Dear Tigey,
The snow. It’s here. Time to plan a getaway.
Entry #215 (Nov 09 2025)
Table of Contents
Snowy…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #208
ට Dreams
Life
Guess who saw only two ants this week. That’s right. Famous last words though, since the reason that this was the case was that I sprayed the two little holes that I had found late last week, by the right side of my sink right where it rests against the kitchen counter, with some insecticide every night after I was finished using the kitchen. One ant I saw was midweek, and was behind the sink, so I also started spraying that back area at the same time from that day forwards. The other ant was actually on another counter near a different cabinet, by the onions, and that cabinet I don’t actually clean very well (there’s a lot of onion skin flakes I should clean up), but it’s nowhere near water. I’ll deal with that one next week.
It’s not sustainable to spray every day though, so I will have to cease that at some point and see if the remaining ants return. Hopefully they’ll find some other neighbour to terrorize instead. Or, y’know, die out. Oddly enough, I also learnt that Safeway does not seem to sell insecticide (anymore?). At least, I could not find it anywhere in our local store’s shelves.
I received a phone call from a Shaw manager about my Open City Wi-Fi issue that I first brought up two weeks ago, only this phone call was to say that they could not find any block on their end and to please ask my hosting provider if they could see any “tags” on their end, whatever that meant, that might be flagging this site as pornography or adult or mature in some way and thus triggering their own site filtering rules. I thought this was nonsense, as did Jah, but I did as they requested and opened a ticket with Dreamhost. They replied very promptly:
Hello!
Thank you for contacting DreamHost Support! My name is John B and I would be happy to help with this.
We have checked the site shiara.antarat.com as requested but we did not find any tags that would flag it as adult content or pornography. We also checked for any malware or compromised files but none were found.
The source of the error you are seeing is block.sse.cisco.com, so the block is coming from the city router. You may wish to contact them again to see if they can be more specific about what the router is picking up from the site to flag it.
Unfortunately since there are no tags or adult content on the site there is nothing we can do to resolve the block from this side.
If you have any questions, please respond to this message.
Take care, and be safe!
John B
Very nice and professional. I agree with them so I emailed that entire reply back to Shaw but have not heard back from them yet. Maybe I should just dump it on our local subreddit as well and see if anyone has an answer there.
Work was fairly hectic this week since I was queue monitor for our team and several people were away, this will continue through this upcoming Monday too before I hand queue monitor duties back over to the usual person. This next Tuesday is a holiday day off, so a bunch of people are off on Monday as well. Not me though, but I plan to flip it around and take Wednesday off instead. But we also have an in-person meeting on Friday that I have to go in for.
The time change, where we roll our clocks forward, happened on Nov 03 this year, so basically the Sunday at the start of this week. That extra hour of sleep was nice since I had been falling behind a bit thanks to watching League of Legends Worlds Championship games on Twitch. There were no games at all this week though, as last weekend was the semifinals and the finals weren’t until the Saturday night at the end of this week. That was an awesome series but it went 5 games and I was up until past 5am watching it.
I will also confirm that I did unsubscribe from that free Fantuan VIP month from a month ago in time. I used it twice in that time span, so I guess that was nice, but as I said back then that app is full of dark patterns and their driver count also seems very low now, so even though they often have somewhat decent deals, it’s hard to justify using them. Maybe the next time they offer me free VIP. If it isn’t a once-per-account thing.
I had picked up the broken Pebblebee tracker that I had mentioned last month several weeks ago, but didn’t get around to actually troubleshooting it until this week, since I thought a warranty return was required and I didn’t want to deal with it with everything else going on. However, upon doing some research, I found that the trackers are just buggy and if they fully run out of power, sometimes when you charge it again, they don’t reconnect to Google’s Find Hub at all. So I factory reset the tracker and connected it again and it popped up as a new entry just fine. Weird. Glad it worked though. Now I just have to get the tracker back to Dad at some point before he becomes lost.
