So many things to do, so few priority choices...
And let's not even start on the things that are a complete waste of time, yet required to do...
Corporate bureaucracy sure takes its toll. My sympathy for Dilbert comic strips exponentially increases.

Another "Hello World!" was born today.
I wonder if it will go anywhere.

The more I struggle the less I understand how can there be people dumber than me in every aspect and how the hell they manage to survive (at times more than just a little succesful).
Reveal your secrets, Life!

It's free, just costs your time and soul

A lot of my free time, as always, is spent on playing video games. I was not lazy in that regard during last year as well.

I really like MMORPG genre in games, but unfortunately it eats a lot of your time. Because of that, for a time, I had switched to pure FPS till I discovered Warframe.

Warframe is a blend between an RPG and FPS. Sure there have been quite many lately, but not every each of them is successful at that. Warframe is kinda like Mass Effect + Ninja Gaiden + enemy spam. Really an engaging game (with all of its grind), that I have spent more than 1k play-hours on.

After a while I rediscovered another game that brought me back to MMORPG, RIFT. The game itself was launched couple years back, but at first it was a pure p2p game which was not that appealing. Last year, however, it switched to f2p and it's really awesome at that. Basically it is just a regular game of its genre and it first it might seem that it does not hold all that much content. However, while playing it you discover and understand that there is just so much stuff to do that you will never get bored of it sitting at main city and chatting (unless you want to, ofc).

Third in the lot is a game that's not really a game - Ingress, a reality that reshapes your life in the most unexpected ways. You can get the mobile app on play store for Android. I first met with ingress a lot more than a year ago, however my Samsung Galaxy Mini could not run the app. Recently my gf got a new phone so I confiscated her old Samsung Galaxy Ace (not that it was much easier to run it there). Ingress is very engaging and forces you to change your lifestyle. A important part of it is the community that's certainly very friendly and since you do have yo cooperate with it, you can forget about your anonymity. I can't tell much more about it without spoiling the fun. However I was forced to drop the game because its too demanding on for my old phone. I do plan to return to it one day.

A year and a bit

It has been more than a year since I last made any meaningless posts here. Not that I even completely forgot about my blog, I just didn't feel like writing anything here. I have kept notes of things to post, but now when I look back at it all, it's kinda out of place, so I will still keep them for some other time.

As for today, today I wanted to look back at this past year and maybe recount things that have changed, for Golden Time anime right now).
the worst and for the best. However, it might be just the pessimistic me, but still I can't name a single thing that has turned for the best. I had broken up with my gf for some time, my world got broken in parts, yet I`m still in the same place where I was, working in the same place, living in the same apartment, wearing the same clothes and stinking all the same. (and it's so damn sad to watch
What I need and what I want is a rollback of myself and my emotions from couple years back. I need to return to my apathetic self and not care a damn about what is the purpose of my life. Kinda like what I am inside games.

It's time for another brainwashing.
Time to reboot.

And time to continue...

The last couple of days I keep thinking that I should hate feeling so apathetic and disinterested in anything. But whatever, who cares, nothing really matters.

Remember - this moment is already a past.

Been wanting to do a little compilation of future. Since it's all videos, I will put it under a cut.

I finally got my hands on some chicken, so I actually made some chicken carcass stock for my miso soups. I didn't trust its taste at first, but when the whole miso soup was made, it did taste really good.
As it can already be inferred, I haven't given up on my Japanese cuisine month and probably will extend it, since I won't be able to use up all the ingredients I bought. So far it has been an adventure. I have no health problems to report and absolutely everything I made was either edible or tasted plain awesome. Now that I`m a bit more familiar with the recipes, I can conclude, that many dishes I previously thought to be japanese delicacies are actually what they eat on daily basis (I still don't really understand why daikon radish is so popular among the Japanese?)
Regarding availability...well, that's quite a bother here in Latvia. While most ingredients are inexpensive, especially if you aren't just buying them for one meal, there are several ingredients that are quite costy or hard to obtain, especially with regards to spices. I still haven't tried tofu as it's so damn expensive and finding ingredients for dashi is such a pain in the ass (why do shops even sell miso pasta if they don't sell anything to make dashi out of?). I can't say I have paid for food much more than I do other months, BUT i usually buy all kinds of crap to eat while watching movies/anime. This month I only bought what was necessary for 2 decent meals a day. As far as I can understand, everything I bought is much cheaper and tastier in Japan.
Would I jump to the opportunity to successfully live in Japan because of their cuisine alone? Yes, yes I would!

