My Diary #070

Dear Tigey,

Japan’s borders are open! Fancy another trip?

Entry #070 (Sep 25 2022)

Table of Contents

Tear down this…
ට  Work
ට  Life
ට  Games
ට  Plushie of the Week #68
ට  Song of the Week #45
ට  Memory Snippet of the Week #52
ට  Last Year’s Entry #21
ට  Dreams

Work

My boss was sick for most of the week, so things were quiet. Work was a little busier this week, and I apparently drove some new instructor hire to tears because she claimed to be dyslexic and communicate poorly over email and that we somehow completely misunderstood her request (made over the phone to the Service Desk team), and after she lashed out at me and I pushed back at her, she broke down and apologized and started talking about her troubles to me in the work ticket. It was kind of weird. We eventually ended it more or less on an amicable note.

Life

This week, news broke that Japan’s borders were announced to finally be reopening on October 11 2022 to individual travellers, with no more daily limit caps or strange restrictions. For the past few months, travellers were allowed in with a 50,000 daily limit and had to be signed up with a tour group/travel agency or some rubbish like that, all that will be lifted next month. That announcement was anticipated, so I had already talked with my boss last week about booking off some time in late October/early November to visit Japan if it came to pass, and with this announcement I’ve pretty much solidified those plans, although I still need to make arrangements and buy a ticket and such.

This is all very exciting though. My boss will be allowing me to work remotely from there, despite the time zone differences, so I’m basically going to see if I can stretch my stay there and only take strategic travel or event days off as vacation time. And then work in the late nights as needed around my travel blogging efforts. I don’t have an itinerary planned out yet, and hope to spend most of the next week doing so, but I will probably try to travel around a good chunk of Japan and not just concentrate myself in the Tokyo region, especially since I already am still planning to apply to Sophia again next year and go there for reals. I will probably build a rough itinerary around visiting festivals and events, but all that planning work still has to be done. I might also, like I did on my USA trip, leave my entry/exit/travel dates between cities and even out of the country flexible where possible.

The other main thing this week was that Jah convinced me to finish setting up my laptop and then install Stable Diffusion on it, and that plus actually playing with the app chewed up so much time this week that I didn’t get much else done besides a bit of scanning. The current iteration of this AI art program is terrible with faces and hands and body structure in general. I’m still very much throwing random keywords to see what sticks, and have barely touched (or started to record down keywords and prompts for) prompt crafting yet, but five days of that have certainly turned up quite a few pictures that I’ve somewhat liked, a few of which are linked below at the end of this Life section.

One of the scans I did do this week was a scan of a Jehovah’s Witnesses letter that I received back in April. It has a QR code that goes here (local). Not that I am proselytizing this, but I found it all very scholastically interesting anyway. This was somewhat significant because it’s rare, in that this was probably the only evangelical or religious junk mail that I recall receiving in the 10+ years that I have been here. The envelope was entitled something like “To the resident of <address>” or something along those lines, so I assume everyone in the apartment got one, and I kind of applaud their quaint effort.

Besides that, this week was a fairly quiet one. I did have a bunch of rental office people trudge into my home during the week to examine my balcony for something that might or might not involve some planned renovations, but winter is just around the corner so it’s not really the time for anything big. I told them about my balcony door’s mesh screen door not closing properly and they sent over a repair person the next day whom I had a brief but pleasant chat with.

Oh, and Safeway launched their new Scene+ (local) program to replace the old Air Miles one, which means my accummulated Air Miles points are more or less dead since I can’t earn any more. They pissed me off right away though, as the app said that I would earn 200 points for spending $20 and I didn’t earn it because the in-store offer that I saw after checkout (because it was posted on the customer service desk outside of checkout) said I would earn 250 points for spending $25 or something like that… and I had spent $22 and change. Well, whatever. 1000 points seems to be worth a $10 discount in groceries right now so that was only $2 or so anyway, and I’m neither old enough nor poor enough to rage over a couple possibly uncashable dollars (in the long run) lost.

Nova Scotia was slammed by Hurricane Fiona this weekend and Satinel was gone without power for 35 hours from Friday night until just before the time of blog post publication. She had reassured us that she was going to be fine so I was only slightly worried about her, but the nagging slight worry is always there, and it kills me that she can be so savvy on some things, and yet, in certain other matters like her refusal to get a phone and a subscription plan like everyone else in modern society… raaaawr. I should downgrade my own phone plan though.

