Dear Tigey,
Life is mostly great. Though the doldrums of summer are in full swing.
Entry #153 (Aug 25 2024)
Table of Contents
The green and white…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #148
ට Song of the Week #125
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #132
ට Dreams
Life
This was one of those weeks that nothing too interesting happened in real life, which is nice after the past couple action-packed weeks. The most noteworthy thing that happened was already mentioned last week too, just that it eventually got postponed due to someone else’s real life until next week — I was made a Twitch moderator on the channel that I watch at night, so that was nice. That kind of thing gets me a bit too much attention though, which I don’t fully like, imposter syndrome is in full swing and I don’t think I actually deserve it, especially since I’ve only been there for 7 (nearly 8) months, and I’m the first person he’s promoted in two years (and 12th or so in his 8 years of streaming). Oh well. I fooled them all with my shining beacon of positivity. Now I have a green and white Sword of Damocles on that channel. And more ability to watch over things and keep the engine running.
I also plan to donate a good part of my stash of spare/duplicate Steam game keys to the channel for giveaways and such, since I’ve accumulated them for over 10 years now and can’t seem to give them away to any friends that I know. This does also for some reason remind me of something I read one time, that one of the core pillars of a good friendship is the willingness to accept a gift from the other person.
Our apartment complex uses a washing machine company called Coinamatic to manage their laundry machine, and their machines are controlled via a dumb Coinamatic app that allows them to keep hiking prices and additionally charge a service fee upon account recharge to make sure the current out-of-control inflation in every aspect of life bites users a little harder than necessary as well. Anyway, the dumb app errored out this week when I tried to refill my account, and I had to call the company and get put on hold a while just to find out that their billing server was down and it was not that my credit card was locked out or anything like that. All just to do my laundry.
While all that is a complaint about how stupid Rent Midwest, my rental company, and Village at Southgate, my current apartment complex, has gotten, I also just wanted to list the error message here as a Google search does not actually turn up the error, at least not in conjunction with the Coinamatic app. The error message in question is “Declined as sale count per IP address is greater than configured amount” and that just means their stupid billing server is down so try again later. And hopefully you aren’t in the middle of washing your clothes! I ended up not even being able to use my primary credit card on the stupid app in the end for some reason, and had to add my spare credit card instead. To be able to wash my clothes. Thanks, Midwest Property Management! Thanks, Coinamatic!
Last week, on the 15th, I got charged twice for some napa cabbage that I bought at Safeway, which I only noticed much later on when inputting the receipt into my ledger spreadsheet. That was only $1.50, so it wasn’t the end of the world, but karma did repay me this week because I found this:
While $10.76/kg or $4.88/lb, the listed price, was still higher than I like to buy my meat at, everything else when I went there was a lot more expensive, so I asked for a couple of pounds of that from the deli anyway to tide me over to the next sale, since I had just about run out of meat for the soup pot.
However, when I got the package, the price was wrong, it was set to the full price so I was paying $20 or so for the 2 pounds of meat instead of $10. Because of the cabbage incident the previous trip though, I had become price-sensitive and pointed this out to them, at which point we realized that that yellow sticker actually says that the offer ended on Aug 18 or something like that, whereas I was there on the 19th. Apparently someone had forgotten to remove the price tag. The meat deli honoured the price though, before removing the offending sticker, so I did get that meat for “cheap” (relatively speaking anyway, it’s still pricey even at that price) and was happy about that.
Later on in the week it was on a much deeper sale on $6.61 per kg though, so at that point I picked up enough to last a couple of weeks and stored them all in my new Stasher bags. And in addition, I was almost charged the normal price for a condiment bottle that I was buying from the half-price shelf during that latter trip, by a new cashier, but I saw the error and pointed that out and thus saved being overcharged by $4.75 on that too. I wonder how many little things like that have slipped my eye in the past.
My free time this week was spent on things like scanning, daydreaming, looking for houses to no avail, petting Tigey, and catching up on my anime backlog. In particular, I finished Seiyuu Radio no Uraomote this week and loved it, it’s now easily in the top 30 shows or so that I’ve watched, maybe even top 20. I’m down to one more series from last season to catch up on the stuff that I had left in my queue from when I went to Asia, which is Yuru Camp Season 3, a show (franchise) that’s already in my top 20 as well. I tend to watch my seasonal backlog from least to most anticipated, so I’m well into the cream of the crop from last season now.
