Kalen Lu

Most of the times when I play games, I’ll play either CS:GO or osu! because for me they’re the most fun, and you get to compete with other people in one way or another. A few weeks ago I started playing some more Tetris, and now I have quite a lot of fun playing it.

I used to play Tetris every now and then if I was really bored, but I never got into it that much because I wasn’t that good, and it seemed like a mostly single player game to me. My brother has been into Tetris for a while, and if you check his blog he has written multiple posts on different types of Tetris variations that he’s played. Sometimes when I played my own games on my computer, I’d see my brother playing Tetris next to me. I eventually noticed how he was sometimes playing against other people, and that’s I found out about Tetris Battle 2P which was a game mode on the website Tetris Friends, where you play against other people in a ranked system. I’ve always liked games where you have ranks and get to compete against other people so I was pretty interested.

You win by either getting three KO’s which is when you make the other player top out, by having the most KO’s in two minutes, or by having the most lines sent in two minutes. The level system worked in a star rating where you’d start at rank one with two stars out of five, and if you won a game you’d gain a star. If you lost a game, you’d lose a star. If you reached five stars at rank one, you’d go up a rank and your star rating resets to two at the next rank. It was also possible to skip ranks if you beat your opponent easily. The ranks capped out at rank 20 on the Tetris Friends website.

For the most part, I only used standard Tetrises in my games which is when you clear four lines and send four lines of garbage. I managed to get to around rank 15 until I couldn’t rank up anymore because I just wasn’t fast enough to beat other players. I stopped playing for a few months, and the only times I played after that was when we had parties and my brother would let people play multiplayer Tetris on his Nintendo Switch. Another day when I was doing my own thing, I saw my brother playing Tetris Battle 2P, and he lost against another player that wasn’t using normal Tetrises. Since I could almost never beat my brother I was interested in what strategy this other guy used to beat him, so I asked my brother what the other player was using. It turned out that the other player was using a strategy called the side four-wide combo where you are able to clear single lines in rapid succession which ends up sending lots of garbage very quickly. Up until then, I had only ever heard of Tetrises and T-spin Doubles.

The four-wide combo is supposedly one of the most powerful standard setups in Tetris, so I started learning it. It was difficult at first, but I was able to learn the side four-wide pretty quickly. I tried it out at rank 15 on Tetris Friends, but I still wasn’t able to win as easily since I wasn’t fast enough. Then, I learned of the better variation of the side four-wide called the centre four-wide where even if your opponent sends you lots of garbage you’ll still be able to survive since the pieces will always spawn in the centre.

I played more often than I used to on Tetris Battle 2P and got up to rank 17 on the site until just yesterday when the website shut down for reasons I don’t know about. Now, I’m looking at getting Puyo Puyo Tetris on Steam since it’s a very popular version of multiplayer Tetris with a ranked system other than Tetris 99.

Overall, I still wouldn’t say that Tetris is my new favourite game, but it’s now one of the games that I’ll play more often than others. I’m still learning more about different strategies and how to improve in general. In the end, I guess I’m starting to enjoy it more after seeing how it’s quite a skill based game with ranked systems in place since those are generally the type of games I like to play.

Yesterday, my class had a workshop where a scientist came into the school in order to teach us about something. We already had one earlier on in the school year about different types of cells, but this time the workshop was about different types of machines and how they can make life easier.

The workshop started in the morning and lasted up until around 12:10 so we had time to go through a few things. First, we were reminded about the list of simple machines such as pulleys, levers, wedges, etc. Then, we learned more about a few types of simple machines through various hypothetical situations, and which versions or types of those simple machines would be the best to use. We also got to use actual items to experiment with.

Our first simple machine was the lever. We started with the various components of the lever which are the fulcrum, load, and effort. Starting with a first-class lever with the fulcrum in the middle, and the load and effort on opposite sides; we calculated the AMA or Actual Mechanical Advantage by dividing the load force by the amount of effort it took to move it. Then, we did the same with a second-class lever and third-class lever, and then discussed which type of lever would be the best to use if we wanted to move a bunch of tables around. It seemed like most people thought that the most practical one to use was the first-class lever because it was the easiest to set up and had the greatest AMA.

