My Diary #252

Life

Funny how life works. After I wondered last week about when my special ballot for the October referendum would come, and bemoaned the fact that I probably wouldn't get a scuffed one at this point, my special ballot did arrive this week and was indeed one of those scuffed ones. Despite the Global News article I linked last week (and reposted here (local)) saying:

The provincial agency is also addressing concerns about wording contained in some special ballot declaration forms.

A statement on certain forms asks voters to declare they are unable to vote at advance voting, which takes place Oct. 13 to 17 or on the Oct. 19 referendum day — or face a fine.

Elections Alberta said the language came from a previous version of the Election Act and will be removed from future ballot packages.

Stoesz said voters who receive forms containing the outdated wording can simply cross it out before submitting their ballot package.

“They complete the rest of the declaration, sign it, send it back — we will accept those,” she said. “Every special ballot package going out from now forward will have a different declaration with that line removed.”

Emphasis mine. Yet mine was mailed out on Sep 08:

But still contained the line:

I'm not sure if they're really inefficient or inept or just looking for ways that they can use to invalidate votes they don't like at this point, since I will have to cross that first declaration out before sending it back, but whatever. From an archivist's point of view I was happy to have received one of those rather than one of the "fixed" ones.

I'll fill in mine and mail it in next week. This also reminded me that I need to go change the address on and/or refresh some of my government documentation, which I apparently have not done since I moved here in April 2024. My passport now has under 6 months left too, which I think means I can renew it online now, but I might want to do it in person anyway, we'll see. I think there are some new rules (local) around getting an Alberta identification card that I need to go navigate as well.

Tying in to all this is the fact that out of the blue, the ICA department in Singapore contacted me to tell me that I had dual citizenship and needed to renounce my Singaporean one (or the Canadian one) by Dec 08 2026. Which is technically true, except that I already had a renunciation application open with them in the past and they were the ones that had denied me at that time. I emailed them with a bunch of questions to clarify what documents of mine they already have (I have to return documents that I no longer own, and in fact the last time I was there at their building I believe I signed forms saying I no longer owned them, for example. Do I have to re-sign those forms?).

They were very inefficient and full of crossed wires the last time I tried to go through this process, to the point that I lost my NUS study abroad chance twice there, over a period of nearly a year, because ICA and/or CMPB couldn't get things straightened out for one of ICA's other arms to grant me a Student's Pass in time. They then hadn't contacted me since about November 2023, but I guess a different officer has now picked up my case or something.

This is good in the sense that I would like to clear this all up once and for all, it's just one of those "right things to do" that I would like to resolve and have off the plate even if I've re-visited Singapore enough times now to be emotionally okay if I'm somehow barred from ever entering the country again (which I do not expect the end result to be, but it is technically possible). However, what would be worse is starting this all up again, submitting all my documentation in duplication, only for it to fail yet again at the same point, because ICA and CMPB cannot agree with each other. And then the ambiguity affecting any future trips I might make to the country, rather than any sort of final resolution.

Also, while I have not used my Singapore citizenship in decades, it is still nice "technically" being a citizen of the country (even if this dual citizenship is due to their government inefficiencies and sweeping my case under the rug) and it will be sad to lose that. The rest of my family has long since lost it too though. But I do think it is wrong that they have a rule against dual citizenship. At some level, we are all humans living and working on the same planet, and free and open trade and travel, and the movement and exchange of people, goods, and ideas benefits everyone. Yet most of us have some sense of loyalty and pride towards our home country or city, and it is selfish of them to take it away just because we want to go live elsewhere. Especially if it wasn't our fault that we moved in the first place. And uprooting and coming home just isn't an option for most people ever, even as adults, especially in a bad economy.

Oh well, whatever. I expect the end result will be either it will get mired in red tape and my case will be shoved under a proverbial "you don't ask about it, we don't talk about it" rug again, or I will finally lose that lingering citizenship but will regain the ability to cross the border at will with my Canadian passport. We'll see! They haven't replied to my reply to their initial outreach email. Regardless, I actually need to gather much of the same documents for this process as the ones to renew my passport and/or citizenship card, so it's high up on the adult to-do list.

Another thing on that list was cleaning the house, and I'm glad to report that the Swiffer that I bought last week worked well. I ended up doing my cleaning on Monday this past week instead, since Monday was a public holiday and I went out on Sunday. A lot of dirt and hair and dustbunnies got cleaned up, and the Swiffer with wet/dry pads seems to be much easier to use than a vacuum/mop, and probably much more economical too compared to how often I've had to replace the vacuum (I've been resisting splurging on a good vacuum for several months now). I even got tired of seeing layers of dust on my computer tower and my standing fan and gave both a good wipe too.

I did end up having to use several wet and dry pads to get through about 2/3 of the apartment, since it was the first time I've used it and there were some dust piles in corners and under furniture I had been ignoring, but subsequent weeks should be easier and hopefully I can get and stay more thorough over time too (for example, I didn't want to waste another wet pad to mop up the area by the front door this last week, but I'll probably do that next week as the kitchen and washroom won't require as much scrubbing.