I spent a lot of the week musing about my upcoming trip again, and wondering what sort of hike or project I’d do for the second half of my trip. As Japan’s sakura trees will be starting to bloom in March but won’t really hit full bloom until end March/early April, my trip doesn’t perfectly overlay with that (unless I extend my return date), but keeping to the southern part of the country might give me better views. I’m thinking of doing the Shikoku Pilgrimage (local), and using public transit to get around instead of walking so that it doesn’t take two and a half months or whatever, but one of the major problems with this is that if I also want to stream it, it is unlikely that I will be able to bring a camera into most of the inner temples. Maybe it is enough to just go visit the temples without doing the prayers though, or maybe I can sneak one in anyway by mounting it on a belt strap holder or something. Or do as some other video creators have done, and just visit the temples without doing the sutras.
Other options involve more urban hikes, for example maybe walking on foot through Tokyo or a smaller city or visiting all the train stations along a specific line or something. Or who knows what other plans and ideas I might concoct or read about before my trip begins. But some considerations include internet access (if I want to stream the journey), clothing and how often I can do laundry, and what I will do with my large suitcase that I will likely bring to hold loot that I picked up along the way in my nearly two month trip. For the latter, even if I do the Shikoku trip, I’ll probably use a luggage delivery service to send it between the four major cities to my main hotels there, and occasionally rough it with just a backpack and a couple days worth of stuff in between.
Between now and when it starts, if I’m serious about doing this IRL streaming, I will also need a number of test streams to see what sort of stream (if any) I might be able to rig together with my DJI Pocket 3, or to see if perhaps I need to pick up some other camera instead. I also need to research and test out the various software that the IRL streamers use to do their streams, how to do overlays, BRB/privacy screens, how to send the video to what might end up being my home computer acting as an ingest server, and so on. I’ve only partially looked into this sort of thing in the past and I don’t really know what all is necessary. I’m not sure it’s actually even possible to do effectively with the DJI Osmo Pocket 3.
I also kind of did something interesting while looking forward at the future of my Twitch channel and streaming activities. I sent the Mars Lasar Studio (local), the studio representing one of my favourite songs, an email asking them how much it would cost to license that song for use on my Twitch and/or YouTube channels. Their response:
Hi Jessica,
You may use the song in your Twitch content. We have a license agreement in place with Twitch that allows users to use our music. You will need to contact us for a license agreement If you wish to use the music outside of any Social Media platform.
Sincerely,
Amy Deucet,
Administration Officer
www.marslasar.com
Sound Manipulations, Inc.
Cool. I asked for clarification as to whether this meant YouTube as well, and they said yes. There’s only one actual problem with this — I uploaded a private test clip of the song to YouTube and it didn’t trigger any copyright flags at all, which means that if I use the song as an intro, it might be possible for a copyright troll to try to claim it and then flag all my videos since the artist/company itself doesn’t seem to have claimed it in YouTube’s system. Hmm. We’ll see though. The studio’s actual upload does identify the song, though I pulled that video and uploaded it privately to YouTube and that also did not trigger any copyright flags, even the benign “the owner allows you to use this” one. Maybe that’s just part of their licence agreement with YouTube though. Who knows. And this technically applies to a lot of games and their soundtracks as well, whose music appears in my games but do not get identified in the Copyrights section of a gameplay video that I upload.
Either way, I do love the song very much and I told them that I was hoping to pair it with some sort of commissioned art as an intro segment for my stream to bridge the initial 5 minutes or so of ad breaks whenever I start my stream every day. Now I just need to commission some nice non-AI art from somewhere. After deciding on a theme and setting of some sort.
There’s one wall switch in my apartment that as far as I knew never did anything at all. However, when I randomly flipped the switch as I was walking by it this week, I was surprised to hear a device disconnection noise from my computer. It’s the same sort of noise I hear when I plug or unplug my phone to the computer via a USB cord. When I flipped it again, a device connection sound came on. However, everything related to my computer, except the VR stuff and the cable modem, is plugged into one outlet. And an examination found nothing turned off whichever way I flipped the switch. There’s no actual interruption of power to anything. I don’t understand what this power switch actually controls.
