Dear Tigey,
I’ve coughed so much recently that my stomach hurts whenever I cough. I didn’t know it was possible to strain your stomach muscles from coughing. And then I bit my tongue.
Entry #177 (Feb 09 2025)
Table of Contents
The long, slow road to…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #172
ට Song of the Week #149
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #156
ට Dreams
Life
I slowly regained my appetite in the early part of the week, though it took a couple of days before I could eat a “normal” volume and type of food again. Like not just Lipton noodle soup and saltine crackers, both of which I had come to hate after a couple of days. I gradually moved to those Jenny’s gourmet stuffed potatoes, finishing my last packet (as the local Safeway no longer sells them), then to various microwaved things, then to soup again. It didn’t help that I partially lost both my sense of smell and taste due to sinuses, before they both came back.
I made a second sickness run to the store on Tuesday, the first being on Saturday last week, and this was during a very cold day but also during the monthly Safeway Customer Appreciation Day so the extra 15% discount helped warm up my wallet. There I picked up honey tea, lozenges, and a few other microwaveable things to tide me over. Later on in the week I also treated myself to some delivery — it’s rare I splurge on delivery these days, even if it actually kind of makes financial sense because I pay $60 for what I essentially partition into 4 or 5 lunches/dinners. But I like to do so to cap off a sickness, once I more or less climb back onto the top of the cliff of health again, since it gives me something to look forward to and also usually beats eating the random leftover soups and budget pasta and rice I make.
The workplace team is apparently arranging for another trip to that Yang Ming buffet place, that we visited in late December 2024, in two weeks or so. And then maybe yet another trip a few weeks after that. It’d be during work time, so I can’t complain too much as it replaces doing work that afternoon instead, and the place was fun, so I’m looking forwards to that. Hopefully the cold weather that we have been having will have lightened up a bit by then. I partially blame this cold streak for how sick I have been recently, and the cold streak will continue for at least the next week and then some it seems.
It was so cold that my balcony door was iced shut for part of the week as well. This was the door on Feb 03, for example:
And then the very nice sunset on Feb 05, 5:18 pm. At least I had to assume that it was really nice, since I pulled on the door and it would not open so I could not go out to verify it.
The weather improved a little bit to about -10°C the next day though, which was enough for the door to thaw due to the space heater. I could open the door and see the sunset in person again. Thu Feb 06, 5:22 pm:
But again, due to being various hues of sick still, I didn’t venture out nor stay out too long.
I also saw this sign pasted in our apartment elevator, the one single working elevator as the other one is still dead.
As far as I understand this is actually slightly wrong, as far as I know the lift will never go down to the main floor directly if it stops on the second floor as it somehow considers it the same floor, so it has to be sent up first before it can go down to the bottom floor again, but it’s not like I’ve done elevator science on this or anything so maybe that note is correct. This building is such a mess and I need to find a house and get out of here as soon as possible. I also had to remove someone else’s untended laundry from the dryer and dump it on top of the dryer this week for the first time since I moved into here, because we only have one shared washer and dryer for the entire floor and what else can you do when someone leaves their stuff in the dryer for 20-30 minutes after the timer ends without claiming it promptly?
And again I am thankful for the door sweep under my door that I demanded they put in last year, because for how chilly the inside of my apartment is, everytime I stepped out the door to do laundry or chuck garbage or check the mailbox, there was an even more frigid gust of air from the ventilator blasting right at the outside of my door.
Anyway, a cold week and sick week makes it so that there isn’t much news to put into here at all. Perhaps next week!
Games
I bought and played a bit of Heart of the Machine this week. This is the latest game from Arcen Games, a dev studio that I’ve liked a lot for years, ever since their first game, AI War: Fleet Command. This one probably needs a bit more time to cook still, as it’s missing a lot of things like clean and clear UI elements, but I did play the demo back in June 2024’s Steam Next Fest and I liked it then, too.
Other games that got played this week include Vintage Story, Loop Hero, Skyrim, and Zompiercer, but I’m definitely feeling like I’m between games right now and am looking for something to satisfy an itch that I can’t fully describe yet. That lost and listless feeling probably partially came from the ennui from being sick, but I hate feeling that way when I have thousands of games that I can try anyway. Maybe I’ll try Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood since I completed 1 and 2 a long time ago but never got around to playing much of the rest.
