My Diary #157

Dear Tigey,

You know that phrase that I have on a little unopened poster by my desk, and in my Discord profile? “If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough.”? Yeah.

Entry #157 (Sep 22 2024)

Table of Contents

Virtual…
ට  Life
ට  Games
ට  Plushie of the Week #152
ට  Song of the Week #129
ට  Memory Snippet of the Week #136
ට  Dreams

Life

Firstly, an update on a couple of things from last week. My small box of CDs arrived, quite far ahead of schedule, so that was nice. Suruga-ya, the online storefront for second-hand goods that I get my Japanese CDs from when they have free shipping promotions, only has a DHL shipping option now (and this was true the last time I ordered from them too) — the EMS delivery option does not seem to be an option they offer any longer. This is too bad because DHL will always charge me a ludicrous customs fee that the EMS, which ships via Canada Post within Canada, usually does not, essentially nullifying the free shipping savings. Something to the tune of $22 or so for 7 CDs in a big box. I wonder what happens if I just order 1 CD.

I might try that at some point from their store as a mild form of revenge because one of the CD cases they sent me in a previous package was actually missing one of the two CDs that it was supposed to have come with, and I haven’t gotten around to replacing that yet. They aren’t as worth it now as the first few times that I bought from them, since the price markup on the international site compared to the regular Japanese site has risen, shipping has gotten worse, and the interest rate is less favourable now as well, but I still do check back from time to time to see if anything on my wishlist ends up there for cheap. Shipping was really quick though, which I suppose justified the price — it only took 4-5 days to arrive, and that includes the time the store needed to gather and package up the CDs.

And when the DHL delivery person finally arrived with the box on Thursday, I was cooking soup in the kitchen when I met him at the door and he mentioned that the smell wafting out the door was very nice, haha. I think it was the Sazon Goya spice packets that I bought back in July that he smelled.

I also decided on a new chair this week, and I ended up purchasing a one from Wayfair that ticked all my boxes and seemed good enough for my liking, this Leasure Side Chair (local). It’s cheap enough, clocking in at a little over $165 after GST, although one thing that does worry me is that they also had an identical chair on sale on their website, under a different model name, that was $100 more expensive. I even compared the furniture specifications and everything. By the time I came back two days later to try to find the link for it though, it was gone and the page only redirected to the $150 one.

The other problem with the chair is that although it comes with free shipping, and has already been shipped, it’s slated to arrive between Sep 28 and Oct 02, which clashes with the dates that I might potentially be away at my parents’ place. Oh well, we’ll see. I have hopes that it will come earlier than that. I’m using a backup kitchen chair now but it’s stiff and hurts my butt.

I did talk to my parents and siblings this week though, and after further discussion, it looks like there isn’t much of a point for me to go down to my parents’ place and stay overnight or anything like that while Jon is overseas and Mom is recovering from her upcoming heart surgery. However, I’ll definitely be making visits during the week down to the hospital while Mom‘s there rehabbing, and then probably on weekends to the house once she’s back home so that Dad can go out and do errands and such.

I used a fake A1A 1A1 postal code for that local screenshot copy above, but when I looked it up on a map out of sheer curiosity, it apparently actually maps to a real location in St John‘s, NL, over on the east side of Canada.

Interesting. It’s doubly interesting because that Terry Fox memorial located just to the west of the highlighted region allows me to segue into my next weekly note — I had a second set of random door-to-door visitors this week in the early evening just after closing hours — two women were knocking on doors and trying to solicit donations for the Terry Fox Foundation. They didn’t push the issue and left when I said that I was not interested. This is still technically illegal — they’re trespassing in an area with no soliciting signs and had to have tailgated someone to get through the front security doors, but it’s still interesting to see people do it, and both the times I’ve seen solicitors now they have come by just after office closing time so no one’s about to hear any complaints from the residents, haha. It’s also interesting because I lived 12 years in the Edmonton 205 apartment and never ever had anyone come solicit me for donations there as far as I remember. Now there’s been two here in about 4 months.

