"All These People are Dead Now"

Last week we escaped the room.

And here's the squad that did it.

There's an activity here in Jilin that we've done a couple times that's unlike anything I've ever experienced before. "Locked Room," as it's been translated to me, is essentially a place you get trapped inside and have to solve a series of puzzles to escape. In some ways, it's like a giant point-and-click game come to life. There are physical challenges (like throwing balls or grabbing keys), codes based on words, numbers, or characters, and all throughout you constantly need to use your environment to your advantage (like aiming and reflecting laser beams to hit sensors that will unlock a door, or finding a lock combination on a scrap of paper with a UV light).

So far, it's been extremely difficult. The answers often require uncanny creativity, and many times I've been thinking "I never would have thought of that" as we move from room to room. But last week, we did it. The goal is to finish all the puzzles to earn your freedom in under an hour, and we were successful. Full disclosure: a couple of us had already done this room before, but we stayed pretty quiet and quite honestly had forgotten most of the solutions anyways.

To those who escape, the reward is a picture of them on the wall. So now we have the honour of mounted fame, plus we'll be the only foreigners on the wall!

Here's a video from our first attempt at the same room, when we were not as successful...

Paint Blast from the Past

I went paintballing… last month.

I only did this once. 

Ok so it’s not the LATEST news but I’ll fill you in nonetheless. After years of thinking about paintballing and discussing paintballing and hearing about paintballing, I finally tried it out for myself. My only prior experience with this type of thing was buying an air soft gun, shooting it in the parking lot, and never again.

So we got fitted with old mechanic’s jumpsuits and masks, and they gave us our weapons and talked us through it. I was pretty excited after all that was over and we were ready to go inside, and when we got in there I took off running. But I quickly realized there weren’t many places to run. So instead, I hid behind a big wheel.

This worked great until I got shot like three times, and while I was checking myself to see if the paintballs actually broke on me (if they don’t you’re not out!), and while I was standing around checking my backside out, someone came up behind me and made it official. The lesson here is don’t check yourself out during paintball. Any other time is fine.

That close range shot directly to my bum kind of hurt, but other than that I didn’t find it very painful. Definitely not as painful as people made it out to be. I took a couple shots in the leg I could feel the next day, but they brought back fond memories while I climbed stairs. When it came to my offense, I was all about headshots. Nothing felt so great as hitting someone’s face from far away. Take that facemask! Now you have limited visibility!

We also played against some randoms that happened to be there, and they were blindfiring all over the place (that’s when you hide behind something and just stick your gun out shooting blindly like a milksop pantywaist). So for revenge, I snuck up behind a completely different person and shot him three times in the back instead of giving him the benefit of the mercy rule. He cried out like a cowering craven. That’ll show you.

So in the end, paintball is fun. I like the jumpsuits; they make me feel like I could change the oil in my car. I like the guns; they make me feel like I’m a mild action hero in a video game. I like shooting people in the face; that might not be a healthy feeling.

I'm one of these highly trained assassins coming to get you.