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I owe you another post now

2012-02-24T12:41:00.000-08:00

Well it's been a while since my last post. I've used my time in February to get caught up on some things while accidentally falling behind on classwork as I get used to a quarter system that is very short. The end of the term has snuck up on me, I was still used to semester length terms and neglected to start my multiple papers. Also notable, I recently finished my applications (oh wait, application) to law schools (er, law school T__T).

I did actually continue with the law school application process even though going back to Korea is now a more desirable course of action for me. I figured I burned so much time getting ready to apply that I had to keep going with it. Unfortunately, I found out there was a problem with my transcripts a couple weeks before the deadline for the UW (the problem being that they never arrived). So I had to go back to request transcripts from my school which was punctual as always, then SCC which was unpunctual as always. First of all, I find that every time I go back to SCC, I wonder how I was ever so happy to go there. Don't get me wrong, I got a good education and I'm glad I went and saved all that money, but a lot of the people there are just so weird. I guess maybe I'm just growing more used to the hipster crowd (shudder) at Seattle U. So I went to SCC and as usual, they told me it takes 5-7 business days to process then send out my transcript meaning it would get to the LSAC in about 2 actual weeks. As usual, I spent that whole explanation contemplating in my head why it takes a school 1/4 the size of SU 4 times the time to send out a transcript. But I had plenty of time, so I wasn't too frustrated about it. Until I received a note from the LSAC a few days before the deadline that my SCC transcript had arrived without a required form attached. Each transcript has to be sent with a form that is signed by the registrar so that the LSAC knows it's legitimate. I told SCC to attach it and they didn't. So I had to run back there and they actually made me pay for the transcript again, then gave me the same crap about how it would take time and I said well I was hoping you would have done it right the first time, so please do it as quickly as possible. And they did it faster than they had done before, but they got it in THE DAY AFTER THE DEADLINE. So having that transcript not there effectively destroyed any chance I have of going to the UW because even if I had been able to apply, they would have seen that I had only been in school for two years, which would be almost an instant denial given my GPA and LSAT score being about lower to middle range for what they want. Seattle U's deadline is the first of March, so I put in my application for them and we'll see where that goes. I'm not holding out for getting any money from them, so as soon as my projects are done, I'm going to start looking at ways to sign on with a company to go teach back in Korea.

On that note, I find that I really miss that place. I enjoyed having my own place (although the basement is working for me again here) and living in a fun city where I could watch Starcraft whenever I wanted. There are some times when I don't want to leave here though, but those times are mostly when I'm hanging out with Steven, Eric, and Chris. I figure I can always meet up with them online though, so being in Seoul wouldn't be too bad.

Speaking of hanging out with those guys, I've started playing League of Legends a lot more recently. It's been fun and those three are saints for putting up with me bumbling around in the game. I'm a lot better than when I started, but I still have a ways to go. I hope to be at a skill level where I can maintain the default ELO rating once I reach level 30. Currently, I'm not up to snuff there. But I'm getting more practiced with a few champions that I like which is making it easier to improve in certain roles.

My classes have been going well, frisbee has not been so great. I've spent most of this quarter horribly busy on practice days or sick, which has prevented me from going recently. I want to go, but practice is 2 hours and my travel time to and from it is another two hours and when those hours are right in the middle of the day, it is really difficult to make it down since those are hours I need to spend working with groups on projects. We have a tournament coming up in mid-March and I'm really hoping to get some practice time in before then, but it's looking like I might not be able to get back to practice until next week at least.

For classes, my econ ones are fine. The videogames class recently had us playing WoW (I think he chose that one because of the culture it has created and the relatively flat learning curve). I picked a class that could heal, tank, or dps since I am one of the guys in class that is more experienced in games (most of the class is casuals). I leveled up at great pain because the game was so boring. Yesterday, we did our culminating event in the game, an instance run. I ran in a group with my friend from the frisbee team who tanked, then a new guy, an experienced WoW player, and my professor's dad (who was really cool) who were all dps. Then at the request of the professor since I was a priest, I provided heals. Healing is really the final frontier for me in MMOs because I seem to have touched on every other type of role except that one. I am proud to report though that I did really well and my group was one of only two that didn't suffer any casualties. I have to start writing my paper for this class soon, but I'm excited about it because I'm writing about the history and economic prospects of professional Starcraft. It's an interdisciplinary core class, so we were suggested to write papers about videogame culture that we could relate to our own majors in some way. This is going to be my easiest paper because I can definitely talk about economics and Starcraft for a long time.

Sorry to cut this post short, but I don't have too much left to say. Also, I'm making it while my rice is cooking for lunch (yes, we finally got a rice cooker!!!) and it's about done, so I'm going to tend to that, then get my papers started.

New classes and things I forgot to mention

2012-01-30T16:35:00.000-08:00

Now that I've completed a few of the class sessions, it seems appropriate to comment on them. It's actually weird to think that I just have about 12 classes left for each one (time flies when you stack them all on two days of the week). On that note, I finally met someone like me. He happens to be in all three of my classes with me and we gave each other props for being hardcore enough to have all our classes on two days of the week. It's bad on the one hand because I have about 8 hours of class going on those days, but having those four day weekends and Wednesdays off is a pretty fair tradeoff. After I get done with the classes and frisbee, I'll hop onto a couple subjects that I forgot to mention in my earlier post that were quite noteworthy.

Asian Economic Development:
I signed up for this class first because I figured it would be a good class considering I just came from Asia and studied economics there. I was already looking forward to it before I found out my favorite teacher was the professor. I'm now in the cool circle with her because this is my third class with her. Many people usually wind up in her class once then avoid her like the plague, but I like her. This class is actually not bad, but it can get dry at times mostly because it's the first class of the day. I think I'll do well since I'm now quite used to her teaching style and this time around, I have more knowledge on the subject which means more participation points if I am so inclined.

Economic Strategy and Markets:
This class has turned out to be a more micro based course (I don't know what I expected...) which is nice because I greatly prefer micro to macroecon and this is the first micro based course I've had since I took microecon which is the first class that got me down the economics track all the way back in 2009 fall quarter. The professor is a nice guy and his class is organized well, but sometimes I feel behind in the class because prerequisites for the class are principles of microeconomics and business calculus and I believe that I am the person in the class for whom it has been the longest since they took those classes.

Videogames and Culture:
Originally, this was going to be a third economics elective because I thought I had to take one. I was not happy because that class was a Monday/Wednesday class, which made my classes split up awkwardly. Instead, I found out that I could take a core interdisciplinary instead of that course which I did not need at all and I happened to notice this one which fit perfectly with my interests and schedule. It turns out the captain of the frisbee team who is a good friend of mine is also in the class. As a Strategic Communications major, this class is a major-based elective for him, but it's cool to have someone I know well in a class for once. The professor is really cool and the class is going really well. My final paper is going to be about the economic prospects of the esports industry which is going to kick serious ass because of all the primary sources I am bringing back with me. We finished our first test recently and since I hadn't studied and his tests are organized very strangely (but he helps us figure it out after they are graded and constantly asserts that you can fail the first test and still recover well because the first test counts for so little of the test grade) it seemed that I had not done well because I got just one point shy of an A-. Then he showed the three highest scores (anonymously) and mine was number 2. I had to contain my chuckles as I could only wonder what the rest of the class did. This class is definitely my favorite of the three even though the other two are related to economics.

Other things:
I recently found out that the lump in my gums was due to having a dead tooth. I fell and chipped it back in 2003 and since then, it died. I had to go in to get a root canal which sucked, but we found out through the process that only one was dead, not two. That was good news since I didn't want to have to go back for a second root canal.

I've also been getting more into League, getting to play with Steven, Eric, and Chris pretty often. Beyond that, I've either been playing SC2 when Keir is on or just playing Skyrim by myself which is really fun. Until next post everyone, peace out.

Re-assimilation into America (but also some other noteworthy events in Asia)

2012-01-19T22:12:00.000-08:00

I have indeed had classes by this point in time, but I will refrain from mentioning them until when I next make a post which I'm planning to do next week in the first half of the week. I should be able to hold myself to that deadline because the post will be short since it will only pertain to my classes. In this post, I'll cover the last few days I had in Korea, then Japan, then briefly go over things that have happened since I've been back. But before I get to that, shoutout to Steven for updating! Thanks for giving me new reading material! Go check out his blog if you get bored of my rants.

Final Days in Korea:

On the moving out day for the dorm, we had to be cleared out by 11am, so many people opted not to sleep due to a combination of some people having early flights and everyone not wanting to have to lose a lot of time when they could be having last hurrahs with each other. I wound up spending most of the night with Chang and this guy who is a BroodWar caster from England who was in town visiting (coincidentally, Chang happens to be his biggest fan) on his way to visit his parents in China. We also hung out with a couple other guys from TeamLiquid who were in town visiting relatives. I wound up getting into the dorm really early in the morning as some people were actually leaving (around 3am at this point). I got into my room where Steve (roommate) was still up and packing and I joined in as well. I got about an hour of sleep and he just went to sleep and planned to get up at 10:30am. I had to get up at 6 and make two trips back and forth to the hotel where I was staying. I would have liked to do it all in one trip, but I had bought so many things, I couldn't get it all into the one suitcase I brought (getting everything I had over in such a small amount of space was challenge enough). I wound up falling asleep in all the taxis I took, but it was fine because the taxi drivers were cool guys. I finally got back to the dorm after my trips after a 2 hour double cross town trip session and just went to sleep. I was awoken with a knock on the door as one of Steve's friends came to say goodbye. It was 11:30. So we both had to pack up and leave quickly. I said goodbye, then went downstairs to help Chang move her things to the bus because she had two huge suitcases that I'm sure she could have lived comfortably in (like using them as houses). That night, after some BroodWar related antics with the caster and the two other guys as well as a friend of mine from the OSL finals, I went back to the hotel and was reunited with my parents.

And so began the busy days of traipsing about Seoul in weather that was in highs of the teens. I showed them all my favorite places around the city and they seemed to get why I liked it so much. I also got to show them how pro I had become at interacting with people, which was also nice. I warned them that old people would point at me and say things to me, then I would respond to them and that all that was happening is we were talking about how I was wearing shorts in such cold weather. It happened a lot, so I was glad I didn't warn them for something that didn't happen. Another fun thing was that our hotel had a really nice casino that is regarded as one of the nicer casisnos in Seoul. I went gambling there twice and just wound up doing roulette both nights because the blackjack tables were all super crowded and it was a lot easier to enter a roulette table. The first day was just dad and I. I won about $25 (25,000W) and dad won about $37. The second night, all four of us went gambling. We all started out with $50 each. Mom and Kathryn and dad did slots for some reason. Mom and Kathryn combined came out up $5 and dad lost all his money. They went to bed way before me and I wound up sitting at a roulette table for 2 hours with these two nice Japanese guys and we all did pretty good. It was funny to react at each other when we all won big money from boxing out the same numbers. In the end, I won $350 (350,000W) and had to cash out at the big boy cashier. I was pretty happy with myself there. There was a Girls Generation repackage album that was different from the Boys by only one song, but it also came with some cool other things and since I won big money, I figured paying (normal CD price) for it was definitely fine. I do not regret that purchase as I now have a nice picture of Sunny looking back at me from above my computer screen.

Going to Japan:

This will be brief because I confirmed through my second time in Japan that I don't really care much for Japan. I just fit in a lot better with Korea. I think if I wind up living there, I will do more travel to China and if I learn a language after Korean, it will be Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese? I thought Cantonese was for pros, but Eric says I would just get made fun of a lot T___T (I just wanted to be a hipster Chinese speaker)). Anyway, Tokyo was kinda cool. It was unlike any other city I've been in. I thought Seoul was huge being the second largest city in the world and all, but Tokyo stomps the crap out of that. It is massive and the subway system is complex to an equally insane degree. We looked around a lot and got to see a lot of the big tourist attractions. Using some of the gambling money I won, I bought myself Girls' Generation's Japanese CD that I had been looking for last time I was in Japan. In addition to seeing the sights, we spent a few days at Tokyo Disneyland because yes, we absolutely had to. It was really okay. The Japanese seem to be really afraid of rollercoasters, which were conspicuously absent throughout the park. Aside from that, it was a neat experience. Flavored popcorn is big there, sometimes the lines were even larger than those for the rides. After the five days in Japan though, I was starting to get homesick. Not necessarily just for Washington, but for Korea as well. I really just wanted to get out of Japan to somewhere I liked.

On our way out of Japan though, we found out the morning of our flight that it had been cancelled because the flight from Seattle never arrived. There was a small group of people from our flight that was also going to Seattle and we wound up getting rescheduled on the same flights, which was kind of nice to have people to share the experience with. We actually had a direct flight to Seattle, but they changed it to a Singapore Air flight (dad and I were super excited because we had seen the ads in the Economist and knew how good the planes were) and then we had a 7 hour layover in LAX (T___T) before going home and getting to Seattle 12 hours after we were supposed to land. The Singapore air flight was super kickass. It had bigger screens, more legroom, a power outlet, free internet, and pretty flight attendants. I would have used the internet, but I found a lot of good movies that I had wanted to see while I was gone from the states, so I used the time to get caught up with that. The layover sucked, but I drank a couple big beers on an empty stomach which allowed me to sleep through about 3 hours of the layover. In the end, we got to Seattle at 10:30pm on New Years Eve and stayed up pretty much just to see the clock turn over to midnight before going to bed. I was able to normalize my sleep schedule, but my family slept in way late the first day.

America:
I've been doing normal things again. School and frisbee started up so that's been eating up some of my time. I'll get into those next post in what will be a fairly short one. I also started seeing Grandpa on Wednesdays again which has been nice to get back to. There has also been game night which changes nights and times now that Steven and Chris are both working (props to that guys). Finally, I started back up with the D&D group. They switched to 4e while I was gone which is unfortunate because according to Steven, there has been less roleplaying and more combat which has definitely been the case since I've been there. I got my new character though and it's been pretty fun to play, so I don't mind terribly. And there has been an economic aspect added to it which of course I enjoy because Chris invested in land which was converted to a farm and brothel (I have no idea why those two things, but they're really profitable).

I really miss Korea still which is interesting because I didn't miss America at all when I left. I don't mind so much when I'm hanging out with people, but times like right now, I kind of wish I was back. I haven't watched any live Starcraft since I've been back partially because I just can't go back to low quality streams and I got too used to it being on at a convenient time. Fortunately, BroodWar matches get free high quality vods posted, so I've been keeping up with that better so than with SC2. I just started playing again though with Keir. I can't wait to play more, it's been too long since we've played together. I also have started to get more into LoL with Chris and Steven and Eric. It has also been fun to have them teach me how to suck slightly less. And of course the biggest news:

I

BEAT

GUILD WARS

My Hall of Monuments Page as Proof

The moment.

At long last they can be together!

I'm pretty happy about this.

So I'm done with Guild Wars 1 forever. Unless Chris calls me back in to help him with his own progress, there is no chance you will ever see me online. I was determined to spend as little time on this as possible when I got back and thankfully, I was able to play the mercantile game rather than having to resort to farming to get my last three titles. It took two weeks after getting back, but on the 14th of January, I finally did it. Major weight off my shoulders as now I feel like I got back a piece of my life that I haven't had in a very long time.

Well until next week, that's all I have for you now. I'll see you later.

Ok at long last, my last month in Seoul

2012-01-03T00:11:00.000-08:00

Well as pretty much all of you reading should know, I'm back from Seoul. I got in when I made my last little post. A lot of things happened in my last month and between all that and finals, then my family coming, then having no internet access into having late flights, I somehow managed to not make a post in December at all. It was quite a colossal failure and I'll try to make up for it with a good post. For now though in the interest of keeping this short, I'll stop this post at the point when my family arrived in Seoul. That keeps this post to a manageable 25 days (at least I hope manageable....).

Girls:
When I last left off, I had gone on a single date with a girl. That unfortunately did not pan out as I had hoped. We seemed to get along, but since she worked for the company I was a student for, she pretty much flat out said there was to be no dating between us and left it at that. The email was actually pretty bluntly worded and I wasn't sure if she was angry/frustrated with me or if she was just simply stating the facts. After that point, I apologized, tried to keep it professional going on, and communication with her was less frequent, though we still were nice to each other. On my last day there, I got called up to the office because she had something to give me for participating in something (unimportant as to what it was) and at that point, I got to talk to her and the director of the program a bit about saying goodbye, thanks for doing this and that, and the I'll see you if I'm ever in the area. But the assistant awkwardly forced into the conversation the fact that she would see me again if I came back to Seoul. Not in a creepy way of course, just in such a way that it was notable, almost like she was asking to meet up when I came back. Honestly, I have no idea what to make of it, though as always I will be optimistic. In the meantime though it's probably at least 8 months until I get back to Seoul for teaching, so we'll see what happens.

After getting rejected by her (which happened just a couple days after my last big post), I was a little disappointed about it, but remembered this other girl I was hanging out with a lot. She was the one that was really into Starcraft. At the point when I got rejected, I started to get more flirty with her until a point eventually when I actually talked to her about it. But she had had a bad breakup with a boyfriend who moved away and either cheated on her or just dumped her, but either way, he wound up with this girl that he had liked for a long time. I figured that had been 3 years ago and she was over it, but such was not the case. She said I was cool, but she refused to do anything long distance (especially since she is a junior in college and it would be a while before we theoretically lived in the same city (I will not entertain the idea of moving to California) so it would not work out. Now having been rejected twice, I figured it was time to just stop trying in Seoul. That conversation happened on the 17th anyway (family came in on the 21st), so it seemed a reasonable decision. I was disappointed to have been turned down twice like that, legitimate excuses or not, but oh well, that's a hell of a lot more than I've ever done in my life before so I'll take what small victory I can get from this haha.

What do you mean that's all you wanted to read about? Keep reading, there's more stuff.

Starcraft:
It was my last few times going to the GOM studio. I got to show a lot of people around there and eventually, the adventure came to an end. I said goodbye to casters and some players (they all had nice things to say when I left) and I departed for the last time. I also managed to get a picture with the girl at the front desk who I was always to shy to talk to. I did have a brief conversation with her (in Korean!) in which I told her I was leaving, but was hoping to come back next year to teach English. Then we got a picture (which took an awkwardly large number of attempts (stupid camera)) and then she let me take a picture of the picture wall. I picked on that made me laugh all season long and it is now safely in my possession...somewhere. I'll find it eventually. It's with another picture that I don't want to lose, so I know I have it stashed somewhere, unpacking is just taking me forever.

World Cyber Games:
So the WCG this year was held in Busan, the first time it had been in Korea since the first one. I was going down with Chang (Starcraft girl) as well as a friend from Canada (they were both going separately from my other group) and then also my group which consisted of me, my Canadian Starcraft friend Chris, Matt from my program, Dan (a friend of Chris and Matt), then Jan and Daniel who were the Germans. We met up with another friend there, Jens who also plays SC with Jan and I at PC bangs once in a while. Since the Germans had class on Friday morning, we all decided to leave after that. Chang and the Canadian guy left first thing that morning because there was a BroodWar game going on that night and Chang wanted to be there for it. My group got there just as it was starting, then the rest of them decided to go look around the town (they mostly went for tourism, just wanting to come to the WCG for the finals day) while I went to meet the other two at the event where I caught the last 3 games of the proleague. At that point, I met up with Jens by random chance. After the game, the four of us went out to get Korean BBQ and our drank on. Chang is really short (5'0") so she had four shots and it was all about how attractive she thought Bisu and Stork are. After that, we met up with the other people from my group and went out drinking again before everyone went back to go to bed.

On the second day, it was just the four of us (that had gone to BW the day before) again. Jens split off during the day and eventually wound up going back to Seoul because he had things to turn in for classes and he could call what was going to happen in the finals (it was the best Terran Korean in the world vs a relatively unknown Chinese Zerg player). I got the chance to talk to Moletrap (GSL caster) for a while which was cool. That night, there was an auction for charity and Stork was not quite MCing it, but not quite modeling things either. It was somewhere in between. Long story short Chang wound up buying a Samsung KHAN leather jacket that belonged to and was signed by Stork with my financial backing (she was short on cash, so I put in 70k (Won, not dollars) to help her out (I got paid back (wouldn't have been an issue if she hadn't rejected me >__>)) (I hope my parentheses open and close correctly here or I will feel the fool)) and as a result, we both got to go up on stage to meet him. It made it on a Korean news site, which was a little funny. After that, the three of us went to get some food nearby, then me and the Canadian guy went out drinking with the Germans since we had some time. We then proceeded to play semi/drunk SC which was really fun.

The third day we were there was finals day. I spent the whole day just watching finals of various games including Warcraft 3, Starcraft 2, League of Legends, and even Fifa '12. In there somewhere, I also managed to get interviewed about Samsung by Samsung. I don't know what's going to happen to that horribly awkward video. We stuck around for the awards ceremony which was fun in that it was really cheesy and lame. There was a silly performance by a magic dance troupe from Korea. They danced to All that Jazz (which since it was Korean, became "All Dat Jaj") before breaking into Danshing Queen. After that, a Chinese pop band came out to perform songs (since the next 2 WCG's are in some city in China). The C-pop was the most creepy pop music I have ever listened to, but the girls at the end when they congratulated everyone and said they would see us in China was so amazingly cute. I want to have each of them to talk to me like that forever. I would never tire of it. After all that, the entire group of everyone caught the train back to Seoul at about 10 at night. The Canadian guy had kind of made everyone sick of him, but Tasteless and Artosis (most famous SC2 casters) and a couple other guys were on our train, so the Canadian guy ditched us for the whole ride to have an epic drunk adventure with them. It worked out for the rest of us. Chang was sleepy so I let her lean over on my shoulder/arm since she is so short which made the train ride home super awesome. Chris and I talked about SC most of the way, then decided we would hit up a PC bang when we got back at 1am. We wound up going to one from 2-5. I lost a best of 7 to him, losing 4-1 (he is a platinum NA player and I am not quite anywhere near that) then we did some team games.

Classes:
Well they finally ended. Actually I really have nothing else to say about them, sorry.

It's now late and I should really get to bed because I need to eventually get my schedule normalized since I'm starting school again in two days. I'll try to fit in a post sometime next week about time until school started. Until then, peace out.

FFFFUUUUUUU

2012-01-01T00:14:00.000-08:00

I FORGOT TO POST LAST MONTH. THE FIRST TIME MY BLOG HAS FAILED TO DELIVER EVEN ONE UPDATE IN A WHOLE MONTH. I APOLOGIZE AND WILL POST MORE EVENTUALLY.

We can blame flight schedules and laziness and whatnot. I'll probably give you guys a somewhat detailed account tomorrow, but then I will post more in detail about stuff I did.

Sneaking in a post before the end of the month

2011-11-28T21:39:00.001-08:00

And golly gee willikers, what a month it's been. I went on (technically?) my first date ever, met both BoxeR and (more importantly) Firebathero, found new Starcraft friends, had a fun bonding week with my group, picked up laddering, and generally just continued to enjoy life in the city. I promise I will cover all these things in the post and with that, I shall get started.

Social interactions:
Most of those leads I mentioned in the last post have dried up. The North Koreans are not going to work out, but I had begun to think maybe that wasn't the best idea to begin with. The GSL girl is still around, but I still have no idea if that guy with her is her boyfriend or coworker. Either way, I was too shy to ever ask her out, and anyway, I wound up asking out the girl that was my first choice anyway (well I guess second if you count Sunny >__>). Anyway, the story shall be detailed below.

November 11th is Pepero day in Korea (Pepero is the Korean version of pocky sticks). Since this was 11/11/11, it was called millenium pepero day (despite it happening every century the way they wrote out the date, but whatever), however that is more or less irrelevant to this story. The magic of Pepero day is you can give Pepero to anyone and there doesn't have to be a romantic connotation to it, thought there often is. It's the perfect way to fall flat on your face in rejection, perfect for me and my nervousness! On top of that, I heard that the director for the program (the reason I am too shy to go up and ask the assistant out in person (her name is Boram which I will use from hereon out)) had the day off that day, so I took it as a sign that this was the time. I went out that night and bought her Pepero and the next day, went to deliver it in person. She looked pretty happy and surprised when I gave her the Pepero (no one else did that all day it seems). She then invited me in because she had something to bring up with me because of the volunteering project and the English tutoring I'm doing. That lasted a couple minutes, then it got more casual for a couple more minutes. Since I was concerned about the rejection last time, I tried to casually slip in my desire to move back to Korea to teach English in the future which she seemed surprised by, but it was well received. Right before I had to leave, I then decided to ask her out to dinner. Unfortunately, both our schedules didn't align for a couple weeks, so we decided to just get lunch the following weekend. I left the office quite happy with myself.

A handful of the girls in the group know I like Boram, but none of then knew I asked her out on a date. They just knew I had given her Pepero on Pepero day and all of them seem to think it's super cute. On my way to the date, I passed Katherine (girl that I came over on the same flight as) as she was waiting for the elevator. I had worn pants because I wanted to look nicer than usual for Boram, so I walked quickly so my legs would be hidden around the corner from Katherine, then when she said hi to me, I leaned back so she would just see my upper body and head. But she is too smart for her own good and walked around to where she could see all of me at which point she asked if I was going to the international party that day. I said no because I was going out to Sinchon for lunch (trying not to say I was going out with Boram because I didn't want it to be big news in case I failed). At that point, Katherine looked down and saw I was wearing pants, then looked back up at me with a smug smirk that just said "You're wearing pants, I know exactly where you're going..." With that, she said goodbye and I did too, then I headed out. The actual date went pretty well. I don't know how much she thought it was a date, though the fact that I was wearing pants should have clued her in. After eating, I paid and she only offered once before letting me do it (I take that as a success, if she had repeatedly insisted, that would have been bad). After that, we were going to go back to the subway originally since I had to tutor that afternoon, but she suggested we walk around a bit to find this art flea market nearby. So we walked around there and saw some cool things, then slowly made our way back to the subway. All in all, it was about 1.5-2 hours with her and quite enjoyable. I'm currently trying to find a time when I can go out to dinner with her. Eventually I'll be able to tell her I like her, I just gotta get out on a date with her again.

In other social lifey things, I made some new Starcraft friends. I found out through TeamLiquid that there is a girl that goes to school here that loves BroodWar. She actually recognized me at a GSL event (I have a blog on TeamLiquid with Starcraft related posts and pictures of me), but was too shy to say hi there and wound up PMing me later on. We eventually connected and now we go to games together (along with a couple other cool people from TL that go here too and one guy that's here on vacation). It's nice to have foreigners to hang out with at BW events because otherwise, I would be the only white guy there. She is a rising superstar on the TL forums and has studied BroodWar extensively. She only started getting into it in June, but she now knows a ton. I guess she went back and just researched the hell out of BroodWar history. There are still times when I can give some knowledge to her, but generally, her memory of events is better than mine (and I was watching them unfold live T___T). Anyway, hanging out with them has been entertaining. I'm planning to go to a PC bang with the girl so we can play some BroodWar (she has trouble with it on her computer and hasn't actually played hardly any BW yet).

