My story

 So the ICPC regionals this year was November 16 instead of February like last year and it's cuz they are adjusting back to the schedule pre-covid. I knew it would come this early tho so I did spend some stretches in the summer while traveling grinding some segment tree problems but ultimately as the school year came I put all my free time towards recruiting and geoguessr lmao. Before Contest Either way, safe to say I wasn't proud of the amount of preparation I put in because I'm like the leader of the team now with the other 2 graduating from last year. We organized weekly practice sessions on Wednesday and sometimes on Saturday too, we would just virtual a contest as a team and get to feel out our team dynamics and splits. The week of the contest, I printed out the entire problem set on paper of the 2022 pacnw contest and we also simulated it more realistically with only one laptop and we put the livestrema on my laptop we could view a "live" scoreboard. Anyway...

So tomorrow I'm about to move into college and start my 2nd year at UCSC. It's a bit different because me and 2 other housemates are renting an off-campus house compared to last year where we lived in the dorms. It's been a long journey to get here. After like no one got an on-campus apartment or dorm last year, literally i only know like 2 groups that got spots, everyone started scrambling to look for housing off-campus during May. Long story short it took hours and days spreadsheeting, scouting on zillow and apartments.com, housing tours, lots of communication and logistics, holding deposits, going to the bank, taking the bus to capitola to submit holding deposit, security deposits, more communication, applications, paperwork, etc etc, that we secured a house. Ideally honestly I wish we would've gotten the hilltop apartments cuz a lot of my other friends are going there but there wasn't any space left idk how it works. But there are plus sides to having like our o...

  so im at the airport with my mom, we are heading to shanghai for a layover to hohhot, ill talk more about this 3-week china trip in a big blog post. But boarding starts and everything and there’s a line and our group isn’t called yet so me and my moma are just sitting there waiting and OUT OF NOWHERE i see a tall asian guy wearing a hat and a mask an he seemed like very american just by his hoodie and everything and he caught my attention so i look down and i see him wear slides with the jlin logo and carry a bag with the jlin logo and i start connecting the dots and like i look back up and this guy iS LITERALLY JEREMY LIN. THIS GUY IS LITERALLY JEREMY LIN. I tell my mom I’m like “MOM THATS JEREMY LIN” and by this time he had walked past us so my moms like looking and shes like “it might be!” and so i tell her that imma go up to him and say hi. At this point he was waiting in the priority boarding line so I walk over there and like athis guy is literally jeremy lin i cant believe...

 Hi hi it is 8:52 PM and we are EIGHT MINUTES AWAY FROM HISTORY, The Tortured Poet's Department  is coming out. I can't really say "i can't wait" because I wasn't necessarily excited or looking forward to it cuz i was prob stressed this entire week about housing and stuff but anyway i will be listening to the full album and giving me first impressions, i believe its 1 hr long around total added up. This feels like im entering a codeforces contest with the countdown LOL and just waiting. But for real ok so I'm expecting a pop album pretty much, with some sad songs sprinkled in. There were tons of random teasers on twitter that she released and I'm getting the vibe that album will be very mature and sonically cohesive. Everything ties to a theme in this album. That's my prediction. Initially I thought it would be similar to Folklore and Evermore  but those 2 are labeled alternative while TTPD  is labeled pop. So that's good ig, hopefully it's...

 Hey,  Here I am, for the second time . I'm inclined to, I have an impulse to... open up this blog and just write. There's something inside me that just makes it feel whole and sane.  It's 1:43 AM and this is the first time I've cried in a while. I'm pretty sure it's the first time I've cried since college started.  These past two days I've been watching a lot of taylor swift and live performances on youtube. Some notable ones are Style ,  ME! ,  Artist of the Decade , to name a few. I've just been going down small spirals and rabbit holes that lead me to so many destinations. I've never been through a phase like this before, I'm not sure when this phase will die down a bit. But anyway, I'm in my dorm right now and I just think about "The Best Day" by Taylor Swift. Once because my sister said it was her favorite song, and twice because Taylor said that it's her most emotional song in the vogue interview. So here I was, openi...

 It's been 1 year. May 1st, 2022, I went to fitness 19 with my dad and deadlifted, dunno what happened, my dad coached me, but to put things into perspective, that was the ignition to a dark wave in my life. This will be a reflective blog post. From a lens of someone who just ran a 10k at PPIE yesterday smiling, from a lens of someone who goes to the park for 3-5 hours on Saturdays. I lie down underneath the trees at orloff park and reflect sometimes too, but here I will lay out all my emotions formally. The deadlifting wasn't the reason, my back ended up getting infected with a rare disease for someone of my age, called "discitis." Basically the disc in my back was inflammed for whatever reason, from bacteria getting there. This could low immune system or the bacteria seeping in somehow through eczema or other things. It is TRULY a mystery that I will never know. My back really hurt like the day after I deadlifted, but there is no way there is a connection between my...

