Entry #155 (Sep 08 2024)
Table of Contents
Rainbow Goobert…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #150
ට Song of the Week #127
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #134
ට Dreams
Life
My days have settled down into a very normal routine — work in the morning, anime group watch and AMQ in the afternoon, and Twitch streams in the evening, more or less. There was even a mini heat wave this weekend, likely the last one of the season now that we’re at the tail end of summer, but with my new fan I barely felt it at all, so all it gets is this one sentence. Something came up this week that threatens to upend this streak of mundane life though. It seems like Mom might be going for heart surgery nearer the end of the month to fix the problem that gave her her major stroke last year, as the cardiologist has said that she would be a good candidate for it and is currently of good/stable health to do so.
The decision and dates are not final yet, but will likely also overlap with Jon going out of the country for a couple weeks on a preplanned trip, so with Kel also already back in China, I might end up moving to the parents’ place for a couple of weeks to help out with them and watch over them while Mom recovers from her surgery.
The exact details of what this entails, and when it will happen if so, are not set in stone yet though, so for now I’m in a wait-and-see mode. It will likely strike about 2-3 weeks from now and last for a couple of weeks. It will be an interesting change of scenery for sure, though my main worries are food as well as being able to do my usual computer-related stuff throughout the day. I might just end up bringing my entire PC over there for the couple of weeks. There’s also a sound issue though since I’d be living with other people and probably can’t just use the PC speakers to blast out my sound, plus my evening Twitch stream that I moderate for tends to be a bit dirty at times as one of their running gags, but I’m also deaf in one ear so if I use headphones or earphones then I won’t hear anything if Mom falls down or something.
Work has also picked up a bit and gotten busier, since I’m in the process of taking back our team’s knowledge base system again and revamping a bunch of articles and coming up with new processes in response to an ongoing system audit that our department is going through. I don’t know how this will mix with me moving over to my parents’ place, especially since October was also supposed to be a start of an initiative from our “new leadership” where they wanted people back in the office once a week, though I think this has either been forgotten about or pushed back or watered down some. But I have no plans to comply with that if I’m staying with my parents (and if I am eventually forced to do that, I will take a class and spend my day “on campus” in classes for part of the day and then head home after). I think everything will turn out fine though.
Twitch released their garbage Stories “feature” (local), which allows streamers to make and post Tiktok-style “look at me I’m so sexy” portrait videos, about 3 weeks ago now. Or rather, the feature has been out for a couple years but they made it available for all their Twitch affiliates and partners within the past few weeks, and forced it so everyone had to see Stories from their followed channels posted at the top of their Twitch sidebar if any of their followed channels posted Stories. Pushing down the list of actual live channels and such, which are by far the most important part of the sidebar for most people. This was so annoying that many people, me included, just rage-unfollowed channels that posted stories, and my channel kill count in the past 3 weeks was 6 of them (a couple of which I plan to never follow again).
I did eventually find a fix though, even though the article above states that it cannot be hidden at this time, which was that those webpage elements could just be hidden via an adblocker like uBlock Origin anyway. The filters will likely change at some point as Twitch‘s enshittification continues on unabated, but for the moment, as per this Reddit thread, the following filters work:
www.twitch.tv##.storiesLeftNavSection–csO9S.dcyYPL.Layout-sc-1xcs6mc-0
www.twitch.tv##.lcFJxY.Layout-sc-1xcs6mc-0
So that was good to discover. However, the second line doesn’t seem to affect Open Stories, but instead removes the streamer Plus Goal counter located on their streaming page, so I ended up removing that line entirely and just running with the first one. That alone still seemed to block Open Stories just fine.
My apartment complex suffered a power outage on Wednesday, from about 3:34 pm to 4:13 pm, which was very rare — it’s the first power outage I’ve experienced in a long time, to the point that there has not been a single power outage reported in my weekly blog posts up until now! Looking back in Discord, my last power outage was on Oct 13 2021, which meant that it should have been in My Diary #026 — but I didn’t mention it there, so it must have just been a very minor one. The cell network, despite being 5G, also performed really badly during the power outage, likely since everyone in the block must have immediately hopped onto the cellular network to talk about it. It was a fairly widespread one around central and southern Edmonton. Thankfully EPCOR fixed it within the hour though.
