Here's My Story

The plan put in place by my current ruler's grandfather had succeeded: he inherited the Kingdom of Arabia :) That contributed 50% to my threat level. Eeek. Since my son was married, I granted the kingdom to him, without worrying too much about who he would marry. It mattered because my rulers were all high in diplomacy and so their wives had to have high stewardship to enable them to hold more land. It was still somewhat risky though: (a) His wife could die before he becomes emperor and the AI might choose a wife without high stewardship, or (b) He dies before his son becomes an adult. His son, my grandson, will then become King of Arabia and I then cannot dictate to him who he should marry. Hope the above two scenario won't happen!   Germany had a rather long period of civil wars ever since their king became a heretic. All started when their king waged holy war on neighbouring Christian rulers. A rebel emerged to claim the kingdom. When that was done, another sprung up and bef...

Until recently, I had owned only 4 mobile phones (chronologically): 1. Ericsson (not owned by Sony then), a secondhand phone dad gave me. Thereafter, I bought my own phones. 2. Nokia. Can't remember the model number but naturally it was a 'brick' phone :D 3. Nokia 5250. 4. Samsung J1 Ace (J111F), which was purchased nearly 4.5 years ago . Unfortunately, my entry-level smartphone fell victim to a side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic: it didn't have enough space for the running of necessary apps. Can't even consider any "nice to have" app. The death knell is probably the phasing out of hard OTP token by DBS and thus the necessity to install their digibank app even if it's just to use the digital OTP generator. That app takes up an incredibly memory space of nearly 0.9 GB! Henceforth, I had to skimp on apps. I couldn't even update apps without clearing cache so that my phone had at least 500 MB before Google Play allowed the update to be installed. So...

 "...it is far safer to be feared than love." This is probably the most famous phrase from this book (as translated by (Peter Constantine). Might be the only one that people know of. After reading this book in its entirety, I suspect that people often focused on this phrase and, in my opinon, misconstrued Machiavelli's advise. There were probably leaders who chose to do so to justify their actions. Machiavelli's advise is definitely not summarised by just this one phrase. Here are some quotes from the book to paint a more holistice picture of that famous phrase (emphasis mine): "      This raises the question whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the contrary. My reply is that one would like to be both , but as it is difficult to combine love and fear, if one has to choose between them it is far safer to be feared than loved. Beucase it can be said of men that they are ungrateful and inconstant, simulators and dissiumilators, and that they are hungry f...

There were no changes to Barik but there were significant changes to items: the most notable one is making Cauterize a passive item for all champions, starting at 25% and scale up to 90% over time (seems to be 13 minutes, according to many players). For more details, read this . So now, when playing Barik, I usually go for Haven 2, Veteran 1, Haven 3, Veteran 3. Recently, I'm thinking of mixing in Chronos and Morale Booster. Maybe Haven 1, Chronos 1, Haven 2, Veteran 1, Haven 3? We'll see. It just occured to me that my Turret Reset loadout is even more important now because enemies do not need to rush Cauterize any more and can take Bulldozer. This makes my Turret Saviour loadout less appealing. I have also tweaked the Turret Reset loadout: (refer to this gamespedia for more details) Field Deploy - 1 One Man's Scrap -4 Healing Station - 3 Brave and Bold -4 Failsafe - 3 More hp so that Veteran has greater impact and greater cd reduction. Hmmm Chronos looks more appealing no...

Unlike previous campaign, the marriage proposer never immediately leave defensive pact when approaching. I had to wait like 1-2 days. Glad that it worked and so I went ahead to land a claimant to then press his claim for the Kingdom of France. Bonus: the claimant married matrilineally to my kinswoman. Nice. It took more effort than I anticipated because I lost in the first major battle. I had to bring in reinforcement.  

Follow-up with the orthopaedic was 7 weeks after the initial consultation . After being on Artrodar for 7 weeks (once daily for 4 weeks, twice daily for the remainder according to the information sheet), there didn't seem to be any difference. Orthopaedic said that it often takes about 3 months to see significant improvement. For those with more severe pain, they might see it in weeks. So he asked me to continue the medicine for another 6 weeks. If there is still no improvement, then an MRI will be ordered to have a clearer picture of the extent of the damage and that either leads to continuation of medicine or one of two micro-surgeries. In response to my questions, I gathered that patellofemoral pain syndrome happened due to injury e.g. a fall, a twist etc. Immediately there was imflammation and the cocktail of glucosamine, chondroitin and MSM helped to reduce. That was why I felt much better and was virtually pain-free for decades. However, the underlying injury was still untrea...

After my booster shot , I took the opportunity to suggest to Ban to have early dinner at this newly opened restaurant. There was another restaurant, District 13 Cafe, that was few minutes away, which is now close. Not sure whether they're related but for sure, their exterior are totally different. I ordered their Smoked Duck Carbonara after reading a review that stated that their carbonara didn't have cream in its sauce: just egg and cheese. Unlike all other carbonara dishes I had so far in Singapore and Malaysia, this didn't make me feel 'jelak' i.e. it wasn't too rich and I guess what the waiter confirmed was true i.e. there was no cream in it. Two unusual ingredients in this dish: shredded nori (Japanese seaweed) and shrimp roe. Its bacon bits were unfried, which was unusual. Seems that it needed a tiny bit of salt (which I added later) but to some it might be go well with the salty smoked duck. Ban had Prawn Aglio Olio, which came with large prawns with shel...

I didn't particular want Arabia and so was considering changing target of the crusade but shockingly, it seems, there was no other valid target! @@ I also tried to see whether there was any member of my dynasty who was a parent of my vassal king/queen. None. By chance, as I was scrolling through the list of potential beneficiaries, I stumbled upon my half-sister. She didn't have any children. From memory, I was fairly certain that the default succession law of the kingdom won by crusade was primogeniture. So my best guess was that the title would go to me, as her eldest brother, and either my son or my brother would be the next in line. I went ahead to nominate her. Since I was prepared not to get the title for myself, I would be fine if my guess was wrong. Fortunately, I was correct :)   Since my threat level was high, I had to think deeply before attacking anyone within a defensive pact. Default strategy was to join vassal's war and, of course, to attack those not in defe...

The usual technique of landing a claimant and pressing his claim for the kingdom. My first war for a kingdom as Emperor of Slavic Union and that pushed my threat level immediately to just above 50%, triggering an influx of members into defensive pact.   My threat level shot up just above 50% right after pressing vassal's claim for the Kingdom of Aquitaine. I knew that would cause an influx of Christian rulers to be members of a defensive pact against me. My priority was to hold a feast to boost up vassals' opinon of me that had taken a beating. I checked, as I regularly do, the inheritance warnings and realised that a couple of counties would leave Aquitaine and join Serbia. From there, I discovered that I could press a vassal's claim to Serbia. I thought maybe there would still be time to do so (before the defensive pact kicked in hard) after the feast. I was wrong :( I later joined my vassal Croatian's ruler to claim a county from the neighbouring republic. To my dism...