So somehow, luckily, I had found these tickets for Joe Hisaishi Symphonic Concert: the Studio Ghibli Films of Joe Hisaishi just as they had opened another showing on Sunday evening so naturally, I bought two tickets. I mean, Hisaishi's music is some of my favorite in movies and I've been to Zelda concerts, video game concerts, etc, before, so of course I would get tickets to hear them do it with a live symphony.
I didn't realize that it was actually Joe Hisaishi conducting the concert until he walked out on stage. Before he came out, the current Consulate General of Japan gave a speech, which I thought was a little strange.
"What is the Consulate General doing down here in San Jose at a concert?" I was confused. Then this gentleman walked on stage to a roaring applause and I was like oh. shit. I had to turn to my sister.
"IS THAT JOE HISAISHI???" I said in my loudest whisper.
"YES," she whispered back.
"HOLY SHIT." I lost my shit a little bit.
Joe Hisaishi is the cutest effing Japanese grandpa conductor. The venue had cameras that captured his facial expressions and gave us an actual view of the frontside of the conductor - not something commonly done at the concerts I've been to, so this was even more amazing because it was Joe mothherfucking Hisaishi. He got super into what he was conducting and would every so often crack into this brilliant and kindly smile that just melted your heart. Definitely one of the more animated conductors I've seen! Like, he was actually a lot of fun to watch to the point where they would show videos from the movies on the big screen but I would be watching him bounce around and cue in different sections.
The most amazing thing though, was how he transitioned back and forth between playing piano (I GOT TO SEE JOE HISAISHI PLAY THE PIANO OMG) and conducting. It was so ridiculously smooth that I can only hope to one day attain a level of being able to switch back and forth between tasks in the kitchen like stir frying something and washing the dishes the same way he, seemingly effortlessly, switched from playing this piano bit (memorized of course) to waving in another cue and then back again to the piano.
There was just something about him playing piano that made the whole thing seem kind of special. It felt like he was adding in flourishes here and there to parts of songs; these were listening experiences that you couldn't hear just from the movie.
There were parts too, with the Totoro song, where sections were playing and I don't know, it's so moving that tears started to run down my face. I don't know what it is about that song - the nostalgia perhaps - but I get really close to losing it when I hear those songs regularly, and hearing them live just pushed it over the edge.
Oh yeah. There was also a part where this marching band came in. Hella random, but damn was I jealous of all those people who got to perform!
But now I want to watch all the Ghibli movies. There were definitely parts of movies I didn't remember at all haha. I wish I had the income and the space to pay for the blue rays with the gorgeous covers. Hell, I wish you could buy those as posters.
...time to scour the internet for posters I guess!
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Questival San Jose 2018
A few months ago or so, I took part in something called Questival for a day and a half. A quest festival (get it? ha.) that the organizers put on in cities around the US. At its most basic, you have 24 hours to complete as many (or little) "quests" or tasks or challenges of some kind with a team of 2-6. The one I did yesterday was focused on San Jose, though really, it was more like the South Bay.
It was incredibly incredibly fun, if doing scavenger hunts and challenges are your thing. Basically for questival, I sort of see it as paying $20 for a pretty cool daypack (that folds up!) and $20 for these people to organize a bunch of fun things for you and some friends to run around doing.
The Questival started officially Friday evening, but in a sense it starts before that when you first pick your team name. For our team name, we eventually decided on Como se llama llama? which we were all pretty tickled about. And that's what kind of matters. Except if you're actually... going for the challenge of trying to actually *win* one of the awards (and if you're trying to finish the most events or get the most likes or whatever you're definitely in the running), your team name will probably be announced at the closing ceremony. So there's that to think about.
You also need to sign up for the App, which.... is definitely not without its faults. They sort of ran into the same problem Pokemon Go ran into when they first launched, where their servers were most definitely not equipped to handle all the racers accessing them at the same time. There were many upload failures and crashes and glitches, though, as they told us at the closing ceremony... none of them are programmers so their app was definitely... a work in progress. I really want to look at the code of how the search function actually worked because that was absolutely terrible. It worked maybe 10% of the time, and never when you typed in the whole correct word you were looking for. Like, it's baffling what code they actually used because of how broken it seemed. But while the app was definitely a key part of the questival, it wasn't really the main part.