  It's so hard. I'm at the most sensitive time, as it just happened this morning. But I don't know why, I'll do it right now. It's so hard to do this, and I'm crying as I write every word.  We got Prince Marshmellow on December of 2012, when I was in second grade. He was so cute as a baby. For the first two years we kept him in a fairly-sized cage, with a litter box, stuff to bite on, toys, etc. We would play with him by taking him outside into the backyard where he would just hop around. I was very little back then. After we moved to a new house in sometime 2014 or 2015, he became a garden rabbit. He would play and eat in our backyard, and then we'd open the door to the garage at night for him to sleep at. He would always sleep near a wall besides the red car in the garage. Our backyard is so big, and he's just so happy there. From 2015 and on, it was just like that. Him being happy. There was a time in between where some flies layed eggs on his neck, a...

  Injuries basically ruin the NBA honestly. Honestly, lots championships can be blamed from injuries on other teams. 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015 all have an asterisk to them honestly. Don't get me wrong, those championships are worthy and deserved, it's just that in my opinion, there is an asterisk. Injuries are part of life, and they are part of the NBA.  SO you thought this would be a post about NBA...no It's about my personal injuries. I never had any major injuries where I broke a bone or had to go in a cast. Those honestly suck. I don't know why that's never happened, I've been kind of close to it before. SO yesterday, I was at the park. We were playing some games when this tall guy pulled up. I knew him from my English class(Dylan Kwong) and if he played basketball regularly, he would dominate. But because he didn't, I coudl still guard/contain him pretty well. It was also very easy to back him down as he didn't know how to play defense that well....

 Here is a pretty scuffed post since its been like 7+ days since a post. So like i hate history. i have a passion of not taking ap [history] classes whether its AP world or APUSH. History is boring, you forget everything you learn, it's boring, and DBQs are on the highest tier of things that i hate. so i was in my regular USH class like last week and there was a sub. We were supposed to watch a documentary about the atomic bomb and we did.  idk what but documentaries always hit different. that documentary i watched is prob like 99% exaggerated, well not exaggerated, but like just, the documentary makes everything so significant. they really evoke the "pathos" and emotional side through all those stories and stuff. thats just how documentaries work and tahts the common trend of how i respond to them. so yea, after i watched the atomic bomb on hiroshima documentary, i was like "dang bruh i always cheered on the US for sending this bruh." i was genuinely kind of sh...

  Remember back when I posted "brain dumps?" Think of this as a rebrand of that lol. https://cavs4tw.blogspot.com/2021/10/simulation-by-vr-album-review.html I'm SO SORRY TO REWRITE!!! IM SO SORRY!!!! After listening to simulation for another like two weeks, I have a deeper appreciation for rewrite. The new top 5 ranking should be: This Could Be Us Exile Back in Time Get Away Rewrite Yes, Back In Time moved up two spots, chroma moved down two spots. Get Away moved down one spot. The second drop in Back in Time is just so well-designed and it's just so creative. The ripples and echo-chops is truly brilliant. I cannot stress this enough. The vocal chop transition from drop -> verse in Rewrite is SO GOOD, the melody is SO CATCHY and just so good, I don't know how one can craft a melody like that. It's simplistic, yes. But the melody is...wow Don't worry is an interesting song. I love the hook, but the dubstep is too much for me to handle. It's an absolu...

  Very random thoughts I've always wanted to make a chrome browser extension, specifically for tracking screentime. I know of existing ones but they don't fit my personal preferences in a screen time tracker. Like I want to track which sites I went on the most which would be cool, and it shouldn't be hard?? Man theres so much stuff to like coding outside of usaco stuff maybe a discord bot, I've seen rayz do it before and he can teach me. Plus its in python which is cool. I'm thinking greed control bot, shouldn't be too hard obviously, the STEP will help make these ideas more realistic, but for now im dreaming Lyric(s) of the Post: YOI YOI YOI From ->  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvKY_DnM1PA&t=605s

I made my first Instagram in 7th grade, mainly to follow basketball players and see what they post on social media. Once I found out that many of my peers also had an Instagram account, I began Instagram. My first post was related to cubing. I got like 10 likes.  But soon my friend Josh made an Instagram, and we began racing to see who would get the most followers. We would go on the "find people" page and follow everyone, hoping to get a follow back. I looked at other people's instagram accounts. Another one of my friends had 500 followers, which made me jealous. I soon began determining popularity based on follower counts. "this person has more followers than another person? I didn't expect that."  I was hungry for more followers. I was always thinking about what others saw me as. I was worried people would judge me.  Fast forward a year or something and I got 200 followers while my friend had 400. I gave up on my quest to get as many followers as I could ...

Teachers often time use words like "rainbow", "cupcake", and "dragonfly" to demonstrate compound words. What they don't say is that dragonfly is a triple compound word-drag,on,fly Why are glue sticks purple? What color is a mirror? capital i and lowercase l look the same Ill   ...maybe not in this font underlining and bolding an underscore is exactly the same as just underlining the underscore I sometimes write a w like VV or \/\/ I found out a cooler way to write \/\/ is to write \\//\\// cuz it looks like your only looking at a segment of the w.   \\\\\  /////\\\\   ////   \\\\\//////\\\\\/////    \\\\////   \\\\////     \\\///     \\\/// That w looks beautiful How's life? For some reason I just have a feeling that Warriors won't win the championship this year. IDK why, but I just do. And when I have a feeling, IT'S USUALLY CORERCT. I had a feeling that Cavs would come back against the...