My Diary #148

Dear Tigey,

I’m glad I seem to be holding up in this heat a lot better than I thought I would. Though I’ve gotten a couple of headaches that I blame on the heat, usually at the very start of a heat wave. It must be nice to be made of beads and cotton.

Entry #148 (Jul 21 2024)

Table of Contents

Magical…
ට  Life
ට  Games
ට  Plushie of the Week #143
ට  Song of the Week #120
ට  Memory Snippet of the Week #127
ට  Dreams

Life

A heat wave came back to Alberta mid-week, and this time it is slated to last about a week or so. Again though, our “heat waves” would be considered relatively balmy weather down south, or west, but places like my apartment for example are just not kitted out for it.

Which is why, late last week, I bought a standing electric fan, the first standing fan that I’ve had in over 13 years. Now I don’t need to rely on the space heater’s fan, which barely works in the first place.

It was a bit of a puzzle to put together because the instructions and the included items were slightly different, but after that everything was great. It even comes with a weird little wireless remote that used a couple triple-A batteries that I dug up from my box.

I wonder if that means it could be reprogrammed or hacked to respond to a universal remote control or a phone app or something.

Anyway, here’s a news article on the “heat wave” (local) showing how mild it is. and the Google website weather widget for it:

And one more from mid-week:

The apartment still gets quite warm, but the fan and some ice (and ice cream — there was a good sale on Breyers Ice Cream this week in Safeway) and other things helped a lot. And the beetles having vacated my apartment (after I chased one out the front door last week, another one out the balcony door on the weekend, and a third got washed down the bathtub drain because it dared invade that part of the bathroom, before I sprayed insecticide around that tiny gap beneath (?) my toilet bowl) also helped the mental mood because I really don’t like bugs around the house. But anyway, with the help of the fan, despite the heat this week outside, I was perfectly content inside and mostly didn’t even have to take extra showers. Or maybe I accidentally acclimatized to the new weather. I don’t know how I used to survive.

On Wednesday, there was a rare double weather warning, a heat warning and a thunderstorm warning, at the same time.

But sadly, the rain didn’t hit us, apparently it only visited the northeast-ish side of the city mostly. We (My plushies and I) are in south-central Edmonton. Oh well.

On Friday and Saturday, smoke from raging wildfires somewhere far north and east of the city blanketed the city in smoke and haze, and I had to keep my balcony door mostly closed even during the cooler temperatures of the night and morning. On the other hand, I feel like the smoke might have helped keep the weather a bit more manageable too because it prevented direct sunlight from baking the city. Who knows. The haze doesn’t capture well in photos, but I tried taking a few pictures on Saturday morning anyway. At 5:12 am:

And at 2:30 pm:

It’s almost hazy enough to hide the view of that other eyesore of a tall apartment building in the distance!

The 10 lb potatoes sale at the Italian store ended, and I still expected to find those 10 lb bags somewhere else in the store but they just didn’t seem to be there. That’s weird, and disappointing, since their other potatoes actually turned out to not actually be much cheaper than Safeway at all. Especially since Safeway also for the past couple weeks has had 10 lb bags of potatoes that weren’t there in the past (I think, or I just never looked at them) but that actually came out to a better price than the Italian mart. I did tabulate the “regular” prices of potatoes and onions at both stores, so not counting the Italian supermarket’s sale a couple of weeks ago, it looks like this:

Italian Centre
Onions (single) — $1.49/lb, $3.28/kg
Potatoes (yellow bag) $8.49/5lb — $1.70/lb, $3.74/kg
Potatoes (russet bag) $4.49/5lb — $0.90/lb, $1.98/kg
Potatoes (russet single) — $0.98/lb, $2.16/kg

Safeway
Onions (Compliments bag of 7) — $1.66/lb, $3.66/kg
Onions (single) — $2.99/lb, $6.59/kg
Potatoes (small yellow bag) $7.49/5lb — $1.50/lb, $3.30/kg
Potatoes (large red bag) $9.99/10lb — $1.00/lb, $2.20/kg
Potatoes (large yellow bag) $11.99/10lb — $1.20/lb, $2.64/kg
Potatoes (large russet bag) $8.99/10lb — $0.90/lb, $1.98/kg

I still need a more comprehensive list but my Ledger spreadsheet (along with actually writing down the prices I see) is really helping me figure out what is overpriced at one place versus another. Onions are deathly expensive at Safeway but their larger (newer?) yellow potato bags are actually cheaper now, and even Safeway’s russets, which I don’t like as much, match the Italian center’s price, though it requires buying them in 10 lb bags instead of smaller quantities. That being said I don’t really know how to compare intangibles like quality yet.

