Dear Tigey,
Smoke blanketed the city for most of this week (until the rains came on Thursday, and even then it only partially cleared). So everyone stayed home and watched my Twitch stream. I mean ice hockey. The games play at the same time as my nightly stream so I don’t get to listen to them. But many of the games have been going to overtime anyway so I listen to those after my stream.
Entry #194 (Jun 15 2025)
Table of Contents
Demonstration…
à¶§Â Life
à¶§Â Games
à¶§Â Plushie of the Week #187
à¶§Â Song of the Week #163
à¶§Â Dreams
Life
So last Saturday, I went down to that Paths for People event, and one of the things I got from that event was the stamp rally thing that I did not complete. However, on that map, which is displayed again below here, there were a couple other unconnected events highlighted:
Right at the top left of that map, there were two other events mentioned — the Ociciwan Art Market and the Africanival at Churchill Square. I was also already aware of the Art Market, but not the Africanival, yet I had seen the latter as well because I had to pass by Churchill Square to even get to the first station of the Paths for People event on Saturday. However, the cutoff for my weekly blog post is generally Sunday morning, so I didn’t put any further follow up for that into last week’s blog post.
However, on Sunday afternoon, I did go down to visit the Ociciwan Art Market at least. I wasn’t sure if the Africanival was still running, but I knew exactly where it would be running if it was, and I had to go to Churchill Station yet again to get to the Art Market anyway, so it was basically killing one and a half birds with one stone. There was smoke in the air from distant forest fires, and it had given me a headache on Saturday from being out too long, but nonetheless I plunged out into the haze and the scent of burning wood for a chance of more Tigey pictures at the Art Market.
Sadly, no such luck. Look, it was not only that Passport that called the event an Art Market — the event site itself (local) called it an Art Market, held in an art gallery, with a very nicely drawn event poster, and a “vendor list, coming soon!” that they never actually bothered to fill in. But this nonsense was what awaited me when I went:
It’s was not a terrible market per se, it was larger than, say, the Asian Creatives YYC Showcase & Market that I visited in Calgary at the start of my recent trip. And it had more stalls than any individual Paths for People stop from yesterday. But it was not an “Art Market”. It was just a regular, and somewhat small craft market. There was one single store selling what I would consider art. This was disappointing because with the smoke out and such, I probably would not have come down for just a regular craft vendor market, selling earrings and scrunchies and other accessories and stuff that I had absolutely no interest in. And if there was a vendor list beforehand, like the website promised but never delivered on, I would not have had to go down to find out that it was such a disappointment too. Oh well.
However! Since I had to pass Churchill Station on the way there and back, I knew that the Africanival was still running on that Sunday as well. There was no way to miss the loud music and drums. I went back to look for the event website (local) later once I reached home, and learnt that it runs in both Edmonton and Calgary, several weeks apart. Cool! The Edmonton version of that event looked like this:
They were really having fun, there was loud music and lots of dancing and lots of tents selling really colourful clothing and accessories as well. I almost bought a purse or wallet, as I kind of need one, but didn’t buy anything in the end, except for some tomato rice with fish head and curry from a store named Elorm’s Classic Kitchen, that I brought back home to eat. Was this worth $20?
I don’t know, but it was pretty darn good. I enjoyed it. And experiencing this event made the effort of me travelling all the way there in the smoke, worth it.
I still got a big headache from Saturday and Sunday that lasted all the way to Wednesday though. It was so bad that I took Sunday off anime and streaming and took Monday off of work as well. It wasn’t debilitating, but it was very annoying and frustrating, and I was feeling a bit nauseous on Sunday too.
The rest of the week passed more peacefully, partly due to the headache, partly due to the smoke, partly due to the Steam Next Fest event meaning that I wanted to concentrate on playing and recording games for that instead, and partly because I just needed some rest. There were things happening around town, it was just difficult to go out to them. That being said, it’s only been a week since I came back, but I already feel the urge to go out wandering again. It’s just.. expensive.
