Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

Previously I reviewed T&T Layered Green Onion Pie , which felt quite pricey for just four pieces despite the weight. Then I remembered the easy paninis I was making with the cheap-great-value Pran Foods Plain Paratha  and the idea came to me to make my own "green onion pie". Get two pieces of frozen paratha ready. Each normally comes sandwiched by two pieces of plastic. Remove only one piece of plastic from each because they might thaw and become soft and sticky while you are working on them. (Slide 2) On one piece, spread your fillings. If you need to spread any sauce, this will be easier while the paratha are still frozen. (Slide 3) Cover with the other piece of paratha. Let them both thaw a bit till you can press them together. To further ensure a tight seal at the edges, you can press them down with the tines of a fork. Now you can use them right away or put them back in the freezer for later use. (Slide 4) To cook, we just seared them in a non-stick skillet without

Previously we talked about one of the common ways mobile games make money.  They create a problem and sell you the solution . Often the knee-jerk reaction is "that's not fair" or "that's a paywall", etcetera etcetera. Mostly these stances demonize making money and accuse it of being predatory. I'm not going to get into that can of worms. I do want to observe that often mobile games that create problems also offer inefficient but free solutions. Solutions that basically control your time , and the consequences of this. Let's look again at Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery and the example I showed earlier about mobile game monetization. In Slide 1 you see that I am currently in a task "Question the Suspects". I have 4h 42m 28s left to complete this task; if the timer runs out and I haven't done so, the task will fail and I have to start all over again. I have made partial progress but there's still quite a ways to go. This task requires

Previously we talked about mobile gaming and how it's very definitely a pervasive thing that "everyone" is into. Have no fear, this isn't a post to rant about gaming or shame you about how much you spend. Or what type of games you play. It's not going to be about "you". But just maybe it will reframe some aspects of mobile games in a way you didn't realize. Because mobile games sell a very different kind of product. So just to be clear, we're not talking about every mobile game or video game doing this. However, most games that are offered free-to-play do this in some form or another, in order to help recover their development cost. Even though you see a lot of cloned games, making those games -- even just making the art and sound to dress a clone up as another game -- costs money. And it's not wrong to make money to cover your costs. I'm not going to rant about that. I just want to point out that mobile games often sell you a very diffe

Have you played a mobile game? Whether you do or not, mobile gaming is very much a thing. Earthweb reports these 2022 mobile gaming stats: Key Mobile Gaming Statistics 2022 21% of Android and 25% of iOS apps downloaded are games. Games account for 43% of all smartphone users. 62% of people install a game on their phone within a week of owning it. 78% of gamers are Android users. The number of active mobile gamers worldwide is over 2.2 billion. 57.9% of the games played are puzzle games. More women spend money on in-game content than men. The mobile games’ revenue was expected to hit $76.7 billion by the end of 2020. Asia is the biggest gaming marketplace in the world. PUBG mobile is the top mobile game worldwide in terms of revenue. About 53% of internet users between the age of 45-54 years play mobile games. Only 37% of mobile gamers are men. Only 8% of mobile gamers are teenagers. But perhaps you will be more interested in the demographics -- people "just like you" are pl

I was recommended this by a friend who raved about how it turned out very nicely in her air fryer. It happened to be on sale (at a very mild discount) this week at T&T so I gave it a try. First impressions - Way, way, overpackaged. Thick box, lots and lots of plastic. Rather small, thick, and sturdy looking pies which really would probably have survived just fine with less packaging. Maybe it looks great, but this day and age when plastic is basically synonymous with pollution, it's basically inexcusable. At over $4 per package, it's basically over $1 per pie. If you look at the ingredients, it's really nothing too special and you can probably hack something similar with similar products sandwiching chopped green onion. The package shows a fantastic amount of filling but the reality (as usual with products that show you the contents only on the packaging) starkly falls short. That said, there's enough green onion to give it flavour, so you might consider that to

