Dear Tigey,
Say hi to the first blog post written with my new keyboard. I defffinitely am not making more spelling errorrrs than usual with this keyboard, Tiggey.
Entry #109 (Sep 10 2023)
Table of Contents
Archiving my…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #105
ට Song of the Week #82
ට Writing Prompt of the Week #25
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #89
ට Dreams
Life
I officially cancelled my study abroad stuff early this week. I told my study abroad coordinator here, who then (supposedly) helped me contact Sophia and cancel things on their end. I also contacted my planned housing place, Sakura House, and cancelled my booking, explaining to them (since they wanted a reason) that my study abroad was cancelled and that I wouldn’t be coming to Tokyo this semester after all. They said my deposit of $200 or so wasn’t refundable, as I expected, but they actually offered to transfer it to a future booking for me if I would be coming back to Tokyo sometime in the near* future and would be booking something else with them. That’s cool of them.
I don’t think they really do short-term rentals though so I figured that January or February 2024 for a week would probably be out of the question, but I told them of that tentative plan anyway. They never replied!
A couple of my computer parts went out of online stock in the morning before I ordered them last Saturday/Sunday, so I had to obsess over finding suitable equivalent replacements for them, which turned out to be a good thing because, for example, I hadn’t really looked at the cases and considered things like frontal USB ports and whatnot. I eventually settled on this though:
It’s been stuck in Status: InProcess since Tuesday, with no indication as to whether this means the parts are still being shipped, the machine is already being built, or what. It better not take 6 weeks or something to build, which is what Memory Express said could happen if you picked parts from the part picker that were not in stock. I specifically swapped parts to things that WERE in stock.
Similarly, I bought a monitor on Tuesday from Canada Computers, after struggling with them because my existing account with them from a purchase a year ago was somehow half-deleted but not quite, so I could still log in to it and see a past ticket that I had filed with them, but could not see my past purchase, nor could I register a credit card to make a current purchase on. I just ended up making a new account to make the purchase. That purchase was a Gigabyte G27Q 1440p/144Hz monitor for $279 or so, $296 after taxes and free shipping, down from an alleged usual price of $329. It was picked up by Purolator on Tuesday from Ontario, and… there’s been no updates ever since.
The last major purchase I made was a keyboard, this one a Corsair K70 Rapidfire RGB something or other mechanical keyboard. It has Cherry MX Speed switches, which are pretty much slightly modified Cherry MX Red switches, faster and with less resistance than the Cherry MX Brown ones that were on my old Logitech G710+ that I was replacing. This one was from Best Buy, and was $150, $157 after tax, down from an alleged usual price of $240 or so, and at the end of the day I needed to replace the old one because it was caked in 8-year old dust and grime, the letters on many of the keys had withered away to nothing, and some of that dirt had probably started to become sentient at this point. And while I liked the Cherry MX Browns, I also wanted to test out a new mechanical keyboard type.
This keyboard came quickly, since it was available in local Best Buy stores too, and I had it in my grubby little paws by midweek. So far so good for me, although the keys are off a little bit in places just enough to trip my muscle memory up here and there, and I never realized how much I used the 6 buttons on the left side of the G710+ keyboard — well, not the buttons themselves, but the space between the buttons as a place to rest my left wrist. The keyboard is also “light” enough that a food carton lid or something that happens to be flipped open and leaning against the keyboard keys (since I often eat right at my computer desk) will trigger it far more easily than on the previous keyboard., Then again, I’ll get used to it, just like I’m now completely used to my oversized Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra phone.
My least favourite thing about the new keyboard though is that the buttons are raised like so in the front:
Dust is so going to build up there. So easily. Why would they leave the front so exposed like that? I can already see dust building up there. I expected a “front rim” there, like the Logitech G710+ had, but this one doesn’t have anything like that, probably to make their consumers have to spend money on buying a new keyboard sooner rather than later, as they obviously aren’t meant to last.