About 24 hours before the opening "ceremony" they release a list of the challenges, though some challenges they also add during the event itself since I definitely saw challenges that were not there before and were not on the original list. It's super nifty because you can definitely use them for planning purposes since there are way too many challenges for one team to actually do (though, man, I would be really interested to see how many you could really do).
The challenges vary widely, from doing outdoorsy-things like hiking and taking pictures of the landscapes, fitness things, to doing good in the community by volunteering or other random acts of kindness, finding locations and going there, to making things, to really random quirky things that felt kind of like dares from the organizers. Really, there was something for EVERYONE no matter what kind of things you like to do. The challenge was getting everyone else on the team to agree to the tasks you wanted to do and squish them into the time frame that you had to do them in. Every task needs to have a special totem in it that they give out at check-in though, so even if you have a team of six, it's not like you can split into squads and do the different tasks since you must have the totem in the picture, otherwise you get disqualified. But it's pretty cool because no matter what you like to do you can probably find something.
Our team was three people - myself, my boyfriend Elias, and his friend Betsy. We tried to plan a little bit before hand but that sort of... sizzled out. We thought we were going to be able to volunteer at the non-profit that Betsy used to work for but unfortunately it ended up being closed on the Saturday, but at least we were able to go to a different charity and thankfully, it was close by.
Elias was still finishing up work, so Betsy and I went to checkin without him. Check-in was pretty...underwhelming? I thought it was going to be some sort of ceremony thing but it was basically a tent with dudes running check in and then giving you a backpack and a flag-totem. Once you got those things, you were pretty good to go and leave, though there were a few challenges you could only complete at check-in, like taking pictures of your backpacks (technically you could do this anywhere) or dancing at check-in or taking a picture of your car. We almost forgot some of them.
We went back though and used some of the time that evening to talk about plans for the next day and that night, as well as some of the challenges that we didn't need to go anywhere for. We figured that since not everyone from the team needs to be in the pictures Betsy and I would do some of the challenges while Elias did work (so some people can leave if they need to or do things as needed or whatever, or I would definitely recommend sleeping in shifts if there are enough people, a late night shift and an early morning shift).
I made the mistake of volunteering to eat 1 clove of garlic, raw noodles, and 1/2 a raw onion.
The mistake was the raw onion. I was arrogant and was like "I like purple onions" so I picked a purple onion. Big. Mistake. Second mistake was not picking a smaller onion. I picked a normal sized onion.
The noodles were stupidly easy to do, and the first few bites of onion were alright. I bit into it like an apple. It was fine for a little bit, but then the burn, oh god, the burn set in. It was the same as the kind of burn from eating ridiculously spicy hot sauce. Like, painful. I started tearing up. But I tried to power through. My teammates came to help, thankfully, though I think I still ate like 2/3 of the onion to disastrous effect. It took us like, 25 minutes to eat the whole thing. The garlic clove I just popped and powered through. The noodles we ate in between bites to help alleviate the burn (it wasn't really that helpful).
I think I actually killed off or destroyed a significant number of taste buds because basically until Sunday morning, my mouth tingled every time food or liquid came into contact with it, all the way from the front of my tongue to the very very back of my tongue and throat. Brushing my teeth helped... but only for the front part of my tongue. Nothing tasted right after and everything was just a tad bit painful to eat. And then we almost couldn't get the video uploaded haha.
Betsy and I swore off onions for at least a week though. I made the mistake of thinking I was better Saturday and put some onions in my in-n-out. Regretted it immediately. So much unpleasant burning feelings.
By the time we had.... recovered, neither of us were really that hungry for dinner from all the liquid we drank in a futile attempt to stop the burn (turns out milk products and bread do not work for onion burn like they do for hot sauce). We got Elias to do the "drink something from a straw out of a bag" challenge to have him eat more and decided that that evening, we would go up to Stanford to do the cluster of challenges there since by then he had finished his work.
On the way up we stopped at CVS and knocked out the fitness challenge of doing fitness things (jumping jacks, push ups, etc) on video in the grocery store and got access to a bathroom and then headed over to Stanford and took pictures of the Gates of Hell, the cactus garden, a jade bush, and recorded a short ghost story at the masoleum in the pitch black.