Group Project Bonding/Classes in General:
My professor that keeps cancelling class surprised everyone one day when he declared that he wasn't feeling well and thus would be ending class early....in the semester. That meant that after last Friday, the class would no longer be meeting for the remainder of the semester. The two remaining presentations would wrap up on that final day, then we would be done except for our papers which we are to submit online. The only problem with this is that my group was the last group and until he told us that (on a Sunday night), we were under the impression that we had twice as much time to complete the project. And we hadn't started. So we instantly figured it was crunch time and proceeded to spend a lot of time together over the course of that week. We did a prezi presentation to stand out and it went really well actually. You get docked points if your presentation is below 18 minutes and you get scolded if it is above 22 minutes. He asked for 20 minute presentations and ours wound up coming the closest at 19:47. The second closest was my friend's group who came in at 19:23. In the end, it didn't look like we scrambled the few days before it was due (though everyone knew we did because we freely admitted it) and we got 40/40s from all groups except one group who is full of bitches and grades everyone's projects really low (they gave us their highest grade all semester, a 39/40). When they said their score, half the class just got this confused look on their face and a couple people just confusedly stared at her. We were damn happy with our prezi and what we had accomplished in such a short time. We even included some trolly things in it, such as a hadoken and some cheesy pictures. Me and the gamer girl snuck those in late at night when we were really bored working on the project. The link is here for you to see. The slides are generally devoid of information because that's what the professor said he wanted from all groups.
http://prezi.com/itnjhtj_xzpa/topic-10-kim-jung-un-and-north-koreas-future/
(does you little good to learn from it without it being narrated, but you can still go in and spot the little hidden gems we put in).

My other classes are going well and are far less interesting than that one.

Laddering:
This one is brief. I have begun laddering more on the NA server. I ended the prevoius season with my MMR really low and because I lost my placement match this season, it put me in Silver. This has incresed my drive to get back to gold and someday higher leagues as well. Confusingly, I am ranked in Silver league on the Korean server as well, so I'm not sure what to make of that since the Korean server is way harder than the North America one. If anything, it might just be proof that I play better against better opponents (and the reason I feel like I played really well (though not nearly well enough) against the pro players I played in the Code A preliminaries.

Meeting BoxeR and FBH:
Two of my favorite players ever, I got to meet them in one month. Meeting BoxeR was already mentioned here, and my meeting FBH can be found in my TeamLiquid blog (it's a bit long) http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=289853

Getting to meet him was extremely awesome and I can't wait to keep supporting ACE at events.

So in conclusion, wish me luck on perhaps getting more dates. Who knows, maybe she likes me too and I will get a girlfriend. That would be quite interesting. Until next time, peace out.

I wasn't feeling guilty about not posting because I had forgotten that I hadn't in a few weeks.

2011-11-07T22:28:00.000-08:00

Well I suppose it has been a while since my last post. I've been up to mostly the usual, Starcraft and adventuring. I also find time to do homework and attend classes of course, but those are less interesting. Our study group went to Japan recently, so expect that to take up most of the post. Other than that, nothing big to report (at least not intro paragraph worthy) so I'll dive right into the post.

Starcraft Stuff:
I was a little disappointed because the GSL finals for October were going to Blizzcon in Anaheim. It was a good just my luck sort of thing, I go all the way to Korea and the GSL goes to America. There's one more final in Korea for this current GSL that I will get to attend, then I have to wait until I come back to go to a final again. Since a lot of people now had no good way to watch the GSL, GOM invited us all to the studio to watch. In the main studio, the Korean stream was being watched. For us English speakers, the lobby was playing the English casted version. It was a pretty fun day, though nowhere near as good as the last GSL finals.

In other Starcraft things, I've finally gotten to meet two of the best players known to man. Of course I'm talking about NesTea and Mvp (I know you knew that already). Someday, I hope BroodWar starts again because I'm really itching to see some good BroodWar games. In addition to that, I really want to see Firebathero play. Really badly.

Ok and I actually had to add this last part because even though I finished this section already (had to leave it unfinished overnight because I was busy), but this is too awesome. I met BoxeR. Of course it wasn't the first time I had ever met him, but the last time I met him, it was just kind of a pulling up in front of him, getting an autograph, thanking him, and moving on. This time, I actually got to more formally meet him. Like with BroodWar (but not with SC2) there are fan meetings after games. Being an old BW player and a generally popular guy, BoxeR held one of these meetings after his game yesterday. After it died down slightly, Jessica (his girlfriend) invited the other white guy and I to get pictures. It's hard to tell when to interject when fan meetings happen and in all cases where I have, the fans haven't minded having a random white guy come in really quick and get a picture and an autograph before asking questions again. This was just nice of Jessica to make it less awkward for us. The guy and I swapped taking pictures for each other and it was really cool. BoxeR used my pen so I don't think I'll ever be able to part with it now. Staying for the fan meeting was cool too even though I caught less than half of what they were talking about. I don't know what to say exactly, it was just so awesome to meet BoxeR for longer than 10 seconds. It's been the highlight of my Starcraft adventures here. Now all I really want is a picture with Firebathero, but that requires BroodWar to start up again.

Japan Excursion:
Our group had a trip to Japan (specifically Osaka and Kyoto) to study Korean diaspora. Unfortunately, the first day consisted of leaving for the airport at 5am, then getting on a plane and spending about from noon until 6pm walking around and touring. By the end of the day, everyone was super wiped out and nobody really recovered until we got back to Korea. The first day was spent touring around Kyoto. We went on a walking tour of an area near where there is supposed to be heavy Geisha activity, but did not see any. Later that night after dinner (which wasn't that great. I didn't eat well in Japan due to the fact that I detest fish) there was an optional tour to the actual geisha activity area at which point a few of us did get to see geisha after we split up to head home after giving up as a large group. After giving up, the big group split up into two groups. I was with the less party-tastic (stupid way of saying less popular?) group which was cool because I like hanging out with them. It's also good to get good points with as many of the girls in the group as possible which I am actively trying to do. Gotta alienate myself a bit less here. We got froyo and saw actual geisha (the other group did not) and then we went back to the hotel.

The next day was the long walking tour of Kyoto. It was pretty informative and for some reason the guide liked talking to me even though I didn't know that much about Japan and couldn't add to the conversation. Usually if a guide likes talking to me its because we have something in common like a deep knowledge of classic rock or maybe just I knew about the topic we were learning about. Either way, this tour was informative, but way too long and about halfway through, everyone kind of stopped paying close attention when we got somewhere. It wasn't necessarily to be rude, it was just that none of us were able to sleep that well given the rigorous schedule we were on (bed at about midnight, up and ready to leave at 7). Everyone welcomed the hour and a half bus ride that afternoon from Kyoto to Osaka at which point we were given the night off. It was one of the girls' birthdays, so a handful of us went to celebrate with her. In the process, I found a really good steak place for cheap that I ate at with a bunch of people before the two groups (we split up to get seated at different restaurants easier) rejoined each other. At that point, a lot of people began to be drains on the productivity of the group while myself and the birthday girl looked around for bars that had room for all of us. I hadn't interacted with her a whole lot before this, but she was one of the people in the group that gets me, so it made walking around with her less awkward. I also think I earned points for being one of the only people helping her find a place to go. Eventually, we all decided on a bar that had some karaoke in it and we just went there and drank and the girls sang a lot. Well the bar neglected to tell us that there is a 200Y charge per song (about $1.50 per song). Anyway, all but a couple of the girls sang a bunch of the songs, but we all decided to chip in equal amounts to punish ourselves for collective ignorance. The guys wound up paying extra because those couple of the girls that didn't sing (unlike the guys) were really bitchy about not paying. We made sure everyone was back safe in the hotel, then me and one of the guys went back out to casually walk around the town for a little bit because we weren't quite tired and we wanted to get away from a couple of the girls who had been really annoying. After walking around for about an hour, it started to rain so we headed back in.

This hotel was nice because the rooms were really small so every person got their own room. Even better was the bed played good elevator music (a console on the bed rather) so I got to fall asleep to that. I actually got 6 hours of sleep and that was the most sleep I got in one sitting the whole weekend. Sunday was our fun day. We had to get up early to tour around a big palace in Nara (just outside of Osaka), but then got the day off starting from noon. The big palace was really cool. In the surrounding area, there were free roaming deer (a lot of them) and they were really tame, so it was like a strange petting zoo. Going into the temple was also pretty amazing because of its size. It is the largest wooden structure in the world measuring at about 160 feet tall, about 190 feet wide, and about 170 feet long. Inside the temple was really nice as well, containing two huge statues each about 45 feet tall. There was also a pillar with a hole at the base that was just large enough for someone of my size to squeeze through, so a bunch of us tried that. You're supposed to gain enlightenment or wishes granted if you do it, so fingers crossed. I also did a special love walk at a palace in Kyoto where you walk from one stone to another with your eyes closed (me and two other guys did it for fun) and if you do that, you're supposed to find true love so fingers super crossed. Who knows, maybe Sunny will just appear at my doorstep someday with all this good luck I'm supposedly accumulating. After seeing the palace, we had an hour to just randomly explore which turned into people trying to eat whilst being harassed by the deer. Apparently I was either the deer whisperer of the group or just the only one that had any experience whatsoever dealing with farm animals because the responsibility kept falling to me to keep the deer from bothering the girls too much. Having so many deer to pet was a nice substitute for not having a cat.

That afternoon, the group split up quite thoroughly. Not even all the guys stayed together which was the strangest part. Usually there are at least four of us (plus one guy that tags along), but this time, only three of us went to get food together. I had planned on hanging out with Boram during this time, but as with all weekend, she was perpetually kidnapped by other people and was hanging out with them. I'll go into a bit more detail in a little bit here the subject of her. Anyway, the three of us got food, then went back towards the hotel to rest for an hour because we were all tired. One guy offered to knock on our doors in an hour and we all went into our rooms. The problem for me was that my bed was so comfortable, if I even sat on it briefly, I would fall asleep. Such was the case this time and I wound up sleeping for four hours as did the other two guys. By that time, we all decided we should go get dinner because it was 6:00. The two guys really wanted steak, but the other people we were now with did not, so I volunteered to go get steak with the two guys since I desperately wanted something that wasn't seafood (any meal provided to us through the program was predominantly seafood which sucks because I hate hate hate that stuff) and I also didn't need to hang out with those other people. We got the good steak again then proceeded to wander around town looking to find gifts for people. Eventually we concluded that gifts were too expensive and we gave up and left back for the hotel to rest for an hour again. Then 3 hours later, we woke up and a couple people decided they wanted to do a night exploration this night similar to the one I did with that other guy from the night before. It went pretty well, but eventually it started to rain, so we went back inside. Back in the hotel, I played cards for a bit with one of the guys, then eventually began winning at that game really consistently. I guess I'm a natural. We then played a few games during the first half of the Giants game (one of the guys is from New York), but at halftime, it was 3am and I was tired, so I went to bed for 4 hours before getting up for the next day.

It was now Monday, our final day. We took a tour of a nice temple which took up a good amount of time. We then spent most of the afternoon making our way to the airport and then waiting for the plane to arrive. A few of us stopped at the duty free store to pick up alcohol (it's gonna be a partay when I come back to game night with all these asian drinks). Also somewhere in there, me and the two guys I hung out with on Sunday ran across Little Bow Wow (who I didn't recognize). He was super nice and the two guys got their picture taken with him. I didn't want to get in on it because I only know who he is because of Like Mike and there was no way in hell I was going to tell him that. We finally arrived in Korea at about 9:00 at which point I got back to my room and passed out at about 11:00, then proceeded to get a much needed 12 hours of sleep.

Japan was actually an interesting experience in that it was not terribly interesting. I had been wondering for a couple weeks prior to going there if I was really liking Korea for Korea or if I was just liking it because it was different from home. After going to Japan and coming back to Korea, I now know that I really like Korea for being Korea. I feel at home here and it was nice to get back into my regular familiar schedule here, doing all the things I like to do on a daily basis. I am positive that were I to come back here (which I still really want to do (but how to tell my family....)), I would really be happy. I know if I tell my family this, they will all say well you're an adult so you can make the decisions and that's cool, but I would rather they support this decision rather than accept it. And unfortunately, unless I underestimate how much they would approve of my plan, my most convincing strategy for them realizing why I want to come back would be to get a girlfriend over here. And I don't want to make that sound really creepy, I would really like a girlfriend here anyway. I've been spoiled here with all the pretty girls everywhere. So with this topic, I shall transfer into...

Amorous Affairs:
Well not so much I guess given my general lack of success/attempts.

First, we have the assistant. I did ask her "out" about a month and a half ago, but after a few events that made me wonder if she understood I asked her out instead of asked her to hang out, the rendezvous fell apart and never happened. It also sounded like she wanted to meet with a larger group of people so it would be more casual. That sounds pretty straightforward, but I still have no idea if she knows I asked her on a date (I applied some of the nuances with the English language that I would on an American girl (that a Korean girl might not understand)) so I'm currently debating whether to try again and that end has kind of been left open for now. I'm also working other leads.

The girl that seemed to like me from the volunteering project has not shown up since that first week. In fact, I haven't heard from her much, so I assume that is now a dead end.

But last week, a new girl showed up to the volunteering project. She is 150cm tall (the perfect height!!) and recently got a license for something involving programming. I take programming to mean one thing, but it sounds like she may just be certified as proficient in excel and programs like that. Either way, she's slightly nerdy and I'm considering asking her out next time she comes if I haven't scored a date by then already. And again, we're allowed to do anything with the people outside of the project so it's totally okay. I actually have a student now through that project and every Thursday, I'm going to be teaching him some English.

And last, but certainly not least, there's the girl that works at the GSL front desk. I see her every day I come in and she greets me with a big smile and I greet her back in Korean. I sometimes try to make chit chat briefly in Korean (still haven't gotten her name yet though) and we're too shy to make prolonged eye contact, but people that have seen me talking to her described what she did while I was complementing her or talking to her and it's usually something that gives me a pretty good vibe. Confusingly, there's this one guy that always sits with her and I can't tell if he's her boyfriend. I don't necessarily think he is, but there's also the possibility that he is a close friend that is protective of her or possibly even an unfortunate friendzoned guy. Being in that position a few times myself, I hate to ask her out under his watch, but I figure I gotta do it eventually. I was planning to do it last night, but since BoxeR was there, getting to meet him had to take priority and in addition to that, there were a ton of people, so I couldn't talk to her really well. Ideally today the guy will not be there and I can just approach her during a game or something. Wish me luck, hopefully win or lose I will actually get up the balls to do something.

Korean Life:
The classes are going well, but they're really boring and my desire to talk about them is even less than your desire to hear about them I'm sure. I've been making casual friends mostly through trips to Costco. It seems every time I take my roommate, he finds someone that wants to tag along, so I get to meet new people that way which is kind of fun. People are also getting to know me as the Starcraft guy or the Costco guy. I also have taken to liking to make really terrible puns around people, so that's been fun to have that going too. Hopefully I can provide people with some amusement. As for my adventures, I haven't had time for many since my last post what with my Japan trip and midterms taking place. I did manage to do another big walk starting at midnight the other day though. The subway broke and I was too cheap for a taxi, so I walked for about 2 hours from my location to my dorm room starting at midnight. And I only got harassed once and it was in the most public area. A Korean guy called me the n-word to which I gave him a confused look and kept walking.

Not much else to report. This post has taken me a while to write and for a second time is running right up into my language class, so I should get going to that. Until next time, peace out.

Whoa, I go to Korea and Blogger gets revamped

2011-10-18T23:54:00.000-07:00

Not that any of you would know since nobody besides me posts anymore. Hey guys, sorry about the massive delay. I should really have posted 2 weeks ago, but I got kind of sidetracked with Starcraft events and other cool things I've been doing. I recently decided that at least once a week, I want to try to just go explore random parts of the city on my own. It's been pretty fun, especially since I've gotten good places to explore by watching a Korean show I like called Running Man. More on that later. Also, I've started keeping a blog on TeamLiquid, which is the most used site for everything Starcraft. Because I now have a medium to make long, ranting posts about Starcraft in a place where I don't feel like it's bothering you guys, my posts here will be less about just Starcraft and hopefully more about my IRL life (and thus perhaps slightly more condensed! (but don't count on it...)). Once I learn more about how the blog setup works on that site, I'll link to posts I've made if you guys want. Until then, best to get on with what's been happening!

First off, I got two of the things on my list of things I wish I had brought. It took a while, but I eventually ordered and waited for a frisbee to arrive. It turns out, it got here in about 5 days, then spent 2.5 weeks on the floor of the mail room (which is odd because usually packages do not get put in the mail room) until it was discovered by a girl who knew me and told me it was there. Success! I still haven't gotten to use it though because I've been going to Starcraft a lot. This weekend, I'm going to get some chances to throw around though, so that will be fun. I also acquired a compass. It came when I visited this big flea market in Seoul on one of my adventures. I've kept it on my person at all times since then. When I'm outside of the major metropolitan area, I can easily tell which way is north. The compass really comes in handy inside the main part of the city and at night though. I still do not have a pokewalker, but I also doubt that I will get one here.

Adventures:
I've been around to a lot of places in Seoul now. Once a week, I get the whole day off, so I like to just hop on the subway and hit a new destination. The best part is at the places I visit, I'm usually the only foreigner there which is pretty fun. It satisfies my hipsterness. Eventually, I'll get around to uploading pictures to facebook. Anyway, I've been to some cool places such as:
-A bridge in South Seoul that every 2 hours also has a fountain display from one side. I then walked back to my dorm from there which was a really long walk, taking just a couple minutes shy of 3 hours.
-A folk flea market which I spent WAYYY too much time at because it reminded me of walking around in a nicer version of my grandpa's shed. I also liked it because I knew Sunny had been there to film an episode of Running Man when she was a guest on the show. Anyway, I'm definitely going back there. I saw an old record of Never Gonna Give you Up and if it's still there next time, that thing is mine.
-Dream forest up in North Seoul where there's a big nature preserve. There's a good forest with good hiking and occasional views of the whole city. There's also an observatory which was unfortunately closed when I was there, but if I go back, I'm visiting it.
-SM entertainment building located southeast of the fountain bridge. The building is pretty boring actually, but I wanted to see it because SM is the label that Girls Generation is with, so you know....there was a chance I could run into Sunny >___>

Starcraft:
I gotta hit on this a little. Starcraft has been really fun. I'm starting to get to know the casters and they definitely remember me by now. I usually come alone, but they're more than willing to talk to me between games and I actually feel like I'm not troubling them, but that they're actually liking me. I've also been able to talk to a lot of people that come in for their first time for whatever reason. It's fun to tell them a bit about esports and what goes on. It feels like being an esports ambassador of sorts, I like it.

I've also found a couple guys here that play SC as well, so occasionally, the three of us will hit up a PC bang together. One guy is my skill level and the other guy is really good (Masters in KR server), but he still likes to play with us, so that's nice. The two of them both go together a lot when I'm going to GSL matches, but they always invite me along and I try to go whenever I don't have a GSL thing going on.

Food:
Because I know you guys are concerned. I found a restaurant here near the GSL studio that I have become a regular at. I eat really good meals there and they always know what I want to order when I come in. I've also started drinking this Vitamin C drink that Girls Generation advertises because it's good for me, it tastes good, and sometimes Sunny is on the bottle. It's a triple win!

Volunteering:
Our study group does this thing called the BACK project where we volunteer on Saturdays with North Korean refugees, teaching them English and going out and doing fun activities with them. In addition to that, we're allowed to be friends with them outside of class and do whatever we want because they're really also looking for friends as well as people to help them learn English. I'm the only guy in the group, plus I'm one of the oldest two people from our study group (then two of the North Korean guys are 25) so naturally I'm pretty popular. And it's nice to talk to them because they're all our age (between 19 and 25). There are two schools that participate in the thing. On the first weekend, only one girl came from one of the schools, and the other school had about 9 or 10 people coming. It sounded like the one girl was excited to come though because she wanted to make a lot of friends because she is the only one from her family here in South Korea. She came with her teacher who has since stopped coming because this program is designed to just be interaction between students. So anyway, this girl and I made good eye contact right away (sorry about the cheesy, slow build in) and then didn't talk much, but I heard her asking her teacher how to say a bunch of different questions in English. Eventually, after all the introductions and games were played, we had a bit of free time in which it turned out the North Koreans were to ask some of us for our contact info so we could become mentors for teaching them English and whatnot. Just to brag, I'm the only one that got more than one mentor, it's because I'm an older guy. But the nice part was as soon as this started, that girl ran up to me and used all the questions she had learned from her teacher on me to get my contact info. I've since been in fairly regular contact with her. She wasn't able to make it last weekend and now we don't see the group until the first weekend in November due to our group's busy schedule, but I'm hoping to possibly see her sometime before that. Who knows, maybe I'll ask her out sometime. I don't know if I should think about doing that just yet. It's going to be fun doing that for the coming weekends though. Also, the experience of teaching them English has been really fun and its making me consider coming back here to teach English even more (PLEASE OVERLOOK ALL GRAMMATICAL ERRORS I HAVE MADE WHEN THINKING ABOUT ME TEACHING ENGLISH).

Well now I have Korean class coming up in about 10 minutes, so I should be heading out. Fortunately, I got to cover everything I wanted to talk about. So I'll get pictures up on facebook and then hopefully I will get to talk to you guys individually eventually. Until then, peace out.

It's too exciting over here!

2011-09-25T03:33:00.000-07:00

Hey, sorry about the big delay between posts. I know I keep saying every other weekend, but I am currently failing at that. I've been keeping really busy with Starcraft matches on weekdays and random activities on weekends. Fortunately, my classes are not big on homework and similar to my home university, they assign term papers and those combined with a midterm and a final will make up my entire grade for the class. I really like it being done that way because I can work on my papers a little at a time instead of just having to crap out a new homework assignment every night while procrastinating on a short essay due at the end of the class. It occurs to me now that I never even got to tell you about my classes, so I'll take care of that in this post. Also, I might start getting a bit more starcraft experience heavy (I'll try not to too much) because we're really trying to keep posts on http://starcraftcrew.tumblr.com/ on the short side so that they're easy to get reblogged.

International Trade Practices:
I like this class despite the fact that it's a little basic. It's the best I could do in terms of getting into econ related courses, so I hope I can get credit for it. At the very least, I am far enough ahead in credits that I can afford to have none of my classes here count towards my major (though I would REALLY like it if I could get that to happen). The professor for this class is kind of silly and has a really thick accent, but either doesn't notice or doesn't care because he just powers through words that he blatantly mispronounces. Every day, we're greeted with a really loud "HERRO EVERYONE." The class as I said is more basic than what I expected from a trade class, but I guess it will work out fine since I know about of the stuff that's we're going to learn.

Politics and Society of North Korea:
This was a class I came across when I was desperately looking for a class to add so that I could have the required 15 credits (I got screwed in registration and ran the risk of getting kicked out if I remained with only 12 credits. Now I'm safely full time at 15 credits). The professor for this class actually lives in Busan (about as far as you can get in Korea from Seoul; it takes about 3 hours on the train) and rides the train up every time there's class (and class is at 9am!). For this reason, he made the class only meet once a week instead of twice (one of the days was a one hour meeting). He suggested we work on our group projects in that time, so my group has gladly begun to do that. The class looks like it will be really interesting.

Philosophy in East Asian Literature:
This was the only class (besides my language class) that I successfully signed up for during the registration period. I'm always into philosophy courses (it's still my minor), so I know this class will continue to be interesting. Additionally, I think the professor likes me because I'm usually the most attentive person (and I sit in the back (I don't like having my back to a door and I like a wall to lean on)). He's actually a lot like the 'typical philosophy professor' so naturally I get along with him well.

Korean Language:
I was a little disappointed to land in the beginner beginner level because it felt like the hours I spent studying this summer were wasted. To anyone interested, I don't recommend Rosetta Stone. It was not particularly effective for me. We spent the first two weeks of the class learning the alphabet which was hell for me and two other people in the class because the three of us knew the alphabet, but not much else (the reason they just stuck us in beginner). More recently, we've been working on introductions and stuff which has been nice. The guy that knew the alphabet is struggling now, but me and the (Dutch!) girl that knew the alphabet are still finding this class kind of easy. Just last Friday, there were some games between our university and Korea University, our rival school. Everyone wound up skipping classes throughout the day to attend this. I was unable to do so because of a test in my philosophy class, so there were only two people (including myself) in my language class. Because we couldn't learn anything new in the class, we took a look ahead to what we'll be doing at the end of the semester. I now understand it, so I know for sure I will pass the class. I also started going beyond the scope of the class which impressed the teacher. She has actually said I'm a smart student to my face, which was a good way to build up my ego haha. We have two teachers, one does M/W/F and the other does a lot of just reading and pronunciation work with us on T/Th. I call the reading teacher the aegyo teacher because she (somewhat effectively) displays a lot of aegyo. Most of the guys like her better. I actually like the M/W/F teacher better because she's the one that said I was smart ^__^.

YonKo Games:
Each year, Yonsei University and Korea University have a sporting event that covers a weekend in which the two schools compete in Basketball, Baseball, Ice Hockey, Rugby, and Soccer. The main activity during the games though is not watching, but chanting and singing nonstop (literally, there were zero breaks at every game). I learned that the point of the YonKo games are not to see who can win more games, but to see how collectively drunk the student bodies of both schools can get. After the games wrapped up on Saturday, there was a big party on the Yonsei campus at which there was an open bar for two and a half hours until they ran out of beer. An open bar for college students....interesting idea. Needless to say, it was a quiet morning in Shinchon the next day. Unfortunately, I didn't meet any pretty girls at the street party T___T. I did go drinking with my Starcraft friends from Korea University though. I impressed them with my bottle opening ability (that was the first time I've done it in Korea, I'm more worried about hurting myself since I'm not drinking my usual crap-ton of milk each day). They insisted on getting a video of me doing it, so I obliged. I don't know why it's such an impressive feat. I later continued to impress them by chasing beer with soju. Again, something so mundane being found impressive is something that confused me. On the note of beer also, I had a Heineken last night (first time since coming to Korea that I've had non-Korean beer. Heineken is not my favorite Dutch beer (Amstel is) and don't get me wrong; Heineken is good and all, but it's not stellar. But it being my first foreigner beer in so long, it tasted like gold. Korean beer just doesn't stack up. I feel sorry for people here T___T.