Best Buy also put a Hello Fresh ad with two “11 free meals” cards outside the keyboard box but inside the shipping box that the keyboard box came in, which I thought was really strange. Now we’re getting junk mail in our packages too?
Anyway, hopefully my monitor arrives by the end of next week. It better arrive. I doubt the computer will arrive that soon though, it’s probably going to take another week after that. I’m looking forward to it though, especially the jump in graphics cards — I’m upgrading from an EVGA NVIDIA Geforce GTX 970, which was a September 2014 card — I upgraded to it partway into my computer’s lifespan in August 2016 when my computer was already about 3 years old. It’s lasted all the way until now, and allowed me to skip over the GeForce 10, 20, and 30 series all the way to a 4070, which is an April 2023 card.
Talking about delayed shipping, the AncestryDNA kit, which I ordered two Fridays ago (on August 25th), still has not arrived. It claims 7-10 business days, but the 10th business day was this Friday, Sep 08. Taps foot.
This week has been fairly busy anyway, partly due to work and the first week of University classes, and partly due to some prep I have been doing as part of the upcoming move to a new computer. I did a bunch of CD scanning this week, and backed up several things as well — some Discord channels and servers using a really neat and simple program called DiscordChatExporter (local), and some stuff from Shiarapedia (local), the wiki site named after me that Jah created for our friends’ use some time ago. Well, Jah did most of the backing up, but I wandered in to take some screenshots as well.
(He also created the logo for the page a long time ago, which I will post here for posterity.)
(Isn’t it great?)
While spring-cleaning and backing up several of my Discord servers, I also backed up, then stepped down from, the /r/tipofmytongue Discord server, where I had been a moderator of for over 4 years. I was force-volunteered into the role a long time ago soon after the server, a Discord counterpart of the corresponding Reddit group (subreddit), was first launched. While it was good and I liked some of the people that I met there, it was also a constant (although very low) source of stress and I had no intentions of being an absentee mod like our admins were and like I’ve seen in various other places in the past, so I had mentioned from a couple years ago that I would be stepping down to go overseas to study in Japan.
And unlike my workplace, they actually did proceed with hiring a couple of new moderators so we two existing mods could train them up and get them comfortable with the system, so I was myself comfortable leaving when I was even though I ended up not going to Japan. I never did tell them that it was cancelled, since that was a last-minute thing, I just proceeded with my step-down plans and closed the book on that chapter of my online life. I also left the Reddit moderator team, though I was only there as a liaison to check modmail anyway.
Due to work and waiting for packages, I only visited Mom at the hospital once this week, on Monday, Labour Day itself, before the work week and semester actually started. I brought her some potato soup and some scrambled eggs to chew on. She has a couple more weeks of rehab and then she’ll get to finally go home, assuming everything goes well.
I had signed up for a class late last week, Introduction to Korean Culture, though I haven’t actually attended it and plan to drop it for free before Sep 18th. I have browsed the class site for it but haven’t had the urge to actually do any classes this semester, what with everything else happening (or not happening) in life. I did discover that a side effect of this is that it activated the student pass on my Arc Card though, so it didn’t actually charge me for transit when I went down to see my parents on Monday. Oops. And I don’t have any option to force it to NOT use that if I want to swipe my card, where all my transit money is, and which I have to do to go visit my Mom half the city away. So I’ll probably drop the course sooner rather than later, though I’m hoping to get and read a couple more lecture slide decks first.
Along those lines, I barely took any pictures this week since I didn’t really go out much either, especially since there were smoke advisories for part of the week. I did take a picture that I liked while out for groceries midweek though:
Fancy clouds, there’s probably a cloud giant living in a floating cloud castle on top of it.
While out late last week, I also ran into someone walking confusedly around the neighbourhood, who then stopped me and asked me if there was a hotel nearby. I paused and thought a while and said no, not really, although there was one several streets to the east. He sighed and nodded and said he had seen that one, but was hoping that there was one closer to Southgate Mall, and after a bit of a chat he mentioned that he was originally from Morocco, and was currently living in Whitecourt, a town about 2 hours to the northwest of Edmonton. He was currently in town for some sort of licence or road test thing. It was a pleasantly random encounter and I wished him well before we parted ways.