A few weeks ago, Real Canadian Superstore started stocking Pran Plain Paratha in the frozen food section. The price has gone up since its first apperance, but it still seems like good value for a whopping 2400 grams and 30 pieces (originally $8.99 I believe, but now $11.49). If there's one thing I really dislike about the product though, it's the excessive plastic. Each piece of paratha is separated from the others by two sheets of plastic. That seems rather excessive, especially nowadays when plastic is basically considered pollution. I think something that might be done to at least reduce the amount of plastic is to simply alternate a paratha and a piece of plastic, instead of two pieces of plastic per paratha. I do try to save them all up and reuse, such as when I make burger patties or bread dough to keep them separated in the freezer. But the sheer amount does pile up. They are very easily prepared in a non-stick frying pan or griddle, and without needing any oil. There&

Just a quick update here on Kokoro Tokyo Mazesoba . I still recommend the place for all the same reasons, but I don't recommend the Cheese Mazesoba. Went again for lunch with another friend, and I thought I'd try something different-weird. And cheese mazesoba sounded pretty weird. Except it wasn't. They certainly did not skimp on the cheese, that wasn't an issue. And when you see the picture or the bowl that's brought to you, you don't see any cheese at all. That's because the cheese is already pre-mixed into the noodles beneath, and you can see it very clearly in white stickiness all over the noodles. No skimping there. The big problem though is there simply wasn't enough cheese flavour. If you isolate the noodles you can faintly taste some cheese. Whatever they are using just isn't a very strong cheese. Which for me was not just a let-down but felt really pointless. Why have an ingredient that you're barely going to be able to taste and that

My InstantPot Duo Crisp malfunctioned within a a year. When I turn on the power, and have the inner pot inside, it showed a C6L error, which is apparently about low pressure. Since it was under warranty I contacted InstantPot and they sent me a replacement Pot. My model is apparently no longer in production (?) because they could not replace it with the exact same model, and they also declined to recover my defective Instant Pot and instructed me to dispose of it. Now that the replacement has arrived, and since InstantPot wanted me to dispose of my old pot anyway, I decided to try a fix I found on Youtube (see below). The first thing you need to know if you want to try it is the screw that holds the bottom cover secure requires a screwdriver with a star-shaped head. It seems clear to me they really don't want any owner DIY messing around, so you should probably consider that while it may be fixed, there may also be repercussions and you continue to use your InstantPot at your own

It's been a while since I bought "Christmas cookies" and I decided to pick up a box of President's Choice Luxury Biscuit Assortment. You may be interested to know what it looks like inside the package as a few things definitely caught my attention. First, the packaging indicates 13 types of biscuits, but it is clear when you open the box that each layer has only 12 slots. So how's that 13 types? Well, on the other layer, there is one slot with the same style of cookie but milk chocolate instead of regular chocolate. (see slide 1). Second, notice the upper right corner of the layer. One layer has two units put side-by-side, while the other layer has a stack of four. Although this may seem odd, nevertheless the total weight should be 1 kilogram, so it's hard to argue about any cookie "shortage". Third, the decorations are not entirely consistent, which is not terrible unless you have some OCD about things being perfect. Finally, at room temperature, th

Brought my out-of-town friend to  Kokoro Tokyo Mazesoba  and it was good! My phone was on the fritz so these pictures are from my friend's phone which captures superior pictures. They have various offerings other than mazesoba , but of course this is what they are famous for. What you get basically looks just like the pictures on the online menu. Unlike fast food burgers, what you see really is what you get. The concept is simple - lots of ingredients you mix into noodles and eat. That's it. The ingredients and sticky sauce make them all gum together so every bite of noodle has some of the ingredients. Price point is decent especially considering not just the portion you get but the amount of toppings you get compared to noodles. And in addition to noodles, you can get about one cup of rice toward the end (at no additional charge) to mix into your bowl, to get at every last bit of food and sauce. Some have chili ratings, but even at two-chilies it wasn't particularly spi