That Polish shop that I had bought the toothpastes from back in July actually did refund me my purchase in full this week — I did lose out on about $1 CAD after the conversions back and forth and Paypal’s fee, but I had paid out $17.02 USD ($24.35 CAD) back in July and received back $17.02 USD ($23.03 CAD) this week. Good enough!

I somehow managed to snap my front door key in half this week. I don’t want to talk about it. As Jon said before he came over with the spare key that my family holds on to: Box 1, Key 0. I was going to attach a picture of it but I realized that people could probably reverse engineer a key from the picture… so no. Jon came by on Saturday with that spare key and some snacks from Mom though, so I made a small profit from it all, assuming I don’t have to pay too much for the key replacement.

I recently added a new tea to the Great tier on Tigey‘s Tea-Testers Guild Report — this one is called S.O.D. Anti-Acid Tea, from a brand called Red Sun, and it was something I bought in Singapore and have not seen anywhere else. It’s great though. I especially like making a flask of it at once with my Takeya Iced Tea Maker that I wrote about elsewhere in the same blog post. Anyway I wanted to capture a picture of the tea as well for when I don’t have the box anymore in the future:

There was a fire alarm in the building this week, and I went outside again along with like maybe 33% of the residents in the building, everyone else didn’t seem to care and just stayed in, looking down at the commotion from their balconies. I did get a picture of a neighbour’s cat from outside though:

The firemen, when they came, were so unconcerned that they took the elevator UP to the fire alarm that was going off to check out the siren, before coming back down to turn it off. So much for not using elevators during an emergency. But we get a fair number of false alarms, I guess. The alarms went off a second time later in the week but this time only lasted for 30 seconds or so, and I hadn’t even made it out of the door yet before it ended. And then, on Saturday, it went off for a THIRD time — this time we all rushed out again, and got to chill with a rabbit while the usual group of firemen came.

I didn’t see which alarm went off the second time, but the first and third one were the same alarm — Alarm 001 on the 8th floor. Very rude.

Next, sky pictures from the week. I have some lovelies this week — there was so much beautiful colour. To start off with, some pictures from last Sunday evening, so September 15th at 7:32 pm:

And 7:44 pm soon after:

There was rain at a medium distance, but not right where I was (though it came by later), and not in the far horizon, and it made for a wildly beautiful sunset, with the sun engulfed in the mist of the falling rain.

Monday, September 16’s sunset looked like this at 7:22 pm:

And then at 8:01 pm:

Beautiful windswept skies. There was even an aurora that night, although with the naked eye it just looked like white mist. When I used my camera though it looked like this:

Quite faint, but I live in a very bright area of the city so I was happy that I could see it at all.

Tuesday the 17th’s sunset, circa 7:44 pm or so, looked like this:

There was a large harvest moon that night but I did not catch a glimpse of it from my balcony, though I took a picture of it the next morning at 7:35 am on Wednesday:

The next evening, on Thursday the 19th at 7:24 pm, dark clouds started to move in in force from the south as sunset approached:

And then on Friday the 20th, at 7:20 pm, there was this cool sight that looked like there was a UFO hiding together with the sun in the clouds, capturing things via an alien sunbeam shining down in the distance through a hole in the clouds.

Also on Friday night, there was someone in a nearby neighbourhood who was firing off probably-illegal fireworks. I could actually see them from my balcony:

Cool. And Saturday at 7:31 pm gave this:

And finally, about the quote I led the diary entry off with. If my dreams don’t scare me, they aren’t big enough. After last week’s post, where I mused about creative ways to harness my love for travelling and writing, I found a seed of an idea that I want to try to nurture.

