Dear Tigey,
The wanderlust is flowing through my veins now, but… it’s so hard to pull the trigger and spend (“waste”) money.
Entry #207 (Sep 14 2025)
Table of Contents
Dizzy Rice…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #200
ට Song of the Week #166
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #176
ට Dreams
Life
To no one’s surprise, after a couple of weeks of furious activity on it, the art thing has become more of a thing I think about and watch videos on than actually constantly practising, especially after I restarted afternoon and evening obligations (anime, AMQ, and streaming) after the two week staycation I had last month. It’s not a condemnation of anything, including my own habits, but rather a reality I expected. I need to find a good place to slot it into or make it part of my daily routine, and I haven’t been able to do that yet, but it’s still in the forefront of my mind, yada yada, so we will see what I can do with it in the end.
I did try a bit of digital art, following a tutorial or two, but those things were more like doodles and are nowhere near anything post-worthy. I am missing some sort of fundamental lesson for how to draw on a tablet and I need to hunt down something for that. I just can’t get used to a “blind” pen tablet where I’m looking up at a screen while my pen draws down below me. It’s so unnatural. But with the time I’m able to put in to it right now, and the other plans I have in life, a proper drawing tablet doesn’t seem to be something I have earned the right to buy, either.
I did purchase Clip Studio Paint Pro this week, the regular cheap version of it, when it went on sale (local). It’s 60% off, making it $23.40 USD, which I just used my Paypal balance for as Steffy is now still sending me $50 USD each month in return for some monetary help I gave her years ago. We do that monthly transaction as USD and I leave it in Paypal and funnel any online USD charges for goods and services to it to avoid currency conversion costs.
Anyway, that Clip Studio Paint program is good, which is why I bought it, however their licensing model is so bad, which is why I only bought the basic one instead of buying the full $200-ish package, which I have done for things like Affinity Photo in the past. Clip Studio does have a lifetime/perpetual licence, which I will give them credit for, but it’s only for the current X.0 version of the software, and if you want future upgrades, bug fixes, new features, and so on, then you have to buy a catch up package for your lifetime package. And you basically pay the difference in cost, so if you buy the more expensive version of the 4.0 package, for example, and later on they release 5.0, and then 6.0, you have to buy the upgrade for 4.0 to 6.0 (expensive package version) based on the current price of the 4.0 expensive version and the 6.0 expensive version.
Whereas if you just have the 4.0 cheap version like I do now, you’d pay the upgrade from the 4.0 cheap version to the 6.0 cheap version, based on the current price of the two, which is a lot less. And then upgrading from there to the expensive version, if I needed it for some reason, is a lot cheaper. But basically, upgrading to the expensive version makes all your upgrades in the future perpetually far more expensive, so there is no point in upgrading at all unless you are absolutely, unequivocally sure you are going to use the extra features, which are mostly animation-based.
What is also bad about it is that it’s for one specific version, and so what happened is I bought the 4.0 version because it’s the most recent one that was updated, but when I input my key my program immediately screamed because the version of the download that they offer on the site was 4.12 or something like that (I don’t remember the exact version) and so I had to *downgrade* the trial version that I had to be able to use the full version. So all the tutorials that I had looked at and followed while playing around with settings and brushes? All basically undone, because who knows what buttons and settings might have changed? At least my lack of focus along that front recently saved me from wasting my unspent time in that respect.
Anyway grouching aside, a lot of my free time this week went towards me laying out some of the groundwork for my upcoming trip. I eyeballed it to being around early February to late March, with my current, tentative plan being to catch Chinese New Year in Singapore, which is Feb 17-18, and then ending with perhaps trying to catch the blooming cherry blossoms in Japan, probably somewhere in Shikoku around mid-late March. In the middle, I’ll also try to catch a sky lantern festival in Taiwan, which has been on my bucket list for ages. That gives me anywhere from around 6-8 weeks of travel, which would encompass Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, and possibly a few other places — I’m thinking of Malaysia, with a chance of Thailand or Hong Kong as well. But it’s a lot to plan for and a lot to buy. Tickets are much cheaper five months in advance than buying them a couple of weeks before my trip though, but they are still pricey, and I haven’t even begun looking at hotel prices yet. I haven’t actually started buying anything either, because committing to it by making the first purchase is so scary.
I also, again, hope that I can find a workable system to bring out my cameras and do some IRL streams while I am travelling, but like everything else, “we shall see” is my current attitude along this front. It’s a goal I’ve had for some time now though.
