Dear Tigey,
The aurorae. It’s here. Time to take a lot of pictures.
Entry #216 (Nov 16 2025)
Table of Contents
Auroral…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #209
ට Dreams
Life
The good news is that I didn’t see any ants at all on my cabinets this week. Not a single one, and I didn’t even use any spray on the cabinets either. If this happens again I might even gain some confidence in using those cabinets and the shelves above them again. At least without gingerly peering at every inch of them every few seconds.
I think they just wandered off elsewhere this week though, as I did find a trail that some ants were using to cross a floor on the other side (relative to the kitchen) of the internal wall in the middle of my apartment midweek though, I caught and eradicated quite a few there, wandering between the internal wall and a hole between the door frame of my bathroom door and the floor/wall.
As it’s on the floor and away from any food or drink, I’m less inclined to formally kill this group. I’m sure if I monitor the dark corners of my apartment or anyone else’s apartment, I’ll find more bugs just wandering their way through their lives too. That and it’s hard to eradicate a nest that doesn’t actually originate from a reachable place in my apartment. But I did end up deciding to spray around all that area near the end of the week anyway and see if that forces them somewhere else though. Although this could potentially push them back to the cabinet counters as well.
I did see this hanging on the door of my neighbour across the hallway from me midweek, and immediately hmm’ed to myself. What sort of bugs were found there? Bedbugs? Ants? Vibe-coded AI plugins?
Work this week was a quiet one, because I was off for two days, Tuesday and Wednesday, and then had a team meeting on Friday which took up the entire day. So in terms of actual work it felt like not much got done this week at all. I was also basically sick on Saturday and Sunday, or rather I woke up with a sharp pain in my upper back shoulders that prevented me from turning my head much and made it hurt if I coughed or made any sudden movements. It was very annoying. I also briefly felt feverish on Saturday but I think that one passed without incident after some hot tea.
While I still have not booked much in terms of accommodations or flights for my trip outside of the first one and the Canada <-> Japan plane that I did almost two months ago now, I did do a bunch of research early this week into an important piece of hardware that I would need to do IRL streaming.
What I needed was basically something to gather and process the video from the camera that I want to use, and send it to the streaming service. There were multiple requirements I needed to fulfil for this, and a couple of potential solutions, but in the end I opted for BELABOX (local) as the service that looked to be the best. I would also need what essentially boiled down to a mini-computer to hold the BELABOX installation though, and the BELABOX site did provide a list (local) of known compatible Single Board Computers that it would work on.
In the end, after looking through a few of the options, I opted for the Radxa Rock 5B+ (local), which was being sold by their Chinese vendor directly on Aliexpress, which itself was having a Singles’ Day (Nov 11, or 11/11) sale. The sale didn’t actually bring down the price of the box or enclosure that I ended up picking up from them for $177 CAD, but it did seem to net me cheaper shipping, so that’s good, I guess? And so even if this doesn’t work out in the end, I can at least turn that thing into a mini computer to do other things with locally.
The Radxa will take a couple weeks to arrive, and it by itself isn’t a complete solution. Besides the enclosure which I did buy, I also have to look into and probably buy an internal modem card with a SIM card slot to fit onto the M.2 E-Key slot that the Radxa Rock 5B+ has. That or I need to buy an external wired modem with a couple of slots that I can connect to the Radxa. The BELABOX image on the Radxa supposedly will be able to do cellular bonding, so it will be able to combine and share out the modem connections and (if I plug it in) my phone as well, and so when I also connect my DJI camera to the Radxa box, I should be able to stream the video into the box, which will then process the video and send it out through however many network connections it has to either my main computer at home or the BELABOX cloud subscription service, which will then send it to Twitch. And the whole thing should power itself through portable batteries that I plug in to the Radxa too.
I believe that’s how it works anyway, but I actually need the product in my hands and to play around with it to find out for sure, and it’s scheduled to arrive in a couple of weeks. We’ll see!