To preface this, I doubt it will ever work out, but I’m used to having extremely long-term goals and big, big plans that don’t always work out. For example, my gender transition took 15 years to come to fruition from when I realized I was transgendered, and 6 years since I first actually was in a position to reach out for help and start the ball rolling, to when I finally finished the process and found that happiness in my life. And then my project of reaching out to the Singaporean authorities to fix my National Service status after that took 4.5 years before I was able to freely walk in and out of Changi Airport customs and immigration at my leisure, and along the way I earned being able to revisit my old school and connect with a lot of my old friends again.

Similarly, my struggle to go to Japan and study there, while only partially successful (though arguably this was the best outcome in the end), took about 4 years as well, and I earned a bunch of sweet successes along the way, like learning a modicum of Japanese, and visiting the country three times along the way, including going to Ritsumeikan for their RSJP and meeting Zian there.

I think that having these sorts of large goals gives me a focus in life, even though I already have an overarching signpost in life (to archive everything for future generations). This blog is part of that, though it’s more a vehicle than a goal in and of itself, and building a computer game someday is also a goal off in the distance that I may or may not ever reach. And the point of a lot of these goals is that they encompass a long path leading toward a big dream that will provide (or force me to find) ways to improve and enrich my life in multiple ways along the journey. I might fail to achieve the ultimate goal in the end, or if the original goal shifts to something else as I meander around in life then I might take a detour to that other destination instead, and all that is okay because there will be a lot of smaller sub-goals along the way that I will have achieved, and hopefully loved.

So, I now have a new goal, and I thought for quite a bit about how to phrase this one, but I’m just going to start with the equivalent of shooting the moon, the ultimate golden trophy prize that I will probably never achieve, and then dial it back and explore all the other things that might come out of that. So, the foremost, ultimate form of my newest goal right now is to join the English branch of hololive, the current largest/best female VTuber agency, as a VTuber and streamer. That’s the furthest possible destination along this path I can see from here.

For various reasons, I know this will never happen. My voice range isn’t great, my accent is a mess, I have no streaming experience, I’m not glib enough and can’t think on my feet, I’m probably a real life generation older than the youngsters they’re surely aiming to recruit, I’m not even more than passingly familiar with any of them, there’s the whole transgendered thing, the whole juggling my job at the same time while staying “anonymous” (and how this blog intersects with that), not knowing how to be particularly entertaining, and so on and so forth. They also get tens of thousands of applications, apparently, to the point even successful applicants often have to apply many multiple times first, and they would never take a second glance at mine since I don’t have unique skillsets.

So it is the equivalent of announcing that I want to perform at the Budokan or Wembley Stadium or the Sydney Opera House while having no experience whatsoever. More than likely I will stop partway along the way, reaping the rewards that I’ve gotten up to that point. Yet, that’s fine, and I wonder how far I can get. It’s a fun dream to.. dream about, and aim for, and it’s not actually about achieving that in the end — there are many possible other outcomes as well besides joining an insanely popular and competitive streamer idol supergroup at the end of the day. Or nothing at all, and that is totally fine too. I can’t see all the options from here yet, and I don’t want to list the ones I do know as I don’t like to look that far in the future, but I hope to find some nice gems and victories along the way.

The reason I set this as a goal is because I was looking at things that I could combine travel and writing with, and happened to be watching a bunch of VTubers in the past two weeks as well. And at one point I looked at their permanent audition page (local) and form (local) and also read up on the process, and wondered if I could combine the two. It’s so not going to work. But, a big chunk of it seems to be having a strong goal in mind, and it made me wonder about what ways I could find to combine my travel/writing thing with “another thing” and make it work. *hololive* probably won’t accept it, and that’s fine, but just reading the template and fleshing out my initial idea is like building a business proposal that I would be able to take to other companies too, and those opportunities are the ones that I don’t know exist yet, but hope to find in the future, inside or outside of various kinds of streaming, and THAT’S what’s important. It made me consider several aspects that I had not thought of regarding what travelling and blogging/vlogging would need to look like, despite having watched other travel vlogging streams.

