My Diary #149

Dear Tigey,

Some weeks I’m done most of my blog by Friday, other weeks I struggle to even start it by Friday. Actually, a lot of the time it seems to alternate weekly between the two states.

Entry #149 (Jul 28 2024)

Table of Contents

Once human, twice…
ට  Life
ට  Games
ට  Plushie of the Week #144
ට  Song of the Week #120
ට  Memory Snippet of the Week #127
ට  Dreams

Life

Our heat wave is over! It was bearable with the electric fan, but the cool air that swept through the city in the latter part of the week was a much better experience. My apartment took one full extra day to cool down though — even though the temperature high on Wednesday was a cool 23 Celsius, the air in my unit was still hot and I needed the fan through most of the day too until that night when the rain came through. Hot air rises and I’m pretty high up in my apartment building, I guess.

I took a walk to the Asian supermarket on Wednesday once the heat wave ended, enjoying the cool, refreshing air outside my apartment and picking up some of the rarer ingredients for my soup (like konnyaku, which I love but which the local Safeway doesn’t sell). I also picked up a couple cute bowls from the grocery store, as I am always short of bowls for storing ingredients while making soup.

I’ve found that a couple of nice and new (but yet cheap) things that I use and see a lot during the week bring a lot of freshness and happiness to my life, and I will share some of that freshness and happiness here:

How cute. The Japanese hiragana on the outside of the left bowl says medetai, or auspicious. The kanji inside the bowl say 開運, kaiun, or good (better?) luck.

Also on Wednesday, the annual Resident Appreciation BBQ took place in the courtyard in the middle of the apartment complex. I went to take pictures, of course.

On one end of the festivities, there was a three-legged race/potato sack race area that was just ending as I arrived.

On the other end, there was an area set up for a spoon race and a water balloon toss. It wasn’t ongoing when I was there, I think those events alternated every 30 minutes or so.

In between, there were event stations like a coloring table:

A beanbag tossing booth, which was through a standing banner this time instead of into a wooden board on the floor like previous years:

A wet slide:

Pop the Balloon, which was a new event this year:

The usual Telus sponsor booth, manned by a horribly bored-looking woman who must have been exiled here for losing a bet or something:

The prize drawing booth in the center. I didn’t stay until the 5 to 6 pm timeframe for draws so I didn’t bother entering.

And finally, something else that’s new this year, a petting zoo!

Very cool. The past year BBQs (linked here for the 2023 one, and here for the 2022 one) did not having a petting zoo. Although another nearby random one that I went to in 2019, by the same Midwest Rental company, did. I haven’t featured this event yet. (Edit: I do now, here.)

Anyway I didn’t do any petting, because I also wanted to get some food and didn’t want animal germs on it. The food section looked like this:

That’s John on the right there handling the popcorn machine, while two other ladies handled the bun and sausage. This year though they skimped out and didn’t have free potato chips as well. Although they did have this for the children.

So that was nice. I didn’t stay around for that though. I took my complimentary hot dog bun (slobbered with every condiment that they had) and popcorn bag, fiinished that, and made my get-away into the afternoon breeze.

I did see a little bicycle parade while I was eating though, made out of kids that apparently signed up for it and decorated their bikes the day before in sweltering temperatures. They did a circuit around the BBQ area and got ignored by most of the crowd even though the MC, which I believe was Denise, the site manager, tried to get people to clap for them.

I did clap myself, somewhat awkwardly, with a sausage in hand. Lastly, here’s a picture of the special tree that I used to be able to see from my balcony, but can no longer see these days since my new apartment faces the other way. Apparently someone hung a bell from it.

I saw a sale on the Stasher site (local) for their silicone bags this week that I liked, so I went in for a 6-pack of sandwich bags and a mystery stand-up bag for about $86 or so, which is a bit over 30% off and free shipping. I’m looking forward a bit too unreasonably much to these bags arriving so I can store my food (especially meat) in my freezer without using single-use Ziploc bags! Yay!

I always like to try to end up buying some sort of weird sauce-based ingredient for my soups or rice or noodles whenever I visit a grocery store, as long as the item is on deep clearance sale or something. This week, I picked up one of those items from the Asian supermarket, something labelled as “Roasted Chili and Kohlrabi Sauce”. I’ve never even heard of kohlrabi until I looked up its Wikipedia article, sauce, but the bottle of sauce has an interesting.. smoky and oily taste.

The strap on my old pair of house slippers snapped this week:

I haven’t had these slippers for all that long, I think only from around the first quarter of 2022, so they still sort of feel somewhat “new” to me as my slippers usually last a very long time. Oh well. I taped it up and replaced an even older pair of shoes, that I use solely when I head out into the balcony, with these. Those shoes are in worse shape and it’s time for them to go. These slippers are still in better shape than those ones.

