osu! UCI
Info
osu! UCI was a school club I started with a few friends dedicated to playing and discussing osu!. It's grown leaps and bounds from a mere 3 members to many times that, and hopefully it's still going strong. We've done a lot of things from having weekly meetings, making beatmap projects, hosting tournaments, and organizing group trips.
- Facebook: osu! UCI
- Website: www.osuuci.com
- Site repository (Older): osuUCI
- Site repository (Old): osuuci2
Background
So before I get into the meat of this project, I think it might be a good idea to remind myself not to get too caught up in the details of things. I just recently graduated, if that's the right term, from osu! UCI, and after spending a year hanging out with the club, there's way too much to talk about.
Usually I'm very carefree about my write ups and just talk about whatever I want. It'll probably end up like that no matter what I say now, but I at least want to try and tell myself here to make a distinction about where to cut the line for content. The osu! UCI crew and I have had a lot of fun adventures, some club related and others not. I'll do my best to focus on more of the club stuff, but it's inevitable that more personal sections will spill over.
The story starts way back in November 2014. At the time, I wasn't actually actively playing osu!. osu! and I have had a pretty interesting relationship up to that point. I was first introduced to the game a long time ago as a PC rhythm game that had a lot of custom maps that you could download for free. No one in particular showed it to me. It was something I probably just found going through YouTube related videos.
osu! had a lot of the songs that were Japanese and anime related, perfectly up my alley. The free nature was a big attraction for me since I didn't/couldn't really go out and buy a lot of games, a restriction influenced by my parents. If I could find and play free games, I would. On top of that, I had a pretty crappy computer, but osu! could run fine on it.
But while music-wise, the game really appealed to me, I didn't play it for long in my first go at the game. It's tough for me to get into single player games, and with a game as skill intensive and stressful as osu!, I got discouraged playing it very quickly. I didn't really have any friends playing osu! at that time. There was definitely a fairly active community surrounding the game, but I didn't tend to engage in online circles.
I did try and introduce a couple friends to osu!, and a few of them and I played in random lobbies for a little bit, but they eventually moved on to other games. After they left, I didn't think it was worth my time playing the game much further. I liked the variety of music for sure, but the frustration and difficulty playing outweighed the fun, so I said my first goodbye.
It wouldn't be until about a year later that I got back into the game. I think I was watching BoxBox's stream a bit of osu!, and I didn't realize until that you could play with a tablet. Until then I thought you could use mouse. I was also doing a lot of digital art at the time, so I was coincidentally getting very familiar with my tablet already. I immediately tried out osu! again when I realized you could use tablet.
This time I stuck around osu! a little bit longer. I played a ton more than before and improved a huge amount. I had a lot of fun playing with a drawing tablet, which was quite an unusual experience since I didn't know a single other game where you could play with a tablet like that. It was a good pairing to my drawing, and it was funny how the two supported each other. I wouldn't exactly say improving at one would help the other, but part of me wants to hope there was some carryover.
By this time I was in my freshman year of college, and I was able to meet a lot more osu! players at UCI. Some people were new players I introduced to the game. My dorm hall had a couple people who were interested in it, and my roommate, Victor, started playing a bit as well. I also met someone in the Video Game Development Club, Valentin, who was a lot better than me and that I occasionally played with.
This time I had a more straightforward goal to reach for, namely improving at tablet and pushing myself to play harder and harder songs. It helped that I had a bigger support group to draw from and more people I could play and talk with. However, the same sinking feelings returned. Frustration eventually overpowered the fun I was having, and with my friends leaving the game one by one too, I too dropped out after maybe 6 months of playing.
I don't really have the motivation to dedicate myself to a single player standalone game without the support of a community. And with most of my friends leaving osu!, I wasn't left with much of a group to play with. At the time, I didn't know of any other circles or affiliations that I could interact with, and I don't know if I was particularly comfortable chatting up with strangers online either. In the end, I didn't look to play with anyone else and instead just moved onto/back to other games. League of Legends, ye ye ye.
It wouldn't be until November next year that an odd chance occurrence would bring osu! back to me once again in what would eventually become this weird club. Early that month or maybe late October, I was approached by Justin via email asking to meetup. Justin was an underclassman of mine back in high school at Archbishop Mitty.
I didn't think we knew each other too well since we were in different grades. Actually, the first reply I gave to him was something along the lines of "lol who are you." I may have barely vaguely remembered him, but I didn't want to make any assumptions. Apparently he knew me back in high school from the anime club, which I had a pretty interesting history with.
For the first three years of high school I didn't join or attend the anime club at all. I'm not really sure why. Part of it was because I was initially involved with sports, so I didn't really have time after school to do other activities. I guess I was also somewhat apprehensive about spending time in clubs with a lot of people I wasn't familiar with. None of my friends, some even who were big anime watchers, regularly attended the events either.
It could be that I was a bit pretentious. I watched a ton of anime over high school, and a lot of the shows the club put on I already saw or didn't want to watch. Honestly, I'm not really sure. Maybe I just subconsciously hated interacting with people or something. Regardless, I didn't reach out to the club until my senior year.
When I hit my fourth year, I was planning on continuing my lack of participation to the end, but a few things changed my mind. I thought I'd try and finally get involved with something since I stopped doing sports then and spent my junior year basically decaying away into nothing. I also happened to be in a class with the anime club's supervising teacher.
Damn, I actually forgot his name. I'm pretty sure it started with a B or something. Mr. B was involved in the club in a kind of interesting way. From what he mentioned to me, he wasn't particularly interested in anime but was asked to be the adviser since he previously stayed in Japan for a bit. I don't really know his personal reasons for helping out, but I guess out of all the teachers, I'd say he was one of the better candidates.
Anyways, I don't think I was ever on great buddy buddy terms with him, but I was interested in anime, and I talked with him a little bit about joining. And then kind of out of the blue, I'm not sure if this was even before or after the first club meeting, he asked me if I wanted to work on the officer board for the club.
I didn't really expect that opportunity to come up. I intended to just go to club to casually watch some anime and maybe meet some new people. Why Mr. B wanted to promote me, I'm not too sure. I neither had any previous experience with the club nor with any leadership roles in general, so this was a bit odd.
Maybe I was pretty vocal in class or something, and he thought I showed some promise. He may have just asked because I was in my last year, and there weren't too many active seniors, if I recall, who were in the club. I thought about the decision for a little bit and decided to give it a shot.
I was confident that I had a wide breadth of anime knowledge that I could share with others, and I wanted to improve the club in any way I could. Also, this was kind of the first time someone went out of their way ask for my help in what I considered a fairly important position. I respected that and didn't want to let Mr. B down.
