Dear Tigey,
I could have been flying off to Singapore this week, but argh, it’s -35 outside and we’re stuck here instead. Actually, you know what, I’d have to had gone outside in this weather to go flying off this week, and who knows if the planes would have even been able to fly in this weather.. and there have been a spate of airplane safety issues recently.. but the funniest thing would have been that I would have had to bring a heavy winter coat with me to Singapore.
Entry #127 (Jan 14 2024)
Table of Contents
Cryogenic…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #123
ට Song of the Week #100
ට Writing Prompt of the Week #43
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #107
ට Dreams
Life
It was cold this week in Edmonton.
Seriously why are these numbers allowed to go so low? Our Edmonton International Airport, which is a little outside the city, even managed to top every other place in the world (of the places which do weather readings anyway) to become the coldest place on Earth according to the Weather Extremes site that people use. Congratulations, Edmonton airport!
At least we’re not Leduc.
The misfits upstairs are still opening and closing the balcony door as much as before though, so I hope they freeze but that the pipes don’t freeze. I actually called the office on Thursday to complain after they did that like 6 times in 10 minutes, and then later on 8 times in 5 minutes, on a day where they had kept me up late the night before due to their constant noises, and then woke me up again early in the morning due to heavy stomping. But the office front desk lady basically cut me off and hung up on me mid-sentence after about a 5 minute call, 2 minutes of which I was on hold for. I sent a complaint letter to Denise, expressing my displeasure at the front desk hanging up on me, but whatever.
It’s not like I’ve been pestering them either — outside of the time that the woman upstairs was screaming, and the time I asked for the furnace checkup/thermostat replacement, I hadn’t even contacted them to complain about my upstairs neighbour in over 3 weeks. Her reply before she hung up was something along the lines of “it’s already being dealt with” though, which is why I’m thinking that maybe they have a move out date or something similar scheduled and no one just wants to tell me anything about it yet. I can dream anyway.
Anyway, the apartment struggled a bit this week with temperatures. It had been very warm, almost overly warm, over the past week or so after the maintenance staff came to replace my thermostat, but this week when the weather went cold, the heat wasn’t really able to keep up with the dropping temperature even though the furnace was running all the time. Nothing a cup of hot tea or soup couldn’t solve, though. Though I also forgot that I had a small space heater until two days into the cold snap when I read about people talking about space heaters on Reddit.
I’m suitably impressed though that those Christmas lights upstairs decorating the tree and courtyard year-round still function when the temperature outside is below -40. That’s some durability.
Due to all that cold fun, the week passed by in a bit of a blurry flurry. I did a bunch of stuff for my blog and archive.org uploads though, so I had spikes of satisfaction from that, and I also had white noise running most of the time as a bulwark against the adult children upstairs, so I had a relatively pleasant week outside of when we fought on Thursday. But the week was a quiet one overall.
As a tangential thing to all the neighbour noise stuff, one of the things I’ve found myself using a LOT on this new keyboard, that I never have on my previous keyboards, is the volume roller button. It’s been a godsend but I’ve never actually needed it or really used it until recently despite having it for every keyboard that I can remember in the recent 10-15 years or so.
Zian and I have moved to a biweekly Saturday video call instead of a weekly one, though it’s been unofficially more or less like that due to school, family, travels, and other things for the past two months or so already. Once every two weeks for an hour or so feels about right currently for the both of us I think.
I’ve transferred everything I wanted to my new external hard drive, which apparently was just under 2 TB of information, so my old drive is still hovering at about 8.4 TB / 10.9 TB used, and my new one was about 1.8 TB / 16.3 TB. The new one is specifically meant to give me space for archiving stuff though, so I’ve started to archive a few more historical Youtube channels that are important to me, like this Best Edmonton Mall one, this irememberSG one, and this annual karuta 全日本かるた協会 / user-wj4hf6ji1s one. As well as some individual videos from other channels. Pretty much every video I’ve ever specifically linked on my blog is archived too, just in case, though this is not the case for channels (since some channels of things like walking videos and Let’s Play gaming content are just too big for me). It’s nice having some white noise videos downloaded too, so I can play those locally and not have to stream them every day or night that I play them.