There’s been a bunch of construction noises around the apartment recently, and perhaps related to that, a couple of new things appeared by the front door of our apartment building over the past week or so. Firstly this weird self-guided tour thing:
And then this big, new utility tank in front on a concrete slab that also wasn’t there before:
I asked my housing agent this week to expand the number of properties that appear on the housing portal that he set up for me. The filter before was for residential units <380k, but apparently that actually just meant 300k-380k and I noticed there were some places near me that I was mildly interested me but that never appeared on it because they were sub-300k in price. He changed it to 240k-380k for me though. Also I asked him to filter out unfinished basements since I don’t want to deal with that. I’d rather have a full basement, or no basement at all, then maybe a partially finished one, but never an unfinished one. The housing selection also now includes duplexes, which it didn’t before. So suddenly I have another 30-something places to look at that weren’t in the list before. I feel like the number should be a bit higher still though.
I read this article (local) this week, thanks to Firefox’s Pocket-recommended stories on their new tab page, and I wanted to highlight it here. It talks about buying a small fancy or unique plate and using that to spice up your life and making meals feel like a little treat to yourself, and I love this philosophy, especially since I’ve bought or received several over the past little while. Like these two bowls from a couple of weeks ago, one of which I use often for soup and sometimes cereal now. Or the bowl that Kel bought for me when she visited in July, which was a copy of a bowl I had originally bought in Hong Kong but which then broke on my return journey, and which is now my main rice and noodles bowl. There were also spoons in that Hong Kong purchase, another bowl I bought in Taiwan on May 06 but never posted a picture of, and if we go back even further, this sakura plate from Aug 2022 or this curry spoon from Nov 2022. Or this mug from March 2024.
… I should make a Memory Snippet of the Week for plates and cutlery at some point and put all that into there.
Finally, here are the usual weekly scenery pictures. This first one, from Monday at 8:13 pm, I’m pretty sure involved some sort of gang meeting in the carpark, just look at the way the cars were arranged. The five guys stood there talking for a bit while the 6th guy on the left side walked back and forth, as though keeping watch.
Ignoring any instances of potential nefarious plotting, the skies did look good this week, especially in my Tuesday picture below.
Sunday, Sep 01, 8:24 pm:
Monday, 9:17 pm, an hour after the gang picture, amidst the pouring rain that was so strong that the rain was coming into my house through the balcony door despite it being covered by a ceiling and having a wire screen door blocking the entrance. The torrential part of the downpour only lasted around 15 minutes though:
Tuesday, 8:17 pm. Isn’t this absolutely gorgeous?
Wednesday, 8:52 pm, colourful and streaky layers:
And Friday, Sep 06, 7:38 pm:
And then again at 8:23 pm:
Games
Games I played this week include Deadlock with friends, Dave the Diver where I got to amuse myself with 4x100cm seahorse relay races, eSports Godfather where I started a new game after feeling an urge to go back to it for just a while, and then Stardew Valley, where I managed to finish the “evil” capitalist route for an achievement that cannot be gotten on the normal game route since you have to demolish the community centre and instead farm a bunch of money to upgrade the Joja community purchases to maximum.
With that out of the way, and the prairie minigame achievements out of the way as well from a few years ago when I loaded it up just to specifically play that minigame, I’ve actually now finished all the “annoying” achievements in Stardew Valley that people complain about since they don’t really match the spirit of the game. So if and when I go back and do a full playthrough of the game, I should be able to get everything else by just playing normally and doing the One True Route, so to speak. I might do this if or when I go to my parents’ place for a couple weeks at the end of the month like I mentioned earlier, or I might do this some other time. Or maybe right away if I can’t find anything else that I want to play. But like the way I eat a dish of mixed vegetables, I’ve now gotten the yucky bits out of the way first.
While fishing for other games to play, I tried out Kitaria Fables too but it felt awkward to control and play. It does say that a controller is suggested instead of keyboard and mouse, but I was too lazy to fish mine out and plug it in, so maybe that’s partially why, but the gameplay loop did not seem particularly inspiring after a couple of hours either. I also played some early game Core Keeper, since I still have an urge to build a little settlement.
Plushie of the Week #150
The Rainbow Goobert Plushie that I pledged for back in June arrived this week on Sunday, Sep 01 from Makeship (local), and thus he gets to be the Plushie of the Week this week. Entry number 150!