Why kids are rotten

I have to log in to get access to the source page of
this picture, so instead have a link to this

I never thought about it, but it just hit me while watching Shigofumi.
The thing with today's youth is that they are too apathetic, they lack any sense of empathy, responsibility, ethics, tolerance etc. etc. etc. They are apathetic and the only think holding them from going apeshit anarchic is fear of authority. And you just know it's not going to last. So where is the root cause? Is it their parents fault or the society as a whole? Well - partly both.
Parents, trying their best to give their kids proper childhood, are always trying to shield them from anything bad. And society as a whole accepts it and encourages it. And the problem lies at how good both of them are at it.
I consider myself a good person. My morals may not be the ones of a shining white knight, but at least I always try my best to remain a good person. Whenever I tried to remember what exactly formed me as such, I remember the TV-shows I watched as a kid about angels and generally people being every-day heroes and such. I thought that it was maybe the good deeds they did, like most parents would think, but essentially it's completely wrong. What really affected me, was the tragedy. The tragedies I saw formed in an imaginary world, imaginary people struggling with their life, imaginary families being destroyed, imagining myself in their place, imagining the pain they I would feel in their place. I do not wish to feel so much pain, to live in a world full of such tragedies or even to be reminded daily that the pain could be real. And that's what the youth today lacks.
Youth today is given just heroes that will save them from any small distress, they are given a bright and shiny world of cool stuff, they are given hope and dreams of future close to utopia, they are given the source of security, that nobody will hurt them and that the whole world is there to protect them. I`m not saying it's bad, if great, it's fantastic, in fact, that we can reach such results just a half century away from the World War 2. But they never get the chance or the time, or the need to discover what a tragedy feels like and that's why they never develop necessary emotional responses to protect the world from tragedies.

Valentine's day

Damn busy morning. Quick breakfest and I`m off to my damn sweetheart. WTF am I doing anyway!?

It's a shitty pic with shitty bento, I know

Cheap chopsticks

Sweet as fuck wine.

It has started. I haven't gotten down all the recipes I require yet, but I don't think that it will be a problem, because, judging by how much money I just wasted in RIMI, I can't really afford to eat 3 meals a day. And even that is not a real problem. I just made my first meal, that didn't taste all THAT good, due to lack of spices, but it was edible. The important thing is, it had so many nutrients and vitamins that I could live with one such meal a day. In fact, I did start noticing that I feel much better right after finishing it. I guess my body really needed those vitamins.
There are still several rare but important ingredients I need. I think I will need to scour the city a bit. I just wish I had the time for it.
Wish me luck. Wish me fortune.

As much as I can understand, according to this article, we are very close to teach a computer how to compute the overall behavior of any complex structure, predict what is going happen to it in the future and  make a world of science fiction real (I want to mention, that it kinda gives me the feeling, that a world of superadvanced robots like in the A.I. movie is closer than we think).
Unfortunately, firstly, at current state the quantum physics can be extremely vague at moments and thus don't give too much credibility and trust and, secondly, my personal limited understanding of physics or anything related to mathematics, doesn't let me make or form any objective observations and opinions. I`m really as dumb as a brick and quite possibly might have misunderstood the whole article.

Couldn't sleep, so I made these

I have finally decided to do something really new and ambiguous...well, at least for me. I have decided to do a Japanese Cuisine Month. It may not be as exciting as it sounds, I`m not going to make a new Japanese dish every day for an entire month - that would be insanely expensive and require more time than I`m willing to offer. Instead, for one month, I will eat the way Japanese do. I mean what they eat daily, not just delicacies. What's even better, I have a high chance of actually saving up some money that way, as for the most part they eat rice and vegetables only, which aren't all that expensive. However, with rice comes along my first obstacle - I will require A LOT of rice and a sane choice would be to buy a rice cooker, which aren't as easy to find in Latvia. Regardless, if everything goes as planned, I may start it up somewhere next month, after getting my salary.

