Dear Tigey,
Only six or seven weeks or so to go left at this place. And I feel like I’ve not done anything to prepare for the move yet. I’m very much at that stage where I’m regretting all my plans and wondering why I couldn’t have just kept the status quo going.
Entry #102 (Jul 23 2023)
Table of Contents
Taking an arrow to the…
ට School
ට Work
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #98
ට Song of the Week #75
ට Writing Prompt of the Week #18
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #82
ට Dreams
School
After sending an inquiring email to Sophia this week, I got back an email that said that I did not make it for that Sophian dorm that I had applied for, because Exchange students could only apply in the first round through their original application or something like that and not through that second general application round. That’s fine by me though, since I wasn’t expecting much in the first place and had soured a bit on the place by then due to having to share the kitchen and bathroom with 5-6 other people rather than 2 in those places. It was a little annoying that they didn’t bother to send a notice of failure until I asked though, like I’m supposed to be psychic and know that I wasn’t actually qualified for that?
I did get one offer and also learn a super interesting thing through this though, which was that outside of those main (and somewhat nearby) dorms, Soshigaya and Arrupe, many of the other Sophian-affiliated dorms (“Sophia Associated Housing”) actually still had vacancies, and I was offered a place at:
- Be Good Zoshigaya
- Flatshare SHIN-Otsuka
- DK House Shinkoiwa
- DK House Tokyo-Nerima
- Azalea House
if I wanted. They’re all listed in my house roundup post from long ago. I just had to email the Sophian inbound international team by Jul 24 (the Monday following this blog post weekend) if so. I didn’t want any of those though, they’re all far away and cramped, but I didn’t bother telling them that I already had separately found a (hopefully) good sharehouse near Sophia anyway, I just told them that I’d think about it and let them know if I need room at one of those places. What was interesting to conclude from that though was that this meant that applying for those places in my initial application would probably have meant a 100% success rate for admission. Which is good to know for anyone else in the future researching these. I should incorporate that into the above page at some point.
The other major thing that happened is that we were told that we could pick up our RSJP certificates from the University of Alberta this week, so I went down on Tuesday to pick it up. The transcript itself looks like this:
So an overall B, with the noted 150 minutes of absence being the day that Zian and I went down to Osaka. Which seems so, so long ago now.
The Curriculum Example table schedule is funny because it states that we had Japan Studies, the after school trips, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday like it was a regular thing. It wasn’t, of course, they were just somewhat randomly strewn across the six weeks there.
And I wonder which teacher wrote the “teacher’s feedback” thing, since that isn’t signed off. It basically says that I need to work on my pronunciation and stop shortening long double-vowel sounds into short single-vowel ones. Which really comes from my SIngapore accent more than anything else.
My official transcript also now has a note at the bottom that says:
July 10, 2023: Granted credit in courses (units) Japanese 300-Level Option (6.00) for work completed at Ritsumeikan University, Japan, 2023. Total units 6.00.
It did slot into my Academic Requirements app, which is an app that tells me how far away I am from my degree still, but at a completely pointless part of the requirements where I didn’t need any more credits, so it didn’t help push me toward the degree, for which I still need about 3 more generic East Asian Studies courses, I think, but that’s fine, since I was never expecting anything to come out of this degree-wise. It’s good enough that it’s on there somewhere.
Work
Another week, another quiet week at work. The main thing that did happen this week is that when I went down to the University to pick up my RSJP transcript, I also went to return my work laptop, which I had picked up about a year ago but had never actually used. I took the chance to take some pictures of the place, of course.
This is the room that our team now uses as a shared office — I think the actual term for this is hot-desking, but we call it a landing spot. Even then, the room is still empty more than 80% of the time though.
This is the corridor just outside that room, our team also “owns” a couple of the brown-doored offices on the left side of the corridor:
They were inherited from the dev side of the team that merged into us. These offices are on the ground floor and locked up in a terrible part of the building that’s colloquiallly called the Bowling Alley though, an area with about 15-20 or so offices and meeting rooms locked away behind a security door which itself is located down some weird winding passages. It’s very quiet, mostly but not totally windowless, used as a sort of dumping ground for things (just look at the number of desk phones on one of our tables in the picture above) and kind of dark and liminal at times, especially post-COVID. Some people really dislike the area, and I used to as well, but now I kind of find it nerdish and cool, like a secret hideaway, except I feel no attachment at all to the area.
