My Diary #208

Dear Tigey,

What does the outside world look like?

Entry #208 (Sep 21 2025)

Table of Contents

Outer…
ට  Life
ට  Games
ට  Plushie of the Week #201
ට  Song of the Week #166
ට  Memory Snippet of the Week #177
ට  Dreams

Life

This week was so odd. I had enough groceries and everything I needed so I just.. didn’t go out this week. And basically didn’t spend anything. There’s a big hole in my expenses tracking ledger file because I didn’t go out and didn’t do anything. Next week won’t be the same thing — besides groceries, I have a work meeting on Wednesday so I’ll be going out for that regardless.

And yet, despite staying at home for the entire week, I didn’t really do or accomplish anything besides a bit of game-related stuff. I know exactly why though. Even after all this time, even after so many solo travel trips and being quite confident with my skills overseas, there’s always this huge mental block when it comes to actually pulling the trigger on buying tickets and booking accommodation for a trip. It’s so difficult. There’s so much guilt, so much second-guessing, so much of me telling myself “why don’t you just stay home? it’s comfortable and safe and pleasant.” And it’s so overwhelming that everything else grinds to a halt because it consumes so much mental energy, and I need to resolve this decision first before I can do anything else.

Part of what ties into this is that a lot of websites and local event guides have not updated their calendar for the 2026 year yet, so in some cases there are events I was wondering about visiting in this or that city that I just don’t have the date information for. It’s kind of silly that this happens, when tourist boards and other such organizations make the entire event calendar near the start of the year so there’s plenty of lead time for people attending events in the second half of the year, but far less time for people trying to arrive near the start of the year. It’s like they lack critical thinking skills? I don’t know.

I did do a bunch of shopping and comparison between the four major airlines that fly between Canada and Japan without passing through USA this week though — Air Canada, WestJet, ANA, and JAL. Of the four, JAL is far too pricey and uncompetitive, even for their economy seats, so they are automatically out of the question. The other three have somewhat reasonable and comparable prices to each other, but after WestJet‘s recent security breaches, I’m likely not going to go with them either even if I have to pay a little more. It’s my own little slice of punishment. I have found that round trip tickets are better in all cases right now because all the return one-way tickets to North America are expensive, almost as expensive as the two-way tickets themselves. So I will probably end up buying a two-way ticket between Tokyo and Edmonton, and then one way tickets to/from Tokyo to wherever else I want to go.

Even right now though, the two-way tickets are close to $1,000 in price — it is technically possible to get tickets closer to $800, but that’s before bag fees and taxes, with no flexibility in case I need to move dates or cancel, etc, and with this particular trip I probably need that flexibility in case a house purchase rears its head. Google Flights lists cheaper prices now and then but that tool is VERY broken and often the low prices on the search page no longer even match the prices on its own detailed listing pages. And I almost never buy tickets from third-party sites anymore anyway so a lot of the prices they provide aren’t useful even if real.

Outside of the bellyaching over prices though, I am looking forward to going overseas and exploring cities again. I love weird shopping malls and streets and Asia is generally the best place to see and experience the kind of sights that I want to find. And after I finalize my trip (or lack thereof), I can finally start to look at a few other things that have been on my backburner for a while. I also never claimed my PSA so I have to do that to get $1,500 back for the year, nor did I ever claim my Jilted Jaunts trip against my Scene+ points, so I actually have a large err.. rebate there that I can apply toward next year’s trip too.

Late in the week, literally a little bit past midnight on Sunday, Satinel alerted me that CrossCode was having more promotional plushies being made (local) on Makeship, and of course I needed to pledge for those. They’re like $30 USD a pop, though buying them together means the shipping gets split three ways, I guess. They’re due to arrive in January 2026. Better not be (too) late or Jon will have to go pick up my plushie while I’m overseas again. While this was expensive, the little bit of money that Steffy is still returning to me every month into my Paypal account really helped offset this cost, especially since it’s stored in USD in my account and thus lets me save on conversion rates. It brought a $106.94 USD cost down to about half the cost.

And that’s about it for the week! Nice and short, after the monster diary entry that was last week. I didn’t even take any photos this week. I did work a bit on scanning and backup projects, in particular moving some savegames to my archival drive that gets backed up to Backblaze. I mean, everything gets backed up to Backblaze, but moving them there makes them easier to find in the future and makes it less likely they’ll get overwritten and deleted.

I also wanted to give a shoutout to the pigeons who were a plague on my balcony last year but who still have not been here this year at all. I wonder where they all went. My balcony is so (comparatively) clean. I think I’ve only had to wield my broom to clean it once all year.

Games

My game lineup hasn’t significantly shifted from last week, with Umamusume: Pretty Derby and Vampire Survivors during my own time and Outer Wilds, specifically the DLC, gracing my stream. The DLC of Outer Wilds was so good, it’s a shame that it’s all over now. With my forgetfulness superpower I should be able to play everything again as though it were brand new in 6-7 years and I look forward to that. Now that I’ve completely finished Outer Wilds too, with 100% achievements at that after 60.8 hours (minus about 1 hour of it that I played several years ago), I look forward to it no longer showing up in my dreams in some capacity every other day.

My next major game on stream looks to be Final Fantasy Tactics two Tuesdays from now, and I might try to squeeze in Strange Antiquities next week as well. Or maybe I’ll just play demos all week — I have a ton of them to play and I kind of need to shrink the queue before Steam Next Fest in October. A remake of Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter just released this week as well to fairly glowing reviews, and I want to play that too but there’s just no time. And then there’s Hades II hitting its 1.0 launch next Thursday too, although that won’t be a stream game for me. Great, just great. I also want to play older games on stream but there’s just no time for that.

Plushie of the Week #201

These are the first two plushies that will be featured from the bag of plushies that Jon brought over a couple of weeks ago. I’ve mentioned in the past about a box of Ty plushies that a customer left at Dad‘s laundry shop after a fire or something that they no longer wanted, and that Dad washed up and gave to us, and I think it’s this set of plushies as every plushie in the bag was Ty-branded except for one which had no branding (possibly it had been cut off). All of them were also either dated from around the same time or had their tags partially scrubbed off or faded over time. I don’t remember when this would have happened and thus when the plushies would have come into our lives though. Probably around 2005 or so, plus or minus a couple of years.

These two plushies are identical baby chick plushies, and their officlal Ty name according to their tags is Eggbert. I don’t really remember whether we called them by those names or not, I don’t think most of the plushies spent much time at all outside of their box due to Mom being leery about letting smoke-infused (at the time) plushies loose around the house, but I do remember these two making an appearance now and then.

Chick 1 front:

Chick 1 back:

Chick 2 front:

Chick 2 back:

Proof that they’re different chicks:

I took photos of both tags but only added the better photo of each one here since otherwise it’d even be more repetitive than what it already is.

Tag 1 front:

Tag 1 back/Tag 2 front:

Tag 2 back:

Memory Snippet of the Week #177

I have a formative memory of one of our earlier trips from Singapore to Canada where we stayed at an accommodation called Homewood Inn, which offered a bed and breakfast experience among other things. I’ve never been able to properly place it chronologically, but I always thought it was in Montreal. I specifically remember that it was called Homewood Inn too, and not Homewood Suites, which is a Hilton subsidiary or something.

Recently though, I did some idle research to try to track down this inn and found that there was only one real match for it, an inn in Toronto that has since closed down (local) due to bedbugs and disrepair and neglect from the owners. Whoops. Here (local) are some of the traveller-submitted photos from when it was still around, though. It only looks passingly familiar, but that could just be invented memories so I wouldn’t put too much stock into it. It almost certainly has to be the right place though, since that’s the only Homewood Inn that I can find anywhere. Which would mean that we stayed here during our trip to Canada at around June 1995, since that was the last time (and only time so far) that I went to Toronto.

That Tripadvisor page seems to be one of the few sources of information left about this inn, so I’m glad it was still up after all this time. It states that the address of the inn used to be 65 Homewood Avenue, but plugging that into Google Maps (local) just shows a normal house there now. Hopefully those bedbugs are long gone too, eh.

Oddly enough, though we have a couple of family vacation pictures of hotels here and there, apparently including the hotel that we went to when we visited Montreal on the same trip, but not for Homewood Inn for some reason. Yet, that’s the one I remember the name of the most.