We’re all the way up to chapter 12 of CrossCode on my nightly Twitch stream now. The game’s main story ended at chapter 10, but it seems to have a nice, chunky epilogue and post-game DLC detailing extra things that happen to the characters, and extra quests and unlocks and things, and this is super cool. My opinion is still that some of the boss fights and mechanics are not programmed very well, my biggest gripe by far being that eating consumables, using some skills, and certain cutscenes, pull the camera away in ways that make it so I’m fighting the camera as much as the boss. No complaints at all when it comes to the story and characters, and very little about the puzzles, though. I’m really looking forward to their next game, Alabaster Dawn, eventually being released.
I did get my first couple subscribers for my Twitch channel this week, so that was nice. Anaden with her free monthly prime sub and Jah with an actual full monthly sub. I got $2.25 USD for the prime sub and $2.86 for the full one, though it can’t be paid out until I accumulate $50 I think. In the meantime people watching ads have been getting me an approximate 0.035 cents per ad, which comes to.. not much at all. I earned 91 cents from ads this week. And 1 cent from a bit that Satinel donated, and 1 more cent from someone with Twitch Turbo who must have came by my channel on accident.
I also finished making a short table of statistics and VoD links for my stream games on Shiarapedia, it resides over here and now on my Twitch page as well. And I started playing around with setting up Playnite (local) again at the behest of Jah, who likes that app as a universal game client and tracker.
Plushie of the Week #172
This plushie is another one that doesn’t have much of a story to it — in fact, teddy bears can be so generic that at this point I’m not even completely certain that I haven’t featured this one on my blog before. I’m fairly certain though.
This is Grizzles the Ty plushie Teddy Bear, circa apparently 2005 or so, according to its tag, so that’s a lower bound as to when we could have picked up the plushie. Definitely Canada-era. I don’t think we picked it up much later then though, it was probably sometime between 2005 and 2015 or so but I don’t think anyone remembers how or when exactly we acquired him. Pictures follow from January 2022 when I visited the parents’ place for Chinese New Year.
Front and tag front. I wonder what was on TV in that reflection.
Back:
Tag inner:
Tag inner 2/back:
Tag 2 front:
Tag 2 back/Tag 3 front:
Tag 3 back:
I might have gotten another Squishmallow on sale after I already wrote this segment of the blog but before I actually submitted the blog entry. They can wait until next week to be featured.
Song of the Week #149
Title: My Favourite Game
Artist: The Cardigans
Album: Gran Turismo (1998)
Besides being on a studio album named Gran Turismo, this song was apparently also featured in the Gran Turismo 2 game itself, but I never played that so I never got that context attached to the song itself for me. But this song is a very Singapore-era song for me, as it charted there during my 1997-1998 formative years and became a song I liked a lot, hanging out in my top 20 songs list for quite a bit, though generally just within the 10-20 range itself and never seriously challenging for the top 10, I think.
The song itself reminds me of playing computer games in Singapore, I think specifically Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, although I think it did spread past that specific game to a general sense of playing all computer games at home. It also strongly reminds me of shopping centers, particularly Century Square in Tampines and the L5R card shop there. I loved the lead singer’s crooning vocals and the melody of the song though, and I also remember liking the similarity of the song name to another beloved and formerly-featured song, My Favourite Mistake. Like many other songs of that era, it occupied a spot on my mp3 player once I acquired one in Canada in the early 00’s, and has followed me onto my Spotify list since then, thus it also mildly reminds me of my high school days, and to a certain lesser extent, walking around Edmonton.
I do recognize the music video, but apparently there were several versions of the music video itself with different endings, some more graphic than others, and perhaps one that edited out the plushie abuse as well. I don’t remember which of the versions would have played and been seen by me on MTV Asia, as I certainly wasn’t aware of different versions back then.
Memory Snippet of the Week #156
Back when we were living in HDB flats in Singapore, there were two important utility-type of people that came around to the houses once a month or once every few months that left me with lingering memories.