Games

This week saw more Gloomhaven with Tes, with a bit of Gunfire Reborn and Deep Rock Galactic on the side. Outside of those games, the other notable Game-related thing that happened this week was that Slime Rancher 2 launched. I absolutely loved Slime Rancher 1, and bought this on release day and played through about a quarter to a third of it before stopping. While I very much like the gameplay and knew what I was getting going in, the game was a bit pricier than I expected it to be and doesn’t feel like it has a ton of content yet since it launched in early access (with more zones coming up soon), nor does it seem to have iterated upon or innovated much in terms of gameplay systems compared to the first game, so it thus far has failed to put an exclamation point on my week.

It just was kind of a mild positive, which is a bit disappointing because it was a highly anticipated title for me and the only game I’ve bought on Day 1 this year. It is rather difficult for me to even put my reasoning down in words, as it isn’t lacking in any major way that I can tell, it’s just.. not as grand as I’ve hoped thus far, and I believe this is because they failed to re-evoke much of that sense of wonder and adventure in exploration (both of the world and of the game mechanics) that I had when playing the first game since the game and slime spawning mechanics are basically the same, as far as I am aware of so far. There are slight upgrades to mechanics like Slime Science, but nothing to write home about, and the things you can upgrades on both your character and your plots are almost exactly the same so far in the end.

The backstory also makes absolutely zero sense, with the player jumping on a magical boat and abandoning their old farm to go to an island, but somehow all their upgrades (including things like personal health) have vanished without any explanation, and they just left all the slimes they’ve carefully raised back home so far to die? Slime Rancher 2 should have introduced a new protagonist in a different location, and it baffles me why they didn’t. The game is trending as Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam right now though so obviously people don’t agree with me, and I wouldn’t give it a negative review anyway despite all that, but it would have gotten a mixed to slightly positive one at best, maybe a 6.5/10 or so, especially for an undiscounted and extremely expensive price point ($34) for an Early Access game.

It feels like Monomi Park reskinned the first game instead of building a proper sequel. Still, maybe the story (which I have not completed, obviously) or future updates will wow me, though I do not have high hopes for the story after seeing how they butchered the introduction to this game.

On the bright side, we’re almost done the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime in our afternoon group watch, and the Cyberpunk 2077 game was on sale this weekend on Steam for 50% off ($40), so I finally picked it up. I had hotly anticipated this game two years ago but had been turned away by launch reviews, but although my PC is near the bottom end of the minimum specs needed to play it, I also have the Steam Deck and my laptop now that I can also play it on, and it has almost two years of patches under its belt now, so why not.

Plushie of the Week #68 – Mini Alagos

Mini Alagos is a grey husky plushie that I picked up from a store called Miniso at South Edmonton Commons (AKA South Common Shopping Centre), an open-air outdoor shopping strip mall in Edmonton. Miniso is apparently a Chinese retailer that specializes in looking like a Japanese or Korean specialty goods chain, but whatever it may be they certainly sold cheap plushies! I got Mini Alagos for $5.24 CAD after tax on Jun 02 2018, which is also apparently the same day that Satinel finally joined our main Discord server after much egging. I was surprised Mini Alagos cost so little, considering he’s quite a decent size.

Mini Alagos got his name because of Rinuruc‘s dog, Alagos. You can certainly see the resemblance. Alagos is the only husky whose name I know and who I’ve met in real life, so the plushie reminds me of him by default. Both are equally well-behaved, although one has a tendency to run off and explore the world more than the other has so far. There are a lot of pictures because this plushie has a lot of tags, so enough talk — let’s see them!

Front:

Back:

Side:

Other side:

Top:

Tag Pic 1:

Tag Pic 2:

Tag Pic 3:

Tag Pic 4:

Tag Pic 5:

Tag Pic 6:

Tag Pic 7:

Tag Pic 8:

Mini Alagos is sorry you had to sit through so many pictures:

Song of the Week #45

Title: Tea & Sympathy
Artist: Jars of Clay
Album: Much Afraid (1997)

Fare thee well!

Most of my nostalgic songs come from the 1996-1998 period, my most beloved time at school, my golden days of youth, etc etc, just before I moved to Canada. This one is no different, it received a fair amount of airplay on Singapore radios during the time period and became a song that I adored very much, especially when I was going through some personal angst while trying to figure out what romance (with Huihan) meant.