My roomate and I have gotten to know each other better. He's actually a pretty cool guy. We're on a comfort level in terms of jokes and information sharing that I'm on with you guys, so it's nice. He's a Ravens fan and I like the Ravens, so we stay up on Sunday nights to watch them play which is also fun. We're going to do that again tonight. It's nice to have a way to watch some football over here, especially since I can then sleep in since I have no class early on Mondays.

I went to the GSL Finals a few weeks ago and it was quite an experience. They had the 10 "all star" players lined up for autographs before the mini tournament. All foreigner fans got instantly moved to preferred spots in the line, then preferred seating, which was really cool. I got autographs from several players and got to chat with a couple too. I joked around with Jinro from TeamLiquid and found out he's actually a pretty nice guy. Also, interacting with BoxeR was quite amazing. When we went in to actually get our seats, we were placed in the third row. There were only press and family members in front of us. When the finals started, team IM sat in the section next to us. My friend was on the aisle and across from him (across the aisle) was NesTea himself. It was pretty cool and the finals were really great TvT.

A couple weeks later, I went to the OSL Finals with my BroodWar friends and some guys I met online from TeamLiquid.net. It was a cool enough experience and the guys from TL were nice, but a few of them really wanted to get absolutely drunk during the matches. I didn't have any interest in doing that because I came to watch BroodWar (they didn't really know anything about it). I've actually found that being a white guy that likes BroodWar, I'm a dying breed. The finals were absolutely amazing and way more intense than the GSL Finals. I was glad I got to go to this because there might never be an OSL again unless the BroodWar scene can find a way to survive in the troubling times it is going through.

General Starcraft viewing is going well too. I found out that Moletrap (english SC2 caster) likes BroodWar and I've run into him at some events, so I've gotten to talk to him a bit more which has been cool. I'm also glad I met him more because I admittedly didn't really like him when I lived in the states. Now that I've gotten to know him a bit (and this is true with all the code A casters), I really like them. They're cool guys. And I like to think they like having a regular visitor to the studios that actually kind of knows his stuff. Most people just pop in once and want autographs and pictures and we never see them again. Can't blame people for being like that though, I was there in my first week. Some players and coaches are recognizing me too, probably since I stand out in a crowd and I'm there quite literally every day. Watching BroodWar has been fun too because I hang out with people that really know the game, so it's nice to have someone that can help me to spell it out. In the semifinals match, I attended with my friend that teaches here. The match actually happened to be on the same day as the birthday of my favorite BW streamer on TeamLiquid (and he's my only way of watching BW matches live back home) so I wished him happy birthday on TeamLiquid and said I would get a sign on stream for him. I wound up actually getting it on the stream much to my surprise. And during each match in the OSL, the winners of the day will autograph a keyboard bag after they win. The bag is then given to the person with the best sign at the end of the day. There was just one winner today, but I got the bag. And it was Jangbi's autograph (current OSL champion), so even better! I was going to buy a keyboard bag while I was here, but not now that I got that sweet one. I was really happy.

In other news, stuff is going pretty well here. I'm really liking it. I of course miss talking to everyone more regularly than I currently do and not having game night kind of sucks, but I can replace it pretty easily with stuff here, so that is always fine. No girlfriend yet, but who knows, maybe one will come someday soon. It took a trip to Korea to learn how badly I actually had 'yellow fever' >___>. So before I sign off for this post, I'll leave you with the short list of things I really wish I had brought.

1: Compass:
I still have trouble finding north sometimes due to cloudiness or tall buildings preventing me from determining the location of the sun. When I can actually see it, I always know which way I am facing, but sometimes it is just not possible. And the worst part is that (like all things in this list), I had a compass in my hand all ready to pack, but I wound up deciding not to bring it at the last minute.

2: PokeWalker:
With this, I figured I wouldn't be walking very much and I didn't want to risk losing it. Turns out I would likely have not lost it, plus I'm walking at least 2-3 miles each day (then running a mile every other day to stay in shape for frisbee) so having that PokeWalker would have really come in handy since I'm just grinding my pokemon up to higher levels in my free time (when my internet dies randomly).

3: A frisbee:
I jokingly said when I was packing that if I couldn't find a frisbee on a college campus, then it wasn't meant for me to play frisbee while I was here. I of course thought I would have no problem finding one in a store. Turns out I was dead wrong and they're super hard to find. I spent 6 hours today looking for one and about 3 hours last Thursday doing the same thing. I'm going to have to give up and order one online because I need to be throwing so that I am tournament ready when I get back to the states. At the very least, the running is helping me a bit. I also play soccer with the Germans occasionally, which is a good way to keep some coordination up I guess.

Ok well thats it for now. Until next time, peace out!

Your eyes do not deceive you! It is an update!

2011-09-04T02:05:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone! I totally spaced on updating last weekend. I'll try to be better about it in the future. It's been a really cramped few weeks and I'm starting to get more and more free time as we go into the actual semester. This post will probably run long, so I'll be keeping all Starcraft related posts short for the time being. I recommend you check out http://starcraftcrew.tumblr.com/ if you want to read about my Starcraft related adventures. Keir and Peter also work on the site, so to tell if I made a post, just find out whether it pertains to Korean leagues or not. If it does, then it is one of my posts. In the future, I'm going to start tagging posts with my name to let people know who made it. And again, I apologize if I'm late on posting in the future (going to try for every other Sunday/Monday), but it may be due to having written too much for that site or just a busy schedule. I'm working hard to try to fill the tumblr blog with as many important news posts as possible in the hopes that it will someday grow big and strong. And since I'm the only one posting about all the things in Korea, I've been pretty much constantly writing posts and getting a huge backlog of them saved up because I don't want to just spam a ton of posts to that site in one day. But I've spoken enough about that, time for a post here!

My plane ride over was nice. As I hate being jetlagged, I made the decision to not sleep the night before flying so that I would wind up having been awake for about 20 hours before hopefully crashing that night and getting a good night's sleep and quickly adjusting to the local time. This staying up idea turned out to be especially great because I was able to get through 13 hours of flying without having to use any electronics or other entertainment items I had brought along. I remember nothing from the SEA to SFO leg because I was asleep before we took off and woke up after we landed. The two guys next to me seemed to have done the same thing, so good thing I [probably] didn't prevent them from using the bathroom. For my SFO to Incheon flight, I sat next to a guy who is an English teacher over here. We wound up talking about Korea related stuff (what I could expect to encounter and whether it was a good experience to teach over here) for about 3 hours of the 11 hour flight. The other 8 hours of the flight were spent sleeping. I was pretty happy with myself. When I landed, I was wide awake and was worried that my sleep plan had failed, but it did eventually work out. There was one girl on my flight from the CIEE group and we had spoken via facebook before the flight, so she waited for me at the exit to the jetway and we went through customs and got our bags together to prevent ourselves from getting too lost. From there, we proceeded to go to the meetup location for the CIEE group. We met the program director there and her (pretty) assistant. Spoiler alert, I wound up asking the assistant out recently, more on that later. After meeting them, we waited for about 3 other people to show up, then we got shuttled off to the university where we ate dinner and all went to bed.

Some names really quick:
Katherine - The girl on the flight, I think of her as kind of a little sister (independently of the coincidence that her name is the same as my actual sister). We don't hang out much anymore, but early on in the program, we did.
Gary - Nerdy guy, but once he starts drinking, he is a party animal. He's pretty cool and good to hang out with, but I've been hanging out with him less and less as he makes more acquaintances.
Peter, Matt, and Chang - I hung out with them a lot during the couple of weeks that we were with the group. They are fully aware of my Starcraft activities and plan to come to one game with me in the future. They're really cool, but they like to go out drinking whereas I like to watch Starcraft. I'll still go places with them occasionally though.
Boram - The assistant director for the program here. I like talking with her and hopefully I'll get to do more of that as the semester progresses.

By the following morning, the group had all arrived. I was surprised to see the ratio of guys to girls in the group (23 girls and 6 guys). We had an orientation thing, then got assigned to 6 groups (one guy per group as it turned out) and were given a photo scavenger hunt throughout the city. Once I learned it was a competition, I really wanted to win. Fortunately, the girls in my group also wanted to win, so we worked hard all afternoon. Other teams took a break for dinner, but ours did not and as a result, we wound up winning. We didn't even have anyone that was really fluent in Korean, but between a girl that knew some Korean and my ability to read Hangul, it worked out really well.

The rest of the week was pretty normal, containing just some minor events like learning locations of important places. On Friday, we left for our three day excursion to the southern part of the country accompanied by a guy who is an expert on Korean history and knows a lot about the land in the southern provinces. He was kind of weird at first, but was really cool after I got to know him. At lunch, people were kind of sick of him after his hour and a half lecture about Korean philosophical history that took place on the bus ride. As everyone was sitting down at tables, I noticed he was alone while all the others were filling up. I decided I would leave my seat to go sit across from him because I felt pretty bad. Boram wound up sitting next to me, so I must have earned some good karma for that to happen. I got to talking to him (his name was David as well) and I found out that we have pretty identical taste in music (he was a hippie) and he is also an Eagle Scout, so that was pretty cool. I gained a lot of respect for him after the conversation during that meal.

That night, we stopped in a small town to stay at a traditional Korean home (where you sleep on the floor and all that (oh, it's great for your back, I'm sure (not))). Everyone went out to eat, but the group got kind of split in two because no restaurant could hold all 29 of us. The staff people went their own way and I don't really know where they ate. The people that I went with went to a Korean BBQ place which was pretty amazing. We decided this would be our big party night, so we all got a lot of alcohol. Knowing that I could handle a lot of Tequila (I learned that lesson after not reaching my limit after 7 shots and 2 beers over the course of 2 hours earlier this summer), I decided I would try to see how much soju I could have. By the end of the night, I wound up having 2.5-3 bottles of soju on my own. Soju is considered hard alcohol in case you're wondering, so yes, that is a lot. There was some lame truth and dare stuff that I didn't really partake in, but it was funny to watch. I didn't actually get drunk until I blacked out. I felt fine, but then at one point, I remember looking at my bed and thinking "Man, I'm really tired." Next thing I know, I'm waking up in that bed. Apparently, I only blacked out for about 5 minutes before falling asleep, so I guess that worked out. All that happened was I stubbed my toe, a girl asked if I was okay, I said yes and apologized for being drunk, then I proceeded to lie down and go to sleep. Being drunk is an excellent way to fall asleep on a hardwood floor! When I woke up the following morning, a ton of people were hung over, but I felt pretty great actually. Everything wasn't super bright and I had no headache, so I don't know what to make of that.

The second day, we went around the southern part of the country looking at buddhist temples and other cool historical stuff like that. At our traditional hotel for the night, we found out that they got MBCGame on the tvs, so the guys room wound up watching that for a while. Later into the night, we went downstairs to the small scale PC Bang that was there to play some Broodwar. I challenged 4 of the other guys to a 1v4 since they really wanted to play on Fastest Map. Two had never really played before, but two of them had. The worst part was that I totally should have won. If I had stayed in my base for about 30 more seconds, I would have repelled their mass attack and I would have been free to move out. Instead, I was impatient and my forces were all the way across the map when I got attacked. After that, we did a 1v2v2. I killed one guy early on, then the other three allied up against me and I wound up losing. I was playing zerg that time, so I didn't have the chance to go carriers like I did the previous time.

On the third day, we saw some more buddhist temples on our way back into Seoul. We arrived late at night and at that point, I just stuck around the dorm and went to sleep.

Throughout the following week, we just had a mass of orientations: first for our program, then for the university and the dorm we were staying in. It was a lot of sitting and listening, but I was able to find time at nights to go to see Starcraft every night. I've become a regular there and I'm starting to even get recognized by some Korean players and coaches (I mean, I have to stand out being one of the few white guys they see on a daily basis). I've also made some good friends through these matches which has been really fun because it makes the games a lot more interesting. I can't hear English casters (and there are none for BroodWar matches), so having someone to talk to is nice. If you've seen my facebook, you know that I've been meeting players left and right, it's been really cool. I've been finding new players to become a fan of and it's been really nice. I've also liked getting back into the BroodWar scene too, I had really missed it.

So less has been happening recently because classes were starting this last week. We did make it out to the DMZ which was pretty interesting. It was a full day, but we got to see into North Korea, we got to see tunnels they dug, and other cool touristy locations. During the trip, we asked Boram if she wanted to come out clubbing with us one night and it was eventually decided on a Friday night. Weekday nights are nights that I go watch SC and Fridays are BW match days, so I was a little bummed, but I was excited to get to hang out with her, even if it was also with a bunch of other guys and some girls too. I found out we were going to meet her in a part of town that is near the GOM studio, so I figured I had time to be over there to watch those matches instead of BW. Then, I got a better idea and asked Boram if she wanted to go get dinner with me before we met up with everyone. She said yes, so that was pretty exciting. Unfortunately, plans fell apart and the hangout never wound up happening. It turned out she had something come up, so she wasn't able to get dinner with me either (T___T). She apologized, and it was fine. Secretly, I was kind of happy because I got in touch with her on my way to the subway, so I hopped on one going the opposite direction and got to see the BW I had thought I would have to miss. She also said that we'll have to hang out later in the semester, so there is still hope.

Today, I had my preliminary games for Code A. There was of course no chance at me getting into Code A, but a couple friends and I figured it would be a fun chance to maybe get to play some pros. My friends went yesterday and didn't do so well against their opponents. To make it worse, the opponents weren't really big games. Moletrap and the other commentators offered to stream their games for fun, but it turned out BoxeR was playing at the same time, so that didn't wind up happening. I thought there was going to be a chance for me today, but I had an early match and the commentators weren't there yet. Oh well. I wound up playing Startale.Squirtle who is actually a really good player and a former Code A member. When he said his name in the chat, the first thing that came to mind was "Oh thank God, a Protoss!" TvP is my strongest matchup, so I was happy to give Squirtle the best games I possibly could. He was really friendly and didn't roll me too insanely hard and it was a fun experience to play him. Afterwards, I asked where he was sitting so I could congratulate him and I did that. He seemed kind of surprised that I offered to do it, I guess it's not that common of a thing to do. I got to meet quite a few pro players today and it was nice to have played Squirtle because I could just tell them I got beaten by him and nobody would have to ask how skilled I actually am at Starcraft. They know Squirtle is a good player and should beat me regardless of my ladder ranking. One last fun note, I got a lot of attention from some spectators. I'm not sure whether it was due to me being white or due to me playing southpaw. It was probably a combination of the two.

Oh, but I forgot! I got to see BoxeR play! Usually, when he plays (be it at MLG, GSL, or whatever) he is instantly upgraded to showmatch status and is put in one of those booths. He was in the later stages of the tournament, so nobody was really around and I was able to stand behind him with SlayerS_Jessica, SlayerS_MMA, and a couple other random people. I know it sounds kind of mundane, but to actually stand behind BoxeR while he's playing in a tournament is probably a once in a lifetime experience and it was totally cool. He lost unfortunately, but maybe next time I'll get to see him rack up some wins.

That's all I can really think of to post for now. My classes aren't 100% locked in yet, so I'm going to refrain from posting about them until that is taken care of. Until next time, peace out.

Last Post (IN AMERICA)

2011-08-14T13:24:00.000-07:00

+1 for Bandit Keith reference? I leave tomorrow for South Korea, so I'll try to keep this post short because I haven't started packing yet (I actually leave in about 15 hours). The remainder of my summer has been quite enjoyable, providing me with good times and some decent stories for you. A quick note first though, I will probably not get to post from Korea until sometime at the end of August. From that point, I'll try to hold myself to weekly/bi-weekly posts because I'm sure the posts from Korea will contain more interesting things (or at least new things).

I went to the beach one weekend with Grandpa and my aunt. I promised I would go with Grandpa during the summer and this was me finally coming through on that. He got to do the go-karts at ocean shores, which he really wanted to do. After returning from that, I continued just studying Korean and doing my usual activities around here.

D&D:
I attended my first session since May a couple weeks ago and the session ended well considering I will not be back for at least four months. I became the first player in our current party to die. I had low health in the fight, but I was trying to make sure we just got through the fight and I was taking calculated risks. The ogres we were fighting had been hitting me for about 10-12 damage or less the whole time and I kept getting good heals from our healstick. So at one point, I got hit down to -5 health, but I healed up to 5. The ogle supposedly was near death, so I figured landing one good hit would kill it. I hit it, but it did not die, so I was kind of hoping Steven would get it on his next turn and I would endure the one hit it would lay on me in the meantime. Out of nowhere, the ogre did 15 damage to me. That was exactly enough to make me die. If it had done one less damage, I would not have died. Anyway, it works out because now they don't have to come up with a reason for my character being unmanned for the next four months. I also feel like this death was a little more legitimate than my last ones.

Keir Here:
Keir came out to Washington because his sister is going to school up here and he was coming up to visit with people/accompany her to the orientation. He managed to get enough time to stay the night over here at my house one night. We had pretty good times playing Starcraft. Keir had not yet experienced Starcraft 2 on ultra graphics, so I had him use my PC while I used my laptop to once again stress test it before Korea. The whole time we played, I kept hearing him being amazed at how smooth everything was. We would be in the middle of a game when suddenly I would hear "OH MY GOD, THE CREEP JIGGLES" or "THE PROBES GLIDE!" The following morning, we played through some Battlefront and did pretty well before getting to a difficult level at which point he had to get going to go see Robin.

That day, since Keir was gone, I went to the rescheduled game night (which was just Steven, Chris, Eric, and I) which we had rescheduled to Friday so that we could have a bigger game night/bbq party with a bunch of people on Saturday. It was quite a standard game night, playing some badminton, then moving on to other games. This time, Chris and I stayed the night because it was meant for this to be just a huge party weekend for the four of us. Eric had to go, but he came back at about 1pm the next day, which was cool. After Eric left, the three of us watched Pulp Fiction (the first time for Steven and I (I really liked it)), then we tried to watch Wild Wild West (which we had all seen), but I fell asleep sometime during the movie and I guess the other two passed out sometime after me because when I woke up, I saw the menu screen for Netflix with Wild Wild West on it. A couple hours after we got up, Eric came back and we went out in the (surprisingly bright) sun to go play badminton while waiting for others to show up.

Eventually, Peter came by. Eric decided that he was going to pretend to be Ting, a foreign exchange student we hang out with. Peter correctly identified Eric, but Eric has such a good FOB impression, he convinced Peter that Peter had incorrectly identified Eric. As Eric went back on the court, Peter sat down with Chris and I and said "Man does he not look exactly like Eric?" It was pretty funny and we let Peter in on the joke shortly after that. A bit later, I went to go get Keir and to buy some beer for the bbq. When we got back, Ting struck again, introducing himself to Keir. Since Keir had never met Eric, the Ting thing was much more believable to him. Throughout the day, hilarity ensued from that. When they were playing badminton together, Keir spoke slower to Eric. Poor Keir was trying to be so nice to him. I was making fun of Ting's accent just to be a dick to see if Keir would say anything and I guess Keir did actually notice. While we were eating, Eric pointed to his beer bottle and asked Keir what the word "Refresh" meant (said with perfect terrible pronunciation) and Keir went on to define it. After about 3 hours of this having gone on, Keir was let in on the joke. His finding out was pretty funny as well, Eric really had him going. After it got dark, we had a ping pong tournament which mostly consisted of showmatches between Keir and Steven. Keir is actually really good at ping pong and managed to beat Steven (I know, impossible!).

People started to trickle out until about midnight when it was down to just Keir, Steven, and I. I was kind of tired from getting 4 hours of sleep and not having eaten all day until we got to dinner. I wound up falling asleep during a brawl match, so Keir and Steven decided to play some ping pong so I could sleep on the couch while they were playing. After that, we played a game of Risk in which I might have been able to win, but I was too timid and Steven took the win on his next turn.

The remainder of my time since then has been spent just playing Starcraft, studying, and packing. I also spent a lot of time visiting people and being visited (because I'm leaving for four months and people seem to think I'll never see them again). I think I'm ready to leave now though, this is going to be a fun semester.

I had to register for classes earlier in the week. That was kind of stressful because they have all 25,000 students enrolled in the university enrolling at the same time. I'm going to need to do some work during the add/drop period, but I think things will work out. Even if I were to get into no classes I need for my major, I only have 6 classes left to take, so I will be able to graduate on time (provided I can get into those classes back at SU).

Last night was more or less my last night since I leave early morning tomorrow. I spent some of it with the guys for game night, then I had to head downtown to hang out with my friend from school. I promised her I would see her during the summer and we hadn't really gotten in touch until late in the summer (more or less my fault there). Anyway, I felt bad and she said that this was the best night for her, so I went to go hang out with her. She was out with some friends, but they were pretty cool and I got along with them anyway. Her and one of the guys were pretty drunk and the designated driver (I assume) was also there. As soon as I got there, she handed me a PBR (oh God, I've become a hipster T____T) and told me to drink it, so I obliged of course. She then told me it was spiked. I didn't ever find out with what, but I didn't taste any hard alcohol in it, so whatever was in there, there was not a lot of it and it couldn't have been strong enough to matter anyway. The four of us walked around the capitol hill area for a bit before it was determined that she needed to get back to her house to sleep off the drunk, so we parted ways. I'll have to hang out with her when I get back because I kinda felt bad about not contacting her sooner than the end of July. After I got back, I hung out with the guys a bit more before we all parted ways for the night.

Today, I'm spending the day packing and desperately hoping I didn't forget anything. I've never been big on first drafts or stuff like that, so if I don't remember to pack something, I'm probably not going to catch it until it comes up that I need it. That's about all I have to say before I head off tomorrow. I'll try to be in touch with you all in Korea. An easy way to figure out the time in Korea is take Pacific time, add 12 hours, then add 4 more. That's how I usually add it. Good times to talk to me will probably be late afternoon/night here when it's morning/early afternoon for me.

Oh, and before I go, visit this site and recommend it to people you know that are into the Starcraft scene and like to follow it (I'm probably pandering to the wrong crowd here, but oh well).http://starcraftcrew.tumblr.com/

It's a blog that Peter, Keir, and I are running. On it, we're going to be talking about Starcraft stuff and we're hoping to make this our niche in the Starcraft community. I will be posting about my SC related experiences in Korea on that site, but I will also be posting them here, so fear not if you don't want to check that all the time.

Until I am in Korea, peace out.

Oops, some mad procrastination happened

2011-07-15T03:38:00.000-07:00

I guess after not really procrastinating this last quarter, I was due. It's not like I haven't also been busy though, I have. Fortunately, even though this post covers a whole month, I will be able to keep it relatively short. You might not even be reading this post anyway, but if you are, thanks! I leave for Korea on the 16th of August and I plan to make one last post before I leave (probably on the 14th or 15th). When I'm in Korea, I'll try to get back to updating more often because I'm probably going to have a lot to talk about. I think I'll be able to hold myself to every other week. I'll repeat myself in the next post and I'll probably tell you all in person too just to make sure you know so you have a way to keep up with my shenanigans over there.

Turning 21:
I was excited to finally turn 21. The ability to drink and gamble is cool, but what I wanted the most was my new license picture and to remove my corrective lenses restriction. Thankfully, I got both of those done. On another cool note, I won the bet! I have proven (to myself at least) that not all kids drink illegally without their parents' knowledge (or some combination of those words) before they turn 21. I get nothing other than a sense of satisfaction from this in case you were wondering. I basically just stuck with this because I am stubborn as hell.

Starcraft:
I've been mostly playing 4v4s with Keir. Occasionally, Peter will get in on them with us which has also been really fun. We maintain a roughly 50% win record which is fine, but not as good as we want. It's difficult because my ranking is artificially high (I should be ranked lower, but the bnet ranking system is too generous). Hopefully for the next season, I will get ranked lower and we will have more success. A recent example of this ranking system comes from earlier tonight when I started doing 1v1s. I lost a game in less than 5 minutes (my computer froze and I disconnected T__T). When I got back on, I had been placed into gold (middle of the pack ranking). I should have been much lower. Oh well though, it seems I'm holding my own in that league so I'm happy for now.

Vacation:
My aunt and uncle were having their 35th anniversary recently. Last summer when my uncle did the marathon, he set in motion this grand plan to have them renew their vows in Maui this summer. It was not until long after this whole vacation was sorted out that I decided to go to Korea. Had it not been a function with the entire family, I might have tried to get out of it because I had(have) a lot of stuff to do before I leave in one month. It was nice to get to see everyone though. My little cousin has become obsessed with the Green Lantern and repeated the oath ad nauseum throughout the trip.

The first seven days of the trip were spent in the timeshare we have on the west side of Maui. Most of each day was spent just relaxing around the town, but there were some other cool events such as watching some family members get surfing lessons. There was not much to tell about that part of the week. The unfortunate part was I had the garbagiest Internet connection at the place. It would take an hour to load a youtube video with a length of four minutes. In fact, the entire time I was there, I could not stream games which was kind of frustrating because there was a lot of good Starcraft I wanted to watch. And it would have worked out especially well too because my parents did not adjust to Hawaii time very well and would go to bed around 9-10pm, leaving me to stay up (if I go to bed before midnight, I take at least an hour to fall asleep). In that time, I wound up just studying Korean as much as I could.

For the final few days, we moved to this house in the middle of the island. What we didn't know about the house was it was more rustic (well actually it was a palace as far as I was concerned) than they advertised. Many cockroach encounters happened which led to many freakouts by all the girls. For the guys, we just hung out all night drinking. My cousin's husband who is a hardcore drinker got Patron at the grocery store (he's kind of a Patron hipster, not liking how popular it has become (mostly because of the price)). The two of us along with dad and my uncle just stayed up late each night taking shots until we got bored and went to bed. Even on the night where I had 5 shots and 2 beers, I did not get drunk. I have now decided that it is definitely not economical to get me drunk and will probably not try anymore.

On the last full day, I finally got to do what I wanted to do which was hike the Haleakala crater. Dad and my uncle came with me. They forgot to bring warmer clothes (it gets cold up at 10,000ft), but we read the trail we were taking was only 9 miles, so we figured it would be about 3-4 hours and thus, coldness would not be a big problem. It turns out, we kept a much slower pace due to dad and my uncle and in addition to that, the trail was 14 miles instead of 9. At the end of the day, we wound up taking 6.5 hours to do the whole thing. The first four miles consisted of a 2,000ft descent and then it was flat for a while before a 3 mile 1,500ft ascent to the end of the trail. It was pretty amazing scenery (not that the other two noticed it, they were really tired). By the end of the hike, they just plopped down in the car and I had to drive home. The women had freaked out again because we took a lot longer than expected, but all was well. They had me to scout the trail and carry all the stuff we brought, so it worked out fine in the end. I would gladly do the hike again, but I'm pretty sure dad and my uncle are not up to doing that ever again.