A neighbour, who introduced herself as Layla (I think), knocked on my door early in the week and asked me for help for the laundry machine — funnily, it was almost a year (less about two weeks) since the last time a neighbour asked me for help with the laundry machines. They’re so cumbersome. For some reason the rental office had issued her a washing machine card instead of asking her to use the phone app, and the card only works on the washer but not the dryer, so her wet clothes were stuck as she tried to figure out how to make the dryer work.
I knew this as the old card that we used to use before they installed these new machines also only worked on the washer but not the dryer, I guess the rental office lost that institutional knowledge at some point. Anyway she had already installed the app but had not yet figured out adding money to it and everything, so once I explained it to her, I told her that I also needed to do my laundry anyway (I was actually waiting for her to complete to start mine), so I started her dryer cycle with my app, then put my dirty clothes in the washer, and she started my washer cycle with her card. Voila, problem solved!
I also renewed my lease for another year this week. I mentioned the laundry card incident to them but I don’t think they really took it to heart. In addition, I had a heated exchange with the apartment manager about my noisy (and lying) neighbours this last weekend, but nothing more seems to have come from it yet. They’re still occasionally noisy but I plan to continue being a thorn in both their and the rental company’s sides until they get evicted or their lease gets discontinued. The noises really started when I came back from my trip in November last year, so hopefully it means that their one year lease is nearly up and hopefully they won’t be renewing (or won’t be allowed to renew) it after. Who knows though.
One of the ladies in the rental office who I am friendly with inquired as to my extension, and I told her that my study abroad was cancelled. She was delighted at that and called out across the room, “Good, you’re not allowed to move out!” Heehee. I plan to next year though. But who knows what the future brings.
Suruga-ya is doing yet another free shipping promotion sale, with a 25% markup on everything (up from 10% in the first sale, and 20% in the second sale, and equivalent to 25% in the third sale). The difference between the third sale and this fourth one is that the base cheapest price has been raised to 500 yen, or just under $5 CAD, so I’m glad that I got most of my super cheap CD purchases out of the way in the first and second sale. I had bought 35 CDs from anywhere between 286 to 495 yen in the first two sales before this floor bump. While I didn’t partake in the third sale, I’m definitely going to participate in this fourth sale, since Dad has a CD that he really wants and I might as well pick up a few others to try out and to scan, since there’s a 500 yen surcharge fee whether I buy one CD or twenty.
The way the shops work, they have both a .jp version of the site as well as a .com one, and I can look up the same item on both shopfronts to see what the exact markup with. This was how I discovered that the markup was 25% with a floor of 500 yen, and sampling CDs on both sites gave me a table like this:
.jp price > .com price (+ increase / +% increase)
260 > 500 (+240 / 92%)
380 > 500 (+120 / 32%)
400 > 500 (+100 / 25%)
450 > 563 (+113 / 25%)
500 > 625 (+125 / 25%)
600 > 750 (+150 / 25%)
730 > 913 (+183 / 25%)
780 > 975 (+195 / 25%)
900 > 1125 (+225 / 25%)
1500 > 1875 (+375 / 25%)
4200 > 5250 (+1050 / 25%)
36000 > 45000 (+9000 / 25%)
2696000 > 3370000 (+674000 / 25%)
(Plus shipping, when a free shipping promotion isn’t running. EMS is the way to go for that too, never DHL or Fedex trash shipping.)
So the “optimal” price for CD purchases where I would be “paying as little overhead as possible” would be CDs that cost 400 yen on the .jp site to begin with, hah.They have a LOT of CDs on sale at the “floor price” though, and that floor price is 260 yen over at the .jp site, and for the .com sales, the base price has gone from 286 (10% markup) on the first sale, to 312 (20%) on the second, to 325 (25%) on the third, to now a base price of 500 yen.
