Here's My Story

"I’ve just been feeling frustrated because I feel like you’ve been questioning a lot of my statements." This friend's remark, during a sort-of-apology he made to me, puzzled me at first. Does he expect me to not disagree with his statements? Many of his statements are arrogant and sometimes delivered arrogantly too but that's besides the point. I sometimes question and/or disagree with his statements because of the content, not the mode of delivery. There were some clues to this puzzle in this recent exchange:  #1   Him: I have never heard of a cluster where almost 50% tested are positive. TG must be breaking SOP and completely neglecting their workers health. And now they’ve overloaded our healthcare system. We can’t deal with 2684 covid patients appearing at once?!? Me: Did our Health DG say that our healthcare system is overloaded? Him: Ah, fair, that’s just my assumption. Maybe they can actually cope with 2684 cases appearing at once. ... I seriously doubt it, but...

Unfortunately, Cow Brother (Damansara Uptown) closed down sometime during MCO. From their Facebook page, they highlighted a stall they were still operating at a restaurant at Ara Damansara, a place that we're not familiar with. One day, when one of our new favourite places for chap fan, 134 Mixed Rice, had a long queue, we decided to see what else to eat. By chance, previously, I spotted a Cow Brother stall at Megah Good Luck Restaurant and so I suggested to Ban to try it out. The taste was quite right. Definitely better than any other dry beef noodle outside of Seremban but seems a little inferior to the Damansara Uptown's Cow Brother's version. It didn't have pickled vegetable and ingredient was quite little. On the other hand, their noodle texture was so much better and similar to that in Seremban. Subsequently, I've asked, and they acceded, for the following changes: less noodle, more peanuts, and less soup. Short of going to Seremban, this is the best so far. ...

I continued playing after achieving one win (right up to defeating the Heart) for each character at Ascension 1 level . The next goal, unsurprisingly, was to do the same but at Ascension 2 level. Note that to open up the next Ascension level, one just needs to defeat the Act 3 boss but I make it a personal goal to beat the Heart as well before moving up a level. This time, my victories were chronologically ordered as follows: Ironclad, Silent, Watcher and Defect. I usually will start with Ironclad because that's the first character. Second, third and fourth characters are Silent, Defect and Watcher, respectively. If I lose, I'll move on the the next character. This time, Defect took so many more tries than the others. Here are some videos: I'm taking a break from this game because I'm ranking up in Overwatch's new season.

We're still sticking to cooking dinner 4 times a week. Tuesday is for Domino's Special Tuesday pizzas and two other days we dine out. Ban, however, has taken to cooking meat dish to last for two consecutive days. Lazy fella :P Ginger soy sauce chicken is one of my favourite dishes that I cook. I rarely pour gravy onto my rice but this one...yum! The reddish soup is red spinach soup with soft tofu. I absolutely love soft tofu. It's quite rare I cook a main meat dish and a soup dish because of the amount of work: I usually make the soup broth the day before. Fish sauce onion soup with snow crab meat & mushroom. This was my attempt to quickly make soup broth: fish sauce with onion, rather than using chicken carcass. I thought seafood would go well with it and so I got some snow crab meat, from Top Catch Fisheries, which is made of mostly fish, rather than starch. In fact, it tasted so much like real crab meat! Pan-fried chicken with garlic and thyme, by Ban. Simple and yet...

In my previous blog post , I essentially stated that I wouldn't be playing this game any more. However, for some reasons, I decided to accept the challenge of going for higher difficulty levels. My aim is to win once per character for a particular level before moving up to another one. In my opinion, Ascension 1 is actually beneficial: there are more elites. So compared to normal dfficulty, there is no way of escaping from an elite. However, Act 1's elites are actually doable and more of them means more relics. Oftentimes, I took the path that allowed me to fight 3 elites. Profitable almost all the time. If not, little time was wasted on the run since it was still in Act 1. The following gameplays are shown in chronological order in term of which character I managed to win at this level first. It's quite shocking that my Defect won before Ironclad and Watcher, given that, in my opinion, its the hardest to play.

Imagine you're working in one of the numerous companies of a conglomerate, Company M, which is related to the ultimate parent company by 3 tiers i.e. it's the subsidiary of a subsidiary of subsidiary of the ultimate parent company. Someone else, let's call person P, works in Company B which is is also 3 tiers away from the ultimate parent company. Whenever customers discover mistakes made by person P, instead of correted directly by him or by Company B, the onus is on the customers to approach Company B to get it rectified, which then falls onto your lap. Neither person P or Company B is involved at all in this rectification. Every single time, you have to correct those mistakes. It sucks, doesn't it? It's even suckier for the customers. There are no repercussions to person P since it's probably too troublesome for Company M to file a complaint that needs to go through 3 tiers to reach the ultimate parent company (provided those in-between agree to act on it) an...

I was so happy that my adopted plant had sprouted a second leaf: Actually, this is an old photo: it's all grown-up now hehehe.

There has been a few changes to the build I'm using since I first blogged about Corvus .  The first change was my agreement with someone's opinion that it's not effective putting many points into The Price of Salvation (I had 5 points in it) because the amount of heals won't save Corvus from being burst by damage dealers (best just to escape, rather than outheal). Its use is mainly for out-of-danger situation to quickly recover some health or to heal up bit by bit any poke damage received so as to negate the need to escape. So I experimented and settled on, for sometime, the following build: Grand Design - 5 Shadow Tribunal - 5 Priority Targets - 2 The Price of Salvation - 2 Magistrate's Might - 1 I stuck to this build, for a while, despite the following changes: Grand Design: Reduced Lifesteal scaling {5|5}% ⭢ {3|3}% The Price of Salvation: Increased healing {60|60} ⭢ {75|75}, Reduced healing time 2s ⭢ 1s (I read this in forum/reddit) Bug fix: No longer gets heal f...

 Saw this at Top Catch Fisheries (Taman Megah):

Ying needs the Life Exchange talent to be on par with other top supports. This then means constant management of the abilities Shatter and Illusion, where the former needs some precision. I find myself busier when playing Ying, compared to other supports. (For abilities, talents and cards for Ying, please refer to this gamespedia )  I've tried a few builds and in the end settled on this: Carry On - 3 Spring Bloom - 4 Squadron - 2 Rewind - 1 Brittle - 5 Some gameplays: