My Favorite Thing on My 22 Things List

I’m happy to say I got to accomplish one of my favorite and most looked forward to things on my 22 Things List: Visit Dawn in Charlotte!! While I’m hoping it isn’t the last time it happens before I turn 23, I’m so glad I had the chance to see my best friend and spend four lovely days with her.

After taking a red eye flight Wednesday and arriving Thursday morning, we both worked from her home for a while. I’ll admit to copping out to a quick nap in between work hours but I told myself the three hours were just making up the time difference. Because most of the jobs I’m recruiting for are on the West Coast, I could get away with a quick catnap and still be right on schedule!

The rest of Thursday we spent doing some work, heading out to a happy hour event and then grabbing some Chinese food for dinner. We were both pretty exhausted by 11:30 so it was off to bed and Friday morning was here in a blink!

We worked a little from home, as promised, and then headed out bowling. Bowling is one of those things I’m either average at or HORRIBLE. My ball pretty much looked like a raging drunk, barreling down the lanes and headed straight for the gutter. I will, however, make the point that I did not end up last in the first game. I was sandwiched between Dawn and her friend, Ivan, with a mediocre score. I also was unable to get a real strike until the last ball of the last game. I did however score three spares where the first ball was a complete gutter and then the second ball managed to hit all the pins. Strange.

Bowling shoes are both the ugliest and cutest shoes in the world.

That night, we headed to a Brazilian steakhouse for dinner. For those of you who don’t know what those are, it’s simply put: a meat buffet. The servers/cooks walk around with these HUGE skewers of meat and come and slice them for you at your table. I think I must’ve eaten a whole cow. I also took it upon myself to ask each server a unique question. Some of my favorites include: “Is that made from baby cows? HOW DID THEY FULFILL THEIR POTENTIAL?” and “Have you ever gotten in an accident with a customer and the knife?”

Why are all my photos cropped for Instagram? But I'm too lazy to find the originals.

After dinner, we spent a good amount of time playing Heads Up (BEST game ever) before heading out to a few bars. My favorite was a dueling piano bar where you could request songs from the pianists and if they knew them, they would play them! We of course requested “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” complete with dance team choreography and all.

Saturday I had to spend most of the morning….and afternoon recovering from the festivities of the night before. BUT it was also the night we were going to celebrate Halloween so it was imperative that I recover before 11:00PM. We went to a club and danced the night away. Our costumes as follows:

I tweeted Jeff Probst that night hoping he would put us on Survivor…alas, no response yet.

One of many blurry pictures of the night!

I think this was actually Friday night, but oh well.

New friends, top 40 music, and god awful toasts.

Sunday was bittersweet. We grabbed breakfast and it honestly wasn’t long before I had to head back to the airport. We did mange to squeeze in a showing of the Hunger Games though I’m sad I won’t be able to watch the next one with her.

All in all, a wonderful trip to Charlotte: saw the best friend, danced like there was no tomorrow, and drank every problem away (not in an alcoholic way I promise!). I can’t wait to see her again!!

Book #2: The Storyteller

During my trip to the east coast, I had a little down time here and there when I had to entertain myself while my sister went to work or during the flights. I got into a bunch of reading and finished “The Storyteller” by Jodi Picoult.

Jodi Picoult is one of my favorite authors: I’ve been slowly working through all her novels and her writing style, while predictable, is one that works. Her books usually address a controversial topic (which makes it great for book clubs) and then while working through the plot, Picoult will reveal a twist that turns the book on its head.

My sister told me I read too many sad books. I started off my 20 books with “Flowers for Algernon,” and “The Storyteller” has many heartbreaking moments. It explores the stories of a Holocaust survivor and the repercussions it has on her family, a former SS guard, and whether forgiveness is anyone’s to give. It’s told in Classic Picoult style: in multiple perspectives with each viewpoint leaving you hanging on.

The story focuses on Sage Singer, the grandaughter of a Holocaust Survivor, and her budding friendship with Josef Weber. Josef asks Sage for her word in participating a promise that seems unthinkable until he begins to reveal his past.

I don’t want to give away anymore of the story than I have to because it’s truly compelling and worth the read. I leave you with my high recommendation to read “The Storyteller” and mull over the pictures that Picoult has painted about everyone affected by the Holocaust.

jodipicoult.com

The Unofficial Survivor Themed Drinking Party

Sometimes, when I get bored, I pretend that I'm a party planner and am able to plan extravagant parties that involved ridiculous amounts of booze. Being stuck at the airport for close to an hour and a half yesterday night, I wrote up a Survivor Themed Drinking Party. If I am one day able to make this a reality, I will do it.

Survivor Themed Party (warning: alcohol involved. Copious amounts of it.)

Outdrink. Outplay. Outlast.

Send out invitations with the appropriate buff for each person. Encourage them to decorate their buffs before they bring them back to the party. (Here's a place you can order buffs)

Start with an even number of people and depending on how many you have, you can either start the game with two tribes or pretend that you’ve already merged. Encourage the two tribes to make up names for themselves: the more inappropriate, the better.