For my regular pair around the house, I am now using the bottom pair of slippers located in this picture:

Which I bought from Singapore on Jun 02 2024, as detailed in my Where the Wind Takes Me, Day 41 blog post. It’s a bit bulky, and doesn’t allow my feet to breathe as well, but fits well enough so far, and we’ll see how sturdy it is. Otherwise I’ll go find a new pair on sale somewhere.

I already have started using the top pair of slippers as well, I use it when stepping out of my house but not my apartment block, so basically whenever I go to the laundry room or garbage room on my level, or the mailbox downstairs. It’s been perfect for that. I love the big bows on them.

(Everything else in that above picture was sent to my parents when I arrived back in Edmonton.)

For most of the week, there was no real sunset at all, due to the smoke. Even later in the week, when the smoke had partially cleared, rain clouds moved in, so the entire evening sky on most days would be a deep blue with no sign of where the sun actually was at all even from well before sunset, perhaps an hour and a half or so prior to when the orange orb usually crashes against the horizon. The only notable sunset picture I like is from last Sunday evening at 9:25 pm, in the middle of the heatwave, where the sun kind of looked like a fireball with a smoky trail heading toward the horizon.

And here are some rain-drenched pictures from Friday evening at 9:12 pm and a few hours later from Saturday morning at 2:35 am as well. I like these sorts of images.

Games

Games I played this week included usual suspects like Zenless Zone Zero, where I am gearing up my characters and have just broke into the third and final chapter of main storyline content that was released with the game’s launch (although more will almost certainly be added soon), and where I just unlocked yet another very Persona-like feature, whereby you can call up characters every day and hang out with them at a chosen location to up your friendship level with them, as well as Tactical Nexus, where I’ve just finished a preliminary run of the second dungeon but am trying to rerun it to get a better score.

Outside of that, the early part of the week saw a lot of play with Satinel in Once Human. The game was quite fun at first, with a shoot and loot gameplay loop in points of interest and an active self-harvesting and passive pet-harvesting mechanic for gathering resources to build your house. As the week went on though, I quickly got tired of the game, especially since content is partially locked until time progresses, the server’s character creation is locked so other friends can’t create on the same server, the gameplay loop is repetitive, and almost everything is going to be wiped in 6 weeks anyway.

Chat and grouping especially is very horribly implemented — among other crimes, you have to pause and open an entire side menu (with a bit of input lag) to be able to write chat messages, and half the time a stupid side menu also pops up and obscures the first half of your the text that you are typing in. You can also never turn off global team and guild recruitment messages even when you’re already in a team or guild, though it’s possible somehow to turn off the ability to receive individual invites using a very unintuitively-named chat option. The UI is so awful it’s like it was designed by a child.

Building is fun, but also comes with its own litany of bugs, for example some stairs and other building options that don’t really fit with any other pieces properly, very weird snapping rules that don’t prioritize trying to fit the piece you are holding over the point you are pointing at unless you look at it from the side, a foundational support system that sometimes breaks the walls and roofs above a piece that you take out but sometimes does not, an upgrade system that lets you place a stone wall over a wooden one to replace it, for example, but sometimes fails and doubles up so you have two walls there on the same spot itself, and so on. It’s neat when it works but so stupid when it doesn’t.

This is what my house looks like from the inside:

And outside (from a blueprint):

The story is basically nonexistent too, especially past the first zone, you’ll be lucky to get a couple of sentences telling you what happened but sometimes the quest will just update to the next objective with no NPC intervention or player monologue reasoning or anything else to indicate why the next objective is what it is. All the main quest cutscenes are voiced, but the side quests are not, which is very jarring, and some of the writing is very awful. This specimen, for example, which uses asterisks to denote a character action like we’re reading casual RP on a MUD or something.

And how can they send out system-wide emails with such glaring typoes/translation errors?

The game still does have good aspects though, the dungeons and boss fights seem fairly fun, the building is nice when it does work, I do mostly like the pet collecting and the way that they’re utilized around your base in a very Palworld-like way, the existence of vehicles, and the generous resource collecting loop are all pretty good to me. There is also a permanent “Eternaland” area where you can build a separate home that will persist past game resets, although the reasoning for why this area exists is very weird and nonsensical.

Oh well, here’s a picture of Satinel invading my house:

I downloaded Path of Exile and will probably give it a shot this week to see if I like playing it this time around. Traditionally action RPGs tend to make me nod off asleep while playing them in practice even though I like them in theory. This will be the first time I’ve logged onto the game since Thrandor, who was a big fan of the game, passed away just over two years ago. This 3-month season, which has just started, apparently features a town-building/upgrading mechanic though, which I’m interested in checking out and should be right up my alley.

Plushie of the Week #144

As a housekeeping point, I went back to My Diary #147 and added a paragraph at the end of the Plushie of the Week #142 segment there with a few notes about Kel‘s ducks that she had left for me but that I had omitted when I wrote that bit up.