One thing that came out of the smoke week was that after talking to WingBenny, I decided that it would be a good idea to get an air purifier machine for the apartment. I could even bring it to my new house in the future as well. I have one I’m keeping an eye out on now, but I am waiting for a price drop on Amazon before I actually buy it.
I did make an online purchase this week though, and that was on Etsy, for a book sleeve that I need to keep Tigey‘s caricatures and pictures in. I bought it from a Canadian store on Etsy, and apparently that meant that it comes with free shipping. I had thought up until this week that Canada Post was actually on strike at the moment, but I found out that they aren’t — there’s something about an overtime ban instead so mail is moving slower but still moving. They did give strike notice around the time that I was going on my trip but I guess I missed that nuance in there somewhere. Apparently many other people are confused as well though.
Overall I’ve felt a time crunch for months now and need to free up some time, that’s partially why I’ve trimmed how many of those optional “Of the Week” sections I do for the blog every week. There are other projects I want to get to, like uploading things onto archive.org, that I just don’t have the time to. Another time that has fallen by the wayside for months now and that is officially getting the axe is the grocery price tracking spreadsheet that I started back in March. That’s not my main expenses spreadsheet anyway, just an attempt to record prices of grocery goods specifically, but I wasn’t getting any benefit out of it and the backlog of things to record in the list was just getting longer every week. No more. I also didn’t visit any place on Saturday or Sunday this week, the first time in months that that has happened. Ahh, sweet relaxation.
Here are some bonus random pictures from the week. This first one is of an asparagus bamboo forest in Safeway. What a weird way to display them.
Next, a picture of the “other” entrance to the old Hudson’s Bay store inside Southgate. I don’t go by this entrance as often but I wanted to capture what it looked like anyway. This entrance has apparently been boarded up now.
There was a sign in our lobby, proclaiming that Amazon couriers apparently have a way to get into our building now without us buzzing them in. Hopefully this also works on weekends when the outer front door is locked too.
And although the sun was hidden behind haze for most of the week, here’s a picture with an angry orange line burning through the sky from Wed Jun 11 at 9:56 pm.
Plus a picture of the rainswept nightscape at 3:24 am on Saturday Jun 14. It was so cooling and so serene.
After the rainstorm finally broke, Sat Jun 15 at 9:03 pm, the sky was very “busy”, lots of light and dark clouds and sun rays and clear skies.
And here’s a shot from late at night, 3:54 am on Sunday, after I had gone to bed amidst the faint scent of smoke again. I thought maybe it was the wildfires coming back with a vengeance. Nah. The sound of a fire truck siren rolled in, soon followed by the truck itself, and it stopped at the parkade below the house:
I couldn’t actually see much of the fire from my balcony because it was behind a tree, but some genius had decided to start a small fire just outside one of the stairwells leading to the upper level of the parkade.
Games
Steam Next Fest, Jun 2025 edition, happened this week, so I played a bunch of demos both on and off stream as always. I love sifting through the list of available demos that aren’t in the top 100 most popular demos or so, and trying out weird things. It’s like digging for treasure. Or sampling weird foods I’ve never heard of before. Not all of them pan out, in fact many don’t, but sometimes they do turn out to be great, or at least thoughtfully provocative enough to leave an indelible mark upon me and force me to buy the game when it comes out in the future. There’s been countless games like that over the past few Steam Next Fests, and I’m sure some of the demos I played this week will eventually be added to that list too.
My complete list is still listed on my Shiarapedia page for my streaming activities, but for completeness and searchability I’ll link the ones I played this week here too (my scores out of 10): Outrider Mako (3.5), Elevator Music (7), Dispatch (6), Galvatein: Adventurers’ Guild (6.5), Tokyo Underground Killer (5), Dungeon Mori (6.5), Wanderlust: The Magnificent Journey (5.5), Anomalous Railroad Crossing (2), Halcyon Days at Taoyuan (7), Trainatic (5), Upalu Mundi (5), Dead Engine (6.5), Backpack Seeker’s (4), Oldish Stuff (3), Strange Antiquities (8), Fading Serenades (4.5), and Hirogami (5).