These plushies are a little pricey, they cost $29.99 USD as a base cost but with an additional $8.99 USD shipping to Canada (from China), and $1.95 USD of taxes on top of that, so the final price came to $40.93 USD, or $56.41 CAD after conversion. Makeship does seem to have a good selection of branded plushies up on crowdfunding at any given time, and I do wish they were cheaper so that I could get more of them, but c’est la vie. The Rainbow Goobert Plushie is from Backpack Battles, and I also have a Ranger Plushie already ordered through them as well, but that latter one only just finished its crowdfunding round and so is still a couple of months away from arrival.
The plushie is actually a little bit smaller than I expected too, especially for that price, but that’s fine. I expected it to be around the same size as Egg but he was about half the size of her instead, and even slightly smaller than my Squishmallow plushies. He did come in a cool drawstring bag, which was nice.
Goobert in Bag:
Goobert and Bag front:
Goobert and Bag back:
Just Goobert front:
Tag 1 front:
Tag 1 back:
Tag 2 front (for some reason this says Goober instead of Goobert):
Tag 2 back:
The bag also came with an insert slip. Insert slip front:
Insert slip back:
The QR code goes to this website (local).
Finally, here’s a comparison picture of Rainbow Goobert together with, from left to right, Opal, Starmiya, Major, and Egg!. The rotund crew (minus Tigey). He’s smaller than all of them!
Song of the Week #127
Title: Love2000
Artist: Hikaru Toono
Album: Make Heroine ga Oosugiru! OST
This song is from a seasonal anime called Make Heroine ga Oosugiru! which is still currently airing as of the time of writing. I need to make a list at some point of my favourite song from each season of anime that I have watched over the past few years, but this one was a runaway victory for this season. The show itself is great too, with lots of background gags, expressive character faces, unique art styles and design, fun characters, and trope avoidance, but the song, which played as the ending song for the first four episodes, drove it over the top for me to make it my favourite show of the season over a couple of other shows that I also really like.
The song is apparently a cover, with the original version being an actual hit song from a singer called hitomi, originally released in the year 2000. That version is pretty good too, but I prefer this 2024 remix. The visuals for the song in the anime ending version are great too, And I liked the song so much that I also made my Anime Group Watch group watch Anima Yell! just so that we could get the version of this song in that anime, sung by Natsumi Kon, into our AMQ games as well.
This song has a nostalgic late 90s sort of feel to me, and besides generally loving the tune and vocals, the overall song also reminds me of my Rosyth and Dunman classrooms, and hanging out there with friends before or after classes while it rained outside. It’s a wonderful, long-lost feeling that is further reinforced by the visuals of the video, which has a character running through the halls in a style very reminiscent of Kareshi Kano no Jijou‘s ending song, Yume no Naka e.
Memory Snippet of the Week #134
I’ve talked about both the Anime Group Watch and AMQ things that I partake in, in many individual posts, but I’ve never dedicated a blog segment to it which I can then point and link back to in the future if needed, I believe. Minus the very small blurb in this Thankful segment. So here we are.
I never watched anime for the first 34 years or so of my life, since I had no idea that much anime existed outside of action shounen, robots, and mecha stuff at all, and I had no interest in that sort of thing. Although I did read the first couple volumes of the Naruto manga at one point in my mid 20s when Kel got her hands on them. It was briefly interesting before it devolved into fights and other nonsense and became dominated by the guy characters instead of the girl one, Sakura I think, so I quit reading it.
In 2017, I started to play a bunch of anime games for some reason or other. This started with NieR: Automata in March 2017 when it first launched, which I 100%’d, and which Jah then also streamed on Jah Stream Night. At the end of July in the same year, Jah then played Megadimension Neptunia VII, which I actually still haven’t played at this time, but which kicked off something in me, as I then played The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky in early August and then Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 right after that. I had a lot of fun and started sampling more anime-styled games over the next year or so. It was like a door had opened to a whole new world, since I had largely ignored anime-styled games up till that point too.
Fast forward a year or so, and in late November 2018, Satinel suggested that since I had played so many anime games already, I would probably like anime as well. She suggested Demi-chan wa Kataritai, or Interviews With Monster Girls, which sounded weird at first but was at least not one of the common fighting anime that I had passively seen and heard about (or one of the thousand-episode shows like One Piece). I decided to try it since Satinel‘s words carry a lot of weight with me as my best friend, and I binged the entire thing in one night on Nov 23 2018. That was great!
