Glory in Death: Roake is a Nice Guy and Eve Dallas takes lesson from a telenovela villana

On Amazon.

This one took me way longer to get through than the first one. And it's because the main characters spent the entire book, to put it very bluntly, acting like anal sphincters.

The plot is once again standard thriller stuff: an unknown subject is killing successful women in NYC. He (or she) slashes their throat and leaves them in a pool of blood. As any self-respecting fictional serial killer would, they take an item from the scene as a trophy. 

To make matters worse, Eve herself is now a high profile NYC woman, not necessarily because she solved a high profile case involving a sitting US senator last book, but because she is dating mega-gajillionaire Roarke. During the murder investigation, Eve has to utilize her newly found "fame" to bait the killer. 

Nadine Furst, one of the supporting characters that appears almost every book, is introduced this installment. Her introduction consists of Eve calling an off-planet penal colony, where Nadine is presumably doing an exposé regarding future USA's deplorable treatment of criminals. Nadine is career-driven and ambitious, but she isn't willing to take shortcuts to achieve glory. She considers it her duty to report on the truth, and she also admits that not every story needs to be told. (In other words, she's a foil for the killer).

That being said, this is not a book I would recommend. Because Eve and Roarke's relationship troubles makes them behave, as I said above, like entitled children.

Dawn of Justice: I don't know what I expected

My friend got food poisoning this Wednesday and I wanted to take him to this movie after leaving observation to distract him from any remaining stomach discomfort. This movie had one job: distraction for a couple of hours. Instead, I get distraction for mainly one hour. It was better than Man of Steel, but since I considered Man of Steel a hostage situation, that's not saying much.

There was a teaser for the Batman: Lego movie, which might have been the best part of the whole thing.

The teaser was different than the one above, but this one is still good.

Anyway, SPOILERS beneath the cut.

Theatrhythm: Curtain Call; a shot to the limbic system

As I discussed recently, SquareEnix and I have broken up. At the moment, I'm bracing myself for hating that FFVII remake they have in the works, dreading the time I will purchase the necessary consoles to play it like a good little consumer. This post it not about that. This post about something that SquareEnix actually got right: Theathrythm: Final Fantasy.

Buy on Amazon. At once.

If you like Final Fantasy music, and I'm pretty sure that anyone who's ever played the games does, then this game is distilled nostalgia. Like the introvert that I am, I've spent most of the day playing tracks on this rhythm game (the battle themes for FFIV, in case anyone is curious). Well, I also wrote some, went running, and practiced Portuguese, but most of my time has been at my 3DS.

This is the only thing that has tempted me to play Final Fantasy games in a long time. Whatever else about the newer games sucks, the music remains superb. My current favorite is FFXI's Opening Theme (hey, there's Spanish in this video):

The gameplay itself is . . . I don't actually care. This game kills my ADHD (meaning I suck at it because I keep missing targets, especially the hold triggers). To be honest, I should probably be just buying the soundtracks, though I suppose I wouldn't be as engaged if I wasn't trying to get things perfect despite my suckitude.

If you're a completist gamer, I would suggest you stay away from this game. There's always three levels to each song (Basic, Expert, and a third level I haven't bothered to try). There's grading for each track, the highest being SSS. There's getting perfect chains for each track. There's getting all criticals in for each track. There's unlocking all the characters via that crystal thingie at the end of each track. There's something called CollectaCards, which resemble Pokemon but more pointless (still want all of them).

By the way, there are at least a hundred tracks on this thing, plus God only knows how many I haven't unlocked.

Good news: I have a job!!!

Yesterday, I found out which hospital I'll be working in this coming July. Without giving up too much personal information, I can only say that I'm very happy. Pathology is a challenging field, and I have an opportunity to go into academic medicine. Four years of hard work, nine if you count undergrad, and I'm almost where I always wanted to be. And I cannot describe how good it feels to budget with a paycheck in mind rather than student loans.