Outside of streaming and recording demos, I also played one other demo without chronicling it too — Escape from Duckov. Escape from Tarkov with ducks?? Not quite, it was a single player top-down PvE extraction shooter. But that demo was lots of fun and I will probably get the game when it launches, assuming it doesn’t clash with the actual Tarkov game when it comes to Steam or with some other big life event.
Outside of that, the first half of my week was devoted to Monster Train 2. Fun game, though I’m bumped up against a couple of challenges that are taking forever to get the right combination of cards to beat. Then on Friday, Backpack Battles hit its 1.0 release and that was the rest of the week right there. Such a great game.
I was also silently made a moderator on the Twitch channel for the other night channel that I watch this week, ragesaq‘s. Mostly because I track his player kills on a spreadsheet for him I think, but that doesn’t require a moderator role to do. On Sunday Jun 8 though, he had a surprise afternoon stream as well and I turned up there when his main moderator person wasn’t, and he quietly elevated me there. I’m not a mod on the Discord server though, and there isn’t much to do on a day to day basis, nor have I been given any marching orders. I do like him, but I am also moderator on two different late night channels that run concurrently now.
Plushie of the Week #187
Back during the final weeks of the Hudson Bay store at Southgate, I did find, and somewhat impulsively buy, a pair of large plushies from their Hallmark section that was on sale and was the last copy of each plushie that I could see. They were actually linked together by a strap or something, so they were meant to be the sold together for sure, but now that they’re in my home they of course have been separated so they can both stretch out and enjoy their not-yet-forever home next to each other without being conjoined to each other and suffering each other’s movements.
This plushie pair is called Hot Sauce and Taco, and they were purchased for $25.99 plus 5% tax, so $27.29 in total, on May 09 2025 from Hudson’s Bay Southgate. They were 50% off at this point, as their normal asking price was $51.99. Far too pricey. $27 or so seemed fine though. Each one of them is about as big as two of my 8-inch Squishmallows.
Anyway they are both being featured together in this Plushie of the Week segment. Here’s a picture of both of them first:
And then Hot Sauce front:
Back:
Tag 1 and Tag 3 front:
Tag 1 back and Tag 2 front:
Tag 2 back and Tag 3 back:
And here’s a frontal picture of Taco:
And back:
Tag 4 front:
Tag 4 back:
For some reaosn Taco doesn’t have the extra tags that Hot Sauce does. There was also this tag that was part of the cord that was connecting the both of them.
Tag 5 front:
Tag 5 back:
Apparently they’re “magnetic plushes”, but I don’t get how. They certainly don’t stick to my fridge, and while squishing every inch of them I didn’t feel anything inside of them that could remotely pass as being magnetic. Maybe they mean their personalities? The tag is also slightly torn at the bottom, but that was the way they were in the store. Who knows what the rest of it used to say. Also, Hallmark stuff is way overpriced.
Song of the Week #163
Title: Nuclear
Artist: Mike Oldfield
Album: Man on the Rocks (2014)
This is another song, similar to Resistance by Muse, that I was introduced to from ragesaq‘s Twitch stream that I watch/listen to at night, but whose song has since transcended the stream itself and become an earworm that I like and listen to in general outside of the stream. According to wiki pages (local), it was also used in a trailer for Metal Gear Solid V, a game that I have played a substantial chunk of but never actually finished. Maybe one day.
This is one of two Mike Oldfield songs that I really like — this one, as well as Moonlight Shadow, which was released in 1983 but that has been remastered multiple times (for $$$). Unfortunately, there does not seem to be one single CD or CD set that contains both of those songs specifically. Not yet anyway. I’ve seen separate CDs containing both of those songs in flea markets and second-hand CD shops around the city, and have contemplated picking them up for $10 or $15 or so each, but it would have been nice if there was a CD with both of these on it. Oh well. Maybe some future compilation album.
