Dear Tigey,
I don’t have pollen allergies (though I’m sure I’d sneeze if exposed to a ton of it), but I’ve been sneezing a lot the last couple of weeks even within the apartment, occasionally itching here and there, and this week I had lots of prickly eye problems on top of that as well. Very annoying. I blame my shorter post-haircut hair irritating my nostrils or dust in the house or something. I actually get the sniffing and sneezing fits less when I am outdoors, and the sneezing subsided entirely by midweek as I think I got used to my new hair length. Either way it’s really annoying and I don’t know the cause for sure.
Also, Tigey, sorry for Tuesday morning where you somehow ended up on the floor on the opposite side of the bed from where I usually keep you. I’m usually a very stable and neat sleeper and things almost never go flying, to the point that I usually have no qualms putting bowls or flasks of water on the floor next to the bed at all if I need that to relieve an eye itch or something. In fact, nothing else was on the floor when I woke up and found you there. Were you trying to make a break for it?
Entry #188 (Apr 27 2025)
Table of Contents
Itchy sneezy…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #183
ට Song of the Week #160
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #167
ට Dreams
Life
I didn’t do any huge walking posts or anything this week because I had really itchy eyes from Sunday evening and lasting through most of the work week. It was really annoying, with lots of prickling along the eyelids, and it was hard to prevent myself from rubbing my eyes over and over. Eventually I wised up and put a bowl of water next to me and used a wet cloth several times a day to try to moisten the eyes instead of using my hands, which helped a bit, but it still took several days for the itching to gradually subside, and I hope my eyeballs weren’t permanently damaged by all the rubbing that I did do. Was this pink eye? Who knows.
Before all that happened though, I went down to my parents’ place on Sunday, and while on the way to the LRT Station to get down there, I passed through Southgate Mall, where I had heard about a robbery that had taken place (local) overnight on Friday morning. This happened at Carat Jewellers, and I took a couple pictures of what the scene looked like a couple days after the incident.
On the bus leg of my trip to my parents’ place, I also took this pretty picture:
I like how low and crisp and similar the clouds were, and how most of them had a dark underbelly. Anyhow, I spent the early afternoon at my parents’ place, before Jon gave me a ride home. I also brought home two boxes of nasi briyani from Auntie Stella, which became dinner for the next two days, as well as some goodies from Singapore:
On the left are a couple of prawn roll snacks, which were apparently expired — Dad said that they were new whne they were bought, but were shipped in a box that took 5 months to get here, and they found out that the expiry date was the day after the box arrived, ha. Either way, going a little over the expiry date doesn’t really matter for most snacks, so they gave me a couple of those boxes anyway. As well as some tea that I had liked very much after I bought a box of it back in Singapore. Now I have more Red Sun rooibos tea, yay. My parents took one of the bags inside the box to try it for themselves.
I had also brought them a couple of the Harney & Sons Year of the Snake sachets that came in a fancy container a few weeks ago. I told Mom, the primary tea drinker, to take that with honey if she could, as it tasted much better to me that way. I’m almost out of those sachets myself, but I can probably source some cinnamon ones or something as a replacement once I am done. I don’t plan to buy from Harney & Sons online as it’s too expensive to ship to Canada (and there’s a lot of anti-American product boycott in Canada at the moment due to their elected president’s antics too).
I stayed home on Monday due to said itchy eyes and a general need to do laundry. That and due to a higher chance of places being closed due to the Easter weekend. I think there were a couple of celebrations out there in the city but I don’t have a very good way of keeping track of those, yet.
On Tuesday, I went out for groceries, and ended up with a couple of notables. The first thing was a picture of one of the workers at the Thai Express store who I dub as Uncle. He’s not there very often at all, I see him maybe once a month at most, but when he is he kind of struts around the place and I think he might be the supervisor or manager or even owner of the stall.
All the workers at that store are very nice and remember me to the point I can just tell them “my usual” and they know what I want. Tofu Tom Yum Soup, large, extra spicy, to go. With a free spring roll and ice tea for as long as they keep offering a spring roll and soft drink to go, which they have for many months now.
As for the second item, well.. look down below at the Plushie of the Week section!
On Wednesday, I did something that I have been thinking about doing for a long time already. I thought I had talked about it before, but perhaps not. Anyway, there’s this website and app called Find a Grave (local), which tries to catalog all the gravesites and cemeteries in the world and where people work in tandem, some people adding memorials from online lists or newspaper obituaries, other people going out and taking photographs of the graves, and so on. I did read that while ther site sometimes has problems with some people being rather bossy over controlling information around their local cemeteries, and it is owned by Ancestry, the DNA profiling site, by and large it’s a great resource that has helped a lot of people locate their loved ones.
