I'm Eating an Apple

  Many people have probably seen or heard of gay couples appearing in Japanese media. While  Japan is renowned for its “Yaoi” and “Yuri” manga and anime, pieces of media that portray gay male or female partners, these genres are actually marketed toward straight men and women, often telling a story of  unrealistic scenarios and relationships. Japan’s tolerance for gay individuals is actually not as inviting as the mangas make you think. On occasion, however, a manga will be published specifically for the LGBT community. Enter Shimanami Tasogare .  Shimanami Tasogare , also known as Our Dreams at Dusk , is written and illustrated by Yuhki Kamatani. They are openly x-gendered, which translates to nonbinary, and uses they/them pronouns. In the story, main character Tasuku Kaname didn’t clear his phone’s search history and some of his “friends” found some evidence that he might not be straight. He attempts suicide, thinking that his life was over, but got interrupted by...

This month, I read Youth by Isaac Asimov. The main characters in Youth are two boys known as Slim and Red. Red lives at his father’s estate in the country and Slim is visiting them along with his father, the astronomer. Red and Slim quickly become good friends and one day, Red shows Slim two small, strange animals he found. These animals are unique and look nothing like anything seen on the planet before. Red’s goal is to use them to get into his dream job of working at the circus, so Red and Slim take care of them together. They keep the animals in a cage, observe them, and make sure they have food to eat. Meanwhile, back at the house, Red’s dad and Slim’s dad have many conversations about the youth, the progression of society, and aliens on other planets. Slim’s father, an accomplished astronomer, made contact with aliens and the purpose of his visit was to meet the aliens and convince Red’s dad to trade with them. The third perspective of the story is the perspective of the aliens...

     Ready Player Two follows Wade Watts after the events of the first novel, Ready Player One . As with any other Squeal, it contains spoilers for its first Novel, so there is your warning. So a few days after Wade inherits half a trillion dollars and becomes the richest man alive, he learns of a new technology Halliday was producing in the background, the OASIS Neural Interface (ONI). This essentially makes it so anybody could control their OASIS character with only their mind and experience all five senses. Art3mis don't really like this, saying it would just cause the world to go into even more of a mess getting into a decent-sized fight with Wade resulting in their break up. Although Art3mis doesn't approve of the ONI headsets, the rest of the High Five, Aech and Shoto, approve. So, the headsets go into production and the sales went through the ceiling. The amount of ONI users increased rapidly and once they hit, with 7,777,777 at once a new easter egg/ riddle appea...

The 68 Rooms is one of my all time favorite book series. Written by Urbana native (and Campus Middle School for girls cofounder) Marianne Malone, the series focuses on two Chicago sixth graders named Jack and Ruthie. One day they discover a key that allows them to shrink down and enter the Thorne Rooms in the Art Institute of Chicago, which turn out to be more than just rooms just also portals to the time period they represent. Over the course of the four book series they unravel mysteries that had been unsolved for centuries. They are a great read. While the books are aimed at a tween audience, I think if I reread them now I would enjoy them just as much.  If you have never heard of the Thorne Rooms, you’re missing out. They are these amazing miniature rooms created by Narcissa Thorne in the 1930s to a 1:12 scale. Each room is labelled with a letter and a number. The letter is either E for European (though for some reason, there are a couple Asian rooms with this classificatio...