Hi, I'm Adam.

Adam Parkzer   •   31   •   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.

I don't use social media much anymore, but my profiles are Parkzer on Twitch, Adam Parkzer on YouTube, @Parkzer on 𝕏, Adam Parkzer on LinkedIn, and Parkzer on Last.fm. If you want to write me a letter, you can send it to PO Box 2222, Las Vegas, NV 89125-2222, USA.

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: Travel | Hiking | Food | Finance | Cats | Best of the Best

 

—§—

 

Hello, Super Sushi in Spring Valley, Las Vegas, Nevada

After a busy few weeks of traveling, helping a friend move into a new house, doing a long chain of work, and eating lots of fast food and at quick-serve res­tau­rants, I finally had an afternoon free to go visit and dine in at another all-you-can-eat sushi spot. Today, I decided on Super Sushi in Spring Valley, an un­in­corporated town in the Las Vegas Valley in Clark County, Nevada.

Upon my arrival, I was taken over to the back of the restaurant and seated at the bar. I’m not sure if this was just coincidence for today, or if I just picked an awk­ward time between lunch and dinner when it’s usually not busy, but I was literally the only person in the restaurant for the hour or so I was eat­ing, and the only other people stopping by were delivery drivers picking up orders.

I went with the all-you-can-eat menu. Because today is Sunday, I wasn’t able to take advantage of the discounted weekday lunch price. Super Sushi also has a premium upgrade where you can pay a little bit more to gain access to some pricier dishes as part of the all-you-can-eat experience.

For my appetizer, I started with some poke salad. The picture below makes it look smaller than it actually was because the bowl was shaped like a ladle, but the portion size was massive—and big portion sizes were a recurring theme across the board with menu items. You may think that portion sizes don’t ultimately matter for all-you-can-eat, but it did make a difference on multiple occasions.

The poke was fine, but the fish was much firmer than I would have hoped. I generally expect poke to be made out of the “scraps” of the fish’s flesh that can’t otherwise be used for nigiri or other cuts of sushi, so it’s not always guaranteed to be the highest-quality fish, but this was notably less tender than I’m used to.

Next was sashimi moriawase that had four pieces each of salmon, tuna, and yellowtail.

The salmon chunks were huge—so much so that, from the photograph, it looks like I got eight pieces instead of four because each one was split down the middle. The quality of the salmon was only a little bit better than the poke—it visually looked decently-marbled, but it was firmer than most other salmon sashimi I’ve had. The tuna had minimal fat and was basically what you’d expect cubed up in a poke bowl. The yellowtail was the best out of the three—it was much more tender and was com­parable to what I would hope for from good sashimi.

Remember how I mentioned earlier that the portion sizes of everything was way bigger than most other all-you-can-eat places? This is one situation where it actually mattered. All-you-can-eat restaurants usually try to fill you up with a lot of rice and have very few sashimi options that are vastly re­duced in size compared to the amount they give to à la carte customers. I noticed that Super Sushi does not do that—the amount of fish I got in the moriawase was very satisfying.

My next set of sushi was uni gunkan, ikura gunkan, and ama ebi nigiri topped with avocado. The salmon roe and sweet shrimp were both good.

The sea urchin… was incredible. It was very confusing to me that I had been eating fish of below average to decent quality up until that point, and then suddenly the sea urchin was top-tier. It had the melt-in-your-mouth buttery texture with a very strong sea urchin flavor and a very large portion size. Sea urchin was part of the premium upgrade, and I’d say the premium upgrade would’ve been worth it even if this sea urchin was the one and only item on the premium menu.

You know what was not worth it on the premium menu? Tonkatsu. This is another time when the portion sizes mattered, and for this one, it was for the worse—the fried pork belly was humongous. This was extremely filling, and an overwhelming majority of the mass of the tonkatsu wasn’t even pork belly, but instead, a thick fried crust.

If you also go to Super Sushi, I implore you, do not get the tonkatsu. It is absolutely not worth it.

I was looking forward to trying out a variety of nigiri on their menu, but by the end of the tonkatsu, I was pretty bloated. To wrap up my meal, I got two pieces of octopus nigiri and two pieces of escolar nigiri. The quality of the octopus was decent, but the escolar was a bit sub-par—again, it was a bit too firm and lacked the soft tenderness you usually get from super white tuna.

