Today is the first day of astronomical spring, so I decided to do another photo dump of miscellaneous pictures I took last season that didn’t warrant having their own dedicated blog posts. (Yes, I know I usually go off meteorological seasons, but it was just more convenient this time to go off astronomical seasons because I was busier than usual at the beginning of this month.)

I don’t actually remember which restaurants these first two photos are from because they were so long ago, but here is a random bowl of noodles and a random chirashi bowl I had.

For dinner one day, I met up with a friend who lives in the southeastern Las Vegas Valley and checked out Noodle Master, which I was told was a relatively new restaurant. Pictured below was our appetizer, spicy pork wontons in chili oil sauce, topped with green onions and served with a side of wonton sauce.

From where we were sitting, we got a decent view of the kitchen where we were able to watch them make noodles. For my main entrée, I ordered hand-pulled wide dandan noodles with minced pork, cucumber, crushed peanuts, spicy soy sauce, and Sichuan pepper, but I forgot to take a picture of it.

Earlier this month, there were some severe fires in Southern California. I have friends who live in the at-risk areas, so I headed over to Los Angeles County to help out with disaster prevention and recovery where I could.

This photograph was taken at almost 11 PM on the night the Eaton Fire started. The smoke was so thick and had already covered such a wide area that it illuminated the night sky and made the moon look like a glowing orb of fire.

The severity of the fires was amplified due to severe winds. The winds also caused direct damage on top of spreading the fire; they toppled a lot of trees, many of which fell into roadways and blocked the flow of traffic.

While in the Southern California area, I met up with one of my friends for dinner. She ordered cheese katsu curry thinking that it would literally just be a chunk of cheese with breading, presumably envisioning a fancier mozzarella stick dish. Well, it ended up being pork dunked in a layer of cheese, which was then covered in panko bread crumbs and fried.

She’s particular about meats and did not like this pork, so she musical-chairsed the dish over to me. I don’t like cheese, but I also don’t like wasting food, so I ate it anyway. … I guess that is one way to make me to eat cheese.

My company Tempo used to have team houses in Southern California back when we still competed in esports, but since entirely realigning the company towards game development, we’ve gone fully remote and no longer have any team houses or offices. That’s made it rare for us to ever see each other in person, so when an opportunity does arise, I usually show up.

Our CEO was in Los Angeles County for some unrelated business, so while he was there, we had a small gathering at the Sea Level Restaurant and Lounge at the Shade Hotel Redondo Beach. I don’t quite remember what we ordered, but just based on the photos, it seems like I got the catch of the day, and the other person whose meal I photographed got some kind of salmon dish.

After dinner, we went for a walk together around the marina, which gave me nostalgia from when we had our Redondo Beach and Long Beach team houses a handful of years ago.

This is the Holy Apple. No further context will be provided.

I finally got an opportunity to watch the Fountains of Bellagio’s choreographed water show from the western point of view. Now all I need to do is go for a swim and watch the show from under the water jets, and then I will have seen the show from every possible angle and perspective.

For dinner one day, I dined at the Yellowtail Japanese Restaurant & Lounge at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino. Pictured below are our dishes of edamame with sweet chili, cucumber salad with sesame and ume amazu, rock shrimp with Korean chili aïoli, and what I believe is a matcha cheesecake (but I don’t remember for sure).

One day, I was driving southbound on South Las Vegas Boulevard when I ran into an insane amount of congestion that was backed up to around Resorts World Las Vegas. After making it closer to the intersection of Fashion Show Drive and skimming through some local Las Vegas news websites on my phone in standstill, bumper-to-bumper traffic, I found out that there was a group of protestors who were planning on marching north on the Strip, turning left onto Fashion Show Drive, and concluding their demonstration in front of Trump International Hotel Las Vegas.

Well, I guess the Trump Hotel got tipped off about this and they (reasonably) didn’t want their business operations disrupted and didn’t want to have a bunch of non-clientele trespassers on their private property, so it seems like they somehow convinced the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to shut down all westbound travel on the entirety of Fashion Show Drive, both foot traffic and vehicular traffic, starting from South Las Vegas Boulevard.

The protestors comically did not know what to do anymore, so I guess they sort of just … stood there. Overflowing onto the street. Which then prompted the police to also have to close a few lanes of travel on South Las Vegas Boulevard to make sure the protestors didn’t get hit by cars while they tried to rally them back onto the sidewalk.

What a clown fiesta.

Back when Tempo was still in esports and we had a professional H1Z1 team, we were forced to work with the Rio Hotel & Casino as the temporary competitor housing provider for the league. Back then, the Rio was still owned by Caesars Entertainment. My experience with the Rio was so catastrophically bad that it sort of just ruined all Caesars properties for me, so I generally avoid anything Caesars-related.

With that being said, I usually don’t let my grudges interfere with my friends’ wishes. One of my friends was in town for a conference, and Mon Ami Gabi at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino was in a convenient location for dinner, so I decided to finally give a Caesars property’s restaurant a chance.

We started with some melted brie with apricot jam, brown butter walnuts, and mint with a side of croutons. This was basically a gigantic chunk of heavy, greasy cheese that tasted like I was dumping a bottle of coagulated cooking oil into my mouth. At least the walnuts were decent, I guess.

Next was onion soup au gratin, baked with gruyère cheese. … I will let the photograph speak for itself.

Yes, this is exactly how it came out from the kitchen.

My friend was craving a burger, so we got le cheeseburger & frites with tomme de savoie cheese, pickles, and diced onion. The burger patty was dry and flavorless.

Needless to say, based on this particular dinner, I cannot recommend Mon Ami Gabi.

I, Adam Parkzer, am always ready for a picture, at all times, no matter what.

Always.

One day, I was driving southbound on South Las Vegas Boulevard (not too far away from the photo near Fashion Show Drive above) when, again, there was an insane amount of congestion. I eventually approached the intersection of Mystère Dreams Avenue where I discovered that there seemed to be… an obstruction in the road.

Now, driving long vehicles is not easy. I drive a pickup truck and even that can sometimes get tricky in tight areas, so driving an entire bus is obviously going to be very difficult, especially in a place like the Las Vegas Strip where there’s a lot going on. In order to not swipe things with the tail end of the bus, you have to make very wide turns, i.e., you have to drive “outwards” first, and then actually make the turn afterwards.

Well, apparently this bus took the most inopportune time to break down: right as the bus driver reached the peak of the “outward” portion of the wide turn. This bus broke down in a way that blocked three out of the four travel lanes on South Las Vegas Boulevard.

Have I mentioned anything about clown fiestas yet?

I usually go get a haircut about once every two months. Two months is a long time, and a lot can happen in two months. Well, apparently, at some point in the last two months, something happened that prompted the hair salon I go to to post a new, interesting sign below their Clark County business license.

… I would like to personally meet and shake the hand of the person who walked into this building, saw several people sitting in salon chairs and styling stations getting their hair done, and genuinely thought they had stumbled across a medical facility.

It’s common for people to smoke indoors in Las Vegas casinos while gambling, and that is also one of the things that I find most annoying about Las Vegas casinos.

I somehow missed this when it happened, but apparently, Park MGM Las Vegas decided to convert to a non-smoking property back in late 2020. To show my appreciation, I decided to go for a walk around the Park MGM one day and stopped by La Pizzeria alla Romana in La Cucina del Mercato at Eataly for a quick lunch.

The pizza was … underwhelming.

And finally, here is a random photo of shishito peppers.

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.

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 some friends and acquaintances for dinner 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.

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.

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.