Previously we experimented with steaming rice in the InstantPot for just 1 minute and letting the residual heat and pressure cook the rice. It turns out, you can do the same with pasta! And then make it mac 'n cheese by adding cheese at the end. Put your pasta in a bowl with just enough water to cover the pasta. Add water to the InstantPot, then sit the bowl in this water bath. Use Steam setting for 1 minute. As soon as the float valve has popped up you can turn off the power. This of course indicates there is dangerously hot pressured steam in the InstantPot. You don't actually need to wait for the 1 minute Steam program to run. Wait 10 minutes then release the pressure. Or, just wait for the pressure to naturally release. If you didn't use an excessive amount of water, it's fine to leave it in the InstantPot for a long time because there won't be a lot of water left over to absorb and become soggy, and the steam in the InstantPot will ensure it doesn't dry ou

Previously, we showed you how WRONG it is to make rice directly in the InstantPot . Further experimentation has show how WRONG it is to use the "Rice" setting on the InstantPot. The InstantPot "rice" setting basically sets it to start boiling the water at a low heat, then it counts down 12 minutes on the Rice setting, then shuts off. At that point you can use the switch for rapid pressure release to open the InstantPot safely sooner and get at the rice. But is there an easier way? Absolutely. And save electricity doing it too. Of course everyone knows you can pre-soak rice. That's certainly one way to speed things up but what you don't even have to do that. Prepare the raw rice and water in the InstantPot. Either directly or using our pot-in-a-pot method  for smaller portions of rice. Set the InstantPot to STEAM for 1 MINUTE. Yes, just one minute. We're actually not even going to wait for the countdown. The Keep Warm setting is not necessary. Your rice w

My friend visiting from SFO very kindly and unexpectedly brought me a very thoughtful gift: Two condiments from TraderJoe's! As you may know, we simply don't have Trader Joe's in Canada, and no doubt she was thinking of my penchant for strange things. Maybe I haven't looked too carefully hereabouts, but I certainly dont recall these condiments on the supermarket shelves. Trader Joe's Everything but the Bagel Sesame Seasoning Blend I do rather like " Everything Bagels " and so I do like this seasoning blend. That said, my experience of Everything Bagels is that the predominant flavour is tasty onion, and this blend has the same. Definitely try to keep this one airtight as the onion flakes are crispy, and combined with the sesame seed, provides a fun crunch. I'm not sure I'd try to use this just to make everything a Everything Bagel, but instead for the onion flavour. And that said, maybe it would be cheaper (but less colourful) to just look for a

My friend re-visiting Vancouver after many years was reminded of Japadog so we stopped by the outlet at McArthurGlen Designer Outlet -- which you can skytrain to for free from YVR airport . Just get out on the correct side of the station. Otherwise you might be confused by the map inside the station. After some agonized selection (we figured we could only try two between the two of us), she settled on the Menchikatsu Dog and the not-shown-on-the-website Okonomi. Together they came to $22.24 after tax. It was interesting to get my friend's take on the Japadogs because she's Japanese. For starters, she recommended eating the Okonomi first, because she estimated it would have a subtler flavour than the Menchikatsu Dog. Okonomi Dog Inspired by the Japanese okonomiyaki pancake, what you think of this Japadog will probably depend on your idea of what an okonomiyaki should contain. If you start with a blank slate about this, then this Japadog will simply be special for having

(UPDATED article:  Even easier and with less electricity! ) Like me, you probably make rice easily in the InstantPot : Throw in the rice, throw in the water, hit the "Rice" menu and come back when it's done. Easy, right? WRONG. Because afterwards you'll have to clean up that stainless steel base once you've scooped out all the rice. You can save yourself a bit of hassle by making soup and when it's done, scrape down the steamed-wet sides and deglaze the bottom of any rice stuck there. But you'll still have to rinse out the pot, etcetera etcetera. If you make a LOT of rice each time, that's great. But for my 8 quart InstantPot, even cooking four cups of raw rice seems like a waste -- and most especially as I'm a poor bachelor who eats one bowl at a time. What you actually want to do is make your rice in a bowl. Inside the stainless steel base of the InstantPot. (Slide 1) You can see I've put some water in the stainless steel base for steaming.

