Dear Tigey,
Phew. I still feel like I’m paying off the “time debt” from Animethon last week. Then again, I still feel like life is glowing due to that event as well.
Entry #152 (Aug 18 2024)
Table of Contents
Knock on the…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #147
ට Song of the Week #124
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #131
ට Dreams
Life
So uh, I learnt that the apartment maintenance team did NOT come by and fix my stove while I was at Animethon on Friday, like I had guessed in last week’s post. The one burner had stopped working on Wednesday when I put in the ticket, and was only very, very faintly working on Thursday when I tried, despite the other three working just fine. But it had started working again by Saturday afternoon, and I had been in all day from Thursday through Saturday except when I went out for Animethon, so I figured that they had done something while I had been out.
I learnt they did not though, because they came by this week on Tuesday and were surprised to learnt that the stove had started working again. John, the friendly Malaysian maintenance worker that I had gotten to know, came by with his coworker friend, Ekram, who hailed from Afghanistan and was apparently good friends with John, as they bantered back and forth with each other and talked to me for about 20 minutes as well. John ended up replacing the stove burner anyway, while Ekram, who was the same maintenance worker who had dealt with my after-hours emergency for the dripping ceiling two weeks ago, asked if I had had any trouble with the above neighbours since. I said no, but pointed out that the plate that he had screwed back had a gap between the edge of the plate and the hole that it was covering, that insects could crawl through, and asked if he could patch that up. He said he could, left and came back with some sort of a paint gun a few minutes after, and fixed it all right up.
After that, I asked to take a picture of the two of them, and they obliged:
They’re good folks! I really like them.
I also had two other visitors to the house mid-week, one was on Tuesday, when a woman knocked on my door in the evening and asked for donations for her son who was something or other. A solicitor! I’ve never had a solicitor visit the door. I refused to listen to her sob story and said I had to go, and she was nice and let me go (so that she could move on to harass another apartment). I then looked at my phone and saw that I had missed a phone call from the door buzzer downstairs about 20 minutes before, so obviously she had been buzzing random people to try to be let in until someone did so, either via phone (you have to press 9 on the keypad to unlock the door remotely) or via tailgating. I considered filing a police report just to note the nuisance since I know that she was trespassing, but by the time I thought of that I had long forgotten what she even looked likeo, so I didn’t in the end.
The other set of visitors to my house came by on Monday — Jon and Kel came by with both our parents in tow, so the entire family was in my apartment and chilling out and chatting for about half an hour before some appointment that they had. That was super nice! I love spending time with them. Kel left on a plane to return to her China job two days later, which was why they had made the plans to all stop by before she left. Hopefully I’ll have a new house the next time she comes by Edmonton. Maybe. Perhaps. We’ll see.
I’ve received a couple of positive comments and thank you’s on the YouTube videos for recording the concerts that I attended at Animethon last week, by people who were also there at the concert and now have a permanent memory of the concert as well. They were nice to read. I was worried about things like sound quality and the awkward point of view in the video recordings but I guess those were not actual big issues after all. It did take me three full days or so to upload all the videos though, mostly because the Day 2 videos were so large since I was using my DJI Pocket 2 to record it instead of the regular Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra smartphone camera.
I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting a bit reliant on the standing fan that I bought a few weeks ago these days. I keep oscillating between an off state, where I start to get sweaty, and an on state, where the breeze starts to feel too cold, and find myself some evenings turning it off and on a few times to try to find an equilibrium, even when it’s somewhat cool outside. It’s a weird feeling since I’ve never had or felt the need to have a fan before these last couple months. Obviously the less of it I use the better since it costs electricity and electricity is money, but I almost feel like it messes up the stability of my body temperature just by being around, and then even more so when I turn it on. Did I use to randomly sweat like this before? Of course I realize that I could also just turn it on and point it away from me for a sort of middle ground, but I’m far too lazy for that since I can turn it on from afar with its remote control.)
Anyway, that also ties in to how there were a couple days this week that the air pollution outside, from forest fire smoke, was so bad that I could not even open the balcony door despite the weather being otherwise quite cool. This was particularly true on Wednesday, when it was so bad that the sun was just a helpless lightly glowing ball of orange going through the sky, but its rays could not permeate the smoke at all. It was pretty surreal in a way that the camera could not really capture.
I’m glad that I had asked the apartment management to install that door sweeper underneath the door, despite their warnings that stoppering up that gap under the door would make my apartment warmer in the summer. The ventilator in the outside hallway that blows air at my door was blowing polluted smoky air from outside at it all Wednesday and Thursday! I could immediately smell it when I went outside.
