danijadegordon

[danijadegordon]

Disney Nature: Penguins Review

    First, watching these penguins waddle around, and slip and fall and just doing penguin stuff gave me so much serotonin. Adelie Penguins are adorable, and at times they try to fight each other and it is so cute. They just flipper slap. Disney Nature: Penguins, narrated by Ed Helms, is a funny, interesting, and very cute film that taught me a lot about Penguins.

    This documentary follows a young male Adelie Penguin named Steve and his journey into parenthood. Ed Helms, most known for playing Andy Bernard on the sitcom The Office, narrates the story of Steve and brings it to life. The story is kept fresh by the commentary from Steve (aka Ed Helm) and at times I felt just as anxious as the penguins were. The score helps the movie stay dynamic and several times throughout my notes I mentioned the score multiple times. 

    If you have an hour and a half to watch the cutest little penguins slip and slide and try to make their way through life, then you should. It’s lighthearted while staying away from Nature Channel bland documentaries. 

[danijadegordon]

Turning 20 during a national emergency.

                 New Year’s Eve I was excited for 2020, in 3 short months I was not going to be a teen anymore. Two whole decades on this earth, and now the day is here (well 17hours and 2 minutes from when I first am writing this), and I am celebrating with my family, in quarantine, while people are dying around the world. And if you think that is morbid, I know. But pessimism runs in my blood (despite how much my mom protests it), and while I wish I could be focused on my birthday all I can think about it everything happening. Oprah once said that your birthday sets the tone for how the rest of your year will go, and with the world right now that is a little uneasy to think about.

               For my birthday last year, my friends all came together and threw me a little party. It was probably the best birthday I had ever had. And this year I was excited to enter my second decade with my little family away from home. I had celebrated my best friends’ birthdays with them, and I was excited for mine. However, Corona has made that impossible. Campus is closed, people aren’t supposed to see anyone outside their household, and my birthday is just another day that people are trying to get through.

With how fast the world has been changing lately having a birthday right now seems almost selfish. The whole world is being put on pause, stores are closed, and very few people are on the streets. Three days ago, I felt confident that I was going to be back at school as I typed this. And yes, maybe I was a bit optimistic in having thought that, but the point is now is not a time where you can really predict anything. Nobody knows for sure if things we have taken for granted our whole lives might be taken away. As someone who struggles with anxiety and depression it’s also hard to be excited about my birthday. I wanted a Nintendo Switch Lite for my birthday, mostly due to a lifelong obsession with Animal Crossing, but felt bad that my parents might spend money they might need for food (despite my mom still working – shout out to the healthcare workers) and so I bought it myself because I can’t stop myself from worrying about the oncoming recession and how so many people are going to be in poverty or even deeper in poverty than before.

In the past my birthdays have always been very exciting to me. But this year, I’ve never felt so underwhelmed about it before. There’s not anything I’m really looking forward to about it. And I’m really just trying to take life day by day. Hong Kong just got hit with Corona round 2, and now it seems like we are going to be stuck inside for a long, long time. Who knows if the first half of my 20th year will be spent stuck in quarantine with my family, maybe this will all end by May? But despite that, I am going to try to make the best out of it. With my quarantine time, I am going to work on building healthy routines that I can continue to do after we are all allowed into the world again. I am going to practice being tidy, I don’t have anywhere else to be anyway. And I am going to work on getting to know my family again. I haven’t really spent this much time with my family since I was a junior in high school, and now that we have all been pushed into the same space again, I want to reconnect.

For all my other spring babies, don’t let the world get you down. Enjoy being home with your family. Who knows if this is the last time you are going to be home on your birthday? Next year we can all throw birthday parties with as many of our friends as we want but enjoy this time home with your family for now. And remember Social Distancing will get us to the light at the end of the tunnel faster.

[danijadegordon]

Educational Video On Comp. Het.

[danijadegordon]

Top 10 (L)GBTQ Shows & Movies To Stop The Pining.