Anyway, this is currently the song I like the most from ragesaq‘s stream, so I am thankful to him for introducing me to the song. All my memories of the song are linked to his stream though, since I haven’t heard the song outside of the context of that stream or my Spotify playlists while at home. The song, voiced by Luke Spiller of The Struts, is so haunting, it eats at my soul. And the video I would like to feature for this song is a GMV, or Game Music Video, that someone made for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. This video is so good that it makes me want to go back and replay the game. And by featuring it here, it also means I back it up on my archives in case it is deleted by overzealous copyright trolls in the future.
Dreams
Jun 09 2025
- I was visiting and walking down the main streets of several small towns. Each road had stalls or tents lined up along both sides of the road. Both the individual tents, as well as the towns in general, had about 25 health each, and as a visitor to the town I also had an ailment which would do about 25 damage to each town.
- So the responsible thing to do, and what I was trying to do, was to optimize my damage to try not to do any lasting damage to the town. I did this by looking for stalls with slightly more health than the damage I was about to do, and put the damage on them instead so that none of it spilled over to the health point pool of the town itself.
- There were often a couple other travellers that I didn’t know who arrived at the towns with me too, and they usually did about 15 to 20 damage per, which gave them more flexibility in choosing a stall to dump their damage on. I also heard of or saw old “cards” of travellers in the past who did 100+ damage per attack on towns.
- Much later on, I arrived at a food market and a Chinese woman with a bent chin seated in front of her husband’s pancake food stall beckoned me over and showed me their menu. I wanted to order something from there but could not decide on which of the weirdly named pancake dishes was the best, since I didn’t recognize any of them, and asking her to pick one did not work either as she was not forthcoming with any recommendations.
Jun 10 2025
- I had just bought a new house whose ground floor somehow reminded me of Edmonton 4012, although none of the individual rooms looked similar. The front door led into a long living room with a smooth wooden floor and stairs that led both up and down. The living room also connected along its long edge to a kitchen, with a long half-wall separating the two rooms, and Mom was in the kitchen cleaning the floor. I was here to scout out the place and I asked Mom if it was fine if Jon and I started moving boxes over and left them in the living room for now, even though she was not done cleaning the kitchen yet, and Mom said that it was a clever idea to bring the items over and use the ground floor as an intermediary storage point.
- I went back and woke Jon, who was taking a nap on a bed, up, and we started moving the boxes over. I moved three boxes at a time, using a forcefield that could lift things up in front of me, and I also had the option of being able to cast a boosting spell on an item to prevent it from breaking but instead of casting it on one of the fragile boxes, I casted it on one of the tools that was helping me lift the items using the forcefield, which I believe was a wooden staff.
- It was raining outside but the journey between where we were and the house I was moving into just took a few seconds per move as they were not far away from each other. It was on the other side of a brick wall however so we had to pass around that wall each time, and there was a sense of slight danger each time we did so.
- There was also a related snippet where I was looking at houses and comtemplating buying them but we turned down one house because it was being used as a hotel, and another one because its basement was flagged as dangerous and there were many men loitering inside of it, and an implication that they were secretly working as gangsters.
Jun 11 2025
- I was part of a pirate crew that was on land finishing up a job. I got wind of the fact that they were going to kick me as well as one of the gang’s lookouts out of the gang and eliminate us. Some people disagreed with that move though and warned me so that I could escape. As the job was very near to conclusion, I prepared my escape immediately. I went to try to talk to the other guy who was going to get kicked out but he was running around in panic in a small circle so I let him be.
- A little bit south of where our camp was, stood a two storey apartment building in the shadow of tall skyscrapers. I went to that building and looked around for someone who might take me in. After a few failures, I swung myself up into a second floor balcony and asked a black man and his kid, as they were brushing their teeth together and getting ready to go out, whether I could hide out here for a couple days. Bemused, he said yes, and I unpacked my backpack onto the floor of his second level.
- I hid there for a couple days, and some Singapore friends came by and moved in with me, though they had more freedom to roam around than I did. I avoided going too near to the balcony so others from outside wouldn’t see me, and also was warned against reading a book near the window facing the skyscraper in case someone in that building had binoculars.