This Yelp Review of the Surrey City Central Walmart demonstrates just why you should never ever sign up for a Walmart Mastercard when offered to you by the cashier in the checkout aisle. You are already done with your shopping but they'll pressure you to buy even more. There are apparently various promotions for a first-time sign-up that you have to use right away, and you may not have the time to adjust your shopping cart to take advantage of it; or you just don't need anything at the moment that would add up to the required amount. You really want to just get the brochure and read it through first, especially if you really just care about the one-time sign-up promotions. Then you can properly understand the terms and conditions and ensure that you will indeed properly qualify. And since these are one-time promotions, it's not really important exactly when you sign up for the Walmart Mastercard, especially if your current credit card already has comparable or superior ben

I have an 8 quart InstantPot with the Air Fryer lid. The manual recommends the "Bake" setting for breads at 365 F for 30 minutes, but I thought why try Air Frying it? Here's how the experiment went: Dough I used the simple bread dough I always use. You can probably get away with using whatever bread dough you normally make, but here's the recipe I use in case you're stuck for one: 5 cups flour 2 cups water + 1 tablespoon quick rise yeast + 1 tablespoon sugar I let this sit for a bit to let the yeast wake up and start bubbling, or at least not still look like dry grains 1-1/2 teaspoons salt 1/4 cup cooking oil After mixing it into a dough, I let it sit and rise for about an hour or so till it has approximately doubled in volume. Once this has happened, I scrape it out and gently knead it into a manageable shape, then cut it into eight to sixteen buns, depending on how large you want them to be. Normally I put them in the freezer and only pop them in the InstantPot

Even though I'm currently living on a rather severe budget, I still wanted something (cheap) to go with my homemade bread buns. After some thought, I settled on Nutella. Not only did it satisfy my requirements, it was also chocolate! Total winner! Of course being on a budget, I didn't just waltz down to Walmart and pick up Nutella, since name brands tends to be on the pricier side. I ended up with the Walmart brand Great Value Chocolate Hazelnut Spread  -- almost 40% cheaper than Nutella  and I wasn't going to be fussy about any difference in taste (honestly just having that much chocolate made me pretty happy). Now a third of the way through the jar, I got to thinking... What might satisfy my chocolate-on-bread craving and be even cheaper? The first thing I discovered was Walmart.ca didn't have nearly enough precise subcategories. You can't even find baking chocolate (slide 2) in its own category, for example. For the slide presented I actually ended up searching

Apparently my mom forgot what happened the last time she bought Pringles  and bought a tube on discount. Sadly, the results were just as bad: Weak cheddar flavor, tastes more lie something salty but not clearly cheddar. Chips have no potato flavor. Bitter aftertaste -- highly suspicious! They only dusted about 2/3rds of each chip with the powder, although that is probably because the undusted portion is in some kind of holder while they move all the chips to be dusted, ensuring that all chips have some flavouring powder. Even if it's on discount you can probably do better with your money. Maybe buy an unprocessed snack, like a fruit.

