Varun Arora

UCSC Engineering Student. Bionics and Virtual Reality Game Design Researcher.

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Favorite Movie Series - Post 1 - Divergent

I’m starting a collection of posts called the favorite movie series, in which I will post random thoughts and analysis about movies that I particularly liked. The first movie in the series shall be Divergent (Like, the movie Divergent, not some other movie being divergent, cue rimshot.). As you may have already assumed, spoilers lay ahead.

The first thing I really liked about the plot of the movie is the division of the human race into the factions created after Chicago is transformed into a post-apocalyptic dystopia. This idea, although not new, really got me interested partially because of my history as a MMORPG player. For most RPGs during character selection, players need to pick a “race” or “type” which can then even be broken down further into groups and etc and throughout the game every character has different roles depending on the type they chose. For me to see this kind of...

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The most useful, useless thing I have

The Twiddle Fiddle. I bought the Twiddle Fiddle off of Amazon a couple of weeks ago because I wanted some sort of thing that I could just mess around with while my body was idle. The primary way in which I use it is while I am studying notes or reading textbooks my hands have nothing to do. The Twiddle Fiddle allows me to simply mess with something tangible as I’m busy reading and studying. I find it to be very comforting because otherwise I start to feel awkward just sitting here staring at my notes.

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Just as a disclaimer, I literally just fiddled with it after I finished writing the above paragraph and began proofreading it.

Anyway, the Twiddle Fiddle is a 70 piece set of little plastic links that you can combine into many different shapes. Another picture of the box:

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The primary Fiddle object I use is seen in the bottom right of the following picture. It’s two squares linked...

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Infinite Loop

Here on campus there are two types of buses that can be found: Loop and Metro. The Loop buses are also sub-divided into regular loop buses labelled “Loop” and another group labelled “Upper Campus”. To be honest I still don’t really know the difference between upper and lower campus. I define the school’s geography as “Buildings/Lecture Halls” and “Middle of nowhere”. Regardless of my ignorance toward the formal titles of the loop buses and sections of campus, one thing I really don’t understand (that I have tried to understand) is the loop bus schedule.

According to taps.ucsc.edu, the buses all depart from a certain stop at a certain time and then return to that stop 30 minutes later. This schedule is fine for planning ahead and getting to class at certain times, but what really bothers me is the moments when I need to hastily rush to another part of campus for one-time occurrences.

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Trusting the internet

I’ve always been hesitant to input my personal information on the internet, even for the big name companies like Facebook and Google. If I recall correctly, the deeply rooted fear of my information being leaked to the public and someone tracking me down to hurt me was instilled in me by the teacher who taught my “computer class” back in 7th grade. She was big on the whole “Stranger Danger” thing and constantly told us to never talk to people we don’t know and never release our personal information on the internet, or bad things can happen. I remember sometimes I would keep Googling myself to make sure I couldn’t be found.

Ever since then anything I did on the internet was under the guise of fake names, emails, and addresses and this made me feel safe. No one out there could determine who I was or where I lived. Unfortunately over the years I became wary of using falsified information...

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