Bento!

Lately I've been failing to get as much exercise as I should be getting. However, on the diet front I've done pretty well. I've got making small bento lunches down to a science. They aren't cute, there isn't a lot of variety from day to day, but they're good and healthy.

In one container I have my collection of what I think of as "bento snack food" which I try to assemble every day. On one end I have a small tin foil thing holding some pickles -- lately two jalapeno-stuffed olives, a few spicy baby dill pickles, and some pickled ginger, but I sometimes add some spicy pickled green beans. At the other end in a similar divider I have a handful of pistachios. In between I have my veggies and fruit -- fruit is almost always green grapes, up to a dozen or so. Veggies are baby carrots, slices of orange or yellow bell pepper, thin discs of zuccini and yellow squash (I like to shuffle them between each other for a striped effect), and maybe some celery slices although I haven't managed to accomplish that lately. I place dried apricots on top, they're flat and dry and fit nicely packed in anywhere there's space left. I also have on one side a thin stick of hershey's dark chocolate. Over the pistachios I pack in some strips of sliced summer sausage and smoked gouda cheese, and that finishes it off.

When I have the time I make a more substantial lunch/dinner by slicing up a chicken breast into small pieces and frying it in olive oil with lemon or lime and spices, and I boil some frozen veggies to go with it. This goes into a different container, of course. Other days when I don't do this I'll buy something small for lunch/dinner, like a sandwich wrap from Arby's.

I bought one of the large family packs of chicken breasts at the store -- much cheaper that way -- and then placed each one in a seperate sandwich baggie before freezing. This has worked really well for me. I take one out of the freezer the day before and put it in the fridge, and then I cook it in the morning before work.

Maybe some day I'll put more effort into designing a bento that's actually worth looking at! ^_^

Experience, or No Experience?

I always get annoyed when other players in an online game complain about how much experience they're getting, as if you can't just enjoy playing the game. I've always thought that I didn't care about experience, I just liked to play. Over the last couple of days I've got to test that theory, as I experienced both extremes of game play.

Monday night I was invited to a group who had figured out a kind of exploit. There's a mission that comes at the very end of a long story arc, in which there are not one, but three arch-villians. Arch-Villians are of course the ultimate bad guys in City of Heroes. Normally you might get one arch villian in a mission, or at the most two, and only for special missions, or at the end of big story arcs. In this mission the three AVs are all attacking each other when you arrive on the scene, and you're supposed to rescue a girl and defeat the three villians, or the ones that survive their own battle. I think you can complete the mission by ignoring the villians and rescuing the girl.

What the team I was on had figured out was that you could defeat the three arch-villians, not rescue the girl, leave the mission, and reset it, then do it again. Arch-villans give excellent experience, of course. Unlike some exploits or schemes to gain fast experience, this wasn't boring or dull -- you were still fighting three arch-villians, and an AV fight is always exciting. Still, there was a lot of standing around in between missions.

Anyway I went along with it and gained nearly two levels in a couple of hours.

The next night I was nearly level 26, and thought that I'd hit 26 on my own first before looking for something else to do. But I was invited to a Task Force right away. A Task Force is a long series of missions -- this one was 15 missions total -- that culminates in a battle with an arch-villian. There is a task force that you can do every 5 or 10 levels, starting around level 15. If you complete it, you get a special badge, but they take a lot of time and you can't add new people once the Task Force starts, so if the people you start with aren't up to finishing the Task Force, you may find that you've spent a few hours and aren't able to complete the journey.

I was on a Task Force on Saturday where people gave up halfway through the first mission. Unlike regular missions, the enemies aren't set to your level -- for this particular Task Force they were always level 25, and our group was in the low 20's so people decided it was too hard.

So I thought, I just logged on, I have the time to do a whole Task Force. So I accepted. It was the same TF that I'd tried on Saturday that had ended so quickly. And one thing that I hadn't realized was that level 25 was the upper limit for this Task Force. What happens if you're over 25 is that you get automatically "exemplared" down to level 25. When exemplared you don't gain any experience, except to work off debt. You only gain influence (money) and any items you might pick up.

So halfway through the first mission I hit level 26 -- and stopped gaining any experience. And because I have pretty strong beliefs about people making a commitment when they sign on to a Task Force, I went ahead and completed the whole thing without gaining any experience. Pretty much all I got was a nice badge saying I had done the Task Force, and some money to spend. ^_^

I still had fun. In fact, nobody quit the Task Force -- we made it all the way to the end with everyone intact, even one guy who decided after two missions that his character sucked and wasn't fun to play and wanted to quit. We sidekicked him so he'd be able to accomplish more (he was lower level and having trouble hitting the bad guys) and he made it all the way to the end, too.

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genebreshears likes to comment on what his iPod decided to play for him recently. Like him, I almost always listen to my iPod on shuffle, so I never know what's going to come up. Unlike him I rarely try to keep track of what it's played. Usually when I'm listening to it I'm out walking. But tonight I was at my desk at work, and decided to keep a running list of what came up:

( long list behind this link )