Hi, I'm Adam.

Adam Parkzer   •   32   •   Las Vegas, USA   •   5'10" (178 cm)   •   152 lbs (69 kg)   •   Korean American

Although I am best known for my various public appearances as a personality, I am a busi­ness­man by trade. Pri­ma­ri­ly, I help run cor­po­rate op­er­a­tions at Tem­po, a game de­vel­op­ment studio, mul­ti­me­di­a pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, and esports fran­chise; I cur­rent­ly o­ver­see le­gal, fi­nance, and hu­man re­sources ad­min­is­tra­tion. I also pro­vide busi­ness ad­vi­so­ry serv­ices to en­tre­pre­neurs and pub­lic fig­ures. You can find more details on my curriculum vitae.

Having formerly been in law enforcement, my main interests include criminology and forensic psychology. In my free time, I like to write, train mixed mar­tial arts, pursue investment opportunities, and de­vel­op new prac­ti­cal skills. I used to be a competitive gamer, but now I just play casually.

The easiest way to get to know me better is to read about INTJs on the Myers-Briggs Type In­di­ca­tor. I'm split between Investigator (Type 5) and Chal­leng­er (Type 8) on the Enneagram. My CliftonStrengths Top 5 are De­lib­er­a­tive, Learner, An­a­lyt­i­cal, A­chiev­er, and Com­pe­ti­tion. I score highest in Well-Being, Self-Control, and Emotional Stability on the SPI-27. My top per­sonality trait on both the Big Five and HEXACO-PI-R is Con­sci­en­tious­ness.

If you want to write me a letter, you can send it to PO Box 2222, Las Vegas, NV 89125-2222, USA. I don't really use so­cial me­di­a an­y­more, but my pro­files are Parkzer on Twitch, Adam Parkzer on YouTube, @Parkzer on 𝕏, Adam Parkzer on LinkedIn, and Parkzer on Last.fm. I don't have any se­cret “alt” or “friends only” ac­counts. Never send cash, gift cards, or cryp­to­cur­ren­cy to any­one claim­ing to be me—they are all im­per­son­a­tors and scam­mers.

Below, you can find my blog where I document my adventures, organize my thoughts, and share snippets of my life. You can browse in re­verse chron­o­log­i­cal or­der, or you can sort by these popular categories: Food | Finance | Travel | Hiking | Cats | Best of the Best

 

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Hello, Grand Central Market in Los Angeles, California

Last week, I joined a group of six friends and acquaintances at Grand Central Market in Los Angeles, California for a food challenge: to eat a dish from every single restaurant at the market.

On initial count, we thought there were 30 spots, so with seven of us total, we would each have to down about four dishes. However, after we got started, we realized we miscounted and the number was somehow closer to 40. We also wanted to go for a more comprehensive degree of challenge completion, so we also got food items from fruit stands and grocery stores in addition to restaurants.

A lot of the food was actually surprisingly good. However, I had a difficult time fully enjoying it because of the mechanics of how food sharing worked. During the “I’ll have what he’s having” fast food challenge, we split up separate food items from the fast food orders and rarely had to split individual entrées. How­ever, for this Grand Central Market challenge, everyone wanted to try a little bit of everything, but because we were only ordering one item per store, people would just dig in with their hands/forks or bite directly into things.

I’m not “anti-mixing-saliva” or anything. In fact, I have a particular optimized system in place when I go to restaurants with my friends that proves this. I’m personally not very picky with what I eat, so I will let my friend pick two dishes she wants to try; we will begin eating, and once she’s had a satisfying portion of the first dish, we will trade plates and finish the other dish.

With that being said, when there are six other people grabbing at and just slobbering all over the food, especially when some of them are not really peo­ple I know that well, it becomes extremely unappetizing for me. For this challenge, we tried to create a priority flow where I would take the first bite of everything so I wouldn’t be grossed out, but near the end of the challenge, it didn’t really work out.

Because of this, I didn’t contribute anywhere close to how much I could have contributed, but we still managed to complete the challenge. Below are some of the nicer photos I managed to capture.

