26: Something vaguely optimistic

Luke Oliver

24 Jul 2025 • 9 min read

This is one of the very few good photos of me that exist, taken at the beach (with my camera) by best friend Cody. This is the same beach trip and crew as Don't Put Me Up On Your Bedroom Wall and The Power of Flight from my portfolio, which are both great photos. It was a properly fun college student adventure, even though we got Caiden's subaru stuck in the sand and had to dig and push it out.

I had a pretty good day today, work was work, I finished my mechanical work and escaped Tagging Jail, and then after work we had a Happy Hour and Trivia night at a nearby bar, which was really fun.

There were 17 of us, including Max, the game-master, so we were split into teams of 5 and 6. Since not everyone arrived at the beginning, we started with 3 teams of 4, and then the other two teams grew to 5 before ours did, and then the final team became 6. I had been hyping up Nate (one of the other interns, who is good at trivia) and myself at work that day, so we were always the last team to get an extra person (not that it hindered us at all). It was 30 questions total, all of which were variations on the "I have/am (some quality or fun fact), what am I?". The questions were split into 6 categories: Science, TV, History, Geography, Pop Culture, and Animals. We scored a 23/31 (there was a bonus), which was pretty good (and won us the trivia!). There was some friction between us and one of the other teams, because we had been smack-talking during the game, and then when it came time to grade, our points were miscounted, which initially put us in a tie, at 22 points each. [I'm realizing now that I had mistakenly believed the team we were feuding with to have been the ones to grade our answers, since we were the ones grading theirs, but it was, in fact, the other team, so some of my competitive aggression was definitely unfounded. Sorry Lara, even though she'll probably never see this, I was a little too verbally combative after the game]. Another part of my annoyance was the leeway given to the other teams, when we were not given any. The team we were feuding with was given two half-points for answers that I do not think should have counted at all, and then the one where it would have made sense for my team to receive a half point, we did not get one. This didn't end up mattering much, because we won, but in the event of a tie (which was the initial condition), it was significantly more impactful. We had a little speed-round at the end with cards from a board game Max had, which was also fun, and we also won 😎, this time uncontested.