From there, I solicited different anime shows from various friends to try out and watch, ending up on some bad shows due to recommendations from friends who didn’t understand that some shows (Uchuu Patrol Luluco in particular) are NOT suitable for people new to the genre, but also ending up on some great shows with top-tier lasting memories like Non Non Biyori, K-On!, Yuru Camp, and Sora yori mo Tooi Basho, all of which were in the first 10 shows that I watched, and which I think of fondly still through the rose-tinted goggles of my “early days of anime”. Because I started watching anime so late in my life, when I was already fully invested into tracking and archiving things, I was also able to start tracking my watched anime list on MyAnimeList.
Soon after that, I also discovered seasonal anime, the cutting edge of current anime with episodes that were being produced and released weekly and discussed on places like /r/anime. I started watching these as well, supplementing this with watching older weekly anime with Satinel and Nak in a project that I call the Anime Group Watch. Anime Group Watch has been great, we started this a month after I started watching anime, in December 2018, and have continued taking turns and picking shows to watch every day (except Mondays and vacation days/holidays) since.
We watch 3 episodes a day or so, and since most shows are not legally carried by any company and the market is too fragmented with licensing companies wanting a piece of the pie, we used to have one person who had the show stream it on a service called Rabbit (https://lets.rabb.it, which apparently turned into some service called Kast (local), but Rabbit is long dead and we don’t use Kast). But we’ve stopped doing that too since the latency was not ideal, and nowadays we just look for the show on whatever platform it’s on by ourselves separately from the other two people and then sync the start of our episodes together through a countdown. We still do this today (as of time of writing) and it’s great, even though there’s been many days in the weeks over the years where I wish we had more days off. Making it a routine and pushing through the shows each week does make it feel really good afterwards though, especially since we pair this with AMQ.
AMQ is Anime Music Quiz, a web game where you can sync your watched anime lists to the game, which will then pull out random opening, ending, and/or insert songs from the shows that someone in your play group has watched (or optionally shows that no one has watched as well) and play a snippet of the song for everyone to guess the originating show. It’s great, and has taught me a lot about music as well as anime composers, as well as turned me on to some shows that I would never have known about or watched otherwise but have ended up watching purely on the strength of their songs in AMQ.
When we first started anime and were watching shows on Rabbit, we used to play a different anime opening/ending shows game while waiting for everyone to get ready. I’ve long since lost the name of this game though, and the Google search results are very hard to root through these days due to a proliferation of “daily” anime opening/ending guessing games that sprouted in the wake of Wordle becoming a thing since December 2021. I just remember that instead of an open-ended answer box with a drop-down list like AMQ has by default (until recently, when it added a multiple choice mode), it was solely a multiple choice game from the start, and it pulled from a much smaller list and kept giving us the opening song of Uchuu Kyoudai to guess.
Eventually we found AMQ and moved over to it though, playing that for a few rounds after our daily Anime Group Watch episodes. Rounds default to 20 songs or so, and we used to play 3 rounds of that per day. I think at one point we tried 5 rounds of that as well, and liked the overall number of songs, but songs repeat over rounds and we didn’t like 5 separate rounds of that, so we set a default of 33 songs a round instead to get around 100 songs a day. We also set 30 of the songs to be from our shared lists and 3 songs from totally random shows, which would still sometimes resolve into songs from shows that we knew, or that were guessable due to being adjacent to shows that we knew, or just shows with a certain style of music, or even just sometimes due to the lyrics mentioning the show.
The game itself has evolved over the years as the dev has worked on it. I used to donate to it, and almost became a mod for it at one point, but some of the existing mods there were a little toxic so I ended up not doing so, which turned out to be a good thing because that opened the door for two other things in my life, one being to start classes and eventually go to Japan several times, and the other being my mod role on the TipofmyJoystick subreddit’s Discord server. But we’ve enjoyed playing the base game itself, and I think being so tied into music and building memories on it the way we are is very beneficial for one’s long-term memory and to fight the onset of aging. Also, it’s very beneficial for one’s long-term memory and to fight the onset of aging. And also, it’s very beneficial for…
Our gameplay style has also varied. We started like everyone else, syncing our normal lists and playing from there, but we moved at some point to custom crafted lists of up to 100 shows per list because our main lists are too big and the game always seemed to randomly select certain songs from certain shows a lot more than other shows, as RNG does. And the songs and shows we did like would not come up very often just due to the sheer volume of shows that we had. With crafted lists, we could put stuff we liked on the list as well as stuff we wanted to learn or torment the group with, or “groups” of shows to make themed lists or something.
