Dreams

Aug 04 2025

• I was downtown late in the evening with Mom, and I think Jon and Kel were there in some scenes too as it oscillated between a 2-person and a 4-person scene at times. We settled on an outdoor Chinese restaurant to eat at, and the moment we sat down my meal arrived, before I had even taken a look at the menu. This was obviously someone else’s meal, who had ordered it to this seat and then left before the meal came. But it was a nice, large bowl of bee hoon with some fish cake sides, and a drink, so I was happy with that meal and accepted it as my dinner anyway.
• Near the end of my meal, the owner of the store, an older Chinese lady, came by with the bill and I saw that it had come to something around $200 of the local currency since it was a double helping of the meal and had other things like toppings and sides attached to it. It was expensive but not overly so, and I tipped them a little bit too so it came to $230.
• When I actually finished the meal though, the son of the owner came along and said that they hadn’t actually charged for the fish cake sides properly, and the drink as well, and added another $100 to the bill. He also mistook the original $230 as a tip of its own, so he added on the original agreed-upon price of $230 to the $100 and then added on another $230 as the tip so my total came to $560. He bragged to his mom that he had mnade the restaurant an extra $100 profit.
• I said that if that was the final price, I would pay it, but then I would return home and perform a chargeback on my credit card and claim back all the money so they were left with nothing, and I would give them a bad review on my blog and never return here again. He started arguing with me and I ignored him. On the way out, we stopped by the counter and his mom was there to refund the difference and apologize for his son’s behaviour.
• My Mom took the cash on my behalf, pulling out a couple of crisp, red $100 notes and some smaller change from an envelope that the owner handed her. Mollified, we then left as I said that I would return at some point.
• After we left, I said I wanted to wander around more and Mom said she would head home on a bus first as it was now past midnight. We parted ways, and I think both Jon and Kel followed her too. I made a two-line note in Discord for Kel, but I accidentally put it in the food channel of my main Discord server, where Kynji was busy typing up something, so I quickly deleted the lines so they wouldn’t be in the middle of her sentences and sent the notes to Kel over the right chat app.
• I went to an area downtown where there were Lotro raids, and I saw that Seo was leading a large raid group of about 24 to 30 people, including some Singapore-era friends. They had just finished a PvE raid and were going to the Ettenmoors for some PvP, so I decided to tag along as a supporting friend, though I didn’t specifically join them since the raid was full.
• Seo gathered the raid group at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the safe spawning area in the PvP zone, to wait for stragglers in his own raid to teleport here and muster up. Channeling both the vulnerability of my minstrel healer as well as the cuteness of Mayano Top Gun from the Umamusume game, I stood at the top of the stairs, laid a sled down diagonally on it, and then slid all the way down the stairs, past the raid group and out into the open PvP zone.
• As expected, this caused a couple of invisible, stealthed warg players who were watching Seo‘s raid group to immediately attack me. But I was also a good self-healer, and my minstrel had a small shield that I could block with as well, so I did a dance back toward the safety of the stairs while keeping myself alive at 20% health or so as the wargs desperately tried to finish me off. To no avail, as the people gathered at the stairs saw what was happening and rushed over to murder the warg spies and save me.
• Dusting myself off, I suggested to Seo that instead of PvP here in the Moors, we attached the downtown area that I was just at to this zone and went off that way to look for some action instead. That downtown zone, when created as a PvP map, had several tough PvE bosses to kill too, and Seo‘s group had just finished some PvE raids themselves so they were still quite raid-oriented and geared for it, so he agreed.
• There was a large raid of Lotro player monsters roaming around the maps but we avoided them and made for a building in the zone where we knew a boss was. This building was a single large room with two doors, a front door which had a doorknob on it and a back door which was controlled by a Canadian-style window crank.
• I realized that the door worked as an effective bottleneck, especially since I could lock the doorknob, and then hold the door shut while everyone inside fought the boss. Even if the enemy raid were to come, only one person at a time could try to open the door. Xuanjie took the back door and held the crank shut while I took the front door and held that shut in preparation for people trying to get in.
• Eventually I felt someone trying to open the door, and I held it shut against them. But a nagging doubt crept into my mind that this might be other friendly stragglers trying to get in too, and trapping them outside might mean that they get slaughtered by enemies. I requested someone to come look through the peephole of the door to see who was trying to get in, since I was holding the doorknob in such a way that I couldn’t look through it myself, but no one was forthcoming.
• I decided to just open the door as I felt like that wasn’t the large monster raid outside. It turned out to be a single minotaur, standing slightly taller than the door, and looking quite puzzled as to why the door was locked and why he couldn’t get in. This one wasn’t a player, but another boss, and he stepped in once the door opened, at which point Seo‘s raid turned around and defeated him too. This was a good thing overall since his presence outside had been rather conspicuous and would have been a sign for sharp-eyed enemies that something was going on in this location.
• I then closed and locked the door again, while Seo‘s raid turned their attention back to the main boss. Eventually I felt someone trying to open the door again, and this time I knew that the main monster raid had arrived. I held on to the locked doorknob for dear life and managed to stop them from opening it, so they were all stuck outside. I also requested someone’s help to look through the peephole again, but again no one volunteered until I threatened to let the monsters in if no one helped. Someone then came by and narrated what he saw through the peephole.
• Eventually, Seo‘s raid finished the boss and he lined everyone up in five long columns, facing the front door that the creeps were still trying to get in through. He arranged four raid rewards on the ground, they were little passport-sized books and each one was a different mix of dark shades of red and blue. He then gestured to me to step aside and let the door open.
• Finally wrenching the door open, the raid of monster players nonetheless stopped short and stared dumbfounded at the books on the ground once the door opened. They were expensive and rare raid rewards, especially on the monster player side since they were actual player raid rewards. The monsters started to feud with each other and Seo took that chance to charge his own raid group out like a column of death, wiping them all.
• Seo‘s raid then moved on further into downtown. I didn’t feel like I wanted to play any more, since it was 3 am and my eyes were feeling prickly, so I was one of those stragglers. I chatted to Xuanjie as we packed up and moved off in another direction toward the bus stop instead. I said that the night had been lots of fun, although I wish we had played night tag before. I had the chance to play that once back at an overnight summer Math camp when I was young, and I had missed it ever since then. I also checked with Mom and found out that she had returned home safely.
• We also saw some patch notes about the game removing doors and locks soon, as several groups had apparently been abusing that mechanic in PvP locations similar to the room that we were in, over the past month or so. Some examples were listed in the patch notes, though our group was not among them. I thought that I had come up with that defensive technique by myself, but it made sense that it had been employed by other groups too. I was just glad that I had the chance to try it before they patched it out.

