Dear Tigey,
It felt like the last week just vanished into smoke.
Entry #206 (Sep 07 2025)
Table of Contents
Smoky…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #199
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #175
ට Dreams
Life
It really felt like I didn’t do a ton this week. The weather wasn’t as hot as last week, and the temperatures had basically calmed down by mid-week, however it was very smoky outside due to wildfire smoke blowing in from the gods only know where, as well as an industrial fire east of the city (local) that lasted for a couple days. Ultimately I only went outdoors once this week, on Wednesday, for groceries.
The biggest event by far in this week was that Jon moved out of the parents’ apartment where he had been looking after them, and in to the new house that I had previously mentioned that he had recently bought with his girlfriend. One thing that came out of this move is that he dropped off a box of interesting things that he knew I’d want for nostalgia and blog purposes, including a box of plushies that I hadn’t known or remembered about up till this point and that thus hadn’t been photographed and catalogued yet! So I spent some time this weekend taking their mugshots, and now my list of unknown family plushies with no backstories or names is quite long again.
He (and Mom, who tagged along) also brought along a couple boxes of chicken rice from Uncle Droy and Auntie Stella, which was nice since I had partially burnt my hotpot soup dinner the night before and thus didn’t have leftovers to eat that evening. Knowing that they were coming meant I could avoid cooking again that day.
Despite not going out the entire week, it was a busy week due to work taking over, as usually tends to happen this time of year. I wasn’t even really working on work tickets this time either, but was instead involved with an annual audit project that I strongly dislike, and helping out with a couple of time-sensitive tickets on the side. It wasn’t a fun week, nor did it leave me much time to pursue soul-soothing things on the side.
Along that note, I didn’t get much time this week to practice art stuff at all, and I continue to not know where in my day I should try to fit in art practice. I did find time to finally finish this reference sketch though.
This was a thing I started about a month ago and the reference picture I used is located back a few My Diary entries. I think it came out pretty well, but it is just copying someone else’s picture after all.
I also tried out a digital art tutorial for Clip Studio Paint this week, but I discovered that the old drawing pen tablet that I have, the Wacom Intuos Small, does not support pen tilt, and so I can’t do pencil colouring using the side of the pen tip rather than the actual tip itself, for example. I also am just not yet good at digital art in general. After a month though, I still have a desire to buy an actual graphical display tablet even though I’m not good at it yet, so I might do that sooner rather than later.
I also did not really have time to do much in-depth research on when I want to take my tentative Jan-Feb vacation, but I did clear up some of the prerequisites along that front, like confirming that I wasn’t going to take a vacation away from Edmonton when Kel might be coming back here for a visit, and I also did start a bit of research as to things that I might want to visit. It’s a long process though and I really need to get this done before the plane ticket costs skyrocket and hotel rooms get sold out. I’m hoping to get round-trip tickets for around $700 this time though, as opposed to one-way tickets that cost around $600 each that I used last time because I was planning my trip locations as I went along.
Talking about airplanes, Air Canada recently was in the news because there was a flight attendants and pilot strike that crippled flights for a few days, a couple of days after Kel left the country. Good for them. However, while that strike was happening, WestJet announced that they had a data breach (local) and that kind of flew under the radar thanks to the Air Canada news. And all they were offering in compensation was some free lousy credit monitoring service for two years. I’ve ran into issues with Air Canada in the past that made me dislike them, however I can’t really boycott both WestJet and Air Canada at the same time since they’re really the only two plentiful options for flying out of Canada, with the only other option being exorbitant flights to certain places by airlines from the destination country. Plus those flights tend to only be from hubs like Vancouver and Calgary and Toronto, and not small-town airports like Edmonton.
My new pair of kitchen scissors arrived this week, and was sitting in a box outside the front door when Mom and Jon arrived bearing gifts on Tuesday. This was a bit of a surprise, since it wasn’t scheduled to arrive until Wednesday. I don’t know how I feel about Amazon delivering packages a day earlier than the “guaranteed” delivery date — to me guaranteed means not being late but also not being early — but I’m glad that they can get into the apartment complex just fine these days anyway without me having to ring them in, so usually the package just sits outside the door until the resident notices. I would probably not have noticed it until the following day if Jon hadn’t stopped by on Tuesday though.
Anyway the scissors look like this, and they are a right pleasure to use. The tension as the blades open and close just feel so good.
I also had a fairly minor but still notable personal victory this week, which was finishing up an archival project on a website that I had wanted to do for some time now. Specifically, I had talked way back in My Diary #156 about making a spreadsheet for one of my streamers, Nomakk, and wanting to import all the historical information about his past streams from a website that I had linked in the Memory Snippet there. Well, almost exactly a year later, I’ve completed that task, which probably took about 10-12 hours or so overall.
