Terraria

Hello people's. Today I'm talking about another game. Here it goes!

The game I'm reviewing is called Terraria. Terraria is a sandbox game for PC, Plastation network, Xbox, and mobile devices. I have played it on Playstaion and my iPhone. Currently the version of the game with the most content is for PC and that's the version I recommend. The game is similar to a pixelated 2D version of Minecraft and some people accuse it of stealing from it but it is an amazing game and while it has some aspects of MC it doesn't copy it.

You start the game creating your character with the option to be male or female, hair style, hair color, eye color, skin color, and clothing color. Once a world is started the player spawns in a forest biome with a copper pickaxe, axe, and sword. Your first priority should be to cut down some trees with your axe and clear a small area on the ground to build your house. You can go ahead and make the walls and ceiling with the wood. (A ceiling is important because there are flying enemies at night.) Inside the shelter you should go into your inventory and craft a workbench. Whenever you are near a crafting station like a workbench you can craft a much wider variety of items in your crafting inventory. You should go ahead and craft a door or two for your house allowing for easy access. The space for the door has to be three blocks high, the same height as your character.

One of the most essential things in Terraria is a mine. You can start mining in a cave if there is a sizable one close by, but eventually you're gonna need to start mining straight downwards. Simply use your pickaxe to mine straight down 2 blocks wide. Collect any ore that you see on the screen by tunneling sideways and fully explore any caves that you stumble on to. During this process you can explore the biomes above ground, build houses for the other helpful NPCs, (non playable characters), you find on your travels, crawl through dungeons, and summon and fight other bosses. Continue digging downwards, mining and upgrading your tools and armor with the ores you've collected to get to the lowest underground layer, the underworld. This area is necessary to fight the hardest boss yet and if you beat him you get to move to the second half of the game HARDMODE. DUH DUH DUHHHHH.

HARDMODE is generally just a world filled with a few more, harder, bosses, new ores to mine, and harder enemies. There is also a more disturbing aspect to HARDMODE... If you've thoroughly explored you would've found the corruption biome and you know how nasty it is. If you haven't it's filled with really nasty flying beasties and a sickly purple environment. Well now this biome is going to start taking over and consuming the other biomes. HARDMODE also makes a new biome called the hallow. It's filled with rainbows and Unicorns... Literally but it is still hostile and will also take over other biomes. As far as I know the only way to stop this is to surround the two new biomes with a block that can't be corrupted or hallowed, like wood which is long and time consuming. Hallow can't hallow the corrupt biome and corrupt can't corrupt the hallow biome. If you don't want to work to stop the spread of the biomes then the easier choice is to live in the hallow since it is less dangerous than the corrupt. You can also corrupt the hallow or hallow the corrupt using corrupt or hallowed seeds.

So that's Terraria. It's an amazing game and you should get it for yourself. Bye.


By Ashton

The 13th Warrior

Hello people's. Today I'm writing about a movie I watched recently. Here it goes.

The movie is called The 13th Warrior. This movie takes place in Medieval times and it starts off near Bagdad. A man was banished from his home to be an ambassador in a northern kingdom. While going north they have to run from Tartars which would kill them if they got to them. The Tartars see a Viking ship and turn back.

However, the ambassador decides to talk to them and they become guests in the Viking camp. During their stay a messenger comes telling the king of the Vikings that a kingdom back home is being invaded by supernatural forces. The witch in the Viking camp tells them that thirteen warriors must go to help the village. Twelve men step up to the challenge but then the witch says that the thirteenth warrior must not be a northman. So naturally they look towards the ambassador and as the thirteenth warrior he must venture into the north with his companions and defeat the supernatural threat.

The 13th warrior is a very good movie. It is a very manly tale of Vikings and monsters and at no point is it boring. It has some gory horror elements to it as well that brings it all together. The enemy they face is also very scary because of their power and they overwhelm them completely. This movie is based off the book "Eaters of Death."

Bye.


By Ashton

Valentines Day

February 14. It was the first valentines day I had ever had with a girlfriend. About a week before I started thinking of what to do. As I said I didn't have much of an idea of what I should do because it was my first valentines day being in a relationship. It took me a while to come up with something (plus a few helpful suggestions from dad) but I finally had something planned a few days before.