Though my blog tends to avoid politics, I’m going to swerve into it slightly again this week, though again it’s for the sake of an interesting footnote. This week, an Edmonton-area Conservative MP named Matt Jeneroux resigned from the federal government caucus (local). He’s not actually my Member of Parliament, as he represents the riding adjacent to mine, but for some reason I had received a newsletter from him just the week prior to his resignation anyway, the first one that I’d ever gotten from him, so I thought it was an incredible streak of coincidence that now he was in the news for his resignation. Therefore, although I had not uploaded anything to the Internet Archive in a couple months, I went and did this one to mark the occasion.
And finally, the first snowfall of the season came this week, bringing with it a nagging headache for me which I blame on the changing temperatures. I was expecting it to come this week though, so I took multiple balcony landscape shots over the week to try to capture how the turning of the seasons look like here, especially now that the clocks have rolled forward so dusk comes earlier than before. I’ll share most of them here plus whatever else I find on the camera roll for the week.
Sun Nov 02, 5:37 pm, I like this sort of sky colour profile:
Mon Nov 03, 4:28 am, this was a day before the supermoon this week (local), shining down upon my bed through the balcony door. We had cloudy skies through Tuesday and Wednesday, the latter of which was the day of the supermoon (christened the beaver moon (local)) at 8:19 AM EST, so this was the best picture I had of it, especially since I don’t have a professional-grade camera:
Maybe I should get one this Black Friday though.
Next up, Mon Nov 03, 4:22 pm, I liked the juxtaposition of the orange and the grey here:
And Tue Nov 04, 1:07 pm, inside our local Safeway, with the juxtaposition between the black and the white here:
And then later that evening, Tue Nov 04, 5:33 pm, with a colour profile very similar to the Sunday one above:
Then this is from Thu Nov 06, 2:22 am, with the roads drenched with rain just before I went to bed:
An ominous sign, but there was no snow that night. There was no snow the next night either, when I went to bed, but when I woke up on the 7th, suddenly bam! Fri Nov 07, 9:29 am:
And another from 3:13 pm:
And another from 5:28 pm:
Dark clouds covered the city and made the skies so much more gloomy this evening, even though just a few days ago I had still somewhat bright sky pictures from 5:33 pm and 5:37 pm. Although the gloom also comes with a modicum of nostalgia these days. A nostalgia of what exactly, I’m not sure.
The snow did stick around but there wasn’t a lot of it, and much of it had melted away by Sun Nov 09, 10:09 am.
Games
Not much change in games this week, I’m still working on FINAL FANTASY TACTICS – The Ivalice Chronicles on stream, abusing a combination of the Arithmetician class, the Thief class, and the Repose spell from the Mystic, to crowd control and strip every enemy on the map of all their gear before killing them. I just give everyone in my party sleep immunity via a Protect Ring accessory, and then chain cast Repose with my arithmeticians, generally using the CT = multiple of 5 or 4 parameters since the way that CT accumulates tends to mean everyone on the board is one or the other (or both). This puts everyone besides the occasional boss to sleep, and then my thieves move in and pilfer everything from each enemy in turn before one of my non-thieves executes them.
Off stream, it’s still mostly Escape from Duckov, though I’m not putting as much time in it as previous weeks. There’s also Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which released a new scenario, and some nice anniversary event gifts for these next couple weeks, but neither of those are likely to save our interest long-term — I believe Satinel mentioned she’s likely going to quit after the anniversary free gifts event is over, and I’ll probably be majorly scaling back after December, once one of my favourite characters comes out and after a nice support card banner rerun that I’ve been looking forward to. I can’t see myself playing it through my trip in February/March, at least. I’ve better things to do while on vacation.