There’s two graveyards near my house (connected to each other, so really it’s just one large one) that I have liked visiting in the past, and I know there were a few open requests in there, so I wanted to go down there and check out what the grave cataloguing project was really like. I did end up finding a couple graves that were being requested, and took pictures of them, while also adding one (out of many I found) that wasn’t added on the list yet. I also added a couple of GPS markers for a couple randomly-selected graves on the site, as most of them were still missing GPS markers, and I found a city website online (local) where most of the buried people were catalogued.
But most of all, what I decided I needed was to make a spreadsheet map so I could map out all the graves and properly see which ones were uploaded and which ones were not. And maybe a touchscreen tablet that I could use “in the field”, so to speak, to track all that. I don’t know if I’ll continue helping out with that ongoing project, but if I did, I now have a fairly decent idea of how it works and what some of the things to look for are. For example, I ran across headstones without a death date, and learnt that sometimes people buy the plots and even gravestones while they are still alive, for the future. This can be because one partner of a pair has passed away and the other has not yet, but they want to be together for all eternity, or even sometimes just because the person wants to be buried by themselves there when they pass on, without necessarily any connection to anyone else.
Here are some pictures from my walk around the scenic, if sombre, Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
There are actually some houses whose backyards come right up against the side of the cemetery, and I thought it was poetic seeing a squirrel sitting on one of those fences, making a statement about life springing forth from death.
I think my parents would be very against this sort of house, but I probably would not mind at all. Until I play horror games or watch horror movies, then that night would be very bad for trying to sleep. There was also this rabbit running through the cemetery that I photographed.
Anyway, after walking around for the better part of two hours and snapping and uploading a few pictures, it started to drizzle. I couldn’t tell if that was a good omen or a bad one, since I do like the rain and it is a life-giving process of Mother Nature, but as the drizzle started to get heavier, I decided to take the hint and leave the cemeteries.
Then the rain turned to hail. Okay, I get it already. Geez. So pushy.
I took refuge in a nearby restaurant called Palabok Filipino Cuisine. It was a combined minimart/grocery store and restaurant, with the retail part of the shop looking like this:
And the restaurant part like this:
I liked that they had both rattan benches and tables, as well as regular ones. I picked a rattan table to sit at, though the rattan benches were rather shaky. This is what the food counter looked like:
They also had a kitchen menu too, and I ended up ordering a dish called Sotanghon Guisado from there:
Look at that fork, it’s gigantic! The meal was pretty good, but took forever for the chef guy to cook and serve it, even though I was the only patron in the restaurant. Four of the female staff members were just chilling around a table in the restaurant area, eating and chatting a little, for almost the entire time I was there, and the whole place had a very “slow life” sort of vibe. I can’t say that I hated it, and the food turned out to be pretty good too, although the table was dirty and still had some food scraps on it from a previous patron, which was a negative. By the time I finished my food, both the hail and rain had subsided, so I headed along home.
Thursday just saw me head down to the mall to do a couple of additional tasks on my to-do list. One was to check in on the usual Bay discount upgrade and take my usual picture from the usual spot.
It was 30-60% off last week, and “should” have been 35-70% off this week, but they shifted the bottom value up a bit. Which was good since almost everything in the store was priced at the lowest number anyway, so the liquidation essentially skipped a week. The deals are getting good and I almost picked up some clothes and tableware. Still pricey though, like everything The Bay ever sells, so I didn’t this time either. I wish I had my house paid for and ready to use though, since a lot of the furniture was 70% off.
After that, I also went to McBain Camera and finally committed to the DJI Pocket 3 Creator Bundle order that I had wanted to get two weeks ago. This time, I brought along my actual credit card so that they would accept my order. It’s backordered, so I put down the 20% downpayment on it, which still came to nearly $200 after tax, and they said they’d contact me once it comes in. I still have the ability to cancel with no penalty and get a refund if I want to, but after my experiences with the Pocket 2 (which I love) and after doing research on the differences in the new one, it’s definitely an upgrade that I think is worth it and wanted to get, and I will probably charge it against my annual Personal Spending Account stipend from my workplace. And honestly the chunky tax return that I got from filing my income tax this year helped alleviate the pain of the price point as well, since I also need to get a laptop or tablet soon.
Still no movement on the house front, but the pressure of getting one sooner rather than later has been alleviated for the time being as well since my new upstairs neighbour is so much more quiet than the last one was (and even the last one wasn’t as bad as the one above me back in Edmonton 205, as I’ve said before). That and it’s the time of year where the weather and the evening skies are beginning to look gorgeous again.
So to round out this section, here are some sky pictures from various points in the week. Earlier in the month, a tall construction crane popped up against the skyline in the distance, and it’s been there ever since, pointed left and right in different pictures on different days. I wonder what they’re building there and where exactly it is. This crane popped up sometime around the 3rd and 8th of April this month, judging by my previous pictures.
