Day Five: A Spambot, a Library, and a Last-Minute Pool Party

6/18/14, 9:33 AM PDT

Has anyone noticed some weird, sorta thought-invoking graffiti around Mira Mesa? I've seen this sort of graffiti in three different places in Mira Mesa, all written in a similar style. I took pictures to show you guys what I'm talking about.

Found near 7-Eleven on Camino Ruiz and Capricorn Way.

Found on the corner of Capricorn Way and Sagittarius Road.

Found in Mesa Viking Park.

That last bit of graffiti is the only one that seems different from the other two because it doesn't have the letters "MMFE" on it (or at least, I didn't see it), but I"m still thinking that it's written by the same person, or at least in the same style. I'm basing this guess on the fact that the S's and the D's on the slide graffiti look pretty similar to the ones on the other two, but I could be wrong.

I don't know, I might be looking too much into this. I mean if it's some sort of sign that a revolution is coming, I'm not sure if that revolution will be a very good one considering that they spelled "successful" wrong. I'm just curious to find out what "MMFE" stands for and if there's other spots in Mira Mesa that have graffiti similar to this. Comment below if you've seen more, I want to see if there's more to this thing.


Since last night, a spambot has been messaging me. Here is a log of our conversations.

I figured out he was a bot pretty quickly.

It wouldn't stop messaging me, so I decided to have a little bit of fun and tried to see how weird I can make the conversation look.

Yeah, it got boring pretty quickly.

You gotta admire the bot's persistence though. It wouldn't stop messaging me through the night. I had to put my phone on Do Not Disturb because the vibration from the notifications would wake me up in the middle of the night.

Note the timestamps.

First thing I did when I woke up today? Yeah, I messed with the bot.

I regret not catching that typo before I sent the message.

At one point, I thought the guy that owns the actual Facebook account replied, asking me why I called him a bot or why I just proclaimed my love for him. I was about ready to explain everything I send him up until that point.

Unrequited, once again. Sigh.

...But then it turns out it was just an alternate response path for when we reply with the word "bot."

Tricky trick programmers.

Jordan tried to jump on the bot bandwagon too. But he messed up.

What a failure, right?

Same day, 7:58 PM PDT

Walked to the library today, where I coincidentally and unexpectedly ran into the awful, awful Samantha. Purely by chance, I promise. We talked for a bit, mostly about my blog's summer bucket list and anniversary story (I know, I shamelessly promote myself, whatever), the possibility of her getting a summer job, and the fact that I looked like quote "one of those old Asian ladies" because I used an umbrella to shade myself from the sun while I walked to the library. Psh, we all know that I am infinitely more attractive than wrinkly Asian ladies. She's just jealous that I had my own personal shade generator because whenever she steps outside, she has to pretend that anything the sun's light touches is hot lava since if her skin gets hit by any of the sun's rays, she instantly gets burnt. And I mean burnt, like charred black.

She also brought her cousin from the Philippines over. Apparently, when I left, Samantha's cousin told her that I was really scary. To comfort her (or just to spite me, I can't tell which), she told her cousin that I was gay and that even gay people can have really deep voices.

So thanks, Samantha.

Afterwards, I napped until 7 PM. Or at least, I would have, if Angela and Christina hadn't rudely called me at 5 PM, demanding that I open the gate to my community pool because they were waiting outside the pool even though they gave me literally NO HEADS UP that they wanted to swim today. So I dragged my groggy, cranky self out of bed, went to the pool, opened the gate, and suddenly they're telling me to go swim even though I brought no swimming clothes. So I get driven back to my house (courtesy of Angela's brother, Alex), get the stuff I need to swim (and my GoPro), drive back to the pool, jump in the water, and what do these two female dogs tell me when I tell them to jump in?

"Oh, we weren't planning on swimming. We didn't even bring spare clothes."

Oh hell no. You do not wake me up from my afternoon nap to invite me to a last-minute pool party that you yourself won't even participate in. For a good chunk of the two hours we were there, it was just me, Nick, and Alex wading in the shallow end of the pool, me playing with my GoPro and Nick and Alex doing... whatever the hell this is.

I'm... I'm not sure what's happening here.

Anyway, I splashed Christina and Angela with a ton of water as punishment. And eventually Christina gave in and swam anyway. Look at this awesome shot of her I got.

