Blivet.

Misunderstanding.

2009-04-17T04:27:21Z

So yeah, I voiced the issues that we had encountered trying to switch from a plastic flatware to a "green" flatware. They're commonly made of potato starch or corn starch, and honestly, have not been well received by our focus groups. The reply comment that I got was along the lines that I hate people and was actively trying to kill them with the neurotoxins released when hot food hits Styrofoam. While I will admit to seriously disliking some people; I think I've avoided actively trying to kill them thus far in life :P

Nuts.

2009-02-06T01:44:14Z

I receive somewhere between 5-10 emails a day in regards to the peanut recall due to potential salmonella contamination.

I have never wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich so much in my entire life :P

Anger.

2009-02-04T01:58:20Z

I know I've said something about this before, but the vegan/freegan/green/environmentalist/whatever the hell fringe group piss me off.

If you really want to help the environment, stop writing stupid articles and go off yourself in a desert to feed the animals and permanently reduce your contribution of greenhouse gases and stuff.

And if I have to hear another report about dumpster diving, I'll go out there with padlocks and a shotgun myself.

Pork.

2008-09-10T07:55:30Z

First try at Pork Spare Ribs braised in Vietnamese Caramel turned out pretty well. Original recipe snagged from Chubby Hubby's blog, which is a great read if you like professionally shot food pr0n and some really interesting recipes and restaurants.

The ribs were good, not amazing & must make more to serve to other people so they can marvel at my culinary ability, but decent. Nice deep flavor since I took my time with it, I added a dry rub for 3 hours and braised for an additional 2 hours, then let it hang out for a few days in the braising liquid. Unfortunately, the ribs didn't have as much fat as I hoped and I let them hit a high heat too much, so it's not as tender as I would have liked. Still soft and quite edible, but I was expecting more of myself.

Notes for later - I wound up needing a ton more liquid for braising; maybe the ribs were of a different size? I had to double the amount of caramel that I made and then needed to add additional fish sauce and water.

Miscellaneous stuff - I have a really nasty habit of shifting tenses within sentences that I should probably work on.

Question to consider - where's the line between posting about every single little thing in life like a goddamn emo teenager and posting so infrequently that people think you died. Also, I'm reluctant to post about everything since the few people who read this have rather varied interests :P

Addiction.

2008-06-30T21:00:40Z

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 - Grimoire of the Rift came out last week. Opening impressions are very good. There's just something about it that keep drawing me in. Like playing until 4 am on Saturday night after a full day of raiding :P

Graphically, it's very similar to FFTA as the character sprites seem to have been ripped straight from there. They did redo the facial portraits for the generic classes and the new characters of course, but very similar. Spells and abilities got revamped to be shinier though.

Music - meh, I usually play with it off. More of the same from what I've heard.

Storyline - meh, kid falls into book, adventure in Ivalice to get back home, meet strange people and have whacky hijinx, etc.

Job Classes - They copied the job system from FFTA where you need to learn x number of abilities to gain access to another class, with some classes being unlocked by quests. As you learn abilities from gear, this flows into the next part.

Items - instead of getting access to better gear as you progress through the game and limiting classes that why, they revamped it with a loot and bazaar system. As you defeat enemies or finish quests, you get loot. When you get to a town, you offer up specific loot items at the bazaar menu to open up new items for sale. The game guides you with little rankings and highlights, so it is not like you have to throw three random items in and see what comes out, but it's more exciting than just going, "Well, I need 4 thief abilities to get ninja, but the shops only have 2 daggers with thief abilities, I guess I'm screwed until I get to the next town."

