At last. Rarely if ever will the words “Happy New Year” be uttered with such genuine goodwill as they are now, as the world bids good riddance to 2016. In decades to come, grandchildren will flock to the feet of their fireside elders to lap up the legends of “the year it all went wrong”. Poems will be penned; songs will be sung; the history books of the future will look back on all this, say, “So yeah, that happened” and skip sheepishly on to the next twelve months. 2016 was literally the most hated year of the century. I’m reluctant to talk about this as a sort of detached, omniscient narrator declaring all manner of things like, “Meanwhile in the Cincinnati Zoo, Death was making yet another guerrilla strike”.  This year has had a deeper effect than that on most of us. But I’m also reluctant to get too personal, as too many of us already have. God’s landline isn’t in the Golden Pages (trust me, I’ve looked) and no amount of screaming down the sidebars of Facebook can change a single thing. Maybe a sort of analysis, then. Not a bland police report, not a bloodbath. A case-study, if you will. Who knows? Maybe 2016 can teach us one or two things. Politically, most people would find some way to agree that the last twelve months didn’t exactly cut the proverbial mustard. From our current perspective in our new post-Obama world, it might be hard to remember just how hopeless it all felt back in February’s General Election, when we thought we had seen the worst of it with the prospect of a Gerry Adams-led Ireland. Ha. The latter half of 2016 began with the bloody end of a reasonably steady period...

Dishonored 2 is a stealth genre video game made by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It was released on the 11th of November 2016 on ps4 Xbox 1 and PC. Gameplay Dishonored 2 has many great attributes. A single mission can be played in a multitude of ways. Do you want to be seen by every guard in the city, running in with your sword and pistol, eliminating everyone in your way? or maybe you’d prefer to sneak around not making a sound and escaping the guard patrols’ attentin?. Don’t worry if you have to move somewhere where guards are looking around; you can get rid of them by using a Tyvian choke hold which is just a fancy way of saying that you can choke your enemies to put them to sleep. Finally, the best part of the gameplay – the exploration and arsenal. As a stealthy assassin you possess many useful gadgets to aid you in your missions. Your sword is your primary weapon. You have a pistol but only use it when you are in a critical situation or else all the enemies will descend upon you. Your crossbow fires many types of darts from the weak and regular crossbow bolt to the powerful and dangerous incendiary dart that burns enemies. If you are trying not to kill your opponents you can use a sleep dart. Dishonored 2 is unique in that the protagonist has special powers that helps him in difficult situations. There are two characters to choose from when playing Dishonoured 2 and each of them has a different set of abilities and powers. Emily Kaldwin has a more passive set of powers, meaning that her abilities are non-harmful but that doesn’t mean she isn’t dangerous. Corvo...

Dear Jack (age 18) I want to be ready to go to college to study business technology. When I am eighteen, technology will be an even bigger part of everyday life than it is now.  When I finish my degree, I want to progress to an M.B.A. Then I would love to venture into the vast open world out there, and set up my company here in Ireland and eventually go global.  I would then become a millionaire. I suspect you may not believe me but you will see. I read a great quote from Eric Thomas: “When you want to succeed as much as you want to breathe then you will be successful.” If I was given a magic wand I would make it much easier and more accessible for people with these so-called learning difficulties to access assistive technology. I do not like to categorise people in such a way; I like to refer to them as people who have a different style of learning. I would also provide courses to help people to use this technology. This will allow people who learn differently to reach their potential. Yes, people might say, “Why don’t you just take away their learning difficulty?” but if we were all the same we would get nowhere in life.   From Jack Kelleher (aged...

There once was a man called William Cuthbert Faulkner, whose writing was almost as deep and meaningful as his moustache. He was a man who liked to say things as they were, with no frilly bits thrown in to make it sound more interesting. He just smoked a pipe to give himself some much-needed gravitas instead. Faulkner dealt in the simple facts of life. This was one of them: “If a story is in you, it has got to come out.” Now, Faulkner lived way back in the first half of the 20th century when things like meaningful moustaches and pipe-smoking were commonplace. Some might claim that he would be thoroughly out of place today. But his writing is relevant even now, and Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh’s first Flash Fiction Competition for 1st Years has proven that. When we launched this competition, we knew that there was a story in each and every 1st Year, even if they didn’t know it themselves. Our job, on behalf of the moustachioed Faulkner, was to find away to “get it to come out”. And to our delight, the response to the competition was overwhelming. We received over two dozen excellent submissions in total, all of an exceptionally high quality, across a wonderfully wide range of themes and genres from clowns to inept house burglars, from malicious Weetabix to stranded children. It was a joy and a privilege to read them all, and a great challenge to decide on the three best. In the end, though, the decision was finally made. The three prize-winning stories are available to read on this very website. But it wouldn’t be right to just leave the competition with such an abrupt end as that. At CloudofThink, we encourage both writing and learning. The great thing...

