Tag: Internship

Wrapping up Gaming

Wrapping up Gaming

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. You heard it here first.

I’m officially done with Gaming…

In American Culture.

You know, that class I was taking for fun with my friend Mimi this last semester? Despite it neither fitting into my Comm major nor my Psych minor.

As you may recall from this great post, that class had the last few assignments I was working on. An essay and a Let’s Play video based on Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones.

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Up to 8 views as of this post!

This evening I found out that I got a 94 percent on both assignments, which landed me at a 102.22 percent in the class overall.

It looks like the professor added extra points to one assignment, and I don’t feel the need to address him in case that turns out to be an accident and we knock my grade down.

Gaming in American Culture was the last holdout for grades, so now I have the full scale of how my last semester shook out:

  • Comm 495T (Internship class) — 100 percent
  • Communications Law — 97.1 percent
  • Cognitive Psychology — 96.35 percent

My Honors classes don’t have grades associated with them… But I turned in my Project materials and give a presentation, which should constitute 100 percent.

Given all of the accolades I received along the way, not a bad way to end things.

Certainly good enough to feel confident in joining the Alumni Association:

Thus, my academic journey is over… Until I inevitably come back for a teaching degree or something.

Plus I’ll have to go back to campus for Alumni Association swag.

And I need to pick up my physical Honors Project once it’s printed.

But that’s all in the uncertain future. For now I can kick back and relax, even for a few days as I side-eye pieces of writing for Gladeo and looming job applications.

Actual gaming has been a huge part of my decompressing formula, because you’d be insane to think that my joke was an indication of actually quitting this sweet addiction.

In that regard, Gaming in American Culture gave me one last gift: An excuse to play through my favorite Fire Emblem game once more.

I didn’t stop playing Sacred Stones when I finished that paper. I’ve been carrying my 3DS around again to get through it.

As luck would have it, I happened to finish my current Eirika’s route run the same night as I found out my class grades. Hence the Featured Image and this picture of my favorite couple’s flavor text:

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Though I may have jumped the gun in pairing them together again so quickly.

I’m not going to say I regret the decision, because they’re my precious babies and I’ve always been the kind of person to fall in love with a pairing and ship them every time.

But Sacred Stones apparently has a mechanic where you can view previous support conversations from the main menu — something I believed only came in later entries.

Once I realized that, I decided I should go for new character pairings and appease the Completionist side of my brain since I’ve been stuck at the same level for years.

Even in this one run I found at least one new ship I adore in Lute and Kyle!

Definitely a great thing, but also deeply troubling.

After all, now I know there are new pairings that I may love… which is more incentive to try new support paths.

And I just so happened to save a separate file for Ephraim’s route.

So between work and Minecraft with my friends, I might just be diving into this Fire Emblem rabbit hole again immediately.

Let’s just hope I don’t burn myself out before Three Houses.

The penultimate week

The penultimate week

My apologies for the absence this last weekend, oh loyal viewers — wherever the five of you may be.

I took a little time for myself following the Honors Conference (both my panel and a few friend’s panels I attended on Saturday) to focus on the last few assignments I have to complete before the semester is over. Next week.

I’ve also spent a good chunk of the weekend letting the existential dread of realizing that “this week is my last full week of college” drape over me like a heavy blanket.

Seriously, what? That’s not real. Who allowed this?

To be fair, I may go back to school one day and get a Masters or teaching credential so I can be a teacher in my later years. Seems like that would be a cool way to give back after I make a name for myself.

But that’s not really a matter for here and now. I’m mostly just nervous about the incoming inevitability of having no excuses to not go after that name.

Because that is terrifying.

So I’ve been relishing my last few college-oriented assignments. Turning in my Internship hours, pulling my novel’s prep work together for the physical Honors project and watching old Stephen Colbert videos for Comm Law.

For my Gaming in American Culture class, my last assignment (other than the final paper) is to read Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One for our discussion on virtual reality this Thursday.

Or… In my case, to re-read Ready Player One. Much like Ender’s Game, I read this book a few years ago. Well before the Spielberg adaptation was even announced.