Auction House - this is a fun minigame that has some value to the main part without being essential as far as I can tell, which makes it a winner in my book. You get issued a number of tokens with different values, and bid for control of areas and items later according to gamefaqs. Each area will have a certain number of times that you can put a token in, and whoever has bid the most tokens wins. What makes this fun is that it is run in real time and the other bidders have tells that can help you decide what to bid. So you get a few seconds to look at your stack, everyone else's stacks, do some mental math, calculate how much you want to bid and whether you can be in the lead at the end. It's a lot of fun ^_^

In terms of material value, having control of an area allows you to get tribute and cheaper prices on gear and quests, so it's valuable but never necessary. Apparently, having control of all areas available at an auction house allows you to get a title and switch the auction house to items so you can get things far earlier than you should or something.

Beyond that, gameplay is much what you would expect from a strategy game, you move on tiled battlefields, kill stuff, loot corpses and level up. Apparently some things were nerfed for balance, but I haven't seen that yet. My biggest problem was doing quests wrong. I was dispatching, failing, and moving on. Apparently, most of these can be done via battle as well, so I was missing out on exp a lot. I'm looking at 5+ level differences right now :\

One change that is slightly worrying is the MP change. Instead of starting with a full MP bar, you regain 10 mp on a character when their turn comes up. On one hand, it allows casters to hit their first level spell pretty much every single turn so they're never reduced to hitting things with staves. On the other hand, buffing before bosses can be difficult and battles tend to go very long because you can almost always heal. The other team has to put out more damage than you heal or it never goes anywhere. I whittled down a level 22 mob with a level 12 group doing 10-15 damage at a time because he could not do more damage than my 2 casters could heal out.

Again, still fun and I'm looking forward to more. Still got that massive stack of RPGs to finish after all ^_^

Anger.

2008-06-16T21:08:53Z

iPod is great for giving the brain stuff to do on the lunch break and all, but then you see stupid stuff. Like a review on some fanfiction that said something to the extent that the reviewer wanted to be raped by an original character because he was so cool and sexy.

Yeah, yeah, intarweb iz srs. business, nerd rage, etc.

Rape is not a term of affection or adjective.

Thank you internet for causing linguistic drift on a scale previously unimaginable.

Lazy.

2008-06-13T06:56:58Z

Yeah, so it only took me a month to stop writing in this thing. Lazy, apathetic, whatever.

Still playing WoW, restarted account on CoX, watching anime, working, more of the same.

Things to do this summer:

Catch up on a little bit of anime and burn off the stuff that I've got sitting on the hard drive. I've been pretty decent about keeping up with recent anime and Kamen Rider, but I've got some backlog to work on. Toki no Kakeru Shoujo is the big one, and I'd kinda like to watch Toushokan Sensou when it finishes up. Soul Eater is pretty damn awesome if anyone is looking for some lushly animated shounen stuff. The burning of stuff can wait if its been licensed. I guess I should check on that <_<

Terenas mage to 70. Shouldn't be too hard but takes some time.

City of Villains character to 50, wtb more character slots and Soldier of Arachnos options. Those Crab Spider backpacks are pretty badass :P

Work on the PS2 stack of RPGs. Damn thing keeps multiplying. Current list for posterity and/or laughter for being way the hell behind:

Phantom Brave
Grim Grimore
Ar Tonelico
FFXII
Kingdom Hearts
Kingdom Hearts II
Oden Sphere
Valkyrie Profile II

Yes, I'm a terrible person T.T

Beyond that - Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 is sometime this summer and then Warhammer Online in the fall.

Randomness - DK over at fanfiction.net has written some interesting stuff in Final Fantasy universes. I can only assume that aspects have been inspired by other horror writers (greatest fear is what is within, madness caused by things we are not meant to know), but I somehow find it more palletable and disturbing when set in an universe that I'm familiar with. "Dismissed" and "That Which Devours" are probably my favorites from been posted. Of course, reading them puts me in a dark mood that I proceed to wash out of my brain with some light fluffy stuff, but anything that can cause emotional swings is art of some kind or another and I really shouldn't ask for anything more :P

Thought.

