My Diary #257

Life

Yet again, it feels like not that much worth writing about happened this week, and the time just flew by without so much as an "if you please". Ever have one of those weeks that feels like Monday turned into Friday immediately afterwards? That was this week for me.

Yet, work was pretty busy this week, and will continue to be very busy next week with in-person meetings and such scheduled too, before the chaos slowly winds down towards the Christmas break at work. Probably. Hopefully. I did formally request to take off the week before AND the week after Christmas this year though, though the week before portion will depend on how many other people on the team need to take that time off, I think.

That eBay purchase of three Tigey-likes from slightly over a month ago, which I mentioned last week was in a disputed state because the seller never sent it out, was cancelled this week after the seller again did not respond to anything. So eBay refunded the money to my PayPal account, and the seller now has 0 positive reviews and 1 negative review. Oh well. There are a couple others I could snag in theory, but generally the cost or shipping is outside what I want to pay for a single unit of Tigey, so I haven't bothered biting on them.

The money was refunded to my PayPal account in USD, and a couple days later part of that was siphoned away by my monthly Internet Archive donation, which I started doing back in June of this year but largely tend to forget about in between months. At least no further currency conversion was done between the refund and the donation so I didn't lose anything from that.

I'd been trying to stretch my Honeywell HEV320WC humidifier's original paper filter from May as long as possible, and it had a good run to last until October, counting the three months or so of summer where the humidity levels weren't terrible and I just left the humidifier off and paper filter standing dry. They're supposed to last 30-60 days before being swapped out, and this one basically served Tigey for about a month from May to June, then from about two more weeks ago until now. It started smelling of dampness this week when I was near the humidifier though, so I finally tossed it away and replaced it with a cheaper aftermarket one from Amazon, of which I bought a pack of 4 sometime ago. We'll see how long that lasts.

I also had to do something that I had not done in a long time this week, probably well over a year at this point, and that was to clear all my cookies and cached temporary files on my main Firefox browser. This happened after my Gmail/Google cookies got messed up, and I got irritated enough to burn away everything with the nuclear option and start afresh. It's crazy how they stack up -- the temp files folder always just shows 1.0 GB for me, so that's probably a Firefox-side cap, but my cookies had ballooned to 1.5 GB of drive usage since I had last cleared it, so it was time for them to face a reckoning. I now have to log in to everything again, and that part is a bit irritating.

However, I've been resisting using passkeys for all this time, partially because I've been lazy to move to something new and partially because I don't really fully understand its pros and cons yet, but maybe now is a good time to start trying them. I think my fears of stuff being tied to one device and being locked out if that device ever breaks are probably unfounded, but... we shall see.

While I'm writing about technological stuff I just probably never really properly understood, I inquired with Gemini on how to do a couple things in Mp3tag, a metadata editor for music files, and ended up being told that there were new ways of doing a couple of things that I had always done manually. I ended up with a cleaner way of using actions to strip all unwanted tags from a file, shrinking the album cover picture when it's too large, and optimizing the file size (I always used foobar2000 for this and never realized it could be done all within Mp3tag too). All this used to take more time because I had always done them semi-manually or at least had to bounce between a couple different programs to do it, but no more, yay.

The Petit Planet final closed beta playtest, which I've been sinking a lot of time into in the past month, was announced to be ending this weekend, on Sunday, and while that belongs in the Games section below, I mention it here largely as context to frame the fact that that drove me into a mood of melancholy and music this week. That, in turn, made me pine again for another vacation somewhere, and if I were to do one, it would likely be to China or Japan again, even though it's still too soon since my last one. China's 30-day visa-free offer to travelling Canadians expires at the end of this year though, though it's likely to be renewed, and if not I'll just get a visa in Calgary, as I'm not unfamiliar with that process.

It's.. you know, it's really tempting to take a trip over the extended winter break that I plan to book off, and spend Christmas overseas. Christmas is usually a very dark period for me, something about the snow and the desolate landscape, and the lack of people around me in real life while other people enjoy their warm family Christmasses, makes me feel lonely while at the same time wanting to avoid others that might help alleviate that loneliness. It's like I sink into a pit and then wallow in it until Boxing Day. It's not terrible every year, and has been better in recent years compared to even 5-6 years ago before I started writing my diary, which in turn is better than it was 10-15 years ago before my gender transition, but the Christmas blues are definitely real still.