And now, here’s an event report from a place that I went to on Friday!
Fri Sep 12 2025
On Friday evening, I skipped my Friday stream and went to a nearby neighbourhood shopping area called Currents of Windermere for what was basically a night market. I left the house at about 5:30 pm, arrived at 6:30 pm, left at 8:30 pm, and came back home at around 9:30 pm, plus or minus ten minutes on all sides, so that was fun. The event that I attended was called AsiaFest YEG (local). There was also a map of the event from the website, reproduced here:
It was really hot both when I left the apartment and when I arrived at the location, about 28 degrees Celsius or so. The sun gradually set and the temperature gradually dropped when I was there though, and it was below 20 by the time I was leaving.
When I arrived at the location, I headed to the food section first. I really wanted to find out what the “low risk food vendor” section was and why it differed from the regular “food vendor” section. Turns out the food vendor section was hot/cooked food and the “low risk” section was things like prebaked bread and cookies and beef jerky and other things like that. That horizontal food section looked like this — the four pictures below in order were east side facing west, center facing east, center facing west, and west side facing east.
It was very crowded, as you can see! And that guy in the second picture was so tall! He’s a head and a half taller than basically everyone else!
I spent a lot of time going back and forth here looking for stalls. There was also a performative area in the middle that bisected the two halves of the food area, and some lion dance people were resting there (in the shade) before their performance when I went past.
That performance started later on when I was in queue for food and there were lots of people surrounding it so I never did go back there to watch them. In lieu, here are a couple of random food stalls:
I ended up buying some food from the last stall in that list, the one with the yellow banners that said “Selamat Datang” (Welcome, in Malay) at the top and “Malaysia” at the bottom. I actually talked to the cashier and asked him if they were an actual restaurant, because unlike some other attendees they didn’t have a name attached, and they said that they were actually a west-end ice cream shop called Pa Peterson’s Ice Cream (local). Interesting!
I bought their Chicken Satay Bee Hoon for $12.60. Everything had tax applied to it, which isn’t usually the case at festivals but was at this one. I don’t know why there’s that difference between different festivals. Anyway, the noodles were nice but overall it definitely wasn’t worth the amount I got, but that’s a festival for you:
Worse, the styrofoam container was really hot at the bottom, so when I was trying to juggle it to put tissues between the box and my hand so that I could eat it (and take a picture of it) without burning myself, some of the peanut sauce or satay sauce or whatever inside spilled out of the corner of the closed styrofoam box and onto my bag. Thankfully the stall itself had a hearty helping of tissues in a box up front and I took advantage of that to clean it as best as I could, before giving my bag a nice shower once I got home.
This ended up being the only thing I ate, for two reasons. One was that the queues for most stalls were very long, something like 15-20 minutes or so at the very least. The other was that the bins were full and there were signs asking people to take their garbage to a special recycling center building set up nearby, but that was on the other end of the festival. So although there was a drink from a stall that I wanted to buy, and some fish ball meals that I wanted to try too, by the time I made my way over to the recycling center, and back, they were sold out of the drink. And I didn’t want to brave another long queue for some overpriced fishballs, so oh well, onwards I went.
This was what the recycling center looked like:
It was apparently sponsored by Lee Kum Kee, the food company, and the way they sponsored it was by having a big box of free sriracha chili sauce packets that one could take while dropping off their food. I took one packet back home.
They also sponsored a food eating contest that was taking place outside:
I didn’t stay too long to watch, as there was a lot else to do, but I’d never seen an eating contest in person before. So that was neat.
Just outside the recycling center was also an exhibit that was marked on the event map as “Giant Jellyfish”. I was wondering what that was, and it turned out to be:
A giant jellyfish. Why? Who knows.
There were a couple of “games” set up too, one sand excavator thing that I didn’t really understand — I guess you had to use the little toy excavators to fill cups of sand — and a foam gun booth next to a temporary tattoo booth.
I then had a very cool interaction, I found the booth of the Chinese Graduates Association again, the group with the girl that had done the watercolour portrait of Tigey at the Heritage Festival earlier this year. The lady who was in charge of the table there actually recognized me before I saw her, and called out to me, and I told her that I had come here because she had recommended the event to me when we were talking back at the Heritage Festival, which was true. They apparently had an artist pet portrait table here too with three girls doing the honours this time, but she did say that the queue was quite long already and I didn’t really want to let Tigey out of my sight in the middle of such a busy event as well, so I didn’t commission another Tigey caricature from them this time.