Anyway this had started to clear up by Thursday evening though, as some rain clouds started to move in and wash away the smoke, even though the air quality was “poor” for the rest of the weekend (I couldn’t really tell besides far-away blurriness on the horizon).
Although some of the smoke apparently lasted until the weekend. There wasn’t as much of a smoky smell by Friday though. Also I found it weird that every single car (at one point it was like 15 of them) on the right side of that left parking lot in that above picture had its vehicle lights on.
By Sunday though, fog had replaced the smoke. Edmonton doesn’t get fog very often at all, but today the fog machines were out in force. I could barely see the shopping mall below my apartment!
On Saturday night at 10 pm, I heard a clatter on my balcony floor and went out to investigate. When I checked, there was a pen lying on the floor there.
This was super weird. I’m 10 stories off the ground! It technically could have been dropped from an above apartment as well, but the angles from that are wrong, since the railings are slightly tucked in from the balcony edge, so I don’t know how that would have been possible. It is also possible that my neighbour to the left could have thrown it through or over the grille separating our balconies (you can see the grille on the left side of the picture there) but there was no grille noise and no neighbour there either when I peeked. And there’s a solid wall betwen me and my right side neighbour so that couldn’t have been it for sure. But could someone really throw that thing so many floors up from the ground?
I wish I could simply ask the pen. But it didn’t answer any of my questions. Either way I brought it in and set it on the kitchen table and so it managed to avoid the zombie fog that rolled in the next day.
It’s not the only odd thing that’s appeared on my balcony in the last week too. Two soft downy bird feathers have ended up on the balcony, as well as a shriveled leaf, even though we’re far too far off the ground. Maybe the pigeons brought the pen by, come to think of it, except that they’re not active that late at night as far as I’ve ever seen or heard.
And lastly, I was offered modship (is that a real word?) on the Twitch stream of the late night streamer that I watch, Nomakk. Something about because I was always helpful and friendly there and had also done some cool archiving-type stuff for them. What a terrible mistake they are making. I did tentatively accept, but as an omen of how things are going to go, our streamer took three nights in a row off this week due to sickness before any of that had been settled, so.
Games
It’s funny that I randomly played and posted a map of my Necesse village last week, because this week they had a graphics overhaul that updated the look of the game. What weird timing! Naturally, I went in and took pictures of my village again after the graphical update.
How cool. I’m not sure if I like it more, or less, than last week’s graphics though. In the meantime, I also started playing a Stardew Valley-like game called Littlewood, and have been having fun building a little town there:
I eagerly await its inevitable graphics update next week.
This week, I also bought a game called Knock on the Coffin Lid, which is a roguelike deckbuilder in the vein of Slay the Spire and other similar games, but the twist in this one is that you’re freshly raised from the dead by a mysterious benefactor, and everytime you die time gets rolled back to the point that you got raised, but you (and thus the benefactor, who helps talk you through things) keep your accumulated memories. Due to this, the world map is somewhat static (though I think fight rewards and chest/shop gear is still random), but you’re essentially using the adventure board and time loop to visit different places along different paths to solve a large overarching mystery, which is a cool concept and one that might give me inspiration for my oft-ignored future game that I’d like to make.
The MineColonies: Dimensional Adventure server on Craft Down Under that I played on several months back, before I went abroad, has closed down due to a disagreement between the modpack staff and the server hosting staff. I had stopped playing on it due to the recent constant server wipes due to what I perceived to be bad management by the modpack staff, as they seemed to just love tossing in and removing random bloated things and pet projects that few asked for without understanding anything about or attempting to achieve game balance, while ignoring some bugs and issues that the player base had to constantly struggle with. And the last straw was apparently some abuse that they levied toward the server staff. Still, it will be sad to see it go, as the community was quite nice. There apparently is another modpack with MineColonies on that Minecraft server cluster that I might check out sometime though. And a lot of other random modpacks in general. I do like the server staff members there.
I also tried out a bit of The First Descendant early on in the week, despite accusations of the program installing invasive anti-cheat software on the computer. It was okay, nothing to write home about, I played the first zone and then decided that I had enough. It does have a zone system that I liked, where you had to unlock each subsequent subzone by doing four short quests within the previous one that progress the story a little each time, vaguely like Guild Wars 2 and its adventure nodes, I thought. They can be done in private or in public instances with small random groups, the latter of which could make it so you never actually have to do much as others in the group can just finish the zone story while you sit around. There are little dungeon areas at the end of each subzone area too with boss fights and such, and even a large boss that I had to take down in an arena fight at the end of the first chapter/zone, devoid of any story other than “this big thing is now randomly attacking our base!”. Ultimately though, I didn’t find the game that interesting, at least not alone. And the game is full of awful microtransactions.
