If you’re somebody who loves movies for the warm, fuzzy feeling they give, “The Movie Diaries” is certainly a site worth exploring. Created by Carolina Alvarez, her site “The Movie Diaries” feels less just like a step back in time… back into a calm, quiet movie room where a good friend is waiting excitedly to share what they’ve been enjoying with you… and popcorn.
The most eye-catching feature of this site is the warm, conversational tone the author has, which invites the reader into film analysis in a style that’s fun and easy to navigate. Posts include important details such as cast members, where to watch, and trailer links, so you can seamlessly go from reading about a film you never heard of, to experiencing it firsthand.
The images embedded throughout the site make everything feel that much more immersive, bringing each post a little bit more to life.
The site does a wonderful job of creating a welcoming and consistent atmosphere. Its use of lists and visuals make it easy to stay engaged while reading. As the site continues to grow, small adjustments such as adding more spacing or breaking up longer sections of text could improve it that much more.
“The Movie Diaries” is a thoughtful and creative safe space that invites readers to slow down, grab a snack, and enjoy the joys of cinema with a virtual friend.
With Coachella fresh on everybody’s minds, I felt inspired to write a few words about the origin of the festival, Bieberchella, those damn phones, and why we get together to do it all over and over and over again.
While people seem to pretty divided on whether or not they love or hate music festivals, I can definitely side with loving them. Humans have congregated together to dance in song and ritual since the dawn of our existence, and the modern-day music festival is just a continuation of that: something we’ve always done, and always will do.
With Coachella weekend fresh in our collective memory (search Bieberchella in any search bar), I’ve been thinking about the future of music festivals, EDM, authenticity, and how we relate to concerts, live events, artists, and each other.
Music festivals aren’t dying, but the experience has definitely changed. Shows are more expensive, more performative, and more mediated by technology, while the genuine, present-moment connection they once had has slowly slipped away.
The Cost of Festivals
I saw many a think-piece on the high cost of festivals, in the form of short form Reels, longer YouTube videos, news and blog articles. It’s estimated that Coachella generated more than $200 million in revenue, a stark contrast to the original founders’ intent to create an affordable festival experience more than 30 years ago, in the face of commercialized, mainstream concert venues dominated by money-hungry Ticketmaster.
Still, hordes and masses attend these festivals. They book flights, hotels, VIP wristbands, and put everything on credit.
The demand hasn’t disappeared, even though the cost has skyrocketed. If anything, the higher price point seems to have intensified the spectacle.
The Appeal of Escapism
It’s no surprise that people today want to escape their daily lives. The economy is in shambles, the future is uncertain, and a general sense of detached dread looms above our heads like a stormy data storage cloud. 2026 has been unpleasant at times, yet still, we charge forward. Human beings, in general, tend to remain positive, hopeful, always optimistic that tomorrow will be better, different.
It’s in our nature.
Many festival goers attend these events to leave the stressful monotony of their daily lives behind; work, kids, and Microsoft Teams. Everything except “those damn phones,” ever-present in a sea of luminescent vertical rectangles enslaving us all like some Orwellian horror novel come to life several hundred years too soon.
The same devices that connect us to the event also distance us from it, creating a strange loop where we attend in order to document, and document in place of actually attending. Nothing is promised to us, yet we meet up anyways; in massive crowds to quell the constant drone of fear and loneliness we’ve learned to live with, even at night, as we scroll mindlessly, aimlessly, while the screens lull us to sleep.
So, where do we go from here?
As anyone can tell, the industry is kind of buckling in on itself.
There are more festivals than ever, but not all of them can keep up with the rising costs, over saturation, and what people expect them to give. Some of them are simply destined to fall off. Others are going to lean all the way in to the times and get bigger, louder, and more over-the-top, just to stay relevant.
The foreseeable future of music festivals seems split…
On one hand, you have these massive, high-production spectacles custom-built for mass scale and popularity. On the other hand, smaller, more intimate events are trying to hold onto some version of intimacy, or at least the feeling of actually being there.
At the end of the day, the experience is yours to define.
My second visit to Miami’s highly anticipated crown jewel of an event that is Ultra Music Festival was so much fun that even a week later, I’m not fully recuperated.
Well, one certainty of attending an event with crowds exceeding 150,000 people in a compacted downtown city area as small as Bayfront, is you’re gonna come out of it with Covid v. 6. I get Covid every year. I’m positive every “cold/flu” that’s “going around right now” since 2020 is some variant of Covid-19, at least the ones I catch.
But back to the show.