However, I did bring all the previous pictures of Tigey because the supervisor lady had asked about them the last time we had talked, and I had guessed correctly that I would find her again here. I showed them all to her, including the Leya picture (the artist from Heritage Festival), and she cooed at them and took a couple of pictures. We formally traded introductions this time, with her saying that her name was Hui Yang, and she said she’d show Leya the picture that she took of both the real life Tigey and her rendition of Tigey that I had brought along. She also held Tigey for a selfie that I took:
I accidentally dropped Tigey‘s carrying pouch on the floor in that exchange, then walked away, but realized that it was missing a minute later and came back for it. Thankfully it was still lying on the ground where it had fallen, and no one had stepped on it or otherwise kicked it aside or taken it, so I retrieved it safely.
Another very important thing I did here around this time, but didn’t take a picture of, was that I found a booth for the Alberta Forever Canada (local) group and finally got to sign the petition. There aren’t any signing places right by where I am, so even though the petition has been running for over a month, I hadn’t been able to sign it yet, but I figured (without actually checking beforehand) that this event would have a canvasser booth for me to sign the petition at, and I was right.
Our premier, Danielle Smith, actually did give the organizers of the festival a stock letter of support (local), but she’s part of the group that supports the separatists and is trying to make it easier for Alberta (local) to separate from Canada. There’s been a large groundswell of grassroots support against her and against this stupid separatist movement though, so a former member of parliament (who was also in the same party as Danielle Smith) started up a petition to “stay in Canada” to cut off and overshadow the separatists instead, and that was the one I signed tonight.
Moving on, I spent the rest of my time here wandering the vendor stalls. Here are some general pictures of the crowd and the lines of stalls, taken over the length of the evening as the sun slowly set over the festival market:
You get the point.
Besides general pictures, I also took pictures of specific stalls that caught my eye for some reason or other. Let’s see if I can identify all the stores/businesses in my reel.
I don’t know if this whole store belongs to them but the back sign is for DrY yOu CrAzY (local).
This store I did not catch the name of. I just was amused by their knockoff labubus.
Mnemo/mmr_kriyaika (local) — a Hololive/VTuber fan and artist and (assuming the artist is the person manning the booth) wearing a Bocchi shirt to boot? 10/10.
Another art booth called Scarlet Wings Kaili (local):
I took and scanned their business card too:
This booth was called Sharks n’ Donuts (local):
I also took and scanned their business card, look how adorable it is.
There was a store called Masa Crafts (local) floating around, they were selling 3D-printed stuff and had a lot of food-themed clickers in particular on sale. I was… very tempted, but didn’t buy anything from them in the end. They also had someone with a phone on a selfie stick going around and taking a video of the stall while I was there, I assume for some future Instagram purposes or something, so I didn’t get in the way by waiting around to take a good picture of the stall, just snapped a quick picture of this little gacha machine and moved on.
And then there was a stall called Night Rice, which I had captured in one of my general pictures further up the page, the second one in the list. They had a bunch of anime-themed stickers that I did take a snapshot of though:
I did end up making my only physical purchase at the fair from them, a T-shirt that was a bit pricey at $42 after tax, but that I just had to have, despite the Pikachu:
Both Night Rice (local) and Dizzy Mob (local) are local Edmontonian designers that (as far as I can describe it) make streetwear and accessories that intersects with Asian car culture, and I’ve seen Dizzy Mob around before and taken note of them because, well, my Twitch channel, dizzypixie, shares an adjective with them. So I decided that I really needed that shirt. While purchasing it, the seller asked me what size I wanted and I shrugged and said whichever he thought would fit me better. I actually meant between Medium and Large, as especially for Asian clothing sizes that’s usually what I default to, but he looked at me, shrugged, and said “Small?”, which was unintentionally? very nice of him, hah. I ended up taking a medium anyway though. Gotta have something to grow into. Actually the medium size fit me perfectly in the end. Dizzy Rice!
There was also a small performance area on the other end of the market area from the food stalls:
That lady on stage was Chloe Lee (local), and she apparently also is lead singer for a band called Popular Demand (local). She performed from 8:00 pm to 8:50 pm, and I admired her confidence and spunk to just get up on stage and belt out songs for an hour. I recorded her first song before moving on.
