The romanticized abuse by male characters in modern-day literature is, to say the least, icky (Colleen Hoover, I am looking directly at you). Without coming across as another pretentious English major who doesn’t know how to stop acting like they’re better than everyone else, I do wholeheartedly believe that we as a collective society need to start thinking more critically about what we consume and more importantly, how we promote it.

Today's music is created with the intent to sell, not influence. The songs today’s music industry classifies as latest hits are songs that lack quality, density, and abandon what it means to produce authentic and genuine music. Due to the unlimited access we now have to music as well as production through media, releasing music today requires a significantly lower degree of talent than ever before. This has a drastic effect on the music industry and what is considered popular today, and significantly influences how artists now approach releasing new music. 

I’ve been challenging myself to audience more. No, that’s not a typo. Lately I’ve been thinking about audience as a verb, the simultaneous role of watching, the active sense of the passive tense being entertained. 

It’s like saying a lion doesn't mean to scare away a gazelle by approaching it. Even if the lion has no intention of hurting the gazelle, how is the gazelle supposed to know that? How is the gazelle supposed to recognize which lion will eat it and which lion just wants to get a drink from the oasis? Maybe it’s the fact that a body of water with a lion near it can never be an oasis for a gazelle.

If you’ve been on social media lately, or have just been following gaming and Pedro Pascal since 2013, then you’ve definitely heard of HBO’s The Last of Us by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin — or, what is arguably the best video game adaptation up to date. The Last of Us, starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay, follows the journey of Joel and Ellie — a stone-hearted smuggler and the girl he’s smuggling — as they travel across Apocalypse America facing mushroom monsters, raiders, and trauma along the way.

Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy role-playing tabletop game where you can be almost anything you want. As a shy person, role-playing always seemed scary, but I wanted to try it as I love fantasy. I was first introduced to it around twelve. At fourteen, I was briefly taught how to make a character. After completing my character, I watched their session and was hooked. I wanted to learn more about it and leave my comfort zone to play.