Here's My Story

So I inherited Italy. After some consideration, I decided that I couldn't keep Italy because it would be hard to defend it. Also, there would be dukes/duchesses who desire the kingdom. I made Bohemia the primary title because my end goal is to form the Wendish Empire and also I built up considerably the capital county, Praha. Before I granted Italy to my brother, I changed Bohemia's crown authority to medium but it went back to low after the grant! It wasn't a reset because game told me that I had to wait for 50 years before changing this again. Grrrr. All along I wanted to go for ultimogeniture as a temporary measure before primogeniture (the latter needs at least high crown authority). However, as usual, due to dissatifaction of vassals in Duchy of Moravia, I granted the duchy to my only son then. If later I get another son and the inheritance law is primogeniture. it would be troublesome. My idea is to always grant that duchy to my heir. It then struck me that elective m

I've unlocked Ascension 10 for all 4 characters recently. As per previous post, I'll blog about victories over the Heart, the Act 4 boss. Ascension 7: Sadly, none of the characters managed to beat the Heart. Ascension 8: Only the Silent managed to beat the Heart.   Ascension 9: Only the Defect, surprisingly, managed to beat the Heart.

Ban's experiment with prawn tempura wasn't done yet. There was one more step: mixing in yuzu & chilli pepper paste into the tempura flour batter.  There's a funny story to this: he wanted to infuse tempura prawn with black pepper and flavour the soba sauce/soup with yuzu but since he couldn't get yuzu, he bought this yuzu & chilli pepper sauce only for the prawn. Yes, that's the reason. Don't ask me why 😆 So one day, we continued with this experiment: It was so delicious that I didn't need to dip it into the tempura sauce. So addictive too! Definitely different than any deep fried prawns I had before. However, given that it's a lot of work in preparing this meal, we weren't be having this often.

Happy anniversary my dearest Ban :) May we grow old together with much joy and happiness. Like previous year , we celebrated twice but this time the first one was unintentional: for the first time, I mixed up the dates 😅  Both times we ate at Kinpachi. During this Phase Two of the National Recovery Plan, the restaurant is open for dine-in, subject to following conditions: 1. Reservation is a must 2. Need to choose one of three available hourly timeslots and, yes, dining time is restricted to an hour On our first dinner, we shared an oden and four pieces of hanpen. Ban also had soba with mixed tempura whereas I had four pieces of salmon sushi and a stick of scallop yakitori. We were happy with the food but I was so full! On our second dinner, Ban had one of his favourite set meals there i.e. teppanyaki seafood, which I had 6 pieces of salmon sushi (they serve the best salmon sushi imo) and 2 pieces of bachi maguro sushi. Forgot to take photos, once again. All good!

This will be the last post on Paladins at least for a while. Two reasons: (1) Fed up with SEA server because there was at least one disconnected player in almost every match. I tried OZ server which was much better (only 1 dc in like 8 matches) but the ping was doubled, and (2) Started a fresh Divinity Original Sin 2 run with Joker but this time in Tactitian mode. Due to lack of disk space, I had to uninstall Paladins. Here were the last few best matches: Corvus Second highest (K+0.5*A)/D ratio, joint lowest death and second longest elimination streak. Seris Highest (K+0.5*A)/D ratio in team (2nd highest overall), joint lowest death, longest elimination streak (16), highest healing (beating both opponent's supports' combined). Ying Joint highest (K+0.5*A)/D ratio, joint lowest death.

Upon a friend's recommendation, I ordered some Nyonya rice dumplings from a seller based in Melaka. It appeared that a minimum order of 10 was required and so I also ordered some Hokkien bak chang with salted egg yolk for Ban's parents and a tub of pineapple tarts for myself. Delivery fee was RM 20 @@ Recently, with her agreement, I provided the following feedback: Hokkien bak chang:  very good; lots of meat. Nyonya chang: loved the glutinous rice's texture; the filling seems to lack spices because all I tasted was sweetened minced pork. Pineapple tart: delicious; the jam wasn't sickly sweet and not dry; the pastry wasn't too crumbly. The feedback process went well until she said that she tried a spoonful of the Nyonya chang's filling of which she could taste the spiciness (due to coriander and pepper) but not so peppery kind of spiciness. She then assumed that I liked strong peppery taste. This, I believed, is a mistake. Seller shouldn't make assumptions ab

My nephew, who was the second in line for the throne, was exceptionally better than my heir (my son). I was trying to figure out how to get rid of my son. Apparently game was patched such that you cannot murder your own children. Meanwhile, I was worried that my son would die before I did. Should that happened and later I passed away, Duchy of Moravia wouldn't be in the hands of the would-be king (my nephew). Hence, I revoked the duchy from my son and gave it to my nephew.   RNG god favoured me this instance: my son died from natural cause and so my nephew became heir. Yay! As expected, my nephew became King of Italy via inheritance and so took out Duchy of Moravia with him. The risk was that he dies before I do but highly unlikely because I was much older. The battle over Krakow was probably my last.

I normally get my lipid profile test done at a Pathlab. I usually get Ban's help to drive me there because it's hard to get carpark spot there. So, when I found out the local pharmacy offered this service, I opted for it (it was significantly cheaper i.e. RM 25 vs RM 45) despite its accuracy at 90% of that done at Pathlab via blood test (this is via blood from finger prick). Results as compared to 4 months ago:                                 May 2021         Ref range              Sep 2021          Ref. range Total cholesterol           6.3                  < 5.2                          4.9                 < 5.17 HDL ("good")               2.08                > 1.04                       1.5                 > 1.03 LDL ("bad")                  4.2                 < 2.6                           3.1                 < 2.6 Triglycerides                 0.8                   < 1.7                         0.5                 < 1.69

A country is currently planning to update their law governing insurance so that it's in accordance with international best practice, protect consumers and all those good stuff. Among the proposed changes are licensing requirements of various professionals, including claim assessors. Of course they couldn't resist collecting fees for those licenses.  It is good that they spell out when the various licenses will be revoked (e.g. when the professionals committed fraud) but one particular scenario made my eyes widened: if claim assessor hasn't assessed any claim for a period of more than 6 months, their license will be revoked 😂 So, imagine this scene in an insurance company: CFO: Good news! There have been no claims for nearly 6 months already and the actuary expects nothing unusual for the remaining year. Our investment is doing well too. CEO: Excellent! We can expect record profit this year. Claim assessor: Oh no! CEO: ? Claim assessor: My license will be revoked in a few d

One day, I noticed that my Paladins game was sluggish and that I wasn't able to record it using GeForce Experience. So once that was done, I went to check the application and noticed that its recording feature, Shadowplay, was greyed out and stated that I didn't have an external graphicas card. Eh? Check on Device Manager showed that it was hidden! I tried many things, including system restore, but they didn't work. The final action I took was to uninstall it but it didn't reinstall when I restarted my laptop. In fact, it wasn't even hidden 😬 I wanted to send to Yus for repair but that would be crossing interstate border, which was still banned and so instead I planned to bring it to OK Computer Solution Petaling Jaya the next day. However, later there was a greater problem: BSOD, with the error message "Bad System Config Info error". It happened 3 times within a short period, the last of with somehow the system got me to a troubleshooting option which a