While walking around the festival, I came across this giant dog, and also took a picture of it to save for posterity.
There were a lot of people walking or carrying their dogs in the area, even though it was horrendously crowded, but most of them were small dogs. This one was much larger than any other one I saw there that evening!
And lastly, there was a small Tesla exhibit just outside the market area, behind the stage where the performance above occurred. A couple people walked by to look at it now and then, but by and large it was ignored by the crowd.
Now that I’m done chronicling the event, here are some thoughts I had on it. Overall, the vibe of the place was very nice, especially as the afternoon turned into evening. It was nowhere even near, say, the scope of Richmond Night Market in Vancouver, which even itself is a whitewashed version of an Asian night market, which is an aesthetic that I love to seek out, but it was a strong step in that direction, and I’m guessing probably the closest that Edmonton has to something like the ones in Taiwan and Singapore night markets and the Japanese festival markets. The vibe was pretty good overall.
Trash was a big problem. The Recycle Center building was ultimately too far away from the food area, and even though there were garbage bins situated around the area, they were taped up with cellophane or something and had signs on them to bring garbage to the recycle area. However, I think either people tore apart some of the cellophane anyway, or else they only taped up the front of each bin but not the back, and every bin that I saw (except one that was situated right in front of the recycle building and was still taped up on both ends) was stuffed full with the food containers and overflowing both on top and next to it. Especially the ones by the food area. I didn’t really see much trash lying on the ground away from those bins, at least not during the time that I was there, but those bins obviously weren’t being cleared by the staff either. People had nowhere to put them and weren’t going to walk halfway across the event and enter a building and queue up (though the lineup was abolished after some time, as far as I could tell) to get rid of their garbage, and then return back to the food area again to potentially buy something else. How dumb.
The area was also very crowded. I like crowds, and I’m used to them, but there often wasn’t even room to walk properly, and it required a lot of patience to navigate. Too many people brought babies, prams, dogs, and so on, and there simply needed to be more space to cater to them, especially around the food stores with long lines or the popular craft stores that had people bunched up around the showcase tables.
And lastly, and this is my biggest complaint of all — this specific edition of the fair was marketed on their main page like this:
We’re turning up the excitement this year with the vibrant cultures of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore taking center stage.
What? There was NOTHING there that was remotely Singapore-related. Nothing. And I’m saying that as a (Canadian-)Singaporean. Not a single stall sold any Singapore cuisine, and not a single craft stall sold anything related to Singapore except for some things like the occasional pin or clicker or sticker with the Singapore flag on it (among a pile of other country pins or stickers). I didn’t even see a Merlion anywhere, for example. And I can’t speak for Indonesia, but there wasn’t really much Malaysian either, though the stall that I did eat from did have a Malay greeting on the yellow banner above the stall. Most of the food stalls and goods were generically Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and Japanese stuff. I’d be curious how they justified anything there as being Singaporean in theme.
Games
On stream this week, I completed the base game of Outer Wilds and started upon its DLC. I’m very happy to have completed this on stream, to help avoid the temptation of looking up stuff when I get tired of trying to figure out the answer. I did mention having a bit of mild anxiety between some of the streams where I wondered if I would be able to push forward in the game or if I would just spend the entire 3 hours of a stream stuck at one puzzle or something, but it was never more than mild, as I’m fairly confident in myself in general. What could go wrong, right. The ending was pretty good, and I started the DLC this week, involving exploring a weird ring world and figuring out the puzzles there. I expect that I’ll be done that by next week.
Off stream, I played a bunch of Umamusume: Pretty Derby as always, and Satinel and I both pulled a character that we wanted, Seiun Sky, from the latest gacha banner using only 2-3 ten-rolls each, which was great. She’s a very nonbiri (carefree/lazy) wind-themed character, which I like a lot since wind is my attuned base element in real life too.
I also continued working on my Vampire Survivors save file, unlocking a bunch more characters and secrets, though co-op seems to have fizzled down for the most part and I just played by myself this week. Which is fine. The game is good at making me nod off. I only have about 40 achievements to go, out of 228 currently, although not all the in-game unlocks and things to do are actually tied to achievements.