Dreams
Sep 15 2025
  • Snippet: There were white circles lying on the ground on a mountainside, with each circular location being a trigger that opened a quest or race that one could do. I didn’t qualify for all of them, but I was allowed to borrow another person’s character to help several times a day, so I used those friend characters to qualify for the quests and then do them, though I wasn’t sure if this was the actual intended use for that game mechanic.
Sep 16 2025
  • Snippet: A princess was playing a 1 vs 1 digital board game with someone else on a display that was floating in the air between the two of them. As an attacker, she accidentally discovered a new technique while doing so, which made her forces more optimized and potent. However, she was somewhat upset at this because many people were watching the game and thus this meant that attackers now had an advantage in the game in general. And the game involved taking turns to play the attacking and defending portions, so she and her friends would now have to struggle even more when it came time for them to play the defensive part of the game.
Sep 17 2025
  • Snippet: There was an art contest going on and in particular I remember a scene where I was looking at a guy standing in front of an artist’s easel and painting a scene. One of the finished pictures was a river flowing from north to south, and a wide raft floating down the river that took up the entire width of the river so anyone at either riverbank could easily have walked onto the raft as it floated by. I also remember that the completed picture had stats, and the stats could be altered and improved by doing something to it.
Sep 18 2025
  • Walking through a mall together with a female friend. Because we were both girls, we had no time limit in the mall, whereas guys did. We went up from the bottom level to a bar at the top while exploring it together, she thought it would be too conservative to have fun at the bar but there was no bartender and there was a tap with drinks and a free refills. She had a couple glasses of Japanese craft beer (the sign literally said namabeer in Japanese) whereas I had a non-alcoholic drink. Though I did mention at the end that I wish I had ther courage to take a few sips of beer since it was free.
  • Later on we walked back down, and among other things I noticed that one of the down escalators ended inside a barber’s shop. Outside the mall, we caught up with four other friends, two guys and two girls, who were having swimming contests with each other and had split the series pretty evenly. Opti was on the guys’ side while Kimberly was on the girls’ side, and I remember noting that I had to ask them when their anniversaries with their respective partners were.
  • Snippet: I remember heading towards a restaurant with a couple of friends. We started across a road from the place itself, and to get to it one of the friends that I was with started to jaywalk across the road. I pointedly turned away from doing the same and instead climbed the stairs to an overhead bridge, and then crossed the road using that, however the bridge had quite a lot of people using it and it felt a bit rickety, as though it was reaching its maximum weight limit or was going to crumble from disrepair. I still used the same bridge on the way back later on though.
  • Snippet: I had a four CD tutorial on being a magic user, and I was ripping it and uploading it onto YouTube. Each CD had a video on it. However, the first and fourth disc’s videos were really short, and by the time I was halfway through ripping the second disc, the first one had already finished uploading to YouTube and someone had already finished watching it and had given it a thumbs up.
  • Snippet: I remember Dad seated at a computer and playing a video game, I thought from afar that he was playing Rodent’s Revenge but upon coming closer I saw that it was actually Chip’s Challenge 2. He told me that he had never played that sequel before and that it seemed fun.
Sep 19 2025
  • I was streaming on Twitch to Satinel but finished my game an hour or so early, and I was chatting with both her as well as with Kel, who was seated beside me in real life, as I tried to decide what to do with the rest of my time. Kel got up and walked away to take care of something and I accidentally said her full name out loud, before realizing that that was probably a bad idea since I was still live.
  • I eventually ended up picking a puzzle game where someone was speaking in triangles and squares and other shapes and I had to input a series of cardinal directions in response, in order to pass that puzzle room and “walk” to the next room. Each answer was usually made out of about five directional inputs, like East East South South West or something. I could not figure out the logic behind the shapes, but the demo gave me the answers right away too so I just put those in anyway to see what was next.
  • However, I discovered that the demo just ended after the fifth room, so not only were the puzzles incoherent, its entire runtime was really short as well.
  • After the stream ended, I went with Kel to see someone in the same building we were in, in order to tell him that we were done and to check out of the building. He was in the bathroom, when we found him, and he nodded, taking out a hammer and tapping against the wall of the bathroom, which caused a weird ringing noise. He found a specific spot and showed us with a gesture that there was a small crack between two of the tiles, and behind that was a wired fence that ran along the outside of the building. There was a bell mounted right there on the fence, and he hit the bell a few times with his hammer through the strangely elastic bathroom wall before telling us that we could go.
  • Later on, at home, Kel said that she was going to be heading back overseas and asked if I could take care of her cat while she was gone. She said that Mom was no longer in good enough health to do so. I said that I could in theory, but that I would eventually be going overseas for a vacation too, and asked how we would handle that. She said that she would find someone else to cover for me at that time since the cat was her responsibility.
  • Snippet: I remember rooms with portraits of horses in them, as well as plaques below each portrait with some stats and achievements that the horses attained. The achievements were a preset list, divided into two columns, that was the same across all the portraits, with each one that they obtained being lit up, whereas each one that they hadn’t obtained yet was dark instead. One of the weirder achievements on the list was “participating in 6 races in a row”.
Sep 20 2025
  • Snippet: I teleported from the outside of a ring world into the inside of it, similar to Outer Wilds. I was looking for something inside of it with someone, but I don’t remember details outside of that.
  • Snippet: I was in a hospital visiting Mom, who was staying there but was not bedridden. While she was on another floor, I visited her bed and found a folded letter that she had written for the nursing staff. She was complaining that the Kwanyin statue in the room, which was in an alcove behind her headboard, was far too big. The leading K in the word Kwanyin was replaced by another character though. I then wanted to go further downstairs but the stairs leading down were blocked by a bed, so I went upstairs instead and found Mom wandering around there. I told her that Kwanyin was the name of the goddess that the statue depicted but wasn’t the name of the statue itself, and she said she knew that too but the nursing staff wouldn’t.
  • Snippet: There was a certain kind of flower magic in one of my dreams that caused a trail of flowers to appear under the person’s footsteps. I remember two different people creating trails of pink and red flowers and that they represented different kinds of magic.
  • Snippet: We were tracking someone named Baewolf in a zone on behalf of a princess that was from another zone. We found no trace of the person we were looking for, however.
Sep 21 2025
  • Snippet: I was in a casino-like area with a single slot machine in a room. The room also contained piles of gold coins stacked up along the walls, with the slot machine set up in the middle of the back wall of the room. Besides playing the slot machine’s actual game, I could also use the machine to conjure up portals to other identical machines in casino rooms located elsewhere, and each of those machines had a slightly different ruleset.

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