This is the final time the portion size matter came into play. Usually, all-you-can-eat restaurants will serve a lot of rice with the nigiri so diners will get full off the cheaper rice and they can cut costs by using less fish. Super Sushi does not do this, because the amount of rice for each piece of nigiri is rel­a­tively small, so the ratio of fish you get is actually extremely high for an all-you-can-eat restaurant.

For dessert, I ordered mango mochi ice cream.

All-day all-you-can-eat  $ 25.95
Premium all-you-can-eat upgrade  $  5.95
Diet Coke  $  2.50
State and county sales tax (8.38%)  $  2.88
Gratuity  $ 10.00
Total  $ 47.28

The table to the right shows how much I paid.

I tipped almost 30% because the service was impeccable. Of course, I wouldn’t really expect any­thing less considering that I was the one and only person in the restaurant, and the waiter probably literally had nothing else to do, but either way, he was very attentive to me through­out my meal and had perfect timing when I was ready to order my next round of dishes.

Because I’m someone who usually goes to very high-end sushi restaurants, the fish quality at Super Sushi was a little bit underwhelming, but to be clear, it wasn’t bad. The fish didn’t have a “fishy” taste, each fish had appropriately sufficient and proper flavor, and I didn’t get sick after the meal. If you’re someone who doesn’t have an ultra-refined taste when it comes to fish, I think Super Sushi would be a great place to try out. In fact, even if you are picky about fish quality, I think Super Sushi would still be worth it if you’re just looking for a really good-value sushi meal, considering the affordable price point.

I look forward to my next visit to Super Sushi, during which I will absolutely not order tonkatsu (or any fried food in general) so I can actually try out more of the nigiri.

 

—§—

 

Food of Seattle

When visiting Seattle this time for PAX West, I traveled with one of my friends who likes searching for and trying out good food. We went to a lot of different restaurants, and I captured enough food pictures that I decided to do a dedicated blog post solely spotlighting the food I ate during my trip.

On the first day of PAX, we left the convention center for a little bit to find some lunch. We decided on Ruth’s Chris Steak House, where I ordered a grilled chicken sandwich and some fries.

I’m not entirely sure if this actually counts as a food picture, but inside PAX, apparently Cheez-It decided to partner up with a gaming company to run their own exhibition booth. Funny enough, the booth was literally just entirely filled with Cheez-Its.

Although I had a four-day badge, my friend only purchased two one-day badges, so on one of the days where she couldn’t get into the convention center, we went to downtown Seattle and did a bit of exploring. For lunch on Saturday, we went to The Athenian Seafood Restaurant and Bar where we ordered some clams in garlic sauce.

Here is the aftermath.

Does water count as food?

My friend took a picture of me in front of Puget Sound because she specifically wanted me to have more photos of my face to post on my website. I guess you can technically argue that this could possibly be a food picture if you consider the fish in the water that you could hypothetically go out and eat…

🍆 … 💦?

The next day, we went to Noren Sushi, where we ordered agedashi tofu for our appetizer.

My lunch was a chirashi bowl.

That night, after the “Fight Mii” panel, we went to Hong Kong Bistro for some dim sum. The service was horrifically bad, but the food was decent. Doug did all the ordering, and he accidentally ordered about 50% more food than our party of nine needed.

I overate, and we still had a ton of leftovers that we packed up in to-go containers; here is the aftermath after we were done:

For lunch the next day, my friend and I went to Musashi’s. We shared our entrées half-and-half, with the first one once again being a chirashi bowl.

The second entrée we got was grilled yellowtail collar.

For the final restaurant of the trip, we went to Meet Korean BBQ. Our cook was great, the meat was extremely high quality, and the restaurant quickly became one of my all-time favorite restaurants.

For our appetizer, we ordered steak tartare with American wagyu chuck, Asian pear, jalapeño, pine nuts, egg yolk, honey soy marinade, and toasted ba­guette.

As our main entrée, we each ordered the signature feast. This round came with American wagyu gold grade bavette, American wagyu gold grade chuck eye steak, and Kurobata pork belly. The feast also included kimchi fried rice, corn cheese, egg soufflé, and wagyu soybean stew.

Meet was very pricey, but if you’re flexible in budget or just want to treat yourself, it was an amazing experience and I highly recommend it.

That wraps up a brief overview of my food adventures in Seattle. I’m glad I traveled with a friend this time around, because it’s always nice to have some­one else scouting interesting places to visit and pulling me out of my hotel room where I otherwise would just be working until my scheduled e­vents at the convention.

