The new ‘Life Series’ season: ‘Wild Life’

By: Julia Yang

Warning: this article will of course include spoilers for ‘Wild Life’

The ‘Life Series’ is back, and more chaotic than it’s ever been! This season, Grian brings back every member that has ever been in the series and throws them all for a loop!

‘Wild Life’ isn’t actually about animals, it’s about how everything in this series is going to be wild. Every session, a “wild card” will activate. Wild cards are the random ongoing mods, events, and/or changes. No player knows what the event is and will have to figure it out on their own— except Grian; Grian is the one who creates the wild cards. These wild cards will disappear in the next session, and a brand new one will occur. One other change is that all players start with 6 lives and red and yellow names will gain a life by killing dark green and yellow names.

Now that we have the gist of the season, let’s do a recap of sessions 1 and 2!

Session 1

In the first session, there was a change that everyone seemed to find super fun, and barely caused any deaths: players were able to change size! If someone were to crouch, they would shrink, if someone were to jump, they would grow, but only ever so slightly over time. Players could grow up to 5 blocks tall and shrink down to half a block.

The poor souls to die this session were Scar and Pearl. Funnily enough, they both died due to falling off the same mountain.

Scar died because he was in F5 mode facing himself (F5 changes a players POV) obscuring his view of what was in front of him, and was walking down the mountain. Sadly with his luck, he walks straight off the steep end and falls to his death. His death doesn’t even have anything to do with the wild card, that was literally just him.

Pearl on the other hand was shrunk down to half a block and was crouching overlooking a dangerous cavern. The mod for whatever reason thinks that players are bigger than they actually are in this circumstance and thinks she’s off of what she should be standing on, thus making her walk off the block, falling to her death.

No other deaths occur this session and I will be showing you the groups that were formed as well as each player’s death count:

Session 2

The next session happens, and the wild card is dramatically worse than the previous one. In this session there were 11 deaths. Things were bad.

The wild card this session was that players would be quickly and passively losing hunger and would need to eat anything they could, and I mean anything. Players for this session are able to eat blocks, flowers, buckets, armor, tools— anything they could pick up could go into their mouth. Even so, only a few select things would actually fill their hunger bar. For example, they could eat a grass block, but it may not fill up their hunger bar. The players had to scavenge for what would fill their hunger bar so that they didn’t die of starvation, which was a pretty hard thing to do considering the fact that this mod included every single item in the game.

Not only did they have to scavenge for what fed them, they also had to make sure that they didn’t eat anything with extreme consequences.

You see, the things they ate could also have potion effects. They could eat oak planks and get levitation, or maybe they’re a little more unfortunate and eat an iron shovel that poisons them.

A smaller more minor thing is that sometimes the things they ate would make weird and loud sound effects after consumption. There were no consequences for this.

To make things worse, what you ate that would hurt you, feed you, and benefit you would be re-rolled every, what I think is, 30 minutes. So, everything that you would have learned about your food would go to waste and you’d be back to square one. Most of the deaths this session were caused by lack of food; dying of starvation. A few of them, though, were caused by players and other unfortunate events.

Skizz, for example, ate some dirt that made him levitate up probably around 50 blocks in the air. He was over a river, so he wasn’t worried about dying or fall damage (landing in water cancels out fall damage), but he had an audience. There were 3 players watching him fly up and fall down, one of them being Tango. As Skizz was falling down into the river, Tango placed 3 dirt blocks underneath where Skizz would land and killed him. Because of this, Skizz’s group had then deemed Tango their number one enemy and would attempt to get him killed multiple times.

Tango, though, died later on due to his own mistakes. He gets word from Martyn that spruce leaves are a great current food source, so Tango headed over to a cluster of spruce trees and collected the leaves. Tango then opened his inventory to grab them and try them out, but a creeper came up right in front of him and exploded. He actually tried to shield the blast because he had a shield in his off-hand, but since the right mouse button is to eat and shield, he instead started eating what was in his hand.

Pearl was mining on her own earlier this session when she died to a creeper as well. Swimming in an underwater cave, a creeper landed right on top of her from a hole above, causing an immediate death. Just like Tango, she tried to shield, but instead consumed her diamond sword.