I went to celebrate with my family and one of my closest friends to one of my favorite restaurants. One I used to visit since childhood, though much less often back then since I had no money at all. When my brother and I got our first jobs, we used to visit the place often. (Well, first real jobs. When we were much younger and got some money for shores, we used to buy Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards).

Hot brownie sundae; my favorite in the world

The only complaint I have about this restaurant is that their servings are too big and too difficult to resist, meaning we have little room left for dessert. Out of all the food in this restaurant, their hot brownie sundae stands out. The presentation on the right makes it look like any random brownie under vanilla ice cream, and the vanilla ice cream might be nothing special, but the brownie. The brownie is incomparable.

My brother says that this brownie sundae is what he missed most when he left for the military. He says he's tried multiple times to recreate it, both by baking and by buying brownies at fancy bakeries, but he's never quite managed. Nothing, from the texture to the taste, was ever the same.

Last night, our dessert came on a plate rather than a cup (as seen on the picture), and my brother confirmed that the secret is in the brownie itself, not in the ice cream or the hot fudge. I've been telling him as much for years, but he's the type that likes to see things for himself.

Accessible adult coloring books: what a time to be alive

Buy on Amazon.

A few months back, I witnessed a . . . heated discussion about the fall of our civilization. Someone noticed that adult coloring books are outselling "real books" on Amazon, which caused them deep discomfort. Coloring books, after all, are for children. 

I must admit that I thought as much, though learning about "adult" coloring books didn't cause me any pain. In fact, I went to Amazon immediately to locate one of these books, then despaired at the price tag on the things. Though I wanted to try them, I couldn't justify spending more than ten bucks on one. Or more than five bucks. I am, and will be until July, a broke student.

This weekend, I went to Costco with my brother to get some cheap running shoes and was thwarted by "blue laws" (the Costco is in some town that won't sell anything but food on "the Sabbath", which I thought was on Saturday . . .?) Anyway, I couldn't get the running shoes, but my brother got me Millie Marotta's Tropical World. Which is an adult coloring book. Behold my artistic vision:

Eh . . . imagine it's rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise.

I've been using my favorite pens for it: G2 pilot gel pens. They are expensive and probably murdering the environment in some way, but they're so pretty! When I need to study, I use them to make my notes happy and colorful. The colors are sharp and the book pages are of high enough quality that the ink does not bleed through.

Coloring this little beak has been very relaxing. I can't color within the lines even as an adult, but it still so relaxing. If these books are ending civilization, then I'm happy to contribute. I highly recommend them. 

The Match - Worst Dating App Ever

Isn't this easy to understand?

Trying to explain the NRMP match to anyone not graduating medical school is an ordeal, to say the least. Here's a video, for anyone who might care.

Around first year of medical school, I didn't give "matching" much thought because I didn't even know what I wanted to do. Mostly, I planned to do primary care because I thought I'd be good at it since I'm multi-lingual, and I didn't want to be in training until middle age (which, hah-hah now that I'm going into pathology).

The idea is simple enough: graduating medical students or anyone who's met the minimum requirements to start residency in the United States, as well as all teaching hospitals sign up for The Match. Applicants send their ERAS application (which is on a different site and costs money) to the programs they are interested in, and the programs have the opportunity to invite them for an interview (imagine a job interview mixed with a college interview, but way more nerve-wracking).

The applicant can choose whether or not to accept the interview depending on how many invites they received. My medical school advised graduating students to apply to at least thirty programs, assuming they were in good academic standing, had scored average or above in the USMLE for their desired specialty, and were not applying for the more competitive specialty. Later, must of us learned that thirty programs was a bit of an overkill for an American medical school (or at least, I did considering I was invited to interview at twenty-something programs).