As someone who has been consuming as much LGBTQ media as I can, I feel I need to do something productive with the hours I have poured into this. Most of these are able to be streamed on Hulu, because as I’ve learned, Hulu is home to some of the best queer media. A fair warning, most of these are sapphic or mainly sapphic. Without further ado, here is my top ten favorite LGBTQ Films and TV Shows.

10. The L Word (stream on Netflix)

    I am pretty sure that no queer women under the age of 35 actually enjoys this show. However, I do think that every woman who likes women should watch this. The cheesy plotmlines and messy characters make the show interesting to watch even if other parts (*cough* Jenny *cough*) make it unbearable. Anyway despite its flaws and slightly biphobic undertones, I think at least a few episodes need to be watched.

9. The First Girl I Loved (stream on Hulu)

    Honestly this is just like a good chick flick but make it gay. High school unrequited love, dramatic kisses, it's pretty good, clearly not that memorable.

8. The Fosters (and Good Trouble) (stream on Hulu)

    Honestly, this show did so much for Gen Z queer people, or at least myself. The diverse main cast, interesting storylines, and head on approach to sexuality and gender, this show helped me learn about the LGBTQ community before I actively sought it out. As in, this show was some of the first representation on TV that I really saw. Steph and Lena showed a side of marriage that I hadn’t seen. Instead of just beautiful wedding photos I saw that love can be hard and messy and still be worthwhile.

    The subsequent spin-off show (Good Trouble), continues to showcase diverse people and (dramatized) real life situations. It feels like the show that first showed me that it was okay to be different, has grown with me as the show is life as a young adult. This show makes me feel like I am in middle school again in the best way, chock full of nostalgia.

7. Marvel’s Runaways (stream on Hulu)

    I am not a huge marvel fan, (*gasp* I said it!), it just feels like men showing off and creating chaos to fight chaos. I much prefer softer shows that make me laugh and have a large female presence (and it took me 19 years to realize I liked women....). But, twitter broke me down on this one and I am pretty obsessed. 

    The plot is exciting and fast paced, and it’s refreshing to see everyday concerns of young adults/ teens weaved in between the action. Each character has unique features and negative and positive traits and the cast is DIVERSE. The relationships between the characters are also complex and the slow build sapphic romance between two of the main characters is everything you could ever dream of.

6. Buffy The Vampire Slayer (stream on Hulu)

    I learned the other day that Dolly Parton produced this show, which for some reason makes perfect sense to me. Of course the show that I spent my formative years watching would be produced by a legend such as Dolly Parton. 

    I am not totally sure this counts as LGBT media but One Day at a Time (stream on Netflix because it’s good just not on my list) references it as something young lesbian (and bi) women do and I did so here it is. 

    I can pretty much sum up why I love this show in 3 words, Sarah Michelle Geller. I thought she was the coolest person ever, and wanted to be her so bad. Watching her kill the creepy vampires, just iconic. And in later seasons when Willow dates a witch, amazing, just *chefs kiss*. I was obsessed when I saw this show for the first time and I wish I could re-watch it for the first time. 

5. Vita and Virginia (stream on Hulu)

    Historical women being gay is one of the most validating things, and furthermore some of the most beautiful love stories. Vita and Virginia is based on letters sent between the two women (Author Virginia Wolff and Vita Sackville-West), and shows a high stakes and emotional relationship between the two. The 20s fashion and culture paired with the universal queer feeling of pining, this movie was everything. 

    It is also important to note that Vita is a tiny top and Virginia is a beautiful soft giantess bottom (she’s like 6ft or something crazy), and I think that is enough reason to watch this movie in itself

4. The Girl King (stream on Hulu)

    Based on Christina of Sweden, who ruled over Sweden for 10 years before marrying the Pope and becoming the Virgin Queen Of Rome, is breathtaking. The juxtaposition of Christina harsh exterior to the world and her court, and the softness she shows her lady in waiting is captivating. This movie gave me the strong female leader that doesn’t get shown nearly enough in today’s media. This movie made me laugh, cry, and hold my breath in anticipation. It is beautiful and makes me proud to be a queer women.

3. Little Fires Everywhere (stream on Hulu)

    This 8 part series based on the NY Times best seller written by Celeste Ng, is dramatic and poignant. It forces you to think critically about moral areas that we like to think we have the right answer to, and it makes me rethink your own privilege. 