There were a few things I wanted to change after reviewing how the club ran activities. In the past, there were a lot of TV series that were shown, and I wanted to cut that down. We only had about a ~2 hour time slot to meet, so it was difficult to just show part of a series. Unless if the show was very short or slice-of-lifey, I don't think it was a good choice.
I wanted to increase our number of meetings, but that was more dependent on Mr. B than on us. We only met somewhat irregularly maybe once a month or two for a showing. I tried to hold alternative early sessions at maybe 7 in the morning to show short films but, kind of expectedly, we didn't get a great turnout from that so and we stopped these after a few of these.
Also, I held some marathon showings at my house. I'm pretty sure there were three of such events. Some may not be directly anime club related and just something for my friends. Ano Hana was for sure with the club, and that went really well. Aria I think was just with my closer friends, but that didn't go so well because it was too slow of show. And finally, there was a time I think where my friends and I watched all of Tengen Toppa; that was way too long but super good at the same time.
The way the anime club officer board was handled was kind of weird. In name we had like a 3 or 4 way split leadership, but I was mainly the one at the top pulling all the strings. I strong handed a lot of the things I wanted done, which included club functionalities and movie picks. I didn't really collaborate much with the other officers, half because they were kind of care free/submissive, and half because I don't know if I really wanted to get along with them.
I mean, deep down they were probably alright people, but man were they incredibly immature and annoying on the outside. A lot of my friends didn't want to come to club because some members were always super annoying, and that included these officers as well. In a lot of our showings, they always just like randomly talked or yelled. It was super distracting, and it made putting on more serious shows extremely difficult.
I even sent a super pissed off email to Mr. B saying that this situation was unacceptable. I almost dropped out of the board because I couldn't handle it anymore. I should have probably said something to the other officers directly, but I don't know if I could contain myself. After repeated warnings they still continued their behavior, so I don't really know what I could do. At the very least, I survived to the end of the quarter.
I tried to show some more film variety in the club. You know, try and move away from that potato salad Ghibli and show some more hipster stuff. Some of my choices were rejected because they were too R-rated. I say too R-rated because we still had some R-rated shows, but there were some that Mr. B put the strict foot down on. Just off the top of my head, the shows I picked: FLCL, Eve no Jikan, Bakemonogatari, Sword of the Stranger, Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuiokuhen, Tekkon Kinkreet, Mistudomoe, Redline, Summer Wars.
Some of the posters I made for some of the showings were pretty cool
It was a good year, despite the hardships, I definitely preferred being on the board and making decisions rather than just casually watching. I tried a lot of things, some that worked and a vast majority that didn't. On top of what I mentioned, I set up a club forum at one point on our school website and also did things like T-shirt sales. Both took quite a bit of time, and both failed horribly, but it was all a good learning experience, right?
Man, super cringe remember this all now
2012 was a dark year in my life
The club gave me a valuable experience as a leader/officer, and it helped me meet a lot of new people, Justin included, who came to a lot of the movies and to even to the Ano Hana marathon I think. Weirdly enough though, it actually pushed me away from joining UCI's anime club, for various reasons.
The biggest one was that I just couldn't handle the format they had for their weekly meetings. To kind of emulate a weekly watching pattern, they watched one episode of like half a dozen series each week. I couldn't stand a like that. If I liked a series, I usually marathoned it through as fast as possible. I hate wasting time watching other things or waiting. This is also why I don't watch ongoing shows.
And at this point I think I became even more hipstery in my tastes and just looked down on other people's preferences even more. This probably still continues to this day. I can't really help it. So outside of hating the format of UCI's anime club, I to some extent despised the people within it too. I'm a sophisticated weeb with fine tastes that does not associate with the lower people, thank you very much.
Instead, all of my time went into the Video Game Development Club at UCI that I joined in my first quarter. My story with VGDC is a bit strange as well. I wouldn't say I'm into video games that much necessarily. I liked playing multiplayer games, but I never really invested myself fully to one and got to the max level or to a high rank in any of them. Single player games I didn't have a lot of interest in, simply because I preferred multiplayer interaction.
Great people
I wasn't really thinking about video games down the line as an actual career path. It was just something I enjoyed in my free time, but not really something I was super serious about. What I was considering then was going into some creative avenue. I really loved drawing, and I was practicing a lot at this time.
If things were a bit different, and I was more assertive, I may have been an artist right now. But due to pressure from my parents, I cut out the art path and I guess as something of a compromise, I chose my second interest, computer science with an emphasis on game development. My parents really hated video games, so they tried to get me out of that focus too. To be honest, maybe they're the reason why I've never truly invested myself in games. Subconsciously in the back of my mind, there's something there that tells me that games are bad.
Welp, you make trade offs. One of the things I probably couldn't stand being an artist or would at least have to work hard to overcome is the loneliness aspect. I think very few artists work with others on any projects. Most of what they draw is fully done by them and them alone. There's probably some back and forth talking about general concepts and designs with others, but at the end of the day it's you sitting at a desk trying to put your imagination into form.
Making video games was a lot different. Especially in small groups, everyone was invested together to trying to finish an end product. Whether you're an artist or a programmer or something else, you had your role. Since very early on, I looked for these collaborative opportunities, and I even started my own video game project, First Reality, with a group I put together in high school.
In short, FR was a horrible failure that traumatized me pretty severely for the next year and maybe a bit to this day. It really made me rethink creative video game projects and how difficult they were to run and get going. I wasn't sure if I really wanted to continue doing it, but I gave it a second and maybe final chance going into VGDC.
I'll spare laundry listing the projects I've worked on in VGDC. You can find all of them scattered in the projects section of this site. In short, as you can see from the large number of them, I found my resting place here. I can't say these projects haven't had their own disasters rivaling FR, but they were mishaps I learned to cope and deal with. It was super awesome to work with teams on different projects, and I really valued the collaboration process above everything else.
Instead going into any projects, I'll talk more about my personal position and growth in the club. I came into the club with a somewhat niche role as an artist. UCI's arts program isn't that great and their digital arts program is pretty much nonexistent, so VGDC has very few artists compared to programmers.
Compared to the other artists of the club, I relatively had a lot of experience already since I was pretty familiar working with Photoshop. For the first year and a half I worked hard to improve my art skills. I basically didn't touch programming at all outside of my classes since art was so needed on projects.
I started hanging out a lot with the art department of the club, attending a lot of workshops and art jams. Through these, I got familiar with a lot of the art members and officers. Eventually, my consistent dedication to the club and work ethic paid off, and as the old art officers were graduating or leaving, I was promoted to take their place.
