Dear Tigey,
It’s blog entry #150! Well, technically, it’s blog entry #311 according to my Table of Contents, which is kinda insane. But it’s My Diary entry number 150, and that’s its own brand of insanity too.
Entry #150 (Aug 04 2024)
Table of Contents
Path of…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #145
ට Song of the Week #122
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #129
ට Dreams
Life
I wanted to get a CD for a singer visiting Animethon next week to autograph, so I ended up browsing both Suruga-ya, the online used Japanese CD marketplace that has inflated international pricing (prices on the English website are 35% over the Japanese version of the website now, as opposed to the 25% that it was before!) but has free worldwide shipping, as well as the Japanese Amazon.co.jp store, and ended up finding a number of rare, cheap, and/or desired CDs sitting around. So I ended up picking up a bunch of things from my wishlist. Amazon does not have free shipping, but it does have faster shipping, and I made the base price of my desired CD from there a bit cheaper by throwing in three other cheap CDs to hit a 5% discount offer, I think, which only slightly inflated the shipping cost since the bulk of the shipping came from the existence of the first CD in the cart. So after some careful planning and sleeping on things, I ended up spending around $150 CAD on both sites combined. I didn’t feel one bit of unease about this, which I use as a barometer to tell whether I think it was a good value purchase or not, so that’s good.
Animethon’s autograph lineups this year seem to be free, as opposed to the last time I went back in 2019, but also involve a lottery this time, which was not a thing the last time I went. It’s interesting to say the least, and I wonder how many people applied for each one. The lottery has a couple phases, with a deadline of August 4th for the first phase, and a deadline of an hour before the autograph event for the second phase for last minute/leftover/second-choice sorts of decisions. The autograph lottery rules page is probably worth saving, so here (local) it is. One of them is even selling some tea. Huh.
For some reason the 4 CDs from Amazon are coming in four separate boxes, though. And due to this, at one point this week I had six different tracked parcels heading toward my apartment plus at least one more pending. The next day though my Stasher bags that I had ordered last week arrived, so that took one off the list. And then a few hours later, I heard that my Suruga-ya package was on the way, so it was back up to 6 again. The 6th package, by the way, was the pack of toothpastes that I mentioned that I had ordered from a Polish retailer a few weeks ago. I had actually made that order on Jun 30th though, so it’s been taking its own sweet time to get here.
I was happy to report that the “Mystery Stand-up Bag” that I had blind ordered while on the takeout screen for $14.99, turned out to be a medium-sized one (local) that retails on their website for $29.99, instead of a smaller mini version that still retails for $26.99. Bigger is better, right? Well, maybe not too big, but medium is better, anyway. And it was a nice blue-coloured one too.
I talked to my RBC mortgage agent this week, as the Bank of Canada reduced their key interest rate (local) again last week, down to 4.5% now. It’s still high, relative to the previous few years, but that’s why I’m going for a 3 year fixed rate mortgage now with the idea that it’ll be in an even more favourable state after that. Anyway, back in June I was preapproved for a 5.07% rate for my $280k/25 year mortgage, with a note that the mortgage advisor would ask the central RBC folks for a better rate and that I would probably get something since I’d been a customer with them for some time. He never got back to me on this one, and when I asked about it this week, pairing it with the news of the interest rate downturn, he said oh, I had been approved for a 4.84% interest instead. This is exactly 0.25 less than before, so it’s just the interest rate adjustment.
He also, weirdly, refused to email me this number — he knows I prefer email to phone calls, and although he told me the number in a phone call, I emailed him afterwards to confirm the number (because I had “forgotten it” and “wanted to confirm”) and instead he texted me asking when it was a good time to call, and then called me again to confirm the number, instead of simply emailing me the number. (I even texted him back asking him straight up why he couldn’t just give the number over email, and he ignored that text, hah.)
But I don’t play that sort of game, so 4.84% was what they offered me. Comparatively, on their website (local) right now, their public number for 3-year fixed rate mortgages are 5.190%, and all the numbers there are 0.1% less than they were a week ago when the interest rate news first landed (and thus already “adjusted” for that news), so that’s still better than that number, I guess. Not too happy with them though, I wonder if I should reach out to my other bank for a talk about mortgage as well. I’d prefer to take it now and then bounce between the two banks next cycle if I can though.