A third thing that was on that adult list that got done this week was investments. I kind of alluded to this in a half-joking way last week when I said that I wanted to look into casually playing the stock market or something. Well, not really, I've walked back on that for now and put a pin in it, but what I did need to do (and consulted Gemini for this week) was invest my existing money somewhere, as most of it was sitting uninvested in either my regular FHSA account or my standard low-interest bank account. I didn't really want to lock up my money long-term in case a good house pops up for sale in the neighbourhoods I was looking for, which was why I had left the money uninvested since a GIC from a couple of years ago matured.

I also had plenty of reservations about ever using RBC for my investments again after the experience with their piss-poor financial advisors (and to a certain extent, mortgage brokers) back then, but there were no current deals from other banks for opening or transferring a direct investment account to them, so for now I left it all with RBC anyway. To be specific, after talking through my options with Gemini, who seemed more than capable of being a basic financial advisor, I reopened my TFSA account (which they had rudely closed when I cancelled the GIC that had been reinvested against my consent back in that above link, even though I had had the TFSA account for ~10 years), and moved 70k of the 78k or so sitting in my main bank account into it.

I then invested all of that $70,000, plus the $24,000 currently in my FHSA, into RBF2010, which is a "safe" cash vehicle thing in RBC Direct Investing, and will supposedly return me around 1.80%, or $1,700 or so, on the $94,000 over the course of an entire year. It's not great, but it's far more than doing nothing with it, which was what happened the previous year, especially since both accounts are tax-sheltered. I could get more relatively safely by putting it into some GICs or something, especially after the October referendum when things are more stable, but that would also lock me in for at least 6 months to a year.

Gemini did point out that if I hold on for 1 year and 3 months more, I get to invest another $16,000 into the FHSA to fully top that out, which creates a bunch of income tax deductions for me that will save me money to the tune of about $4,500 to $5,000, I believe, on top of being a tax-free investment engine. So unless a GREAT house appears in the next year and a bit, before Jan 2028, it's actually a fairly bad idea to buy right away without first maxing out the FHSA, since I cannot use that anymore once I buy my first home.

I'll think about whether I want to lock in my money for a year. I also really don't want to do it with RBC.

But time sure flies despite all the instability in the world. Something weird and once-in-a-lifetime that is happening soon is that Alberta is moving away from Daylight Savings Time and Mountain Standard/Daylight Time to Alberta Time, which is functionally identical to Mountain Daylight Time or Central Standard Time, but with our own name branded on it. But anyway, this has a caused a bunch of confusion at work and other local places because Google apparently fumbled the ball and "forgot" to account for this upcoming change, whereas Microsoft and Apple did account for it (or are in the process of doing so), according to a work meeting that our University had with Google reps.

So Google Calendar now has an issue where for most people, all Alberta appointments past Nov 01 2026 "might" be one hour off, depending if they've applied Google's recommended fix or not, which is to... manually adjust our appointments past Nov 01 one hour later. Yeah, that was their recommended fix communicated to us. And now that they've done that, they can't very well go back and apply a fix anyway since that would break the calendars of everyone who's already changed any meetings past that date. Plus they've not communicated this to people in the ABT area on regular consumer Gmail accounts as well. And good luck figuring out who has switched and who has not switched on more complex calendars.

It's oddly serendipitous that ABT not only stands for Alberta Time but also an old LLM-generated infinite anime channel on Twitch called Always Break Time, that I used to watch briefly back in Mar 2023, when AI stuff was first bursting onto the scene. Thus they share the same hover tooltip in my blog. This week also happened to be the week where I came across an article about that AI anime on this blog (local). That blog said the show was technically lost media now, and I did realize that that was true, so I spent several days in the week downloading and archiving what was saved on their YouTube channel for posterity.

This led to running into an issue with JDownloader2 (local), the archival/download program I use, where I kept running into "Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot" errors that JDownloader2 then instructed me to fix by signing in to an alt account in incognito, then capturing those cookies using an addon named Cookie Editor (local), before uploading them to JD2. That was easy enough to do, and seemed to fix the issue temporarily, but then it failed again at some point near the end of the day (the archive took a while) and wouldn't work at all after that.

The issue in the end seemed to be that adding YouTube account cookies to JDownloader2 actually doesn't work at all (local), and really hasn't for around a year now (local), but there's no Knowledge Base article on the JD2 website mentioning this, and the YouTube accounts part of the app redirects people to this article (local) which is where I went to do all that Cookie Editor stuff. What actually fixed it was trying a different IP address via a VPN, or waiting out what turned out to be a temporary block from YouTube's side. I suspect any old JD2 update might also bypass the block for a little while, perhaps since it comes with a new app signature or something, though I'm not certain on this (this sequence of events seemed to happen once for me but it might have been coincidence too.)

