Dear Tigey,
We’re off to Animethon this week! We haven’t been there since 2019. Thanks to the pandemic. Also, this is the first time you’ve left the house since we returned from Singapore.
Entry #151 (Aug 11 2024)
Table of Contents
Concerted…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #146
ට Song of the Week #123
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #130
ට Dreams
Life
DHL was supposed to deliver all five of my packages on Tuesday, and they delivered four of them — the four CDs that I had ordered from Amazon to get a discount on the one CD that I wanted, but each of which was sent in a separate package on the same day and that arrived at my house on the same day anyway. (What was the point of dividing them into four boxes again?)
The guy who delivered the first four checked his van for the 5th when I showed him the tracking number but there was nothing there. The fifth one was marked as out for delivery all day, but never arrived, and late at night I received a notification that the address on the package was wrong and undeliverable and I needed to give them a new address and wait two days for them to try delivery again.
I was livid — because this package had been caught up in customs and DHL had made me pay something like $25 in customs fee for it (come to think of it — I might have avoided customs on the Amazon stuff because they were divided into four boxes so each individual cost was low). The actual customs fee was only $7.27 though, the rest of the fee was DHL being a bloodsucking vampire of a company and charging exorbitant customs helper fees that were 3 times the fee itself. And then they failed to deliver the package, lying that the address was wrong. See, their greed did them in here, as part of me paying customs and being angry at those fees meant that I also downloaded the receipt for the customs package, which also included a picture of the delivery invoice which CLEARLY stated my address, phone number, and even email address. They had it all, it was correct, and I had proof of that, so it was obvious that someone along the way had messed up and sorted the package into the wrong van, or whoever the driver was got lazy and never finished their round.
I complained bitterly to a DHL email address about this on Tuesday night, and to their credit they apologized and made sure the package got sent out the next day (instead of waiting two days) and got to me safely in the end. The same guy who delivered the first four came to me for the fifth.
In the meantime, that toothpaste from the Polish company still hasn’t arrived, although I know that they sent it since I had the tracking number for it (that ended at Poland Post mailing it out over a month ago now). I’m not expecting it to arrive anymore and that’s fine I guess, I can always reorder it and use a slightly more expensive shipping option than “registered letter” next time! Or not reorder it.
I use the burners on my electric stove in the kitchen a lot, and I was surprised when I learnt that one of the four burners had stopped working on Wednesday. Not sure how that happened, as I had used it just the day before, but thankfully the other three still worked so I put in a work order for someone to come take a look at it. Midwest‘s work order system is very weird, they give you a huge box to type in your problem but you’re actually limited to only 72 characters for your issue description. Either way, someone apparently came in on Friday afternoon when I was away at Animethon, since I never heard back from them but noticed that it had started working again by Saturday afternoon.
It stormed very hard last Sunday night, Aug 04, which caused for some really nice wet floor pictures of the surrounding peasant lands from my queen’s balcony.
Partially egged on by Jah, I also went to try to capture some flashing lightning for him, and after about an hour of on and off attempts, I captured this:
Wild!
One of the interesting things about living in this apartment is that I have a nice view of the carpark below me too, and although in my old apartment I did see what looked like a security guard occasionally walk by in the grassy quad area in the middle of the apartment complex, I only saw that happen two or three times in the 13 or so years that I was there, so I always felt like there was no security actually patrolling around the complex at night even though there was supposed to be.
After living here for a couple months though, I’ve seen a certain white car with some sort of text on the side of it go into the parking lot beneath my balcony, and circle around it before heading out again, several times now, and I suspect that this highly suspicious behaviour is actually part of the “security patrol” route of whoever they contracted to keep the place safe. I even managed to capture a poor photo of the car this week:
It comes in from the top right each time, makes a loop around the middle island following the yellow arrows, and then exits via the top right again. So that’s probably a security guard, or someone quietly canvassing the cars. I haven’t yet managed to catch any criminals in the act of breaking into any cars though.
Also after living here for a couple months, I’ve also ruminated on how nice it has been to have more or less a quiet house again, and how I am usually able to hear myself think and calmly relax now. It’s not that I don’t hear noises at all, or that my neighbours are never noisy, but it’s no longer a constant thing eating away at me every day from dawn to midnight. And that’s wonderful.
It’s probably unrelated, but in the past two weeks or so my left ear (which is over 95% deaf and essentially just a source of light tinnitus and nothing else) has been occasionally popping a bit with staticky noises, as though a sound is trying to break through or something (as I recognize the static pop as what I hear when I try to blast music into that ear at maximum volume via a single earphone). It’s weird, rare, and not very noticeable most of the time, but it comes in streaks, and also doesn’t correlate to actual loud noises in my environment, so I’m not sure what’s up there. It’s also not related to the Animethon concerts, as it started happening long before that event.
There weren’t as many good sky or sunset pictures or scenes this week, it seemed that the sun herself wasn’t even out during the evening for half the week. But here’s a sky picture from Tuesday, August 06 at 8:33 pm:
And the sun blaring out from behind the clouds at 7:18 pm the following day, Wednesday, August 07:
Nature offered this somewhat nice sky duality on Wednesday, August 07 at 9:18 pm, with rain on the left and half a sunset on the right.
