GK Mongolian BBQ - one of the places that we went to for a MCHS Reunion Lunch, class of 2008.
Stuff that you might like: Ability to choose your meat, sauce, amount of noodles, and various toppings and have it made in the oven (see above) - and it's actually pretty good to be worth going a second time. Costs 7.51 (with tax).
Merry Christmas, everyone! *or Happy Holidays, if you're celebrating something different.
Even though it's Christmas today, my family got together yesterday, so I still have time to get a quick vid up for a game released two days ago, Star Lost.
In under eight minutes.
Even though it might be helpful to upgrade your ship with all that stuff, it isn't actually required to win.
Today marks the beginning of the Winter (at least in the US, according to Wikipedia) - hope you all have a good winter break!
Also, due to not enough people in the area seeing the previous Fall Picture album, I've decided to do an extended version by pushing it towards spring (it still retains the Fall labeling however)
Image: Taken during FTC (See the image on Facebook for a full caption of the image)
Fall 2011 in Pictures: Started off great at the beginning, but tapered off at the end... just like the others. No sketches were completed due to lack of time / proficiency in that skill, and is now accepting user submissions of missing pictures in question. Overall, no more effort may be placed in it, due to the fact that very few people from the intended audience actually saw this. All people that can be identified were tagged on FB on a per-picture basis in the caption area, leaving them free to tag themselves or others.
There were five other people (Claudio, Wei Wei, Aarafi, Yoon, Nhi) that would've been on the 'People of Note' but I didn't have a picture of them available.
Errata:
Even though it's finals week and people are studying, I think it's more appropriate to see this as a first world problem - being unable to stick the AC adapter in the desk outlet. (No, it's not that I could plug it into one of the wall outlets, as it's a bit too far away to reach and poses a trip hazard. The problem was later resolved somehow.)
Thankfully, I do have a netbook and not a large power-consuming notebook, so it should last me six hours off a single charge. Or not...
It's the day before finals - I'm helping both Tim and Cecilia with review material from COMP 51, and managed to solve a few of their problems they were having. In the end: exhausting, but at least they reported the test wasn't that hard.
Banquet is over, what now? Denny's, of course. If there's ten of us and one of these (dessert books) then this is how we do it.
Production Tree for Space Factory.
Two attempts were made at the game, one to explore all of the parts, and another to find an optimal strategy. Thanks to a bug in the game that raises the cost of laser swords and ray guns exponentially when they are in demand, the factory value peaked at 1.3 million CR by 50 weeks.
NOTE: You are not expected to see this tree as is, a larger version is listed here.
Continue on from there.
The banquet differed slightly from the other years in that it was situated in the Regent's room. The differences didn't stop there however with the introduction of family competition minigames.
(UOP New Membership Installation Banquet)
For some reason I loled at how Kim describes Karok in Vindictus.
Speaking of that, I haven't been on the game for a while - it's due to being unable to find other friends playing it as well as being unable to beat the White Tyrant solo.
I heard from a friend that CKI had their own gaming clan - should find more about it. Or I could resort to playing with lots of 'temporary' allies to get through the storyline...
Usually Black Friday specials occur early in the morning, or at midnight. Today I saw what it was like to be in one of those rushes.
Line for Best Buy in Stockton - at 12:30am when waiting, was approximately 450ft long and took 1hr 15m to go through. (If you're a local, stretches to where the Macy's building starts). Bought stuff at 40% off but I liked the purchase of Mass Effect 2 ($5*) the most.
Sketch Note: I knew from a friend that tents were set up Wednesday night for the tickets and saw a few travel chairs near the mall entrance, with a guitar nearby - It looked like Ry Val from a distance, but whether or not this is actually true it will show up as a sketch for Nov 23's entry. Note since my drawing skills are less than decent, and my cousin Jason Chan (who is a well known artist who creates drawings for various games, including for Magic: The Gathering) estimates at least 50 hours for a decent picture, sketches may show up much later than when they were scheduled to appear.