I noticed that one of the three lightbulbs in my ceiling light no longer works. It’s not going to get fixed until the heat wave is over. The three bulbs are pointed in different directions spaced out 120 degrees from each other, and that bulb is the one that points away from my desk toward the kitchen anyway.

I received a call from Chubb Life Insurance Company of Canada on behalf of Scotiabank this week, offering me a complimentary $5,000 accidental death insurance for 5 years, with an option to pay a small monthly fee to up that insurance to a higher number. I didn’t bite on the monthly fee part of it but did take the complimentary amount for free, after sitting through a half-hour phone call in the heat. Apparently I have to submit a form declaring who my beneficiary will be, but so far they’ve only given me a digital form as part of the welcome package and I’m far too lazy to print that out as that would involve a walk to the nearby library. I think they said they’d sent a physical copy too but I’m not certain. We’ll see I suppose.

I ended up not buying the face towels from Amazon last week even though I wrote that I did, as I was going to do so on Sunday night but then held off as I realized that Prime Days was coming up. It came and went without anything particularly interesting for me, though, so I bought some of those face towels for real afterwards, for $16.79. They arrived on Friday.

A shirt that I had ordered from a cereal promotion when I returned from my trip a month ago, and that I briefly alluded to last week, arrived this week. I was not expecting it to arrive for another month, but it came quickly enough that I can wear it to support Canada in the Olympics that I probably can’t watch without a TV and will be too busy to enjoy and isn’t that thing full of scandals these days anyway. Yay. The shirt looked like this:

It’s good enough to wear around the house and maybe can make me feel like a cheerleader.

After sending them an email to figure out the schedules of the concerts being held this year, I bought a 3-day ticket to Animethon 2024 this week, which is the annual anime convention held in Edmonton. There are a couple Japanese singers coming to town that I would like to see in concert, which is usually what determines for me whether I end up going or not. The schedule isn’t fully finalized and released yet though, which is weird considering that the event is from Aug 09-11 2024, which isn’t far off at all now, and they want people to commit to buying 1-day or 3-day tickets before then, and the 3-day ones are already almost sold out, which is a bit dishonest, but whatever. Under early bird ticket prices, the 3-day ticket is only $65 compared to the three single day tickets at $50, $55, and $40 price points.

In other festival news, this year’s Resident Appreciation BBQ was announced for July 24th, which is on the very last day of the projected heat wave sweeping through the city. It’s free food so I’ll definitely at least go down to take some food and snap some pictures like I have for the past two years (2023, 2022) though. This year it’s being held a month earlier than normal for some reason.

I swapped from using bars of soap in the bath to body soap bottles this week, my reason being that I don’t really have a good container for soap bars, which usually sit in a plastic bowl on the edge of the bath tub and then get worn down and turned to mush really quickly by the water from the shower head, which is affixed to the wall above the tub and cannot be moved in this building. So I’ve always felt like a good chunk of the bar of soap gets wasted. Hopefully a bottle of soap wash will last longer, although the one I selected seems to be a bit more like soapy water than the more gel-like ones that I encountered in Asia on my trip in the various hotel and residence rooms I stayed in, even though it was a Japanese branded bottle. The brand I used this time was called Kracie Naive Body Wash.