One of the rooms in the Bowling Alley is this meeting room, that used to be our team’s physical weekly meeting room for the eight years or so pre-COVID.
This was an open walk-in IT support area on the second level of the building pre-COVID, located next to pedways that lead to our two neighbouring buildings.
This is a small pond outside the Students’ Union Building that I’ve walked past thousands of times.
About five minutes away in an easterly direction, this is the view of the new University Commons building, taking the place of our old Dent-Pharm (Dentistry/Pharmacy) Building next to the LRT station. This thing took how many years to build? It definitely started pre-COVID, apparently about 4 years ago (local), though the entire area’s been shut down for so long that it feels much longer than that. It looks good when dolled up a bit (local) but right now is kind of an empty place that gave me a feeling of a kid wearing pants that are a few sizes too big for it, and I’m not sure what the University’s plans for the place is yet.
I was looking forward to the weekly public question/answer notice board in the library but it was empty this week. Oh well. Going up through the pedway from the library toward HUB Mall, I took a couple of photographs of this exhibit:
Jellyfish, mushrooms, and a little volcano (not pictured in this one, it was offscreen down below the edge of the picture), oh my. It was eye-catching and nice. Apparently a student project called Beyond Human Will by Tamara Storm. Also apparently supposed to have been taken down two months ago, but that’s our University for you. Glad it was still here though since I had not seen it until that day.
I took two random pictures of our long and thin campus mall, HUB Mall, while I was cutting through there to get to the TELUS Centre to pick up my transcript.
And one of my former favourite food stall, Ho Ho’s, and their current much-reduced menu.
Life
One thing that spilled over from the School section that I will be putting here instead, is that the Sophia folks also told me that I would be getting a COE, or Certificate of Eligibility, that would allow me to go apply for my Japan student visa in Calgary. This would arrive by early August, they said, a month before I had to go. They’re such jokers — it arrived 22 hours after that notification email, on the very next day, July 21st. It arrived too late for me to do anything with it this week though, since I apparently have to go fill in and print out a couple forms, get yet another headshot camera picture, and then arrange a trip down to Calgary to visit the Consulate-General of Japan there.
I am specifically forbidden from reproducing the CoE though, so I won’t be pasting that onto the blog here. But it’s a digital CoE that came in the form of an email into my inbox.
I apparently also have to book an appointment with the Consulate there first, and apparently this booking can only be done by phone, between 11 am to 12 pm or between 3 pm to 4 pm on any given day. Which is such a weird schedule (local) but also feels kind of very stereotypically Japanese to me. I wonder if other countries’ Consulates have similar quirky schedules.
While I’m writing about applying for visas, the RBC Ion Visa card that I had applied for a couple weeks ago as part of the credit card renewal process arrived this week — except that the expiry date had not changed at all, and it was still slated to expire next year at the exact same time as my old card. I called them again to inquire as to why this was the case and the very nice guy that picked up the line this time said that he was baffled why the other customer care client had done that too — it was actually not even really legal because they shouldn’t even have been able to issue two cards that expire at the same time or something like that, as one (i.e. my old card) would have been immediately invalidated that way or something. I didn’t fully comprehend that part.
Anyway, he said he’d send me a new Ion Visa with a proper expiry date in a couple more weeks, but that my current one would immediately expire, and he asked if I was fine with not using my card for a couple weeks. I said it was no problem, although I still see that first replacement card as active in my account, so who knows. I guess at the end of the day they gave me a credit card that I’ll never actually be able to use though, which is interesting in its own way. I scanned everything and stored it away.
In preparation for my trip to Calgary, I also picked up a book that I had booked a long time ago but only came in this week — How to Invent Everything, by Ryan North (local). I’m only 40 or so pages into it, but it’s great so far, it’s a guide on how to build civilization from the ground up, written as a fictional time travel machine user manual for when things go wrong. It was originally a recommendation that I found on Reddit somewhere, though I didn’t save which page I got it from exactly, and a Google search now turns up many threads that recommend it. I’ll probably bring the book along and read it on the 4 hour bus there and back.
Here are a couple more pictures of the neighbourhood kids in the evening from this week. I really like this first picture:
And in this second picture, if you look carefully, you’ll see the shoes of a kid sitting on the brown roof of the little shed on the middle-left side of the picture.
He would have gotten there via jumping down from the yellow balcony above. I wish this sort of thing had happened every year that I was here and not just this last summer. It’s so nice for people-watching.
