My Diary #174

Life

Chinese New Year is not actually until Jan 29 this year, but our family dinner was this weekend, on the 18th. Happy Year of the Snake! It was also in the middle of the coldest day of a cold snap, so the weather looked like this:

Oddly, despite the temperature being -30C outside, the interior of the house wasn't as cold as it was earlier in the winter.

So I wrangled a car ride to the family house and back from Jon. Yay. We had a nice dinner there and I spent about four hours socializing before arriving home. Jon and his girlfriend were there, as were Mom and Dad. Kel briefly joined over a WhatsApp phone call, and met Tigey, who had come along in a bag, as well as a new plushie that I had picked up from Southgate's Indigo bookstore after I had bought some food to bring to the Chinese New Year dinner and before meeting up with Jon and Mom there. What plushie was that, you ask? You'll meet him next week! As I already wrote up the Plushie for the Week for this week and that one thematically fits better with the blog anyway.

I did bring back a couple of other pictures for the blog though. The first is what our dinner looked like:

Most of the food is from Sam Wok Restaurant in the city, though the round bowl of BBQ Pork and Zucchini is from Bourbon Street Grill in Southgate. And the rice was home-cooked Hainanese chicken-style rice. Not pictured: Three packets of Nasi Briyani from a restaurant that I was not familiar with. One of them was spicier than the other two, something about 65% spice or something, and I got that one to bring home.

The second picture is a couple of two red packets that Mom gave me on behalf of the parents, one for CNY and one for my upcoming birthday.

We also exchanged small mandarin oranges -- I brought and gave two each to Mom and Dad, and Mom gave me back two other small ones, whereas Dad gave me back one regular large orange. I don't think they were supposed to do that, giving oranges is supposed to be from the younger to older generation, but hey. I ate them all so I didn't have to bring them home afterwards, because I still had another packet of mandarin oranges at home.

Dad indicated that he might be interested in going to Singapore earlier rather than later, perhaps around March rather than around June, but I don't know that that's such a good idea since that timing would not only overlap with my house hunting period but also coincide with around when I need to start deciding whether I want to renew my lease or not, if I have not purchased a house by then. We'll see.

The weather was great earlier in the week though, and I went out a couple times to the markets, once to the nearby Safeway and once to the farther afield T&T Supermarket for more eclectic Asian imported goods. Like random noodles and spices on sale. And some discounted shampoo. I need to cut my hair soon. And Tigey needs a bath soon.

But I love trying out random new things on sale. That's how I found that angelica root tea a couple of weeks ago, though I didn't stop by that store this trip even though it was nearby. Maybe I should have, but the bus stop is right in front of that H-Mart supermarket, and the bus, which comes once every half an hour, was arriving just as I stumbled back into that vicinity from T&T, so I ran for the bus and caught that home instead of spending another half an hour in H-Mart. Slight regrets, but money saved, and I'm not done my current box of angelica root tea yet anyway. I also barely caught the bus TO the area with these two Asian supermarkets on my way there earlier that day, so I was pretty happy that I spent a grand total of 0 seconds actually waiting for the bus on either leg of my grocery odyssey. And now I have a ton of food to tide me over this cold spell and then some.

While I was gone on this grand grocery adventure, a home inspection supposedly took place. At least, they were scheduled to come in on the same day that I did the grocery trip, according to a Notice of Entry that they placed on my front door earlier in the week, but they had left themselves a wide window of time that they could stop by, and although I was only out for a couple of hours, I never saw them and they didn't leave any notes either. I assume the ladies that usually do the inspection, who are also staff from the rental office, came in and did their thing and then left while I was gone.

In preparation for this, I had also finally packed away all my stuffed animals after the group picture two weeks ago. It was my version of leaving a Christmas tree and lights out and not taking them down expediently right after Christmas. In my defence though, I'm sure the plushies enjoyed their couple weeks of freedom before about 80% of them got stuffed back into a cramped box, where they will stay until I find a good house to move into.

There were a couple interesting houses that popped up near the first house that I had seen last year, and made an offer on before withdrawing it, in the Century Park area. But they were both slightly outside my price range, at around the 390k-400k range, and while I think I would be able to barely afford them, I probably wouldn't be able to afford any additional services like cleaning or repainting before moving in, since there are always additional hidden costs like that, so I ultimately did not express my interest in them to the realtor. They did both have garages though, and looked to be far less of a mess than that previous other house in the area.

My left eye has been kind of weak for a couple weeks now, there were a couple days where it was outright giving me a headache, and that's gone now, but as the day goes on, I've found that my left eye's vision starts to get blurry whereas my right eye's remains strong. I'm not sure if this is just a winter thing, or if this will pass in time -- I do remember it's happened in the past and it recovered after some time, but it's always a bit worrying when this happens. The left side of my body is weird. My left ear went almost two decades ago, now my left eye is going too huh.

