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Oct. 15th, 2004 01:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ibmmanI decided it might be best to make this a cut because otherwise people might take me off their friends list because its... quite long.
Last week's utlimate do stuff for stuff challenge premlims entry now with LJ-cut goodness (and split up into paragraphs)
just wanted to write something about the "Ultimate do stuff for stuff challenge" fall prelims last saturday. I wanted to do it again this year after the success last year, which lead to the acquisition of some kind of neat stuff and it would be nice to get stuff again. When I saw the first flyers around for it, I set out on a mission to assemble a team with members worthy enough to attempt the ultimate challengyness of the "Ultimate Challenge". Although I occasionally do talk to the people that were on my team last year and two of them goto anime club, they never mentioned trying it again this year or that they were interested. Some of that might be because Akira, who was kind of the one who ended up figuring everything out last year, is currently abroad in Japan (he also happens to actually be Japanese).
So I mentioned it to Frank (room mate) because for this 'Ultimate Team' we would need people who can both think as well as run, and maybe even think and run at the same time. I also figured we could recruit tyler who was on our floor last year and he said he could probably find somone else. I appologize that most of you won't have any idea who this people are, but that seems to kind of be the case alot of times in situations such as these. I also recruited someone that most of you will know, this person being Pasha. Thus was how the team was assembled. There was much dillydallying before I actually signed everyone up and it came kind of close to the deadline before I did and at that point there were only 3 spaces left, so we were somewhat lucky. So along came last saturday and we assembled earlier than every other team in the gym, since I had figured that im always late for things so trying to set a goal of getting there early couldn't be a bad thing.
Here was the format of the event, quite similar to last year's (except there were no prizes for this because they were the prelims): 10 teams of 5 compete for 6 spaces in the finals in spring in events consisting of physical and mental challenges. There will be a clue after each event that will indicate the location of the next event, there is a 15 minute penalty for arriving at the wrong event and a 40 minute penalty if a team would like to just be told where to go next, and various other event-dependent penalties for incorrect completion of an event. Every team started at the same time, but we were given a clue first, that we had to figure out to get to the first event. The first clue was kind of a shock since I don't remember any of the ones last year being too difficult. It presented the sum "DOG + FOOD = GOOD" and we had to figure out how to assign numbers to the letters so that the sum made sense, and then match the numbers in the sum to the numbers corresponding to the letters in the alpabet below. An 'o' then had to be added to the word and then it had to be unscrambled. Suppossedly there was also a clue in the list of numbers that corresponded to the letters. I'm not really sure if any team actually totally figured out what it said but we tried pretty hard and spent at least 15 minutes on it, not sure exactly how much time it was. A few teams (2 or 3) took the 40 minute penalty and after the second team did, we just kind of followed them and hoped that everyone did get the same clue and it ended up being in the 'infinity quad', the area near the infinity statue between the science and engineering and art buildings.
The first event: to eat 50 buffalo wings of various spice intensities and then use the bones to create a tower of at least 6 inches on which a basketball must rest for at least 10 seconds. I think the first thought was "ah shit the tower will be easy but how are we going to eat these" which ended up being not-so-correct. Frank and Tyler and I ended up eating, and I think its probably the first time I've had 'buffalo' wings, although it was kind of spicy after about the 5th one I don't think I could really taste it anymore. Was probably like 20 minutes (maybe a little less or more) to eat them which I was suprised by since thought it was going to take longer. Building the tower took alot longer for us than anticipated though since they were kind of.. slippery and there weren't really enough of them to built a really solid base while having it wide enough at the top. It probably took about 6 attempts to finally get the ball to stay on for the 10 seconds, after which we got the next clue and ran into the science building and found a table in the nearly empty study center (1 other person was in there studying) to try to figure it out.
I should mention the bag of things they gave us also. Each team was given a wristband thing (advertising the "Team America World Police" movie) that was a different color to identify the teams (we were white) as well as a ziplock bag of various other things labelled "survival kit". The contents of the kit were: a small golf pencil, a bottle of poland spring, a plastic spoon, a plastic knife, a cd (later identified to be of the audio variety), and 5 condoms packaged in matchbox-looking things also advertising "Team America World Police" (Im starting to think there was some sort of sponsorship involved) we were and are still befuddled as to why we had condoms in the 'survival kit' since it doesn't appear that they would have had much use in any event so maybe they just don't want people to go off and get an STD that would prevent them from coming back for the real challenge in the spring? Maybe it's a conspiracy to get us to think "Team America World Police" when we think of 'sex'? The mystery remains as such..
