Damian Writes About Stuff

I feel like I have a grab bag of assorted hobbies and activities that I enjoy doing, but I often struggle to categorize them. I think even I lose track sometimes of all the things I have going on, but that wont stop me from doing more. Recently, I’ve been thinking that the actual activity itself isn’t what interests me as much as the process of trying new things, especially the odder the activity is. I’ve decided to call this hobby Activity Maxxing and I’m gonna write about some of the more memorable experiences.

To kick off this series the first activity I want to highlight is my foray into speed puzzling. This came about when two of my friends, Chloe and Skye, told me they need a person to join their puzzling team to compete in a four-person event. Of course I was in, there was no way I could turn down an opportunity to compete with seasoned veterans like them and also our fourth Trevor :).

Speed puzzling is pretty straightforward, you complete a puzzle in as little time as possible. When you sign up for a competition, you get a brand-new puzzle that remains secret until you open that package at the beginning of the competition. It turns out there’s a sizeable community of people whose special interest is completing puzzles as fast as they can, and competing against each other. Competitions are regularly held over Zoom, but there are also in-person events like the one we signed up for, which happened to be the California State Championship. We prepared, unsurprisingly, by doing puzzles together in the month leading up to the competition to hone our skills and build team cohesion.

The competition was held down in San Mateo, so basically a home game, and I arrived a bit before our event’s start time to check out the vibe and talk to people. There were five different events that day and the four-person team event was the grand finale. The puzzle for this event was a Boardwalk 1000-piece depicting some lake houses with a sunset vista. We each picked a distinct feature on the puzzle to work on at the start before eventually bringing it together.

I honestly didn’t know how many teams we were up against but the room was packed, and we were seated near who I assumed were some heavy hitters. This was confirmed when they finished almost 30 minutes faster than us, but overall, we did well, finishing 14th place out of around 70 teams! Not too bad! Here’s a timelapse of us putting it together:

After the competition, I felt inspired and wanted to keep practicing, so I was given a previous competition puzzle to use. Needless to say, my first attempt was pretty pitiful, it took me over two hours, and when I looked at previous competition results, I would have been pretty much last. Undeterred, I embarked on a side quest to achieve a respectable time, which involved me grinding attempts on this puzzle over and over.

The goal I set for myself was to be under one hour, which I thought would be challenging enough to take a few tries but within reach. In the end, it took 10 tries over a few weeks, but I finally got there, and I have included a timelapse recorded of the last try below. By the end I felt like I had like 90% of the pieces memorized and a general order strategy to be as fast as possible. I did notice improvement in certain transferable skills, like being able to flip the pieces quicker and sort them more efficiently. I also plotted my times for each attempt, in which you can see the diminishing improvements on the graph below.

Hobby review: I enjoy the feeling of being locked in while doing a puzzle. There is similar feeling when I go to the movies of being completely captivated and shut off from external distractions which I think I need to combat my TikTok brain rot.