My time as a YVC volunteer has brought me pretty much everywhere: summer camps, green team events, Alberta Ballet, and now, a break-dance battle? That’s right, last Saturday, I was lucky enough to volunteer at Culture Shock 2017, a youth driven art event celebrating culture and community, held at the Genesis Center. If you know…
It’s a toy! It’s an instrument! It’s the Otamatone! A few weeks ago, I stumbled on some videos of people playing this strange object in the shape of an eighth note (or a quaver, if you prefer). This instrument, created in Japan by Maywa Denki, produces a sort of electronic sound when it is…
What would happen if we never changed ourselves? Our ways, our mindsets, our outlooks… It seems that we’re always either trapped within a cycle or travelling along an upwards spiral. With the former, we put ourselves into a stagnant position, where nothing terribly bad or terribly great ever happens. It’s always a desirable place to…
When browsing for books at the public library, it’s not uncommon for me to wander into the Teens Fiction Novels section and pick up a book that’s marked with New York Times Bestseller at the top of the front cover. Several years of reading these “bestseller” books later, I only recently came to wonder: what…
It’s a trend that has become more and more popular recently, and has provided its users with a way to easily lay out their lives on paper. Bullet journaling is often regarded by many as an intersect between mindfulness and productivity, which is why it’s such as useful tool in our past-paced, digitized lives. Due…
While most of you were enjoying the celebrations around the city during Canada Day weekend, I was enjoying my time volunteering and checking out the events at Otafest 2017. In case you aren’t familiar, Otafest is an annual anime/gaming convention that has been running since 1999. Although it was first held at the University of…
She was writing about her life, what had happened, and how she had felt during those two years. She was scared and alone, but she had hardened up to the world and so she sat there, with her tea and pastry beside her, knowing her writing was what would save her. She was in a…
On Sunday, April 23, at 12:30pm, I went to see The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer in the heart of Calgary: VertigoTheatre. In other words, I went to see a masterpiece of animation, puppetry, acting and ukulele playing. Yes, you heard me, ukulele playing. The play ran for about fifty minutes, and it…
And so they tell us, be grateful that you live in a world of freedom. But what exactly defines our freedom? And how precious is freedom, if our voices are being suppressed by the amount of money in our bank accounts or number of degrees associated with our names? What good is liberalism, if we…
There are some books that are just pure art. Books that transform you into somebody better from the moment you read it to the rest of your life. Those are the books that show a part of the human spirit and what it means to be human. After reading, you are left wondering how a mere…
Learning about history in school sometimes feels cumbersome, especially when dealing with facts, dates and other analytical data. Studying and memorizing everything could sometimes take hours, and as a result we often forget why we even learn history and social studies. The whole point of learning history is to make the future better, because by…
Throughout the past three ANAD (all new, all different) parts ( Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) I have talked much about the curse affecting Marvel Comics and in this conclusion to this series I will go over everything I have said with some final words. Event Fatigue A lot has happened since the last time I…
If you have been reading any Marvel comic or crossover event recently there have been dark times in the current line up of comics. While there have been some amazing issues and story arcs, the vast majority of issues and events have seriously been affected by the ANAD (all new, all different) curse. Previously on What’s up…
The day I scrolled through my Facebook timeline 3 years ago and watched slam poetry champion, Neil Hilborn, perform this was the day I fell in love with slam poetry: I vividly remember tearing up because his performance was so passionate and raw, and I had no clue until that moment such kind of art existed.…
You know how sometimes you hear a song come on for the first time, and after listening to it only once, you already think it sounds really good?