I don't know how long the block is though, and didn't need to in the end since I used the VPN method instead to grab all the files I needed. While this is YouTube's fault, and they deserve much of the hate for it, JD2 is not innocent too since they have poor instructions on this whole process and no note at all in the app that YouTube accounts are not working. After nearly a full year of it being broken.

Anyway I'm putting down all this so I can look back at my own notes next time. I should really just pivot back to yt-dlp for YouTube though. I do have one of its forks installed but have no idea what the state of that project is at this point.

Another software group that confounded me this week were note-taking apps. I had mentioned three weeks ago that I wanted to move away from Microsoft OneNote as my note-taking app due to various issues with it, and the two frontrunners that I was considering the most to replace it were Obsidian (local) and Joplin (local). It turns out though that one of my most dire needs for this software is that it has to support tables well, and choosing between Obsidian and Joplin is like choosing between digital diarrhoea and digital headaches when it comes to table support.

This turns out to partially be because both of them store their stuff in Markdown files (and Joplin additionally stores some data in an SQLite database), and Markdown files don't support a lot of fancy stuff when it comes to tables. Like resizing columns. Both Obsidian and Joplin handle this differently -- Joplin hardcodes in some stuff like resizing columns, but also has a really onerous thing where it will also resize my other table columns for me when I want to resize just one to what it thinks is best for me, to make it fit the full width of the page or container, or because the new moon was shining overhead that night or whatever other arcane reason.

On the other hand, Obsidian doesn't let you resize columns at all natively, but has some community plugins that allow this, but due to the way its editor/reader work, every single plugin I tried was irredeemably broken in some frustrating way or another. Obsidian also has several community plugins to create tables in code blocks instead of Markdown format so that they can have more style features, but I hated all those I tried too (though I did not try them all).

Due to this, I got very frustrated with both apps when I tried using them midweek. Gemini did suggest a couple other options but I didn't want to dive down into other obscure apps by then, and in the end Joplin had more dealbreakers than Obsidian, so I went for Obsidian for now, especially since I found some plugins to help mitigate some of my bigger issues (and had Gemini write up a couple of CSS/code snippets to solve a couple issues too). It's still not perfect though, like I already found a bug where it will look at my Twine/SugarCube2 stuff, like <<widget>>, assume the first < represents a html tag, force-colour the rest of the word weirdly, and then this breaks all formatting (underlines, bolded text, etc) in the rest of the page section below the first < symbol. It's so weird and so dumb. I can escape character everything to make it not do that, but then I lose the ability to copy/paste it outside somewhere else. And there's a lot of them that I store in my notes.

(OneNote has its own problems though, like extremely crappy copy/pasting support and also some auto-column adjust nonsense that I dislike, and heck, even table-specific software like Google Sheets have problems -- for example, a couple of months ago, Google Sheets introduced a bug on Firefox where if I paste a URL into the edit input box of a cell, so not directly into the cell itself but first hitting F2 or Enter to bring up a blank edit box, then pasting a URL in, then the input cursor totally breaks and I can no longer type or edit into the box unless I press Home + Escape, End + Escape, Ctrl + Home, or Ctrl + End first. It's so annoying.)

I used an Obsidian plugin to export my notes and tables out of OneNote, and it actually failed at first when I tried to give it the manual backup, so I had to grant it temporary access to my Microsoft account for it to retrieve the stuff. I then dumped it all into a custom notebook and started pulling tables and lists and notes out into brand new notebooks as I need them. Around this time, I also set up implementations of Syncthing (local) as my solution to sync notes between my desktop (I used SyncTrayzor (local) for PC) and my phone (I used Syncthing-Fork (local) for Android).

I chose Syncthing because I will likely need to extend something like this in the future to sync things from my Dad's computer and my own computer to some sort of file server that then gets backed up to Backblaze in the future, so I figured it was a good idea to get used to the software now. And it seems to work well. I do worry about having yet another app open 24/7 on my main PC though, and also on my phone, and I'm not yet sure how much battery and/or processing power it will take at its usage peaks. We shall see, I guess. Right now I'm only syncing a very small number of notes between the PC and the phone, since I am not syncing the notebook of old stuff that I pulled out of OneNote.

The writing on my Twine game took a bit of a backseat this week, although I did mostly complete a set of branching passages that I had been stuck on for most of last week too. This was because I needed to import most of my notes over from OneNote before I could use them, and I did that near the end part of this week. There's a lot more stuff outside of my game notes that I need to move over though. The move (and my fiddling about with about two dozen tables) also started me on another project -- to unify my English and Japanese music playlists from Spotify, my bought CDs, and some MyAnimeList/AMQ lists, and try to start on a FLAC/MP3 collection that I can bring around with me. Not like I need yet another project on top of everything else, but hey, a lot about living life well is doing what I want to do at any point in time, and this is a thing that I want to do right now, too. Also, apparently my Spotify account is 14 years old next week. And I've never paid for premium or used the free trial for it.

