Dear Tigey,
I want a Bellabot plushie.
Entry #170 (Dec 22 2024)
Table of Contents
Becoming famous for…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #165
ට Song of the Week #142
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #149
ට Dreams
Life
This week, our team went to Yang Ming Buffet in northeastern Edmonton for our second team lunch, an auxillary one to the one we went to last week. Only half the team signed up to come for this one, and it was mostly the same people that turned up last week, so oh well. They’re still all nice people of course, but it was still mostly the developer side of the team, and I was hoping that some of my own original teammates would come, but none of them (besides Ronnie, our boss) did.
I had asked for a buffet for this second one though and we found and decided to try this Chinese buffet place after my boss saw a picture of a Bellabot on a photo on its Google Maps listing. What’s a Bellabot, you ask? It’s this thing (local). I’ve actually seen one of them in person before, back in Japan, and I’ve heard that they can be found in some Asian restaurants in pretty much any Asian city and occasionally western ones as well. Like the one we were going to!
The journey to the restaurant involved me taking a train ride to the north side of the city, and then taking a bus eastwards to the restaurant. When I got on the bus at the transit centre, an older Chinese woman who spoke only broken English and had stuff written on her phone in Chinese tapped my shoulder and asked me for help trying to figure out how to get to a place — this place turned out to be the exact same buffet place that I was going to, which was very serendipitous. I told her that she was on the right bus and that I was also headed there, and we were both pleased at the coincidence. We chatted a bit and she said she was from Xi’An in China.
Upon arrival, we were greeted right away by a Bellabot!
The waiting area at the front of the eatery had a rather stunning lineup, and I found out later that there was a second entrance to the place that also had its own lineup. The interior of the buffet eatery was huge, and very packed — we were actually stunned on how many people were in that place, even discounting that it was the lunch rush on a Friday afternoon the week before Christmas, and that the price actually was cheap for a buffet ($21 for the lunch buffet, around $25 after tip). There were lots and lots of tables and they were all basically occupied, and plenty of food being wheeled out to the buffet place every now and then too. I loved the atmosphere!
Thankfully someone in our party arrived early and secured a table booth for six. It was in the corner though and thus a bit more difficult for the people inside the booth to get out of, but we managed. In between my plates of food, I attempted to take some pictures of some of the food areas as well:
I took four helpings of food in all, although I did not remember to take a picture of the first plate, which was a fusion of regular Chinese fast food (Shanghai noodles, sweet and sour pork, mixed vegetables, and a few other things) together with a couple of Western breakfast items (sausages, eggs) and Japanese food (a sushi and a maki roll). I didn’t think the Japanese sushi and rolls were particularly interesting but I did like both the Chinese and Western food.
My second plate was from a separate counter and consisted of Chinese dim sum offerings, so there were a bunch of dumplings with different stuffings, and a few random things like chicken feet and glutinous rice wrapped in banana leaf or something. I also took some congee and brought back some youtiao to go with it. Yum. This was great. I definitely had an advantage being familiar with Chinese cuisine and knowing what goes well together with what, compared to the rest of my team.
My third plate was similar to the first place, and looked like this:
It was a mix of the dimsum table, and the general Chinese food area, with a couple onion rings thrown in on top. At this point, I was starting to approach fullness, and I was feeling bad about going in and out of my seat at the table and making Justin stand up and move out of the way each time, so I did one fourth and final trip to just get some miso soup and red bean soup to wash down the meal.
While I was collecting my second and third plates, I also heard a commotion from one of the side rooms and saw that there was some sort of event happening there, attended by what looked like mostly old men and women, including the woman that I had shared the bus ride here with, since she saw me later on and came by to greet me. But what was happening in the room was really interesting — there were people taking turns to go up to the center of that room and doing things like playing old Chinese horn instruments, or singing a song in tune to some music that was playing over the speakers, either in small groups on in choir groups. I didn’t recognize a single song that was playing, nor did I ever find out what event exactly was happening in there, but I was intrigued enough to stand and watch (and take some photos) for a while from the entrance. It was super neat to watch.
Anyway, about the restaurant in general, the satiation levels were satisfying without being overstuffed, and the asking price of $21 was a good deal for that amount too since each plate itself would probably have been $15 or so anywhere in town, with the current state of food prices in Edmonton. I enjoyed it! And apparently so did the rest of my team, everyone expressed surprise that such a place like this existed and Ronnie declared at the end of the buffet that we’d definitely be back here. The name of the buffet store was Yang Ming Buffet, 揚名自助餐 in Chinese, and this is important for a reason that will be explained further down on the page. The only disappointment is that there were so many people that the Bellabots were just standing at the entrances greeting people, and were not actually being used to ferry food around. Oh well. That and I didn’t really like the different types of Japanese sushi and maki rolls on offer.
After the meal, I took the bus with Alex and Emily toward the train station, then hopped onto the southbound train with Alex. We had a good chat as always on the way back. This was also the last full week of work. For next week, while half the team is already on vacation, the rest of us only have Monday and Tuesday to go before we’re off for our paid Christmas break too. Hopefully they’re just quiet days and nothing out of the ordinary happens.
Outside of work, I spent a lot of time this week doing logistics for my night-time Twitch streamer, Nomakk, who is about halfway through his Christmas subathon now. It’s mostly been giving out game keys, both his ones as well as some of my extra keys that I offered, to giveaway winners and donators in his chat. I also helped him with bookkeeping and keeping track of how much “experience” (in the form of donations, with “experience levels” unlocking certain community goals) had been gained through the event.
There was absolutely no news on the housing front, though the realtor did check in with me to see if I wanted any settings tweaked. I didn’t though. There were only a couple new houses on the market this week on the new filters that he had set up for me, and nothing in any areas that I was interested in.
While I missed the Black Friday sale, Humble Bundle offered a Humble Choice/Humble Monthly coupon for half the year that was half the price of that sale, so I took that one. This cost $49 USD for 6 months of Humble Choice, which comes to about $62 CAD or so. This is much better than the usual $15 CAD a month, or $159 CAD or so for a full year’s subscription, although this doesn’t allow the subscriber to pause any month. Oh well. I can always collect the keys for future giveaways. A GST break for many items also started for Canadians this week and is scheduled to last until early next year, but sadly it doesn’t apply on digital games so I still had to pay GST for that purchase.
I’ve slipped and fallen in my bathtub twice in the last three weeks now, which is a rarity that again never happened at all in my last house. I don’t have any other comment about that other than I wanted to complain about it.
I didn’t take many sky or landscape pictures this week, as it was cold and cloudy for most of the week until the weekend rolled around, but I did take a couple that I liked, so here they are preserved for the future.
This first one is from Mon Dec 16 at 8:53 am, and was taken because I fancied the early morning moon in the sky watching down balefully over little humans huddling in the cold and rushing to work.
And this second one is from Fri Dec 20 at 4:54 pm:
I love evenings and think they are supremely pretty. Can you tell?
Games
On stream this week, I finished and 100%’d Oxenfree II — great game, but the achievements are a little weird. Like there’s an achievement for petting a specific dog and an achievement (one of the rarest ones) for NOT petting the dog…
The story itself was pretty good though, I’m definitely a big fan of time loop stories. One of the strengths of Oxenfree 1, and similarly shared by the sequel, is that the conversations flow “into” each other, you can interrupt someone speaking depending on *when* you answer, not just what you answer, or by doing something in the world and triggering a different conversation that way. Although I think most of the time this can kind of devolve into “if you don’t let the other character finish their monologue you might miss a bit of extra information.”
It also lends itself to two cool mechanics that can’t be found in many other games though, one being that even though the game presents three dialogue choices for every option, not answering and letting the passage of time flow by is almost always a hidden “fourth answer” as the conversation flows on and your dialogue options fade, signifying that you’re ignoring all of the three options they give you (and ignoring the character speaking it). The second is that the game also gives you inconsequential “one or two second” dialogue options, representing the chance to express surprise at something weird or sudden happening, just enough time to read but often not enough time to click, representing internal speech rather than external conversations. And even if the player does click on those, they just get a quick interjection. It’s an interesting dynamic that I wanted to put down on paper.. er blog.
After I finished Oxenfree II, I started streaming Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale — an older game, but one I never played through, yet that I want to finish since I like shopkeeper simulators. The stream will act as a promise and motivation to finish the game. It’s actually been a lot of fun this time around. WingBenny also gave me my first Twitch raid this week after he finished one of his streams, while I was playing this game, which was nice.
Being an older game, this one leaves a lot to be desired compared to newer games — poor screen resolution choices, lack of QoL, and things like that, and there are certain mechanics that it doesn’t explain at all and leaves it as an exercise to the viewer to figure out, but it hasn’t really detracted from the game in any major way. Yet. Capitalism, ho!
I played a bit of Infinity Nikki early on in the week but kind of drifted out later in the week to play other things, especially once the Steam sale started. I traditionally buy a bunch of games near the start of the sale and another bunch near the end, but I haven’t decided what exactly to buy yet this time. Not due to a lack of things that I want to buy though. There’s always lots of fun indie games and things to buy and try, so I never really understand various people (on various chats and threads that I’ve read) who say that the Steam sales are no good. Unless they have no time to play games, which is a different issue entirely. Otherwise, live a little! There are so many gems out there to find.
I also spent a couple days playing HoloCure: Save the Fans this week, though that was largely a stopgap between Infinity Nikki and the start of the Steam sale so far. Great game though, a Hololive-themed Vampire Survivors clone with a lot of extra minigames attached. And free to boot!
Plushie of the Week #165
We, via Kel, have a lot of whale plushies, particularly the various Jinbe-sans that Kel has. But this one, this little whale plushie, is an oddball. We have no idea where he’s from, what his story is, or why there’re threads dangling out his nose or on the left side of his body just above the fin. He’s not particularly large or notable and he looks a little weird. But every army needs foot soldiers, or uh, fin soldiers, and Tigey‘s Plushie Army is no exception.
Just look at him and his weird body patterns though. Two different shades of blue on the top, and striped lines below him like he’s being partitioned and chopped up for sashimi. Mmm. He has no tags or anything of the sort, but a Google Lens search shows this eBay listing (local) of an identical whale, listing it as a Burger King plushie and even proving it with its attached tag. And it has no snot knot attached. We never detach tags ourselves, the most that ever happens to them is that they get faded from years of abuse, so I wonder what the story behind this one was We probably got it second hand from someone else while in the Canada stages of our lives?
Because he has no tags, there are only a couple of pictures for this one. Front:
Side:
Other side:
Underside:
About 25 more nameless plushies to go!
Song of the Week #142
Title: Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major
Artist: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (and Iosif Kotek?)
Album: – (1878)
This week’s guest writeup is from Danethor! Here is his chosen song and his words describing it:
As most of us music devotees will attest, picking just one song is about as challenging as formulating a write-up that will do it justice. So at the risk of being the contrarian contributor to this series, my submission is Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major, the only Violin concerto he wrote. While there are many other pieces in the classical repertoire that stand out for their audacity to break convention, this piece, while not particularly groundbreaking or controversial (at least not for anything related to its structure. It was, by all accounts, a relatively standard 3-movement concerto for soloist and orchestra), has stayed with me throughout my life because of the musical story it tells.
The soloist develops the theme almost with perfected tension and release, leading up to the tutti recapitulation with trumpets providing a triumphant fanfare to support the strings. It then gives way to a quasi-cadenza for the soloist again, before a 2nd restatement of the theme in a new key. Both the 2nd and 3rd movement are touching in their own right, but for the sake of brevity I will simply focus on the 1st movement, my personal favorite.
Aside from the musical structure, the backstory of the composition is also worth noting. Tchaikovsky was not a violinist by training (he played piano and flute), so he enlisted one of his composition students, Iosif Kotek, to aid him in constructing the soloist part. While it is not widely known, there was speculation that this partnership developed into more than just a working relationship. Because of customs of the time, however, it was not only frowned upon but personally and professionally dangerous to openly embrace homosexuality. Therefore, an important piece of musical history, which was essentially the work of a partnership in an historically independent field, remained attributable to a solo composer, with no official acknowledgement given to Kotek’s contribution.
Unlike many other pieces, I find listening to this one on repeat not only relaxing, but necessary, as focusing on a different instrument or group of instruments in each re-listening adds a whole new layer to the experience. If you were previously unfamiliar with this piece I hope you enjoy it. And if it is not new to you, I hope you share my unique appreciation of it.
What a writeup. I really like Dan for his musical background and knowledge (and personality, and other things, but those first two are more relevant to this writeup!) — he’s introduced me to a great music Twitch stream called a_couple_streams or aeseaes in the past, and played DJ Okawari’s Flower Dance to me on piano when I visited him in San Francisco, which was an amazing experience, and I respect the hell out of him. I really appreciate the background behind the song too — I think (and told him so) that this knowing the history behind the composers and/or artists and/or song helps build appreciation for the song and becomes part of the fabric of the song that you can see when you listen to it. It’s the same sort of thing that builds nostalgia for people — linked memories and knowledge that bubble to the surface when the brain hears a familiar tune.
That being said, classical music is not a strong point of mine, and while I recognize many classical songs upon listening to them, I generally am not able to even match a name to a song. Therefore it was very unlikely that I would ever have had the ability to feature a classical song on my blog, and why I am happy that Dan did, so that the blog now has one. Yay! I can’t say I knew this specific song before listening to all 19 minutes of it, because I don’t recognize it at all, but it, and many other classical pieces, evokes a sense of walking through the streets of London during a snowy winter for me.
Thank you for writing all of that despite your busy schedule, and for letting me chronicle and archive your memory of the song!
Memory Snippet of the Week #149
1. This thing comes in three interesting parts. The first part is a homework assignment that I did back in August 1997 — it was a history assignment where I had to interview someone and write a newspaper article based on it or something similar. I ended up interviewing my grandfather, Ah Kong, and he told me a story about his experience in World War 2 in Singapore, when the brutal Japanese army defeated Britain and took over the island country for a couple of years, drafted him, and how he then managed to escape from them.
The interview I did and the subsequent document I prepared for it were transcribed and uploaded onto a separate page here. I do like how this far back in my history, I still was trying to do chronicling and historian stuff even though I was still a couple of decades away from making this sort of thing my life goal! I’ve thought about making a list of questions and interviewing random people to get their responses to those questions
Ah Kong mentioned in the story about how he escaped from the army and hid out in a relative’s house for a year, and it’s wild to think that if he did not do this, he might not have eventually ever met Ah Ma, and neither Dad nor I would ever have been born in that case. There is one part of the story that he did not tell in that interview though, but has been apocryphally passed on down to me, either through Dad or through another chat with Ah Kong directly, which was how exactly he escaped from the Japanese. He apparently crawled out of a bathroom window when he was using the toilet and managed to evade them until he got to safety in the form of that relative’s house. Crazy!
2. Although I blanked part of it out in the screenshots on that page itself, the second interesting part of this find was that for some inexplicable reason, this document actually contained the address of my grandparents’ house in Singapore! This was Blk 148, Bishan Street 11, exact apartment number redacted because I don’t know if a relative still owns that apartment or not. But anyway, this was an important find, because while I knew that they lived in Bishan, I had not been able to find documentation (or dredge up the memories from my parents) to get the exact HDB apartment block that they lived in.
When I went back to Bishan earlier this year during my Singapore trip, I said that I had no clue exactly where the old apartment was. After returning home though, I did realize that I had clues pointing to the rough area the house was in due to this writeup, and knowing that the “Tat Lee Eating House” listed there was very close to the apartment itself, but that was still only just a general area. Because the apartment blocks had had massive renovations in the ensuing year, I wasn’t sure that I could have recognized the right place even if I was in the general area. This document nailed down both the exact HDB block and the exact unit number though, which was awesome. And it let me look at the general area on Google Maps (local) and see the distance between Block 148 and the now-defunct Tat Lee Eating House.
Very nice. It turns out the Block 148 was just south of the little shopping area where Tat Lee was. The next time I go back to Singapore, I will go back to this area, visit the HDB flat where Ah Ma and Ah Kong used to live, and go eat at the food area (local) that’s replaced the Tat Lee eatery where we had our last dinner in Singapore. The carpark where I toppled over the one motorcycle on accident when young is right there too.
3. But this part really blew my mind. When looking at that Google Maps link two paragraphs above, I noticed that one of the places that had replaced Tat Lee was called the Yang Ming Seafood Bishan Branch. or 扬名海鲜, for the Yang Ming Seafood part of the name. This blew my mind because I found this out on the same night that I visited Yang Ming Buffet, in Edmonton, for our team lunch. THAT Yang Ming, as mentiioned before, was called 揚名自助餐 in Chinese. And the first Yang Ming, 扬名, was written in Simplified Chinese, whereas the second one, 揚名, was written in Traditional Chinese, but they’re the same dang name/word.
The word itself means “to get famous” or “to get notorious”, but it’s not exactly a common word and it’s not a modifier to some other part of the store name, it’s the entire store name in itself for both the buffet place in Edmonton and the replacement eatery in Singapore. They just happened to use the same word for their franchises (assuming they’re not actually the same company, which is rather unlikely, but I guess not impossible). And I just happened to see them both on the same day. Talk about the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon in action.
Dreams
My dreams this week were all short snippets for the most part. Nothing exciting, but I guess it still trains the dream retention memory, and that’s always good. Lots of “I almost remember” mornings though.
Dec 16 2024
- I was living in a house with some friends in a game and raiding other houses and places in nearby zones alone or with those friends, defeating monsters in them and bringing them back. The day-night cycle was important in some ways too, either in that zones only opened at night or that we tended to do the zones at night or something, and that there was also the feeling that our time in the zones were limited in some way.
- There was a mechanic where we could unlock evolutions for mounts or creatures back at base or something similar to that, by defeating certain boss monsters, but the identities of which bosses exactly to kill was each obfuscated by a poem clue. I had gathered one of these clues on what was implied to be a previous dream or previous session, and was staring at it in a card binder next to other evolutions that I had already unlocked, when I managed to decipher it.
- I confirmed with some NPCs in a post office building during the daytime that that clue referred to a Star Manticore, of which I knew there were three in a zone that I had done that previous dream or session as well. Two of them were near the start and a third one was much further into the zone.
- That evening, I grouped up with Satinel, who also had figured out a separate clue for another evolution in another zone, so that we would both get credit for each other’s too. We went to first kill my manticores to unlock that evolution, and then went to her zone to kill her set of monsters for that one.
Dec 17 2024
- Snippet: All I remember is giving people badges for giving out more than ten gifts to other people at once, however the badge itself was a bluish-greenish badge that was obviously off-colour in some way, but we could not figure out why it was off-colour.
Dec 18 2024
- In one dream, I was with Killadrix and he was showing me a binder full of memories from a streamer meetup convention that he attended. He apparently acted as the DM for a oneshot game of D&D or something similar there. He also had a backup of stream redeems or something like that with him.
- Later on, he was in control of a housing neighbourhood with HDB buildings in it, and was loudly proclaiming things near one end of the neighbourhood. To get some quiet and to avoid being picked for something, I snuck away and hid on the other side of the neighbourhood in the void deck of a building.
- In a second dream, I was walking along a road with four others, one other person and three other dwarf-like NPCs, along with a cart that we were pulling along. One of the things I could do was influence the walking speed of the group, and I noticed that three of us were beginning to create some distance in front of the cart and the two others with it, so I put a giant floating hand out to stop the front three, including my own character, from walking until the two behind had caught up with us. Then we continued walking along as a group of five.
- At one point, the cart spilled its contents and we stopped to repack it. At another point, a couple of the NPCs died and we used a menu to either rebuild or hire new ones. I was short of materials to equip one of them, and I realized that I had been told in an earlier dream that when NPCs died, we needed to mine its gravestone that was on the same square as us to get back its equipment, and the person telling me that had said that he had no idea why that was not automatic and missing it was an option. I mined the gravestone and got back the equipment and resources I needed to restore the last NPC.
Dec 19 2024
- Snippet: I remember one snippet about drawing things from a pouch in order to complete achievements that floated in front of me, in groups of 3. Completing an achievement gave me a badge.
- Snippet: There were also achievements that gave me abilities or something, like one that caused a dodge which let me avoid some incoming damage. This one was at least partially triggered or fulfilled by visiting specific locations, so I’m not sure if it was the same dream scene as above or not.
- Snippet: Lastly, I remember fishing in a cave and catching a fish species called a “nectasm”.
Dec 20 2024
- Snippet: There was a scene with a floating figure that had two mirrored copies of it, another one floating in the air some distance away and a third one a digital version online. Whenever the main figure received a donation or something, it moved, and the other two copies moved too, and the other two eventually disappeared once enough donations to the main copy were accrued.
- Snippet: I also remember going overseas and staying with a nice Asian couple for a bit. One of the only scenes I remember from this is stretching my neck to one side in order to let the woman of the couple snag and pull off a silver necklace from around my neck. There was also a cat involved, and one or two other people who might have helped me set up the stay but didn’t actually stay there, as well as the concept of someone scouting out the place by staying there so that someone else could do an identical repeat stay with the same couple afterwards. I don’t recall if I was the first or second person though.
Dec 21 2024
- Snippet: I remember either picking achievements or building a custom achievement from a list or something like that, specifically pressing left and right arrows on what seemed like the image of a scarecrow in order to change the torso part of said scarecrow, and browse different ways it could be puit together. The achievement itself had nothing to do with scarecrows though, I believe, and there was a long plotline later about helping a friend achieve it.
- Snippet: Much later, I remember a specific scene like I was walking through a marsh land or savannah, an outdoor area with brownish-yellowish grass and shrubs and the occasional tree.
- Snippet: Lastly, I remember the neighbours of wherever I and a couple people I was living with complaining about noise from our house.
Dec 22 2024
- Snippet: I needed to change the shop that I frequented for a specific purpose, so I took a bus around a large, old neighbourhood full of shops and tall apartment buildings, looking at possible replacement shops. I don’t think I was alone when doing this, but I don’t remember any of the purpose behind doing any of this.