Hi, John here, and before you start asking questions, yes, I am the John that got stranded on the islands, and if you didn’t hear about it, turn on your TV! Everywhere I go it’s like, “Oh you’re the poor little boy that got stranded on that island-” No old lady I didn’t get stranded, I got ditched, by whom you ask… MY MOM, and, as you can clearly already see, my mom’s not very nice. My mom never really liked me so this was her big chance to get rid of her underachieving son all because she wanted a...

I swerved onto 56th Avenue and continued driving towards the inner city. I worked for the Boston Police Department and was heading to intercept a car that had been called in over the radio. It was five A.M., still dark. My lights cut through the inky darkness. Traffic increasing, I turned on the sirens to clear a path. There it was, speeding along the street in front of me. I was gaining quickly. Suddenly a large item came flying from the car, hitting the road. Too late to avoid it, I hit it head on. My world flipped upside...

My mum sent me to my room. I was furious at what she had said. I banged my bedroom door so hard the whole house shook. The weird thing was, the house didn’t stop shaking. It grew stronger and stronger until I slipped and banged my head. I woke up in a completely different room. I called for my mum but there was no answer. I slowly got up, the pain in my head increasing. I walked to the door and opened it. I looked out. Instead of my boring corridor I was on the verge of a rugged...

Mario is the best-selling video game franchise ever. There may be a few unpopular Mario games (cough cough Hotel Mario, cough cough) but nevertheless, Mario is the king of video games. The Wii game – Super Mario Galaxy – received enough critical acclaim for Nintendo to make a sequel. Its plot isn’t as good as the original. The story begins with Peach telling Mario to come to the castle for a cake during the Star Festival. Along the way Mario finds a Luma who goes into his hat. However, when Mario gets there, Bowser has arrived. He traps some Toads, causes chaos, kidnaps the princess and flies away. Some other Lumas send Mario to another galaxy where he gets a Power Star. He ends up getting a Starship shaped like his head and goes off to get Grand Stars, stop Bowser and save the princess yet again. The gameplay is incredibly fun and addictive. Mario can jump and stomp on enemies; players can make him perform a spin attack by shaking the remote. The game uses the Nunchuck to move Mario around. Mario also has some power-ups like the Fire Flower, the Cloud Mushroom, the Rock Mushroom, the Rainbow Star and the Bee Mushroom. Yoshi appears in the game and can eat enemies, pull things with his tongue and flutter jump; he even has his own set of power-ups. In every galaxy you can choose a mission to get a Power Star. There are some mini-bosses guarding the Stars occasionally. You need Power Stars to unlock gates to get to the Grand Star which unlocks the next world. To get the Grand Star, you must fight either Bowser Jr or Bowser himself. Despite these virtues, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is imperfect. The Dash Berry...

The end of the world The Apocalypse (anonymous) I was walking down an alley at the side road to my school when I saw something, a flashing green light. I walked up to it. It was what looked like a mine bomb. It was labelled “The End of the World”. (Ross McCarthy)   Your dream vacation My dream vacation is to go to Africa so I can see the wildlife and safari parks. (Ryan Durkan) My dream vacation is to go to Hawaii and go to all the beaches, go swimming and go to a hotel. (Kate)   A lie you told and got away with I broke my brush at home and I hid it under the shed and I got away with it for a week. 🙂 Ha. Ha. Ha. (Leah Durkan.) My name is Billy. (Niall)   Describe one of your bad habits and why you secretly get joy out of it Biting my nails (anonymous)   What’s the stupidest thing you used to believe whole-heartedly? I used to believe that I had two imaginary friends called Kevin and Arnold who lived in Mexico. (Luke Cremin) I thought in 3rd class that I had too much homework.  (Brendan Mee)   Explain the off-side rule If you are behind the last defender when the ball is played then you are off-side. (David Byrne)   The glow of success I like this school but more importantly… Messi is the best player in the world. He has won five ‘Ballon d’Ors.’ He is better than Ronaldo. (Troyo Romith)   That snappy reply I never had a chance to say I think golf is stupid; it’s up there with the ‘Ban the Wheel’ campaign!   My hopes for the future A happy life, a good...

