ZZZ

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Room temperature or you can use a microwave.

I've learned something with cooking that rice. Previously I would cook the vegetables with some water because carrots are hard and they need cooking to become soft. But if you do that with onions and belly pepper it ruins the flavour. It's best to use olive oil and start cooking without adding any water. Onions, belly pepper and frozen vegetables already contain lots of water and I cook until all that water evaporates and you start hearing that frying sound. That same recipe tastes great with mushrooms, specially shiitake. Pout pepper is great too.

Mashed potatoes with spinach and onion. Salt and black pepper. Some butter too. I bought spinach last week and almost forgot it rotting in the fridge.

I don't have a name and didn't follow any recipe in particular. It's rice + vegetables Carrot Belly pepper Peas Cherry tomato (not really, in here there is a similar tomato called Sweet tomato. It's less rounder and more oval) Onions Garlic Himalayan Salt Dried grapes Black pepper Parsley Basil Olive oil

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I don't know if anybody ever noticed it. When you cook yourself rather than buying or ordering it, there is some pleasure involved in cooking. And also something related to planning ahead of time, taking care of yourself and having better control of your own time.

Mexican Jello or Mosaic Jello or Sea Glass Jello.

I didn't predict that the colored gelatin would be sticky. I thought that the white cream would make the flavoured gelatin float but it didn't. The original recipe asks for condensed milk. I replaced it with coconut milk, grated coconut and Xylitol. The grated coconut ended up being a bad idea because the cream ended up too thick and hard to pour and mix. It tastes great though.

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After watching a psychiatrist and reading some threads in other forums about insomnia, I have to give these tips: Don't watch movies or series, before going to sleep, where each episode ends in a cliffhanger. It keeps your mind "trapped" in that alternate reality In some cases exercise helps because you need to spend energy and exhaust yourself. In some other cases it may be bad because the exercise may make you even more awake than before I don't know the name for this, but it works. What causes insomnia? Most of the time your mind is thinking about things related to the past or to the future. It's very much related to anxiety. One way to trick your brain is to focus on what is about the present. Look at what is right in front of you. Hear the sound of silence. Hear your heartbeats. Feels your feet touching the ground. Feel the cold or the hot. Sniff leaves or something. Breath in and out. Play with your tongue. Even if just for a minute or so your mind is going to stop the negative thoughts and focus on things that are mostly concrete. I've watched another psychiatrist horrified that some patients were taking dozens and dozens of Zolpidem (Ambien) per day to sleep. Jesus!!! It's insane. Some youtube channels out there have sounds of rain that play for 10 hours. I don't know the relationship between white / brown / pink noises with sleep. There are some channels with ppl walking on streets with go pro cameras. They are relaxing more or less in the same way as the sound of rain.

I was watching this and what he says can clearly be applied to life itself. He mentions John Wooden, New Zealand's All blacks, US Navy Seals, Ego is the enemy, Only the paranoid survive (he mentions that all the players from the national volleyball team nicknamed him a Psychopath), Tom Bradley, Simon Sinek, Peter Drucker. He talks a lot about taking responsability and not blaming the world, the rules, the adversaries or even God. No, learn from mistakes. A powerful quote that he says is "There is only on way to never lose and that way is to never play in the first place". He mentioned this https://www.thisiswhywestand.net/single-post/2018/08/15/never-ever-ring-the-bell-life-lessons-from-a-navy-seal It made me think back on how many bells I have ringed in the past. So many things intersect with what I read about narcissism and mental health in general. It made me see that the way I'm trying to get into the industry is wrong. I have to change my perspective. He mentions that the country lacks a strong leader and that really applies to many many countries all over the world. If the country's leader is giving bad examples what are you going to expect from the average person? More often than not you need to do the right thing and right thing is not comfortable or pleasant. Here is where I'm going wrong: I'm avoiding what is right because it's uncomfortable or unpleasant. Sports in general are great in teaching life long lessons. I think her whole talk can be summarized in "Is it worth it? What do you have to sacrifice or abandon to win? Is it going to be worth the cost?"

Rage isn't a bad game, but it's not exceptional either. Right before the journey to the other wasteland, where the sky is dark, I dropped it. The env art in this game is really excellent. I saw how much effort they put in to make a believable wasteland. The thing is, megatexture made it all static. There is nothing to interact with. All you do in this game is to accept a quest, go to a place, then comes a door and a loading screen. Once in you kill everyone there, do your job, return to the outdoor wasteland, drive back to the city and go to the next mission. There is no plot to explain the lives of each character, each place you visit. It comes down to "bandits are trying to explode the blablabla, go there and stop them". It's not like bioshock where the whole world has a background story from its creation to the current time where the game takes place. It's doesn't offer much beyond killing enemies. I don't know if the hardware at the time imposed serious bottlenecks or if the script writers didn't develop the world any further than just give an excuse to explain that the world was destroyed by an asteroid. Take out the enemies from each level and there is nothing left to populate it. It has good mechanics, various weapons, different tactics, but the world itself seems a wasted potential. Compared to bioshock it is way easier to earn credits and obtain ingredients.

I just realized that I made a mistake in this map that is going to result in me scrapping it. I over-focused on the architecture and now that I'm looking at the floorplan, I didn't notice that the corridors are too narrow. The gameplay is not going to work because the player's flow is very bad. Not only that, I misjudged how complicated the architecture would be and honestly, it's not something I would be able to do.

Megatextures really look good from a distance, but extremely low res up close. The wasterland's design is very good. Just learned something new from Rage. If the player visits an area and then has to go back to the beginning of it. Either make the mission end near the beginning or give the player a shortcut, like they did with ziplines to go back to the beginning.

FEAR 2 is the best. FEAR 3 ruined the horror theme.

I quitted Quake 4 in the first mission and watched about 1 hour in youtube at 2x speed. I guess, the stroggs universe is a dead end. It adds some new tech on top of the old quake, but that's it. It's too dark and repetitive. There is a lot of blood stains everywhere but this is an action game, not an horror game. F.E.A.R. does a better job at bringing horror than doom 3 and quake 4 is boring. The medic dying on me made me quit haha. Id tech 4 suffers from a severe lack of contrast. It must had been some trade off between performance and color precision that they made at the time. This brought me one more example to my level design site. Revisiting areas can be done and the first mission did it and opened up some new passages, but to travel back just to escort a medic is so boring. It doesn't add bring anything fresh to the plot. It just forces the player to revisit a previous area twice. Trying Rage now.

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https://sites.google.com/view/leveldesigner/english-version?authuser=0

Duke Nukem Forever. I knew it was bad and I'm playing it to get more examples for my level design site. The first enemies and levels are already awful. EDIT: I couldn't bare this game. I had to download a save and use the cheats to rush it straight to the ending with god mode and infinite ammo. lol. It has the same mistake of Prey 2006. They give no clues and leave the player lost with no proper directions.

Useless rant deleted.

I'm taking a shot at Dark Forces after decades. Boy, the level design in this game is overly complicated and confusing.