Our neighbourhood lit-up tree has been randomly off and on in the evenings and nights this week, and I have absolutely no clue as to why it’s turned on some nights and not turned on on other nights.
The rain came by and swept away all the chalk marks from last week, but the kids diligently decorated some of the tiles with other doodlings.
I look forward to whatever other nuggets of knowledge the kids can dispense to the neighbourhood before I go off. I wonder if any of them will ever stumble upon the blog 45 years from now and go “Hey, I drew that when I was little..”
I had a nice video chat meeting with Zian this week. I walked around the neighbourhood early in the morning, taking her to the front door of the mall (it was still closed) and then to the nearby park before wandering back home. I very briefly showed her my apartment, and she also showed me her room, and a bunch of the plushies that she had gotten, plus she shared some of the stories behind them. Because it’s time for her to fly back to Sydney from China to continue her studies abroad, I think this upcoming Monday will be our last (or maybe second last) regular weekly video chat session though, and I am sad about that. We still don’t talk at all outside of those sessions, even though those sessions are nice 2-2.5 hour chunks of time, so once that well dries up we’ll practically have nothing left to do with each other.
Regarding this old Memory of the Week #63 segment, in My Diary #081, I randomly found a picture of the Ninja Turtle cards this week that I have now edited into that segment above too.
The picture dates from February 2016, from an email exchange with Jon that we had where the topic of these cards came up. I guess I shared them in my Discord at that time too, but I had no recollection of that, only of the original conversation where I mentioned these cards existing and my search for them.
Games
In terms of group games, Satinel and I played a ton of Risk of Rain 2 this week, and we’ve basically unlocked all the characters there are now (except one of the two DLC characters because she doesn’t own the DLC). The gameplay feels really, really good, all the characters handle really well for the most part, though they all have different advantages and disadvantages and playstyles in general.
The game still suffers from the same issue that the original Risk of Rain does though, which is that in co-op, if one player falls behind due to an early death in a zone, then their experience for the rest of the run is basically ruined because they can only be resurrected at the start of the next zone if the other player/s complete the current map, and by that time the other player will far outgear them, not only in terms of having more time to loot the previous level, but also because there’s a timer mechanic in the way that enemies scale up, so their lack of gear will mean that enemies will be a lot stronger than them by the time they resurrect, which leads into a vicious cycle of quickly dying again and having to sit around for 10 minutes more or whatever while the other player carries them through the zone to the next one.
It’s happened to both of us in different games, and it’s fairly terrible, and difficult to recover from even if we try to do a catch-up thing for the other player by giving most of the loot from the next zone to them. It’s the main issue with the game’s timer progression system and is something that hasn’t really been mitigated between the first game and the second.
We also tried out a bit of River City Girls 2, which was interesting. I liked the vibe (story, atmosphere, characters, etc) and the idea in general, but the controls suck so badly, both on keyboard and controller, and do not feel responsive at all. So when we die to a boss it feels like we died fighting controls rather than fighting the boss.
In terms of solo games, I’ve continued to play a fair amount of Yamafuda 2nd station, and I’ve actually now completed the main game on both the characters, with all that’s left being more difficult climbs on the same mountains to unlock a sort of prestige system (kind of like Ascension runs from Slay the Spire, but it’s just bigger numbers with no new mechanics, I think) for achievements.
I also got back into Skyrim modding (i.e. putting together lists of mods, not actually writing them, though I’ve also considered that) for some reason, except this time it’s on the Special Edition instead of the Legendary Edition. Which mostly means that the mods are fragmented between the two thanks to Bethesda, but most of the mods these days support the newer, Special Edition (or Anniversary Edition) instead of the older Legendary one. Anyway this time I’m trying to build a mod list around Legacy of the Dragonborn, a museum/collection mod that should make me very happy, if only I had the time and willpower to actually play it to completion.
I hadn’t looked into building Skyrim mod lists in something like three or four years now due to this fragmentation, and it made me very happy to play around with it again, as exploring the vast swathe of mods out there (mostly on Nexus Mods) is like searching through an attic full of treasure chests for cool stuff, in a way that no other game quite does, with the possible exception of something like Second Life, which I’d kind of like to explore with a friend sometime. Skyrim’s probably not the best thing to do so close to going abroad though, but hey, it’ll be the last time I can do this on this old computer. The next time I do this, a couple of years from now, it will be on a newer, more powerful computer. Probably.
