My inner perfectionist is crying that I have to post this, in
particular over my pathetic
snowclone
title, but my inner pragmatist knows that, judging by my old blogging
patterns, it’s now or never.
18.06: 56%, haven’t touched it in a while, but I think I can do lots
more on the plane.
As a non-contestant, I confess I feel totally uninvested in the
results and find the Closing Ceremony boring. All contestants go up,
country by country, and have their awards read off. No effort is made to
make any sort of buildup to a climax. But maybe this is for the best; we
don’t want anybody feeling shafted or discouraged from continuing to do
math due to a mere elementary-/middle-school competition. Meanwhile,
though, I’m browsing reddit on my phone.
After this ceremony, the entire Taiwan delegation spends some time
walking around outside while the guides make confused phone calls trying
to decide where we eat lunch. My parents offer me some potato chips they
bought somewhere, which are (as the label is really eager to point out)
baked, not fried. Some time passes this way; eventually, the guides
figure it out and we go through amazingly long queues to eat at the
cafeteria, as usual. Then we are sent to a massive shopping mall for the
afternoon, a place so large that its exits have number labels that go up
into the double digits so that people don’t get lost.
I take trippy failed panorama photos from the bus windows.
My mom says I blog too much about myself. I am completely guilty of
that and this post is mostly not an exception. Sorry.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like to write posts about others and for
others. But I know more about myself so obviously there’s
more
I can write about myself. It’s kind of a habit, and it’s been a very
personally helpful habit. I discover lots of things when I write
introspectively. But I’m a very weird person and a lot of the insightful
things I discover when doing this are things I doubt I can generalize to
other people. I tried getting a lot of my friends to join HabitRPG when
I discovered it, but it was nowhere as effective on them as it was on
me.
What else could I blog about? What else do people blog about?
No, I didn’t forget. Not for one minute. I was doing homework. I am
very happy because that means I was actually carrying out my priorities
as I envisioned them. I’ve probably edited this post too many times,
though. Meh. But it’s the first weekend after finishing summer homework,
so here we go again!
Fun fact: This is by far my favorite post title in the entire series.
Possibly in the entire history of this blog.
In the morning of the last day of official IOI activities, there were
a bunch of cultural activities, e.g. writing Chinese characters
calligraphically, doing tricks with the diabolo, or picking up beans
with chopsticks, and noncultural activities, e.g. getting somebody to
pour water into a cup on your head while he or she was blindfolded. Due
to the last activity I got wet, but my shirt dried really quickly. And
alas, even though I had taken calligraphy summer classes a long time
ago, my calligraphy was awful — robotic, lifeless strokes without the
right aesthetic proportions to make up for it. Blargh.
Anyway, lunch followed, and then it was time for the closing
ceremony, in the same building as the other ceremonies and contests. Our
team caught the ending song of in a Chinese musical being rehearsed as
we walked into the auditorium. While we waited for everybody, we milled
about waving flags that our various teachers had brought, including not
only Taiwan’s flag but also flags of my school, thoughtfully brought by
teachers who had volunteered. A little later our leader told us that all
the leaders had discussed the matter during a meeting and decided that
we shouldn’t bring any flags to the stage while receiving our medals, so
we were going to have to make do with being patriotic and
school-respecting off stage.
There were a few performances, including two aboriginal music
performances and the musical we had seen rehearsed ealier, which was a
fun rock musical rendition of some Chinese tale that seemed to have been
sharply abridged, giving it the plot depth of a Wikipedia stub-article
synopsis — a conflict, boy-meets-girl-and-falls-in-love, and a lamenting
Aesop song conclusion with thrillingly vague general applicability. But
the singing and counterpointing and atmosphere were good. I guess it was
proportional to the relative importance of the performance to the
closing ceremony. The program interleaved them with the long-awaited
medal presentations: one round of bronze medalists, one round of silver,
one round of gold.
Dum-dum-dum-dum, medals! The home team advantage was really obvious
here; the cheering and the medal-presenter handshakes were both
significantly more forceful for Taiwan’s medalists.
I think our leader made this. Thanks.
Naturally, after the normal medals had been exhausted, the three full
scorers received bags with prizes that may forever remain unknown to my
sorry self, as well as a standing ovation from everybody in the
auditorium. The orchestra had been going through ABBA songs during the
ceremony, and very considerately played “The Winner Takes It All” for
this part. It was impossible not to mentally fill in the lyrics.
The winner takes it all The loser has to fall It’s simple and
it’s plain Why should I complaiiiiiiiin?
Speeches followed. Most were just average forgettable speeches, but
Forster gave another speech that was somehow even better than the one he
gave at the opening ceremony, with nonstop golden quotables such as:
So winter vacation started and parents had planned a trip to southern
Taiwan, to get closer to nature and walk around and stuff.
Also, the MIT Mystery Hunt, the absolute granddaddy of all the other
puzzlehunts in terms of age, structure, and size, happened this weekend.
Originally, I didn’t have a team and just planned to look at the puzzles
after they got archived and try solving some puzzles read the
solutions while constantly thinking, “How could anybody ever solve
that?” Because of that, I wasn’t planning to even bring my laptop at
first; then I could force myself to study some long-overdue ring theory
during the nights. I was taken aback by a private message on Saturday
morning from somebody with many different names inviting me to
remote-solve for Random Thymes.
Note: I wrote this in 2012. Maybe it’s kind of
amusing?
For some reason, everybody around here seems to think that adding
English characters, no matter how broken or meaningless, confers an
added sense of quality or superiority. I don’t really understand the
mindset here but it’s the only explanation I can come up with. It’s
certainly not to make the lives of our English-speaking population any
easier.
We were sharing songs in Chinese class with literary techniques, and
there were a bunch of songs, including mine, by this pretty famous
singer with the stage name
Fish Leong. Okay,
it’s kind of cute and it’s a translated homophonic Cantonese pun, so it
makes some sense, although I wonder what people would think the name
meant if mentioned without any context. There was this more obscure guy
a couple seasons back in the reality TV singing competition (see, no
original shows around here) whose name was Quack. smacks head
It’s also kind of cute if you only know that the word is the sound a
duck makes, which probably holds for most of the audience. But still, it
takes just five seconds to
put it into Wikipedia.
Oops?