THIS SHIT is AWESOME SHIT !
Try it now!

On related news, I`m continuing to study up on my Japanese finally. Ja Sensei really does help. Though I only do it while commuting for now, so it's not moving along too seriously. I do have some ideas in store to move it a step further, but that's for another time.

And yeah, my damn sweetheart will probably just say that I`m predictable, but: I finally tried out Sake (Choya Sake to be more precise). It's weak and has an odd taste, but it's quite good in combination with spicy foods. At least that's the impression I got from it. Not everyone agrees with me.

Just remembered that I completely forgot to write a review on my experience with Chinese restaurant.

Together with my usual partners, we decided to visit a Chinese restaurant and did so on 14.12.2012. Our restaurant of choice was Ginger (see attached location), mostly thanks to the location, but also the reviews weren't as bad and they did have a nice deal of 50% off everything on Fridays in December.
To put it short - it wasn't a regrettable decision.
To elaborate, let's start with the food. It was our first time having anything Chinese so I wasn't sure what to expect. We managed to order 3 different portions with 3 different kinds of meat, with seafood included. Thanks to the Chinese tradition of serving one big portion on 1 separate plate, from which you put stuff on your own, I managed to taste-test everything and I`m now in awe of Asian culinary. I did like Japanese sushi better, but if I had to bring someone to a restaurant and raw fish wouldn't be an option, a Chinese restaurant would be my second choice.
The restaurant was filled with colorful lanterns and our seats were put on a kind of elevation (I think it resembled some kind of a boat harbor or something). It was enough to put up a nice setting girls would most definitely enjoy, but, above that, it didn't feel cramped there. I dislike most restaurants because I always feel somewhat cramped there and thus can't relax, but Ginger didn't have that vibe on me.
I will, have, have to deduce a point for service. The boy that served us didn't really seem very professional. I mean, he was trying to be nice and did know his stuff, but he just wasn't a professional waiter and didn't really know how to handle customers. Not that it matter to me much, but there are lots of people for whom it does matter.

Here is a bad quality photo of my damn sweetheart and  Armands, as
we were leaving.

Things to note:

• I have started drinking tea with milk. Well, I usually don't have milk laying around and if I do - its old, so I substitute my milk with milk powder. Good enough for tea, it's the taste you want anyway, not the fat.
• Watched Gantz Live Action movies 1 and 2. Not shit-tier, but I`m quite sure nobody, who doesn't already know Gantz, would enjoy it. And even then the story has been changed quite dramatically due to lack of screen-time and budget.

• I installed aNTP (can't ever remember its full name without looking it up) on my google chrome. Looks interesting and will try it out for a while. Sadly, I`m no designer and thus it looks tasteless, but I hope my damn sweetheart will be able to fix that.
• I really need to start saving up some money, thus I really need to stop spending so much money. I`m afraid, however, they I will need every last penny I have soon, since I`m unsure weather I will be allowed to keep renting my current apartment. And the prices on apartments have kind of skyrocketed. Hopefully everything will come out better than expected.
• Last few days I feel like my brain has been working with 40% or less efficiency. Well, I don't really need more than 10% to get along, but still it does come with some negative effects. One of which is me getting increasingly more extroverted due to increased anxiety about future. People get to know parts and bits of me, when I get extroverted. People don't really like me. I need to find a way to stop doing it and just shut up.
• I somehow decided I could start learning Japanese by frequenting on 2chan. I`m somehow still procrastinating.

You and me - we are the same electron

So, there I was, typical Wednesday morning of me not sleeping, having breakfast and watching youtube video . I have watched some quantum physics stuff, I have heard that quantum particles can be in several places at once, that they are not bound by time etc. etc. For now mostly I brush off to that we probably just don't understand something yet,

Sauce

I mean, it can't be completely right like that... And then comes the part about John Wheeler up and it's just thrown at me that the whole damn universe, me, you, every beautiful and every disgusting thing in the world, consists of the same one electron. And that's when my mind blew. Thankfully, not for long, but it's still an extremely interesting and yet unpopular idea.
Everyone and everything might just turn out to be one and the same thing, but boiled down, it's even less impressive or meaningful than we like to imagine that idea.