Next, we looked at two wedges of different sizes, both were isosceles triangles, but one had a shorter base than the other. We calculated the IMA, or Ideal Mechanical Advantage by dividing the side length by the base. It turned out that the wedge with a smaller base had a greater IMA. However, our hypothetical was that we wanted to prop open a window in order to cool down the room. You’d then have to decide whether or not you’d use the wedge that’s easier to put in or the wedge that creates a larger opening for air to go through. I ended up choosing the larger wedge because even if it takes more effort to use, it’d end up cooling the room down faster.

After that, we used inclined planes and how they provide mechanical advantage. We first calculated the work of using both an inclined plane to reach the top of a surface compared to going straight up, and also the AMA of the inclined plane. It turns out that using an inclined plane requires more work or time but less effort in the process. Then our hypothetical was that we wanted to go up a cliff to reach a food truck at the top, and we either had to choice of climbing straight up or using a slope. I’m not sure if some people were joking or not, but a few people actually said that they would rather climb straight up rather than use an inclined plane. To me, even if it takes a bit more time I’d rather use less effort to get up.

Lastly, we used four different types of pulleys and how each of them have different AMA’s and IMA’s, but also have different efficiencies. It’s kind of difficult to explain, but some of the pulleys also have different positions on where you pull, so they can only be used in certain situations. We started with a fixed pulley, then a movable, then a single block and tackle, and then a double block and tackle. Each one had a higher AMA than the one before it, but also had a decrease in efficiency. Our hypothetical was that we wanted to lift up a sign to a certain height, and I went with the double block and tackle because although there is low efficiency it was still the pulley system with the greatest mechanical advantage.

The final task we did was attempting to construct a contraption that utilizes at least three simple machines in order to ring a bell, but not a lot of people actually finished because we didn’t have a lot of time. Overall, I had some fun, and it was a lot better than doing the normal school work we usually have.

Every year, my school has a track and field meet on one day around this time of the year. Everyone after grade three participates and the winners of each event are chosen to go to our board’s area track and field meet. However, in my opinion, this was probably the worst track and field meet we’ve had so far.

Originally, the teachers were planning on making the meet take place over the course of two days. A lot of people didn’t like this because it would be a lot more work, and there wasn’t really a point in having it over the course of two days since we’ve always done track and field on one day even if some events spilled over to the next day.

The Monday of the week we were supposed to have the meet was when they had canceled the two-day plan from Tuesday and Wednesday, due to the weather. They then postponed the meet back to a one day meet on Friday. Additionally, the teachers wanted us to do some events before the actual meet to save time on Friday. However, our grade was unable to do standing long jump in the gym, so we had to go outside and do it into the sand pit even though it was still wet outside. We also had to run the 800m on the wet track that had puddles in it which led to a lot of people not participating.

On the Friday meet, it was still kind of wet. Compared to last year, it was a lot windier and colder. When we ran the 100m almost everyone slipped on their starts, and when we were all waiting for our next event it was cold. Since the grass was still wet, they ended up moving the 200m race over to the soccer field next to the park across the street. Once, my grade crossed the street to the soccer field we found out that we weren’t running that day since there wasn’t enough time. Some people were kind of mad since we had gone through the trouble of doing a few events before the meet so that we would be able to get through everything on that day. Even after they canceled our 200m, everyone crossed back across the street, and we waited outside for half an hour doing nothing until we went inside to get our things only to leave right after.

Overall, I’d say the meet was pretty poorly planned and it was partially due to the weather being bad for the past few weeks, and the school didn’t want to push the date back any further. Most of us still had some fun though since we didn’t have to do any school work, and we had the long weekend to look forward to.

Last Tuesday was the day for my school region’s badminton area tournament. Since I was on the team I also competed at in the tournament, and I had a lot of fun. I didn’t get a chance to go last year, so I’ll be writing about it this year.

The tournament was held at a high school that was big enough for all of the school’s teams. There were quite a few teams at the meet. Some of them were a lot more well known than others, but they were the usual teams our school competed with for other sports. The way the tournament was set up was so that there was an A and B bracket for each type of pairing (male, female, and mixed). If you won against your first team you would move on, and if you lost you’d go down to the losers bracket. This way, each team had a chance to play at least twice.

My original parter I was supposed to play with just got better from a fever, so I was playing with one of the substitutes. However, I think it wasn’t too bad since I’ve played with him quite a few times before. We waited for quite a while before we played our first game which we won, but a lot of time was spent watching other teams. When we played our second game we lost and moved to the losers bracket. After playing our last game which we lost in the losers bracket, my partner and I thought that the team we played in the losers bracket was even better than the team we lost to in the main bracket.