Thus, similar to Ender’s Game, I’ve decided to take my re-consumption of the story in a different form: Listening to the audio book.

Cue YouTube-style Audible shill.

But not really, because Amazon isn’t paying me. If anything, I’m paying them — or at least my family is.

I will say the re-listen has been pretty worth it. Not only does the audio book make it easier to reacquaint myself with differences between the written and cinematic versions while doing other work, the act of listening is that much more fun because Wil Wheaton is reading it.

Wheaton’s reading leads to some beautifully meta moments, because he is personally mentioned in the story.

For instance, Wade Watts (the story’s protagonist) talks about Wheaton as a great representative of user interests on an elected council in the virtual reality world of the OASIS.

He says those lines without a shred of irony or winking to the audience, and it’s great.

But yeah… That has basically been my life. Everything y’all missed over the last couple days, other than helping a few friends through their own stressful life situations and watching Kill Bill with my family. Alyson had never seen it, and we needed to rectify that.

I know it’s a hot take for me to say it, but that movie is genuinely still incredible. A visual splendor.

If you need a little stress relief, like I have with all this impending graduation fatigue, go watch yourself some Tarantino. Or play a little Don’t Starve.

That’s my advice.

On Fandango and Vive

On Fandango and Vive

I’ve been vaguely hyping this up for a while, so I’m excited to finally talk about it.

A few weeks ago I had a lovely conversation Paul Yanover, the President of Fandango. I put together a Spotlight all about his career path from being a software-writing USC graduate to heading one of the largest names in the movie/entertainment industry, and it’s one of my favorite pieces.

Not just because he’s a big, recognizable name to promote either — though that does help. Mostly because he had a lot of great advice for anyone interested in managerial positions.

For instance, we talked about his early years at The Walt Disney Company.

There he learned that he was better with interpersonal relations than programming, which led to him “making a positive difference” as an advocate for the animator clientele he and other engineers were serving.

He had a lot to say about the value of recognizing one’s emotional quotient as an indicator of leadership potential, while recommending those who aspire to lead teams make sure they practice working with diverse staff who learn in different ways.

At one point we even went off on tangents about the Dyson vacuum cleaner company and Mike Tyson, because that man loves to tell stories and anecdotes.

Even with all that condensed from a 4,000+ word interview to a 1,000-ish word story, there was plenty more I couldn’t include.

Such as the quote that made its way into my Featured Image!

All-and-all, Paul Yanover was a great conversationalist with some excellent advice. I’m happy I got a bit of his time, even if it meant rushing to my car after class so I could lock myself in a quiet place, as the interview had been rescheduled once already. And also working some extra photos through corporate HR departments.

As is the life of a soon-to-be-not-student journalist.

If you want to read the piece in full, check it out here.

Editor’s Note:

Full disclosure, the way I got an in for this interview was because my Dad passed my interest along as an employee at Fandango.

He had nothing to do with the process beyond that introduction. The closest he came to being involved was when Yanover suggested I sound like the old man over the phone.

But wait, that’s not all folks!

I haven’t had the chance to talk about this yet either, but a Spotlight I wrote about Jason Ray, Senior Content Producer at HTC Vive, also got published recently.

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Here he is being a total badass with some virtual reality gear. Because if you haven’t heard of Vive, it’s one of the more well-known virtual reality headsets on the market right now — a field that has been growing substantially (in gaming especially) for the last few years.

Jason Ray up there helps to create the games in said virtual reality, which is awesome.

I’m obviously more interested in the writing side, but I do have aspirations to work on video games. So getting to talk to someone in the industry was pretty cool.

Especially since he too has a long history of working with companies like Activision and Konami, which let him touch properties like Yu-Gi-Oh!

Obviously that’s one I care about in particular, even if Duel Links hasn’t been opened in a bit.

Ray also had some great things to say about working on teams, so it’s definitely worth a read! There’s going to be more coming from me on that subject down the line, so I won’t go too deep on the matter now.

If you want to check out the piece, it’s right over here for your viewing pleasure.

Both of these Spotlights will soon be among my blog-based collection of writings for Gladeo, as will a whole bunch of other Spotlights and Career Profiles I’ve been working on for the last couple months as part of my Comm Internship class.