Even outside of all that, knowing how to work with the technical side of streaming and/or podcasting, would be a boon for any future game I might make, and working on my voice used to be a big goal of mine (and was a reason I went to South Korea for my voice feminization surgery back in 2014 and 2015 in the first place).

I can type and write well and express myself through text at a level that I am very happy with, but voice is another matter, and even at work I tend to shy away from and refuse phone calls when possible, though I generally have no problems connecting with a client once I actually am on a call with them. Now and then I still run into people who say they can’t understand me because I inflect words weirdly or speak too quickly, and it would be nice to get rid of that quirk, or at least get it under control, while at the same time trying to expand my voice’s pitch range and strength. I also tend to shrink away from conversations in groups larger than two, and so on, and that would be nice to fix.

So, while the “shoot the moon” goal above is ridiculous, and purposely so, the more realistic and *actual* small goal is just practicing and training things to do with my voice and seeing what doors open up, for now. Hopefully streaming in the near future, but who knows. I also want to learn audio stuff in general, especially if I ever get around to learning how use musical instruments, or art doodling, both of which are other potential sub-goals, but even just for general technical knowledge. Or perhaps I have just been watching too many Twitch streamers lately. But I kinda want to reinvent myself. And so, to that end, I did a few things.

Firstly, since my bank account had more than recovered from my trip in April/May, I did some research and then purchased a microphone, the Shure MV7X, and an audio interface, the Elgato Wave, from Amazon, plus a couple other peripheral things for about $500 in total. I generally feel really nervous about making big purchases and have to fret over it before pulling the trigger, that’s just the way I am — but not for this one, I was fully confident and excited in this and made the purchase the same day that I did the research and started putting together a list of what I needed.

One of those other peripherals I bought was this microphone arm, but when I put it together I found that it seemed to be missing one of the accessories inside of it, the 3/8″ to 5/8″ adapter for the microphone to screw into, which I needed. So I contacted the product support and they refunded me half the price so that I could go get another one instead. So that was nice. Especially when I then realized afterwards that my Shure MV7X also came with a similar 3/8″ to 5/8″ adapter, so I used that one instead. I don’t think I like a mic hanging level to or above my head though, so I might try a tripod stand instead.

Secondly, I actually picked a game and started to play it while practising game commentary on it. I am only doing local recordings for now, as it is coming out pretty terribly, but it’s nice being able to practice talking and trying to avoid dead air or talking my way into a dead end like I always do where possible, while not having it streamed and thus not being judged for it. And absolutely fail at voice acting because I don’t have any variance in my voice at all, without being judged for it. On the flip side though, there’s also nothing I can react to to keep the conversation going since there’s no one to bounce conversations back and forth with. Anyway, I committed to myself to do this for one hour a day every day, and I will see if I can more or less keep this going for as long as possible. I need to listen to myself speak.

Anyway, this week I allowed myself to dream about the path that I wanted to take going forward and any potential goals that I might reach in the end. I think dreaming is healthy, and this particular dream left butterflies in my stomach pretty much for the entire week, similar to the sensation when I am getting ready to board a plane and go overseas for a vacation. It’s a sensation I like a lot. I felt like a secret princess this week.

As an amusing sidenote, it doesn’t help (or maybe, it helps immensely) as well that the current anime that we are watching for Anime Group Watch is Skip Beat!, an amazing and hilarious show about trying to break into showbiz, with inspirational lines like “To reach your dreams, you have to keep fighting, even if it means getting a bit dirty along the way.” and “I want to experience lots of new things, learning from them to broaden my world. I want to do my absolute best to discover my true self.”

Games

I was still bitten by the Stardew Valley bug at the start of the week, and basically got to the end of summer in Year 1, but the game kind of stalled for me after that since it felt very much like I was constantly running against a treadmill of too many things to do and too little time to do them all. This is now the longest game of Stardew I’ve played yet though — I reached and surpassed the previous record, which was the middle of summer in Year 1, which I did for my “evil” Joja run a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a couple pictures of my farm at the end of summer.