Thanksgiving returns with a few differences:
This is the web program/code that results when someone decides to discontinue a "top 50" leaderboard. (UPDATE: He has returned and is now continuing top 50 leaderboards. Hopefully.)
Title: Zuma Blitz Score Parser
Description: Allows you to see a player's Zuma Blitz stats (including high score) that would normally be found under the details section of the leaderboard* and parses them into a webpage. Having a user id is enough - doesn't require that you be friends with them*. Works as of Nov 15 2011.
You will need to supply your own auth code (its different for each user) and need to be logged in to FB and must have installed Zuma Blitz to use this.
Purpose: I generally use this code to determine people's previous scores before accepting them as a friend, but can also be used to recreate a weekly high score board. Maybe even a (opt-in) world leaderboard. Hmmm...
Example: Major Mouthful (Nov 29-Dec 6) - ZumaBlitzTips (all participating players) - formatted for readability
Soon after - a farmer's market - most items were a dollar per pound, etc. Haven't been in this part of town for a while, since there was no real reason to head down here.
Picked up one tip along the way: That you can soak a bottle of honey in a tub of warm water to decrystallize it instead of discarding the bottle of remaining honey.
I had not enough time this weekend to do a lot of things. Sadly, this includes a good portion of my homework assignments, so that means that I have to sit back from a DCM for next week.
I was only here because one of my friends invited me to this event - I wouldn't have known about this event otherwise. By going, this would be something different from the pictures I saw of this event. In the end, it's not what I anticipated. Really.
UPDATE: The receive mojo from multiple tabs was patched on January 26, 2012, so that you only get credit for one of these tabs, but this trick still might work for some people.
Over 20 million mojo has been collected in fortune cookies cumulative, thanks to a trick that allows you to greatly increase the value of these cookies. On the other hand, cookies for others are few and far between. I am the 1 percent.
BUT I'm willing to give this trick to the other 99%. (This has been discussed on the main tips page but I think this deserves a separate page.) See the above image for examples for each step.
NOTE: The number of tabs you can open at one time (aka your fortune cookie multiplier) is dependent on your system specs. A laptop can typically handle five tabs while a 2010+ computer can safely handle up to 18 tabs worth of mojo (before reaching the memory limit and crashing the browser altogether). Experiment to find the most number of tabs you can open at one time while following all of the above steps.
Requirements: You have at least one fortune cookie to open. (You can only receive them from friends, and there's a small chance after every game you will be given one and the ability to share to others.)
How much mojo will you expect?
For each fortune cookie, there's a chance to get this amount mojo:
NOTE: Mojo gained assumes you are at lvl 80. The amount earned may be a lot less if you are below that level. The left side is the lower end of your mojo gain per cookie (lvl 1), it's strongly recommended you don't open them. Pct Chance Mojo Gain (lvl 1,80) Freshness (est) - Mojo 13.75 2 - 105 0-4 hrs 5 - 552 20.25 4 - 285 4-12 hrs 2 - 289 38.38 15 - 545 12+ hrs 0 23.62 45 - 880 4 75 - 5,500 What mojo fortune cookies will be worth at freshness level at level: (20 cookie average - no freshness) | | 2 4 15 45 75 | 4 2 | 1-3 409 (3% of lvl 80 value) 5 20 40 95 210` | 34 19 | 4-20 1,019 (7%) 10 35 115 235 515 | 99 53 | 21-24 2,574 (10%) 15 55 150 260 665 | 118 65 | 25-27 3,176 (22%) 25 80 165 340 720 | 153 79 | 28-41 3,841 (27%) 40 90 250 455 850 | 224 116 | 42-50 5,223 (37%) 50 135 295 500 1130 | 248 127 | 51-57 6,215 (44%) 55 150 305 550 1370 | 259 141 | 58-63 6,794 (48%) 65 195 385 605 1410 | 311 168 | 64-70 7,910 (56%) 80 200 405 800 1550 | 332 181 | 71-75 9,158 (64%) 90 245 455 835 1800 | 421 212 | 76-77 10,117 (71%) 105 285 545 880 5500 | 552 229 | 78-80 14,183 (100%) (value of cookies are determined upon opening the game)
where mojo gain is the amount of the mojo you will get from one fortune cookie, and freshness is how long it took you to open it from when the friend sent their cookie to you.