I do know from previous experiences though that the shipping cost normally averages to somewhere around 250-400 yen “per CD case”, depending on the actual shipping method used and the bulk amount of CDs being bought at once (more CDs tend to be a lower cost per CD, but not always) and the size of the CDs or any attached bonuses. So it’s still sort of not that bad, as long as the free shipping promotion is active, but anything too expensive is not worth the 25% markup despite free shipping, and if I were going to make such a purchase above the “sweet spot” of somewhere around 1600 yen (400 markup) or so, or even outside the 300 to 800 yen range (200 markup) if I wanted to clamp down on the parameters of the “sweet spot” even further, I might as well make it via a Japan shopping proxy like Buyee or Remambo instead.
Anyway, Dad‘s CD costs 900 > 1125 yen. Well within my comfort range with the free shipping offer on top of it, so I’m glad we waited an additional week. I also like browsing music CDs and hunting for bargains and looking songs and albums up on YouTube and such from the comfort of my own home — I’ve found some songs I really like while doing this already.
I bought some JVC earphones from Amazon that should be identical to the ones I bought from Tokyo near the end of my Kyoto Ritsumeikan trip back in May/June. I *really* liked them, but the current ones I had lent to Mom when she got admitted to the hospital, since they not only attached to the USB-C port of the phone without any extra connectors but also came with a good microphone attached. I don’t plan to ask her to return them, so I bought a new pair for myself instead for pretty much the same price.
I had placed the order last week, but they were listed as “out of stock” on Amazon when I actually placed the order, and I was told that they would only charge me once they got more stock in. Apparently that happened this week, and the availability got updated from “Out of Stock” to an estimated delivery date of “Thursday, September 28, 2023 – Thursday, November 2, 2023”. That was still a rather wide margin. This Saturday though, on Sep 09, I got a shipping notice that said that it was on its way and the estimated delivery date for it was Sunday, September 10 instead. It really got bumped up. Hopefully the product is legitimate and in perfect working condition (it’s basically the same price as the one I bought in store.)
Games
I played more Streets of Rogue with Satinel this week. SoR became my 50th game on Steam to hit 100 hours playtime last week, though it’s around 130 hours now and I’ve finally just about completed all the challenges in the game (except a timed one that I don’t care for). I’d like to make a game inspired from this someday. Outside of that, and our usual games of AMQ, which had a Nexus (roguelike mode) update this week, we also had one evening of Risk of Rain 2, which felt weird coming back to after so long away.
Outside of cooperative play, it looks like I spent a little bit of time this week on Yamafuda, Creeper World 4, and Our Adventurer Guild, though not much time was spent on any of them. I also tried Dark Messiah of Might and Magic for a little bit, but it gave me motion sickness, so I dumped it after a night.
I’m looking forward to my new computer arriving though, at which point I’ll probably swing back through a host of earlier games that I never got to play properly, or that lagged a whole lot, to see how they hold up on a computer that isn’t 10 years old.
Plushie of the Week #105 – Puchimaru x2
Meet Puchimaru! We have two of them, one in my stash of plushies and one with Jon and Kel in the family stash. Which by the way will be reunited after many years if I ever move back in with the family.
All I know about this plushie besides the pictures is that, assuming of course that they were bought at the same time, they were acquired by Kel in January 2019 when she was over in Taiwan. Each one costs 45 yuan (元), according to the price tag that’s still on one of them.
My puchimaru was the model for this top picture:
And this front one in a begging pose:
And this back one, which also shows one side of the tag in hiragana — it says Puchimaru:
And here’s a belly picture of my puchimaru, with the other side of the tag visible:
The other puchimaru still has his other tags attached, so it was the model for the following two pictures
This one shows one side of both tags::
And this one the other side:
It’s apparently a mascot toy from a company named Amuse, and the price tag sticker even has the shop name on it — transcribing it shows that the price was a special offer (特價品) from a place named Xiangliang Stationery Wholesale Plaza (享亮文具批發廣場). Which means it was probably sold from a shop called Xiangliang Stationery Paradise (local) (享亮文具樂園), of which there are several branches around Taipei City. Neat.