So since I've been back, it has been just Starcraft and some Korea stuff. I anticipate my life being mostly that before I leave. I'll post again in about a month, so until then, peace out.

Guess I have nothing stopping me from updating.

2011-06-20T00:32:00.000-07:00

Well it's been over a month. Oops, I guess I kinda forgot to post. I've been out of school for 10 days now (clock just hit midnight) and I suppose the first week and a half of break was spent just appreciating that nothing was on my plate. But I do want to keep record of all the important things that have happened to me in the last month. I can only hope I have not forgotten most of the stories. I'll get through school stuff first I suppose then get into other things.

Business Ethics:
This class turned out to be a good one in the end. I enjoyed the first half a lot more when were were talking about philosophies and cool things like that. Eventually, we went into globalization and environmental sustainability which was less exciting for me, but was still good. For the final essay, we were given a prompt for this case about Wal-Mart and we also had the option to do our essays on another topic if we so desired. I decided to do a report pointing out critiques and then ultimately defending Rawlsianism (a more logical version of Utilitarianism to keep it very simple (I discovered that I subscribed to Rawlsianism without even knowing it over the course of the quarter)). I think the professor was impressed at my choice which was cool because he would point me in the right direction for interesting essays and opinions on the topic. It was very helpful and I guess my report was well received because I got a good grade in the class. Also, he agreed to be a recommender/evaluator for my law school applications which was super excellent as well.

International Political Economy:
This class ended up like the one I had with this professor last quarter, I wound up enjoying the class. The individual research report was kind of a doozy though. We had to write a 4-5 page (double spaced thank goodness) research report on the topic of our choice that pertained to the international political economy (if it sounds really open ended, it was). I had a lot of trouble nailing down a topic at first, but eventually just chose to write about food security in Sub-Saharan Africa. I went a little gung-ho with the project and went well above and beyond the guidelines. While the project was really a glorified literature review, I actually did a legit research report complete with graphs and all that good stuff. In the end, my report wound up being barely contained within 6 pages (even after extending the margins to allow more text on the page). Oh and by the way. that was single spaced. So my report was over twice the length required. From my final grade in the class, it looks like I got a pretty bangin' score on it. In addition to that, I turned my project in first, 2 days early. I did it in order to win favor with this professor in the hopes that I could ask her to be a recommender for law school apps (she was my first choice for recommenders because she's pretty highly regarded in the department). To my great excitement, she said yes. That was the highlight of the week for me (and keep in mind, this was a week in which I relieved myself of having the stress of 3 projects, a final, the LSAT, and the same week in which I began summer vacation (it was that exciting)).

Economic Growth:
Well this class picked up once the first half was done. Eventually it became just a freetime on laptop while we learned about how to write research reports. During that time, my partner and I would work with our own data or if we were bored, just mess around on laptops for an hour before getting out. In the end, our report came out very well. I don't know when/if we hear whether he wants to work with us (or any papers this quarter) to try to get them published, but I don't particularly mind either. Both me and my partner are in Korea this fall, so we're going to be kind of busy if it comes up.

Frisbee:
I didn't go much after the last tournament that I went to. There was one more the team had, but it was on the same weekend as Kathryn's confirmation so I couldn't go. During some practices, some of the guys on the team made comments about how they wished I was there, but I think it was just polite talk after I made a good play during scrimmages. I do know that they could have at least used me there for the camping part of it. They had a lot of good horror stories about tent fails and stuff like that that might not have happened if anyone that knew how to camp were there (yes fellow Eagle Scouts and readers of this blog, I know enough about camping to get by...). It's too bad I'm going to miss the first half of the season next year, but I look forward to rejoining the team when I get back.

Confirmation:
Kathryn's confirmation was pretty nice. I got to catch up with Josh H. while I was there because his sister (who is a friend of Kathryn's and who he was sponsoring) was also doing it. It was just nice to have another person there with as cavalier an attitude about the whole thing as me. I realized that the service was the first one I had been to in that church since I had been confirmed in 2006 and the first time I had been to a church service since June of 2008 around the time my grandfather died. And I have no plans to return to church any time soon. My family likes to give you a free pass once you go through confirmation and since you're then an adult in the eyes of the church, you can make your own decisions. We get confirmed to appease the older, more devout members of the family, but they don't care if we don't go to church every Sunday (or at all) so we don't. Don't worry, the irony of getting confirmed in my family is not lost on me.

LSAT:
The class seemed to have helped me in the LSAT. I went into the test feeling pretty confident, having lifted my score up to levels that would work for applying to the UW. The test itself was rather good. To anyone reading, if you're going to take the LSAT in the Seattle area, do it at Seattle U. The conditions were top notch. I don't know how much else I can say about the test given that I signed a confidentiality agreement, but feel free to ask me in person about it and I definitely won't tell you ;).

Starcraft:
Keir and I have started playing Starcraft again. We're burning through the 4v4 ladder, but mostly getting burned. I've done some research and found out that people are having similar problems to us, less than strategic allies. We're trying to find ways to more or less carry our team when some moron decides to tech to battlecruisers that either never see the light of day or die within 30 seconds (highlight was the mothership that actually lasted 4 seconds before it died). So far, we have been unsuccessful, but we will keep trying. Also, I will soon be done with Guild Wars forever. I swear the more I play that game, the more I just want to play SC2. When I finish Guild Wars, it's onto 1v1s for me and I shall begin my progress towards my 750 Terran wins to get back the picture that was stolen from me after the beta (battlecruiser profile pic).

Other stuff:
Jack was in town recently which was fun. I missed having someone around who constantly reminds me that I need to get a haircut. But seriously, it was nice to see him, it had been too long. I enjoyed the few times I got to hang out with him and Davis. We also saw Rosa and Lucy one day which was fun. I got to show off my picky eating skills by finding a restaurant that was considered a good place to get seafood despite me not eating or liking seafood. In case any of the four of you were still wondering, I knew about that place because my mom's family always liked going there when they would come visit my parents in Magnolia. Soon after they moved and occasionally today, that side of the family suggests going there when they're in town. I usually approach it from the other side (since we live that way) and its really one of the only things I know about in that part of town. Along with Jack being in town, I mentioned this, but Davis was in town too. We got to do an SC marathon day with him and Keir which was pretty fun. We messed around in Bronze and got fewer wins than we should have, but that was still fine. Happy now-belated birthday by the way Davis if you find yourself reading this.

Now not much is going on. I'm eventually going to start the big load of work I have to do around this house, my aunt's house, and my grandpa's apartment sometime soon. Orion comes up this week actually, so I don't know what my full schedule will be. I'll try to work on days when he does if he does. For now, I'm staying up to watch a tournament (SC2 of course) and it starts soon, so I'd better get going. Until next time, peace out.

2011-05-31T13:10:00.000-07:00

Real post coming after school and the LSAT are done. I simply do not have enough time to sit down and make a full post between now and then. The LSAT is less than a week away (cue fearful whimpering noises) and my final final is on the 10th. In the meantime, enjoy some quotes!

Reading suggestions of things to bring to Korea:
Me: Oh, they suggest bringing contraceptives!
Mom: Yeah, you don’t need that. Just keep it zipped while you’re there.
Me: Well what’s odd about it here is they list it under “General” and not “Things you can buy there.”
Mom: Haha, that is pretty weird.
*Dad walks into room, other conversation ensues*
*Conversation gets to a point where mom says…*
Mom: I just hold my family to a higher standard.
Me: I’ll say, she won’t even let me bring condoms to South Korea!
Mom: You’re just there for four months, you can hold it!
Me: Interesting choice of words…
*… then assorted laughter*
Mom: I didn’t mean it like that!

Dad: Ok, I’m going to give you a quiz I heard about to see what you thought of us as parents.
Me: Uh, ok
Mom: Ken, don’t do it, he won’t give you a straight answer!
Dad: Oh don’t worry about it. Okay, so say you’re a little kid and your first pet, a goldfish, dies unexpectedly. Would we:
a. Go out for a jog
b. Tell you to suck it up and not be a crybaby
c. Go out and buy you 10 new goldfish to compensate
d. Sit down and have a good cry with you
Mom: And talk about it!
Me: Uh, probably either b or c
Dad: Oh come on! No!
Mom: See? I told you he wouldn’t give you a straight answer!
Me: What? You guys would totally go out and buy 10 more!
Mom: No, we’d sit and talk to you about it!
Me: He said cry with me about it! You wouldn’t cry with me! Why am I even crying? It’s a goldfish!
Mom: Oh you’re not getting the question!
Me: Well then maybe it’s a. You guys like going on walks. Maybe you would go on a walk
Mom: No, it meant running away from your problems!
Me: No, maybe it meant you were just absent-minded and liked walking!
Mom: What? No!

Me: And then when you have prom, I can supply you with booze!
Me (imitating mom voice): No, Kathryn, David won’t do it. I’ll supply you.
Mom: What? I wasn’t paying attention.
Kathryn: He was talking about how he can give me booze for prom parties.
Mom: David!
Me: What?
Mom: Well what if…
Me: What if what
Mom (slightly quieter but still quite audible): She might not get asked
Kathryn: MOM!
[We have no idea what she was thinking, but she wound up apologizing to Kathryn later. Epic absent-mindedness maybe?]

lastredcoat: grrr
i have diag tomorrow
Me: same
but im not staying up as late as you
lastredcoat: lol
L(
Me: what is that one
crying?
lastredcoat: yes
Me: ah
do it the azn way
T___T
lastredcoat: no
i am white
i have sideways faces
Me: haha
lastredcoat: not up and down ones

Talking about fantasy football last season:
lastredcoat: how the fuck did i not win the whole thing?
me: idk
didnt you lose to dad?
oh right
lastredcoat: :/
i was regular season winnraw
me: your quarterback got fucked up
and you had to roll with ben
lastredcoat: bennn
noooo
me: yeah you got majorly shafted
lastredcoat: so bad at fantasy
me: so unlucky
lastredcoat: o well
no fantasy baseball rite?
me: nope
i considered it
lastredcoat: lolzes
me: no fantasy nascar ever formed either : (
lastredcoat: damn
i would have drafted jimmey joe bob
me: that would have been good competition
in that none of us would have any idea who to pick
ah jimmey joe bob
he's pretty good
almost as good as lester johnson
or his brother/father carl johnson
lastredcoat: true
also remember the billie bobs
first family to have 4 generations in nascar at the same time
me: hahaha
odds are one of them will win the.....
[wikipedias nascar]
nextel cup
lastredcoat: lol

Happy Birthday Sunny!!!

2011-05-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

If you don't know what I'm talking about in the title, it's probably for the best (though feel free to ask I suppose). This will be the first of hopefully two updates this month. Around the next time I would be thinking about posting, I will be freaking out about the LSAT and I might delay a post until after it depending on how I feel. In this post, I don't think I'm going to say much about my classes because all I would wind up saying is how each one of them is assigning me a project. Again, I'm working on studying for the LSAT, so having those projects is an added challenge. For my growth class, I have the group paper that involves a lot of econometrics and other fun mathy things like that. The idea on it is hopefully all the reports are able to be published with a little bit of work over the summer. In my IPE class, we have a theoretical paper coming up. It has to pertain to an issue in the international political economy and has to be written for an executive at an NGO. I don't think it will get read by one, but having to write for that audience is a new challenge. The third project is my least concern, it's a paper on any topic we want from business ethics. There's a standard prompt about Wal-Mart, but the professor encourages us to go ahead and do anything we want if we are not inspired by that. Being the moderate achiever I am, I have decided to do whatever I want which will be a bit more difficult, but more enjoyable for sure. And that is all I am going to say about my classes.

Frisbee:
There is only one tournament left this school year and since Kathryn had confirmation this weekend, I was unable to go to it. The past few weeks since the tournament, I haven't been going to frisbee very much. I've only really been able to make it on Sundays because on Fridays I have felt like I didn't need to go since I wasn't going to the tournament. On top of that, I decided that I was better off using those 3-4 hours (including driving times) to study for the LSAT and/or work on my projects. On Sundays, I've been going to pickup games at Magnuson park with Steven, Eric, and Chris because I prefer to play with them.

Confirmation:
Kathryn had her confirmation today. It was pretty meh. Aside from maybe some weddings here and there and funerals, I doubt I will find myself in a church again. The ceremony went pretty well. It was actually not such a bad process because Kathryn's friend who is Josh H.'s sister was also getting confirmed so when sponsors had to come, there was someone cool there to hang out with. It was also nice because we seemed to have equally cavalier attitudes about the whole process.

Guild Wars:
Jen (the guild leader (and my facebook friend!)) has been off doing alliance battles with her friend recently, so she hasn't been doing as many money earning DoA runs that have coincided with my schedule unfortunately. Still though, her or some other guildie has been online and talking with them while vanquishing has made the whole process a lot less painfully boring. Since I caught up on a youtube series, I've been doing homework and some Guild Wars stuff during my break between classes now. I'm earning a lot of money and I am quite certain I will be done with Guild Wars altogether before I turn 21. In other gaming news...

Starcraft!!:
I've gotten back into playing. The more I play SC2, the less I care about Guild Wars. But then I see that Hall of Monuments calculator and I have to finish it. I've been mostly getting in time with Keir, but having Steven involved also has been fun when we are able to do it. I missed SC during winter quarter, especially the part where Keir and I bicker incessantly during a match. We're not that great yet, but we took a lot of time off and what can I say, Guild Wars really does not hone your videogaming skills (though when I went back from SC2 to Guild Wars, I got a lot better). Last night, Steven and I were playing some games against computers, working on our 6-pools when Steven accidentally clicked on "Find Match" instead of "Coop vs. AI." Neither of us noticed during the loading that there were human players and it wasn't until our zerglings were attacking and we saw they were walled off that Steven realized they were humans. For people that don't know, 6-pool is pretty generally douchey and we felt pretty bad, but at the same time it was funny that the mistake happened and that we were able to beat them. After that game, to add to the moment, battle.net decided it we deserved to be placed into diamond. So that is the story of how Steven and I are in diamond for 2v2s (not that it's a terribly impressive achievement, just that we definitely didn't deserve it after 6-pooling). I can't wait until the summer when I have nothing but time for SC2 and I definitely hope I can get back into the culture before going over to Korea. I'm already getting into pro games again and I discovered they still do Broodwar matches, so I might start watching those again too when I get time.

Game Nights:
They have been going well. Eric recently got Settlers of Catan, so I expect that to be fun in the future when we continue to play it. In other games, Steven and I are often able to make deals by me giving him something in the board game in exchange for something in Guild Wars that I can use to fund my Hall of Monuments run. I try not to be ridiculous about it though, I want to put up a reasonable fight to win in the board games to make them more interesting, but if I have enough to spare, I find making those deals is very good. For example, we were playing Life and I had the high income. With that, I was clearly doing well, so I offered to pay Steven's college loans in exchange for Guild Wars money. I can't wait until we play Risk next. I'm going to be a super assassin.

D&D:
Our campaign is going along pretty well. We're only two sessions in so it's hard to tell what exactly the overarching story is yet, but I think we have an idea. Our spellsword is starting to learn how to play her character. I like to think Chris is learning his as well, but then he does things like shoot at a ghost with a crossbow unsuccessfully......twice. At least Steven and I are there with some good DPS although we are also the ones getting messed up a lot of the time too. I think the only real downside to Steven's character is his speed. Other than that, he is good at tanking and dealing out good damage.

That's all for now. I don't know if I forgot anything, but I should really finish this work. I'm reviewing papers for our group essay. I've actually been doing that throughout this post between writing sections. The papers are 30 page walls of text followed by 8 pages of regression data, so I've found it has been easier to take breaks between essays. For this project, I'm reviewing 10 this weekend and my partner is doing the same. I then have to review about 5-10 more for my IPE project that I'm doing alone. Bleh......how many weeks are left in the quarter? Ah well, once again, Happy Birthday to Sunny and until next time I post, peace out.

I can't tell if this quarter is going to be really hard or really easy.

2011-04-27T23:48:00.000-07:00

Considering I'm nearly halfway through, that's an interesting thing to have up in the air still. Some days, it seems like there is a huge amount of work coming down the pipeline for the remainder of the quarter. Other days, it seems like those projects coming up aren't such a big deal. Either way, I don't get too much free time anymore since I have now started devoting what was formerly free time to LSAT study. It's weird to actually be studying for somewhat of a "standardized" exam. I never studied for the SAT, WASL, anything like that, so it's strange to not be studying facts and equations for once. That being said, I should get into the progress on my classes. I have a bit more to say outside of classes this time around, so hopefully that will make this post a bit more interesting.

Business Ethics:
This class has turned out to be pretty cool. The professor is a really nice guy and I like that he actually makes you defend your point of view and reflect on why you feel that way about an issue. As we have gone through the quarter, he occasionally makes references either cultural or historical (or both) and generally, I'm the only one that gets them. There was the Ayn Rand example from my last post where I was the only one that had heard of her (although I was rather happy about that). I've since found out that there are some pretty hardcore conservatives and some libertarians even in that class, so I'm pretty shocked that they had not heard of Ayn Rand. It's just pretty sad. Recently, the professor referenced the HUAC. I knew what it was right off of that. When nobody else knew what it was, he said what the acronym stood for. Still, nobody knew what it was besides myself. When he finally explained what it did, about half the class seemed to realize what he was talking about. Its times like this that make me wonder what I could have done with my GPA if I had buckled down in high school if people like this are being passed through to college. And these are people that have been at the university their whole college career unlike myself. I guess at least I know I wasn't missing out on anything when I was at SCC.

Another fun thing in this class was that we were discussing Rawls and his theory of economic justice recently. For a critique to it, we also read an article by some Nozick guy who was a huge libertarian and basically stood against Rawls. Now the class on the whole is pretty liberal (as is the school). When the professor asked us all to raise our hands to take a side, he began with Rawls. I proudly raised my hand because his ideas made perfect sense. One girl in the front row sheepishly raised her hand to about her nose, then began to put it down quickly as she scanned the room. The professor then counted out the people supporting Rawls "One....two?...no? Only one?" I looked around the room and realized I was alone in my support of Rawls. Crazy. The professor decided that most of the class was probably undecided and went to see who supported Nozick. Aside from three people, EVERYONE ELSE IN THE CLASS RAISED THEIR HANDS. So basically, it was about 25 people against me when we went to defend our opinions. I think I earned some points with the professor for being able to defend the idea on my own against that many people. After that class, I think I should look into becoming a defense attorney after law school, it was pretty fun.

Break time:
Between that class and my next class, I have a huge break. I've started going back to the gym during it. I don't know if the gym usually is crowded during the day, but since I'm there at 10:00am, it's not an issue for me. The nice thing about getting there that early is volleyball is getting off practice, so I have to walk through them to get to where I'm going (very nice!) and there are a surprising amount of attractive girls working out when I'm there. There's generally always one on those machines that men agree is the most fun to watch (the leg spready one (I'm not a pervert, I swear!)) which is also nice (hmm, maybe I am...). I didn't know it could be done, but today, a girl actually used the leg spready machine AT me. As hard as it is to explain how someone can use an exercise machine AT someone else, you'll just have to trust me, such was the case. I wasn't sure on protocol whether I should follower her to the free weights when she got up and went to use them. I might have overcome my shyness (lololo yeah right) and gone to talk to her, but a more alpha-male-y guy went to go hit on her after she got up so I wound up not going over. Missed opportunity, she was actually pretty attractive too :/

After working out, I usually head back to a cubicle in the library and "do homework" which means I watch some videos then fall asleep for a couple hours before waking up for my next class.

International Political Economy:
It's going pretty well. A lot of the stuff we learn is foundational information for economics because of all the international studies majors, but she is able to mix in current events and the occasional new piece of information for us econ majors to keep it interesting.

Economic Growth:
I don't want to give the wrong impression, I like the professor and I like the class. That being said, the material of the first few weeks was terribly dry and given the time of day it was in, I had a lot of trouble staying awake. We recently had our midterm exam, so now the remainder of the quarter is spent on excel writing up our big research papers. My partner and I wound up choosing financial aid and its effectiveness. It's not the most original idea, but we are both really busy outside of class this quarter, so we wanted to pick something we know we could do and that we could possibly excel at.

Frisbee:
A few weekends ago, we had a tournament over in Cheney. Only 11 of us were able to go, so it was a pretty intense weekend in terms of our lack of subs. Despite the lack of players, it was pretty much the best group we could have asked for (only would have switched one guy out and one guy in(who was too sick to go)). We were actually going to have 13, but one guy had to stay in town for some reason and one guy got robbed the night before. It was funny to find that out because we all get the emails when something of a criminal nature happens near campus, so we had all heard about it, we just didn't know who it happened to. Also, the fact that it was that guy getting robbed helped explain why exactly he and his friends were smoking "cigars" (as the email claimed) at 1am. So for things like this, we usually rent a 12 passenger van from the school and one of the captains drives that. Unfortunately, he was sick and couldn't go, so the other captain was to drive. Now I don't want to be rude, but he is a terrible driver. Like comically bad. At least he knows it and doesn't mind us poking fun at him. In the email he sent the night before we left, he said "If anyone is certified by the school to drive, let me know since I'm probably not the safest option we have." I asked him how easy it was to get registered and as it turns out, it is very easy. Long story short, I wound up getting certified to drive by the school. On the way over to Cheney, he drove until Ellensburg because he didn't know that I enjoy driving or how good at driving I was. After I took the wheel halfway through the trip, I was the only one for the remainder of the weekend that was allowed to drive (it was a vast improvement haha). The motel we stayed at in Cheney was kind of sketchy (doesn't narrow it down, I know) and it was quite an interesting experience because we had 11 guys sharing 1 room with 2 beds. Needless to say it was pretty cramped. I did learn that I can dry my whole body with a washcloth though.

Oh hey shoutout to Davis here: Thanks for showing me around Eastern when I came last summer. I was the only person on the team that knew the area and it really helped to know where everything was. It was too bad we didn't get to meet up that weekend, but I don't know if the timing would have worked out anyway.

So the actual tournament went pretty well. We got put against the usual teams, UW B-team, WSU, Eastern, and then a team called 'Combo' that was made up of the best players at Eastern (since they had enough for two full teams) and some from Wilamette. Usually, we suck pretty bad at tournaments which is ok because this is a building year for our program. This time though, we had a pretty elite team with us. We beat UW in our first game and I think took them by surprise since they had rolled us in every prior meeting this year. After that game, we had a bye, so I went with two of the players who had forgotten their cleats and we went to Wal-Mart in Airway Heights (near Spokane) to get them a pair because they were slipping around in the first game. When we got back, it was just in time to start our second game. Our second game was one of the best games that whole weekend. Each team was guaranteed one game on the red turf at eastern's field. I had admired it back when I went with Davis in the summer and to get to play on it was really fun. We played Eastern's team on that field. Zack was on Combo as were all the Eastern players I knew, so this was just some rookie team. We almost bageled them, winning 13-1. It was a really cool experience playing on the red turf. For our third game, we played the combo team. This was the 'elite' game for the day since both our teams were 2-0 and at this point in the day were likely to be spots 1 and 2 in our division. We got off to a rough start then somehow found our rhythm and actually managed to beat combo in a pretty amazing game. I don't remember the score, but I know it got hard capped and we were only 1 or 2 points ahead when it happened. That was the highlight of the day (besides the red turf). Our last game of the day was against WSU. They brought their parents for some reason and their parents were super annoying. We had to ask them to stop yelling "travel" every time one of us caught the disc. We wound up losing that game, I don't know why. We should have won. At the end of the day though, Combo and us tied for first with records of 3-1. Since we beat combo though, that meant we got the official first place and the oh-so-sweet first round bye that came with it. We headed into Spokane for some Olive Garden, then went back to the motel after that. We wound up watching Return of the Jedi with me and one other player pretty much quoting the movie as it went (to the amusement of the other people for some reason).

On Sunday, we didn't do very well. We won our first game in a rematch against WSU. After that, we played Gonzaga who were pretty good. It got hard capped and we were down 3 or 4 points anyway, so it seems like they would have won. Overall, that means we got third place, but still, a rematch against combo in the finals on the red turf would have been amazing. It's too bad it never came to be. We left after our last game and just went straight home in one sitting since I was more than happy to do all that driving. After we got back, I was complemented a lot on my driving which was pretty cool and then I was told that either myself or the captain that couldn't come would be perma-drivers from here on out. That was also pretty cool. The other guy is a good driver as well, it's nice to be in company with him. Overall, this was one of those good team bonding experiences and it turned out to be fun because we had an elite group and did a lot better than we usually do.

Since the tournament, I haven't been coming to practice as much. There is one tournament left, but I can't go because I'm sponsoring Kathryn in confirmation (a couple of you just spit out your morning cup of coffee laughing at that sentence (trust me, the irony is not lost on our family)) and it happens to be that same weekend. It's all the same though, I've also been injured. I suffered a pretty crazy fall onto some non-padded ground on our indoor field (falling about 5 feet down right onto my ass) and my leg has been kinda messed up since then. It didn't hurt tonight when I went though, so I think taking the last week off really helped to heal.

Miscellany:
So yeah I'm sponsoring Kathryn in confirmation. It seems appropriate because she is just about as motivated to do it as I am. I can't wait until our whole family is confirmed, then we never need to go to church again (that is TOTALLY how it works ;)).

I've found that I am really retarded when it comes to women. For some reason, I just can't pick up on subtle social cues. For instance, I was leaving a building a couple of weeks ago to meet dad in a parking lot on campus. He had come to get me since it was suddenly hailing and lightning after a day of having been bright and sunny. I happened to leave the building at the same time as this moderately attractive girl (617 maybe?). As I held the door open for her (as I always do), she commented about the weather. I lingered outside for a bit as she started to put her jacket on and I talked with her about something. I forget what it was exactly, but it was most likely related to a joke about the weather. Then, I noticed dad in the parking lot and without thinking, I went away from her and straight to the car so as not to keep him waiting. I got about halfway there and suddenly came to my senses. As I looked back, the girl was still standing there, kind of with a dumbfounded look on her face. I'm not sure, but I think that leaving was probably the totally wrong choice to make there. Oh well.

In better news, I got accepted to study abroad in Korea!!! Now all that remains is to finalize paperwork and stuff like that. Pending plane tickets and visa approval though, it looks like I will be in Korea come August. Now, that means I'll be missing PAX, so if you're going, don't forget to get tickets. I feel like I should still remind everyone since I always do anyway. Have fun, take lots of pictures for me to look at.

