So, today I woke up, and I was still 13 years old. That sentence sounds weird unless you are aware that today is my birthday. In that case, I was actually enthusiastic to wake up super early in the morning and drag myself to school (for once), since I knew that in a matter of hours, I would finally reach a milestone in my life. I would turn officially have been alive for 1.4 decades (AKA 14 years old)! So I ate a pretty average breakfast (an egg omelet, some cheese, and cereal), and then rode the bus to school. I was excited about my period #1 class since, in our school, we have a video livestream every morning. I wasn't really excited about the livestream announcements themselves; they're nothing special, and in my opinion, absolutely not at all better than my elementary school's DDN (which I was the cameraman of, so expect no bias whatsoever). But our Star Wars fanatic teacher, Mr. B, typically puts some song during the break when it is loading, for all of us to list...

Hello everyone! A few days ago, it was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays since it gives everyone time to get together and show gratitude for the special people, privileges, and things in their life. This year, it was no exception. My friends Ali and Burak were kind enough to invite Onur and me over to their house for a Thanksgiving celebration. We ate a delicious feast of turkey and other traditional Thanksgiving food together, talked about what we were thankful for, and had fun playing Super Mario Party together. I recorded bits of our celebration and edited it together into a full-length vlog, uploaded to our collaboration YouTube channel, The AABO Show . You can watch the full video above, right on this site. Or, if you'd like to have the link and open it in a new YouTube tab, here it is:  https://youtu.be/2Fk-sqTVLgo We hadn't posted in a while previous to this, so of course, I started out the video with an Undertale Megalovania meme that prop...

This post serves as a temporary goodbye for my blog. Due to a plethora of responsibilities that I will have to deal with soon, I have officially decided to announce the first ever scheduled hiatus in my blog's history. This means that, not only will I not be able to make new posts myself, but there will actually be a set date which I will continue making them. In the past, there have been times which I would stop blogging for a while, but this time is different. Now, I am doing it voluntarily. This means that anything I originally had planned to publish between now and November 16th is effectively put on hold. Luckily, I didn't exactly have much planned: Just one post. It was going to be a collab story themed after Halloween. I have decided to cancel it for this year. It will no longer be published in time for this Halloween. I am sorry to all whom I may have promised a role in it in advance (Burak included among them). This does not mean that you guys will not get a c...

Hello, guys. This is Arca, and I will be writing about the final week of my annual Turkey trip. I wrote a post that covered the first two weeks of my trip, about Ankara and Bodrum. You can see that here:  http://www.arcabaran.com/2018/08/turkey-trip-2018-weeks-1-2-ankara-and.html This post is ridiculously, hilariously, extremely delayed, as you may have noticed. But that's for a good reason, which I will get into at the end of the post, so read on if you're curious. Anyways, on to the main part of this post! So, a quick recap of what happened leading up to our third week: We stayed in Ankara, the capital city, first, for a week to stay with my mom's side of the family. Then we spent another week in Bodrum, at a beach resort. Finally, we went to Yalova, across from Istanbul, and that is where the final week of our Turkish adventure begins... The first few days, I found myself in my grandma's house, an apartment where both she and my uncle Zafer were staying. I s...

This is Arca, and for the first time in a long time, I have some bad news. Stefan Karl Stefansonn, the Icelandic actor aged 43, has just died of cancer.  He spent most of his life as an actor, in some way or another. After staring out early on with theater, he eventually moved on to movies and television roles. His most famous role, and the one that you probably recognize him for, is his role in the children's show Lazy Town.  I personally, as a child growing up in the mid-2000s, have plenty of memories of me spending my days indirectly with him. Not that he was actually with me, of course; My kindergarten days were of a pre-iPhone era, before the preschoolers of the world entertained themselves by means of staring at an iPad screen and being brainwashed by YouTube "nursery rhymes" (actually strange bootleg, kinda creepy content in disguise). Instead, in the years following my ability to speak, walk, and talk, I entertained myself the old-fashioned way: By watching TV. My...

This post will be a summary of weeks 1 and 2 of my annual vacation in Turkey. My family is completely Turkish, and while I live in the northeastern US, I do pay them a visit them every year. This visit, while it has varied slightly over the course of 13 years, is usually in the same format: One week visiting my mom's side in Ankara, one week visiting my dad's side in Bursa and Yalova, and one week just chilling in the Mediterranean Sea, at a beach resort in Antalya or Bodrum. My trips do vary slightly from this format in terms of whether it is just one week or two per location, and the order of places can vary chronologically, but other than that, this years trip is just like that.  In my three-year tradition of journaling my Turkish travels, this time, since I didn't have enough photos to show for week one (Ankara), I have combined weeks one and two into one post, for your viewing convenience. Week three, which I just started yesterday, will be uploaded at lea...

Hello, this is Arca, and while you are reading this right now, I am in Turkey. Long-time fans of my blog, or anyone who knows me personally, is familiar with the fact that every summer, I go on vacation to Turkey for around three weeks to visit my family and go to the beach. Seeing as I have around three weeks, a decent chunk of which I will be sitting around doing nothing, I decided to not put my time (and WiFi) to waste. To make the most of the summer I have left, I will try to continue to blog as much as possible, even in Turkey. Of course, it won't be as frequent or detailed, but I will try my best to post a few times a week. My blog will still be about my regular post topics, but this time, I will also make a post at the end of each week discussing what I did in Turkey that week. This week, so far, I am in Ankara (the capital of Turkey), and I happened to meet a famous Turkish journalist woman named Ayşe Arman. My mom recognized her at the New York airport, and immedi...