Andy ATrain Blog

Re: Summer Shred 2026!

2026-08-12T22:04:33.698-07:00

About 3 months ago, I started my "Summer Shred", which basically is just me using a walking pad on a regular basis at home. At first I was using it almost everyday, but I found it especially effective when I used the walking pad during my daily status meetings for work. Before I owned a walking pad, I often took the meetings from my chair or even my bed. But now I am always walking during these 30-45 minute meetings, thus increasing my physical activity on a daily basis, especially Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday when I have those meetings.

Here is the log of my walking time, speed, incline, Kcals burnt, and steps. The Kcal value is reported by the walking pad, so I don't know how accurate that actually is. Also, I rounded down the steps to the nearest hundred, for simplicity.

* Used a more accurate weight scale at the office.

At the beginning of the summer, I came in weighing around 193-195 lbs via the weight scale at the gym. I feel like this scale is pretty inconsistent, so you'll see that I occasionally weighed myself using the more accurate scale at the office, which is what I'm basing my results off of. I started on May 15 and am reporting back on August 5 because I just took a vacation to Boston and I'm pretty sure I might have gained weight during the trip since I ate and drank freely without my usual level of physical activity when I'm home.

I feel like the results have been good so far! About 5 lbs lost in a 3 month period, although who knows how much of that is just water weight. Regardless, the results have looked good, and I feel way more active than I used to be working from home on a regular basis and having a standard corporate desk job. You'll also see that I was able to increase my speed and incline gradually once I got acclimated to the pad in an effort to increase the amount of Kcals burnt.

I'm going to continue using the pad regularly and see how effective it can be in the longterm. I'll share another update later in the year!

Summer Shred 2026!

2026-05-15T12:54:55.696-07:00

20+ years into my career at IBM, I find myself working remotely a majority of the days and will only go into the office maybe once a week at most. The demands of my job just don't require me to be on site as much as I used to be. While I am still active by going to the gym a couple times a week (for strength training and cardio) and pickleball league on Wednesdays, I often find myself getting very little physical movement on several of the weekdays that I am working from home. As I've gotten older too (I'm now 42 at the time of this blog post), I've definitely noticed that my metabolism just isn't as fast as it used to be. I still like to eat and drink a fair amount throughout the week and changing the diet is not always easy.

My friend Alec from Twitch is a personal trainer and he even owns his own gym in San Fransisco. He's always been good about trying to push people to be in a better physical and healthy state, so I've decided to jump on his Summer Shred motivational bandwagon. I currently way about ~193 pounds, which is pretty heavy for me. Let's see how much I can lose by the end of summer...but how are we going to do this?

Like I've said earlier, it's difficult to change diet. It's also difficult to move around a lot when you're working from home all the time. And finally, at age 42, the joints just don't hold up as well as they used to. Extreme workouts are effective, but they also take a toll on the body. So what can we try that doesn't require a major change in lifestyle, will get us more active, but also lower the risk of injury at an older age? The answer might be: a walking pad!

Alec has pitched how effective a walking pad can be and he recommended me the same one he uses every day. It's the Vitalwalk Apollo 11 Elite and I just got mine delivered today! The goal is to use it on days that I don't have pickleball or go to the gym for cardio, which will be approximately 4-5 times a week. And on those days, the goal is to do two 30-min walking sessions at a brisk speed like 3-4 mph and the incline % of this pad goes up to 6%. We're starting on May 15, so we'll come back in 3 months on August 15 and see how effective a walking pad can be. Already I can tell that the walking pad will be something I can use easily while watching a baseball game, or even while I'm working on my laptop (since I got one of those stands that can raise up high if you want to stand while working).

You also know I loooove spreadsheets, so I'll document my daily walking amount over the course of the next 3 months. There will be periodic weight checks that we'll use the scale at the gym to track. The scale is a little inaccurate at times, but as long as we use the same scale to measure our weight, it should be somewhat accurate, right?

Wish me luck and stay healthy out there!

Another New Bowling Ball!?

2026-04-17T16:22:00.001-07:00

You might recall last year I posted about buying a new bowling ball. While I did get the Storm Typhoon, it was really only for dry lane conditions. At PINZ Fiesta this year in the Thursday bowling league, there just haven't been lane conditions where this ball has been needed. In fact, I can't say that I've thrown more than 10 games with it since getting it.

The oil this year at Fiesta Lanes has been really challenging, often to the point where I just wasn't getting any reaction with my Infinite Physix. It's gotten to the point where I just feel like there's no life on the ball anymore, and my average was suffering, dropping all the way down to the low 180s! After talking with several bowlers at the alley, they all agree that the oil has been difficult and many have turned to more aggressive balls, which my Storm Typhoon is the opposite of.

And thus, I decided to purchase another new bowling ball, this one to replace the Infinite Physix. I ended up deciding on the Storm Ion Max Pearl, which is arguably the most aggressive ball I've owned to date.

I've also been taking my bowling balls to get drilled by my friend Butch (former IBMer and friend who I've bowled many seasons with over on the east side at Bowlero), as he now works at the Bowlero pro shop. He did a great job with the Ion Max Pearl and after owning it for a few weeks, I've already shot a 723 series with it! I probably won't be able to salvage this season's average (190 is possible but definitely not 200+), but moving forward it feels like this ball was a great choice.

Bowling balls seem to last about 4 years for me, which was about right for the Infinite Physix. Here's to the new bowling balls! Let's see if they can overcome the challenging bowling alley that is PINZ Fiesta!

New Furniture!

2025-12-29T12:45:00.001-07:00

I recently went to American Furniture Warehouse to take a look at some new furniture. I have had the same dining table and couches since I moved into this house, which was back in 2005.

First, I wanted a new dining table. My old dining table was a small round glass table I bought from Ikea.

Old Glass Dining Table

While this table was fine for 1-2 people to eat a meal on, I wanted something bigger and better for playing board games on with 3-4 people.

While I was at the furniture store looking at tables, I figured it was also time to replace the sofa and loveseat that I had gotten from Macy's back in the day. They had become pretty worn out from 20 years of sitting in them. In fact, a lot of the cushioning had broken away and you could even feel the block pieces inside when you sat on them. I also had a hand-me-down blue couch that my sister gave to me when I first moved into my house. I never sat on the couch and to be honest, it was more for my pets than for me.

Old Sofas and Couch

I ended up getting a rectangle marble-top table and a new 3-piece sofa, loveseat, and chair set! All the seats have power reclining too. In total it was $2,700 including taxes and delivery.

New Table and Seating

The dining set has some chairs that match it, but they were out of stock until February, so I'll have to go back once they're available. That will run me an additional $240 for four chairs. For now, the old chairs with the glass dining set are still shown in the above picture.

Crazy that the previous furniture lasted me 20 years before I changed it. That's pretty good value if you ask me! Happy Holidays!

Expanding my Bowling Game

2025-09-06T00:51:00.001-07:00

In 2022, I bought a new bowling ball, the Infinite Physix by Storm. It was definitely a more aggressive ball that I don't usually throw, but over the first few months of using it, I eventually figured out where to stand on the lanes in order to throw decent games, and by the end of the first season I found myself just missing out on a 200-average season.

Then came the 2023-24 season, which was a big change for me. I decided to try a league at Fiesta Lanes with my friends, breaking the streak of bowling with the IBMers and at Bowlero for 16 years. Part of the reason was my work and streaming schedule had me staying up at some pretty late hours, and bowling on the east side of town just wasn't convenient at that time in my life. Regardless, even though my average wasn't 200+, it was a still a season where we ended up in 3rd place overall.

The 2024-25 season, I found myself back at Bowlero because Fiesta Lanes had major damage during the monsoon season that summer. I joined a team halfway through the season and ended up with a 207 average, my highest ever albeit in less games than a full season.

Since I didn't bowl a full season, I decided to join a summer league with my friends once Fiesta Lanes reopened (now renamed to PINZ Fiesta). However, I found it difficult to keep up with the dry lanes and had a below average season, nowhere near the level of my expectations. In fact, I had always felt that Fiesta was just a more difficult house to throw at than Bowlero.

Here are my past years with the Infinite Physix so far:

As an experienced bowler, I feel like my ability to read the lanes is really good. I know when I need to adjust my boards when the lanes are more oily or more dry. However, I would often struggle when the lanes became too dry as the night wore on, or if the lanes were dry to begin with. When the lanes are dry and I throw the Infinite Physix, my path to the pocket becomes a bit tight and it's easy to miss the pocket and leave splits. I would talk to and see other bowlers with 210+ averages and I came to the conclusion that there was still a big hole in my game: I was only throwing one ball for all lane conditions. Thus, I pursued throwing another ball for when conditions are too dry.

I began to do a lot of research on the bowling balls I've used in the past, starting with the Code Red and now the Infinite Physix. The Code Red was a less reactive ball with less hook, and my starting board with that ball was on board 9 (board 9 being the 9th board from the left, or board 31 if you want to get technical for right-handed bowlers). That starting board was a good 2 boards to the right of where my starting board is with the Infinite Physix, which is a more reactive ball with bigger hook.

Based on the specifications of each ball, I compiled a Google spreadsheet that shows the behavior of each ball and how they will roll for me. Using the data, I decided the new ball I should buy would be the Storm Typhoon, which had similar stats as the Code Red.

And so begins my quest to become a better bowler! I am now taking 3 balls with me to bowling league instead of 2. One ball for oily conditions (Infinite Physix), one ball for dry conditions (Typhoon), and then one ball for the 6, 9, and 10 pins. Here's hoping that this is the missing piece to expanding my game!

Getting Into Pickleball!

2025-06-29T16:33:00.001-07:00

At the end of last summer, I was looking for new things to do and distractions when I was going through a rough time. I had learned about a volleyball league at the Tucson Racquet and Fitness Club that a couple of my friends were playing in on a weekly basis, so I decided to give that a try. I am very bad at volleyball, I never played in my life but a few casual games with friends here and there, so playing in a competitive league was a bad idea. I quickly felt out of place, like I wasn't helping the team but hurting it, so after a few weeks I decided to call it quits.

But I was still looking for activities to do. While it's true that I still shoot pool on Mondays and Tuesday and bowl on Thursdays, those were sports (are they more games than sports?) that I was already very nestled in, I wanted a change of scenery. A few of my friends suggested I give pickleball a try. I played a few games and also was very bad, I had never played tennis growing up and just some ping-pong games with family here and there. Nonetheless, I enjoyed playing it enough and was interested if there would be some leagues in my area.

Turns out that the Tucson Racquet and Fitness Club, the same place where my friends were playing volleyball, had weekly leagues on multiple nights of the week. I decided to give it a try on Wednesdays, joining the Mixed Ladder League that was open to all skill levels Beginner and up and on average it suggested Intermediate. I didn't know anyone going into the league. After a few weeks of learning with friends, I entered myself as a 2.5 based on a chart similar to the one found on this site.

The league is about 60 players and each session spans a period of 6 weeks. It's very welcoming and I enjoyed how I get matched up against players of similar skill level. Each week, you get put in a group of 4 players, where you'll play a total of 6 games of Doubles (2 versus 2), with 2 games per teammate to ensure that you get to play with and against everyone in the group. I really enjoy the format, it seems pretty balanced. It's also a ladder system, where each person scores their own points, with a max of 11 points per game and a theoretical max of 66 for the whole night. If you score a lot of points, you'll move up in the ladder and play tougher opponents the next week. If you score few points, you'll move down and play weaker opponents the next week. Here's an example of how the format goes for a given night.

In the above example, the players that are shaded would pair up with each other and serve to the other team. So in Game 1, players A & D start with the serve to B & C and scored 11-5. Then B & C start with the serve to A & D in Game 2, losing 7-11. In Game 3, A & C are paired up against C & D, and so forth. At the end, you can see that Player D scored the most points and is "King/Queen of the Court" that night.

I would say Pickleball is a very beginner-friendly game, it's easy to play and welcoming to all ages and genders. In this league I'll find myself matched up with all kinds of people from young players in their twenties to seniors who are 60+ and I feel like there's a good balance of men and women in the league. There really is no discrimination in who can play, which is something I love.

Since I've joined the league, I've invested in the gear, picking up some Adidas court shoes, several Nike sportswear shirts and pants, and I've even invested in a carbon fiber paddle sponsored by my favorite professional player and bought myself a nice combination cooler + pickleball bag.

Since August of last year, I have been playing pretty much every Wednesday. The league will run 6 weeks and then have one off week, so I do get a little rest, but it's pretty much my weekly routine now. I would rate myself around a 3.25 right now, which is fine for me considering how bad I was when I started. I think I can become high-intermediate in time, but it's already worth it for the weekly workout and camaraderie of meeting people.

So yep, keeping busy during the weeknights with a league of some sort every Monday through Thursday! 😊

Review: 2023 Lexus RZ 450e Premium

2025-03-18T13:35:00.004-07:00

What I've Been Driving

It's been almost 20 years since I bought my first and only car. In 2006, I purchased a 2006 Lexus IS 250 that was manual transmission and ~200HP. (Man, this blog didn't even exist back then, which is crazy to think about how old that car is). It's currently got 210K miles on it and still runs really well, plus it's one of the last of its kind - Lexus no longer makes cars with manual transmissions and I don't think they have since 2013.

While my IS runs great, I know it's only a matter of time until it finally breaks down for good. It has to be close, right? We're just one major repair away from it costing more to fix the car than it's worth. Hence, it was about time to buy a new car! I wanted to stay with Lexus because I love the builds and quality, plus I'm also very loyal to a brand if it treats me well, and considering how long I had the IS without any major problems, I've been a very satisfied customer!

Why I Was Interested in EV

I was interested in an electrical vehicle because I simply just don't drive that much anymore. I work remotely a majority of the week and most days I'll drive 30 minutes round trip and less than 15 miles. Once a week I'll put in about 90 minutes of driving to go to work, bowling league, and then back home, for about 50 miles. I will occasionally drive to Phoenix once a quarter, but that's about the most I'll drive as anything over a 3-hour drive I would prefer to fly.

I've been in a Tesla before and I will admit, they are very nice and fancy. Like the iPhone version of a car. I also witnessed their superior acceleration and was very impressed. EV just sounded like something that could make sense for me, and when Lexus introduced their first ever EV in 2023, I was at least a little interested. I gave it some time for reviews come out and it was mixed, and to be honest I simply forgot about buying a car until recently I just decided I should check it out. Fortunately, Tucson had one RZ 450e on its lot that was available for a test drive. I tried it out and instantly fell in love with everything about it, at least from a driving and riding perspective. However, I knew part of that had to do with the fact that it was a new car and that I just love how luxurious Lexus cars feel. I asked if this car I just drove was available for purchase, but they told me that it has been used as a loaner vehicle the past couple years and was not available for purchase yet. If you don't know, a loaner vehicle is a dealer's car that they lend to people to drive while their car is in service. The car had 7K miles on it and appeared to be in great shape since it has always been in care of the dealership.