Not going to lie, that was a little freaky. It helped to have a high powered light that I clutched basically the whole time. Taking pictures at night with the flag though, was a little bit of a challenge because our cameras were definitely not that great and it was sort of rainy.
We ended up skipping out on the papua new guinea statues because our team was just was too tired at that point and hungry, so we went to cheesecake factory before calling it a night. We at least managed to decide on a plan for the next morning.
We woke before sunrise to go to a park and jesus. It was early. But it was so worth it! Sunrise was AMAZING. But also the start of a ridiculously long day. By the time we finished - after 6 because they had allowed for submissions to keep going past the normal cutoff time of 6pm due to server issues - I was ridiculously exhausted. Like. So. Damn. Tired. Elias and Betsy wanted to burn things because a few of the challenges involved a campfire, but with the rain and the distinct lack of fire pits open at all hours, it was a little difficult to do that without planning beforehand.
Overall, Questival was amazing fun, and the best part about it, is that you can really scale it to however intense you want it to be. We weren't really that intense. We had something of a plan - my map, with all the destinations pinned on it so that we could do things when we were in the different areas - and I think we were trying to go for quantity. Judging was super confusing, especially since it was all sort of based on the reactions from other teams and it wasn't clear when the judging stopped, but it felt a little bit like Whose Line, where everything is made up and the points don't matter (at least, until it got to the judging but still).
Those six/4+ person teams though, definitely benefit from things like division of labor. There were a bunch of things that we definitely could have split better.
Let's talk strategy.
Of course, Questival is the kind of event that can be as intense or as chill as you want it to be.
I'm the kind of person who likes to organize things. I got a spreadsheet and google maps together before the whole thing, but that was with only a limited time. The spreadsheet was to keep track of the time during the day since there were certain check in challenges that were only at certain times and we didn't know how long they would take. After having done a Questival, I think it would have been worth the time to create a spreadsheet of the different tasks we could do together, were location agnostic, and also to build out some sort of schedule.
Questival officially starts at 7:00pm, about an hour after check in. However, this is only when the app will let you start to upload your videos or photos to the challenges. So if you really want to cram as much as you can into the short 24 hours that is Questival (after 6pm Day 2 you're not allowed to submit any more, unless the app/servers have massive problems and they extend it for another hour) (ie, if you want questival to really be 24 and not 23 hours), plan ahead. Buy materials ahead of time. Figure out what is close to what. Figure out what you want your team's strategy to be. Upload everything asap - the sooner you upload things, the higher chance you have of it getting reviewed and rated. There are also sprints - windows of time where I think they give awards out for thhe most? (or the most liked) uploads of a certain category. But either way, basically, I think it's fairly safe to assume that things that make for a worse picture/video are better off doing at the end of the competition because they're not really going to have much time for people to rank them anyways.
Having a strategy meeting is an absolute must. Having multiple working phones - both with cell service and at least one GPS phone - is necessary if you want to do things efficiently. Because we had to drive around a lot, whatever phone that was being used for GPS couldn't really be used to also upload things at the same time. Car time was valuable time to be uploading and captioning submissions as you ran from one place to the other. Being able to share the picture/video between multiple phones so that you could have at least two things uploading at the same time was also incredibly helpful. For this, you also need to make sure passengers in the car know what they're supposed to be doing and can help out.
I'd also highly recommend having two drivers. As the only driver in our group (since not everyone could drive my car) I was basically stuck driving the whole time and didn't really get the chance to see submissions, since all time outside the car was basically spent doing the challenge itself. At least if there are two people, you can switch things up and it's a little more fun that way for the person who has to drive IMO.
It was incredibly incredibly fun, if doing scavenger hunts and challenges are your thing. Basically for questival, I sort of see it as paying $20 for a pretty cool daypack (that folds up!) and $20 for these people to organize a bunch of fun things for you and some friends to run around doing.
The Questival started officially Friday evening, but in a sense it starts before that when you first pick your team name. For our team name, we eventually decided on Como se llama llama? which we were all pretty tickled about. And that's what kind of matters. Except if you're actually... going for the challenge of trying to actually *win* one of the awards (and if you're trying to finish the most events or get the most likes or whatever you're definitely in the running), your team name will probably be announced at the closing ceremony. So there's that to think about.