Would’ve had more to show off today but a few of the Profiles were sent back for a couple of updates. Stuff I’m about to go work on, actually.

I’m sure I’ll write another post whenever those get through the pipeline.

So look forward to that when it happens!

To the bone

To the bone

After commitments kept me busy Friday and Saturday, today became my dedicated homework repository.

I mostly just kept on my Internship hours hunt.

Locking myself away in the house wound up being a really positive thing—as it usually is, in my experience. I got the opportunity to chip away at a lot of my work, turning in a Career Profile on being a UX researcher (a career I really didn’t know existed, but one with a lot of resources online) and a Spotlight featuring a very special person.

I’m going to wait until it publishes to really go off about that, because it’ll look much better with the story’s context.

Just know that I’m excited.

Between those two pieces I racked up almost 10 hours of work today alone. As a result I’ve just broken past 100 of my 120-hour requirement for Comm 495-T, that internship class I need to graduate.

My final report for the class isn’t due until May 3 and the timesheet isn’t due until May 10. I’m fairly certain I can bust out the remaining 20 hours by then.

Especially considering I still have my Profile/Spotlight on Dr. Wesley to write.

And a video interview to schedule.

And the blog-related side project that kind of went on the back burner for a while.

Somewhere in there I’ll have the rest of my time served and still find the chance to do whatever else I have. Give my Honors project presentation and write two more gaming papers. All that fun stuff.

After putting in all that time today I’m a little weary of continuing to stare at this screen and type, so I won’t make this post too long.

Instead I’m going to turn my attention to the T.V. screen, nosh on some Milk Duds and watch Futurama with my family.

And you know. Not type stuff.

Even though re-watching episodes of that show is a consistent reminder of how brilliant it was, a topic that could theoretically fill tons of copy on my blog.

Tomorrow I’ll try to post something a little more insightful, I just wanted to write something up so I didn’t have a gap. That something may just be lackluster teasers in overly verbose prose, but if that doesn’t describe my life in a nutshell I don’t know what would.

It certainly wouldn’t be Game of Thrones. Because I ain’t ever watched that junk.

Maybe one day. But for now, take that people who have spent all day talking about the last season’s opening.

Featured Image via Wikimedia Commons

Opening a forum

Opening a forum

Not long ago, the University Honors Program gave me an opportunity to add “event planner” onto my résumé.

Now it let me add “forum moderator” to the list as well.

For the last few days, the program has been holding Open Forums to introduce students to the three finalists vying to be next year’s Associate Director.

Co-Curricular Coordinator Tyler reached out to see if I wanted to be a student representative and ask some questions, given I already had some clout with the Honors Center as an Ambassador.

I saw no reason why not. Sure there are superficial benefits to the event being résumé filler and something to do on a Friday (slyly for blog purposes), but it also seemed like fun! An extension of personally sitting on panels.

Plus I was slated to run the forum for Craig McConnell, who I know pretty well.

I’ve had a lot of classes with the guy, most recently my Evolution and Creation course last semester.

Perhaps that makes me bias. Especially considering I didn’t go to either Open Forums prior… But I was just there to ask questions, so I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.

At the same time as I was asking questions, I decided to take advantage of my recent training with SPJ by practicing image graphics for my social media feeds.

My role as a moderator meant I couldn’t Live Tweet as I often do, but I tried to put out at least two nice graphics at the start of the forum.

Here’s what I did for Twitter:

And this one is my piece for Instagram:

Figured having slightly different pictures to go along with the slightly different messages on each platform would make sense.

Perhaps I could have been more creative… But practice is practice.

Plus, there weren’t a lot of opportunities to get diverse pictures given the paltry audience we gathered on a Friday at the commuter college.

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The event was mainly for Dr. Perez (left) and Tyler (unpictured), as they are going to be voting on the new Associate Director soon. Other students were there mostly for McConnell to address and field questions from.

I featured two quotes in those social media posts, but those were drawn primarily from the start of the Open Forum.