You know when you leave a tab open in your browser because you want to do something with it, but the browser tab just sits there in your session for months because you either never get around to it, or because the task you want to do with it is so large that it takes forever to do and you just pick at it now and then? This browser tab was like that and had been residing in my Firefox browser session for over a year, but I finally finished it up after a strong push of energy this week, and was able to close the tab for good after that. That felt so very good.
That energy came from a strong urge midweek to do something sparkly, which is an urge I get sometimes where I want to try to go somewhere and view new sights or to find some sort of new project to start on and probably never finish or to learn about something new or find something interesting to buy or something like that. Perhaps I should have used that energy to research my tentative Jan/Feb trip. But I harnessed that sparkly energy to finish up an old project instead.
Games
This week was my second stream week of Outer Wilds, and I believe that I’m fairly close to finishing the base game now. I’ve still barely really touched the DLC place, but most of the detective board for the solar system seems to be complete now, barring two major things. Of course I have no idea how to proceed with any of the remaining two things, and one of them is the pinnacle of the quest itself, but I guess I’ll find the solution eventually. Then, the DLC and achievement hunting. Then I’ll probably play some demos or something and wait for the Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter release or something. Even though I have definitely now seen that J/RPGs, even new ones, do not do well on stream at all. It is a remake of one of my favourite games ever though, so. Perhaps.
Offstream, I did a bunch more Vampire Survivors, though aside from a bit of co-op at the start and end of the week, it was mostly solo play. I’ve been plugging away at the achievements and secrets, mostly aiming to do one secret (from the Secrets menu) a night or so, which usually takes an hour or two. There’s also been Umamusume: Pretty Derby taking up a bunch of time every day, though my interest in it is starting to wane a bit because I am starting to really feel the grind doing the same things over and over every day.
Or rather, I’ve been starting to crave time to play other games too, to find new sparkly worlds, in either some sort of an adventure RPG or some sort of a farming life simulator, which usually means that time allocated to some other active game that I was playing gets compromised and it gets to take a backseat.
Plushie of the Week #199
Before we start on the list of plushies that Jon brought over, we still have a dozen or so old ones to get through! Well, I’ll probably end up mixing them together, but for now, this is an old one that slipped through the cracks.
Back in My Diary #106, I featured a large Gordon the Squishmallow plushie that Mom had with her at the hospital, however what escaped notice at the time was that we actually have a second, smaller Gordon clip-on plushie as well, and I had taken a picture of him when I went to the parents’ place in Feb 2024 for our annual Chinese New Year dinner but never ended up featuring him here.
I don’t know the origin of this second Gordon plushie, so it is unknown from where and when Tigey‘s Army recruited him, but the two of them are featured together here:
And Gordon the Second himself is featured here alone turning his back to the camera:
And here’s the front of his tag. The back, as can be seen in the above picture, is blank.
Memory Snippet of the Week #175
Two of the boxes in the container that Jon brought over to me this week were full of sets of playing cards/poker cards, and this definitely warrants a couple of Memory Snippets to showcase them all! And in fact, one of them links to a previous Memory Snippet of the Week as well!
This week, I will display our collection of playing cards through a series of still photographs. It isn’t an absolutely complete catalogue of all our cards — I’m pretty sure I have a couple more sets of the Malaysia Airlines cards that I will show below tucked into one of my boxes somewhere too — but this collection is the vast majority of them.
This first picture consists of the airline playing cards that we’ve collected over the years. As you can see, we took a lot of Malaysia Airlines flights when travelling. I have several distinct memories of being on a plane and going to the air attendants at their rest area in between cabins to ask if they had complimentary packs of cards and whether I could have one. And most of the time, they did! For free! This was a long ago thing though, mostly in the mid to late 90s, and I somehow highly doubt that they do this anymore. Though I’m sure they’d be happy to exchange a pack of cards for your credit card these days.
From left to right in this picture, we have: Two different versions of China Airlines cards, both sealed, one of Singapore Airlines, eight (!) of Malaysia Airlines, a dark green set of Cathay Pacific cards sans the box, and five total of two different versions of Japan Airlines — three of them in the red and white boxes and the other two in the pure white boxes. Where possible, I showed some of the jokers and kings as well because some of them really are very neat.
The three red and white Japan Airlines poker card sets were particularly neat, and I ended up laying them all out and taking a picture of them as well to show that each and every card had a different design.
Next, we have some miscellaneous sets of poker cards. The one in the top left is from the Mystery Guild, which apparently is a long-defunct Canadian version of a mystery-themed monthly book club (local) that used to be owned by Doubleday Canada. Just below that is a set from the Genting Highlands, which is a mountaintop resort in Malaysia that we visited once or twice from Singapore, but most memorably in 1996. It always felt like a really exotic place to me. Both of these came with not only a pack of cards but also 4 six-sided dice each.