My Lexus RZ 450e Buying Experience

After looking at all the models (300 or 450) and options (Base, Premium, Luxury) available, I decided that the RZ 450e Premium was the one I wanted. I wanted the higher horsepower of the 450 and the little gadgets and features that the Premium offered. I didn't get to see a Luxury model, but I was actually close. I started looking online at used car websites like Cars.com, Carvana, AutoTrader, and CarGurus for anything RZ 450e. There really weren't many options out there, probably because of the low amount of these cars they sold and the ones that are currently still being leased. However, I spotted one on CarGurus, a RZ 450e Luxury that was going for a very low price at $35K because it was a manufacturer's buyback. I don't know anything about buying used cars because I've only bought one car ever and it was brand new. Located out of a dealership in Utah, I was so excited about the car being available and for that price that I put $500 down while I proceeded with getting a car loan. While I never flew out to Utah beforehand to check out the vehicle, the pictures looked fine and the manager had ensured me that I could return the vehicle within 7 days if I found something drastically wrong with the car and just eat $1000 in shipping costs round trip. While I waited for the loan to approve, I went to my insurance and found out that they could not insure a vehicle with a branded title. I did some research and learned a lot about what a Lemon Law buyback was and even though the Carfax did not show it, the AutoCheck report had shown the car's battery had been serviced and replaced 4 times in a 5 month period! I did a lot of research into Lexus RZ 450e batteries and found that there are some problems reported with the 12V battery dying inexplicably overnight, but it seems to be due to people leaving their Lexus phone app open and constantly sending requests to the car when it's idle. My guess is that the previous owner's 12V battery died so many times that they wanted out of their lease, but I can only assume. Regardless to say, I was pretty relieved that I didn't go through with the purchase of that car.

I had told the Lexus dealership in Tucson that I was interested in buying a used RZ 450e Premium in Iridium (silver) color, whenever they started becoming available. I told them I was still planning to keep my IS, so I could afford to wait months to years if I needed to. Welp, I guess someone was looking to make a sell, because they called me just a week after I was about to buy that car in Utah and asked me if I would be interested in buying that car I test drove if they could find a way to sell it to me. I was excited to hear that the car was for sale! I knew it was in good condition because it was under the dealership's control the whole time. They also offered it to me as Lexus Certified Pre-Owned with a 0.99% financing rate and selling it to me for $42K, which it had originally MSRP'ed two years ago for $60K. The price was a little higher than average, but I liked the peace of mind knowing that it was Lexus Certified, that the Carfax and AutoCheck reports both came up super clean, the financing was going to be very cheap, and I was also getting an extended warranty up to April of 2029. I'd end up paying about $1300 on a 72-month loan. Overall I was very happy with my eventual buying experience and ended up with the exact car I wanted!

Owning a 2023 Lexus RZ 450e Premium (after 2 weeks)

So here's the part that people probably want to know: How's the car?

I was coming from a car from almost 20 years ago, so when it comes to look and features, basically anything was going to blow my old car out of the water, lol. This car is loaded with features: multiple cameras for parking including panoramic and bird's eye views, adaptive cruise control where you can set the follow distance from the car before you and it assists with keeping you in the lanes, wireless Apple CarPlay is really nice oh and so is that area to wireless charge your phone, the HUD on the windshield is fun, the car can park itself although I can easily park it faster, and even the Lexus app is cool although it won't be free after a year.

I also love the way it drives, it's so fast! I'm afraid that I will get many speeding tickets with this car because I just want to pass everyone on the road with its torque. Plus it just looks super sleek and sexy. My friends have asked if they're "going to be riding in a spaceship?"

The biggest complaint I've read about online is the low range on the car. They advertise about 196 miles on the RZ 450e. Last weekend I drove my car from my house in Tucson to my parents' house in Scottsdale in one fell swoop and from 100% I got to my parents' garage with 13% battery after 126 miles of driving. I even had the thing in ECO mode with the climate off (fortunately I drive late at night so the temperature was cool around the high 60's that night). However, most of that drive is also highway driving at 85mph except for maybe 15 miles.

Before I went back home, I knew I would have to charge my car before I went back to Tucson, since I had driven around Scottsdale and my parents don't have a 240V outlet installed, I was simply charging off 120V. I downloaded 3 apps: ChargePoint, EVgo, and Plugshare. Chargepoint sucks, it did not find many stations even in a big city like Phoenix. EVgo was really nice, I could even select the type of charger I have which is J1772. But Plugshare was the best because it had the most locations and users rate their experience at each station. I found a convenient station off Wild Horse Pass, charged my car up from 50% to 73% for $9 after waiting 15 minutes and was on my way!

To be honest, this is not a car you should drive from city to city unless you like waiting around for it to charge. Fortunately, I am still planning to keep my IS so that I have both an electric and gas vehicle and my IS will be the car I take anywhere out of the city. It was just nice to show this car off to my parents and my friends and test its range, but yeah, probably never again lol.

As for installing a 240V charger at my house? I'm not going to. Like I mentioned earlier, I really only drive about 15 to 30 miles a day on average, which usually consumes about 13% of battery. With the 120V charger, I can get that back in about 7 hours, which is overnight while sleeping. And since I have the other car still, I could always use that in a pinch. I want to drive the IS once a week still anyway. I did however install this fancy holster and hook for my cable though, only $36 off Amazon!

Oh and some other things about the car I want to comment on that I've discovered: You can have the dealership disable the constant beeping that is on by default when you put the car in reverse mode. I don't like that you can't open the roof windows like you can with the moonroof on my IS, plus I tried to buy some $100 roof shades off Amazon and they are more of a pain to attach then its worth. There's no glove compartment but there's plenty of space in the arm rest cubby or underneath for your registration and insurance binder. The owner's manual is so thick at 600+ pages that it's probably easier to just throw it away and rely on an online version.

Overall, I am pleased with my purchase. I really enjoy driving an electric vehicle and it fits the bill for all my needs. It's also nice to have a new car! Thanks for reading and hope this helps if you were wondering about the Lexus RZ 450e!

Review II: Nationwide Pet Insurance (After 5 Years So Far)

2024-12-26T16:43:00.024-07:00

You may recall last year that I wrote about a couple pet insurance claims with Nationwide for my dog Lucy that involved removing a bunch of benign masses from under her shoulder. Well unfortunately, 2024 included three more claims: one for my cat Benzi and two for Lucy...

OPERATION #1 (BENZI - STOMATITIS):

Benzi was born with some pretty unfortunate luck. I didn't blog about it, but back when Benzi was 8 months old, he actual developed Acute Kidney Failure and had lost so much weight, down to 4.5lbs after not eating for days. I honestly thought he was going to die. I took him to St. Mary's Animal Clinic because it was close to my house and the vet Dr. Laura Maillard diagnosed the condition. Dr. Laura was great and offered me an affordable, at-home treatment to help save my cat's life and Benzi made a full recovery from that. You can read about my review on Google here if you're curious about it. Dr. Laura eventually left St. Mary's but I followed her to Bernarda Veterinary Hospital and will basically follow her now wherever she goes. The kidney failure was before I acquired pet insurance for him, so that $1,000 in diagnostics and treatment came out of pocket and since this is a pre-existing condition before the insurance was activated, no future kidney failures can be claimed. Let's hope it never happens again...

I've known about another condition for a while now called Stomatitis, which basically involves Benzi's teeth and gums. He was unfortunately born with it and now that he's 5+ years old, Dr. Laura suggested it was time to treat his mouth. The operation was successful and I submitted Benzi's first ever claim, which was reimbursed for $1,190.44 after my $250 annual deductible and omitting the dental cleaning.

Nationwide Insurance Claim #1 - Benzi (tuxedo cat), Stomatitis

OPERATION #2 (LUCY - VALLEY FEVER):

I went out of town for Labor Day weekend and left my dog Lucy in care of a friend who had never taken care of her before. The friend would end up taking Lucy on all kinds of trips, for example to Mt. Lemmon or the nearby apple orchard farm. When I got Lucy back, she stopped eating for a couple days and I it was near impossible to get her to eat anything, even boiled chicken (which most dogs will always scarf down). After two days of her not eating, I had to take her to Urgent Vet, which is unfortunately more expensive than my normal vet because it is urgent care. The vet couldn't tell what was wrong with her at first, but asked if I wanted to pay for additional diagnostic tests. The nice thing with having insurance is that you stop thinking about how much medical care costs, because there is some peace of mind that it will be reimbursed later. So I opted for the additional tests and one of them was for Valley Fever, which turned out to be what Lucy had! If I didn't have insurance, I might have opted not to run the test for $100 and it would have taken longer or more to find out what Lucy's condition was. It's likely that Lucy picked up Valley Fever from those excursions during my friend's care for her, from spores in the air or dirt.

The treatment for Valley Fever is simple, it just lasts a while. I pick up bottles of Fluconazole that cost about $50 for 2 months worth and I give Lucy .4mL by mouth twice daily. I am told from Dr. Laura that this treatment will last 6 months before we are able to revisit her levels and see if she's fully recovered. But at least Lucy is fine and eating well again! Here is Lucy's second ever claim, which was reimbursed for $895 after the $250 annual deductible.

Nationwide Insurance Claim #2 - Lucy (terrier dog), Valley Fever

OPERATION #3 (LUCY - MASS AND TOOTH REMOVAL):

Poor Lucy. While she was diagnosed with Valley Fever, I also discovered a mass growing on her skull. My vet had done some research about Lucy's "breed" of dog when the first mass appeared and learned that they are just a factory for developing these masses, albeit benign. This one was on her skull however, and I definitely didn't want it to grow any larger, so I scheduled surgery a few months after the start of Valley Fever treatment to give Lucy some time to recover from that.

Here is Lucy's third claim, which also included a removal of some of her teeth since they were in a pretty poor condition. We opted to do this now since it was inevitable and Lucy would be sleeping from the mass removal anyway. The total reimbursement for this operation was $1,632.75, which only omitted the dental cleaning since my annual deductible from the previous claim had already been met.

Nationwide Insurance Claim # 3 - Lucy (terrier dog), Mass & Tooth Removal

A POST-ANALYSIS OF INSURANCE COSTS VS SAVINGS:

A lot of people will ask me if pet insurance is worth it. Honestly, it's like any insurance in the world: it's worth it if you use it or if you have trouble setting aside money for when things go awry. It's up to you to decide if you'd rather save chunks of money for when your pets eventually get sick or if insurance is something that can work for you. I will say however that like in Operation #2 with Lucy's Valley Fever, it was nice to have the reassurance that insurance would cover the additional diagnostic tests that I may have not elected for had I been paying out of pocket.

When I first started the pets on insurance, it was $18/mo for the cats and $30/mo for the dog. Now it is $23/mo for the cats and $44/mo for the dog. The monthly insurance went up for the cats as they are getting older (or maybe inflation?) and I'm not sure if the increase for the dog is higher because of the previous claim or age/inflation or both...

Regardless, we can "estimate" if pet insurance is worth it by doing some ballpark math. I don't know exactly when my rates changed, but let's just say it was $18/$30 for the first 3 years and $23/$44 for the next two years, just to give us an idea of how much I'm spending versus saving:

Benzi = ($18 x 42 months) + ($23 x 24 months) + ($250 deductible) = $1,558 paid over 5.5 years. With $1,190 reimbursed, that means I'm -$368 for Benzi so far and 1 operation.

Ember = ($18 x 38 months) + ($23 x 24 months) = $1,236 paid over 5 years. This means I'm -$1,236 for Ember so far and 0 operations.

Lucy = ($30 x 28 months) + ($44 x 24 months) + ($250 deductible x 2 claims) = $2,396 paid over 4 years. With $1,147 + $934 + $895 + 1632 = $4,608 reimbursed, that means I'm +$2,212 for Lucy so far and 4 operations.

So there you have it. I've said it before and I'll say it again...your pets will eventually get sick. So far the pet insurance has definitely been worth it and I'm happy that I went with Nationwide's Major Medical Plan for all three pets!

Review: Kaisar Garage Door Replacement

2024-09-09T13:31:00.001-07:00

The week before Labor Day weekend was a little crazy. I came home around 9pm from pickleball league on Wednesday night, with intentions to pack for my trip to Minnesota with a 5am flight out the next morning. My garage door had opened just fine, but when I tried to close it, it suddenly got stuck. The two wheels on the bottom panel of the door had come off the track. My garage door was pretty old, in fact it was the door that came with the house (built in 2000), so about 24 years now.

However, I was in a rush to get the door closed since I had to leave for a flight in less than 8 hours, so I frantically tried to fix the wheel/track/door myself so I could just get the door closed. Unfortunately, the axle for one of the wheels was off the bracket, and there was no way to get it back in without completely removing the bracket. As I tried to fix the door, it just got worse and worse. A lot of it has to do with the door being old and a poor design. It also had to do with my ignorance and not having the proper tools to keep the door held up while I worked on it. As a result, my door looked like this after an hour of making things worse:

As you can see from the pictures above, all of the door had completely fallen off the track on both sides and by the end of the night, it was only hanging by the motor at the top of the garage and a single wheel on the left track.

I was extremely stressed out and couldn't leave my garage in the shape it was, so I canceled my flight out to Minnesota. I woke up at 6:30am on Thursday morning to call garage door companies in my area. I started with Kaisar Garage Doors & Gates because it was a company I used in the past to replace my motor and fix a bent panel. They were really affordable and did a good job, plus the house actually came with a Kaisar garage door that had lasted some 20+ years. When I called Kaisar, they told me that they could come out 10am. I really wanted to the door fixed in the same day so I could possibly still make my trip out to Minnesota. So I called up another company called A1 Garage Door Service, which was also one that my friend Jenny had given a good review on Yelp. A1 told me they could come between the hours of 11am-3pm.

I got a call from Kaisar that an appointment had canceled, so they came to see me even earlier at 8am. The salesperson's name was Scott and was there to give me an estimate on the price and work required for the door. I wanted a full replacement of the door. Scott first just wanted to help me get the door off the motor and track so that it didn't cause any damage or possibly fall off and hit my car. So he helped me detach it and move it outside safely for free. He said he could have charged for something like that, but he was just a normal human being who wouldn't want that on his own garage and it was a fairly simply task to do (with my help holding the door and pushing it away from the car as it fell down). He told me a full replacement (door, tracks, springs) would run me around $1700 and that the earliest installation would unfortunately not be until the following week. He also did a very interesting but cool thing, which was refer me to a friend who might be able to get it replaced same day had I really wanted it fixed in the same day. However, it wasn't going to be an established company, more of a private practice, so I was hesitant. Still very honest of the guy, which I loved.

A1 proceeded to come by at around 11:30am. The technician did their measurements and then asked me to come out and hear the estimate. He called a salesperson at the office and put them on speaker phone. They were not short and to the point and kept asking me silly side questions about how I like the service or is so-and-so treating me well. The salesperson on the phone finally gave me a quote for a full replacement (door, tracks, springs) and told me a price of $3700! He even said he gave me a $500 discount. The technician who was live in person started nodding his head and said afterwards "not too bad!". I felt like this was a sleazy company and the price felt very marked up. I think they were trying too hard to present "pleasant" customer service and make me feel like I was getting a good deal and treated well. I told them I would think about it, and then the salesperson on the phone started asking me "what are the things your thinking about"? Inside my head I was like, "I really don't have to answer that", but to be friendly I simply responded with things like "time of installation is going to be important for me". They finally left but there was no way in hell I'd use them as a company. Now I just really want to talk to my friend Jenny and learn about her experience with them. How did they earn such a good review from her?