    The dance around the subject of sexuality and romance, and motherhood throughout every aspect of the film is enchanting. What is a perfect life, what is a perfect mother, and how do you move on and grow from mistakes. This show is beautiful and regardless of gender or sexuality this series is worth the watch.

2. Motherland: Fort Salem (stream on Hulu)

    There is no match quite like that of lesbians and witchcraft, and this show does both brilliantly. This show is female dominated and exciting. The characters are interesting and all have different things that motivate them. The history behind the world the show lives in is deep and fleshed out. It’s the fantasy TV show that I have been waiting for my whole life without knowing.

    With a strong queer women as the main character, who has a complex and passionate love story with ANOTHER strong queer women, this show is just amazing. Unlike male dominated media (production included) this show gives viewers the tender and tension filled moments that aren't given to sapphic love stories usually. It doesn’t feel overly sexual (looking at you Blue is the Warmest Color) but it’s not just friendship under a different label. 

    It releases new episodes every Wednesday so, get caught up because this show is worth it!

Portrait of a Lady On Fire (stream on Hulu)

    I never understood why french was a romantic language, until I watched this movie. The score is beautiful and the slow burn romance between the two main characters is captivating. I don’t know what more to say, painters and ladies just go together it seems and this movie proves that. It’s a bit long but it doesn’t feel like that long of a movie.

[danijadegordon]

How to Change the World According to AOC

 Living in 2020 we witness history happening all around us every day. We tune in to the news and something new that has never been done before is happening. Stuff like scientific discoveries and new social issues that need to be addressed. We are constantly evaluating our current climate and how we can fix it. And as young people living in this changing world, we feel like we need to help make a difference but tend to think we aren’t capable. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shows college students that if you believe in something, and want to make a difference, it doesn’t matter your background or perceived societal advantages to be the person to make that change. AOC isn’t like other political figures, she doesn’t come from money, her family isn’t lifetime politicians. She is a normal person with strong convictions and as a college student in today’s political climate, it's evident that college students can learn so much about holding values and advocating for what they believe from AOC. 

            Politics aside, what makes AOC a good role model is she uses her voice to advocate for others. In a world where so many people are disenfranchised, and ignored, to be able to use the platforms and privileges you were given to help other people is so important. Many modern politicians use their power and position to help benefit themselves and people who look like them. AOC, however, understands that she has the power to help people who don’t have the means to help themselves. In a Huffington Post article, they included a quote of AOC saying, “Our district is overwhelmingly people of color, it’s working class, it’s very immigrant ― and it hasn’t had the representation we’ve needed”( source here). Her goal in office isn’t personal, it isn't a case of working up the political ladder because that’s how you can get power. AOC shows college students how to achieve power through advocacy for others. Which is something that is lost on a lot of people today. We go to college so we can make money so we can be happy. But if students, myself included, took a note from AOC and did things to change the world for the better. Became lawyers and politicians to advocate for those un-proportionally targeted by the law. Became doctors to help bring affordable and quality healthcare to areas where healthcare is a privilege and not a right, we can start to imagine a better world, and achieve our personal goals as a side effect of that change.

           I understand for some students it may be hard to convince that AOC is someone to look up too. Her political views and her advocacy of some topics may lead someone with opposing views to dismiss this point. But it’s not just her politics. AOC shows college students that barriers are not impossible to overcome. Republican, democratic, or independent, how ever you politically align yourself, it's hard to imagine being involved in the bigger ticket issues. It’s easy to say, that’s a problem for some other guy. Or, I could never do that I don’t have X, Y, or Z required to achieve what I want to do.  But AOC is a perfect example of not letting those perceived limits stop you. Because if you don’t work to be that change, someone else is going to. And maybe that someone else is a billionaire career politician, or maybe it’s your classmate who got the same grades as you but applied to an internship you wanted but didn’t think you could possibly get. The point is AOC shows college students that the only real limitations are yourself. AOC demonstrates how to use what you know and apply it in a useful way. She tweeted, ���Bartending + waitressing (especially in NYC) means you talk to 1000s of people over the years. Forces you to get great at reading people + hones a razor-sharp BS detector. Just goes to show that what some consider to be 'unskilled labor' can actually be anything but.” AOC got where she is today because she used her perceived disadvantages as tools to work with. She knew she didn’t have the money or resources that her opponent had, so she used Social Media to get her campaign running because that’s what she had available. As college students, we can learn to stop focusing on what could possibly hold us back from achieving what we want to do, and instead look for ways to use what we do have. As the world changes we as students need to be like AOC and change with it, work outside what we have learned about how things are “supposed” to be done. Create new paths for ourselves and others.