Slowwww motion.

Later, we grabbed Boba, so I guess losing my naptime was worth it for a free lychee smoothie.





RFotD: A framerate of 24 FPS is the bare minimum required to give the illusion of motion in humans. That's why 24 FPS is the film industry's standard framerate.

SGAT: Went outside for the majority of the day. Imagine that.

Day Four: Parkour Flow and Mario Kart

6/17/14, 10:30 AM PDT

Woke up at 7:10 to drop my sister off at school because I'm a wonderful, caring brother that values my sister's education.

Just kidding, my parents had to practically drag me out of bed because I really wanted to sleep in today.

But I guess it's a pretty good thing that I have to drop my sister off at school every day for the rest of the month. Waking up before 10 AM means that I actually get a chance to run and/or do parkour in the morning, which I did.

A big thing I've always wanted to try with parkour was flow outside of a gym. Stuff like this video. See how they do everything without slowing down? Yeah, that's flow. Up until today, all of the parkour stuff I've done outside of a gym were single tricks that I practiced in a drill-like fashion. Even though that sort of repetitive, single-task oriented exercise helps me learn the movements, it's... well, it's pretty boring.

Yeah, this looks fun now, but it won't be after the first 30 minutes.

So today, I decided to change that and practice some real flow. Living in suburbia, I don't really have many obstacles to utilize, but the park and the front of Ericson Elementary had some pretty okay stuff. So I went crazy (or, as crazy as intermediate parkour skills would let me).

And you know what? I actually had a LOT of fun. Even though I was doing really simple stuff (pretty much just vaults and precisions), the fact that I could connect those moves smoothly just made the entire workout so much more awesome. I mean not to brag, but I was pretty amazed at myself for doing some of the things I did there.

It's a really strange feeling to describe, but at some point during the exercise, it almost felt like my body was running on autopilot. Usually when I do parkour I have to meticulously plan out every movement that I'll make, but when I practiced flow earlier today, I didn't even have to think about what I was going to do, I just ran towards an obstacle and trusted myself that I would somehow find a way through it. It didn't require any conscious decisions on my part, it just felt so fluid and natural. Even when I stumbled and fell at one point (got my foot caught on a fence while I speed vaulted over it), I just automatically saved myself by rolling and kept on running, which I thought was incredible. God, this probably sounds super cheesy, but in that hour or so that I was doing parkour, I felt really free.

Hopefully that entire paragraph sort of made sense. I might have been rambling, but really, that sort of feeling is difficult to transcribe through words. In short, I'll be practicing flow again very soon. Heck, maybe I'll even film myself with my GoPro so I can show you guys.

Oh, scratch that. Before I work on flow again, gotta work on long distance running. I got really tired out after the just 10 minutes of flow, which is AWFUL, so I'll definitely work on building up that endurance over summer. Landing could use a bit of work too, my legs hurt like CRAZY after the fifth precision or so. A few hundred more squats should solve that problem.

Same day, 11:46 PM PDT

Went to Angela's house, along with Nick and Kayla. When I got there, they were watching some weird (and frankly, kinda crappy) WWII movie. It had special effects that I could probably pull off if you gave me enough time and the dialogue was really weird. I wasn't really paying attention when it happened in the movie because I was playing Temple Run on Kayla's Kindle, but a character in the movie said the words "Yankee Doodle" or something and it made everyone watching the movie laugh? I don't know. Angela said it sucked, so I'll take her word for it.

Anyway, Angela got a WiiU a few days before school ended, so she invited us over to play Mario Kart 8. And HOLY CRAP IS IT AWESOME. It's got flying sections, it's got drifting, it's got awesome new (and ridiculously overpowered) items, it's got catchy as hell music, it's got an EPIC antigravity mode, and it's got HIGHLIGHT REELS THAT CAN BE PLAYED IN SLOW MOTION AFTER EVERY RACE.

Look at it. Just look at it.

JESUS, I am SO IMPRESSED with how amazing Mario Kart 8 is. I mean I loved Mario Kart Wii, but this just BLOWS EVERYTHING OUT OF THE WATER. Seriously, they added SO MANY MORE AWESOME THINGS, I can't even BELIEVE IT.

I want it. I want it now.