With the garage door off the ceiling and stowed away to the side safely, my garage was completely exposed. I decided I could still make my trip to Minnesota, so I booked a new flight on Delta for $400 that would get me there at 1am on Friday, effectively only missing a half-day of my trip. It was an extra $200 to make it out, but sometimes this shit just happens and you gotta pay the difference to make up for emergencies. I then put all valuables from my garage into the house and backyard. I texted my neighbor, telling them my situation and if they could help watch my garage for me while I was gone for some 5 days. They actually agreed to help by having her son and nephew park their cars on my driveway during the weekend (instead of in the street) to help make it look like people where at the house at all times, which was really nice! I would eventually reward my neighbor and her family with some cookies from Nosh Tucson, which is a bakery my friend Tina owns. I then took a rideshare to the airport so that my garage would be occupied with my car all weekend and give an illusion that I was home all the time.

I proceeded to go to Minnesota (for the rennaissance fair and to witness my friend proposing to his girlfriend of 8 years) and while I was nervous leaving my house with the garage door open, I felt somewhat safer knowing that it was being watched by friends and the neighbor. I also have a camera for the cats inside the house, so I would know if someone made it inside and past the locked door.

The installation for my garage door wasn't scheduled until Friday of the following week, but Kaisar knew of my situation and called me on Tuesday and told me they could install it on Wednesday since an appointment had fallen off! They came and got it installed in about 2 hours and I was so happy to have a brand new garage door. This one also has a much better wheel and track design, so the chances of it falling off the track are not so easy now.

In the end, it also only cost me $1600, which was really close to the ball-park estimate that Scott had given me. I then picked up some paint and supplies from Home Depot for about $100 and painted the door later in the week. We're finally back up and running!

I would 100% use Kaisar Garage Doors & Gates again. It felt nice to work with a company who just seemed really down-to-earth and honest. And I can't complain with the price either!

Time for another Fitness/Health Trial

2024-08-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

We all do it. There are times we get unhappy with our weight and we try adding or changing our lifestyles or diet in attempt to lose weight quickly. In the past I've tried paleo, but I didn't like how it excluded so many things I could eat, including drinking beer, which is something I struggle to give up and simply don't want to. I'm "fit-ish" and relatively healthy, maintaining an active lifestyle where I go to the gym regularly and workout from home when I can't. The problem has always been in my belly because as I've gotten older, my metabolism has decreased and it's not like I've stopped eating and drinking.

Today's fad? Intermittent Fasting. You'll recall last year I saw an advertisement for this app called Fitcoach that I bought into because it pitched to me a daily 7-minute workout that I could add easily in addition to what I already do: lift about two times a week and some form of cardio the other 5 days. Well, turns out the app also has a method to help you keep track of intermittent fasting, so I figured I'd give it a try because I hear it actually works.

Another reason intermittent fasting sounds attractive is because it seems doable. Waiting another 2-4 hours to eat breakfast isn't too bad at the beginner level. And I still want to be able to eat a variety of foods without restriction and you know I'm not giving up beer anytime soon. So yep, I want to see if this works. My goal is to try 12:12 for the month of August and if it goes well, I will step it up to 13:11 and go from there. It's currently August 1st and last night I weighed in at 189.4 lbs. 😩

In related news, I have stepped up my physical activity lately. I'm playing basketball during the summer (when there's no bowling and the kids at the U of A are gone so the courts aren't as crowded), I tried learning some sand volleyball, and I just bought a pickleball paddle and am trying to get into that! Expect another update from me soon!

APA City Tournaments

2024-06-13T16:04:00.000-07:00

9-Ball APA City Tournament (Jun 1-2):

The first City Tournament for APA was for 9-ball. I had taken a few years off playing 9-ball because I don't like the format as much as 8-ball, but I decided to join back up in the fall of 2023 because I wanted to participate in more side tournaments. I joined a team that had a lot of newer players (skill levels 3's and 4's), so I was coming in as a 5 and the highest skilled player for that team. It was actually kind of sad, they tried to recruit many players but no one wanted to join them because they thought they were "bad". But in reality, they were just inexperienced and needed some coaching. I brought my friend Matt to play with us that session and since he was a skill level 8, that really helped improve our team's competitiveness.

While we didn't have a great fall session, we ended up drawing the wildcard for the playoffs and ended up winning those, qualifying us for a chance in the Big Money Tournament. Those are the tournaments where you win the first match, you qualify for cities and then if you win the second match, you win $1000 for the team. Our team never expected to make it this far, but they played well enough at Big Money to give me a chance. I just had to beat the best player in APA in a sudden death match to qualify us...but I actually won against him and sent us not only to Cities but we ended up winning the $1000 as well later that night. My match against Ronnie and beating him in a higher level tournament is probably my greatest achievement in APA to date, no joke here are his 9-ball stats:

Anyway, the City tournament didn't go as well unfortunately as we were knocked out in the second round. The spring roster had changed a bit and we added some new players that I didn't really think we needed to. They were added because our team captain wanted to make the team stronger, but I sort of feel like we should have just rolled with the team that got us there.

9-Ball Bracket (pre-play)

It also didn't help that I didn't win my match in the only round I played, despite jumping out to a 10 ball lead against a skill level 6. I knew if I lost, the team would lose, given the remaining players we had in the match, and that's exactly what happened. :( I'm still playing for this same team during the summer, but Matt and I have thought about starting our own team come fall, since we have a lot of players from the Tuesday team now interested in playing Mondays.

8-Ball APA City Tournament (Jun 7-9):

The next tournament was the following weekend, this time for 8-ball and my Tuesday night team I captain where we've had basically the same core playing for over a decade. Unfortunately we did not have Anthony, arguably our best player. But we actually would end doing really well without him...

8-Ball Bracket (pre-play)

Our first match was on Friday night and since the tournament is a modified-single elimination tournament where you are guaranteed to play at least two matches, I knew that losing the first match would not really hurt us. We ended up winning and I didn't even have to play, my team got it done in the first 4 players.

We left the pool hall at midnight Friday and had to be back at 10am on Saturday for our next match. That match ended up going to sudden death, but I only had to beat a skill level 3 in one game to advance us to the next round and fortunately I got that 1 game.

On to the third round, it was win or go home. We played a strong team and were also able to beat them in the first 4 players, again leaving me in a situation where our team advanced I didn't even have to play. I was really proud of how well the team was playing. We went out to Shogun for sushi after the tournament to celebrate not only our team's performance, but Frankie's birthday. It was a good weekend so far.

On to the semifinals, just two matches to go. It was a back-and-forth match and would end up going to another sudden death match. This time, I would need to win two games against their skill level 5 in order to advance. The first game, I started out really hot, running 6 of my 7 balls but leaving a tough bank shot on the 15-ball that I would end up missing. My opponent played a good safety and I was unable to convert on the next turn. The table was pretty much wide open for him after that, and he shot well enough to run out, ending the game in 2 innings. A disappointing outcome and we were knocked out of the tournament. Crazy, I ended up playing on 2 games the entire weekend, not even a full match. But that was the position I wanted to be in, as the anchor for our team, I was just unable to get us the win in the semifinals when we really needed it. The team we lost to would end up losing in the finals, but they were also facing a very good team as well.

Even though we lost again, I was still really proud of our team and how everyone performed. It was a great run without one of our best players. I really hope one of these years this team will make it to Vegas, we're now running on 13 years together without making it. But I still have hope and I'm always thankful they've stuck with me as their captain for all those sessions. Crazy to think about it's been that long!

Bowling Rolloffs!

2024-05-12T13:37:00.002-07:00

I last updated in January that our bowling team had made quite the turnaround in the second quarter of our season, going from 23rd place to 1st place and qualifying our team for the championship rolloffs at the end of the season!

Those rolloffs took place last Thursday against 5 other teams, with our team having a chance to win at least $200 and a maximum of $700 based on placement. All the teams bowling in the rolloffs were really good, in fact we had to face the team with the best bowler in the league (226 average, bowled a perfect game earlier in the year). Our team also had the lowest average and highest handicap going into the night, but that didn't stop us from putting up a solid 900+ team pins each game for a total of 2,770, which was good for 3rd place! Our team is listed in the picture below as team #38, "538019" and we won $500 from the rolloffs.

A quick story about the team name. We started the season as "Poker 'n the Gutter", a name I created because our bowling team likes to play bowling poker where you draw 1-2 cards for bowling spares and strikes and then make the best 5-card poker hand at the end of the game. During bowling, there is a 50-50 raffle that goes on each week and Brandon had been playing every week but never won. About a month ago, I figured I'd finally give it a shot and low and behold, I ended up winning. Brandon was hysterically jealous and ended up changing our team name to the winning ticket number "538019", which is why our team name was changed. And I was unable to change it before the end of the season no matter how many times I tried.

This was my first full season bowling in a new house over at Fiesta Lanes and it was difficult to adjust to the lane conditions at first. I ended the year with a 197 average, which was lower than the 200+ I had been putting up the last two years at Bowlero. Overall on the whole season, our team took home $1500 collectively. I'm gonna enjoy the offseason for the next 4 months or so and be back to bowl again in the fall.

Next blog entry will be to cover the City Tournaments for both 9-ball and 8-ball for APA! Updates to come in June!

My 5-Year Journey as a Twitch Streamer

2024-02-01T01:42:00.032-07:00

DISCLAIMER: This article is a honest, personal experience of my journey through the online platform of Twitch.tv. Any names of other people mentioned in this entry are replaced with a single letter in order to best protect their privacy.

How I Started on Twitch Back in 2011

Actually the correct title of this section should be "Why I Started on Justin.tv"...

Throughout my life, I've always been great at RTS (Real-Time Strategy) games. My first claim to fame on RTS was with a game called Command & Conquer: Red Alert, which was created by Westwood Studios. During the years of 1998-99, Westwood Studios would hold a monthly ladder where they gave away prizes for the top 3 players in both the Allied and Soviet factions. I was 15 at the time and I still remember rushing home everyday after school to get my 2 hours of online gaming in before my parents got home from work. I couldn't play when they were home because back in the day, we only had one phone line, and the only way I could connect to the internet was with a 56K dial-up option. Whenever I was online and playing, it would tie up the phone line. Or if someone picked up the phone, it would kick me off the internet. So 2 hours a day every weekday for months, I trained and got better until the month I finally won the Allied faction side in January of 1999. I couldn't use my personal handle of ATrain64 because I couldn't let me parents know I was playing in online tournaments and therefore I couldn't provide an address to Westwood Studios should I win the tournament. This was just a product of my strict childhood where my parents wanted me to focus on school instead of video games. So I asked my cousin to make an account for me under the handle "AsDgSaGsR" (that he created for me randomly by mashing a bunch of letters on the left side of the keyboard) and my prize for winning that month was a 4GB Western Digital hard drive that I didn't need, but ended up selling to a schoolmate for $90. This was the peak of my Red Alert career and I didn't play much after that, since Red Alert started to die out and StarCraft was starting to grow in popularity...

Fast forward to 2010, when the game of StarCraft 2 was released by Blizzard Entertainment. I had played a lot of StarCraft 1, but never competitively. However, I had a lot of friends playing multiplayer StarCraft 2 and I wanted to become really good at the game to show off my skills, which I knew I was capable of since I've always been great at RTS games.

In order to get better at a game, you have to learn from others and practice practice practice! Out of my group of friends, I was the best at StarCraft 2, but that simply wasn't good enough to beat other players online. I would look at forums online regarding build orders and strategy, and I found a website I fell in love with: Liquidpedia (created by Team Liquid). There was so much information in that forum and I definitely got better by reading about strategies. I also found a section on the website that featured people live-streaming the game on Justin.tv. This was the first time I ever learned about live-stream gaming and after watching everyone else streaming the game, I eventually decided to try it myself. I still remember the countless hours I spent setting up Adobe's FMLE (Flash Media Live Encoder) and using audio repeater to capture both my microphone and the game sound for my live-stream. Here's an archived video on Youtube of one of my first live-streams: https://youtu.be/BdLM_nUBssA.

I streamed on Justin.tv for about half a year before they eventually created Twitch.tv, asking people who were streaming video games to move to that platform and off Justin.tv. I made the move to Twitch, but I certainly didn't treat streaming like I do today. Back then, I only cared about myself and the audience I brought in by myself. I was able to build a small gathering on my own because I was a high-level player (I was Diamond when I started out and eventually Master League by the end).

In late 2011, an IBMer named C found my blog entry that I was streaming StarCraft when he Google searched for the keywords "IBM" and "StarCraft". He learned that I was a player who also worked at IBM Tucson like himself, and he told me about a weekly gaming league for StarCraft 2 where only other IBMers were playing. I had so much fun in this private league and met so many other coworkers at IBM to play with.

Come 2012, C had met some IBMers from outside of Arizona and one of them told him about a competitive work league called the After Hours Gaming League. The AHGL featured teams of players from companies all over the world such as IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Google to name a few. Some of the games were even casted by Day9, a popular sportscaster during StarCraft 2's peak, including a couple of my most memorable games here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc5NM9baIW4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjrdhbSMYGs.

It was during the AHGL that I really got into eSports and Twitch streaming. However, I only streamed on Twitch on the weekends to broadcast IBM's games, shoutcasting and covering games as the team's captain for years. A lot of the games are still archived to my YouTube as of this day. The AHGL was a big part of my life and I still remember the highlight being Season 2 in 2012 when IBM made it to the Grand Finals, where we traveled to Santa Monica and played at Red Bull Gaming Headquarters in front of a live audience.

The AHGL had a good run and Team IBM would continue to play for 3 more seasons until 2015 when StarCraft 2's popularity started to run dry. It was at this time I stopped using Twitch, since there wasn't really anything left for me to stream regarding that game.

How I Returned to Twitch in 2018

While I was no longer playing games competitively after StarCraft 2, I still spent a lot of time playing video games with my friends. Between 2015-18, my friends and I played so much Left 4 Dead. We'd download custom maps on the Steam workshop and play for hours a night, exploring all the different user creations. Eventually a game came out called Fortnite: Save the World, where you had to work as a team to build a base and establish a tower defense against hordes of zombies. But Fortnite was also working on another game mode called Battle Royale. I decided to try it one day and I had no idea the impact this game would have on my life for the next several years...

My first ever experience of Fortnite's Battle Royale was a comical one. I was very bad at the game and played very scared. Fortunately, I wasn't alone, as my friend A had accompanied me in trying it out for the first time together. While we didn't get any wins, we still had a good time. You can see that video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZsEGUuEy0s

The competitive gamer in me, I wanted to get better at Fortnite. In the beginning, I played a lot with my IRL friends and while we didn't get many wins early on, we were having a lot of fun. Fortnite was gaining so much popularity online, but unfortunately this also meant people were getting a lot better at the game and eventually my friends started getting frustrated. Not being able to keep up with the improved opposition, they eventually stopped playing the game altogether. I, however, wanted to get better and keep up with the competition, so I turned to videos online on how to improve one's building, which was a major aspect of the game at the time. YouTube was a great resource for this, but there was nothing like Twitch.tv. You could actually watch the best players in the world play the game, and learning from a live session was unlike any other educational experience out there. I eventually found a professional player/streamer named D and I would watch their streams multiple times a week, learning as much as I could from what they showcased on their channel.

After a couple full seasons of playing Fortnite (about half a year), I felt pretty confident with my skills. I felt like I was good enough to carry newer and less experienced players to Victory Royales on a regular basis. I began streaming my games on Twitch and in the beginning, only my IRL friends would watch the channel. It felt a lot like the StarCraft 2 days, but honestly, that's all I expected or cared for at the time. The middle of 2018 is basically the moment I started streaming again on Twitch and solely the game of Fortnite.