I think I did an alright job. Compared to the other club departments, the art department struggled a bit more because we had a lot less members. A lot of our regular attendees also eventually went to other clubs on campus, partly due to my suggestion. We had some digital artists come into VGDC who weren't necessarily that big on sprites or games, so I pointed them to the Animation Anteaters and Comic and Manga clubs.
I don't think I did a great job holding everyone in the department together. I would say I'm not the greatest peoples person in general and didn't interact as much with the members as I could have. But I did I think put in at least the effort to show my commitment to the club. Weekly art jams and art workshops were always held by me regardless of the number of people that came. I tried to make an example of consistent practice; this was the period where I always kept a sketchbook on hand and always found time to practice and draw.
Because VGDC was broken up into separate departments, we had a lot of officers handling a lot of different things. Our general officer meetings were always somewhat hectic because there were so many involved and a lot of things going on. I think I did fine contributing to whatever we needed to discuss, but I didn't take much responsibilities outside of the art department.
Eventually, I started to step away from the art side of things and just become a smaller officer of the club. It wasn't really difficult transitioning out because there were other capable art officers around me ready to take over, so I felt like the department was in good hands. A lot of things factored into my decision to step down. The main reason was because I decided to not fully pursue art anymore.
I was a very conservative artist. I didn't really like to try new things without making sure my foundations were solid. That's why I never touched 3D, even though that's a huge component to games. Additionally, I was never a great colorer or shader either. Until I had my basic lines, form, and perspective down, I didn't want to divert my attention elsewhere.
After spending a year training myself, looking up online resources, taking some classes, and practicing in my free time, I wasn't improving at a rate I wanted to. In fact, as I kept on doing it, art began to feel physically and mentally draining, and I didn't have the motivation to push myself further. I sacrificed a ton of my free time to try and improve myself, but I wasn't making progress I was happy with. Unless if I went to art school or dropped everything to concentrate 100% on art, I didn't think I could make it.
So I put art aside and focused my time on programming and other activities. I started to code a lot for projects, whether that'd be on my local game jams with my friends or on long term projects. I also looked more into web development, writing the first iteration of this site. Art opportunities undoubtedly popped up here and there, and I didn't mind doing a bit of it for the odd project, but it was no longer my focus.
This brings us pretty close to November of 2014. Yeah, sorry for going on some tangents here and not talking about osu! UCI in this osu! UCI post. I even tried to remind myself not to do this kind of thing, but I guess there isn't really helping it. I thought about skimping out on a lot of these previous club experience details, but in the end I think these points of my life are quite important. The high school anime club and VGDC are my biggest influences in shaping osu! UCI. They explain where I'm coming from and where my knowledge/skill set are born from.
So let's get on with the story. Justin sent me an email at the end of October saying he wanted to meet up. After realizing I knew him from anime club, I said sure, I'd love to show him around. I don't know how much I'd be able to him out with, but it was always nice to catch up with people from back home.
He offered to buy me lunch in exchange, and I couldn't say no to that. In the meeting, he also brought along his roommate that he was old friends with from NorCal, Brad. I don't really remember what we talked about during our meet up, but because they were both Computer Science related, I'm pretty sure I mentioned VGDC and how it helped me meet a lot of people and work on a lot of awesome projects. They didn't seem quite keen on making games, so I don't think they planned on joining, but I showed them around the club anyways.
On a busy day
Specifically, I brought them into the club room where I usually hung out and introduced them to some people. Then, we went on one of the lab computers to show them some of my and VGDC's past projects. One of the things installed on the computer was osu!, which I think I added to the computer a year before or something, so I mentioned some of my past history with that. And to my surprise, it turned out that Justin and Brad were actually really into the game.
I was really excited because they were pretty high level too and very active in the game, so I wanted to get together as soon as possible and play with them some time. They were the first people I knew that played the game pretty much exclusively, and I thought with their support I could maybe stick to playing osu! again once more.
Getting back into the game felt awesome. I had a small group of friends now who I could constantly talk about the game with, and that motivated me to play the game more. To organize our lobbies and members a little better, we kept in touch through a Facebook group. I added Justin, Brad, and a few old friends I remembered who touched the game once or twice. This was the start of osu! UCI.
The next few important people to join this group would be Haoming and Jason. I'm not sure how I knew Haoming, but apparently he was on my friends list when I came back, even though I didn't remember who he was. My guess was that somehow he found me via the nearby filter a year ago, and I had him added ever since. He would actually be the top player of our small group for a while, sitting at somewhere around 4,000 rank. Jason I wasn't familiar with, but he was close friends with Haoming, the one who originally dragged him into the game.
So with roughly half a dozen number of people now, I wanted to have more structured meetings with everyone and possibly meet in person as well. That was what pushed us to become an official UCI organization. My goal then and going forwards wasn't really looking to use the org as a chance to expand our club that much, or at least I wasn't. I just wanted some place to meet up with this small group each week and hang out with these odd friends I met through this odd game.
I think that was the right mentality for us going forwards. osu! is not a very well known game, so I don't think outreaching and trying to pull in new players was a great or feasible idea. I just wanted to use this org as a chance to do more events with my friends together. Even if people dropped out and we lost members, as long as if we had a core number of people in the club who just wanted to play osu! together, I was fine with that.
We were actually really lucky with our timing. We decided to try and form the club late in fall quarter, and if we missed a window of something like one week, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be allowed to make our club for the rest of the year. But we filled out whatever we needed, paid $50 to some suspicious office on campus, attended some shady meeting, and we were pretty much good to go.
Winter quarter was an interesting experience. It was tough for us to gain any traction pulling in members because we started so late into the year. If we planned this before fall quarter, we probably would have gotten a ton more exposure at the fall club fair, but because we missed that, there weren't too many new events to get our name out there.
But despite that, we still picked up a few people from word and mouth and friends. I was drifting around in VGDC and telling everyone about the new club. A few people were interested, though not many joined and stayed. That was still fine though, it's just a matter of getting the word out that we existed.
It turns out that freshmen were a great target to get more people. I was working on a VGDC game during the quarter, and a few freshmen from there were interested in osu!. Some of them joined, but the more important thing was that a lot of people from their dorms were exposed to us too, and a few of those visited us.
We tried a lot of different things that quarter, some worked and some that didn't. Taking a lesson from VGDC, we held weekly in person meetings where we played locally with each other. We made a big mistake in our room selection, picking a room with standard table-chairs. I initially chose the place because it was close to the Computer Science areas of campus and also nearby the VGDC club room.
Damn these suck
These table-chairs were very impractical to play osu! on. I, with my big tablet, needed something like three table-chairs tetrised together to play comfortably. In the future, we would go through the entire class room directory looking for rooms with long table and applying for those. After using the long tables now, I think it's safe to say there's no way we could go back.