Fortunately, we were able to play three games which is more than the minimum two, but I think that we definitely could’ve played more since we didn’t even lose by that much to the second team we played. There was one school that did really well since almost all of their players had extra practices and went to other badminton clubs while our team only had around four practices and some of our players didn’t really know how to play. One guy in mixed doubles was really good, so I asked my friend who was the best on our team how good he thought the guy was and my friend said he was probably the best player in the tournament. I think he was right though because he beat one team 21-0 in two sets, and also won a game where neither he or his partner smashed at all as a handicap. Although our team left before the tournament was over I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I found out that his team won.

Overall, I had a lot of fun playing at the tournament, but I think I could still improve a lot more if I practiced more. There were a lot of really good players there that were interesting to watch and learn from.

For the past few months my school has been preparing and rehearsing for its interpretation of the musical, The Lorax. Just last week they presented for both the school and for parents and others in the area. Here’s what I thought of the whole musical.

The school’s music teacher first announced auditions for the musical a few months after the school year started. There were quite a few people in my class that were chosen to play some of the parts. Because of rehearsals, a lot of people weren’t able to fulfill their other duties around the school, and other students had to help them fill in. However, this wasn’t too big of a deal since it was only at recess.

Every single day for the past few months, the cast had practices in the music room at lunch except for Fridays. Normally, during the week the music room is open for students to come in and practice. However, due to The Lorax, there was barely any time to come in to play and practice. In the final weeks of rehearsal, there were lots of props in the music room, and students that took part in the musical had to take time from class in order to practice for the performance. In addition to Wellness Week presentations being held, a lot of lessons were skipped and our class even didn’t have math for about three days in a row.

Since the musical was to be presented in the gym, they put down the stage and had all the lights and props there. We had a lot of skipped gym periods, and additionally our badminton team had to cancel quite a few practices. This made some people kind of frustrated how we didn’t get a chance to use the gym for the past few weeks.

When the final presentation did come it felt kind of strange to think that it was all put together of the course of several months. Some people forgot their lines and there were very few props. The only live music was one of the teachers playing guitar, but the rest of the music was played by speaker. In the end though I think they were able to convey the message of The Lorax anyways, so I guess that’s the most important part.

Overall, the play wasn’t half bad, but I definitely don’t think it was worth all the extra time and effort that was put into the musical. If they were to perform another musical later on I would definitely suggest planning their schedule a lot better.

I like to play the guitar. Currently, I mostly play fingerstyle guitar, but when I first started learning a long time ago it was a lot different. I’ll be writing about how I started playing the guitar.

When I was little, my brother and I both got small classical guitars. Neither of our parents knew how to play the guitar, so I remember we were struggling to figure out how to tune them. Eventually, we started taking lessons at our local music store learning the basics such as reading notes and playing basic chords. Later on, we got electric guitars since the old classical guitars were too small, and they were kind of chipped. I remember both my brother and me didn’t really enjoy practicing either. Each day we’d just practice for 15 minutes and then we were done.

Over the course of a few years, I don’t think either of us got that much better, and I think that’s because we didn’t want to try to get better and weren’t really having fun. We continued taking lessons, but eventually, once my brother started high school he stopped and I continued playing. I remember I was watching Youtube and came across this Sungha Jung video of him playing a song called River Flow in You when he was 14 with around 40 million views. I thought it was pretty cool, but I still wasn’t interested and thought it was too hard to play with all of the notes and fingerpicking.

Around grade 6, I started watching a lot of anime like Naruto and Tokyo Ghoul, and I really liked the opening song from Tokyo Ghoul called Unravel at the time. Again on Youtube, I found a video of Eddie van der Meer playing the song in fingerstyle. I still thought the style of playing was too hard and decided to just listen to the music instead. However, in grade 7, music class was starting to be about learning how to play either piano, ukelele, or guitar. I didn’t really feel like playing a new instrument so I stuck with guitar and decided to go back to Eddie van der Meer’s Unravel video and downloaded the TABS to learn at school. At first, I had no idea what to do even though I could read the notes. I took the music to my guitar teacher and he showed me the different techniques. It took me around three months to learn how to play the one minute and thirty-second song, but looking back on it, it was a pretty difficult piece to play for a beginner and that’s probably why it took so much time to learn.

