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Jiya Kohar Week 8: Kirkification

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The first meme I remember seeing was when I was scrolling through TikTok, one September night, and stumbled on a clip of Charlie Kirk being shot in the neck, followed by a montage edit of Bullseye . Moments after his death, far right political commentator, Charlie Kirk officially turned into a meme. After the momentary shock of his assassination died down, Kirkification became rampant all across social media. Kirkification, or, to Kirkify, is defined as the process of editing or swapping one’s face with Charlie Kirk, usually to be presented as a mockery or meme. Since his death, more unhinged and deranged memes of Charlie Kirk have been spreading online. Kirkification has caught on for a couple reasons: 1. Provocative and dark humor performs well on social media, and 2. So many people genuinely despise(d?) Charlie Kirk. The online reaction was the result of the extreme hatred of the reputation Charlie Kirk built online before his death. For years, he made a career off of his insanely ...
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Kimaya Khurana - Week 8 - Billions

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A billion is a number a human brain can't comprehend.  One million seconds is about 11 days. One billion seconds is 11574 days. That's 31 years. One billion one hundred dollar bills stacked is approximately 3,583 feet. The tallest building in the world is 2,717 feet tall. This is almost 1,000 feet taller.  If you were to put a $100 bill into the bank account everyday, it would take you 27,397.26 years to reach $1 billion according to Berkeley’s study on “How Big is a Billion?”.   To count to a billion, this would take 95.1 years. And this is going at an average rate of 3 seconds for each number, no brekas. Even 898,595,276.  The equators circumference in 24,792.5 miles. To take a billion steps, this would cause you to walk approximately 15.278 times around the equator. I'm sure most of us can't even comprehend walking 50 miles.  Even if you were to spend $10,000 everyday, it would take 274 years to spend a billion dollars. Now putting all of this in perspec...
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Josh Karthikeyan Week 8 - America: Nations in A Nation

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If California, the state we live in, broke off from the United States, and was its own country, it would then be the fourth largest economy in the entire world. The fact that California, only a single state out of 50 total, is this important to the Union is incredible to me.  California feels like a unique place compared to the rest of America where people have different ideologies. By splitting up America into 50 different, individual states, it leads to a nation where people have different cultural backgrounds but also spreads division.  For example, a person from California and a person from Texas likely has different political, religious, and ideological beliefs overall. Although the difference in beliefs is normal and even healthy, it is human nature to not become as close with people who share different beliefs and instead focus on people who share similar lifestyles. The aftermath leads to bubbles of people who likely share some commonality, leading to less compromises ...
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Cyril Nadar - Week #8 - I have no words, but I must speak

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     Words carry value and power, society revolves around the usage of words to command and convey. What happens when these words start losing their value? Semantic bleaching is when words start to lose the full weight of its meaning through overuse. I think we can all think of at least one word that really shouldn't be used in most contexts. For example, starving meant dying of hunger, but now it just means your hungry, or tragedy meant something that causes immense suffering, but now people use it to describe simple things like missing the bus.      Our words are also starting to become more bleak. They are losing their precision which ruins the beauty of language as a whole. Deep emotions such as enraged and agony are being simplified to mad and painful. Nuances of our language are being lost and what is left is a boring black and white canvas. It is like playing “ Merry-Go-Round of Life ” from “ Howl's Moving Castle ” without a pedal. Sure, it sounds f...
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Disha Murugupandiyan - Week #8 - Movie Myths

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When I initially saw the theme “America” at the beginning of this quarter, my first thought was, “What even is American? What defines America in a way that I could write about it? Hamburgers? Football? There’s quite literally nothing else.” Contrary to my expectations, I did end up finding a lot more diverse topics than I thought to write about around the theme of America. However, since this is the last blog post for this quarter, and ultimately this semester, I think it’s only right that I go to where this started: the American stereotype. Young kids in America often base their expectations of the world, including the high school experience, off of movies. Especially those cringy high school movies with the tall lockers, groups of student cliques, bullies, and impromptu sing-alongs. Personally, when I watched those movies with my older sister as a kid, I thought that the characters were so cool, and that they had a considerable amount of freedom to do whatever they wanted, whenever t...
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Tanisha Madhukar - Blog #8 - Strangers On The Street

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A recent surge of street interviews has overtaken the internet. A person will walk around with a microphone and a camera, stopping people on the street to ask them a question. Usually these questions prompt funny responses and are a fun test of general knowledge. When American participants are chosen to be on the show they often fail at questions regarding topics like geography or mathematics. As a result the people in the comments began berating them at their lack of “ common knowledge .” The reality is that common knowledge is not as common as it used to be.  After the 2020 pandemic there has been a significant decrease in literacy and numeracy levels, especially for Americans. According to OECD , in their 2023 Survey of Adult Skills , the United States was 17th in literacy levels and 25th in numeracy levels out of the 32 countries that participated. America is one of the most developed countries militarily and economically but the fact we are ranked so low in literal and numer...
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Cyril Nadar - Week #7 - The "Demons" are Back

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  Dungeons and Dragons   (D&D for short) is a table top game where a group of players create and explore a fantasy world while being guided by the Dungeon Master. Last month, me and my friends finally wrapped up a year and a half long D&D campaign. The bi-weekly scheduling of quests fighting demons and demigods has deeply engrained itself in my life.  In 1980’s America, D&D was a decently popular game. Many kids played it with their friends, using premade campaigns and rulebooks. Then came the “ Satanic Panic c” in which people believed that Satanic rituals were done to abuse children. I think you can see where this was going. People accused D&D for encouraging children to do demon worship as it made them interact with demons. People were afraid that this board game would undermine Christian values that were held prominently during that time which caused campaigns to be formed to ban D&D. This “panic” and scapegoating of ideas is resurfacing in the for...
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