Flash Fiction is writing for people who like to do other things. But you can do a lot with a little. We think that by choosing the right words and by putting them in the right order, real magic can be achieved. We’re looking for First Years who would like to write some Flash Fiction just for the fun of it. You might be wondering what Flash Fiction looks like. Well, just log on to cloudofthink.ie and type in Flash Fiction in the search box in the top right-hand corner to see some examples. Do you think you could write a story in fewer than a hundred words? We’d love to read it if you do. Email your entry to cloudofthink@gmail.com and make sure to put your name and the words “Flash Fiction” in the subject box. This competition is open only to first years. The prize for the winner is €25; second prize is €15; third prize is €10. The winning entries will be posted on cloudofthink.ie and will be reviewed by several of the best writers in the school. The closing date is  Thursday, October 6th 2016. Here are some tips: Try to create an interesting character; Don’t be afraid to rewrite your work; Try to create pictures the reader can enjoy; Don’t explain everything – let the reader do some of the work; Model your story on stories you’ve heard; Think about different kinds of stories: detective stories; romantic stories; war stories; mysteries; ghost stories; funny stories; action adventures; thrillers; silly stories. Remember, you can base your story on truth if you...

Ratchet & Clank is a very successful video game series and one of my personal favourites. It’s so successful that it’s been made into a movie directed by Rainmaker Entertainment that, unfortunately, received unfavourable reviews as a movie that kids will enjoy but adults will not. Rainmaker lost $10 million on the movie and blamed Disney. I however think it’s great and I’ll explain why in a spoiler free review.   The story is about a Lombax named Ratchet, a mechanic who dreams of becoming a Galactic Ranger. He meets a Sentry-War Bot defect named Clank. They join the Rangers and have to stop Chairman Drek and his chief scientist Dr Nefarious from destroying planets using a weapon known as the Deplanetiser. Some people say it’s very much like A New Hope from Star Wars.   The jokes in the movie are really good and very well put together, the first few moments are no exception. The action is also very good to watch with the War Bots fighting the Galactic Rangers. The characters are all likeable and the villains are very fun to watch. There’s also a very good plot twist that I wouldn’t have seen coming if I hadn’t played the game on which the movie is based. However the movie’s not perfect. Sometimes the action can be a bit weak and they don’t show of a lot of weapons like in the games.   In the end, The Ratchet & Clank Movie is in my opinion, a great movie. It is rated G, but PG would be more appropriate in my view. Nevertheless, it gets an 8 out of 10 with the title of...

I don’t write essays. I don’t write crosswords in pencil either. “Desperate times” etc. * ‘Mr Morey,’ I hear you ask, ‘why are you so resistant to the idea of “the essay?”’ ‘Ah,’ I reply, ‘I’m glad you asked that, because I was going to answer it for you anyway whether you liked it or not. My reasoning is quite simple – I don’t know what they are.’ ‘But Mr Morey,’ I hear you inquire, ‘how could you have no knowledge of so common a style as “the essay?”’ ‘Ah,’ I suavely reciprocate, ‘it is not that I have no knowledge; it is that I have too much.’ ‘But Mr Morey!’ I hear you tempestuously expostulate. ‘How can there be such a thing as “too much knowledge?” Surely there is no limit to learning!’ ‘Ah,’ I ratiocinatively riposte, ‘that, my eager but obtuse friend, is where you are gravely mistaken.’ Knowledge, you see, is an excellent thing when it builds on previous knowledge. You learn one thing, and then you learn another, and the second adds something to the first. Step by step, your information becomes more advanced. Knowledge is not an excellent thing, however, when it builds beside previous knowledge. If you learn one thing, and then you learn the same thing again in a different way, you have still learned only one thing. Step by step, your information becomes more confused, but no more advanced at all. Consider the way in which I just wrote the words “ask” and “reply” in increasingly elaborate forms. By the time I arrive at “ratiocinatively riposte”, three things have happened to the reader: They are now 100% certain that I am the most linguistically intelligent man alive. They have now learned how to write two ridiculously...