After emerging victorious, we decided to memorialize the day by taking pictures in a photo booth. There were seven of us and three shots, so we split into groups of 2-2-3 and rotated in and out between each shot so all of us would be on the same strip.

My group was with Doug and Billie Rae. I seem incredibly confused in the photo as to why Billie Rae is headbutting me, but I later found out that it was my own fault because, I thought Billie Rae was going to walk in front of me and squeeze in the middle, but in fact, I was supposed to be the one in the middle, so I was blocking her way into the booth.

 

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Hello, Donna’s in Los Angeles, California

A few days ago, I joined some friends for a meal at a high-demand Italian res­tau­rant called Donna’s in Los Angeles, California.

Our first appetizer was fried calamari. It was very typical of what you’d expect from calamari. I wasn’t a big fan of the marinara sauce (and I personally think it doesn’t really belong on calamari), but the squid ink aioli was great.

Next was the sourdough garlic bread with oregano. It came out as a small, partially-cut loaf of bread covered in cheese. The inside of the bread was soft, but the bottom was ex­ces­sively burnt—not just charred for flavor, but actually burnt to the point where the bitterness overwhelmed the remainder of the bread. The outside of the bread was essentially saturated with oil and made a huge mess on my fingers with even the lightest touch.

The Caesar salad came out next. It was covered in so much cheese that I wondered whether it was a salad with cheese on top, or cheese with some lettuce below it. The dressing was so thick, creamy, and greasy that it didn’t really taste like a salad.

People often wonder why, when they cook vegetables at home, they aren’t that delicious, but when they go to a restaurant, the vegetables are the best vegetables they’ve ever tasted in their life. The reason is because restaurants will cook vegetables in massive amounts of butter. Donna’s salad had a sim­i­lar premise where the preparation of the salad made it such that it completely defeated the purpose of getting a salad for the health benefit. Sure, the salad tasted good, but it was because it was drenched in saturated fats.

We also got a small bowl of olives. I had one and was not a fan. I believe we collectively ended up eating only about half of the bowl of olives.

Our first main entrée was lasagna rollatini with pork and beef bolognese, parmesan fanduta, and pomodoro. This was the heaviest, thickest, greasiest, oil­iest lasagna I’ve ever had. Typical of Italian restaurants, it was also unbearably salty. The dish did not let any of its core ingredients’ flavors shine through. In fact, this probably could’ve been made out of bugs and I wouldn’t have noticed because of how fatty and salty it tasted.

Our third appetizer was patata with potatoes, Calabrian chili aioli, shallots, fennel pollen, and rosemary. What I could tell of the flavor of the sauce was ac­tu­al­ly decent, but again, it was masked by its excessive creaminess and fattiness. I could hardly distinguish the flavor of the potatoes because they were e­gre­gious­ly oversalted.

Our second entrée was fusilli alla vodka with ricotto, chili oil, and pecorino romano. The pasta was cooked to near perfection, but there was about three times more sauce than was needed. Again, the sauce was excessively creamy, fatty, and heavy, so it severely detracted from what could have been a great dish had it just been prepared in moderation.

The third entrée we ordered was mushroom risotto with mixed mushrooms, thyme, parmigiano, wine, and herbs. I think the other dishes could’ve been made better had they been prepared with less salt and fat, but I think this dish was beyond repair. It just tasted like I was eating mushy mushrooms and citrusy porridge. The best way I can describe it is that it felt like I was eating two separate incomplete dishes mixed into one, rather than one single co­he­sive dish.

The last plate of the meal was a side dish. We ordered Tuscan black kale, but instead we received broccolini with parmigiano, herbed breadcrumbs, and anchovy. As you’d probably expect by now, this was also way too greasy and did not have the clean taste you’d expect from vegetables. I also think they completely left out the anchovies.

Our first dessert was three cannolis—fior di latte, candied orange and pistachio, and chocolate. I liked the candied orange and pistachio cannoli. The other two were passable but a bit underwhelming—the fior di latte was weak in flavor, and the chocolate didn’t meet my personal preference.

Our second dessert was Tuscan carrot cake with almond carrot tarte and orange mascarpone. The texture of the inside of the carrot cake was unique, but the outside was too bitter.