There is an annual karuta competition in Japan that aired on that third Youtube link in the last paragraph, and in 2024 that aired last week, on Saturday night/Sunday morning. For whatever reason (i.e. I finished the blog too early on, became lazy, and never edited it in) it never made it into last week’s blog, but I did end up staying up to watch those matches and the Queen’s matches (the finals between the top two female players) were extremely thrilling (for the niche of people who know what’s happening anyway). The match was a best-of-5 contest, with the first to 3 games winning the title, and the first three games came down to the final card on both sides and what was essentially a 50-50 coin flip to see which one would be read first. The fourth game was one card away from coming down to yet another 50-50 coinflip too. In the end the challenger won over the incumbent, and the commentators said that they’d never seen anything like that before. Very cool stuff. To me.
That annual tournament took/takes place at Omi Jingu, where I’ve physically been to twice before, once by myself and once with Zian.
I’m apparently Queue Monitor for work for the next couple of weeks now. Although this will cause a bump in how busy I feel, this should mostly be fun, with one exception — Firefox specifically does not work for copy/pasting our team ticket list from our ticketing tool, FreshService, to our Google Sheets spreadsheet that the team’s queue monitor uses to work on, because it pastes the output very weirdly and breaks it up into different lines. I’m not even sure whose fault this is, Firefox or FreshService, but I will call the entire process a piece of junk anyway. Chrome works, since that’s what my co-workers use, but I don’t have Chrome installed and refuse to install it. So, oddly enough, for the first time ever, I have to resort to Microsoft Edge to do my work.
Games
I played a whole host of games this week — looking at my Steam library, I played some Merchant of the Six Kingdoms, ZERO Sievert, Battle Brothers, Starbound, Hades, Talented, a bit of Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword, a bit of Rimworld, and also a bit of SWTOR with Satinel. It was one of those transitory weeks where nothing seemed to stick and nothing interesting came out of my game time as I just wandered through various fantasy worlds while watching game playthroughs in other fantasy worlds on Twitch or Youtube on my other monitor.
Due to all that, the modus operandi for the week was to play a little bit of whichever games I’m somewhat interested in every night. One round, one fight, one objective, and so on. And this way my progression in the games will still slowly flow forwards despite any lingering ennui.
Plushie of the Week #123
Because it’s so cold outside, here’s a set of five bears wearing cozy winter sweaters on top of their comfortable fur. I’m sure they don’t like it as much in summer though, but at least they’re in a cool box whose temperature is mostly moderated.
Apparently we got these bears from the Real Canadian Superstore sometime in the 2000’s, but that’s all anyone seems to remember about them.
Bears front:
Bears back:
They all have the same tag, so, Tag 1:
Tag 2:
Tag 3 front:
Tag 3 back:
Song of the Week #100
Title: Dayung Sampan
Artist:
Album:
This was a difficult segment to write, because I couldn’t actually find the specific version of this song that I remember — I went down a Youtube rabbit hole and came back up again after listening to well over a dozen versions of it, but no bueno.
The original song, Dayung Sampan, which translates to Rowing a Wooden Boat, was apparently an Indonesian Malay folk song, with this Wikipedia page crediting it to someone named Dasimah from the 1940s. I couldn’t find an online rendition of this though. In 1979, Teresa Teng sang a Chinese version of the song called Tian Mi Mi, which is one of her more famous songs and is what the above Wikipedia page is about. A link to that video is here.
Being talented at singing in multiple languages, among other things, she also released an Indonesian Malay version of that song around the same time, and a video link to THAT version of the song is here, complete with Malay and (sparse) English lyrics.
The problem is that neither of those is actually the correct version of the song that I’m looking for. According to a multitude of pages like this one (local), there is also a Singapore-centric version of the song which exists, which mentions the Malay word for Singapore, Singapura, several times in the song. Here’s a short lyric video version of the children’s song example of that song sung by a guy, and one here sung by a lady named Noraniza Idris.
The problem with those versions is that because there’s a Singapore-centric version of the song, there’s also a Malaysia-centric version of the song, which both those above links are, and both start off with modified lines that mention sailing from China to Singapura, and then eventually change the lyrics to mention Malaysia all over the place instead, since that’s where both that children’s show as well as Noraniza are from.
Is that the “more correct” bastardized version of the song? I have no idea. However, it’s not the version I was trying to find, though I know it exists — the Scribd website is stupid but I did find more correct lyrics (local) that someone uploaded to it that mostly mention Singapura through the song instead of Malaysia.