RFotD: Mario Kart 8 is the first game in the series to use a sexy, sexy 60 FPS frame rate.

SGAT: Worked on the anniversary story a bit. And by "a bit," I mean two lines. I suck at this.

Day Three: Smash Adventures in Viet's Bedroom

6/16/14, 8:15 PM PDT

Today, I went to Viet's house, along with Jordan, Ivan, and Khai. Viet has a pretty pimp room. In every other aspect, it's a pretty normal room for a teenager. A maze of clothes everywhere that require you to walk on your tiptoes. A computer half-buried under stacks of paper and wrinkled notebooks. Mysterious stains everywhere. Yeah, pretty normal for most teenagers (although my room is pretty tidy).

But what made Viet's house really awesome? IT'S TWO STORIES TALL.

Well, not two full stories. It a loft more than anything. But god DAMN, is it cool. I didn't take any pictures because I didn't wanna shame Viet by posting pictures of his bedroom on the Internet, so take a look at this picture.

(via bedroomwise.com)

See that? Yeah, imagine that bedroom, except if it had blue walls, was right next to a laundromat and an Office Depot, and a category five tornado ripped through all three buildings. Then you'll get a rough idea of what Viet's room looks like.

Anyway, what were the four of us doing in Viet's model of an apocalyptic wasteland? Just playing Super Smash Bros. Melee and a bit of Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

For FIVE HOURS STRAIGHT.

Jesus Christ, I don't know how we pulled off that long of a gaming session, especially since Viet's sub-par room ventilation and lack of an electric fan meant that the room hit 10,000 K two hours into playing.

By the end of the day, most of us were close to fainting from heat exhaustion, except for Khai because he left two hours early and because his pores are all blocked from when he fell into a vat of molten plastic as a child.

Oh, Viet has a REALLY cute dog too. It was a mixed corgi and it was REALLY FAT. When Jordan and I first entered Viet's house, it just barked at us as if it was trying to be a guard dog. Except we knew it couldn't ever be a guard dog because it was SO PUDGY. When it waddled out from behind the corner of Viet's house looking like a tiny furry hippo, I just died because of how cute it was. Whenever I got the chance, I tried to play with Viet's dog (I think her name was Marcel?), but she just ran away and hid behind stuff whenever I got near her. One of the people in Viet's house (I'm assuming his brother) claims it's because their dog isn't too social, but it seemed to like Khai a lot so I think it's just a racist.

If that's the case, she's the most adorable racist that I know.





RFotD: While racism can't technically be present in animals such as dogs because it requires higher brain processes that they don't possess, animals can be conditioned to react with hostility towards people of a certain appearance, either through poor socialization or from a former abusive situation with a person of a specific look. In short, they can "act" racist because they predict people's behaviors based on past negative experiences.

SGAT: I was supposed to work on my anniversary story today but I never got around to it. Too much Melee.

Day Two: Father's Day Monstrosities

6/15/14, 10:19 AM PDT

It was around 1 AM this morning that I realized I didn't have anything for Father's Day. I'm not a firm believer in Father's Day, partly because it's been commercialized to the point of insincerity and partly because I'm not big on showing any kind of love to anyone. But from pure obligation, groggy, half-asleep me decided to make a card for my dad anyway.

Here's what it looks like.

The cover.

The inside.

My mom laughed really hard when she read the entire thing. My dad kinda just looked like this.

I'd say that was a pretty good start to Father's Day.



Same day, 1:08 PM PDT

Worked on a new piano cover for a bit. The song is "Sad Machine" by Porter Robinson and ever since it was first released, I fell SO IN LOVE with it. My god, it's just such an amazing song. Still gives me goosebumps every time I listen to it and I must have listened to it over a hundred times now. If you've never heard it before, give the original a listen before you check out my half-piano cover because the original is INFINITELY better than my rendition.



And here's what I have so far on the piano. It's only a recording of me playing since currently, it requires me to use two hands for that pretty crazy left hand part.

Not bad, no? I'll work on it and hopefully you'll see the final version in a few weeks or so, lol.



Same day, 8:18 PM PDT

As part two of our Father's Day present, we went to the local pho restaurant. While we were there, my sister was messing around on the iPad. Then, she figured out how to add effects to pictures.