Ultra was… amazing. At 500 a wristband, and with guests flying in from all over the world, you can’t deny the gravity of the event. It is however, up to you to make the best of it. Personally, I love the “classic trance” character of the festival. It’s a 25 year annual event that started out as a makeshift stage on the sand at the beach in 1999. Songs like “Listen to Your Heart” by DHT and “Heaven” by DJ Sammy remind me of being a little girl around my mom and aunt at the peak of their clubbing years.
Since Ultra was born in the era of that dawn-of-the-new-millenium futuristic trance sound, DJs have a tendency to play the classics in their sets. Steve Aoki did; and some of the later DJs paid homage to the golden-era EDM classics of my (actual) college years, 2012-2016: songs like “Middle” by DJ Snake, and pretty much anything with Justin Bieber vocals.
I wrote an article about some other thoughts I have about this year’s Ultra. Gripes made by local residents, safety concerns, noise violations and even the inauguration of an official “Ultra Day” by the grace of the city commissioner.
It’s a good day to be a Miamian. Be safe out there!
P.S. Don’t be afraid to leave the house. Sure it can be intense at times, but we live in a flourishing, vibrant, neon-lights international city that people only dream of experiencing. It’s important not to take that for granted.
I just added a new Contact page to my site to make it easier to connect and keep up with me. The page includes my email as well as links to my social media profiles where I share updates and additional content. 🙂
I read my first rock band press release when I was 14 years old. I scored a crazy opportunity in the form of a summer internship to the Palm Beach Post because I was the only kid in my 8th English grade class who enjoyed writing enough to do the assignments. The teacher had connections and threw me a bone.
So there I was, Revolution Live in Fort Lauderdale, FL, armed with braces, a tape recorder, note pad and a Media Pass strung around my neck, ready to interview Cobra Starship and We The Kings backstage before their show. Someone passed me two sheets of paper- their press releases. We The Kings’ was normal. It had a picture of the band, where they were from, pretty straight forward information.
Cobra Starship’s was out there. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It had a picture of a UFO, said the band had arrived from outer space, and made absolutely no sense. It was basically a creative, poetic fiction on one piece of paper that gave me no info about the band. I was one confused kid reading that press release, but I never forgot it.
Anyway, that’s my little press release story.
Feel free to reach out, follow along, and check back for new writing and updates!
Analytics may sound complicated, but it doesn’t have to be.
Adding analytics can help you understand which pages attract readers and how visitors interact with your content over time. That’s why I decided to make a dedicated set of instructions to light the way for first time users interested in setting up analytics for your own site.
To make the process easier, I created a clear, step-by-step guide for adding analytics to the FIU MyWeb site. The user-friendly instructions walk through installation, connection, and verification so that even first-time users can get started easy.
One of my favorite experiences growing up was falling asleep on long road trips with my dad to Delilah’s soothing voice playing like a lullaby on the radio.
Audio, as a format, is such a treasured art.
That’s why this week I’m experimenting and channeling my inner Delilah by reading an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote and eventually adapted into a short reflective piece of creative non-fiction. I was so enamored by my words, I submitted it to an English Department writing contest a few weeks back.
This week I decided to add a short welcome video to my site.
I realized that if someone visits a site for the first time, it may be a little difficult for them to determine who’s behind it. This video is just a short introduction so that you all can get an idea of who I am and what this space is about.
In this video, I talk a little about what it’s like being a DJ, cat mom, and English major at Florida International University, along with any other projects I’ve been working on this year. This site has become a world where I can collect various pieces of work in one place, thoughts, reflections, and anything else that may pique my interest along the way.
If you’re new here, this is a good place to start before exploring the rest of the site.
Winter in Miami is always stunning. Spring semester at a university like mine can be even prettier if you slow down enough to take it all in.
This is a recap of my Spring Semester 2026 so far. You can view the full gallery here.
I work on campus part-time during the week, so I don’t have as much time to explore campus as I used to. Sometimes, on especially cool, 60° days, I like to break away from my office desk and wander around the 8th world wonder that is the Modesto Maidique campus.
There’s the swinging tables where students can find a serene spot to study in the shade, or warm sunlight depending on which part of the bench you sit on. They’re all over campus, but if you want the newest ones with the least amount of traffic, leather seats intact, you can find them in the courtyard in the Law School building.
Then there’s construction on the new dorms coming up behind Vicky’s Bakery. Can you believe they’ve already torn down half of University Apartments? Moving into Building F last spring was my first experience living in a college dorm. I cried for a week when I first moved there, it was so emotional finally getting to go away to college. Better late than never. UA will always hold a special place in my heart.