Chris, Steven, and I joined up a DnD group with this girl Chris knows and her boyfriend who DMs. He's a good DM in that he knows the rules well and is helpful and makes well balanced campaigns, but even after one session with him, I think Steven and I have been able to appreciate how awesome Davis' DMing is much more (wow man, two shoutouts! This is what you get for talking to me while I'm writing a post I guess). I'm playing a monk in this campaign. I was going to be a druid, but I found out that they don't have tree form in 3.5, so I was like "screw that" and decided to be a monk since I felt like I never really got to appreciate the class. I must say, it's a pretty awesome one. It also helps that I got Dirk-like stat rolls (17, 16, 16, 12, 12, 11). My favorite moment from the first session was when the four of us were going to use ranged attacks. Steven fired his shortbow and missed. Chris shot his crossbow and did a little damage. The girl fired a spell for a little damage. I picked up a rock off the ground, threw it 50 feet and scored a kill in one hit. In that same battle, my character jumped through fire to punch a hobgoblin (my favorite enemy) in the face before throwing it into said fire. Oh, I also had the time to curb-stomp a werewolf from a tree. That was pretty cool. I think I can get used to this kind of monking.

Ok that's about it. Aside from this stuff, I've been doing videogames as usual and still hanging out on Saturdays which has been fun. This post is definitely long enough though, so I'll let you go. Peace out.

After 6 years, my blog is still not dead!

2011-04-07T00:37:00.000-07:00

Provided blogger stays online. And for the time being, it looks like it will be doing that for a long time. Before I get started, happy 21st Orion! Hopefully you sober up enough to read this post in a few days. In other news, not much is happening. I've been keeping busy, but finally found some time to sit down and make a post about the new quarter. I'm also going to squeeze in some stuff that I omitted from spring break because I didn't want the last post to run long. Turns out it might not have mattered, I don't know if anybody read it.

Spring Break:
I mostly spent my time earning money in Guild Wars with the new guild. I've been doing a nightly run with them and it's fun because a bunch of us just hop on vent and talk while we do the run. It makes the 90 minutes go by quicker. In fact, if this post shows that I posted it on April 7th, it's because I took a break in the middle of this post to do a run with them since they wanted me to come along. I did also get to see some people over break including the usual gang of suspects (Steven, Eric, and Chris) as well as Davis and Lucy at one point. In addition to that, I played games, worked on some single player Guild Wars stuff, and went to drill state. It was cool because they got first place in one of the events they did. I don't know, I'm not an expert on dance. I suppose it was good, but then again all the performances seemed good.

But now spring quarter has started and you no doubt want to hear about my classes!

Business Ethics (Mondays, Wednesdays 7:45am-9:50am):
I actually wound up in the wrong building the first day, but was able to find my way to the class on time. The nice thing about getting lost at 7:45 in the morning is nobody is really out on campus, so if you see people walking around, chances are they are going to the same place you are. This class is pretty cool. I like the teacher. He challenges people whenever they make a point, not to be a dick, but to make them think about why they take that point. We are in the middle of studying Utilitarianism currently, so I've been talking a lot. Most people in the class thought this was a totally crazy idea while about four of us actually bought into it. I was more than happy to argue in favor of it and I think I did a really good job of it actually. There was also one point a couple lectures ago where the professor brough up Ayn Rand. When he saw the confused look on everyone's faces, he asked if any of us had even heard of her. Myself and one other girl near me raised our hands. Now mind you, this was a class of nearly 30 people and only two of us had even heard of Ayn Rand. I suppose on one hand, that's a sad thing, but on the other hand, it's a very great thing.

After this class, I have a break until about 1:30. It is a great amount of time that I could be using to get ahead on readings, play games, read books, or do just about anything. So far, I've primarily used it to sleep, which has also turned out to be a good use of my time. It also prepares me for the afternoon onslaught of classes that I foolishly(well I guess I had no choice) scheduled in the late afternoon when I am extremely likely to fall asleep.

International Political Economy (Mondays, Wednesdays 1:30pm-3:35pm):
This is the class taught by my econ professor from last quarter. There are four of us in the entire class that are repeat students of hers, so I've become in kind of that inner circle of hers. Since she is a major player in the econ department, I'm trying to suck up to her more in order to get a letter of recommendation from her when I apply to law schools. If I get time, I might actually be volunteering to help her do some research eventually. The class itself is pretty basic. It has to be since it is also a class required by the international studies major. So what we are left with is a class that is challenging for them because they have no econ background and is *supposed* to be challenging for econ majors because we don't know much about political decisions. Fortunately for me, I am well versed in both since I've done a lot more law study than the average econ student, so I think this class will go well for me.

Economic Growth (Mondays, Wednesdays 3:45pm-5:50pm):
This course is basically what you would get if you took my final project in econ last quarter and made it into a class. I like that it is like that because it gives me a chance to redeem myself for a project on which I felt I could have done better. Two of my three team members are in this class, but I'm not working with them because my friend from SCC (who is also in my ethics class this quarter (we always wind up in the same place (we might even be both going to Korea at the same time))) is in that class and we're going to work together for the final project. For the final project, we're going to do a legitimate research paper, which will be pretty fun. As a bonus, the professor will pick the top two in the class and work with the authors for about a year and eventually will help them get the report ready to be published. We're definitely hoping we get to do that, but since we both lead busy lives, we won't be particularly sad if it doesn't happen.

Frisbee:
With it getting warmer, some people are coming back to practices. It's been a bit difficult because those people took three months off while the rest of us were hard at work so we've had to accomodate some of their sucking while we play. We have a tournament at Eastern coming up this weekend and we had to invite some of those people since we were short on guys to play (in my opinion, we should have invited the girls) so we'll see how that goes.

Gaming:
Going to Steven's on Saturdays has been fun. We were playing a lot of Minecraft for a while, but are now getting back into Brawl and Munchkin because there are just a lot of douchebags online in Minecraft. Last weekend, we took a bit of a break to try to teach Chris the names and looks of each member of SNSD (you know, the important things) which turned out to be a very funny use of time. We also got to hear Eric's Korean impression which brought me to tears. It was pretty damn funny.

LSAT:
Well I shouldn't really bring this up. It just popped into my head that I have my first practice test tomorrow. I'm hoping I beat Keir's first time score.

Study Abroad:
It looks like I have been accepted right now, but I don't want to speak too soon, so I'll let you know in the next post.

That's it for now, until the end of the month, peace out.

Why is Winter Quarter so Busy?

2011-03-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

So I had planned on starting my two posts a month this month by updating in the first week of March, but obviously that did not happen. I was ready to make a post, then suddenly all the classes I was in upped their workloads and I was actually left with no time to sit down and make an update. Then last week, I put in a new quotes post (see below by the way if you haven't yet) and I wanted to have some space between posts. I do plan on making a post in the first half of April though (currently I am aiming for the 4th or whatever that Monday is) and from there, I will start doing posts twice a month. In this post, I'm going to probably skip over some minor things that happened because I want to keep the post to a normal length and frankly, those things weren't terribly important. Since the quarter ended, I will first start off on that though.

Theology of Peace: (This will be the longest section by a lot, I promise)
I'm actually really glad I wound up in this class. Since it was full, that means by me getting in, someone else did not. I hope that that person that I prevented from entering the class looked at alternative options to this class and got their theology credit that way. If that one person avoided the pain this class caused me, I am more than happy to have suffered through the whole quarter with it. I wanted to give it a shot, I really did. I was nice to the teacher, but she was just so disrespectful to all the students. She wouldn't let them argue points without claiming that they were "not interpreting what she meant correctly" or telling them they were being disrespectful (while she was interrupting them to tell them this). Fortunately, we get to rate teachers on their performances and I know a bunch of us did not give her very favorable reviews. I spent the last half of the quarter experimenting to see how little effort I could put in while still getting full credit. She even commented on what a good writer she thought I was, which clued me in to the fact that she clearly had no idea what she was talking about. I would not consider myself a good writer.

For the final project, we had to give informative speeches on a peacebuilding organization of our choice. We couldn't double up, but that wasn't a problem because I knew of a local one (World Concern) that fit the bill perfectly. Even better, I personally know the president (dad's best friend) and I decided it would be fun to go the extra mile for the project and interview the leader of the organization. As I thought, I wound up being the only person to do this. He also gave me several good anecdotes, which was really cool. In the end, I had about 20 minutes of material for my 5-7 minute speech. Of course, I got up there without rehearsing and without a script (because I tend to get distracted when I have/have done those things). During the speech, I was unable to see the clock, but the teacher was to let us know when we were running out of time. After what seemed like about four minutes into the speech, she started playing with her watch and standing up and generally being a distraction. At that point, I was concerned that I was actually a few minutes off and was out of time, so I had to actually stop my speech to point back at her and say "Am I out of time or what is going on back there?" She then proceeded to tell me I had a couple minutes left. I just looked at her with a look that I hope said "Then what the hell are you doing?" as I got back to finish my speech.

Students in the class rate the speeches and offer feedback on them through hading in slips of paper after each speech. It's hard to tell what exactly to work on because for mine, I ran the gambit from "not enough eye contact" to "excellent eye contact" and "too quiet" to "very easy to hear and understand." I guess it depends on where they were sitting. One guy commented on my monotone, which was funny and true. The one comment that really offended me was the one that said I was boring. It was the only comment like it in the whole class. Guess who it came from? THE FUCKING TEACHER! I was super pissed (which you can see since I just dropped a rare f-bomb on my blog) that the teacher herself said it was boring. I even asked my mom if that was feedback she would ever give someone and she said if she actually were to do that, it would be accompanied by a long list of ways to improve that. Mine did not, so again, I was really pissed at her for that. What was boring about my speech lady? I was the only person that didn't give just a historical rundown of the company. I told stories of real people receiving real help. Real experiences in actual countries and actual warzones all over the world. What was boring about my speech? Is it boring that I can talk about something without resorting to a video every 5 minutes? Seriously, we watched a video all but 3 days in that class. It was a total waste of my time and again, I really hope I helped somebody avoid that class. If not for the cool classmates, this would have been a totally intolerable experience. I did continue to spend time between classes hanging out with that girl from frisbee, but for those of you wondering how that progressed, it sounds like she has a boyfriend.

Financial Markets and Economic Development:
In stark contrast to the last class, THIS CLASS WAS SO AWESOME. I only got a B in it for the quarter, but I really learned a lot and I feel like I earned that B. The teacher was extremely helpful and I'm glad I have the opportunity to have a class with her next quarter. She was one of the best teachers I've had in my college experience thus far. That was another thing that helped me to get through theology was knowing I was coming to this class immediately after. Our final project in this class was a 20 minute presentation about an assigned topic. Of course, our group of four got the hardest one because of the lack of specificity. There were ones like, "Effects of Microfinance" or "Lessons from Crisis" that were pretty easy to follow. Our topic was "Finance in Development." Well there are hundreds of financial factors that can spur development, so in the end, we decided to just do some regressions based on a few factors we found interesting. Fortunately, my group was pretty good. We had this one guy that I had class with last quarter and also play frisbee with. He was a pretty good leader. Then there was this guy that is kind of like me, but much more pro at econ. He got a lot of good data for us. Then, there was this cute asian (I know, sorry for the redundancy there) girl who also got good information and helped keep us guys in line. After we started working as a group, she began to sit by me in class (by choice) which was actually pretty cool. Then there was me, I guess in addition to doing whatever was needed at the time, my special skill was tech support (which surprisingly came in handy very often). The presentation went pretty well, judging by my grade in the class, we aced it. Our presentation actually wound up being the longest at 30 minutes including the question and answer period, which was good because it meant people were really interested in it. I said a couple things that didn't make sense on accident, but was able to recover from it.

Law, Politics, and Society:
This class really had some great people in it. It was entertaining to watch them interact with each other all quarter and I was kind of sad on the last day to know I probably wouldn't have class with them again. It was like a nice TV show getting cancelled. The class went pretty well overall and I was happy with what I learned. I also found out that the professor of that class is one of the pre-law advisors at the school, so I got to meet with her about that, which was super helpful. I guess she thought I was a polisci minor, so when she found out I wasn't and that I was just taking the course as a general elective, she seemed kind of impressed.

Frisbee:
This went pretty well too. Last time the finals were approaching, the team kind of broke up for the remainder of the quarter since tournaments were done and it was cold outside. This quarter, we had a tournament the weekend before finals, so practices were getting more serious as we got to the end of the quarter. This wreaked havoc on my schedule, causing me to just miss a few practices rather than get behind on projects. Despite that, I was playing pretty well all quarter. I've cemented myself as a handler, but not because I can't run. I still get called upon to cut in some situations, but most often, I get to sit back and handle for the whole point. I like it that way. The tournament we had recently was PLU BBQ down in Tacoma/Puyallup area. We did pretty bad the first day, but I guess they won both their games on the second day. I did not go on Sunday because I was doing...

St. Patrick's Day Dash:
I beat Kathryn again and got first place in my family this year. Both Kathryn and I were able to run the whole thing without walking at all this year, so pretty good. I ran under 10 minute miles and got my new personal best time of 35 minutes and beat Kathryn by 5 minutes. We then got to hang around the finish line taking snacks and stuff while we waited for mom and dad. One of the things being given away was 5 hour energy, which I got three of. I tried one recently and other than feeling like I wanted to puke after tasting it, I did not feel a thing. No energy, no crash, I don't know what was up.

Gaming:
Guild Wars has been going well. I read an old blog post to see why I quit and I'm glad I gave it a second chance. When I stopped, it was just because I was getting really bored with it, now it is fun again. And with Steven to play with, it's more enjoyable. We recently found a great place to earn money, so we have been doing that. We both quit SOT and left it in Chris' capable hands for now. This new guild has about 80-90 people (15 of which are ever online) that do this run, so it's fun to just talk with them during runs and stuff. It also helps that they are good and can do a 2 hour run in about an hour and a half.

Steven, Eric, Chris, and I have also taken to playing Minecraft online which has been pretty fun. Going online and messing with servers or playing on pvp servers is quite fun actually and a great way to spend 5 hours without realizing it.

Studying Abroad:
So I don't know who I told about this. I am convinced I told someone, but so far, I have not found who that someone is. I am led to believe that I may have had a series of my dreams about mundane conversations (I hate getting those mixed with reality) since nobody seems to know I was even thinking about this. The truth is, since I went to the Netherlands, I have wanted to study abroad. Initially, I thought I would wind up there. At Seattle U, I began looking at options. NL was not one of them, but one that did strike me as interesting was South Korea. That has long been a language and culture I have wanted to learn about and the program looks really great for econ majors, so I'm trying to get into it (also, it is where Sunny and Starcraft live!!!). The problem right now is figuring out with my parents how I can help cover the cost. I'm thinking it won't be a problem because of all the money I saved by going to SCC (2 full years at SCC with overload every quarter is equal to the cost of only about 2 quarters with dorming and a meal plan at the UW). I'll keep you all posted on how this pans out. If it does work out, I won't be able to make it to PAX this year, but after last year, I think that is something I can live with. I'm not saying you guys sucked at it, just that it was getting way too crowded.

Ok well that's it for now. I'm in Yakima right now at the hotel where the drill team is staying. All the parents stay here too and they are all at the place where they perfrom right now just sitting around for 10 hours today. The team perfroms at 4:30 which is when our relatives from the tri-cities are coming up, so I'm planning on going up then. In the meantime, I'm going to just play some Guild Wars to pass the time. Until about a week and a half from now, peace out.

2011-03-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

I'm sure by now that everyone has heard of the terrible tragedy that has unfolded, now starting to cause panic and confusion in America. Of course, I'm talking about the new song "Friday" by whoever the hell Rebecca Black (aka R.B.?) is. I first heard the video on Monday night and was immediately taken with its ridiculousness. For about an hour, I riffed on this song with Davis, Keir, and Sai. It was definitely the best study break I had all weekend. Here is the conversation. Sorry, I had to split it into two separate pictures. This was the only way I could get it to zoom to a readable size.

Ok I think I've finally figured out a way.

2011-02-11T00:45:00.000-08:00

I think I've finally figured out my new posting schedule. I'm going to try to do this at least once a month now. Whenever I do get around to updating, I'll set a status in gchat to let everyone know. Also, I will try to stick to a fairly regular schedule, updating around the end of a month. I will always make at least one post a month. In addition, if interesting things continue to happen, I might start doing this more often (like twice a month). That ties in well to what I wanted to get to next, I apologize in advance for what I anticipate will be quite a long post. I'll try to keep it reasonable. At the very least, remember you have at least 2-3 weeks to read this, so don't feel like you need to do it all in one sitting. I've ramble enough here, so I think I'll just get going on the post.

First off, check out this article. What the heck, Marvel? First you kill Captain America and now Fire Man (The Human Torch)? I get it, you hate me! And what' worse, they're replacing him in the Fantastic Four with Spiderman of all people. With every new comic they produce, they find new ways to disappoint me.

Theology of Peace:
So in news of classes, my opinions of classes have changed since last time. Especially for this class and my macro class. In the case of this class, it really seems like a class designed for people that haven't figured out their lives yet. Everyone in the class (save for myself and a couple other cool guys) are very emotional people and it can get kind of frustrating for the three of us since we are guided by logic. Another issue I have with the class is it needs a name change. It should be called Theology, then Peace because we are not learning about theology and peace together; we are separating the two. The professor was in El Salvador during the civil war they had in the '80s, so she has some interesting stories, but that's as cool as it gets. In many other ways, she will preach something one minute and do the opposite the next. For example, she recently brought up "violent" turns of phrase such as "Bite the hand that feeds you" and other things like that that suggest violence. She then proceeded to suggest that we not use them. Just today, she used another phrase, "Throw the baby out with the bathwater"(yes it's a real turn of phrase). But the point is, did she not realize what she just told us earlier in the quarter? In addition to that, it's ridiculous to assume that someone is using a "violent" turn of phrase in a malicious way in my opinion. She has actually missed a few classes because she has had surgery for her hand earlier in the quarter, so she had a friend of hers fill in. He is a lot peppier than her and it's nice to start the day with him. He's also an expert on the El Salvador Civil War, which is what we've been learning about. That has been cool to have his knowledge about that since it's a fairly interesting topic.

One day in the class, the professor was setting up (or at least trying to) a video for us to watch and was having trouble. She called for a techno genius to come up and help her. Now, I know enough about technology to know that I would not consider myself a genius in that field, but I have learned that tech genius level for her falls well within my abilities. One other guy came up to help her though before I volunteered. I decided to keep an eye on the situation anyway. She was trying to load a DVD into the DVD player, but kept putting it into the PC and couldn't understand why the DVD wasn't playing (the projector was on the DVD player input. The guy helping her couldn't figure it out either, so finally I leaned back to tell her "If you want it to play from the DVD player, you have to put the disc in the DVD player." She took it out of the computer and put it in the DVD player and it worked. She asked me how I knew which one was the DVD player and I responded "PCs typically don't have VHS slots."

In general, the class is pretty light. I can't tell if it's either graded easily or if I'm getting good at faking the emotions I need. Either way, I've put as much thought as I think I need to into papers and essays so far and I'm doing exceptional in the class, so I see no incentive to stop doing it there. Fortunately also, videogames have only come up once the entire quarter. I didn't say anything in their defense because the girl talking about them had a valid point. She wanted to know whether people playing FPS games would still play if they actually felt the pain of being shot. I suppose she's correct, they would probably not. The girl I like from frisbee still sits next to me in the class, so that is nice. Between this class getting out and my next class (and hers which starts at the same time) we will go to the building where our classes are and talk or something for the 10-15 minutes between classes. Sometimes it is longer, but only if the theology class ends early. Talking with her has been pretty nice, even though it seems we are both as awkward as each other (or maybe I'm just so awkward I bring people down to my level (I like to think that is not the case)) which is something Davis seemed to find great humour in. She hasn't shown up to frisbee practice as much this quarter as she did last quarter, but when she does, it's pretty cool to have someone else to talk to besides the usual guys that I see every time.

I realized recently that the makeup of my school friends is very different from what it was in high school or even what it was last year and the year before. The last couple of years were kind of a stepping stone, with me hanging out with more girls than I did in highschool. Currently, if I am not alone or in a class, I am hanging out with a girl. Outside of frisbee, all the friends that I consider hanging out with regularly are girls. Uh oh, am I becoming the gay friend? Curse you, friend zone!!! One day, I shall break you!

Financial Systems and Economic Development:
I finally learned the name of the course! I was wrong about this professor, I have taken quite a liking to her. She is very tough, but once you have a few classes with you, you learn she is actually very funny. She has kind of a deadpan sense of humour; she will say very funny things and never crack a smile, always acting very serious. I've only seen her smile twice this quarter. One of those times was in class (she was pumping us up for a test and said something that made herself laugh (and by laugh, I mean chuckle before catching herself and going back to serious mode)) and the other time was when she probably didn't even notice I saw her. Speaking of being observant like that, I have noticed she is as observant as I am. She picks up private conversations from halfway across the room (my curse of selective hearing and the reason I read people's lips when there is a lot of background noise). She also has a photographic memory which is something people have thought I had in the past, but I know I do not. She does have a very great memory though. It's pretty neat.

The thing I like best about this class is that she expects a lot of all the students, but at the same time, it has never been more clear what is expected of me. She is really into transparency and she will give you the reason for why she does everything and explains how every aspect of the class is going to work. I'm glad this class falls in 10:00-noon time area because I don't have much trouble staying awake then for some reason. Coupled with the fact that I am terrified of what she might do if I fall asleep (I'm being dramatic, she is very subtle about waking me up the couple times it has happened), I have little problem staying awake in the class.

From that class, I have a break before my next one. I typically head to the library at that point and hit up a cubicle to get work done or watch minecraft videos before the next class.

Law, Politics, and Society:
This class has been pretty smooth. The people in the class are nice as is the professor. There is one lady though that has a hearing disability that was either not properly treated for the first 3 weeks of the quarter or has gotten rapidly worse since the start of the quarter. She's been finding more and more intrusive ways to require assistance. None of them have directly affected me though, so I don't particularly mind. She often has ASL translators come in, which has actually been nice for me too because those people like to really mouth the words, so that helps my comprehension go up because I like to read lips in addition to hearing. I also am interested in ASL (not learning, just viewing), so that has been fun to watch too. Recently, she also brought in a lady that had some contraption that copied down the entire lecture word for word as it was spoken onto a computer screen that she could read. It was pretty neat and I don't understand how it works. Now the problems with her are that she frequently comes in late, we're talking half an hour, not some petty lateness. She also has displaced people recently with her new equipment which kind of sucks because those people had their seats claimed for the first 6 weeks of the quarter and all of a sudden, they were taken when the lady was doing fine in her other seats. Again though, none of this directly affects me, so I don't personally feel anything against her.

I think the professor of this class has taken a liking to me because I tend to say smart things or perhaps it's because I think like a lawyer. Perhaps it's both, but she seems to have been supportive of my answers that I've given to questions lately, which is always nice.

From that class, I've typically been going back to the cubicles until I leave. Recently, I decided to get back into going to the gym. The new years resolutions people finally wore off around midterms, so there has been room to move in there again. Unfortunately, the gym is going to be closed for the next couple of weeks due to construction. They're renovating it for next fall, so they are screwing around with the standing structure in the meantime.

As for frisbee, that is going well too. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but for a long time, everyone thought I was a freshman. It took some time, but I think almost everyone on the team now knows that I am actually a junior transfer student and that is why I haven't been around the past couple of years. It seems like there are only about 3 or 4 of us regulars that are juniors (myself, the two captains, and one other guy). There are two regulars that are seniors, one regular that is a second year law student, and the rest are freshmen. I also recently found out that I'm the only legitimate lefty on the team. The other left handed guy (who people often mistake for me because we look similar (except I have facial hair) turns out to be right handed in real life, he just throws lefty for some reason. Oh well, we can't all be born great. I admire his dedication to try to make himself better.

I can't quite tell how valuable I am to the team right now. I haven't felt confident since that tournament in Oregon in November where it felt like I had to be babysat on the field. I'm sure it wasn't seen like that, but I was pretty unimpressed with my level of play. Since then, I've received feedback on my play ranging from light suggestions of how to do something better to being considered someone that looks like he knows what he's doing. I don't know for sure where I stand, but I feel pretty confident about my standing I guess. We had a scrimmage a couple weeks ago and I was picked fourth, which was pretty surprising for me. I was picked over players I thought were better than me, so that was a confidence booster.

In another quite note about frisbee, I finally got new cleats. My old ones were from the last two years of playing with the lazerbeams, so they were at least 5 years old. They had gotten to the point where the top of the shoe was detatching from the soles, so by the end of their lives, I had duct taped around them to prevent them not only from leaking (the grass we played on was frequently wet, making for uncomfortable playing once my socks got wet), but also to just hold them together. I went out and got new cleats recently though and I'm really liking them. They're football cleats (couldn't find any lacrosse ones) and they're called "Land Sharks." After I saw that name, I knew I had to get it because of the meaning of that term in a frisbee context (hit up urbandictionary if you're curious).

Around the house and at the rest of the family's houses, it seems like nobody can keep their stuff straight without me. My mom got mad at our internet recently and reset the router. That was a fun time spent getting it back up. At least our new password isn't 20 characters long though. I was glad about that. I'm not really complaining about having to do more work here, quite the opposite. Being needed more by the family makes me feel more vindicated for remaining at home while I'm pursuing my undergraduate degree (besides the convenience and cost saved by staying at home). I am planning on moving out though after I graduate, so heads up to all of you. Maybe by then, Keir will come here for law school (hint hint). Either way, that decision is a ways off at this point.

I still go to Steven's every Saturday where he and I play Munchkin (and now some Wii as well) with Chris and Eric. A few weeks ago, Steven was looking at the Guild Wars 2 page because he was reminiscing about his time spent playing an MMO. We joked with him a bit and I reiterated the point that I would only get GW2 if Steven got and if he would play with me because I didn't want to spend that much time playing alone or playing catchup, especially with SC2 being out. Anyway long story short, a couple days later, he emailed me saying he reinstalled it. I did as well and now we've been getting back into it since seeing how close we were to completing our hall of monuments for Guild Wars 2. We've decided we want to try to get to 50/50 (he is close than I am) and/or the God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals title. As far as gaming goes, that is mainly what I've been doing since the end of January. This time around, Guild Wars is better. Steven and I play together and we don't pull ludicrous hours anymore. We get bored with it for the night at more normal rates, so it keeps us from going crazy with it again. Once Chris gets his laptop back though, I think we'll wind up doing a bit more Minecraft as well again because there are some modes we want to try out.