Anyway, after trawling through Youtube with a fishing net, I still came up blank for my efforts — there’s so many versions and renditions and remixes of this folk/children’s song that I could not find my “perfect” mind’s ear version of it. So in lieu of all that, I used a version from Noraniza Idris, mentioned above, who collaborated with He Yun to create a version of the song interlaced with Chinese instruments instead that I quite like, even though her interpretation of the song is quite a ways off from the version I’m trying to find in terms of the syllables that she emphasizes or stretches in many places. I’m not 100% satisfied this this one though and might come back and replace it if I ever find a better version. I’m surprised that Singapore, which tends to fiercely protect and preserve its heritage, doesn’t seem to have an entity that has saved/promoted the Singapore version of this cultural song prominently online anywhere.
But that’s fine. The essence of the song is there, and this is probably the best one of a couple of Malay children songs that I know and remember from my childhood, though I didn’t exactly know Malay and couldn’t sing it outside of the chorus. This is like a primary school era memory, something that would perhaps be sung as part of Children’s Day celebrations or something, and I always mostly liked it, even when there wasn’t nostalgia to tinge my memory of the song with rose-coloured streaks a couple of decades ago. Many years later I ran into Teresa Teng’s Chinese rendition of the song and fell in love all over with it again.
Writing Prompt of the Week #43
This week’s writing prompt reads:
“The first time I intentionally lied…”
I’ve already talked about this one here. This book and its similar, repetitive prompts..
“Write a letter to your childhood self giving advice, guidance, and perspective.“
Well, little me, you were very wrong when you thought you’d never live to 10, 20, 30, 40 years old, because those numbers seemed so big so long ago. You’ll live a very interesting life, no spoilers, but by and large it will be fairly fulfilling. Keep on writing and making lists and do not throw away your work and projects from school, they will be something you wished you had kept more of in the future, so store them somewhere. Try to make multiple copies of things, don’t trust Iomega Zip Drives, but your diskettes do last for a really long time so you can use those, or CDs, or just transfer stuff with you from one computer to another. The more you can save the better though!
Take photographs of your homes, of life in the 90s, of things like the shops and the trains and the schools and the people, those are things that you will miss eventually when you grow up. Write down what date, and from where, you got all your plushies and CDs, that info will also be really useful in the future! And you like making lists anyway. Cherish your friends, write down all your memories with them, and also start your dream diary early!
Wait, I’m just writing out all the ways that my earlier self could benefit my blog now. Well, I’m the same person anyway, so whatever! I haven’t really had any major regrets in life or anything like that.
Apparently this is the last prompt of the “Childhood & Family” section that opened the book, the next section is entitled “Young Adulthood & Firsts”.
Memory Snippet of the Week #107
This week, while poking around old memories, I found and archived a Youtube video about my Primary 4 (and I think 5 and maybe 6) English teacher in 1994, Mr Grosse, winning an award back in 2010 for being a great English teacher. Good for him! I’ve had two really, really good English teachers in my schooling career, one being him, and the other being Mrs Douziech in Grade 10 and 12.
I had posted a picture of him before, back in My Diary #058, and I’m reproducing that here for completeness:
Compare and contrast to the person in the video below. He was irrepressibly fun-loving and infected us all with his enthusiasm, and I remember several quotables and snippets from him, more so than any other teacher that I’ve ever had. I’ve mentioned a few of those elsewhere in the blog already, but they include:
- The snippet on the back of that photo, which I also pasted in My Diary #058: Barbarians of Today, Leaders of Tomorrow.
- There is Chaos in Order, and Order in Chaos.
- “Who What Where When Why, How!”, a weird chant he taught us to help us remember the 5 W’s (and H).
- I believe a thing that went around the class where we found out that calling someone Friendly, Understanding, Caring, and Kind was an insult to do the first letter of each word also came from him, though I’m not 100% sure on this one.
- The one Golden Rule of the English language is that there is no golden rule in the English language (or something like that)
He used to give us English puzzles to think about after class and overnight, and would go through them with us the next day in class. The one I was most proud of solving was to find two homophones, or English words that sounded the same, that were 12 letters long or something like that. This turned out to be independents and independence, and I had a eureka moment and solved this while getting ready for bed that evening and excitedly wrote it down on a worksheet, during what was very much a pre-Internet world that one couldn’t use Google (or Altavista) to look this sort of thing up on. Though as I recall there were a few possible answers ending with the dents/dence suffixes, and possibly a couple that were even longer than 12.