I get the urge to play around with building mod lists and wandering around in game to see what it looks like every few months, though I don’t always carry it out. One thing that’s been consistent though is that I find building and putting together mods and making it launch is vastly more fun than actually playing the game itself, and I’ve never actually made it past the first couple quests of each city and never progressed either the main quest or the civil war stuff very far as well. Somehow I doubt that this time will be any different. Someday though I’ll find out how the game ends! Never mind that I have 621 hours combined in both versions of the game already and still have never even reached its halfway point.
I played a smattering of various other games — one that I wanted to highlight was Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate, which came in this month (July 2023)’s Humble Choice bundle, and which I spent a couple hours one evening on. I beat the game once on my second try, though it’s a game that’s meant to be beaten (or failed on) several times over to unlock new stuff for the game, and I’m not sure I have the interest level to do that. Nonetheless, it was an interesting take on “chess” that I kind of liked.
Plushie of the Week #98 – Tiggy
My Dad likes to call Tigey Tiggy, but what he doesn’t know is that there actually is another plushie named Tiggy, this little guy from somewhere or other! I think he was a gift from Kel from one of her trips to Singapore, but I honestly would not be able to confirm this, as he might have been from anywhere really. (She says it wasn’t, actually, which leaves me even more stumped about its original source.) About all the clue I have to go off of is the little green sticker that reads $3.50, and that’s not a lot of help at all. And that he was a plushie I obtained after I moved out of Edmonton 4012, and also that he was most likely a gift.
He’s cute though. He’s a little rectangular-shaped plushie, very reminiscent of Japan, and is apparently part of the “Teeny Tys 4” collection. I don’t have a joined-the-plushie-army birthday for him, but the tag says that his real birthday is April 16th, so April 16th of some point in the mid 2010s it is.
Front:
Back:
Underside:
Tag 1 Front:
Tag 1 Back and Tag 2 Front:
Tag 2 Back:
Tag 3 Front:
Tag 3 Back and Tag 4 Front:
Tag 4 Back:
And Tag 3 Inner:
Today I learnt that these tags are called Swing Tags. Or at least that the Ty company wants them to be called that.
Song of the Week #75
Title: Cry
Artist: The Mavis’s
Album: Pink Pills (1998)
Another firmly-entrenched-in-the-90s song for me, this song released in January of the last year that I spent in Singapore, and got some airplay there. Although I don’t think the song itself got immensely popular, I loved it — it went into my top 10 favourite songs of all time list and stayed there for a long time even after I moved to Canada, peaking around #5 or so.
I really like the way the voices synergize and overlay together, and the wacky musical sounds of whatever instruments they are using are called, for sure, and how it’s an upbeat song overall — even though the song is called Cry, it’s not a song I’ve cried to and probably never will be. Instead, my visual imagery of this song is halfway between a Singapore sunset and a retrowave sunset — a scene drenched in an overwhelming amount of warm orange with some mellow purple swathes of the paintbrush along the side.
I’ve never seen the music video until today though. It’s always interesting to be able to put a face, or a few faces, to a voice. especially since while I knew that the group was Australian, I didn’t even know how many people were in the group.
Writing Prompt of the Week #18
This week’s writing prompt reads:
“When I was a kid, my favorite TV show was ____ because…”
Oh dear. I don’t think I had a favourite TV show, and that’s kind of carried over into adulthood since I don’t really ever watch TV now either. I did watch Saturday morning cartoons, so I liked stuff like Animaniacs a lot, and all the other Warner Brothers spin-off shows like Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies. I liked the Hanna-Barbara cartoons (they were a separate company back then) like the Flintstones, Jetsons, and Wacky Races/Penelope Pitstop too. Stuff like the Power Rangers and Captain Planet were also popular locally and I somewhat liked them. I wanted a Heart ring.
Outside of cartoons, I really liked Barney & Friends and Sesame Street when young, as well as Square One Television, especially the noir detective-themed math segment within that show, Mathnet, as well as the Pacman spoof, Mathman.
Overall though, I didn’t really watch a whole ton of TV, though I remember watching the odd soap opera or Chinese drama that I don’t remember the name of, in particular one I’ve been trying to find that aired as a series over a long period of time and ended with a concubine woman, scorned by the Emperor or something, living in a wing or building in the Chinese Imperial Palace (or something that looked like it) and pretending to be a ghost who had died and surviving off of the offerings that the other staff in the palace would leave for the “ghost”. It was kind of sad, or at least melancholic. But I don’t remember anything else about the plot.