You also need to sign up for the App, which.... is definitely not without its faults. They sort of ran into the same problem Pokemon Go ran into when they first launched, where their servers were most definitely not equipped to handle all the racers accessing them at the same time. There were many upload failures and crashes and glitches, though, as they told us at the closing ceremony... none of them are programmers so their app was definitely... a work in progress. I really want to look at the code of how the search function actually worked because that was absolutely terrible. It worked maybe 10% of the time, and never when you typed in the whole correct word you were looking for. Like, it's baffling what code they actually used because of how broken it seemed. But while the app was definitely a key part of the questival, it wasn't really the main part.
About 24 hours before the opening "ceremony" they release a list of the challenges, though some challenges they also add during the event itself since I definitely saw challenges that were not there before and were not on the original list. It's super nifty because you can definitely use them for planning purposes since there are way too many challenges for one team to actually do (though, man, I would be really interested to see how many you could really do).
The challenges vary widely, from doing outdoorsy-things like hiking and taking pictures of the landscapes, fitness things, to doing good in the community by volunteering or other random acts of kindness, finding locations and going there, to making things, to really random quirky things that felt kind of like dares from the organizers. Really, there was something for EVERYONE no matter what kind of things you like to do. The challenge was getting everyone else on the team to agree to the tasks you wanted to do and squish them into the time frame that you had to do them in. Every task needs to have a special totem in it that they give out at check-in though, so even if you have a team of six, it's not like you can split into squads and do the different tasks since you must have the totem in the picture, otherwise you get disqualified. But it's pretty cool because no matter what you like to do you can probably find something.
Our team was three people - myself, my boyfriend Elias, and his friend Betsy. We tried to plan a little bit before hand but that sort of... sizzled out. We thought we were going to be able to volunteer at the non-profit that Betsy used to work for but unfortunately it ended up being closed on the Saturday, but at least we were able to go to a different charity and thankfully, it was close by.
Elias was still finishing up work, so Betsy and I went to checkin without him. Check-in was pretty...underwhelming? I thought it was going to be some sort of ceremony thing but it was basically a tent with dudes running check in and then giving you a backpack and a flag-totem. Once you got those things, you were pretty good to go and leave, though there were a few challenges you could only complete at check-in, like taking pictures of your backpacks (technically you could do this anywhere) or dancing at check-in or taking a picture of your car. We almost forgot some of them.
We went back though and used some of the time that evening to talk about plans for the next day and that night, as well as some of the challenges that we didn't need to go anywhere for. We figured that since not everyone from the team needs to be in the pictures Betsy and I would do some of the challenges while Elias did work (so some people can leave if they need to or do things as needed or whatever, or I would definitely recommend sleeping in shifts if there are enough people, a late night shift and an early morning shift).
I made the mistake of volunteering to eat 1 clove of garlic, raw noodles, and 1/2 a raw onion.
The mistake was the raw onion. I was arrogant and was like "I like purple onions" so I picked a purple onion. Big. Mistake. Second mistake was not picking a smaller onion. I picked a normal sized onion.
The noodles were stupidly easy to do, and the first few bites of onion were alright. I bit into it like an apple. It was fine for a little bit, but then the burn, oh god, the burn set in. It was the same as the kind of burn from eating ridiculously spicy hot sauce. Like, painful. I started tearing up. But I tried to power through. My teammates came to help, thankfully, though I think I still ate like 2/3 of the onion to disastrous effect. It took us like, 25 minutes to eat the whole thing. The garlic clove I just popped and powered through. The noodles we ate in between bites to help alleviate the burn (it wasn't really that helpful).
I think I actually killed off or destroyed a significant number of taste buds because basically until Sunday morning, my mouth tingled every time food or liquid came into contact with it, all the way from the front of my tongue to the very very back of my tongue and throat. Brushing my teeth helped... but only for the front part of my tongue. Nothing tasted right after and everything was just a tad bit painful to eat. And then we almost couldn't get the video uploaded haha.
Betsy and I swore off onions for at least a week though. I made the mistake of thinking I was better Saturday and put some onions in my in-n-out. Regretted it immediately. So much unpleasant burning feelings.