So my 3DS XL had a bit of a freezing issue, and I had what can only be called a non-epileptic seizure

I had my old 3DS XL for about for years, and last week it started randomly freezing. Maybe because I've been playing Fire Emblem: Fates like it's 2004, whereas I used to play half an hour or so before this game came out. Today, I threw caution to the wind and decided to get a new DS.

It was an adventure, to say the least. And by "adventure", I mean a stream of unintelligible profanities.

First of all, there's a new 3DS XL that's cleverly called . . . well, here's the logo:

A focus group approved this

I can only assume this exists because the 3DS prints money for Nintendo. It looks sleeker, as if that matters, and it has the cartridge slot in a different place than the "old" 3DS. And some amiibo stuff I don't care about in the slightest. Originally, I bought this thing first because the Gamestop lady assured me, multiple times, that it took the same memory card as the "old" 3DS.

Spoiler alert: not it doesn't. The "old" 3DS takes an SHDS card while the "new" 3DS takes a micro SHDS card. You can tell it's more advanced because it has the word it's micro, and the future is about slimness.

Oh, and you have to unscrew the back of the "new" 3DS to put in a new memory card. I'm a hundred percent serious. This is something that Nintendo's engineers, as in more than one engineer, thought was a good idea. And the game testers were like "great idea, Ken! I can't believe we didn't think of this before!"

So I go back to the Gamestop lady, intending to get my old, possibly defective 3DS back. I can't because the Gamestop computer sets the price of any returned item at $9,999.99 until it's returned to the its factories for refractoring, or whatever it is they do to used system. I have no idea. I think I just made up that word.

But good news! I can get a used "old" 3DS XL which will accept my memory card, and now I'll have extra store credit to buy more 3DS games. I don't understand why they didn't just say that before, but okay. My fault for not researching the evolution of the DS. My fault. I get a new "old" 3DS XL.

And it doesn't matter! The DLC of my old "old" DS wasn't saved on my memory card. It was saved . . . on the DS itself? And I murdered the content once I reset my old "old" 3DS to its factory settings. Which is making my head explode.

In no particular order, I've lost:

1. Fire Emblem: Awakening
2. Bravely Default
3. Conquest path of Fire Emblem: Fates
4. Fates' DLC bundle
5. Person Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth
6. An amount of money I'm not comfortable disclosing
7. The cool red 3DS I used to have
8. My trust in the free market and capitalism 

This doctor money I'm getting starting July better be good.

I have a job, Nintendo. Why did you make Fates so hard?

If TVTropes is to be believed, then Fire Emblem: Awakening caused a civil war within the Fire Emblem fandom. See, older FE games had a "permadeath", meaning that if one of your soldiers died in the game board, then they died for real, and forever. If one of the main characters died, then the game was over and you had to restart that battle. This forced the player to plan out every last move if they wanted to survive each chapter with their army of characters intact.

I'm not going to lie; I was never one of the players who refused to let any single character die, no matter how minor. There was always at least one ax-wielding fellow who die in their introductory map because they insisted on spawning way too close to enemy soldier. Even when I was a teen with relatively large amounts of free time, I was not the greatest fan of the permadeath feature. So I'm one of the players who likes that Awakening introduced a casual mode.

That being said, Fates is difficult even on casual mode. Especially Conquest. I blame the stinginess of the RNG, which insists on giving out level ups that refuse to cover for each type of unit's weakness. For example, I give you my Charlotte:

From my 3DS' unwieldy screenshot-taking feature 

High HP, strength, and speed, but supbar skill, defense, and resistance. This means that, more than once, Charlotte has been murdered by the Nth or so enemy that ambushes her in some corner of the map or other. Most of the time it's my fault, I admit, because I forget that I can't do what I used to do with a berserker this far into other FE games. She will be killed by some random sorcerer. She will be criticalled by some random enemy swordmaster with a Killing Edge.

I'm planning to do a Hoshido run in Classic mode soon. Jesus take the wheel. In other news, Charlotte is one of my favorites. I married her to Prince Xander despite my pseudo-incest threat last post.