Dear Tigey,
That was the quietest week we had in a while. Still, home sweet home is nice.
Entry #201 (Aug 03 2025)
Table of Contents
Karaoke…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #194
ට Dreams
Life
Due to a combination of being really busy at work, hot weather and heat warnings in the latter part of the week, and general tiredness after being out so much last week, I didn’t go out this week except for a spot of groceries, though I might go to a local festival later this long weekend with Kel and Jon. I appreciated the time at home though, but although I’ve read, and also said, in the past that there’s no such thing as a quiet week, just a week of small, interesting things that one forgets about by the end of the week if one isn’t being mindful, this week was pretty close to that because I had no time to really be mindful or look up and around.
Work was the busiest culprit of that by far — out of five people on the team, one was away for a family emergency for the entirety of the week, two others were gone for half the week due to time off or other obligations, and the fifth was doing other things, so I was running our entire team’s queue mostly by myself, with one or two other people that I could occasionally toss single-day straightforward tickets to. That meant that I had to also triage which tickets needed to be bumped up in priority and which could wait, find ways to buy time for some of the tickets, deal with all the tougher tickets that had to move, and also answer questions in our joint chat with, and be the point person for direct escalations from, the Service Desk.
It was busy. Something like 10-12 hours a day busy, since I work from home, the whole morning and afternoon would be spent looking out for emergencies (and there were a couple!) in the queue and chat and dealing with any tickets that could move, and I’d go all the way until our group watch anime started at 4 pm, and often even then until 4:30 pm or 5 pm. Then I’d stream from 6-9 pm. Then work a bit more from 10 pm – 1 am, sorting through the mess of tickets for the day and giving them out (if applicable) to others for the next day, taking some of the easier ones for myself, and working through them.
All that extra stuff was unpaid, but necessary. But even then, this was a step back from what I’d used to do two or three years ago, before certain people came into the department and certain things happened to sap out most of my goodwill and loyalty and the pride and fun of working here. Back then I’d keep plugging away at it through the day and night, even if alone, to make sure we were down to as close to 0 tickets as possible. This week, we were still riding along at about 20, then 30, and at one point 40 backlogged tickets through most of the week and I just didn’t care to do them. This was requested by other people on the team too, since emptying out our queue while we were severely shorthanded could be seen as a sign by the current administration that we didn’t actually need the extra people and that it was sustainable to run with a smaller sized team or something.
What aided me in the time pressure this week was that I no longer really watch my main morning streamers because all they ever play is Rimworld and I’ve gotten sick of watching or hearing about that game, and both my night-time streamers also had reduced schedules this week, so I had a good chunk of time left over to do stuff. Maybe it’s better this way in general. Not all that “stuff” was work, it also meant I was able to stay on top of my current seasonal anime schedule, for example, so there wasn’t any personal pressure along that front.
Another thing I was looking at this week again, which I hadn’t done for quite a while, was look at ways to improve my voice, both in terms of watching YouTube videos on the topic, practising some singing and voice exercises, and so on. That sort of thing was easy to slip in between doing tickets, and kept my mood up as well. I hadn’t actually done anything like this since I started streaming back in October 2024, so it’s been nearly a year, wow. I’ve been slacking. I’m thinking of formally looking for a local voice teacher/coach and taking lessons from them, despite the cost, but we’ll see.
Regarding the housing market this week, there’s no personal news, but over the last week or two there’s been a good number of houses popping up and staying up in the areas around me, even several within my price range, they’re just not really houses that I’ve wanted. I’m cautiously optimistic that the market might be starting to cool just ever so slightly, and I hope it stays that way. Or just make it crash entirely. I could use a market crash right now too.
I supposedly have a vacation block scheduled starting next weekend, from around Aug 09 through to the 18th or so, so I tentatively have the entire Aug 12-16 week booked off, but I don’t really know what to do with that time. I haven’t planned anything. Kind of tempted to spend $1,200 plus lodging and take a quick jaunt off to Tokyo and Hong Kong, or $1,000 plus lodging to go hiking in England, or $500 plus lodging to go to Toronto, or $100 plus lodging to go to Vancouver or Jasper. But maybe I’ll just be boring and stay home. There is the Animethon festival next weekend too but I’m actually tentatively planning to take that event off this year. Too pricey and restrictive of an event, and I don’t have any CDs for the incoming Japanese singers to sign.