At around 4-4:45 I started setting everything up before I picked her up at 5:20. We would've had school but there was a ton of snow. I wore Jeans, a dress shirt and I managed to find a suitable tie with the cuffs unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up and not tucked in, (to my fathers somewhat discontent.) ;) I set up a table and two chairs in the sunroom and hid the card and chocolates in places to be revealed to her after dinner. Afterwards, my mom and I picked her up (as usual she looking great and me looking less than great.) She gave me a valentines day cookie and we endured the awkward, still having to be driven around my your mom, car trip and hung out at my house till Mom came back with the Chinese food.

We talked and ate there while the sun set beside us through the windows until it was time for the movie. (And yes, less than sneaky photos were taken by mom.) We were dropped off at Berkley Plaza and I bought the tickets for Winter's Tale. It was a romance/drama movie with angels and demons and all that and it was pretty good but that's a different blog. At around 9:30 we went back to my house for her things and said goodbye at her house. At home I took our movie tickets and put them inside a letter she had once given me, still smiling like a fool, and went to bed. The next day at breakfast I had a very, very good cookie.

I hope you had a good time Molly, I did. Bye.




By Ashton

The Graveyard Book

Hello peoples. Today I'm talking about one of my favorite books. Here it goes.

So quite a while ago I got a book called The Graveyard book by Neil Gaiman. I read it for the second time recently and it is a very good book for all ages. There are some books that can be very good but seem tiring to read but this book pulls you into a strange and very big world that you never get tired of. So the story starts with a man named...

Jack. For reasons not yet to be revealed this man has killed a baby boy's parents and sibling. However, this is not quite a normal boy and with the door still left open by the murderer the boy manages to toddle out into the night and slip through the tall gates of a graveyard. The man named Jack comes into the graveyard looking for him but one of the graveyard's supernatural residents slips the man named Jack's mind and Jack becomes convinced that the baby did not in fact, go into the graveyard but toddled down the opposite way and it must have been a fox he had seen. The little boy is taken up by the ghosts Mr. and Ms. Owens and gets the name Nobody, Bod for short, and earns the "freedom of the graveyard", the power lets people's eyes slip off him as if he was a ghost and he can go into graves, slides through mausoleum walls and talks to his only friends, the residents of the graveyard. This book is about the adventures in the graveyard of Nobody Owens.

I love the creepy supernatural things in this book and afterwards I read the graphic novel of Coraline, also by Neil Gaiman, and loved that as well. I highly encourage you to pick up The Graveyard Book.


By Ashton

hello peoples!  Today I'm continuing my rant on shining-esque things with Doctor Sleep!  Here it goes!

     So one of the first (quite depressing) points in Doctor Sleep is that Danny is... a drunk.  After all the horrible things brought to his family by his father's own drunkenness Danny's Shining was to great a curse and to little a blessing for him to resist the bottle.  Being severely drunk is the only thing Danny has found that calms down the Shining.

     Specifically the book starts at what you would call the "Bottom", the worst thing an alcoholic had ever done is called their bottom.  I'm not gonna go into detail about that because it is a pretty big plot point in the book (and because its rather explicit.)  Anyway some good things happen to Danny for a change and he ends up being sober for quite a long time and ends up with a job at the local hospice.

     He works theree for a while with a grey cat that always visits a patient the night they are going to die but he's a nice cat.  Danny helps people pass on with the shining, such as looking at their good memories to comfort them and if they can't talk or are comatose he can hear them in his mind so him and Azriel the cat work together and life is good until they came...

     I'm not gonna say anymore about the book but there is one major thing I'm gonna give you a small hint on... The Torrance family has some more family ties.  That's it! That's it! I've said to much already. bye peoples and pleeaase pick up DOCTOR SLEEEEP.

Radiolab

Hello people's. Today I'm blogging about my favorite podcast that I listen to. Here it goes.

My favorite podcast is called Radiolab. The full hour long shows come out about once a month and the shorts out around every two weeks. So Radiolab is basically a show about ummm... Everything. Every show has a topic and the topic is dissected and looked at scientifically and in a full show is normally told in several amazing, thought provoking stories. But don't let the scientific part of it put you off its a great show for all ages and types of people and all the concepts are explained very well. (If there is violent or explicit content one of the hosts will always warn you beforehand.)

Some of the stories are very sad, some of them are very happy, and most of them will leave you thinking for a while. One of the things that makes Radiolab such a great podcast is the sounds. Audio is their medium and they utilize it beautifully. Each show is filled with the most perfect sounds, songs, and moods that go along with the stories and you can picture everything perfectly in your head and they edit everl ything perfectly. They also released a video of one of their live shows and the full audio of the show.