So anyway, armed with a golf pencil we set off to uncover the secrets hidden in the next clue, which was a grid of squares each with a letter, and 2 of the squares were cut in half to be triangles, on opposite corners. The instructions were something along the lines of "Make one cut. no matter how complex, to assemble by rotation or translation, a 4x6 rectangle that will give you the location of your next event. You need not make a physical cut." Ok, we all took geometry at some point, this should be easy. Don't know how long we spent on this one but we didn't figure it out the way they wanted us to. Pasha discovered that it actually said something like "trail behind gracies" backward near the bottom. Since it probably couldn't have been anything else, and there is a trail behind gracie's, we ran. Maybe a little too fast for me... and brian (the other person on our team, who happened to also be on our floor last year) but pasha is like... really freaking fast and I haven't actually seen him run before but yeah he's really fast. so anyway yeah by the time we got to behind gracie's i couldnt breathe too well for a little while but it probably saved a few minutes.
There was a CAB (college activities board) person standing in front of the field thing that gave us our next, and suprisingly simple task: find a pumpkin with a specific number written on it somewhere along the trail. The trail is only like ahalf mile long anyway, so we jogged through there, pasha ran ahead, found the pumpkin (which was somewhere right on the trail) and we went back and I don't think we actually had a clue for this one, since the next thing was to bring the pumpkin to the 'greek lawn'. Thus the next challenge was carving the pumpkin within the premarked lines with only what was in the 'survival kit'. First thing we noticed: the knife was conviently not serrated at all, and promptly broke when inserted into the top of the pumpkin. This proved somewhat useful, since that edge was probably sharper than the edge where there probably should have been some sort of blade. The spoon was also useful, especially in Tyler's raping/mangling of the inside of the pumpkin once we got the top off (rules were that if there were any seeds left on the inside the penalty would be 15 minutes per seed found) and i kind of helped grab the pumpkin stuff from the inside and hold it when they were working on the front of it. They're probably going to use those pumpkins for something and just decided to let us do all the work for them. At this point we were still thinking "what the heck are the condoms for??" oh and the CD.. we thought of trying to break the cd and use it on the pumpkin but thought "Oh what if its important for something else?" so it stayed in one piece.
For the next clue, we had a bunch of setences that were suppossed to be palindromes (I think thats the term) and we had to guess what the words in the phrases were based on small hints, and some of the letters had numbers under them that corresponded to a position in the phrase that would tell us where we needed to go. I remember doing something like that before at some point in time, but forget exactly when it was. Things such as 'i prefer pi' (I forget the rest) and we ended up having to goto the pool. Well we weren't sure, because we didn't get all of the phrases, but it said SLC and something about wading and the only thing that would have to do with the challenge that would be in the SLC would be the pool. Hadn't been in there before then since it's rather new and I haven't very much of a need to really go swimming and I can't say I really did too much looking around when I was down there so I don't know about anything other tan the little area we were in and it looked pretty nice. This challenge I have to say was pretty creative, they had rectangles of corrugated plastic and wax markers and we had to draw something they told us to draw underwater with the board flat on the bottom of the pool (shallow end) and then have the rest of the people in the group guess what it was... water-based pictionary. First one was a balloon, somone had 'robber' and 'microphone' and there wasone I forgot, I ended up with baseball and I have to say this is probably the event I didn't do much in contributing too since as soon as I got underwater I felt like I needed to breate which was strange so I wasn't underwater for very long and didn't end up drawing anything that really looked too close to a baseball to they eventually started listing things and I just indicated yes or no until we got it and I'm kind of curious what happened there so I'm going to have to try something like that again sometime.. so onto the next and final and most annoying clue.