           Nothing important or necessary comes easy. AOC shows us as students that we can do even the most impossible things. If we choose to ignore that advice, we are complacent and give into the system we once wanted to impact. The world is our responsibility, as college students, we are the next generation who will be congressmen, and lawyers, and the people who are going to run the world. It would be nice if we could learn from those who caused the issues we face today, and instead of repeating those mistakes be like AOC and fight them with new ideas and solutions to those previous problems. Change doesn’t come from the people doing what's always been done, and I hope in years to come to see more people like AOC changing the world and the positive changes that will result from it.  

[danijadegordon]

Does the media we consume affect how we view ourselves?

 Instead of spending my days playing outside, running around, riding bikes, or even just sitting with my friends somewhere, I spent my pre-teens scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, and most frequently Tumblr. I consumed hours and hours of content and media that never seemed to end. Pictures, videos, gifs, and text posts gave me my daily dopamine boost. I cared more about actors playing fictional characters in shows than I did about almost anything else. I read stories written by people like me about the characters I was watching. It was exciting and overwhelming. I can attribute almost all of my personality and sense of humor to Tumblr. There was a community for everything. If you had ever felt excluded before this was a place where you felt like part of something. It was new enough that it was shiny, anonymous enough that even the shyest people felt okay with being themselves. And the longer people were on the website the more they shared, and naturally communities around things that made people different started. Most notably, the mental health community. 

This space was created for inclusion and validation, spread positivity through inspiration. This community shared deep intimate stories about their struggles, used each other as crutches when things got hard. They created a safe space for people who needed it. And to its credit, it was and still is today an overall very positive and helpful community. When I talked to my friends about this, a lot of them say that it helped them with their own struggles.  But like, as large groups of people end up doing, gatekeeping in the community began. Posts saying things like, “You aren’t bipolar because you are having a bad day” and “You aren’t antisocial because you don’t have friends”, while well-intended ended up coming across as shame-y and exclusionary. Consuming this media in my early teens ended up affecting how I saw my own mental health. I denied my own mental illness to myself for almost 3 months, before I even thought that I should talk to someone. I spent the first semester of my sophomore year, staring at my white walls, laying on my bed, and just wishing that I had the energy to put my life back together. My room was covered in dirty clothes, I was wearing the same shirt I had worn for the last three days, and I still refused to believe I had anything wrong with me. My grades suffered terribly, and I still denied what was happening. The community on Tumblr, the mental health gatekeepers telling me what was and what wasn’t a valid mental illness or opinion, or symptoms, was engrained in my brain. The same people who set out to create a safe space for people who struggled had failed me. It had me convinced that if I said I had depression, I would get shamed and yelled at by people with actual depression. Like it was a competition. I didn’t want to seem like an insensitive person to people struggling with mental illness, but I neglected to see that I was also suffering. When talking to my friends who had mental illness previously to being exposed to the community on Tumblr, told me that it helped them find their place and define what they were dealing with, the friends I talked to who had developed mental illnesses after being exposed, like myself, felt otherwise.