I did get a "stealthed" Google Calendar invite for the free workplace lunch next week that my coworker who was going to had already received before the Xmas break. I didn't, but at some point after last Wednesday, Jan 08, and this Friday, Jan 17, it did arrive, even though I double-checked my inbox and found no notification for it. So anyway I guess I am going after all! It's scheduled for next Tuesday, Jan 21. Right as the cold weather front eases its grip over Edmonton.

I had negotiated with Steffy near the end of last year to start getting repayments for the loans that I had given her a few years ago too, and this started taking effect on January, without me having to push for it or anything too. No interest or anything, since I never asked for it and would not accept it anyway, but she's covering the Paypal return fees until we find a better way with lower fees to do the returns. It's just $50 USD a month for now but that's totally fine with me, and will help me immensely too, though I'm worried about the $2.50/transaction fees on her end over time. It ended up as CAD in my Paypal account even though my account accepts both CAD and USD, so hopefully we can figure that out for next month too.

Here are my balcony/sky pictures for the week! Sun, Jan 12, 4:30 pm.

It's okay. But then this was the sky 15 mere minutes later, Sun, Jan 12, at 4:45 pm:

How gorgeous. The little ray of light that looks like a lens flare on the left side was actually there in real life too, and not a trick of the camera at all.

This was Mon, Jan 13, 9:02 am, not too long after I woke up for my first day of work this year:

I seldom get to see the sun shining from "behind" my apartment onto the shopping center below, since my balcony faces west, and so I was drawn to that specifically and took a picture to capture that.

Next is later that day, Mon, Jan 15 at 5:13 pm:

Fast forward to Thu, Jan 16, when the snow came in and it started blizzarding. Visibility plummeted to nothing.

Then the blizzard stopped, and I went outside in snow-laced slippers to take a picture of the carnage at Fri, Jan 17, 12:45 am:

Games

I've been using this section to highlight my stream stuff as well, so this tidbit will sit here: I received a really nice comment from an acquaintance this week from another non-Twitch related Discord server that I'm active in, who found my Twitch channel via just looking at my profile when I said something in there. He said that he "just wanted to thank you directly for your streams, although I came across your channel not that long ago, I must say that they are very cozy, the voice is very calming as well, makes me lose all the stress and relax."

How nice, considering that as far as I knew everyone that has come to my stream and stuck around were either from my main Discord (Satinel, Jah, Anaden), friends of them (Emmy_), or Twitch friends (WingBenny). I knew of the guy cause he's also spoken up many times in our mutual Discord server, but we had never directly spoken. He said he wasn't a native English speaker, which I couldn't tell as he writes well, that he isn't Russian but speaks Russian, and that he moved to Ireland last year, so he just catches VODs now and then.

Besides being a nice thing that I wanted to note, I say all that as a preamble to the note that I've made my YouTube playlists of Twitch VODs public this week, though I haven't made the individual videos public yet, nor have I renamed them or anything like that. The YouTube playlists in general are located here though. I want to make an accompanying "Table of Contents" page for the game on either here or my wiki though. That's the level of organization I like for my content.

This stream week was still CrossCode week, and I think this will continue through most if not all of next week as well. The plot has sure gone places, it's pretty great and the writing and art is full of humour and emotion. I'm loving almost all of it, minus a few fights in the game, particularly the ones where the battle has mid-game "cutscenes" that steal my camera view while the fight is still going on. But I do like the puzzles very much and the way that they teach you mechanics of the game by making you figure out how to solve easy versions of puzzles before throwing more difficult ones at you. And they use lines on the floor as hints rather than something like endless numbers of popup windows teaching you how new mechanics work. Which is very clever. Show, don't tell! The Eureka! moments are very satisfying.

Outside of stream, I mostly played Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, and reported a couple bugs and typoes with the handy in-game F10 bug report screen which they fixed within a couple of days. That's cool, and made me feel listened to. The Treve Brothers, as the devs call themselves, are apparently well-known for being this level of responsive in their various games. They also sent me a couple of nice thank you/explanation emails for my reports.

I only played Vintage Story (local) a little this week because a major update was imminent, and we had already planned to restart the server map when that happened. That update dropped on Friday this week, so the server was wiped over the weekend and I look forward to playing a bit on it next week.