This one was a list of words that had letters missing that were replaced by dots and stars. Had to use every alphabet letter to make sensible words, and then take the letters that corresponded to where the stars were and unscramble them to get the location. There was a fatal flaw in this plan though that was not our faults that we later discovered. We spent like 15 minutes in the locker room adjacent to the pool looking at it and then we figured well lets head outside and go somewhere else where we might be able to figure this out. So we ended up going to the lobby of the gym and sitting on the floor again going through combinations of letters to see if any of them made sense. Meanwhile some of the CAB staff was playing with assorted things in the gym. At some point a group came out and one of them said "I swear its right in there just go in there" and I kind of started moving toward the gym since we couldn't figure it out.. but decided against it since after the person said that he had started laughing so I thought "asshole" and then went back to see if there was anything we missed. And there wasn't, for it was actually something CAB missed. We eventually did take the chance and yes the gym was the destination (and the final one) and they had messed up the clue and left out a star on one of the letters (there were 7 stars, and it would have needed to spell 'Clark Gym' which is 8) and there was kind of one last challenge after which time was stopped. We each got a packet of 'Mexican spice worms' which are dried insect larvae that were flavored and distributed by a real company.. it was a small packet and they really didn't have a taste so that wasn't too bad, and we finally used the bottle of water. At the time we were pretty sure we did ok but weren't totally sure, our big advantage was that we didn't have any penalties and the only thing we were concerned about was having been held up in our quest to decipher the last clue. They said they'd send us the results in an email so we left..
I took the cd since i was curious (if anyone else is interested it is labelled 'oncampus booking 2 volume 3') and I tested it here and its an audio cd, pretty scratched up by now but still playable, with some not too bad bands and such (that i don't know who they are). About an hour and a half to two hours later I did get the email, and we ended up in 4th and thus we qualify for spring. yay! hopefully CAB won't mess up their clues next time and we'll do much better. The teams that didn't want to figure out the clues and took the penalties didn't fare so well, and one of the teams had 3 hours of penalties, making their total time double that of everyone else's they probably just ended up not taking the whole thing seriously though. At any rate if theres anoyone who actually reads this thing aside from me and jessie and maybe meredith if she's bored ill be kind of impresed. in the mean time i really should goto sleep since I sort of have a sore throat/kind of cold and I meant to goto sleep a few hours ago.
Last week's utlimate do stuff for stuff challenge premlims entry now with LJ-cut goodness (and split up into paragraphs)
just wanted to write something about the "Ultimate do stuff for stuff challenge" fall prelims last saturday. I wanted to do it again this year after the success last year, which lead to the acquisition of some kind of neat stuff and it would be nice to get stuff again. When I saw the first flyers around for it, I set out on a mission to assemble a team with members worthy enough to attempt the ultimate challengyness of the "Ultimate Challenge". Although I occasionally do talk to the people that were on my team last year and two of them goto anime club, they never mentioned trying it again this year or that they were interested. Some of that might be because Akira, who was kind of the one who ended up figuring everything out last year, is currently abroad in Japan (he also happens to actually be Japanese).
So I mentioned it to Frank (room mate) because for this 'Ultimate Team' we would need people who can both think as well as run, and maybe even think and run at the same time. I also figured we could recruit tyler who was on our floor last year and he said he could probably find somone else. I appologize that most of you won't have any idea who this people are, but that seems to kind of be the case alot of times in situations such as these. I also recruited someone that most of you will know, this person being Pasha. Thus was how the team was assembled. There was much dillydallying before I actually signed everyone up and it came kind of close to the deadline before I did and at that point there were only 3 spaces left, so we were somewhat lucky. So along came last saturday and we assembled earlier than every other team in the gym, since I had figured that im always late for things so trying to set a goal of getting there early couldn't be a bad thing.