We also went into specific ideas for improving the Honors student community engagement (because commuter campus) and the possible role of an Associate Director in helping students figure out their career trajectories beyond course adjustments.

Because you know. I work for a career oriented non-profit.

And wanted to write off this event as Internship hours.

Yet as vaguely self-serving as that was, Dr. McConnell had a good response:

“I think colleges should give students a few years to expand their minds,” he said of his concern that traditional schooling is too tunnel-visioned about post-grad careers. “But I’m also aware that it becomes more important every year for schools to help students find jobs as soon as they leave.”

He pivoted on my question quickly and easily, so I was impressed.

The only line of questioning I was unfortunately not able to delve into was arguably the most important.

I should have asked him what he thought of the Star Wars Episode IX teaser! It dropped about a half an hour before our event, so that would have been a perfect barometer of his cultural absorption.

But oh well.

Maybe next time.

Another day, another exam

Another day, another exam

The first day back from Spring Break went off pretty well all things considered!

Last night I expressed some concern about a Cognitive Psychology exam that would be greeting me after a week of lazing around.

My feelings were mixed about it. On the one hand I gave the material zero attention over the break because I was busy hanging out with friends and doing internship stuff, so I couldn’t help but imagine walking into a nightmare. On the other hand the class’s first exam was very easy, so I didn’t feel the need to spend a lot of time studying.

Luckily the lazy side of my intuition won out.

The test was rather easy, and even though I haven’t seen the official grades come out (we took it at 1:00 p.m. today), I did my own basic calculations off of what I didn’t know and figure I’ll get a 92 percent at the lowest.

Unless I’m wrong about what I don’t know, of course. But my intuition is usually solid.

The thing that got me about the exam was how haphazardly our professor seemed to handle things. Firstly, she decided to announce that she added extra free response questions to our docket only five minutes before passing out the exam.

Would’ve been nice to get some advanced notice over Spring Break… But then again, she promised to post the kind of scantron we would need and didn’t get around to that either.

So who knows. Teachers need a week to relax too.

There was also a stretch of seven questions at the beginning of the test where every answer was “C,” which made me second-guess my choices despite knowing they were correct.

I don’t have proof that it was on purpose… But that kind of trickery always felt like a joke on behalf of professors to stress us students out.

After finishing up the exam, everything else was smooth sailing clear to nightfall.

I managed to secure my Commencement tickets, another topic I touched on last night. Even made a fun little Tweet out of it:

It was a legitimately weird process.

Spent a little bit of time in the Honors Center after that, finding out some more about another event I’m taking part in this Friday and working on my novel.

Felt good when I sent the next chunk of the story to my mentor tonight, even if Spring Break wasn’t as lucrative for the writing process as I wanted it to be. At least I’ve done something, and the more I write the better I’ll look come my presentation in May!

I also watched/listened to some cool things I suppose. The latest Mostly Nitpicking podcast on X-Men: Apocolypse. The most recent KingK video on The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.

Lots of nice things.

That’s really all I’ve got to say for the night, though. It’s been another lukewarm kind of day with a lot of work and not much else.

Tomorrow I’ll be able to break things up with a Fire Emblem Heroes post (as exciting as I’m sure that is for you all), and Friday I should hopefully have something to write about my next Honors event.

But until then, I’ll just be here keeping up the ‘mundane day-to-day’ posts train that the end of the semester has brought out of its station.

Racking up hours

Racking up hours

I promised something more exciting than hang-out escapades at the end of my post yesterday, but let’s just say I never got around to doing anything more exciting.

To be fair I made “more exciting” impossible by staying up until 1:30 a.m. playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice with my boys, finally learning why people love From Software games.

I seriously went from this:

To absolutely exploding with hype as soon as we began picking off mini-bosses with Sly Cooper levels of stealth.

But I also didn’t come up with something more exciting to talk about today because I spent most of it working.

I’ve hit that point (as always) where thinking about the things I have to do before summer turns me into a quivering mess of stress and food wrappers.

Except this semester has the added benefit of stress about graduation too!

My goal was to use Spring Break to catch up on homework. Namely my internship hours and Senior Honors Project.