The first of these two people would come bringing blue gas canisters in tow, and would sell them to households and take away their old gas canisters in return for a fee. These gas canisters are something I’ve talked about and linked to pictures/blogs about before in the past, and were used to power the gas cooking stoves in the apartment. I believe the ones we used were mostly Esso branded back then, just like Tigey, though I don’t know for certain. I am not sure if we had to call someone to bring a new canister when we were nearly out, or if they just came by on a schedule each month, as a child those things tended to just go over my head.
The other person that would come by our house now and then was called the karang guni man, or colloquially known as the old newspaper collector. The Wikipedia article lists some stuff about them and how they worked, but in the context of the HDB flats they’d live in, they’d come along the corridors in front of our flat and we’d flag them down, and bring out all our old newspapers in a pile for them. They’d place it on the ground outside our front door, tie it up in a neat knot with pink raffia string, and then use a weighing device with a dangling hook (these things (local)) to lift up the device and get the weight of the newspapers. We’d then be paid an accordingly tiny sum for the weight, but at least we’d get rid of that stuff from our house without much effort. Like the Wikipedia article mentions, we’d occasionally get rid of other broken items and spare clothes as well, it really depended on what we had on hand to get rid of when they came around.
These days they’re all dying trades though, especially since physical newspapers are much more of a rarity than they were back then. Here’s a random Reddit thread (local) from two years ago talking about them, for example.
Dreams
It was mostly snippets this week, but honestly with how sick I’ve been I’m happy that I’ve gotten dream entries at all most nights.
Feb 03 2025
- I was taking a train from the east end of Singapore’s train line to the west end, which was about 24 stops or so. There was a somewhat obnoxious guy seated next to me, and who kept shifting around in his seat — at some point he even moved to sit on the top of the back of the seat, with his feet on the seat, and was eventually practically sitting on top of me too.
- However, that was fine, as there was a quest active for me to defeat him and I had plans to do so for a good prize, with the prize increasing the longer I waited to kill him. So I was going to do so just before the train reached the western end of the east-west line.
- The train attendants who were in charge of the quests did not think that anyone could be that patient though, so they asked someone else to aggro him and defeat him, which chased him off the train a stop or two before I was going to strike instead, costing me the prize. I was extremely livid, especially since he somehow managed to leave with my Tigey as well, who was in a black jacket that he made off with.
- However, it turned out that he was a nice guy, and Tigey was returned to me a bit later on, none the worse for wear. Tigey apparently really enjoyed his brief sojourn and indicated that he was a fun guy to be around.
- Snippet: I also remember some scene at a playground where a girl was looking at white plastic spoons discarded on the sandy ground, looking for an intact one with a particular fit for me.
Feb 04 2025
- Snippet: There was a queue of little red lines with white circles around them in a production line in a factory that someone else and I were guarding and watching over. The queue had been logjammed and moving slowly for a long time, but suddenly sped up immensely and completed itself, surprising the person I was with. The reason for that speedup, was because those red lines represented a variety of tasks from other people, and since New Year’s had just rolled around, many people were either cleaning up or cancelling their old stuck tasks, which allowed the queue to flow more smoothly and increased throughput.
- Snippet: I was living in a modern, or perhaps slightly futuristic, city and had invited several female friends over to the house I stayed in with the family. They came over in groups of three at a time, however sometimes we didn’t have enough people and had to hire a girl from outside for the third spot. That girl usually entered the house from a different door though, which made Dad suspicious. I believe all this was for school-related stuff.
- Snippet: Lastly I remember a scene where we were living in a house similar to our Edmonton 4012 one. It was very early in the morning, and Dad had parked his van outside the backyard on the road instead of in front of the house, in preparation for driving me to school, as it was far quicker to reach the school from that road. I crossed the slightly sloped backyard to the van a few times, enacting a version of this scene from the summer and the winter, among other scenes.
Feb 05 2025
- Snippet: There was a map of a forest divided into four parts by a cross, with the first segment in the southwest, the second in the northeast, the third in the northwest, and the fourth in the southwest. Each one had a portal that I could teleport to and each one had a robotic NPC near the portal that I could speak to. For some reason, I was trying to get help chopping wood in the forest and was going around and asking them starting in the above order, but neither of the robots in the first two zones would do it. I managed to convince the third one though, and this activated a worker in all of the four zones. Two NPCs hidden just outside the northeast forest were happy at this change and started naming words starting with C, trying to find a complimentary word to describe the success.
