Miscellaneous photo dump from Denver, Colorado

by   •   General, Travel
 

My trip to Denver, Colorado has come to an end, and like usual, I visited a lot of museums, restaurants, and other tourist hotspots while I was there: the Denver Firefighters Museum, Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum, Clyfford Still Museum, Colorado State Capitol, Forney Museum of Transportation, Denver Christkindlmarket, and Uchi Denver.

Here is a photo dump for everything else I did that didn’t make it into its own dedicated blog post.

On one of the first days I was in Denver, my friend and I went to Băo Brewhouse. The decor and ambiance was unique and interesting.

The service was extraordinarily slow, and we eventually found out that it was because they brought out all four of our dishes all at once, as opposed to serving them to us as they were ready.

This is honey Sichuan fried green beans with garlic, ginger, crispy onions, and furikake.

Our main entrée was short rib spicy noodles with lap cheong (Chinese sausage), garlic, ginger, scallion, baby bok choy, peppers, fresno chili, Thai basil, pistachio, sambal hoisin, cilantro, daikon sprouts, and miso Mongolian sauce.

My friend wanted soup dumplings, so we ordered pork xiao long bao served with a side of sweet black vinegar and chili oil.

We also got salt and pepper tiger prawns with furikake and red pepper blend seasoning, scallion, daikon sprouts, and Chinese mustard.

Later that night, we went to watch the Denver Nuggets play basketball against the San Francisco Golden State Warriors at the Ball Arena.

It was pretty cold in Denver, but not cold enough to discourage me from exploring outdoors. On one of the days, I went for a walk around the Cherry Creek State Park in Aurora and got some nice photos of the Cherry Creek Reservoir.

Historically, I never took United Airlines because of their excessive involvement in controversial matters and their seemingly lower tier of service. However, earlier this year, I had no choice but to take a United flight because I had to urgently fly same-day out-of-state, and United was the only major carrier that had available flights to that destination. I got really lucky for that flight, because I ended up on one of their newest planes, and it was the nicest domestic first class cabin I had ever seen.

Since then, I’ve been more open to flying United, and I took them to Denver because the Denver International Airport is one of United’s major hubs, so there were a lot of options and very good pricing. Unfortunately, the luxurious first class cabin from before seemed to be a rare thing, because I haven’t gotten good luck since then. United planes seem to be the most dated out of the major American carriers if you don’t roll a new plane.

On my outbound flight to Denver, I noticed that the screens were basically just regular TVs (as opposed to an actual operating-system-like app like Delta or American Airlines have). I turned my screen off, but everyone else left theirs on and on the default channel… which was literally just advertisements playing on loop. I guess that is one way for the marketing department to squeeze out some extra ad impressions.

Maybe United heard my complaints, because on the return flight, I ended up on a plane that didn’t even have screens at all. I guess if you think about it, that is technically still better than being forced to watch your neighbors’ commercials for three hours, as long as you don’t plan on using the screen anyway.

I’m already planning my next flight for my next trip, but until then, I intended on staying put, resting up, and relaxing for the holidays.

 

—§—

 

I accidentally purchased two new luggages

by   •   General
 

At the end of last month, my friend Doug Wreden held his annual charity event for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation to raise funds for ocean conservation. The stretch goal for raising half a million dollars, inspired by an inside joke from a prior live broadcast he had done, was for him and me to go to New Zealand to purchase cologne and visit the aquarium.

The fundraising event was a huge success, raising US$625,376.68 this year and elevating his all-time total to over a million dollars. At the end of the two-day event, I knew that we would be going to New Zealand, so I slowly began making preparations.

I was born in the United States and have only gone out of the country once when I road tripped into Canada, so this will be my first real international trip beyond North America. I thought about what I would need to buy to get ready to travel abroad. I realized that the only luggage I have is carry-on-sized, and I figured that I would need to purchase something bigger.

I started conducting some research on the best luggages available on the market, and the rabbit hole led me to brands like LuggageWorks and Briggs and Riley that are often used and endorsed by pilots, as well as manufacturers like Rimowa and Tumi that market themselves as luxury brands. However, one particular company caught my eye… Victorinox.

Victorinox is the original maker of the Swiss army knife. I browsed their travel gear selection and became interested in their metallic red Spectra 3.0 expandable medium case. I travel a lot and have seen some red luggages, but never one of this deep red tone and shade, so the idea of having a visually unique and distinct luggage was appealing to me.

Additionally, the Spectra 3.0 line is made out of SORPLAS™, a high-performance polycarbonate by Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation. This means that, even though the luggage has a metallic look, it’s actually made from a proprietary plastic, so it’s more resistant to dents and other surface-warping damage than real metal would be, as well as bearing a handful of other features (though I guess a downside of that is that it would no longer develop a patina over time that I usually like to see on my belongings).