- Snippet: I was in a second storey apartment and preparing to go out to get groceries while it was snowing lightly. I was also listening in to some online friends chatting at the same time, and someone mentioned that they were looking forward to colder weather the next week as the weather would be more consistent then instead of hovering between warm and cold weather that would melt and freeze the ice. ragesaq, who was also in the chat, agreed with that. I said that I disliked cold weather and that whatever weather temperatures they were talking about, we were always at least 10 degrees Celsius colder and so we were already frozen up here and it would just get worse.
Jun 12 2025
- Snippet: I was on the platform of an above ground LRT Station. There was a large concrete block stretching to the ceiling that blocked a good part of the middle of the platform, and I was trying to catch an incoming train before the block, but it didn’t stop in time so I had to settle for after the block instead. However, while it was going past the block, I realized that I could adjust the train speed from where I was in order to make sure that I was the first one to catch and board it after the block.
- Snippet: I was with a dog that would go around sniffing and testing important people to determine whether they were good or evil. It approached a Slime King that was seated on a throne, and who had a bright green aura around him which signified that he was probably evil. There was a secret hand gesture and four word codephrase that only good beings could say, and the Slime King desperately tried to say it to prove to the dog that he was good, but he could only manage the first three words, so the dog attacked him.
- I found a small market area at a back area of my University that I had never been to before, with one person selling food laid out on the ground on a mat, another person selling food on a table in front of a large wall of boxes stacked three high, and a few other stalls around the area. At least one of the other stalls was a second hand bookshop with a few books laid down on shelves, and to my surprise I found a large, white book with a very thin cover and spine, that turned out to be a Dunman High yearbook that spanned 8 years of the school’s history during a period of construction and war.
- Being a 4-year school, this meant that the first 4 years involved people who entered the school and then left it by the book’s halfway point, and the second half of the book then involved new people who had arrived after the first group left and then they themselves graduated as well. The book highlighted this with two separate prefaces from two different students at the front of the book. It also had a page of obituaries for people who had died in the 8 year period, as well as a note about the school leaving a Coin of Remembrance out for each of the 8 years of students.
- I was excited to buy this and scan it, but just before I could make the purchase, my dream was disrupted and I “woke up” in my dream world, which had the effect of sending me back to another earlier point in the school. I hurried back to the hidden market with a friend and found that the book was still there, and managed to buy it again this time. Then I woke up for real.
Jun 13 2025
- I was on my way back to the Edmonton 4012 house with a bunch of plants that I took from an exotic jungle, which I was going to use as a resource for something. I was using a car to hold some of these plants, but when I got out near the house, a Chinese man hopped into the car and tried to drive away with it. I had to chase after him, pull open the door and drag him out, and then report him to the authorities to get rid of him.
- I then brought the car back to the home, and rang a doorbell next to a pit in the ground that stretched down about eight feet into the home itself so that I could get my parents to extend the ladder for me, as I did not have a key for an alternate entrance into the home. Dad came into view at the bottom of the pit, about one house level deep, and I showed him my plants and then tossed them down the hole into a cardboard box that he had, before coming down myself.
- Kel asked me if I wanted to go wash up first or to go “clean up my soldiers” first, which had something to do with maintaining some minions that I had, and while I wanted to do the former, there was a time limit that I had to do the latter within so I said I would go clean them up instead.
Jun 14 2025
- Snippet: During a commotion at a doorway of a classroom, a girl from a geology club was shrunk down to the size of a human’s palm, even though she wasn’t the intended target of the skill that did that. The shrinking was temporary, but she had a club to attend, so someone picked her up and let her stand on his palm as he offered to help her out with getting to her club, but she was not interested in the extra assistance.
Jun 15 2025
- Snippet: I walked into an open-air railway station with the tracks in the middle of the station separating two platforms on either side. The tracks and platforms were on the street level. There were three sisters there that I was going to meet, though I don’t remember the reason that we met any longer. However, each of them had a different power that she could use.