There was also this offer (local) of some amount of cash and some (worthless) Avion points if I did a mortgage and settled a home purchase before end of December, and I asked him about that too, slightly irritated because he didn’t reach out with that information and I had to find it myself. His response was that oh, I did qualify for that, but because we had done our initial pre-mortgage talk on June 26th or something like that, the dates would be different for me and I would have to purchase the house by October 26th to qualify for that instead of the end of December. He then tried to apply a bit of pressure by saying that he wasn’t sure he could get such a good interest rate for me if I didn’t purchase before then and the pre-mortgage expired. I rolled my eyes at him over the phone and told him I would take my own sweet time.
On Tuesday, on my way out of the apartment, I saw this sheet of paper pasted up on the front apartment door.
See why I complained about the Last Stop Moving crew trying to leave my two computers in the lobby when they were moving my stuff up a couple of months ago? Idiots. And then the magnifying glass going missing when they left it in the lobby the following week.
On Friday, a loud noise started emanating from the toilet. Upon closer inspection, there was a plate in the ceiling that was bulging a bit and water was dripping out from the cracks around it and loudly falling into my bathtub at a rapid rate.
It then stopped, but not before I called emergency maintenance, who sent someone by a couple of hours later. The person took apart the plate to peer into the hole above:
He said that he could see the plate was wet, so obviously there had been water there, but that there were no water marks above at all, so he was confused. I said that it was the first day that I had heard this leak, so he went upstairs to check the apartment upstairs to test and see if any of the toilet faucets were leaking.
A few minutes later, he came back down and said that there was a Ukrainian couple living in the bachelor suite apartment above me, and that what happened was that that apartment’s bathtub had a broken overflow plate. The couple was new to Edmonton and refused to use the shower head because they had hand showers in Ukraine, and also had not called maintenance to inform them of the broken overflow plate but “were going to contact them this week”. So what happened was that they had filled up the bathtub to take a bath, and the water had overflowed into the hole in the side of their tub through the broken overflow plate, and splashed into the alcove area between our two apartments and down into my bathtub via the plate in my ceiling.
The maintenance person was quite annoyed at the couple living above, because not only was their bathtub damaged, their toilet seat was apparently also broken and they had not called about that either. He gave them a talking to, saying that that sort of thing was what caused him to get called up for emergency maintenance on the Friday of a long weekend, and that thankfully it hadn’t caused more damage to my apartment. All I could think about was that I’ve had very bad luck with living next to bad Ukrainian refugees and that I was starting to really reinforce a negative stereotype against Ukrainians by now. They have been more or less quiet though, so they’re still much better than the last idiot Ukrainian couple living above me. Anyway the maintenance guy patched up my ceiling and even mopped down the bathtub for me before he left. (He did trudge around my house in his shoes though so I still vacuumed after he left.)
There was one other interesting sidenote from this interaction too, which was that the maintenance guy mentioned that all the shower heads had been swapped a couple of months back for newer low-volume ones or whatever, the “weaker” ones that I had complained about when I first moved in here and that John had helped me quietly replace the following week. He mentioned this as part of talking about the upstairs neighbours, who he said could have just asked for a hand shower attachment instead, which surprised me since I had asked for that and been denied by the rental office. He said they made exceptions for things like seniors or whatever that needed help, and said that they probably would have done it for them as part of their refugee thing to help them acclimatize, but he also mentioned that every apartment had been switched to these shower heads because the water bills (which the rental company pays for — water is “free” as part of our rental fee here and not a separate bill) had been really high and they decided that it was because people were running their showers for a very long time or something.
I hope I don’t have to elucidate what a terrible leap of logic it is to go from “some of our tenants are using too much shower water” to “let’s replace everyone’s shower heads with crappy low pressure showers”. Especially since the regular bath taps themselves output water at a crazy high velocity and volume. Midwest Rental is a horrible company (though not nearly the worst in the city, from some of the stories I’ve heard of other rental companies like Boardwalk).
