In this post, I will being a review of all three books in the "Masterminds" series by Gordon Korman. I finished the final book yesterday.  Masterminds is an action-packed thriller mystery series with three books in it, all written by one of my favorite authors, Gordon Korman. The first book is called Masterminds , the second one is Masterminds: Criminal Destiny , and the third book that concludes the series is Masterminds: Payback .   Short Plot Summary (Only one spoiler) Its hard to explain the plot of the last two books without spoiling the first one. So I will have the reveal the climax of the first book.   _________________________________________________________________________________ There is a town in New Mexico called Serenity. The kids there live perfect, happy, lives, free of violence and bad things. Four kids: Eli, Malik, Hector, Tori, and Amber, are suspicious of their parents and what they are really up to. Everything in the town seems...

(HI, JOSH!! ) It all started 9 months ago. I have explained this over and over again on previous posts.  Why should I have to re-explain it? Well, I may as well take some direct citations. This is a quote (written by me, so I am not plagiarizing) from the site of the online #savexiangschickens Chicken Petition that me and my friend Xiang created: Xiang Meng is a friend of mine. His family has been owning pet chickens for a while. They are getting older. The officials of Marlboro, NJ want to take them away. The chickens have not caused any harm. According to the neighbors, they supposedly walked into their garage. But they haven't actually done so. Even if they had walked near their property, it is as harmless as a squirrel passing by your yard. Yet they are going to be taken away to some farmers. This is unfair since the Meng family has owned them since they were still in eggs. They have become very attached to them. They have the freedom to keep pets, as long a...

By the way, hi, Josh! :)  The only reaction I can give right now is the title of this post.   June 2017 is the one month of the entire history of my blog to get the most additional views within that month, with over 9,000 so far. The amount of views that I once made in a few weeks is now what I often make in a single day. Take a while to digest that sentence. For those of you who still don't understand the enormity of the situation, let me say it in a different context: Bob can eat one thousand cookies, but it takes him a week or two. Recently though, his doctor has worried about his risk of obesity, since he eats one thousand cookies in a matter of a single day, and has been doing this for the past few days. Bob expects this habit to continue. He may eat around 30 thousand cookies per month, and this can potentially lead to an additional 60 thousand cookies by the end of summer and crazily enough, (if this pattern continues)  360 thousand per year!!!!!...

Before I begin this post, I just want to say hi to my awesome camp counselor, Josh, who is reading this right now! :) Anyways, today happened to be my first day of recreation camp. In the morning, I woke up one hour later than I would on a school day to go on the bus to the rec center. My little brother Onur and I rode together on the same bus, and that hasn't happened since I was in 5th grade at Defino. My home base ended up being Marlboro High School, so that is where on-site activities will take place. Onur's home base was Defino Elementary (he is so lucky that he sees his own school again)! The first half of the day, nothing special happened. We just stayed on site. In the afternoon we went to the aqautics center for swimming. When I came home, I saw that the new Switch game Arms had arrived from Amazon, and me and Onur had fun versing each other in it. Lastly, we went to Onur's friend's house for a birthday party in their backyard. Then I came home and starte...

Before I begin this post, I want to point out that I didn't get a chance to make a post today. This is due to the fact that yesterday was my last day of Turkish school EVER (even more "good riddance" than normal school) and I didn't have time because after that, we visited a family member's house in Long Island, New York, to have a feast for Eid (a Muslim holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan). There was an insane amount of traffic both going there and getting back, and by the time we got back home it was past midnight. It was an interesting few days after school ended. That Friday, I was going to go to a Third Eye Blind concert with some of my friends. Before that, I had a doctor's appointment. I waited at the doctor's office for over an hour. They kept on saying the doctor would be there in ten minutes, but an hour passed and it didn't happen. We just marched out of there, in a hurry, and that was the end of that. We went to the concert, ...

Before I begin this post, here is my previous post, which explains all the changes I made to my blog's template recently as a part of Upgrade 7.0:  http://arcabaran.blogspot.com/2017/06/school-is-over-blog-upgrade-70-summer.html Because of all the recent madness with this really pointless trend of "The Floor is Lava", I decided  to combine this trend with another one: fidget spinners. I coded a game on Scratch called "The Floor is Fidget Spinners". Click the green flag to play! You can play the HTML version below Once you lose, click the green flag again to start over. NOTE: The game will not work on mobile devices. If you are on a computer browser and it isn't working, then go here:  https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/167088741/#player Use the arrow keys to throw fidget spinners on the floor! Every fidget spinner gives you  a point. You are timed for 20 seconds. Try to get as many points as possible within the time you are given! Cli...

Good riddance... I have finally finished 6th grade, and this school year has finally ended. Today was my last day of school, and it was a half-day. I promised you guys in my previous post that my next post would be out today. So, I kept that promise! After several months of upgrade 6.0, I decided to finally upgrade my blog to  7.0! 6.0 was just an excuse to change the logo. This time, I packed 7.0 with A LOT of features to improve my blog's layout!  List of Features The first thing you must have noticed is that I changed my logo! I made it orange and blue, which I think are kind of summer-ish colors.   I also added a "read more" button that automatically shows up on every post on the home page. If you are reading up to this point, then chances are, you clicked it already. (Unless you got here from a link to this post.) I added this feature so that you wouldn't have to scroll down forever to see more posts below the featured one. I changed the entire te...

If you are confused as to why I titled my post like that, let me explain... It all started a month ago. It was the time to sign up for being representatives for student council executive board. As you already know, I don't exactly have the best past with elections (Google+ moderators... Edwin won... *cough, cough* ) but my mom wanted me to give it a try because I could put it on my resume or whatever. I agreed that instead of running for 7th grade president (I am currently in 6th grade but this vote is for next year), I would only run for vice -president.  I thought I had no chance of winning because in the beginning of the year, when they did the elections, twenty people ran and I knew I had no chance among that many people. But this time, things were different. For vice president (and apparently president as well), only two people ran, including me. My only opponent was a girl whom I wont say their name for the sake of their privacy, obviously. We had to prepare ...