Travelling at that time of year is expensive though, especially so with the wars going on and inflated fuel prices everywhere, so realistically that's probably out of the question. And Petit Planet is likely launching somewhere in December anyway, and it'd be weird to have poured my heart and soul into playing it the past month, designed a few things for launch, and then not actually be around to catch the launch. But I've been in this fey wanderlust mood off and on for a bit now. Even if I don't go in December, I should take one at some point next year. The question is, when?

So the other part about the framing with the Petit Planet playtest ending is that I now have a 1-2 month period between the end of the beta and the launch of the actual game (and the onset of deep winter) to get adult stuff done. I need to:

• Finish the Singapore citizenship renunciation that they contacted me about a month ago, which involves finding a (free, I'm a cheapskate) notary to watch me fill in a few forms.
• Renew my Canadian passport for another 10 years.
• Fix the address on my provincial identity card (I noticed this still reflected my old address when I was advance voting for the referendum)
• Fix up my old secondary computer for Dad, and then either repurpose his old machine, or get a new one (possibly a Mini PC) to see about running my balcony camera stream 24/7.

All that while still taking care of work duties, looking for a house to buy (or deciding against it and investing everything into a GIC for one year), advancing my ephemera scanning and website tinkering goals, doing some story writing for my game if I can, playing other games, and all the other little things in life. It promises to be a rather busy late fall/early winter season.

Closer to home, I went out to the local Safeway a couple of times in the deep evenings this week, enjoying the time of year where the gloom of sunset and nightfall comes early, but the temperature hasn't quite dipped down into the too-cold region of the thermometer yet. Far less people are out and I get into a nice liminal mood as I walk.

The grocery store itself has far less people in it as well, though it certainly has other non-human denizens stalking the produce.

There was also a non-human stalking the corridor outside my apartment when I did my first of two walks on Sunday, Oct 11:

A cat! His name was Scooby, according to the man who came out of the door to the right to recapture the feline who had scampered out to rest in the middle of the carpet when the owners came home with groceries. He was eyeing me expectantly as I waited for the elevator down, but I had no snacks to give him.

I tried a couple of new food products this week, the first being from one of my Safeway runs, where I brought back some smoked duck that I briefly needed to fry before tossing into my rice bowl. I haven't had duck in ages. Like the fish, this one also stunk up the apartment for hours after, though I didn't dislike this smell either, and it was certainly less pungent overall compared to the fish. It didn't turn "golden and crispy" like advertised, but I probably just did the heat wrong or something. It was quite edible and juicy either way. "Quite edible" is a good benchmark for food, right? It did taste good though, despite the look.

I did try the fish again this week as well, and I again ended up with what were basically fish crumbs after frying it. Sigh.

I also opened and tried a tea that I had brought back from the China trip, specifically from Haikou, called Hainan Zhegu Tea, or Partridge Tea. I never did crack the box open to try it while at Kel's place, and I had been so focused on finishing most of my other teas first so that specific box never even got unsealed until this weekend, nearly seven months after I returned home.

Look at how that little bag of leaves expands into a monstrous tangle that fills up my entire tea beaker after it gets hydrated! Wow. The tea itself tastes like po chai pills. Apparently they have no ingredient in common, but both are used for post-meal palate cleansing, I guess. I did like it. I also realized that comparison is of no help to people who have not tasted either one, but I don't know how else to describe it. Slightly herbal, pleasantly earthy taste?

To round out the week, we had a couple of pretty decent sunsets this week, catalogued below. First is a shot from the balcony camera on Wed, Oct 14, at 6:52 pm:

I was suitably amused by the one single raincloud moving through the otherwise mostly clear sky, pouring down water on whoever happened to be under it.

Next, Thu, Oct 15 between 7:01 and 7:04 pm or so. None of the photos/screenshots really capture it perfectly, but I tried capturing it with three different colour profiles from my balcony camera to see what it looked like, and then also went out onto the balcony to snap a picture with my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. They're all bundled together down below here.

Finally, a couple from Fri, Oct 16 that show the blinding setting sun as it shines upon the camera, and then ebbing to a nice collection of hued clouds about 40 minutes later.