Even though it took a long time to learn that one song I picked up a lot of different techniques that I could use for other songs. I don’t think the difficulty of the first song you learn should matter as long as you like the song you’re learning. The harder the song the longer it may take, but you’ll also learn a lot more from it. This was when I started enjoying the guitar a lot more. I was able to find a lot of free TABS for songs I enjoyed and was usually able to play them. I started learning more songs but didn’t really venture out to anything new. Around the end of my grade 7 year my school was having a talent show, and I wanted to participate. I decided I wanted to learn something new that would be a bit of a challenge. I found Eiro Nareth’s Youtube channel and found his My Heart Will Go On cover to be very cool, so I decided to try and learn it. It was pretty difficult to figure out the percussion, but that was a new thing I picked up from the song as well as tap harmonics. I only got fourth place in the talent show, but I felt pretty good about being able to play the song.

Over the summer I stopped taking lessons but continued playing. After learning the My Heart Will Go On cover I started to feel more confident about learning how to play songs I couldn’t play before. I remember Eddie van der Meer’s cover of A Cruel Angel’s Thesis was a song I was struggling with for the longest time. Later on, I started learning about tunings besides standard that gave more options to play different songs. I remember Tam Lu was a guitarist I looked up to who used a lot of open tunings. Even now his songs use complex rhythms and lots of harmonics, so I still can’t play a lot of his covers although he doesn’t really play too much anymore. Eddie van der Meer’s cover of Sincerely was a song I worked really hard on over the summer. I was able to play it and memorized it in just about a week.

This school year I’ve started trying to learn Eddie van der Meer’s cover of Uchiage Hanabi, but it is a very dynamic song that I’m still trying to perfect. I also started being able to play some of Tam Lu’s arrangements, but my favourite one to play is his cover of the Girl’s Last Tour opening Ugoku Ugoku. There were a lot of harmonics in the song as well as the use of a slider capo that I got used to. His cover is very fun to play and was also fun to learn.

Now I have a new music theory teacher and am learning how to write my own arrangements for songs. At the moment I have a complete arrangement of W:Wonder Tale. Though I still can’t play it even though it’s my own arrangement. I also have the first few bars of the ending theme of 5 Centimeters Per Second that I can play, but the rest of the arrangement is on hold at the moment.

Right now I’m still having some problems with playing large stretches on the fretboard and also reading various strumming patterns, especially in Tam Lu’s arrangements. In arranging, I still can’t identify chords by ear and make good choices in arrangements. I’m also writing an original song with my theory teacher at the moment too. Just recently I got a new electric guitar and learned the first Bohemian Rhapsody solo, so I’m trying to get back into that genre of the guitar as well.

I think a lot about learning fingerstyle guitar is the many various techniques involved with the style. The style itself is very flexible and you really start to learn the different sounds the guitar can make. I think a very good example of this is Henry Chen’s song Ancient Dragon.

I’m not really that great with the electric guitar still, but for fingerstyle guitar, I’ll say that it doesn’t matter what the first song you learn is or how hard it is as long as you have fun with it. Like I said before the harder the song the more you’ll learn; it just might take a bit longer to learn. That’s why I think the first song you learn should be one you like so you won’t give up.

Some people that have TABS for their covers that I would recommend are Eddie van der Meer, Tam Lu, Robert Chen, Seiji Igusa, and Eiro Nareth. If you’re looking for easier covers Steve Hansen has a lot of free TABS that are easy for beginners but sound good at the same time. I usually play songs from anime, so those recommendations I pretty bias.

Overall, I’m still having fun playing the guitar, and I’m also still learning new things. I hope that I can keep on improving and especially get better at writing my own arrangements so that I can play whatever songs I want. That’s the story of how I got to where I am with guitar today.

Just yesterday, my music theory teacher helped me make some suspenseful music for a video of our family’s cat Darci as requested by my mom. I think I learned quite a few useful things, so here’s what we did.

We first took a look at a few samples of suspenseful music that was interesting and identified some elements that were common throughout different pieces. The things that we found were a slow build up, a continuous droning sound, various string ostinatos, and some percussion.

Then, we watched the video we would be putting our music over and laid out when we wanted certain elements of our music to come in since part of suspenseful music was the slow build up. After choosing our sounds from the GarageBand music library we started with our continuous drone and worked our way on from there. We introduced a new element of music as new things happened in the video to layer onto what we already had to make our music more suspenseful.

There was a slight problem when we reached our percussion stage though because we couldn’t find a drum hit that we thought would fit. Therefore, we had to sound design some of the sounds that were already in GarageBand by changing the EQ and adding some other effects. In the end, I still couldn’t figure out how to make a good sound, so my teacher did it for me.