Along with the check, we each got a small complementary glass of non-alcoholic limoncello. It basically just tasted like lemonade, but with four times more sugar than the recipe called for.

This is what the interior of the restaurant looked like:

To put things simply, this restaurant catered their food for biological dopamine hits. What I mean is, back in the cavemen era of food scarcity, humans really liked salt and fat because they were critical for survival, so they would chase the fattiest foods with the greatest caloric density. This is why fatty, greasy foods with lots of butter are so carnally delicious to us—they trigger our primal, instinctual cravings for food that minimizes our chances of star­va­tion.

True elevated fine dining goes beyond treating their patrons as cavemen. The best restaurants will avoid using an excess of basic condiments and sea­son­ings so that the core ingredients can speak for themselves, telling an intricate and elegant story of flavors (as opposed to completely ambushing the taste buds with extremes).

Donna’s completely missed the mark on fine dining, yet still charges fine dining prices. Not only did the food quality fall short, but the service was also lacking.

The wait staff seemed to just be wearing aprons draped over random black shirts as opposed to a uniform or other formal attire. On a few oc­ca­sions, we had dishes taken away from us before we were finished, without them asking first. When rotating in fresh utensils, we did not receive a full set of utensils each time, so we had to eat some dishes without knives. When giving us spoons for dessert, the waitress placed our spoons on the table side­ways and on the opposite side of each person’s eating area, away from our bodies.

Sure, these things may not seem like a big deal individually, but when the restaurant suffers miss after miss after miss, it adds up.

I’m not sure why this restaurant is in such high demand for reservations. If you want to go to a spot that seems quirky with this particular kind of vibe, then I guess it’s worth considering. However, at this price point and based on my personal experience dining on this particular day, I cannot really rec­om­mend Donna’s to anyone.

 

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Photo dump from February 2024

I don’t have a wide breadth of spare photos from February that didn’t make the cut in other blog posts, but my friend Dani was visiting Southern Cali­fornia, so I also made my way over from Las Vegas to coordinate trips. We spent a good chunk of Saturday the 17th, Sunday the 18th, and Monday the 19th together, so most of these photos are from us adventuring around Los Angeles County.

On the night she arrived, we got dinner at Sushi Enya Pasadena. For my main entrée, I ordered a chirashi bowl.

Dani and I each also got a signature Enya special hand roll with seared scallop, chopped toro, sea urchin, and fresh truffle. As you can see from the pho­to­graph, it was not a real hand roll, but rather, just an oversized piece of lavish nigiri.

We also ordered two cut rolls.

The food was delicious, but wildly overpriced. The chirashi bowl was $36.80, each signature hand roll was $34.80, the first cut roll was $22.80, and the second cut roll was $26.80. After 18% gratuity on the subtotal and a tax of $15.99, the final total was US$200.07.

The quality of everything met the bar for that price point, but the amount of food did not. I’d actually be flexible enough to say that the price on the rolls were justified, but the fact that a single bite of “hand roll” was almost $35, and the chirashi bowl only had ten medium-sized slices of sashimi with tamago and roe, made those two dishes absolutely not worth it.

For some reason, Sushi Enya had a poster advertising Shrek the Musical on the window to their storefront. Here is Dani excitedly pointing it out. (Dani prefers for her face to not be on my blog due to the volume of visitors my website receives.)

Here is a random intersection at Old Pasadena. I like the diagonal crosswalks; they are very efficient.

Here is a random arcade we stumbled upon that Dani wanted to check out.

Dani also wanted to check out Miniso. It was very visually stimulating.

The next day, we went to Ramen Tatsunoya for lunch. I wasn’t that hungry, so I decided to get a small yuzu chashu bowl instead of ramen.

After touring the La Brea Tar Pits, we continued walking westbound to check out what else was on that block.

Apparently this is an art piece titled Levitated Mass and is literally a huge boulder held up in the air.

We then looped down to the front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

We then stumbled across another public art piece called Urban Light.