Games

The Petit Planet final closed beta ended this Sunday, and so it ran for about the same length as the last one which I took part in. That one, christened the Stardrift Test, went from Apr 23 - May 25 2026. This one, the Final Beta Test, went from Sep 19 - Oct 19 2026.

I do like the base game quite a bit, and the designing portion is also fairly fun as well, but I was far more involved with the community this time around, and fell in with a group of people who were testing and sciencing out stuff, and boy are there a lot of bugs and half-baked mechanics still. I documented and submitted about 30 of them, about half of them with videos, and a good number of them far more complex than just a simple text typo needing a fix or item needing a re-categorization. While several aspects were much improved from the Stardrift test five months ago, it also felt like there were many regressions and things that were rolled back from that build. Hopefully we were just not playing their latest build for this beta.

I did take a few pictures for the blog but then realized they were basically the same ones as from two weeks ago, just in spring instead of winter, so I didn't bother uploading them again. I also did go around and take some pictures of other people's planets, but a number of people had started dismantling things and doing Science or selling everything off, or simply plain locked their planets to prevent other people coming in, once the beta end date was announced, so that didn't go too much as planned either. Instead, I also ended up locking my planet, blowing up my build, and spent the last two or three days designing what I want my live planet to look like.

Among the pieces of science we did, I was most proud of finding a hidden shrub that no one else on the server was able to find, because it simply lacked its 3D model and thus was not actually displaying on the islet that it was supposed to be found in. It was still there to be looted if I dug in the right spot, though. I had noticed that a couple other items had similar invisibility issues too, although one of the invisible entities was only found deep into the flower breeding process and the other one was only found on a specific seasonal screen. Once I realized that that was what was happening, I just dug up the entire island tile by tile, until I finally found it.

Besides that, I also found a way to use the (somewhat glitchy) planet building system to escape the bounds of the island of the home planet that we were confined on. Sadly, there was just a bottomless void outside of that, but it was still a fun romp, and I did find a random fish spawn that wasn't supposed to be there on a usually-unreachable reef before the bottomless void.

Stuff like that, plus a little mini race to try to discover all the flowers and their breeding combinations, served for quite an entertaining beta. I do want to shout out a bunch of people who I did meet and hung out with through the course of the beta. Especially since I've already forgotten everyone I had met in the last closed beta, although I was far more detached from the community at that time. Anyway, Bella, Myskaros, Nozomi, Iseri, Faythe, Azoula, Crystal, lap2ha, and the rest of the people in the Petit Planet Flower Guild server (some of which, like Cake, Dante, and Yue, were recruited late and I never really got to meet/know well). And other people I met along the way, like Anchloe, TeaTreat, Tibix, Astro Sei, and about two dozen more people that I visited often and exchanged gifts with sometimes. If you ever Google your name, hi! I was Shiara of planet Tigey. Find me in the live game too!

Plushie of the Week #250

This last entry for the Plushie of the Week series from Kel's Guangzhou apartment isn't a singular plushie of the week. Rather, it's a set of pictures of all the Linlee ducks and random other trinkets from her TV counter! Just look at all the ducks she has! You can trade in 30 of them for a giant duck!

Some of these already have their own separate posts, like the beaver in the first picture is here, and the Ikea plushies from here and strewn around on either side of the duck army. I'm sure most of these have vaguely interesting backstories that we'll never know about. The Mahjong tiles on the right side were giveaways from a store called Jo's Cha, as I learned. And I don't really want to know why there's a cat figurine holding up a sign that says 赞 (zàn), or praise.

Her duck collection has grown significantly since I first took a picture of her original ducks back in mid-2024 though!

Dreams

Oct 12 2026

• Snippet: I dreamt that a friend and I lived in a house with an entrance and exit area that had a garage door but was no larger than a small room, about the width of a single car. I grew flowers in there on a grid scale, and was trying to breed a legendary tier 5 flower, and we passed through the room several times during the course of the dream for other plot reasons. Eventually I did breed the flower, and it turned out to be a combination that most people had not tried, between a tier 4 flower and a temporary tier 2 ink flower that wasn't even recorded in most guides because it was a transitory ingredient ink flower that one could clone using another bottle of ink from the store and that needed to be combined to make another tier 2 flower. I was rather unhappy about this being the eventual legendary combination even though I was the first to discover it, as it did not feel particularly legendary, just random.