This first picture is actually from late last week, Saturday Apr 19 at 9:26 pm, it just didn’t make it in to last week’s blog post. I like the contrast of the two different colours.
This next one is from Monday, Apr 21 at 9:11 pm. It was raining, so all the lamp lights around Southgate Mall have glimmering reflections on the ground, an aesthetic I like a lot.
Also compare and contrast the big pile of post-winter sand on the bottom left of the picture there, with the next one, Wednesday, Apr 23 at 5:48 pm. Despite the drizzle on Monday, there was a single plow at night there pushing sand around and preparing it for pickup, but due to the rain it looked like they decided to spread it out a bit to dry instead of load it up onto whatever truck they use to bring it back to storage. It was mostly gone by the end of the week though.
The next picture is this chaotic cloudy scene later on the same day, Wednesday Apr 23, at 9:09 pm. Some of those clouds are clearly raining down on the land below even though there’s so much space between the clouds. And the contrast between the dark clouds in the foreground and the colourful sunset in the background was nice, too.
Compare that to the sky on Thursday, Apr 24 at 9:13 pm. Clouds? What clouds?
And while there were no pictures going into the weekend, Friday was our first 20° Celsius day of the month, so that felt pretty great.
Games
Off stream, I played a lot of Dark and Darker this week again, running lots of PvE dungeons together with Satinel and occasionally with Emmy_. This was a lot of fun, though we go really late and Satinel goes to bed at ungodly hours during work nights due to that. The ingame marketplace, an auction house where you can buy gear from other people, opened up this week too, and that’s been interesting to browse through. It was locked for the first couple weeks of the newest season to allow (or force, depending on your point of view) everyone to find their own equipment to play with and to build up a personal treasure stash before unleashing this marketplace trading economy onto the game.
While it doesn’t really matter much for PvE, there is one huge concern for the game for me, and that is the game is heavily based around finding gear with different effects on them, with epic gear having three random effects, legendary gear with four random effects, and so on. Some of the effects are strong, while others are nonsensical and pointless, and none of this is actually explained in game, so it involves a lot of reading the wiki and other people’s data mining efforts to find out which ones are useless, and hoping that none of the material you’ve read has become outdated by newer patches as well. And then you keep doing loot runs to try to get good combinations of effects on gear that you can use.
It’s a very Diablo/Path of Exile/Borderlands-ish sort of system, which sometimes works and can be fun, but I think in this case makes it difficult to improve in playing the game because one of the facets of “improving” means doing research into gear a lot of the time and then finding specific gear for certain builds, and I just am not willing to put in that kind of micromanagement in a game. Plus then certain effects like +all stats or +movement speed or +true damage become a meta during certain seasons if people try to stack them, and gear with those stats becomes very expensive. This contrasts many other looter extraction games where there are still lots of rare things to search for on each run, but gear is generally static — everyone has the same chance to find and use the same guns and same armour, some are rarer than others but any given gun of one type is the same as all other guns of the same type, and if you lose it you can just go try to find another one and you’ll be right back where you are before, as opposed to finding specific combinations of effects or affixes on your gear again.
But anyway I guess improving and optimizing one’s gear to that level ultimately doesn’t really matter for the PvE part of the game! Which remains very fun for now, at least as long as we still have quests to grind away at.
Outside of Dark and Darker and my stream game, the only other Steam game I spent any time with was a singular, sad round of Backpack Battles. I did win my round, so maybe it wasn’t that sad, but I mean that in terms of not having the time and energy outside of Dark and Darker, blog-writing in the evenings, and also my eyes, since the prickling makes me feel more tired than I think I actually am.
Atelier Ryza was the stream game this week as well, though I am now very close to completing the game and we will almost certainly have a new game early next week. It’s not been very engaging though, I think partly because a lot of it is just standing in one spot and crafting things — I definitely haven’t felt like I can do part 2 and 3 immediately and I’m not sure when I will get back around to them after this one. I haven’t decided what game will be next either, but will need to start brainstorming this — I seem to always have this problem around when I need to pick a new game.
Plushie of the Week #183
Late last week, I saw that the Claire’s store in Southgate Mall had a buy one get one free offer on their plushies, which included a number of Squishmallows. Fun! But I didn’t decide on any of them at the time, so I decided to come back later. Then on Sunday, on the way home, I joked to Jon that we should stop by the mall and pick up a couple of the Claire’s plushies since they were essentially like $7 each, which was a really good deal for the 13 inch Squishmallows that I like. But we didn’t, and so I decided to go back in another couple days myself for them.