I also haven't started playing it yet, but I installed Gate to Sovngarde for Skyrim based on a friend's recommendation. It's a Nexusmods collection, which usually involves subscribing to their dumb monthly premium service to download, in order to be able to use a download all button instead of clicking on 1800 individual buttons, but thankfully there's a Tampermonkey addon called Nexus Download Collection that bypasses that garbage. I'm already a supporter of Nexusmods on a one-time fee basis due to some promotion in the past, but I will never subscribe to them on a $13.68 CAD monthly basis too, even for just one month, just to download mods. Vultures.

Oh and I played a bit of Brotato, a bit of Backpack Battles, and a bit of the Command and Conquer Remastered Edition that Jah bought me over the Xmas sale.

Plushie of the Week #169

To usher in the new zodiac animal coming in a couple weeks, Year of the Snake, here's the remaining snake in my plushie list that I haven't featured yet. It's a small rubber snake though, so not really a plushie in the traditional sense, and you can kind of squeeze it but I wouldn't fall asleep hugging it at night. We also have absolutely no information on it, not even a year range where we might have picked it up.

But it is in our plushie box, so it counts, right? Here's a front/back picture of the rubber snake.

(Yes, it's a caterpillar, but I didn't have any other snake plushies, and it's actually written down as a snake in my plushie notes, so I figured it was good to use the excuse and feature it this week anyway. A caterpillar-snake!)

Song of the Week #146

Title: I Could Not Ask For More
Artist: Edwin McCain
Album: Message in a Bottle OST (1999)

This week's segment is from yet another LotRO Discord server friend and featured guest, Gregeor! He played as a Hunter class main in our raiding guild on the Landroval server in LotRO, using Gregeor as his character name, and that's forever what I will mentally associate him with. Greg gives a bit of his own background below, and how he met Candy, his wife, before linking it to his song, so I will let him explain things from here:

Candy and I met late in life. Well more in the middle but I was 32 when we got married and she was 29. She turned 30 two weeks after the wedding but still talks to this day about getting married in her 20's. We met in an AOL chat room called "Michigan chat" back in 1997. I sent her a pm just saying hi and her response was "What do you want?". Being a female in a chat room back then meant dealing with lots of perverts so I cut her some slack and just said I wanted to chat. I still to this day harass her and point out I could have just said "geez, how unfriendly" and went on my way and she'd have never known she blew off the guy she would later go on to marry.

Anyway, we went on to chat for hours and really enjoyed chatting with each other but it was getting late. So I asked her if I gave her my phone # would she call me and she said yes. She called the next day while I was playing golf but left her # on my answering machine so I called her back and again we chatted a long time. So we decided to meet in person the next day. I sent her a picture of me and we decided to meet at the entrance to a local mall. We then had lunch at Max & Ermas which went well so we decided to see a movie at the theatre in the mall. The choices were slim but we settled on Mimic starring Mira Sorvino which was odd, but makes for a memorable "first date" story. We eventually went home but have been inseparable since. It was a couple years before we went a day without seeing or talking to the other since the day we met. To this day I can probably still count the number of days on my fingers.

Getting back to the song. We were engaged at the time and we were searching for a song to dance to at the wedding. Candy was off dress shopping when this song came over the radio and I thought, this is it, its perfect. When she came home (we were living together at that point) I told her I had found our song. It wasnt long before it came on the radio again and told her this is it. She started crying so I guessed that she agreed. While we both waited before finding each other we both thought that we could not ask for more in the person we did find. OK, we wish we were closer in height - I'm 6'4" and she's 5'2" - but thats about it :)

Thanks again Greg! I know of this song, and Edwin McCain's earlier song, I'll Be, because the latter song floated around in the middle of Rick Dees' Top 40 weekly charts for an inordinate amount of time, I believe for over a year, partially due to its involvement in Dawson's Creek. I was listening (and charting on a piece of paper) to that radio program every Saturday. While other hit songs burst in to the charts, rose to the top, and then sank out of the charts after a couple of months, I'll Be hovered around the 10-30 range for forever and refused to leave, catching my notice as I wondered why and how this was possible. It was such an ongoing, ubiquitous presence, to the point that the Rick Dees show would just skip over that song sometimes and just mention its rank in passing.

That was how I learnt about Edwin McCain, and eventually they started playing this other song of his as well, either after I'll Be finally eventually left the charts and this second one entered the chart to replace it, or as a preview before playing I'll Be or something like that. Either way, it didn't have the staying power of the first song, and I found it okay, but the artist at least had carved out a rent-free place to live in my mind based on the sheer strength of being a statistical anomaly alone. And all that gave me a nice little yarn to spin to tie together Greg and Candy's story back into this blog right here and now. Wikipedia claims that I'll Be is a popular wedding song, but that it really wasn't meant to be one, and I agree that this one is a better song for that!