While I was doing my own thing on Twitch, I was curious about other Fortnite streamers on the platform, looking for other people to play with. I started scrolling down past the big streamer channels and looking at smaller streamers that 1) I enjoyed their vibe and 2) thought I might have a chance to play with eventually. Eventually I found two Fortnite streamers in specific that had just started out and I found both of them around the same time, both with about 15 or less viewers at the time I discovered them, and who eventually invited me to play with them after watching them for a while. These two streamers I had the most fun playing Fortnite with in the beginning, so much that I eventually was invited to become moderators of their channels. I'll also admit that both streamers were girls who I found physically attractive, which helped make it more enticing to want to play with them. At the time, I didn't really know much about what Twitch could entail, so I just decided to go with the flow. We'll call the two streamers P and L.

I would end up getting pretty close to P, but a lot of that had to do with having gaming sessions and talks with them off stream. P talked about their interest in going to Twitchcon, but how she didn't really know anyone else going. Me being the adventurous traveler I've always been, I convinced her to go if I was going and we were really excited to share our first experience of Twitchcon together. Twitchcon 2018 was in San Jose, and I still remember a lot of the trip clearly. I rented a car and booked my own hotel for the weekend, while she had plans to stay at an Airbnb. However, she missed her flight to San Jose and thus got redirected to San Francisco. I told her it was no problem for me to drive to San Fransisco. So that's how the trip started out, with an hour detour turned road trip with P.

The con itself was a really cool first experience for me, especially the Fortnite tent, which was holding live competitions and there were so many fascinating Fortnite decorations set up. It was also during this convention that P and I met S, a League of Legends streamer who was bigger in viewership than P at the time. S was very welcoming to P, and since both were aspiring to become bigger streamers on Twitch, the two appeared to have connected well and wanted to establish a friendship post-Twitchcon and help each other out.

Towards the end of the con, P had issues with her Airbnb. She had rented a shared space and the owner was being creepy with her, so she was basically looking for somewhere else to stay the night. I offered my hotel room to her, since it had two separate beds, and she accepted my offer. While nothing really happened that night, things did get a little intimate and it was at this point where I believe we both shared some feelings for each other.

After the con, P expressed how she wanted me to become a bigger part of her channel. She basically wanted me to become a supermod and I wanted to help her achieve her goals. I took a lot of responsibility helping her improve and plan her streams and I would say things were going really well. So well that she would eventually invite me out to her city to visit her. That first trip had a mix of ups and downs, some of which I will admit I was at fault for in my own decisions. Perhaps my expectations were running high. Eventually we would continue down this path and I would take another trip out there around Christmas, but this time with other members from her moderator team and community. While that all went well, I still couldn't help but let her know how I felt about our situation, and how I would eventually want more out of it. She wasn't really pushing for that yet and I respected that and gave her her space, but I could feel like things were slowly drifting in the wrong direction. She would also learn that I was moderating for the female streamer named L and I could sense a form of jealously arising. I still remember how guilty she made me feel when I was playing with L instead of her, or just doing anything for L, who I had met around the same time as P and had felt an almost equivalent responsibility to as a moderator of L's channel. In fact, P even made me feel guilty of being friends with S and playing Fortnite with S on her stream, and I would end up having many conversations with S about how uncomfortable P was starting to make me feel.

Then came the day I gave up on P. It all started because she got into a game with a famous Fortnite streamer named N. The two were paired up in a random-duo in Fortnite and her views on Twitch immediately blew up into the thousands during their game. People in N's community came over to her channel, discovered that she was a very attractive woman, and began asking questions to her about what she thinks of N and basically if she would ever date him. P quickly leveraged the possibility of a N relationship to her advantage. Many of N's viewers would come back to her channel asking about her and N. Here's the one thing that really triggered me though. She specifically told me to lie about her knowing that N was following her on Twitch. She honestly told me that she would play dumb, to try and build up whatever you want to call it. It was here I began to confirm that she had some very deceitful ways in how she mislead people by saying what they wanted to hear and not really meaning it. I began to wonder, is that basically how she strung me along the whole time? Or did she actually ever have feelings for me? Regardless, P would end up riding the N wave to the point she eventually got partnered on Twitch. As a supermod of her channel, I envisioned her growth on Twitch would be more organic, not because some bigger streamer came along and they had a notion of meeting up together, especially when I had interest in P myself before they showed up. I was really disappointed, and it was here that I decided to leave P and her channel altogether, I just couldn't take it anymore. I went my own way and was eventually banned from the channel, even though I never had a discussion with P about the way things ended.

And so a new path on Twitch would form for me...

My Eventual Growth on Twitch

To be honest, the aftermath of P's channel left me feeling pretty crappy for a while. I still wanted to hang out on Twitch, but I wanted a clean slate, so I looked for a stream where I wouldn't know anyone and no one would know of me. Up until this moment, I had only watched and been a part of Fortnite streams, so I decided to look up one of my favorite games of all time: Final Fantasy VII. It was here that I a found a streamer named V and they were doing a first playthrough of the game, which was extremely rare since it was 2019 and the game was originally released in 1997. V was a very small streamer at the time with a simple stream setup through their Playstation and some ten or so viewers, but I found hanging out here very refreshing. Their space made it feel for me like I was starting brand new on Twitch.

I would continue to watch V through their first playthroughs of various games and over time I began to find myself a bigger part of their community. V had also found my stream and enjoyed watching me play Fortnite, so I could sense a nice friendship developing. In fact, this was probably the first circle of friends I felt I was actually on equal grounds with. I didn't moderate for them, they didn't moderate for me, they just treated me equally like another streamer on Twitch and I found the community very endearing. Others I met through V would get to know me pretty well. I'd start branching out and watching their streams and they also started watching my stream, even though I never asked them to. Next thing I knew, I had a small following on Twitch and was becoming a double-digit viewer where I had always been in the single-digit views on Twitch before this. It became apparent to me that people were more likely to watch your stream if they knew who you were, and the easiest way to allow someone to get to know you was by hanging out in other Twitch communities.

For most of 2019, I felt pretty good about my new place on Twitch. I had found a nice community with V and while I still loved to play Fortnite, the only stream I still moderated was for L. I had made it clear that I never wanted to mod on Twitch again, after the way P treated me, and people respected my wishes when I would respectfully decline to moderate for them. But I was having fun on the platform and I was really happy being on Twitch.

Then came that one night that changed a lot for me. In October of 2019, I received an extremely large host from a professional Fortnite gamer/streamer named A. They found my channel randomly because of my muscles showing on camera, at least that's why they picked my channel to raid. A clip of it still exists on Twitch and can be viewed here. Instantly I saw my viewercount on Twitch rise from 11 to 9,000 and leveling out around 2,000 for the rest of the night. I also saw a spike in followers, from 250 to 500 in just one host.

I was so nervous, I'm pretty sure I died 3 or 4 times before even getting a kill in Fortnite because I was so scared of everyone watching and the comments in my chat blowing up the stream. I would eventually make it through the night and was the talk of the town the next day within my small Twitch circles. Everyone was really excited for me to have that opportunity and I felt really special. However, the most surprising thing about the host was that the people who followed my channel actually enjoyed my personality and would come back to my following streams. This is when I realized that at any moment, hundreds of people could be watching the channel, not just close friends. I decided I no longer wanted a rudimentary-looking stream anymore, I wanted to invest into gear that would make it look more professional. And by May of 2020 I had put together what would eventually be my stream-computer for the next few years, investing in $1000s of upgrades towards my channel.

And that is basically how I began to grow on Twitch. First I had my real-life friends who would watch my channel because they knew me in real life. Then I had the friends I made through Fortnite because I was decent at the game and could help carry players to Victory Royales. V's channel was also a big contribution to my following, they had a lot of followers who supported everyone in the community. And then A's host made me realize that I should take this streaming thing more seriously and professionally. By the end of 2020 I had developed my own community on Twitch, consistently averaging 40+ viewers on a nightly basis.

It was at this point that I should've just been content on where I was on the platform. But then I started to notice something happening among some of my friends: they were getting Partnered on Twitch, one of the highest titles a streamer can hold and certainly a level of accomplishment. To be honest, I had never really thought about Twitch Partner. But when I saw some of my favorite streamers on Twitch reaching that achievement, I began to wonder if I could do the same. Now, keep in mind, everyone has a different path on Twitch. People get Partner on the platform for various reasons. Usually what I would observe across partners was one or more of the following:

Physically attractive and usually a female but can also be a male.
Extremely good at video games and makes a name for themselves by winning online tournaments or having the highest ranks within a popular multiplayer game.
An already known presence from outside of Twitch. Either a large following on social media already or a celebrity of some sort.
A unique talent/skill that only a small subset of people can showcase. Something you just don't see everyday on Twitch.

I knew these were the most common criteria to reach Partner on Twitch, but I didn't really have any of those characteristics. I was just an average guy in their late 30's like so many else, so how would I stand out above the rest? Yet I was passionate about my craft and hard-working, and like any other task I embark on in my life, I wanted to be the best that I could be. I wouldn't feel good about myself unless I honestly felt like I gave it my all. And there was another thing I had at my advantage that most people on the platform didn't already have: disposable income from another vocation.

Supporting Other Streamers on Twitch

The foundation for me was set in place: a top-notch computer and streaming gear for a high quality and professional-looking stream and an already developed community of folllowers and friends to support me along the way. Now I just wanted to keep growing.

Again, I go back to the argument that no one will really watch or support your stream on Twitch unless they know who you are. At the time of this article, the algorithm on Twitch really doesn't support small streamers, since when you look at a game category, the streamers with the highest number of viewers at the time will rise to the top. The discovery method on the platform isn't good, but the problem more so lies in the over-saturation of supply and demand. There are just too many streamers out there (supply) and not enough audience to watch them all (demand). Thus, I believed that the best way to make a name for myself by branching out to other communities, becoming a part of their channel, letting everyone get comfortable with me, playing with the streamer and others, etc. But one of the biggest unwritten rules about Twitch etiquette is respect for other streamers when you are a streamer yourself. Self-promotion is a big no-no on the platform and rightfully so, it seems extremely selfish if you are there only for your own personal gain. It kind of sucks because you'd think all streamers could treat each other more as co-workers than competitiors, but that's how so many people treat each other on the platform. I still remember when I went to a Partnered streamer to support them everyday by saying hi to them and leaving them a lurk on all day while I was busy working, only for them to eventually take screenshots of my messages and shared them saying I was trying to steal views. This left me feeling really shitty. The only reason I was called out upon was because I was also a streamer. If I was just a nobody, a viewer and not a streamer, that person would have loved that I came in and said hi to them everyday and left their channel on all stream to support them with a +1 viewer. But because I was also a streamer, they made me feel as if I only had selfish intent. This basically set up the premise for me that I had to be careful about my behavior whenever I watched and supported other streamers on Twitch. If someone shouted me out, I felt guilty being there and I would often respond "I don't stream, I just watch so-and-so's channel." It's really a shame I had to act that way, but that was the reality of the platform. I felt like I couldn't have my own success until others had their success first and I put others ahead of myself.

Still, I wanted to rise above it all. I made it my own personal goal to be the best supporter on Twitch that a streamer could have. I've always believed in the saying, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I am very empathetic person and I constantly think about how my actions make others feel. I try to put myself in their shoes and think how I'd like to be treated. And so I found myself supporting basically anyone I met on the platform who I think could in return become a friend and supporter of myself. I started to think of Twitch streams as parties in real life. If you want people to come to your party, you need to show up for their parties too and vice-versa. In order to support other streamers like I would've like them to support me, I made sure to always open their stream and leave it open for as long as they were live, even if I was also streaming at the time. I'd end up having 10-20 Google Chrome tabs open at a time all the time. I began to use my work laptop to open all the channels, as to not interfere with the resources on my streaming computer. I had to upgrade my internet plan to an unlimited plan, since I was constantly going over the 2TB/month data limit. I know people say that once you have over 3-5 tabs from Twitch open, you no longer count as a view, but I didn't care. I still believed that it helped support them, that I could still watch their stream along with 20 others, and it still counted towards a person's "watchtime" should they have that set up. I wanted them to find out that I always had their stream open, that I was there for them, because honestly that's how I would've liked to be treated. And to this day, I still leave my laptop online 24/7 to support Twitch streamers, only now I have a Google extension called Twitch Lurker that will automatically open any stream I choose within a few moments of them going live. I'll leave my computer online all day while I leave the house and when I sleep, and the Twitch streams just open on their own. I usually come back to my laptop after hours and have to close the many tabs it opens while I'm away. Twitch lurker was the best tool I ever discovered for Twitch, since I no longer had to constantly be running to my laptop to open a friend's stream when they went live. It was the greatest quality of life improvement on Twitch I've ever experienced, so if you're like me, I highly recommend you go add this extension to your Chrome right now.

I was really good about trying to get to know other streamers on the platform and treating them as my equals. There was a countless number of times that a streamer I never heard of would raid my channel, and I always tried my best to make them feel special and welcome for selecting me. I would immediately stop whatever I was doing on stream, go check out their channel, drop them a follow, make sure I added them to my autolurk, and stop by their channel the next time I saw them go live so that I could get to know them better. It was a heartwarming feeling when the smaller streamers would actually tell me, "that was so cool of you to stop by, there's so many bigger streamers that won't do that." I wanted to show them that I cared and actually wanted to try and befriend them, because that's the kind of person I am. Give everyone a chance and give everyone time.

Let's get back to "watchtime" real quick. This was a tool that certainly had it's uses, but in a way it was also a curse. I had watchtime set up on my channel so that I could see who was actually supporting my channel. Over the years on the platform, I've had too many people lie to me where they say "yeah I love watching your channel, I just don't say anything" or "oh I lurk for you all the time", only to look up their watchtime and see that they were straight up lying to me. They would only say what I wanted to hear in hopes that I'd continue supporting their channel. If you're interested in setting up watchtime for your own channel, you can do so with Streamelements. Streamelements is a third-party tool and in order to enable watchtime, you do have to enable "loyalty" and "points", even if you don't actually use them. While watchtime was helpful in me calling out the liars, I think it was also a curse in that I looked at it too much. I would meet a new streamer on the platform, usually through a raid of some sort (either I raid them or they raid me) and I'd track new streamers' watchtimes in an Excel spreadsheet. I basically gave every new streamer I met the same treatment as everyone else. My laptop would automatically open their channel a few moments of them going live, and eventually I would try to pop in on my own and say hello to them and hang out when I could. I'd give them this treatment for a month, but for the most part, most streamers wouldn't reciprocate the same behavior, so I would eventually unfolllow them because I just didn't think they were worth my time.

Time; I honestly wish I had more of it. The more people you meet on Twitch, the more streamers you meet, the more time you need to make for everyone. It's easy when you only have a couple streamers you want to watch, and only a few people to connect with who watch your stream. But supporting other streamers by actually watching their channel and hanging out and chatting became overwhelming for me. I'd watch 2-3 streamers at a time, trying to make sure I gave them enough of my time. I'd watch someone for 10-15 minutes, then I'd go to the next channel and watch them for another 10-15 minutes, and then I repeated the cycle all day and everyday. I would visit hundreds of streamers everyday. Twitch literally became my life, where all I would do is watch a person's channel just to show them support, and I when I began to feel obligated to it, that's when this became a chore. I was no longer watching people because I actually liked their content, I just wanted to keep showing them support. Don't get me wrong, I agree that it takes time to build friendships. But trying to build hundreds of friendships at the same time became too tasking of me to keep up with that I began to get burnt out. To put this in perspective, here are my Twitch Viewer statistics for 2023.