Okay, it’s not quite as melodramatic as that sounds — I actually have a very positive connotation of this song despite its negative connotations. My memories of this song are not specific, but I get the feeling of wandering around Singapore, either under HDB blocks, along streets, or around the Tampines shopping malls, while cool rain lightly drizzles down upon the heated pavement. I think of friends, of my lost memories of the 90s, of the regular games and video games that we played back then, and when that synthy instrument (I don’t really know my instruments well) comes on at the 0:42 mark, my heart soars.

Jars of Clay was a mildly popular Christian rock band that got some airplay in Singapore, although I think the popular songs from them that most people liked were Love Song for a Saviour, and/or Five Candles (You Were There). I like both those songs well enough as well, but this song is the song from them that I absolutely love. It charted well into my personal Top 10 Songs list in the past, hovering around the #5 mark if I recall right.

I feel like I’ve seen the music video for this song on MTV Asia before, but it doesn’t seem to turn up on YouTube on a cursory search if so. Maybe it doesn’t exist anymore. Pity.

Memory Snippet of the Week #52

This week’s snippet will also be a separate page of its own, one of two that I will be uploading and making a separate page for right after this. It’s a schedule sheet I found that belongs to an overnight astronomy camp that took place in Nanyang Polytechnic on August 21 1998, and it was very important to me because of something extremely significant that I believed happened that night.

I was there with two friends from my secondary school, Dunman High. I don’t remember who — it was likely two out the group of Xuanjie, Yaoxiang, Zixiang, Eugene, and Allen, but I can’t remember who for sure. My memory has it down as Xuanjie and someone else though (and Nov/Dec 2022 edit: Xuanjie has since confirmed that he was there, but cannot remember the third person either, nor is he sure if it was his house.) Anyway, what happened was that after gathering at this place, we didn’t actually stay for the overnight astronomy camp. Xuanjie‘s house was nearby, about a 15 minute walk away from Nanyang Polytechnic (my class data sheets confirm this), so we went to his house and chilled out there the entire night instead. We ended up sitting around a computer in their main room and watching him play Might and Magic VI and (I believe) one of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games for most of the night, before wandering back in time to join the end of the astronomy event (the eclipse portion of it, specifically) to await pickup from our parents afterwards. We were alone in the house and didn’t sleep a wink that night — in my memory, Xuanjie said that his parents were away or something. Among other things, this was the first time I got to stay overnight at a friend’s house, plus there was a vague sense of freedom and rebelliousness in doing this as well.

This was a very important event in my life because it started me down the road of fantasy RPGs, as I managed to convince my parents to let us buy Might and Magic 6 ourselves a couple weeks later, and my siblings and I started a love affair with that game and series. We ended up eventually buying Might and Magic 6-8 and Heroes of Might and Magic 1-3 as they released over the next few years, and playing all those games into the ground, and that would serve as our entry into the world of RPGs, whereas before that our computer gaming time was linked to things like the Windows Entertainment Pack games (like Chip’s Challenge!) and various compilation CDs and demos, and a few one-off games like Rise of the Triad. My entry into RPGs and this rather magical memory eventually led me to explore fantasy games like Medievia over Telnet, Utopia over a web browser, and eventually even MMOs like DDO a decade or so later. Without this entry point, I might never have ended up in LotRO and met many of my lifelong friends there.

That is why when I attempted writing a Games page on my blog a few years ago, located here for now, I put this game and this event right at the top. However, there are a couple small problems with this memory.

Firstly, the date. This astronomy camp took place in August 1998, and we left the country in December 1998. Was it really that late in my time in Singapore that I started playing RPGs? I had listed on the above page that I thought this took place in 1997, but I don’t think I went to more than one overnight astronomy camp there, so I don’t think that was it. However, my Might and Magic 6 notes (text files, a dump of some random MM6 fansite/page etc) in my archives date from November 1998, so that timeline does technically fit (and in fact, probably fits better, since I would probably have looked up and saved whatever I saved earlier than Nov 1998 if I had actually fallen in love with the game in mid 1997).

Secondly, I thought that we went to a friend’s apartment in an HDB flat, and not a house.. but that’s apparently wrong as well. Xuanjie‘s address (old childhood) turns up as a house in Google Maps. But I don’t think it could have been anyone else… a couple other friends did live in the area, but not close enough, I think.