When my Japanese friend's children were still young, she prepared tasty rice snacks to put on standby for the hungry kids. Basically you mix rice with something tasty , pat a handful into a nice shape, and wrap it in seaweed so people eating it don't have to deal with the same sticky mess you did. Looks like sushi! The reason I remembered this is because I'm currently living alone on a tight budget, and if I were hungry I didn't want to reach for chips or other "snacks". They are expensive, of dubious dietary impact, and of course not really filling. Which would be what I need in a snack to banish any sudden hunger before a proper time for lunch or dinner. But I didn't have fancy ingredients, and devoting time to squeezing rice into nice shapes was just too much work for someone lazy like me. I even considered borrowing a ice cream scoop to shortcut the rice-shaping process, but... nah. So instead, I devised something simpler: Making them by the tray. Pr

When I ran out of Knorr Chicken Broth Mix and my local Walmart didn't have any (!) on the shelves, I contented myself with Lee Kum Kee Chicken Bouillon Powder , thinking they'd be approximately the same thing. Even the proportions to use (1 tsp per 1 cup of boiling water) were the same. Well, it turned out I was wrong. I normally use a whopping 2 tablespoons per 1 tablespoon of uncooked rice when I prepare the chicken soup version of my " TV dinner rice bowls " and the Knorr powder resulted in what tasted like instant noodle chicken soup. Whereas the Lee Kum Kee powder tasted like... SALT. Yes, it just tasted salty. Whatever flavour was flattened by the overwhelming amount of saltiness. If you follow the instructions and use 2 tsp of Lee Kum Kee per 2 cups of boiling water and just make chicken stock, it's not super salty, but the flavor is weak. If you double it, the flavor improves a bit but you can tell the saltiness will overtake it if you put in even more

There are many reasons to try to speed up cooking pasta. Maybe you're too impatient to stand around waiting for the pasta to boil properly and test it periodically. Maybe you like to step away and do something more productive while it's boiling but lose track of time. Whatever the reason, there's a lazier way to do it with less attention, at long as you remember to prep ahead of time. Then you can go straight to preparing the dish. In slide 1 you can see I'm soaking some dry pasta. The minimum time is around two (2) hours of soaking in cold/lukewarm tap water. Don't worry too much if you go overtime. If you completely forgot about it and went to sleep, don't freak out. Just drain the water and try to stir fry it gently in a non-stick pan. As long as it was swimming in water, it shouldn't all glue together. After draining the water, put some oil on them and gently mix/toss, so they don't melt together once they are in the frying pan. After two hours, yo

Black Diamond Cheddar Cheese Slices are on sale at Walmart this week, at the very low price of $1.97 per 410g pack (normally $3.88). You can get regular thickness at 22 slices per pack, or extra thick at 14 slices per pack. At this price, it is amazingly cheap compared to basically every other type of cheese you can get at Walmart. I bought two packs of the regular Cheddar, and immediately regretted it as soon as I ate a slice. The problem is the flavour is so very weak as to barely be present -- especially for a cheese that claims to be cheddar, normally a stronger-flavoured cheese. It is so weak as to be easily overpowered by pretty much anything else you are having it with, thus making it pointless to add. Even eaten on its own, the cheddar flavour is disappointingly feeble. Too bad I had discarded my receipt already. Otherwise I'd go back for a refund on the unopened pack.

This is a simple recipe to make simple yet delicious meals, on a budget, and in batches ready to heat up and serve for busy people -- whether you are single or preparing meals for the family they can just grab from the fridge and prepare themselves. Here in slide 1 we see the "deluxe TV dinner" garnished with cheap extras of vegetables, pickles, and perogies. But the bare basics are rice and cheese (slides 2 and 3). Prepare rice. I use a parboiled rice that recommends 2 cups of water to 1 cup of rice, but I found that you can get away with as little as 1 cup of water per cup of rice. You can throw virtually anything in here to flavour it a bit and make it more interesting, such as diced potatoes and carrots which will cook while the rice is cooking. In the worst case, if you are on a strict budget, just add some salt. 1 teaspoon of salt per 1 cup of raw rice is more than enough. A useful product is Knorr Chicken Broth Mix , which you can use to make broth / soup of course but

