanks to my will to learn, my curiosity and my methods, I finished many games like Zelda. I got to the point that I started to feel like I was needing the dictionary less and less every time, because I was actually understanding almost everything the games were telling me by text.

I eventually acquired a computer with Internet and my learning of English boosted greatly. Nowadays almost every game has a multi-language option, but I honestly never play in Spanish, I always prefer to switch everything to English, so I can learn more and more that way. The same with online series: always with English subtitles instead of Spanish subtitles.

I say that learning English through videogames is a fascinating and fun experience, because you can see your learning progress reflected in the progress of the game. I'd also say that your willpower and your desire to know more is vital in the learning process of a foreign language.

-Franco González

SADISTIC LAGOPHILE

[Parental Advisory: Explicit content]

SADISTIC LAGOPHILE

Jared has always been a common, regular man. An average joe in almost every aspect. You think you already know him when you see the simplicity on his eyes and his look. But what you don’t know, -what no one knows- is that he has a secret, a secret he has managed to hide very well for years. He may look plain and ordinary, but what nobody knows is that, deep inside, Jared is a sadistic lagophile. Since a very tender age he had an uncontrollable attraction to rabbits, but that seemed normal in a child. The dark reasons of why or how he started to develop a serious desire for slaughtering tiny rabbits to later rape the putrid corpse are unknown.

            Fortunately, he got married at his 41 years old, and it seemed that he finally calmed his obscure thirst of blood and depraved tendencies. He was living in a small house with his wife Jenna -who he liked to call “bunnie"- in a tranquil neighborhood. Everything seemed normal about his lifestyle and relationship with his wife, mostly because he was actually a good husband and a taciturn person, and also had left his dark side behind.

              Unfortunately, evil knocked his door one fated day. It was his neighbor, who was giving away a box with seven baby bunnies in it. Jared just couldn’t resist. In the moment he laid his eyes on those tiny, soft and furry animals, his hands started to itch. The desire to strangle, to pulverize and to abuse of those little innocent creatures was just too strong. He accepted the box and put it on the cellar without telling his wife. It couldn’t be helped, his internal demon had reawakened at last.  

               ‘Bunnie’, his wife, eventually discovered the box with the animals in the cellar, but she was told that it was a surprise for her, so she didn’t suspect anything weird about her husband.

                  Every night, Jared got up from bed at 5.A.M., just to go downstairs and pummel one of the seven little rabbits with a hammer to the point they started to bleed severely, to later use an axe to slice their ears, feet and tail, which he liked to keep as a memento while the other rabbits watched in an inexplicable type of intuitive fear. He always assured himself that the creature was still alive before doing his last act of heartless inhumanity to them: to sexually abuse of the massacred animal to death, so he could listen to their cries of pain that way. He brought them death by eventual blood loss or just death by decapitation. Every night, he slayed one rabbit at the time, and hid the severed corpse in a wooden chest in the cellar.

Everyday, ‘Bunnie’ payed a visit to the creatures to feed them, but she eventually started to notice that oddly enough, it appeared like every time there were less bunnies in the place, along with a growing horrible smell.

                  

                   The day were just one rabbit remained in the cellar finally came. Jared as usual went through his depraved ritual with the last rabbit, but this time, when he finished his sexual intercourse with the animal, followed by its decapitation, he found himself unsatisfied. He wasn’t bursting of pleasure like he was used to. The emptiness he felt inside of his hollow self just lead him to feel a crazed wrath, along with the beastly idea of using his wife to ease his sadistic berserk.

                   

                     That night, Jared hid the last rabbit in the chest, washed the blood of his hands, and went to the bed with his wife. In order to continue with his nonsensical carnage, he made his wife wear a bunny suit, deceiving her into the idea of just “having a great night for once”. ‘Bunnie’ accepted her husband’s request and acceded accompany him to the cellar, where supposedly a surprise was waiting for her. When they arrived to the cellar, Jared closed the door and grabbed her wife by the hips while having a demented face. He pushed ‘Bunnie’ against the wall and started to violently mess her up. ‘Bunnie’ wasn’t enjoying it. She felt like the man with her in the room wasn’t his beloved husband. She saw the insanity of his eyes and smelled the terrible smell coming from the old chest in the corner. ‘Bunnie’ struggled with Jared and escaped his arms. “What is wrong with you today?! You’re being so rough, you’re scaring me… Besides, I can’t keep bearing this smell coming from that chest.” She said, as she walked to the chest. As soon as Jared saw her opening it, he knew it was over. He knew he had to get rid of her before she called the police. So he wielded his axe with both hands and slowly started to approach his wife from behind.