Later in the wek, Satinel finished a prototype of a game for the latest game jam that she participated in, based on a merchant game concept that we both enjoyed. It was just a two week game jam, so it was amazing that she could come up with a game with such solid technical aspects, graphical/sound assets, and personality, and create a springboard for a future possible fully-fledged game like this so fast from scratch! How exciting. The game is currently called Fantasy Trader and is located here. It’s amazing what Satinel can do. Don’t tell her I’m a bit jealous of her.
One of the comments in the game jam called Tigey a teddy bear…
Satinel and I also played a bit of Fallout 76 on the side after the game jam ended. I had gotten her a spare key during the game jam from Fanatical as I had wanted to try it with her, but also wanted to wait until the game jam ended before presenting the key to her (and possibly forcing her to play it with me out of guilt). It’s not very good so far though. But apparently I have a lot of friends that really like the game, especially once they get further into it, and so I’ve been trying to figure out why.
On the flip side, I’ve played a lot less Zenless Zone Zero this week, though I’m still fully caught up with the main story and progressed a bit on the remaining side stories. A combination of there being less to do and Animethon forcing me to take a couple days break from it, which I then continued into playing lesser of it overall, I think.
Plushie of the Week #147
Kel has another one of her plushies featured this week, a rabbit-turtle.. thing that she apparently won from a claw machine somewhere in the Clifford Wonderland bubble near where she stays in Guangzhou. According to her, she wanted it precisely because it was a cute fuzzy rabbit with a turtle shell on a keychain, and she bought 10 plays for the claw machine and won it in about 6-8 tries. The tag for the plushie is disproportionately big and hangs very annoyingly over the face of the plushie, but she has yet to snip it off.
That’s about all we know about this plushie, except that the lettering on the tag, JHWH, is also just the initials of the Chinese characters below it, 嘉惠文化, or Jia Hui Wen Hua, some toy company with a scattering of plushies over Chinese shopping sites.
Plushie front:
Back:
Side:
Other side:
Underside:
Tag front:
Tag back:
Song of the Week #124
Title: 1979
Artist: The Smashing Pumpkins
Album: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995)
I’ve already had guest entries before on Plushie of the Week segments, sort of, so why not songs too? I asked Jahandar last week if he would like to write up a Song of the Week segment to highlight and memorialize a song — not necessarily his favourite song, as I know that many people do not really have a single favourite song that towers over all others, but instead a song with stories or meaning or some sort of weight behind it. Jah obliged, and here is his voice to accompany his chosen song:
When Shiara asked me to contribute a song, I thought it was a fun idea. But what song to choose? She asked for a favorite song, but I don’t have a favorite song! There are just too many across vastly different genres and trying to pick is daunting, so I don’t. Instead I decided to do as Shiara does and just pick something that evokes a memory, and not try to attach a “favorite” label to it.
This is 1979 by The Smashing Pumpkins. For me, this song evokes memories of driving to school with my sister in a Ford Tahoe, and this was one of the songs on one of her mixtapes that were played on repeat. I like the added bit of fun in picking for nostalgia a song that is also very much about nostalgia. Great band too!
All my other ZOMG Discord friends should be on alert that I will eventually ask them for similar entries too. A quick blurb like the above would be perfect, or if you want to write more that’s good as well. It’s better if you volunteer them as tribute rather than waiting for me to come ask you, but either way I want to capture your words here too. Plus it means I have to write less each week!
I do know this song, and I like it, although not to such a level that I would have ever featured or written about it. That music video disturbs me though, because I don’t like that sort of chaos and destruction of things. Wait, I ended up writing about as much as I usually do for a featured Song of the Week anyway! Argh.
Memory Snippet of the Week #131
One of the booths at the Animethon event last week was a table set up by EJCA, or the Edmonton Japanese Community Association (local). I chatted to them briefly while I was there, telling them that I had attended an EJCA event back in 2019 before COVID hit, and I figured that for this week’s MSotW I would feature that event. So from all that, I started building the memory snippet, and just like last week it had enough pictures and media that it basically needed a page of it’s own. So here we go, again!