Also, the local Safeway was selling a packet of Ben’s Original (local) rice, normally $4.99, for just $1.00 this week in their clearance section, and I bought this to try it because I had never tried it before. It ended up becoming four large portions of rather nice rice, three of them partitioned into tupperware for a dinner meal base that I used throughout the week. Although the packet said that it was essentially 6-8 portions of rice. Those helpings would have been too small though. Anyway that deal made me feel like a shopping bandit. It’s still probably not a good deal at full price, compared to just buying small bags of rice, but it did at least plant the idea that I could probably cook rice in bulk and store it in the fridge as well, since I’m doing so with meat and vegetables now. This is important because with the heat wave out in full force, the fewer times I have to use my appliances the better for the house temperature (and I suppose power consumption too). The fridge and freezer both already let out a burst of mist whenever I open either door while the stove is running during this heat wave.

I tried to take a picture of the sunset or evening period every day this week, and came out with a ton of pictures I figured I’d put here too while I still have access to a nice balcony view. I had actually started this last weekend but they didn’t make it into last week’s blog, so here they are now.

Saturday the 13th at 9 pm:

And 10 pm:

Sunday the 14th at 9:20 pm:

And 10 pm:

Monday the 15th at 8:35 pm:

And 10 pm:

Tuesday the 16th at 9:55 pm:

Wednesday the 17th at 10 pm:

Thursday the 18th at 9:55 pm:

Friday the 19th at 8:30 pm:

There wasn’t really a proper sunset on Friday due to the haze and smoke, but sunset is still just before the 10 pm mark these days, so the hour before that and the half hour past that tend to be a nice time to take copious amounts of photos. I’ve said this several times before but I like how each and every sky (minus the 100% bereft of clouds one) is unique.

Games

I heard that the MineColonies server that I played modded Minecraft on had wiped their server again last week, and though I hadn’t played all that much since I came back from my trip, I still did have a decent colony starting to build up, plus they removed a couple of useful mods in the latest update so at this moment I don’t have the drive to return even though there is a fresh map. This was a good thing, since they had another wipe announced THIS week, due to yet another malfunctioning mod that got removed. Poor server.

I didn’t spend a ton of time playing games this week outside of AMQ and Zenless Zone Zero, the former of which is a tradition with Satinel, Heg (who was absent this week), Nak (rarely these days), and Lightcaller (on the weekends). And the latter of which is a recently-launched HoYoverse game which I’ve grown to like the visceral combat of, now that I have a proper DPS character, and grown to get annoyed of the grid movement minigame portion of the game, which is extremely stunted due to too much handholding and repetitive explaining of extremely simple mechanics by the game, forcing the player to sit through very short but unskippable “cutscenes” over and over and over again. This seems to be the prevailing opinion of the game in the community as well.

Anyway, I didn’t spend a ton of time playing other games because I spent a lot of it in thinking and brainstorming mode for the magical girl sort of game that I want to write. It might never get past prototype notes on OneNote pages, where it currently resides, but it is still fun to try to come up with ideas and slowly build the world of my dream game, and I try to at least spend 30-60 minutes a day doing it if possible. Even if on many days I barely get anything done, I find that just thinking about it or bouncing an idea or two past Satinel is like waves crashing upon a rocky cliff, or like sifting rice and water in the pot — just facing the game and basking and simmering in it will over time help erode and eliminate the bad ideas and let the good ones rise to the top.

To that end, for the last couple weeks, though I generally do not need a time management app to help myself focus, I’ve been using this as an excuse to “play” one of the “games” that I picked up in the recently-ended Steam sale, Spirit City: Lofi Sessions. That thing is just a productivity app that plays LoFi music and has a built-in timer and task list, though it’s still missing many basic features  I mentioned it last week too, but now I’m using it to accompany two things — my time spent on thinking about my dream game, and my time spent on working on the blog. To 100% Spirit City without cheating requires quite a few hours over a long period of many days of just leaving it open and doing other things in the background, so this will be perfect for that.

Outside of all that, because my night-time Twitch streamer of choice (Nomakk) started a new playthrough of the game this week, I tried to play a tiny bit of XCOM 2 this week, specifically its Long War of the Chosen mod, which extends the game significantrly. However, I felt like I had too many other games already on the docket and I didn’t really feel captured by the first mission of the game and inspired to play more, so I let it drop for now. Although I was amused that my first mission, Operation Gatecrasher, was set in “Tunnels under Edmonton”. I think the tunnel location probably is random, since it’s just thematic, but it’s like they know where I live. Though do we even have tunnels here?

