Mrs. Ho's 11th Grade AP Lang 2022-2023

The last push of the semester is coming up, so it is extremely important to focus and study to get good grades for midterms. While studying, it can be tempting to check your phone for just a minute, but the temptation causes us to get sucked into social media and other distractions, which causes us to waste time rather than study. So, as I study for my midterms this weekend, here are my top distractions to avoid. YouTube. There is always one more clickbaity video to watch. Then once you watch that, there's always another video queued up with an exciting title and thumbnail. As a result of what you click on, the algorithm knows what videos you would be interested in. YouTube is a big attention grabber. TikTok. TikTok may be the biggest distraction of all time. The TikTok app is a social media platform that lets you post short videos and scroll through them as if they're endless. TikToks range from pranks to advertisements and funny dances. Instagram. The gram. It is easy to get ...

  Whether you use Spotify or Apple Music, you have to admit Spotify is better. I remember my dad mentioning ‘The Playlist,’ a show about Spotify’s origins. I haven’t quite had a chance to watch it, but we’ve discussed how revolutionary Spotify was as a company.  It was founded on- as I was writing this, I freaked out, apparently, Spotify is one day older than me- April 23rd, 2006 , and launched later in 2008. At this time, you would typically have to buy physical copies of an album like CDs, or you could pirate it. Pirating grew as access to the internet increased, but download time was lengthy, and it wasn’t easy to find the song you were looking for.      The first “streaming” service was Napster, but it also required you to download the song with the possibility of viruses. Napster was problematic because not all songs uploaded were licensed; it took possible money from artists and their record companies.  Daniel Ek worked with Martin Lorentzon to crea...

In this blog, I am discussing some new or important issues plaguing the game.  Apex Legends has had many issues, most of which I would attribute to the company owning the development studio (Respawn Entertainment), EA or Electronic Arts. As I stated in my first blog on Apex, EA is notorious for being greedy regarding microtransactions, and unfortunately, it applies to Apex. Although Apex Legends's situation is not as bad as some other games, it is far from perfect. Many can argue that the free game abuses its high prices and does not reinvest enough into improving the game. I understand that companies need profit, but for a game that made $2 billion in revenue since launch and a projected $1 billion a year for future years, the whole system is running with absurdly little money reinvested.  The tournaments are partly funded by specific (tournament-related) in-game purchases, which is done in many games, but for apex, a large amount of the prize is derived from these specific p...

During this past Thanksgiving break, my family and I went on a trip up to Orlando to spend some time together. One of the most memorable parts of the trip was when I and my brother went to the Orlando Magic game. On the 25th of November, the Magic were set to play the Philadelphia 76ers, and although the outcome was not what we were hoping for, it was still a thrilling game to watch. We started the night by arriving at the arena about half an hour before the game began because we knew that there would be a lot of traffic and it would be hard to get into the arena. The traffic was so bad that my parents ended up dropping us off 2 blocks away from the arena and we ended up walking the rest of the way. Once we entered the arena, I was surprised at how nice and clean everything was and how pleasant the scenery was. We walked to our seats and were impressed by how close the seats were to the court, even though we bought the tickets for cheap and at the last minute. They had the entertai...

  If you asked me 2 years ago where I would think I would be in life now, my answer would definitely be far from what it became. During the terrible covid year of 2020, my parents began having talks about leaving Canada. They both were truly tired of the lifestyle we had in Toronto and wanted a change. It was in the summer of 2021 when I found out that my parents decided to officially move to Florida. During my first reaction, I was honestly excited. Regardless of the fact that I was pretty happy with where my life was during my time in Toronto, the idea of a complete reset sounded amazing. However, I did not realize that a complete “reset,” is a lot harder than it seems and that there are a lot of obstacles that come with making the life-changing decision of moving countries. The biggest hardship that came with leaving was being far from my family, specifically my grandparents and cousins. I was fortunate enough to have one of my grandfathers come live here with us, but everyone e...

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite times of the year. It's a time to spend quality time with family and friends. It's always a joy to have extra days off from school to relax, hang out with family, and eat a lot of food. This year, my brother Noah flew down from school in Philadelphia. He also had the week off, so neither of us was busy. Spending time with him was nice, as I don't see him often since he goes to school so far away.  Usually, we spend Thanksgiving morning preparing the house to be clean for our grandparents to come over. We also usually cook a lot of food, and my brother and I are responsible for baking a few desserts. This year, however, was not a typical one. My grandparents could not come to Florida this year, so we got a little lazy and decided to spend the day at the beach instead. After some discussion, we also realized that nobody was really excited about the turkey anyway, so we decided to have a barbecue. My mother decided that maybe we should at lea...