Song of the Week #82
Title: Shiawase
Artist: Omoinotake
Album: Horimiya: The Missing Pieces OST (2023)
The current anime season is coming to an end, and the best show of the season to me by far is the second season of Horimiya, which was supposed to just be a bunch of side stories, but is so good that it overshadows and overpowers the first season. It’s extremely wholesome and funny and just snugly satisfying in a melancholic sort of way, as even though each episode itself is great, the characters are progressing toward the end of their high school life at about the same pace as us viewers are progressing toward the end of the season. The wheels of time inexorably rolling on toward an end that we (might) wish we could stave off for a little bit longer, since there are so many more stories that could be told. So many little things between friends that mean so much in the moment and that nurture the bonds between them but are then lost in the big tidal wave of time that passes through everyone’s lives and washes away all but the largest rocks.
Anyway, besides being the best show of the season, I also consider its opening song the best song of the season. It’s a CD single that I definitely want to pick up at some point, although it apparently only released earlier this week in Japan. I seldom like anime songs sung by male singers, to the point that there’s only 1 or 2 currently in my top 40 anime songs list, largely because I either find them too generic or too shouty. There are exceptions though, and this is one, as it strikes a perfect melancholic and wistful tone for me, and I thought that the anime opening video version pairs particularly well with it, especially around what I consider to be the best part of the song, the second half of the chorus from about 0:58 onwards where it cuts to the montages of the girls with their hair blowing in the wind, until the end of the clip.
Writing Prompt of the Week #25
This week’s writing prompt reads:
“What event(s) brought you closer as a family?”
It’s hard to outsell Mom getting a stroke, but that’s a current event and not a past one so it’s hard to talk properly about it since we don’t know the full outcome yet. The family coming together was a great thing to see though, especially Dad, who has spent every waking moment by Mom‘s side, to the point that I got a warning email from Backblaze saying that his computer had not been contactable for over a month for backups. Kel also spent a lot of time with Mom before she left to go overseas, and Jon has also been a soldier, more or less driving Dad and Kel everywhere that they need to be around his own work responsibilities. If anything, I’m the one who has done the least for her.
This is kind of a non-new answer though, so I wanted to also touch on the next question in the book because I can’t give a full answer to it myself.
How well do you know your extended family–cousins, aunts and uncles, etc.–list their names, how you’re related, and their roles in your childhood.
I’ve also largely covered all that I want to with this question, way back in My Diary #022. They never played a huge role outside of my paternal grandparents, I only really ever met them around Chinese New Year, which is coming up in a few months again.
Hm. I wonder if I can time a holiday to be in Asia when that rolls around this year. Feb 10 2024 would be right around the events that I would like to hit in Taiwan and Hokkaido. Or maybe my parents will insist that I stay, especially if Kel is coming back to visit then too. I’d like to see an East Asian or South-east Asian country all decked out in CNY festivities though. Hm.
Lastly, this question:
Describe your first big disappointment.
This is another one where I’ve already more or less covered it, it would have to be either the migration to Canada in 1999, or the Sentosa Chalet incident, depending on how you define “big” exactly.
Memory Snippet of the Week #89
I wrote two weeks ago that I was thinking about an Item of the Week segment, and I eventually figured that instead of starting up another new segment (insert eyerolls here), I could do something like that in Memory Segment instead if I felt the urge to on any given week, expecially since Memory Snippet itself was borne from the old Picture of the Week segment anyway, so its a mishmash of pictures and memories already.
This week, I wanted to leave pictures of my old Sony Walkman. Boy this thing is old. I had it when I was in Singapore, and I used it primarily to listen to FM radio there — there was no real need for AM radio in Singapore since Singapore was so small, and I never really had cassette tapes to use in it anyway. I did continue to use it once we came to Canada, but here it was more of a split between FM and AM radio. These days, of course, it’s pointless — there’s a phone app or internet radio station for everything.