On top of weekly in person meetings, we also had weekly officer meetings to plan the weeks and make powerpoint slides. These officer meetings was also something I picked up from VGDC but enforced more rigorously. They were very helpful to me for discussing and scheduling. I really dislike planning things online and always prefer face to face interaction. I don't know. It's just something about in person contact that makes deciding and discussing things many times easier.
On top of these two types of meetings, we had an online session for the general club on Saturdays where we played for a pretty long stretch of hours together. These were really fun for me since I got to grind out games with others, pick up new maps, and get to know people better. But as the weeks went by, attendance for these dropped pretty heavily, and I think now with myself not manning them anymore, they're not being held anymore.
To fill our general club meetings with activities, I wanted to plan something special for each week. When we were starting off, we didn't really have anything interesting to theme our weeks on. The best we could do was have a lot of tutorial type sessions where we explained mechanics of the game to everyone. This turned out to be pretty useless since most of the meeting goers that came were much better than us and the officers already, and they probably could teach us more than the reverse.
We've since stopped any such kind of tutorial lesson. I still think they're still pretty useful on some odder subjects like mapping, skinning, or storyboarding, but I can see how these things aren't applicable to everyone, and it can be a waste of time. Usually if someone had a question, its just resolved on the side after general announcements.
In the future, we've discovered and tried a lot more different activities to fill the time. We've had outings to Round 1, anime movie nights, people bringing in their consoles, some osu! celebrity appearances, among other things. Some people played cards on the side, and most of everyone looked forward to eating dinner together afterwards.
For most of the winter and spring quarter, Justin, Brad, and a few other freshmen provided swipes for everyone to get into the dorm commons. Good stuff. Free food was a great club attractor, so I'm sure maybe some people came exclusively for that. I think we cut our swipes really close and by the end of the year we barely just ran out.
On the creative side of things, I pushed all our members to make beatmaps that quarter. Even myself, with zero experience, took a stab at it. Mapping a beatmap was intersting. It's a lot of tedious fun. You can read more about my personal contribution in that quarter's map compilation and a little bit of the other projects under BARKLEYNO!.
As for my personal play, I started to play a lot more consistently, though not a lot. I don't think I've ever broken 1000 plays a month, which someone actively playing could reach fairly easily. osu!'s just not something I can throw too much time in at once, and that's probably why I made slow progress in the game. It was still easy for me to get frustrated and discouraged, but the club meetings interspersed in each week helped refresh me and remind me that we're all in this hopeless dump together with no end in sight.
I don't know if I want to talk too much about my personal osu! progress in this project post, but I guess I'll try and say something here and maybe leave it at that. I have a very weird play style, due to a lot of things. If you just see it for the first time you might think it's pretty bizarre and unplayable, but I think I at least have some okay reasoning to back my style up.
I play full area on a very big tablet size with something I call a thumbs up grip. This grip is basically holding the pen in a fist with the exception of the thumb outstretched. The reason I do most this was because I came from a digital art background. I started playing on a fairly big tablet, and that was what I got accustomed to.
At one point I did get frustrated at how I couldn't reach things fast enough, so I did play around with my tablet size. After playing like this for a while though, I decided to switch back to the max size, mostly due to the fact that I hated going back and forth between small and big areas and messing my muscle memory up when I was respectively playing or drawing. It seems this was more a problem of practice than anything, because over time I was able to keep up.
One of the reasons why I can get away with using a large tablet area was because I tried to not use my wrist at all when playing. This was something ingrained to me from drawing, where I was trained to use more of my arm muscles than wrist muscles. The reasoning was that using your arm/shoulder more gives you a greater range of motion, and you're more heavily restricted if you solely use your wrist.
A lot of players have trouble with large areas because they hold their pencil in some kind of writing grip and use their wrist for all their motion. This can make reaching some parts of the tablet almost impossible without using some arm muscle. To compensate, a lot of players use a smaller area. I'm not saying smaller is bad per se. There're definite trade offs. With bigger you have more room for error since more physical area corresponds to more screen area. With smaller you can move faster and keep your stamina.
I too started with a writing grip since that was what I was most natural with. But as I played over time, I started to notice some odd things with my hand. Maybe it's something subconscious, but I felt like I was using some wrist and hand muscles without my control to reach notes, and I could feel my hand twisting awkwardly and ruining my built up muscle control. So to dedicate myself fully to only using arm, I switched my grip to a fist to restrict wrist movement. The thumbs up doesn't really mean anything actually, is just to keep my spirits up struggling in the darkest of times.
Naturally, I don't drag my pen, something that a lot of people inexperienced with tablets may be trapped into. Maybe trapped is a bad term, but I'm pretty heavily against dragging. Without protection, it destroys your tablet surface and certainly destroys your pen nibs. Putting a protective cover on wasn't really a convenient solution for me too since I needed to have accurate pressure sensitivity for my pen while drawing.
I don't even think it's possible for me to drag because I have to move so quickly and cover so much ground on my larger area. My drag queen friends claim that dragging does improve stability, but I can't say much since I've always hovered. If you think about it, it's pretty impossible to do digital art efficiently while dragging.
A last point to note about my play style is that my tapping hand only alternates. This is a little unusual since it feels more natural to single tap and have a dominant finger. I started out kind of always wanting to alternate. This is definitely a little weirder to play, but I wanted to do it for a few reasons.
The first was because I was afraid of straining my hand and fingers. I knew a lot of people who've had a ton of problems with carpal tunnel syndrome or other hand pains and injuries, and I wanted to avoid that as much as possible. Alternating was one way to help the problem since it reduced stress on a single finger. Although, in my case because I didn't really play that much at all, I don't think I'll ever run into too many hand problems, at least from osu!. Still, my livelihood comes form my hands, so I want to keep them safe.
The second reason was that I imagined it would help me keep rhythm better. I find that my fingers have a lot of problems with mashing and overstreaming. I lose track of what I'm pressing, and I'm notoriously well known for being a horrible accuracy player. Forcing myself to alternate in my mind should solve this problem to some extent, as I have to tell my fingers to constantly press back and forth.
It's taken several iterations of alternating to help guide me on the right track, but I think my most recent style is going the correct direction. Within alternating itself, there are some variations that people use. On jumpy, single tap sections, some people choose to alternate to help relieve stress on a finger, and on a stream section, they always start it with a dominant finger. I tried this but still found myself still having problems.
What I ended up going with was alternate holding, as I call it. Basically, every time I press a key, I try and hold it down fully. This way, it prevents myself from accidentally pressing that key again, and I'm forced to use the other key on the next note. I notice my mistakes more easily like this, and I feel more control of my fingers. I'm definitely not up to my old form using this style, but I think I'm improving properly.