While I didn’t rush-order any CDs, I did order a larger, custom-made book cover bag to hold Tigey‘s caricatures, since all the recent ones I picked up from K-Days were too large to fit in the current book cover bag that I use to carry them around in. Instead, I commissioned one from a local Albertan designer through her Etsy shop for $40. It’s coming sometime later this month… probably. Canada Post workers just rejected their latest collective bargaining deal (for good reason) so we’ll see.
I also bought a backup of my current electric kettle, which I really like. I use the Ovente Electric Kettle, 1.8L, and I love the aesthetic way I can fill it in from the top without opening the lid since I am lazy. But no, I drink a lot of tea and it’s very important to me that I like the entire process of making tea, and this tea kettle has made me feel very happy over the last year.
The only downside about the one I have is that the metal plate inside the bottom of the flask looks a bit weird after near-daily usage (and constant submersion, since I almost never empty the flask out and let it dry) over the past 14 months or so. And its other major downside is that it is very expensive to buy in Canada. I can buy two from Amazon.com and still have it come out to about the same price, after shipping and currency conversion, as physically going to Walmart here and buying one. Anyway I’ve been meaning to get a backup for it, so I did so this week.
But yeah, otherwise this week was quiet. It was even a little bit mystical, since I never fully close my curtains except when there’s a heat wave going on, so my apartment, while warmer than I liked at times, also felt like a secret hideout or a spaceship. Also I found 30 cents at the bottom of my apartment floor’s laundry machine.
Jahandar starts a new job next week, fully remote, and we’re all very happy and excited for him. I am especially so since he sponsors this blog. Jon and his girlfriend have also bought a new house and they move in next week, Aug 07 2025. Just like our houses in Singapore, we’ll lose things like our move-in dates and move-out dates to obscurity if we don’t write them down somewhere, so I’m writing it down here, and hopefully this blog will still be around in 30 years when we are trying to find the date so that we can be thorough on some other project that we’re cooking up.
Talking about blogs that will be around in 30 years, Gibbs started his gaming memories blog (local) this week after some nagging by other people in Discord. We look forward to this surely very successful and long-term venture. Maybe he’ll also find all those random sample pages that are still there in his blog template someyear too.
Horsie, the Plushie of the Week last week, took her bath this week, and I’m happy to report that she came out of the bath relatively unscathed. I might leave her on my desk instead of bringing her to my bedside though. She has already staked out a nice spot for herself here. We’ll see.
I did hear and mention a few months ago that a Vancouver billionaire, Ruby Liu, had put in a bid for several Hudson’s Bay stores during their shutdown process, including a few in Alberta, and after reading news about the locations and companies I had been cautiously certain that Southgate Mall was one of them. She wanted to turn them into Chinese-style department stores, but doesn’t seem to have much of a concrete plan at the moment so the mall owners are trying to invalidate her bid and I’m not sure she’ll succeed in her bid in the end. I obviously do support it and wish it would come to fruition though. But the reason this is here this week is that during some court proceedings, the names of the stores were released (local) and I was right, Southgate Centre is among them! Although it lists Southgate as being a two-floor Hudson Bay store and it’s actually a three-floor one.
And I only took one picture this week, which was this sunset picture from Wed Jul 30 at 9:56 pm. Pretty. And there’s a moon in there too.
Games
Despite staying at home virtually all week, I didn’t have a lot of time spent in gaming either. I think the bulk of the free time I did have went to Umamusume: Pretty Derby, and the most significant thing that happened there is that Satinel and I left our current guild at the end of the week, once the end-of-month rewards for being in a guild had been given out, and hopped over to Teslain‘s guild instead.
I didn’t end up buying He Is Coming this week, even though I was thinking of it at the end of last week. It was in my cart and everything. But due to a combination of being busy at work, plus watching even more gameplay on it, I decided that it didn’t hook me enough that it was going to find a rotation in my games right now. Maybe in the future. I did buy Demonic Mahjong though, which is a mix of Chinese Mahjong, Balatro joker and tile manipulation, and a Slay the Spire sort of map progression. The UI elements need a bit more work on this one but the base game itself was interesting. I am in the same Steam Family as Satinel now and I know she will try out the game at some point as well so it was a worthy purchase to play now and then.