These are the abominations that she has created, with captions courtesy of Kayla and Christina.

Looks like my first acid trip when I had hallucinations of Mickey Mouse.

"Mmmm you smell good gurl."

Hobgoblins are real.

Love me. Feed me. Never leave me.

Jesus Christ.





RFotD: The word "pho" is believed to derive from the French phrase "pot-au-feu," which describes meat soup with boiled beef.

SGAT: Brainstormed a few ideas for the poem with Samantha.

Day One: Goalsetting and a Banquet Prank

6/14/14, 11:44 AM PDT

A big issue with last year's blog post is that other than several movie nights, I achieved absolutely none of my big summer goals. I made a ton of progress in a few of them, especially in making the short film, but I never finished, which is a shame.

So to combat that, starting today I'll be including an outline of what I want to achieve every day, updated weekly on Sundays. I'll just go ahead and start it off today because the first day of summer really shouldn't be productive at all.

It'll look something like this:

• Sunday, June 15: Go over basic cinematography info. See this video, but definitely look into other sources as well.
• Monday, June 16: Write anniversary story. Finish up to the murder.
• Tuesday, June 17: Write anniversary story. Finish exploration/clue collection.
• Wednesday, June 18: Write anniversary story. Start trial.
• Thursday, June 19: Write anniversary story. Finish trial, finish executions.
• Friday, June 20: Write anniversary story. Work on HTML elements.
• Saturday, June 21: Finish anniversary story. Post on Blogspot, set publish time to Wednesday.

If you couldn't tell, my priority right now is my freaking anniversary story which is SIX MONTHS OVERDUE. My bad on taking pretty much forever on this, but I promise that by next week Wednesday, this WILL BE DONE.

Oh, and if you guys are curious, here's my current priorities list, in order of when I want to accomplish them. I'll also update the summer bucket list to include this priorities list and the weekly outline.

1. Finish writing the anniversary story.
2. Finish editing last summer's short film.
3. Work on spoken word poem with Samantha.
4. Write a new, five minute screenplay.
5. Self study for the AP Computer Science A test.

Lot on my plate, huh? But with three months, I'll definitely have enough time to get most of these done.

In other non-self improvement, news, THE EFFING WORLD CUP. Japan vs. Ivory Coast is happening at around 6 PM today, can't WAIT. If you guys don't already know, I'm rooting for Japan simply because god damn it, they made their official mascot Pikachu. LOOK AT HOW ADORABLE IT IS.

I know they're probably gonna lose. But everyone loves an underdog story. Especially when this underdog story involves Pokémon.



Same day, 8:29 PM PDT

So yesterday, I promised to post pictures of the Seminar English class. And here they are, courtesy of Amanda Lee and her fancy, two-thousand dollar camera.

Notice Nick's position.

For this next picture, we told everyone to not smile. Look at Tina, Mrs. DJ, Toossi, and Emrys disrespectfully disobeying.

Mrs. Palumbo said that we looked "really scary."

And then we pointed at the most important person in the room.

I don't know why Emrys is pointing at Toossi, that's pretty much the
opposite of what we were going for.

And here's some bonus selfies that Alex took.

They're blurry because Nevin left the camera on manual focus.

But given how people in Seminar look, I think it was a good thing
that most of us were blurry.

On to the new stuff that happened today. The big thing was the Red Cross banquet, which was pretty okay. I'm still pretty much deaf in the left ear from swimming yesterday, so I could barely hear what was going on around me. But from what I picked up, I think there were infinite refills on lemonade and water. Or maybe my hearing's just crap because the lady that promised to refill lemonade never came back even though we waited hours for her to show up again.

What a disappointment.

Oh, and as part of our banquet, Eric (next year's club president) wanted us to prank Utkrisht (this year's club president) by singing happy birthday to him to attract the attention of the people around us. So Eric starts telling us to sing on his cue and to pass it on to the people around us and eventually, after seeing a bunch of people secretively whispering to each other, Utkrisht realized that something was about to go down. He started to ask people what they were talking about, so to cover the prank up while it spread across the table, I said that we could get free cake since Buca di Beppo gives free cake to groups with at least 20 people. Of course, it was a total lie, but it was convincing enough for him to shrug off the whispering happening around the table.