You should earn around 12.2k mojo per 20 cookies (no freshness bonus) to 23k mojo (full freshness) for one tab. Multiply by 18, you get a decent 400k mojo towards your stockpile, more than what you might expect from a 3x mojo potion. Cookies are scarse these days (at the time of writing), and just one cookie can be enough for a full-power game, so start sharing whatever cookies you find!
Just because you receive one fortune cookie to share doesn't mean you can't share only one. If you happen to open the request dialog on another tab, the "send request" button can be clicked on multiple times, sending multiple cookies to people (or person) at once. Screenshots on this soon. (Note: This may not work since was patched on Nov 22nd)
Friend receives one cookie to share. Using the send method above, selects friends to send it to, but clicks on the send request button 100 times. The request to you (and others) gets sent as 100 cookies. You then use the receive method to convert these fresh cookies into 1800 of them (with 18 tabs) = ~2 million mojo received.
Penny Wars: A fun competition to help raise money. In the realm of Circle K, Penny Wars is serious business, meaning that in order to win, you have to plan beforehand. Or not.
Round 1: Fairly straightforward - see the image to the left.
Round 3: (either I missed a round or they skipped it) - Groups get more aggressive. Golden gate is the only one in the black with the help of a 20 dollar bill. Divisions gang up and flood Golden Gate's jar.
Round 4: All divisions are in the red, with Desert Oasis winning (at -285) and Golden Gate at -21,410 points. SFSU enters rage mode and summons lots and lots of filled penny coin wrappers (they had at least 80 total last time I saw) - and drops them into every other team's jar to even out the playing field (ensuring that Desert Oasis doesn't win the second time.)
Results: $740.32 was raised for Not For Sale. Capital Division (our division) wins. Although the pennies in our division would cut the score close compared to other teams, We had a dollar-filled penny wrapper to ensure the victory.
In the middle of FTC, Winter came a lot earlier than expected. What originally was rain turned out into snow (first hours of snow melted as soon as it touched the ground) - ends up with groups singing Christmas songs, making angels, or just playing with it. Including sculpture making.
I've always seen people inside the snack bars serving food to people, whether it's during a sports game or in the middle of a play (Hazelton ACT Team's Cinders Play comes to mind). I see what it's like to be in one - busy making (and serving) foods and the occasional shortage of supplies.
Nice house. Even though I came a bit late that I couldn't tour any groups, there were some interesting finds.
(UOP Safe Trick or Treat)
Service Project involves installing water mains (possibly for irrigation purposes) in Auburn Ravine Park. This means digging a mile long trench along the pathway, putting the pipe in, and burying it.
Alternative Title: The Facebook picture version has 'Everyday I'm Shovelin' but not here since I've used that respective meme twice in this imageset.
Another edition of the 'As a' series, with the other one being a assistant mentor a while back. This one involves helping a friend on a project due later today (Please ignore my screen to the left). Typically the regular tutors for SOECS aren't available on Friday, else they occur during 7pm-11pm.
I wonder if a SI position is open for me at UOP - it could give me the necessary cashflow to attend events.
More specifically, a folding bike. This, I definitely need. With the problem of theft (UC Berkeley has it worse by people stripping wheels off bikes while they're still chained), having a mobile bike really helps.
Fiona dancing to Gee by Girls' Generation. It was supposed to be 'do something awkward if gavel is stolen' (by person on right), but the video on Facebook has this cut out. Positive reviews and likes ensued.
Going south to help build a house in a Habitat for Humanity project, we end up doing only one section due to lack of safety measures (the scaffolding is all but flimsy on our side and couldn't support more than two people, and the roof area is more dangerous than you might expect.)
Also: Pacific Preview Day.
Today... missing L in the Buck Memorial Hall label, replaced with a binder paper letter L (and blew off the next morning). Most people at UOP might not have noticed this, but once you see it...