2008-01-29T07:17:28Z

Random thought that got stuck in my head, spawned by an errant comment from my boss -

Nothing ever makes me feel quite as poor as going to bed with an empty stomach.

Explosion.

2008-01-25T18:22:43Z

So yeah, need to get this out or I'm not going to be able to concentrate at work.

Last night, a manager managed to blow up a butane tank inside on of the dining halls during a theme night. Middle of dinner rush, massive fireball , people got hurt and were sent to the hospital. Needless to say, management is not having a good day today.

I was seriously thinking about going there for dinner because of the theme night, but I decided not to because I had a raid last night. "But for the grace of God" and all that.

So I think I'll hyperventilate for a few more minutes and then get back to work.

Failure.

2008-01-24T07:19:13Z

So yeah, if you've been reading video game blogs or websites or Penny Arcade lately, you've probably seen the article proclaiming Mass Effect as a terrible game marketed towards young children that allows them to customize a sex scenario between a custom avatar and an alien. That's a pretty silly sentence in and of itself :p

Who knows if any actual research was done, but Penny Arcade ripped him apart and gave him a comic based on his stupidity.

Then today, Lum the Mad links a clip from Fox News where they basically ripped off the guys article, errors and all, proclaiming it as the gospel truth. You've got the enraged researcher, the video game expert from Spike TV, of all places, trying to calm people down, and a whole panel of clueless people saying the obvious in tremendously stupid ways. Parents need to pay attention to their kids and parent! Ratings should be enforced! And then this gem:

"Who can argue, possibly, that, y'know, Luke Skywalker meets Debbie Does Dallas is a good thing? It's not. It's just not good. And I'm not going to let Mass Effect into my house ..."

EA then fires off a letter to Fox News detailing the many ways that they were wrong.

Nothing new or insightful from me, but the quote just cracks me up.

Perspective.

2008-01-18T03:23:59Z

It's trite, but as a reminder to myself, it can always be worse.

Apparently my roommate is going to be staying late at work per management at 5 pm. They're taking some server down and need him and his whole team to stay behind and test everything. They don't know when the server will be back up; could be now, could be 2 am. They still need to be at work tomorrow morning.

Then they need to do this all over again on Saturday night starting at 8 pm due to some kind of timezone thing.

How anything gets done over there is beyond me.

Guildchat.

2008-01-17T03:10:52Z

Much love for my guild. I told them last night about the issues that I was having at work with an econazi type client. Their suggestions?

Rent a SUV and leave it running on their lawn.

Start fires all over with styrofoam peanuts.

You need to do that while wearing a fur coat.

Roast a whole pg on the lawn.

No, go further. Veal stuffed with fois gras.

Beat him to death with a dead baby seal.

Nice? No. Politically correct? Nope. Just what I needed after a long day? Totally.

Prism Ark.

2008-01-12T19:56:08Z

Finished watching Prism Ark today. 2007 anime based on a H-game. Spoilers ahoy~

Character designs were pretty if not terribly original. You've got your blockhead luck hero, the tsundere heroine, the quiet/stoic/obsessive, the imouto character, the bad ass 2 sword fighter, etc etc.

Storyline was pretty much non-existent. The first episode was really exciting battles and stuff, but then the rest of the series was a "we were in school before we got here, let's see the whacky hijinx!" lolcharacterdevelopment on tsundere character :\

So why did I finish watching it? Probably the rotating whatchamacallems, the still frames before where they would break for commercial, totally drawing a blank here. And the ending sequence was pretty cute (hiry is a sucker for cute anime girls in bathing suits) :p

Overall, it was shallow fanservice laden fantasy drivel. Snag it if you want to have something mindless going while you do other stuff, but hardly worth devoting your time to like other stuff from last year (Gurren Lagann was awesome, go watch it right now!) :P

Braindump.

2008-01-11T03:20:00Z

So yeah, job is at risk due to being an asshole to clients.