It's nostalgic for me, though the memory has more of an oddly bitter, metallic tang to it than a sweet one, bringing me back to the early 2000s in Edmonton 4012 as I struggled to find a mental footing here in Canada. Greg picked the specific video too and I am amused that there's a Lord of the Rings inspired background in this one. Enjoy the song!

Memory Snippet of the Week #153

For MSotW this week, I wanted to give a shout out to an old browser game called Abyss-UK. All traces of this game seem to have been scrubbed from the web, but this was a browser forum game that, according to Archive.org, seems to have started around late October 2003 and ended around September 2015. It was located at https://www.abyss-uk.com/, and the game involved creating a vampire character and then walking around a large grid-based world with a bunch of NPCs and the occasional idle player to bite/fight and gain blood from, and I believe a bunch of quests to do.

There was also an integrated phpBB2 forum where people hung out in both in-character and out-of-character, with subforums for chatting with each other, and other subforums for roleplaying. I played the game for a couple of months from October 2007 to January 2008 or so, and joined a small guild there where I made a couple of friends. They were girls a couple of years younger than me from Europe, and did a little bit of RP with them. One of them, the person who ended up "siring" me in game, was Nexus, a girl from the UK. Siring was a character linking thing, where a higher level character could "adopt" a lower level one and get a "childer", whereas the lower level one would get a "sire". I don't remember what this mechanic did.

Anyway, I know from Nexus' Yahoo profile that her name was Rachel Faulkner, possibly with a middle last name of N, that she was a few years younger than me, and that she had a friend from the UK as well that we played with but I have long forgotten what her name was exactly. I do remember, however, that this friend had a pet lizard or something that she would let crawl around and on her now and then! I feel like our guilds had a few other older people as well, but I don't remember associating with them and have no idea who they are or what the clan was. But my name there was Alesha, so maybe they'll find me via this way at some point in the future!

While the website itself is gone, it looks from archive.org like Abyss-uk started at another site called Ravenblack Vampires. I have no idea what that is, and was definitely not there during that time that the site was around, but it was a very interesting look back in time. It is also possible that it's somehow linked to this Vampires! The Dark Alleyway thing since that also invokes the Ravenblack name, however I was unable to find any link or reference in a cursory look at their Livejournal pages, and that game and all the Discord links seem dead now as well anyway. I never played it or heard of it while it was around. I feel like there's this entire vampire RP Internet subculture that exists just out of my current reach though.

Anyway, I thought it was fun to dump a few artifacts that I had saved from this time period here as well. Firstly, here's my one and only screenshot from the game itself:

I took this screenshot back on Jan 28 2008 because there were an inordinate number of bugbears on screen, which were some sort of NPC that I could fight for experience. I think the humans were victims that I could suck blood from or something. I can also see from that screenshot that traversal around the city was done via movement in the 8 cardinal and ordinal directions, that my Sire was Nexus, and that the city's Master Vampire was Lilamara Morea, or rather Lilamara Mórea, neither of which had a Google search result until now. I assume that represented the top player in the game in some measure or other.

Next, you can see an AbyssCityMap.gif tab open but not displayed in my Firefox browser in the screenshot. I actually have a copy of that map as well, and as I can't find it online as well, this might be the last living copy of AbyssCityMap.gif on the open internet.

I'm not sure who this Essence that maintained the map is, and it's almost certainly not the LotRO friend that the hover text for that name refers to, but great job. That map is from Oct 25 2007.

I also have a picture of Nexus's character that I think she commissioned, as well as two versions of the forum banner that she used as a signature in her posts on the game's forum:

Nexus: All the best bits! Next, I actually have some text snippets that I saved from the game in a random text file. Like this flavour text from a random NPC's attack:

[00:19 Today] Minion Number 9 says: "Run in haste, for this is but a taste!"
[00:19 Today] Minion Number 9 used Nuclear Cucumber on you, causing 90 damage.

And this one, which I don't understand the context of at all:

Grudge Woman [180] - Nether [A Scary Cat]
Jigsaw [26] - Slums [Jigsaws Key]
Cat Woman [247] - Everspring [Whip]
Jack [190] - Charon's [Fire Axe]
Cryptkeeper [71] - Cemetary [Storybook]
Lettuce Head [7] - Residential [Salad Dressing]
The Great Pumpkin [16] - Industrial [Pumpkin Pie]

And this one, a bunch of flavour text from some Bartender NPC:

The Bartender says: 'My favourite musician is Moby. Ever heard of him?'
The Bartender says: 'It's said cheap drinks do little to loosen tongues.'
The Bartender says: 'You're kind of funny looking.'
The Bartender says: 'You know, I didn't wash that glass.'
The Bartender says: 'Despite the high cost of living, it remains popular.'
The Bartender says: 'I heard a really good group yesterday: Apollo 440 I think they were.'
The Bartender says: 'A procrastinator's work is never done.'
The Bartender says: 'Do radioactive cats have 18 half-lives?'
The Bartender says: 'Ack! A bug! Squish it! Dear Noko there seems to be a lot of them around lately.'

And this other Bartender snippet, I assume it's the same guy, but this time it actually includes a location and what seems to be a quest:

(10) - Draper's Tavern - Pilchard and 48th

The Bartender says: 'That's a mighty fine looking cloak you're wearing there.'
''Oh, by the way. There was this girl in earlier, saying she was 'going to rid the world of the Vampire evil'. Imagine that!'
Go after her?

The Bartender says:'Yeah, I think she said she was going to be at Amethyst and 49th.'

And then there was this other player who drank my blood while I was offline, as apparently you don't disappear from the game when you log off:

[05:34 Today] Sabbath drank 11 blood from you.

And a few gameplay tips I saved somehow:

Energy of 112 combined with Celerity 10 gives one the fastest MP regeneration rate possible - about 3 minutes.

Pairing Alacrity 3 with Thievery 3 allows one to find items off of humans.

I also have a couple character roleplay background snippets from the game that I have absolutely no memory of writing, but they were definitely mine since it was part of a larger clan application or something similar that I did. I present these here for other people's viewing pleasure while I go cringe in a corner.

This first one was some sample writing I did for the application but was not an actual character that I played or anything like that. As far as I remember anyway.

Linna Gaustad's story basically began in the basement of an old antique shop, where the proprietor ran his side business, the man being a collector and purveyor of rare books. An American with distinctly European looks, Linna was employed by night to take care of the small library, working from dusk till dawn to serve whatever few customers came in now and then.

The waxing gibbous moon was concealed this night, behind a front of storm clouds, and so thus was her own turmoiled soul hidden behind a rebellious, gothic front of clothing style that she favoured. Her short black hair spiked, hard eyes draped with eyeshadow, cheeks heavy with blush, and with a little pair of slim metal rings each piercing her earlobes and eyebrows, and even one upon the tip of her tongue.

Her entire outfit screamed goth as well, the girl clad in black cloth and leather from head to toe. A short baby-doll cloth shirt adorned her torso, the words, "I'm a Bad Girl - Love Me" scrawled upon the front in a pink font that tries to emulate dripping blood. Her skirt was a pleated leather mini, stretching halfway down her thighs before ending off, set low on her hips several inches below the shirt, and with a belt of studded metal wrapped loosely around her waist. She wore no bra, so one might be able to see the faint shape of nipple rings pressing against her shirt in good light. Her feet had been seduced by a black pair of open-heeled clogs, not much more protective than flip-flops at all. Around her neck was a thin, black leather collar, several bright studs and four D-rings stuck into it at intervals.

The place was not very well known except to collectors and mysterious garbed people, both of whom she would help when requested, but would never associate much with, instead sitting by her desk to read a randomly-chosen book from among the historical and hobby books there - they had everything from history books to occult and the paranormal to medicine and science. Tonight, however, there were no customers, and that was strange in itself, since even on slow nights there would usually be one or two lonely customers that would huddle in a corner to read.

Still, she wasn't sure, queer as those people were, that they would brave a storm just to come down here to read. Or maybe they thought the place was closed, for even the two dim lights set outside the shop had both blown out after the lightning had brought down some lines nearby. Leaving her alone in the near darkness, a single woman struggling to get along in life with a couple candles.

Not that that was such a bad thing, Linna thought to herself - for she wasn't sure of the sanity of some of the patrons that frequented the store. She still remembered the bearded man last month who had asked her to climb a ladder to retrieve a book for him which had inexplicably got stuck on top of a bookshelf. When she had grabbed hold of the book, he seemed to slip and bump the ladder from under her legs, causing her to shriek and fall amidst a pile of books before he caught her and apologised profusely. He must have done that on purpose just to see her legs and cop a feel!

And the funniest thing was, though she had a multitude of little scrapes and bruises in the fall, she also suffered a strange wound just above her right ankle, two weirdly-shaped puncture marks, as though from some sort of small, sharp object or canine teeth. She had searched after and not found the source of that wound.. but at least it didn't turn out to be anything serious.

But she shook those thoughts out of her head. Trying to calm the frustration in her heart that she felt toward most of the creepy patrons of the little library, the little lecher of a boss she had, and life in general. Letting it simmer, but not get out of hand, as she tried to staple her eyes to the book. It just so happened that the first book she had picked up after the power had gone out was a scouts' handbook on ropework, and her eyes blurred a little from all the diagrams as she gazed upon hitch knots and butterfly knots and sailor knots and what not! So that didn't help her lose herself in reading.

But she didn't stand to change her book. Honestly, Linna was a little spooked.. just waiting for something to happen, something palpable in the thickness of the air in the room, or so she felt. For the past few weeks inexplicable things had been happening.. chairs moving about seemingly of their own volition, when her back was turned.. books mysteriously disappearing and reappearing somewhere else, or falling to the ground when no one was near them.. never in front of her, but always registering in her consciousness immediately after.

She tried to convince herself that that was just some of the other patrons playing tricks on her, whether on purpose or otherwise. It couldn't be a poltergeist, despite the occult books she had read, there surely was no such thing! Plus, it had only really started in the last month or so. Still, she knew that there was no one else in the library this night. But huddling by the guttering candle by her desk, shadows loomed dark and forboding in the bookshelves to her, piles of unevenly-stacked books casting strange shapes across the floor every time she glanced up. Lurking, waiting for the perfect moment..

Her hands tightened on her book as she willed her eyes down again.. too much imagination was a bad thing sometimes.

The second was my actual in-game character's background and personality blurb, and I concluded from there that characters started as humans and eventually got sired and turned into vampires. Here's the background:

A first-year medical student at the local university, Alesha lived in a small apartment in a run-down neighbourhood of the city, that being all she could barely afford with her student loans after subtracting off the cost of her tuition. It was worth it though, she always reminded herself, in order for her to achieve something with her life and avoid plying the street trade like she had seen so many women forced to do.

Especially her late mother, after Alesha's father had abandoned them both before she was born. Her dear mother had sacrificed her body and soul to raise Alesha up, and she always preached to the little girl, then growing teenager, that she loved her child with all her heart and would do anything in her power to protect her. The two enjoyed a strong relationship, and even though the girl grew to knew what her mother was doing for income, and why her mother cried herself to bed some nights, that only made their bonds all the stronger.

Her mother had made enemies though, and in the rare spurts of time when she needed a shoulder and would confide in her daughter, she whispered in tears about strange men and women, factions, gangs, that controlled the street and were always jostling for power in the escort industry. They were rumoured to somehow be not human, but monsters, supernatural vampires and other beasts that were involved in an intricate web of power struggles in the city's underbelly. And that one day if she was to not return, that her daughter had to avoid them at all costs but build her own life for herself, and hopefully do better than her mother.

And so it went that Alesha entered university, though it put them heavily in debt, but at least there was hope. She was the one shining light in her mother's life, and strived to do her proud. Then one night the unthinkable happened, and her mother did not return. Night stretched into day and night again, and though Alesha prayed fervently, deep down she knew the truth and it chilled her to the bone. If her mother was not to return, she was lost, alone in the city, and saddled with a heavy debt, but who could she turn to for help! Hardly the men listed in the business cards that her mother kept, that was for sure!

No, but she had to trudge on, she had no other choice now. And as days turned into weeks, her panic receded to a dull ache in her heart, a sad, fond memory of her mother that accompanied her as she tried her best to push on with her studies. The light at the end of the tunnel was definitely much dimmer now.

And here's her personality!

She's generally a pacifist, hard to provoke into hurting others or fits of anger. Shy at first contact, avoids big crowds, and very blushy in general. She tends to be submissive, especially to those who play her correctly, and thus tends to be more of a follower than a leader, and is easily seduced by the right bribe, offer or occasion. That being said, once befriended she's fiercely loyal and she would do more (and die more) for her good friends than she would do for herself.

ICly, if and when it happens that she becomes a vampire, she will hate how others (humans) have to suffer and die in order for her to un-live, and might proceed slowly down a path of self-flagellation initially. She has all this power at the cost of others' lives, and no idea what to do with it, yet is afraid to squander or misuse it and waste the cost of all the lives so far. To that end she will take up the mantle of a cleric and look to see what sorts of small good deeds she can perform for others, whether they know of it or not, and appreciate it or not.

But while that might be her overarching worry, that does not preclude having some fun in the meantime, for the warm winds of laughter, happiness and hope help to blow away the gloom and help her keep in touch with her humanity.

Any special weaknesses are hidden for now. :D

The warm winds of laughter, happiness, and hope huh??? I did immensely enjoy going down this rabbit hole of my past though.

Dreams

Jan 13 2025

• Mom was talking with Dad over the phone and she mentioned that she was looking for a box of pumpkin tea from David's Tea. I remembered seeing some pumpkin tea from them being sold for 50% off at a convenience store on the west side of the city earlier in the dream, so I told her about it and then drove her there on a motorcycle. However, when we arrived, I found that it was a different type of pumpkin tea from David's Tea that was on sale instead. She was looking for a tea flavour with two words with Pumpkin as a suffix, something like Old Pumpkin, whereas the one on sale either had three words in the name, or had Pumpkin as a prefix instead.

Jan 14 2025

• Snippet: One dream I had involved several small pits or boxes of sand arranged haphazardly near each other. Each sand pit could be in three different states, off, on, and activated. That would change how balls reacted to them, either passing over them or bouncing off of them, and being redirected in other directions, and the challenge was to toggle them into such a state that I could shoot a ball into the mess of pits and have it come out in another desired direction.
• Snippet: In another dream, I was listening to some female streamers who were travelling together to some event in some overseas country and streaming their experiences in the IRL category on Twitch, when to my surprise I heard them chatting to and travelling with Killadrix, who was not stremaing himself but was apparently in that country as well. He was part of a group of 10 or so and was somewhat familiar with the place and so was leading them around. I asked his online community for details and Greymulkin told me that one of the other girls was streaming, someone with an 8 letter name that started with D, so I went there to watch. One of the other community members commented that that stream had been going for 5.5 hours already and that that seemed so long, and I told him that IRL streams often went at least 8 hours long, sometimes as much as 11 or 12.
• Snippet: In a third dream, I was now overseas with my parents and siblings and staying in an apartment, but there were three pipe leaks that developed in different rooms in the morning. Regardless, we reported them and then went out to walk around. Dad pointed at a nearby game center and we entered it, but instead of an arcade, what we found was more of a very sparse casino with a few tables where you could play things by yourself. We sat at a table that had a pack of playing cards and Mom and Dad began playing some game between themselves. I took a look at a piece of paper laid down on the table and saw that it was food catering offered by one of the adjacent shops. Either Jon or Kel commented that this was smart advertising.
• Snippet: Other shorter snippets I remember but cannot resolve to another particular dream involve something about a budget ride that cost $60,000 instead of a six digit price tag, and something about crimson sand that wasn't related to the first sand pit snippet.

Jan 15 2025

• My family was moving into an apartment, and while packing up from the old place we were living in, we realized that not all the plushies could fit into the plastic box meant for them, so Jon carried two of the larger ones, Carrotblade and Doggy, by hand instead of trying to squeeze them in.
• The owner of the new apartment building was a man in a suit, with a 4-5 letter first name and an 8-letter last name I believe. He was nice, but often wandered around the building trying to poke his nose into people's business or finding minor faults with them, so no one liked him much. We first met him when we were moving in to the place but I thought he was fine and cordial.
• There were many minor activities going on in the building. For starters, one of the two elevators was also booked off by a group who had to install a power generator on every level and we were helping with that.
• One level had a baseball stadium with two teams of children, aged around 6-8 years old, playing each other in a match that was attended by several dozen people in the stands. I noticed that he was on his way there from another floor and I engaged him in conversation in the elevator lobby to slow him down, while pointedly being obvious about it to another friend who realized what I was trying to do. She ran to the stadium to inform the kids that the owner was coming and to stop badmouthing him until he left.
• There was also an idol performing group in the building, and two of their star members, one a bubbly genki girl with light hair and the other a more serious girl with straight, dark hair, went down to the basement and found an illegal casino with barely anyone in it. This casino was owned by both the building owner as well as a tall lady that he was involved with. At the front of the casino, they found a microphone and a Cardcaptor Sakura mini-CD, which was about half the diameter of a regular CD, and one of the two girls found that if she held the CD up to the microphone so that the middle ring was snug against the microphone's foam, and then spun the CD slowly, she could play the CD and listen to the music, and the playback would get faster the faster she spun the CD. I told them that this was a bad idea because the sound would get them caught.
• The two of them went further into the building and immediately got caught by the tall lady, who was lounging on a couch in a cocktail dress. They got reprimanded, and I feared that they were going to be detained but instead their punishment was to confess some of their sins in public to their fans. This was apparently the man trying to both punish them by possibly ruining their career or at least embarrassing them, as well as get them to turn over a new leaf.
• The bubbly genki girl looked pleased by this though, and proudly said that she would go first. She ran up to the main floor and out to a stage in front of the building, and proclaimed that she had cheated on a minor test recently, and then apologized to her fans for it. The other girl followed behind and announced that she had kept a bit of money recently that was given to her from some event instead of returning it or something. Either way, both were very minor misdemeanours and their fans immediately forgave the both of them as neither incident was a big deal.

Jan 16 2025

• Snippet: I remember a top-down map where there were a bunch of switches, some with little ribbons next to them or on their icon, and some without. I had to turn all the ones with ribbons on, while the ones without ribbons didn't matter, and once I did so this triggered a gift box or chest to appear.
• Snippet: I also remember a log pie that I could sell to a vendor, though I don't know the context behind it, just that I had it at one point and figured out its name by looking at its name in my inventory.

Jan 17 2025

• I left my old job due to a disagreement, and went to a job in the same workplace in the same building, just a different office. The room had a TV and three desks, even though it just housed Dad and I. It also had a couch and TV and Dad sometimes watched the TV from that couch.
• Someone came in and wanted to do an audit on some other department via the Office of the CISO, he had used a form from us as preparation for that audit so he had some suggestions and errors on the form for us to fix. But we started taking a look at the form before he came in and when he arrived, we told him that that form itself was also under the purview of the Office of the CISO and he would have to talk to them to fix it too as we had no permission to change anything on it. He said he didn't have time to do so as part of the audit.
• There was a noisy office across the hall while we were talking, and I looked at it, then stood up to close the door. Dad commended me on doing that automatically without being told. I said that I wish I had a towel too to stopper up the gap under the door. Then I looked around the room and found four bath towels that I could use for that, but decided not to in the end as that would dirty the towels. Instead, I hung one up on the back of the door to make it thicker and thus dampen more of the sound.
• In the dream, I lived near or passed by Yio Chu Kang MRT station on the way home, and when the train reached the station, I hoped to myself that I would be able to catch the weekend outdoor market there at some point. This market was a memory from a previous dream.
• Editor: This recalled market was the one from Dream 2 on Dec 01 2024.
• Snippet: I also had an odd dream about an adventuring party that encamped by the seaside and came under attack at night by invaders from the sea in a computer game world. They got wiped out, and when we arrived there the next morning, all the corpses were submerged by the rising tide except for someone who had somehow died in a seated and crosslegged position and was thus half-above the waterline. We were upset and mourned them. A turtle that had accompanied them had somehow survived, but the turtle egg that it was transporting was smashed, and it pushed the broken eggshell mournfully along the beach too.

Jan 18 2025

• My dream took place in a University that acted as both a school and work environment, with the school portion mostly taking place in a classroom. When I arrived at the classroom some time before class, Huihan and Antonia were already there and seated at their front row desks, and I chatted to them both before ultimately taking a seat behind Antonia, who was seated at the front of the middle column of desks with Huihan at her left.
• Other people soon filtered in, including a male teacher who seemed to be teaching us English Literature. As this was the first day of the new semester, he asked everyone to name him the two ships from a poem that was part of an assignment last summer, to see if we had forgotten everything we learnt or if anyone had reviewed their work.
• I saw some people trying to Google it, but I had actually brought all my worksheets from last semester, they were neatly stacked together and held together by a stapler bullet that went through a small white paper triangle that wrapped around the the top left corners of the entire stack of worksheets. I flipped through the sheets, found the sheet with the names and sketches of the ships in question, and showed it to the teacher who was walking by my desk. He nodded in acknowledgement and told me not to answer the question so he could see if anyone else had prepared or memorized it.
• In the work segment, I was walking with Ronnie and two other teammates toward an assembly hall located around where the Students' Union Building was. We approached it from the back of the building and stopped off at a convenience store in the building next to it. Another student in the store was purchasing what looked like a perfume bottle, half-full of liquid David's Tea, and did not seem to have a problem paying for the $100 cost for that bottle of tea even though I was aghast at it. Looking at the price, it seemed like it cost $20 per some sort of small measurement unit, which I found exorbitent.
• I started taking pictures of the cost markup at this store to put on my blog, first doing a front and back snapshot of another perfume bottle with my phone camera before doing the same for a rectangular card on the shelf that listed the prices of a bunch of other products from David's Tea that were sold here.

Jan 19 2025

• My dream involved a lot of game elements, like balls I could shoot out that upgraded plants by having them explode and then a new, stronger plant growing in its wake, and that could upgrade animals after hitting them, by making them knock their foreheads onto the ground a few times before growing stronger. For a part of the dream I was trapped in a box in a top-down view but able to hit things outside of the box using those balls.
• There were many other hazy snippets that I remember being part of the same dream but cannot connect into a coherent story as well. There were definitely other players, and I even found a bot player who was hiding half off the map and shooting their weapons automatically now and then. One was a laser that fired a molten drop of liquid that melted part of my character's arm away, but that regrew back almost instantly. He was apparently much, much higher level than I was due to his use of the bot program so I stayed well away from him.
• I had other friends around too, and one friend complained at a certain point that his screen was white but if he went into his Settings menu then he could see the actual game screen there superimposed on top.