My bank account has also recovered decently since my trip. I’ve paid off Kel, refilled my side Scotiabank account so that it’s an extra $1,000 above the minimum limit to be flexible, withdrawn a bit of money to have around the house just in case, and I have about $5,000 left in the bank account after all that, though this month’s credit card bill and parental tithe haven’t hit yet. I’ll still have about $3,500 or so left over after all that though, which is reassuring since I was flirting with $0 after the credit card bill following my trip. TIME FOR ANOTHER TRIP.
(I wish. The wanderlust is there for sure, though.)
Also on the 19th, we had a midday rain followed by a really nice, “crowded” sunset sky. Nothing the sky could do for the rest of the week would beat these absolutely glorious pictures:
That was just so awesome! That orange splash just above the sun in the second picture was like a reverse ocean. I love the sky. The one on the following day would normally be a pretty decent shot for the week but could not help but pale in comparison:
And I saw and captured another large goofball of a sun without any rays at sundown, just a big red blob in the sky, on Thursday evening:
Games
I spent a bit of time in a circuit of games this week — Fallout 76 (with Satinel), Knock on the Coffin Lid (which Nomakk is playing too), Our Adventurer Guild (which I don’t understand how it has Overwhelmingly Positive reviews even though the game is littered with typoes, even though the story seems funny), Zenless Zone Zero (in which I continue to enjoy the side stories), and Littlewood (in which I continue to entertain and cook and plant and harvest materials for an entire village of worthless NPCs who cannot do anything on their own).
Littlewood might well be the first Stardew Valley-like game which I will 100% in the end. The loop is fairly simple but not overly so, and I like collecting all the furniture blueprints and building them. Had to look up several things that were not well explained or displayed in game though, like traveler gifts and flower pollination. This is a common problem with Stardew-type games.
On the other side, Fallout 76 is inoffensive and not bad at all, especially when Satinel and I both installed a chat mod so that we could chat with each other (as the game does not provide in-game text chat by default but does support — or at least have — player-made mods to supplement that). Yet, I haven’t yet found the spark that would make me want to play the game more. Like I told Satinel, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the game but it hasn’t managed to capture me.
A game called Aotenjo, a mix of Balatro and mahjong, had a demo come out this week, and I had some fun with that for a few hours. It’s a little barebones right now though, but has potential, and seems decently explained, probably even to those who have not played mahjong before (I think — I have so I can’t say for sure), and I can’t wait to see where the game goes before its release.
I also played and streamed a bit of Merchant of the Six Kingdoms, by request of Satinel who knew that I was itching to try to stream something. We had latency issues so I don’t know that the stream went very well but otherwise it was nice to mess around with and show her around a game that was in the same genre as the game jam game that she made last week, and point out what I thought its strengths and flaws were. That game having no stable currency despite having a coin system still bugs me.
The funniest part of the entire thing though was getting an email a couple of days after streaming it, offering a streaming sponsorship from a “game” with predatory microtransactions called Rise of Kingdoms:
I’ve seen Nomakk do a number of sponsored streams with actual proper games, and also talk about the predatory ones that are also sitting there in the offer section (both on Twitch‘s bounty board and through StreamElements like the above one) and how they always try to lure people in with large payouts that are technically possible to gain but only if you have a ton of people all playing a ton of time into the game together with the streamer, which is almost always impossible. I never expected one of them to reach out after I did a single 2 hour stream though. I’m not even a Twitch affiliate! And by the end of the week, there were 10 of them, all F2P games with microtransactions and/or gacha boxes (although apparently a lot of them say as part of your contract that you cannot say the word “gacha” on stream while doing the sponsored stream, haha).
Plushie of the Week #148
This week, I am pulling out a rather unfortunate-looking plushie from the archives, one that is currently sitting in the box at my parents’ place and was there the last time that I went there to take photographs. It’s a bald turtle with a vaguely humanoid-shaped face and limbs, or perhaps a human baby with a turtle shell attached to it, since there’s a picture of a milk bottle on its tag that reads DooDoo — there’s a lot to pity this plushie for but it’s nonetheless somewhat cute. We had no idea where this creature is from, but the website that the tag points to a Singapore store called Mini Toons (local), and in fact this plushie looks very similar to the Tortoise Girl Plushie on this page (local), just without the pink ribbon, so it’s a safe bet that that was the origin of this plushie (and thus a Kel purchase), and this is probably a Tortoise Boy Plushie. The live website itself is long gone anyway, so I’m not sure if they’re still around these days anyway.