I was also very amused though because the maintenance guy gestured at my shower when he was talking about the low water pressure shower heads — he obviously didn’t recognize that the one I had had been replaced by one of his compatriots!
Other than that, ’twas a quiet week. I spent a bunch of time scanning things, and working a bit on other parts of my blog. My to-do list is not as long as it was when I first came back from vacation now, but there are still a variety of things that I would like to get done.
I also had a great sunset or clouds picture from my balcony pretty much every day this week, and they are going to be plastered all over my blog as always. So here we go!
Last Sunday, July 28, 9:26 pm:
Monday, July 29, 9:42 pm:
Tuesday, July 30, 9:30 pm:
Wednesday, July 31, 9:29 pm:
Thursday, August 01, 9:36 pm:
Friday, August 02, 8:30 pm:
And Saturday, August 03, 9:20 pm, certainly the most boring of the week’s set:
I love certain aspects of my current apartment, for sure. It’s a feast for my eyes and soul nearly every evening.
Games
My Path of Exile experiment lasted all of two days before I got bored of the game midway through Act 2 (out of 10) and quit it again. I should like this game, but something about it is just so annoying and tiresome. Part of it is probably not being able to keyboard my way around, and having to click to move everywhere instead, part of it is that the gameplay in general is uninspiring, and part of it is probably how this meme from one of my Discord servers succinctly puts it:
How true. The developers are pretty good and the legacy of the game (its existence, with its huge skill tree and free to play-ness, minus the need to buy initial stash tabs so it’s not really “free”) is pretty great, but so many of the systems are old and convoluted, and the huge skill tree is such a nonsensical barrier for normal players. It’s the ultimate in gaslighting, with how many people have colluded with the community “groupthink” to spread the idea that Path of Exile is actually a good game.
That being said I do think there is a good game in there somewhere, and I do like the idea of the endgame map-grinding cycles, and all the different league events they come up with every 3 months. It’s just very frustrating to get into, like learning an entire new language just to play a game, and having to grind a full character every 3 months to try out the new league mechanics since many of them don’t make it into the vanilla version of the game after the league ends.
Yet I do still want to play it, unlike something like Once Human, which I was playing just last week but have no urge to go back to. I do have the urge to play Path of Exile in general, I just don’t have the urge to actually push the Play button on Steam when I am staring at it.
I didn’t play a ton outside of this, but I did complete chapter 3 in Zenless Zone Zero, which concludes the original storyline that the game shipped with. It was about as much content as Honkai Star Rail (local) shipped with too, I believe, and I should go back to that game at some point soon because there’s a ton more story that has been added since I last played that. But for now, completing chapter 3 unlocked a glut of extra stories and random side quests that I still want to slowly work through.
I sampled several old games that I hadn’t touched for over a year at this point, like Atelier Ryza 2 and Ghostwire: Tokyo, but it’s always so difficult going back to games with complex systems after being away from them for so long. I’m so bad at actually finishing games.
Plushie of the Week #145
This week’s Plushie of the Week features two more of Kel‘s plushies, and two more from her favourite Jinbe-san line. These two were from some sort of earlier promotion, apparently called Jinbe-san to Umiusagi according to the tags. Umi usagi seems to suggest “sea rabbit” or egg cowrie/sea snail, but is written in hiragana, making the meaning ambiguous. They were gifts to Kel from a friend of hers when she went to meet said friend in Japan for lunch in June of 2023. The Jinbe-san and friends in this line have little rabbit ears on their head and frills around their.. waist? Bottom?
According to Kel, and also the little drawing in the booklets attached to the plushies, the “official” story behind them is that little umiusagi rabbits came down from the moon, to the ocean where Jinbe-san and the others were, during a full moon. There were a whole bunch of them, and some of them attached onto the heads of the Jinbe-san series characters. The Jinbe-san characters played along with the rabbits latching on to them, and they all decided to make-believe (the act of playing make-believe together is gokko) that they had turned into sea rabbits, too. And thus the collaboration plushies.