Screen within a screen within another screen... Actually, I have no clue what to name it. Just a standard screenshot dump to fill a pic of the day. Reminds me of times when I was doing manual square terrain editing in Starcraft Maps. (They have never been released but I intend to do so at a later date here.)
The livestream in the pic in question can be viewed here and airs nightly.
The first minigame between the two sides of UOP CKI (Royals and Majestics) involves a black curtain... the team who can guess who's behind the curtain the most wins the day.
Relay Race: Julie blindfolded (and veering off course a bit) in the last leg of the race. Don't ask me what Seo's doing other than being a judge.
Location: Crazy Kompetition for Infants, Memorial Glade, UC Berkeley (yes, during the mumps outbreak)
Song Poncho Minigame: Split into four groups - plays the same as poncho (where I make a brief appearance in that vid), with the exception being that you have to sing out the lyrics for a song containing a pre-determined word. That word was 'love'. Good luck. (It helps if you have smartphones handy though you aren't supposed to use them)
Results of the game went through around 60+ songs before a team won.
Bruce Mercado (LTG of D27 Key Club and from MCHS) makes a guest appearance in this meeting.
Same place (Dixon Corn Maze), same date, except one year forward. Last year's pic on the maze can be found here.
Surprisingly enough, there's more people in the corn maze bent on scaring people than before. We happened to be surrounded from both ends. (I didn't know who was in the image until after I took it, and a lot of people liked the resulting image in our CKI group, and was quickly spread.)
A few days later I found my Dixon Corn maze map a year back and noticed that huge sections of the maze were identical to that of last year's.
Fun Fact: The image title also makes a small reference to Space Pirates and Zombies (very decent RTS in space definitely worth the $15) which I've played for the past few weeks. Someone called the person in the background a zombie, hence the title.
Three things come to mind about this meeting: UC Davis, Zelda, and M. Cabe.*
Also known as 'The Legend of Circle K', the name on the T-Shirt, this is their first meeting.
Note: In relation to this semester's theme of pictures, this overview image might not be as badass, but the intro skit fits the theme nicely.
Rope-based jungle gym in Hidden Valley Park in San Ramon, CA. I've not seen a jungle gym of this type before.
Note that I was intending to go to a community service project in Sacramento today, but was redirected here instead due to a family birthday party.
Event: The Record’s Literacy and Book Fair - Family Day at the Park
Well, this IS technically a book fair for kids, so that means that the books shown here are free (limit 1 per child), making the post title slightly inaccurate. Despite the huge number of books available to give away (more like 5,000) they disappear fairly quickly if you're faced with a never-ending line.
More specifically, we create dinos using a wooden model kit.
(Theta Tau Rush Social/Game Night)
Personally I don't like the news ticker on Facebook, so I made a small script to remove it*. Add the following filter on AdBlock Plus:
facebook.com##div.tickerActivityStories
I've also heard from friends that it's possible to revert to the old newsfeed by switching the language to English (UK) but it's a temporary solution - it's only a matter of time before the ticker appears in that language as well.
By 'second playthrough' means that I've covered a cleanup job in this area already a while back, and doing it a second time. However this is part of California Coastal Cleanup, not UOP.
Remembered: Mrs. Langone talking about these cleanups 4+ years ago but decided not to go at that time. Now I have the chance.
The definition of this being that Davis*, Sac State and UOP CKI were at the same restaurant (Denny's).
Highlight: Earlier I won a High School Musical book as a raffle prize but didn't want it, so... more raffle tickets were drawn. It managed to get around to Mo-Kang, who rejected, then Ilani, and May before it went over to Andrew.
NOTE: Even though it's possible to tag anyone on FB, you can technically do so only on one of your pictures. It apparently isn't giving me permissions to do that.
A quote was made about what might happen in the long run exactly one year ago. Well now... I'm already here.
In summary, The prediction occurred in that all of the statements in last year's quote later became true one way or another.