Here was the format of the event, quite similar to last year's (except there were no prizes for this because they were the prelims): 10 teams of 5 compete for 6 spaces in the finals in spring in events consisting of physical and mental challenges. There will be a clue after each event that will indicate the location of the next event, there is a 15 minute penalty for arriving at the wrong event and a 40 minute penalty if a team would like to just be told where to go next, and various other event-dependent penalties for incorrect completion of an event. Every team started at the same time, but we were given a clue first, that we had to figure out to get to the first event. The first clue was kind of a shock since I don't remember any of the ones last year being too difficult. It presented the sum "DOG + FOOD = GOOD" and we had to figure out how to assign numbers to the letters so that the sum made sense, and then match the numbers in the sum to the numbers corresponding to the letters in the alpabet below. An 'o' then had to be added to the word and then it had to be unscrambled. Suppossedly there was also a clue in the list of numbers that corresponded to the letters. I'm not really sure if any team actually totally figured out what it said but we tried pretty hard and spent at least 15 minutes on it, not sure exactly how much time it was. A few teams (2 or 3) took the 40 minute penalty and after the second team did, we just kind of followed them and hoped that everyone did get the same clue and it ended up being in the 'infinity quad', the area near the infinity statue between the science and engineering and art buildings.
The first event: to eat 50 buffalo wings of various spice intensities and then use the bones to create a tower of at least 6 inches on which a basketball must rest for at least 10 seconds. I think the first thought was "ah shit the tower will be easy but how are we going to eat these" which ended up being not-so-correct. Frank and Tyler and I ended up eating, and I think its probably the first time I've had 'buffalo' wings, although it was kind of spicy after about the 5th one I don't think I could really taste it anymore. Was probably like 20 minutes (maybe a little less or more) to eat them which I was suprised by since thought it was going to take longer. Building the tower took alot longer for us than anticipated though since they were kind of.. slippery and there weren't really enough of them to built a really solid base while having it wide enough at the top. It probably took about 6 attempts to finally get the ball to stay on for the 10 seconds, after which we got the next clue and ran into the science building and found a table in the nearly empty study center (1 other person was in there studying) to try to figure it out.
I should mention the bag of things they gave us also. Each team was given a wristband thing (advertising the "Team America World Police" movie) that was a different color to identify the teams (we were white) as well as a ziplock bag of various other things labelled "survival kit". The contents of the kit were: a small golf pencil, a bottle of poland spring, a plastic spoon, a plastic knife, a cd (later identified to be of the audio variety), and 5 condoms packaged in matchbox-looking things also advertising "Team America World Police" (Im starting to think there was some sort of sponsorship involved) we were and are still befuddled as to why we had condoms in the 'survival kit' since it doesn't appear that they would have had much use in any event so maybe they just don't want people to go off and get an STD that would prevent them from coming back for the real challenge in the spring? Maybe it's a conspiracy to get us to think "Team America World Police" when we think of 'sex'? The mystery remains as such..
So anyway, armed with a golf pencil we set off to uncover the secrets hidden in the next clue, which was a grid of squares each with a letter, and 2 of the squares were cut in half to be triangles, on opposite corners. The instructions were something along the lines of "Make one cut. no matter how complex, to assemble by rotation or translation, a 4x6 rectangle that will give you the location of your next event. You need not make a physical cut." Ok, we all took geometry at some point, this should be easy. Don't know how long we spent on this one but we didn't figure it out the way they wanted us to. Pasha discovered that it actually said something like "trail behind gracies" backward near the bottom. Since it probably couldn't have been anything else, and there is a trail behind gracie's, we ran. Maybe a little too fast for me... and brian (the other person on our team, who happened to also be on our floor last year) but pasha is like... really freaking fast and I haven't actually seen him run before but yeah he's really fast. so anyway yeah by the time we got to behind gracie's i couldnt breathe too well for a little while but it probably saved a few minutes.
There was a CAB (college activities board) person standing in front of the field thing that gave us our next, and suprisingly simple task: find a pumpkin with a specific number written on it somewhere along the trail. The trail is only like ahalf mile long anyway, so we jogged through there, pasha ran ahead, found the pumpkin (which was somewhere right on the trail) and we went back and I don't think we actually had a clue for this one, since the next thing was to bring the pumpkin to the 'greek lawn'. Thus the next challenge was carving the pumpkin within the premarked lines with only what was in the 'survival kit'. First thing we noticed: the knife was conviently not serrated at all, and promptly broke when inserted into the top of the pumpkin. This proved somewhat useful, since that edge was probably sharper than the edge where there probably should have been some sort of blade. The spoon was also useful, especially in Tyler's raping/mangling of the inside of the pumpkin once we got the top off (rules were that if there were any seeds left on the inside the penalty would be 15 minutes per seed found) and i kind of helped grab the pumpkin stuff from the inside and hold it when they were working on the front of it. They're probably going to use those pumpkins for something and just decided to let us do all the work for them. At this point we were still thinking "what the heck are the condoms for??" oh and the CD.. we thought of trying to break the cd and use it on the pumpkin but thought "Oh what if its important for something else?" so it stayed in one piece.
