Swallowing Stones Book Review

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          Swallowing Stones by Joyce McDonald is a really well thought out book that people should give a chance to read. From the beginning, it starts off good enough to hook you into the story. One of the best things in this book are the characters. It makes you want to like specific characters and vice versa, it makes you dislike others, their characteristics are unique to themselves. The story is interesting enough if you like a little mystery in your books.

          The book begins by introducing the two main characters in this book, Jenna Ward and Michael Mackenzie. Michael fired his Winchester Rifle at a party to show off to his friends , but he fired it on the same day that Jenna’s father was fixing the roof. Her father’s death caused Jenna to have different emotions about the situation. Whenever Michael realizes what he has done, he begins to feel guilty and goes through a lot of emotional struggle and thinks about what’s going to happen if he gets caught. Jenna and Michael have to deal with what’s going on and the book does a good job on illustrating the internal and external struggle of grief. This book does an excellent job on making everything sound realistic and you’re able to make some connections with some of its characters. One of the many themes from this book is that one moment in your life can affect and change your life and others around you. Its plot is excellent and the narrative is well done.  Overall I recommend people to read the book, it has something that everyone can relate to or even learn from.

Personal Narrative

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Minecraft, oh boy, the possibilities are endless. There are the new players who don’t know how to start playing, trollers who obviously troll for fun, the master builders who spend most of their days getting every single pixel out of many exactly on a character that turns out to be about 5,000 blocks tall. Stealers is another type of person, I hate them more than trollers. Sadly, we had one on Swoop_The_Bat’s server and blames other people. I become mayor for a reason. I’m responsible of our small town to find a way to stop this stealer from stealing the precious items from the citizens of this small town. This town started with two random people, a boy and a robotic pig to the population of eight called Block Town.

After realizing someone is stealing our stuff, I had to find evidence. Remembering previous events I remembered Brian reporting that someone stole his brand new, shiny, diamond pickaxe. Then it came, TheZoraKid got obtained a diamond pickaxe even though he hasn’t done much mining these past days. He couldn’t have spent an entire day mining, surely not. He is human, he would have to take a break, use the restroom, parents might get angry, and even I get bored looking at a screen that has nothing more than stone blocks on every fame. So it came, he had would had to steal rare item to obtain it in one day!

A week later I finally finished my house, then got off Minecraft. The next day someone stole my wood from the corners, then looked at everyone else’s houses and saw that TheZoraKid had a complete house. How does he have all that wood when the closest forest is about 300 blocks away. This is when I snapped, took my wood, when I finished his entire house was exposed. Meanwhile, I called Swoop_The_Bat to help me do something. I called my CO-mayor and had to figure an idea to stop him. I looked up how to build a jail in Mincraft. And eventually we tried to make a jail for him, but he was the “police” of our town, so he put me into jail and I escaped, so that failed. Then I thought of the only thing I have control over, I made him leave town, but angrily he’d always come back to steal our stuff.

Swoop had to go and so he is my problem again. I went into my house, stared at my pet pig and asked,” Oink Oink ?” After that I fed him a four of my carrots and then it came. A solution that would probably prevent him from stealing our stuff. I went to everyone’s houses and replaced the door for an iron door. But wait, I was so dumb that I thought to myself faintly. I knew he had the right materials to make a lever, button, or a pressure plate. So I went to the thief’s junky, old, not really resourceful house to check what he has. I had to make it where every time he went into his house he would have to fall down 15 blocks and have half a heart left. I did this so anything that attacks him would kill him, but he intentionally get blown up by creeper right by my house. Later I have to fix that hole I made in his house, meanwhile he was stealing out of Swoop_The_Bat’s house. When I got to the surface he was still in the house, I said fiercely, ” I’m pretty sure he is stealing like always !!!”

I had it with this. I’m annoyed of this madness! So, I told him angrily,”To stop or I’ll ban him for stealing anything else.” Eventually, he stopped for a while until Christmas day. We gamers don’t really care if it is a holiday or what, we still play no matter what. So on Christmas he stole my present and Brian’s too. I killed him and banned him for as long as the server lived. After this happened, he requested, “He won’t steal again and behave as a good citizen.”, I responded with “No! You ruined our town and I gave him too many chances to count on my two bare hands to correct himself , but that’s life do something bad you get punished for your actions. “

Lift Off

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Do you remember the last time we went on a field trip, not counting rewards trips, like when we went bowling ? To tell you the truth I don’t even know, so that’s why we need to go on one. We can learn some history from it and learn about some complex stuff. We can go to NASA to have some amusement for once and learn lots of acquired facts. Shouldn’t we ?

Do you like amusement parks …. me too, but they don’t have the park part, but they do have the amusement part in NASA. Of course, if a place has some amusement in it, shouldn’t they have some activities for us kids ? Well they have that, isn’t that fun ? Interesting fact is that, you can do those activities on their website. Who doesn’t like space-related things ? I mean just looking at rockets, but don’t forget the machines that go beep, beep non-stop, that causes you to get a headache seems fun ….

Now on this trip  we will learn lots of data if we go to NASA. We can learn what Neil did or what the crew members do to help the astronauts into space. At this point, we know we will learn a lot about astronauts, space, and rockets, how it works and this will be an informational trip.

Let’s go to a space adventure, we will have some fun and our brain will be full of knowledge from this trip. Perhaps one of us in here will become an astronaut. Let’s go to NASA, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, wait for it and now we are off.

It’s Evolving

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The sound of the Joystick moving

the sound of the coin falling into the machine

selecting your character

moving a ¾ circle collecting power pellets.

Shooting Galga in space with a ship

the Feeling of Beating the High Score

 

Most of that gone

most don’t even know what the first game ever invented was

everything is evolving into more advanced games

technology changing the way we play ….

 

Words invented to show pixels

HD

FPS (Images moving to another image or Frames Per Second)

Resolution

Graphics

 

Companies taking 1 year to release a new game

instead of 2-5 years.

New games

everything looks so real

so smooth

not much lag going on

 

Touching your screen

seeing your character move

controlling your would

hitting your head on a block

to collect a coin

building a house

out of wood

 

Video games changes kid’s life

was it for the good

or was it for the bad ?