 

—§—

 

Hello again, Seattle Aquarium

Exactly three years and one day prior, on September 1, 2020, I visited the Seattle Aquarium with my friend Monica. This was during the pandemic, shortly after the government-mandated lockdowns were expiring. I was out actively stimulating the economy, but most other people were reasonably still concerned about the spread of COVID-19, so there weren’t many tourists there and we got to experience everything at a fairly leisurely pace.

A few days ago, on September 2, 2023, a different friend and I made another trip to the Seattle Aquarium while we were in town for PAX West. It was obviously a lot busier this time, but I also accrued three years’ worth of photography experience, so even though it was still dim indoors, I managed to get a lot more nice photographs.

Below are the best ones I captured.

 

—§—

 

Hello, “Fight Mii” at PAX West 2023

With a successful “Friends ’til Death” panel on day 2 of PAX West, we went into day 3 with an autographing session followed by Failboat’s “Fight Mii” pan­el.

The premise of “Fight Mii” is for audience members to participate in creating Miis in accordance with a prompt given by the host. Usually, audience members compete against each other, but for this iteration of “Fight Mii,” the audience members were allied against “Team Failure,” the team rep­re­senting Failboat and consisting of his friends.

Here is our friend Aidan, who owns the “Skip the Tutorial” channel on YouTube, filming Dan in a pre-panel interview.

Moments before the start of the show, I peeked back behind the curtain to make sure Dan was still alive. He was mildly surprised.

At 8:30 PM in the Monarch Theater, Dan went live with his signature gold sequin shirt. Unfortunately, his co-host Jay wasn’t able to make it this time around, but Jay filmed some pre-recorded segments which Dan played for the audience to provide them with the prompts.

Between each round, Dan came down into the crowd to pick some audience members to compete.

I was the first challenger from Team Failure, and my mission was to create a Pikachu Mii. This was my first time ever laying hands on any Wii game what­so­ev­er, so it was not exactly a smooth experience. To top it all off, the voting system was highly rigged, in that the audience cheers determined which team won… and of course, the audience voted for their own representatives. Long story short, I got demolished.

The next challenger on Team Failure was Aidan.

Dan realized that the voting system was a bit one-sided, so instead, he brought Stitch from the PAX team up to be the judge instead.

My favorite part of Dan’s panels is when he brings out the prizes. One of the prizes was a book of animals in the “Baby Touch and Feel” series.

Not bad.

Next up was Dan’s college friend Sam. The prompt was simply “red,” so Sam put red foundation on his Mii and called it a day.

Stitch came back up to judge the Miis and select a winner.

The next prize… HP printer ink cartridges.

Hello, Douglas Douglas.

Stitch came back up to judge the Miis again, and she ended up picking Doug’s Mii.

His prize? An inflatable unicorn sprinkler.

In traditional Doug fashion, he decided to pull a prank on Stitch and, on his way back to his seat, he pulled out $11 from his wallet and handed it over to Stitch to make it look like she was bribed to pick him as the winner.

For the final round, our friend Altrive was up to close out the panel.

The final prize? An ironing board.

This was a fun panel, and Dan is a very high-energy performer. Even though I wasn’t notified of my requested appearance until literally the morning of the panel, and then proceeded to have absolutely no idea what I was doing, I am still glad I got to participate.

If you missed it, PAX live streamed this panel on their website—you can check it out on the “Streams” section of the PAX West website.

 

—§—

 

Hello, “Friends ’til Death” at PAX West 2023

I’m currently in Seattle, Washington for PAX West 2023. I have a lot of photos of the event, and I’ve also been spending time with friends and doing other tourist activities around Seattle; I’ll be posting those over the next week or two after I get back home. But for now, I wanted to share some photos from yes­terday’s “Friends ’til Death” panel with DougDoug and Failboat at the Oriole Theater as soon as possible.

A part of PAX is taking place in the newer Summit building of the Seattle Convention Center. It’s a very nice building, and I really like its architecture as well—it is very modern, but there are still some nice wooden elements indoors that make it feel cozier and off-set the usually harsher feeling of today’s con­tem­po­rar­y style.

We arrived just shy of half an hour early for sound check, set-up, and a quick rehearsal.

PAX usually has live streams of panels, but unfortunately, they did not have one for the Oriole Theater. We still wanted to share the show with people who couldn’t make it to PAX, so we brought our own equipment to film. As you might have noticed already from my pictures, I was on photography. Berry, Doug’s creative director, set up a camera at the back of the theater to film the primary camera angle.