I also remember him teaching us how to say hello and goodbye in different languages, so instead of standing and greeting him in English when he entered the class at the start of the period, and left the class at the end of the period, we’d have weeks where we said it in Japanese or other more exotic languages that I don’t remember instead. We might have done this once a week or we might have had a different language every week for some period of time, I forget exactly. Those were all very interesting days, all the more so because what did those really have to do with the English language? But they certainly captivated us.
He had other games too, like he would ask us to come up with pictographs to represent words and submit them to him for others to guess, and he would compile a bunch of the best ones on some transparency sheets to put up on the overhead projector the next day for students to guess. An example being something like, if one had the letter P standing on top of a letter Y, then that could be “P on Y” or “Pony”.
Also, I’m pretty sure this was a self-invented rule but it came out of the “no golden rule” thing and also all the thinking about wordplay that Mr Grosse made us do — but at some point around Primary 4 I came up with a general rule to help differentiate between -ce and -se words like licence and license. I called it the rice/rise rule — when a word had a -ce and -se version, the word ending in -ce was a noun (like rice) and the word ending in -se was a verb (like rise). It’s not foolproof because Americans like messing with language, but it holds true in a lot of cases, especially in British/Singaporean/Canadian English, for things like licence/license and practice/practise and even words that were somewhat unrelated to each other, not only rice/rise but also in cases like device/devise. I did run across some counter-examples eventually, which miffed me, and much later on I also found out that it was an actual real English rule/trick that others had figured out too, but it was nice to independently discover on my own anyway and is still occasionally useful to this day.
Anyway, the video in question is linked below — oddly, he mentions maintaining a library of books and lending those out to people but I don’t remember that from his class, so it might have been something he started in the 14 or so intermediary years between when he had us barbarians as his students and when he actually received that award.
Dreams
I had a really long dream diary entry on the 8th. It’s probably in my top 10 in terms of sheer length.
Jan 08 2024
- The first part of my dream featured five separate people who just returned from a vacation. The first was a shopkeeper friend who had just gone overseas for a short while, but who left her shop open and told us to look after it for a couple of days to make sure no one stole anything. Although the lights were off and the store interior was dimly lit, people still came in now and then to buy something.
- Jah also had a separate trip of his own, but had left his house partially accessible to the people living in his community since it had become the common area of a share house. He had cameras running the entire time though and reviewed the footage when he returned, and he uploaded a YouTube video of a lousy neighbour that he didn’t like entering his kitchen as a family of three, with two parents and a child, and then baking a cake or some cookies with his utensils.
- There was a girl hiding down in a sewer manhole, and from our apartment we could see two policemen hanging around the top of the manhole, by its open cover, trying to negotiate with her. Although it was some distance away, we could hear both their shouted conversations very clearly. She was apparently a runaway and the policemen were trying to coax her out of the hole, offering her tea and other goodies to do so, but she adamantly refused.
- Eventually though, once the policemen had gone silent for some time, she tried to sneak out of the hole and make her escape, but they were waiting for her and tackled her to the ground before putting handcuffs and legcuffs on her as she fought them.
- Ronnie returned from his vacation at this point and talked to the policeman as they were wrapping up the case. They still had no idea why the girl had run away and been down there in the first place, but Ronnie and the policeman were discussing some terminology used during the negotiation, something about the girl’s use of the word “left” to represent the word “west”. The policeman asked Ronnie to do some research on human psychology for him on whether people said left or west more often. Ronnie agreed.
- At this point, there was a commotion outside my condo apartment. My apartment was not fully enclosed, and only a half-wall that came up to my waist separated the interior from the common area outside. A man in a light blue Hawaiian shirt and shorts was yelling loudly into a phone in the lobby area, and another neighbour yelled back at him to shut up. The man on the phone yelled back at him, but I also yelled out in support of my neighbour. He glared at me, since my apartment was right across from the lobby, and stormed off.
- Later he returned and threatened to fight me, but I yelled at him again and this conflict somehow turned into a verbal classroom pop quiz in math which I won handily.
- Another student, a tall Chinese boy, had just returned from a week-long vacation with his girlfriend, and when the teacher asked him to answer a math question, he said that his week off had totally messed with his ability to recall any of the Math formulas and such that he had learned. I laughed and asked him jokingly, that did the buildings and such that he saw while on his trip not remind him of geometry and angles?
- I also saw that the trip with his girlfriend also involved two other guy friends, and a lot of locations like beaches and waterfalls that were nice to look at but that I probably would never go to on my own due to a lack of things to do. However, a company that had sponsored him had turned their adventures into a promotional YouTube video.