Obviously if you do the math, 37,000 hours is more than 24 hours a day (it's 104 hours a day). But the days and chat messages are legit. I literally had my laptop on to support Twitch streamers 363 out of the 365 days of the year. And pretty much everyday of the year I was actively chatting in channels on Twitch. The only days I didn't have my laptop on was when I was on a cruise for my birthday, I literally didn't have internet out at sea. But usually if I was traveling, I still had my laptop with me and I would still auto-lurk every channel I supported.

However, lurking and chatting is just one form of supporting other Twitch streamers. I mentioned before that I had "disposable income from another vocation". I've held a career at IBM for 20 years now and I've been very lucky that I've been able to balance work and life the way I have for the past 5 years, especially since I often felt like I was on Twitch more than 80+ hours a week as both a viewer and streamer. IBM awards me a nice salary that allows for me to have a comfortable cost of living, and being the type of person I am, I am very generous with the gifting of my money. This is a trait that follows me into my everyday life. I'll admit I wasn't always this way. In fact, before I started working at IBM, I was a very frugal person that stressed when it came to money. Hell, I still remember when I was in college that I would ask friends for compensation if they wanted to eat some of my cookies, or if they were visiting and wanted to borrow soap, I'd ask them for like 50 cents. I look back and hated that I was that kind of person, and I never want to be that person again. I like who I am now and I feel like I've earned the lavish lifestyle that I live now, where I can afford to have the things I want and also give away a portion of my earnings. Now I'm the kind of person who will buy all their friends a meal at dinner, picking up the entire tab just to do it. Or buying a whole group of friends a round of drinks at the bar, just because it makes me happy. That's who am now, and being generous with my money is a way of showing people that I care about them. In fact, that same person I asked to pay me for soap was shocked when a couple years later at a New Year's Eve party, I just offered to pay for our entire group's cover. He couldn't believe how much I had changed just because of one job, going from being completely stingy to philanthropically generous.

I prided myself in being a sub-gifter on the Twitch platform. Every month for the past years on Twitch I would give away over $1,500 a month in the form of gifted subs. I recorded everyone's birthday in my laptop calendar so I wouldn't forget to give them their $20 on their birthday. For the most part, everyone received the same treatment. If you're wondering, I'd only earn about $300-$500 a month from my own channel, so the net expense of Twitch was over $1,000 a month. I spent so much money on other people on Twitch. I spent more than I received, but I never at once expected anyone to give me the same treatment back since I knew that I was more financially fortunate than others. I loved gifting away my money to friends. It honestly made me feel good and it made me feel special, since it was something that not everyone on the platform had the power to do. In a way, this is how I stood out above the rest. I even made myself an emote for Twitch that was gifted sub in the form of a sniper rifle, since I would always say "BAM! Sniped" whenever I gifted a friend a sub in a channel.

There are many streamers on the platform who enjoy a monetary reward for their time streaming. There are also streamers who stream for a living, and the donations and gifted subs/bits provide for their food and bills. But unfortunately gifting subs and spending bits also had its negative opinions, and again this had to do because I was also a streamer. Some people viewed this as a way of "buying views" on Twitch, getting streamers and people in the audience to notice you. Don't get me wrong though, it definitely brought attention to myself, but it was very difficult to not be myself on the platform.

Auto-lurking, visiting streamers' channels everyday, being a part of their community, and gifting money. This is how I supported other streamers on Twitch and I personally think I was one of the best to ever support others on Twitch, regardless of how they supported me.

The Peak of My Twitch Channel

The peak of my channel was probably around the 2021-22 timeframe. I had transitioned from solely being a Fortnite streamer to delving into other games, both single-player and multi-player. I have always been a variety gamer and I enjoyed variety streaming. I'd alternate between single-player and multi-player streams, finding success in both areas. I met so many people over the years by playing all types of genres and I was starting to see my stream grow even further. I began to think that getting Partnered on Twitch was an actual possibility, and I was hoping to bear the fruits of my labor. The requirement to unlock Partner on Twitch was to average 75 concurrent viewers over a 30-day period, and I was consistently in the high 50's according to their records.

In May of 2022, Twitch had invited me to participate in their API (Asian and Pacific Islander) month, where my channel would be featured on the front page of Twitch. It was a very exciting opportunity to be a part of, and it was an experience where I actually felt special on Twitch. I was also thinking that this would be the exposure that would push me over the top. While it did help a little, it still wasn't enough, and I eventually went back down to my normal numbers following the promotion period.

While I did have some additional offers and opportunities to join stream teams and piggyback off others' established success, I didn't take them. I wanted to grow my channel organically and by myself. I kept thinking about how much it bothered me that someone like P only got partnered because she luckily fell into the circle of a famous streamer. I wanted people to be impressed by me because I got there on my own way and that I had truly earned my place on Twitch, not because someone else gave it to me. Ironic if you think about it though, because that A host did exactly that for me in a way. It was just difficult for someone like me to be a streamer on Twitch based on my ethical foundations.

I would continue to hold the same ground for a long while. I wonder how much of my Twitch success had more to do with Covid-19, which forced people indoors for several months. There was certainly a spike in Twitch users during Covid, since people found solace in online gaming and being able to remain social through Twitch while the rest of the world couldn't be social. Regardless, I felt confident that my channel was doing well, and I was happy with were I stood on the platform. It felt good to be a player on the platform, where people recognized your name and even looked up to you. There were even times I'd be spotted in real life and people would know who I was and that was such a surreal and rewarding feeling. However, I began to notice things change as the months continued...

How I Lost My Faith in Twitch

While some people may argue otherwise, I personally believe that I hit a wall on Twitch that I would never be able to overcome. I would see people on Twitch come and go, and while some stayed with me the whole time, there were several who would not.

Shortly after V got Partnered on Twitch, they stopped visiting my channel completely, in addition to several of the friends they introduced me to. I don't really know why, but I think they had found their niche on Twitch and I was just not meant to be a part of it. I was pretty sad about it at first. However, there were a number of streamers I supported who I watched grow and become partnered, only to stop visiting and supporting me once they hit their goal. I began to grow bitter, feeling used and as if the friendships I was trying to create were always superficial to begin with. Even the streamer L, who I moderated for so long, never wanted to hang out with me on my channel and when I began to find some success and told them that I'd be focusing on myself more, L didn't even acknowledge my existence anymore. After I asked to no longer be a moderator of the channel, I still remember when I resubscribed to L's stream to show her that I was still in support of her, but she wouldn't even read my name, just my message. She proceeded to go on with her stream as if I didn't exist and that was such a saddening experience after all that time I had spent on her.

With an increased number of followers and friends on the platform, it became difficult to divvy up my time across everyone I wanted to support. I would continue to use watchtime in my channel as a reason to cut people out and decrease the amount on my plate. Even though I was trying to do my best to support everyone, I just couldn't keep up with the amount of people I was meeting. I got approached on numerous occasions if I stopped visiting a channel, since I had built such a strong reputation of supporting people and saying hi to them everyday. For example, when I was asked by a streamer why I stopped visiting them, I was honest with them and didn't make up some fake excuse. I told them the reason was because they would never come visit me when I was streaming. I think the chat history shows that they only said hi to me once in a about 2-month period even though I had said hi to them everyday they went live, multiple times a week. I just got tired of what felt like a one-sided friendship and told them there was just other people I wanted to spend my time on. They couldn't accept my reasoning and told me I was being selfish and that they were disappointed in my behavior. They created a private Discord server to try and turn all mutual followers of our channels against me, basically painting me in a bad light. I never once said anything bad about the person publicly to anyone, keeping everything off record in a private sense like a professional would. Even though I wanted to move on, they still made me feel really guilty and I felt really bad that they hated me so much now.

Hate. It happens in the world and it certainly happens on Twitch. And for the silliest reasons too. Did you know that people actually told me they hated my channel? They didn't even give me a chance, they just assumed that I was some cocky person because I wore shirts on my stream that reveal my muscles. I've honestly said many times on my stream that I wear these shirts because I am in fact a muscular person and normal shirts that constrict my arms' range of motion are simply not comfortable. And when I'm relaxing at home playing video games, I just want to be comfortable. I get it though. You can't control if anyone will like you, and there were certainly a lot of people who didn't like me because of my looks, because I was Asian, because of the way I talked, etc. And on a global place like Twitch, it all felt multiplied because everyone in the world can access your channel and be quick to judge your character in the first 5-10 seconds of seeing your stream.

I think a problem with Twitch certainly lies within its users. Anyone in the world can be on Twitch. There is no application or credentials required, no level of accomplishments required before you go on the platform. Think about a professional-level job: you won't get hired at some places unless you've earned a degree at a University, or you show some prior experience that proves you are qualified to work for the company. On Twitch, there are so many people who lack professionalism because they have never been exposed to working in a professional setting. It became difficult dealing with people on the platform who reacted in what I viewed as an illogical and irrational manner, often resulting in immature and childish behavior. I tried my best to be accepting of everyone I met, but it was a challenge having to deal with all types of these kinds of people.

Don't get me wrong though, I also think a lot of the problem has to do with me. I always told myself that you should never make goals that you can't control. The goal of getting Partnered was dependent on other people, and it was a bad goal in the back of my mind that I should have never instilled. I tried hard to focus on my content, focus on playing games of different varieties, and focusing hard on being the best supporter of other people I could be. But to be honest, I couldn't keep it up. I got tired of playing games I didn't really want to play, just playing them to try and meet new viewers and grow the channel. I got tired of visiting so many channels everyday, that felt so much more like a chore than actual entertainment. And I got tired of pouring in so much of my heart, time, and money into others without getting anywhere. I've always strived to be the best I can be, and I wanted to be one of the best "Twitchers" out there. That's why I set up a 24/7 auto-lurk on my laptop, that's why I chose to be so active on Twitch as a supporter of other streamers, that's why I gave away so much of my money on the platform, and that's why I streamed some really heavy hours myself, about 30+ a week in addition to having a full-time career. I can't change the kind of person I am, and I was motivated enough for years to try and be the best Twitcher I could be.

But that itself is another problem. I feel like I poured in so much effort into Twitch, but I never really was rewarded. Sure, I made friends on the platform to play games with, but as you can see from my stories, a lot of these friendships felt superficial. Perhaps it's the virtual world and the fact that people are separated by long distances, and you can only do so much with a long-distance relationship. It did often feel like there were a lot of one-sided friendships, where I was doing all the work and others just took my friendship for granted. But putting in so much work into something and not feeling rewarded is a deflating result. For example, you can work hard at your job and get paid for your hard work. I've spent years getting better at pool and bowling, and I'm recognized by others as a top player in the leagues I participate in. But with Twitch, I never felt like I was anything special even after all the hard work I put into the platform and into others. And while most people would argue here that I should be selfless, even selflessness can have its limits, and I unfortunately I just think I hit that limit.

Twitchcons were supposed to be an opportunity to meet these people in real life and try to establish a more meaningful friendship with these people I had interacted with for years online. While most of the cons did accomplish this, the last couple cons really did me in.

For Twitchcon 2022, I co-organized an Airbnb with a good Twitch friend of mine, but the selection of people who are allowed to stay with us was very strict. In fact, the entire trip was like this. Some of the streamers in the group were Partnered on Twitch, and I still remember one in particular, a streamer named T, who was very adamant about who was allowed to hang out with them. This was completely the opposite of the kind of person I was, where I wanted everyone to feel welcome and involved. I figured if there was actually somebody out there who wanted to meet me in person, that was such a rewarding feeling for me, it basically made me feel recognized and that I had impacted their life enough to make a positive impression. T didn't feel this way at all. T had a large following on Twitch but only wanted to hang out with other streamers and in particular only other Partnered streamers. There was a crab boil dinner that I told people I was going to on my Discord and I wanted people to join as I always figure the more the merrier, right? T sat at the end of the room with their Partnered friends while I sat with everyone else, the viewers and small streamers. T didn't interface with them at all. After the dinner, T scolded me harshly. T would say things like "how do you think that makes me feel having all these viewers come to dinner?" T basically made me feel guilty about inviting people, but I was honestly shocked. I just couldn't relate to someone like T, and I hated how there was someone out there who didn't care at all about the people who supported them and wanted nothing to do with them. They had portrayed themself on stream as being so caring and friendly, but in real life they basically thought nothing of their followers and viewers. I continued to see this kind of mentality among several Twitch streamers. Everything I watched online just felt like an act to generate views and obtain popularity and donations but I knew a lot of it was fake and these streamers were successful and getting rewarded for what I viewed as the wrong reasons.

For Twitchcon 2023, I wanted to take leadership to avoid people like T, so I booked an Airbnb for over 10 people to have a place to stay and I picked who was allowed to stay with me. This included all types of people, streamers and viewers both. I wanted to treat all my supporters equally. I fronted a lot of my own money to make the experience as pleasant for anyone staying with me. I went out of my way to try and make everyone feel comfortable, I set up a schedule of events for people to participate in so they would have activities to keep them occupied, and I provided and cooked a lot of food for everyone. There was even a person who I was not expecting to stay at the Airbnb, but I felt bad that they didn't have a place to stay, so I accommodated their needs and gave them a place to stay. I also made the mistake of driving to Twitchcon, and as a result I found myself driving people all over the place, since I was one of the few people who had a car and people could save money riding with me instead of booking their own rideshares. And if I chose to use a rideshare myself, it was usually me being the one who got it. While I never really expect anyone to return the favors I hand out, it would be nice to eventually get some of that back, or at least appreciation shown for what I did for everyone. In fact, I don't think a lot of people would have even had the experience they did if not for my leadership. But in reality, about only half the people I helped actually thanked me for what I did. I talked with some close friends about why that is, and some seem to think it's because it's just what people expect of me. It's easy to take for granted someone who regularly does so much for everyone. But after this Twitchcon, I really began to think to myself: why am doing so much for those who won't do the same for me? I really started to feel unappreciated after this past Twitchcon and I don't think there was anything anyone could do for me to feel otherwise. While it sounds selfish to think about myself in this stance, I honestly can't change the way I now feel about a majority of the people on Twitch. And I know I'm not alone on this either. Remember S who I mentioned earlier? She felt exactly the same way I do now. She was 72 out of 75 viewers from unlocking Partner on Twitch but never made it there either. And she also got burnt out after Twitchcon 2022, just like I did. She hasn't streamed in over a year and she also agrees it was one of the better decisions she's made in her life.

And that's kind of where I stand now. I feel exhausted from the platform. I spent so much of the past years on Twitch, I literally lived on it everyday. And after all of that, while I have made some really good friends, there's a lot that feel very superficial. The small reward I have from the platform are some friends who I think I will stay connected with for life, but that's about it. I just don't think Twitch is a good place for someone like me. My generosity and compassion for others will get taken for granted and I don't want to feel this way anymore. I just don't want to spend anymore time on superficial, one-sided friendships, and there were too many of those relationships on Twitch. And there's too many people on the platform I just can't personally relate to even though I tried so hard to be accepting of everyone.

So What Now?

