#lingotwow

Song: 070 - Long Elevator

Quick update because this is the third week I’m writing late. Oh yeah, did I mention I got eliminated from LingoTWOW? Well, I got eliminated from LingoTWOW. Yeah, sucks. I guess wordplay skills from songwriting don’t really transfer if you only have 10 words. Anyway, since I think this is a fun twist on minitwows, I’ve decided to begin supervoting on each episode since then (there’s already been two episodes between my elimination and now)

One game that I’ve been really getting into recently is Blue Prince. I’ve been watching Wade’s playthrough of it (I’m currently on part 16). It’s the perfect video to eat to. About the game itself, the mechanics are really refreshing, and the layers and layers of puzzles - I think I’ve found a new interest. Thing is, though, I haven’t bought the game mostly because I feel like I wouldn’t have the patience myself to play through the game, so I’m just resorting to watching someone else play it. Anyway, yeah, I think it’s a really fascinating game. 

Song: 063 - It's Raining Somewhere Else

A bunch of things happened this weekend.

(I listened to ‘You Will be Found’ while writing this, I think you should too :) )

#1: On Friday, I went Geocaching… and found 11 Geocaches! (that is a lot.) There were a bunch in the park a few miles away and a few more in the streets surrounding it. Thankfully, I didn’t have to walk there as I normally do. Most of them were simple fake electrical plates, but others were more creative 3D printed caches… still pretty easy to find, though. This was by far the most I’ve found in a simple day (last time was about 6 or 7?) and was mostly just to bump up my find count. I’m at 50 now, halfway to triple digits :)

#2: On Saturday, I realised that LingoTWOW 5 responses were due today, so I watched 65B… and it turns out I won the entire language of Vietnamese. Yeah… I’ll be honest, I didn’t think through my response that much - I’m actually not very proud of that response, but hey, if it wins the entire language, I guess I shouldn’t be complaining. For context, languages with too few responses would get one final round before being retired, and the winner of the round will be declared ‘the winner’ of the language. There were two languages eliminated this round, Swedish and Vietnamese. I just gave you context without giving you context. You’re welcome.

#3: You remember that Reddit April Fools’ event from last year? You know, the one I spent ~50 man hours working on documenting? Yeah, it’s coming back. But this time… I can proudly say I am participating in the event as an April Knight. (God, I’m gonna need more context…) So, the April Knights are a group started on April Fools’ Day 2015 - ten years ago - and were a pretty big part in the event. They’ve continued to be this central authority on all things Reddit or April or Fools’, coordinating plans and shenanigans and whatnot. As silly as it sounds, I do think that I look up to these people. And, yesterday, I was able to do The Interview and become a Knight myself! Yeah, I’ve been meaning to do it since last year… but better late than never, right? The interview itself wasn’t that bad at all, but I was actually stressing throughout it. Anyway, I’m a knight now, woo!

#4: I spent about an hour and a half or so practically belting musicals in my bathroom while alone. Mostly ‘Legendary’ from Epic, though. (Also, when I was searching for covers of the song, looking up ‘legendary epic cover’ sounded so much more silly without context.) The fun thing is that it actually felt like I sang - I wasn’t worried about anyone hearing or judging me any more - in fact, maybe they’d enjoy it? Anyway, I was really working on my singing technique and all, and it just felt so fun just… singing. To be fair, I did have a blanket over the door to mute a bit of sound, but oh my goodness it sounded so much better than other times. I recorded myself and stitched the best bits of me singing together from different takes, and I’m actually so happy with the way it turned out! Unfortunately, since I wasn’t singing without a backing track it’s missing that little something, as well as me changing the tempo ever so slightly throughout the song, but that’s what next week is for!!

#5: I broke my 4x4 PB… by one second. It went from 1:25.94 to 1:24.49. The thing is, the cross and edge pairing were absolute amazing, and the F2L was pretty fast… but I got OLL parity. I knew I was on PB pace, so I did the alg as fast as I could… finished OLL and PLL… and barely broke my PB. But now I’m wondering how much faster I would’ve been if it weren’t for that pesky parity… darn. oh well, a PB’s a PB, right? And then, today, I got a new 5x5 PB. And this time, it wasn’t by 1 second. It was by 20!!!! 3:16.55 to 2:50.64, passing the 3:00 barrier :D I think I’m improving my weaknesses for big cubes - the whole edge pairing thing is gradually getting easier on 5x5. Anyway, the price I had to pay was my cube popping in the middle of the solve today, and it took a whole hour to rebuild because the pieces were slippier than usual, and none of my tape helped them stay in place. :( I mean, it was a small price to pay for all that.

Song: 056 -  Confession

Voted for LingoTWOW during the grace period again… oops

Today was a pretty good day; I went Geocaching and found three caches (two multis) that I DNFed the other week. Did a bit of this and a bit of that. Oh yeah, and yesterday I watched the Super Bowl and talked about it with friends in the group chat as it was happening. I said that ‘shutout games are fun to watch because you want to see how many points the other team can score, and close games are fun too, but this is just bs at this point’ and everyone agreed. I think it’s the only time we all agreed on something, heh.

I have been practicing singing for, I wanna say, a month or two now. I’m a bass, both by vocal range and the quality of my voice. My range goes from F2 to C4 normally, or from E2 to E4 on a good day with some practice. Most of the songs I want to sing (AKA, the songs from Dear Evan Hansen) are all in higher registers, though. I am working on my belting, though.

Another thing that’s happened recently: I’m re-relearning cubing. I re-remembered all of the 2x2 algorithms, and even learned to solve it blindfolded. My PB so far is 52 seconds, for a solve where I only had to memorise four letters.

I have a confession. It really feels like I’m trying to do too much (?) I have all these hobbies and passions and things I want to pursue, and I really just can’t give enough time or effort into all of them. There’s a million things I’m doing, and another million things I haven’t done that I want to do, and I just can’t see how I can do all of them. I… I dunno. I’m not sad or angry or going through something right now, I’m just realising that, well, I’m gonna have to decide to leave something behind soon. Right now, I’m more like an 8 at most trades. Master of none, proficient at maybe a few. Am I still better than a master of one, though?