Here's My Story

About a week ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a call from my GP who wanted to know how I was doing. So I told him what happened since I last consulted him. In fact, I'm now quite sure the redness is gone because my throat feels normal now. As my sister said, he's a keeper.

I had only one post dedicated to the game Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark . It's developed by 6 Eyes Studio. It is my first time playing such game: grid-based and turn-based tactical game where you control a party. According to Ban, the most famous game of such mechanic is Final Fantasy Tactics, a game that, I guess, encouraged many people to to try Fell Seal. Apparently it's more common among Japanese RPG ("JRPG") console games. Yes, Fell Seal is playable on consoles too. Not only its turn-based system is my cup of tea, it also has a variety of ability "trees" that are available to all characters, saved those reserved for story characters and certain gender. It's not hard to pick up and yet it provides sufficient challenge to be able to play well. Together with wide variety of maps; dialog that can be serious, witty or whimsical; as well as rather compelling storyline, it doesn't bore you...unless you want to inflict boredom upon yourself by grind...

For the past 6 months or so, I've been having this throat irritation almost all the time. Once a while, it was painful (sorethroat) but mostly it felt....dry? Hard to describe it properly and so I just settle on 'irritation'. According to my doctor, there was redness on my throat and swelling too if it was painful. If it was just redness, he would typically asked me to gargle with warm salt water and stay away from fried, spicy or oily food. If there was swelling, he would prescribe dexamethasone, and maybe antibiotic if it looked bad. The medicine elimninated the swelling and but merely reduced the size of the redness. At one point, there were two streaks of redness after a course of antibiotic and dexamethasone. I suggested that perhaps it was due to backdrip but he didn't seems convinced. Doctor: What's your address Me: ??? Me: *gave my address* Doctor: Are you from another planet? *laughs* Me: *laughs* My mum, sisters and I are from the Twilight Zone ...

" At the program where I work, we have members of all three diagnostic groups as clients, given that those with autism are high functioning. When prospective clients and their families visit, we like to ask a veteran client to show his or her apartment to the visitors. This is an unambiguous social sitaution in that there is a specific point to the interaction; it is meant to be friendly, informative, and brief. Our executively impaired clients have no difficulty accomplishing this task and passing for normal if the contact remains brief enough and superficial enough. They have sufficiently good social behavior to greet strangers with eye contact and a hand shake, to make small talk while walking to the apartment, and to point out obvious features of the environment (this is my bedroom and this is my roommate's bedroom). The clients who have autism or Asperger's are not able to accomplish this simple behaviour without revealing their social disability. " - "Adu...

" Our PDD-NOS clients have trouble doing the socially correct thing when their focus is pulled elsewhere. Unlike a person with Asperger's or autism, these individuals are very contex-dependent; unlike the others on the spectrum, when questioned about social behaviour, they can correctly answer what is expected as long as their focus is not pulled to some other need or interest. Knowing the right answers does not guarantee the correct behvaiour when the situation arises, however. Those with Asperger's respond very differently to the same social questions. Although they don't know the correct answers, they tend to be overly confident about their interpretations, even self-righteous. And they don't accept others' interpretations even when they would obviously benefit by doing so. On the other hand, intelligent individuals with autism or Asperger's can sometimes train themselves in social behaviour to an extent that they can get by, although awkwardly, in the...

Slay the Spire is a deck building game that's highly recommended by Ban. In fact, he recommended it to me quite sometime ago but I didn't take it up, probably because I was already busy playing a few games and didn't have time for another. However, earlier this year, I was bored with Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark (but started afresh recently), played Overwatch just enough to get Silver rank in support role, was unhappy with the wilcard situation in Minion Masters, and Dota Underlords was becoming more random for my liking. For reasons that I forgot, I then picked up Slay the Spire. To me, it's a good game but I get bored once I managed to beat the final boss (videos of each success below). Probably because I'm not good enough: I don't see the point of playing at higher difficulty, that has only downside, when the normal difficulty is already challenging. Only other reason to repeat the run is to try different builds but I find that only a few builds can give...

I've been making salmon maki once a week during this MCO. Instead of jointly making them, we have adopted the same strategy as any other cooking session: one person cooks, the other person washes dishes and wipes stove. However, when it comes to maki and pizza, we also watch a show together while having dinner. So far, we have watched Phantom of the Opera and Ghost in the Shell (original animated version), and are currently watching the tv series The Untamed. One day, to my surprise, Jaya Grocer ran out of seaweed. We waited a few days and still it wasn't restocked (we checked two outlets). It wasn't available at Oliver Gourmet and I think it doesn't stock it in the first place. A senior staff at Starling Mall's Jaya Grocer called the supplier and then told me that seaweed would be restocked the following Tuesday i.e. 8 days later. I hadn't bought cucumber yet but the problem was the ripe avocado. I agreed with Ban's suggestion of using it in making ham...

Inspired by some chicken broth recipes I read online, I made one with celery and garlic: It was so aromatic when I was cooking it. I used half to make long cabbage soup and the remainder to make ABC soup. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for the former becuase long cabbage has very little taste of its own. So the taste of the soup was ordinary. Meh. As for the ABC soup, the addition of celery and garlic to the broth didn't make a difference to this soup. The good news, however, was that I finally had silken tofu :) One day, I was hunkering for chicken rice. The kopitiam nearby has chicken rice but only roasted chicken. So, we drove to Yat Yeh Hing . Ban stayed in the car while I queued. I asked for one roasted chicken breast with large rice and one steamed chicken drumstick with small rice, but I was told that I had to order a quarter chicken to get the drumstick. After 2 seconds of thinking, I declined to order anything. As I walked away, I heard a "huh?...

Ever since I got mobile data for my phone, I seldom read the book that I had with me when I brought my parents to hospitals for their appointments. I usually read news and snoozed. During the last few months of my dad's life where he slept most of time, I read books whenever I sat by his side. Naturally that habit vanished when he passed away but I should still try to read. Mind you, I do read lots of news articles, actuarial discourse and writings of various topics but reading a complete book is still different, isn't it? Here is a list of books I've completed reading recently: 2019 The Salmon of Doubt - Douglas Adams Consist of many 'ramblings' and short stories. His style of writing is such that I needed to force myself to read an entire story before I could say I enjoyed reading it. So not a good idea to read this if you know you will be interrupted multiple times. 2020 Value Investing In Asia - Stanley Lim Peir Shenq & Cheong Mun Hong Usef...