Another YouTube thing, that has been torturing me for some time, came in this silly video about pyramids. I will have to be vague about this, as it was the mathematics and formulas in it. The thing is, there is something missing and something is just not alright with the wild theories they are spewing out the, but I can't crosscheck or even try to understand, what it could be, as I`m bad at maths. And that leaves me to only two decisions: believe them unconditionally or dismiss it as bullocks based on my gut feelings. And I`m even worse with those two options, than I`m with maths. Hopefully I will forget about it soon enough.


I believe now, that there is one important thing wrong with mass media education and nobody really realizes it. By pursuing the attention of viewers, the mass media are always trying to show them the most fascinating things and they extremely often do that not by explaining things, but by raising questions. Unfortunately, most of these questions are such that probably no one in this life time will be able to answer them. So eventually, if someone does get positively influenced by these educational programs, they haven't got the slimmest idea on how to solve problem, how to give answers to anything or how to explain what the fuck is going on in the world. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, as the college is there to teach that to them, if they have the interest, however, the interest is the problem. It's in human nature to lose all the interest once they discover that nothing is going according to have they have planned.
Though I may be wrong about all that and it's just my frustration, that comes from so rarely finding new information in YouTube videos. They are like goddamn fiction books - every smallest thought and information worth reading is piled under heaps of unnecessary fillers and words that, the author thinks, look beautiful.

Forgot to mention, that I did finally get my salary, only 2 days later. Turned out it really was stuck so if I would have waited any longer, I would have probably died of hunger.
Unfortunately large portion of my this months salary will go for paying off the damn water counters [?]. Their expiry date is due and thus fucking Rigas Namu Pārvalda are charging me ridiculous amounts of money. Obviously, by their count, an average person uses 10 times the amount of water I`m usually using. Fucking corrupted bunch of idiots without any idea how to properly do anything.

In another news, I`m a proud member of CyanogenMod community for a few days and my slowpoke Samsung Galaxy Mini grew a pair of data stream wings, as it seems. There are a few glitches, but no more than in the official Android releases and the gains from CyanogenMod 10 that is JellyBean 4.2 are awesome. I now have a zoom for my camera. It never had that. It's a digital one, so it's crap and I will never use it, but still a zoom.
Effectively, with that I got rid of Go Launcher. Seems it started lagging my android and eating more battery, than it ever did on Gingerbread.
Aw, I abolished Gingerbread right before Christmas.


To continue what I started today...well...yesterday already: we bought a new decent winter coat for my damn sweetheart. 80Ls. Fuck.

They are eating themselves. Yum!

What goes for Cloud Atlas, it was as boring for me as I thought, but at least I thought it would have some deeper ideas in it, something to think about when you are bored. Well...fuck. It was all about how important it is to tell the truth, to fight for the truth, to fight for freedom of speech, so we could tell truth and not be afraid. And it was laid out in a plain as possible way that every idiot could understand it. Waste of 3h, they could have just made a youtube video and include the key sentences in it. What I liked, however, was how they returned Mr. Smith. And a bit of matrix, when they started feeding dead clones to dead clones. As if they couldn't have been fed from the fast-food leftovers.

Unfortunately my evening didn't end on that negative note. My damn sweetheart is still being ignorant and oblivious to anything not considered as important by a higher authority than her. And It's driving me crazy. And I finally feel like giving up that shit.
I mean, I did change my fucking everything for her. I feel like I`m entitles to getting at least that little thing back, for her to stop and think bit, to learn to think, not just listen to whoever says whatever and blindly obey till her emotions take over and then everything flies to shit. She would be the one to get something out of it mostly, not me.
Or maybe I`m from, maybe I`m not really entitled to anything at all, maybe I didn't change myself at all and maybe that's just my fucked up emotions running wild.
Either way, it's hard to keep doing what I don't want to do, especially when there is zero motivation and nobody expects it from me. So why should I, again?

Todays plan - shoppimg for a present for my damn sweetheart and then to cinema. Most likely to watch Cloud Atlas.
Damn I could buy myself a new washing machine from the money I will spend here...

More later...