So on Tuesday, Apr 22, I went down to the mall to get groceries, and I planned to pick up two Squishmallows from the set that they had there. But alas, the sale was over! They now had a different sale at Claire’s and that did not include plushies. Rude. Sad. But while walking around Southgate Mall, I saw an alternative that had not been there before. QE Home, the quilts, linens, and bedding store where I had formerly gotten Carrotblade from, had just gotten a shipment of new plushie cushions in, which I haven’t seen from them in a while. I didn’t take a picture of this, but they had avocados, bananas, tooth plushies, and two that caught my eye in particular — one amanita mushroom and one Chinese-style dumpling.
I harumphed back and forth between the two of them a while before asking the clerk if they had any more of either one in stock. She said no, those were both the last ones they had in stock. So fine, after some more deliberation, I ended up picking up both the cushion plushies at a price point of $26.24 after tax each, the exact same price that I had picked up Carrotblade for. Here’s a size comparison picture of the both of them when I got home.
Aren’t they adorable? Also Tigey is quite cute and small in their midst. They are currently in a one month quarantine to let any germs on them expire, but in the meantime I will spend this week and next week featuring the both of them as the Plushie of the Week in turn, starting with the amanita mushroom this week. This guy is often used in games as a potion ingredient, usually for some sort of poison, but how can a cute mushroom like this be responsible for such deadliness in video games?
Top:
Bottom:
Front, which is really very similar to top but more laid out:
Tag 1 front:
Tag 1 back/Tag 2:
Tag 3 front:
Tag 3 back/Tag 4:
Tag 5 front:
Tag 5 back:
The funniest part about all this though, is that I passed by the store on Thursday again, and I saw more amanitas and dumplings in the cushion box out front! So much for either of them actually being the last one left in stock!
Song of the Week #160
Title: Losing Haringey
Artist: The Clientele
Album: Strange Geometry (2005)
This week’s writeup is from another dear Singaporean friend and former classmate of mine, Debbie. I met Huihan and her together in Singapore back in 2022 for the first time in two decades, then visited her house and went out with her again a few days after visiting an art gallery where an exhibit of hers was being featured. I then met Zixiang and her again in 2024 when I took my second trip back to Singapore. And if I do end up going back later this year once Dad‘s surgery is over, you bet I’ll be reaching out to her again. One day I’ll be as famous as her and earn my own Wikipedia page too. But for now, I will be more than delighted with instead enshrining this writeup and memory of hers that she has graciously agreed to share to the time capsule that is my ongoing Song of the Week guest collection. Speaking of which, I really need to itemize those somewhere so they’re easier to access. But for now, please enjoy her great story and accompanying pictures:
A PIC FROM 2008
“COCKTAIL CREW 2008”
When I first heard the song “Losing Haringey” I didn’t know where Haringey was. I was an English literature student in 2006, forced to study copious amounts of British literature, trying to read Britain from a distance. My much-older boyfriend at the time – sounds weird to say this, my former English Literature teacher from Junior College – had studied Medieval English Literature at UCL in London. He used to say that if he had gotten a first class honours he would have tried to stay and make a life in London, but he didn’t, so he tried to backpack on foot back to Singapore instead, where he agreed to become an ordinary teacher. He might have played me this song and I was a very very sheltered child back then. I did not understand anything about the places, had never travelled out of the country, and I had no way of visualizing them. I liked the sensation of juxtaposition it described, and the sensation of time slipping – a decade appearing and dissolving in a sentence, “as if none of the intervening disasters and wrong turns had happened yet”.
I forgot about the song and moved to London in 2008 on a whimsy. From where I am right now, it seems so strange to imagine, because I moved to London without knowing anyone and yet I know that I did not find it scary or frightening. Instead I reveled in being completely unknown, unanchored to anyone and anything. A painter friend of mine told me she loved working bars because everyday during service she could pretend to be someone else, and no one would be any wiser. The first house that I stayed in was highly irregular: room the size of a broom closet, my housemate’s foot falling through a hole in the stair, rats the sizes of tall beer cans coming in through holes in the wall in the winter. That year many of my friends were broke and unemployed during the credit crunch of 2008. We were drinking beer and making music, going to gigs and organizing gigs in Shoreditch in a Turkish pirate bar, eating Lahmacun from Kurdish shops and pastries from Hasidic Jewish bakeries, and playing ping pong and BBQing courgettes and Halloumi Cheese in a Sainsbury bucket in London Fields. (Back then it was the first time I had seen a courgette in my life)
Picture: The musician Horatio Pollard impromptu smashing a satellite dish in the Korsan Bar during one of the Hulk Dash gigs which I co-organised. One of the bands couldn’t bring their drum kit and so they drove around the streets in a van looking for something they could use as a replacement drum kit, and someone found this discarded satellite dish. When the wanton destruction happened I was convinced the owner was going to kick us all out. But suddenly I realised the bar owner was actually standing next to me. And then he said to me with a twinkle in his eye, “Wow. What a performance.”
