Shear Luck

“Sheer Cold (Japanese: ぜったいれいど Absolute Zero) is an Ice-type one-hit knockout move introduced in Generation III.” — Bulbapedia

Stoicism

It’s much easier to be a stoic with a good understanding of statistics because you realize just how indifferent randomness is to who you are.

Bad things happen to you not because there’s a higher power that has a personal vendetta against you, but simply because you happen to be on the other side of luck.

Epic Fails

It’s important to fail and be laughed at because you realize that the people laughing do not actually care about you personally. If it were any other combination of audience vs failer, the audience would always laugh.

I missed about 5 spikes in interhouse volleyball against some random house the other day and everyone was laughing, but it wasn’t anything personal, we won, and that was that.

It’s not like I haven’t been embarrassed before or anything; it was much worse when I was busking in Shanghai and nobody stopped to listen. That felt like the entire city was laughing at me, so who cares about 20 nerds?

Deliver

Teaching is also quite luck-based, since whether a student understands an idea is somewhat up to probability based on their background, mood, and various other factors.

I was at a middle school’s science night attempting to teach text compression through repeated phrases like “UMBO” in “WUMBOJUMBO” and there were two high schoolers who could not understand the lesson, but a five-year-old who got it immediately without much explanation.

Points of Failure

I finished interviewing for a company last week and I’m not sure when the results will come out, but regardless of the outcome, I know that it can go either way.

So, even though I can’t completely avoid the stress, I am prepared for things to go either way. Taking a wider view, my future will be better than the present whether it’s a rejection or an offer.

Winner’s Curse

Some of my friends who play Genshin Impact decided to host a random pull party where we all try to pull for a really good character called Furina.

I have pretty incredible luck in the game, as I mentioned in a previous post, and I did end up getting Furina with only 50 pity¹, so I guess my streak of luck has continued, but that may not necessarily be a good thing.

By receiving a new character, I am incentivized to play the game more and lose more time on schoolwork and other projects. This could be seen as a negative rather than a positive.

Free Stuff

I’ve noticed that my roommate E really loves free stuff, and often does things just to get free stuff but I’ve realized that nothing is truly free because it costs time to acquire it.

He’s going to spend an entire week in Washington D.C. at the end of the quarter which is a pretty bad idea since it’s literally finals week, but everything is going to be paid for by some company.

Time

is the most valuable in my opinion, along with health, and only after that, is money even in consideration. But above money is probably personal relationships.

As I learned from Civ 6, no man is an island. Not only from the achievement, but also because I would spend hours on Civ rather than spending time with my friends, which turned out to be incredibly depressing.

Down with the sickness

I became sick the night before a quiz in finance and found out about the quiz the next day and asked to be excused from the quiz, but unfortunately the policy is that we must ask to be excused before the quiz but how are we supposed to know that we are sick beforehand?

I find this very strange because it incentivizes always buying the option to miss class, which is what students seem to be doing because only 15 students show up to class.

Who is ???

The Ws recently moved into Avery House and me and J helped carry a grill up to their apartment. After that incredibly difficult lift, we were granted permission to enter the apartment and pet their cats.

I’ve never held a cat before, but they are very heavy and they are mostly fur in volume, I guess that’s how they get through tight gaps.

Footnotes

1. The pity system automatically grants a 5-star character 50-50 after 75 pulls without receiving a 5-star character. ↩