Our friend Aidan who owns the “Skip the Tutorial” channel on YouTube filmed a side angle, where he was able to get shots of Doug and Dan in addition to some crowd reactions. Doug’s team has all the footage now, and it will likely be edited and published at some point in the near future on one of Doug’s YouTube channels.

A few minutes after 9 PM PDT, the panel started with Doug and Dan walking out on stage.

The entire theater was completely filled, and unfortunately, many people even had to be turned away (which was even more motivation for us to capture the event so we could share it with everyone). There were a surprising number of people in the overflow area, and once the panel started, people who were denied entry started crowding around the glass doors to peek in. The framing of this photo below doesn’t even show the whole theater.

As the panel began, Dan explained the premise of the show—he would be playing Dark Souls while he and Doug answered questions from the crowd, but the instant Dan died, the panel would end. This is a live rendition of their “Friends ’til Death” podcast, during which they are playing a game, but the instant they die, the podcast episode ends.

Here’s a view from the theater from the other corner—you can sort of get a better idea of how packed it was.

Very pog.

As you can see by Dan’s oozing confidence, he knew exactly what he was doing. Side note: this was his first time ever playing Dark Souls.

There were a lot of people lined up for an opportunity to ask their question.

A few minutes into the game, Dan started getting himself into a bit of trouble. The crowd went wild telling him to run away, but unfortunately, their efforts were in vain.

Upon Dan’s death, they both got up and marched straight out of the theater. The panel was over.

A lot of the crowd chased after them out of the theater, but a line formed of people who wanted to meet me, so I stuck around for a while to chat and take photos. Someone even brought a Ryobi cordless power inflator for me to sign.

After wrapping up with everyone inside the theater, I found out that an impromptu meet-and-greet had formed out in the common area outside the theater with Doug and Dan, after their fans eventually caught up with them. Two of Doug’s fans hand-painted these amazing signs for the panel.

If you missed this panel, either because you weren’t at PAX or got turned away at the door, you still have two more chances to see us.

Today, Sunday, September 3, 2023 at 6 PM PDT, Doug and Dan will be holding a more formal meet-and-greet in the Autographing Area, during which I may be lingering somewhere in the background.

Two and a half hours after the start of that, today, at 8:30 PM PDT, Dan will be holding his “Fight Mii” panel in the Monarch Theater, during which Doug will be there momentarily as a special guest, and I will be running around taking photographs again. This one should be live streamed on one of PAX’s broadcast channels.

… See you there?

 

—§—

 

Photo dump from summer 2023

Today’s the last day of the last full month of summer, and I figured it would be a good time to share some of my miscellaneous photographs from the past three months that haven’t made it on my website yet. I always find it really funny when people post “photo dumps” on social media and it’s only two or three pictures, so this is going to be a real photo dump.

One of the things I like to do is to park on the top floor of a parking garage so I can go to the edge and take a nice picture of the view. Here’s Glendale, California.

Here’s an Italian restaurant I went to with my friend Eric Morino, better known online as Pointcrow. Apparently every waiter and waitress was also an opera singer, and they literally took turns singing to everyone during our meal. It was very … interesting.

I went to visit my friend Doug Wreden and he asked me what I wanted to watch on YouTube. I told him I was indifferent, so he made a decision instead.

As you can see, I am clearly an expert at arcades.

Hello, rabbit.

I recently had tableside guac for the first time. It never occurred to me what exactly the “tableside” was supposed to mean, but it soon became very clear that they literally bring the ingredients out and make the guacamole beside your table. Our waitress seemed to just indiscriminately randomly throw in ingredients without measuring anything or adjusting for taste. This was also very … interesting.

One of my friends came into town for a convention in Las Vegas, and while she was here, she wanted to try a popular breakfast spot called BabyStacks. I ordered velvet pancakes and they served me four meals’ worth of pancakes and sugar on one plate.

Hello, cat.

During a quick visit to downtown Los Angeles, I joined a friend and her cousin for all-you-can-eat sushi at Hello Fish. Apparently they’re a fairly popular restaurant in Koreatown—their slogan is “feed me sushi and tell me I’m pretty.” I would’ve normally done a dedicated blog post for a restaurant like this, but un­fortunately, they just had very dim and very pink lighting, so my photos did not come out very well. Here are three of the nicer ones.

Afterwards, we went to get shaved ice for dessert.

Here are some views from my hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It made me miss my days of luxury high-rise living on the Las Vegas Strip.

 

—§—