“*Eeeeeeek!* W-What is this? A-Are those our poor little rabbits?!” She screamed with fear. When she found the putrid corpses of the crushed rabbits in the chest, she knew it had something to do with the strange behavior of his husband. She couldn’t believe it. The simple, plain and ordinary man she fell in love was a murderer. She was in shock, but then, her intuition told her to turn back quickly. She saw the diffuse image of an approaching axe at high speed aimed to her head, and in a split second, she managed to dodge it. *BAM!* The axe was struck on the wooden chest and Jared was struggling to withdraw it. ‘Bunnie’ was still stunned by the situation, but deep inside, she knew that everything had went to hell. Obviously, it was a hard decision for her to make, but she accepted her fate. “Do I have to kill the person I love…? I don’t want to, but… It’s kill or be killed!” She thought quickly. Then she saw her opportunity, and in a frenzied effort, she grabbed the hammer her husband used to batter the poor little rabbits and smashed it on Jared’s head with full force as she cried a desperate “I’M SORRY! I LOVE YOU!”

It was over… and there was no turning back. ‘Bunnie’, or better said, Jenna, called the police and the man was taken to the hospital. Strangely, he survived, but he was left with the center part of his head sunk by the hammer strike. Ironically, he looked like he had two short bunny ears by the deformation of his head in contrast with its lateral sides.

Jared was sent into prison, and put on a cell full of big muscular black men, who rapidly adopted him as the new vessel for their sexual necessities.

Jared was ended being called “Bunnie” by their cellmates who made fun of his head and raped him everyday, but in the end... He enjoyed every second of it.

-THE END-

-Franco González

T H E B L A C K W O R M H O L E

T H E B L A C K W O R M H O L E

“Greed will be your perdition” is what Ryan’s father always told him when he was a child. Now as an adult, Ryan is the typical unhappy office employee who hates his routinary life along with his boss.

        

               As usual, he was once again the only worker remaining at the establishment, even though it was 3 A.M. His boss had gave him the job of printing a massive load of documents again, for a minimal amount of extra money. He had accepted, and there he was, alone, in a peaceful silence, except for the sound of the printing machine.

             

              Among the documents he was printing, there was a very strange one: a paper sheet with a black circle in the middle. He didn’t pay attention to it and put his coffee cup on top of the black circle. Suddenly and to his surprise, the coffee cup fell into the black circle, as if it was a pit.

             Maybe it was a glitch in the matrix, maybe it was a gift bestowed by a God, or maybe it was just the materialization of his hollow self, but whatever it was, it was indeed a strange physical manifestation: A black wormhole in one of his printed sheets.

           He was astonished by it, and started to test it by introducing his arm into the wormhole. It felt like his arm entered in separate container out of this dimension. Not only that, he also discovered that he could trespass solid objects by using the paper sheet as a bridge. He found out this by putting the wormhole on the snacks machine’s window and being able to nab a chocolate bar from it.

            So what brilliant use could a mediocre, unhappy, and bad paid man give to this complex artifact? Exactly, stealing millions of dollars from the safe box of the office. Ryan, in an act of greed, placed the wormhole in the door of the safe box and inserted his arms in it to grab all the stacks of money he could. He already had more money than he would ever need in his life, but his greed drove him to nab every single dollar from the safe box.

          In the end, Ryan noticed that he wasn’t being able to grab the last stack of money from the back of the container, so he decided to enter with his full body to the wormhole. Bad idea. The sheet of paper suddenly fell into the ground with the wormhole facing down, meaning that Ryan had been trapped inside of the container. It was just a matter of time for the police to find out him in the safe box, if he didn’t die asphyxiated by the lack of air in it before.

Perhaps if he had remembered to his father’s advice, he wouldn’t have fell into that oblivion of future, created by his own greed.

Franco González

[The Brave Agnès Oblige] by Franco González

Agnès Oblige

Agnès Oblige is the female main character of the Japanese fantasy RPG (Role Playing Game) BRAVELY DEFAULT. Agnès is a 20-year-old girl from the land of Ancheim, located in the world of Luxendarc. She is a vestal who prays and protects the Crystal of Wind, one of the four sources of life and balance of the world. Her journey starts after a powerful and unknown dark energy engulfs the Four Crystals of Light, causing a major chaos in the world and the shattering of the balance between good and evil.

As for her physical appearance, she is a young woman who has very long brown straight hair and a pair of beautiful brown chaste eyes full of faith and determination. She wears a long white dress with black sleeves. Also, she wears a blue pendant, black boots and black gloves. She also carries a variety of weapons, ranging from a sword to a staff. Her main weapon and outfit depends on the Job Class she is at the moment. If she’s a White Mage, she will have a long white and red dress and hat, with a staff to cast White Magic and heal her party members. If she’s a knight (as in the image above), she’ll wear a knight armor and use a sword with a shield. If she’s a summoner, she’ll wear a black garment with rainbow feathers and so on.

Her personality and character develops during the game, but in general, she is a very devoted person, who never loses hope on her purpose. She’s very innocent and pure, but also sometimes shy and naïve, mainly because she spent almost her entire life as an acolyte and vestal in the Temple of Wind, not knowing too many things about the exterior world. Her voice is very calm and polite (provided by Erin Fitzgerald, a well-known voice actress for videogames.)

Agnès Oblige is a great character, who drives a good story in an awesome strategy game which definitely would be of the liking of anyone who enjoys the RPG genre in general. And on top of all… she’s pretty cute, at least for the appreciation of who wrote this short text, a.k.a. me. 
Franco González