A couple of games

It's been a while, hasn't it?

The main reason is that I haven't had much to write about. I started my apprenticeship at the city's IT-services a few weeks ago and that's pretty much all I've been thinking about lately... that and games actually. So I have tons of (not quite, 169 in my steam library) games but sometimes I feel like I've got nothing to play. Familiar feeling? That goes for clothes too... But now, I've picked random Steam games that I've been meaning to play but haven't gotten to it until now. There are quite a lot of them so I'll try to be brief.

Mutant Mudds Deluxe

So the first game is an old school platformer with a twist; you can travel from dimension to another, e.g. from the background to the foreground. The game really has hours of gameplay because the stages get extremely difficult as you progress, at least for me... You have regular stages and from those you can enter extra ones. On top of that you have so called 'ghost stages' that are similar to the regular ones, only they are more difficult and you can't hurt the enemies. I've played it some buuuuut, it just gets so frustrating when you enter the extra stages.

 Data Hacker: Reboot

 Data Hacker: Reboot is a role-playing game made with RPGmaker and it has a special kind of Japanese vibe. Perhaps its the characters. Oh and they even have voice acting! Anyways I haven't really understood the story yet but what I've figured is that the worlds are collapsing and people are being dropped into this virtual reality that's also being attacked by some virus-like monsters. The main character, who's also in the picture above, is looking for his sister by using these so called world shards to enter different worlds. Really, I have no clue. That's where all the cool stuff ends. I need to grind so much that I constantly feel like I'm not making any progress. Grinding can be fun, I love grinding in some games, but in Data Hacker it just feels like I've been playing for 20 hours instead of four... I'll get back to it when I can but playing it now feels too heavy.

Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten

This is a tower defense game so it requires some strategy, which I usually lack. Somehow, I've still managed and I love this game! At times it becomes very stressful but most of the times I triumph in battle! I even like the story; it's original and a classic battle against evil. So the main character is a librarian of a royal court, and she gets thrown into a huge pit or valley where all plague victims end up. The twist here, is that all plague victims in this story end up turning into zombie-like creatures. Our main character is about to turn into one as well, but instead she magically finds a way to battle these 'revenant'. She meets friends from different fighting classes on her journey to discover what is going on. I've enjoyed the game immensely, seriously, play it. I suck at strategy games but Defender's Quest is a lot of fun!

 Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

Gotta love anime-styled RPGs, right? Recettear tells the story of a young girl who is left behind by his adventure-crazed father. All is good, until a fairy-loanshark comes along and tells our heroine to pay his father's debts! So, Recette opens up her own store! Your task is to get enough money at the end of every week, by buying low and selling high! You can also go dungeon looting, which requires the company of an adventurer. I played this game a long time ago and I remember having huge problems meeting the deadline every week. I decided to try again and now it's going smoothly! I really like this game but it can get a little repetitive quickly.

Hero Siege

 Yet another game that can get a little repetitive but more about that later. Hero Siege is a rogue-styled adventure game. Your mission is to hack enemies into pieces, level up and loot all kinds of riches. And of course to kill Satan's son, that is probably the final boss of the game. I've had fun with it, but like I said it gets a bit boring at some point. For instance I went into this secret level with hundreds of killer-sheep in it, I had probably all the possible bonuses on and I rocked the level. Oh, and leveled up quite a bit. The next levels were all rainbows and kisses instead of harsh blows and bloodied grass, well not quite but you get my point. You're supposed to start every level very helpless, but you can cheat that by grinding earlier levels. And what's the point of that...

Long Live The Queen

I am so addicted to this game! But it's so darn difficult... In this raising simulator your task is to aid a young princess on her way to coronation. Her mother has just died so she's feeling depressed and lonely. In fact, the mood she's in affects what bonuses and penalties she gets while studying. For instance when she's feeling happy, she's best at conversation and athletics. On top of that, every skill has three subskills that you can level up to 100%. If I counted correctly, there are in total 42 skills!! For instance, on my first gameplay I concentrated on military skills and Intrigue (internal/foreign affairs, ciphering) and thought that no one can hurt us now! Then I embarrass myself at a ball, since my character doesn't know anything about dancing, royal manners, flattery, decoration and the list goes on... And then she dies of a poisoned chocolate because she doesn't know anything about medicine! Oh, she only knows how to crypt secret messages and command an army... So frustrating, but I have to keep playing!

So sorry for the long post but yeah, I've been gaming a lot lately. I'll have a break on Saturday because some of our relatives are coming over. I'm baking and I hope everybody's going to have a good time.

Thank you for reading and see you next time!

What Our Weekend Was Like

So what's been happening?

