Wally Darling from Welcome Home made from 1200 Rubiks Cubes.
I dont typically post my art on Tumblr, just tiktok, youtube, reddit, and Instagram lol. But as the community for this piece originally comes from here I figured I would dust off my account. Should I post here more?
ive been grinding F2L for the past few days and now whenever i open my computer and see a youtube tab open titled AB Optimization i think its a cubing thing and then i remember im just doing math homework. on an unrelated note when i close my eyes all i see is cubes
I've been cubing for almost 2 whole years now, and apart from finding a new hobby and passion, I feel that speedcubing has taught me much more too. This is a (lengthy) blog on what I've learnt through cubing.
I'll be writing about a lesson that cubing has taught me every 2 days for the rest of the week so check back to see more.
Short Intro - How I got into cubing
Of course, the first big step would be finally solving your cube for the first time and seeing all 6 colours solved (not by peeling the stickers). But I really was fascinated by this puzzle. It looked so simple at first, but when I actually tried solving it, well of course I did not succeed. However, I was determined to solve my cube. I spent days trying to learn off YouTube videos. And one day, I did it. No more messing up in the middle of trying to return it to its solved state. I remember holding it up in front of my family proudly. So anyways, after that I saw some videos of speedcubers solving it faster than the time it took for me to type this sentence. And that's when I started trying to improve my timings and really learnt a lot from cubing...
Lesson 1
To improve, I first decided, hey why not learn a faster method, knowing that probably wouldn't get far with the beginners' method. Like most cubers, I chose CFOP, mainly because it was similar to beginners' and therefore easier to grab the concepts.
I started by learning cross, taking it a step at a time. So I tried making a white cross directly, instead of a daisy. I thought that I would be much faster at once. Who knew? It took me longer to make a white cross than a daisy. I was sort of disappointed but I decided to give it a chance. So I practised a lot and looked at other cubers' ways of making the cross, practised the techniques and a started getting the hang of it. I'll come back to this later but let me give another example.
Now the next part I learned was 2-Look PLL, a set of algorithms. It was tortuous memorising them. Everytime I tried using the algs. in solves, I would just mess up. What did I do? I told myself to keep practising over and over again. I'd start the moment I had time, clocking in as much practice as possible. It was hard, but worth it. My times then, were now halved as compared to when I was still using beginners'.
Back to cross, I just want to compare how I put in the effort to practise to my brother. My brother can solve a cube. He uses beginners' and I tried teaching him the cross. However, he too ran into the problem of his daisy being faster. He gave up. I tried convincing him that eventually, as long as he was willing to practise, it would help a ton. But I guess it's not easy to change someone's mind. Just because of our different attitudes, I'm 4-5 times faster than him.
So what is my takeaway and the lesson here? I think it's quite obvious by now but here it is anyways : Although practice can never make you a perfect person at whatever you are doing, it can make you much better. Hard work pays off and overall, this makes me understand the concept behind delayed gratification.
This is the end my blog for today