Recent events in France ensure that that country remains an important focal point  for anyone interested in world affairs.  Many of us perhaps fall into the trap of believing that terrorism is a recent phenomenon; it certainly isn’t. The French themselves have been masters of it, in France itself, in Africa (Algeria is a notable example) and elsewhere. The tragic and brutal slaying of innocent people in the streets of Paris and in France’s other cities and towns has precedent. Those of us familiar with the French Revolution from school may know that the guillotine was used to kill the king and later his wife. The names Robespierre and Napoleon ring bells. However, we may not know a whole lot more besides. Christopher Hibbert’s highly readable and detailed account of the Revolution is a real eye-opener. His treatment of the subject is thorough without being exhaustive or overly dense. He is particularly strong on the personalities involved, Mirabeau and Danton being two of my favourites. It all starts with the king. King Louis XVI strikes one as a man unsuited to the throne. He was smallish, with poor posture and reputedly impotent. He liked to read and was disciplined enough to teach himself English. But he liked to eat and his wife, Marie Antoinette, felt the need to deny him access to pastry. She, for her part, was Austrian and rumours abounded of her sexual exploits and infidelity. It was eight years before she bore her husband their first child. In the late eighteenth century, about 26,000,000 people lived in France, the vast majority of them in the countryside, working in agriculture. Poverty was widespread; Hibbert quotes two English travellers’ observations of “terribly ragged” children and peasants with the appearance of “ravenous scarecrows.” Taxes...

It was one of those coincidences that happens to me every so often I think because I like to read. I picked up a copy of The Irish Times (Wednesday August 3rd 2016) and saw an article by Eileen Battersby: “Casement: romantic defender of the oppressed.” I knew a little about the man. He was a colourful figure, although that phrase “colourful figure” troubles me a little now as I write it. I always liked his face for some reason; it was the visage, I liked to imagine, of a man with compassion, a misunderstood man, maybe even a tormented soul. There was his involvement with the Rising of 1916, his gun-running, his subsequent arrest and execution. Hadn’t he delivered one of those masterful speeches while in the maw of destructive justice, akin to Robert Emmet? He’d served, I knew, as some kind of investigative civil servant in areas of the world still considered to be God-forsaken backwaters like Congo. His story read like a Hollywood script: a man going from being one of the Empire’s own to a wretched, traitorous homosexual with a complicated story. Battersby tells us that it’s been a hundred years since his death, “a horrible death.” He was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London at the age of 51 despite several very famous figures intervening on his behalf such as W.B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw. Battersby predictably enough argues that his homosexuality probably didn’t help his case, being what she calls “a Victorian homosexual.” It’s hard to imagine she’s wrong. One thinks of Oscar Wilde and others who were treated shamefully because of their sexuality. Perhaps it didn’t matter that Casement was a humanitarian who exposed injustices in parts of the world most people at the time as...

The death of Amy Winehouse in 2011 was tragic of course; there is no “but.” It was tragic in ways that perhaps many people don’t understand. This may be because they weren’t into her music or didn’t follow her career – because those two things are not identical. If Amy showed us anything it is that her music and her public self weren’t the same though they came close to converging upon the release of Back to Black in 2006. Amy’s tragedy was twofold: firstly, it was her descent into what Elton John apparently warned John Mayer about: “the world of bullshit.” Amy was not best suited to it; she was troubled from a young age anyway and I suspect the level of talent on which she operated didn’t render her especially amenable either to what the rest of us know as ordinary life. She said herself she feared fame and defined success not in terms of money or exposure but rather the freedom to record her music as she saw fit. Her fame exploded when her troubled life became more interesting to the public than the music. This perversity is encapsulated perfectly in the song that made her a household name: Rehab. She had finally conformed to the dreaded rock ‘n’roll stereotype: she was skinny and had that “heroin chic” appeal – she looked like a drug addict; she had a destructive relationship with a drug-addicted boyfriend, later husband, Blake Fielder-Civil; she had that so-called “difficult relationship with the press” that people find so alluring; she was over-exposed, on TV all the time, “in the news,” a commodity. Her first manager, Nick Shymansky perceived that a time came when the world wanted a piece of her. He’d seen the signs of her possible self-destruction...