We also moved from playing competitively against each other, to playing a fully unofficial co-op mode where we’d share answers in chat and discuss what we thought the answer was, within the 20-30 second time limit, before deciding on an answer (or deciding to disagree and putting in whatever we want instead). The game did eventually launch a co-op mode where one person submitting an answer could be automatically copied by everyone else on the team too, but the developer in his eternal wisdom purposely nerfed experience gains in that mode so we never used it. There were also other game modes that we tried now and then, like a battle royale mode and a nexus dungeon mode, but at the end of the day the original game mode was still the best one.
Over time, we played with a lot of people and I wanted to note them down here. The original group was with the same people that I do group watch with, Satinel and Nak, with Heg joining us after some time as well. Nak eventually dropped out of this after a couple of years, around the same time that Lightcaller, someone I met from another group, joined us from his European time zone, so he only really played on Fridays and Saturdays NA time as those were the days that he could afford to stay up in the European mornings due to the lack of work on the following day. Looking at my friends list, I also see accounts from Jahandar and Kynji, so they have joined us on extremely rare occasions in the past to check the game out as well, but they didn’t watch enough anime in the first place to be able to really vibe with the game, so they didn’t stick around.
That other group of people that Lightcaller was from included Neichus, KiwiBen, and Angrypinkcrocodile, a group that I played with on Saturdays for several months before they all dropped playing. We also initially sometimes played with a group from the /r/anime Discord, led by Seren, and including other people like Kinpika, and then a bunch of rude people I didn’t really care for and never befriended. Lastly, I occasionally played with some people from the Chihayafuru Discord server, where I met and befriended people like AlexFBFB, BodhiSearchTree, Ensorcell, EpicTroll, Jangles, and SoftKaede. Many of them also occasionally joined our main group for a game or ten before drifting away. Lastly, Satinel had a friend named Emmy who joined for a month or so as Emmy_, so I called her Emmy Underscore until the end of time.
These days our group just includes Satinel, Heg, me, and then Lightcaller on weekends as well. But I wanted to write all this down to preserve some of my memories with the game this week, because after 5 years and 5 months of playing, I finally hit level 1000 in the game! Out of what apparently is a maximum of 5000 levels. My account was created on 04/04/2019, and I have a 63.95% guess rate on 192,410 songs or so (it took me 192,311 songs to hit level 1000 since I’ve played another day’s worth of songs since then).
Satinel stated the other day that this is the only game where we’re playing normally but I’m outstripping her in levels — usually it’s the other way around, with her somehow gaining levels on me despite the fact that we’re playing together. Anyway, this was apparently true from the very start of our AMQ careers, even before I joined a couple of other friend groups to play with them and thus started to really outlevel Satinel and the others, since to cap off this writeup I wanted to post both the very first and very last screenshot that I have in my folders on the journey to level 1000. My first screenshot was this one, from May 01 2019:
And my last one was this one, from Sep 05 2024:
Now for the journey to level 2000!
Dreams
And another 7-day dream week! Nothing particularly long and memorable though.
Sep 02 2024
- I was going through a tall building, where each floor is a grid based floor map. Floor 17-21 or so in particular had monster enemies, I had been here before and was here with two other friends so I had prepared spells accordingly, and also led the way and we went to Floor 16 by elevator, then had to hang on the rim of a hole in the ground and fall down gently into Floor 17 below us, which had some small spiders waiting for us. We had to visit a couple of specific places in these few levels, like a stone hut where someone was living in. I led the way through the levels as the occasional enemy group spawned and dropped in around us.
- Outside of Floors 17-21, we also tried to visit a fast food restaurant elsewhere in the building, where there was a set deal for buying two burgers, and Kel ordered two of the same McChicken burger and then decided she wanted her second burger to be something else with fresh lettuce instead. I had been busy figuring out whether a Happy Meal set was cheaper if I bought all the components separately, so I was a bit behind on my order as I had decided to first order a large whipped potato side dish, as opposed to the Happy Meal which only provided a medium side dish, and then had only picked one of my two burgers so far. I volunteered to take Kel‘s second burger as my second one so she could take some other burger as her second.