I also bought and played MagicCar of Delicious, which I played the demo of back in the February 2025 Next Fest. The game past the point where the demo ended was really weak though, and I left a negative review on the game, which was then responded to by the dev who pointed out a system in the game that I had not noticed because there were no tooltips or hints in the game about it, but which did negate the main roadblock preventing me from moving forwards. It still is plagued by a lot of minor issues though, which is too bad as it was a fun enough idea.
Once I’ve settled the vacation plans (or lack thereof, that’s still a possibility) I’d like to start on some sort of RPG and explore a new world to work off some of that pent-up wanderlust.
Plushie of the Week #200
While doing some grocery shopping on Thursday this week, I popped into the Indigo Spirit bookstore at Southgate and ended up walking out with a new friend, officially known by her tag as Truffle the Brown Horse. I took to her at first glance because she reminded me of a Japanese horse that I know from Uma Musume — Satono Diamond (local), a very similarly-coloured dark horse with a white diamond on his forehead too. Inspired by him perhaps? Who knows! The Uma Musume girl character inspired by that horse looks like this (local), by the by.
Anyway I ended up calling her Satono Truffle, and she cost $13 CAD, or $13.65 after GST. Her enlistment date in Tigey‘s army is Sep 11 2025. She’s the first Palm Pals plushie I have — I saw a bunch of different ones at the store — and I can confirm that she fits perfectly into my palm. She’s also a little bottom heavy, as she’s just filled with little beads that sink to the bottom. Don’t tell her I said that, though.
Front:
Back:
Here she is posing with other horses. On the left is Horsie and on the right, filling in for Lady who is on a trip to China right now, is Tigey instead.
Tag 1 front:
Tag 1 back:
Tag 2 front:
Tag 2 back/Tag 3 front:
Tag 3 back/Tag 4 front:
Tag 4 back:
Memory Snippet of the Week #176
Meet Alynne Jollyhopper.
A well-rounded, hale hobbit hunter with nice, hairy feet and a bear mask from her level 15 class quest, she’s a much higher level now but still wears that mask (as a cosmetic) for nostalgia. She’s my hunter in LotRO, formerly of the Landroval server, but now on Peregrin, since our kinship (guild) moved there in the recent forced server transfer.
I felt like her story was worth chronicling and archiving here, because she was the leader of an initiative that I started back when I was in my first long-term kinship (guild) in Lord of the Rings Online, called Knights of the White Lady. They were an LGBT-friendly/focused casual guild on Landroval (and still are, except they are on Peregrin now), and when I was in that kinship as an officer, I started an initiatlve to roll up hobbit characters and play as a static group every Saturday or Sunday for a couple of hours. And as part of this group, we all rolled hobbits, and took the same last name, one that I also came up with at that time — Jollyhopper.
The Jollyhoppers were thus named because everyone hopped around a lot, or perhaps they were just living up to their name — basically in most MMOs where you can jump, it is almost always far more fun to jump around while running than actually just running from place to place, and climb up to the tops of roofs and such. And potentially get stuck in terrain geometry, but let’s not mention that part. We then jokingly considered figuring out a way to jump onto the roof of the Forsaken Inn in the Lone Lands to be an initiation test to become a Jollyhopper, though in practice we of course never enforced this in any way — it was just a way to make people think about how to do that sort of thing in general while traversing Middle Earth. If I recall right, the solution to that puzzle involved jumping onto a mailbox and then onto the roof eaves. It has been a while though so maybe it was actually a different way.
Anyway, this initiative was very popular, as was the last name — some people asked if they could take it for their regular hobbits trhat weren’t part of the group, and there were also many people who could sometimes join the static levelling group but not always, and we would always try to accommodate them when possible — well, they all mostly also took the last name Jollyhopper. It became an in-joke in the kinship and then also spread outside of the kinship once I joined the raiding group that would eventually unite into my second major kinship, Defenders of the Mithril Halls. So even several of the people in the raiding guild took the cute name for their hobbits as well. And eventually, as the group ran into other people or we individually made friends on our way through Middle Earth, so did a couple of people from outside of the kinships as well. I’m pretty sure a good number of my friends and acquaintances in both kinships still have a hobbit character or two with the name, even if they aren’t active anymore.
So that was a bit of cool history that my character bears, and that I remember everytime I log onto the account. It was like a family, or maybe a cult, long before the Church and Army of Tigey started to formally try to take over the world. And now it’s on Google search results too. Also see My Diary #062/MSotW #44, as this can be considered an extension to that writeup.