Over the years the cost of living and the rents got higher and higher, we felt priced out of Dalston. I moved up that greasy A road to Stamford Hill. And then to a house in Haringey. This was so far north that I started to find it hard to meet with friends who were scattered all over London by now. Many had quitted London entirely. There was probably a year after my Masters that I myself felt like a broke depressed artist, unsure as to what the future would hold. I’d be hiding at home in Haringey alone, where I could hear distant drum and bass festivals in Finsbury Park and people playing in the park in the sun. During that time, I used to take long train rides just to keep moving; the Great Northern trains that went to the garden cities and Greater London region. Alexander Palace, Enfield, Potter’s Bar, Hatfield, Letchworth, Welwyn Garden City. There was something that soothed me about being in motion with no destination.
Recently, I heard Losing Haringey and realized I had completely forgotten the song for years. Forgotten that there was a time in which I lived in the song without even knowing what was Haringey. I realized that in all the time I had lived in Haringey, I had never thought to look for the pale yellow flowers mentioned in the song. They might have been there all along, growing somewhere I was walking past every day. Even last September, I visited London for the first time in years with my husband and now 5 year old daughter. We happened to stay in a friend’s place in Haringey and I thought about what it might have meant if we had stayed and made our life in Haringey. Chip shops on the high road, crockery from the poundland, children walking home from school. Now I’ve chosen to build my life back in Singapore, but a memory – from a time where there were different pathways and possibilities – still follows me.
I searched for the song recently and tried to use Google to find the specific place it described. I actually asked ChatGPT to act as a psychogeographer for me and it told me where it thought the flowers were.
They were indeed in a place I had known very well when I lived in Haringey. Haringey was indeed in the past, just waiting to be remembered. Some part of me is still there, finding Haringey.
A spoken song! I’ve never in my life heard of the song, or the band, or even Haringey, but I gave the song a good listen and followed along with a copy of the lyrics (local). The 2005 song, distilled down to its simplest elements, is about someone losing their way in the present, having a moment of mindfulness while sitting at a bench near a certain square in northern London, and just for a moment, stepping back into wistful memories of the past, days of yore spent with the family when they were still young, in places that no longer exist as they were twenty years ago except in the mind of people that were there at the time.
If one were in an English Literature class, there’s also many other little things that one can pull from the song, like how the entire song is a bunch of paragraphs read out like a story despite the background music, which one can take to represent the idea of the “real” present superimposed on a “fake” experienced past and how the two blur together to form a sensation of reality dissonance. Or how interesting looking back at the song and Debbie‘s story through a lens dated from the year 2025 is, since both the song and her experiences date to approximately 20 years ago, which is also how long ago the 1980s were before when the song was written. So now we’re looking at the blurred memory of the photograph through two 20-year lenses at the same time, one of them Debbie‘s and one of them the original singer’s.
I do very much feel the sentiment in this song though. I get sad or nostalgic all the time looking back at photo albums or thinking back on mental images of people and places from long ago and ruminating on how much they have changed over the years. I miss our family dynamics when everyone was younger and it was our energetic parents taking care of us, and we were going places and doing things and making friends and learning about the world around us, now they’re more sprightly than energetic and it’s our turn to take care of them and it just feels so wrong.
And I miss Singapore, even though I’ve been gone from there for so long. You can’t just up and leave a place that you’ve lived in for so long without feeling like the place has left a dent in your life, and the blog entries of my trips back there, while they have helped to alleviate a lot of the pain that leaving the country left me with, also are strewn with comments about how places no longer match the mental image I have of them, those slightly underexposed photographs that now only exist in brief flashes inside my head. Oh how I wish there were photographs of places like Kallang McDonalds and the area outside the MRT Station there before all those places were forever consigned to lost history.
Even Kyoto, where I only spent a month and a half in for my RSJP course a couple of years ago — even though that feels like an eternity ago now, I still feel a draw to it, a nostalgic sense of “home” and travelling to school every day by bus like a local, pining for the friends and teachers that I met there and wishing we could all hang out again, and learning about and understanding some of the little things in the city that tourists and visitors will never experience. Heck, I do have a copious number of photographs of those times, but does it make it feel any less that I’ve lost that part of my life now? Or does it feel even more so? There’s a part of me that still lives there with Zian and Mr Tanaka and the others, and I hope that she is still having a good time there. I haven’t felt “guilty, and inconsolably sad” like this in quite a while.