Ok well I hope I didn't forget anything in there. I'll try to get the word out in my status on gchat tomorrow (or later today, it's Friday as I'm posting this (I know I'm late, sorry -_-)). I might try to post before the end of the quarter, but it does end in exactly one month, so we'll see. If you feel like you want to know something more about anything that's going on, feel free to chat me up sometime. I'm generally not doing anything important. At least not so important I can't set it down for a bit. Anyway, until later, peace out.

2011-02-08T16:37:00.000-08:00

Well I got my prediction right for the Superbowl, so I guess going 6 for 11 isn't so bad in the end. This was a pretty great season for football, getting to see some new teams making the playoffs and generally seeing a more competitive scene with all the teams performing what some critics considered to be rather mediocrely. I like when teams aren't undefeated going into week 11 and I really like when the last two weeks of the season still matter. I hope next season is just as good. Fantasy football starts in late August, so try to drum up some support if you can.

And now to make a longshot prediction for next season. I'm going to abandon the Texans for this time (sad, I know) given how the second half of their season went. I'm not going to say to watch the NFC West for the Rams or the Seahawks either, though I think both will have winning records next season. The team I am picking to do much better than they have in recent times next season is...........The Browns! Hopefully I am right and Colt McCoy uses his superpowers to turn that team into a playoff contender. Perhaps he will even lead them to their first ever Superbowl (though I doubt they'll have that dramatic of a change in one season). I do think they will do much better than this season though, even though they are in a tough defensive division with the Ravens and the Steelers.

I'll make a regular post on Thursday. Feel free to bug me relentlessly if I forget.

2011-02-01T17:04:00.000-08:00

Well looks like I'm still no better at predicting football than your average coin. Good thing I didn't pick the pro bowl too because I would have lost that. I figured the AFC would just start the entire Patriots team, but they did not, so maybe that's why they lost. Anyway, it's time to pick the superbowl champion!

Packers vs. Steelers: Packers by 10 points:
The Steelers are hot, they've been hot, they'll be hot for a few years to come. They have the playoff experience that Aaron Rodgers and the Packers don't have. The Packers have shown this season though and especially in the playoffs that they are an offensive force to be reckoned with and their defense is also excellent. While the Steelers will stop a large chunk of the points that could be scored by the Packers, it won't be enough. The Packers utilize every chance they get to score, so the Steelers will need to step it up on offense to match that, which is something I am still waiting for them to really do this season (at least not when they're playing the Browns). Packers win, I go 6 of 11 and feel slightly less ashamed at how my postseason picks went. Don't let me down Packers!

2011-01-18T13:15:00.000-08:00

Well I'm very happy that the Patriots were eliminated, but I'm disappointed the Jets had to win. I also was hoping the Steelers wouldn't make it, but oh well. I'm not doing so well this year, currently I sit at 4 of 8 correct picks. That means I've been no better at selecting winners this season than your average coin. On the plus side, a lot of announcers have made the same mistakes I have, so that makes me feel better haha. Only down to two games this week, then off to the pro bowl and the superbowl.

Packers at Bears: Packers by 14 points:
The Bears put up a worthy effort against the Seahawks and crushed the worst team to ever get into the playoffs. Enough about that though, the garbage time really showed the Bears' weaknesses to the other teams. The Bears played seemingly well until the fourth quarter, before that holding Seattle to just 3 points. In the fourth quarter, the Bears started slacking a bit, allowing 21 points in a single quarter from the Seahawks. Aaron Rodgers is a huge football nerd and does his homework. He is going to be watching that quarter over and over and he'll know exactly where to get the ball by knowing what Bears defenders are weak in what areas. On top of that, the Packers are really hot, they beat the number 1 seed after all. I'll be rooting for the Packers in this game and in the Superbowl, regardless of who wins the AFC game (I don't particularly like the Steelers (sick of seeing them win Superbowls) and I REALLY don't like the Jets (sick of seeing them...period)).

Jets at Steelers: Jets by 3 points:
Both number 6 seeds beat the number 1 seeds last week in big surprise games. I think that we'll actually see both 6 seeds in the superbowl for once. I'll be rooting for the Steelers in this game because I hate them less, but I think after what we saw last week with the Jets beating clearly the best team in the league this past season, there is something to fear from them there.

2011-01-11T19:10:00.000-08:00

Ok well one week in and already I can't get another pick wrong if I want to beat my record (8 of 11 correct). I was surprised by the Packers and stunned by the Seahawks. The fact that that has happened has made picking winners this season near impossible for even professionals, let alone myself. I'll do my best though and hopefully I get them right. Before I get started on the picks, I want to post about that game.

It was by far my favorite Seahawks game that I have ever been to (previously, it was the game vs. Dallas a couple years ago where Tony Romo screwed up the snap, costing his team the win). Usually, the 12th man is super loud before the game and then as the game progresses, gets quieter to loud levels of other stadiums. This game, everyone was excited. We were in the playoffs and happy to be there even though we had a losing record. It maintained the loud volume THE ENTIRE GAME. Almost everyone was on their feet the entire time. Whenever our team was on defense, the stands were loud. I couldn't hear a person 3 feet away from me. We were even so loud, we were reported to have caused a seismic tremor when Marshawn Lynch ran that beautiful ninja touchdown. The atmosphere was amazing and the stands remained full the whole game. It was nice to see players on the team getting pumped up and it was refreshing to not see Drew Brees walk out like the god he is made out to be. The Seahawks defense made him look like any other mortal. That being said, time to get my picks on.

Ravens at Steelers: Ravens by 3 points:
I'm picking some upsets this week hoping that I get some right. The Steelers have faced Baltimore twice this season since they're both in the same division. The two teams split the season, each one winning on their away game surprisingly enough. The teams seem to be evenly matched this year, but I give the edge to Baltimore because I think they want it more and they are going to be capable of doing it. Plus, they're on the road so if the past season taught us anything, that means they're going to win.

Packers at Falcons: Packers by 7 points:
Yeah, I'm going with another upset here. I wasn't sure about the Packers, but after seeing them play last week, I think they can do it. Matt Ryan is a great quarterback with a great record (especially at home (only 2 losses in I think 22 games)), but Aaron Rodgers is also great. Their records this season are actually pretty similar. The Falcons were 13-3 while the Packers were 10-6. That may seem different to you, but consider that Matt Ryan played every game for the Falcons. Aaron Rodgers missed a couple. In those he missed, there were some bad losses. In the end, only four of the Packers' losses this season came while Aaron Rodgers was playing more than 5 minutes. I think that even though this is at home, the Packers are going to be a contender for the Superbowl and they'll come through the Falcons (and hopefully Seattle) to do it.

Seahawks at Bears: Bears by less than 5 points:
I just can't do it. I can't pick the Seahawks. I sure don't mind being proven wrong by them though. I think that both teams are actually pretty evenly matched, but I don't know if Hasselbeck has it in him to play as well in an away game as he did last week at home. Once again though, I would like to point out that I'm calling this game close. I did this last week too because I want to acknowledge that the Seahawks really do have a fighting chance in this as I thought they did last week. I was surprised when they acted on that fighting chance last week and won, but I don't know if they can do it again, even though they beat the bears once this season. If the Seahawks win, I probably won't pick them over Green Bay, but boy would I like to see that as well. I think the game will be very close, but in the end, I'll be rooting for the Seahawks, even at the expense of my record.

Jets at Patriots: Patriots by 10 points:
Can't both of these teams lose? They are my least favorite teams in all of football. I always hate when they play each other because it means one of them will have to win. I don't know what I want to see more, a loss for my least favorite team the Patriots, or the smug grin to be wiped off Rex Ryan's face with another 45-3 blowing out of the Jets like in week 13. In the end, it doesn't matter because I will be unhappy that either team is making it into the AFC Championship game and I will be rooting for the winner of the Steelers/Ravens game, though I hope it's the Ravens because God am I sick of seeing the AFC only offer up 3 different teams (Steelers, Patriots, and Colts(well not so sick of them :] )) to the Superbowl year after year. The Patriots are on fire though and it seems a safe call to pick them.

Ok well that's it for this week. Hopefully I'm right on all my picks but the Seahawks game. Here's hoping for an upset and a return to Qwest field (only if the Packers win, otherwise we head to Georgia for yet another postseason rematch).

New Post for the New Year

2011-01-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

Well hi. Hopefully you won't hold it against me that I failed to make an end of the quarter post after the fall quarter ended. I'm no longer good at keeping to a blogging schedule (though I think I will be now since I'm getting back into doing football posts weekly). I have a bit to cover in this post, mainly the end of the quarter as well as winter break and the start of this quarter, so I'll get started right away.

Last quarter ended on a high note what with me pwning the crap out of my three finals and performing well in frisbee again, recovering from my bad showing at the OMG tournament in late November. In Philosophy, we spent the last day just reviewing the whole course before starting our final essays. During the class, I got in a philosophical debate with the professor. We share the same views, but he took the other side and we were going back and forth for a couple minutes before remembering there was a class going on, so he had to end it with a nice "I'm excited to read your paper now." I had half written it already and had not gone in that direction, but I was more than happy to completely change it on the hope that I might get a better grade. It worked out well and he really liked it and offered some counterarguments to the ones I laid down in the essay. My favorite part about the essay was that I was able to incorporate Mass Effect into it. I was really proud of that. As for Macro and Stats, well those were just boring tests. Nothing too exciting to tell other than I must have totally rocked them because my grades came out nicely. That was probably going to be one of the hardest quarters I will have here at SU and I got a 3.43 out of it, which is heartbreakingly close to the 3.5 I want and need. I need that 3.5 cumulative by the end of the year so I can keep my Xavier scholarship (of as I refer to it, the Charles Xavier Scholarship (people give me weird looks when I call it that though, but I will not stop)). The scholarship gives me $10,000 off of the cost per year which is really nice because it makes it so the cost of attending this school is only about $2,000 more than the UW and since the classes are smaller here than they are there, I think it's definitely worth it.

Some sad news out of last quarter is that the Jazz Band folded. I guess the enrollment wasn't at total full capacity, so the school cancelled the program before our winter concert. It's especially too bad since I planned my Tuesday and Thursday oriented quarter currently around the time this class went on. We might start a small group to just jam, but I don't know if that's ever going to materialize. The class will be reevaluated next year and I will definitely be there for it. I was enjoying this band, finding that I was actually practicing pretty often (which explains why I was doing so well in the songs). With the free time that I won't spend practicing now, I might go back to the flute or bass (probably the flute for now) and try to learn one or both of those. I like being able to play as many different instruments as I can.

After the quarter ended, I was glad to sleep in (until 9:30!) the next few days, making up for totally screwing up my circadian rhythm throughout the quarter. I spent the first couple weeks of the break mainly just playing Oblivion and putting in a little Starcraft here and there when Keir was available. I wound up getting all my skills to level 100 in Oblivion. If you've played an Elder Scrolls game before, you know exactly how ridiculous it was of me to do that. If you've only played Morrowind, they don't let you train infinitely in Oblivion, so I had to do it the hard way. I spent the middle of the break playing Starcraft with Keir a lot. Christmas was pretty nice, I got a cool letter opener dagger looking thing from my Grandma (she likes to send random gifts) and a Hungarian winter military hat which was also cool. Another good thing I got was a lego Winnebago (a reference to scouting days (Black mountain and the idiot video in case Davis is wondering)). Mom also found a Colt McCoy jersey and she got that for me, which was pretty awesome. Now my man crush on him can be shown off to the world!

Davis came over after Christmas and we wound up using one of the Starcraft trial codes I had. We hopped online with Keir and played for the 7 hour duration of the code. It was actually really fun and I think we had a winning record by quite a bit at the end of the day. We got put into bronze (Davis hadn't played before), so Keir and I got to cheese occasionally which was really fun. Mass battlecruisers ftw. I got my Yamato achievement in that game. Orion also came back that week and the four of us along with Eric played some Munchkin one night. I guess Orion hadn't played before, but he picked it up quick which was really cool. On Davis' last night on the west side, the four of us decided to get Taco Bell and take it to the bridge again because as I said "It's been too long since I've had diarrhea and have been cold" (I hate to quote myself, but Davis did quote me so I feel like it's more ok (still feel like a douche though)). I also quote myself because that was about the experience I had. Maybe without the violent diarrhea though, but it was sub-freezing (and three out of four of us were wearing shorts like bosses!). While we were on the bridge, some rando walked by and said something to the effect of "Interesting place to hang out." It was a good sendoff I think and hopefully someday we do it again (see, already I have the happy memory of doing it because all I remember is leaving).

After that point, I've been mostly doing my usual things which consist of spending extensive time with Grandpa and playing videogames (not at the same time, Grandpa's not into CoD or Halo......yet). Steven recently convinced me to get Minecraft so I did. It's totally worth it. It's like all the fun parts of the Sims. The possibilities are really awesome and I don't see myself getting tired of it for some time. The day after I got it, I played for 12 hours. The day after that, 10 hours. The day after that, 8 hours. The day after that, Steven and I decided to try a multiplayer server. Since we went and did that, I became unaddicted to Minecraft. The multiplayer was so fun that it made the singleplayer seem like there was little point. I still enjoy it, but I only play for a couple hours at a time, less than I would spend playing Starcraft in one sitting anyway. Now Steven, Chris, and I have a cool server that we play on and that has been really fun. We're getting past the need to have all three on at any given time, so each time we sign on, somebody has improved our shelter in some new way. I'm going to post some videos eventually of what I have done and perhaps of what we have done as well. I'll keep you posted there.

Now the quarter has started and it seems I have a new problem on my hands. Where my last quarter classes were really math heavy, this quarter's classes are really writing intensive. In addition, there is a lot of reading assigned. I got assigned ~100 pages of reading from a Tuesday to a Thursday. I can keep up, but there is going to be a lot of reading and analyzing here. I must say I greatly prefer the math heavy stuff to this. I have to get good at the writing though if I'm going to be a lawyer. It also helps that I do this blog because I get practice and can see how well/poorly I write when I look back. Here are my classes:

Theology of Peace (7:45am-9:50am Tuesday & Thursday):
This is going to be an interesting class. I mean that because it seems like it is really geared towards watching disturbing clips of war and being in touch with your emotions. The professor lived in El Salvador in the '80s though, so she has an expertise in war-torn countries and stuff of that nature. In the first class, we watched some commercial about a person that wanted to grow up, but they were killed. The commercial only showed pairs of shoes though, no specific person. Being the souless robot I am, I didn't really take note of anything other than "damn the song they are playing is annoying." After it ended, I looked around and people around me were just sad looking and it was pretty depressing. They were taking notes about their feelings (as per instructions) and were writing paragraphs of information. I said everything that came to mind which was only really "That was an effective commercial." I've trained myself to avoid strong emotions (due to my aspirations in the legal field and my general stoic nature), so I think I'm going to have to fake a lot of emotional responses in this class to get by, but this is definitely one that I can BS my way through this quarter. The students seem pretty nice. As a bonus, this girl I like on the frisbee team happens to be in the class, so we sit next to each other. Today in the class, we watched a music video by Jackson Browne. The professor was asking if anyone had heard of him. Thinking "Well he was a big player in classic rock history," I proudly raised my hand. In the class of 27, NOBODY ELSE DID. That was kind of funny and disturbing to learn that. After hearing him sing though, the girl from frisbee recognized his voice because her father used to listen to him. I'm only 20, but I somehow manage to date myself all the time.

Financial Markets and Economic Development (10:00am-12:05pm Tuesday & Thursday):
I took this class because I thought it was going to be focusing on macro and I figured I could always use more practice on that side of economics. I wasn't totally wrong actually, but it's also going to have a big focus on microfinance which is something I don't have much experience in. What's more, the teacher is a real hard-ass. She seems at times like it's just a ruse, but from what I hear, she is actually pretty strict. She called "people" out on sleeping when I suspect it was just me the other day. She then proceeded to ask students for suggestions on how to stay awake. I couldn't help but feel it was a bit directed at me since I had had a sleep attack at that point. It's always a bit insulting to hear people suggest ways to stay awake because when I get tired, my brain is going at the same rate, realizing I'm tired, but I can't will my limbs to move or do anything and I have to accept that it's going to happen. Hell, I can even fall asleep while sitting upright, taking notes and not even feeling tired. Next thing I know, it's about 10 minutes later and evidently I fell asleep. I cleared it up with her though during the break. I told her it's why I sit in the back (it's colder back there and this way I don't call attention to myself if it happens) and I gave her permission to throw a koosh ball at me (hopefully I don't regret that). She was nice about it though, so hopefully it doesn't happen and the whole thing winds up being a non-issue. It didn't really happen in my macro class in this timeslot last quarter, so maybe I'll get lucky again. I'm not posting from class right now, she's down in Denver at some conference being interviewed for something so there was no class today.

Law, Politics, and Society (1:30pm-3:35pm Tuesday & Thursday):
I'm taking this as a general elective actually. It's really a 300 level polisci class, so there were prerequisites. The professor waived them for me though when I told her my plans, which was super nice. She seems to be living up to that so far. The class looks like it will be pretty cool.

Frisbee (2-4 Sundays, 3-5 Mondays, 8:30-10:30 Wednesdays, and 3-5 Fridays):
Not really a class I know, but something I am doing. We added a Sunday practice since people weren't making the Monday ones. The fate of the Monday practices is up in the air currently. They may become conditioning days or we may just drop them altogether. Either way, I won't be attending. Getting down to SU and back is a pain in the ass and since the practices are all on days when I don't have to go down there for class, I'm only going to make the other three. Having to fight rush hour on my own is bad enough once a week and I decided Fridays are the better day on which to do that. I think we're doing winter quarter this quarter, so that will be pretty cool.

Okay so my quarter is pretty busy. Tuesdays and Thursdays are pretty hellish, but I think the four day weekends will really make it worth it. I like it this way where I block the days off together because it lets me rest up and be ready for the week. It may increase the size of homework, but I have time to do that while I play Minecraft now, so no worries there.

I'll maybe do a big post like this again this month, but it would be at the end, so I don't know. Happy new year to all and hope you have good new quarters/semesters.
Peace out.

2011-01-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone, if you came here today looking for a big Winter Break update, check back in 2 days, the post will be made then. In the meantime, it's playoff season which means every Tuesday, I'll be making my picks for the playoff games of the week. Before I get started, I made a video about the Seahawks getting into the playoffs that I have used to troll forums where Giants fans are expressing their rage at the system. It's a 45 second video, here is the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoQ85cG_rJU (I'm not Rick Rolling you, I promise)

Ok well time to make the picks.

Saints at Seattle: Saints by 7-12 points:
I love that the Seahawks are in the postseason again, but I don't think they're strong enough to win. A sure sign is that they're trying to decide which quarterback to start. They have to choose between a seasoned veteran or a younger guy who only has two starts, one being a huge blowout. When that's a hard decision to make, you have a quarterback crisis. Now since it is at Qwest, that can be the wild card in the game. It's outside, the Saints typically play in a dome, so it will be a different climate. If one team could pull off an upset with the home field advantage, it would be the Seahawks, but I think the Saints will get the win by at least a touchdown in the end.

Jets at Colts: Jets by 5 points:
This is a rematch of the AFC championship game last season and it's even at the same place. I intend to get the pick right this year as I did last year, but by picking the opposite team. I think the Colts are struggling a little this season (which is unfortunate because they're one of my three favorite teams) and the Jets have proven they are capable of getting the points on the board. That being said, I think the Colts defense can keep the Jets more or less in check, so it will be up to Peyton Manning and the offense to prove me wrong on this one. Jets will probably win, but go Colts!

Ravens at Chiefs: Ravens by 7-10 points:
After having the two of my three favorite teams in the playoffs on the same day, I get to enjoy two more teams I like the following day. Kansas City has done uncharacteristically well this season and should be commended for that, but not even the homefield advantage (undefeated at home (or maybe they lost only one, I can't remember)) will be able to help the Chiefs against the great defense of the Ravens.

Packers at Eagles: Eagles by 3 points:
This one is a complete tossup. Both teams have adequate defenses (Green Bay's being the better) and will probably allow high scores. The teams both have exceptional offenses however and I think (and really really hope) it will be a high scoring shootout between Vick and Rodgers. In the end, I'm going to give the game to the Eagles because the Eagles are playing at home and because I am biased (Michael Vick is left-handed).

So there you have them, my picks for the week. I'm pretty much betting against the home field advantage it seems, but that's fine. Hopefully I can beat my all-time playoff record of 8 out of 11 correct picks.

Delay me a day and I'll take two Weeks

2010-12-03T19:15:00.000-08:00

Although I suppose this is the first any of you have heard of any delay. To be honest, I was actually going to post this the Monday before Thanksgiving, but due to weather (which I shall get to later), I was forced to postpone it. Due to forgetfulness, I forgot to update earlier this week. Eventually, I decided I would just get it done today even though the quarter ends on Wednesday and it might make more sense to do it then. I couldn't wait though, I anticipate this being a longer post, so I'm going to refrain from talking about my classes in it. I will post next Wednesday or Thursday, after the quarter has finished. In that post, I'll talk about my final thoughts on classes I took. I'll get into the post now and hopefully that will leave me with more to say at the end, leaving for a less awkward signoff than usual.

Campus Life:
It's been going pretty well here. I've found places that I hang out regularly, so I've gotten pretty easy to find if one knows where to look. I've continued getting to know people around campus, though most of those people are on the frisbee team. I've hung out with my friend that is in the philosophy class with me more often. We went to a Vietnamese place recently (whoaaahh the picky eater ate there!) which was pretty good. Aside from that, I've been doing homework or exercising in my downtime after classes and before I leave each day.

I also found out that I am in an incredibly small major. There are about 8,000 people in the entire school. I attend Albers, the school of business and economics. I think business is the largest major in the whole university, but I'm not sure. It also happens to be paired with one of the smallest, economics. They list the school as Albers School of Business and Economics, but given the amount of econ majors there are (54), I'm surprised they even bother to mention economics when other majors get lumped into "School of Fine Arts" or "School of Science" and all that. Recently, an email was sent out to all econ majors. Usually when you get an email like that, it is sent to a group that might be named something like "Albers Econ Majors." In this case, there was no group. There are so few of us, they just list all our names when they need to email us. Despite that small number of econ majors, I somehow still get picked out as one by people that I meet. When people guess my major when they're first meeting me, most of the time they guess econ correctly. I don't understand why people go to that small of a major as their first guess for anyone, maybe I just have some strange mannerisms of an economist or something. It is an interesting phenomenon.

Frisbee:
Frisbee has been going both good and bad. I've been doing well at practice showing off my ability to play, which got me invited to one of the two tournaments we went to (the one that required an invitation). Two weekends before Thanksgiving, our team attended Sundodger. It was my first one, but I had played on the Burlington fields before back at Spring Reign, so it wasn't too unfamilliar. We even played our games on one of the fields we played on for Shorewood (I only remember because it was the one I had a great catch on). For Sundodger, it was open to any people on the team that wanted to come. We were able to get 24 guys on Saturday and 21 on Sunday as well as 10 girls both days for their own team. Of the guys team, half had never played in a tournament before (I counted Spring Reign even though it had been a long time) and almost just as many people had never played ultimate before the school year began. Unfortunately, we were pitted against U Montana (who were really good surprisingly), U Vic (there are no bad Canadian teams), and the UW A team. I ran into Steven who was playing for Eastern on Saturday, that was pretty cool. We lost all our games, but managed to do pretty well. After we played four games on Saturday, I came back to another game, but this time with UWB. We won that game, so it was a nice change of pace from losing. On Sunday, it was bracket play. We won our first game against University of the Pacific, then lost to Eastern. The Eastern game was really fun because it was so close and I was playing against people I had played with the night before (a lot of the guys on Eastern were staying with Zack and they came to play with UWB that night). After that, we had one more game that we decided would be for the people that didn't get to play much. Even though I had played a sufficient amount, me and one other guy that had played just as much decided to stay with the newer guys to help them out and get some experience. The captains and other guys that had gotten a lot of playtime went to cheer on the girls. We lost our game of course since it was the rookie game more or less, but it was good to get some practice for the newer guys.

The weekend after, we had our other tournament down in Eugene, Oregon called OMG. For that, the top 16 players from SU were invited (myself included obviously). Of those 16, only 11 of us wound up going, which was fine. We had to cram into one 12-seat van for a 5 hour ride though with 12 people (our coach came). In this tournament, there was a higher level of play and I was on the low end of the top 16, so I was not up at that level. Due to that intimidation, I made some mistakes, but generally had some good play. On the second day, the weather was bad and I was not playing well. On top of that, I had really hurt my knees and couldn't run hardly. We did win a game though and had a lot of other close losses, so it could have been better, but not a terrible weekend. On the Saturday night, the team had a party which was kind of interesting. I stuck around in the room, but did not consume alcohol due to my bet. I made the excuse that I was doing homework (which was not entirely false) and just generally observed what happened. One guy took up the challenge of doing a disc chug (four beers fit into a disc, you have to drink it as quickly as possible). He made it to the end, but barely. His puke unfortunately did not make it to the toilet. It was a fun weekend overall. I found my offense was rather lacking both weekends. I ended them with 0 interceptions, but a handfull of forced turnovers. I was proud of my defensive play however. I was especially happy that between 12 games in 2 weekends, there were only 5 instances where the person I was marking caught the disc for the point.

This week, practice started up again. I thought my knees healed, but that was incorrect, they are now just as bad again. I'm looking forward to having time off so I can let them heal up. We were practicing forehand throws only during scrimmage on Wednesday which was interesting because we were supposed to force forehand on everyone, but everyone kept forgetting that I was left handed. I made some pretty silly looking forehands trying to throw like that, but a lot of them worked. I had to literally hug my defender on one throw to get it around him the right way. I was intimidated by how poorly I performed during the first part of practice, but by the end, I was doing well again. I even ended the scrimmage with a hammer for the win, so that was pretty nice. Today, I was doing even better. I also found out that I have some sweet dance moves (referring to my flailing that I do when I am trying to fake out a defender).

Now let's move to something everyone understands!

Registration:

At SCC, registration was a simple process. One would simply get a schedule form, fill it out ahead of time, then wait in a 20 minute or so line on the day of registration in order to get into the classes they wanted. If one was not motivated to wait in line on the first day, they would risk not getting into maybe one or two of the classes. In short, it favored the motivated and I liked that. At Seattle U, it is done all online. Well, I should refine that, it's done all online if you happen to get selected to register on the first day. If you don't, then chances are one or more of you classes will be filled at which point you have to go in person to the office for your school and fill out a bunch of forms before embarking on a small fetchquest to get (a chance at getting) permission to enter that class. They claim registration goes in order of credits earned, but I have my doubts as it seemed people with similar standings to mine were registering days ahead of me. Perhaps they just really hate transfer students and that's why I got to register in one of the last couple time slots.