I also played some Backpack Battles late at night when I was too tired to do anything else, plus I reinstalled The Lord of the Rings Online because there was something about a server shutdown and transfer at the end of this month (local). Goodbye Landroval, I suppose! We’ll meet again someday, out on the roads that go ever on! Well we’re not really losing much (yet), nearly everyone from Landroval is just transferring over to the same 64-bit RP-encouraged server (Peregrin) anyway, but definitely there’s some name attachment and nostalgia there that will be lost.
On stream, I am about to be done playing Prey, at which point I will move over to probably just demos or short 1-stream games until my break next week, and then Outer Wilds once everyone is back from their break. I am gradually shifting away from my formerly resolute stance to play JRPGs and other RPGs as a staple on my stream, I don’t think it will ever grow that way. Demos might be a path forward but they’re unstable as well since you’ll never get fans of any one game. But maybe I’ll just go full variety and go through various game genres while lifting the restriction that games I play have to have a story with a firm start and end. I’m also not that far off from perhaps trying to commission some art for my stream.
I did find out that even though that Keymailer site that I talked about last week will not accredit me because I don’t have enough views to hit whatever arbitrary baseline they have, game developers still do send out playtest requests through that system and I’ve received a couple offers from dev studios whereby they’d give me a full game key (either for the game in question or for another game in their publisher’s catalog) in return for playing their latest game, on or off stream, for at least two hours. That is sort of neat. So there’s no real reason why anyone should not just sign up anyway even if they are not a (and I dislike this term) Content Creator, since the system can also be used to volunteer as a playtester for some games. Now, I wasn’t particularly interested in the games that came through that pipeline this week nonetheless, but they were not terrible games either. So maybe another offer another week will be enticing enough for me to jump into that.
Plushie of the Week #194
During one of my recent trips to Southgate, I picked up yet another discounted Squishmallow from London Drugs there. Yes, I know I have quite the army now. They’re mostly food-themed too. This one (local) is named Townes, and he’s (apparently) a cucumber mint smoothie plushie, and a tour guide who will welcome and onboard all my other plushies from now on and show them around town. I expect him to become a leader in the long term, with a long and distinguished officer career in Tigey‘s Plushie Army.
But for now, he sits in a pile with the other Squishmallows on the box next to my bed. He was bought on Jul 21 2025, so two days before Horsie, who was featured last week, and he cost $8.99 CAD, $9.44 after tax.
Plushie front:
Back:
Tag 1 front:
Tag 1 inside:
Tag 1 back:
Tag 2 front:
Tag 2 back/Tag 3 front:
Tag 3 back:
Dreams
Jul 28 2025
- I was playing a game where I would open doors and loot things and would get a % chance of getting specific types of desired loot, or perhaps double loot, when looting something.
- This chance was governed by a literal loot table in a room — a table with different items on it that increased my red, yellow, or blue percentage of looting items. I don’t remember what types of items the three colours referred to, however the percentages were to two decimal places, and the ones I remember were all around 65%.
- The items only provided small incremental updates to the number though, so while there was a way to collect them and increase my percentage, I said that I wasn’t really going to bother with it until there were enough to give them a substantial boost to get closer to 100%.
- Eventually the company that made those items went out of business, and I overheard from other people that they were going to have a fire sale for the remaining items, and whatever wasn’t sold there would then be loaded onto a truck and sent to a liquidation centre, randomly placed in boxes, and sold to other people.
- I don’t remember the larger plot of the dream but I do remember that both Jon and Dad were there in some capacity, as was a friend who was subsisting off of my character in some way, relying on me for energy or something similar.
Jul 29 2025
- While walking through a town in the late evening, I decided to leave the main roads and walk through a large meadow full of beautiful pink flowers as a shortcut to my intended destination. This was however still ultimately a residential area, with houses lining both the left and right sides of the meadow as I walked through it.
- However, I soon found out that in the evenings, there were wild dogs, black panthers, and both adult and baby bears that encroached upon the meadow, wandering around and occasionally checking out the adjacent houses as well. I saw one house had left their front door open on accident and one of the wild dogs noticed it and made a dash into the doorway. I hoped the owners of the house were alright.