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Song of the Week #125
Title: Sailing
Artist: Rod Stewart
Album: Atlantic Crossing (1975)
This song is a beloved song to me, but a more recent one — it only entered my S-Tier Spotify list in August of 2016, during a couple year period of grim reflection after my voice surgery in Seoul, South Korea in October 2015 and before my vaginoplasty surgery in Montreal, Canada in November 2017. I had known of the song long before then, easily stretching back to the 90s for me, but it didn’t take off as a beloved song for me until that time. I never particularly liked (or disliked) Rod Stewart and his songs but this one bit me for some reason during that time, and surged up in my song rankings.
The song obviously embodies travelling and water, and I’m sure for many people who love the wide expanse of the ocean, it’s a theme song that represents their wanderlust and the mystery of the open waves. I have no such mousou (delusion) — I do not find the ocean or sea or anything larger than a stream or small river to be romantic or alluring. Although I do really like streams and rivers. But no, for me, this actually embodies the air, the wind — you can’t have sailing without water but you can’t have it without wind either. I am a creature of the wind, and like the sails catching the gentle breeze, I will fly free and see where she takes me.
Besides that, I don’t really have any mental image or nostalgic event that comes to mind for this song, except I have a dark image of a sailboat, perhaps setting off on a journey to unknown places after dark. It’s possible that the word darkness relates to sailing for me due to an IdleWild screen saver called Boat Race that is similar to the Rat Race screen saver in the After Dark suite. See this memory snippet for a little more info on that rabbit hole.
Memory Snippet of the Week #132
I don’t know how true this is, but I read in a book when I was younger that the hardest 7-letter word to unscramble when all the letters are rearranged in alphabetical order, is the unscrambled form of the letters ABENOTY. This random alleged factoid has stuck with me ever since. Is this true? How was this “proven”? On what research was this claim made?
I’ve mentioned an anagram game that our Dunman High crew used to play a couple times already, specifically in My Diary #113 and My Diary #119. We would make lists of scrambled words for each other during class or in our spare time, and them similarly solve them during class or in our spare time. I found and got around to scanning some of them late last year sometime, and I haven’t uploaded anything from my scanned stuff from a while so I wanted to toss these up and link them to one of my Table of Contents pages.
So without further ado, here are a couple of anagram packages/pages that I found preserved all this time. I’m not sure who wrote these and gave them to me, though it was most likely Huihan based on the handwriting and the theme of the words. The first two scans here are from opposite sides of the same sheet of paper, while the third scan was its own sheet.
I’m not sure if there are more of these secreted around somewhere, but if there are I’ll scan and add them to this Memory Snippet in the future.
By the way, ABENOTY unscrambles into “bayonet”.
Dreams
Dreams are weird. I went 8 days (Aug 07-14 inclusive) without a remembered dream over the past couple weeks, and then went at least 11 days (Aug 15-25 inclusive) with some sort of remembered dream. Including the August 18th one last week, which was on Sunday and thus was squeezed in last minute to last week’s blog, so I still hadn’t fully processed yet, but will likely turn out to be remembered as one of those magical 8/10 dreams.
Also, Aug 25 2016 was the date of the very first dream diary entry in my file, so my dream diary is 8 years old today!
Aug 19 2024
- I dreamt that I was with Kel in class after school and was going to meet her somewhere later on in the day to run a game dungeon, but she had to finish some homework and do some oter chores that involved paying money first whereas I wanted to go home first and prepare some stuff. This happened for two days in a row. On the second day, I nagged her to hurry up and come home too and take a bath before doing her homework so that her hair would be dry for when we go adventuring. She only had a stack of 1000 Japanese yen notes with her to try to make her payment with, and I offered to trade a $10 Canadian note for one of them but said that I didn’t really know the current exchange rate. She didn’t either. Eventually a teacher and then a prefect came into the classroom and helped settle that before chasing us both out of the classroom as the prefect was going to clean the room.
- In the end, I went on before her and was stuck somewhere between my Yishun 799 and Yishun 723 houses. It didn’t feel like I had an actual home in either apartment though.