Another thing that entered my orbit of things I wanted to do this week was that Kynji, bless her heart, linked a cheap eBay listing of three Tigey-likes, although the problem with that was that the shipping to Canada from USA for them was pricier than I liked. Still, that led me to create yet another big table in my new Obsidian notebook, and talk to Jah about setting up a system where I could ship him small things (like Tigey-likes) that I found for reasonably cheap on eBay, and have him consolidate the collection and then ship it to me afterwards in one box. Once we hashed out the details on that, weighed his Tignardo (I don't have a weighing scale for mine), and asked Gemini about the absurd cost to ship anything at all from the USA to Canada through USPS, I calculated that it would need to save me about $7-8 CAD per Tigey in shipping costs for it to be economical to ship a Tigey to him instead of me. This dropped to $4 if we used a bigger box, but then I'd need to fill it with quite a few Tigey-likes.

That meant that I decided that the listing of 3 Tigey-likes, which I did buy in the end, was not worth sending to Jah and have him reroute it to me, since I would have saved $16.85 CAD on shipping by doing that, which was only $5.60 CAD or so per Tigey. I just had it shipped here direct instead to cut down on time and potential points of failure, and have eBay protection for the trip across the border. I also found a cheap-ish listing in Ontario and had that shipped here via Canada Post as well. And I sent a third bought plushie to myself from the States, which I won't reveal yet but am hopeful it arrives as listed. That one was not a Tigey-like, and was more expensive, both in cost and shipping, but I guess that makes sense since it was larger. They'll all get their days in the sun when they arrive.

I did buy a fourth listing, a single Tigey-like plushie from the USA, and had THAT one sent to Jah though. So there's one on the way to him, four (across two listings) on the way to me, and a larger plushie as well. Because I'm doing this, I'm also wondering what else I can buy and send his way instead of mine to repack into a cheaper package afterwards. While doing this, I also started looking at some stuff from Japan and thereabouts which offer free shipping to Canada... and now I'm suddenly worried I'll spend a silly amount of money on things that please me and nullify all my capital gains this year.

I also did learn that if I add an item to a cart and leave it there for a bit, sometimes the seller will offer a 10% discount or a couple of dollars off to try to entice me to move on it. I accidentally did this at first since I was mulling about this whole Tigey-like trafficking operation for a couple days, and saw a couple of offers arrive while I was doing said mulling. Eventually, I ended up accepting one of them, on the big non-Tigey-like plushie. I was offered a second discount on a separate Tigey listing, but I did not end up getting that one because the price was not the issue, instead the shipping was too expensive even though all the USA listings were using USPS Ground Advantage. So I passed on it with a note to the seller that said as much.

Anyway, there's some Tigey-likes headed our way, Tigey. And most of them were paid for with extra USD that I had sitting in my PayPal account from Steffy slowly returning me some cash that I had lent her years ago. So she's bankrolling me some extra backup Tigeys, basically.

So a lot of digital madness happened this week. A couple other minor things happened here and there, including the fact that we had a fire alarm, and on the way back up from evacuating the premises, I learned that one of the two elevators in the building sometimes skips a stop if multiple instructions are queued up. I saw it happen twice, and it was very weird. The other elevator is physically incapable of going down to the ground floor if it's stuck idle on the second floor, without first being sent to the third floor or higher manually, and this is apparently on purpose and unfixable according to the staff, so both elevators are wonky to some regards. Great.

The annual anime survey from the International Anime Research Project (local) was sent out this week too. This is a longitudinal study of anime fans by Dr. Stephen Reysen et al, and I've done this every year since 2020:

I didn't get any work done on the balcony camera this week, mostly because the items that I ordered from Amazon last week have not all arrived yet. One of the items was due to arrive on Friday this week, but it was "Out for Delivery" for some time, before suddenly flipping to "Estimated to arrive by 17 September". That was 6 days later! What happened exactly while it was "out for delivery"??? But who knows with Amazon these days. Another small package I ordered is apparently "Delayed at Customs", according to its delivery status, but it's actually been sitting in front of me for a couple of days already. Sooooo.

I also alluded to going out on Sunday earlier in the blog. I went out for a walk around Whyte Avenue, going to the Village Goods store there to pick up a loofah and sponge and bath soap rack, and then visiting some bookstores and shops to look for things. I didn't end up buying anything else except this lunch, which I did want to share here, it was kimchi jjigae from a store called Hanjan:

It came with a croquette, a bunch of side dishes, and a "milkis" drink that I did not really like in the end, but the meal itself was great. I wish the Korean store at HUB Mall in the U of A, Chosun Korean, still sold their kimchi stew dish that they used to have. I also love there being many little side bowls of stuff, it reminds me of the Teishoku (定食) meals in Japan, which I will almost always opt for if I see that word, which means set meal, on a menu or storefront.

Sadly, the outfit which I had seen the last time at that Village Goods store was already long gone, but I did see this skirt which I liked very much in a different store:

But the price tag was $350! Plus it was much too long, since it would have gone down all the way to my ankles. But $350. I'm not paying that much for an article of clothing! Oh well. The search for a nice patterned skirt (tartan or otherwise) continues.

And as always, not least but last, here's a couple of balcony cam pictures. I liked the fiery sunset one.