Dear Thelma You know, with all the walking and looking around, endlessly looking around for something, anything, you forget how cold it is here. And where is “here” anyway? I know I sound negative but it’s hard, so hard. Cooper’s finally collapsed into a permanent low-mood; “He’s not depressed,” Scott insisted; “he’s just very terrified all the time.” “Of what?” I asked. “I dunno,” he said, “but I found him trying to insulate his head last night with a crate.” He returned to his sketchbook into which he draws portraits of his relatives from memory. Unfortunately, all his photographs were stolen. We’ve looked everywhere but not a sign so far. He used to enjoy copying them out with a burnt stick; all our pencils were used up when the kindling combusted. Still, he likes that auld stick. Scratcher and The Shifter have got old. They used to be thick as thieves, always pulling and tearing at dead stuff and eating bits of Browny. Now they just lick at each other and try to bury themselves alive in the ice. Scott wanted them shot but Cooper’s aunt wouldn’t hear of it so Scott would change the subject to Western man’s reimagining of the snow through adversity which nobody wanted to know about. Bloom’s gone again. He got up yesterday morning and told everyone, “I’m going outside; I may be gone some while. Don’t wait up,” and off he went, nude, except for a huge hat and waving at nothing. “He’ll be back,” Scott insisted. “Feck him,” Tawny Owl grunted; “let him off, mad bastard.” Tawny Owl came to my part of the tent yesterday and told me he had something to tell me. He looked about him several times and stretched and sang the first...

It’s my privilege to know Cian. He’s 15 but when you’ve got what we like to call “talent” (one word just doesn’t seem to contain adequately that cocktail of qualities, of enviable attributes) age doesn’t matter. Wasn’t it JFK who said that someone’s age should not necessarily factor in our assessment of them. Though we can all hope to attain greater skills and understanding with time, some – the chosen few – have it at a young age and Cian is one of those. He was published recently in “The Irish Times” (Fighting Words supplement, Wednesday, May 11th). The excerpt is from his novel “Aether.” The prose is phenomenal, dense but with a scarily ferocious energy; reading Cian’s description is like being there – no, it is being there. Take this, my favourite bit from his published excerpt: “Sinister figures stalked the alleyways; fallen women flocked in the shadows; intoxicated, boisterous brutes surged in and out of alehouses and gin mills, to stagger or brawl their way across the street. An assortment of buildings pumped an assortment of fumes into the sky from their chimneys. Silhouettes of airships and aircabs floated slowly past the lunar corona.” I know what some might say: they’ll think it’s overwrought, all that alliteration and hyperbole. But it’s like Baz Lurhmann’s movies: it’s wretched, it’s exciting, it’s lurid, it explodes with colour and darkness in equal measure and black is not a colour, technically; I bet Cian could make it so – he’d put the words to it. He’s like a conjurer in that way: “The man clasped a wine glass in his spindly hands, but I noticed that none of its contents had yet met his mouth. He stood quite still, but his eyes roved about expeditiously, settling...

This is an extraordinary autobiography. It feels like a novel because of the vivid and persistent way she presents her mother to whom she only refers as “Mrs Winterson.” The latter is impossibly mad and cruel and just plain weird. And yet you believe that this is Jeanette’s mother or at least her adoptive mother. Her biological mother was “a little red thing from out of the Lancashire looms…from the village of Blakely where Queen Victoria had her wedding dress made.” One can hardly imagine the writer would have been worse off had she not been adopted; sure, her real mother was just 17 years old and probably living in penury but at least she might have been loved. Mrs Winterson, if one wished to be compassionate, could be said to have been capable, to a modest degree and in a very odd fashion, of loving Jeanette but she certainly failed miserably to understand her. One instance of this abject incompetence relates to book-reading: “It never occured to [my mother] that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside for safe-keeping.” This failing is especially significant when we read that her mother burned all her books. And this is just an example of how Mrs Winterson failed as a mother even back in the 60s when things were not as touchy-feely and PC as now. While “there were plenty of kids who didn’t get fed properly” there must have been few enough who were locked in the “coal-hole” or outside on the front door step all night. There isn’t time here to offer a definite inventory of Mrs Winterson’s parental transgressions; suffice to say that neither Jeanette nor her father believed for a moment that Mrs Winterson would be happy in...