The other ones in this picture are just random packs of cards that I don’t really know the history to, although there’s another Genting Highlands one in the middle of the bottom row. There’s also a Settlers of Catan pack of poker cards in the top left for whatever reason, and a University of Calgary set next to it, likely from a Math camp there that I went to in 2000 or so.
This next picture consists of several packs of weirdly-sized cards, one jumbo-sized one as well as six half-sized ones. For some reason the three in the middle of the right column look the same from the top, but they have completely different backs. The leftmost box of the three small decks at the bottom still has a price tag attached to it that shows that it was from a shop called The SCIENCE Shop that used to be in Southgate Centre, but that closed in 2015 (local).
A reverse image search on the bone card set shows that they’re called Umbra novelty playing cards, but does not give a clue as to where they can be normally bought. They’re evidently supposed (local) to come in a carrying case as well but I don’t remember ever seeing this, and we certainly don’t have it now if we ever did have it.
The Canada pack on the top is sealed, but humorously enough has the words “Made in Hong Kong” prominently written in the bottom footer of the top visible joker card.
And lastly, that deck of cards on the left with the Guarantee card was a set that I forgot to put into the previous picture, however I do remember that we used to use the Guarantee card as a super joker card or similar depending on what game we were currently playing with the cards. Together with the Malaysia Airlines and the Cathay Pacific sets in the previous picture, they were some of our most used decks of playing cards.
Lastly, I found the pack of misfit playing cards that I had previously featured way back in My Diary #094! I took a front/back picture of the cards, not counting the four loose ones that I had pictured in the link above (as they’re in some other box by now and will be and reunited some point in the future) and attached the pictures below, as well as in My Diary #094 itself:
While I know that a lot of them were from Singapore, I’m surprised to see a healthy number of Canadian cards in there as well. The two at the end of the fifth row, and every other card with a card back that looks like that, are the Reader’s Digest cards that I mentioned above, and several of the other cards are obviously from the same deck as well, but are all very incomplete. There’s a bunch of different casinos represented here, mostly from Edmonton, some from Las Vegas even though we had never been there ourselves while I was actively collecting these, and even one from Harrah’s, which is in Las Vegas but reps Reno in Nevada, where Rinuruc currently lives.
Dreams
Sep 01 2025
- I was taking part in a Children’s Day event at school, where there was a stat training session with speed skills that involved picking start and end points within a model of the solar system, and then a race later on with the spaceship or whatever thing it was that we were training. Because the exact start and end points for the options that each person was given were random but around the same length, all the actual training selections did more or less the same thing, although it was possible to micromanage the selections for a bit of extra speed.
- Besides speed, you could also train for energy, however if you already had maximum energy and continued to exercise it, then you or your spaceship would get a special status called “Overweight and Oversized” that would stick with it for the rest of the game.
- This entire event was linked to a school project and worth points that one would get by showing the resultant spaceship to a teacher in a one-on-one presentation around a large, rectangular table.
- There was also some plotline somewhere in between where we had a goal to hit a hologram of a tower on the surface of a planet with the spaceship and see how close we could get it. We had three tries to do so.
Sep 02 2025
- I came back from a war against some computer AI opponents. Upon returning to my home area, we brought along and returned loot from a farm house to their original owners. All was returned except for a rectangular package wrapped up in a metal sheet that I kept aside. People kept calling it a package of butter, but I knew that it was something valuable belonging to Mom. I was going to give it back to her at night, when there were less people around, but she inquired out loud about it so I took her to an auditorium room, asked her to wait there, the went to my room and came back with it, at which point I gave it to her right then and there.
- Later on, a friend was playfully chasing me around a hub zone with entrances to other zones. I ducked into a bedroom and found that it was an entrance to a Lord of the Rings map. To unlock the portal, I had to screw in four screws, one on each corner of a large king-sized bed, with an automatic powered screwdriver. The friend who was chasing me came in to the bedroom as I was finishing up the last screw. I asked him if he knew that there was a Lord of the Rings zone here, and he was surprised as well and said no.
- To get into the zone, we had to watch an introduction video after finishing the screws. We watched it together, but it was the second time I had watched it for some reason so I knew what was going to happen.
- The scene of the video was set in an artificial prison of misfits, as though it was a movie set rather than an actual prison. The camera panned to a room where five young men were standing together by a wall. They were forming a band, and the leader was a bassist. There was also a drummer, a vocalist with a guitar, a guitarist without a guitar, and a fifth guy with some other instrument.
