EBOC 2025

Another year, another EBOC. I participated on both the 5th and 6th of April event, which was great.

Pre-Convention

Unlike last year where an email was sent, I knew the event from Discord announcement. There were forms to register for diagram submission, exhibition, and teaching. Being a local, I have the moral obligation to participate on all of those, but with some adjustments.

The first is diagram submission. Worrying the printing company would mess up again, I asked the committee if they can check if my submitted diagram has correct mountain and valley before it's printed. I also changed the diagramming software from Affinity Designer (with Nicolas Terry's template) to Inkscape, with template built from scratch. Hopefully this template with plain old vector won't introduce missing asset. By the way the model I submitted was water boatmen.

The second is exhibition. The convention venue is small, and we better to take the exhibition off at the end of each day because no one knows if the exhibition would be mistaken as rubbish during nightly cleaning. Therefore I minimized the number of models to bring, limiting to a common theme of birds designed in the past year. The models will be properly packaged to prevent damage (my condor got beaten quite badly inside shoe box).

Lastly, for teaching, I applied to teach a simple model. Teaching complex model isn't suitable for small convention with highly unpredictable student's skill. So I planned to teach my crocodile.

This year they also have special guest, which would be Joseph Hwang (also known as Ponadr, or Birdchirp).

The ticket price steeply increased to $21.5 per day. Not sure why is that, but later they announced that there will be pizzas served as lunch. Sounds fair enough.

Day 1: Back to Berkeley

Having visited Berkeley several times, I no longer feel adventurous to try new things. Just stick to the good places to eat and get coffee that suit my taste. The plan was to arrive in Berkeley around 9 AM, then chill at MY Coffee Roastery with their amazing black coffee, go buy some lunch sandwiches from nearby bakery, then go to the venue at 10.15 AM to check-in and setup exhibition just like the year before.

Models secured on the shoebox to prevent collision with each others

The check-in only started at 10.45 AM, so we have little time before the first class at 11 AM started. I met Chris and Joseph for the first time and had a brief chat before rushing to the first class. Kind of felt bad for the first class' teachers, as the tight check-in schedule made the students arrived late to the classes. Anyway I took various classes throughout the day.

Seal by Matthew Kim

Pig by Joseph Hwang, frog by Ryan Liang

Beerus by Nishita Thumati

Some classes went smoothly, while others were quite stressful. Not because of the teacher. The teachers were great. It's the students. I might sound like grumpy old-school man to expect that students should just sit, pay attention, and follow the teacher's instructions. Talk only when it's time to talk. Some classes were so noisy, where students don't pay attention and ask stupid questions out loud such as "wait did I miss a step?" or "fold and unfold, or just fold?" even though the teacher said "fold and unfold" 2 seconds earlier. Some even fold while mouthing out loud like "I folded it on this side, now I am not sure if I can fold it on the other side". Yo, Just shut up and fold, nobody cares. Seriously, when a single swivel fold required 5 minutes for the class to perform, it felt like a torture.

The best class was Beerus (a character from DBZ) by Nishita. Her teaching skill was awesome. I was amazed how she used the precise word for each instruction, not only the standard one like "corner", "edge", "raw edge", etc, but also specific descriptor such as "along the edge" and "preventing cave-in".

By 5 PM, all classes were over and we head to the main room for activity. This year we were asked to form a team of 4 people, and compete in creating the tallest tower out of 15 cm paper without glue. I got recruited by the Berkeley alumnus whom I met on the past 2 EBOCs: Abhik, Albert, and Oliver. We drafted a plan to make base/cap-less triangular prism that can be slotted into another prism vertically, and also expand the base horizontally by tiling the prism for stability.

Albert and I were in charge in scaling vertically, while Oliver and Abhik scaled horizontally. These guys have strong engineer mindset (3 of us are software engineers, and 1 is mechanical engineer). Our teamwork went so well, and we improvise/adapt/overcome along the way, such as:

1. The vertical prism eventually couldn't support its weight, so we need to insert "bone" on the weak parts, or make the prism thicker by adding "sleeve"
2. The base is scaled horizontally without glue using waterbomb units. The exact implementation is left to the reader as exercise.

An hour passed, and we became the winner by building 68 inch tower (as expected some made the joke of "just one more, and it will be nice!"). We won Paper Tree paper sample pack, which was only split on the next day.

Content list, we split it auction-like

The finished tower, which we later expanded so much that it touched the ceiling

The day concluded at 7 PM. I went back home after eating in Yin Ji rice noodle bar. Somehow they moved couple blocks away towards downtown.

Day 2: Calm and Clear

I repeated the routines from the day before and arrived in the venue at 10.30 AM.

The first class was horse red pocket by Don Leung. What's great about this model is the horse head is made out of a corner flap. So technically we could shape it to other Chinese zodiac animals. If there's not enough paper, just graft it.

I took Chris' live design demo next. He spent some time explaining the basic of circle and river packing, before asking participants to give ideas then vote on what to design. Eventually the chosen subject is a giraffe. The class went fast paced, with students well engaged. It was a great one.

By the way the participant roster significantly changed. There were people not seen the day before, and some people from the day before wasn't seen. Actually the amount of noisy and not-paying-attention participants are greatly reduced. So the folding classes throughout the day was much smoother. I felt calm and clear.

After lunch, we would have Bernie Peyton's fox hat class. But before that, I traded paper with Ryan. He brought dyed Wenzhou and Moon Palace papers, which was gorgeous. In exchange I gave him a white Lokta paper.

Bernie's hat class has always been fun. He would bring us big paper, measure our head, and give us appropriately sized paper so the hat fits. During his class, he said that he is dyslexic and has difficulty of differentiating left and right. His solution is to span his arm when saying "this side"; left arm for left side and right arm for right side. That's a neat solution which I might mimic, as my left right distinction is quite bad.

I made the small version

The next class is Joseph Hwang's turtle hatching. It has some cool locking mechanism that is only apparent at the end of the steps. While the model is mainly boxpleated, the folding process is sequential collapse and sink, which makes the process enjoyable.

The bottom of plastron are locked by hind flippers

The final class of the day is my crocodile. It went smoothly despite the sequence were figured out only a day earlier during train ride. That's what's great about simple model.

There was another activity planned, which seems to be a competition to fold as much star as possible out of a strip of paper. We were given the choice whether to do that, or "just chill". I chose chill because the whole 2 days were full of classes, and we didn't have enough time in the morning to talk with each other. Eventually "just chill" is chosen, and I spent the rest of the day talking to Joseph, Chris, Ryan, and others.

Post-Convention

I had fun with the convention, and will definitely come again next year. Hopefully they have another one.