On the 18th of April, 2018, my brother's friend, known as YoSquid (not showing real names for privacy), organized a small party at his house for his 17th birthday. My brother HeadsHoKer and I were invited, along with 2 other boys who were also my brother's friends, mastergamer24 and a guy who I will call Mr. M since I don't know his username.
Of course, I was excited for the party, not just for the typical party activities, but for a primary purpose that I will explain much later since I'm writing this in chronological order.
I was sort of scared too, however, since I don't feel comfortable with talking to 2 or more people, and I've had a bad history of ruining group events due to social boredom. HeadsHoKer is also a hot-tempered moderator, so I knew I had to restrain my crazy tendencies.
Initially, my plan was to just sleep through most of the party since I thought they were just going to talk about things I wasn't interested in, and my mom confiscated all of my gaming devices. I thought, there was nothing fun or important to do until my "final mission".
Thankfully, they invited me to some interesting games.
The first game we played was Would You Rather on either.io but instead of deciding what we would rather do, we guessed which choice was chosen more than the other. Whoever guesses incorrectly has to eat spicy noodles.
We did not keep track of who got the most wrong answers, but I think I got 4 wrong answers out of 10? I'm pretty sure others made more mistakes than I did, though.
I remember HeadsHoKer and I getting some clutch answers that were only SLIGHTLY above 50%.
(The spicy noodles wasn't actually very spicy; all of us survived.)
The next game we played is what we call "Monkey-Monkey", a card game where a random card is hidden, and players remove pairs of same-number cards from their hands until they run out of pairs, in which case they trade cards until one player is left with only one card and becomes the "monkey".
In the first game, I was the first to get rid of all my cards, with HeadsHoKer being second, and YoSquid and mastergamer24 struggling to avoid getting the "monkey card", the card with no pair. mastergamer24 won a clutch victory after correctly predicting the non-monkey card out of the 2 cards that YoSquid had and playing his last pair of cards.
In the next game, YoSquid won first place this time (I think), with HeadsHoKer again being second, and mastergamer24 getting yet another clutch victory against me by grabbing the card I was gripping tightly. I was raging, "How the heck did you get TWO clutch victories in a row?" I guess I didn't want the card to break, since I work out a lot but mastergamer24 doesn't. But I still said "good game" afterwards.
(Mr. M didn't play.)
We then played Jenga, which I have never played before.
My strategy was to make it as hard as possible for the opposing players to keep the block tower stable, so I took out the bottom blocks first. It's a high risk, high reward strategy, but I just played for fun, not for competition, so I didn't care if I lost.
Again, Mr. M didn't play, but he constantly changed the music to scare us with sudden noises. I was barely affected, but I think mastergamer24 was. (Shout-out to Michael Groth from MandJTV for his Ash vs Red Rap Battle, which Mr. M played during our game.)
mastergamer24 was the first to lose after, perhaps, 3 minutes, by trying to remove a block on the middle that carried most of the tower's weight.
I lost 2 times thanks to the riskiness of my strategy. One of those games went on for about 10 minutes, despite 2 of the tower's layers being "skeletonized", that is, having only one block each.
HeadsHoKer lost once.
P.S. I probably need to watch physics-related videos and shows again because I always lose in physics games, video or otherwise.
P.P.S. GG to YoSquid for not losing.
The last game we played was Twister, where we put our hands and feet on randomly chosen points on a mat. Players are eliminated when they touch the floor with an elbow or knee, or fall down completely.
Mr. M added a twist (no pun intended) to the rules where, after moving a hand or foot, we dance for 10 seconds or so, without removing our hands and feet from the mat. Despite my lack of flexibility, I'm nearly invincible at Twister, but this new rule exhausted us badly, especially since we played in a bedroom with only one small window and some fans.
mastergamer24 was again the first to be eliminated by touching the mat with a knee.
YoSquid was eliminated shortly after, leaving only HeadsHoKer and I, who were the strongest, muscle-wise, in the group.
Thankfully, YoSquid removed the dancing rule, but what ended the game was a new rule he added where we have to put our hands and feet on opposite sides of the mat, and since we already had our bodies on one side of the mat, HeadsHoKer and I not only stretched our arms and legs long distances, but also interlocked limbs, and my torso was directly below HeadsHoKer's. Eventually, I overstretched and lost energy thanks to YoSquid's wrestling submission-like torture for a rule, and fell over.
