Are you sitting down? Yes? Okay, great. I have never played a Pokemon game. Ever. I grew up when Pokemon began getting very popular, but never really understood the hype and thought that it was pretty childish and for some reason, my attitude was pretty stuck up when it came to Pokemon. It just looked and sounded dumb to me, but I never actually picked up a Pokemon game. I knew who the infamous Pikachu was and considered him cute, though overrated and the other characters such as Squirtle and Charizard looked really cheesy to me. What was going through my head? I have no idea.

About two weeks ago I picked up Pokemon X, deleted J's file (sorry J) and started playing with an open mind. What happened was inhabited happiness and lots of squealing. I was immediately addicted to catching new Pokemon and seeing what I could find next. I was pleased with how easy it was to get into the game and that there weren't long cutscenes of story to get through. It's very much a pick-it-up whenever you want type of game and I enjoy that I can easily put it down or pick it up.

So, my first impression is that I wish I had given Pokemon games a chance sooner and I apologize to all the kids I insulted when I said their favorite characters were weird.

I love smoothies, but the cost of going and having someone else make it for me can get quite expensive. I always saw blending to be such a chore for some reason, but recently decided that I wanted to give it a try and see if I could incorporate smoothies into my diet. I struggle with getting fruits and vegetables into my diet partially because I try to only buy and budget for what I need for particular recipes, so getting extra ingredients for something that I may not eat because I'm not hungry usually results in a waste of money. However, I do know that I struggle with eating breakfast. I am NOT a morning person. If I am going to have something for breakfast it's either because my husband was nice enough to make it for me OR it was something I could just pick up and eat like a banana or some other fruit I can just grab. Then again, since I don't usually budget for fruit and mostly focus on lunch and dinner recipes, I end up not having anything fast for breakfast and being that I'm not a morning person anyway, I tend to slug my way through the morning until I can finally feel like eating which is typically around 11AM.

This isn't healthy for me and I know it! So I am trying to change this, one delicious smoothie at a time. I dusty off my blender that gets used on rare occasions and made a trip to the grocery store with a minimum list so that I didn't overwhelm myself with too many options. Here is how I came out!

In total with taxes I spent around $17. So far I have been able to conquer a smoothie every morning for the past two mornings and I am sure I can get another week if not a little bit more out of my stash, so as far as feeling like I would spend too much, it comes out to about $1.88 a day or perhaps a little less if I stretch out my recipes a little bit more. Currently I am enjoying about a cup of froze fruit, a cup of spinach and kale, about a half a cup of almond milk or less, a half to a whole banana, and a few pieces of ice to add a little bit of water. I have yet to try the peanut butter, but I am thinking a banana and peanut butter smoothie would taste good. 

This is what my concoction looks like! It could probably be a little smoother, but I'll need a new blender for that. It tastes surprisingly delicious considering there is spinach and kale in it! But then again, spinach and kale don't really have a strong flavor so I am not sure what I was expecting. I think I will add more next time!

I have seen some recipes that call for chia seeds, protein or other additives and I am not quite ready to take that kind of plunge, but eventually I hope to venture into adding more healthy options to my smoothies. For now, I will continue to push myself to have breakfast every morning. I have struggled with not eating breakfast since I was a kid, so I have a lot of years of habit forming to undo and redo. 

Until next time! 

Lately I have been feeling overwhelmed with those normal adult things that we have to do in order to keep functioning in society. I was sitting at my desk wasting time as I do and bumped into one of my old YouTube videos where I was hauling a horde of books. Wait, what is a group of books called? A pack, a gaggle, a murder of books? A bountiful bunch of books? Anyway, I remembered how happy I was to just sit and read for hours and hours. I've been an avid reader since I was a child and have always been able to escape in the pages of a good book, but as I am ashamed to admit, it's probably been about two years since I have been able to sit down and enjoy reading. I have tried a few times and my mind would either wander or I would get distracted by something else and get frustrated with trying to finish. 

Well, I want to read a book and get back into regularly reading and occasionally reviewing books when I have the time. My brain feels slightly more like the consistency of mush from my lack of indulgence in one of my favorite pastimes. So, now the only question is what to read. I have a few books on my shelves that I haven't dug into, so I think I will just close my eyes and point and whichever one I point at I will read and report back to you, blog. I want to hold myself accountable somehow so I a putting it out here on the internet so that if I don't do it, well, I just might be embarrassed at the fact that I didn't do what I said I was going to do. 

The next time you hear from me, it should be about said book. :)

-Panders

Captain J Log Stardate 12.14.2014

Another Sunday, another lonely day in my cube. I am busier than usual due to Microsoft’s update earlier this week. However, that has not stopped me from continuing my habitual procrastination by perusing of the internet.  Whilst perusing I ran into the results of last night’s Capcom Cup as well as the first video of live Street Fighter V play. Surprisingly, I found myself getting excited by the whole thing. I say surprisingly, because I made a conscious decision to walk away from the street fighter community partly because of the ridiculousness of some of the people in it, but mostly because I didn’t have the time to practice, and didn’t have anyone local I could really play with the I like. That being said, these videos as well as a couple other things from earlier in the week (Guilty Gear Xrd demo, SkullGirls..) have reminded me that while I am definitely way past my glory days in street fighter, or any other fighting game for that matter; fighting games in general are always going to be one of my go to pleasure points.