Ways to split the tribe:
• Girls vs. Guys
• Older vs. Younger
• Schoolyard pick (has anyone else ever wondered what this actually means?)
• Whether you use hashtags on Instagram or not
• Hard liquor vs. winos
• Macs vs. PCs
• Bros vs. not bros
• Trumpets vs. Bones (eh, Cal Band?)

The Hidden Immunity Idol
At any given point in the game, players may elect to try and “find” the hidden immunity idol. This is done by the following:
A hidden immunity station is set up on a table. There will be 10 shot glasses lined up and each glass is sitting atop a small box. Under one box, there will be a hidden immunity idol. In order to look under the box, the player must down the shot before looking. If you’re really persistent, you can drink as many shots as you want until you find the idol but at that point, you may forget that you have the idol, and get alcohol poisoning.
Feel free to try and find the idol at any given time and keep it as hidden as you can. As the game progresses, I’m sure it’ll be more difficult to hide.
There will also be hidden immunity idol clues given out in reward/immunity challenges. We’ll do our best to make them as cryptic as the show. Potential clues:
• The idol is hidden in the box furthest to the right (not that cryptic)
• The idol is hidden under the light rum (maybe you’re good at distinguishing the color of light rum. I personally am not.)
• The idol is hidden between the 70 proof alcohol and the 80 proof alcohol (yea good luck with that)
• The idol is hidden under some alcohol (cryptic enough for you?)

Immunity/Reward Challenges
So because this is a condensed game, it’s just easier to make reward and immunity challenges the same. Start with group challenges, and then move to individual challenges after the merge. Tribal Council will take place after every event. Also copious amounts of alcohol. Feel free to add/make up your own games. Here are some to get you started:

Group Challenges:
• Survivor Flip Cup – why not start with a Survivor themed drinking game? Start with the teams on opposite sides of the table. Engage in regular flip cup. Losing side votes off a member. In round 2, the losing team with one less member has to drink the same number of cups as the losing team. The number of cups on each side has to equal the number of people in the higher number team.
     o For example, Team A and Team B have five people on each side, Team A wins the first round. Team B votes someone off. In round 2, both teams still have 5 cups but Team B is down a person, which means someone has to drink two cups. If Team B loses again, they play the next round with 5 cups and only 3 people. If Team A loses in round 2, then both teams cut down a cup and play with 4 cups. Continue until one team has no more players.
• Three part challenges – pick a combination of three mini challenges and string them together.
o For example, the first members of a tribe need to recover 3 ping pong balls by answering three trivia questions. The next members need to sink the balls into cups. The final members complete a puzzle.
• The (mini) Great American Challenge – Each team needs to finish 5 slices of pizza, a 6 pack of beer, and a puzzle
• Blindfolded puzzle – One player is blindfolded, the rest of the players drunkenly yell at him to put together a puzzle.
• Modified beer pong – each team has ten cups set up in normal beer pong fashion. First to sink 5 wins. No re-racks, every one must shoot in rotation. Ain’t nobody got time for a full game of beer pong.

Individual Challenges:
• Landmines
• Player trivia – ask true/false or multiple choice questions about the players that you can collect from them before the party.
• Memory game – show a sequence of symbols and then the players have to repeat them back one at a time
• 30 piece puzzle – get a 30 piece puzzle and whoever completes it first gets immunity
• Survivor Rage Cage – play like regular rage cage but when your cup gets stacked, you’re eliminated from the challenge
• Categories – pick a category, go in a circle and everyone has to name something from that category. If you falter, you’re out. Potential categories:
      o Disney characters you’d like to f*ck
      o Men Taylor Swift has dated
      o Harry Potter spells
      o Mixed drinks

Rewards:
Rewards can pretty much be whatever you want. Maybe you want to reward the team with more drinks. Maybe you want to give them a clue to the hidden immunity idol. Maybe the reward is a generous gulp of water. Let your Faux Jeff Probst decide! The fate of everyone’s alcohol poisoning is in his hands.

The Merge
The merge should happen when the original number of players you have are about half. So if you start out with 20 players, merge at around 10. If you start with 10, merge when there’s 5 left. The jury is composed of players that get voted out after the merge.

Tribal Council
Because we’re condensing 39 days into essentially one day, tribal council will be drastically shortened. No worries, with the added component of alcohol, the game will be just as fun. For each tribal council, the tribe that needs to vote a member off has 5 minutes to decide who they’re kicking off. The member voted off takes a shot and can participate on the side as a cheerleader until the jury comes back to vote for the sole survivor.

The Jury
Unlike the jury on the show Survivor, the jury at the party can be as loud and as obnoxious as they like. They are not only permitted but encouraged to wreak havoc on the remaining members and engage in as much alcoholic debauchery as they would like.