- The guitarist was making music by doing raspberries with his lips. The leader asked him if he actually brought his guitar and he said no. The leader sighed and said that he could hum his parts today instead and he’d accept it, but just this one time. The vocalist then offered his guitar to the guitarless guitarist instead. The leader asked the vocalist why he even had a guitar, and whether he could play it. The vocalist said that he had been interested in playing the guitar at the same time that he was singing too, but that no, he didn’t actually know how to play it. The leader got exasperated and said that on second thoughts, they’d reconvene another day instead when everyone was more prepared.
- The introduction video ended on that note, and my friend said that it was a terrible video and that maybe he’d come back to play the zone another day instead.
Sep 03 2025
- Snippet: I was levelling up in a game, and in that game I could level up three components of my character, their early game, midgame, or endgame. However, there were actually four different upgrade options, as there were two ways to upgrade the early game — a white pillar option and a green vine option. People said the white pillar option was “better”, but I used the vine option for science and could tell no difference between my character and one trained up using the white pillar option, even when watching the characters race each other through binoculars later on.
Sep 04 2025
- Snippet: I was waiting with a couple acquaintances near the bottom of a large tower or similar structure. We did not plan to enter the structure, rather we were gatekeeping and watching over a panel on the outside of it. There was an activation process for something that generally happened elsewhere in the game world that we were in, however one specific combination of characteristics or abilities of the request that needed to be processed would be sent to us for processing instead, as the central area couldn’t perform it, and although it was rare those requests would appear on the panel outside the tower to alert us of their presence.
Sep 05 2025
- Snippet: A friend and I had both finished up levelling a single-player respawn or buff skill that was somehow linked to individual Discord servers that we had. Now, we also had a joint Discord server that the both of us were on, and we were trying to figure out how to co-op and level up a skill for that server together.
- Snippet: I was walking through a long school, from some classrooms near the rear gate of the school all the way toward the front gate of the school. I passed a couple of friends like Eugene along the way and said hi to them, they were involved in doing something but I didn’t join them. I also passed a sprightly Mrs Douziech along the way, and she was talking to another teacher that I had never seen as they walked down a sunlit path together. She did not recognize me due to my transition though. I realized after some time that I was not carrying my bag with me and so I doubled back using a different path to return to the classroom, though I did consider finishing my trip to the front gate and then taking a bus back to the back gate.
- Snippet: In a separate bus-related dream, a friend and I were walking along a road and saw a bus 66 going down the road in the opposite direction. However, although the bus route 66 was supposed to have buses going back in the direction that we were walking as well, those buses never came. We had to figure out what was wrong and then do something to unlock that return route.
Sep 06 2025
- I was in a classroom with a single large round table in the middle of it. There were many wooden chairs circling the table. The teacher was seated on the left side of the table, away from the door while also facing it, and I was going for a chair that was in the middle of the room and facing the blackboard but those chairs were already taken by the time I, and two others I was with, were ready to take our seats. So instead I settled for a chair across from the teacher, near the doors. I sat down next to Valerie on my right, and another girl on my left.
- Later on, there was also a brief scene just outside the classroom where a corridor ran parallel to it. The classroom was not on the ground floor, and had a half wall with a horizontal beam on top of it dividing the corridor from a couple storey plummet. Yet, I saw Zhuquan and another boy either floating in midair just past the railing, or standing on some roof or device that happened to come up to around the building level that we were at.
Sep 07 2025
- While I was house-hunting, I was taking notes of RPG-based statistics that each house listing had, things like health and cooldown, as well as weirder stats like first shine and last shine. A friend explained to me that one of the popular listing metrics that houses tended to list in listings was a trap stat due to the way stats work, and caused a skill to fire off too early in the day to be of use. Therefore we avoided this stat while we went around looking for houses.
- Mom and I visited a couple to see them in person and I distinctly remember one with two rooms full and two rooms empty, one of the empty rooms being a carpeted bedroom on the ground floor with a view of the front door and mailbox. I did like that house and knew that that would be my bedroom if we bought it.
- Later on, I took care of my apartment’s neighbour’s cat, who was sick and throwing up. She had no idea how to take care of him but knew that I was in very good standing with the cat, so she asked for help. I went to the entrance of her apartment and beckoned the cat over, and the cat stumbled his way over and collapsed into my arms.
- I carried the cat back to my apartment and put him on my bed, placing his head on my pillow and tucking him into my blanket. The cat also liked watching the news, so I turned the pillow so that he faced the TV in my apartment.
- The cat was sent to the doctor the next morning and got better, so he returned to my neighbour’s place. A bit later on in my dream, I saw something belonging to the cat that was left in my apartment, and I wondered how he was doing.