Thirdly, according to the notes, there was a quiz of some kind linked to the event that our school was taking part in. I don’t remember this at all, which made me doubt whether I had the right event or not — but I do remember at some point in my secondary school life watching a quiz contest between some teams on a stage, and knowing the answer to a question that no one on stage knew, and I feel it must have been this one. I always had no idea why I would have gone to watch a quiz that neither I nor anyone I knew (I think) was taking part in just because our school was there though, unless it was a school quiz competition between classes (but that makes very little sense too), so that memory was always kind of just orphaned — it was something that happened, somewhere, sometime, for some reason. This sheet suggests that maybe we were there for the astronomy event after that, and that makes some sense. But then, there are problems with that assumption as well. I’ll write more about this part in the dedicated page for this event.

Anyway, the linked page is here but here’s a copy of the images as well, since there are just two of them:

In order to not be duplicative, I’ll comment on the pictures over there and not here.

Last Year’s Entry #21

My corresponding diary entry from last year is My Diary #023. This was published on Sep 26 2021.

The start of the MLP last year at this time last year reminded me that the JCC also had that tutoring exchange thing from six weeks ago that I hadn’t heard back about. It was supposed to start at the beginning of August, but they said it had been pushed back due to school and some student group election stuff going on.

It’s funny I mentioned the vacuum being “fun” to use last year — that vacuum is now pretty much clogged up and broken and an exercise in frustration to use, and I’m about to just toss it out and get a new one even if I’m going to be leaving here in three months or so (since that could well get postponed again and I could be stuck here for 7 or 11 more months).

I wish I was in Singapore right now for their Chinatown Mid-Autumn festival thing, but oh well. It no longer hurts since I managed to return there for a visit earlier this year.

Dreams

A fairly long block of dreams (i.e. longer than just one or two lines) every day this week. Good stuff.