Oct 13 2026

• I remember walking from an Yishun HDB flat area, past some mailboxes in a void deck, then along a road until I reached an outdoor shopping area vaguely similar to the shops at Mill Woods Town Centre. I had to cross two roads on the way there, and a girl was telling her friends that they were going the wrong way as they crossed the first street just behind me as well. So after crossing at that traffic light, they turned right while I turned left instead.
• After crossing the second street, I reached a shopfront which was a bar being manned by police officers. An older lady reached the place at the same time and I told her to go first, so she ordered a drink. While waiting, I noticed that the place literally was just a bar, and there was a sign that said that they didn't do regular police activities, whereas I needed to collect an authorization form for something, so I realized that I would have to walk a bit further on to the next police station, not far from here, to actually get it.
• Before leaving, I heard the police officers talking about a transparent duck container that held either some orange juice or beer, they mentioned that it was from Linlee and all of them loved the container very much. I wanted to tell them that I had a whole bunch of ducks from Linlee, and was thinking of buying and collecting this one as well, but decided not to.
• Next to the police station was an arch that was marked as a one-way exit into a central courtyard of shops that would progress the quest to its final part. I knew that once I went into there I would not be able to come out again, and a series of events that would complete the instance would begin, so I skipped it and went to the police station instead.
• I don't remember how that dream ended, but later on, I came back here with another two friends in a different instance of the dream, and one of them warned me about the one-way archway as well. I said that yup, I was already aware of it as I had done this zone before.
• We walked by the police station bar and in the vague direction of the other one again and this time, there was a large dragon lying on the left side of the road that we aggroed. It attacked us, and although we could fend it off and move away from it, I wondered why a dragon boss was out here, before the archway to the final area. A tooltip popped up, saying that the dragon would not leash and would stand wherever it was when it dropped aggro on the players, so it could be lured to anywhere on the map with enough planning.

Oct 15 2026

• Snippet: I was sorting papers on the floor in a room at a high-level condo unit after arriving home from school. Through the window of the room, I saw the rest of the family crossing the road below our apartment as they came back home, though they seemed to be accompanied by a couple other people. I left my papers alone and went to the front door to meet them, realizing that they had not closed it properly on the way out and that it was still slightly ajar. Opening the door to look out into the passageway, I greeted them as well as the two special guests that they had brought along, Auntie Stella and Uncle Droy, both with huge smiles on their faces. Uncle Droy was carrying a large blueberry pie that was seated on a portable stove that was still turned on to keep the pie warm. Jon, Kel and I wanted to then continue a card game that we had been in the middle of playing, but we couldn't remember whose turn it was in, so I suggested that we go in "reverse blueberry pie order", whichever of them had less recently touched the pie could go first, then the other one could go, and then I would go after them.

Oct 17 2026

• I remember hanging out by a table of free items after a volunteering session at a university and noticing that there were still a lot of unclaimed copies of the items not being taken, so I put together a bag with one item from each stack, containing things like T-shirts and other knick-knacks, to take home.
• I had my red travel backpack as well as two full duffel bags nearby on another table as well, containing clothes and other necessities, and Tigey was seated on top of the red backpack. Two guys came into the room and one commented that if I wanted to take home stuff, one of the duffel bags would probably hold a lot of the stuff.
• Later, I wandered down to an area that was similar to the main corridor in SUB Mall at the University of Alberta to meet with some friends. After chatting to them for a bit, I wandered away and behind a pillar briefly to slip on a pair of black athletic shorts and pull it up beneath my skirt.
• When I got back to them, I found that Kel had come by with a friend to sign a guestbook on a nearby table, and she had left me a Discord ping there too, but I had not seen it because I had stepped away momentarily and no one there had bothered to inform me.
• Luckily she was still nearby, so I caught up with her and said hi. I asked if she wanted a bag of the free giveaway stuff too, although the room was upstairs and there was a chance they were all gone by now. She said no, and just before she left she pointed at a Venezuelan woman walking down the corridor and commented that she was related to our family in some way. I wondered out loud just what kind of ancestry ran in our blood if not just Chinese.
• Snippet: I also dreamt that I streamed on Twitch, although I was not broadcasting any video and was just playing some music in the background. While I got out of my chair and wandered around, someone came by and spoke in some Japanese and someone else answered their question in voice to them.