Aug 05 2025

• I was training or building large, flat digital cards that I could see floating in front of me if I brought up the UI. These cards had distance aptitudes like in Uma Musume, but otherwise were not really related.
• We could earn skills for those cards by doing things in the game world, and a friend and I, who were both Engineer class players, were searching for some matching cars with certain qualities late at night so that we could upgrade our cards.
• We were searching for said items on a street while avoiding police. But we were also part of a larger group of people, led by a female player, who were on another street dealing with the police. Two other girls from the main group were initially following the two of us around as well, but after a while they inquired why we weren’t helping out with the police incident on the other street.
• My friend told them that we were engineers, and that we were trying to level up our skills by finding suitable cars so that we could develop better skills to help in the longer-term. The other two, who were not engineers, then left us, with the younger of the two girls pouting heavily since we weren’t dropping everything to go help the leader and main group now.

Aug 06 2025

• Jon and I took part in a golf tourmanent that I don’t remember the details of except that the grass was a very vivid shade of green. After that, we visited what seemed to be a strip club together with Kel, except it was set in a one-room Singapore-style apartment. We didn’t partake in the risque stuff though, and mostly sat or laid around in a circle, chatting to each other plus one of the girls there while the owner stood around nearby and watched on.
• The girl was holding a bolster with keypad-style buttons on it that allowed people that interacted with her to press them and gain points when they touched it. But she could not use it herself as that was how the bolsters were designed, and that sacrificial nature was apparently part of her job. Nonetheless, I inquired if I was allowed to take and hold one of the bolsters from the closet too so that she could use mine instead, and she said yes.
• Jon and I also briefly kicked around a half-deflated football, and the owner asked if we watch soccer, and then if we knew the score of the Manchester United game that was played today. Jon told him that the score was 1-1 when we left the house late in the game, and that the opponent team, from Holland, had a few players injured at that point. We looked it up online and the final score was 4-1 for Manchester United.

Aug 07 2025

• Snippet: All I remember is walking past a neighbourhood in a town with someone, and there was a house that was potentially for sale there but it was locked out from being purchased somehow. To unlock it, I had to drop a gun item that I had looted into a slot in front of the house, although I was not even sure in the end that the person I was with wanted to look at this specific house.

Aug 08 2025

• Snippet: I was walking along a long alleyway with a couple of friends. It kind of felt like we were on rails, like we weren’t allowed to go back the way that we came from, only forwards. We could interact with things that we passed by in order of their appearance, although I don’t remember the details on how. I do remember that we had levels and upgradable skills, but that as far as I recall there was no combat.

Aug 09 2025

• Snippet: I remember one scene where there were 15 identical nameplates in a room for some reason and pressing a button on the wall activated all of them at once so that they all lit up.
• Snippet: There was another scene where I was walking along a school corridor and saw a boy with a short sword, barely managing to fend off a giant, yellow-striped spider that was trying to jump on him. The spider’s height came up to his knees and it was about the same length and width as that height as well. I called out to him and told him that there was a security conference nearby being held by Tyler P and Michael, and to bring the spider there as they would help him deal with it. He backed away from the spider toward the lecture theatre door while fending it off, opened it up and entered it, and the attendees of the conference indeed killed the spider for him with their weapons.

Aug 10 2025

• I was stuck in an elevator with Mom, Dad, Jon, and a man with an adult tiger as a pet. The tiger was fairly docile, to the point that Jon even stuck his head in the tiger’s mouth at one point to look inside of it, a move that I chastised him for.
• I called the elevator operators to tell them that we were stuck, and they asked if the lift was in imminent danger of collapse. I looked up through an access hole in the ceiling of the elevator and then said no, the cords looked steady, though the elevator was swinging slightly. Mentally I blamed the tiger’s extra weight for getting the elevator stuck. I then chatted to Kel over the phone while we waited for rescue.
• We waited around for a bit, until a firefighter on a rope suddenly descended. He grabbed me around the waist and started pulling me up as I pulled out both Tigey as well as a phone, the former to make sure he was with me and safe as well, the latter so I could grab a picture on the way up.
• Once at the top, I thanked the firefighter and he nodded and said that he hoped to finish the rescue within 10 minutes because he had a town defence in some online game that he was playing to attend. Jon came up next and then my parents soon after, and Mom reported that there were two different rescuers deployed after they did my initial rescue to make sure it worked, and she saw the other one going down on a separate rope as she was coming up on hers.
• I wondered how they were going to get the tiger out and whether they would do that first or do its owner first, as not seeing its owner around might agitate it. I guessed they would just sedate the beast and bring it out via a rope around its waist or something.
• After the rescue, we went to a nearby supermarket. Mom and Dad went in to do some shopping while Jon and I waited outside, under a covered walkway next to some talkative teenage girls. We watched them line up at the back of the cashier line and I told Kel at that point that we were coming home soon.