Sep 19 2022
  • I was part of a team preparing for a school sports day event or something, and the event I had somehow volunteered for was the girls’ high dive event, although the springboard for the high dive was only one meter or so above the swimming pool. Most of the people on the team didn’t even have a sport they were assigned or volunteered to, however, so while I was hanging out with a friend and watching some of the other events practice, I wondered why I had to do this at all, as athletics looked more fun. I used a laptop to google up techniques for high diving though, as I suspected that I would have trouble keeping my legs together once I launched myself from the springboard.
  • Talking about athletics, I watched Zixiang and Jahandar get ready to practice an athletics event that involved running from a starting point to an ending point, and then back to the starting point. Zixiang was by far the fastest runner, but he couldn’t move from the starting line at all due to an injury, so Jahandar won easily. It became evident afterwards that there was a cut in the fabric of space or something over one of Zixiang‘s legs, and his leg was trapped due to the movements of some planets and a localized meteor shower. Apparently this happened to him quite often so his athletics prowess was considered unreliable, even though he was good at it.
  • Dad was at this event too, and he posted some inappropriate pictures into a chat channel which I and LittleStranger had to delete. Kel and I also looked up Singapore’s population on the laptop at some point, as she had said that its population was now 50 billion and I refused to accept that. The Internet agreed with her though, and I was shocked at that, wondering out loud how the country had room for all those people. There was also an event that involved a v2 version of some sort of handheld game that led to an alien world, and the game was completable within one day for a score of D+ if you skipped a bunch of content, but otherwise took at least two days to complete for a better overall score.
Sep 20 2022
  • Satinel, Nak, and I were gathered around a television watching an anime show. I think Jon and Kel were in the room as well. The show featured two female volleyball teams who were friendly with each other. One team was located on a farm just outside the city and they had an entire plotline based around trying to build a floating wired fence or something around their farm and a neighbouring farm to help the children play, but the farmer that owned the other farm apparently hated children and wanted everything down to the ground as close as possible to his wife at all times, whatever that meant. Anyway the main character on this team was trying to hide the fact that the farmer hated children and suggested they tried asking for permission to build the fence anyway cause if he really hated children then maybe he wouldn’t want to keep them down low to the ground because he wouldn’t deem them valuable enough or something. The farmer then went out somewhere, leaving his wife, who was in the garden hanging out clothes, in charge.
  • The other team was in a school in an adjoining city zone. Another deuteragonist girl had almost joined the farm team but eventually ended up joining the city team instead, they accepted her right away as she was quite tall and had good athletic ability, even though she had glasses. Nak had to pause to bring Kel to the hospital before it closed for the night because she was bleeding or something, but apparently we all had separate feeds, and so I wasn’t sure if we were pausing or not as we were about two-thirds through the episode anyway.
  • I let the show continue, and most of the rest of the episode was with the city team huddled around a table as their male coach explained to them that their school they spent extra money training the girls from the moment that they were accepted, and allowed them to play volleyball all three years of their school life there. There was a wall mirror to the side which the deuteragonist girl looked into, and saw/thought about how powerful the farm team would be if they were allowed to practice uninterrupted for all three years as well.
  • There was a bunch of banter between the coach and individual members of the team after that. One of the members of the team really liked/looked up to another senior and the coach made fun of her for that, which annoyed her at first until he namedropped her senior and something about sitting next to her, at which point she cheered up significantly. Another short girl had a recent literature award or something and the coach and her held a conversation that suggested the front of their shoes were touching each other under the table and that that was suggestive somehow.
  • There was two minutes left in the show at that point and I chuckled at something, but realized that Satinel had probably also paused the show since she didn’t chuckle. She confirmed this, and I decided to pause the show, though I was half tempted to just finish it anyway and rewatch it the next time after Nak got back. Jon asked if I had the initial timestamp still, and I said that I did, there was a .zip file on the 2nd floor balcony outside that contained the URL of the show as a zip file and then a timestamp that itself was also somehow zipped up and appended to the end of the filename. I thought to myself that worst come to worst, I could just putter around the house and clean up some stuff while they caught up to me the next time that we watched the show.
  • I popped out of the room at that time to go visit the hospital where Nak and Kel were. Nak looked like Dad and was waiting at the front counter, whereas Kel was nowhere to be seen. A nurse said that while he was welcome to wait, they would likely not know the results of the tests they were doing until tomorrow morning so it might be best if he left first.
  • Snippet: At one point, I dreamt that I was playing a two player turn-based grid game with Tes, where he was the tank and I was a support player behind him. We were trying to determine how to defeat some griffin-like bird enemies who did quite a lot of damage with our combination of health, damage and heals.
  • Editor: This definitely has shades of my daily anime group watch with Satinel and Nak, as well as a snippet featuring Gloomhaven, a digital board game that I’m currently playing with Tes.
Sep 21 2022
