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.

Question 2

Nobody really wants to live in this world, knowingly or not. Some, the less fortunate ones, even regard to it as Hell. People escape the reality at every chance and when there is no chance given - by death. Death indeed, the last resort, the most obvious way out.
So why do we keep struggling to live in here? For hope? For happiness? Because we are afraid?
If we look at people being thorn away from this reality, we will always see fear. Fear of the unknown which is to come. Fear of the illusions our paranoia has plotted in our heads. Fear of losing what has never been ours. Fear makes its presence at every death and we fear the fear. However, it's not what holds us back from escape. Fear can be overcome and it was never there, when we first encountered life and choose not to abandon it.  Fear may make us do many things, but it does not make us clinge to life.
Lucky people might agree that they live because they feel good and happy that way. On some scale it's possible, but happiness is just a measurement of hormones in your brsin. And even so, even if your brain feeds on constantly high serotonine levels, the moments of indifference, apathy, unhappiness and despair will outnumber every moment you feel good. Thus happiness is just a mechanic, evolved to fool our brain and body. At least in this world. And that were the, we would stop functioning every time we dofn't feel happy.
My choice is hope. Hope is limitless. Hope lasts to our last dying breath and where you chop down one hope, two new rise. Hope is your undying dragon that will carry your wish and see it come true. It really is the embodiment of the previous two that will always give you something to fight for, to live for.
It may not solve the quest for purpose in life. People may disagree with it. People may not even care about the why and just keep living in the moment. And it will not matter either way. Everyone has their own reason for it and it should stay that way, if we want this world to continue.

Sad story, bro

[frustration]
Getting your first job might be still exciting as well as getting a job that you always wanted. Mainly, though, every story about getting a job is a sad story in one way or another.
Daily I see people with good education and actual brains in their head to work in a place way under their level. The same place I work in  with basic highscooleducation and no particular skills. While loking for something better I always ask weather I deserve something better? Well, no, I don't. But would I do a better job than some people with higher education? Sadly, it's very much even possible.
There are also a lot of other things that make me sad while job-hunting. Like the usual requirement for people to already have experience they can't get because nobody takes them without experience. There are also a lot of places that could offee you decent salary, they promote it, but at the end they just cut off all the cornes for ridiculous requirements. There are places that, if lucky, put down an ad for something that anyway gets given to someone they know personally.  Most of the time you can't even understand the criteria by which they choose people. Couple of times I applied for job in places where I would do the same damn thing I do now. Sure they didn't have education requirements put down in the ad, but obviously it was a factor since i never got a response. Then, if you get lucky, you manage to get an interview but after it they barely reply to you that you didn't get the job. And some other things I'm extremely uncomfortable to even think about.
And after all this text I still must say that I just might be extremely unlucky, as the cruel evidence of real life shows me. I can whine all I want, but people keep getting a job without much effort everywhere and they are always the same people I would like to see being overrun by a bus for how stupif they are.
[/frustration]

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.

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!

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.

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.

Since my damned sweetheart is being a dumbass (not that she is, she just loves to behave like one), i resumed watching anime, browsing 4chan, reading mange etc. It's a wild world out there!

I do, however, keep watching documentaries on youtube and would like to feature some of them here. The list of the ones I watched can be found after the break.
I will admit that, for the most part, they are quite childish and elementary and I do feel like still wasting my time on nothing when watching them. I will not amount to anything with that knowledge, even if I get it all and will be able to talk about it for hours...
To add to the complete and utter waste of time, there were some good deals recently on steam games, so I bought a few game packs and couple of games I had set my eyes on before. It's hard to feature just the games I bought recently, so here is the complete list of the games I own (+Guild Wars 2) including some f2p ones.
Additionally: a little something I would like to feature from the Play Store for android. It's an app for contacts. Why? Because I did like the original contact list my Samsung Galaxy Mini had, but, unfortunately, CyanogenMod 10.1 with JellyBean has a really crappy and slow contacts apps, so I replaced it with something better.

I really do need to find a way to stop wasting my life. And money. And start exercising.
Oh fuck you, life, for tempting me with the good stuff and then coming up with all the complicated rules to acquire it.

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...

I recently finished off 4 seasons of The IT Crowd. It's hilariously funny at times and at times - a britt-boring show. Still I consider it being worth watching, especially for people who like The Big Bang Theory.
Otherwise I keep on distancing myself from anime and 4chan and instead spend my time watching documentaries on youtube and exploring the What's hot list on google+. And I feel like giving up, but still holding there.

Picture related

And right now I`m a sad panda, because I still haven't gotten my salary. Contacted personnel department [?] today, seems the payment was stuck and got it moving. In my naivete I hope it will be transferred from DNB Bank to Swedbank in a couple of hours and I will still be able to make it to the mall, but usually it takes a day at least.

Among everything else I suddenly have the urge to install a dual-boot Linux distro. My weapon of choice - Ubuntu...or rather Kubuntu after first Ubuntu installation failed. Or rather I dropped it for now since i effectively killed my flash drive I had the installation copied on. Killed it in my sleep. I mean, I had some difficulties splitting some free memory off my hard drive, so that I wouldn't loose all the 200GB of data, but then I fell asleep in the middle of the process and today I discovered that my flash drive stopped functioning. At least partially, the little, green light on it is still functioning - yay.