Midweek, I was sent an email about this year’s International Anime Research Project (local) survey, led by Dr. Stephen Reysen. They have done this annual survey to try to gather statistics on the anime fandom and their outlook and viewpoints on things since 2014, and I’ve taken part in this “longitudinal study” since I first heard of it in 2020. I’ve mentioned it passingly in my blog before too, here and here for example. One day I’ll probably buy a copy of that book mentioned on the Google Site too for keeps. Though not before I get my house.
There were also a couple of nights with a very strong aurora in the middle of this week, with lights visible at least as far south as where Milumbar is in New Mexico. Over here in Edmonton, it was apparently very visible in other parts of the city but where I stay the city lights still mostly drowned it out. It was visible as a slight shimmery mist though, and when I pointed the phone at it, I could definitely still faintly see and capture the aurora using its night camera. These two pictures were from 9:46 pm on Tue Nov 11:
Not super vibrant or anytthing like that from where I am, but at least I have a really wide and high-up view of them from my balcony. There were supposedly aurora the next night as well, but Edmonton was covered in clouds as was wont, and no one saw anything here.
On Friday this week, I went down to my workplace for an in-person team meeting, and snapped some random pictures along the way there and back. Starting with this one, in front of our local Gamestop store in Southgate Mall, of people queued up an hour (or more) before the store opened. This was taken at 9:15 am, and the picture was slightly blurred cause I was walking, but close enough.
I believe they were queueing up for some Pokemon card set release. In this economy?! Ick.
At the University itself, since the temperatures were slightly below zero, I snapped this picture of the versatility and resilience of nature finding new ways to grow and thrive in harsh, natural environments in harmony alongside with humans. Specifically, this discarded carved pumpkin in a little pond that was covered with ice next to a footpath.
For lunch that day, we went to Edo Japan as a team. There was a weird promotion going on there that I didn’t take a picture of in the moment, but I took one of the same promotion back at the Edo Japan stall in Southgate when I passed by there later that afternoon. It’s this one on the right:
Apparently, if you buy a bento box now, which are extremely expensive ($16-17) and not worth it for their price by the way, you can get a “gift redeemable in January”. This gift turned out to be a “buy one rice bowl and get one free” gift card:
But seriously, why is this only redeemable in January? It’s only the middle of November now. That’s annoying. I did get one anyway though in bemusement, after buying the cheapest bento set that there was ($17.75 grilled veggie bento after tax), just so that I could have a copy of the card to scan.
Southgate Centre itself has also broken out its Christmas trees. The picture’s a little blurred again, but archived here for posterity anyway:
My apartment complex has done the same:
Though our apartment complex’s fire alarm went off so many times last winter that that tree just reminds me of fire alarms, hah.
Finally, here are some sky pictures that I took this week, starting with a gorgeous one at 5:02 pm on Sunday, Nov 09:
Look at those gorgeous colours, wow. Simply resplendent. The sky evolved rapidly over the next few minutes, and looked like this just ten minutes later at 5:13 pm.
The rest of the pictures don’t hold a candle to it in terms of vibrance, but I’ll include them anyway as a horizon log for the week. Monday, 4:49 pm:
Wednesday, 3:42 pm. This picture was taken in a moment of serenity, when I was not far from being in an At Peace with the World state.
Friday, 4:34 pm, between rounds of AMQ with Satinel and Lightcaller:
And Saturday 4:20 pm, between rounds of AMQ with Satinel:
Games
I’m well into Chapter 4 of my first-time, tactician mode Final Fantasy Tactics playthrough on my stream now, with 10 of the 12 zodiac stones gathered and all the classes unlocked on my entire main team of characters. I think I still have a couple weeks left to go, but I need to start thinking about what stream game to play next. Not many people are watching the stream, as always, though I sort of hope that maybe if I manage to stream my trip I will be able to gather some viewers and some of them might stick around to form a mini-community even when I return to gaming after that. That isn’t for at least 3 more months though, so what to play between now and then, hmmmmmmmmm.
