Category Archives: Hobby

entertainment, Hobby, television

Why You Should Start Watching Survivor

By Jonah Vroegop

Edited by Natalie Grace Sipula

[3.5 minute read]

When one sits down to watch the hit reality series Survivor, they’re in for countless hours of entertainment, drama, and an eye-opening look at an American social experiment. This is how it works – a group of about 16 to 20 people sets off to an island with only basic survival supplies and is then split into two tribes. These two teams compete against each other in frequent challenges to earn creature comforts or immunity and to avoid being eliminated. After each challenge, the losing team must vote for one of their members to be sent off the island and removed from the game. These eliminations happen until there is one final “survivor” who takes home the one million dollar prize. In theory, the premise of the show is simple. However, I’ve learned that there are many more moving parts to the game itself. The contestants protect themselves from elimination by forming alliances within their tribe and strategically eliminating other players who they believe could slow them down or pose a threat to them later on.

Photo by Chor Tsang on Unsplash

In the first season especially, there was a heavy emphasis on survival. The contestants were made to hunt and fish, gather food from the jungle, and cook only over the fires they managed to build. Many players used their fishing and hunting skills to gain the favor of others and therefore avoid elimination. Due to the lack of food and other resources, weakness and hunger can later put tribes at a disadvantage. Although the characters face harsh survival conditions, I like how it forces them to be more strategic about who they vote off and how they do it. In the later seasons, the aspect of survival is less relevant and the show is more focused on the complex elimination challenges and unique contestant personalities.

Photo by Julian Hanslmaier on Unsplash

The tribes themselves also influence the flow of the show heavily. Through the show’s 40 seasons, there have been such divisions as “White Collar vs. Blue Collar”, “Gen X vs Millennials”, and “All Stars”, in which some well-known players come back from previous seasons. Some tribe divisions are fair and others are less so, thus influencing the order of eliminations and increasing the tensions between teams.

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Advice, Art, college, culture, Hobby, Language, student life, USC

How to Write a Blog Article

By Natalie Grace Sipula

Edited by Natalie Grace Sipula

[6 minute read]

Writing is hard. From a pretty young age, I have greatly enjoyed expressing myself through creative writing, and as I got older, I started to enjoy academic writing as well. I would write poetry about things I observed in my day-to-day life, short stories or fragments of prose, and even entered a few essay-writing competitions. Something I noticed pretty early on about writing is that writing the things that come to your mind without method or intent is a lot easier than writing for an audience. I prefer writing while keeping the reader in mind more because writing only for myself lets me pick up bad writing habits, such as not carefully considering my word choice, as the only person interpreting the writing would be me. But writing creatively for a reader is pretty difficult, and academic-style writing for a reader can be exhausting because most college students already have to do that so much for their classes. A form of writing that I had not previously considered before coming to college, however, was blog writing. When I started working at the USC American Language Institute, I tried out writing for a blog for the very first time. One blog that I wrote about rereading Harry Potter with an older perspective challenged me to consider the perspective of both myself and my audience.

Photo by Mathilde Langevin on Unsplash

Writing for a blog is a great way to open your creative energy and write to a wider audience while also being able to maintain a level of informality and free expression to your writing. A blog article could be about anything–your daily routine, a hobby you love doing, your journey writing other things, or aspects of your social life. It is a happy medium between writing creatively or academically for others and dabbling in creative writing or journaling for yourself. This can be good because it allows you to practice writing with a sense of accountability, while also having fun. I have written a few blog articles since coming to college, and I found that I had a great time writing them and was actually proud of my work after the fact. I also realized that I was less judgmental of my own writing when writing a blog article, which made it easier for me to actually finish a writing project I started on. For me, the most difficult part of writing a blog article is narrowing down exactly what it is you want to write about.

What can you write about?

Have you ever had that feeling where you are inspired to write something and then as soon as you sit down in front of your journal or computer screen, your mind goes blank? Or when you know of a lot of things you think you might be interested in writing about, but aren’t sure where to start? This is a very common problem writers encounter, but with some consideration and time, it can be overcome. Some common blog topics to inspire you are: life advice about a specific situation or circumstance, a recipe or instructions on how to do/make something, a list of recommendations, a funny or shocking story and a lesson learned from it, hobbies or goals and how to accomplish them, and so much more.

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Art, athletics, entertainment, exercise, health, Hobby, Identity, Outlook

Return to Practice

By Eileen Kim

Edited by Natalie Grace Sipula

[3 minute read]

When I was younger, I understood the concept of practice in the context of the Merriam Webster Dictionary definition: “to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become proficient”. As a child who participated in many sports and played multiple musical instruments, practice referred to the events I worked on to improve my technical skills. At practice, I would learn how to do better through acts of repetition and intentional change. 

Eventually, I chose to centralize my practice towards my passion for dance. With my goal of becoming a professional ballet dancer, practice took on a whole new layer of meaning. I worked daily and repeatedly at a set of physical movements in ballet to improve and refine my technique. This repetition led to growth and mastery within ballet and my practice became understood as a necessary means that would result in self-improvement.

Photo by Nihal Demirci on Unsplash

As I got older, my conception of practice began to evolve. My practice became grounded in the habitual sense of coming back to something. There was still a level of mastery that I was after, but it was more so realized as a continuous and infinite pattern that I felt compelled to return to. Year after year and almost every day, I would start again at the ballet barre where I would repeat the same series of physical movements. But the sameness of this repetition never bored me, because everyday was different and I was different everyday. Every day brought its own joys and challenges, and everyday I came back with 24 more hours of lived experience. Everything surrounding me was in a constant state of change and the stability of my daily practice became like a refuge for me, one that I could always return to and find comfort in.

As I reflect on how I approach my practice in the present, I have found that in many ways, practice is similar to a routine. The habitual nature of both concepts are the same, but practice puts an intentionality to the repetition and implies a sense of growth. The contents of our daily routines can be the same as our daily practices, but approaching our daily routines as daily practices can drastically reframe how we approach our lives. For me, practice no longer only refers to the physical practice I put into my dancing body. My daily practices encompass how I approach my life, what I eat, what time I go to sleep, how I take care of my body, and how I take care of my mind.

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