Dreams
Sep 08 2025
- Snippet: All I remember is that just before I woke up, my last dream act was to thank a man for his inadvertent help in some training-related activity. The thank you was still on my lips as I woke up. He was not a trainer, though I was, but I was only able to succeed thanks to either his presence or something he had done. I don’t remember details as to what the thing he did was though, or who or what exactly I was training.
Sep 09 2025
- I played a game involving going to rooms and finding a hidden code to redeem. I went with two or three friends to each one, but they were often different people. We learnt after the first couple of rooms that the codes were almost always hidden on a flat panel behind a wall-mounted telephone that I had to unfold into something like a small poster, with a white light strip above and below the unfolded poster that I could press to turn on the light to see the code better.
- One of my goals was not only to redeem the codes but to write them down and share them with Discord friends as well so that multiple people could redeem them for prizes. I did this after we found the first one, and had the two people with me at that time — Super Creek from the Umamusume game as well as a young boy who was tagging along with an adult male who was his teacher and overseeing him while not playing the game — both redeem it separately, before I redeemed it myself as well and wrote it down.
- I went to several other rooms with different partners to get more codes after this. Another room was a noisy auditorium or lecture hall in a University, and we arrived there just after the end of a class and unfolded the wall telephone that was on a pillar near the back of the room. But I got mad at some of the university students in the room because I wanted to take a proper picture of this poster with a camera, yet the students were constantly obliviously walking across my camera’s field of vision, in front or behind the pillar, instead of behind me, on their way out toward the door, despite repeated requests to please be alert of their surroundings. I called them clueless and classless and had to wait for them all to leave before I could take my picture.
- Another room I went to, this one with Jon and Kel, was a small office cubicle located in a Singapore-style void deck, made out of two half-walls, one full wall, and one side with no wall at all where we walked in from. While we looked around for the telephone, a surly girl who was nearby snuck up and tried to vandalize and delete something in a notebook that Kel had brought along. I grabbed the girl’s arm, turned her around, and pinned her against the full wall, and berated her for trying to interfere with us. I realized that she had also been involved with a prior incident that we had, before I had realized how mean she was, but had been unable to catch her at the time.
- Yet another room we went to was a ground-floor apartment owned by Uncle Droy. We were in a side room copying the telephone code while Uncle Droy was in the living room watching TV with a friend. Outside his front door, a movie was shooting a generational remake of a film that he had starred in when he was much younger, but it was the specific scene in which his character had been killed off. He finished watching his show, then strolled outside to catch up with the crew and say hi. He knew that they had almost finished shooting the scene by then, but he offered to reenact the scene again as an older version of his original character if they wanted. For some reason, this caused everyone to laugh heartily.
- There was also a seaside beach scene with two girls dancing in the scene that I remember but am not sure how it connects to everything else. Also, there was a separate computer game that we were not playing but that I remember seeing the name of in the Steam client, called White Presbyterian. It was a short platformer that was on sale in an active Steam sale, with three bonus movement skill unlocks in that game that I could earn only by playing three other game demos that were assumedly owned by the same developer.
Sep 10 2025
- I attended an event at school sponsored by the Scouts, where we went to volunteer with various other groups around school and take part in various activities with them.
- I took part in three events, the first one being ping pong, where I was part of a group of 6, three guys and three girls, that formed a mixed double pair and a single pair to play with each other. I wanted to be in the double pair initially but the girl that was going to face off against a guy in the single pair said that she wanted to be in the double pair instead, so I relented and we switched.
- We went to an open foyer area where there were lots of ping pong tables strewn about the roofed but wall-less lobby. Not all the tables were usable, as some didn’t have nets or paddles, but some boys graciously let us use their intact table which they had put bags of marbles onto while chatting with each other, and my partner and I used that for our singles game, while the doubles group set up not far from us.
- My partner gave me a new ping pong paddle that still had a clear plastic wrapper around it, and asked if I had played ping pong before, I said that I had only passingly played it in school but was probably fine. He gave me a tip to hold the ping pong with the paddle pointing downwards instead of sideways but I found that awkward and said that I’d manage.
- The second event was some sort of orientation tour thing that we gave other students. As part of this, everyone participating had an item called an uado, which was a floating digital cross-section cutout of a crossroads where two railway tracks (possibly roads for some other people instead) intersected each other at a perpendicular angle. The digital overlay was about three feet by three feet wide and was zoomed out enough to see about a three metre by three metre square centered on the middle of the intersection.
