The Stargazer

In November 2019, my opinion on music changed forever. As dramatic as that statement may seem, it is true. On this freezing autumn night in New York City, I was fortunate enough to have tickets to Bob Dylan at the Beacon Theatre. Unsurprisingly, I was the youngest person in the audience by far. Strangers in the audience chatted with one another about the impact that Dylan’s discography has had on their lives. While I have been a Dylan fan since my early teen years, it was remarkable to witness first-hand how Dylan’s career has influenced lives for over sixty decades. In the last month, I have found myself listening to Dylan more than ever before, and I cannot help but wonder, how is Dylan’s music still so relevant?

Judd Apatow is one of the most unique voices in 21st century comedy filmmaking. With an entertainment career spanning three decades, Apatow has been a long-standing figure in comedy on both television and particularly film.

In the list of trending video game livestreams on YouTube, after PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Minecraft, and Fortnite, there is an indie game with a humble seven thousand viewers. Since the promo art faintly resembles another famous title – Five Nights at Freddy’s – and it’s free on the App Store and Google Play, I was intrigued enough to give it a try.  

Quarantine would have been a lot harder without Wi-Fi. Imagine playing Charades in Morse code, or sending your buddies a messenger pigeon with a tic-tac-toe table. Fortunately, we have better options these days and a vast variety of them too. Below is a list of 23 games that you can play online. They are split into categories so it’s easier to find the kind of game you’re looking for.  

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has the captivating ability to leave audiences wanting more. It was only normal then, after watching Shoplifters on Hulu, I turned to Nobody Knows. But what does this have to do with Totoro?

I cannot believe I am writing about Grand Theft Auto V seven years after it was released. The game’s popularity became very clear when it was available for free in 2020. From May 14 to 21 anyone could claim GTA V for free at the Epic Games Store. The demand was so great, the store was brought offline. In a tweet, the Epic Games Store acknowledged the problems with the site – “slow loading times, 500 errors, or launcher crashing” – and promised a swift solution. The amount of attention this spree attracted brought up the question of how GTA V is still popular.

Leaks. Leaks everywhere. If you’re interested in the details of this scandal, but haven’t read much in order to avoid spoilers, then you’ve come to the right place. This is a spoiler-free compilation of information from several different sites, including Forbes, Polygon, IGN, Screen Rant, and Twitter. There is also a timeline of events created by a member of the ASLC’s Game Committee, Parker Chojonowski, along with a few thoughts about leaks involving popular game franchises.

To some people, Rosemary’s Baby is a timeless, eerie classic that deserves to be shared. To others, it may just be that strange movie that Blair and Dan watched together over the phone in Gossip Girl. To me, it was the movie with the most amount of yellow and perhaps the most unintentional amount of allusion I have ever seen. I read Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s dark short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” in high school, not long before watching Roman Polanski’s cursed movie for the first time. I remember noticing a pattern and then pointing out every single yellow item onscreen. There were so many that I became an unbearable company. Yet the parallels between these two works run much deeper than the shared color.

Early memories of Minecraft sound like a mixture of "Can’t Hold Us" by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, "Blurred Lines" (you know exactly the one), and "Harlem Shake". In 2013, at the height of Minecraft’s popularity, the word “selfie” became part of common vernacular for the first time and was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionary. For many of us college students, those were our middle school days, and it’s probably best to leave those in the past. That’s exactly what happened, according Google Trends. Following Minecraft’s meteoric rise in 2013, it dipped and has been steadily decreasing in web search popularity on Google and YouTube. But seemingly out of nowhere, it’s trending again?

Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games trilogy, recently announced the release of a new prequel to her hit series. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is expected to reach bookshelves in May 2020. The film series has briefly resurged in popularity following Freeform’s Hunger Games Weekend – a marathon of all four movies which aired April 25^th and 26^th. Lionsgate also streamed the series for their "Lionsgate Live! A Night at the Movies" fundraising event on April 17^th. It’s no secret that The Hunger Games is no longer the buzz-worthy, popular series it was around 2012. In my own experience, bringing it up in casual conversation is a little awkward for everyone involved, but it shouldn’t be. There are a lot of amazing feats that this franchise and its respective books have accomplished. Even if it’s been a few years since it peaked in popularity, there are still reasons to support this series.