This entry isn't going to have a certain theme but instead I'm just going to tell a little about our weekend. Nothing too exciting, but I do have some pictures to show!

FRIDAY

On Wednesday I went to the so called "Crazy Days" that a big Finnish retail chain holds every once in a while. I could've been in and out in less than 2 hours but since I went there with Rami's two older sisters, it took us more than five hours... God I wore the worst shoes possible for shopping so my legs were in terrible pain the time I got home. Anyways I don't think the prices actually go crazy low, but I did make some cool finds. I bought a yoga mat for around 12€, a nice cardigan for 20€, some spices 1€ per shaker, 450g of goat cheese for 5€ and the reason I'm telling all this, I bought 500g of salmon for around 5€. Since fresh fish is terribly expensive most of the time I've made all these excuses for why I haven't made sushi before, but now I got the inspiration to do some Japanese cooking!

 So here they are, my very first homemade sushi! I used specially made sushi vinegar that I mixed with the rice, and for the fillings I used salmon, cucumber, avocado and cream cheese. I must say that they were very delicious. All the ingredients cost me around 30€. That's quite expensive but since we had to purchase EVERYTHING, it does cost a bit. Next time it'll be a bit cheaper though.

On Friday we were supposed to eat lots of sushi, drink a bit of wine and relax with Rami. We did that, yeah, but we also had a little company. Our good friend Saija used to live close by with her boyfriend Antti, but they moved last spring and we haven't seen each other that often anymore. So that's why it was so wonderful she called and asked if she could come by. We listened to music, ate sushi and drank wine the whole night. We were supposed to stay in but we ended up going in one of the local pubs. It was nice though, I got to dance a little bit and sing karaoke. We even had a conversation with this Romanian guy that we seem to see everywhere, and we got to know a little about his life despite the language barrier. I don't think he understood my English at all...

 

I almost forgot about this photo! We're all going into different Halloween parties this year and the big question is, what are we going as? So in my drunkenness I realized that I once bought a Cookie Monster costume from eBay. The only problem is that it's too small. I'm 176cm tall and I purposely bought a suit that's for 180cm tall, and I thought that'd be enough but no... It's probably just fine for a 165cm tall person. I'll come up with something else, but since I was a bit tipsy I decided to try on the costume anyways and take a selfie. Yeah...

SATURDAY

Terrible, terrible hangover... I've been going low carb for over a week now and despite Friday being a bit of a cheat day, I got drunk so fast. Even at the pub I was only drinking water, in the beginning... So me and Rami took it easy really. We were invited to go barbecuing with two friends on a lake, but what the heck it's less than 10 degrees outside?? Obviously we didn't go since walking 4km felt like too much at the time. Even our friends didn't spend that much time there at the lake. But in the evening they decided to visit and brought a little meat with them. It was yummy and in return we offered them some sushi. Once they left we went to sleep almost immediately.

SUNDAY

There's not much to tell about today. It's been more of a cleaning day, doing laundry and dishes and so on. We visited my grandma shortly and went grocery shopping. Rami's actually cooking right now and I was supposed to help but this is taking more time than it should. Anyways, I'm just waiting for tomorrow and I'm freaking out a bit. My three-month apprenticeship is going to begin and I'm terrified since one of my tasks is going to be educating city employees on information security. I am not a presentation-giving-type of person at all... But I'm just going to think that it's only three months and if 3 years can fly by like "where the heck did the time go", then so will the freaking three months. Hopefully I will learn a lot from the experience.

Thank you for reading again and I shall leave you with this picture of Lilla My!

 

 

Food and music

Good morning!

I actually feel a lot better now that I've slept a little longer. A whopping seven hours instead of just four! Anyways I've already made some arrangements and I'm finally going low carb again (but not high fat). In high school I lost over 10 kilos by cutting on carbs and exercising regularly. Back then I was normal weight and proportional and I hated my body, but now I actually have a reason to lose weight. I've known it for a while now but on the weekend I tried to take one of my rings of and it wouldn't come off. We tried olive oil, cold water and all things slippery to make it come off but all I got were awful burns. So yeah, that's when I decided I need to do something. I have no idea how much I weigh because our scale can't make up it's mind. For instance before we moved I weighed myself and the result was what I expected. A week later I tried again and it showed 5 kilos less. I was happy but then it started showing 10 kilos more! Today I weighed myself and I was again in the starting point where I was before we moved. So no trusting the scale!