To be honest, the best solution for me would probably be to just play easier songs and build up better consistency and accuracy from those, regardless of style. But I'm in the habit of always trying to challenge myself and play harder songs. That's probably why I have so many mashing problems. I guess at some point I'm going to need to sacrifice some fun factor and grind some games if I want to be a better player. I think if I consistently play more with my current style though, I'll get over my current skill wall.
I think that's a pretty good summary. I suppose the only other thing to mention is my rank growth. With the help of a lot of Tillerino and some luck, I went from something like 80,000 rank at the start of the club to a little under 20,000 a year later. Most of my plays have horrible accuracy, and my total accuracy is sitting somewhere around 90%. In lieu of fixing my problems, I'm starting to decay quite a bit in order to address my issues.
Oh yeah, it's worth also saying something about my skin. I use a custom skin I've been modifying on my own. It started off as an edited version of aesthetic, but it's been stripped very, very heavily of away of features and made as minimalistic as possible. I removed numbering, slider ends, any extra pop ups, and added in some coloring. It's not something I would recommend for people, but it's what I'm used to now.
The last thing to mention for winter quarter was All Systems Go. All Systems Go was a LAN event that the club was invited to help out on. How they found us, I have no idea. We were only a few weeks old then. I thought the club was super underground still, but I guess we making some kind of name for ourselves. If I had to venture a guess, maybe they found us when browsing through the organization directory.
If I recall correctly, the organizers wanted us to host an osu! tournament at the LAN, but after some discussion with the officers, we decided to not hold a tournament and just have a BYOC free play area for the whole day. We did this for a couple reasons. The main one was that we had no experience holding tournaments, so we weren't sure of formats or map pools to choose from. Plus, we didn't know if we would have enough people show up at the event, so we didn't want to hold a lopsided tournament for a few people.
The event itself wasn't super interesting. It was actually pretty tiny, and I think the organizers expected a lot more people. I don't know what happened. Someone told me the marketting team or something didn't do their job properly. I didn't really care the situation though since I wasn't involved in the upper organization that much. We the osu! club just had our own separate private area and invited people to play with us.
The free play went alright. It was like any of our other online lobbies, so it didn't feel too different. Haoming brought his whole computer setup over, so I guess he went all out. Originally we were scheduled for something like a really long 8 hours of play, but we can only play so much before getting tired or running out of songs, so we left early.
What the LAN was really good for, however, was getting our name out there. A lot of people never heard about us before, so they were interested in what we were up to. In particular, we attracted the attention of the dude named Jimmy who would later become a big part of the club. He showed up to our next couple meetings and was really interested in helping out, so by the end of the quarter, he was promoted to be an officer.
Finally, the last thing we did for that quarter was handle T-shirts. I really wanted to sell some merchandise for the club and have some osu! UCI swag to carry around. T-shirts seemed like one of the more simpler things to do, and it was something I had minimal experience from the anime club. I requested some shirt designs from our members early in the quarter, but we only got one design, made by Haoming's "friend" that we've never met or will meet. I liked the design a lot, and it looked great, so we used it for everything: our T-shirt, logo, all over our social media.
I wasn't 100% sold doing T-shirts yet and also this soon, but that changed when a half off deal came across us on vistaprint, one of the T-shirt selling sites I was looking through. I didn't really consider local options, though that probably would have been the cheapest. With vistaprint's half off deal, T-shirts were about $7, and that's roughly what we charged our members.
Turns out charging this low would almost screw us over because I forgot to account for shipping. I think in the end we barely didn't break even selling all of the shirts we had. This would set the trend for the club's horrible financial practices, where it would always pretty much leave us in some debt, and myself taking up most of that cost. Even with some donations here and there, I'm certain I shouldered a good chunk of money upon my leave.
That pretty much sums up the winter quarter. In between the winter and spring quarters, I spent a lot of time working on the osu! UCI website and handling social media. A big part of operating costs came from the site, but I was willing to field everything on my own. Renting the server was like $5 a month and the domain was about $1 a month. To make the website, I basically just copied what I had of my old personal website and restructured some things to my liking. I also fixed up our social media and hooked everything together onto the site.
In terms of social media, there was the Facebook group we started off with. There was also a Google Drive to keep track of files and slides. We had a Twitter that we didn't really use, but it was our public form of contact. Over break I added in a Mumble server that was put side by side with our web server. I also made a Twitch account since I think a few of us were interested in possibly streaming in the future.
We also had a club group chat to socialize between members. Our first version of this used Skype since that was what we used for VoIP early on as well. Conveniently, it saved all our conversations. Next, I tried to solely use Mumble, which I AFKed in all the time, but it didn't catch on with the rest of the members. After Mumble died, we now use a split between Discord for VoIP and some messages and also a really, really active Facebook group chat.
Just with the nature of our group of officers, a lot of the burden was put onto me to run the club. I organized all the officer meetings and planned much of the regular ones as well. Since I had website knowledge, I was the sole person taking care of that, and I end up having to take care of a lot of social media descriptions and posts regularly too. It was a struggle to split up tasks to the others, partly because they lacked some of the skills to manage things and partly because I wanted to keep a close eye on things.
Usually we looked for the odd task or two to offload on some people. I designed a quick poster early in the quarter that I wanted to put up to hopefully get some new members. Justin and Brad handled printing and putting up the posters. Some of our posters got sabotaged, but we did have like 1 or 2 people show up because of them.
ye ye ye
At the time, we were still planning on having some workshops/tutorials early in the quarter. These were mainly beatmap tutorials, and it was Justin's responsibility to teach these since he had the most experience with the editor out of all of us. Brad I also assigned to setting up MailChimp, an email manager that VGDC used to handle all things email related.
Not everyone used Facebook regularly, so I wanted to make sure people could get emails about meetings and events. I think MailChimp's fallen out of use of the club though, kind of a shame since I think it's an important outlet we should maintain. Facebook's where the club's most active.
And last but not least, Jimmy handled tournaments. He really wanted to make a map pool and hold a tournament for us and other SoCal players. Eventually, we were able to get in touch with Press Start LAN to hold one that very quarter. It was a pretty complicated project that required a lot of time and attention. The details of that can be read within its write up.
Spring quarter kind of sucked since it's pretty much the end of the year, and it was difficult to grab many new members. More than that, we lost a couple people from our already small bunch too. The ratio of officer to casual member was over 1:1, and that only got worse when about mid quarter, Aaron and Victor decided to join the board.