Anyway here are some plushie-style photos of it.
Front:
Back — there used to be a clip here that could be turned to either side and locked in place. Wherever that was, it’s fallen off now.
Top:
Side:
Bottom (cassette slot lid opened for balance):
Underside of the cassette slot lid. Inmate serial number 1426868!
Inside of the cassette slot — there’s a foam thing in it still intact and present after all these years:
The last side, where the battery slot is. I found two old batteries in there and gingerly tossed them away. The walkman hasn’t been used since before I moved in here ~11 years ago.
This Sony FM/AM Walkman.. or rather, “Radio Cassette Player”, has a model number of WM-FX123. The stuff on the front says that it comes with anti-rolling mechanism, mega bass, and 13 hours battery life. The back side says it uses a battery supply of 1.5Vx2 IEC, JIS R6 Size AA or equiv.
Dreams
Sep 04 2023
- I dreamt that I was a tank class in an MMO, and was taking about five of my friends through a zone connected to a school where there were several boss monsters that could be found and fought. I had already beaten all of these bosses in a previous dream, so I had a full set of gold-rarity gear from them, but we lacked a healer and so it was dangerous and I rapidly got flattened by the first boss because I didn’t cycle my skill rotations in time and took too much damage from it.
- I implored my team to run away while my character respawned but they didn’t really listen to me and so they all got flattened too. We came back to try again afterwards and I made sure to cycle my damage shield (which could be case once every 10 seconds or so) to coincide with the boss’s most powerful attack, while cycling my taunt skill on her in between.
- Eventually, we took down that first boss, and a piece of golden-rarity armour popped up for the party to roll on. Milumbar won the roll, rolling a 10 on the ingame random number generator, beating out Gibbs (who also rolled a 10) and Jah and several other people. He was surprised and unexpectedly happy about this, a stark contrast to his usual bad luck. He said he never tended to win any gear in games against other people. We then moved onwards through the zone to look for another boss.
Sep 05 2023
- Snippet: I remember taking an elevator down from inside a fast food restaurant to a train station two storeys beneath it, it was a shortcut that led right to the platform where I could catch a train in the direction of my home. Later on in the dream though, I came back to the same place with someone, and told them that there was an elevator here that was a shortcut down to the platform. I was a bit ahead of them, so I went down in the elevator first with another person, but the elevator took a lot longer than usual, before finally ending up in some weird factory in the slums where a male and female couple boarded the elevator. The other person looked as confused as I was, and asked where the train station was, but the woman pointed to a sign above the buttons on the door that said that this was a horizontal elevator-train with 5 stations that went through a tunnel, and that the train station exit was in station 4, which was the fast food restaurant that we had boarded from. I was in no hurry anyway so I shrugged, and we took the elevator-train back to where we started.
Sep 07 2023
- I was on a public bus headed to school, but it seemed that I dozed off on the bus and didn’t wake up until I had missed my stop. I immediately rang the bus stop bell, and we just so happened to be passing by a Singapore-style drain canal with a bus stop right at that moment so the bus driver asked if I wanted to get off at that stop or the next one. I said this one, so he let me off there.
- The canal was next to a couple of highrise HDB blocks which looked familiar, and there were a couple of shops of some kind in the void deck of the nearest block, so I went there. To my slight surprise I met up with several other people headed to school there, a group of about four people that I didn’t know but was on decent enough terms with, as well as a much younger than normal Dad and Mom. I wondered why everyone was late, then checked my wristwatch — I had thought the time was 8:25 am, which would have meant that we were all late, but it was apparently 5:40 am, which meant that we were all still really early.