And a bonus one:

I wandered around to Dave the Diver for a bit as well, but my heart wasn’t really in either game by the end of the week — it wasn’t really a gaming week per se.


That being said, the other game I did start this week and started to practice some lousy game commentary narration on was Dream Tactics. This was a game I played the demo of back in February 2024’s Steam Next Fest, and it was my favourite game coming out of that event. It was in a bundle that I picked up last week, and I wanted to give it a go, and this meshed perfectly with my desire to start game commentary as well so I started to do that while walking around and beating up pillows (the monsters in the game).

The weirdest thing about Dream Tactics is that it has a hardcore mode, which is required to 100% the game’s achievements, but rather than hardcore mode here wiping your save or anything like that, it instead just makes you redo the fight if any of your characters die during the fight, or accept that you will be without the character for the rest of the run. There are still checkpoints, and if you lose a combat or die to a trap or something you just get reset to that last checkpoint just before the fight or trap. I say weird, but I actually kind of like this. Compared to the normal definition of hardcore mode that makes you reset the run, that is. I believe that on all other modes you just resurrect your dead characters after a successful fight.

Plushie of the Week #152

The featured plushies this week are a group of plushies that Kel collected from an IKEA store in China, which I guess is apropos since I had to get a new computer chair recently (though I didn’t end up getting mine from IKEA. I definitely looked at the site and their options, though, among other stores.)

Apparently Kel bought these for 100 RMB each, and planned to bring them to her class at some point, but never did, just like her beaver. So they all adorn her television stand in her apartment instead.

There’s not much else in terms of information on these, no stories or names or tags or anything, and they were so nondescript that they just got a couple of group shots together instead of individual solo shots. But don’t think for a moment that that makes any of them any lesser of a plushie! So here they are, presenting the IKEA idols!

Top/Front:

Bottom/back:

Song of the Week #129

Title: Whole Wide World
Artist: Mindy Gledhill
Album: Anchor (2011)

According to Spotify, I discovered this song on May 31 2014, and fell in love with it soon after — it entered my S-Tier Spotify list two months later, on Aug 04 2014. I like this song not only for both its cheerful tune and upbeat melody throughout the song, but also its hopeful and whimsical lyrics, and I am thankful to it for shining a light and helping me through a particularly dark part of my life that was somewhat detailed here — my first trip to South Korea for my cancelled voice surgery was in July of 2014, and my second trip where I finally got it done was in October 2015. That period between July 2014 and October 2015 was my second (and last, so far) bout with major depression and when I was off work for a year or so, and although this song was something I discovered just before the start of that time period, it was a light in the darkness rather than something that ended up symbolizing the darkness for me.

This is also a song I’ve hummed to myself during vacations, particularly when travelling around or through airports or similar places. It’s a very wanderlust-inspiring explorer’s theme sort of song to me, with lines like “A little girl with great big plans” and “I’m gonna live a crazy dream” and such. The world is huge and amazing, with plenty of both natural and man-made beauty packed away among both the light and the darkness of humanity, and while there are many people who will never have the opportunity to explore the world due to circumstances beyond their control, I feel like a lot of people who could do so but who also shackle themselves and end up not doing so. And that’s one of the tragedies of life, which is already so fleeting and so fragile.

Memory Snippet of the Week #136

I tend to like playing games in an extremely organized manner, with spreadsheets and lists of various sizes coming out my wazoo, but several of my crowning spreadsheets come from ArcheAge, a game that I played twice, with two different guilds, once from July 2014 to March 2015 when I played with PiNK, and the other from April 2017 to September 2017 when I played with another guild called Freehold of Arandor.