Aaron was a freshman at the time that came to know us I think maybe through All Systems Go like Jimmy. He definitely played some osu!, but his main game was StarCraft. The SC2 community at UCI, however, was pretty dead from what I remember, so when he stopped by to hang out with us, he really liked our active atmosphere and small community.
By then, the club was developing into a weeaboo friend zone where all we pretty much talked about after club was how horrible each other's tastes in anime was. Aaron was one of the few exceptions to the weeb group, but I think after so much exposure to us, it's not safe to say he's safe anymore. Anyways, he had some engineering background and was interested in making two-key keypads for osu! as a side project.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aaron would later be a big asset for us in helping set up and handle Twitch streams. He and Brad understood hardware really well too, so they helped others to anything related to that. At the end of the quarter, I dropped like $800 altogether to build a new computer, and they helped a lot with that process. Brad was one who actually screwed in and put everything together for me, so much thanks to him.
Victor was someone I worked with on a lot of past projects. To be honest, I was kind of unsure of adding him to the board seeing his past track record of not doing very well on any of our past game jams together. But we didn't have a vetting process, so I didn't want to be wishy washy about a decision. We probably just added him more as a friend than for any of his capabilities. He had been hanging around the club a lot, so having an extra helping hand wouldn't be too bad.
He's kind of a weird dude in description. He's a big white guy that used to water polo. At first glance he would probably rank very low on the suspect to be a weeb list, but he just might be the biggest weeb out of all of us. I think it was him and another friend Derek that made a stupid bet to try and watch as many episodes of a year's worth of currently running anime. From what I remember, he lost in the end because he went to Canada and couldn't watch the a few series.
Victor helped us admin tournaments and perform some odd duties, but over time, his focus started to fade as he began to step away from osu! standard. Eventually, due to the pressure of doing tasks and himself realizing he wasn't as committed to the game or to the club anymore, he decided to step down fall quarter.
Losing motivation to play osu! was not something uncommon, even within the club officers themselves. Justin, Brad, Victor, and later Royce, all officers, would all at one point drop standard and move onto other modes or games. Due to this, a shift in the club started to happen towards the end of spring and probably extend to this day, where the club became less of a game club and more of a social club.
I don't how I feel about this. This was something I raised as one of my parting points to the officers. Personally, I wanted the club to focus on the game more, and I was considering asking some officers to step down if they were no longer willing to put in the time for osu!. But the club was going to go where it needed to go, and I didn't want to alter its future too much since I was leaving.
I suggested rebranding to something simpler like Rhythm UCI and maybe promote itself more as a social club. Changing brands, however, can be tricky since there's a lot of things that needed to be switched out, and this could be costly too. New logos needed to be made. Buying a new domain cost some money. All of our social media outlets needed to be updated.
At the end of the day, it seems like the club's growing by itself as a game club or not, and everyone seems fairly content with just hanging out casually with each other. So that's good, and maybe nothing needs to change. I guess osu! players are all soulless anime nerds in the end anyways, and this is the only home for us.
Speaking about anime, as one of our meeting activities we decided to start having quarterly anime nights. This time we chose Piano no Mori, a movie chosen I think by democratic vote on Facebook. I don't know why democratic voting doesn't work, but it just doesn't. This ended up being a pretty terrible movie that I think everyone that watched it can agree with me on. Okay, maybe you won't agree as harshly as me, but at least we can say that this wasn't a great movie. I don't remember many things about it I can comment on. All I remember is just a sinking feeling of regret.
Ugh, moving on for creative projects, that quarter we worked on Silicon Heart, an originally produced instrumental made for us by my friend Wesley. The big details there can be found within its write up post. I think with this project, beatmaps became my favorite thing to work on with the club. I didn't really like mapping itself, but I enjoyed the drawing and coding associated with it.
Also for creative projects were charms. This was kind of mostly a selfish desire of mine of wanting to hang some charms off my backpack and phone. I also wanted to sell something osu! UCI related each quarter and charms seemed like the next popular thing after T-shirts. We could have made the charm designs completely from scratch, but I didn't want to spend too much time working on art, and I wasn't confident in my cutesy artwork.
We were considering commissioning someone at one point to do the job for us, which would have gotten us further in debt, but luckily that never happened. Instead, we scurried the web for some cute osu! related fan art, and we found these heads made by kunknee for an official osu! competition. We asked permission from him to use them as charms, and he said it was fine. I did some minor edits to add osu! UCI in, and they were ready to be made.
Blame Brad for the focus issues
I think altogether, Justin spent about $50-60 getting them printed and shipped. I'm not sure how many we needed to sell to break even, but the problem was that we didn't get a lot of sales. Some say to this day Justin and Brad have a bag somewhere full of charms waiting to be bought. This time it was Justin that shouldered the debt, but I did buy like maybe $20 worth off him to try and sell on my own.
So after another botched merchandise deal, the officers were kind of unsure about selling things in the future. It wouldn't be until next winter quarter that would be another shirt sale, this time handled much better than how I did it. I'm pretty sure they actually made money this time.
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I really wanted to try and run the club as non-profit as possible. There have been some shady organizations on UCI campus that have profited off their members with subscription deals and the such. And then bizarre things happen like money randomly disappearing, people running off, yada yada. I didn't want to deal with that. I can't say these things still happen to this day, but I specifically didn't want to join these clubs because of the rumors.
I tried to make things as cheap as possible in osu! UCI, and if there were any debts that needed to be had, I'd shoulder them. I'm not exactly what you would call well off, but a few bucks here and there wasn't going to hurt me. I think the officers through me learned a lot about how to properly manage money, or probably better how to not manage it.
Finally, a last note to remember the quarter by was a visit from Remco/Happystick, a top 10-20 osu! player and a well known osu! streamer. He's originally from the Netherlands, but over the course of the year has been in the process of moving over to the United States to live with his girlfriend Camille/MissPetrai.
Over spring he visited us once and after he settled down, he came by again next winter quarter. Pretty cool dude. I think we found him, no wait, actually he found us, through a random reddit post we made for the club on the osugame subreddit. We might see him more regularly now since he's fairly close by.
I think that pretty much covers spring quarter. I guess as an off note, I started to develop some weird sleeping schedules during this quarter, half due to my class schedule. I went out for food in the middle night often with Jimmy for what we called 3AM donuts. Good times. There's actually a lot of places open 24/7 within reasonable driving distance. Donuts, fast food, drug stores, even a tofu soup place.
Like most clubs, we don't hold meetings over summer, though that wasn't to say we were inactive. We oversaw 2 major projects: osu! UCI Summer League and Sweet Regret. The first was a long spanning online tournament we organized for osu! players and the second was a vocaloid beatmap project. Both took the entirety of summer for us to complete and had their plenty share of twists and turns. You can read about them more in depth through their write ups.