Dreams
Aug 15 2024
- Snippet: I was wandering through a city-like area with my family, looking for and doing little map quests in instanced dungeon-like areas with them that we had apparently run before but that had all reset themselves for some reason. These dungeons, at least the ones that I remember, were a small series of rooms in a building with a predetermined path through them that we went through, and then an objective that we touched or collected at the end.
Aug 16 2024
- I was staying at an inn with my parents and siblings on some overseas trip. While walking through the inn, I saw an anime show being broadcasted on a TV in the common area that played a couple of songs that I seemed to recognize, and I double-checked with Satinel to make sure that she recognized it too. I did manage to identify both songs in the end, and one was a cover of a song from Season 5 of Natsume Yuujinchou, and another was the cover of a song by The Beatles.
- While my family returned to our rented room, I went to a recreation room next to it and sat down next to a large arcade machine that was shaped like a pinball machine. There was a large chute set into the machine that was used for returning extra coins to the user, and I had the idea to use that machine as a change machine, and trade in a larger dollar note for some smaller dollar notes. However, when I tried that, the machine spit out a lot more money than I had put in, including five $100 bills, and a whole host of smaller paper notes and coins, all the way down to a handful of pennies.
- I took this money and showed Mom the amount at the entrance to our unit, and Mom said that we shouldn’t keep the money as the trip here had been funded with “clean money” and they had even found deeply discounted airfare online that allowed for Dad and her to come along as well, as usually deep discounts on airplane tickets only allowed for 1 or 2 people to travel on them so Mom and Dad usually ended up staying home, instead of 5 people like we found this time. Anyway she said that keeping that money would sully the memory of the trip, and I told her that I agreed with that and was going to bring the money to the police station.
- It was late at night by the time I reached the police station, and instead of making a new case file report of my own, I saw some friends in the waiting room who were being registered at the front desk, and joined their group instead. The group consisted of two old women, who were both over the age of 80 and apparently sisters born one year apart, as well as Jackson, who was somewhere in his mid 30s to early 50s or so and was their son. He was the primary person filling in the paperwork at the desk since the two older ladies could not easily read or write at their age. Jackson said that he also had a younger brother, Jimmyturx, who was around 25 years old or so, and I was surprised as I knew Jimmyturx online but had not been aware that he and Jackson were related.
- Anyway I explained what I was here to do and Jackson added my name to their case file, and then we sat down to wait. There were three other groups in the room, and a few minutes later, a policewoman came up to the front of the room with four different coloured folders and asked all the groups to send one representative up to the front and pick one folder. That would determine the order that we were going to be seen by the police chief. Jackson went up and picked the blue folder, which put us second in line to see the chief after the group that picked the yellow folder.
Aug 17 2024
- Snippet: I remember several points where I had to summarize a scene that just happened by picking one of four glowing purple summaries on little pedestals on the ground, with each one giving a buff either to me or to the people in the scene or something.
- Snippet: There was also a segment where Kel and I were escorting several toddlers, at least four of them, through a bookstore. Kel found some gamebooks from the Fighting Fantasy series and showed them to me, and I pulled out my notebook from my bag to figure out which books I already had and which ones I was still missing.
- Snippet: Another scene involved an agent chasing a criminal toward a building, and then up a tube that was attached to the outside of the building, with a ladder set on the inside of the tube. This tube led all the way to the top of the building, where there was a helicopter, and the criminal was trying to get away but could not open the door of the helicopter as it took some time to break in. The agent reached the top of the ladder too and shot the criminal a few times to kill him.
- Snippet: Lastly, I remember walking around that same world that that last snippet was set in, getting off a train or bus and then passing a crowd at a shopping center. The people there were queueing up for two separate concerts, one by Frieren from Sousou no Frieren and one by the singers of another really popular show that apparently aired around the same time.
Aug 18 2024
- I was playing an RPG computer game as the hero of a story involving a group of childhood friends who had now grown up and were on opposite sides of the law, with police and mafia that had been fighting to survive and eradicate each other. While I had not been officially on either side, I had been doing some jobs that had put me afoul of the law too, and an old friend who was now a desk detective from the police force had now finished analyzing some evidence that I had left behind and tracing my exact position to a rooftop somewhere in town, where I was bleeding profusely and trying to stumble to safety. The third-person camera panned over me and I saw that I looked somewhat like Adam Jensen from Deus Ex, but distinct enough to avoid copyrights.