Not knowing the pain I was about to go through, I happily went to search for and register for my classes that I had selected earlier. Unfortunately, all three of the classes had been filled. Disappointed, I checked my three backups; all three of those were full too. Now concerned, I checked my two remaining double backup classes that I didn't think I would need to use. Both were full. After a large "FFFFFUUUUU," I sent out some emails to my advisor, the office of the registrar, and the professor of the micro class I really wanted to get into. Fortunately I emailed all three because each one only gave me a small piece of the puzzle. If I had only emailed one of them, who knows how lost I would have been. I was able to find out that basically, to get into my classes, I would need to embark on a huge fetch quest.

So the next day I was on campus (Friday unfortunately), I went to the office in the business and econ school which I am enrolled in. It didn't open for another half hour, so I had to kill some time to wait for it to open up. When it finally opened, the guy manning the front desk was kind of snarky, so I avoided asking him too many questions. I did manage to find that to get into the closed classes, one must fill out a closed class registration form. To add to the annoyance, each form only covers one class, so in my case, I had to fill out three. Even better, for each class I don't get into, it would be one more. With my enchanted papers that gave signatures meaning, I had to head out to find a place to print my education plan which details credits I've earned and credits I need. I decided first to head over to the school of Theology and Ministry for some information since one of the classes I needed was a Theology class. Upon arriving there, I met the man at the front desk.

Me: Hi, I'm trying to get into a closed Theology class. I'm an econ major, so do I get a form from my school or from here?

Guy: Well actually for that, you want a form from the school of Theology and Religious Studies.

Me: *Blank stare*

Guy: This is the school of Theology and Ministry

Me: *Continued blank stare*

Guy: It's in the 2nd floor of the Casey building.

Confused still, I headed off to the Casey building to get the information I so desperately sought. Upon arriving in that office, I was informed by a sign that they don't handle that type of problem there and that I would need to go downstairs to the department of Arts and Sciences. I went down there to see the people and they were about to send me to yet another place when they realized I was talking about a core class and they could help me there. I scheduled a walk in advising session and waited about five minutes. After five minutes had passed, I got called to the desk where they had just realized I was an Economics major and as such, I would need to go to Student Enrollment Services way across campus.

I headed off yet again in search of a simple answer. When I arrived at the entrance to the services area, I noticed they were closed and wouldn't open until right before my first class of the day. The office of the registrar was right down the hall, but I couldn't see anyone staffing that either, so I gave up on the whole thing. I decided to go back to Pigott (home of Albers, the school of business and economics) to print out my education plan and turn in the two forms that I knew I could turn in there. To print out the plan, I went to the computer lab for the first time. Upon entering for the first time, I was greeted by a familiar voice. It was my friend from econ and frisbee. I guess he works in the computer lab. He helped me figure out how to print (there are about 50 printers you have to choose from and the nomenclature is somewhat confusing). Each education plan is 4 pages long and I had to print three copies. At first, I felt guilty, but then I thought about the pain that this terrible registration process had caused me and that helped the guilt go away. With plans and forms finally in hand, I went to the front desk again to turn them in. The guy was much happier this time around (someone must have brought him some coffee or something). Since he was in a good mood, I decided to ask him about how to get into that pesky theology class. He told me that all I had to do was schedule a walk in advising session in which an advisor would help me register. Another great "FFFFFUUUUU" moment.

I got into the session pretty quickly (they really mean walk in). The advisor said I would not be able to get into the class I wanted and asked if I was interested in any other theology classes. I told her I was interested in the kind that were offered on the days I hope my other classes will be on. She managed to find me "Theology of Peace," not very interesting sounding and it's another 7:45 class that runs two hours, but it was offered on the days I needed, so I took it without a second thought.

Eventually, things sort of worked out. I was told it would take 3 weeks to process my applications, but it only wound up taking two, so that was nice. I was able to sort it all out without coming to school during the break. A spot actually opened up in the Theology class I wanted, but I decided Theology of Peace sounded better (the other one actually started to sound super lame). I got into one of my classes, but not Micro which I really wanted. Instead of filling out a form to get into a class I more urgently needed, I decided to just take a general elective so I'm going to take Law, Politics, and Society. It's required that you be a legal studies specialization for it, but I petitioned the teacher and told her about my plans for law school and she was totally fine with it. I have a feeling I'm going to like that class.

Other stuff:

I guess first off, I'll talk about my possible narcolepsy. I'm more suspicious that it is actually that now because I recently experienced a couple more of the "signs" that I had previously never though I had experienced. Once I experienced them again, I realized that I had indeed had that happen before. What I'm referencing here is a loss of ability to move. I wake up from sleeping and I still have some lingering sleep paralysis. In the most recent instance, it happened to my arm. It felt like it was asleep, but I wouldn't feel it tingle unless I moved it. I could not move the arm though unless I moved it using my other arm. Eventually I think I should go in for a sleep evaluation or something and try to discover a way to combat this. For now though, it's not causing a problem. In fact, I find the more often I fall asleep in a class, the better grade I get in that class. Perhaps there is some merit to the idea of listening to tapes while you sleep to gain information.

In videogames, I've been playing a lot more Starcraft 2 now. Keir and I are doing some 2v2s and it's going pretty well. We're improving to say the least. I haven't played much Trackmania lately due to my increased playing of SC2.

I also started using Goozex again. I randomly checked the other day and one of the games I had listed as an offer since the day I first joined was finally requested. In my excitement, I decided to trade away another few games. The next day before I was going to send them out, another game I had offered since my first day as a member got requested. In total, I have 7 games going out this weekend for a total of 1300 points. That means I'll be able to get a new game if I want. I plan to sit on the points for a bit though as I am still playing several games in my library and I anticipate getting a couple more soon. I'll let the values of games on Goozex go down so I can get more for my points.

The last thing on my list of things to get to is Thanksgiving. We went to Sunriver (Central Oregon) for the third year in a row with mom's family. Grandma did not come this year and one of my cousins and her husband did not either. The way over and back were slow going due to icy road conditions. On the way there, it was a good 8 hours of driving that I did because I don't trust the rest of my family to drive us safely through hazardous road conditions (I don't feel safe with them and bare in mind, I suspect I have narcolepsy!). We had a good few days there. Kathryn and I used icicles to unicorn our car (pictures to come) which got us many looks from people as we drove past. The day after Thanksgiving, some of us did the Turkey trot which is a 3 mile run. For the first time in my life in a timed race, I ran sub-10 minute miles. I finished the 3 miles in 27 minutes and got second place for my age group. I was pretty happy with that. I didn't get a ribbon though because I cheaped out and signed up to walk instead of run (it was less than half the price). I was the first walker to come across the finish line though and I'm sure I also beat about half the running crowd. I lost to my cousin who is good at running by only 5 minutes so I was pretty proud of that. That day, we also went sledding. My 2 year old second cousin got really into it and my cousin and I took some turns taking him down some of the less bumpy sled runs. He really enjoyed it. Coming back only took about 6 hours and it was significantly clearer than on the way there, which was nice. I still drove the entire way and it was nice because everyone was sleeping a lot of the way.

Ok that's pretty much everything I planned to cover here. I'm looking forward to seeing most or perhaps all of you this break. Unless your name is Keir, we have not talked as much as we should during this quarter, but that is partly/mostly my fault in many cases. Actually, if your name is Keir, we still have not talked enough. We should play SC2 right now. In case you're not getting it, that's what I'm going to go do right now. How was that for avoiding an awkward signoff? Fail.

Peace out.

Getting extra free time to make posts

2010-11-01T11:18:00.000-07:00

Or at least I am today. My econ teacher failed to show up, so we got the day off. It is actually frustrating though and I'll get to it later when I mention my classes. On another note, whoaaahh it's November! Anyone out there doing No-Shave November? I won't be this year since I decided last year would be my last time ever. If you want to see the pictures, I'm happy to show you them, but I don't want to post them to the blog. To sum it up, I'm not confident in my ability to grow facial hair beyond what I currently have. My past couple of weeks have been pretty eventful and hopefully I'll be able to remember most of the things that have happened.

Classes:
Classes generally are not getting worse. The exception to that is Macro where the professor has gotten more frustrating to learn from as the quarter progresses. She has been teaching for that magic amount of time where she thinks her curriculum is flawless and she won't deviate from it at all. It's causing some problems for people in the class. She is also frequently tardy to class and is bad about procrastinating. Last Monday, we had our big midterm. Only 5 people had enough time to finish every question on the exam. She promised our tests back on Wednesday, failed to deliver, then promised them on Friday. On Friday, she blamed her not finished grading on "the bottom 25% of the quizzes where the answers were confusing to grade." She then did not show up today, which is why I'm making this post. I hope I did well on the exam because it almost sounds like she did not curve it. Perhaps she did though and someone just aced it. That's the thing about curving I suppose, it makes a huge bastard out of the top performer in the class.

Aside from that, I'm getting to know people more in my classes. I've been chatting before class (and making remarks during class) with the girl that sits on the other side of me now. The area where I sit in macro has become closer and all the people seem pretty cool. As for Philosophy, I made a new friend (my first facebook friend at SU!!!) and we hang out before class usually since we both have a half hour break. In math, I have made a friend I suppose because he always walks in when he sees me in an opera booth. He just strikes up a conversation no matter what I'm doing, sits down and does some reading for about 20 minutes, then awkwardly leaves. I don't know his name, but it's just kind of odd. He seems nice though. Philosophy and Math are going well, but I find myself falling asleep in them frequently, bringing me to my next point.

Possible Sleep Disorder:
Falling asleep has now become a regular problem for me. It began back in high school, must have gotten worse at SCC, and now is pretty bad. The thing was at SCC, I had Jazz Band during the time which I normally get sleepy, so I was kept awake pretty effectively by standing and playing an instrument. I do not have that luxury here and since all the classrooms are kept warm, it is hard for me to stay awake most of the time. Of course the professors are very nice about it (probably since I don't seem to snore (knock on wood)). One day in my math class, someone asked a question and then I fell asleep. I drifted in and out of sleep the entire two hours and woke up about 10 minutes before class ended. The professor was answering the question that was asked at the beginning of class. I leaned over to my friend next to me to ask what was going on and he just said "You picked a good day to sleep, he just spent two hours getting to an answer that took 5 minutes." Of course, not all the days are so lucky. I manage to wake myself up to scribble down notes I miss, but I don't really get the lecture part. Oddly enough, it seems that the more I fall asleep in a class, the better I am doing in it this quarter. Anyway, I looked up sleeping disorders on WebMD and after looking around a bit, I think the one I matched up with most was narcolepsy. It actually matched me pretty well, so now I'm wondering what's going on there. Of course if there were a cheap and relatively non-time consuming way to test myself for this, I would do it. For now though, it seems I would have to visit a sleep center, which is something I don't have an interest in doing. I'll just try to schedule my classes differently next quarter.

Jazz Band:
I should have put this in classes, but I forgot. It's going pretty well. I found out the instructor is actually kind of a big deal in the Seattle area, here is his wikipedia page(yeah, that big of a deal). He looks a little bit and sounds a lot of a bit like James Earl Jones, which is pretty awesome. Unfortunately there are still only two trumpets in the band, but I think we might eventually get a third or something. For now, the other guy is pretty cool.

Frisbee:
Frisbee is going quite well. I recently got invited to join the team at a second tournament that is the weekend after Sundodger. Sundodger is the one that everyone on the team is invited to, but the second one (OMG) is in Eugene, Oregon; for that they only take the top 16. Since I was invited, that means my effort in practices has been noticed, which was nice to see. Last Monday, we had a particularly interesting practice. It was raining really hard so at a point when the few of us that were there were completely soaked, we decided to do layout practices. It went pretty well. I didn't get any spectacular layouts (none for offense) because I was handling the whole time, but I did get a couple half-assed layout D's.

Life on Campus:
As I said earlier, I'm making a couple more friends here and there that I occasionally talk to. Aside from that though, I have found places to hide on campus where I can get homework done uninterrupted. There are small closets in the library on floors that are rarely visited by other people, so I like to hide in there when the opera seats are occupied or when I need to watch videos online for macro. Having time to get the homework done each day is nice because then I get to enjoy my days off more.

Life off Campus:
I've beaten the SC2 campaign on Brutal now, so in between working on remaining achievements, I find myself going into multiplayer more. Steven somehow has the infinite patience to teach me sotis when I'm online. Eventually I'll become halfway competent at it. I also have started doing 1v1s in hopes to beat Keir's bronze placement. I should be on track for that so far. I've only got two under my belt right now. I lost my first match to a gold guy who said that if I kept playing the way I did, I should at least make gold. He corrected me on a unit matchup that was the reason I lost, which was really cool of him. The second game was also against a gold player, but I stomped him (I was playing Terran that time though, it's hardly fair). I've also been playing Trackmania here and there and just beating times. Other things I do like horn lessons and visiting grandpa are the same as they've always been.

UWB frisbee has been going well too. We just had our last games of the regular season on Saturday in a double header. We won the first one, but lost the second one. More girls (and more people in general) have been coming to games, which has been really nice. Of course, none of them actually go to UWB, but I don't mind because they're all pretty nice and generally good at frisbee.

I think I generally covered everything there. I'm kind of hurriedly writing this during my break and I have to get going here to get to my next class, so if there is any confusion on what I wrote up there or if you just want to say hi, go ahead and message me, I'm always on gchat. Until later, peace out.

Campus Pics Below

2010-10-22T09:11:00.000-07:00

Sorry about not posting on Wednesday or Monday, I forgot. It's been a busy week here and I'm trying to make sure I get big assignments out of the way so I can study for tests. On top of that, all my commitments are in full swing now and that has been keeping me busy. Since the time between now and my last post has been rather busy, I will try to hold myself to posting on November 1st so I can get in all my good stories. Now like I have said in the title, pictures of my life on campus follow this post, so enjoy. I'll post again next month.

The Square and Casey Building

2010-10-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

This is out in the middle-ish of campus. I like the look of it and so do a lot of other people (as evidenced by how many people usually sit there). There is nobody there in this picture because it was taken at 7:30am.

This is inside the Casey Building which houses the Philosophy department. The ground floor is set up with a podium and a semicircle. No doubt many great philosophical discussions have occurred and will occur here.

This is the staircase in the middle of the building. I like it because it's right in the middle of the building and it gives a cool look to the interior. Unfortunately, there was little reason for me to come to this building as it is only an office building. I did enjoy the seldom used bathrooms though (now not needed thanks to one I found that I mention in the following post).

The hideaway at Lemineux Library

2010-10-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

They recently redid their library here at Seattle U making it very modern and very awesome at the same time. Up on the top floor is an area that is not frequently in use by anyone other than myself. It has days where it is fairly busy and I generally don't go up there, but when it is empty, it is a great place to get away.

Fortunately, the only elevator that goes to this floor has regular issues, so until they fix it, there will be some days where the place is deserted (since you have to go up a lot of stairs to get up there). Out this window you can see Logan field (the softball half of it at least) where Throbot practices on Mondays and Fridays.

I call this hangout spot "heaven" not because it has some divine property, but because it is the highest spot one can be on campus (without being allowed on the roof of the building).

The best part about this area? There is a huge single user bathroom on the floor. I don't know how to feel about how excited I got when I saw this, but you have to admit, a place on a college campus with a frequently vacant single user bathroom that anyone can use? That's pretty excellent.

Pigott and the Math/Science Building

2010-10-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

On the third floor of Pigott, they have these little balconies where you can sit around and work. They're separated from the adjacent hallway by a wall, but they are open to the main area of the building. Because of that, I refer to them as the opera seats as they are somewhat similar to those. This remains my favorite place to hang out on campus as once you enter one, it seems that people are reluctant to come in with you even though there is room for more than one person. Unfortunately, there are only three so it takes a bit of luck to get one in the afternoons. I am making these posts from one of these.

This is a huge 2 story Chahule (sp?) piece in the main area of Pigott. To the left on the upper level are the opera seats I previously mentioned. Pigott is my home building and I must say, I lucked out. It is not as pretty as the Sullivan Building (law building), but it is definitely the best building on campus for places to sit undisturbed.

This is the Math/Sciences building. The hallway in this picture is actually underground and those skylights are just coming up from a garden that is on the 'roof' of the building. This building is always very quiet, I rarely see other people in it. I would spend more time there, but the seating situation is horrible. Yes there are plenty of benches, but they are not great when you want to be doing a lot of studying/homework and on top of that, they aren't comfortable.

Whoaahhh, I'm back baby!

2010-10-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

Well if it isn't the ol' blog. I know you've been missing me around these parts, some of you readers have resorted to actually facebooking/IMing me no doubt desperately looking for updates on my life since I was not making posts to this blog. The truth is, I mean to post a couple of weeks ago. My classes only meet three times a week, so I wanted to have a couple weeks with them before I talked about them. When I was going to make that post though, I saw a sign for a club I wanted to join (more on that later) which caused delays to my posting because I really wanted to have tried each extracurricular activity I was planning on doing at least once. Now that I have done just that, it is time to fill you all in on what has been happening at the new school. Now in the interest of keeping this post as short as possible, I'm going to omit some anecdotes that I do want to eventually get to. I am going to post those at a later time (most likely Monday or Wednesday) and they will be accompanied by....PICTURES!!!! Also note that besides that post of a few pictures, I will not be updating with a wordy post until sometime in mid-November so if this post gets too long at any point, just pick it up at a later time. You will have plenty of time to finish reading it before the next big post I make. But I've rambled enough, time to get into the past few weeks. I guess I'll start with my classes.

Econ 310: Quantitative Methods and Applications: Monday & Wednesday 7:45am-9:50am:
Don't be fooled by the title, it's just another stats class. This was the class I referenced when I was talking about how transfer students got last picks for classes. The 7:45 start and the whole doing stats for 2 hours straight thing is pretty brutal actually, but he posts all his lecture notes online. I've found that to be very helpful as I have a terrible time staying awake for the full duration of that class. This is also the only class I really know anyone in. The first day we met, I walked into Piggott (the building where this class is located) and who should I see waiting around but the guy that I had all my business classes with at Shoreline CC. He was waiting around with another guy from there too, so the three of us hung out before class, then sat next to each other in class. They're cool guys, so it's nice to have them as some people I know here. As for the teacher, he is much better than my previous stats teacher (which isn't hard). He has a learning disability affecting his ability to spell (if there are a lot of repeated letters, he will have trouble spelling the word) which can get pretty annoying a lot of the time. I give him slack though because he is a nice guy and he usually keeps the class interesting which for stats is no small task.

Econ 330: International Economic Events and Business Decisions: Monday, Wednesday, & Friday 10:00am-11:25am:
This class is essentially intermediate macroeconomics while inserting some current events as well. I don't know how I let myself get into having another quarter where I take stats with macro, but I guess I'll just have to get through it again. It's not that they're hard classes, it's just that doing the work for each one is incredibly time consuming especially when I have to show my work. The professor in this class is interesting. She is actually from Transylvania where she apparently grew up a couple miles away from what is called Dracula castle. She has a pretty thick accent (sounds like a lady Chekov from Star Trek) and when she makes spelling errors, it is usually in a way that if you read what she wrote, it would sound like how she would say it. She has made some mistakes in asking questions, on assignments which has forced me to try to reason with her to get points back. On the last assignment, she wanted growth rates for the year I was born AND 2008 when what she meant was she wanted growth rates for the year I was born TO 2008. It took a lot of convincing to get her to realize that she asked the question incorrectly, but I eventually got through to her and won back the points I should have gotten. The people in the class are pretty nice. There's a pretty girl that sits next to me by choice (maybe because I look smart?) and one of my frisbee acquaintances sits right in front of me. I sit in the back which seems to be where most of the really businessy kids sit. Being an economicsy student, I am not one of them, I just sit amongst them.

Phil 210: Philosophy of the Human Person: Monday, Wednesday, & Friday 11:55am-1:20pm:
Again, thank the counselor that signed me up for my classes for that stupid little half hour break. I can't wait until I make my own schedule here, I rather dislike short and pointless breaks such as that. This class is one I thought I would like more than I do, but one that is still interesting nonetheless. The professor is Italian, born in Italy, and has only been here a few years (by far the shortest of my three professors). However, he has the best grammar and spelling ability of my three professors. Also, he sounds a lot like Borat, so his lectures are always pretty fun to listen to. Of all my professors, I think I like him the best. So far in the class, we've mostly just read a lot of Plato and Socrates, which is starting to wear thin on me as we get to the places where Socrates and I do not particularly agree on things, but we will soon be moving on to more contemporary philosophy after reading the allegory of the cave (how many more times must I read that?). The classroom for this is just big enough to hold all of us, so we all get to be friendly with each other. Everyone in the class is a transfer student too, so it's nice to have other people my age in the class. Seattle U requires a philosophy class as a general elective, so it's usually one you would take freshman year unless you're a transfer student.

Seattle U Ultimate Frisbee (Throwbot):
I'm not sure if there is actually a 'w' in Throwbot, I'll look into that again and get back to you if you're really curious. This is a legit university team, there is an all guys team and an all girls team. Originally, there were 80+ people interested and about 75% of them actually came out to practices. The numbers have gotten a bit smaller since the less committed were weeded out, but that is proving to be a good thing. We have about 20 guys that can really play, so that will be good for subbing when we go to tournaments. Jack's brother Jeff is on the team too, so that was nice to see a familiar face. There are also a couple other Shorewood kids on the team (that did not do ultimate at Shorewood, for shame!). The team is pretty big and there are only a handful of us that know how to play well. A few returning team players including the captains have complemented me on my throwing, so that felt pretty nice. Also due to my throwing performance during the practices, I seem to have secured my position as a handler. It's nice because this team runs a weird deformed ho-stack formation with 3 handlers that do little other than make short throws without really running at all and then four cutters that have to do a ton of running. Ability to throw FTW I guess! Practices are held Mondays and Fridays outside from 3pm-5pm rain or shine. On Wednesdays, we practice from 9pm-11pm(it's not too bad since I don't have class the following day) in the ASTRO GYM!!! It's actually less exciting than the name. It's a small probably repurposed basketball court that now has turf in it. It's way too small for a legit game of frisbee, but we still play 7 on 7. It just makes the matches way more intense. Also nice about the astro gym is it is inside which is unlike the environments I've played in before. There is no wind at all so the disc goes exactly where I want it to. It's weird having to remember not to compensate for wind and other factors.

Jazz Band:
This started out like my experience at SCC started out. Hopefully I enjoy this band as much as I did that band. Before I got to SU, I was sure I wanted to do the jazz band here. Once I arrived, I was overwhelmed with my new schedule and trying to learn all the new places and I decided not to do it. Then, a couple weeks later, I saw posters advertising that the band needed players, so I changed my mind. Note to all of you, I usually don't change my mind like that if I get asked the same question twice. Feel free to try, you might get lucky, but most of the time I will not be that easy. So I went to the informational meeting this Tuesday which turned out to be an audition which turned out to be a formality. I guess the instructor just wanted to interview each new member individually and see them play. I think he was overall satisfied with how I did. I owe Doug a big thanks for working on building sight reading skills with us in the band, that helped during the audition. The director didn't throw out Doug's name, but he did notice that I mentioned Shorewood and was quick to mention Harshman. I guess I can't ever separate myself from that name in the Seattle music scene. Oh well. The director is this big black guy with a deep Barry White-esque voice so I can already tell he is going to be great. I can't wait to start rehearsals next week.

Pep Band:
Just kidding, I'm actually not doing this one. Seattle U was trying a new thing with the pep band this year in an attempt to get it to exist again. They were having the band be made up of a mix of SU students as well as alumni and students from local high schools. Well stupid me, I forgot how almost nonexistent our music program is here. There were 3 SU students, no alumni, and about 50 high school kids all with that pep band nerd personality that can have a tendency to annoy the hell out of you. Fortunately, I had frisbee immediately following the meeting, so I ducked out early. They will not see me again. I remember that I never really liked pep band anyway. Besides, if I were to do this, I would be on campus from 7:30am-11:00pm on Wednesdays which is kind of excessive.

Well that's pretty much all I'm doing right now. It takes up a lot of time though, so it all seems like more. I haven't really spent much time socializing that much yet, but I don't reall plan to go and make friends outside of the few activities I'm doing because I'm here to get a job done. This is just a warm up for when I totally destroy my social life in a couple of years by going to law school.

Since I have that early class, I just carpool down here with dad since his office is a 15 minute walk from campus for me. I just meet him at his office after school and we get to take the carpool lanes back home. It's a pretty nice deal and it works out with all my activities plus working out and doing homework that I don't generally find myself lacking in things to do while I'm here. Now if you recall, I said earlier I was going to omit things from this post and put them into a later series of smaller posts. I was referring to this section, the "campus life" area. Expect more on that with some pictures on Monday or Wednesday. In the meantime, here are some things I've been up to outside of school.

UWB Tempest:
Steven and Chris and I are now regular players for that team. I like playing with the whole team because everyone there is really cool, even the new people they bring in. A couple of weeks ago, we had Orion's sisters in and still had to play a man down, but we almost won the game. It was pretty cool. The team is looking not to bad this year, the problem still remains that we need more girls. I'm working on becoming friends with the girls on SU frisbee which is proving difficult because they have enough for their own team and they don't usually play with the guys I play with (the ones that know how to play). After games now, Steven and Chris and Eric and Sai and I play some Munchkin and eat pizza which is a pretty good way to spend a Saturday in my correct opinion.

Paintball:
Well actually I only did this once, but I had a lot of fun doing it. Dad has a coworker that has been trying to get him to come play paintball for a while now. He and his family have a private paintball course on his brother's property. It's in this big woodsy area complete with a big swamp too. They've had it for a while too, so it's decked out nice with forts built into hillsides and bridges over some rough terrain making for a cool experience. We played four games while we were there for the day.

The first game was a straight up attack and defend game just to get warmed up. Unfortunately, the attackers more often than not are the winners for some strange reason. I was a defender. I was also the first person out. The first shot I ever got in paintball was a shot right into my balls from about 50 yards away through a six inch hole. It was a miracle shot and it hurt pretty bad. Fortunately, it took the fear away the rest of the day. The only shot that hurt as much as that one did was surprisingly one that hit me on the knuckle. I even got hit in the head and that one didn't hurt too bad.