But at least, being a small streamer and not having my livelihood tied to doing well on Twitch, I could care less about only playing the latest popular games that can attract audiences, and encouraging people to subscribe so that I can earn enough every month, or something like that. I just want some more viewers for my ego’s sake, probably. Getting channel visibility is hard.
Off-stream, I mixed the usual games like Duckov and Umamusume and Dragaea with a couple of forays into new gacha games. The first was Chaos Zero Nightmare (local), which I started midweek. That one is a gacha game with Slay the Spire style cards and map gameplay, and some sort of anime story wrapped around it. Their signature mechanic also seems to have something about being able to save your build at the end of a run and continue using it in a future run if you want to? Or something like that. I’m not that far in yet. Some of the character art is lovely, while others are ugly as sin, especially a couple of the ladies with gratuitously exposed cleavages and very hungry/dazed looks upon their face. They’re pretty disgusting to me. Thankfully they’re not particularly good either so my main party is consisted of ladies that are nice and cute or stylish in addition to being good at kicking butt.
The second was Where Winds Meet, an open-world Chinese Wuxia one, with things like starting at the bottom of the ladder in terms of world power, then cultivating your strength and achieving breakthroughs until you become very powerful, which is a theme that I like very much in both anime and games. I also just like trying weird games to see what kinds of new game mechanics each game brings to the table, and this one is weird indeed, with things like using Tai Chi to slam the water to get fish as though you were dynamite fishing. And AI NPCs that you have to talk to in chat to convince them of something and befriend them in order to receive gifts from them. So of course I started to spread the gospel of Tigey to them.
It has a lot of other weird mechanics too that I’ve never seen in a game, which is a reason I like to try Chinese games in particular, I find that they have a very different gaming culture and different genre norms over there that we seldom see in Western game development, or even the English parts of Asian game development. And I like Chinese art styles and music very much too.
Plushie of the Week #209
Meet Valentina, a pink Ty-branded bear that looks a lot like Orson. Unlike Orson, this one has not really ever known life outside the plushie boxes, as it came over to us in the box of smoke-infused plushies that was left in Dad‘s laundry shop way back in the mid 2000s. Like the others, they’ve long since been cleaned, but never actually been integrated in any way with our plushie ecosystem. This style of bear was also very popular in the early-mid 2000s in Canada for some reason, with tons of slightly different variants, mostly but not exclusively from Ty, which all looked like Orson and Valentina.
Front:
Back:
Tag 1 front:
Tag 1 back/Tag 2 front:
Tag 2 back:
Dreams
Nov 10 2025
- Snippet: There were dozens of video recordings of the same thing in a folder, with thumbnails that looked like a sunset sky. One person was trying to edit the files in some way, but each edit took 3 turns of uninterrupted attention to alter, and someone else kept on innocently interrupting them after 2 turns to cancel it.
Nov 11 2025
- I was in a semi-darkened GEP classroom with just 5 students in my class. In addition to a desk we had a sphere of influence around us, a radius of one additional desk where we could relax in a cozy seat and store items. Mine was near the front left side of the class. Despite that, I had my wrong textbooks with me today as I realized that I had not unpacked my Friday bag and repacked my bag with the textbooks for Monday’s classes. Oh well.
- Our first class was History, where Ms Lim came in and did a lecture while writing down some stuff on transparency film, which then got projected onto the projector screen in the front left side of the class. She also did get three of the other students to read from their textbooks at some point but luckily missed asking me to do so.
- The next class was Math, where an undetermined teacher came in and we solved a computer game style math puzzle involving cubes and numbers on each face of the cubes. This was very fun, plus no textbooks were involved.