Instead, I will watch my streamer vicariously play it. Like many streamers, Nomakk does Twitch channel point redeems for random subbed viewers who want a character in the game named after them in games with this ability, and XCOM 2 is one of those games, so I got a hero named after myself. He designs the character afterwards based on what he thinks of the person based on their personality and Twitch name colour and stuff, so my character ended up like this:

Here’s hoping my fashion sense doesn’t end up killing me. By the by, I was a white cow in his last game with rename-able “characters”, Stardew Valley.

I also started up a game of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, though like XCOM 2, it didn’t immediately take my attention hostage either so I just let it sit, especially since I’m also puttering my way through Persona 5 Royal slowly. One game that I did start this week and did capture my attention for a bit is Tactical Nexus, a free and niche puzzle game similar to Desktop Dungeons, which I’ve played a bit of in the past, but far more complex. I had no idea it existed until I read about it in an article (local) about it going free. I actually really like it in the 3.4 hours I’ve put into it so far.

Satinel and I both also independently decided to try Once Human, so we colluded and spent Saturday night playing that. It’s interesting, like Fallout 76 with vehicles is what I mentioned a couple of times, though it’s weird because there’s a server wipe (and thus partial player wipe, including levels and gear) every 6 weeks or so as the server storyline “progresses”.

We found a furry Tigey pet that some other player had hanging around their base though! Check this out, Tigey!

Humble Choice gave me a very interesting offer this week after I cancelled my subscription (after having bought last month’s Choice for a discounted price). I had stopped my subscription earlier this year, partially as a cost-cutting measure and wanted to see what their month-to-month deals were like, and partially because I wanted to get on their annual plan in November that comes with a discount. They offer that discount at other times too but the blanket offer to everyone has been in November in past years, so accepting that offer at other times would put me out of sync with that November offer and make it harder to renew the next year. This week though, they sent me this “Holiday in July” offer that would give me 6 months at the same discounted rate as that November offer, and catch me up to the end of the year:

The catch is in the fine print though, which seems to note that months cannot be skipped under this offer:

Single use coupon. Coupon is redeemable to sign up for Humble Choice at $8 USD per month for 6 months (reg. $11.99 USD per month) before any applicable taxes and fees. Regional pricing may vary. Coupon expires on August 6, 2024 at 9:59 am PT. This price is locked in for 6 months, and this offer will be void if your plan is canceled or skipped. Gifts are not eligible. This coupon may not be combined with other identical coupons in the same transaction, and may not be combined with other Humble Bundle coupons. Discount will be automatically applied at time of checkout. Coupon has no cash value. Void where prohibited or restricted by law. Coupon may not be reproduced, copied, purchased, traded or sold. Unauthorized transfer of coupon and internet distribution strictly prohibited. Users in Russia and China are not eligible.

So this will be unskippable and will take me to December, whereas I am waiting for that annual November deal to sign up for, and I’m not sure exactly how that would overlap. So I decided it’s probably better to still skip it for now.

Plushie of the Week #143

I’m now out of plushies that I bought while on my Asia trip, so it’s time to go on another trip. No, I mean, it’s time to feature other plushies. The first lot I plan to feature are Kel‘s companion plushies to the Icekurage one that I have and featured a couple of weeks ago.

I mentioned in that post that Icekurage was part of the San-X Ice Cream Jinbesan promotion (local), and that I had picked up two other plushies then to accompany a third one that Kel already had in her possession as a birthday gift for her. This post will look at those other three plushies.

The first of the three plushies below is the original Jinbe-san, the one that Kel already had. She apparently picked this up when she was in Kyoto in April 2024, from a store named Kiddy Land in Kawaramachi there. She didn’t explicitly remember the price, but it would have been 1,980 JPY since that was the standard price for the plushies according to that web page. The second one is Pink Jinbe-san, basically a recoloured plushie of the same character, and the third one is Same-san, a shark character that’s somehow part of whatever storyline San-X created for them. I picked up both of those for her from the Sanmin store at Taipei Main Station Underground Mall, in Taiwan, on May 11 2024. Due to the bulk purchase discount that I mentioned receiving on Icekurage’s Plushie of the Week page, both of them ended up costing me 779 NTD each instead of 860 NTD each. Today, 779 NTD is about $32.71 Canadian dollars each, whereas due to the weakened Japanese dollar, 1,980 JPY is about $17.25 CAD.