From this you can see that they also use amazing visuals on enormous screens, and huge articulate puppets, and bands. Every show they produce is an experience in itself. I listen to it every time I go to the gym with my phone and earbuds and since I listen it so often I've started listening to their older episodes and have almost listened to all of their full shows.

I highly recommend listening to at least one of these full podcasts. Radiolab from WNYC is hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich and their website is radiolab.org Bye peoples.


By Ashton

The Shining

Hello people's. Today I'm writing more about The Shining. Here it goes.

So from one of my last few blogs I've told you that I've seen the movie and got the book and it's sequel, Doctor Sleep for Christmas. I've already finished the book and I'm over half way done Doctor Sleep. This blog is gonna be about the differences between the movie and the book.

One of the first few differences is another past incident that happens to Jack that makes him feel even more guilty about what he's done on top of him breaking his son's arm. It was when he was still an English teacher in high school and he was in charge of a debate club and he had one kid who was really good but whenever the kid felt like he was going to win he would start to stutter. So one class the kid was debating and started to stutter and after class Jack told him he was going to have to kick him from the club and they got in an argument with the kid saying that Jack sped up his timer. Jack denies that completely in the book when he's going over the story. Later Jack see's the kid slashing his tires with a knife and Jack flew into a rage and almost killed the kid with him ending up with a severe concussion. This is also why Jack was originally fired from his teaching position which I don't think was explained in the movie. As time goes on in the book he changes his story as his guilt becomes greater, saying secondly that even if somehow if he did set the timer ahead it was only by a minute to put him out of his misery and then thirdly saying that he only set it forward one measly minute as the tension rises.

Another one of the more scary differences is the hotel itself. In the movie it's more of Jack going insane and the ghosts in the hotel help him become insane. In the book the hotel starts out as being not as bad just creepy sometimes but we learn that since Danny's shine is so powerful it's making the hotel a stronger and stronger malevolent force and using it's dark past to bring back ghosts and fragments of the past to control Jack and his family. However the hotel still needs Danny for his steam, (explained in Doctor Sleep), and it still isn't powerful enough to seriously injure the family so the hotel starts bringing back ghosts and powerful happenings to guilt rid Jack who starts becoming obsessed with the hotel and it's history, eventually believing they want him and not his son.

(SPOILER) This spoils the ending of both the movie and the book. In the movie Jack is driven mad by everything happening around him and he tries to take an axe to Danny and Wendy, he kills Dick Hallorannn but after a climatic chase through the hedge maze, Danny and Wendy escape in the Snowcat, and Jack with his wounded leg freezes to death outside. In the book, Jack is brought into a party just like he is in the movie and the hotel promises him things using ghosts as its speaker. They end up making a deal that if he brings it Danny then he would get in good with the manager (the hotel itself) and maybe even rise to management status. After giving him plenty of booze from his alcoholic days, (it is unclear whether the hotel was powerful enough to give him real alcohol because the hotel had none when Jack got there but afterwards he is in a drunken rage.), Jack "comes to his senses" and sets off to kill his family this time with a roque mallet. He seriously injures Wendy and Dick and climatically chases his son through the halls cursing and slamming his mallet into the walls. Finally Danny reaches a dead end and bravely tricks his father. He knows that his father is no longer there, that the hotel has pretty much consumed his soul. He voices this to his father and confuses whatever is left of him until the hotel gives up and... SPOILER TURN BACK NOW IF YOU DONT WANT THE ENDING RUINED (or if your squeamish) the person that was once Jack Torrance slowly raises his mallet into the sky and again, and again, and again, he brings it down... On his own face. He slowly turned to his son and horrifying faces of the ghosts are transformed into the bone that makes up his skull revealing that Jack Torrance is truly dead and all that's left of him is with the hotel now. But Danny still has one more trick up his sleeve. Tony, before disappearing for a long time says, " You will remember what was forgotten" and Danny remembers at that time that the boiler hasn't been checked up on and if it's left unattended it could blow up and destroy the entire hotel. Danny tells the hotel and it runs for the boiler screaming and shrieking like something no longer human and Danny, Wendy, and Dick escape before the hotel erupts into flames.

Bye peoples. REDRUM.


By Ashton