For the next clue, we had a bunch of setences that were suppossed to be palindromes (I think thats the term) and we had to guess what the words in the phrases were based on small hints, and some of the letters had numbers under them that corresponded to a position in the phrase that would tell us where we needed to go. I remember doing something like that before at some point in time, but forget exactly when it was. Things such as 'i prefer pi' (I forget the rest) and we ended up having to goto the pool. Well we weren't sure, because we didn't get all of the phrases, but it said SLC and something about wading and the only thing that would have to do with the challenge that would be in the SLC would be the pool. Hadn't been in there before then since it's rather new and I haven't very much of a need to really go swimming and I can't say I really did too much looking around when I was down there so I don't know about anything other tan the little area we were in and it looked pretty nice. This challenge I have to say was pretty creative, they had rectangles of corrugated plastic and wax markers and we had to draw something they told us to draw underwater with the board flat on the bottom of the pool (shallow end) and then have the rest of the people in the group guess what it was... water-based pictionary. First one was a balloon, somone had 'robber' and 'microphone' and there wasone I forgot, I ended up with baseball and I have to say this is probably the event I didn't do much in contributing too since as soon as I got underwater I felt like I needed to breate which was strange so I wasn't underwater for very long and didn't end up drawing anything that really looked too close to a baseball to they eventually started listing things and I just indicated yes or no until we got it and I'm kind of curious what happened there so I'm going to have to try something like that again sometime.. so onto the next and final and most annoying clue.
This one was a list of words that had letters missing that were replaced by dots and stars. Had to use every alphabet letter to make sensible words, and then take the letters that corresponded to where the stars were and unscramble them to get the location. There was a fatal flaw in this plan though that was not our faults that we later discovered. We spent like 15 minutes in the locker room adjacent to the pool looking at it and then we figured well lets head outside and go somewhere else where we might be able to figure this out. So we ended up going to the lobby of the gym and sitting on the floor again going through combinations of letters to see if any of them made sense. Meanwhile some of the CAB staff was playing with assorted things in the gym. At some point a group came out and one of them said "I swear its right in there just go in there" and I kind of started moving toward the gym since we couldn't figure it out.. but decided against it since after the person said that he had started laughing so I thought "asshole" and then went back to see if there was anything we missed. And there wasn't, for it was actually something CAB missed. We eventually did take the chance and yes the gym was the destination (and the final one) and they had messed up the clue and left out a star on one of the letters (there were 7 stars, and it would have needed to spell 'Clark Gym' which is 8) and there was kind of one last challenge after which time was stopped. We each got a packet of 'Mexican spice worms' which are dried insect larvae that were flavored and distributed by a real company.. it was a small packet and they really didn't have a taste so that wasn't too bad, and we finally used the bottle of water. At the time we were pretty sure we did ok but weren't totally sure, our big advantage was that we didn't have any penalties and the only thing we were concerned about was having been held up in our quest to decipher the last clue. They said they'd send us the results in an email so we left..
I took the cd since i was curious (if anyone else is interested it is labelled 'oncampus booking 2 volume 3') and I tested it here and its an audio cd, pretty scratched up by now but still playable, with some not too bad bands and such (that i don't know who they are). About an hour and a half to two hours later I did get the email, and we ended up in 4th and thus we qualify for spring. yay! hopefully CAB won't mess up their clues next time and we'll do much better. The teams that didn't want to figure out the clues and took the penalties didn't fare so well, and one of the teams had 3 hours of penalties, making their total time double that of everyone else's they probably just ended up not taking the whole thing seriously though. At any rate if theres anoyone who actually reads this thing aside from me and jessie and maybe meredith if she's bored ill be kind of impresed. in the mean time i really should goto sleep since I sort of have a sore throat/kind of cold and I meant to goto sleep a few hours ago.