Worth pointing out from the summer, however, was picking up Royce as an officer. I talked about this a little more in the OSL write up, but he joined our team mid summer when we needed some more hands to manage the tournament. Royce is a really cool dude. He's super chill, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen him be non-ironically angry. Or maybe he's just angry all the time, and I can't tell.
He has the best sock game
He's a chem major, sorry, chemical engineering major as I've been corrected, so he doesn't really have any applicable talents for us outside of joking to make meth for us, hehe. Nowadays with more experience under his belt, he's helping out and taking leadership over beatmap projects. Regardless of his skills, I think just his relaxed personality was a good addition to our team. He was already super active in the club, hung out with the rest of us all the time, and spoke the weeb language well, so it felt natural to add him.
That's pretty much all I can say about summer and Royce. After all this time of elaborating on points, it feels kind of weird condensing down the entirety of summer to a few paragraphs. Maybe this write up wouldn't be so lengthy after all since I already previously did all the history writing already. Although... to make the summer a little more complete, I'll talk a bit about my separate job I had over summer.
I interned at Blizzard for 12 weeks as a web developer working on internal websites. Specifically, I worked in SSE, support systems engineering. It's actually kind of funny how I ended up there because I applied for an automation intern position, got interviewed by platform services, and somehow ended up in SSE. As for what I did, I don't want to say too much about that. I probably won't make project write ups or long posts about any of my jobs, due to privacy, NDA, security, and the likes.
I will say kind of generally that I worked on databases of sorts and organized information. It's not terribly secretive or all too important, but it's better safe than sorry if I don't go into too many details. The overall experience was very educational and eye opening. I've only really worked with games before this, so working on other things, especially web, was a very different and exciting experience.
Honestly, I'm kind of surprised I got the job. I feel like maybe there was a mistake made somewhere. I wasn't really a web developer so I struggled with the test they gave me. They only gave me one preliminary test too, which is kind of odd. When I did get the job, I had to overcome a pretty big learning curve starting off because I was so inexperienced. I guess my background working on a lot of things carried some weight for me, and as the weeks went by I started to find my groove.
I'm really thankful for the experience. Blizzard is a really awesome place to work for. They treat their interns and employees really well, probably too well to be honest; I felt pampered, haha. On the flip side, mostly due to my own faults, I did feel a bit disconnected from my coworkers and cointerns. I'm admittedly not the biggest Blizzard fanboy and haven't played their games too much.
I watched a good amount of Hearthstone streams but didn't really play the game itself. I played WoW for a while but lost interest when I didn't really find a community to mesh with and felt myself decaying to death grinding alone. For the same reasons, I gave up on Diablo. Heroes I didn't have much interest for because my big MOBA of choice was League.
Which kind of explains me getting the job a little weirder. I was somewhat interested in the upcoming Overwatch, but I have a funny story with that too. This was before beta came out, and all employees could play the game while on Blizzard campus. Except I didn't play a single game over that summer as it turned out. Every day on break, I just played osu! in my free time.
It was hard balancing osu! UCI activities with work, and the latter probably suffered because of the former. When I got home from work, there were a lot of new programming terms and concepts I wanted to search up and get myself familiar with, but I couldn't a lot of extra time to study. Every night and weekend I had to be there managing the tournament or working the beatmap. Sucks. I feel sorry for my boss and coworkers, who told me I did an alright job, but I could have undoubtedly done a lot better if I freed up my schedule.
I play Overwatch quite a bit now, funnily enough. After the summer ended, a few interns stayed, and one of them, Matt, offered to link my account to his so that I could get into the beta. When the beta released, I played the game nonstop for a few nights. It was probably the most fun thing in the world, and I actually missed half a midterm because I was up all night~ playing.
Now, I'm not so sure. I don't know if it's a matter of my raw aiming reflexes not matching up or my decision making being very poor, but I feel the game can be really frustrating to play. Instant kill deaths feel so awful, and I feel powerless to stop a lot of my deaths. There's a lot of random OP stuff flying around that just randomly kills you. Maybe I'm just bad. Since the new match history wipe, I'm sitting at a great 3-17 win loss, whew.
It could be that I'm getting matched up with a lot of people who have been playing for a really long time now, and myself, not being that active, am certainly at the bottom pile. But I don't know. Most deaths just feel incredibly unrewarding, and I hate waiting around. In terms of battle arena games, I'm looking most forward to Battlerite, AKA Bloodline Champions 2 coming out. Bloodline Champions was one of my favorite games of all time, but it died off due to player inactivity and mismanagement.
I think BLC did it right. Each round only has one life, so you're constantly whittling away or regenerating health. There're a lot of opportunities for quick reflexes to reverse situations, but smart placement and usage of abilities are more important. It's very mechanically intensive, but mastering a certain bloodline feels a lot more satisfying. Overwatch is of course, a different game with a completely different genre, but it's not as much to my liking I suppose.
Well anyways, let's move away from other games and come back to the club. The summer months were very difficult for me because the relatively large amount of work I had to do. I managed both of our summer projects and had pretty big responsibilities for both. The summer league was very tedious to update each week and my art/code for the beatmap project took a lot of time to polish.
For this coming fall quarter, I wanted to offload a lot of my jobs to other officers. One side of this was to free up my time, but more importantly, I wanted to properly prepare the more junior members of the board going forwards. It would be important to make sure the others could handle things in my absence as it was going to be my last year at UCI.
Well, it would turn out that my last year would be ending early. Due to having a lot of high school AP credits, taking a lot of classes early in college, and taking summer classes, that fall quarter would be my last. If I really wanted to, I could have finished the previous spring, but I wanted to make sure my Blizzard internship would stay valid, so I finished at least a quarter after my internship.
After that, I wanted to spend some time working on this site. I thought this website would only take maybe a month or so of work, but as you can see now, another quarter has passed since I've been writing and writing my days away about all my past projects. Then the plan would be to study up on programming and look for jobs. That's still the plan, although somewhat delayed.
In the last spring I began to split up officer responsibilities, but in fall I tried to enforce these roles more heavily. Justin I started teaching HTML/CSS so he could update the website in the future. He showed some interest in learning a bit of web programming, so I gave him a few brief lessons. Brad took control of emails and powerpoints. He's our resident image memelord, and all of the slides are now just bloated presentations with a 100:1 meme to content ratio.
Typical slide
Royce I wanted to put in charge of future beatmap projects since that was what he and I worked closely on during summer. I still led the fall one, but he acted like my second shadow. Also, Royce would handle some other miscellaneous tasks like setting up Facebook events and organizing weekend lobbies.