Alright then. I also captured the campaign page (local) for Jinbesan to Umiusagi for posterity’s sake.
Kel has two of the tiny versions of these plushies, one of them is Jinbe-san himself and the other is named Maigo no Kokujira, or the Lost Whale. I’ve featured other Jinbe-san related plushies in Plushie of the Week #033, #034, #041, #140, #143, and #144, but this is the first time that I’ve featured the kokujira whale, except for a brief mention in the booklet in the PotW #034 entry. Well, kind of, I do also briefly mention and show a picture of Boop in the PotW #041 link above, and that picture looks like a Kokujira whale too. None of them had the Maigo (lost) modifier like this one has though. I also do find it interesting that the booklet in PotW #034 above shows the whale, but the one in PotW #033 does not.
Anyway, pictures. The Jinbe-san pictures come first, and here’s his front:
Side and part of the tag:
Other side:
Back:
Underside (Nothing here! There’s supposed to be a manta ray here) and the other half of the hard-to-reach tag:
Booklet outer:
Booklet inner:
And here’s Kokujira, the whale. Front:
Back:
Underside (This one has a friend attached! A coral or seashell or something):
Booklet outer:
Booklet inner:
Song of the Week #122
Title: Seize the Day
Artist: SPiKA
Album: Tokyo Xanadu OST (2015)
This song seems a little more.. muted than my memory remembers it now that I’m listening to it again, but it’s a song I’ve liked for several years and one that brings me back to 2018-2019, when I streamed the entirety of the Tokyo Xanadu eX+ game on Twitch for Satinel and Mell to watch. And then saved it all on YouTube. That was very fun, and from a chronicler’s point of view I want to passive stream and capture something like that again. We tried Persona 5 but real life got in the way and we only ended up playing a quarter or so of that, and I’ve since played further in that game separately by myself.
Nonetheless, Tokyo Xanadu was a bit janky in spots, but I liked the characters a lot and the shared experience of playing through it. I also very much liked the opening song and insert song, Seize the Day by SpiKA, which is featured here today. Listening to it brings back a flood of memories to do with all those streams and with the game itself. It is also somewhat apt since it was at the 2019 Animethon where I found a Tokyo Xanadu art book and the original soundtrack CD for sale there and picked those up. I also picked up the second-hand copy of the CD of the single for 330 yen when I was in Kyoto for my RSJP program, which was a nice find too.
Memory Snippet of the Week #129
Last week, I mentioned that the BBQ that I attended was not the first Midwest event that I had been to that had a petting zoo, though it was the first one for our specific apartment complex that had one. The other one I had been to before was a nearby small fair from one of the other Midwest properties near my apartment complex — Midwest Rental has four different properties around Southgate Station and I feel like they’re a bit predatory and should not be allowed to own so many prime properties in such a small area, because not only do they own apartment complexes but also rows of townhouses, but that’s neither here nor there.
Anyway, one of the other Midwest properties in the area had this Midwest County Fair going on, and they had sent us a brochure on it too since we lived in the area.
As this was just about a five-minute walk away from my Edmonton 205 apartment at the time, I visited it while passing by the area on a walk on July 20 2019, and took the following pictures. It was so old that I was still using my iPhone 6s, which was two phones ago.
Our appreciation BBQ didn’t have horses or ponies! I do remember that the fair overall was very small though, even compared to the one that I attended last week.
Dreams
Jul 29 2024
- At one point, I was on some sort of exchange trip with a few other acquaintances, and I was hanging out at a canteen near a war zone. I vaguely knew the way back but wasn’t sure which of the exits from the canteen to use to safely return back without accidentally crossing the zone border and stepping into a dangerous area. I noticed some of my fellow classmates, including Yongrui, nearby at a table that looked to be finishing up and about to leave as well, so I waited for them to do so and then tagged along a short ways behind them.
- Later on, most of us had been shrunk to the size of a small insect for some reason or other and we were visiting the office of a young female teacher that looked very much like Ms Khoo, in order to show her proof and secure the day off from school classes. She examined us and tried to turn us back to normal to no avail.