My friend treated me to lunch and All About Pho was her choice. It was the first time for both of us, and for me it was also the first time basically since Covid was a big deal that I'd gone out for lunch. I'm tempted to say the price for portion is terrible, but sadly this is what you can expect nowadays, so it is probably hovering around average. My order of regular sized Vegetarian Pho was definitely not a filling meal except that it had a lot of soup. 41. Grilled shrimp & grilled chicken on vermicelli / Bún tôm gà nướng ($15.50) Slides 1 & 2 This was my friend's order and she was very happy with the chicken and the plate overall, enough to want to come back. I'm currently on a no-shellfish low-meat diet because of my gout, so I declined to give it a taste. 62. Vegetarian Phở - served with rice noodle, bean sprout, basil, lemon & pepper, tofu, vegetarian ham,  baby corn, veggie, carrot ($12.50 Large: $13.50) Slides 3 & 4 Where's my baby corn? F

My 8-quart InstantPot with Air Fryer worked so well on crisping up raw potatoes that I wanted to try them on Walmart's Great Value brand perogies . Here are the results at the default 400 degrees Farenheit setting on the Air Fryer. I used the air fryer bin, used straight-from-the-freezer frozen perogies, did not add any oil. 5 minutes (slide 1) Did not appear sufficiently cooked. add 5 minutes (slide 2) From the same batch as slide 1, I closed the lid and added another 5 minutes of air fryer time. Since the lid was opened for inspection, there was a lot of heat loss, so this is not exactly the same as an uninterrupted 10 minute fry. The skin was still slightly undercooked but palatable. Steaming the perogies first and then air frying for 10 minutes produced similar results. 15 minutes (slide 3) This was a new batch, cooked from frozen with 15 minutes on the air fryer timer. Still too long. The skin was crisp on the outside but still had a chew to it. The filling that came out wa

I was looking for something novel for Mother's Day and came across Galina's Euro Food in Surrey and was recommended this "souffle cake" as something with a more modest price tag ($15) than most of their cakes in the freezer ($35+). Turns out, it's not very novel at all. Imagine a chocolate coated marshmellow, but the white marshmellow part is just a bit more firm. Add token amounts of cake And that's really close to what this tastes like. Maybe if you were from Europe this might be a nostalgic treat, but for me (and I do admit I'm rather picky), this is not novel enough to justify $16.50 for taste and portion size.

Using the InstantPot, I've been making easy "cheesy rice pie" side dishes. The process is what's important here, so adjust to taste. Two cups rice, four cups water This will depend on the ratio that come with your rice instructions. I use a parboiled rice that indicates a 1:2 rice-to-water ratio so that's what I use. For a 8-quart InstantPot, the thickness of the rice "slices" will be around 1.5 inches. Adjust the rice for desired thickness. One teaspoon salt This is optional. If you are going to eat it mostly straight instead of a side dish, you probably want to flavour the rice a bit. If you are going to use a lot more cheese, you can probably leave this out. Cook the rice normally in the InstantPot. When the rice is done, release the steam safely with the valve and while the rice is still steaming hot, add: A layer of cheese on top. I like to use a flavourful cheese that melts easily, such as one that already has herbs or other flavouring mixed in. If

I recently got an 8-quart Instant Pot , and if you have one too, you'll know the "pot" part where all the food goes is really quiet deep. And the food inside can of course be piping hot. I didn't want any metal utensils in case it ends up scraping and marking up the pot over time, but I also didn't want to use just any rubber spatula. But I did want a spatula-like thing to scrape down the sides, such as when I made rice. So I was really pleased to find this really long-handled spatula-like scraper at my local Dollarama . The scraping head is quite thick and sturdy, so it doesn't have the same flexibility as a rubber spatula, but it works well enough to reach all the way to the bottom easily.