- Kel got into a heated exchange with the cashier who was trying to get her to accept a raccoon meat burger or something though and she kept on refusing. In the end they were unable to fully fulfil either of our burger requests as the kitchen, which was on another floor, had run out of ingredients. They did manage to make one of my burgers before running out, and it came with an anime girl sticker pasted on top of the bun. I was relieved that they did not misprint the sticker and have to throw away the burger since the whole process of making it was apparently new.
Sep 03 2024
- I was at a guild meetup with my online gaming guild in a neighbourhood that several guild members owned an apartment in. There were eventually about 15 of us in all, with two vans that we piled into when we needed to drive around. People I know including Kynji and Frotswa owning a small house in the area, and Rinuruc hearing about the event and driving in from about two hours out. Rin was one of two people who drove in to the city at around the same time, one from the north and one from the south.
- The guild meetup took place over a couple of days, with many of us staying up overnight and being tired the next morning. Our activities involved us looking out for crimes and random events and solving them. There was a robbery, a helicopter crash in a garden, a lost transit card, mysterious visitors looking for one of us at night when we were all staying in our guild house, and one of our guild members was shot at one point when he scuffled with some drug dealers outside a science centre or something that the rest of us were visiting. In turn, we had been visiting that science centre to check out an exhibit which contained a hidden set of GPS coordinates, but multiple people also discovered that other random people had already also come to that exhibit and put the set of coordinates on Google Maps to spoil the puzzle.
Sep 04 2024
- There was a scene where I was going through immigration at an airport with a female acquaintance that I met there, and I talked to her about importing Singapore food to wherever I was going because I would be there studying for a while and would miss the food. Apparently there was a food delivery company similar to Doordash that did deliver internationally and I was musing how they could possibly do that with a styrofoam box of noodles so that it would still be warm when it arrived. Anyway the Chinese store I liked to get delivery from was apparently going to add a couple of new dishes soon and I wanted to try them.
- There was also an old man nearby who I overheard talking to one of the airport attendants, he was asking where the nearest toilets were and she pointed him out of the gates that we had entered the room from, and toward the shopping area just outside.
- Later, I was relaxing in a bathroom with a couple people. It was similar to my Edmonton 4012 bathroom, and I was sitting on the toilet bowl facing the door, with a cabinet table to my left, and the bathtub to my right. Dad was sitting on the edge of the bathtub while Kel was sitting in the bathtub itself, and we discussed newspaper ads and recent happenings with each other. At one point, I asked Kel to get out of the tub so that I could use the glowing showerhead to wash myself, it apparently emitted ultraviolet rays instead of water.
- At another point, Nomakk was there instead of one of them. I had fallen asleep during his previous stream since it was late at night and he told me that he had bought a $50 battery pack that fit in a fanny pack around his waist to help ensure that his stream would not go out if he lost power.
Sep 05 2024
- I do remember at one point I was looking over a map with rectangles on it representing pieces of land. Most of the rectangles were long and thin, like half the length of an ice cream stick. I had about 12 or so sticks laid together to represent my entire kingdom, and each one represented a district or province and had a name and everything. There was another player who had one large rectangle that was about the size of eight smaller sticks, which represented her home base, and about 12-15 smaller sticks as well. She had a larger kingdom, but I was considered more well off than her and we were mostly on friendly terms with each other even though we considered each other rivals.
- Something happened that caused us to have to move our fiefs though, which meant that we had to pick up our sticks and put them down on another map. I lined my sticks up right against the left edge of the map, while my rival lined her sticks up against my right side, hemming me in. However, one of her provinces then expired, which put it up for auction, and I bid her up on it, pushing the price from a couple hundred gold all the way to slightly over 5000 gold, and then pushing the bids from gold to real life dollars instead.
- Gift subscriptions to the Twitch channel that our game was being broadcast on cost $2 per subscription, and I had purchased 25 to give away before the game started, so I pushed the bid up to around 50 dollars, which made her bid $51 or so in order to retain her little ice cream stick piece of land. I let her win that bid at that cost, but planned to donate the $50 worth of gift subs to the channel anyway as a donation.
- She had a similar thought process and also donated 25 gift subs to cover off most of her winning bid, but it turned out that she ended up donating to the wrong channel because she had clicked on her own channel to look up something at some point, so all her gift subs ended up on her channel instead of the broadcaster’s one. When she realized her mistake, I told her not to worry about it since I was going to donate to the channel anyway, but she bought and donated another 25 gift subs as well, except that this time she donated them to the channel for the overall game that we were playing on accident, instead of the broadcaster’s channel. I then did my donation to pay the winning bid for her before she could misfire any more gifts.