I also picked up Legends of Dragaea: Idle Dungeons this week and played it a little bit, and there are a couple other games I’m interested in like Duet Night Abyss that I want to invest some time into, but various other things like trip planning and general ennui with the here and now, as well as this headache that has been bugging me all week, have been taking up the gaming time slots instead. That being said, I appreciate games that allow me to easily use my own character portraits for my ingame characters:
It was also a nice game to play while distracted, like when watching the LoL finals late on Saturday night/Sunday morning.
Plushie of the Week #208
Deep in the depths of the plushie box at my parents’ place is a… bear door stopper? I’ve never seen this product before, but the third picture below shows how it’s supposed to be used — you hook it against the door handle (or I guess door knob) on both sides of the door and it hugs the door frame like a koala bear and helps to keep it open. Um, sure. I have no idea where we got it from, or who acquired it (though I suspect Kel randomly bought it). The sticker suggests that it was bought in Canada though, from one of the stores selling Chinese or Japanese products, although it is unclear which one exactly. $5.50 CAD for a 300 yen item! Highway robbery!
Front:
Back:
Tag 1 front (with image on how to use it):
Tag 1 back (under the sticker, which I didn’t peel off, so not all of it is visible):
Tag 1 back sticker:
Is this considered a plushie? Oh well.
Dreams
Nov 03 2025
- Snippet: I was a spectator watching a group of around 6 friends, including Jah and Dan, play a game. The game started off as a League of Legends style MOBA before turning into a third-person camera RPG. As a spectator, I had a ghost character that I could follow the players around in, and for some reason I could even perform certain actions like rezzing downed players, although it didn’t seem to work on Dan, who was playing the game on a demo account instead of a full one. Jah could rez Dan with his character class though. I also couldn’t heal anyone so this extra ghost character had a very limited utility. Later on there was a game update and I found out that after that I could turn my game portrait pink. I also acquired a pistol from the update, although I could not fire it.
- Snippet: I was talking with Tes in a second-floor apartment or room in a house near a hawker center where he stayed and telling him about my house-hunting woes. I had apparently owed him 210k which I had recently repaid and I bemoaned that if I was smarter, I would have held on to that and bought a more expensive house, paid off the lawyer fees, and then paid him back after that slowly, since now I was slowly bleeding money every month that I couldn’t find a house due to said lawyer fees.
Nov 04 2025
- I was walking between rooms or houses set around a major city street, doing quests while packing up rooms that lacked a fourth wall and opened up to the street. I was apparently getting ready to move into a new house, which was why I was packing up.
- In one of the rooms was a contact card for Lee from Vernon Barford, and I wondered how he was doing now. I checked his profile and noted that I had contact details for half the people from the class that we were in, but not the other half, and hoped that they would one day reach out and leave a note on his profile as he had the most recognizable name in the class if they were ever looking people up.
- Later on, I was also levelling up a skill to max level, and when I reached that level, I led a class together with Director Akikawa from Umamusume. We were training three boys in a classroom to try to get them to max level too, which was apparently level 18, and she was the “bad cop” while I was the “good cop”. She scared one of the boys so much that he peed in his pants, and there was a small puddle on the floor, but neither of us commented on it and they all eventually reached max level too, thanked us, and left the room.
- A bit after that, I was walking with her past an open-air restaurant featuring a Thai curry buffet for $19.99. We felt that this was a bad deal because the rice was limited and in comparison, an Indian curry buffet only cost $17.99 and had unlimited rice.
Nov 05 2025
- Snippet: I was moving through a house together with a team of other players, we were fighting alien creatures on a grid-based map but the battles were in real time instead of turn-based. One of the character classes we had could heal in a very similar manner to a monk from Final Fantasy Tactics. At one point, I was lagging behind the team and someone ahead triggered a door closing mechanism that caused a stone slab to start descending from the top of a doorway, closing it in seconds. Thankfully I heard the weird sound of the grinding stone and the yells of my teammates, realized what was happening, and charged forward through the doorway before it closed. Also, many of the monsters had QR codes which we could scan to defeat them, this was particularly helpful for a couple of the monsters that were on scaffoldings that we could not otherwise reach.