- This video also included clips of another person on vacation with a friend, the two of them had both rented vehicles that looked like jeeps, and this guy had driven his jeep into a muddy pond and was trying desperately to escape from it while crying out “I’m dead, I’m dead!” He eventually managed to get one of his wheels up onto a flat rock by the side of the pond with enough friction to propel the rest of the jeep up, just as an alligator appeared behind the jeep and snapped its jaws down on where he had been a moment ago.
- There was also a part of the video where he was walking with his girlfriend along a path, when he suddenly stumbled and fell down onto the ground. He claimed to be nervous about an upcoming test as his girlfriend helped him up and calmed him down.
- The scene then shifted back to my home, and I was watching an online streamer who had just returned from his own vacation too. It was here that I learnt that the girl who had been in the manhole earlier was a clingy friend of his, and they had made a date together to play Dwarf Fortress on the day that he had been supposedly returning from vacation, and she had even confirmed it with him a couple days ago, but he had totally forgotten about it since he was flighty and tended not to remember his appointments, so he had been late returning home from his vacation on the previous day.
- As I added some detergent to a washing machine that wasn’t mine in order to try to overpower the sewage stains on some of the clothes inside of it, I heard him mention that she had stolen money and her own passport from her mom, and was going to try to escape to a mountain resort that was a pilgrimage for many Canadians in order to become more grown-up in his eyes so that she could command more respect from him. Even though she was only around 15 years old.
- There was one other person that might have been involved in this that may also have partially instigated the girl by raising the prices on something that she needed to buy. They were also there in the audience for the math pop quiz segment earlier, and I had also showed him up by showing proof of a math logic puzzle that he thought was not the correct answer, so he wasn’t happy with me.
- I also found out much later on that my opponent in the math quiz, the original noisy guy on his phone outside, was not qualified for the quiz because we were both given a list of prerequisites on a sheet of paper to qualify for the quiz, and he didn’t meet one of them. He knew this but pretended he was capable anyway. His minions, one of which was also a student in the class, definitely should have realized this too, but perhaps just did not bring it up out of loyalty.
- Snippet: There were many snippets in this segment and I’m not sure how most of them fit in to the story. One was that I found a napkin scribble from a restaurant that was a clue to another long unsolved math problem, and I was quite surprised at this.
- Snippet: There were zombies at the bottom of a ramp, stuck there in a pile as the bottom part of the diagonal ramp was not totally aligned with the floor. I ignored them and walked on, assuming that they would just despawn eventually.
- Snippet: After the first crisis was over, I followed a student into another room where there was some device with a bunch of notches. I had a decryption key on a drive that could be inserted into device, and would unlock it and cause it to whirl into action. I showed the people present how to use it.
- Snippet: There was also a militia robot that had sliced a child’s cheeks, and an adult came over to tend to the child. I was there too and one way or another this also turned into a math quiz, someone had a good theory for a question but his theory produced the result too infrequently so it was wrong, and I proved that another method was better. My opponent triggered two traps for getting this wrong, with a doom circle and a confusion circle being generated in a room across the corridor from the room we were in, large enough to envelop my opponent but not me in their radii.
- Snippet: A prince also sauntered up at some point, he had been searching for a glowing, “eminent” character living in his lands, in a very Cinderella sort of fashion, except he did it with code. She was eventually found but had no intention of marrying him, though I don’t think she had a choice. Later on, there was also a computer or board game with a princess piece wandering the board and fighting the occasional opponent with her stronger army. This was related to something the previous prince was doing somehow, but neither she nor I had a clue on what the prince’s plot or motivation were.
- Snippet: Finally, there was a person with a sword who realized that he had not enough food left to sustain his family for more than two days, so he pledged to venture out to go find some.
- At this point, I finally “woke up” in a mattress on the floor next to Jon‘s bed. He had also just woken up, and with Mom‘s help, was writing down his dreams. Both of us had had long dreams with dream networths of over 200k each, and we commisserated on how difficult it was to write down long dreams. I wrote down a dream that was shared with Jon somehow, either a variation of one he had had before that I had now, or that I had had before and was thus helping him with now.
- This dream had a plotline about crossing a meadow, and then two stone bridges that went across dry river beds. There was a clover field past the second bridge, where the path ended, and a bus stop that looked abandoned near it as well, and the entire meadow was encased in a large room with stone walls.