This links into goals for the new year. And I haven't written in this damn thing for over a year, so here we go :p

Stress - yeah, pretty stressed out. Work + Family + lolWoWdrama.

Solutions - write in this thing more. Stop bottling stuff up and letting it lose at work. Going to try out that yoga studio by the campus and see what they offer. Do more yoga at home. Spending less time in front of the computer would probably help.

Writing more is probably not a bad idea. Seriously, 75% of the stuff that I type is probably "Overstuffed Turkey & Bacon Sandwich." The rest is probably something stupid in game that devolves into "lol penis" or something.

I'd like to try my hand at writing fiction some time.

For now, I think I'll just work on getting a few hundred words down in the LJ a week. Hopefully that will make things a little better.

Happy Stuff - dropped the cash on a new monitor after Christmas, so I'm running dual monitor at home now. Very convenient for gaming or watching anime and doing other stuff at the same time.

Beyond the being a retard at work bit, it's good. We're doing very well in terms of sales growth compared to the last few years so yay us.

Still have my health, still have savings, still have a roof over my head and a full stomach at the end of every single day. All in all, things are pretty good. Just need the curb the asshole impulses at work :P

Death.

2006-08-15T08:11:50Z

So mom called me up today. Turns out that they found one of her coworkers dead in some skid row alley dead from a drug overdose.

The guy was doing well. His background was in food service, did hosting and cooking and owning a restaurant and all that. Like many in food service, he wound up drinking and taking drugs and smoking to work off tension and deal with all the random shit. He made it into rehab eventually and was clean for over a year when I first met him. He had just picked up a real estate license and was working for the top seller in the area. Doing well, like closing 3 deals at a time. Young guy, clean, starting investing in his own property, moved his mom into a new house, a success story right?

He gave me my first break in catering. He was doing catering on the side and heard that I liked working food. He was a little shorthanded and gave me a chance. So I joined up with him and his crew for night. 240 bucks cash, all under the table but we worked for every penny. Client was living in this 4 story townhouse in LA, so we had to haul all the equipment up the fire escape on the side. A grill, a convection oven, 2 kegs of beer, another 1000 bucks of booze, 4 coolers of food, pots, pans, the works. Passed hors d'oeuvres, open bar, buffet dinner. We put out a nice spread that night and I had a lot of fun playing at sous chef. Cleaning up at 3 am, hauling all the crap back down to street level and driving home on the 110. Good times. I spent most of the next day in bed and the rest of the week massaging the stiffness out of my legs :P

One of the things that I remember the most was how strict they were when I took a single drink. The client was trying to get us all to drink and have fun and I finally had a drink with him. That cinnamon liqueur, with the gold flake in the bottle (Goldsclauger or whatever?). Apparently, they had all met up in rehab so they all knew about how screwed up you could get from drugs and booze and all that. They were so concerned for me despite my body mass and the time before we left and everything and wondering if I would get home okay. I really appreciated that.

So anyways, he was clean and apparently fell back. Mom heard something about "being afraid of success." Being afraid of succeeding and self-destructing is quite possibly one of the dumbest things that I've ever heard of. Course, now that I'm all emo and introspective (or at least what passes for it with my mind), I'm starting to wonder if this is something that I've done, which is why it bothers me so much.

So here it is, 1 am and I can't sleep. Sure, I'm disturbed to hear that someone that I knew managed to kill themself in a tremendously stupid way. But my mind is skittering around like a hamster on crack, and I'm looking over my life as much as I can to see if self-sabotage to avoid success is something that I do.

I know I can be self-depreciating, and I've always wanted to think of it as making me more humble or slightly comedic or some kind of positive trait. God knows that I've made more than my share of mistakes, and anything that reminds me that I should be more aware of my relative status would be good. On the other hand, I want to be the best. If I am the best, then I need to find some other target to shoot for. Lately, this has been manifesting in damage meters in WoW instead of something productive or destructive, so I guess I should be happy.