They all have a little glob of ice cream on top of their bodies, and a little manta ray (for the two Jinbe-san plushies) or squid (for the shark) stuck on the underside of them. According to a booklet attached to a previous plushie that I got for Kel, the Nekonbu one, the manta ray is known as Ei or Ei-san and the squid is known as Ika (or Ika-san, I guess). Basically direct translations of their species names with an honorific on the end of it.

Plushie 1 (Jinbe-san) Front:

Back:

Underside:

Tag 1 front:

Tag 1 back:

Tag 2 front:

Tag 2 back:

Plushie 2 (Pink Jinbe-san) Front:

Back:

Underside:

Tag 1 front:

Tag 1 back:

Tag 2 front:

Tag 2 back:

Plushie 3 (Same-san) front:

Back:

Underside:

Tag 1 front:

Tag 1 back:

Tag 2 front:

Tag 2 back:

These pictures were taken at Kel‘s place in Guangzhou on May 24 2024.

Song of the Week #120

Title: Taenaru Hoshi to
Artist: Photon Maiden×Lyrical Lily
Album: D4DJ All Mix OST (2023)

This song, with an English translation of “Melodious Stars”, was played in episode 9 of the D4DJ All Mix anime, and I fell it love with it then and there from a combination of its melody and its visuals. It literally gave me chills down my spine the first time I saw it, which is a rare occurrence that denotes a “love at first sight” sort of song. I love star and astronomy based shows and songs, probably due to my childhood wish of being an astronomer of some kind, and for me, this scene ranks up there with Houkago no Pleiades and Sora no Manimani as anime with particularly memorable fantastical night sky/outer space/star scenes in them.

I also really like Lyrical Lily in general, out of all the musical groups in the D4DJ franchise, and I own most of their physical CDs. Though ironically I believe this song doesn’t have a physical release, only a digital one. The song featured below in the embed is the full one, but here’s the in-show clip of the performance of the song that I really like, courtesy of AMQ. Being musically uneducated myself, I also wonder what the instrument that they used for the airy transition part of the song is.

Memory Snippet of the Week #127

I randomly sailed past a Twitch stream of someone trying to learn to use her sewing machine this week, and this invoked a memory. Kynji these days does the occasional cross-stitch pattern and posts it in Discord, and my mom also used to get me a bunch of those for me to do back when I was young, somewhere around the Primary 1 to 6 range.

We also owned a sewing machine, and while I don’t know that I really know how to use a thread and needle (then again, I remember using it in the distant past and I think I can more or less remember how to), I do know that I used to use that sewing machine. I don’t actually remember using the machine to repair anything, but I remember being taught and possibly playing around with stitching a random piece of cloth or something.

I mused that it was interesting that I was taught both to use a sewing machine as well as do cross-stitching patterns for “fun” when I was young, though I don’t think I did a ton of them. I think I asked Mom now and then to try ones that she had and was working on though, as I don’t know that I would have ever encountered them to try them otherwise. It’s not like there was the internet or Amazon delivery services back then, nor did most regular stores sell them. I wonder how and where we bought things like that from back then, actually. I mean, fabric stores for sale, but I don’t actually remember ever seeing any fabric stores around the malls that we went to.

We didn’t bring the sewing machine over to Canada, but Mom definitely at least had a big box of sewing needles and thread. Since I moved out though, I haven’t had anything like that in the house at all, and like I said I’m not sure I even remember how to use them. I did have to repair my skirt a couple of years ago and I sent it to the nearby tailor store in the mall next to me, but that store is also gone now, so. Maybe I should get something at some point. That skirt is showing signs of being a bit too worn again.