- We then watched an anime girl who was practising her dancing, and who then presented her dance in front of her teacher while the teacher was attending and watching a public ballet recital of another girl from the back of the room. Both of the students were protagonists, and were currently rivals with each other, though I knew that they would become best friends in the future. The girl enraptured the teacher who held up a C sign with her fingers, signalling to her that she was almost ready for her own public performances as well. The teacher ended up ignoring the ballet dancer on stage though, who noticed this and got miffed.
- The main animator for this scene apaprently did a great job and was rewarded by his studio by being given the best night festival scenes from later on in the episode to draw. I got all this information from a Japanese blog post that I helped translate into English for Jon and myself.
Jan 09 2024
- This dream involved me going around and unlocking structures around the dream city’s map by bartering items and performing trades until I had enough to trade for the ownership of a structure as part of my deals. I owned about a dozen buildings or locations in the city due to this, but there were several dozen other structures, possibly over a hundred, still to buy.
- At the same time, I was also a student finishing up an adventure in school with 3 of my friends, including Zixiang. We more or less finished it, though I think there were some extra optional steps that I didn’t do, but I didn’t have time to do them any longer as I was going on a study abroad trip to Japan from the 1st to the 15th of the month, and my plane was scheduled to leave today, in a few hours time.
- I was seated in the classroom packing my suitcase when I realized that the train to the airport was coming, and I decided to leave my luggage there as it was only a two week vacation anyway. I asked my friends to help me pack up my stuff once I was gone, as they followed me to the train, which had pulled up outside the school. However, once I boarded the train, but before the train door actually closed, I had a sudden inkling that leaving without my suitcase would be a vey bad idea, so I stepped off the train before the doors closed and decided to go back to the classroom after all.
- My idea was that I could pack my suitcase, which was too important to skip, and then enlist Allen‘s help to get to the airport later than I was originally scheduled to be, but still hopefully in time for the plane. Allen either was, or had command of, a “bomb creature” that could turn into one of about two dozen types of bombs from a list, with each entry on the list denoted by a stylized icon that looked like an angry cartoon bird. Each bomb had a different explosion strength and arc, and I figured that if I saved the game before using it, I could eventually find a bomb that would propel me through the air in an arc towards the direction of the airport without overshooting it. That became my plan for getting to the airport on time.
Jan 10 2024
- I obtained a special goshuin, or temple stamp, from a shrine at a Canadian festival, which the shrine attendants said was given out every 3 days when I visited them on the day before one of those multiples of three. They also said that a queue tended to form early for it, and that they drew and then gave out the goshuin until they ran out of ink, so to be sure to be there early.
- I had written all this down in one of my notebooks, so the next day I visited the festival again with Kel, and then split off from her to join the queue once we arrived. I indeed managed to get my stamp before they ran out. The next day, I was going to show Kel the goshuin but realized that I didn’t bring the stamp book with me because it was unlikely that we would run into another shrine giving those out — those were rare to find outside Japan, although I noted that they weren’t illegal as far as I knew, just that very few shrines even knew about it, never mind bothering to set up the service.
- Later on, there was a game with two people per level that I had to promote to a leadership position temporarily, for about half a round each. And to do so I first had to temporarily remove or disable obstacles that they disliked from a board with a whole bunch of little circles, where each circle represented an obstacle. I believe that I could do this by trading sets of obstacles for other sets that contained things that they didn’t mind as much, until there were as few things as possible that they minded that were still on the board.
- There was apparently a school advisor that I could call for help too, but when I gave my business card to a guy in an office that could help me place the call to the female advisor, and he made said call to her on my behalf, she hesitated for a bit and then didn’t want to speak to me because my business card, which the guy read out to her, said that I was only a student and not a staff member.
Jan 12 2024
- I remember being in a carnival park. There were items that were glowing purple, about seven of them in all, and I had to destroy them.
- There was also a map where I could walk around and pick up weapons from the ground to help, I had a default melee weapon and there were many other types of weapons around. There was one ranged weapon in particular that I knew gave me an achievement if most of the weapon charges I had left were from that weapon, so I picked that up, but I wondered what combat would be like if I only had a ranged weapon left.
- Later on, I was on a train and reached my stop, but I hadn’t packed up my items yet so I decided to stay on the train. My items were scattered around the floor, and one of the items I packed up just after the train left the stop turned out to be my Steam Deck.