For the last creeper death of the session: Jimmy would die from a creeper whilst attempting to steal from the Swole Patrol (Ren and Martyn). Jimmy decided to trap Ren in his own base while Martyn was away and stole two sheep from their pen because they had stolen from him in the previous session. This would end horribly. As Jimmy is confidently walking away, speaking all cocky to Ren, a creeper came up to him and exploded both him and the stolen sheep.

Cleo died from a skeleton. As Cleo was coming home to the Final Girls, she was bombarded by a load of hostile mobs, one of them being a witch and another being the skeleton. The witch threw a potion and poisoned her, and at the same time she was taking arrow shots from the skeleton. The poison effect brought their health to half a heart, only then would the skeleton take the final shot and kill her, right beside their base.

For the final unique death of this session, Mumbo would die due to fall damage. Mumbo was testing out things to eat since the effects were just re-rolled, and ended up eating cobble slabs that brought him up 50 blocks. Levitating was of course an accident, unlike how Skizz was seemingly prepared, so there was no source of water nearby that he could get to quick enough. Mumbo fell down and died.

Those are all of the deaths that weren’t connected to starving (explaining all of the starvation deaths would take a while and usually they’re all the same), so here are the results for this session:

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‘Internet Hometown Hero’ music review

By: Persephone Pond

‘Internet Hometown Hero’ is an EP (extended play) written and produced by a small indie-pop artist MICO. Released on October 25th, the album includes 8 tracks, 3 of which were singles that were released on earlier dates. This article will tell you what you need to know about this album and artist.

MICO is an indie artist based in Toronto, Canada. He started making music early in his life, but blew up after releasing his debut single, “Who Do You Love” in the summer of 2019. He released his debut EP, ‘21st Century Heartbreak’ in 2020, and has released 4 EPs since, including ‘Internet Hometown Hero’.

With around 1.8 million streams since its release, ‘Internet Hometown Hero’ is MICO’s most successful EP yet. The tracks (in order) are: “TV”, “The one to fall”, “Idontwannaknowyou!”, “glhf<3”, “HOMESICK”, “Senses”, “Tears in your eyes”, and “What you’re not”.

3 tracks were released as singles before the full EP release. “glhf<3”, “HOMESICK”, and “Senses” were released in the order listed, having their releases staggered through September and early October to gain traction for the full EP . “Senses” is currently the top streamed song from the EP.

Though MICO tends to write songs about his own heartbreak, this EP is slightly different. The songs reflect on unrequited love from both perspectives in a relationship, giving a deep understanding of how empathy is important and how to look at a situation through someone else’s eyes. This message is consistent though many of the tracks.

Personally, I can’t pick my favorite track from the EP. Every song is a perfect mix of slow, emotional lyricism and faster, upbeat components. No matter what pace of music you’re looking for, this EP has it.

Overall, this EP showcases MICO’s incredible songwriting talent, singing range, and emotional power. I would highly recommend giving MICO a listen on any streaming platform.

Why 43 is the largest natural number that is not an original McNugget Number

By: Ian Larson

Did you know that 43 is the largest natural number that is not an original McNugget number?

McNugget numbers are based on the idea of Frobenius numbers AKA coin problems which were made by Ferdinand Georg Frobenius. These coin problems were to see what the maximum number of values that you can’t make with 2 values is, as if they are the values of coins. For example, if you had a coin worth 3 and a coin worth 5, you could make any number above 7.

McNugget numbers were introduced by Henri Picciotto in ‘Games Magazine’ in 1987. A McNugget number is any number of McNuggets you can order, and originally the McNuggets came in boxes of 6, 9, and 20. This meant that the largest number of McNuggets that you were
not able to get was 43 McNuggets. You can prove this by the fact that you are able to get 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, and 49 McNuggets, and if you add boxes of 6 to any of these you are able to get any number greater than 43.

In modern day, you are actually able to get 43 McNuggets. In most locations in Europe and Asia, a box of 4 McNuggets was added to the menu. This made it so you were able to order 43 McNuggets. I was personally able to order 43 McNuggets, as is shown in the image for this article. With this 4 piece box, you are actually able to order any amount of McNuggets that is greater than 11. In fact if you are able to get McNuggets from one of these locations and Japan, which has their McNuggets in boxes of 5 and 15, you are able to order any amount greater than 7. It is likely that nobody has ever ordered 11 McNuggets because you have to order McNuggets from multiple countries.

McNugget numbers are a very interesting and weird math concept. I hope McNugget numbers were as interesting to you as they were to me.