I haven't streamed since before Twitchcon of 2023. I think my last stream was October 16th. I've packed up my cameras and my Streamdeck. While I still auto-lurk for everyone I follow, I have not chatted in anyone's channel since Twitchcon. I feel like if I say hi in one person's channel, everyone will expect me to say hi in theirs, and I'd feel bad if I didn't give everyone the same treatment. I will often watch the streamers I really want to watch, but I never engage in their chat anymore. It is interesting to see when someone says something about me and it's nice to know that I am still remembered and sometimes missed. But to be honest, it's also been very refreshing to be off the platform like I have been the past few months. It's crazy how much time and money I was spending on the platform, and I've been able to spend so much more time and money on myself now. Playing video games has actually become enjoyable again. For example, I'm currently playing Final Fantasy XVI and it's been so nice to just be able to watch cutscenes uninterrupted, sprawl out on the couch and be lazy, and play unrushed for an hour at a time at my own pace as I choose to.

I honestly feel like Twitch can be a great place for some people. The five years I spent on the platform, I did feel like a lot of the people I interacted with were good friends of mine. And while it didn't actually end up that way, it can be a place for lonely people to feel not so lonely anymore. When I was on Twitch, I was at a point of my life where I felt lonely. Recall that I had trouble finding people to play Fortnite with, my IRL friends gave up on the game. I found people on Twitch to play video games with and also on my own schedule and you can't always have that in the real world.

If you do get involved on Twitch, I hope you'll take what I've said in this article and prepare yourself for the possibilities of what can lie ahead. At the end of the day, it's still just a social media platform where people can live behind their virtual curtains and leave you at any time if they want to. I think it's a tough place to be for someone like me who wanted to make real, meaningful relationships with everyone. The streamers that are so big and popular don't have to worry about who they try to befriend, they are as selective as they want to be.

I wanted to change the mold of streamers on Twitch. I wanted to be that person who excelled at the platform, but was giving back to everyone that was a fan of me. I wanted to share my success with others, and I wanted to reward those who chose to support me. I've always been a person who will give more than they will receive, and I want to put others' happiness and well-being ahead of my own. But that is why a place like Twitch is bad for someone like me. I felt like I gave so much, only to get devoured in the process, and then that feeling was multiplied by the hundreds of people who treated me that way on the platform. I feel like only 5% of the people I met on the platform actually treated me well, like an actual friend, and for those people I am grateful they exist.

As for now, I am retiring from Twitch. I don't want to go back to how I was on it any time soon. I'm hesitant to just hang out on the platform like I want to because I've created too high of expectations of myself. If I say hi to one person, I'd have to say hi to everyone; I'd personally feel obligated to and I'd feel bad not saying hi to everyone I know. So I remain quiet and distant because I don't think I can live up to those expectations right now. I kind of want enough time to pass to the point where people just forget about me, so that if I ever did return, I could start brand new. Go back to just enjoying a few channels and having myself a chill stream here and there. Right now, I doubt I'll come back, but if I ever do, I'll definitely have a different approach based on what I've learned and experienced from it these past five years.

I'm 40 years old now and just ready to move on to the next stage of my life. Twitch was a big era in my life for me and I'll have many good memories of it. For me, it's just time to move on and put myself ahead for a change. I wasn't happy on Twitch anymore, it became more of a chore and less of a hobby. It felt more like a job, a job where I didn't actually make money or was rewarded, and that's just the reality what it became for me. Again, I know that a lot of it was my fault, I'm just that kind of person in life, but it's not fair to not be allowed to be who you want to be, and I honestly think I am a really good person, I'll just get severely taken advantage of on a place like Twitch. So that's pretty much that. These past few months of being off Twitch, I'm probably the happiest I've ever been in my life, so that in itself says a lot.

Thank you to all the people who did choose to support me and the ones I feel like I can call actual friends. And thank you if you actually took the time to read all of this. I don't expect anyone to agree with how I feel about Twitch right now, but it took a lot of courage for me to write everything and be completely honest with the way I felt.

League Updates!

2024-01-12T22:11:00.002-07:00

I'm still participating in both pool league and bowling league and I have some updates to share today!

Pool League:

Pool is still going well, our 8-ball team already qualified for the City Tournament later this year after winning the Big Money Tournament at the end of the 2023 summer session. In addition, I joined a 9-ball team last fall where we won playoffs and will be playing in the Big Money Tournament in a couple weekends.

The added practice has helped and as a result, I moved up to a 6 again in 8-ball. You may recall that this happened to me at the end of 2019, but I was unable to keep the higher rating. I believe part of that had to do with Covid, where we I stopped playing pool for months when everyone was forced to stay indoors. This time I feel a little bit more knowledgeable of the game and my shooting has been consistent enough lately, so we'll see if I can maintain it!

This will be the first time our Tuesday 8-ball team has ever had two skill level 6's on the roster at the same time. Pretty crazy!

Bowling League:

Last year I switched bowling leagues. I had been bowling for over a decade at the Bowlero Camino Seco on the east side of town since that's where IBMers had bowled for the longest time. Bowling on the east side had worked for me for so long because I would just go to the alley after going to the IBM office. But the last season was challenging for me since 1) I was working an odd schedule where I would go to bed very late on Thursday mornings and basically wake up right before bowling league and 2) I was working remotely, so I would have to drive through town during rush hour to the alley on the east side, so that would end up taking me a good 40 minutes. While I enjoyed bowling in the Thursday Turkeys league over there and had some of my best seasons there (over a 200 average in three years), it was getting tiring making the commute every Thursday.

In 2022, I had introduced some of my friends from pool league to try a summer bowling league at Fiesta Lanes on the west side of town with me. Fiesta Lanes is considerably closer to my house, about a 15-minute drive away at most. They enjoyed bowling so much that they decided to continue on for the 2022-23 season.

I felt like it was time for a change, so I decided to join my friends at Fiesta Lanes for the 2023-24 season. While it was sad to leave Bowlero where I had bowled for so many years, it was nice to be closer to home and I looked forward to bowling with my friends. At first, my average struggled and I started out in the low 180s, I wasn't able to string as many strikes together and I'd often leave splits. I argued that the lanes are oiled differently and it would take some time to learn how to bowl at this house.

This bowling league spans 36 weeks and there are four 9-week sessions. The first quarter, our team record was not very good and we ended 18-54. We didn't think much of the standings, since my friends were newer bowlers who are still learning and we were struggling to find a consistent group of bowlers who could bowl every week. This is a co-ed league were at least one member of each gender is required to bowl on a given night, and there would often be nights where we couldn't find a female to bowl with us. And so came the second quarter when a new girl joined the team. She instantly brought a high level of energy and positivity to the team and would show up just about every week to bowl. Members of the team were having fun since she joined and the consistency of having 4 bowlers every week was also helping. Soon we found ourselves quickly rising in the standings. When she joined in week 2, we were in 23rd place out of 40 teams and our record was 2-6. We would finish the season 58-14 and her presence definitely helped fuel our success!

I'm really proud of how successful this team has become in such a short while. We're now locked into Rolloffs for the final week of the season, where we'll have a chance to play for the prize fund. I'm also happy because I've seen my average go up over the quarter and I currently rest at a 196 at the moment. I feel like I've finally figured out how to bowl at this house. I no longer leave myself nasty splits and I even bowled a 277 game during the position round when our team won the quarter. I'm so glad I joined this league with my friends and I look forward to finishing out the season strong.

IBM X2

2023-06-30T17:01:00.007-07:00

Wow, I can't believe it's already been 20 years since I started working as an intern at IBM. A lot has changed since then. A made a post about working here after a decade, so you can read that here if you haven't already.

My mentor who helped hire me, Sonny Williams, has retired. He had an amazing career at IBM, all in the Performance team, over 40+ years... He was probably one of the most well-known people at IBM when he was here and was responsible for so much of the company's products' success. I always hoped the day would come that he would retire and I would still be at the company to congratulate and thank him for everything he did for me. I honestly would not be the person at IBM I've become without his guidance and advice. Sonny had a funny mannerism about himself where he would say the funniest (yet very clever) sayings in regards to the business and life in general. Everytime he said something memorable, I wrote it down in a notepad on my computer, with plans to eventually put them on a poster when he retired. I had years to accumulate so many of his quotes, and when he finally retired I asked colleages and his family to send me photos so I could make a retirement collage for him. Congratulations Sonny to a wonderful career!

In addition to Sonny leaving IBM, my team in Tucson has changed a lot. Only a small number of colleagues who were around 10 years ago are still working at IBM. The Storage Performance team in Tucson mostly dissolved, although some of them are working on Spectrum Scale on the "Real Fast" team. The last decade I've mostly worked on FlashSystem, which is a solid-state storage product I've grown to love over the years. There was a brief period where I moved to developmental software projects like MetaOcean and Machine City, but unfortunately neither of those ever came to fruition. At least there was always a home for me in FlashSystem.

However, as the Performance team in Tucson began to dissolve, most of the FlashSystem work was being developed in Hursley, U.K., so I eventually got transferred to that team. Nowadays, I work a very odd schedule, which involves me working late at night to sync up with the Hursley team and late afternoons to attend to anything in the U.S. that requires my attention. But to be honest, this schedule fits my lifestyle. In the first decade of IBM, I was always known to come in late and leave late, arriving to the office as late as noon on some days and working late at night from home to fulfill my job responsibilities. Now I am about 95% remote and only go into the office to work on the systems in my lab when they require attention.

Covid hit the world in 2020 and the site at IBM was forced to shutdown for half a year. A lot of people lost jobs during that timeframe and everyone was remote. It's 2023 now and the world is finally past that pandemic (although it still exists, it's just not killing people like it first did), and as a result they have pushed to get people back into the workplace. However, I still feel like the site is not as populated as it used to be. In fact, there'll be days I go into the office where I'll hardly see anyone in my building.

The culture at IBM was something I used to love. I'd look forward to all my coworker friends I'd see on a weekly basis and the company would hold on-site events to increase employee morale. While I can still walk around the buildings and see a lot of familiar faces, the culture here has definitely changed since I first started here. There's no more cafeteria on site where people would have a lunch break and mingle for a bit. The perks of working have decreased over the years. There's no more sports leagues (that I know of) and the years of gaming with coworkers is a memory of the past. A decade ago I would have said IBM Tucson was one of the greatest companies to work for, but if you ask me now, I'd say it's good for some and not so good for others.

Don't get me wrong though. I've had a wonderful career at IBM and personally I would love to retire with them. We'll see if I eventually get that opportunity. I have a six-figure salary in a city with a low-cost of living, and for the past decade I've lived a very financially comfortable life. I never think that I'm spending too much money to enjoy the lifestyle I want to live. My lone debt is to my home mortgage, which will actually be paid off in about 5 years. My retirement funds are growing well, although I'm still about halfway to the point I'll eventually want to be when I reach the age of 59.5. I've had a very flexible schedule, I usually work less than 40 hours a week, and I can comfortably work from home on a regular basis. To be honest, I've had a very stressfree career and IBM is the reason for that.

So while a lot of things have definitely changed here over the past decade, there's still a lot of reasons to stay with this company. There'd have to be a really good offer or some life-changing event for me to change jobs at this point in my life. I want to thank IBM for everything they've given to me after 20 years, and here's hoping I can make it another 20!

Also, there's one last thing that changed. The sign outside the lobby was painted a different color. :D

Trying a Fitness App: FitCoach

2023-05-23T14:02:00.004-07:00

As I've gotten older, it's no surprise that my metabolism just isn't what it used to be. You may recall that recently, I've been making a more conscious effort to eat healthier and drink less alcohol. It's been working slightly, but the results just aren't where I want them to be yet.

At the beginning of the year, I weighed in at 185 lbs and my belly (when relaxed) measured 38.0" around the biggest part of the circumference. If you didn't know, my height is about 5'10". Both of those numbers are more than I would like them to be. I set out on a goal to lose fat around the belly and get that size down, and my guess is that my weight should be closer to 175 lbs for someone of my stature. It's now the end of May and by altering my eating and drinking habits, I've seen little results, weighing in right now at 183.3 lbs and my belly has only shrunk half an inch, down to 37.5".

After a while, I start to get targeted advertising on social media based on all the stuff I google about becoming a healthier me as I get older. One of the advertisements finally got to me, an app called FitCoach that sold me on prescribing a simple 7-minute workout to do every morning in addition to the fitness routine that I already do. In case you're wondering, I still work out about 5 days a week on average. I have a membership to Anytime Fitness, which is a 24/7 gym just 3-minutes from my house. I also work out from home if I don't make it to the gym, usually doing P90X cardio workouts, 15-minute HIIT workouts on YouTube, or the occasional set of 9 DDR songs on Heavy (because the last one is also the most fun)! The only days I'm not working out is on Tuesdays because of pool league and Thursdays when I have bowling league.

There was no free trial for me to try on FitCoach, so I ended up paying $40 for a 3-month subscription. Today was my first 7-minute workout, which involved a series of burpies and core exercises, since I made my goals centered around my abs/back. I also set a goal of getting to 175 lbs by mid August, and hopefully the weight loss also translates to a reduction in belly-size and maybe even getting some of my abs back (I used to have a 6-pack back in high school when I was super skinny).

Anyway, here's hoping the process helps a little. The app basically ensures I'm doing something every day now, and it'll be like I'm working out twice a day for most days of the week. I'll circle back eventually with news of how it goes!

Review I: Nationwide Pet Insurance

2023-02-28T05:03:00.003-07:00

12/26/25 UPDATE!!! -- See my latest review of Nationwide Pet Insurance 5 years later...

My Pet Family and Buying Insurance:

I've had a happy pet family for a couple years now. A tuxedo cat named Benzi, an orange cat named Ember, and a white terrier named Lucy. You might recall that my first cat, Duncan, died at the age of 13.5 years due to bladder stones. At that time, I didn't have pet insurance, so the veterinary bills quickly started to pile up when he got sick. I think I spent around $4,000 to keep him hospitalized in hopes that he would get better, and I was prepared to drop another $10,000 should he need surgery to save his life. Unfortunately, we never made it to that point, he was put to rest before he was able to have surgery.

When I adopted my new pets, I wanted to sign all of them up for pet insurance. I wasn't really sure what to go with since I had never bought pet insurance before. I researched many options and found one that sounded good: Nationwide "Major Medical". This was an insurance plan that offered a 100% reimbursement for many medical conditions after a $250 annual deductible. My cats were signed up for $18 a month and the dog is $30 a month. They say dog insurance is more expensive since they go outside and are more prone to getting injuries when outside. They also offered me a 5% discount for each additional pet. Another perk to the plan was that they would allow me to use any veterinarian, not just ones they approve.

My philosophy for getting pet insurance was simple math. Assuming a cat lives for about 15 years and at $18 a month, that would be about $3,200 towards insurance over the span of its life. I easily spent that much on Duncan when he got sick and was prepared to spend much more. A dog living 12 years at $30 a month would cost $4,300. I figured the math made sense, so I would go ahead and give Nationwide Pet Insurance a try for the lives' of each of these three new pets of mine.

Adding pets to a pet insurance plan was pretty simple. Nationwide did run a background check on the pets to eliminate any pre-existing illnesses/injuries from being covered and the plan doesn't take into effect until 2 weeks after you sign up. This is obviously to prevent people from only signing up for insurance once their pet gets sick. To my knowledge, you can cancel pet insurance at any time. I'm also not sure if it goes up in price per month as the pet gets older.

My Experience Claiming Pet Insurance:

My dog Lucy recently had a couple operations based on vet recommendation. First, all of her little teeth in the front of her mouth were loose. My vet suggested we remove them, since it was probably painful for her and it's not like she chewed with them anyway. Second, she had developed a couple masses growing under her shoulder and above her belly.

