Hello, everyone, this is Arca. It's been a while, but yesterday I celebrated my 16th birthday! Obviously I wasn't able to go see a movie with my friends after going to a restaurant for dinner as I usually do, but I devised a fun way to make up for it with Discord. Discord has both text chat, audio and video features, and features a way to stream one's screen to multiple people at once... so in other words, it was perfect for a virtual movie-watching party! If you said that no new Star Wars movie was releasing this year, well, luckily, you'd be incorrect. The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special was a short 45-minute movie on Disney+ that released last month, but I held off on watching the pseudo-time travel/Christmas movie parody until my birthday party!  So, to start from the beginning of the day, I woke up, ate some pancakes, and then was greeted with a surprise! I had gotten a birthday wish from the person who plays my favorite Star Wars (and possibly fiction in general) c...

(Above you can see the spooky edits I made to both my profile picture/blog favicon and my personal Discord server's icon for this year!) UPDATED: I wrote this in the morning, but now, in the evening, I updated it at the bottom :)  Hello, everyone! I know I haven't posted in a long, long time. A lot has happened since mid-July. For one, school has continued (in-person, kind of) through hybrid school for many people where I live. I was hybrid for a short amount of time but am now back to remote. Many, many exciting things have also happened. The article I wrote with the fantastic team at Curious Science Writers got published! It's about using wearable smartwatches to fight smoking addiction, a problem that likely affects at least someone you know in your life, like a family member or loved one:  https://curioussciencewriters.org/2020/10/26/going-from-ismoke-to-no-smoking-with-wearables/ .  I know I've talked about technology constantly on my blog, but this article is more...

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Hello, everyone. This is Arca. I was planning on completing a month-overdue post on my thoughts on that amazing PlayStation 5 reveal event that I watched live with millions of others on June 11th. Instead, I decided to talk about two more recent events. It'll also be shorter than usual. Here we go! Paper Mario Gameplay Shown in Treehouse Presentation Today, and Bakugan Announcement Causes Fan Toxicity Image Credit: Nintendo Nintendo hosted a Treehouse Live presentation, and beforehand explicitly stated that it would only be about the upcoming game (it releases in just a week, in fact) Paper Mario: The Origami King  and also a brand-new game from Shantae independent developers WayForward not-yet-announced at the time for a third party franchise. Then it aired at 1 PM Eastern time and the video dislikes started rolling in. The chat was also very toxic, but it seemed mostly to be from arrogant fans expecting it to be a Direct (Treehouse presentations have literally never been like Dir...

Image collage done by me, but individual screenshots from Amazon and PlayStation Blog . Image credit for game box to Sony, Marvel, and Insomniac.  Hello, everyone. This is Arca, and today I will be doing a news roundup of sorts. This post was originally, as I hinted at in yesterday's post (which you should totally read here ), going to focus on next-gen AAA games potentially all costing $70 rather than $60. Then, two pieces of breaking news occurred. First, yesterday at noon, the book sequel to Ernest Cline's 2011 movie-sparking phenomenon Ready Player One was given a confirmed title, cover, and release date. Then, just 3 hours ago as of the time I started typing up this post, Sony via the official PlayStation Blog showed off for the first time what PlayStation 5 games will have as their cover art design through Spider-Man: Miles Morales . Let's tackle all of those subjects, as well as my thoughts on them, in precisely that order, starting with... Ready Player Two book is ...

Image Credit: EA Motive via Engadget Hey, everyone. This is Arca, and today I will be discussing the announcement, as well as the gameplay reveal, for the new EA Star Wars game coming October 2 of this year, titled Star Wars: Squadrons . It will have both multiplayer modes, a singleplayer campaign, and VR-support on PS4's PSVR (which is great, especially for PSVR owners like me who'd like to be able to fulfill the dream of jumping into an X-Wing's pilot cockpit), as well as PC VR, and will launch on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. It will be a starship combat game with crossplay multiplayer across all platforms, which is great. The game was leaked on the PlayStation store, as I talked about all the way back in March ( http://www.arcabaran.com/2020/03/star-wars-project-maverick-ea-leaked.html ), as "Project Maverick". I watched the initial reveal trailer premiere live on YouTube, and didn't see the gameplay reveal live but watched it a few hours after it premiered (al...

Image Credit: Activision, source , cropping done by Bandipedia Hello, everyone. This is Arca. This post is my reaction to the first new Crash Bandicoot game in over a decade that was announced via livestream a few weeks ago, titled "It's About Time". It will release on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 2, 2020 (the same exact day that a new Star Wars game, Squadrons , will be released). I'm assuming that, even though PC and Nintendo Switch releases haven't been confirmed yet, they'll likely be revealed eventually. This is since there's no reason not to put a multiplatform game on PC, and also since the past few Crash remasters were also released by Activision on the Switch with a bit of a delay (or none at all, in the case of the Switch version of Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled ). Despite the next-generation of consoles, the PlayStation 5 from Sony and the Xbox Series X from Microsoft, literally releasing a month or two after this game releases, b...

Image Source Hello, everyone. Saturday was the Fourth of July, AKA Independence Day. Happy (late) Fourth of July to all! As you probably know, this is celebrated all across America for it is the day that the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress. This, of course, led to the birth of the United States, independent from England. Normally, it would be celebrated with fireworks and barbecue parties. It still is... without any precautions by those who aren't practicing keeping themselves and others safe. But with precautions by those who are. Or, just not at all in the places where public fireworks got canceled and no one invited you to a barbecue party so you just have to barbecue some chicken yourself. Or eat a veggie burger if you're vegetarian, I suppose.  On Saturday, I started out on the Fourth of July by going to a half-capacity beach for the second day in a row. Some people clearly, blatantly didn't care about social distancing and this conc...

This post was born when I remembered that I, once upon a time, intended to make a series of photo editing "tutorials". The only one I ever made used Google Drawings and may have been semi-impressive considering that at that age we were learning how to use spreadsheets in Computers class, but nowadays seeing as I can be outclassed in literally anything by someone my age out there, that's not very "big brain", if you catch my drift. And what I'm going to be showing you how to do today, seeing as I made it entirely with free browser-based tools available on the web, intentionally isn't. I don't currently have the tools or skills (beyond Adobe Photoshop Elements, which I have already used for this ) to really do it in a more complicated manner, or without a small barely-noticeable watermark on the bottom right corner if you want to make it a transparent-background GIF, so you'll have to bear with me.  Anyone can easily do this! This is especially gr...