It definitely wasn’t cheap, though—the price tag was US$650.00 before tax, which wasn’t the most expensive luggage I looked at, but still a sizable chunk of money. After consideration, I decided I would test out a cheaper version of the Spectra 3.0 before committing to the more expensive one, so I bought the Spectra 3.0 expandable cabin case, sized as standard carry-on luggage, for US$575.00.

After its arrival, I tested it out by unzipping everything, checking out all the pockets, rolling it around a bit, and inspecting all the components. The color was just as nice in-person as I expected from the photos on Victorinox’s website, the build quality seemed pretty good, and I was overall satisfied with my purchase. I concluded that the Spectra 3.0 line was good enough that I was comfortable committing to the more expensive and larger checked bag, so I put in an order for the medium case too.

After a short wait, the expandable medium case also arrived. The quality was consistent with the smaller carry-on luggage, in that everything was good and I was satisfied with my purchase.

Moments later, I got stunlocked for a good minute or so while I came to two epiphanies:

  1. The size of your luggage has nothing to do with international travel. Just because you travel internationally does not mean you have to bring a checked bag. The thing that determines the size of luggage you should bring is the duration of your trip, not the location of your destination. A single carry-on bag has plenty of space for me to pack a week and a half’s worth of belongings.

  2. It makes absolutely no sense to purchase a similar smaller item to “test out” a larger version of that item. This would be reasonable if you buy an item, retain all its original packaging, and test it out during its return period with the expectation that you would send it back for a refund if it did not meet your quality bar. Buying a different item as a test product, buying the actually-desired item days later, then trashing all the packaging on both products is… incorrect.

So anyway, I am now the somewhat proud but mostly confused owner of two new Victorinox Spectra 3.0 luggages that I don’t actually need.

 

—§—

 

Photo dump from March 2024

by   •   Food, General, Travel
 

March has been a fairly eventful month for me. I was home in Las Vegas for a portion of it, but also spent a good chunk of the month in Los Angeles and Boston.

While in Las Vegas, I met up with one of my friends who wanted to get some dinner at Winnie & Ethel’s in downtown. The online reviews for this res­tau­rant were surprisingly high, so I went in with high expectations, and I wasn’t disappointed.

This diner had a very interesting pricing model that aggressively encouraged you to order more food. For example, you can get one malted waffle for $8, but if you want to order three instead, you can get it for $12—only an additional $2 per waffle. The French toast had the same pricing structure. I ended up getting five malted pancakes for $13, which was only $5 more than had I only ordered one.

I also got a side of brûlée grapefruit. I was familiar with crème brûlée, but this was my first time ever trying brûlée grapefruit. It was a little bit difficult to scoop out the pulp and eat it, but overall, I liked it—it was sweet, it had an interesting texture, and it wasn’t at all sour like I expected.

I enjoyed having breakfast for dinner. We had a late dinner so we were the last ones out; here is a shot of the empty restaurant.

Here is professional, world-renowned, distinguished, prestigious, acclaimed, award-winning, illustrious hand model Billie-Rae showing off some sesame balls.

While in Los Angeles, I joined Doug Wreden for dinner with some of his friends at Shin-Sen-Gumi. We ordered a bunch of skewers.

For my main entrée, I got a negitama beef bowl.

Payment was tricky because most of the skewers were shared. In order to decide who covers the bill, we pulled up a horse race on YouTube and everyone picked a horse. We watched the horse race, and whomever picked the horse that came last had to pay for the meal.

You’d think that’s straightforward, but this video did everything in its power to make it as difficult as possible for us. Unsurprisingly, people don’t really care which horse gets last place, so the cameras only focus in on the leading horses. There were a few opportunities for us to catch who was in last place, but once the race neared the end, the scoreboard went away and none of the trailing horses were in the shot. We even tried to look up the official results on the league’s website, but they only listed the top five horses.

Eventually, we watched and re-watched the footage over and over again until we managed to take our best guess on which horse lost.

Towards the end of March, I flew to Boston, Massachusetts.

I was in Boston to attend PAX East and watch my friends’ shows at the convention.

The convention itself was fairly underwhelming, like usual. It wasn’t much different than any other convention, and because I personally wasn’t really in­ter­est­ed in waiting in long lines to be able to try some of the games on the exhibition floor, I was basically able to see everything in about a day.

With that being said, there was one interesting thing I did. Apparently there was an exhibitor that brought a bunch of cameras and laser pointers that could take three-dimensional models of people and turn them into statues.

This was intended to be used by cosplayers who want to memorialize their cosplay as a statue, but my friends decided to troll me and book me for a scan so they could turn my normal regular self into four different six-inch-tall statues that they could each have in their homes so that I could be spread out across the United States like Horcruxes.

After the final day of PAX East, I joined my friends at the Lookout Rooftop and Bar and had dinner in little insulated pods overlooking Fort Point Chan­nel and the downtown Boston skyline.