- In the dungeon part of the dream, we had to navigate through a series of fire and lava tunnels and fight a fire boss after stepping through several teleporters connecting the tunnels together. We barely lost, and decided to go upgrade a few pieces of our armour. Some of our gear was correctly upgraded to the fire zone, with fire-resistant stats, but some of our gear was still leftovers from the last zone, with earth resistance on it and slightly lower stats overall. Kel was the tank and damage dealer so I told her to upgrade her gear with our leftover ore first, since I was a healer and ranged character and would be less likely to be hit. We had taken the boss all the way down to half health in just a few seconds before getting wiped so I figured I could skip some of the gear upgrades until the next zone.
- At one point, I visited a bookshop and found Book 6 of the Fabled Lands series tucked away on a shelf, but a girl who was there before me took it and a large teddy bear and went off to the counter to pay for them. I was glad that I already owned that book and thus didn’t need another copy of it. I watched her walk out the store and further into the shopping mall with a large plastic bag.
- At another instance, I was preparing for class the next day and asked a few friends from Dunman High what homework we had for it, apparently Chinese was the only class which had assigned us homework and it was just answering a few questions from the textbook, which would just take a few minutes. We also chatted about how tomorrow was a field trip day and we were going to meet directly at West Edmonton Mall at noon to start off the school day instead of our classroom. I said that I would probably be there at 11 am and walk around beforehand since I was already familiar with the place.
Aug 20 2024
- I was with a couple other people on a long adventure, which involved travelling around between places in an oval mining machine that was shaped like my standing fan’s remote control, just a lot larger, at one point.
- One event I remember from the adventure is being in the upstairs level of my Edmonton 4012 house and seeing a number of enemies talking to each other in my siblings’ bedroom, whose door was ajar. We tried to find the correct angle to stand so that only the enemy nearest to the door in the room could see us, although his back was turned to us at first, and then once we were in the right position we made a noise to aggro him and pull him away from his friends and into my bedroom so that we could defeat him there.
- The game had a weapon upgrade system where a weapon could be levelled up and morph into several weapons before becoming an ultimate weapon. One of the ultimate weapons might have been named Vangrokia. Also my weapon had a high accuracy but also high presence attack, which meant that it was difficult for me not to use it, like I had to discharge it now and then to reduce the pressure of not having recently used it.
- Lastly, I remember a scene where we were in a room that looked like a museum, with a number of slowly gyrating stands, each one holding five identical copies of an item on display. Because there were five copies of each, we could steal one item from a couple of stands without incident.
Aug 21 2024
- I remember a hotel/shopping centre that I went through, with an elevator that stopped on each floor and escalators connecting the bottom floors. Each floor besides the ground floor had a balcony with railings that allowed people to look down toward the bottom floor. The escalators were of a gentle incline and had two short horizontal portions built in to the diagonal slope as well. I took both the elevator and escalators several times over the course of the dream. I was waiting for two other friends one time at the elevator but they didn’t arrive so I went up with other strangers instead.
- We lived on the third floor and at one point Dad came out to watch over me from the third floor railing as I went downstairs to order food from some of the shops on the bottom levels. There was a whole procedure or minigame that had to be obeyed to go shopping and buy food and I helped someone else through it on a different occasion.
- There was also a school level with classrooms but I was already graduated so I was working there instead of studying there. At one point I had a messaging app that I had to set up on my new phone to receive work messages on, but for some reason they were delivering to my old pre-transition name instead of my new one, and I knew that I needed to change some setting or talk to some admin person or something to get this fixed like I had on my last phone. I looked through my old email and thought about looking through my blog as well to see what I had done the last time I had set it up.
- Later, I hung out outside the classrooms with a couple other friends, next to the railing that allowed me to see down toward the bottom of the building. I looked at the day’s schedule and saw that English class was starting in the classroom next to me, but according to a sheet of paper I was holding, Robert Barrington Leigh had a 2-3 hour long Math competition to attend that morning as well. I saw him not far from me, outside the classroom front door, seated at a table that was pushed up against the railing as the English teacher gave him the exam paper before heading into her class.
Aug 22 2024
- Snippet: I remember there being a couple of airplanes and that I was sitting or standing on the wing of one of them, while talking to someone else who was likewise standing on another.
- Snippet: I also remember passing by a room and seeing Shuuka in it as she got chided by someone else for some reason having to do with needing to be more independent.