  Here's an easy method for making simple, convenient, low-to-no mess handheld tortilla "pouches" with very few resources. I like it because I'm lazy. Here are the advantages: No oil needed in the pan to brown the tortilla. If you don't let the fillings touch the pan either and carefully keep them all on the tortilla, your frying pan doesn't need to be cleaned at all. If you are careful folding and eating it, you won't make a mess (so don't over-fill this pouch). What's needed: You just need one or two tortilla shells, such as the cheap 10-packs from Superstore that sometimes go on sale for $5 for two packs. And you need some fillings. I used cheap marble cheese and some cherry sauce but you can put pretty much whatever you like. Be careful not to get all excited and overfill, or it will definitely spill and ooze out, and probably scald you because it'll retain heat very well. Notice I left the center empty as a reservoir space (slide 2). This

I was looking for a fairly portable "desk" for working on my laptop that was cheap, so I shopped AliExpress and Walmart online (both of which qualify for rebates through MyPoints ). Normally AliExpress (which can take over a month to mail Canada) has cheaper prices but this time Walmart came through with a comparable price. This desk by Living Basics is basically a desk for your laptop that also sits / goes over your laptop . Overall, not recommended but sometimes beggars can't be choosers, especially when it comes to price. Here are some observations: The tray is metallic, but the legs are NOT. They are plastic and not very stable. Left to stand on their own, they cause the desk to jiggle with every keystroke. I would have preferred much more solid legs instead of a metallic table. The table itself isn't the load bearing part of the desk and didn't really need to be metallic. Neither did the optional mousepad. The legs feel wobbly and weak, so I wouldn't ac

In a Currency Market Fund, you deposit money and they trade it for you -- at the core, it's basically a day trading service. Since it is a Currency fund, they trade currencies (e.g., cryptocurrencies). They keep some of the profits but you get most of it. In the case of Volo Capital , the minimum deposit is 10,000 USD, the profit share is 70% to you, and they automatically deposit all accumulated profits weekly. I call it a "deposit" because unlike most investments, your money is not locked in. At any time you can ask them to stop trading with some or all of it and just take out what you want. They have a four-year positive-returns track record. Recent returns were: Jan 2022: +10% Feb 2022: +9% Target return is +7 to +13% per month. Minimum investment is 10,000 USD (approximately 13,000 CAD at the moment) No TFSA/RRSP Profits deposited weekly. I put in 10,000 USD in their Ethereum (ETHUSD) trading fund, and my first day of trades was 2022-Feb-25. You can see in less than

DON'T BOTHER WITH THIS APP ANYMORE  unless you like doing surveys. That's the only thing that works mostly-reliably. Everything else is prone to freezing and crashing -- even just playing music. UPDATE  (2022-July-5): The video ads that play will cause the app to freeze up and crash. UPDATE  (2022-July-1): They steadily introduced advertisements into every square inch they could find but this has apparently caused constant crashing of the app everywhere. You can't even leave it to play music without it crashing every few minutes. And now, trying to read news articles will cause an advertisement to play. If you try to skip it early to get back to finally reading the news, it will play another advertisement. And when you do finally get to see the news article, there's a good chance the app will just outright crash. Also, playing games for points did not get me any points at all. Seems like the tracking is completely broken. DON'T BOTHER WITH THIS APP ANYMORE   UPDATE

Does it pay? Short answer: NO. Long answer: Sort of Yes. We tried Mistplay and after several hours of playing various idle and semi-idle games, we earned enough to request a payout. This took over six hours, and we played three games during that time. There were accounts of Prepaid VISAs not working once received, so we opted for a $5 Walmart Canada card (slide 1). They sent an "order confirmation" which looked like a blank email (slide 2). We saved the email as a file, and opened the file in a text editor, and it did appear to contain formatted text (see appendix below) that may have resulted it it not being viewable. The key information is to watch your junk mail folder, and contact them at https://support.mistplay.com/hc/en-us/requests/new if there is no email within 48 hours. Once they started processing the redemption order, a second email arrived saying the order was being processed. Same problem as the first -- looked blank. Content basically the same as the first --