Malls are so damn pro

Yesterday night we watched mall cop. I'm really bad at doing movie reviews, so I won't attempt one. Nonetheless, after playing CTF at Tysons, this movie just seemed so epic. That probably conveys nothing, but I'd recommend you watch the movie.

Grad + ANGP

I'll actually describe these sometime in the coming week. For now, though, a quote from Lily's car just as I was getting dropped off this morning.

Lily's dad has dropped off Ellen and takes a left turn, whereas my house is off to the right ish.

Lily: Dad, Arvind's here.

Lily's dad takes an alternate route.

Lily's Dad: Arvind is so big, Lily. How could I forget him?

Two hours ago, I was frantically filling out forms online, writing essays and panicking because I had to turn in all this stuff for college housing and advising by 5. I finished, and, after saving several confirmation pages, I went to eat an incredibly late lunch. I came back upstairs and noticed all these saved pages cluttering up my desktop and I decided to move them. I opened up my school folder and realized something: I should probably stop storing these files under Colleges in my Senior Year folder. I quietly went up a directory and moved my frosh, soph, jnr, and snr year folders into a new TJHSST folder before making a new College folder. I won't lie: it hurts.

Capture the Flag - So Legit

Take note, the title of this post is not sarcastic. Lily briefly described this, but I had a lot of fun with it, so I wanted to be more complete.

First a bit of history. Whether or not he admits it, this amazing idea was borne of Ved Basu. If asked, he will claim that he was joking, but this is a farce. We were trying to figure out how to spend the evening after the last day of school (suck it, juniors =P) on Wednesday. The initial suggestion was laser tag, which is undeniably fun. However, Ved said there was a lot more to do at Tysons Corner. He started throwing out suggestions, and we ended up talking about capture the flag - not outside, but inside the mall itself. It's kinda funny, but before we started playing this, everyone in our group was like, fail, this will not work, while everyone else whom I told this idea to was like, THATS SO PRO. Anyway, no one responded to the email thread about Wednesday evening, so on Tuesday night, we opened a group chat with me, Tim, and Ved to discuss what we were doing, eventually expanding to Eric and Dwang as well. The conversation was not incredibly on topic, though I dont think the participants would be very happy with me if I revealed the chat's contents =P. In any case, we finally worked out more or less all the details except for one: what would the flag be. Tim suggested rocks (no), I suggested flags. No one liked either of the suggestions, but we promised to bring in two flags and several rocks the next day.

Thus, after school had ended on Wednesday, we piled into several cars and drove to Tysons. Tim went to pick up Alice from Oakton and meet us at the mall. Eventually, we all arrived and began to argue about how to make the game work, while me, Ved, and Renjie at least were having really dumb "who can go the farthest in three steps" competitions. Eventually we decided on the rules of the game and set out for our bases. I stopped off at Nordstrom with Chris to give his mom his backpack, which took quite a while because we're both introverts who dont like to ask questions to employees >_>.

The rules of the game:

Tysons corner is shaped like an L. We situated the two bases at opposite ends of one branch of the L (note: this does not imply that the other branch can't be used for the game). We were allowed to use both floors of the mall. The teams were:

Team Tall (or not short):

Renjie You, Jack Wang, David Kim, Chris Olund, Eric Bomgardner, Arvind Thiagarajan

Team Short + Kee Young:

Tim Hu, Alice Yeh, Ved Basu, Lily Hsiang, David Wang, Luke Cheng, Kee Young Lee

Tall had their base outside of Bloomingdale's, while Short had their base outside of Macy's. Because we didnt want to get caught and thrown out by mall security immediately, we instituted the no-running (more correctly translated as no-getting-caught) rule. No man's land was this little strip between the two bases where escalators went up and down. Flags were located on the the upper floor, jails on the bottom floor. The game begins.

Let me describe a little bit of the strategy here. There are three ways to attack Tall Base:

1. Straight on, a direct line from the Short Base. This is likely to get you killed, but is also the easiest way to the flag if you can make it.

2. Descend to the lower floor, enter Bloomingdale's bottom floor by somehow tricking the jail guards of Tall, and go up the escalator there, then try to take the flag from behind. This usually works alright as long as you play the priorities of the jail guard against him. If he's trying to catch you, try to free teammates in jail (both you and they then get a free walk back to home base). If he's trying to guard the jail, then get into the store and head on up to the flag. Of course, everyone's got cellphones, so you have to get to the flag before the people below call the people above.

3. From the outside. There are actually two ways to do this: one entrance comes in from the side hallway outside of Bloomingdale's, and if planned properly allows for easy access from behind to either the flag or the jail. This is by far the best entrance. The other entrance is at the back of Bloomingdale's, but while it allowed for easy access to the jail, its access to the flag was heavily guarded.

There are also three ways to attack Short Base:

1. Straight on. Same deal as with Tall.

2. From below, this time through Macy's. Same deal as with Tall.

3. From the outside, there's again an entrance into Macy's directly, but this has the same flaw as for Tall Base, except now the flag is guarded much more securely. However, there are now two other entrances from the outside. One of them is too far up the hallway, so it really is the same as 1, but it provides for a nice escape route. The second one is all the way up the unused branch of the L. Nobody expected it to be used, and I dont think it was, but in future games, it's likely to be pretty epic.

I'm not gonna go through each game detail by detail, because that actually would get boring. First game I was on defense, our team as a whole played a mostly defensive game, putting half their team in jail. Ved was going to free them via attack route 2, and I noticed but, being an idiot, I waved to him for the lulz, so I was no able to catch him as he ran away through escape route 3 (back of shop).

Meanwhile, dkim waited until most of their team was trying to salvage their position, and then snuck across quickly, took the flag, ducked into a tea shop, drank some tea samples, and then walked leisurely back.

Second game, we decided to play more offensive a game, but Short was playing good defense, and basically all of us minus dkim and chris were in jail (maybe Eric too, I forget). Kee Young took our flag and they won.

Third game, I decided to take attack route three, via the outside edge of the L. However, as I started running along the path, I noticed Tim and Alice doing the same thing from their side. So I ducked behind a dumpster and waited for them. At one point, I jumped out to tag them and then realized that it was some random black man, who looked at me quizzically. I apologized and went back to hiding. God I must have looked sketchy >_>. In any case, I jailed them both and then stayed at the jail guarding them. Unfortunately, I then fell for the oldest trick ever, when Alice said "Hey Arvind, look over there" and then Kee Young freed them from the other direction. It was ok though, because while they walked back to their base, Eric got their flag and got back to ours. So in short, Team Tall was a winner =P.

Basically, we need to do this a lot more often, and next time with more widely spaced bases and with visible flags instead of putting your hand on your head to indicate possession of the flag. Twas epic.