I never really watched more than a couple episodes of it, but I also remember an old Malay kids show whose name and theme song has stuck with me over the years, for some reason or other. I guess I found the song really catchy. It’s called Aksi Mat Yoyo.
I also remember that in our Tampines 294 apartment, and possibly in Yishun before that though I can’t be sure, we subscribed to a cable service called CableVision, and there was a black cable box in our house with its own separate remote control that allowed us to access many more channels than we could actually receive locally. I did watch a bunch of MTV Asia from that. And soccer. And the odd movie. And shows like Buffy the Vampire Hunter and Xena: Warrior Princess. I also remember watching Eurovision for several years in a row because it let me stay up late at night (with permission from parents).
Favourite show overall though? I had none. If I had to pick one, probably Animaniacs.
Also see next week’s Memory Snippet of the Week where I do a part 2.
Memory Snippet of the Week #82
I’ve alluded to this exactly once before (hey look, that’s from my LAST trip to Calgary!), but the Ninja Turtle Card Game picture find this week reminded me of this. Another lost game from my childhood that I would love to find, but likely never will, is a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle that came in a yellow cardboard jigsaw puzzle box, featuring Mickey Mouse, dressed in a black suit and top hat and carrying a fancy stick as he posed for the camera, while standing on a white, square stage that was raised into the night sky and superimposed over a scene of night-time Los Angeles, with the Hollywood sign in the background on the left side, and things like streets, cars, and empty parking lots in the foreground below and around the stage.
I credit this jigsaw puzzle as one of the things in my formative youth that made me eventually really like liminal spaces and night cities, so it would be really nice if I could find the jigsaw puzzle again eventually, but this puzzle was something that we had in Singapore, in Yishun 723 specifically and probably Tampines 294 too, and I don’t think we ever brought it over to Canada when we moved here.
There’s no real way to dig up old jigsaw puzzles lost to the sands of time though, and even if it somehow was online somewhere, searching for particular components of a scene used in a jigsaw puzzle is even harder than searching for a CD album cover by the elements that make up the cover or something (which is already usually nigh impossible on its own, but is apparently a thing many people have tried to do, in my experience watching over the Tip of my Tongue subreddit and Discord server).
Because it was from so long ago too, I don’t believe a picture of it exists in our family archives anywhere as well. I do remember this being the most played puzzle in my childhood, and I remember that at one point, as a home craft project, we took one completed jigsaw puzzle, flipped it around, put glue on the back cardboard side of all the pieces, and then overlaid a large piece of construction paper or something on it so it would end up sticking to the paper and could then be displayed like a painting or portrait. I don’t think it was *this* jigsaw that we did that to, though it could have been, in which case since we did that in Yishun 723, it would not even have made its way to Tampines 294 in the end.
On the other hand, I remember having several “jigsaw competitions” with my siblings in Edmonton 4012, where we would spend a couple hours on a lazy weekend afternoon competing with each other to see who could more quickly complete different jigsaw puzzles of the same piece size, and 500 piece puzzles were one of the categories that we sometimes completed in. Did this 500-piece mickey mouse puzzle survive all the way there? I don’t think so but I don’t remember for sure, so it could have.
I need a time machine.
Dreams
My dream retention has been really bad recently. Most mornings, I wake up with the recollection that I had a dream the previous night, but I just get feelings and sensations rather than actual memories that I can put down in text.
Jul 18 2023
- I dreamt I was navigating various zones, first a town, and then a zone with a maze, and then an overall map that represented the entire island of Singapore, with some of my Dunman friends as well as other strangers, as we tried to get from place to place in order to to fulfil some objectives or do one of a varying number of quests.
- The “quest” in the town zone involved flying drones that followed us around as pets, with each person controlling one drone and each drone having one specific skill. I don’t remember much more than that other than we were also travelling around various streets and then within shopping centers and other buildings as a group, looking for something. There was a school trip feel to the entire thing, and at one point I saw Shaun from Rosyth seated on a chair on the side of the road along with a bunch of other school club performers, cheering us on or something. I passed him, then stopped, went back to him as I took out my new Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra phone, pointed my camera at him, and gestured that I wanted to take a picture of him. He said it was ok but that it was difficult to capture everyone in the picture, so I took another step back and then took a picture of him and the people behind him, then moved to another angle and took another picture of him and the people behind him from the other side. I also, later on, talked to Emily from my workplace and she said something about planning a trip to the north side of the country, or perhaps even out of the country to the Malaysia zone that was just north of Singapore.