And here’s half a sun, a quarter of a moon, and an airplane flying overhead, on Friday, August 08 at 9:12 pm.
Last but not least, it was a short week at work this week, with Monday off as a statutory holiday. I also took Friday off, and then went to Animethon, and instead of dumping the pictures and stuff from that here, I gave it a separate page of its own.
Games
This week, I felt rather restless and could not really commit to a game. I bounced around a couple games, finishing a mission in Mass Effect Legendary Edition, built part of a little town in Necesse, gather a few more gems in Tactical Nexus, wandered around a little in both Zenless Zone Zero and Honkai: Star Rail, and helped my main streamer and another person from his community get the PVP achievement in XCOM 2, which involved some shenanigans (local) since the multiplayer mode was shut down several years ago.
Between the running around waiting for packages, the Animethon event that took up most of my weekend, watching my main streamer, and a few scanning/uploading projects that I was working on, it didn’t really leave much time for any other games though. Or rather, I felt like I was always waiting on something for the entire week and could never really relax and turn off to just bury myself in a game.
So to pad this section a bit, here’s the northern and southern halves of the start of a town that I made in Necesse:
Fancy, hey?
Plushie of the Week #146
This was the plushie that most caught my eye when I was visiting Kel‘s house in Guangzhou during my trip to Asia earlier this year. Isn’t this plushie so interesting? It’s a red ghost with an amphora of wine strapped to his back! How weird! It’s strange and interesting like I’d expect a Japanese youkai (ghost/demon) to be, except it’s Chinese.
Some cursory searching of its tags and the plushie itself online points to this being from Gansu Provincial Museum in Lanzhou, China. One of his tags also mentions something about a Plush Museum, which I assume is there as well. The creature itself is apparently a salamander or newt — the name of the doll, 鲵娃娃, translates to Salamander/Newt Doll and apparently is a reference to the patterns on the jug itself.
Anyway, Kel did not visit that museum to get the doll, rather one of her students got it for her as a gift, from student to teacher, somewhere between November 2023 and January 2024. The doll adorned the display stand by Kel‘s television when I went to visit her, and I’m sure will make its way back to Edmonton sooner or later. And Tigey and his merry crew will feast on aged wine.
Pictures of the nameless plushie and his tag follow. Front:
Back (and amphora):
Tag 1 front:
Tag 1 back:
Tag 2 front:
Tag 2 back:
Tag 3 front:
Tag 3 back:
That third tag is a certificate of authenticity thing, it leads to this site (local), now preserved for posterity’s sake. We didn’t check it, as it would have involved scratching off that silver coating on the second last picture to get the ID number to input onto the site.
Song of the Week #123
Title: Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire
Artist: David Foster
Album: St. Elmo’s Fire OST (1985)
This is the “American Express” song to me, because I remember an American Express advertisement that played on Singapore TV when I was young, somewhere in the early to mid 90s. I don’t remember much about the ad, other than maybe an airplane flying through the sky, though that might be a fabricated memory. However, I’ve always remembered this song as the American Express song due to that, even though I have never had an Amex credit card. I’ve also been unable to find this ad despite searching a couple times for it.
Knowing the song and knowing its title are very different things though, and even though I liked it a lot, I had no idea what the title of the song was for the longest time. I did find it now and then, or it would play on the radio and I would ask Dad what the title was or something, but I never fully saved that information somewhere safe until it showed up in Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist on the week of May 15 2016. There were song recognition apps on the phone by the mid 2000s of course, and they gained widespread use by the 2010s, but just like how people say that you can’t know what you don’t know, I never remembered the song to search for it.
Anyway, I like the song a lot, at least this instrumental version. There’s apparently a vocal version too, but it’s a pretty bad song to me. I just like the pure instrumental version too much, I guess!
Memory Snippet of the Week #130
Since I went to Animethon this weekend, I wanted to knock off another item from my to-do list which had to do with it, which was to feature pictures from the last and only other Animethon that I’ve been to, back in 2019. Thus I wrote up a memory snippet on it and then decided to put it on its own separate page instead, so here we are.
Dreams
Aug 05 2024
- I remember being part of a group defending a half-ruined building, possibly a church, against a horde of zombies. We seemed to be just managing to hold on, when suddenly we heard the sounds of a vehicle approaching, and saw Bunny_Monk, who was supposed to be part of our group, driving a noisy bus toward and around the ruined church, with a large line of zombies in tow. This was ostensibly to help us, as the bus was a sort of weapon too and gathering zombies would help efficiency, but the sheer number of zombies was sure to wipe us. I ran around the ruined church, closing all the doors and windows on its three intact walls to try to delay the zombies, but the fourth wall was missing altogether so the zombies poured in through that and overwhelmed us. Later on, back in the classroom where we were doing a post-mortem on that game round that we had just failed, I realized that she was probably being forced to betray us by the game master. I wasn’t sure how to approach and confront her about it however.
Aug 06 2024
- Snippet: I just remember being summoned to some place that felt like a court of law but wasn’t as formal. I was called up to a tiny podium that was supposed to be like a witness stand but did not end up testifying or having to do anything else there before eventually leaving.