For a short period after I moved to Las Vegas, I thought that I had forgotten my shower curtain in California. However, I soon remembered that I never actually had a shower curtain (my apartment used to have a sliding glass door, and the team house shower curtain belongs in the team house), so I went and bought a new shower curtain.

I bought a Volens ruffled white shower curtain because it looked more luxurious and elegant than a regular printed shower curtain, and it fit my apartment’s minimalistic and simple theme pretty well. After it arrived, I hung it up using the included rings, and I had my shower curtain.

Now normally, Amazon gives you product recommendations based off what you purchase. Sometimes it will recommend the same item again in the case of refillable products, but for one-time or big purchases (like televisions), it usually won’t continue to recommend you even more TVs, as it knows you now already have one. In those situations, it may instead start recommending related products, like a TV wall mount.

For some reason, Amazon insisted on constantly giving me additional shower curtain recommendations. Now, if I had purchased a product like dog treats, it would make sense for Amazon to continue recommending dog treats to me, as my (theoretically-existing) dog (for the purposes of this ex­am­ple) would eventually finish consuming the treats and need more. However, people generally don’t eat or replace their shower curtains too often, so I was very confused as to why my recommendations were lined with more shower curtains.

I ended up just ignoring the recommendations, and everything was fine for two months. But recently, my shower curtain started smelling a bit un­pleas­ant – it was actually the smell that clothes give off if they’ve been left out to air dry in a humid and bacteria-prone area, instead of being quickly dried in a machine dryer. This wasn’t a problem, though – I just unhooked my fancy shower curtain from the rings and threw it in the washing machine and dryer.

It shrunk.

For some reason, the shower curtain railing above my bathtub is unusually high, and on top of that, my tub is one of those hybrid soaking tubs that are ergonomically designed in an oval (which requires even more leftover curtain at the bottom to be able to stretch inward and fit inside the tub). My royal shower curtain was already only just barely making it in, but with it just barely shrinking in the wash (because this was made out of polyester and not vinyl), it was hanging above the tub.

This is the moment I discovered that Amazon knew what was going to happen months before it happened, and I began questioning the meaning of life. Amazon somehow knew that, because I had only purchased a polyester fabric shower curtain and no vinyl shower curtain liner to go with it, it should keep recommending shower curtains because it predicted that (1) I needed something vinyl to go inside the tub, (2) I would wash this shower curtain, it would shrink, and I would need to buy a new one, or (3) both.

I picked out a PEVA shower curtain liner and placed my order. The shower curtain recommendations instantly disappeared.

Now Amazon is recommending different kinds of body wash, soap, and toothbrushes to me.

I haven’t replaced my toothbrush in 4 months.

I’m just going to pretend like Amazon doesn’t actually know that, and they just made a lucky guess.

I was originally going to title this blog post “I am now officially a Nevadan” as a follow-up to the story of how I nearly failed my eye exam when transferring my driver’s license over from Illinois to Nevada. But, when I went to photograph my two driver’s licenses to show the difference between the two, I noticed something pretty interesting.

I have a Canon PowerShot G7X Mark II, which comes with facial recognition. There’s a setting in the camera where you take multiple photographs of yourself and record them into the camera, allowing it to recognize you in photos and videos. I guess this allows you to stay in focus a bit better, because the camera knows that you are the star of whatever you are filming.

I personally don’t think it’s really that noticeable, but apparently, my face has changed enough that my camera consistently detects my current face as my real face, even though I don’t have glasses on (yes, I still wear glasses, and all benchmark photos in the camera are me with my glasses on; I just had to take them off for my driver’s license photo because the photographer asked me to).

I guess this blog post technically could’ve gone either way – if it recognized me as my old photo, I would’ve laughed at how I used to be me more than I currently am, then just attribute the discrepancy to my glasses. But either way, I found it pretty interesting.

My aunt and uncle came to visit Las Vegas from Southern California for the first time since I moved here, and during their visit, we went to a Korean restaurant in southwest Las Vegas. It was similar to an all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue restaurant, except it wasn’t actually all-you-can-eat, and the quality of meats they had was far better.

When at home, I go shopping for the best-quality meats available at the grocery store and cook them myself, so I would say that I’m a bit more of a meat enthusiast than the average person. I can generally tell the difference between different cuts of meat, and can alter the way I prepare different meats to produce different kinds of tastes from them.

At this restaurant, they brought out a trail of different kinds of meat, all labeled with different tags. Unfortunately, this experience has made me realize that maybe I’m not really that much of a meat enthusiast when it comes to top-end meats, as to me, all of them ended up tasting like the same “tender and well-marbled meat.”

I’m usually a fan of when it rains because it seems like such a natural cycle of life that lets things flourish without human intervention. Having grown up in the Chicagoland suburbs, seeing rainfall, especially in May, was a glorious event because that meant you didn’t have to water your lawn. I thought rainfall would be an even greater and more monumental event in Las Vegas because of how little precipitation there usually is in the desert.

… Then this happened.

This was the view out of my apartment window. The intersection right by my building was completely flooded.

I’m not sure if I like rain anymore.

I’ve been doing some shopping for collectables on eBay lately. I’ve never really been much of a materialistic person (and I’m still not), but I recently started collecting Absol Pokémon cards for two main reasons – the first reason being that Pokémon has had quite a significant impact on my childhood and it seemed like, if I were to collect anything, cards of my favorite Pokémon would be reasonable.

The second reason is a bit more complex. I often criticize people for being too materialistic and focusing too much on possessions, especially if these are material possessions that aren’t even used that much and serve no real function or purpose. I personally believe in spending a lot of money on items that you use often, then offsetting that extra spending by just straight-up not purchasing items that you don’t really need – this is a pretty straightforward way to enhance your quality of life.

However, I’m also under the belief that it’s very difficult to understand other people’s “strange” behaviors unless you are there in their shoes. As a result, in order to ensure that I’m not “missing out” on something simply because I’m not a collector of an item, and to make sure that I’m not making this criticism out of ignorance, I decided to partake in the activity for first-hand experience.

That explanation got quite a bit more involved than I anticipated, especially for a blog post titled “how not to address a letter.” As I mentioned moments ago, I’ve been buying very cheap Absol Pokémon cards off eBay to try and round out my collection, some of which are only available from international sellers. I found one particular foreign card offered by a German seller, so I purchased the item.

Of course, being from Germany, the seller most likely wasn’t too familiar with United States addresses. However, instead of just copying the address exactly like how I submitted it to him, he decided to apply his own unique twist:

I’ve historically complained a substantial amount about the United States Postal Service for leaving my packages in front of random, incorrect doors, or putting my mail in the wrong mailbox, but in this case, I’m genuinely impressed that an envelope addressed to “8SΛCA Las Vegan” somehow still ended up in my mailbox.