Most of it has been spent throwing myself against those internship hours, much to the detriment of progress on my novel.

For now I’m hoping to hit my 120-hour mark so I don’t have to worry about that ever again, since I have a bit more time to finish my novel on the backend.

I have made decent progress (approaching 90 hours), and there are enough other things coming for Gladeo that I think I’ll be fine.

In fact, tonight I finished transcribing my interview with Dr. Nicole Wesley, the Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources for the Redondo Beach Unified School District.

Also my ex-Principal at both Adams Middle School and Redondo Union High School. We’ve stayed in touch.

I transcribed almost 7,500 words for a good couple hours and still have to put the piece together, so she’s been a godsend. Alongside other stories in the works.

I probably won’t talk about her again until stuff gets published, so I figured I would leave y’all a nice teaser from the end of my transcript:

“I think that before you become a teacher, you don’t realize the level of difficulty and complexity that comes with the job. But as complex and frustrating as it can be, it is equally if not more rewarding in every other sense. Even on the worst day, you will experience a situation that brings joy and hope in a way that is inexplainable.

I think that may be the case with a lot of jobs. There are no perfect jobs and you’re going to work really hard, even beyond the seven hours you’re paid. But the memories and relationships and the impact you make are second to none.”

— Nicole Wesley

Great stuff. Can’t wait to pull the Profile and Spotlight together.

That was about the most exciting part of my day. Unless you want to get into my orthodontic adventure.

… Actually, I did talk about this problems, so it might be worth writing closure.

Toward the end of 2018 I broke my permanent retainer at a celebratory end-of-semester dinner with my friend Mimi. The cherry on top of an already relentless day.

I took a little too long getting to the Orthodontist after that, so my teeth had moved out of alignment. They told me to wear my plastic retainers 24/7 for a few weeks and come back.

School got busy. So I wore these bad boys all day, everyday for probably a good month or two.

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Just be glad I didn’t get a gross picture of the new brace in my mouth.

Spring Break offered the rest I finally needed to make a new appointment, so $250 later I am back at full capacity.

Only having to wear these at night again is a true blessing that I will never take for granted.

… Until probably half a year from now when I stop bothering.

But I’m hoping to be better about that this time around!

And that, ladies and germs, sums up my day. Lots of work and orthodontic care.

I’ll try to stop promising cool things on specific time frames because I seem to keep failing to keep my word.

At this point Shantae will be taunting me for the rest of my life.

All I’ll say is, don’t be surprised if I come out with a few more silly posts or life dump posts for a while as I attempt to keep writing through my imminent semester-end burnout.

God knows graduation will be the death of me.

Pay your Copy Editors

As of tonight, I break away from classes to celebrate Spring Break 2019.

It promises to be more of a workation this year. Not to say that I’ve ever been the hard partying Spring Breakers type in the first place, but I usually chill when I can.

However, 2019 is throwing all that out the window.

While all those peers I don’t know are off in Cancún, I’ll be at home writing my novel and racking up Internship hours.

My regular schoolwork has left me a bit behind on those projects, so the extra time is a godsend. For Gladeo, I have a bunch of work stored up that I just need to sit down and finish.

Editing a piece, completing my own piece, planning a video shoot for later and transcribing the interview I’ll be conducting, and more.

No idea whether my blog post tomorrow is going to be about that interview or the Fire Emblem Heroes banner that’s dropping.

Or I might do both. Who knows!

For tonight, all I know is I’m going to relax and write a nice, easy post.

At the end of writing about the SPJ guest speaker last night, I noted seeing an echo of things from my time at CSUF.

Today I’ve noticed a few other things. Including my love affair with Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links back during Spring Break 2017. 

It defined my life when I started back then, but I’ve completely abandoned the game after a nearly two-year streak.

I blame a combination of exhaustion with the gameplay and a distinct lack of time to pass around.

I’m not going to say I regret the decision necessarily. Plus it’s still on my phone, and can be reopened at any time.

But the timing felt poignant on the eve of this anniversary.

However, the more stand-out example of a recurring college experience happened when I stopped to get gas on the way home. Because I won’t be at that Shell station I use during my commutes for at least a week, I was thinking about how I might not have to use it much longer.