ArcheAge is a terrible game now, and has mechanically been a terrible and predatory game for most of its lifespan, but there were periods in time, especially near its launch in 2014/2015, when everyone was on equal footing and there was a certain emergent brilliance in the game that I hungered for and still think back on fondly. And even when the game is bad, finding the right group under the right circumstance can still produce several months of brilliant memories. If only people would actually play the game instead of using it as a dating service. There was even someone who rolled a low-level character named Ketsuu to follow me around every day for a couple of months, hanging outside my character’s house and harassing me with proclamations of love for me (or well, my character) while picking me up and driving me off somewhere everytime I went AFK. I never figured out whose alt character he was, but he sure was persistent.

But anyway, back to the main topic — I had several pretty crazy spreadsheets for that game, the first one being a “floor plan” of the land area in the Gweonid Forest zone where we (the PiNK guild) had settled down in in my 2015 playthrough. There were only a certain number of open tiles that one could put a piece of land down in, and each piece of land had a different footprint size that needed to be free before one was able to put down the land deed — everything from 2×2 to 7×7 squares. All the land in the game was not instanced either, but rather in a shared open world, so only one person could put land down over a certain spot at one time.

So I mapped out the exact size and layout of the area that we had decided to settle down in, how much space we had in between the land we had claimed, and then who else owned the land around us and when their properties would expire (if they failed to pay upkeep on the land) so that we could hopefully snatch it when they freed up. Or else talk to them and see if they were willing to join our guild instead, which several people actually did.

I would swing by and update the spreadsheet every few days like a real estate agent to make sure it was up to date and there had been no other land ownership changes or opportunities to snap up land nearby that we had overlooked. People claimed that it was very difficult to snap up land in the game, and that bots always ended up with land that they were trying to get, but this was not quite true, as even with my vigilance over my guild’s home area, I definitely saw times when land was free, and bots, if they existed in the global way that people were accusing, would have swooped in and snatched them up. It was more along the lines of hyper-organized players like me knowing what pieces of coveted land was opening up at what times and going there to claim them right on the dot.

Anyway, just like Guild Wars 2 let me play a unique scout and ninja character in a way that no other game has, ArcheAge is nostalgic in my book because it let me play a real estate agent sort of role in a way that no other game has as well. I wanted to share the spreadsheet that I had saved from this time in my life, which even comes with several versions of the map — I used the first tab for updating the map to the “live” version at the time but also did save a few “snapshots” of the map at other points in time. This housing spreadsheet is linked over here.

This was not the only spreadsheet I made — I also had an ArcheAge Almanac where I compiled a bunch of crafting stuff, which I barely remember making (but I definitely did since there’s a reference to Nyari in there), and then this spreadsheet of ingame tree growth timers, which was valuable for trying to hunt down special “thunderstruck trees” that other trees occasionally converted into at certain growth transition points. I then combined the two together for an Updated ArcheAge Almanac spreadsheet when I came back in 2015 for my second playthrough.