Jimmy I wanted to take over tournament management and outreach. I also chose him to be the next president, a position I didn't really think too much about. I picked him out of seniority to avoid bias, and he would also only have a short time left before his very own graduation.
Aaron... kind of does his own thing with his two-keys. I guess he's the main guy we go to if we need any help for streaming or hardware issues. And finally, Victor, he was a special scenario since he was stepping further out of touch from the club as the quarter wore on. As mentioned before and elaborated more in the OSL post, he would be leaving the officer team at the end of fall.
For the most part, I think our past responsibilities were all split up, and I could leave without causing too much of a ruckus. Maybe the only role left as a question mark was graphic design. I had some Photoshop background so I could easily handle any logos or UI we previously needed, but the new team wouldn't have someone to fill that void. Aaron has a bit of knowledge to make some minor edits, but I doubt he has as much general knowledge as me. I suppose graphics aren't too big of a deal. The team knows quite a few friends who could help out if it came down to it.
It was difficult for me to judge how much control I should command over fall quarter. If times were different, I probably would have done less of the responsibility splitting above and put more work on my shoulders. But because I was leaving soon, I wanted to leave the club peacefully and with the organization in relatively stable shape. I didn't want to make any big decisions and have the rest of the guys deal with the mess.
So the fall quarter didn't look too different from the other ones, although we did get quite a few new members coming in. This year, we actually made it to the club fair, where I think we did a pretty exciting job getting new people interested in us. A lot of our new members stayed on, and even now in the winter quarter, the club's numbers have grown larger as word of mouth traveled and osu! players from all over the area now come visit.
The biggest two events we held were, similar to summer, a tournament and beatmap project. I've written up posts for them, which you can find at respectively osu! UCI Fall League and I'm Just an Average Magical Girl, Sorry.. They both had their share of ups and downs, but they were neverfailing fun to be a part of. We did a swell job.
The first few weeks were pretty hectic since we had a pretty large influx of members. A lot of new freshmen joined us, some who knew us a long while now. Kenny is the first such person that springs to my mind. He played the whole way through our summer league. He's a mouse player that was the top player of the club at one point.
Other members actually heard about us through reddit. Jimmy occasionally writes posts on the osugame subreddit about the club and what we've accomplished. Apparently there are people trying to get into UCI in four years from now so they can join us. Awesome. UCI will be the best osu! school in the world... yay...
This quarter we tried holding meetings on Fridays instead of a weekday. We thought this would be the best time when people would be free and could afford to spend a late night the club. The biggest problem with such a schedule was that the school shuttles didn't run on Friday night. This meant that after dinner, a group of like half dozen would have to walk 20-30 minutes back home every time.
Turns out this schedule worked out well for us. I'm not a huge fan of walking long distances, but the walks back have been small interesting adventures in their own right. The extra time we had on Fridays was really beneficial, and everyone could relax and play more after a long week. We still had dinner afterwards, though not in commons as none of the officers had free swipes anymore. Typically, we just walked down to the nearby plaza to eat. Also, a lot of people outside of UCI could join us now since they didn't have school/work the next day to worry about.
After dinner, some of us ventured to Victor's place and watched real 3D people movies. These are probably what I remember these Friday journeys the most now. This didn't really become popular until winter quarter, but man have we watched some weird stuff. We went through Grudge, Grudge 2, Ring, Ring 2 (all the awesome Americanized versions of course). A bunch of other horror movies, kung fu/martial arts movies, other bad movies. Somehow we talked ourselves into watching all of High School Musical in one sitting. Good stuff, 10/10 would do again.
We also held another anime movie night during this quarter. This time, it was a Christmas anime film that Victor and I really loved, Tokyo Godfathers. There wasn't really much of a democratic vote this time, we just forced it on the club, and I may or may not have leveraged my graduation to weigh in on the decision.
And also another new thing we did this quarter was have a trip to Round 1. Round 1 was an arcade that was pretty close to us. The majority of the club members didn't go, but Haoming used to be a fanatic that went there like I swear daily or at least weekly to blow money on IIDX. Eventually Victor got sucked along with him, except in his case it was Sound Voltex. Finally after their constant badgering, we organized a club trip there to check it out.
There were other games and activities there other than rhythm games, but since that's where Haoming and Victor usually hung out, we stayed around there. And plus, we were a rhythm game focused club, so it only made sense. It's kind of funny though because even though a lot of us played a good amount of osu! standard, that didn't really help at all in any of the typical rhythm/mania games.
I think the best part of the night was finding some osu! standard lookalike games, one that was some kind of touch based version of the game and another that involved shooting hexagons with guns. Good stuff. I think typically we'll try and have one Round 1 outing each quarter to spice up our various meeting events.
Speaking about Haoming, he's a pretty weird character. He used to be the top player of our club, but come the end of spring, he decided to give up on standard. I don't really know why. He complained about the game mode being bad for a long time now and I guess he finally snapped. Since then he had a lengthy phase with IIDX before giving that up to and now maybe(?) moving onto osu! mania. I'm not sure.
Now the top player of the club is his former standard partner he brought the game to, Jason, who's about 1.5K right now. Alright, cut, let me stop myself here though. That's enough I'm going to say about players. I don't want to fall into a rabbit hole talking about how each player joined the club and about the habits and activities each one has. I don't think this suits a project write up (although anything pretty much goes now), and there're just way too many players I've met to talk about.
And with that, I think that about concludes the year. I said some final goodbyes at the end of fall quarter as I fell from the grace of the officer team. In terms of attendance though, I guess I never really left. Even though I dropped from the officer team, I've still been attending their meetings each week, now as a casual member.
From our final fall quarter photo shoot
I think they're doing alright. This winter quarter seemed a bit rough, maybe since they're figuring out what needs to be done in my absence or they're deciding how to lead the club for the future. We didn't have a tournament or beatmap project this quarter like usual. Starting next quarter, I think they're going to restart them though. We'll see, I wish them the best.
I guess that's pretty much it. This post was pretty weird for me to write because half of it is just outsourced to other project posts. I suppose some parts of this write up won't make sense without getting the fuller picture. Hopefully a proofread and recheck through will fill in some holes. Oh yeah, and if you don't know what osu! is, you might be horribly confused. Basically, it's a game where you click circles. Alright, hoped that helped.
To close, I want to thank everyone in the club for being a part of it and sticking by me. This is probably the biggest real world project I've spearheaded and been a part of. I learned a lot from this past year and met a ton of new friends and acquaintances. And here we've proudly built a sausage fest of weebs, safe for no one, especially ourselves. Actually, now that I think about it, it's pretty weird, I wonder where all the m'ladies are. Pretty sure the guy to grill ratio here is like 100:1.
