adventures in cubing

Yesterday, AL60Ri7HMi57 posted a quick video with new lighting and a clean 22-second solve. In the comments, she wrote, “Do the scramble and post your time in the comments below!” So, I figured I’d give it a shot. I had my camcorder charging on my desk, so I haphazardly aimed it, flipped it on, scrambled, and solved. 35.65 seconds. Not great. But, in all honesty, right about where I am. At least on video. I’m about 5-7 seconds faster off video, without the inexplicable nervousness of being on-cam.

The Video and Initial Observations

My first reaction was to ignore the solve and move on. Rarely one to miss an opportunity for self-examination, though, I decided to learn from it. So, for better or worse, here’s the video.

Some initial observations:

1. The production is awful. One extra minute to locate the camera better, move a lamp, etc. would have helped.
2. I shouldn’t have used a black cube with the U face gray. Gray U faces work on a white cube on video, but not really on black ones.
3. The angle is rather unflattering and makes my arms look crazy hairy.
4. Upon further reflection, it turns out my arms are crazy hairy.

Reconstruction (Why I Suck)

Since so many folks had taken the challenge of doing the same solve, I thought this would be a good opportunity to do a reconstruction and see what I could learn by sharing it and comparing it against others. Here are my moves (with time stamps), with the animated reconstruction here:

scramble: L2 U2 B’ D2 R2 F2 R2 F2 R2 F U’ B2 F U L2 D R D B R’

y’  // inspection
L U’ L2 d’ R2 D R’ u’  // cross (4.4s)
y’ U U R U R’ U2′ R U R’  // F2L-1 (7.9s)
d d d R’ U R U’ R’ U’ R  // F2L-2 (13.8s)
d R’ U2 R d’ R U R’  // F2L-3 (17.5s)
y d’ U’ R U2 R’ U U R U’ R’  // F2L-4 (22.6s)
y F U R U’ R’ F’  // OLL-1 (#17) (25.2s)
y R U R’ U’ R’ F R F’  // OLL-2 (#33) (29.3s)
z D’ R2′ D R2 U R’ D’ R U’ R U R’ D R U’ [R]  // PLL (V), AUF (35.65)

Looking at the video and reconstruction, there are at least a few plainly obvious reasons I’m not a lot closer to 20 seconds:

1. I missed that the orange-green F2L pair was already paired after the cross and broke it up when doing the first (red-blue) pairing and insertion.
2. My look-ahead is awful. In fact, there is no look-ahead. Each F2L pair is like starting from scratch. And the cross > F2L > OLL > PLL transitions are clunky.
3. Because of point (2), I spend a lot of time hunting still. Maybe a total of 5-7 seconds.
4. Although I insert F2L pairs into slots other than the front-right, I setup each of the four by starting with the corner over the front-right open slot. That leads to all sorts of unnecessary cube rotations and U turns. (Off-camera, I do this a lot less. But on camera, it’s a disaster.) This is the result of learning F2L based on the badmephisto/Andy Klise sheet, with all the open slots being front-right. I do know F2L intuitively now, but I started there, and old habits die young.
5. Two-look OLL. Not just the fact of it, but also that I paused for a while before doing the second of the two. I know a little more than half of the OLLs; #17 is not one of them.

Interestingly, since I just posted over the weekend about my new V Perm, I got to apply it here. That was fortuitous.