  • Firstly, I was having a dream or watching a show about a house and some sort of drone delivery service carried out from the balcony of a high-rise building, the drone would automatically return home at the end of the delivery and that was somehow something that was noteworthy. It also involved a map of a school campus which our house was located on, and a bunch of resource spawn points, mostly flowers and herbs, that I had located on the map. There were common and rare herbs and the rare herbs granted achievements for finding them — I had one last achievement left and noticed that I had marked the location of its corresponding herb on the map already.
  • I went to that location with a friend, both to show them where it is as well as so that I would have some protection/company. It was located inside an airplane cabin that was repurposed to some sort of massage parlour room with long beds, I told my friend that I had apparently gained access to this place because some flight attendants I spoke to in the past really liked me (they specifically said I was shining brightly) and gave me access to this place if I ever needed to use it. It was heavily implied that I could bring men here and seduce them.
  • Anyway the herb was a brown sprig of nuts that only grew on Wednesdays. It was located inside a closet in that massage parlour, and the closet had plenty of cupboards and doors and was packed full of Mom‘s clothes. I had to push my way past the clothes and fumble around to find a secret door at the back of the closet, at which point I opened it and found a little compartment with nothing inside. I realized that today was Monday, and I had known this but had not put two and two together. I would have to come back here another day to complete my achievements.
  • I “woke up” from this dream and did a recall exercise for this dream in front of Ronnie, naming its key points in a quick summary, in preparation for “writing it down”. I told him that I wasn’t sure how I somehow did not equate that Monday and Wednesday were different things. Apparently even though it felt like a dream, people were watching it, since he understood what I meant.
  • I left for school after that. This was the first day of Secondary 1. On my way to school, I passed a field where two classmates that were implied to be in one of the two GEP classes that I was also in, were involved in a little tussle. I went up to them and found that one of them was pseudo-bullying the other, refusing to let him go anywhere until he sang some insert songs from the show that represented the dream that I just had, which they had both apparently watched last night too. There were eight or so of those songs, and I could see the songs in a digitized list floating next to the bullied boy. That second boy said he didn’t know all the songs, but ended up singing a line from several of the songs, as the aggressor named them off one by one, before the aggressor relented and let him go.
  • It was 9:00 am at that time and we all rushed up to class. I had also flipped one of my hair locks over the center parting of my hair so it bent the other way and stuck up a little above my head contour. I kind of liked that look though so I left it that way. I asked one of the boys to confirm that our classes started at 9am and not earlier, but when we reached the landing outside our two classrooms, we found that classes had started 5 minutes earlier and were technically late. One of the boys was in mild trouble as he had to enter the other classroom with the teacher staring at him, and attendance had already been taken in that class, whereas I and the other boy were able to sneak into the back door of our classroom as our teacher was occupied at the front of the class. A couple of the students looked at us, but we got to our seats without incident — my seat was next to Zixiang near the back of the class so he just shifted a bit so that he wasn’t blocking my path.
  • Our teacher was busy showing us a small company’s organization chart on an overhead projector, with the head of the department being a woman’s name and then branches leading down from that to her subordinates. It was a rather narrow and tall tree, kind of shaped like a Christmas tree rather than spread out, implying that each person only had one or maybe two subordinates maximum. She told us to all pull out a piece of paper and write down ways in which this tree was deficient. I pulled out a piece of lined foolscap paper from my bag which had the school branding on it and the school motto or some similar chunk of text printed right in the middle of the paper.
  • I saw that the example that I had missed but that she had written next to the org tree as an example was “No Remix”. I had no idea what that meant, but I saw that Zixiang next to me, and Matt in front of me and to the right, had both listed that as their first answer as well, so I put that down too. I then added other reasons — the tree was owned by the woman and things would be lost when she left the company, it didn’t support Chinese and Japanese characters, and about half a dozen others that I’ve now forgotten. I hoped that I was on the right track.
Sep 22 2022
  • I was in a cozy bedroom studio on a second level of a two storey sharehouse/dorm place. Besides having beds, it was also an AI art studio with a couple desks and things strewn around the floor, where I produced things like moon and night sky pictures, though many of them looked weird. Outside the room was a laundry door with the main boy character from Natsume Yuujinchou, along with his cat friend, staring at a moon, and ultimately I was trying to reproduce that with no luck.
  • I was preparing to head home since it was around midnight and I didn’t actually live there. Zhuquan was in the room with me, and he did live there — he was apparently under probation from having recently came out of jail and staying at the sharehouse must have been part of the monitoring that he was undergoing, along with a bracelet that monitored his movement, as well as some sort of plain prison gown. But just before I stepped out the door, he suddenly pulled out a pistol, reached down under the hem of his gown and aimed up at his crotch with it, and fired. The bullet from the gun apparently penetrated his rear and he started to leak blood and guts from it.
  • I asked him why he would do such a thing, and told him to fight for his life — I knew he was unhappy and his future seemed bleak but someday he’d find happiness, so if not for his sake, then for the other Zhuquan 20 years from now who would look back at him and thank the present him for surviving long enough for the future him to find happiness. This might or might not have swayed him, but he barked out a short laugh and then collapsed on the floor.