The Final Vote
In the final vote, the three remaining players after the merge will have one minute to make their plea to the jury. Anything goes.
Winner gains the title of sole survivor and biggest alcoholic.

And most importantly, outdrink!

More Hulu+ Gripes

As I’ve continued on in my Survivor binge, I’ve discovered more “problems” with Hulu that make it frustrating for me to use. I’ve started using it on my AppleTV (a birthday present that I love!) but it’s difficult to get the streaming across all my devices. I guess my main comparison of the site is to Netflix and its interface but without further ado, here’s part II of my Hulu+ gripes.

Queue feature – I tried to start using Hulu’s queue feature and it’s very confusing and not at all helpful. Unlike Netflix that allows you to add full seasons of shows to your queue, Hulu+ is more geared towards new episodes and whatever is currently playing on TV. This means that the feature only adds new episodes that recently aired and only after you join and log-in. So if I want to add the entirety of season 21 of Survivor, I can’t just add the show to my queue because it’s not newly airing. Instead, I have to individually add each episode of the season into my queue. That’s 15 more clicks of the mouse than I’m willing to do. The closest thing they have to just adding the season is adding the show to my favorites. By adding it to my favorites, I can easily access the show without searching for it and it will save my spot. On my AppleTV, if I finish an episode, however, it won’t know to automatically line up the next one to watch, though it does this on the site.

Browser resize – Hulu doesn’t resize the window for viewing when you change the browser size which makes it so that your window always has to be a certain size. It makes it hard to watch things in the background and make the window smaller so you can work on something else in the foreground.

Device compatibility – After subscribing to Hulu+, you can access your account and stream episodes and movies on several devices, with a caveat, not all the shows can be streamed to your mobile devices (AppleTV included). That means I have to keep track of which shows can be streamed and which ones can’t.

Their show advertising – I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: those Hulu exclusive shows are irritating. None of the advertisings look even remotely compelling to watch. I don’t know if it’s the way they’re presented or just that I don’t see any familiar faces in them, but I find them just so annoying. I’d rather watch a car ad then these Hulu exclusive shows.

Well, there you have it, Part II of things I wish could change about Hulu. If I could get my Survivor binge elsewhere I would, but for now Hulu+ holds the treasure among the rubble.

I read a great article here about why author Simon Dumenco both loves and hates Hulu and I think he does a pretty good job of explaining the problems. I aspire to write better and this is a great example of an article and less of  paragraph-list like mine.

Hulu+

I recently started subscribing to Hulu+ (ok well my dad did) so I could binge watch old seasons of Survivor. While it only has 5 of the 26 seasons, it’ll hopefully be enough to tide me over until the new season starts.

Unfortunately, I do have some gripes about Hulu+: mostly the ads that still play despite the fact I’m paying $7.99 each month. When I want to binge on a show, I don’t want ads playing and disrupting my flow (do I sound like a terrible rapper?). It’s annoying having the ads play, especially when I’m watching something with suspense. Netflix doesn’t have that problem and I find the experience immensely more enjoyable. Hulu+ also tries to promote its own shows (their Hulu exclusive series) and while I know they need the advertising, it does not make me want to watch them. Perhaps they should’ve waited a bit more before coming up with their own shows.

Additionally, the streaming seems to vary a lot more in terms of buffering speed. If I try to do too many things on my computer and mom is streaming a video as well, the buffering shuts down.

I really shouldn’t complain – having Netflix and Hulu+ means I’m pretty much getting all the TV I need, and probably at an unhealthy rate. But if there was a choice between Netflix and Hulu+, I’d pick Netflix in a heart beat, even though it doesn’t have seasons of Survivor.

Outwit. Outlast. Outplay.

I really got hooked on Survivor last semester, thanks to my roommate. When I was younger, I don’t think I understood the logistics of the game enough to get what was going on. As a result, I liked watching the challenges, but past that, I didn’t understand what so and so was getting voted off or anything.

Now that I’ve watched a full season, I’m beginning to learn about the nuances that make good players and things that make certain players more successful than others. Ever since the last season ended, I’ve been itching to watch past seasons to observe and learn more about the show.

Luckily, I convinced my dad to subscribe to Hulu Plus. Well at least subscribe to the free trial for a week and that means I get to watch however many seasons they’ve uploaded, which looks like at least three. One of the seasons is the very first season ever of Survivor! The show is completely different from what it looks like now. I’m only halfway through the first episode as I’m typing this but there are some pretty obvious differences already:

First, the players are just tossed into the sea from a boat that they’re allowed two minutes to salvage whatever they can from. Then they had to swim the raft carrying all their stuff to the beach of the island. It looks like they could all bring a knapsack with them too with a few personal effects. The things they salvaged include crates of supplies, rat traps, fish traps and someone even brought a ukulele with them! It seems more like a game of survival than of the wit and cunning that today’s game is about.

I can’t wait to keep watching and I’ll update you on how the old seasons of Survivor are! Tomorrow my mom and brother and I are going to have tea. Like the kind with scones and stuff!