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Stranger Things Season 2: A Review

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Image source: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/11/15952888/stranger-things-season-2-poster-stephen-king-release-date Stranger Things 2 (henceforth ST2 ) , released October 27 on Netflix exclusively, is the second season of the wildly successful TV show Stranger Things ( ST ) , created by the Duffer Brothers (Matt and Ross Duffer). Given the incredibly positive reception of season one, the Duffer Brothers were in the difficult position of producing a second season that recaptured the success of the first while creating a story that stands on its own merits. Did they succeed? I'm afraid not. One problem with ST2 lies in its monsters. The entire plot of ST was driven by the mystery of the monster, nicknamed the Demogorgon by the kids. The Demogorgon was terrifying throughout the season, and that's because of the rate at which information about it was revealed. The first glimpses of the monster were brief silhouettes, and the audience only got to see it full-on in the f...
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MUVEs and Libraries

The only Multi-User Virtual Environment I have used is Minecraft. Minecraft works especially well as a MUVE (as opposed to a single player game) because of its creative nature that encourages collaboration. A lot of time spent in Minecraft consists of menial labor as you slowly accrue the resources you need to build things, and because of this, playing Minecraft alone can sometimes feel like work, at least in my experience. However, through my experience of playing the game collaboratively with others, I have found the gameplay experience to be quite different. Suddenly, instead of working in solitude, you are adding structures to a landscape that reflects the styles and personalities of several different people. I think Minecraft could make an excellent MUVE for public libraries, particularly in the children's section. As a kid, I always had fun playing computer games in the children's section of my town's library, but I think it would have been even more fun if I had be...
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Social Media Comparison

I have used Facebook since I was a freshman in high school and the social network was just getting started, and I've watched it continue to change, year after year. I've noticed how Facebook constantly reshapes itself to match the trends of other social networks, and how it is almost completely unrecognizable from the website it started out as. It's an interesting course for a social media platform to take, since Facebook's attempt to do everything (messaging, photos, newsfeed, personal profile, news, etc.) contrasts other popular social networks that focus on one specific thing, such as Instagram with pictures and filters, or Snapchat with ephemeral videos. Snapchat is the only other social network I've used in my personal life, and I use it in a radically different way from Facebook. While I mostly just use Facebook to scroll stupidly through repostings from other people and don't post anything for myself, I never open Snapchat just to browse through other peo...
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