Dreams
Sep 17 2024
  • Snippet: All I remember is a specific scene from a game where a friend and I had to defend against waves of enemies or monsters coming at us, so we took position in a corridor, barricading one side to ensure that everything had to come to us from the other side. We additionally set up a table in front of my friend that blocked half the passage, and a square foot stool or something similar under the table to block any crawlers, and that my friend put their feet on to prevent it from drifting away. From that defensive point, we shot any approaching enemies with bullets. Later on, we “found” and recruited a third person and he joined us there at that point for a subsequent wave. He had some skill that made taking care of the enemies easier, even though he stood in front of me so he mostly blocked my ability to shoot.
Sep 19 2024
  • Snippet: I dreamt that I was a new VTuber, and there were several snippets linked to this, like there was a segment where I was saying hi to my senpais, and another where we were drawing names of people from a list, two at a time, to pair them up. At another point I was in a circular clearing with a top-down view shooting stuff to clear the screen, while eating pizza to give me buffs or something.
  • Snippet: I also had some train-related snippets, one where I was on a single-carriage train which had to stop on a track, reverse onto a neighbouring track, and then continue onwards again. While reversing, it almost bumped into two students who were lazing unconcernedly on the track that was used for reversing, but they were just a little bit further than the distance the train needed to reverse to be able to travel on the second forwards track again, so they were safe. Another snippet had me coming up from an underground train station that was four stories underground, and noting that the stairwells were seedy and that in the future I should use a different stairwell instead.
Sep 20 2024
  • Snippet: There was something about inverted plastic thimbles or cups on the ground that I or someone I was watching could enter, in a top-down view as though from a game. Later on I also visited a bookshop with books stacked on shelves both inside and outside the storefront, where I spent some time looking for something to buy.
  • Snippet: There was also a scene at some point about asking permission for something from someone else so that I could do something as a VTuber. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember thinking to myself as I was waking up in real life that it was two days in a row of dreams involving VTubing now.
Sep 21 2024
  • I dreamt about a side-scroller apocalyptic world, with two halves of the map that one could use a rickety ship to travel between. There was a clothes boutique shop on the west side, and females could also buy a dog that was seated on the floor in the boutique for a certain price, but there were concerns about how to take care of it since it would consume extra oxygen and so the player who bought it would have to be mindful of their oxygen levels.
  • There was also a turn counter of some sort that would reset to 0 now and then, and this apparently was not necessarily a good thing, though it wasn’t always totally bad either, since resetting to 0 gave the player more turns to do something but also meant they were further away from being able to wrap up the day.
  • Snippet: A previous dream had something to do with Fate/Stay Night, particularly the visual novel I think, but I don’t recall what about it.
Sep 22 2024
  • I was part of a guild playing in a large MMO game world with multiple servers. There were several locations in the world that I remember, starting with a big city and a large multi-storey apartment in the city that we resided in that doubled as our guild hall, a beach, some stairs that I didn’t like and that I believe could be toggled in and out of existence, and a restaurant seating two that my friend and I visited once while secretly trailing two other friends. Those two friends ahead of us got a table for two at Table 8, then we wanted to leave but Table 9 next to them opened up, which was also a table of two, and the serving staff directed us there before we could refuse and leave, causing the two people we were trailing to notice us too.
  • There was also a dungeon that we could enter via a cauldron in our guild hall. We would open the lid of the big cauldron pot, put a piece of charcoal in the bubbling water, and the charcoal would dissolve and open a portal that sent us there. The dungeon had an outdoor forest and city and indoor catacombs component, and was full of monsters. The catacombs had lots of valuable eggs that could be collected for levelup benefits or guild points, while the outside area had opportunities for treasure.
  • However, a glitch happened to our server in the game that broke the teleportation, so the charcoal no longer generated the portal and thus no one could visit the dungeon. This apparently happened because three people with near-identical names either got created or tried to log in at the same time to the game, and this broke the system in some way that I didn’t understand at first. So we hung around the guild hall and talked to each other and looked out the window at vehicles coming and going.
  • Eventually, I looked on the forums and saw that a fix for it was still at least a week away and hadn’t been announced yet. This annoyed me and I began to look into why the bug was happening in the first place. I found some posts talking about it and peeked at the login UI again, and realized that it was because one of the character names either had a trailing semicolon to it, or the three similar names triggered a line of code that contained a stray semicolon to be added to the game’s command list, which was ending some multi-effect commands prematurely.
  • I realized that the charcoal cauldron was one of these affected multi-effect commands, as it had to dissolve the charcoal and then summon the portal. I then realized that I could still get into the dungeon by using the game console to type out the actual list of commands that the portal summon button did, which would trigger the same actions, and add in my own semicolons to the line as well so that the console could parse them in order. I did this, and voila, the portal opened! I entered the dungeon and collected a bunch of eggs from the catacombs area before letting my guild know that I had figured out a way into the dungeon and that they should come profit and get stronger while no one else was around.

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