Games

Playing sorting games has continued to supercharge the amount and quality of remembered dreams this week. Or so I tell myself. My overall game playing, even in terms of the cozy sorting genre, has been low though, and dipped even further nearer the end of the week as other computer-related projects took precedence.

I finished Shelves and Sorcery: Tidy Up the Enchanted Shop (local) in the wee hours of Monday this week, and once I was done that, my next game was Konbini Cleanup (local). I've already 100%'d the game, but there's one more level with a ton of items that I'm still working through, so I haven't moved on from it yet, even though I've already bought a couple other games as well since they came as a set with Konbini Cleanup. This game is serviceable, but not great in terms of there being a lot of nitpicky details and small bugs that I found, and the dev is already trying to make another game to cash in further on the genre, which I'm not thrilled about. Still, it's not awful either, so I didn't give a negative review, but I did leave a list with a bunch of bugs and thoughts in the forum for the dev to review (local).

That's about all I played this week! Boring old me.

Plushie of the Week #245

This plushie is one of my three or four remaining entries from Kel's Guangzhou apartment when I visited her earlier this year. According to its tag, it was bought from Taiwan for $390 NTD (Currently $17.11 CAD) from a studio called Little Matter (local). Either directly from their boutique store or from a rack in a larger bookstore or gift store. I don't have any other details beside that, and the indications on the tag that the rather hairy turtle was made from handcrafted wool in a Nepalese co-op. Cool!

While the English name of the studio is LittleMatter, the Chinese name is 重要的小事, roughly The Little Things That Matter. Also cool! Tigey could use a new steed. I mean what?

Top:

Bottom:

Tag 1 front:

Tag 1 back:

Tag 2 front:

Tag 2 back:

Dreams

Sep 07 2026

• I started at level 1 in a sumo-inspired MMORPG, where we had to level up by exploring and doing quests, attend school in between, and had to face off against another player in a 1 vs 1 duel every 10 levels to level up past that multiple-of-10 level.
• One particular scene I remember is exploring a crypt with a friend, and underneath the base of some stairs leading up from the entrance was a small hideyhole with a couple of ominous-looking skulls and bones, and about a dozen magical artifacts. We could only reach a couple of them because neither of us had a long stick and we didn't want to extend our hands in, in case there was a trap.
• Another scene had me exploring what seemed to be a tall building with many basement levels, and at the bottom of the stairs leading down through the basements were several delinquents seated in groups of 3 or 4 on the floor. They turned out to be fairly friendly, and I had a brief interaction with them that I forgot the details of before leaving.
• I fought against Andy when I hit level 70, and he charged me but I dodged his attack, caught hold of him, and gently forced him down to the ground using his forward momentum. A woman in the same clan as us that was watching exclaimed something to the extent of "What the heck was that" since the whole fight was over in two seconds, and so I explained what had happened.
• Another guy in the same clan added some context that there were many different styles of fighting, and some smaller people tended to put more force into charging their opponent, which could make them vulnerable to being caught off-balance like that. Other smaller people sometimes took a dodging strategy instead, playing hard to get and hoping to get their opponent to overextend.
• A little later on, before some classes started, I had a quest to return to my dorm room and interact with a sumo wrestler who was resting there. I did so the first time just going through the motions, as I thought I didn't have enough time to finish it before class, but I found out that I had plenty of time left over, and for some unknown reason I had to rewind and repeat it again.
• This time I went back to my room before the sumo wrestler even arrived, and I saw him carrying a struggling woman in to the room, placing her on the bed, and then as I was about to step in, I saw that she was in the throes of childbirth and he helped her give birth to a turtle. The father came in with his two little sons, one about 6 years old and one about 2, and the older kid took the turtle, who was glowing, in both hands with a look of awe on his face.
• The father thanked the sumo wrestler and then helped the woman out of the room, and following the quest steps listed on the side of my screen, I gave the sumo wrestler a hug, before taking the recording of the event to deliver to a location. I finished all that at level 72 and at 59 minutes past the hour, one minute before classes started.
• Snippet: I was living in a house with Dad, and was watching soccer on a television in my room. I saw the finish of a 3-3 draw between Switzerland and Croatia, where both teams' goalies managed to score a goal because one of them was late getting back to his goal after scoring on the opponent. Dad was only just waking up at that point, and I went out to ask him if he was going to watch that match later, as I said that it had a good ending. He said he wasn't sure yet. While out there, I checked other scores and saw that Japan had blown a 5-1 lead in the first half and had tied 5-5 with Argentina.