I’ve seen people do photo shoots in front of this a lot on social media, but I did not realize that it was just on a random block in Central Los Angeles near giant pits of bubbling asphalt. I usually see pictures of this from nighttime, so it was interesting to see how different it looks during the day.

 

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Hello, Masamitsu Japanese Cuisine in San Marino, California

I go to nice restaurants on a very regular basis, but it’s been a little while since I’ve been to an ultra high-end place. Last Wednesday night, I joined one of my foodie friends for an omakase experience at Masamitsu Japanese Cuisine in San Marino of Los Angeles County, California.

For our appetizer, we got four small dishes. The first was shrimp and mushrooms in house-made sauce. The sauce had a perfect level of tang to it, and the shrimp was literally the most tender shrimp I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.

The second was monkfish liver. This is the second time I’ve ever had monkfish liver; the previous time I tried it, it sort of tasted like crab miso, but this time, it had a more unique and individual taste. The third was some noodles with jelly-like consistency. I wasn’t really able to precisely pinpoint exactly what it was. The noodles themselves had a mild flavor, but the sauce was a tiny bit too sour for my preference. My favorite facet of the dish was actually the texture—it was very slippery and slimy, but not in an unpleasant way.

Finally, the fourth was an oyster. I squeezed a tiny bit of fresh lemon juice onto it. This was probably one of the best oysters I’ve ever had—it had just enough flavor that it was right up to the threshold of strength and intensity of oysteriness without being too strong. The texture was extremely smooth and it had a very clean and pure aftertaste.

The second course was a plate of sashimi. Each cut of sashimi was aggressively thick, which made it extremely satisfying to eat. Even the slice of chutoro was very large, which is rare to see when it comes to high-end fish like tuna belly.

The sashimi came with various edible flowers on the side. I usually try to avoid edible flowers because they just taste too much like I spritzed perfume in­to my mouth, but these were a lot more subtle in flavor. The chef also gave us some advice on which ones to have in what manner (e.g., certain ones that work better with or without soy sauce), which also helped maximize the flavor profile of the whole course.

The third course was chawanmushi with truffle, caviar, and mushroom. The deep richness of the egg custard went well after having just finished large por­tions of raw fish.

Next up was the assortment of nigiri.

There was one piece that stood out to me. I actually don’t remember which fish it was, but it was very well prepared. Half of it was seared so, when I put the whole piece of nigiri in my mouth, it tasted as if I was eating two different pieces at once. The amount of sear was perfect—it added the nice flavor of charred and burnt fish, but it was not bitter at all.

One other recurring theme for some of the pieces of nigiri that I really liked was the way the fish was scored. This increased the surface area of the fish so that, when I put the piece in my mouth, it made more thorough contact with my tongue and allowed me to taste the fish more deeply. This doesn’t mat­ter as much in other situations, but when the quality of the fish is as high as what Masamitsu uses, it does make a noticeable difference.

We took a brief intermission from nigiri for some black cod. The skin was nearly as tender as the fish itself, and with the thinly-sliced and lightly-pickled cucumber on the side, it tasted amazing.

I always take and use my own photographs for my website, but my friend wanted to contribute this time around. She took six out of the 21 photos in this blog post. Can you figure out which ones they are?

The next round of nigiri came after the cod. We got sweet shrimp, tuna belly, and salmon roe.

If you know me well, you know that my favorite sushi is uni. The chef opened a new box of sea urchin for us and let me take a photo of it. He then pre­pared uni gunkan for us with a very generous portion of uni.

As our dinner approached an end, we received some miso soup with mushrooms and fish as a closer. This is probably the one and only thing we were served that I wasn’t a huge fan of, as the miso was a bit too strong. I ended up not finishing the soup, but I did eat all the mushrooms and fish inside.

The final piece of nigiri was skinless eel. I was very full by this point, but the relatively mildness of the eel went along nicely with the strong miso soup.

For dessert, we got one scoop of ice cream each. Mine was black sesame, which sort of tasted like a mixture of coffee and vanilla bean.

My friend got green tea and decided to add some extra character to her scoop.