This week, we feature one more of her plushies, a pink shark with very prominent teeth that she claims is part of the Jinbesan line too. Or is supposed to be. The problem is that she bought this from Taobao, which is a Chinese online e-commerce site, and it came without a tag, so she can’t tell if it actually is official from some older set, or a counterfeit or “artist’s impression” sort of thing. Regardless, it’s hers now, and that’s what’s most important. She didn’t give me information on exactly when this was bought, but it cost 26 RMB (19 RMB base cost plus 7 RMB delivery), which is right around $5 CAD these days.

Front:

Side:

Other side:

Back:

Underside:

I found the protruding teeth to be kind of goofy. There’s enough space in the mouth to stick a finger in and get it bitten off if the shark was made of anything but soft plush. And as can be seen, there’s a little Ika (squid) on the underside.

Song of the Week #121

Title: Eternal Love
Artist: Ant & Dec
Album: Psyche (1994)

Ant & Dec, otherwise known as PJ & Duncan, are a British television personality duo that performed the occasional British pop song as well, and I particularly love this ballad that received airplay in Singapore back in the late 90s and that I subsequently fell in deep love with. I don’t know anything about the singers outside of this song and maybe another one of them that I’m passingly familiar with though — all I know about them is what I read in their Wikipedia article above a few minutes ago. I love the best friends for life vibe that the article describes though. That is (or seems to be) the sweetest thing ever.

This song gives me extremely strong Singapore vibes — no specific memories of events per se, but a general vibe and mental images of a cooler (temperature-wise), younger Singapore, MRT trains, windy beaches, vibrant neighbourhoods, Huihan, cars, the school canteen, some sort of school camp, and the taste of sweet, cool milk for some reason. I love the sound of their voices in the song and the simple, earnest lyrics, and the song always injects me with a healthy dose of nostalgia, though it’s nostalgia for a Singapore that no longer exists.

Memory Snippet of the Week #128

One of the wildfires raging through our province this week in the wake of the heat wave reached Jasper, one of Alberta’s two famous mountain hiking/skiing touristy towns, and sadly burnt a portion of it to a crisp. That was all over the local news here this week.

Burn map as per the township’s official site.

In tribute, I wanted to showcase some pictures of Jasper for my Memory Segment of the Week segment this week, taken on my only visit there as part of an outing with the University of Alberta‘s Outdoor Club when I briefly joined them as a student back in September of 2019. But the post was too long, so I spun it off onto its own page, which can be viewed here.

This trip to Jasper, Banff during Summer Connect 2020, Drumleller to Royal Tyrrell Museum sometime during 1999-2002 when I was in junior high or high school, and a family trip to somewhere or other (that we all hated because we were cooped up in a minivan) sometime in the summer in the early 00’s, are the only times I’ve been within Alberta but outside of Edmonton or Calgary. I have been to Calgary a handful of times now but still not many times or for very long. I really need to visit more of Canada and more of Alberta when I can before the entire country burns down.