OPERATION #1:

Based on my vet's recommendation, I proceeded to have her teeth removed and the rest cleaned. She also ran two punch biopsies on the masses to have them sent to the lab to for analysis. The first operation ran me $1,500. You can see my invoice here:

Invoice #1 for Teeth Removal, Cleaning, and Mass Biopsies

Submitting a claim to Nationwide was very easy. I wrote two paragraphs describing what had happened to my dog and attached a PDF of my invoice, similar to what you see above. I also mentioned that surgery on the masses would likely be needed in a couple weeks. A few days later, they had approved my claim! I assume they called the veterinarian for confirmation of the procedure, but personally I was never contacted.

Claim #1 for Teeth Removal and Mass Biopsies

I knew that I would have to pay $250 for the annual deductible. I also knew that dental cleanings were not covered, so I expected to pay that portion as well. A couple weeks later, a check arrived in the mail for $1,150!

OPERATION #2:

After the biopsy results showed that the masses were benign and there was more clarity what they were made of, my vet proceeded with surgery to remove them. This operation cost me another $1,000.

Invoice #2 for Mass Removal

I submitted another claim to Nationwide and after a couple days they had approved my claim!

Claim #2 for Mass Removal

Another check arrived in the mail, reimbursing me for all of operation #2.

Overall Review:

This was my first time submitting any insurance claims for any of my pets and I could not have been happier with the process. It was exactly as I expected it to be. I spent around $2,500 to have these two operations done for my dog Lucy and overall I only paid $250 for the annual deductible and another $200 for dental cleaning, which I knew wasn't covered.

Even before the operation, I had questions and each time I called Nationwide, their support was very quick to get a hold of and very informative to explain me what was covered and how it was going to be covered.

I've had my dog Lucy for 30 months, which means I've spent about $900 in pet insurance to this day. Throw in the $250 deductible, I've spent $1,150 on her but I also saved $1100 so far because it would have cost me $2,250 if I didn't have the insurance. Already the insurance has paid for itself.

Based on this experience, I highly recommend Nationwide Pet Insurance! The Major Medical seems like the best value to me. You can upgrade to their premium plan "Whole Pet" if you want things like vaccines and dental cleanings covered, but I think the value is not as good there. I also had a lot more peace of mind when the vet suggested actions for my dog. Knowing that I had insurance to help cover the costs of the operations made it easier to get the proper treatment for my dog, which is ultimately in the best interest of my pet.

You know your pets will eventually get sick. If you're like me, you adopt these pets with the responsibility that you'll do whatever you can to help them should they get ill. Having pet insurance is now a no-brainer for me and I'm really glad I signed up for it. I hope you'll consider Nationwide if you're looking at options!

TwitchCon '22 in San Diego!

2022-11-15T05:02:00.000-07:00

This past month was my most anticipated trip of the year: TwitchCon in San Diego (October 3-8). It had been 3 years since the last TwitchCon, which is crazy when you think about it. Covid was such a brutal virus that it knocked out life for a good two years and even major conventions were suspended for a 3-year hiatus. We lost a good amount of our lives to that outbreak.

If you don't know by now, Twitch has become a big part of my life. I spend roughly 30 hours a week streaming on the platform and many more countless hours watching others and hanging out in their communities. I honestly believe you can make real friends off this platform, and TwitchCon helps solidify that belief when you finally get to meet these people in person.

This year, I had been planning the TwitchCon trip with my friend AlecAfterHours since March when the convention was announced. Alec is a friend I met through Twitch because we both had a love for Fortnite, and we spend a lot of nights just playing Fortnite and talking about stuff going on around the platform. We were both at the TwitchCon in 2019 but didn't actually get to meet that time, although chances are we were probably around each other since my friend Stapus was friends with many of his friends who were there.

For San Diego, we booked an AirBnB for 10 people, expecting to invite many of our friends to come party with us. Because that's basically what TwitchCon is...a big party where you'll see several people that you've seen streaming or chatting on the platform. I then bought a "3-day ticket + party" for the convention but was only planning to make it out there 2 of the 3 days. Honestly, the convention itself is nothing too exciting and I usually spend more time meeting up with people than checking out exhibits and shows.

I got in on Thursday night and met up with Alec and everyone to grab some snacks and drinks for the AirBnB, which was a pretty nice space about a 10-minute drive away from downtown in Golden Hills.

Later that night, we headed over to the convention center to grab our badges. A few of the girls staying with us are Partners on Twitch, so they went to the exclusive Partner Party while I met up with friends at the bar. It was wild to meet so many friends that night that I had accumulated over the past three years. I made it a game where I was posting in my Discord channel my location and if you found me, I would buy you a drink. Needless to say, I did spend quite a bit of money this weekend, but I do like to treat my friends!

On Friday, we didn't make it to the convention until 2pm because we had stayed up the previous night until 5am hanging out and drinking at the AirBnB. When we got to the convention, I literally didn't leave the Artist Alley because I ran into several friends and by the time that was over, I was ready to go to the Kappa Kabana for some bar games and drinks. Tess and I challenged Alec and Kevin to a couple rounds of cornhole, which we would eventually split 1-1 and we never actually got to resolve that competition. On Friday night, we had made reservations for 20 people at the Crab Hut. Turns out we ended up having 25 people show up, which I was all for. The more the merrier! Just another example of how crazy TwitchCon can get and the number of friends you have the opportunity to hang out with throughout the weekend!

I spent most of the night barhopping until I eventually made my way back to the AirBnB to use the hot tub. However, at 2am in the morning, we heard a large crash outside our AirBnB. A drunk driver had hit another car and swerved into the fence of the AirBnB. Fortunately no one was hurt, but it was clear those guys should not have been driving. Eventually the cops showed up, but the main annoyance of the night was that one of the guys in the car that caused the accident got abandoned and kept pestering us for help. He was apparently military and was trying to get back to his naval base, which would be a 40-minute walk down the streets of San Diego. I tried to direct him how to get there, but after he walked one block he turned around and continued to ask us for help. Eventually we caved in and arranged an Uber for him, which was not an easy task considering he had a concussion and was bleeding from the mouth. I guess police did not feel it was appropriate to call this guy an ambulance. It ended up being a really long night for us and I didn't fall asleep until 7am.

I slept in on Saturday and completely missed the convention. It's a good thing I got a 3-day pass and I knew I was only going to go there on two of the three days anyway. That evening, we made reservations for the Rustic Root to get those memorable tomahawk steaks that I loved from my experience 3 years ago. We invited only the people from the AirBnB for a more intimate and private experience. Later that night, we had a gathering at our AirBnB before heading out to Hillcrest, so we made it out there for an interesting but fun experience. There was a club that was open past 2am (although you could no longer order alcohol at that point) and we literally danced in a crowded dance floor for an hour. Even though I don't dance often, it was actually a fun time given the environment. I guess you had to be there. :D

On Sunday I went back to the convention and made an effort to actually see the exhibits and the Expo Hall and I talked to several exhibitors regarding products and games that I had interest in. I then went to the Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner to return for that Garlic Shrimp Alfredo I enjoyed three years ago, but they were out of that dish! I was severely disappointed and ended up getting some mushroom pasta that I didn't even like and only ate half of. :( Oh well, it is what it is. The rest of the night I would spend barhopping until I eventually got invited to a huge TwitchCon party in La Mesa. This place was literally a mansion on a secluded hilltop. Apparently it was an AirBnB that the renters paid their neighbors $500 each to prevent them from reporting noise complaints. They also hired security to check IDs, ensuring no minors would be illegally underage drinking. Someone even bought several taco boxes from Taco Bell at 3am to feed everyone. Although it was a really big space that could've housed a 100-person party, there was only about 50 people there, which was kind of disappointing. Regardless, it was a fun time and they did have a pool table where Alec and I doubled up to play anyone who challenged us and of course we did not lose (even though i don't think Alec made more than a ball a game haha).

On Monday, everyone had planned to leave in the evening, but we went out to Haidilao Hotpot in La Jolla for a long afternoon lunch. This was actually a really good restaurant and probably the best hot pot experience I've ever had, and I don't even like hot pot that much. I didn't fly out until Tuesday morning because the only direct flight from San Diego back to Tucson leaves at 10am daily and that would have been painful to do after a late night of drinking on Sunday night had I flown out Monday. I got a hotel for the night at Wyndham Bayside, watched the Chiefs play and then called it a night.

TwitchCon 2022 was the best TwitchCon I had been to so far and I expect next year's to be even better! I was constantly meeting up with people and pretty much met everyone I was hoping to meet up with, and I expect it to grow bigger and better over time. Until next year!

Final Fantasy Record Keeper - End of Service

2022-09-29T17:00:00.001-07:00

***I started this entry but never finished it and now it's been over a year since FFRK in the US was terminated. Rather than delete it completely, I decided to just post whatever I had written. Thanks for your understanding!***

Back in June, I blogged about how my favorite game on the mobile phone was coming to an end. This is a game that I had played since release, I was so excited to hear about a game that featured all my favorite characters and battles from one of my favorite video game franchises of all time: Final Fantasy. I was so saddened when I learned that the game would be reaching an end of service, with no ability to download and play the game offline. Here is a dedication to one of the great games to ever hit the mobile platform...

Final Fantasy Record Keeper

Final Fantasy Record Keeper (or FFRK for short) was a turn-based game that featured battles of your party up to 5 characters against enemies bosses throughout all Final Fantasy games in the series: FF1-15, FFT, Type-0, even Kingdom Hearts and Brave Exvius made cameos in the game. What made the game great was that there was never any ads, and the developers rewarded you with their in-game currency by completing missions or logging in during certain events. For the entire course of the game, I only payed $30 once, mostly as a support to the game's creators. By the end of the game, I had more resources than I could spend and I never felt handicapped in the game during the time I played it.

Mythril was used for the relic draws, which basically determined what Limit Breaks your characters had access to. Relic draws were typically 50 mythril each, with a chance to grab 1-3 Limit Break granting relics out of a set of 10.

Gil was mostly just use to upgrade characters and items, as you can see I had over 443 million by the end of the game, so I was never short on that resource.

Stamina basically allowed you to enter dungeons, costing anywhere from 1-60 stamina to play the battle with unlimited restarts. If you left the damage, you lost the stamina, but you would gain one every 3 minutes. The 275 amount you see below was the maximum possible, which would take half a day to recharge fully. You could also spend Mythril or obtain Stamina Potions to recharge to max capacity.

Mythril, Gil, and Stamina

FFRK was also completely turn-based, but you had the option of an Active Time Battle (ATB), where the enemy would keep attacking you even if you didn't put in actions, or a Wait mode, where the time would stop until you took your characters' turns. You also had limited actions: Attack, Defend, Ability 1, and Ability 2. The simplicity made it easy to pick up, so the strategy came in executing Soul Breaks and whatever abilities you had access to.

What made FFRK great was that it encompassed all the games in the Final Fantasy franchise. I collected all the characters and leveled them up to a maximum level. Although there is an addition leveling system past Lv99 called "Magia Levels", which basically allowed you to assign points to various powerups like elemental offense and defense, hit points and magic points.

All 262 Playable Characters

Before I delve into the characters deeper, I would like to explain the missions available for players to embark on. Each set of missions usually had it's own theme, some related to the Final Fantasy world while some where actually unique to the game's story itself (which involves the Record Keepers who are responsible for keeping records of all the Final Fantasy memories stored in paintings).

Realm Dungeons are where the game starts you. Each realm has several dungeons that are memorable points in each Final Fantasy game, and the stages get progressively harder. I still remember when I first started playing the game, I had so much trouble advancing through stages. I would have to carefully plan my parties to survive the mobs on the way to the boss fights. As I leveled up over time, these dungeons became much easier to the point were I could simply auto-battle and collect all the rewards at the end. Regardless, they are important because they give you Stamina Shards, which are basically what allow you to play the game more frequently (unless you choose to refill stamina with mythril or a potion). Each Realm had a Cassic side (normal mode) and Master side (more difficult, with additional challenges to complete), although I would argue these Dungeons were some of the easiest to complete.

Realm Dungeons

Record Dungeons was the game's story mode, although I'll be honest, I got a little disinterested and eventually started skipping all of it. They introduce about 5 story characters: Keeper, Elarra, Dr. Mog, Biggs, and Wedge. There's also Cid and Shadowsmith, but neither of playable. The record dungeons bounce around a lot across all Final Fantasy realms, but what made it unique is that it actually recreated the stories via cutscenes. There were even some dungeons that had explorable maps, although you could only click to move to a location, there was no free movement. They only released two episodes for record dungeons and they forced certain characters into your party from each realm. And finally, the characters in the Record Dungeons had separate levels from the rest of the game, which actually made some of the dungeons more challenging then say the Realm Dungeons.

"Prelude" Record Dungeons

"Canon" Record Dungeons

As the game continued to expand, they introduced methods to level up characters quicker and upgrade abilities and weapons faster. There were multiple resources that achieved this:

Orbs were used to create and upgrade abilities. Various abilities could be used across all characters, but some were specific to certain classes. Most of the time, I spent my excess stamina farming orbs so that I could max out any ability I wanted to use in battle.

Growth Eggs were used to level up characters, but eventually I found these worthless once all my characters hit level 99.

Crystal Water was used when a character reached maximum level, but only gave a small boost to the key stats: HP, MP, Defense, Resistance, Attack, Magic, and Mind.

Adamantite and Scarletite were for upgrade weapons to a maximum level based on their rarity. In addition, Rosetta Stones were something they added to try and make weapons slightly stronger once maxed. However, I felt standard weapons via Relic Draws became worthless once Artifacts were introduced, which made both of these materials worthless towards the end.

Rainbow Crystals were used to upgrade Artifacts, the strongest weapons in the game. So these had the most value. There were more Artifacts than anyone could upgrade, so you had to really be decisive about what you wanted to upgrade, since the only way to obtain Rainbow Crystals was to destroy the items you obtained via Relic Draws.

Arcana was the only resource you couldn't farm in a Resource Dungeon, and these were used to upgrade Magicite. Rat Tails were also unfarmable, and those were used to upgrade Historia Crystals. Both of those I'll get into later. I was able to max out all my Magicitie so Arcana was not really an issue, but rat tails were definitely scarce and it was very expensive to max out all your Historia Crystals.

Finally we have Motes, which basically were added midway through the course of the game to give even more bonuses to your characters and unlock classes, which gave the characters more abilities to choose from. Motes were definitely the way to truly unlock a character maximum capabilities, since it also unlocked very powerful abilities specific only to that hero. There was no way for me to unlock every character's maximum.

My Collection of Resources

The most challenging dungeons in the game started with the Nightmare and Magicite dungeons. Nightmare involved a ramp up to a difficult boss, usually with some special gimmick for the final boss in each. Once you completed a Nightmare dungeon, you'd obtain a powerful ability to use in battle. Unfortunately, the only ones that were useful were Curada, Valigarmanda, and Affliction Break. Occasionly Reraise was helpful, but Soul Breaks with Last Stand were far better for Revive-on-KO. Regardless, these were important to complete in order to unlock the more useful Magicite dungeons. Magicite dungeons were all elemental based and my favorite dungeons in the game. By beating these you'd be rewarded with Magicite, which was not only a summon you could call within battle but also increased your elemental damage. And the more you combined your obtained magicite, the more powerful your party became. I felt like Magicite dungeons were the most balanced dungeons in the game, where you really couldn't advance to the next level until you mastered the current level.