But right now, I think I'll do random stuff until my body shuts down and I can ignore this tremendously annoying emo bitch feeling that I have right now. Office chairs, there's a good start. I need a new desk chair, one that is actually comfortable to sit in and doesn't scratch the floor.

Take care of yourselves all. I've always wanted to be a great protector or helper, but there's only so much you can do with happy thoughts and text. Stay safe and tell your loved ones that you care.

Depressed.

2006-03-31T02:00:04Z

Disorder	Your Score
Major Depression:	Very Slight
Dysthymia:	Slight
Bipolar Disorder:	Slight-Moderate
Cyclothymia:	High-Moderate
Seasonal Affective Disorder:	Moderate
Postpartum Depression:	N/A
Take the Depression Test

So apparently I'm moderately depressed of some kind or something. I thought it would have put me more as a crazy fucker, but okay. I should probably put a real entry up and clear my head out a bit, but I need to go kill lava elementals and stuff.

Accident.

2006-02-19T08:39:10Z

I was driving back from JZ's place. Heavy rainstorm, slow traffic, etc etc. Right at the 57/5 junction, someone's Explorer got into an accident with a pickup truck. The Explorer flipped and landed on its roof. I didn't get a good look at it (I was trying not to gawk, I swear) but I thought I saw movement.

Nothing deep or insightful or cliched, just stay safe people.

Blood.

2006-02-04T04:06:25Z

I'll tell you, today blew chunks. Long, tense stressful day, capped off by driving a worker to the hospital to get a finger stitched back on :|

Yawn.

2006-01-26T08:17:18Z

I should be sleeping, but I wanted to hit all the daily bookmarks before bed. Wandered around the friends list a bit, noticed that Jamey /flisted me, attempted to return the favor and realized that I forgot my LJ password. Every single time I need to log into LJ I have to request that my password be sent to me. Am I getting old? :P

Re: me - some stuff happened, some stuff didn't happen, more stuff that I don't feel like talking about (but not as much as before!), and etc etc etc. I'll update later when I'm not supposed to be sleeping.

Take care all.

Oh, don't forget to do all your fingernail/toenail clipping, hair cutting, and house cleaning! Lunar New Year is coming ^_^

Driving.

2005-11-24T05:03:05Z

Off to San Fransisco for Thanksgiving. Headed back to Arcadia now, leaving for parts north around midnight. Expected to be leaving from SF at about midnight Saturday, sleeping in Arcadia for a bit, eating with family and then driving back to Irvine on Sunday. Will probably be a mess at work on Monday. Joy.

Birthday.

2005-11-16T07:03:35Z

So I'm 23 today. I know I'm more experienced, but that's about it. Yay.

Soup.

2005-11-05T02:16:01Z

Since the weather in Irvine has been generally cool lately, I decided to go for the soup. French Onion Soup is good stuff anyways, and can be made on the cheap ^_^

I don't have oven proof bowls or a working broiler, but toaster oven cheese toast will do just fine, thank you very much.

Slowly working through first episodes of the new anime this season and posting Stream of Consciousness type review thingies on Ama's site for fun. Still watching Bleach, Shuffle and Yakitate from earlier seasons though.

Rented Wipeout Revenge last week and had a blast with that. Not quite worth owning, since all the cars are pretty much the same and there are only like 6 tracks, but a fun rental.

WoW - Avarice Alliance is working on Ragnaros, which thrills the heck out of me. Basin led ZG is on the verge of Hakkar, need to get the Arlokk fight down and we're ready for Hakkar. Also, I've got my EPIC EYEPATCH FROM GAHZ'RANKA which also makes me happy.

Transferring from Deli Lead to Catering Assistant - read office bitch. I'm looking forward to it though, it's going to be challenging and higher paid. Also, my hands are starting to become serious concerns and various other aches and pains are starting to make themselves known. I should take better care of myself.

Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up - going to have to be cheap and do cards this year. Maybe if my finances look better next year I can do gifts ...

Need to see if SoCal Basiners want to get together for the holidays ...

Off to kill a dragon, later all ^_^

Posting for the sake of posting.

2005-09-28T06:35:41Z

ZG was a mixed bag. Killed 2 bosses with little trouble, got outrolled twice on need, people need to stop screwing around and just move.

Feeling a little tired, but don't want to go to sleep even though I should. Watched something that I probably shouldn't have, emotionally disturbed right now. Adding to weird dreams that I had early this morning. Meh, putting it down makes me feel tired. Guess I'll sleep now and see what my brain has done with it in the morning.

Hands are still messed up, but the worst of the flaking is gone. Just a slight redness and itchiness. Better.

Basic Cooking 101 for Monday (Tenative) - Marinara Sauce and the millions of ways to tweak it.

Family.

2005-09-26T05:42:09Z

Met a second cousin today. Found out that my cousin/uncle have a tenuous relationship at best. Proceeded to go look at various Open Houses. Restrained Fist of Death at least twice.

Was confirmed as referral, getting more money. Completely unexpected.

On the positive side, food turned out well and people enjoyed it. Good times. Pears could have been a little firmer, maybe should have used a different variety? Chicken should have been browned and finished in the oven. I'm too damn nitpicky.

Sleep now, work tomorrow. Take care all.

Think about and thank your father if you can. Family is important.

Henshin!

2005-09-25T01:37:42Z

Finished off Kamen Rider Faiz and Paradise Lost. Overall, pretty good but not as good as Blade. My biggest gripes were with the charactors getting all angsty and doing total 180s on their positions and the lack of cool power demonstrations. Granted, the events that happened explained why they might change, but it was really sudden. As for power usage, only Faiz got serious powerups and then he didn't freaking use them. Without the higher level powers, you get the feeling that there's no actual progression of power of opponents. Also, Kaiza was a freaking dick the entire series. At least Takumi had some moments where you could see that he was a good guy.

Paradise Lost at least had some cool fights to make up for the pathetic lack of any real change to the series. I know it's an alternate universe and all, but they could have at least made an effort :\

WoW - ZG was a mess today, everyone started off pissy and didn't improve from there. No one was executing properly, people weren't listening, just overall lousy performance. We downed bat and snake, but should have been smoother and Gahz should have been a cakewalk. Still working on alts, but slowly.

Anime - nothing much, seems like all the groups are crippled by people going back to school. I can wait, since I'm really not watching much right now. Bleach, Yakitate, Shuffle, Eureka, Futakoi - might watch FMP 2nd Raid and MSG Seed Destiny when they finish up and I can get them as batch torrents. Maybe I'll get Justirisers to tide me over.

Work - first week of serving customers is over. We're really freaking popular, usually takes 2 weeks to get to full capacity T.T
So far, not too bad. Need to get better with time management so I don't need to have people helping me do my setup all the time :\
Going to be living paycheck to paycheck for a bit, but it's going to get better. Looking forward to proving that I can live on my own and become independant.

Music - finished listening to that 5 gig torrent of all jpop releases for the month of March. Highlights include various albums/singles that I'll be keeping, 3 japanese girls performing a strange take on hiphop where the chorus was "Get drunk, everybody! Move your body, everybody!" and an album of Japanese groups and artists performing covers of classic funk/hiphop/whatever such as Stayin' Alive, Play that Funky Music White Boy, and Le Freak :P

Off to Wholesome Choice, need to get groceries for tomorrow. Current menu -

Roasted Garlic and Crustini (maybe do a simple Bruscetta?)
Mixed Green Salad with pears, bleu cheese, hazelnuts and raspberry vinegrette
Roasted Baby Red Potatoes with Rosemary and Parmasan
Roasted Chicken (brining with lemon, black pepper, candied ginger and honey)