This was one of my activities in the Guitar Club — it felt so rewarding when it finally ended!

Preparation

To be honest, I barely did anything this time — our design lead handled almost everything. I could really just lay flat and relax. I’m terrible at design, and my digital drawing skills are nonexistent, so all I could do was run errands, buy materials, print name tags, and help make the canopy. I’ve bought so many things that I’ve practically memorized the school’s tax ID number.
We mostly went to Xingda Bookstore and Xingwen Bookstore for supplies, but their paper colors were a bit different, so we made several trips back and forth trying to find the right shade. After all that effort, my crafting skills still couldn’t keep up — by the end it was all like, “They won’t notice, right? No one’s gonna find out, right?”

The name tags turned out great too — though two people filled in their info late, so their tags ended up in a different color.
Laminating was also way cheaper than I expected.
Seriously, why didn’t we do this for freshman camp instead of forcing everyone to “serve time” together…

We originally planned to perform three songs¹, but the freshman camp workload was just way, way, way too much, so we had to cut it down… In the end, we only played Lover. I’ll make sure we bring the others back next time.
The arpeggios in Lover are really tough to play — my hands were sore in the beginning since they’re all barre chords.
For the arrangement, I mostly followed this tutorial by Bluefish and Iron Man, but I tweaked a few parts since their tabs differ slightly from the original. Editing someone else’s work is faster than starting from scratch — maybe I’ll write out my own version when I have time.

The Orientation Event

I was really surprised by how many people showed up — by the end, people were sitting all the way to the doorway. It must’ve been around fifty or sixty attendees, nearly double what we had during Guitar Week. It was my first time performing in front of such a big crowd, so I was pretty nervous.

I was in charge of the snack counter — basically, I was the “snack manager,” responsible for distributing snacks.
In short, I played the role of the OS (Operating System).
The OS’s purpose is to be Easy to use and Efficient to run, but we only had two CPUs², so there were limits. During intermission, the audience launched a DDoS attack³ against us — since our hardware buffer⁴ was too small and the CPU clock⁵ was too long, we got hit with a service outage in under a minute.
Then the ready queue piled up, and people started chatting with us while waiting. That’s when we had to manage CPU time — no single process can stay in the queue too long if we want to maintain a smooth multitasking environment.

That was my “Operating Systems brain rot” showing. If you didn’t get it, the footnotes below translate it to normal human language.

• Lover