But it’s hard to appreciate a place so deeply until you leave it and realize all the good things that you had (but perhaps missed on taking full advantage of) along the way, and at this point if I left Edmonton, I’m sure I would feel the same way about the city too. Ditto for Debbie and Singapore, especially since she now also has a husband and young child there.
Damn it, Debbie. Now I need a drink too. What do I even have on hand?
Memory Snippet of the Week #167
There’s a story my father likes to bring up about me, I think it’s one of the earliest stories about me that he remembers to this day. Apparently somewhere around my first or second year of life, when I was a young little devil and trying to vocalize words that I heard other people use, one of the words I was trying to pronounce early on was “kangaroo”.
However, being a wee little one, that wasn’t happening. Instead, according to the apocryphal story that Dad keeps around, how I pronounced it was instead “nehk-oo-oo”. He thinks the pronunciation was funny enough that he has worked it into family lore over the years, whereas I shrug at it and wonder why he fixated on that particular one from 40 years ago every time he brings it up, but still it does count as a childhood memory related to me from way back in time, even though it’s not specifically my own memory snippet (my actual memory snippet entry here is more relating to Dad saying this many times over the years, rather than the original memory of me saying the word, which obviously I don’t have).
And this is the first occurrence of the word “kangaroo” in my blog too! Did you know my blog actually does have a search feature? Only on the very front page of the blog, though. I disabled it everywhere else.
Dreams
Apr 21 2025
- I was helping someone clean a rented room in a busy building that felt like a mix between a school and something like a spaceport. That person was a tall African international student and he had to, as part of some agreement, hire a volunteer to help him. We had chatted a bit prior so I knew he was going to pick me and I entered the room to set up the cleaning even before he swiped a credit card on a keypad to hire me for $10.
- The lady supervisor who oversaw international students and their activities had suggested that I leave the heavy carrying to him, but I didn’t see that there was much to carry around at the moment unless we were going to move the computer desks in the room later after dusting and wiping them down. For now, I put a large metal bucket, almost half as tall as me, in the middle of the room, and filled it with water.
- This also caused the whole room to fill up with water, this was somehow expected due to the way the water outflow into the room was. It sloshed up to our ankles and I wondered why the floor drain in the room was working so slowly. At least the water wasn’t going out the door into the hallway because there was a slope up right at the doorway, as well as a soggy rug positioned there.
- Anyway, we started cleaning the computer desks and other furniture. The room looked like it was used as an office in the past. The lady had suggested that we decorate the room with garden motifs after we were done, but I talked with the African student and both of us disagreed with that approach. Ther was a row of windows on one wall of the room, with one window that was ajar, and on the other side of the windows was a sun-lit garden room lined with grass, and with walls but no ceiling. He said that a garden motif was far more suitable for that room.
- For the interior of our room, he suggested getting a few house-shaped trinkets and dioramas and lining them up on the wall or on shelves instead, and then draping Tigey-shaped plushies inside or over them depending on the size. I wholeheartedly agreed with him. He suggested going to Superstore to look for some and I suggested Goodwill instead. He said he wasn’t sure about getting them second-hand but I said that the selection would be a lot more eclectic.
- A little later on, when we were both outside the room, he peeked at my UI and was surprised to see that I was still stuck on a main quest, which all students had to do and basically acted like a semester-long project, to apprehend four captains or generals. Then he realized why — I was at 3/4 on the quest, but the final one required a 10,000 gold deposit to apprehend and I only had 9,368 or 9,385 gold or something close to that. That was partially why I was working as a volunteer in this program.
- Snippet: A dwarf friend was building a bridge outside in the rain. The combination of the digging and the rain was summoning weak skeletons that would attack him, but he had no idea about this until we told him that, and he finally stopped after he had gained that information. He had an extremely small hut built nearby where he retreated to to wait out the rain. It was made out of natural dirt and stone blocks for its bottom half, and crafted blocks and bricks for the top half.
- Snippet: Jon was playing a Civilization-like computer boardgame, he showed me that he had started a new country called Shoexland but it was stuck near a Russia that stretched north to south. While he was on the east side of Russia, Russia was at war with another smaller neighbour to her west and was sieging one of its cities. I suggested that he invade Russia to help but he said that he didn’t have enough of an army and didn’t want to be retaliated against yet. As I was watching, an ally of Jon‘s country cancelled a deal which was providing him with monthly funding, as they weren’t doing too well themselves, and Jon groaned and said that his nation was now going to be poor.
Apr 22 2025
- Most of my scenes took place in or around a school setting. For starters, I was helping a younger kid build up or upgrade this school at one point, but I don’t remember the exact details of this.
- There was a Physics exam where another friend and I were joining our neighbouring class for, picking empty seats by the left window as those people finished their previous exam and left. Some of the other people currently in the class stayed, others left and were eventually replaced by other classmates of mine.