GG HeadsHoKer.
P.S. Then again, this game would go on for too many hours if YoSquid didn't change the rules.
For dinner, we had chicken and spaghetti. No biggie right there. (I wasn't a fan of it.)
Mr. M left afterwards, but HeadsHoKer, mastergamer24 and I stayed.
I can't remember what happened next, but we had a Marvel movie night where we tried to watch the Marvel movies in chronological order, starting with Captain America: The First Avenger, which I enjoyed and watched from start to end.
I started a little game where we have to shout "STAN LEE!" when Stan Lee appears. However, mastergamer24 already watched this movie to begin with (and is a huge superhero fan), so he beat us to the punch.
Our snacks were junk food and, ironically, a cake that we didn't eat during dinner.
However, I got bored and super sleepy at approximately 1 AM, since I slept at 2:30 AM the night before. I finally fell asleep at 3:30 AM, when everyone else finished the first two Iron Man movies.
Breakfast was corned beef. No biggie again.
We played games yet again, the first of which was a clone of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, where mastergamer24 got 71st place, I got 52nd place, and HeadsHoKer got 25th place with 2 kills. (We weren't able to kill anyone. I don't know what place YoSquid got.)
After that, we ate lunch, and I ate plain spaghetti. (I'm a very picky eater.)
Then we played five rounds of Uno, where HeadsHoKer got 1st place, YoSquid 2nd, me 3rd, and mastergamer24 last. HeadsHoKer and mastergamer24 left afterwards, leaving me and YoSquid in YoSquid's house.
(At this point, I'm losing memory and getting lazy.)
Now to reveal the final mission I've been hiding during the introduction: I wanted to help YoSquid record a gameplay video.
I still had social boredom, despite the party and the games, since I haven't had a serious one-to-one conversation with a friend I knew well, so I took this opportunity.
YoSquid started a series of videos of a farm game called Stardew Valley, and I came to record his second episode to voice some of the characters and make random, funny comments.
I've never played or watched Stardew Valley before, so I had no idea what I was saying sometimes.
This specific episode was focused on fishing, since YoSquid chose a riverside farm, and what do you expect? He's a squid.
We ranted about how hard it was to do the Introductions quest where we had to meet 28 people (some of which he met in the previous episode) and some of those people are either well-hidden (or maybe YoSquid isn't looking hard enough) or they only appear at certain times of the day. Let's just say we got bored to death, with my boredom multiplied by my lack of sleep factor.
It's also funny how we struggled to catch 2 eels, which were more expensive than herrings, but waited a painfully long amount of time to catch one herring just for one of those quests.
Sometimes, I didn't speak directly on YoSquid's microphone during the recording, so I hope my voice didn't mess up; as of writing this, YoSquid's video hasn't been posted on YouTube. (Edit: He got lazy to edit and post the video. RIP)
At the end of the recording, YoSquid told me (in paraphrase, since I have a hard time remembering quotes) that he was more motivated to record a video with me since, for him, recording is usually boring because he almost always talks to himself.
Well, I'm glad we were able to take a win-win opportunity. I once again helped a friend in need and, in return, not only "buying" a bit more friendship points, but also some dopamine from the act of generosity itself. (+1 Good Karma!)
And YoSquid is growing his YouTube channel.
In conclusion, although my expectations for YoSquid's birthday party were low and I thought I would screw over everything, the activities, which I mostly didn't ask for, surpassed my expectations, because not only did everyone have fun, but I was able to do a good deed. (I cleaned YoSquid's floor, by the way, since I felt uncomfortable stepping on invisible dirt "spikes" while abiding by the barefoot-only rule.)
I still feel anxious about group parties, but at least I've grown substantially and I can survive them without screwing up. So go ahead and throw me a party that I will get bored of. As long as everyone else is having fun, I'm happy.
P.S. Last Tuesday when I wrote "Helping People", I promised to make up for my lack of a blog post on Sunday by writing a short blog post this week. Turns out, this was much longer than I expected since the idea is still kinda fresh in my head--before the party, I had no idea what to write. I will still write a serious blog post next Sunday, but I need a lot of time to brainstorm.
TL;DR summary: Although I was anxious due to disliking gatherings of people and my bad history in parties, I enjoyed YoSquid's birthday party thanks to the games and movie night. I helped him record an episode of Stardew Valley the next day, before going home.
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