The second game was one where both teams had to go to a place in the middle of the area with a booby trapped clue. The team had to then successfully get the clue in that highly contested area and use it to find a chest that was hidden out in the area somewhere. One of our stealth teams that was moving around to flank (we had two and I was in the other one) the center happened to run into the chest, so without needing the clue, they ran it back to the base and the rest of us slowly trickled back in once we died and respawned at our base. We had this one ninja guy on our team that just spent half the match in the trees sniping people or army crawling through the muck in his gilly suit. He also had a slingshot in case he wanted to be stealthy. All in all, he was a total badass. The crate never left our base and we wound up winning in the end after some pretty intense holdouts against big assaults from the other team.

In the third game, our team had to arm a bomb by 15 minutes into the game. The bomb was in this really open area right by the enemy base, so we had to get a guy in position to dive out to it and as he did that, all 7 of us in the immediate area opened up on the base, just getting shots out towards the enemy so they would have to keep their heads down. It worked and the bomb got armed. Then we had to hold position for 15 minutes and wait for it to go off. We were successful in that as well.

The last game was probably my favorite because by this point I was doing pretty well. There were 5 people that were related, so they were on one team against 15 of us. It was like an infection version of attack and defend where if you get hit as a defender, you go to attack. The attackers win by getting a guy across the zipline without being hit, so it gets easier the fewer defenders there are and when there are none left, it's just a formality. I was one of only two people left defending at the end. Of course we were the only two that lost, but there was a badge of honor in that considering the attackers are destined to win no matter what. I even got a really great lucky blindfire shot where I was blindfiring where I knew this guy was. He had ducked though and I happened to hit a guy I didn't notice was on the zipline. Right place at the right time I guess. It was a pretty fun match and the guy that lasted that long with me and I were proud of ourselves.

Videogames:
Well I finished Fallout 3 so I've been getting back on the PC more. I also play this Trackmania game now that runs better than SC2 on my laptop and works better around the brief times I actually find myself with time to play videogames here on campus.

Ok well until Monday or Wednesday, then until mid November for my next big post (which should be smaller than this one), peace out.

New School Starts Tomorrow

2010-09-21T14:37:00.000-07:00

Well tomorrow is the big day I attend my first classes at a University (well the first ones I signed up for at least). Today, after this post, I'm going to be posting pictures of summer to facebook, so expect to be tagged, unless you did not hang out with me this summer. Now that I think of it, that is very few of you. Oh well. Well anyway, my September has been pretty nice so far. A lot of my major time drains (not to say I didn't enjoy them, just that they sucked down a lot of my free time this summer) have "dried up" so to speak, leaving my schedule wide open. It did allow me to have some fun adventures however. First though, I'll get the usual things out of the way.

Gaming:
This past week though, I have been mainly playing 360. I got some new DLC for Mass Effect 2 and spent a lot of time playing that again on the hardest difficulty. I also got my two new games from goozex, Kane and Lynch as well as Fallout 3. I was really disappointed with Kane and Lynch, but the game was super short, so I guess that was nice. It's going right back through goozex once I get some envelopes to send it in. Right now, I'm into Fallout 3. It's really great because it handles just like Oblivion which I am very familiar with (the same company made them after all). It's pretty scary, but not as bad as Bioshock so far, so that is nice. Also, while I'm talking about goozex, I got a special game in the mail. I used goozex to track down a copy of Mission: Impossible on NES, a game I have been looking for since I discovered a functioning NES while cleaning out my grandpa's house. It had most of the collection I had when I had my own, but Mission: Impossible was one of the big names I remembered that I was having trouble finding. I have played it and I have no idea what is going on when I play. I couldn't be happier as that is about where I left off when the game left me so long ago.

As far as the PC goes, I've stayed off it except for business things (checking emails and things like that). I did get on last week between finishing Mass Effect 2 and starting Kane and Lynch. I decided to marathon an Imperial Campaign as Egypt in Rome: Total War. I played to get every single settlement and I was reminded why I never really do that in one sitting. It takes forever. I don't know how long it's been since I've played Starcraft 2, but I think I'm going to start again soon. I guess this is a sure sign I probably won't get addicted to it ever (if I can just randomly not play it for almost a month), but I'm going to start having a lot of free time if I'm on campus for several hours without homework 3 days a week, so I think I'll get back into it once the quarter starts up.

As for the other type of gaming (tabletop), I have not heard from my Warhammer friends since I last played with them in mid-August. They planned to have something last Wednesday, but I never heard from them. I know one guy's wife had a baby, Steve is starting school tomorrow as well, and I'm not sure what the others are up to. I think though that it is safe to assume I won't be hearing from them for at least another month. I did have fun playing and I would like to play since I invested a good chunk of time and a bit of money into it. I'm sure I'll play in the future sometime though, so I'm not too concerned. In the meantime, I'll enjoy the extra free time that it has left me.

Beach trip and other Grandpa related things:
I still hit up Costco about once a week with Grandpa. I'm kind of getting into that schedule of going once a week which is what I do when I'm in school. It's Tuesdays this year because it's one of the days I have off and it's the one I don't give horn lessons on. The weekend after I got Davis over to EWU, I went on a little weekend trip out to the beach with him, my aunt, and Kathryn and our cousins. It was pretty fun. On Saturday, Grandpa rode in the go-karts at Ocean Shores. Getting him out of the karts was much easier with 3 people. This past Sunday, we had his 87th birthday party as well as his 1 year anniversary of moving into his new place party. He clearly has made a bunch of friends in the place in that one year because the apartment was crowded with other residents. My cousins and Kathryn and I went out of the room (since it was so crowded) at one point to play the golf simulator down the hall. We were not hitting it very far and soon, this 80 year old guy walked in. My cousin hit the ball and the screen said it went 30 yards. The guy walked up to see if the sensor was messed up and he was like "oh, I'm not warmed up or anything" and he doubled my cousin's hit on his first swing. On his second, he tripled it.

Taking Davis to EWU:
The Tuesday after PAX, I went to Davis' house to load up as much stuff as we could in the truck before we set off the following morning. We left around 9:30 and after a rather uneventful drive, we got to his apartment at about 3:00. I got to meet his super conservative complex manager. After that, we began moving all the stuff into his place with the help of one of his neighbors at one point. I enjoyed the looks of confusions on people's faces when we would introduce ourselves (since our names are so similar) and then seeing the look of relief on their faces when I would tell them I was not going to be around more than a day. After getting his stuff more or less sorted out, we went up to EWU for a tour and for him to look into a couple things. We went all around the campus which was actually really nice. I took a lot of pictures for mom. I'll put some up in my album on facebook. Like I said, it was a very pretty campus and there are some really cool views in places. We went to go have dinner and get groceries after that, so we hit up Carls Jr. then this small grocery store Davis had heard about. After that, we went back up to the campus to hang out with one of Davis' friends. She was one of the ones that is really into DnD, so that was pretty cool. I got no sympathy for Dirk's death from her though. After that, it was late, so we went back to Davis' apartment and then we went to sleep.

The next day, we got up and hung out around the apartment for most of the morning. We went up to the campus for Davis to get something signed for work while I explored Tawanka commons at my mom's recommendation. After that, we came back to his place so I could pack up and leave. And thus began my amazing adventure. I headed up to Spokane because I knew of a Costco (that was a lot further from the freeway than I remembered). Upon getting the gas, I did a calculation and found the truck getting just under 22mpg. Pretty excellent for an 18 year old (almost 19 now) pickup. Now instead of going back on I-90, I kind of spontaneously decided that I wanted to epicly detour and check out Grand Coulee dam before going back to I-90. I wasn't thinking at the time, but it would have been better not to get back on I-90 after doing that, but I thought the dam was much further south than it was. It turns out, it is about the equivalent of detouring all the way down to the tri-cities from I-90. If I had known that, I might have stuck on highway 2 all the way back, but I did not. In the end, I am glad I did not because the drive was really spectacular and I do enjoy driving.

So until I got on I-90, I was just going 60 or whatever the speed limit was. I was not expected at home until late at night, so I was in no hurry to get anywhere. For the first leg, it was mostly just rolling hills and grain fields. Very pretty stuff. After about an hour and a half, I turned to take a 20 mile road up north to the dam. When I got there, I checked out the dam and enjoyed the scenery for a while before wondering what the best way to get home was. I had no signal, so I was flying blind this whole time. I decided I could probably take highway 2 back, but I knew I-90 much better, so I decided to find my way back to that. It was rather challenging because you change on and off and across about 4 different small highways before you finally start seeing signs for I-90. Fortunately, the sun was in the sky and as long as I could tell I was heading south and west, I was doing fine. As I drove, I eventually came by a place called dry falls. I quickly hit the brakes and pulled into the viewpoint parking lot because the sight was really amazing. I stuck around there for a few minutes before getting back in and going on my way. The rest of the drive to I-90 was really uneventful but pretty. I was going along a big river most of the way and there were cool land formations as well as settlements there. While I was driving along, I pondered ways to make a Mass Effect version of DnD work and I came up with some cool ideas, but nothing too serious as I was focusing mainly on this cool scenery going by. Eventually, I wound up on I-90 several hours behind schedule. I took it the rest of the way home, only stopping for about 20 minutes in the pass to wait for ROCK BLASTING!!1111 Unfortunately, I didn't get to see any actual blasts, but on the plus side I did not have to wait very long in the line. I finally got home at 10pm. Going on I-90 from Spokane to my house gets me home in 4-5 hours. I planned on this trip taking 5-6. It took 8 hours in total. For over 7 of those 8, I was behind the wheel driving the truck along. It may seem ridiculous, but I really had fun because I like driving, especially driving past new places. I think I'll take the same detour next time I wind up in Spokane (who knows when that will be though).

Well, that concludes my past few weeks. I guess now it is time to go post some pictures to facebook and then get to bed somewhat on time before school tomorrow. I'm attempting to change how much I sleep, but that will be addressed in the next post. Until the next post (which will be in October), peace out.

Preceeding PAX Pics

2010-09-13T13:40:00.001-07:00

So the PAX pics are below in case you didn't notice. They are of course in backwards order, that's why we start with making the costumes we wore. Just as a reminder, you won't see a new post on the blog until the 20th or 21st (most likely the second date) and after that, I'm going to drop to posting every other week or less frequently depending on how busy of a life I lead. I don't know if it will matter, but I felt like I should tell you just in case you are still reading and/or checking this blog regularly. Enjoy the pictures. Don't forget, blogger is silly and you have to hit "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page now to view the next page of pictures.

2010-09-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

Making sure the keyboard strap was long enough.

2010-09-13T13:37:00.002-07:00

Getting the boxes painted.

2010-09-13T13:37:00.001-07:00

Drilling holes in the keyboards.

2010-09-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

Tools used to get the keyboards onto the straps that went around our necks.

2010-09-13T13:36:00.001-07:00

Success! The keyboards are attached to the straps!

2010-09-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

My first time sewing in quite a long time. This was the first one I did, the rest actually looked less chaotic. I should have taken pictures of Steven's straps, I did good on those.

2010-09-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

Drawing the spiral on the front.

2010-09-13T13:34:00.002-07:00

The outside.

2010-09-13T13:34:00.001-07:00

The front.

2010-09-13T13:34:00.000-07:00

Figuring out how high the straps need to be placed.

2010-09-13T13:33:00.002-07:00

Making sure the packs fit.

2010-09-13T13:33:00.001-07:00

It's looking ready now.

2010-09-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

Finally complete after hours of work.

2010-09-13T13:32:00.002-07:00

Getting the packs on.

2010-09-13T13:32:00.001-07:00

The three of us suited up and ready to type some zombies straight to hell.

2010-09-13T13:32:00.000-07:00

A second shot.

2010-09-13T13:30:00.001-07:00

The picture of us that wound up on Sega's twitter feed.

2010-09-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

Not on the twitter feed, but it was also taken by the Sega guys and put in their PAX blog post.

2010-09-13T13:29:00.001-07:00

D&D bus.

2010-09-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

Eric unsure how to pose with the D4.

2010-09-13T13:28:00.003-07:00

Found him.

2010-09-13T13:28:00.002-07:00

2010-09-13T13:28:00.001-07:00

2010-09-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

Ooh, a light cycle at the Tron booth.

2010-09-13T13:27:00.002-07:00

Best game...ever?

2010-09-13T13:27:00.001-07:00

Chris is either yawning or yelling.

2010-09-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

PC freeplay.

2010-09-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

Typing the dragon to death. Note our different opinions on what was appropriate footgear to wear with suits. You can't see, but Davis is wearing dress socks. I clearly am not.

2010-09-13T13:25:00.001-07:00

We had to get one with swords too.

2010-09-13T13:25:00.000-07:00

It turned out blurry, but this is Munchkin being played in case you couldn't tell.

2010-09-13T13:24:00.002-07:00

Davis with his prize and his attention acquiring orange sword.

2010-09-13T13:24:00.001-07:00

Looks like you found a Red Box!

2010-09-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

Playing the 4 person (2 person) fighting game.

2010-09-13T13:22:00.001-07:00

Me: Raynor, can I get a picture?
Raynor: Now? Sure, I guess.
Me: Thanks man.
Raynor: Here you go, Jim Raynor gets lunch!

2010-09-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

Props to the guy, he grew his own beard out.

2010-09-13T13:21:00.000-07:00

The full SC2 party. I can't believe we missed Zeratul (who I would have really really really wanted to see), Queen of Blades, and the Reaper. For the record, I was going to get Kerrigan's picture, but we were asked to get a picture of our costumes and she (much like an actual ghost) slipped past me during that. Her costume actually lit up like in the games though. It was very cool. I'm in awe of these people. They are probably the best costumes I have ever seen at PAX.

2010-09-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

Getting in some Goldenaxe.

2010-09-13T13:17:00.001-07:00

More nice looking costumes. Sorry about the blur, skull kid was kind of hyper.

2010-09-13T13:17:00.000-07:00

DSsex

2010-09-13T13:16:00.000-07:00

Painting his big floor picture.

2010-09-13T13:15:00.001-07:00

One letter separates them from being twins and that one letter apparently contains all the skill (since this guy was eliminated).

2010-09-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

At first, I only saw the girl and I was wondering why so many people were taking pictures of her. Once I saw the whole thing, it was a must get. This was one of the funnier cosplays at PAX.

2010-09-13T13:14:00.000-07:00

One of the badass things Duke has been up to in his time off. He also won several academy awards, won a ton of money in blackjack, scaled mount everest, and several other things like that.

2010-09-13T13:13:00.001-07:00

High security at the Duke Nukem booth.

2010-09-13T13:13:00.000-07:00

Chris spinning a D20 on a Munchkin card during a particularly boring round.

2010-09-13T13:12:00.000-07:00

As I was taking this picture, a guy walked right in front of me. Fortunately, I was holding the camera up high enough, but there was barely enough space for him to get by in front. He should have gone behind, but I think he was pretty clueless.

2010-09-13T13:10:00.000-07:00

And that guy walked right in front of me as I was taking this shot too. What a fool. Fortunately, I was able to get the shot off since I held the camera up relatively high.

2010-09-13T13:09:00.000-07:00

The first of our two gifts from the Sega booth. This replaced the more boring free lanyard we got.

2010-09-13T13:08:00.001-07:00

DUKE NUKEM STEROIDS. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? CHRISTMAS? My uncle found them quite humorous as he was a big fan of Duke Nukem back in the day. Props to Davis and thanks again for picking this up for me.

2010-09-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

And the drug facts.

2010-09-13T13:07:00.001-07:00

A couple D&D related books that might be worth a read if I run out of other reading material.

2010-09-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

A pirate bandana that I decided to keep even after it was thrust upon me as I walked by a booth.

2010-09-13T13:06:00.002-07:00

Screen cleaning kit.

2010-09-13T13:06:00.001-07:00

Maybe after enough PAX trips, I'll have enough for a full deck of Magic cards.

2010-09-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

A bag that helps me both be environmentally friendly when I grocery shop and allows me to brag about how I may have gone to the Art Institue of Seattle (so prestigious!).

2010-09-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

Poster that looked cool, then got less cool the more I looked at it.

2010-09-13T13:04:00.001-07:00

Poster that actually looked cool and still does (minus the glare at least).

2010-09-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

The cool sweatshirt we got from Sega. It's black, just like the rest of my sweatshirts! It does have a little design on the front though and it has a zipper, which would be pretty different for me to wear.

Post PAX......Post

2010-09-10T14:29:00.000-07:00

Alliteration ftw I guess? Anyway, PAX has ended (a while ago, sorry about the delay) and it is time to regale you with stories of how great it was. I'll be posting pictures after this, so keep a lookout for those. I leave in a couple hours for the beach, so I'll try to have them all up by the time I head out. For this past week, I'll include it in my next big post which will be right before school starts (so look out for it on either the 21st or 22nd. Around that time, I'll also put up my summer album on facebook, which will have more pictures than you've seen on the blog. I do it that way because I trust facebook's minimal privacy settings more than I trust blogger's. I want anyone to read the blog, so I don't restrict it. On facebook, I can post more pictures of my family and not feel bad. Here, I try to keep pictures just to myself and friends. Enough of my rambling though, you came here to read about PAX! Or maybe you did not, in which case I don't care what you do though you are invited by all means to read this post. I decided to "do" PAX differently this year because of experiences and wisdom gained from going to PAX 3 times before. The following are the changes I made:

Don't take those huge-ass bags: They're really big and they stab people as well as you. When they get home, the bag will generally sit in my room for several months until I get sick of seeing it in February and I purge it along with most of the contents in it. Besides, I have a perfectly good Piper-Jaffray bag that can usually hold all that I need. Which brings me to my next thing.

Bring my own bag to hold stuff all three days: I always seem to forget to bring that bag on the first day which forces me to get one of those bags because I need something to hold all the stuff I get on Friday.

Don't take huge posters: Same reason as the bags, they just take up space and are inconvenient to transport though you can usually combine them into one super roll. Anyway, I have gotten many posters from PAX and I have hung up 0 of them. The only thing I have ever hung up on my wall that I got at PAX is a cool little Guild Wars picture. Since I always throw the posters out, I decided that I would avoid taking any this year. I broke that rule twice, but only because the posters were kind of cool looking and they were relatively small compared to the huge ones I got in years past.

Be selective: Of all the freebies I get at PAX, I throw away about 75%. I decided this year to take mostly just stuff I though would survive my purge later in the year. I think I did a really good job of that actually.

Keep headache medicine around me: Last year, I got one of my migraines at PAX and at the worst possible time (during Metroid Metal). From there, we had to bus back and it was not a fun 3 hours living with that migraine. I made sure I had excedrin on me at all times just in case one came on. It didn't thankfully, but it's good to be prepared.

Don't hesitate to take pictures: I didn't do very good here, but I am never really good about it. I wish I had gotten pictures of/seen more cosplayers. I'll try harder next year.

Friday:
We (Davis, Steven, and myself) met Eric (now joining "we") at Northgate. We went to the convention center and got there at about 10, right as the queue room was being emptied into the expo hall. The expo hall had grown from the year before. It's grown all four years actually. The first, it was just most of that main hall. The second year, the main hall opened up to its full amount and got filled out. Last year, it spread across the skybridge to that other area. This year, they added on last year's queue room to the expo hall. The queue room was in the concert hall from the previous year. The concert hall was in Benaroya (60,000 people for the weekend plus seeing how they expanded like that, a sure sign that PAX is getting way too big). In addition to all that, there was a small "hidden level" below the main room of the expo hall. It was pretty huge this year.

Back to us though, we first stopped by the Sega booth where they immediately recognized our Typing of the Dead cosplay and had to take a lot of pictures of us. We got some cool lanyards and then said goodbye before going off to explore the rest of the hall. There wasn't a ton of great stuff there (Blizzard wasn't even there :[ ). After seeing all that was there, we went back to the top floor near the escalators where the Omegathon stuff usually takes place. There, we met up with Chris (now joining "we"). From there, the five of us headed up to PC freeplay to try some Left 4 Dead 2 (Left 8 Dead?). The game was surprisingly hard, but we got about 2.5 hours of freeplay because it was early on Friday and everyone was busy in the expo hall, leaving PC freeplay very empty. After doing that, we decided to go get lunch because it was 3 in the afternoon. We ate at Taco Del Mar, then went back upstairs for some classic console freeplay. Chris watched Steven and Davis play Golden Axe while Eric and I played Contra on another console. We were able to beat it in that one sitting, so that was pretty cool. I had not yet beaten the original Contra and now I can say I have. I think Super C is a lot harder though, I might have to try it again.

After that, we decided to go check out Munchkin. We wound up playing that for about 4 hours while Davis played Inspectres and then another thing with Jon and company. The games of Munchkin were pretty intense and fun (at least when we weren't arguing about the sometimes vague rules). By the time we finished that, it was getting to be late. We decided to check PC freeplay, but i was about an hour wait to get in. We decided it would be best to just head home and get some sleep, so we did that.

Saturday:
For the weekend, we had the use of the garage where dad parks. It is really convenient because we don't have to worry about the buses and we can then arrive and leave whenever we want to. We got to PAX at about 10:30 because I was pretty late picking everyone up. When we got there, we met up with Eric (he had come earlier) and the five of us went and checked out the expo hall again. From there, we went to the hidden level to see what all the D&D stuff down there was about. It looked pretty cool, so we decided to sign up for some playing later in the day. There weren't a lot of spots, but Chris volunteered to head and do his own thing while we played with Jon and his brother later. The time slot was for later in the day though, so we decided to go hit up the D&D bus down the street from the main convention. We checked out the red box (kind of) while we were there and we decided to stick around while Davis attempted to win a signed one. He was successful, so that was pretty cool. It was a $20 value and it was signed by the artist, so that is a great thing to win for free.

By the time we got back, it was close to the time to go to our session, so we hung around the expo hall for a bit before doing that. Our session was not so great. The DM was really nice, but the adventure was so hard, we died half an hour into it only managing to kill half of the enemies in the first encounter. It was kind of embarrassing, but I must say, Eric did well for his first time ever playing D&D (even if he was just playing a fighter).

After that session, we went to go hang out at classic console freeplay. We tried out a four player fighting game at the recommendation of a guy working there. It turned out to be only 2 players (as Eric said "well the guy did say screw over 3 of your friends..."). After we got bored of it, I went and did the Goldeneye 64 tournament while Steven and Davis played Goldenaxe again. It had been a long while since I played Goldeneye and it showed. I lost the first round, it was embarrassing. It did distract me though from the fact that Steven and I had been screwed out of joining a spontaneous SC2 tournament (finding out about it was a good "FFFUUUUU" moment). We wound up doing some PC freeplay after that and we got some good vs mode Left 4 Dead 2 in. After that, it was getting pretty late, but we wanted to play Munchkin again, so we did that for a couple hours before leaving for the night.

Sunday:
We got to PAX closer to 10 again since I had my routine down. The last day of PAX is always kind of good and bad for me. On the one hand, I'm really tired by then and I want to get back to my regular schedule, but at the same time, I don't necessarily want PAX to go away for a year. We decided to cosplay again this last day because of the rare, but very positive feedback we received on our costumes. After doing some exploring in the expo hall, we went up and did some PC freeplay. After that, we checked out the hidden level again to see if we missed anything there before going up and giving the expo hall one last runthrough. After all that was finished, we met up with Sai and played some Munchkin until late in the day. By then, it was getting towards the end and I needed to get home to see the relatives in town, so we left.

Thoughts:
PAX was way too crowded this year, if it keeps growing, eventually it is going to be more than I want to deal with within a few years. I'll go next year though, I always like going while I can. Cosplaying is also really fun. I liked going as Typing of the Dead because the few people that got what game we were from were really excited to see it. I think we'll have to figure out something cool to do next year, we've got plenty of time for now.

Ok well I think I'll have to post the pictures on Monday. Maybe it will be Sunday night, depending on when I get back. Until later, peace out.

Pre PAX Postery

2010-09-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

Ok well I doubt anyone will really read this post because I will be making a PAX post as well as many picture posts soon. That being said, if you are reading this, then hooray! I'll say it again in later posts, but once the school year starts up, I will be posting every other week now. I might go down to once a month depending on how busy/interesting of a life I lead. For this post, I'll just mention what I've been up to since last time and then get to bed here so I can get up early for PAX tomorrow morning.

Work:
Work kind of dried up this month because after I left for those two weeks, people seemed to get along just fine without me. I did get a chauffeur job for my neighbor (taking him to drivers ed) that was easy money. I've still been doing horn lessons every week and that has been cool too because she's been getting a lot better. I'm feeling less incompetent with each new note she reaches. If she keeps going at this rate, she'll by 1st horn material (she has no competition, but she doesn't quite have the range for 1st horn parts yet) by January. I've still been working on the backyard at my aunt's house. The junk left by my Grandpa will never go away. We just took a record single dump load though last week. The whole load was 1,200 pounds (300 in metal which is free). Usually I don't put that much in the truck, but we were able to pack a lot of heavy things in this time.

Grandpa:
We've been up to our usual tricks, going to Costco a lot and eating there. Some interesting things at Costco that happened were I ran into Orion's mom and his sisters. That was kind of an awkward conversation actually. I also witnessed a crazy person yelling at one of those buttons that you push to cross the street (well that's not really fair. Maybe he was sane and the button had accosted him in some way). This last Monday, I went to the fair with him and that was about as interesting as it usually is: somewhat.

Starcraft 2 and gaming in general:
Stacraft 2 has been pretty awesome. I'm not playing as much as I thought I would right now, but I think once I settle back into the school year and find myself on campus for lengthy amounts of time, I'll start playing it more often again. In the meantime, I'm also playing some old 360 games that I hadn't played in a while. As for DnD, that has been going well. The group works together well and our characters are pretty fun to play and play with. If you really want to know what exactly has been happening, go ahead and look on the DnD site link to the right.

Teh Faire:
Davis, Lucy, and I went to a Renaissance Faire (or was it Medieval? I forget) a couple weeks ago. It was a pretty interesting way to spend a day. I don't have much else to say about it I guess. If we do go back though, Davis and I both think we should dress up. I don't know if I will go back though unless it is cooler and cheaper.

PAX Preparations:
The past couple of days, I have been preparing the PAX costumes with Davis and Steven. We're cosplaying Typing of the Dead, which will be super awesome. You'd better believe there will be pictures.

Ok well I think I was able to keep that relatively quick, so peace out until after PAX.

2010-08-16T15:26:00.001-07:00

Pictures are below. As usual, backwards ordered for your convenience. Since there are more than blogger allows on one page, don't forget to hit the older posts button when you get to the bottom if you want to see them all.

2010-08-16T15:25:00.000-07:00

Street party for a wedding I think.

2010-08-16T15:24:00.002-07:00

OBJECTION!

2010-08-16T15:24:00.001-07:00

Apparently beads do grow on trees in New Orleans.

2010-08-16T15:24:00.000-07:00

Getting bored of seeing pictures of courts?