Nightmare and Magicite Dungeons Mastered

Like the Magicite dungeons, there existed Dreams, Torment and Cardia Dungeons (Dreambreaker and Dragonking), which instead focused on Realm synergy instead of an elemental focus. So for example, instead of specializing on Ice damage, it was more important to bring characters all from the same Final Fantasy Realm to really boost your success. Beating these dungeons required the use of Historia Crystals, which not only allowed a powerful summon to be called within battle but also boosted the power of characters from the same realm. Again, beating the lowest levels of these dungeons made it easier to tackle the next, making for a progressive climb throughout the dungeon gauntlet. Cardia dungeons were the hardest dungeons in the game to complete and unfortunately I could not master any of the Dragonking challenges, although I hoped that I would have eventually had the game service not ended when it did.

Dreams, Torment, and Cardia Dungeons

Magicite was definitely easier to obtain the maximum levels because it was in the game for longer, but I was unable to max out all the Historia Crystals given how late in the game they were introduced before the shutdown.

Magicite and Historia Crystals

The playthroughs of FFRK varied among each user, the strength of the characters mostly being determined by the Soul Breaks they obtained via the Relic Draws. This is the fun of a gatcha game. You spent your Mythril in hopes you'd gain the powerful Soul Breaks for the characters you liked the most. In some cases, there were just some Soul Breaks that were so good, you just couldn't afford to pass them up. In the remainder of this blog entry, I will go through each Final Fantasy Realm to describe which characters were the best in my playthrough, basically an ode to my strongest parties in each realm.

***END OF ENTRY***

Green Juice!

2022-09-21T02:57:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that my diet doesn't always consist of enough vegetables. I've been in talks with friends who promote "green drinks" to supplement a lack of vegetable source in a diet, so I am going to start drinking them on a daily basis. At first they recommended I try "green powder", but I couldn't find it easily at my local grocery store. What I did find was this stuff called "Naked", which has a couple of green juice options full of fruits and leafy vegetables like spinach and kale.

Honestly the stuff doesn't taste that bad! My goal is to drink an 8oz glass a day and see how it goes for me. I also bought some steamable veggies that I can make as sides with my heavy meat diet in an effort to be more health conscious as I grow older.

Yeah I know, not a super exciting blog post this month, but I didn't really have anything else to report lately! Anyway, here's to living a hopefully more healthy life! :)

It's time for another Bowling Ball!

2022-08-29T20:26:00.001-07:00

In 2018, I bought another bowling ball, the Code Red by Storm Bowling. While things started out slowly, I eventually learned how to take my game to the next level. I attribute a lot of it to a change in leagues. In 2020, there weren't enough teams in the IBM & Friends league anymore to hold a league, so we were invited to play in the other league on Thursday nights at Bowlero (on Broadway / Camino Seco). Not only was I more motivated to bowl against new opponents, I also had new teammates who were bowling well and pushed me to try harder. Here are the averages for the past 4 seasons with the Code Red:

As you can see, 180 to 200 is a huge jump. I've been a 190+ bowler before and my best season before 2018 was a 193, but I definitely had a struggle for a few years. In addition to bowling motivation in a new and bigger league, I think a lot has to do with a change in my approach, which I've improved over the last two years. I have a better understanding of where to start my approach and finish the delivery. I'm also able to read the lanes better and tell if I'm hitting the pocket light or heavy when I leave a 10-pin.

My expectations of myself are now higher than ever. These days, if I don't bowl a 200, something is "wrong" and I'm expected to be better. I don't think the bowling ball really changes the results, but it certainly can help. I'll be changing my bowling ball every 4 years now and next up is the Infinite PhysiX from Storm Bowling. $200 for the ball and $40 to get it drilled.

Here's hoping I can keep up the string of 200+ averages!

TwitchCon EU in Amsterdam!

2022-07-31T17:04:00.000-07:00

In July, I traveled to Europe for the first time in over 20 years. In fact the last time I went, I was way too young and I really only remember driving around in a Lego car at the Legoland in Denmark. This visit was for TwitchCon in Amsterdam, their first convention since 2019 since they others were cancelled due to Covid.

Amsterdam, July 14-18:

The trip was mostly to meet and hang out with friends from Twitch from over the past few years. I met up with three other streamers in Salt Lake City (Noglek, Spitfire0088, JaredMetalhead) and the four of us flew to Amsterdam on a 10-hour KLM flight. When we arrived, we were greeted by our friends from Europe and east coast U.S. (IamFericho, Mizzmacs, NoctisLP, and CzarOmega). It was super exciting to meet most of the people in person for the first time ever!

Almost all of us were staying at an AirBnB together, which is the way to go for big groups who travel together. The convention itself was a little bit of a let down when compared to the ones I've been in California (San Jose, San Diego), with small space and not as many exhibitors/sponsors as I've seen in the past. But I mostly just chalk that up to being in Europe and the first TwitchCon in 3 years.

Amsterdam is beautiful city and really well kept! The streets are super clean. If you go to Amsterdam central where the concave of the city is, it's absolutely gorgeous. I loved seeing all the small canals around the city roads and buildings. The Netherlands is not known for it's food, but their snacks are pretty good. I especially enjoyed the dutch pancakes and as a group we tried some really cool flavors like smoked salmon and cream cheese, asian teriyaki chicken, and fried egg and bacon.

Amsterdam was the highlight of the trip and definitely my favorite part, since it was the time all 8 of us were all together and you know how the story goes, the more the merrier. After Amsterdam, it was on to other countries, since I wanted to explore some of Europe since we paid so much for our flights out there...

Germany, July 18-20:

Driving to Germany was really cool, as it's true what they say about the autobahn that features no speed limit. We had a rental car (Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross) that I was only able to max out around 105mph, but that was good enough for me. Really fun to drive several miles at that speed. :)

When we arrived at Germany, we had a friend (NoctisLP) still with us and he basically showed us around two cities, Dusseldorf and Cologne. Unfortunately the weather was really hot and humid those two days, which made walking around during the day pretty uncomfortable. It didn't help that the AirBnB we stayed at didn't have air conditioning either, but I guess this is common in some European regions.

My favorite things about Germany were the food and beer! I especially loved this breakfast meal called "mett", which is literally raw pork served on a half-roll and topped with fresh chopped white onions. I guess the meat is taken from finer parts of the ham, so it's not dangerous to eat. But of course, it would never fly in the U.S., which is why it was such a rare and exciting opportunity for me. I also had a pork shank for dinner one of the days and you know I love the fatty meats around the bone! The two beers I liked were Alt in Dusseldorf and Kolsch in Cologne, and apparenty the two cities rival each other, which I found interesting.

Belgium, July 21-22:

We drove through Belgium and spent a day in Antwerp, which was an absolutely beautiful city. It was nice to have a viewer from Twitch show us around the city and be our tour guide for the day. I tried a couple Belgian waffles, and while they were good maybe they were too hyped up for me. Unfortunately we spent the whole day outside and barely spent any time at our AirBnB for the night, which was actually pretty cool being a section of castle (although the interior looks pretty normal).

As we exited Belgium, we toured Brussels and ended up doing a couple touristy things like Atomium and Mini Europa. And I will admit I really loved the Lambic beer in Belgium, which is a very sour beer, but for me it was really easy to drink. :)

France, July 22-24:

It was a 3.5 hour drive from Brussels to Paris and we got in pretty late on Thursday night. It was really stressful driving around Paris, their roads are literally webs of streets with no real order and some streets you have to merge across one another without any lines in the road. As much as I hated driving in this city, I will admit it was a sight to see. Probably the coolest architecture of all the countries we had seen so far.

We actually checked out Disneyland Paris on the first day, which had some noticeable differences compared to Diseyland in California, but I would say the parks are about 80% similar. A few rides are different such as Ratatouille, Cars, and Indiana Jones. We saw both parks (Magic Kingdom and Walt Disney Studios) in one day, so it was definitely a long day. The final day in Paris we took it easy and drove around the Arc de Triumph, checked out the Eiffel Tower, and ended the night with a dinner cruise that traveled the Seine river and you could see so many cool attractions over the course of a fancy 2.5 hour boat ride. I highly recommend doing this if you visit Paris.

I had a ton of fun in Europe, but I will admit that maybe I planned too many countries in the time we had. I think part of that was because I wanted to see Paris, but we also wanted to experience our friend's country of Germany, and Belgium was just on the way. If I go back, I would like to see less countries and spend more time in each. Regardless, it was still a great trip and again, it's always the most fun to meet friends that I make on Twitch since it's such a big part of my life now. Next up will be TwitchCon in San Diego come October, which is something I'm really looking forward to!

Final Fantasy Record Keeper (FFRK) - End of Service

2022-06-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

This week I received some very disheartening news. My favorite game on mobile that I've been playing ever since it was released is being shut down later this year. :( I actually blogged about this 7 years ago when it first came out, and as an devoted Final Fantasy fan I was super excited when I finally got a chance to play it (it had been out in Japan a couple years before).

The game has had so much content added to it throughout the years, but as a Day 1 player who basically logged in every day and rarely missed any rewards, I've been able to keep up with all the challenges the developers have presented me. It's not really surprising that the game is getting shut down, in fact I've only ever spent $30 on the game lifetime at the beginning, just wanting to support the developers for a game well produced. It truly was Free-to-Play with not even a single ad, so I imagine it does not bring as much income in as other games.

Here's the screenshot of the End-of-Service notice they announced earlier this week:

So basically my favorite mobile game of all time will be gone after September of 2022. :( At first I was really sad and somewhat upset, since I've invested so much time and love into this game. However, I've accepted that some things will just come to an end and have made the following goals for me to complete before it's all over. Here are the things I still want to accomplish:

Magicite Dungeons - I've pretty much 5-starred all of the Magicite Dungeons (which means beating all 5 bosses in each element). I still have Wind and Lightning to do, but had been saving those to do for "Dr. Mog's Homework". This will be the easiest thing I have to do on the list.

Dreambreaker - So far I've only mastered FF7 and FF9 and have not attempted any of the others. My gear in each FF realm is good enough where I should be able to master all of them, but getting sub 30-second clear times in each is probably not going to happen. It's okay, the rewards for clearing them fast aren't necessary, although it's gonna take up a ton of Rat Tail for me to upgrade most of the Historia crystals needed to help defeat each boss.

Dragonking - This one might be difficult. The only one I've attempted and completed (no mastery) is FF7. But since I'll be setting up parties for all the Dreambreaker runs, it should help prepare me for the Dragonking bosses. This section is the final and most difficult of the Cardia Records.

Labyrinth - This one is my least favorite, since it requires clicking through a "maze of portraits" to complete each dungeon. The rewards are really good (hero artifacts are some of the strongest gear in the game you can wield), but the time required to farm them is not really worth it in my opinion. I've skipped the elemental/realm bosses in the labyrinth up to this point, but my goal would be to complete those as well if I have time.

And that's about it. Everything else in the game I have basically mastered. I have about 3 months to finish out my goals, which when set reasonably should be doable. I'm still gonna be really sad when the game finally does get shut down and I'm not even sure what game I would play afterwards. I still occasionally crush candy, but I moved on from Simpsons Tapped Out. Square Enix's only other decent mobile Final Fantasy game is Brave Exvius, but I didn't like it as much as FFRK and eventually walked away from it with no intention of coming back. Ahh well, it is what it is!

Updates to come at the end of September with tons of pictures to show off my collection and mastery of this wonderful game. ♥

2022 APA Regionals Winner!

2022-05-03T16:15:00.003-07:00

Back in March, I went to Phoenix to play in the APA 2022 Regionals Tournament for 9-ball. In order to qualify for this tournament, you must defeat players within your city during the "Regionals Qualiifer Boards", which I did back in late 2021.

The Regionals Tournament for 9-ball took place on Sunday March 6 and started very early in the morning at 8:30am. I played with mostly other skill level 5s being a 5 myself, and in APA a skill level 5 must race their opponent to 38 points (where each ball pocketed is worth 1 point with the exception of the 9-ball being worth 2).

My first match I actually got crushed, losing to a skill-level 5 from Suprise AZ with a final score of 19-38. Fortunately, the tournament is a single-elimination modified tournament that guarantees that you play at least two matches. One could argue that losing my first match didn't actually matter since I was going to still have to win the same number of matches the rest of the way after that first match.

My second match out of the loser's bracket, I played a skill level 6 from New Mexico and actually won pretty convincingly with a score of 38-24. I then found myself back on the winners bracket between two more skill level 5s on my way to 38-11 and 38-28 victories. I had then found myself in the finals match and played a skill level 5 from New Mexico, who I was able to defeat 38-32, the closest win of the day.

This was second time playing in the Regionals Tournament. My first time, I played 8-ball in 2016 and lost as a skill-level 4. I actually moved up to a skill-level 5 during that tournament, which ended up costing me the finals match since I had to win one more game. Unfortunately the runner-up doesn't get anything in these tournaments.

But this was a new day and I am now qualified for the Nationals Tournament in Las Vegas! I leave today and the tournament can go all the way until Friday May 6 if I do well. There are payouts for the top 17 players (out of about 100), with first place walking away with $10,000 in prizes! :O Super exciting!

Wish me luck and stay tuned for updates!

"I'm going to Disneyland!"

2022-04-05T16:48:00.002-07:00

When I was a kid, I remember professional athletes winning championship and being asked, "So what are you gonna do next?". They'd respond with "I'm going to Disneyland!". Not sure if anyone got the reference in my title, but if not, that's where it's from. :)

Last month I went back to Disneyland for the first time in over 20 years. My parents had taken me there several times when I was young, although we spent a lot of time at Knott's Berry Farm and Six Flags Magic Mountain as well.

I know a lot of people complain about how prices have increased a lot for Disneyland, but seeing how I haven't been in so long, I wasn't one to have an opinion. I bought a 2-day pass for a total of $250, allowing me to see Disneyland one day and California Adventures on the other day. I've never been to California Adventures before, but I still .

Going to Disneyland is such a better experience when you are older and have money you don't mind spending. My favorite area was the new Star Wars Galaxy Edge. We immediately went there first and stopped at Oga's Cantina for a couple drinks, by far one of the coolest bars ever! I highly recommend checking it out if you're able to get in. I think we got in because we went there super early at like 10am.

My favorite ride in this area was the Rise of Resistance, it's a long and exciting experience. Also, I did buy the Lightning Lane daily pass for an extra $20 because my time is invaluable and I don't mind spend a few extra bucks to skip lines. We as a group also used the single rider options quite frequently, since these rides are short anyway and I just wanted to experience as many rides as possible.

At Disneyland, I went on basically every ride I wanted to, starting there at 9am and closing down the park at midnight (I got into Space Mountain at exactly 11:59pm). California Adventures closes two hours earlier at 10pm on the weekends, but that was fine since there's slightly less to see. At California Adventures, I'd say the best rides were the new Spiderman Webslingers and also the Radiator Spring Racers.

I've also learned that as I've gotten older, I'm more sensitive to motion sickness for some of the rides. Kind of sad since I used to be able to handle roller-coasters so well (Six Flags Magic Mountain was one of my favorites as a kid). But I admit that the Guardians of the Galaxy ride (formerly known as Tower of Terror) had me feeling a little nauseous after I got off.

While Disneyland was a really fun experience with my friends, I don't think I need to go back for a while. Maybe once every 10 years. My next trip is planned for later this month, I'm going to San Antonio for a friend's bachelor party!