Since every series I`m watching is coming to an end, besides watching stuff like this, I have been visiting facebook.com, aitām.lv and plus.google.com a lot more lately. And there is one thing that has become increasingly obvious to me: there is absolutely nothing on Facebook  There is nothing to do, I tell you! You can sometimes find at least something interesting on draugiem.lv, and there is always something worth reading/spreading on google+ What's Hot list, but there is never anything on Facebook  And that's even when I have the biggest amount of /friends/ there.
Though that may not come as a surprise to most google+ users...

P.S. I miss you, LiveJournal. Why did you have to die? russificate? become an embarrassing stigma to everyone not from Russia?

Lately feeling doomed

Regardless..

By trying out new tastes I found another nice pearl. While I`m always skeptic about anything that comes with Cyrillic letters, I did buy a drink named «ЭЛЬБРУС» and it turned out to taste quite awesome. It's not quite as cheap as most light drinks, especially since it comes in a glass bottle, but one 0.5l bottle of it quenches your thirst quite easily, in contrary to some more popular drinks that promote exactly that. I other word - worth every cent.
In shot, picture related. If you see it - buy it (I got it @ RIMI)

In another news - I`m working overtime again. Feeling a little lazy, but I need all the money I can get on my next paycheck and this is the best way to get it. Unfortunately my hours are limited, so I`m going for the maximum of 224 work hours I`m allowed. I think I`m at 206 atm, though I`m not sure, could be more.

And I changed my mind....I will not ignore, that I`m feeling doomed.
I feel like I`m stuck at working for a little over minimal wage for the rest of my life, which is probably true. It's a sad future, but if it were only about me, I could live with it. Unfortunately it isn't. My damn sweetheart is a lazy, dreaming klutz, she may become a graduate in a couple of months, but I do not believe she will be able to find a job that suits her whatever and won't be able to support herself. That's why I need to find a way to move forward without education, move forward, to be able to support myself and her. I need a new job, one that offers me more skills and bigger salary at the same time. Dammit!

OMG what a mess my room is!

Recap series - Tex Mex

Continuing our adventures, a week later after visiting Kabuki, we decided to try out Mexican food.
Our course was set to Tex Mex (see location). After arriving I concluded that it's a place you should visit at summer and eat outside, not inside. Unfortunately for us, as it was a cold autumn evening. I guess the atmosphere was ok, but personally I didn't find it comfortable, as we couldn't get seats that would cut us off from other people and I felt extremely exposed. However, you could feel from the waitress, that her heart most definitely belonged to that place and thus she helped me to feel a little like at home - it did help to relax a bit. The Mexican food itself wasn't really anything special. I guess I could compare it to a pizza. I probably will return there some day and try something else from the menu, like I occasionally do at pizzeria, but not until summer.

Overall it was a nice experience, but it did leave a lot of space for improvement.

Recap Series - Kabuki

Believe it or not, it's 21st century and I have never tried Sushi. Up until recently, that is.
In my conquest to broaden my world, I got together with my damn sweetheart and the_guy_i_know_since_kindergarten and we went on exploring the menu of Kabuki restaurant (see location).
Musty say I enjoyed the experience a lot and the choice of restaurant wasn't bad as well. Well, sushi is a bit too expensive for me to eat it every weekend, but I will most definitely occasionally order some sushi from and then and if I will have to take someone to a restaurant - that will be my first choice.

A successful experiment.

Recap series - purchases

I think it was back in July, though I`m not sure. Thanks to working overtime (frigging 225 work-hours in a month, lots of night shifts e.t.c.) i got a hold of another nice paycheck and upgraded my computer a bit.

First, and most notoriously, i bought a new monitor (silly picture related) a Samsung SyncMaster S23B300. It's a decent HD LED monitor, nothing fancy, but my eyes will never see the difference between a 500bucks worth screen and a 128bucks one. Even with my perfect vision (color or otherwise).

Secondly, bought a new cooler. An ass-kicking Titan Skalli. Be sure to take a look at the package if you follow the link. It looks great, other than that - it works so good and quiet, that I never even notice it doing anything.

Lastly, I upgraded my RAM. Since i have this old_like_the_world_itself gigabyte motherboard, I went for the small upgrade from 2GB to 4GB. However, to my great disappointment, it turns out, if your motherboard is limited to 4GB, you will never be able to use more than 3GB of ram, as a goddamn 1GB gets reserved for fucking nothing I will ever need. And that's how I discovered, that I have reached my limits at upgrading my old PC and should start saving up. If not for a whole new PC, at least for a new motherboard, sound card and 16GB worth of RAM.
Disappointment of the year.

Well...at least I thought that was the last of it. A couple of weeks later, while messing with my BIOS, i managed to accidentally turn off my PC's ability to recognize the hard drive. Since my hard drive was quite old and getting glitchy at times, after some time I concluded that it died and just went and bought 500GB of empty space. Long story short: new hard drive wasn't working either and after few ours of trying out EVERYTHING i finally managed to get both of my HDDs working.

And this is what becomes of me when I don't have to worry about my next meal anymore. Spent more than 200bucks on that and no fucks were given back then.

Back from a successfully attended job interview. Not really psyched about all that stuff, but only because a recruitment company approached me themselves, so it's just a sudden opportunity not something I was looking for. If I do, however, score it, it does seem quite reasonable to take that opportunity as the company has much higher pay-grid and offers me the same amount and type of work as the current one I`m employed in.
While it feels that the interview went well, I somehow do think that the test results won't be as splendid. And the feeling that I missed something important just doesn't leave me. Well, we'll see.

I would like to give some more details about the company the offered position, but I don't feel like that would be appropriate right now.

Off to work for now.