 This was my breakfast today + coffee. The bread is delicious but it was a pain in the ass to make. It contains some carrots, seeds, two eggs and spices. I boiled the carrots and I thought that why not try the old blender I got from my stepmom. And nothing, the carrots just lay there in one piece and nothing happened. I decide to do it by hand but I realize that the only thing I can smash the carrots with is a fucking fork. I do that for two minutes and go FUUCK this shit, Rami is looking a bit worried over my sudden mood swing, but I then proceed to trying a mixer. That goes a little better but in the end the mixture's not smooth at all and I was a bit worried. In the end it turned out alright even though I made a horrible mess in my anger. But tasty breakfast nevertheless, even though I have no idea what to eat for the rest of the day!

The real reason I'm writing

Since k-pop has become very popular recently you may know the band I'm about to talk about. It's BIGBANG, or just Big Bang like it was back when I listened to them a lot. I remember paying a crazy amount of money for two of their albums, that also contained cool stuff like messages in Korean, stickers and whatnot. The album covers were huge and funnily shaped and they had holograms! How awesome is that... I even wanted a t-shirt but back then it was crazy expensive like I mentioned. I listened to BIGBANG in middle and high school but since then I've kept a small break. I've listened to some new songs afterwards, I really liked Fantastic Baby, but that is nothing compared to what I discovered yesterday.

 Hoooly moly! These guys are killing it and I love it! I will definitely continue listening to them more often in the future. I went absolutely crazy about this song yesterday and I couldn't go to sleep since I needed to watch the video over and over and over again. The dance version is very cool as well and I was planning on showing it to my Zumba instructor. It has a few zumbaish moves so it would be kick ass to dance to this song! The first thing I did when I woke up was turn on this song and DANCE!

From left to right: T.O.P, Seungri, G-Dragon, Daesung, Taeyang. (So you know who I'm talking about)

And wow. My favourite was always T.O.P and he is still handsome, but dang what happened to Seungri and Taeyang!? Especially Taeyang, damn he is hot if I may say so! That all goes for everyone but Daesung... He makes that cool head bang at the end but still not as cool as the rest of the band. And cut your hair young man! I don't need to mention G-Dragon, since he is amazing, a true mastermind and super hot in his own quirky way. Love you Gee.

Shortly said, BIGBANG is back and I am effin' excited. Perhaps I'm a bit late as usual, but I'm happy I found this great song that has inspired me to stay tuned.

Thanks for reading again and I'll be back with new stuff soon in the future!

 

Time for some photos!

Good morning all!

Do you ever leave your bedroom in the morning, enter the darkness groggily but somehow satisfied after a good sleep? Your first thought is water, but suddenly there in the darkness a microsecond later your next thoughts include boogieman or bughuul from Sinister, that creepy girl from Grudge, possessed Regan from the Exorcist, Michael Myers and the list goes on... It's funny how the brain works. I then proceeded cautiously into the kitchen, turned on the lights and turned around to see if something or someone was lurking behind me. Most of these stories end happily and you laugh at yourself a bit afterwards, and that's exactly what happened to me for the millionth of time. Seriously, I'm still a bit freaked out by Sinister 2 even though it's been a couple of weeks since we saw it in the theater. I watched the trailer again and it wasn't as terrible as the rest of the film, because they included cheerful music in it! I think I'm more traumatized by the music in the film than the jump scares and disturbing images.

Got a bit sidetracked...

So I took some photos yesterday. I usually take pictures, mostly for Instagram and Facebook with my Huawei phone, but recently I've started to use my good old Panasonic pocket camera. The pictures aren't that great but decent enough for me and my budget!

 So these two pictures of my cat Lilla My (Little My from the Moomins) are really funny in my opinion. I actually tried to record her snoring because it sounds so cute but I failed dramatically. She then woke up, looked at me and the camera and as usual started to moan or groan in this terrible sound you wouldn't imagine a cute lady cat making. Seriously, everybody who meets her tells me how weird or terrible she sounds! But it's normal, she always reacts to the camera this way. MEEEOOOOO What is that? Why point it at me? What's it do? MEOOOO Tell me right now!! Notice how her mouth is just a bit open? She's just stopped meowing! Such a talkative cat sometimes.

 I nearly missed the chance of taking this photo. Me and Rami were out on the balcony smoking (even though we shouldn't, our families don't know we still smoke a bit) when we noticed how lovely the skyline looked that evening. I decided to smoke my cigarette, grab my camera and take the picture. That only took around three minutes but meanwhile the pink had nearly faded away. Thankfully I do have photo editing tools (crappy online ones, don't have a license to Photoshop at the moment...) so I was able to make the colors pop up a bit. The tool I'm using doesn't have the option to emphasize a certain color scheme, like blue and pink in this picture, so I had to use curves.Thankfully the rest of the photo was dark, otherwise it wouldn't have looked natural. I was missing some other useful tools I would've liked to use but perhaps in the future I'm going to have Photoshop. Dad mentioned something about not using his Photoshop license and giving it off to me...