Then we all sang happy birthday in unison and Utkrisht was completely confused. When we finished, a girl (who was in our group and therefore knew about the prank) asked if it really was Utkrisht's birthday. And she was serious too, I could tell. So that little bit of confusion made me laugh hard.

And at the very end, you know what Utkrisht said after the entire prank passed?

"So are we seriously getting some free cake or what?"

I love Red Cross.


Afterwards, we hung out at Barnes and Noble. As soon as we got there, Angela suggested that we all compete to see who can find the funniest book in ten minutes. Everyone chose really funny stuff and you know what I brought to the table? A book of Wiccan spells that was in the nonfiction aisle.

Nobody laughed and I felt super embarrassed.


Oh, and Japan lost their first World Cup game. Aw man.

It's okay, Pikachu. Your team'll do better against Greece. Probably.

RFotD: Japan's highest placing in the World Cup was 9th place, achieved both in 2002 (when Japan and South Korea hosted the World Cup) and in 2010.

SGAT: Planned out my work for the week. Now whether or not I'll actually stick to it is a different story...

Day Zero: Farewell Seminar, Hello Summer

6/13/14, 10:35 PM PDT

Technically, my day started on midnight since at that time, I was still editing the DJ/Seminar tribute video. I didn't finish until 3 AM, and I had to wake up at 6 AM to get ready for school, so for the very last day of summer, I was running on three hours of sleep.

But it was worth it. Dear god, was it worth it.

Okay, so not counting sleep deprivation, the first thing that happened today was a great little potluck in English. Unfortunately, I didn't really bring anything since I was too preoccupied with editing to bring in jello cups like I always do, but it was okay since a lot of people brought stuff so I wasn't too missed. Someone brought those massive sandwiches from Vons pre-sliced, so whoever that was I love you because those sandwiches are my LIFEBLOOD. Seriously, I have them pretty much all the time for lunch and I never get sick of them.

After a few more English project presentations, my video finally premiered. Take a look.

Sappy paragraph incoming. Brace yourselves.

It's basically a mixture of all the videos we've done in Seminar English since 6th grade (with Alex and Nick's Spanish project thrown in there because it's so beautiful). And even though they look like stupid little amateur videos, I got pretty emotional when I finished editing the entire thing and I watched it over for the first time. It's less about the actual content of the videos and more the fact that it shows just how long we as a class have been together. I mean I've been with this same group of people for three years (six for a few of them), and the fact that today will probably be the last time we're all guaranteed to have the same class... it's a little saddening. But at the same time I'm so glad that I got to spend all this time with such a great group of people. If you know me in person, you'll know that I absolutely LOVE talking about Seminar English and it's because honestly, Seminar English is period I look most forward to, not just this year, but ever since middle school. I think Kevin Tran said it best when he said that this class really did bond, whether it was through the in-class discussions, the potlucks, or (and especially) through the all-nighters that we pulled from doing English. And he's right. In my entire academic career, I've never felt so close to an entire class before.

So yeah, when I showed it to the class, I kinda teared up. Just a little though. Shut up.

Oh and the first minute or so was a tribute to Mrs. DJ. If you look carefully, you can see that I swapped out her husband's face with Mr. Tompkins' face. And it's not because I wanted to be random. Just take a look at the original picture and tell me that Mr. DJ doesn't look like a cop from a 1980s TV show.

She didn't really notice it when it first popped up. I think the entire class laughing tipped her off that there was something up with that picture. But you could definitely tell when she figured it out, because when she did, she gasped and immediately covered her face with both hands, it was hilarious.

Oh, and we took a few class pictures too. Check back on tomorrow's entry because I have to wait until people send their pictures to me since I didn't take any unfortunately.

Afterwards, sort of slept through psych. Nothing really happene-OH WAIT. Brandon, Limbert, Toossi, and Xerxes pelted Biggs with water balloons. Limbert missed and accidentally hit the big TV in the middle of the room, so I think that thing is dead. Then after school I hit up IHOP. Obligatory food photos because I've made it a personal goal to put more pictures in this blog.

Some sort of... giant eggroll?

Yeah, we like french toast. Do do dodo, can't wait to get a mouthful.

See that savory crêpe at the top? Yeah, it had mushrooms, chicken, onions, and spinach in it. Kayla thought it would be good, so she ordered it and split it with me since her tiny atrophied stomach couldn't possibly finish both.