The total for the meal pre-tax and pre-gratuity was US$306.00—omakase was $150 per person, and we added on a yuzu soda for $6. Compared to other omakase restaurants I’ve been to, this was a great price considering how good the food was. The service was also fantastic—the servers were attentive and respectful, and our chef was interactive to a degree that you like to see during an omakase experience.

If you’re ever in the Los Angeles or Pasadena area and looking for a great meal around this pricepoint, I highly recommend Masamitsu Japanese Cuisine. This was a real omakase experience in the sense that it was a truly chef-catered experience, as opposed to some restaurants that have been popping up now­a­days that just piece together a few existing items on their menu and claim that it’s omakase.

When people ask me what my all-time favorite restaurant is, my go-to answer has been Utzutzu. After this dinner, I now have Masamitsu to add to the list.

 

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Hello, Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California

My friend Dani is still in town, and for our next tourist activity, she picked the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena of Los Angeles County, California.

There was a phase during my two-year road trip during which I was intrigued by art museums and art galleries, but I think that period has ended, be­cause I found the Norton Simon Museum to be fairly understimulating.

It was also extremely packed and congested inside—probably be­cause Los Angeles has been going through a rainy phase so people probably thought an art museum would be a good indoor activity for a gloomy day—so it was difficult for me to stand still and read the placards without feeling like I was ob­structing the view of a row of people walking assembly-line style past me.

The downstairs area had a spotlight called “Benevolent Beings: Buddhas and Bodhisattvas from South and Southeast Asia,” which I found to be a bit more interesting.

Unfortunately, the Sculpture Garden in the outdoor area was closed due to heavy rain.

Even though this wasn’t personally my thing, it was nice to see that Dani seemed to enjoy it. We paid US$20.00 each for admission, which is not bad for an art museum of this size in Southern California. I’m still glad that I went, because I like to broaden my breadth of knowledge and understanding on var­i­ous topics, and even though I’m probably not creative or attuned to artistic themes enough to be able to get the most out of this experience, it was still nice to look at everything.

 

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Hello, La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles, California

My friend Dani, who you may remember as the owner of Mina the cat, was making a trip to Los Angeles, so I headed over from Las Vegas to visit her while she was in town. For one of our tourist activities, we visited the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles, California.

When Dani first told me she wanted to visit the Tar Pits, I was a bit confused as to why she would want to go look at a bunch of asphalt. But, when she ex­plained more about the story behind it, it became a lot more interesting.

Apparently, the tar pits are a naturally-occurring phenomenon that would trap animals in them a long time ago. Small animals would get stuck in there first, then some medium animals that were predators of the small animals would see them in there, think it’s an op­por­tu­ni­ty to get some free food, and also go into the tar pits and get stuck. Then some larger animals that were predators of the medium animals would see them in there, think it’s an op­por­tu­ni­ty for them to get some free food, and also go into the tar pits and get stuck. This process would continue until many different animals of many dif­fer­ent sizes ended up getting stuck in the tar.

The tar is still active and was bubbling up while we were there. There were also many cones set up by staff and sparingly spread out across the entire plot of land—this was to warn people about locations where even more tar was randomly coming up where it didn’t used to be, so that visitors wouldn’t end up stepping in it.

There was also an indoor portion of the museum. It was very stereotypical of a regular museum, but one portion of it I liked was the laboratory section where we could watch scientists clean fossils found in the tar pits.

There was also an interactive section where you could test your strength and see whether you would be able to pull yourself out of tar, if you had gotten stuck.

Remember how I said the tar sort of just erupted from random locations throughout the plot of land? When we had wrapped up and was walking back to the spot I had parked, we saw a section that was coned off in the parking lot because tar was coming onto the surface even through the pavement. It made me wonder how damaged the vehicle above the leak was, if there was one parked above it when the tar first came out, as well as how long it would take for the entire parking lot to eventually be covered in cones.

The La Brea Tar Pits are in the same block as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, so if you’re going to either of those two, I think it’s worth a visit just to see something so unique and different in the middle of a city.

If you’re interested in learning more about the fossils, admission to the museum was US$15.00 per person for me, but if you just want to see the tar pits, that is free and open to the public.

 

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