- The shop we were at had a place for eating, and then on the other side of a wall there was a large fish tank with some fish and a pagoda inside. Mom and Dad were standing over that, and I went over to see what they were doing. Apparently the top level of the pagoda had a timer and would eventually burst, releasing piranha and other irritating fishes that would sting whoever put their hands inside the water. I asked if the top level of the pagoda could be removed early or something, so that we could scoop all the fishes out, and they said that they had another plan and had carried this out plenty of times already.
- Dad unscrewed the lid on a little bottle, and poured a bunch of spices into the water near the top of the pagoda. This was evidently chilli spice, and the spice was hot enough to be deadly to those little fish, whereas it was little enough that the spice would also eventually dissipate among the water. Mom put a hand in and spread the spice around the water near the top of the pagoda, and put her hands on the top of the pagoda, and yanked on the roof, which came apart and out of the water with a little pop.
- A swarm of little fishes came out, mostly piranha, but also a tiny, tiny shark that was maybe about 15 cm long, and some other creatures that I didn’t recognize. They panicked and swam in all different directions, but the spice overcame them all and they all soon died — the shark was the last one alive and went belly up in the water. Mom and Dad then scooped all that up.
- With the remaining water in the tank, Dad suddenly produced a large, headless, white chicken, like one can find at the supermarket, all ready for cooking. He handed it to Mom, then pulled out a huge cardboard box cover and slid that diagonally into the tank. Mom put the chicken into the tank as well, where they had it marinade among the chilli water for a few seconds, before Dad pulled out the cardboard box cover, and the chicken that had been resting against the cover in the water came out together with it.
- They repeated this several times — I had no idea where they were getting or storing the chickens and this large cardboard cover, but Jon and Kel were here and seated in the food area chatting at a table, so I called them over and had them look at what Mom and Dad were doing. A couple of our unknown acquaintances also came over to watch.
- Once they were done, I took Jon, who was somewhere around 5-8 years old, to a nearby shop as I wanted to get him a present. This was a little slice of what seemed like a supermarket, and we passed by the corner of a shelf selling Christmas toys. I pulled off a bear and asked him if he wanted that, he said no at first but then took one look at the bear and decided that he did want it instead. I also looked at the bear — he was made out of knitted yarn and had black beaded eyes — and asked Jon what he wanted to name the bear. Jon was cradling another plushie which was slightly smaller then the bear, so I laid the bear down on top of the other plushie to envelope it and commented that the new bear was acting like a Blanket for the smaller plushie, obviously intending or hinting for that to be its name.
- After the shop, we all went to school together, even though Kel and Jon didn’t go to my school. Mom and Dad did though, and they were one year ahead of me. The classrooms were arranged by inverse grade level, so my 2nd year classroom was on the 2nd level of the school building while Mom and Dad‘s 3rd year classroom was on the ground floor of the building. I followed them to their class.
- When I arrived, the scene changed again, and although we were still “in school”, I arrived at a long, rectangular arena instead of a classroom. There were a couple of friends without real-life counterparts that I recognized on my side of the arena, and there were walls and obstacles scattered around on our side as well as on the other side of the room. Everyone was rather chill and there was no actual official match going on, and a couple of the people on our team seemed to be studying from a book anyway, but the two teams occasionally took potshots at each other with guns.
- I took up my hand pistol and actually put a bit of effort into my shooting, and eventually took out all four members of the opposing team. They were replaced with another team, and I started shooting them again, only to find that my pistol had run out of bullets. I asked one of my teammates for help, and he went to the side wall of our end of the arena, where there were a pile of unopened and half-open boxes of bullets. He tossed me a box of pistol bullets. In the meantime I had swapped my gun for something that looked like a black assault rifle, but still acted like a pistol, and fired pistol bullets to boot. I reloaded the gun and took out the new team as well.
- The next replacement wasn’t a team at all, but there were two Indian women with stage lights shining down upon them, one was dressed in red robes and one in green robes and either one of them was interviewing the other or both of them were being interviewed by someone else offstage, I was too far to tell or hear them. I did know that one of them was involved in an incident which involved making fun of or bullying either a friend or my parents, and I inquired around on my side if I should take pot shots at them as well, but decided not to as they were unarmed, obviously in the middle of some sort of recording, and I couldn’t be sure what actually happened in the incident — whether they were the bullies or the ones that tried to stop the bullies.