Feb 06 2025
- Snippet: I was in an anime and hobby shop, waiting for someone while without my glasses. There was a square counter in the middle of the shop with one of two acrylic anime keychains hanging on it, among other things that I didn’t care about. I couldn’t see who the keychains were of, though. There was also a shelf in the corner of the room that I wanted to look at, but an Indian woman and her two kids were parked in front of it and had deployed a large portable device that basically acted as a telephone, and were talking to someone on it, so I couldn’t go near the shelf and was annoyed with them.
- Snippet: I was walking alongside a road and approaching a traffic light near a train station similar to the one at Southgate or Century Park. There were distance numbers that I could see on the UI of the “screen” of my field of view as I approached the traffic stop — one number for how far away I was from the traffic light, a second number for how far away I was from the train station past the traffic light, and a third number for how far away a guy walking behind me who wanted to speak to me but had not engaged me yet was. I parked myself at the light, watching the third number get smaller as he approached while pretending not to have noticed him yet.
- Snippet: I saved a shopkeeper at a bazaar from losing her wares and made it so she could open up her stall. Her stall was full of wooden trinkets made out of polished and shiny walnut wood, and once her shop was open, a rich woman pushed by other people and picked up an expensive-looking wooden contraption from a shelf that was shaped like a VCR player. Jahandar was nearby and queried as to what that was in a friendly manner, but the rich woman shot him a dirty look for daring to disturb her with a question, so I shot her one back as well.
Feb 07 2025
- Snippet: I was walking around a drab game zone that was largely made up of a single building with multiple floors. I had floating screens set up where I could look at and talk with other players or NPCs in the level as well while I travelled around. I had a specific skill that let me set booby traps involving tomatoes in certain locations, and I did set one up in a small alcove, but to my chagrin no one ever came by to trigger it.
Feb 08 2025
- Snippet: There was a complaint board in a computer lab at work where people could file complaints. One of the complaints I saw was that a printer was installed facing the wrong way in the correct spot, and because it was facing the way that it was, it meant that people couldn’t use a nearby washroom. The complainant asked for it to be installed facing the other way instead. I had my own long list of things that needed to be done but that weren’t being looked at, and I spoke to Alex and he was going to leave the University soon because the people in charge were ignoring our requests.
- There was also something related to the above dream that involved us refusing to give balls that represented experience penalties to friends. Zixiang was there, as I recall, and one of the friends that I held off on giving those balls to.
- Snippet: There was also a top-down team-based game later on that was a team sport like soccer, or perhaps capture the flag, but was done on a large game field with many paths and several biomes, something like would be found in a MOBA game. It was essentially a 5 vs 5 game, although two of the things we could accumulate were blue and red points, or heaven and hell points, and having 30 of each would let us summon more players for our side too. After the game had progressed a bit to the point where I didn’t care about the score, I went exploring down a side path with a friend on the other team and found a secret location that I wanted to trigger together, but could not because we were on opposing teams.
Feb 09 2025
- Snippet: In one dream, knocking down a bunch of target pillars with balls a la CrossCode summoned other reward pillars that I could then also hit. There were some groups that I was competing with, one was a group of griffins and another group of flying creatures that I had to race to reach somewhere before them. There was also a group of people that I refused to play with or against and told my friends to avoid them as well.
- Snippet: In another similar dream later on, I believe there were also balls and pillars but they took more of a background role. There was a friend who had been lurking with our group and levelling up as we went but when he suddenly jumped in and said he wanted to help, I told him that he had had no actual gear or practice first and would have to wait a full round before he could help us because right now his attacks would do no damage. There was also an impending storm that we needed to deal with first.
- As snippets within that second dream, I also remember collecting clean laundry to send to drycleaners from a male stranger at the Edmonton 4012 house on behalf of my parents in the early morning, as well as levelling up to level 3 in some skill that allowed me to start sewing and painting little blue embroidery pouches.