Sep 08 2026

• I was watching and cheering on a pair of lovers fighting in a war as part of a televised sports-like event with a set duration. The taller man was dressed in a military uniform, and he was the one who actually went out to war, while the shorter girl was dressed in a beige sweater with sleeves that went all the way to her wrists, and she stayed at their home.
• At one point the man was affected with blindness, but they learnt while embracing that the woman could take the man's blindness and transfer it to herself, and she did so happily, sacrficing her own vision so that he could see again. She said that as long as she could feel him, that was all she needed.
• The pair's side was eventually victorious, overthrowing the existing government in a civil war, and I think the blind spell was lifted here. It was Friday afternoon at that point and we had to take a boat back to the mainland from the island that we were on, so I followed the two of them after they signed out and headed towards the docks.
• We had to dodge a lot of identical-looking people carrying guns, some loyalists to the old tyrant that were shooting soldiers, some others happy about the revolution and shooting the loyalists, and some other people shooting anyone that looked like they were trying to loot cultural artifacts and bring them home.
• We got to the pier at the docks safely though. There was just one more ferry left that was coming in 15 minutes, so we lined up and I hunted around in my pockets for the 35 cents fee. I pulled out some clipped magazine coupons that added up to 35 cents from my pocket, but I also found two Canadian dollar coins there that were shaped like a jagged mountain peak instead of a circle, and I showed those to the couple as well as a group of women standing in front of them.
• Suddenly, behind us was a familiar face and voice, and I turned around to see Mrs Shu. She said she was glad that she had caught us, as she needed the man to come do some additional soldier duty. She apologized for this happening after we had checked out, and said that she had exhausted other options, but no other alternatives could be found. He said that it was alright and left the queue, with Mrs Shu promising that she'd send him home with some extra makeup vacation time after.
• The girl and I headed home on the ferry, and once we got home, I dumped the contents of my backpack in a large tank of water that was as tall as the living room. All the books floated into a pile at the bottom of the tank as part of a detox cleaning process. I saw one of my unused clipped coupons float by and wondered if the drain would get clogged.
• In the meantime, I received a phone call from a friend about another friend who was coming over tomorrow, and was told that I needed to make two bowls of fried rice with sweet corn bits and that she would bring food herself as well. I had to ask for confirmation a couple times to figure out exactly how much I needed to make.
• The next day, as the girl was about to arrive, a chatbot intervened and insisted on trying to generate the scene of me opening the front door and gently pulling her into the house. First, it generated a scene with us looking at the front door of the house from outside, and me reaching out a hand to pull her behind the "camera", which was obviously not inside the house. When I said that it was wrong, it fixed the point of view so we were inside the house, but now I had two separate hands pulling two separate versions of her into the house, one from the top right of the camera viewport and one from the bottom right.
• Subsequent attempts fixed both the point of view and the number of hands, but her figure kept getting more stylized so she looked different each time, and the LLM kept giving her a different coloured dress as well, and while those were mildly interesting changes, I told it to stop wasting our time.

Sep 09 2026

Dream 1

• I had a motorized plastic stool that I sat on and drove around on while in Calgary. I went back and forth between a friends' birthday celebration on the side of a road that was hosted by Dad and featuring a bunch of my friends, and an area adjacent to it along the same road which was considered to be one or two rooms away, where there were crafting tables and gatherable resources.
• I was trying to make the person a birthday gift, and ended up crafting them a handheld mirror about the size of a face, but I also wanted to craft them some chalk that they could use to write on the mirror. This took a while as I kept on changing the colour I wanted, and had to go harvest different resources for it each time.
• Eventually I was satisfied with the colour that I had, and brought the chalk and mirror back to the main party, only to find that it had just disbanded and people had already left to start heading home, many of them heading back to Edmonton.
• Dad asked me if I wanted to call everyone back so that I could hand over the present. I said no, I'd just send the person the gift directly in the mail. I also checked the newspaper and my watch around this time and saw that it was Jan 25 2023, at around 4:30 pm or so.
• I asked Dad if we could grab some dinner on the way home to Edmonton too. He said yes and suggested some sort of chicken rice and I said I was hoping we could find some Hokkien Mee stall instead.
• Snippet: In between the two dreams, there was another dream where I was a ninja and jumping and scaling about some levels while mostly concealed. I don't remember most of the plotline, but I do remember visiting a house at some point where my parents apparently lived, but other people were living there too, including a male teacher who I apparently knew. I let him see me when he wandered out the back door, and we chatted briefly before I climbed up onto the house roof and disappeared again.

Dream 2

• I visited a quiet supermarket and saw a bunch of boxes laid out that people were unpacking onto shelves, but also noticed that some boxes concealed a way up to a second level of shelves too.
• I found some fancy-looking, giant purple letters nearby and arranged them to form words starting from the floor and leading up the boxes to draw other people's attention to the fact that there was a path there. The message I formed was something along the lines of how there were buttons by each product that one could press and hold for 10 seconds to call the staff to ask about a product.
• A stocker saw me forming that message and thought that what I did was neat, but he wasn't actually sure that that was what the buttons did, so he wanted to check on this. He went to ask another staff member nearby, and she said she thought the button just caused an alarm bell to ring. They checked with another stocker who told them that I was correct, though.
• The initial stocker then went upstairs to talk to his supervisor as well, and that supervisor came down to talk to me and ask me if I would mind not putting up the letters into words like that. That was fine to me, since it was technically in the way of the boxes too, except that to make the point, she had summoned all the stockers on the second floor to come down with her, including Yaoxiang and Yucheng who were apparently working there, and had them all stand in a semi-circle around us for "pressure" as she came down to make her demand.
• I confronted her about that as she walked away and she rudely deflected the accusation. I decided that I was going to give them a negative review on Google, so I walked out and looked for a computer.
• The next room over had two computers in the middle of the room on a table, but when I tried to use them, I saw that they were actually preloaded with only one program, a Chinese text-to-song program where you could type out some words or sentences, and it would auto complete them into a song if what you typed didn't rhyme or otherwise wasn't suitable, and then would have a text-to-speech voice sing out the lyrics. The right computer had a female voice, while the left computer had a male voice, and I noticed that that the male voice handled some nationalism-related words in a very matter-of-fact tone that didn't really lend itself to a song melody.