- I realized that I hadn’t studied for this exam but I hoped that I would be okay anyway. The teacher handed out the exam, which was 20 pages long but also contained 40 pages of notes, rules, and acknowledgements that didn’t directly help with the exam. The moment he handed out the papers, he also said that there was an errata, and he drew a picture with cartoonish ducks on the front blackboard for the first question, saying that he was changing it from a vertical force question where one of the ducks was crashing down on the ground near the other ducks, to a horizontal force one, where the duck was instead charging by the other ducks.
- I knew this meant that the formula we were using to calculate its speed and impact would change, since the duck now continued on instead of coming to a stop, but I didn’t remember what either version of the formula was. Still, the teacher did not seem to ban phones so I was thinking that it might be an open book test, and was seated far enough away that he could not see me anyway, so I planned to just look up the formula on the phone.
- After the errata but before the exam started, I asked if I could go to the washroom, and so did another guy to the front and right of me, as well as a whole seat column of girls. The teacher said yes, another sign of how the exams were rather informal since he didn’t make us all go one by one to avoid collaboration, so we all left to visit the washrooms together.
- In another scene, I was about to leave the house when I got a notification that someone had left a comment on my blog. Reading it, I saw the person say that an article full of pictures that I had featured on my blog was now dead and my link to it was now broken. I remembered taking six or seven pictures of the actual article itself and I replied, thanking the user for leaving the comment, and saying that I would look for replacement copies to fix the post tonight. The reader replied saying that they enjoyed reading my long-form posts.
- On the way to school, a guy friend and I were carrying a girl toward the school when a powerful elder vampire flew overhead toward the location where we had found a girl, looking for signs of the girl as he wanted to defeat or eat her in her weakened state. He didn’t react to seeing us at first as he didn’t expect the girl to be here with us instead of where we had found her, and we were moving on foot instead of using superpowers in order to stay incognito, but his suspicion started to grow when he reached the place and she wasn’t there, and we knew he had some way of detecting her and would imminently locate us, so we used our superpowers and leaped right to the school with her.
- Later on, possibly in the same dream sequence, there was a dinner table scene at the school for our friends and allies, but where one person was secretly working for the enemy. As an uncontrollable sign of his dark powers, and something akin to sneezing, he phased out of existence and became invisible at one point briefly, startling someone sitting several seats away who happened to be glancing at him, even though he tried to make sure no one in his immediate vicinity was looking his way before he blinked out.
- On yet another day, I woke up in my bedroom at the home that I shared with my parents, and looked at the clock. It was 11:40 am! I went out and complained to my parents that they hadn’t woken me up at 8 am, and now I was 2 hours and 40 minutes (plus travel time) late for school on a final exam day. Mom, who was seated on the couch, said that she had tried. She showed me her phone and used it to beep the alarm of the tablet I carried around with me, but that just played a soft knocking on door noise and was certainly not the original noise that I had set up as my alarm. I said that it was such an important day and they should have come to physically wake me up when I didn’t respond.
Apr 23 2025
- Snippet: I was in a dungeon similar to one from Dark and Darker, together with three other players. One player had a shopping list of items that they needed to find, this list included both things like rare weapons and armour as well as dinner ingredients like a Wild Potato. Shortly after, in another round in a similar dungeon, I was with five other players and one had a counter for gold coins or something which was at 9695/10000.
- Snippet: Much later on, in a separate dream after waking up and falling back asleep, and after some different dreams that I don’t recall, I do remember another run in a dungeon but this time focused on item rarity. We had each had normal rarity items with normal names but one of our party members had managed to figure out a way to get golden legendary items somehow and was trying to fill up their item slots with those.
Apr 24 2025
- I dreamt that Greg had returned to Discord and at the same time, he and I and others returned to our old LotRO guild, which was represented by a large classroom with lots of empty seats for the people that were now gone. There were still about 8-10 people present though, and we made our introductions and chatted with each other while planning out future expeditions.
- I looked around and noticed several notable missing people like Radian, and I wondered out loud if the Champion class had been nerfed to such an extent that all the Champion players had quit the game over it. Someone in a neighbouring seat told me that that was indeed the case.
- A Ranger player that I was acquainted with sent me a tell asking me to look at his skills. He had gotten to Chapter 3 of the main questline using only free skills that cost 0 gold to upgrade, and he was very proud of it as those were very weak skills. While replying to him, I initially wrote a message and sent the tell, which was what they called private messages, to the wrong person at first. The Ranger had a 7 letter name made out of two compound words, but I typoed it and sent it to a Rogue with a 6 letter name instead. That person never replied though and I just re-sent it to the right person after that.