By the time we had.... recovered, neither of us were really that hungry for dinner from all the liquid we drank in a futile attempt to stop the burn (turns out milk products and bread do not work for onion burn like they do for hot sauce). We got Elias to do the "drink something from a straw out of a bag" challenge to have him eat more and decided that that evening, we would go up to Stanford to do the cluster of challenges there since by then he had finished his work.
On the way up we stopped at CVS and knocked out the fitness challenge of doing fitness things (jumping jacks, push ups, etc) on video in the grocery store and got access to a bathroom and then headed over to Stanford and took pictures of the Gates of Hell, the cactus garden, a jade bush, and recorded a short ghost story at the masoleum in the pitch black.
Not going to lie, that was a little freaky. It helped to have a high powered light that I clutched basically the whole time. Taking pictures at night with the flag though, was a little bit of a challenge because our cameras were definitely not that great and it was sort of rainy.
We ended up skipping out on the papua new guinea statues because our team was just was too tired at that point and hungry, so we went to cheesecake factory before calling it a night. We at least managed to decide on a plan for the next morning.
We woke before sunrise to go to a park and jesus. It was early. But it was so worth it! Sunrise was AMAZING. But also the start of a ridiculously long day. By the time we finished - after 6 because they had allowed for submissions to keep going past the normal cutoff time of 6pm due to server issues - I was ridiculously exhausted. Like. So. Damn. Tired. Elias and Betsy wanted to burn things because a few of the challenges involved a campfire, but with the rain and the distinct lack of fire pits open at all hours, it was a little difficult to do that without planning beforehand.
Overall, Questival was amazing fun, and the best part about it, is that you can really scale it to however intense you want it to be. We weren't really that intense. We had something of a plan - my map, with all the destinations pinned on it so that we could do things when we were in the different areas - and I think we were trying to go for quantity. Judging was super confusing, especially since it was all sort of based on the reactions from other teams and it wasn't clear when the judging stopped, but it felt a little bit like Whose Line, where everything is made up and the points don't matter (at least, until it got to the judging but still).
Those six/4+ person teams though, definitely benefit from things like division of labor. There were a bunch of things that we definitely could have split better.
Let's talk strategy.
Of course, Questival is the kind of event that can be as intense or as chill as you want it to be.
I'm the kind of person who likes to organize things. I got a spreadsheet and google maps together before the whole thing, but that was with only a limited time. The spreadsheet was to keep track of the time during the day since there were certain check in challenges that were only at certain times and we didn't know how long they would take. After having done a Questival, I think it would have been worth the time to create a spreadsheet of the different tasks we could do together, were location agnostic, and also to build out some sort of schedule.
Questival officially starts at 7:00pm, about an hour after check in. However, this is only when the app will let you start to upload your videos or photos to the challenges. So if you really want to cram as much as you can into the short 24 hours that is Questival (after 6pm Day 2 you're not allowed to submit any more, unless the app/servers have massive problems and they extend it for another hour) (ie, if you want questival to really be 24 and not 23 hours), plan ahead. Buy materials ahead of time. Figure out what is close to what. Figure out what you want your team's strategy to be. Upload everything asap - the sooner you upload things, the higher chance you have of it getting reviewed and rated. There are also sprints - windows of time where I think they give awards out for thhe most? (or the most liked) uploads of a certain category. But either way, basically, I think it's fairly safe to assume that things that make for a worse picture/video are better off doing at the end of the competition because they're not really going to have much time for people to rank them anyways.
Having a strategy meeting is an absolute must. Having multiple working phones - both with cell service and at least one GPS phone - is necessary if you want to do things efficiently. Because we had to drive around a lot, whatever phone that was being used for GPS couldn't really be used to also upload things at the same time. Car time was valuable time to be uploading and captioning submissions as you ran from one place to the other. Being able to share the picture/video between multiple phones so that you could have at least two things uploading at the same time was also incredibly helpful. For this, you also need to make sure passengers in the car know what they're supposed to be doing and can help out.
I'd also highly recommend having two drivers. As the only driver in our group (since not everyone could drive my car) I was basically stuck driving the whole time and didn't really get the chance to see submissions, since all time outside the car was basically spent doing the challenge itself. At least if there are two people, you can switch things up and it's a little more fun that way for the person who has to drive IMO.
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