Sep 10 2026

• As part of a larger plotline that I don't remember, I and my brother, who was not Jon but was someone else around the same age as me, spawned in a school and needed to join a classroom in a non-operational bus or caravan that was across the field. We hopped a short wall dividing us from the field instead of going around it, so that we could get there faster and secure a better seat.
• We ended up getting the two seats right by the front right entrance of the room. It was cramped in there even with just about 6 to 8 other students in the room.
• Because of our position, we were called on to be the first to do a Chinese oral test by a female teacher once she entered the room. We had to hold a back-and-forth conversation with each other, and I was better at the language than my brother, although I had to ask the teacher at one point what "minimum grade" and "average grade" were in Chinese. She pointed to something written on the board and said I could use that word and combine it with another word to get what I wanted.
• Because it was freeform and there was no other requirement, when the teacher briefly left the room, I finished the conversation by replying to my brother said with an "OK" so that he wouldn't have to generate more lore that we'd have to adhere to, since we were actually there undercover for something else and our personas in class were not our real ones.
• This drew a short laugh from the rest of the room, and when the teacher came back in, she simply asked the next person to start their conversation. We wanted to leave the room to visit the washroom but were not allowed to until everyone else had finished their practice.

Sep 11 2026

• I was initially in a school campus area with 15 other people, 7 of them were some friends I knew from my class like Jah and Eileen, and 8 others were some acquaintances from the neighbouring class, in a format that was similar to the two GEP classes in my cohort in Dunman High.
• Our next classes were both outside the campus, but in different parts of the city, and we technically had the option of choosing which class to go to next. Most of my class was going to the eastern building centre on the map, whereas I thought the western class was more interesting. I followed my class out of the campus at first but eventually split off to join the other one.
• We gathered in the atrium lobby of a building in the western centre, while a female teacher that had accompanied us went ahead and registered us in a side room while we waited. I learned here that the registration process involved being shocked by two electric pads.
• I also realized at this point that it was inconvenient for the classes to be split up 9-7, and even though this class seemed fun, I'd again be separated from my main class when we swapped places since I'd have to do the one at the other centre with this class at that time. Due to this, I had a change of heart and wanted to see if I could join the other class.
• I looked around for a public phone to see if I could call a taxi, and was even willing to do the electric pads in the taxi if it meant I could go to the other centre. But I could not find one, and everyone inside the building looked busy. I went outside and found a cafe, and an outdoor reception desk for the centre we were in that was abandoned and covered in leaves that had fluttered down from the tree above it. No one seemed to be able to help me though, and the whole area looked like a fake facade from a movie set.
• Someone that I recognized to be Michael from McNally happened to walk by, and he shared with me a tip that when abroad, if it was just a quick phone call, sometimes using roaming data was just more efficient and quick and worth the cost. I didn't have that option on my phone though, and wouldn't know who to call anyway, so that didn't help, but I thanked him for the advice and went back inside.
• In the end, I decided to just stay and get the class over with. We were led into a room and the camera shifted into more of a third person one. The class was about exhibiting perfect behaviour, and we took turns performing etiquette on each other and helping each other dress up smartly and put on makeup and other such things.
• But the class stretched on and on, and things started to get very strange as it did so. Although I was a girl with really short hair, I learnt through a narrator that I was actually a guy doll, and my creator had held a naming contest and then rejected all the submitted names for me, and then turned me into a female doll and discarded me. This elicited some sympathy from the other 8. I also apparently had had nothing but pea soup for food for the past 15 years.
• We were stuck in this room and routine for ten full years, with nurses watching us from observation rooms outside and experimenting on us to watch our behaviours. We got used to it, and the whole world outside felt fake by this point, I was not even sure that my friends from the other class, the campus we were on, and the wider world outside this room even existed. And some of the other students I was with occasionally had completely vacant, doll-like eyes.
• Suddenly there was an emergency and we were ushered by nurses outside of the room through areas that were out of bounds to us in an attempt to save us from the emergency. There was a piece of paper lying on a table that we passed that I could have stolen to learn the Fireball spell for myself. But I didn't, because I knew that this was the last day of our lives.
• Snippet: I was in an action survival game where we were in a multi-level school building with rooms that had books strewn around on the floor. I had to gather certain books to level up, but I was only in each room for 5-10 seconds at a time before disappearing, picking upgrades, and then reappearing in another room. Instead of learning skills to defeat the enemies, the skills gave us different ways to avoid the enemies, which meant we could stay in each room for a longer period of time, since being hit was what ejected us from the room and sent us back to the upgrade void each time, while chipping away at our overall HP. So gradually over time we could stay in game longer to be able to find more relevant books.