The game Dead Metal, essentially Bubble Tanks in space (and without the metal music). Combined with the fact that the AI is smarter in that they will lead their shots and will hit you more often, it puts more strategy in the game than you might expect than just continuously moving around. Notable things include:
Note on the image title: I may not have the image title on the top left if it looks better without it. Post title: There are two games called Scrap Metal and Scrap Metal Heroes (two unrelated games). Then there's Dead Metal (this game) and there's this post title.
Playthrough @ Level 67 with Tempus Fugit + Multiplier + Speedball. 6.16 million in 1:56.
6 million and counting, and still haven't hit timelord yet.
And this marks the first youtube video I've uploaded. (The rest are in photobucket btw). There's probably going to be a few errors my first few uploads or so, but at least I don't have to worry about a bandwidth limit. Additionally I can increase the quality of videos put up here for the same reason.
Note: For those interested, Super Speed was used. Why? Normally I feel they don't make much of a difference in a game, but if balls are moving quickly and you're firing through a two-ball gap with little margin of error, then a speed powerup will help you to lead your shots easier. There were many games where the double gap was messed up because either the balls fired moved too slow and they miss their intended target or they stuck to one of the gap edges.
Two ball gaps are much smaller and riskier than normal three ball gaps, but they yield 20% more points (~155k compared to ~132k per double gap at 9x)
UPDATED: September 2 - more map data
Went through a few runs of the Arkandian Revenant Mystery Dungeon during the past few days, where even non-rare resources are hard to find, and did a map dump of the dungeon. (And there might be at least one map missing here). Link for larger version of this image
Conclusion: There are a few ingredients, the most important being Holy Water, that is not obtainable in any room of this repeatable dungeon.*
NOTE: You may have noticed there's a large gap between this image and the last one in the Fall 2011 image set - I will put them up as I finish them.
The last day of DSSS (it's officially over) involves visiting UCSD in order to attend the Paradise DCM. I'm the only person representing UOP since the rest of my crew left hours ago.
After having lunch and goodbyes, we proceed back home. This concludes the five day summary of DSSS. Running totals: 677 images taken, 52 new people met (and maybe more).
This is the real service project of this event. This involves - you guessed it - clearing off overgrown plants in order to clear the trail for people to walk through it.
This is the Mission Valley Preserve in San Diego, if you were wondering.
More cards. Bookmarks. Posters. Back to school cards. The card to HPU (Hawaii Pacific University). Ok, it's more on drawing stuff for kids.
For some reason I believe that squirrel drawing is nice and would fit in with this year's Sac State theme nicely somehow.
The MRP Division of Circle K was assigned to produce a video for promotional purposes. Both Party Rock Anthem and The Lazy Song are used (with Right Round as the credits).
The video itself was released a bit over a month later on September 21. (NOTE: If for any reason the video doesn't play, I have a alternate download link available.)
The first day's events at DSSS (District Summer Service Social) focuses on setting up, doing some service projects (this includes the creation of bookmarks and posters). After some workshops, the main event is the mall scavenger hunt where (with a group of seven people).
During the twenty period of finding all of the stores and a picture next to each one, we managed to get into first.
Status Message: Victory at the DSSS Scavenger Hunt. Good job, guys. (that includes you, Andrew Tom, Christine Bonuel, Stefanie Chow, Mike, Shane, Ruth, Theo, and Shannon.)
You're representing an entire district, there's a lot of people going, and only several drivers. What to do now? Make a plan and form a caravan.
NOTE: I'm starting to experiment with the HDR Toning Feature.
The title is exactly what this post is about - taken in the American River. I was misled when they said something about a 'beach', and I looked on Google Maps, and there was no apparent beach nearby...
Fiona came up with this particular title, followed by some Oregon Trail jokes, since it involved most of us (not including me) crossing through the river by foot. At this time the river's a bit fast, so if you're not prepared...
Fun Fact: I was faced with a similar situation with crossing a creek during a science camp trip ten years ago - I fell headfirst into the water but got an award later on since I was going through it like 'a pioneer'.
Basically this is Garrett's cat, where he's fairly nice to guests. I normally have trouble when taking pictures of these subjects up close, but this one...