As it got later into the night, the buildings lit up for an even nicer view.

Here is what the interior of the bar looked like.

 

—§—

 

Photo dump from February 2024

by   •   General, Travel
 

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.

 

—§—

 

Photo dump from January 2024

by   •   Food, General
 

For the past month and a half, I went through a phase of chasing nostalgia. I live streamed a lot on Twitch during my holiday break between Christ­mas and New Year’s Day, just like how I used to stream a lot during my winter breaks from undergraduate university over a decade ago. I also wanted to try daily blogging again, just like how I used to daily blog in 2011.

Needless to say, I failed. I made it January 1-9 of daily blogging before I realized it was unsustainable. My minimum acceptable quality bar of a blog post has increased substantially up to the point where it usually takes me an average of an hour or more to finish writing one… if I even have anything to write about to begin with. Over ten years go, this wasn’t the case—on some days, I would just publish a single random photograph and call it a day.

Earlier in the month, I was collecting sets of pictures that I thought I would turn into individual blog posts, but didn’t because the size of each set wasn’t satisfactory. I don’t have much from the final cou­ple weeks of January because I let myself indulge in something personal I wanted to do that took up basically the entirety of all my free time and even some sleep time, but I think I still have enough to warrant a small photo dump from this month.

 
Here’s a small set of photos from a quick all-you-can-eat lunch from Tomomi Sushi in Alhambra, California. To open, I got tuna, salmon, yellowtail, al­ba­core, and tilapia sashimi.

Next was a plate of baked green mussels.

My third dish was tako wasabi, which is raw octopus.

For my assortment of nigiri, I got salmon, yellowtail, Spanish mackerel, albacore, escolar, and squid.

My final dish was ika sansai, which is squid salad.

 
As many people already know by now, I used to live on the Las Vegas Strip in a residential high-rise condominium building. It obviously has its perks, like having great amenities and security, and being central to the Las Vegas Valley so I can pretty much get anywhere within 20 minutes, but another ma­jor thing I liked was the view.

One of my biggest regrets from the past year is moving out into the suburbs under the false assumption that I would appreciate the more peaceful life­style after having road tripped for two years non-stop while living out of hotel rooms. The first month was pleasant, but after that, it got boring—it was too quiet out near Summerlin South, and more than anything, I missed waking up to a stunning view and bright sunlight.

While in Los Angeles County in January, I visited a friend who has a nice view from her home, even though she doesn’t live in a high-rise. It’s definitely not the same as a high-rise view, but it reminded me of when our Tempo team house was up near the Hollywood Hills, and it gave me a little bit of nostalgia from my time living on the Strip.

 
I have historically not been much of a board game person, but I was persuaded to join my friends Doug and Billie-Rae for board game nights once in a while.

Our very first attempt was Pan Am, which is apparently built around Pan American Airways, a now-defunct airline. We spent almost two hours un­pack­aging the game and learning how to play, actually played the game for around 20 minutes, and then proceeded to get distracted and quit before ever fin­ish­ing a single round because it was almost 3 AM and I wanted to go to sleep.

Next was Monopoly. This went a lot better than Pan Am, though I accidentally made a catastrophically critical error which allowed Billie-Rae to snowball out of control and make it absolutely hopeless for anyone else to have a chance at winning. Luckily, in exchange for my inadvertent generosity towards her cause, Billie-Rae gave me a few breaks when I landed on her spots, which at least let me beat Doug and not get last place.

I also landed on the Free Parking space. I am going to save this photograph as evidence and use it the next time I go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (which is what this version of Monopoly was themed after) so I can get free parking there.

 
I’m a fan of going to restaurants by myself with my laptop so I can enjoy a nice meal alone while getting some work done and not feeling pressured to uphold a conversation. However, I do still occasionally like dining out with friends, which I did earlier this month at No.1 Kazoku Japanese Yakitori and Sushi Bar in San Gabriel, Cali­fornia.

Our opening dish was tuna belly nigiri. The cuts of fish were extremely high quality and were overwhelmingly rich in flavor.

Next were chicken skin and beef tongue skewers. I found these to be pretty underwhelming—the chicken skin just tasted intensely strongly of gamey chick­en flavor, and the beef tongue was overcooked and lacked the tenderness that you normally expect from tongue. However, my friend ab­so­lute­ly loved these, so much so that she texted me in the middle of the night, hours after dinner, telling me that she was still thinking about the chicken skin skew­er.

Next up was tuna carpaccio. This wasn’t bad, but was vastly overshadowed by the tuna belly nigiri from earlier.

Finally, the closing dish of our dinner was a chirashi bowl. It’s very rare that chirashi bowls come with sea urchin, and I’m glad that this one did, con­sidering that sea urchin is my favorite sushi. However, it also came with little chunks of a strange cold cooked fish, and I never really found out what it was.