Sep 12 2026

• I dreamt that I was trying to go through and solve a game zone that involved rescuing a princess from a tower. I did this zone together with someone else, who was Dad in some parts of the dream and a friend of the same age in other parts.
• To solve the tower, we first needed to enter it, which required both an ice and a fire key from areas that surrounded the tower. I tried going into the tower without the ice key at some point, and while it allowed me through the front gate, a ladder leading up a short wall into the tower was missing altogether so I couldn't get in.
• Once inside the tower, we had to first clear our way down a side path that led to the princess's bedroom on the third floor via a back door in the room. That gave us a skill or something that we could only use within the tower. Then, we had to leave the bedroom through the front door, past a crowd of cheering NPCs who were programmed to think that we had rescued the princess because we just came out of her locked bedroom door. We then had to go back down to the front area and up another flight of stairs.
• I remember being annoyed by Dad at some point as he would stop to chat to people sometimes, including another man and his young son who were going through the tower in the opposite direction that we were headed. Dad and the man seemed like they wanted to challenge each other to see whose pool of general knowledge was better.
• I don't remember the ending, but I do remember replaying the tower at least once more after completing or mostly completing it.
• Snippet: I had a dream where I went out to buy dinner for myself from a local coffeeshop, and made the trip back to my Edmonton 4012 apartment complex front door with a styrofoam box of noodles, but the food largely vanished on the way back. I wasn't sure how, though, and I found no food on the ground even after partially retracing my steps, which indicated that I likely hadn't just dropped the food on accident. I decided I wasn't that hungry after all and told Mom that I had already finished the meal once I got home.
• Snippet: There was also something about a giveaway of Ukraine-related items in another dream, but I don't remember the context.

Sep 13 2026

• I was participating in an event that included both a foot race as well as puzzles to solve at stops during the races. This event was also the last one in a season of races, and was one that I had ran before, so I knew that my final position didn't matter as long as I did relatively well.
• There was a group of about six people or so who took off once the race started, and those didn't bother me as they were people I couldn't really catch up to. I ran a little behind them, but well ahead of my competitors behind me, and I mused that at some point in the past this race would have tired me out by this point as I went down a ramp less than five minutes in. After the entire season I had gone through, I was not even panting at this point though.
• I reached the first zone, which was a three-storey manor building lined with security guards, and a backyard where the owner of the house was golfing at. I remembered something like this level from Hitman 3, and wished someone near me good luck, as this was the first time he was visiting this puzzle level and I remembered how difficult it was to even start the puzzle to get upstairs.
• Since I was familiar with the puzzle, I bypassed the first floor with ease and went upstairs to the second floor. There, I met Zian, who was in another group race or something, as well as her parents and a cousin, who were in a room near the top of the stairs adjacent to where I had to go to the second floor's puzzle. We exchanged greetings as Zian introduced us, and the cousin asked if I was the one that she always talked about. Then Zian left downstairs to continue her race, and I went onwards with mine as well.
• The second floor puzzle took place at a desk near the stairs up to the third floor, which was a small room at the top of a tower, and involved first solving the third floor puzzle and then taking the answer back down to the second floor to punch into a device, which would unlock a key in the shape of a candle or a bicycle handlebar that I needed to bring up to the third level again to unlock a safe.
• I did this, but felt like something was wrong once I brought the answer to the third floor puzzle back down to the desk, as there was no handlebar key there and thus no way that I could prove I had the answers as I couldn't open the safe upstairs. I spent some time searching, turning the entire desk upside down, but there was no dice. I wondered if one of the previous runners ahead of me had done something to the key, but I was under the impression that the race organizers either reset the room each time for each new person coming, or that the puzzle was instanced so we'd always get a fresh copy of the puzzle even when we were in the same space.
• Still, not solving the puzzle would cause a time penalty but would not stop me from finishing the race, as it was ultimately optional, and it would not affect my position in the final standings at this point either, so I kept on searching until I heard some voices below that indicated that two people who were in the group behind me in the standings had arrived at the manor.
• Then I went up to the third floor again and jumped out the window, using an external staircase made up of crates to descend down to the first floor again and continuing onwards. Since I knew the answer and had spent a significant amount of time searching, I figured I would just lodge a complaint about the puzzle at the end of the race.
• I heard a spectator who was watching me race ask another spectator if the organizers could just teleport me a little ahead to make up for the last time, and the other spectator said no, I still had to complete the race. I couldn't reply to him directly but would have refused the teleport as well, especially since it would make no difference in the end to the overall standings.