Dreams
Jul 22 2024
  • I returned to school and saw many of my Dunman friends again in a classroom. There were long, canteen-style tables set up near the front of the room with many chairs lined up on both sides of the table. Most of the class were seated in chairs there. Someone had saved me a seat that was directly across from Huihan, so I sat down there and got ready for class. Later on, or perhaps the next day, when I arrived back at the classroom, people were more spread out around class, with several people like Kaiting seated at single desks near the back of the class, so I joined them there instead as I didn’t feel sociable enough to join the big table.
  • Later, there was a mock battle-like segment of the dream where two sides with lots of people clashed against each other in a large room. Not everyone cared about the fight, many people towards the back of both sides were also there just to socialize, and later on in the battle it was even possible to cross to the other side and socialize with the people there. Mom and Dad were on the far side, with Mom in a hospital bed in a corner of the large room, and us children thus went across from our side to visit them there. Mom had a Steam deck there with a bunch of visual novels and other games installed but there was one game that she wanted deleted off of it for some reason, so Kel asked me to do it while we were all talking to each other.
  • There was also an RPG segment of the game where I was a witch’s animal familiar (possibly a cat?) and we were vastly more powerful than the enemies in a mansion that we were invading. We were hiding out in a corridor with doors leading to a closet and a bathroom — the witch was hiding in the closet and I was blending in with the wall in the main room so that I could scout the area with my eyes. Two enemy minions came by looking for us because we had tripped some alarm, but they did not find us, and then instead of looking in the closet they instead opened the bathroom door and went for a hot bath instead. The witch slipped open the closet door and signaled that we were going to attack and take out the two minions, I told her to give me a five second warning before she did so. I believe we eventually defeated them by turning up the hot water to lethal levels.
Jul 23 2024
  • I dreamt that a couple of hours before school started, I and three other people that I usually went to school together with took a detour and ended up taking a rocket to the moon, together with another slightly younger child who considered himself our rival for some reason. On the moon, we could see the rest of the solar system flitting by a tiny solar window located between Earth on our left, and a large expanse of outer space, creating a sort of solid room, on our right.
  • The planet Earth was blocking the view of all the other planets except for when they alternated from one to the next like images from a camera through that window, and the planets that we could see were stylized like picture book drawings, each one flat and with a few hair-like tendrils snaking out from their circular border into outer space.
  • After a while, the four of us took a ride back on the rocket toward Earth, careful to aim our ship so that we would land safely back home, as a bad aim would have left us stranded in outer space. The other kid that was with us decided to hold out a little bit longer by himself on the planet to “win” before he followed us home as well.
  • Much later, there was a story where there was an enemy boss character down in an underground basement area below some farmer fields, and three minion characters. She sent them out to look for us or something like that, but two of them died near two different crop fields and the third barely escaped to report back to her, and then barely avoided dying to her anger as well.
  • I was with a group of heroes or something when we came across the dead minions. We resurrected one using the flower in the field that he died in, as someone noted that the trick was to feed them the flower and then feed them something closely matching the last thing they ate as possible. In this case for some reason it was also the same flower because he died in that field, so the guy was fully rezzed. We also came across the second corpse and I noted that he could probably be rezzed in a similar way, with the flower from that first field and the crop in that second field, which was some sort of vegetable.
  • Near the top of the ramp leading down from the surface to the underground lair, we also ran into a fourth guy dressed in a punk outfit with a facemask who was running up the ramp and away from the enemy boss wrath, as he had woken up and decided that he did not want to work for her anymore. We didn’t know that though and so we defeated him before he could explain anything.
Jul 25 2024
  • Snippet: I remember meeting Mom and telling her that I had bought some Stasher silicone bags earlier in the week, while travelling through some sort of neighbourhood with 5-6 storey high buildings with an assortment of shopfronts on the bottom levels of those buildings.
  • Snippet: I also remember a weird scene where I was seated cross-legged on the ground while some other people were nearby, and someone questioned me as to the weird way that I was seated as they had never seen anyone comfortably sitting cross-legged before.
  • Editor: I actually did buy those Stasher silicone bags online earlier in the week. They’re en route to my house as of today.
Jul 27 2024
  • A short girl with pigtails was exploring a school while it was raining outside. More specifically, she was looking in the female bathrooms at the leftover clothing strewn about the counters there, looking for school uniform blouses that had been discarded from parties that had taken place there the previous night. She first went into the toilets near the schoool building entrance, accidentally stepping into the male bathroom before seeing guys inside and then turning around and leaving, stepping our past another startled guy going in before taking the path into the adjacent female washroom instead.
  • There was nothing of note in there, so she walked out past a cleaner lady who was curiously watching her. She went further into the school, coming across a second set of bathrooms and entering the correct female one on the first try this time. She headed deeper into the bathroom after passing another young female who was tending to the outer bathroom stalls. There were articles of clothing strewn across the counters in this one, but she didn’t find what she was looking for.
  • On her way out, she was surrounded by about five guys or so, who belonged to a gang that was trying to kidnap her and bring her for a checkup elsewhere in the school. Their leader then stepped forward and read to her a list of procedures that their boss, the nurse, wanted to perform on her, including something about being stuck with a needle and having her blood checked. She didn’t want to go through this though, and they said that they’d give her a chance to escape.
  • Around that point, a friend of hers came in and tried to help her, however as part of the conversation that the two girls had, the pigtailed girl mentioned that she was already 18 years old, despite her diminutive stature and looks, and this caused the gangsters to say that in that case, they would give her no choice and she had to come with them. They shot her with something that partially turned her to a stone statue, and as her friend tried to grab her and run anyway, she sunk slightly into a depression in the ground as she told her friend to run and find help instead. The friend turned and fled.
Jul 28 2024
  • I dreamt that I was walking alongside a busy road in Singapore while heading home, when I suddenly saw two horses walking by across the road in the other direction, one black and one white. I pointed my phone camera at the two horses to try to get a better look at them, pinching the camera screen with two fingers to zoom in and magnify the view as they crossed a traffic light.
    – Soon after, it started drizzling, so I also crossed a road to take shelter under some HDB flats as I began to text Mom to tell her that I would be home soon. However, I realized to my horror that I had mistakenly taken the train to Yishun, on the northern side of Singapore where our old house was, instead of Tampines, on the eastern side of Singapore, where our newer house was. I would have to retrace my steps to the station and take the train for at least an hour to get back to Tampines. I decided to just head to the site of our old house anyway as that was supposedly now a secondary home that I could still take refuge in in my dream.

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My Diary #150

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