- The quest in the maze zone involved finding a ladder in that maze that led up to a classroom that we had rented and wanted to use, and once I found the path there, I told everyone else that they could turn on the pathing feature and select me so that they would have a pulsating red trail that showed them the shortest route through the maze to me. Once we all reached the classroom, I settled down at a desk and asked Zixiang, seated two desks ahead of me, what we were to do next. I addressed him as seito kaichou (or student council president in Japanese). Satinel, who was seated at the desk in between the two of us, turned around and said we had to read something or other on a handout that she pointed out to me.
- The quest in the island zone involved finding a girl who had weakly threatened suicide on some forum, and she was one of several questgivers who we had to do quests for to unlock their story, but we didn’t like her threat and so had left her until last and had some arguments as to whether we even wanted to do her story. I took a quest item to her and unlocked a thing that said that her character quest was about a boyfriend who had dumped her though, and that it needed 6 more quest items to properly unlock the story. We only had 5 people in our party, and could only turn in one quest item a day, so I asked everyone to turn in their quest and we could do her tomorrow.
Jul 21 2023
- I was walking around my UAlberta campus, watching a new fad spring to life that apparently only 19 and 20 year olds specifically could trigger. It involved an AI script that someone wrote that attached itself to a piece of music, and then attached it to the person themselves, and allowed them to program in and customize a dance choreographpy that their body would then know how to do as long as they followed the steps that the AI script told them to do. Groups of 19 and 20 year olds were travelling around the campus learning to use this and playing with this, a couple people even had impromptu busking sessions that drew large crowds.
- One of my friends used this in a concert hall in campus, drawing a large crowd that dressed nicely, like they were attending an opera, and who sat in single chairs set up in a large square on the concert hall floor. For her dance, she had attached 30 cute little animal heads emoji to her dress, and that was part of her performance. The crowd liked it a lot, and asked for an encore, at which point she revealed that she had prepared another 30 animal emoticons to attach to her dress for a second song, replaced the first 30 with those, and tried to dance her encore song as well, but she ran out of energy halfway through the song and staggered backstage to drink some water.
- She apologized to the crowd and said that it was still much better than yesterday’s performance but that she had a long way to go to be a fully-fledged performer since she was being carried by AI. The crowd clapped for her and encouraged her on, asking her to continue and finish her dance from where she had stopped anyway, so she did so.
- I don’t know where they fit in the story, but Mom was there at some point, as was Trin. Trin in particular could trigger the AI script, so she must have been 19 or 20 in my dream as well. I and whoever else I was with realized that virtually everyone was just doing variations of one song that was attached to the script, as they didn’t know how to attach new songs to the script and then customize some API hooks to allow for different dances to be attached to that. I felt sure that we could figure it out if we tried though, and come up with new songs for dances that way.
- While walking around campus, I had seen a small overhead bridge that was owned by ETS, it went up by the side road that went by the hospital area on campus, stretched along and followed the sidewalk about four metres above it for quite a long way without any good reason, before featuring a 90 degree turn that finally allowed the person using the bridge to actually cross the road and descend back down to the ground at a bus stop. The bridge looked really tiny, but I had seen someone’s head bobbing atop the bridge as they walked along it, so I wanted to check the bridge out too as it was a new setup to me.
- Upon reaching the start of the bridge and looking at it though, it was a really tiny tunnel that I would have to crawl on my hands and knees to even enter. There was a tiny motion-powered escalator inside that was not currently moving, but could go up or down depending on whether someone approached it from the top or bottom first. The entire tunnel was narrow and could not fit more than one really small child comfortably though.
- Earlier, there was also a car chase game on campus that I was part of. Specifically, I was riding in a car in a group of 3, and the car as well as another car were taking part in an arena full of roads that looped back around and above and below around each other in confusing knots to form what was basically a large sphere, and the object of the game was to drive up behind the other car and attack them to win points. It was hard for the driver to concentrate on both attack and defence at the same time, so I told the driver to concentrate on driving and focus on finding the car ahead of them, and I played defence by looking out the back window of the car to make sure that the car didn’t suddenly appear behind us, which would give them a significant advantage.
- Eventually, we found the other car and chased behind them for some ways, but they drove up to a disembarkment point and got out of the car to forfeit the game instead of trying to (or perhaps after failing to) escape from us.