I chose people I knew had been on Tumblr and suffered from mental health to talk to and asked them a similar set of questions relating to Tumblr, and their own mental health. When I sat down to talk to Tai, a freshman theater arts student at LIU, she told me that she felt the communities on Tumblr were helpful to her. She felt they had helped to destigmatize mental illness. When I talked to Cat, a sophomore ES&P major, she said similar things. Cat said, “(Tumblr) helped me… in middle school you don’t really get any teaching about mental health,” she continued, “Posts on Tumblr explaining it really helped me”. And while I don’t disagree that this community despite its flaws has an overall positive impact, I had really expected that they would have felt similar to me. The idea that they didn’t have validation in their struggles. When I talked to Derek, a freshman at LIU, he helped me realize the difference. Derek agreed with Cat and Tai in the fact that it was helpful in identifying and learning about their own mental illness, but he also felt that double-edged sword that I had. He said when he realized he had his own mental health issues, it was hard for him to identify it because of the precautions and parameters around what it meant to be mentally ill by the Tumblr community. I shared my own experience with this issue to the people I interviewed and most of them could understand how this culture could negatively affect someone’s mental health.

What I ended up learning through talking to my friends about the relationship between social media and mental health that I had noticed, was that we need to talk more about these issues. When someone tells you about something going on with them, we need to listen and not make them feel different. We need to have more open conversations, instead of forcing people to find communities online. If we could teach people about mental health in school, and at home, and have open conversations about not being okay then we could eliminate the negative side of what the existing community is doing. If someone had given me a lesson on depression and anxiety and how it feels without the judgment behind it that a lot of posts on Tumblr seem to have, I wouldn’t have wasted a semester of my life lying in bed feeling sorry for myself. Having stopped and analyzed my own relationship with Tumblr, and talked to others about it, I feel more secure in myself. Knowing that while they didn’t have my exact same experience, but they understood how it could happen, made me feel less insane. So, if you are struggling, and you feel like you cannot express it because you don’t have proof or its not that bad compared to some people, don’t let that stop you from being happy. Because the only person you can save in the end is yourself.  

[danijadegordon]

Uninspired in your gameplay? Tiny Living will solve that.

As a builder in the sims, Tiny Living was something that I was very excited to own. I feel pretty comfortable building large family homes, with multiple bedrooms and floors, so the challenge of the ting homes really caught my interest. In true Sims stan fashion, I bought and downloaded the newest addition to the already impressively large and full game so far immediately after it was released.

Now a quick disclaimer: I have been playing for the last couple weeks with this pack. But, I wanted to do a walkthrough with this pack and discover university, to show it off. After playing both expansions to the game, I think the items in both packs complement each other well and will show what you can do with the new stuff pack.

I started a new game for this, so I began in create-a-sim (CAS). After spending a stupidly long time making my sim for my walkthrough, I created my sim and gave her outfits all using only Tiny Living and Discover University. The result was a laid back look that had a very cozy vibe. The clothes in both packs complement each other very nicely, and if you have one pack already, CAS wise, you should get the other. 

So now my sim needed a place to live. I chose one of the lots in Britechester to demolish and build my sims tiny home. I started building my 'micro' home, as its called in the sims, defined as 32 tiles or less home. I wanted to push my creative limits for this build, as I've found that's really what this pack is about. It challenges players to think outside the box and do something different than what is usually thought about. One thing I really enjoy about Tiny Living is the color palette in their build items. There are a lot of complementing colors and the items all have matching color themes, which isn't always the case as longtime sims players know. 

I will admit. I motherloded*. And as I started to play I added other items from different packs. But only after I had a fully furnished house, and only for aesthetics... I was just too invested in this build to stop now and not landscape and such. So the final version I’m showing you is a little over a single sim budget, but… it’s my game, and I'm proud.

After making my sim and her tiny home, I went in-game to do playability run-through of the house and to explore gameplay in a tiny home. Despite a few tight squeezes in my final build, the tiny house had everything my sim needed, and even fit a 5 person welcome wagon on move-in day. I enrolled my sim at Britechester University as a communications major (I couldn’t help myself) and got her a job as a freelance author. And the tiny home is perfect for her.

Tiny Living seems like another niche pack put out by the Sims team, but the depth and dynamic it brings into the gameplay and build mode makes it more than that. It bounces off and meshes well with previous packs that have been released. The aesthetic and system of the tiny home building just adds a new element to the game that refreshes the game enough to spark uninspired gameplay.

*cheat in the game to get money