- Even later on, most of us were back to normal, but Nak was not, and he had fallen onto a pond in a jungle area and was being chased around by pond skaters. I put my finger down on the surface of the pond to let him climb up upon it, then put him down by a tiny helicopter that was also on the surface of the pond, allowing him to climb into it and pilot the flying machine into the air. I told him to come north where we had a small group hut area set up as it was safe there and others were gathering resources to bring back to that area.
- In the hut, I had built a sorting device that was a totem pole of five voxel-based blocks with different filters set upon them arranged in a vertical column, and all five of them had arrows on their blocks, with four of them pointing right and the fifth one pointing left. On the right side of all five blocks, I had put item pipes that could draw out items from the sorting blocks and put them into chests, forming a second column of five blocks that was attached to the first one. I had meant to put a third column of blocks, this time all chests, in order to actually hold the sorted items neatly, however I had to temporarily abandon the project to go save Nak.
- When I returned to the building to continue work on the sorting device, I saw that Kel had taken it over and had attached a bunch of pipes to the right side of that contraption that just connected everything to her own personal chests so that anything put in them would become hers. I got annoyed at that and demanded that she removed the pipes as I had meant it to be a community build and had not finished it yet, while she got annoyed and said I shouldn’t have just laid those blocks around unattended. In the end I won the argument though and she removed her extra blocks, giving me back the contraption.
Jul 30 2024
- My dream revolved around some web server or computerized program that we were running from a small chip connected to a power circuit, hidden inside a power box in the lobby area on the third floor of a building. Although we were kids, we had set this up as a measure of secret rebellion against the government or something, and this chip was essentially producing an important resource for us.
- We knew that the police, which raided us regularly, would eventually find it though, as I had played out that scenario in my dream and then rewinded it, but we tried to make it last as long as we could by distracting them, for example by leading them on tours but stopping short just before that level and showing them something weird on the fourth floor instead, or by removing oil bottles and tools from the inside ledge of the power box so that the cops wouldn’t get suspicious and hope that whoever was looking through it did not recognize the chip. We planned to feign innocence if the chip ever was found, but it was never found within the scope of my dream.
- At one point as a distraction I went to one of the upper floors and watched a musical concert, but the performers were dancing on a stage in the middle of the hall when I arrived there at the start of the show, and I needed them to perform their songs on the stage on the far end so that all the audience was facing them, and not the current setup where half the audience on the other side of them was facing me. This was because I needed the privacy to do something or other.
- Apparently other people also didn’t really like this middle of the room setup though, as someone brazenly said he came here for the actual concert and asked when that would start. One of the dancers replied, while continuing his dance, that they could just adjust the video seek bar to 34 minutes or so to jump to that segment of the concert. There was indeed a video seek bar at the bottom of my field of vision when facing them, so I adjusted that and the scene popped to the start of the proper concert, with everyone in the audience facing the front stage as expected.
Aug 04 2024
- I dreamt that I went to a foreign country or possibly even planet to study on, via some sort of study exchange camp that saw several of my workmates come along too. However, when we all shuffled off to class and sat down at long white tables that could accommodate 4 each, I tried to hold an entire row of seats for them but realized that none of them had actually followed me into the class except for Sandy. Apparently Jeremy and the others had set their classes, or at least this class, which was a Chinese-based class, to optional while signing up for the camp itself, and so they had left to go do something else. I wondered what the point of coming to a study camp and then skipping the study class was.
- The teacher gave us all a form to fill up, and it was implied that several of the students were there for a second year in a row as she said that we only had to fill them in if we had not filled it out before. Half the class was apparently also there not due to the study camp, but from some other program whose class was merged with us.
- Snippet: Much later on, there was something about the father figure of a gang who turned himself in for execution by the rest of his gang or something, and they tied his arms above his head in a spread Y pose. His arms then became represented by a long, thick piece of rope tied horizontally between two stakes in the ground in front of us, and he urged the person doing the execution to cut off the rope at either end cleanly, with this somehow translating to him losing one of his arms for each end of the rope. The executor didn’t have the strength for it though and had to saw through each end of the rope partway with his long knife before he could sever it with a slash.