What’s Miami without music nights out? I wouldn’t be complete without it. I love the ambiance of the city after dark. Blue and purple glowing rooms, gray clouds on navy sky, stars and cars and all kinds of homes sparkling in the distance. Looking out my bedroom window takes me back to looking out the plane window as a little girl. When I saw these same lights, I knew I was home.
I hope you enjoy these images. I take so many photos of things I love: my cat, my roommate’s kitten, my gym fits, shows, moments with my friends, and especially FIU. We may never want some moments to end, but we can preserve them in pictures.
A girl gets broken up with a week before Valentine’s Day. Instead of flowers, she gets ghosted. Instead of dinner or chocolates, she gets the appetite knocked out of her like the wind. That girl is me. Except I’m not a girl anymore, I’m a grown woman, and despite the unannounced panic attacks, acute chest pain, disrupted sleep and astonishing difficulty concentrating on… anything, I’m trying my best to handle this better than your typical rom-com crash out scene on the couch with the bucket of Haagen Dazs.
All I did was defend my autonomy. I have the right to walk over to a girlfriend’s apartment at 10pm for some wine and girl therapy. It was the straw that broke the controlling camel’s back. In that moment, thumbs hovering over the glass iPhone keyboard, I had a choice to make. Me or him? I chose myself, obviously. I’ve been down this road before. When you give in and let the guy control you with ultimatums, it never ends well. Next time the demands will be more rigid, the tests harder to pass.
If you look at it that way, the timer started ticking the moment we agreed to upgrade our best friendship to VIP.
Choose: Him or Me?
It has not been easy. I could easily succumb to the blackhole of my bed (I washed the bedding today, round of applause) and avoid work, college, fitness and dietary responsibilities for the rest of February. My shocked system is crying out to do nothing but dissolve into a heap and watch Inuyasha on Prime. I watch it every day for comfort. He was so rude, just like that half-dog demon anime boy. When the show is on the TV in my room, it’s almost like he never left.
However, at my big age, and this being my third real boyfriend, I decided to channel my newly unexpected heartbreak symptoms into more productive avenues. Like funneling my lack of appetite into a structured, high-protein calorie deficit. After all, break-ups can come with their own perks if you look hard enough, like a snatched waist and defined jawline! What’s the polar opposite of bed rotting and eating one’s feelings? Getting up for the gym at 5am and smearing Manuka honey and freshly squeezed lemon juice on your face after. Deleting Instagram off your phone and actually opening Canvas.
I had to make sense of this train wreck, or else allow the chronic overthinking-thoughts to loop indefinitely and drive me crazy. Why me? Why now? This has to be cosmically aligned for my best interest. Could this have anything to do with the upcoming solar eclipse on February 17th? Saturn entering Aries for the next three years? I’m an Aries moon and rising. Certainly, it has to be in cahoots with the Chinese New Year arriving that day, purging out the year of the Wood Snake and welcoming the year of the Fire Horse.
Blame It On The Stars
Sometimes, things that aren’t meant for us clear themselves out of the way to make room for blessings we couldn’t even imagine. I loved my boyfriend, and I wasn’t expecting to lose him right now. In that moment, the night he asked me to submit to him or else never speak to him again, I made a choice I’m still proud of. A choice I firmly stand by. I chose myself for all the women before me that lost themselves to controlling, abusive men. It starts small, don’t go to that event. Don’t hang out with that person. It escalates to worse. I’ve seen it a million times. I knew with every fiber of my being I was doing the right thing. I cooked lunch for myself the next day, and the first bite tasted exactly like I was on my great grandmother’s ranch in rural Panama. My cooking tasted like her cooking, a distinct taste I knew but hadn’t had since she died when I was 11.
I instantly recognized the spiritual co-sign. My great grandmother suffered greatly within the confines of a marriage to her abusive cop husband. I feel her presence all the time, especially when I enjoy my freedom on campus and experience university, things she only dreamed of. I tilt my face toward the sun and soak it all in, primarily for her but also for all the other women before me who didn’t get the opportunity to escape life sentences underneath a controlling man.
The Woman I’m Becoming
I don’t feel bad that I didn’t get flowers or chocolate this weekend. I see the strings they would have come with. I’m in a world of pain, but still I get up each day and push through with everything I got. Every ounce of strength. I know it’s for the best. What’s one shitty Valentine’s Day in the grand scope of living a life you’re genuinely proud of? I’m just glad I stood up for myself. I chose myself over him and for that I will always win.
If you want to read more of my writing, check out theAbout page.