- Later on, I asked one of my friends in the classroom how to optimize my skills to take down enemy mobs, and he loosened my school tie a bit, looped the end of the tie over the knot to make the knot a little larger, and tightened the tie again. He or she said that that would help.
- Snippet: Much later on, I remember a scene where I was in a room sitting on a king’s throne, and there were two switches on the back of the throne that opened nearby secret passages. I don’t remember the context of the scene though.
Apr 25 2025
- Snippet: I was in the same room as ragesaq and a friend of his, but the two of them were at the front of the room and on stage trying to do something up there, while I was in what was essentially a seating area by myself near the back of the room watching them. A large giant entered the room from a door in the right wall and approached them, and he tried to engage it to keep his friend from getting hit. At that point, I had still never uttered a single word to them, but I also pulled out a longbow and shot at the giant, helpfully drawing the giant’s aggro away from him and the stage. I stopped shooting it as the giant turned to me and started walking toward me, and ragesaq realized what I was doing and let the giant walk partway to me before shooting it and regaining the monster’s aggro, causing it to turn around and walk back toward him. This way, we bounced aggro back and forth until his partner was done with his task.
Apr 26 2025
- Snippet: I was talking to my housing staff and they offered me a new apartment in a separate building to move into. Instead of facing the horizon, this one faced a marketplace below the building, which was also a very tempting scene for me to view daily. However, it was slightly more expensive than my current place, and they wouldn’t let me preview the place to see exactly what the view looked like, plus they wouldn’t let me transfer over a discount that I had for the current contract into that new contract, and both those reasons made me hesitant to accept the offer.
- Later, in a separate dream, I did move into a new place, which cost 450k to purchase and was a building with the bottom two levels being a cramped but peaceful townhouse or maisonette. I first moved in with Dad, and remember a scene where we were relaxing at night near a window. He opened both the window and a screen to keep the bugs out at the same time, then closed the bug screen so insects wouldn’t fly in, while we enjoyed the cool breeze from the outside.
- Jon then moved in with us as well, and though Mom was not there yet, we prepared the house for her eventual arrival too. I also got word that Kel was coming back, and I went out to a nearby shopping mall to look for her. That mall had an indoor market with spice tables and such and several other shops that I did not recognize or care for.
- I met Kel outside the mall and led her home, then showed her the new house, especially the bedrooms on the second floor. The stairs up were narrow and cramped though, so we had to be careful on the way up. There was another set of stairs on the second floor that led to a third floor, and this one was even narrower than the previous stairs, plus the ceiling was so low that I hit my head against it even though I was on my hands and knees. Those stairs led to a small utility closet room and then a door that opened up into a corridor with other doors that went into other offices or housing units that we did not own. Although we lived on the bottom two floors of the building, apparently there were offices and other business spaces above us too, and a separate, public building entrance for office workers to get to them.
- At one point I was also standing by the road next to a river while waiting for a bus, and looking at sharks circling in the water below. A girl some distance to my right jumped into the water and started paddling around on a kickboard, first doing normal forward strokes while holding on to the board, before flipping onto her back and leisurely doing a backstroke instead as she floated past me and to the left. But a couple of sharks chased her through the water and one eventually chomped down on the kickboard itself, before she got the hint and fled the water. It was unclear if she knew that there were sharks there at all, even though they were very visible to me.
Apr 27 2025
- Snippet: I was doing Dark and Darker runs, and there was a counter in each room that ticked up either over time or as damage was done to monsters, and that number needed to be over a certain value before players could use healing items or certain more powerful weapons in that room. This led to weird situations like one adventurer standing just outside a doorway and trying to beckon a goblin to come over as they couldn’t use their ranged weapon yet and didn’t want to just charge in.
- Snippet: I remember getting a notification that Killadrix‘s stream was going live on Twitch, but I typoed the address a couple of times in the web browser trying to get there, and due to the browser autocomplete I ended up at weird sites that needed to fully load, which took a minute or so, before I could try again. By the time I finally arrived at his Twitch stream, all his twenty early bird channel point redeems were gone, and I got frustrated when I remembered that not that long ago they would survive for easily up to two hours after his stream started because not that many people redeemed them.
- Snippet: Dad drove me down a street and I pointed out that there was a street festival going on and I wanted to check it out. Dad asked if I had brought along money and I checked and said that I only brought along a few coins in my purse but that it might be worth checking out anyway. So we stopped, and Dad went to use a nearby toilet while I walked around and looked at tables. One table was someone prepping a Chinese Chess board made out of paper for a game demonstration later on, another table had a person cooking some food to sell later, and I realized that the festival wasn’t quite open yet and in fact we were in someone’s ground-level apartment that had been opened for the festival, and that Dad was using their private washroom, though no one seemed to care about that.