- I sat around for a while, contemplating target practice on a wooden target board that I could see propped against the far wall of our side of the arena from where I was leaning against, next to the pile of bullets. However, the person who had got me the bullet refills was also near there, and I decided that it was too risky and likely broke some sort of school rule to practice shooting irresponsibly.
- Eventually, it was time for some sort of school test, so I went out of the room with a partner and friend. He went ahead of me, and I went up the stairs to our level after he had already done so. After the stairs and before our classroom though, I saw a door with an optional boss in it to fight that would give us bonus marks, so I opened the door and tried to solo the boss myself. This boss was also a mystical Indian woman, and she gamely took all the shots that I fired at her — after reaching about 25% health though, my bullets stopped doing anything to her health bar and I ran out of them, at which point she smiled and started to attack me.
- Dodging and running about the small room, I nonetheless must have gotten hit a few times, as one of my defensive mechanisms called Avengers triggered, summoning three female valkyrie who looked like blonde anime girls with large white wings. They looked confused for a moment, then attacked the Indian woman, and although they didn’t do much damage to her, they acted as a diversion. I noticed that my gun had regenerated a few bullets, so I fired it into her back as she dealt with the valkyries, which took her down to about 10% of her health.
- She transitioned into her final stage, her form shimmering in the air, and I noticed that there was a rotating panel around her neck that exposed a vulnerable robot-like interior if I could time my shot so the bullets went into that rotating panel. It was easier to do from behind her, but she soon turned to face me anyway after finishing off the valkyries. I still managed to do it though, and eventually staggered out of the room, tired and wounded but victorious.
Sep 10 2023
- I was at home with Dad and Jon, and while the other two were in bed in the morning, I was looking out a large glass window in the front hall of our house when I saw a huge alien spaceship float down from the sky and start wreaking havoc on the surrounding neighbourhood. Little alien spaceships floated out of the large one and started doing battle with friendly green defensive spaceships that were piloted by humans and came out of nowhere too, but it looked like the aliens were slowly winning, and they sucked up the remannts of destroyed ships as well as whatever people it came across.
- Dad was sleeping and it was difficult to wake him up, but I woke Jon up and had him take a look at the scene outside too. I tried to take some pictures of this with my phone to send to Kel, but for some reason the large spaceship would not show up on my phone at all, though the little alien and human piloted ones both did.
- Later on, we were on a bus fleeing from this and trying to get to the hospital where Mom and Kel were, which was probably safer. Most of the people on the bus strangely didn’t seem particularly concerned about the scene though, though some could see it, and after doing some research I finally found out that the whole thing was an Augmented Reality hoax planted by the maker of the camera app on our phone, and those who had installed it were somehow able to witness the whole thing (even without using the phone), but the proof that they were the ones who had done this was simply that it made no other sense that the camera would not be able to capture the large spaceship on photo when it could otherwise capture the small ones.
- Once we were at the hospital, I checked myself in to a room as well in order to use their washroom. The washroom area was shared but there were individual bathroom stalls for males, females, and “queer”. There wre two cubicles marked queer with really small wooden toilet bowls, about half the size of regular ones, and just for the sake of novelty alone I tried one of them. Also, on the way out, I was told that I had skipped some post-surgery tests when I had my surgeries years ago, and so the doctors wanted to run them even though I felt like it was pointless to do them over five years after the fact.
- Lastly, there was a scene where I was underwater and floating around at the bottom of the ocean, and the developer section of my work team was apparently in charge of the infrastructure on the sea bed there. As part of repairs, one of them had made a little tear in the sea bed, and the ocean was very slowly draining into a neverending void beneath the sea bed through that tear. I told Ronnie this and he nodded and assigned someone to work on fixing it.