Overall, the final project was only about thirty seconds and most of the ostinatos weren’t consistent since GarageBand’s quantizing system wasn’t really working for us. To me, it doesn’t sound that good, but we managed to create something in one hour that sounds more suspenseful than what I could probably make on my own.

Around this time of the school year our school board starts with badminton teams and hosts an area tournament in May. Badminton is probably the sport I enjoy playing the most so here’s my experience so far with my school’s team.

My school held our team’s tryouts around a week and a half ago. The tournament our board hosts only does doubles so the team takes seven boys and girls each to form two pairs of girls, mixed, and boys and two backup players. So in total the team only takes 14 people. The school held two different tryouts on different days and there were a lot of people. Unlike last year where they had you rally in doubles, this year the tryouts they had you play half court against one other person. I feel like this was a better way to do things since you didn’t have to worry about rotations or getting a partner that takes all of your shots.

The tryouts went pretty smoothly and the coaches announced the teams pretty fast. Pretty much all my friends who play badminton got onto the team. I know all of the guys on the team, and they all know the sport and played before. However, almost all of the people on the girls’ side seem to have very little experience and makes me think that there weren’t many good female players at the tryouts. My friend who has lots of experience playing volleyball also used to play a lot of badminton says that this years’ team isn’t looking too good.

We had our first few “practices” were mostly just rallying and going over the rules. The only real exercises we did was practicing our defense against the wall. What seemed strange to me though is that the coaches told to try and use the forearm strokes against the wall even though when you’re defending you typically use backhand for returning powerful attacks.

Overall, I don’t think our team will do very well in the tournament especially since it’s soon and we still don’t know who our partners are. Despite that, I will try to focus on getting better and have fun.

Since it was my birthday last week, I decided that I wanted to get a new electric guitar and ended up getting the Chapman ML1 Pro Traditional from Cosmo Music. The guitar had a limited sale which was one of the reasons why I ended up choosing it, but there were a few other reasons too.

From the beginning, I already knew that I wanted a new electric guitar since there isn’t a guitar I can use at home that has single coil pickups. Pickups are magnets with metal wire wrapped around that makes the string vibrations into an electronic signal. The three main types of electric guitar pickups are single coil pickups, humbucker pickups, and P90 pickups.

Single coil pickups have more of a brighter tone, humbucker pickups have a warmer tone, and P90 pickups are kind of in the middle. Overall I prefer the tone and sound of humbucker pickups, but I wanted a guitar with single coils so I could have a variety of all three. I was originally planing on getting a Fender Stratocaster with an HSS setup which means there are two single coil pickups and one humbucker pickup. With this guitar I’ll have two single coil pickups, but still have one humbucker pickup I can switch to.

However, Cosmo Music only had two currently in stock and I didn’t really like the colours. The people at the store told us that although the ML1 Pro was a more expensive guitar the Stratocaster had a better build quality with better tone variety with the HSS setup. Eventually I decided on getting the ML1 Pro since at the time it was a cheaper price than the Stratocaster, came with a case, and I could get a Stratocaster later.

In the end I think that the ML1 Pro Traditional is still a good guitar and it sounds and feels better than the other two I used to use. It looks good and the side dots even glow in the dark.

A few days ago one of my friends told me that I should check out this new game with him that I’ve never heard of called Dauntless. I asked him to explain the game to me and it seemed pretty interesting.

Dauntless is a game developed by Phoenix Labs. The company is supposedly a small team made up of developers from other game making studios such as BioWare and Riot Games. Dauntless follows a “Monster Hunter” genre where you create your own character that starts off with really basic gear. As you progress through the game by defeating monsters you can upgrade your weapons and armor in order to defeat even stronger monsters.

There are all sorts of different quests and expeditions that you can part take in either solo or within a group. By completing objectives you can gain materials to craft new or improve your current gear. The combat system has different combos for different weapons almost like an MMO game like Black Desert Online.

The world that you play consists of a bunch of floating islands called the Shattered Isles. After a cataclysmic event Behemoths were dispersed throughout the game. Your player is known as a “Slayer” to the NPCs and you are supposed the eliminate the Behemoth threat one your adventure.

Overall, I think this game is pretty cool and interesting. It feels like the type of game where if your group of friends is feeling bored you guys could get onto Dauntless and just talk while hunting monsters.