Welcome back! Unfortunately, due to personal issues and my busy schedule lately, I have to cancel the last episode, "Evolving". This marks the end of my podcast. But don't you worry, because I'll make a brand new podcast in the foreseeable future! So goodbye for now!

Welcome back! This is the last episode of my mini-series, "The Hobbies". Stay tuned for the next episode next week!

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One of my favorite hobbies is solving Rubik's Cube. I first learned about it when I was about 3 years old. Back then, my parents were introduced to the Rubik's Cube by an acquaintance, so they bought me one. To be honest, I didn't even know what it was back then, just remember it was colorful and looked really nice. Of course, there were only a few people who could be able to solve a Rubik's Cube without having to learn how to solve it. But unfortunately, I was not one of them. Plus, I was just a 3-year-old kid. So what did I do? I threw it on the floor, and somehow it broke into pieces. And from then on, my parents never bought it for me again, until I bought one for myself 12 years later. When I transferred to a new school, I saw a lot of new friends messing around with Rubik's Cubes. And in the end, I decided to learn how to solve it. 

I had to sit in front of the computer for hours just to learn about Rubik's Cube, and I finally understood why my friends loved it so much. “Solving Rubik's Cube will help us reduce stress after work, increase reflexes and our memories will be significantly improved.”, as said on the Internet. I also found out that there were many different types of Rubik's Cubes, with many different colors and structures. So I spent a lot of time just learning how to solve it in many different methods as well. 

Gradually, I started to enjoy it more. But that didn’t mean I started with the hardest thing. On the contrary, I started to learn how to solve the simplest Rubik's Cube - the 2x2, also known as the Pocket Cube, due to its smaller size compared to the original one. After a very long time, through endless practice, I became the fastest 2x2 Rubik's Cube solver in school, in just about 8 seconds. My Personal Best is currently 0.89 seconds, whilst the World Record is 0.49 seconds! Very close indeed. 

Then, I started to learn how to solve the 3x3 – the original Rubik’s Cube. Due to a completely different structure from the 2x2, I actually had to learn how to solve it from scratch. And it indeed took a very long time for me to learn how to solve it. My first few solves was around 40 seconds, which was unacceptably slow. So what I did was try to look it up online, watch some tutorials on YouTube about how to solve it faster, learning some new algorithms. And then finally down to 30 seconds, 20 seconds, and finally my current Personal Best - 13.38 seconds. The current World Record was way faster than me – 3.47 seconds. I still need to learn a lot. 

After that, I decided to learn how to solve other types of Rubik’s Cubes as well, most notably the Pyraminx – which was in the shape of a pyramid. It might sound difficult to solve, but in reality, it was much easier to solve than the regular 3x3 itself. On my first try, I got around 17 seconds. But it was just lucky since the next solves were much slower – around 1 minute or more. So I decided to learn how to solve it properly, and then I got my Personal Best – 9 seconds. But it was still much slower compared to the current World Record – 0.91 seconds. I also tried to learn how to solve other types as well, such as the 4x4 or so. But since those were so difficult, and I was too lazy, so I turned down the idea. 

Nowadays, I’m not that crazy about Rubik’s Cubes as much as I used to anymore, since I’m so busy with my work at school. But when I got my hands on it, it brought back so many happy memories with my old friends back in the day…