Dreams
Jul 18 2024
  • I was on a team of 8-10 people or so, playing a match of something similar to Capture the Flag against another team. We had a large obelisk in the middle of a square set on the basement level of some urban area that we were guarding, and the other team had their obelisk on the ground level above us, out in the courtyard of a train station.
  • The other team was significantly more powerful than us, but for some reason, either because it was their first match or last match or something, they didn’t care about ending the game and just sat at their base, so my team just did the same as well.
  • At some point, I noticed that they had all gone for lunch, except for someone in a large animal suit (or possibly actually a large bipedal animal) who was guarding the obelisk by themselves. I had a limited invisibility skill which lasted for about 10 seconds but which I could renew every 10 seconds as long as I managed to get behind cover so no one could see me, so I wanted to try to activate the obelisk while most of the opposing team was gone.
  • I decided to try to get nearer first before activating my skill, but when I got up to the main level, the only person who was guarding the obelisk saw me and called out to me even though there were other random passersby going back and forth too. I nodded to him in a polite manner and stayed out of his and the obelisk’s range, pretending as though I was heading to the nearby canteen to have lunch as well while planning to pop my invisibility skill once I was behind a wall.
Jul 19 2024
  • Snippet: I was in a tall building, shaped like a HDB flat from Singapore and ten storeys high or so, but without any apartments or rooms in it, just large open areas on each floor. It was currently night and the building was lit up with white lights, and each light was an event that I could trigger to perform an action and also add time to the same “turn” that I was using. I was trying to chain them together and reach as many lights on the same turn as I could.
  • Snippet: I alighted from a bus at the base of two flights of stairs that led up to a carpark in front of a hotel or convention centre where my new school was holding a field trip at. I went up the left flight of stairs after being unsure if this was the right place but overhearing two other girls mention the name of the hotel or centre up there. I saw students starting to line up in a square, either by class or by group, though there were many gaps still, and Allen and I locked eyes and he smiled at me. I smiled back and then went to a group of teachers at the back to sign in.
  • Snippet: I was playing a roleplaying game of some kind with friends and this involved stopping by a large open-air bazaar located in a school at one point. There, one of my friends retired his character because the character’s goal wasn’t attainable anymore or something, and the narrator, played by another friend, introduced a brother of that original character as the first friend’s new character instead. Also, I remember specifically learning that we could buy and sell things using money or credits, but that actual money had weight in the game, and there was a maximum weight that we could carry.
  • Also, in the same school, I had an overarching goal to prevent teachers and police and other adults from lowering metal roller sheet doors around the school, and I had limited success with this one, managing to fool a couple of organizers in the main halls from closing a sheet door there but unable to do so yet for sheet doors that were located by a toilet in one corner of the main floor because there was a long line in front of the toilet and because class was starting.
Jul 20 2024
  • This dream was set on a couple of tall apartment buildings with balconies jutting out unevenly from its apartment units. The balconies were largely floating flat floor pieces without any sort of support beneath them, similar to floor tile pieces in some base-building games.
  • There was also a giant patchwork tile puzzle ship made up of haphazardly-placed cubes jammed up against the balconies, and a number of low-level recruits on the ship. They were shooting things with guns at a bunch of people on another floating patchwork tile ship, pressed up against another couple apartment buildings, located nearby but across a void. In this dream, this shooting match was called hockey.
  • The entire area that I could see was basically an arena encapsulating the two ships and their attached buildings, and it was slowly drifting along rails from station to station as the two teams or sides shot things at each other’s ship.
  • I was watching this hockey game from my balcony, but I noticed that my shirt was really constricting, so I wanted to go indoors to try to find a quiet place to remove it. However, my apartment was full of windows and blinds and lacking proper walls, so it took me quite some time to find a location that no one on the outside could see me at, at which point I could finally remove and change out my shirt.
  • To raise morale, the recruits on the ship were being read a manifesto that someone had written around the year 2000 extoling the virtues of the game and how the skills were very strong, and that levels meant nothing and newer players could easily succeed. A few stations later, someone asked if all that was true and I said no, it used to be true when the game was new but everyone had long since figured out all the strategy behind the game. Nowadays levels now made a big difference and many people on both sides knew how to build really powerful characters, so they would probably get steamrolled if they were a much lower level.

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