But don’t worry, I’m not actually getting sentimental about a gas station. Only a specific story related to that gas station.

About two-or-three years ago when I was News Editor at the Daily Titan, I found myself looking for things to drive our Copy Editors Kyle Bender and Ashley Haley crazy.

My favorite discovery was a completely misspelled word in the gas pump digital display. It was very obvious, and given the high traffic through that station I expected it to get fixed quickly.

But no.

Here we are in 2019 and that same spelling error is there:

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“… come indise and check out monthly specials.”

It’s astounding to me that this is still there. I’m 100 percent certain they’ve changed out all the pumps since I saw this the first time, yet nothing has changed.

This is why we need Copy Editors, folks. Otherwise these mistakes live on forever.

That’s all I had to say. Go pay your copy editors.

In the meantime, I’m going to go start whatever semblance of a break I have.

Aesthetic updates and internship hours

Aesthetic updates and internship hours

I know all of my loyal readers pay intimate attention to each and every change on my blog, but in case you didn’t notice what happened I’ll fill you in.

Just last night I modified some minor elements over in the archive for my work with Gladeo. The biggest and most noticeable change was the shift from an internal photo showing the reporting team from when I first joined on:

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To a much more recent image on Gladeo’s website showing myself with my title:

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Given my current lack of facial hair, both images are technically pretty dated. So you might be wondering why I bothered.

I assure you that the change isn’t some vain attempt to clear my blog of any pictures not featuring me, myself and I.

It’s more about the page where this new picture is found on Gladeo’s website.

The team photo is about a year-and-a-half old, and the Gladeo League itself has drastically changed since. For instance, I’m technically no longer just a part of the reporter-interns.

I’m the head of the League, the Managing Editor. The Superman to their Justice League. The Lex Luthor to their Legion of Doom.

Just not the Jesse Eisenberg one.

As a result you can this new-ish picture of me on the official staff page. Essentially where a bio would go, just without any text from me.

I wanted to bring things more up-to-date with this web development, as Michelle let me know she was setting it up yesterday.

Even if it isn’t technically that “up-to-date” due to my aforementioned lack of fur nowadays. In fact, when I was in a video conference with Michelle, it took her a long time to figure out why I looked younger until she realized we haven’t seen each other since I had foregone the follicles.

The visual change isn’t the only update I made to that Gladeo page on my blog, however.

Part of the reason I was in a video call with Michelle yesterday was that she needed to show me how to do some work on the inner-mechanisms of the website.

As I mentioned in my Homeless in the South Bay post, and many times before that, I’ve begun to accrue hours for my Internship class. The 120-hour goal will likely encourage me to go to more events or reach out to more possible interviewees, but at the same time it has encouraged me to take up as much extra work for Gladeo as I can.

Including now running the official website’s blog.

That’s right, I have a more traffic heavy outlet to shout my thoughts into now!

… Or I would, if that job wasn’t mostly about posting updates and such. The only assignment I’ve been given so far is copying off the last year’s worth of Facebook post updates onto the nonprofit’s website.

Once I see how that will come out in a tangible form, I’ll figure out the right place to point you all and flesh out my work portfolio with the PR-esque work.

Today I just wanted to relish in the increased responsibilities, expansion of my skill set and time sink for required Internship hours.

As always, great things should be coming soon enough!

I think so, anyway. Really the only reason I had the chance to finish this post so early in the afternoon is because my car crapped out on me.

So here’s hoping that doesn’t become such an issue that I’ll have a lot to say on it for another day’s post.

Homeless in the South Bay

Homeless in the South Bay

For the most part, this weekend has been quiet. The best thing I had to talk about a few days ago was doing homework, and one of the most exciting things I did recently was put my binders together for the semester.

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Beautifully organized and poetic in their duality, but not very interesting.

But tonight my Mom pointed out a meeting dedicated to learning all about the homeless situation in the South Bay. Much more interesting writing fodder in a traditionally journalistic manner.

My interest was piqued two-fold. I spent a good amount of time covering homelessness about a year-and-a-half ago for Bonnie’s Investigative Reporting class.

