This weekend I had the privilege of watching a dear friend from CTY (so many years ago – summer of 2000!) who joined me at Stanford this year when he started his PhD here, compete in a speed-cubing tournament on campus. It was actually my first time watching him compete, although he’s been inviting me to his tournaments for the last four years. I was duly impressed by what I saw (especially when a little kid asked him for an autograph!). This time, he came in 2nd overall, with first-places in 2 different individual categories (blindfold and 2x2x2). Here’s the champ himself:
If you like reading trivia news, you might recognize him from a couple years ago, when he set a world record (11.13 seconds) and appeared on Leno and in the Guinness World Book of Records. [The record’s since been broken multiple times].
Sometimes I feel like I’m namedropping when I talk about L. Actually, it’s more like I’m really proud of him. ^_^ As I am of all my friends. There was a weird moment a few summers ago when L. visited me at home and met my high school friend B., who’s made quite a name for himself in the bemani-type game world (bemani: e.g. DDR, ITG…) by being the creator of the popular ranking site, Groovestats. The two of them gawked at one another…
B: Whoa, you’re the Rubik’s cube guy??
L: Whoa, you’re the Groovestats guy?
It was a very interesting moment, indeed. Made me chuckle.
[And thus ends my 15 minutes of bragging about my uniquely famous friends].
– s.
silverkeys.writes 