Nov 06 2025
- Snippet: I was watching SpartanVRTTV stream a game with ragesaq on a 3D spectators’ channel when someone raided his channel, sending him a few extra viewers. He apparently would get buffs for his character in the game when the number of incoming raiders were a multiple of 4, but the incoming raiders this time was a multiple of 5, so one of his moderators quietly tweaked the channel’s script to make it say multiple of 5 instead so that he would get the buffs this time.
- Snippet: There was also another scene about me going to a restaurant and ordering pasta but the waitresses not really speaking English there and thus we were having communication issues.
Nov 07 2025
- Snippet: There was some place that was trying to decide between staying together or seceding from its parent place, and to help decide, players were playing a game where they were trying to find anagrams in two different words that would each fill up its own progress bar meter for either staying or seceding for each word that was found. I don’t remember the word for staying together but the word for seceding was “venoms” and its associated anagrams.
- Snippet: I visited a cultural enclave in another country with Kel, this enclave was an old and run-down two or three storey building that we were warned not to visit as the people and the culture was dangerous, but that when we actually visited anyway in the end we found the people there to be harmless and polite. Some people at the entrance invited us to play a game with them involving a gun though, and I declined, and when we went upstairs to the top level we found an empty parking lot there with an outdoors staircase that led down to the ground floor. Apparently Jon had been here in the recent past as well.
- Snippet: I was at home with Mom and Dad and we were watching the end of an Edmonton Oilers hockey game. We were tipped by a friend at the game that the Oilers were about to score the game-winning goal via a penalty shot, but the cameras didn’t actually catch it and they had to use a fan’s camera capture from some seats that was located from behind some netting instead. I was confused at this and Mom helped me look up other angles of the goal online while Dad prepared the TV for a couch co-op game with Mom.
Nov 08 2025
- Snippet: I played my first ever chess-like game at a club and won against my opponent, which got me an invite to a club and the ability to purchase or earn a number of small stones. These stones allowed certain eligible people to transform into superheroes when they held them and tapped the tops of the stones, so I gave it to four of my friends who I knew could do it. They all happily accepted, but they wanted to ensure that their identities were kept a secret, so they looked up their own online profile and checked it from top to bottom to make sure that there was no mention of them being superheroes there.
- Snippet: There was also a separate dream where I remember being in a hideout and having a potato in my hand, that was important to the plot somehow but I don’t remember any further detail about it.
Nov 09 2025
- Snippet: Various members of a 5-person team with different stat limits, in particular someone with low maximum health and mana totals. They also had different passive skills that helped the team though, and another person for example had one that raised everyone’s health and mana points by a certain percentage, which helped offset the other person’s low totals. They did some quests together as a unit, though I don’t remember any in particular.
- Snippet: There was an army of about 30 or 40 people about to take part in a really difficult battle. Several people tried to defect out of the zone, but their stern commander got wind of that and went into the transition zone connecting their waiting area with the area exit and tried to yell at and give pep talks to the people leaving, though it was ultimately their choice if they wanted to leave in the end still. According to the minimap about six green dots turned around and decided to stay for the fight. While he was gone, someone commented that a lot of the people in the army were people that preferred to be solo in terms of their civilian jobs, things like pirates and soldiers and farmers. Everyone looked around and noted how true that was, but also how comradery had brought them together and everyone was now chatting and laughing together in groups of 3 to 5 even though there was a dire battle coming up.
- Snippet: I was at a KFC store and found whipped potato on the menu as part of a three-item deal. It was named something weird, with the naming structure of Someone’s Something. But it showed the picture of the items, so I was fairly certain what it was, and confirmed with the male cashier that it included whipped potato before I ordered it. I also orrdered some fried cauliflower, which itself was around $10. The total price was $16.80, and the cashier handed me a $3 coin and a $0.20 coin before he went through a doorway into the store kitchen to get the food.