Aug 23 2024
- Two friends who also ran a weekly radio show together. When on air, the two girls shared a desk with a board attached to its front side which was facing the dream camera. The board was divided into six squares and each square could be selected but cost a certain amount from the overall show’s time bar, while containing an item for the person who picked the square. One of the items from the board was carrots, for example, while another was wooden planks. Some also just gave points and someone was trying to collect all the points in a little pile, but they couldn’t finish their collection because I had to use part of the time bar to get something crucial for my dream plans.
- Later on, in a separate dream, I visited a market in an overseas city during an intermission of some game event, and went to the back of the marketplace area, where I found a table selling a box of 50 lapis sagu rainbow treats for 1500 of the local currency. I spent some time trying to divide the price and find out the cost of each cake to calculate whether this was a good deal or not. The stall owner then picked up a cat from the ground and put it on his lap, and I pulled out a camera to try to take a picture of the two of them, but the camera screen was full of glare, like there was sunlight or glass behind the store owner even though in reality there was just a solid wall behind him.
Aug 24 2024
- I remember playing a top-down game with some friends involving a series of zones, each zone or level having several different biomes and a goal where we had to collect certain resources and other items from the level while enemy overlord NPCs or players weren’t looking, before being able to proceed to the next level. For example, for one level I was sneaking through some grassy land with a friend, and telling her that we had already figured out how to gather the items from the level but did not want to tip off the lord that we were ready to move on yet, and wondering if we could sneak into the next zone early to get a headstart there since we still had lots of time on our timer for the current level, since we would lose that extra time if we triggered the final fight for the level right now. The next zone was way to the north though, past large open plains. Still, we went east to get away from where the overlord was hanging out in the west, and tried to go northwards to scout out the area.
- At another point having one of my teammates put behind some bars into a mini jail at one end of a room, as some sort of penalty that cost him a couple of hours of detention. He took a basketball and another sports ball in with him and asked me to give him some resources while I was helping the powers that be lock him in. I hesitated for a bit and then opened my inventory UI and dropped 5 wood on the floor in front of the jail cell so that he could pick it up.
- At yet another point, I was sitting and watching something on a computer monitor at a table with Mom and Dad. It was suggested that we were watching an anime that was also related to the level we were on or place we were in somehow. As the episode ended, I realized that I was being rude as the monitor was located just in front of me even though I was on the right side of the long table. Dad was sitting in the middle and could watch diagonally just fine, but Mom, who was still recovering from her stroke, was on the left side of the long table and had to strain her neck and eventually stand up to be able to watch. I apologized and said that they should have spoken up and I would have just moved the monitor into the middle of the table. I did start to move it but they said not to worry since we weren’t watching another episode for now.
- Lastly, there was a quiz for a game show where someone had come up with a list of questions and written all the answers on a board for about seven of us, who were going to be the actual game show hosts. Each of us was in charge of 5 or 6 questions in a different category. We had the list of questions on a separate sheet of paper and had more or less looked over the answers already, so I started to colour over the answer board with a black marker to hide the answers so that the contestants would not be able to see them. However, someone pointed out that it would be nice for us to have the board as well since we all weren’t very sure that we had memorized all the answers properly yet. I even tried recalling the answers to one of my questions, something about a building in an American city named after a former president whose name was related to the category name that I was in charge of, like the Ford Tower or something, and found out that I wasn’t certain what the answer was. So I pressed and held an undo button until I rewound all my actions as I told myself that I didn’t want to pursue that dream route for now.
- Snippet: I also remember passing by three guys drinking and smoking on the grass beneath a tree and I brought out my phone to try to take a picture of them as I was passing by. As far as I know I succeeded with that but I don’t remember how the rest of the dream went.
Aug 25 2024
- Snippet: I was pushing something that looked like a lawnmower across a few roads toward a river that cut horizontally across town, as I needed it to test the water supply or something like that. I actually overshot the river at first, but realized it after a couple streets and went back west and north past a construction area where a bunch of kids were sitting on some metal I-beams that were left on the floor and playing with blue cords that were left on those beams.
- Snippet: There was also a large convoluted story around unlocking things in a museum or city and also a thing where pressing the F1 key on a keyboard would generate a shield of pure energy for me, but I don’t remember how any of those things relate to each other.