- Everyone’s uado had a slightly different decoration to it, like the colour of the soil or pavement around the tracks, the colour and material of the tracks itself, any flowers blooming around the intersection, and so on. There were various places people could visit around campus to further level up and gather decorations for their uado as well.
- The third and final event was a wargame segment between two armies, which was basically a game of elimination tag. I got separated from my army and hid inside a bedroom when I saw an enemy player approaching, then once he was inside the room and searching through a closet, I snuck out of another closet and held his neck in a choke grip, which caused him to surrender and withdraw from the game as a dead player. We exchanged pleasantries and then left the room separately.
- It was evening by the time the event ended, and I started to head back toward the central school building, but as I was walking alongside a fenced path next to a river, I saw bolts of flickering blue lightning in the skies past the river. Several people were also staring at this by the fence, but once I walked past the area where we could see the phenomenon the best, I saw that the phenomenon was blocked by houses that had been built on the other side of the river.
- I walked on a bit and saw that a couple new houses had popped up recently, like within the past day or two, and that they were out of alignment with the existing houses and were still unfinished as well. Next to one of them, an activist had put up a sign on top of a city street sign that said that new houses were illegal here.
- I decided to turn around and return to the place where we had a more unfettered view of the phenomenon. By the time I reached there, I noticed that the fence itself had also been affected by the blue lightning phenomenon and that one of the people standing next to it had bravely reached out to touch the horizontal bolts of energy and started strumming on them like guitar strings.
- After watching this scene for a bit, I decided to move onwards and went back to that central school building. I initially thought of just going right home but I knew that there was still a reporting component that I could do, if the teacher in charge was still around. In the lobby of that building, I saw about fifteen teachers or so still sitting on a semi-circle of couches and chatting to each other, and my math teacher, who was in charge of my group, saw me and waved me over to a table.
- I went up to him and told him about my day’s activities, as well as the fact thaet I had survived the wargame. I also mentioned that I had done similar events to this volunteer day a couple of times before in the past but had just never bothered reporting in for the points at the end of the event before. He wrote all these things down in a book before I gathered my things and left for home.
Sep 11 2025
- Snippet: I remember something about levelling up a full moon on various different platforms and places, like one of them was being levelled up on a Mac. I had several full moons in different configurations though and was testing them against each other.
- Snippet: I went outside our Edmonton 4012 house and the front door closed behind me. I was in pyjamas and wasn’t sure how to get back in so I stood outside the door of the attached garage. Dad shortly came outside for something as well and I ran back to the front door to try to get back in. It closed behind him before I could catch the door, but he had the key to reopen it for me.
- Snippet: Dad and I later went to a neighbourhood around a University to try to find a cheap apartment or house that we could rent and split. We found one across the road and spoke to the nice Chinese auntie owner there, who lived in another attached apartment in the building. The place was decent but the rent was $3,200 or $3,400 a month so I rejected it, saying that we could only pay a maximum of $3,000.
Sep 12 2025
- I was with Dad in a quiet downtown area situated in a large, forested hill dream world that I’ve been to several times before in the past. Both people and open shops were sparse due to the drizzle of rain that was coming down as we looked for but failed to find a particular shop or service.
- I then parted ways from him, even though we were both heading back to the University and going to meet up again there later in the day. I went to a bus stop to wait for the bus to the University, watching with interest as a tour bus headed to Indonesia pulled up and then passed by. That did make me realize that I was on the wrong side of the street, but I was right by a traffic light anyway so I crossed to the correct bus stop on the next light.
- Somehow Dad got back to the University before I did anyway, and even though I had recently graduated, I met him and a friend there and helped them with their casting of a spell.
Sep 13 2025
- Snippet: I had a list of 12 weapons that I was levelling up, divided into a grid of 2 columns and 6 rows. Others were playing this game too, though I am, not sure if it was a multiplayer game with a shared world or a single player game with different sessions. I was the first person to finish one of the weapon evolutions, but I had no idea what it did, and when I went to look it up online there were zero hits for it on my search as well.
Sep 14 2025
- Snippet: I was playing a game in a large high-top tent, something akin to a circus tent. On a digital screen in front of me, the game picked a scenario/location as well as an elemental type once I spent a coin or token that I had, and I then chose characters from my roster to take part in some sort of race or contest in that place and under that element type. I won some and lost some but thought that the results were very random.