- Someone next to me was playing an MMO, apparently a variation of LotRO, with two of their friends, I offered to log in and buff them with stat scrolls and gems. While I was logging in on my unguilded level 2 hobbit character and about to introduce myself to them, I saw someone randomly come by and buff the four of us anyway so I thought I wasn’t needed anymore, but I then realized that that random buff was only a seven second buff because it was a captain class skill whose effect only lasted that long, instead of a scroll which had a much longer buff.
Jan 13 2024
- Mom was supposed to bring me to what was a combination between school and work today, but while I was all ready to go, it turned out that she was sick and upstairs in the spare toilet off of the master bedroom, so the time ticked down from about 1 hour before school or work started, all the way until 10 minutes left, before Mom appeared.
- She could still bring me there, but I said that today was a Thursday, I had no homework or tests for school, was between projects at work, and it was -50 Celsius outside, so I didn’t really have to go today and was planning on taking the day off anyway. In the end I still got driven partway there by someone in a car, whom I believe was Kel, before realizing that I hadn’t told her the same thing that I told Mom, that I wasn’t actually going to school today.
- But, I told Kel, Mom neded medicine because she was sick, so let’s stop by a nearby market area instead and buy some. She agreed to this and we stopped by a large bazaar area with many stores shoved into the bottom level of buildings over a large radius.
- We went into a nearby medicine store, and inquired if they had a certain medication or not. They had, but we didn’t end up buying it, we just took a picture of it with a phone and sent it to Mom, asking if that was the right one that she needed. The store clerk stopped us and said that even taking pictures of things in the shop would cost us a small fee.
- I said that we didn’t know that and that we would change it to just going outside and taking a picture of the nameplate of the store above the entrance instead. She said that that also cost a fee, and she had by this time also written up a bill for us, which she handed to me, expectantly awaiting payment.
- I frowned, then suddenly grabbed Kel‘s hand and ran off, as the clerk’s eyes widened in surprise as she couldn’t fathom why we wouldn’t just pay. She ran out of the store and in the other direction to summon some guards, but by that time we were long gone.
- Kel and I jogged across a grassy strip running parallel to the storefronts in order to put some distance between us and that shop. It was a large bazaar area so I said that I wanted to head to another shop near a train station on the other side of the neighbourhood which I had been to earlier on in the dream. Kel tried to climb over a wall at one point that we could just simply walk around, and I chided her for doing something that would draw some attention to us. Still, nothing seemed to come of the encounter we had at the other shop, we eventually walked by a line of policemen who were shaped like bottom-heavy, round game pieces and were wobbling back and forth as they walked and they never even looked at us, never mind tried to stop us.
- We eventually approached the area with the train station, denoted by a large “1” and “2” written on square areas on the ground which the train tracks ran over, yet were visible from some distance away. I found the medicine shop that I was thinking about, and I remembered that I had bought something else a day or two ago in the same dream from the shop and they had offered to sell me some otah, a Singaporean fish paste wrapped in green banana leaves, that they were grilling on a stove in the shop. It was quite nostalgic. They didn’t have that on sale today, but besides the medicine I was looking for a thieves’ ring that I had also been able to pick up before, and I checked in to the jewelry shop next to the medicine shop to see if they had that on sale.
- They didn’t either, but I noticed a lot of customers in both shops, and the clientele included a number of people in the thief occupation who obviously owned those rings. I realized that I must have stumbled upon the shop yesterday after a fight had broken out and a number of people had been defeated, and that was how I had managed to loot that thief’s ring back then. I idly wondered how to trigger another fight in the area so that I could loot the casualties again.
- Snippet: I and some others were on call with a girl in her room when her mom approached the room, and she stopped talking and wrapped herself up in her sweater and pretended to be asleep. Once her mom left, she uncurled from her ball and placed the phone screen down on the floor, then proceeded to take off her jacket and unhook her bra because it was too hot. She then heard a few pings of excitement from the phone and realized that the phone not only had cameras in front but also on the back, and somehow the people in her video chat were able to see her taking off her clothes and were warning her of that. The scene camera panned to a shot of her nipples and the scene then abruptly ended on that still shot.
Jan 14 2024
- Snippet: All I remember is a top-down view of a game board with cities, and my unit/army on the board being able to move up to a city, select it, and then select a portion of my followers or army to move into the city instead of moving everything in at once. I don’t think it was a game with combat, rather there was some sort of per-city quota or time limit that I had to fulfil.