Speaking of pleasure points, yesterday Panders and I were doing our normal Saturday morning routine which consists of us hanging out (**translation = lying down and eating) in the living room. At some point, I decided to turn on the PS4 and go through the PS Now catalogue for some entertainment. Earlier in the week I had gone through the catalogue and rented SkullGirls Encore during a spout of boredom this is completely out of the norm for me, as I have purposefully avoided the PS Now catalogue until they implement some sort of monthly or yearly subscription pricing model. For the uninitiated PS Now is a service offered by Sony, powered by Gaikai, allows you to rent and stream PSX through PS3 generation games. Anyways, I am quietly going through this catalogue while Panders is doing her social media rounds, and I come across NiGHTS Into Dreams for $1.99 for 4 hours. Seeing that neither Panders nor I were going to be moving any time soon; I buckle and start playing.
 Now growing up I have always been a Sega kid. I started off playing NES with my dad earlier on but when I first played my neighbor Martin’s Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog it was over. That being said, I was never able to get a Sega Saturn until very recently, so my only experience with Nights is having a brief time with it at my cousins house. As brief as that experience was; the experience and the feeling felt throughout has always stuck with me.  The bright colors, the cheery music and atmosphere, the feeling of just having fun is something that few games get right. I started playing and I immediately was taken out of boredom and started smiling. So much so that Panders pointed it out. Now the hunt is on to see if I can get a reasonably priced copy for my Saturn. J out.

(Yes, I am using a screenshot from Final Fantasy 14 as a picture on my Interstellar post)

Interstellar is a movie that I am happy I didn't know much about going into it. I knew vaguely of Christopher Nolan, Matthew McConaughey, but otherwise knew no plot or theme other than space. It is many things, it's dramatic, heartbreaking, thrilling, and beautiful. The story was compelling and instead of making me root for one character or another, it pushed me to root for mankind. We are always flooded with such negativity and terror in the news, a sign of our own self-destruction, and Interstellar, if only but for a little while, made me feel hopeful for what should be our common goal; survival.

This movie was exactly what I needed this time of the year, when everyone is celebrating with food and gifts, and pulling out credit cards that they can't afford. It's the time of the year when I wish I could give beyond my means and I am forced to come up with creative ideas to help spread the holiday cheer as far as I can. In the grand scheme of life and our time here on this little blue planet, there are few things that matter as much as much as we put emphasis on. It is also easier said than done, so I challenge myself and those around me to think about what truly matters in our lives. I challenge myself even more to remember this throughout my life; we are so small and so insignificant. 

This feeling of smallness is overwhelming, powerful, thought provoking, and terrifying. It is also sometimes a relief in a world filled with problems, a reminder that what pain we may be experiencing is fleeting and that our problems are smaller than they seem in the moment.

I definitely recommend Interstellar, though I promise that you don't have to get as emotional or deep into your head as I did if you don't want to, you can merely enjoy it as a space flick. A damn good one at that.

Until next time,

Captain J Log Stardate 12.7.2014 (dont judge me). Currently I am sitting in my comfy office cube reading news articles, listening to music on Youtube, and the occasional peek at Facebook to chat with Panders.
Lets get this out of the way. I hate Facebook and I hate that I check it on an almost daily basis. I hate it for the same reasons that every other internet entity hates it. The stupid timeline posts, the selfies, the ridiculous self righteous political posts created by people who have done 0% real research and are CRTL+C'ing the latest cable news talking point; you know the usual stuff. However my true gripe with Facebook is my partially forced interaction with people with whom I would prefer to never even see their silhouette ever again.

Now the easy answer to my frustration is to unfriend the people who are giving me such annoyances, or simply quit Facebook all together. Now I used the latter tact several years ago, and was spared these annoyances, with the exception of Panders showing me something crazy on her timeline every now and again. After a few years of Facebook-less bliss, at the behest of the lovely Panders, I joined Facebook again so that she could share more things with me and I could connect with the few individuals on my friend list I truly cared about. Seemingly like clockwork, I started receiving invites from distant relatives from both mine and Panders side. Some of these people are just kind of annoying but a few of them are people that have the kind of hateful views that makes me, or anyone with common decency for that matter, want to vomit. In traditional social settings one would simply avoid these people and be spared of their hate spewing, but Facebook adds an easier level of visibility to fringe corners of your social network, that would normally go unnoticed. Now its not so easy to avoid and regulate interaction with Cousin A or Aunt B to rare family get-togethers. Anyways, moving on...

Last night Panders and I were playing the PS4 version of  The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and I have just got to share how great of a job Nicalis did in developing this game with Edmund McMilon. We have been playing since the Steam release of the first Binding game and its still just as fun. One of my runs last night had me owning things with Azazel and getting so lucky with my item drops  that it elicited strong stink eyes from Panders throughout the rest of the evening. This stands to reason as she is usually not so fortunate in her runs. (Seriously, shes cursed.) Anyways, we will see how it goes tonight. J out.

Hi everyone, we're J and Panders. For the sake of continued internet anonymity and clever nomenclature, we will hereto refer to ourselves as JPanders. This is a place for us to expel our thoughts into the vast void and if there happens to be a reader, we welcome that reader to join in on our shenanigans. Of course we are aware that it's silly to say "hi, everyone" when there is nobody here and we don't intend to share this blog with anyone, as our focus is to have a place to store our thoughts and opinions for ourselves. While this first post is being written as a joint effort, we will be posting separately. Now onto real introductions!

Panders is the lady half of the team. She enjoys long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners, and -- oh, this is the wrong introduction. She is a papyrophile and as such enjoys books and smelling them. That's not weird. She is easily attracted to anything cute which sometimes distracts her and she spends hours on cat videos. Her challenge in this blog is to stay true to her non-conventional opinions.


J is the less creative male counterpart to Panders and often the sole reason the world hasn't succumb to a massive attack of cute from her. That being said, he is currently an IT  professional, life long video game aficionado, and cheeseburger junkie(seriously, somebody help him.) His challenge with this blog is to remember to write in this blog and not just drive Panders crazy with his "clever" anecdotes.