- He got in touch with me and said that as befitting his job, he had to submit the evidence and set the robots in the city to shoot me on sight. I looked down and saw a tall, thin robot turret with lasers on a lower roof scan around looking for intruders. They had not found me yet but it would probably only be a matter of time, and I sighed about this over the phone as I said that I wasn’t actually involved with the mafia and if only I could just get to the docks and leave the city.
- As we chatted, he invited me to a former mafia hideout in our old high school that had been one of the first hideouts cleared out by the police some time ago. This was going to be a reunion between the survivors of the story as a way to close out the game. I had to get there via a tunnel that led me by a train station, but I did get there without incident, at which point I met up with the detecive and his assistant, as well as a guy and girl, the latter in a red band t-shirt, who were with the mafia. The mafia provided some keys for some of the locked room doors in the building, and we gawked at things like clothing and weirdly-posed mannequins that were inside one of the rooms that the police had never managed to break into.
- We then went into the band room and saw a bunch of chairs and tables still arranged in a semi-circle toward the front of the room. There were two sculptures of a boy and a girl seated on two of the chairs on the right side of the room, in front of their music stands, locked in an eternal pose where they were happily looking at and chatting with each other. The girl was a flautist and the guy played some other instruments. There was a very melancholic feel with this scene as we all kind of stepped back into the past and relived old memories of when all of us were friends.
- The two sculptures were of the two surviving Mafia members when they were students here, and they looked on ruefully at their younger, happier selves. They had become romantically involved with each other from the band, and had dated each other and married once they grew up, but due to plots spun out of jealousy from other students, had ended up tangled up with the mafia and leading them. I noted that this band room was “where it all began”, and was able to point out not only those two students, but where five of their former fellow gang members had been sitting, as well as the two detectives and another two students who had joined the police force but were no longer here. All the others were now dead or captured though. I wished that things could have turned out differently for everyone.
- The next thing I remember was that the game had restarted, and for me this involved a task to steal a gem on a pedestal set in the middle of a large field next to a building that was under construction. There were lots of media with cameras surrounding the gem, and police with guns and helicopters, as well as the mayor who was accepting the gem as a gift from someone or other. I recalled playing the start of this game in the past, and according to the scripted tutorial there would be a bunch of missiles fired from a friendly helicopter that would land in another part of the field nearby and distract all the cameras to point toward it, at which point I was to run in, grab the gem, and run away. This would net me a few seconds but would still end up with the police pursuing me, and in the game story this was the catalyst for the police and mafia to eventually clash together in an epic city-wide struggle as the mafia had been the ones who commissioned me and were going to shelter me.
- This time though, there was no more tutorial, so as I approached the area I was able to remain located behind a wall from where the gem and all the media cameras were. There were several police officers hanging out in that area though, including an elite commander unit of some kind, as well as the mayor. They were near the building that was under construction, so I tossed a couple of exploding grenades there to gain their attention, and then tossed a few more grenades that did not explode as a distraction as both the mayor and commander went over to investigate. I figured that if needed, I could set them off with another grenade and try to kill them both, but it never came to that. None of the police officers apparently saw me tossing the grenades even though I did it while standing amongst the police officers, because I made sure not to look at the spot where I was tossing them as I did so.
- With them suitably distracted, I snuck up toward the gem and waited on the misisles to come. Soon enough, the mafia helicopter came by and launched a bunch of ballistic missiles into the empty field nearby, which caused all the media cameras to point toward it and away from the gem again. I ran in and grabbed the gem, and then hit my new stealth skill this time, which would give me 10 seconds of invisibility, enough time to get into the bushes next to the building under construction.
- I did that, slipping the gem up the left leg of my shorts and hiding it there while doing so, but the bushes were not very tall and only came up to my knees, and I became visible again as I crouched down over the bushes and ran along the side of the construction site, away from the media and mayor and toward the city itself. However, this was fine as there were plenty of other spectators that were also running away in a panic, not because they had stolen a gem but due to the explosions.
- I ran up to a police officer who was brandishing his gun at me, and grabbed the barrel with my hands before I noticed that he was not specifically pointing it at me, but at random people in the crowd, trying to figure out who had stolen the gem. In the previous game, he was one of the cops who had shot at me, but this time, he was exclaiming out loud that “Who stole the gem? There’s no one to shoot at!” or something like that. Apparently my “stealthy” attempt to grab the gem had worked and this time the police had no clue who I was. I let go of his gun and slipped back into the crowd, running into a mortuary building where I was supposed to meet a contact for the next part of the story.
- Editor: This was one of those cases where the dream was so realistic and evoked such a memory that I am certain that it was a continuation of a dream from the distant past that had managed to stay unwritten.