- I tried to avoid the animals as best as I could, and I even had time to stop and take some photographs of the breathtakingly beautiful scenery on my phone. I did understand that the animals, especially the bears, were dangerous though, and I had to run now and then to escape detection.
- I also came across a man further into the meadow who was standing next to a docile black panther who had a blue squiggle on its forehead. Apparently this was a magic spell that turned the animal into a pet, and the man was trying to sell the pet panther to someone else who was standing next to him and listening to his spiel.
Jul 30 2025
- I was traveling with two friends while carrying a cardboard box around, the cardboard box was about the size of a small flat-screen TV but wasn’t too heavy. Due to its bulk though I was placing it on a green skateboard with pretty graffiti on it and wheeling it around. The skateboard also had a pink bag strap attached to it so I could carry it around.
- While waiting at a traffic light, two people going in the same direction as we did stole the skateboard and made off with it, but they were easy to spot because one of them was carrying two skateboards, one of them being the one that was ours.
- I pointed them out to the original owner of the skateboard, a tall black guy, and we followed them until we caught up with them. The owner of the skateboard confronted them in a corridor leading to a cafeteria, and they were apologetic and said that their own skateboard broke and that’s why they took what they thought was an abandoned one.
- I didn’t believe them because they basically filched it from my sheet, but the owner told us all to wait and went to get a set of tools to help them repair their broken skateboard. While waiting, I reclaimed the skateboard and put my box and a few other things I was carrying onto it, including my bag and a jacket belonging to the third friend.
- Snippet: Earlier, I remember going into a shop with someone else. This shop did not sell anything, it was more of a prize shop with plenty of egg-shaped items preserved in resin lying around. I remember playing a game where we tried to guess the age of the items or tried to find items that were older than a certain age. For example, I found a snake trapped in resin and knew that this was a prehistoric item that was thousands of years old.
Jul 31 2025
- Snippet: Two friends and I were driving around in a car. We were all looking for different things in the same area — the driver was looking to buy a house, the other friend was looking for someone else, while I was looking for a limited-time shop vendor that had something to do with a hockey game. I found the vendor and queued up for it, but the shopkeeper didn’t give me a chance to order whatever I wanted from her, instead prescribing me something and sending me off to a different room. That room turned out to be a clinic, and I explained to the nurse at the front desk that I wasn’t here for an appointment but had somehow ended up with one instead. She said that this had happened with other people too and gave me a refund, which allowed me to return to the queue and try again.
Aug 01 2025
- I was holding a bunch of Minecraft-like cubic voxel grass blocks in a grassy field, with a chance to start building a castle either on a raised flat part of the field or on the regular ground part which was at the same height as the surrounding area.
- The castle would house a bunch of nodes where some friends and I could store loot and other treasure in treasure piles along the side of the wall. There were also three locations for unlocked NPCs to stand in so that we could interact with them.
- There was more space on top of the raised part, plus apparently the last time I was here I had built the castle on the ground, so I wanted to build it on the raised part this time.
- However, I was not sure if I wanted to fully put in the effort to do so because we each only had 12 turns of adventuring to play in this round of the game, and I could only build a few blocks of the castle between each turn. I would not be able to finish building the castle within the round, nor would my friends get to see and utilize the entire castle even if it were fully built up to the extent that I wanted to make it.
Aug 02 2025
- Snippet: I remember a dream location that I was in was a server room, and in that room there was a panel that showed me how many horses I had for each race distance in Uma Musume. I only had one horse that was suitable for long distance races.
- Snippet: I also remember a gym that was three stories high, according to its map, but upon further investigation the map for the second and third stories was just an elevator shaft and a ladder to a platform that I could climb or ride to, and then jump down from.
- Snippet: I was also hanging out with one or two guy friends in a mall at some point but I could sense that they didn’t really want me there. I took my leave and went to look for Kaiting and another Dunman-era girl friend that I had seen earlier on when we walked by them, but I couldn’t find them again.
Aug 03 2025
- Snippet: All I remember is an Umamusume-style horse raising game where I apparently raised a horse with 9-star dirt affinity, and where all the horses had an additional base statistic to consider that would influence their career, which was one of three horse trainers or horse lawyers or something like that that represented them in real life.