That's it for now! I'm fully awake now and it's 5AM (woke up little before 4) but I'm going to have a long day so I should probably sleep a bit more at some point. We are going to Rami's sisters place today and those evenings always stretch into the wee hours of the night. I have to work on Sunday so I definitely need to sleep some more today. And as always (sounding like MatPat from Game Theory...) thanks for watch... reading. 

Food entry!

Hello all! 

I've had an incredibly boring day. I woke up quite early, 5:30AM to be exact and since then I've switched from one activity to another every 30 minutes or so. It's a frustrating feeling when you have lots of time at your hands but don't know what activities you'd enjoy at that moment. I've tried playing The Sims 3, going through my Steam library, reading and watching Netflix. Nothing felt enjoyable so I decided to write a bit. Writing has suddenly become extremely fun!

Sooo, food!

Me and Rami have lived together for two months now and cooking has become an enjoyable every day activity that we share together. While living alone I rarely made any effort in cooking my meals and most of the time I was content with my instant noodles... But now that I cook together with someone I'm willing to try different kinds of recipes. Also, my cooking has a meaning now since I know that someone else is going to share the food with me and I definitely want them to enjoy it as much as possible! Like during the time I didn't have a laundry machine so I had to use my dad's; I was washing laundry at his and his fiance´s place when they decided to go grocery shopping and left the cooking to me. So, pasta and sauce. I was so nervous about cooking a good meal that I ended up overdoing it a bit but at the same time I probably made the best pasta sauce to day. To be honest it was a lucky experiment and they had just the correct ingredients in the fridge. My step-mum frequently asks me when I'm going to cook for them again, which is nice!

What I've also noted is that our cooking needs variety. I was partly vegetarian for five years meaning that I sometimes ate fish and chicken, but I avoided red meat. It wasn't a moral choice, I just felt like we ate so much meat at home that after meals I felt ill and tired. During the time I mostly ate food consisting of soy and veggies. I haven't cooked meals out of soy in a long time, until now. And I fell in love with the ingredient, again. When I suggested that let's use soy in our pasta sauce, just for variety, Rami was a bit unsure at first. He said he'd never liked the taste of soy but with proper seasoning I made him change his mind! I don't think he's lying either, since he's eaten my soy-filled meals with such ferocity! On top of that using soy is extremely cheap. Using cheap ground meat in our meals, like in pasta sauce costs between 2 and 3 euros. We eat that pasta sauce for two days and the package contains 400g of meat, a combination of pork and cow. 2-3€ doesn't sound that expensive but wait 'til you hear about soy. I bought a 500g pack of soy and so far I've made 4 meals using soy and it's taken aroung 130g. This package cost me 3,50€. So what do I choose? Red meat that is more expensive, or soy that is cheaper and equally tasty? I think you know the answer.

Picture time!

 

So the pot full of vegetables was actually going to be a 5 litre soup! It contained cabbage, carrots, paprika, celery, onions, tomato mash and spices. Unfortunately I think that no matter how much flavoring I added it didn't taste that good. If the ingredients sound familiar, this recipe is actually for a diet soup! My grandmother was talking about it so I decided to give it a try, but I must say that on the third day I told Rami that enough, we are getting a pizza!

 Here is a pasta sauce made out of soy. I still remember how incredibly good that meal tasted... The vegetables were especially tasty! Even though I'm always talking about pasta sauce we never eat pasta. We eat a lot of rice. I tried to eat brown rice for about a year since I thought it could be healthier, but I hate the taste of it so much that I decided to change back to white rice when we moved in together. I don't regret my choice since white rice is so amazing... I could eat it bare with only a bit of sriracha sauce on the side (done that a lot when tight on money!).

 It was actually this week that Rami introduced me to an ingredient called 'quinoa'. I was visiting my dad's mother over the weekend (my mum's mum is the one who recommended the soup) and I was positive that Rami isn't going to get any cooking done during that time. I was surprised to hear that he had eaten quinoa and chicken. At that time I had no idea what quinoa was, but after the weekend when he suggested we eat it again, I was introduced to one of my current favourite food ingredients! I don't know how to describe the taste of it, but it needs a bit of flavouring. It's texture is very similar to couscous. I ate this meal yesterday and it had quinoa with a creamy chicken and vegetable sauce. It's incredibly tasty! We already used up our package of quinoa and it's quite expensive to buy here in Finland. I'm not sure if any other company is selling it, but we had 'Go Green' labeled quinoa. We are planning on purchasing quinoa online from iHerb. It must be Rami's favourite site since we are constantly receiving packages from iHerb. And they call me a shopaholic...

Anyways, thank you for reading and I'll be returning with other topics in the future!