That was the worst mistake of my life. That crêpe was AWFUL. I was so nauseated by the end of it.

Oh, and my friends also made my blindly eat a pancake practically covered in salt. So if I get kidney stones about 20 days into summer, you'll know why.

Then went swimming with a bunch of track people. Kayla and Christina were there, but they didn't go in the water since they didn't have spare clothes. There was some guy that was apparently in charge of safety in the pool and he called me out EVERY SINGLE TIME I broke a pool rule and went into a 15 minute lecture about why we have that rule in place, complete with California law codes and death statistics. I mean, come on, I did one side flip into the pool, that did not warrant a verbal encyclopedia with works cited.

Got home at around 5:15 PM and just passed out from exhaustion. But today was a great start to summer. Great, great start.





RFotD: Nemo 33, the world's deepest swimming pool, has a depth of 33 meters (108 feet). It is designed for divers and has numerous artificial caves for exploration. It also has numerous facilities around the pool including a restaurant where diners can see the divers up close through poolside windows. Check this video out.

SGAT: None really.

2014: Orientation and Bonus Entry

6/11/14, 4:22 PM PDT

It begins again. Oh god, it begins again.

Alright, for those of you who weren't here last year, I'll give you a bit of an orientation. It's gonna sound a bit clumsy since I'm always bad at this sort of stuff, but just bear with me. So every summer, I write these journal entries about the stuff I do during vacation so that I can share the fun fun things that I experience with you poorer, less fortunate people who don't live as entertaining a summer as I do.

HAH. Kidding. Roughly 70-75% of my entries are probably gonna be boring, but I will try my best to make this blog as interesting of a read as possible without deviating too far from the truth. This blog will be updated daily and in the six years that I've written summer journals, I have been very timely with these entries. The only times I've been late on entries is when I don't have access to the Internet (usually when I'm traveling abroad) or when I do things past midnight, which is frequent. Every update will roll out at around 11:30 PM each day.

As I've mentioned, updates will come daily, and contrary to popular belief, I am not the most interesting person in the world (I'm in third place, behind Sean Connery and one of the baggers at Albertsons that used to be a POW and has war flashbacks when someone buys kettle corn). But since it's updated daily, my blog will pretty much reflect the current mood that I had during the time. So when I'm happy, my blog entries will be happy and when I'm sad, my blog entries will be slightly less happy (I'll try to avoid a repeat of last year where I got hit by a wave of depression midway through and a ton of my entries were just melancholic bullshit).

Two things to note. If you look to the very bottom of most entries, you'll see something that says "RFotD" and "SGAT." They stand for "Random Fact of the Day" and "Summer Goals Achieved Today," respectively. The random facts will be true facts that I include purely for the sake of educating the masses. And if you look to the top of the site, you'll see a page labeled "Summer Bucket List," which is a list of stuff I want to accomplish. Even though it's labeled as a "summer" bucket list, in reality it's just a list of stuff that I want to do before I die, so you'll occasionally see me add new things in there and cross stuff off even if it's not summer. SGAT basically notes if I tried to accomplish anything in my bucket list that day, just to keep me productive.

Oh, and one important thing that I feel people didn't use enough last year: tags. If you look to the right and scroll a bit, you'll see this big ol' column that says "Tags." Yeah, use that. With every update (unless I'm on my phone, where tagging is a bitch), I will include tags that usually give a gist of what the entry is about. They'll be fairly consistent, I don't typically add new tags unless I see myself writing about that subject more times in the future, so they act as a really reliable categorizer. And if I write an entry that I'm especially proud of or think is funny enough, I mark it with the tag "Favorite Entries." I'm fairly selective when it comes to tagging entries as my favorite (quality assurance, in essence), so if you want to skip all the crap and just read interesting things, definitely check that tag out.

Alright, recap. Summer blog, updated daily, 11:30 PM, RFotD, SGAT, tags exist, yeah, I think that about covers it. Hope you guys enjoy the blog! I'll see you in two days or so. Or hell, maybe I'll start tomorrow because I'm foreseeing tomorrow as being a pretty interesting day.

Bonus entry: New York Trip, written from 6/6/14 - 6/8/14