  • I told him to stay put and ran out and downstairs. There was an admin office with a man and a woman there writing on separate paper-strewn desks. I didn’t have a phone, so I needed to borrow one from them, and once I explained what had happened, the man gave me his mobile phone as well as the 7 digit phone number of the cops. I dialed the number but ended up at a male voice intoning that I had reached his voice mail, before the male staff member realized that the last digit was a 3, and not a 5. He told me so, and asked if I knew how to repopulate a new call with the old phone number and then edit it by changing the last digit. I said that I did, and pressed the redial button on the screen before editing the last digit, which did exactly that.
  • This time, I reached the cops. In the meantime, Eisen, who was going to take my place in the room, as well as another girl had arrived, and I explained what was happening over the phone and went back upstairs as I did, since I knew it doubled as explanation for the new arrivals too. I said that the incident happened 15 minutes ago, though I privately felt that it had been a bit longer than that, due to phone issues.
  • When I reached our room however, I saw that Zhuquan was missing. The remnants of his nightgown and several bracelets and cufflinks were on the bed, and the policeman told me that he was still located in the room. I looked around the room, and said that if he was, he’d have to be inside one of the metal cupboards for some reason as the room really was not all that big and he was a tall chap to boot. I also said I’d rather an ambulance be there if I was going to open those cupboards and find him inside. I also told them about the bracelets on his bed.
  • The policeman went silent for a bit, then laughed softly and said that he had figured out where Zhuquan was and what he was doing. Despite the gunshot wound, he had dragged himself out of the sharehouse/dorm somehow, without leaving a trail of blood, and was now headed to a bus terminal to try to catch a bus out of town and return home to see his mom. The cop asked me how to spell Zhuquan‘s name, and I spelled it out for him, starting with his surname Goh, and then Zhu and Quan with a space in between. I looked out of the window as I was doing so and saw that dawn was arriving and Allen and someone else was walking by on the street, either coming to the same sharehouse we were in or heading to a building adjacent to us.
Sep 23 2022
  • I dreamt I was on an MRT train, specifically taking the northern/northwestern line on the Singapore MRT line from Yishun all the way north, west, and then south to where it met up with the east-west line at Jurong East. I was in my (female) school uniform and trying to get to my school, which was located nine stops before the end of the line, but I needed to use the washroom, and the only female washroom was at the back end of the back carriage of the train and there was a 6 person queue or so for it, so I got in line there and waited for my turn.
  • I noticed several people in the queue that I knew, particularly Kim and Teresa from Rosyth, even though they were in a different school now and had a different school uniform on. I politely asked them if they were in line — Teresa was, and I queued up behind her. Kim just happened to be seated nearby but was not actually in the queue. Teresa asked if I could hold her spot while she ran back to her seat and got something, I nodded assent and she rushed off and came back in a bit.
  • The queue took a long time, so by the time my turn came and went, and I came out of the train washroom. I noticed that not only had the train reached the end of the line at Jurong East, it had converted into an east-west train, gone west three stops to the end of that line, turned around, and was about to hit Jurong East again on its journey back east. I didn’t want to miss the stop here as it would be much harder to transfer back to the north line to get to school, so I quickly got off. Mom at some point around here pointed out that one of the other stations I had passed likely had a shopping center next to it so I could probably have gotten off there and used the toilet there.
  • Anyway, I headed back north on the train toward school, but because it was so late already, I decided to skip school and hung out with two friends instead, a boy and a girl who were likely romantically linked. They were both also cutting class that day, and the three of us got off at another random train station and went to a different school to hang out in. We climbed the stairs of that school and found an empty second-floor classroom next to the stairwell where we sat in and began to chat. There was a washroom next to that classroom and I eventually visited that as well, noting in the mirror that I was basically wearing the Dunman High female uniform but without the school badge, and that my uniform had gotten a bit ruffled and somehow my left nipple was visible, so I straightened it and buttoned back up so it wasn’t.
  • I wondered how we would get away if a teacher from the school found us, as our uniform was very different from the ones that the students of this school wore. I considered running down the corridor in either direction and which one would end up being safer. The other direction led toward and past classrooms that were actually in use, so it would cause quite a commotion if we went that way, but we had to be prepared for that possibility if the teacher that found us came up from the way we did.
Sep 24 2022
  • I was in a slice of life MMO with a bunch of friends. I don’t remember much about it, but each square map represented one country, although each map was no larger than a small park that we could walk around in. Some had different climates, for example the one we were in for most of the dream was full of greenery and had some ponds and a small river but another one I saw had snow and was -25 degrees Celsius with outdoor heaters strewn about the map.
  • There were also guilds, and most of my friends I played with were in the same guild that I was in. I did notice Zixiang was online on my friends list but was not in guild as he had left it at some point in the past with his max level main character, but since I saw he had an alt character as well that he was coming online on, I quietly tossed him an invite and he rejoined the guild eventually. This made him visible to us again.
  • At one point we were looking for a 6-sided die that we had buried somewhere on the map, as it was emitting loud rabbit noises and no one could figure out where we had put it. Eventually we found old video logs of it getting buried, and we saw that it was half-buried in the ground just to the north and east of an L-shaped bend in the river, just north of a path that crossed the river itself, and west of some old rocks. I found the place in the game world and dug up the die, pocketing it.