- Snippet: I remember wandering around what seemed like a school, in a world that reminded me of a first-person crafting survival game but was not actually that. I don’t remember much except I had to pick between two things a bunch of times, and that near the end of the dream, I met Zach and Lukasz who had to pick another role for their characters because we didn’t need programmers in whatever context of the dream it was.
Sep 06 2024
- While out on a walk, I saw Jon and Mom putting up a sign that said that they were having a potluck food event for the three of us in a week’s time to coincide with the holiday season. It was even covered by the newspapers with a minor footnote since they had put up the public sign, even though the feast was just for the three of us.
- I also did read in the newspaper that a major annual charity event set up in the city, near the University Hospital, had been shut down since the philanthropic donator either had run out of money or had felt like the event was no longer worth supporting in these tougher times. In previous years he had donated 2 million dollars a year to host a Christmas block party or festival outside the hospital with entertainers and food.
- But anyway for me it looked like the family gathering would replace the festival this year. I donated a bunch of food through the week, and heated up a big pot of drinking water and brought that over on the day itself as well, since they needed two big pots of water for the feast and hot water was apparently not the easiest thing to get in this world.
- However, when I arrived and went into the kitchen, which looked like Edmonton 4012‘s kitchen, I found very little food there, only several bite-sized, chopped up pieces of white bread, cabbage, and meat spread out over the counter next to the stove and over the kitchen table to make it look like there was a lot more food than there actually was. Most of the food I had sent them was also not there.
- I surmised that Jon and Mom had actually started to sample a bit of the food here and there throughout the week, and over the course of each meal ahd slowly whittled the food down to nothing already. They were now pretending that there was still a reasonable amount of food left when there wasn’t, and I was mad at them for trying to mislead me and for basically ruining the party for me since there was barely any food left.
- They argued that I should not act like that since Mom was recovering from her stroke still and could not get up and walk around much, and also that there was still so much food left and that they were now all easy to just pop into my mouth and eat. I retorted that if we gathered all the food onto a plate, it would barely even cover half the surface area of the plate.
- I regretted not immediately taking a picture of the tables when I first arrived since I had actually ate a couple of the food scraps by then anyway but I decided to give the event a bad rating in the newspaper so that others would not be misled by it into thinking that there were suitable personal festivals that had popped up to replace the philanthropic one that had been cancelled.
Sep 07 2024
- Snippet: I remember running through a bunch of 2D overhead maps and placing things on them, possibly with another player. There was a collection of different pages, each one filled with different items or effects, and I/we had to select and buy one page out of the catalogue, which would then be the items that we could place down for the level or something like that. I tried to calculate what exactly had to happen for me to break even for the page that I ended up selecting.
Sep 08 2024
- There was a dream scene where I had just finished watching a Twitch channel for school or something, and in between watching channels I was solving puzzles involving railway tracks laid out on the ground in a room, connecting different stations that were represented by dots on the floor. In particular, there was a puzzle where the commentators said that it was impossible to traverse through all the stations exactly once because the tracks were laid out in a figure 8 pattern with several stations in the intersection between the two loops, but I said that it could be achieved if we unhooked one of the tracks where the bottom loop connected to the top one, and rehooked it so both the entrance and exit to the bottom loop were between the same two stations in the top loop. This would require more train track pieces overall, but would allow all the stations to be visited exactly once.
- Later on in the same scene, Mom was at home and recovering from surgery but was helping me by going through my items and cataloguing what I had in a nice, big list. For some reason though I discovered this only while at school, and only because I saw some people carrying long, white tables with my things on them through the school hall to bring them from wherever I stored them to my Mom, who was at her home, even though I think I was staying together with her. I didn’t mind her doing this but I remembered that there was a box with some folded sheets of paper containing fan fiction or something that I had written in the past and that I didn’t want her to see now, so I resolved to go find that box and remove those papers before it got shipped off to her.
- In another scene, I was receiving requests for cards in a computer game world in sets of 3 cards per person, and pausing time each time I received one to craft or summon the cards before sending them to the requesters. There was some mechanic around creating them that I don’t remember, but I do remember a group of rich CEOs getting several copies of a card that was out of print and very rare from me using this service, and I was annoyed at that because I felt like they were rich enough already. However, I believe I decided that either the card or the game round was also temporary so they probably wouldn’t be able to sell it.