I covered the Point-In-Time homeless census that year and wound up winning the third place “Best News Series” award alongside my friends at the 2018 California College Media Awards.

So I have some experience in the subject, and wanted to see things happening much closer to home.

The event was held at the Hermosa Beach Playhouse, which is literally five minutes away from my house.

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About as close to home as it gets.

In addition, I’m able to write off the whole experience as research, networking and sourcing for Gladeo. I’m on the clock for my internship class, so I’m looking to do as much extra work as possible.

That more cynical reason aside, I did learn a good amount and picked up a whole host of documents:

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The panel was hosted by the League of Women Voters of the Beach Cities.

There were seven speakers on the panel who each gave spiels and answered a few audience at the end.

First came Jennifer Lamarque and Ivan Sulak from the office of Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn. Hahn was apparently slated to come earlier on but had to drop out, sending representatives instead.

Most of the discussion coming from Sulak, who is the supervisor for housing and homelessness in the 4th District. He was also apparently homeless himself.

He talked all about different initiatives being worked on across the District. The growth of a year-round shelter, more Emergency Response Team development and pushing more housing projects. A veteran-focused project in Downey, student-focused housing in Whittier and more.

“The end of homelessness is to get people in houses,” he said before delving more into the fact that homeless people on the streets are just a snapshot, as the issue has “many different faces.”

That snapshot came more into focus with the next speaker: Ashley Oh with the LA County Homeless Initiative: Measure H.

Because homeless counts for 2019 only occurred within the last week or so, the numbers we got tonight are technically outdated.

More to come from people like my friend Spencer over in Orange County.

Support local papers, y’all. Nudge, nudge.

That said, Oh pointed out that in 2018 there were more than 52,000 homeless individuals counted in LA County, with ~40,000 not sheltered. She said that was the first year in eight with an overall decrease.

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A bit more of a breakdown.

One of the most interesting things about this event for me was seeing the break-down at a local level with some places I actually know a thing or two about.

I picked up a document from the South Bay Coalition to End Homelessness outlining findings from the 2018 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count which said Redondo Beach had 154 homeless, half in vehicles and half on the street.

Though it’s great that the number was down about 41 percent from 2017, there’s clearly still a long way to go. Over 150 people is nothing to scoff at.

From there the discussion went more into Measure H, a pretty big initiative here in the South Bay.

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Oh mentioned that 51 strategies to combat homelessness have been developed which fit into six categories, including prevention, more affordable housing and increasing income.

That last point in particular led to discussions of working, as she pointed out that “most people think these homeless are comfortable living off government money, but that’s not true. Many want to work.”

Those three speakers had the most general information to hand out, so I figured I’d give the rest more of a quick-fire treatment.

Shari Weaver from Harbor Interfaith Services talked about her group’s more intimate outreach work, claiming that their 40 or so staff members know about 80 percent of the unsheltered homeless in the beach cities.

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She also brought the feel-good stories, such as that of a client who they housed that had lost his home in the recent Paradise fires.

Weaver was followed up by representatives of the Cities of Manhattan and Hermosa Beach who talked about city governments creating homeless plans, including a $150,000 multi-jurisdiction proposal between them and Redondo Beach that got funded by Measure H on January 24.

Finally, a lieutenant with the Manhattan Beach Police Department talked about officers across the beach cities working on more “holistic approachs” of homeless outreach on top of their usual enforcement.

All that remained was the Q&A, which was relatively short. It was hilariously obvious that most of the questions came from older members of the audience who simply do not like the homeless population being around.

Watching the panelists have to explain that private churches would be allowed to help the homeless whether or not there was a “centralized gathering location” to feed the needy was pretty great.

In the end I didn’t have too much of a chance to talk to people after the event, but if nothing else I gathered a lot of names, contacts and general information for the future.

Plus I got a two-hour addition to my internship log while rubbing shoulders with folks like Redondo Beach Mayor Bill Brand.

So who knows, even if I get no Gladeo interviews out of this, it could be handy if I ever break into covering homelessness again.

Either way, I’d say this was an educational night well spent.