  • At another point I and one other friend were accompanying a third friend who was taking some sort of religious class in a building, and going to introduce us to the teacher in an attempt to recruit us. I wasn’t sure this was a good idea and noticed that our third mutual friend wanted out, so I pretended to get a call on my phone and told the student friend that our guild leader had ordered the two of us to get somewhere right now but that we would join him again in the future.
  • Later on, I visited a different country and had my items stolen there from a hotel room as I slept. This included my smart phone and all my clothes except a shirt. I looked out of the window and called down to the reception area from my room until I got the attention of a woman attendant, who tried to get some details for the police from where she was down there, but we couldn’t communicate well so she exasperatedly came upstairs to my room, along with a maid. They got some details from me like my home country (which I answered Singapore to), but said that I might be stuck in this country a long time, up to 3 years or possibly even forever, because I didn’t even have a smartphone. I said that of course I didn’t, since it had been stolen, and couldn’t they lend me one so I could make calls home?
  • They also needed to know some sort of signature thing that was on my pillow, and kept on writing it wrong despite me telling them what it was. It was a 5 letter word that started with Jac- but the maid kept on writing down Jag- on purpose and said it didn’t matter at first, but I made her correct it on the form. I suspected at this point that they were in cahoots with the thieves somehow if not actually the perpetrators themselves.
Sep 25 2022
  • Snippet: I dreamt that I rejoined work after a 12 day or so layoff, which caused all my longevity benefits to reset due to a break in my employment. It was a somewhat dirty move on HR‘s part to do that to me. I flipped through a physical dream diary in my dreamworld that looked just like my dreams.txt file I use to record my dreams, but was a physical book that I could turn the pages of, in an attempt to find out the exact date that I was laid off in a previous dream, but did not find the correct entry. I just remember having felt very down since that day until today and having that bleed into all my dreams.
  • Snippet: I was in a room in a school building together with about four other friends, including Eileen, and were going to race down a corridor on motorcycles toward some end point as part of a quest. My bike was fastest so I knew I’d win anyway, but when we all got to the end of the corridor, the quest didn’t complete, so we figured it was some sort of bug and decided to restart the race. Just before the game restarted, I noticed that the quest tracker had updated at some point from the original objective, which read something like “race to a certain end room” to “race to the room between Eileen and where you are now”, which basically meant we had overshot the exit. The second time around, I screeched to a halt beside a nondescript room about halfway down the corridor, and drove into it. Everyone followed me. The quest then updated to “look for the questgiver” so I disembarked from the motorcycle, as did everyone else. There was a circular stairwell in the room leading up eight floors, and I swung my mouse cursor in circles while holding down the left mouse button so that I would quickly climb them, but I (and everyone else with me) climbed all the way to the top and down again without finding the quest giver. I then noticed the quest had quietly updated again to “get back onto your motorcycle”, so I went back down and did so, moved the motorcycle one inch further into the room toward the stairs (despite all the motorcycles already physically being well into the room at that point), and the questgiver, a wizened old man, instantly spawned in front of me.
  • Snippet: I and five of my friends were hanging out near the front counter of a bar when we watched a short girl who had recently joined our.. team? school? enter the bar and immediately get accosted by a group of men who wanted to flirt with her. The loli could normally deal with them, but looked really distracted today, and I knew that she was new to the group and also had just seen a scene where she had visited the owner or headmaster’s office and looked at something written on his desk, then sat down on his chair and penned out a letter of some sort, and then had a talking owl and some other animal in the room look over the letter for her, the letter on his desk. It felt like a resignation letter, although I didn’t know for sure. I called out to her and invited her over, giving her a chance to break free of the group of guys accosting her. She sat down at the bar and two of our teammates moved their chairs to either side of her, closing ranks around her to protect her. There was still a bit of a gap behind her and two of the guys came over holding their drinks anyway to try to continue chatting her up, but I told them in no uncertain terms (referring to them by their shirts, i.e. “Hey, blue shirt!”) to leave her alone and that they could talk to her another day but not today. One of the friends in my group asked if I was not just setting her up for trouble down the road, and I said that I was pretty sure that that would soon no longer matter and that we should make her day as comfortable as possible.
  • Snippet: I was hanging out with a male friend and a female friend in our high school uniforms and the male friend was talking about how he wanted to be a movie director and ideally wanted to shoot a movie before graduation, even though it was abysmally hard to get a movie published by Hollywood while still an amateur in high school. We encouraged him on and said that we would be happy to star in his movie. I suggested that he should figure out a certain style that he could uniquely call his, for example occasionally panning to overhead top-down shots as though we were in a video game. He declined that one, so I brought up a sniper rifle and aimed it at a wall of a building some distance away and suggested a camera view that started on one end of the scope and flew “through” the scope out the other end like a bullet, and having the scene transform from brown to an explosion of blue to somehow represent freedom.
  • Editor: That dream I was looking for does not actually exist and, as far as I could remember, was not based on an actual dream I’ve had.

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