 
Hello doggo.

 

—§—

 

Photo dump from fall 2023

by   •   General, Travel
 

I usually do seasonal photo dumps upon the conclusion of each three-month period, but I decided to do this one early because I haven’t been blogging much lately, and because the Season of Discovery releases on World of Warcraft: Classic on November 30, 2023 so I might be occupied playing that with a group of friends. Here are some photographs from the last three months that didn’t make it on my blog on other posts, but are still interesting enough to share.

The beginning of September for me involved taking a trip to Southern California to help my friend Doug Wreden begin his move from the Seattle Met­ro­pol­i­tan Area to Los Angeles County. Because he was driving a much longer distance while I was coming from Las Vegas, it was easier for me to co­or­di­nate timing for his move-in logistics. I headed over to LA, spent a night in a hotel, then met up with the property manager to collect the keys.

This is the view I had from my hotel room:

Doug’s first event he ran after arriving in Los Angeles was the stretch goal stream from a prior fundraising event for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. One of the rewards for reaching a certain threshold of donations was for me to appear on his channel and do a “hot tub stream,” the concept of which has be­come notorious on Twitch and many people saying it is inappropriate for the platform due to basically being one step away from softcore por­nog­ra­phy.

Of course, I would never actually do a hot tub stream; instead, I dressed up in full business attire with a suit and tie, and while in the hot tub that was actually a cold tub because apparently it didn’t have a heater, I answered some of Twitch chat’s business-related questions. This photograph below shows the aftermath at the end of the broadcast.

Previously, I posted about going to Bubble World and Dinos Alive at the Los Angeles Exhibition Hub. In between those two tourist activities, my friend and I went to O’Sushi in the city of Rosemead. It was a small and cozy spot with good food and a friendly waitress.

We had fried squid rings as our appetizer.

My main entrée was a chirashi bowl.

The waitress suggested that we try a limited-time dish with salmon and mushrooms, so we ordered one of those too.

My friend got a couple sushi rolls as her entrée.

A few days later, we went exploring in downtown Los Angeles. I saw an interesting trolley lift system, and when I pulled out my camera to take a picture, Doug let me know that he also wanted to be in the photograph. I’m not sure if this is exactly what he was anticipating… but you cannot deny that he is definitely in the photograph.

Hello, Douglas Douglas.

Fast forward a week and a half, and it’s the end of October and I’m back in Las Vegas. A lot of my friends, including Doug, came in for a con­ven­tion. During non-convention hours, we went on an adventure exploring the Las Vegas Strip, which included the M&M’s Store. This was definitely one of the more visually overstimulating ex­pe­riences I’ve had.

The convention I alluded to above was TwitchCon. Although I’m still not a fan of it, it was a lot better last year. I imagine Twitch learned from their mis­takes from last year, and this year, they probably got a decent amount of help from the Las Vegas Convention Center staff, which is going to be much more experienced at running large-scale and logistically smooth events.

Doug had a meet-and-greet scheduled on one of the days, and upon his insistence, I joined him for it. I was mainly off to the side chatting with the Twitch staff members who were supervising the event, but once in a while, I would be requested by fans to pop in, autograph various different things, and stand in photos. Doug’s meet-and-greet went over the expected two-hour time slot by about an additional hour, and he still had fans lined up long after every other streamer had left.

After TwitchCon, we went to Guy Fieri’s Vegas Kitchen and Bar. The food was horrid; I ordered a chicken sandwich and it tasted like a sandwich you’d find at a grocery store in one of those plastic containers sitting chilled in an open-top refrigeration unit. However, as a consolation prize, at least I got a pic­ture of my friend Eric Morino taking a sip of a drink using 5 adjoined straws.

A month later, I joined some friends and friends-of-friends in a Friendsgiving gathering in celebration of Thanksgiving. Of course, in traditional Thanks­giv­ing fashion, we had to prepare a turkey. Apparently there is a way to remove and/or snap the turkey’s sternum and/or spine in order to lay it flatter and allow it to cook faster and more evenly. Our chef was having a little bit of difficulty snapping the seemingly invincible bone, so Doug decided to help.

For Friendsgiving, participants usually bring their own dishes to aggregate them together and enjoy a full feast. This year, we were given a considerable amount of freedom to decide what we want to contribute.

In a move that surprised absolutely nobody, Doug’s dishes he brought were a large Chuck E. Cheese’s pizza, four different kinds of ube-flavored snacks, and a whole coconut. Luckily, Doug was well-versed at wielding a convenient hammer we found in a cabinet under the kitchen island, so we were able to actually consume the coconut.

I’m not the biggest fan of large gatherings, so it’s rare to see me at a party this densely populated. However, the good news is that the hosts had a great cat I was able to pet instead of having to socialize.

 

—§—