- I noted that I hadn’t taken part in math competitions since I entered University, because the type of math in the math contests these days had changed away from fun puzzles into the copious use of theoretical formulae, which I hated and was bad at. I thought about seeing if I could enter one again for old times’ sake since I was in the last year of University now, to see whether I could meet my math cohort friends from other schools again. I thought of Robert Barrington Leigh specifically and wondered how he was doing.
- The last class after that was English, where Mr Grosse came into the room. I knew that we wouldn’t be able to escape being called upon to read something from the textbook in this class, so I told him straight up before he started that I had forgotten my textbook.
- In response, he assigned me some extra homework to pick a small picture and research its origin for next class, and wrote that onto the chalkboard alongside his class plan for the day. I thought about suitable pictures, including things like company logos and people’s social media account avatars. Mr Grosse also provided a few suggestions on his own that he was curious about the origins of.
- There were also three other snippets that were somehow definitely part of the same dream world. The first involved a special, cordoned off gift section of a department store that opened five minutes after the rest of the store in the morning. I waited around until it opened and went in there with some friends. Later on in the classroom, we looked at an Edmonton postcard that we had gotten from there, and one of my friends asked about a name that was written down on the card. We found out that this was the name of a former Edmonton mayor, and I wanted to scan and archive the postcard.
- Another snippet involved a side-view Metroidvania-style game with art design similar to Terraria. There was a top zone that gave some skills, and a second zone just below it that required a traversal skill that was a reward from the top left side of the top zone in order to reach the first save point in it. There was also some sort of friendly chat or guild chat in the game, and Nomakk and a few other friends were wondering where to get that skill. I went back to my version of the first zone to show them where it was, and found a small area in the top right of that zone that I hadn’t fully explored myself. There was nothing new there though, but I ended up with a bunch of different blocks in my inventory to clear away into storage before I went back down into the second zone.
- Lastly, I talked to Nomakk separately about his new house and he said that now that it was summer, he had used some spray throughout the house, using the air-conditioning system, that gave everyone in the household Thorns, in order to ward off mosquitoes from landing on them and biting them. But the product he had used hadn’t even lasted two days of the advertised five days, and he couldn’t be bothered doing that every day for the entirety of summer.
- Snippet: I also had a much earlier dream about the show Mahoutsukai Sally, even though I’m not familiar with anything but the name of the show, but I don’t remember any specifics about it.
Nov 12 2025
- Snippet: I led my family plus some friends through the upstairs portion of an abandoned house, to the main landing, and then down the stairs. At the foot of the stairs were several tables with mounds of clothes on them. I told them that the clothes used to be part of a shop but that they were probably abandoned now, so they picked through them a bit and several people picked up a few articles of clothing that they wanted to keep. The next room past the tables was suddenly filled with cashiers bustling around and packing up their work counters to move out though, and some people like Jon decided to pay for the clothes they had taken even though it still felt optional to do so, while others like Mom decided to just put the clothes in their bag and walk onwards, since the place was supposed to be abandoned.
Nov 13 2025
- Snippet: I was on one of the middle seats of a train, with the seat facing the window across from us rather than the front or back of the train. There were three kittens wandering around the train, much to the delight of the other people on the train. One of the kittens belonged to a friend of mine who I was with too. Another of the kittens walked up to me and offered me its belly to scratch at one point, and I duly obliged it.
- Snippet: I was in a room at a workplace office with Sandy and Jeremy, and after answering a phone call, Sandy informed Jeremy that he wasn’t going to like what he was going to say, and then said that the people due to pick him up later this afternoon had already arrived more than an hour early. Jeremy looked up in surprise and then gave an exasperated sigh as he then left the room to deal with them.
- Snippet: I also remember a game scene where I was viewing a top-down grid map and circling a mountain in a counter-clockwise direction, using spells to blast away fog and reveal hidden things.
Nov 14 2025
- It felt like sometime over the past few days, I had a dream where several students in a University were proposing to each other and then becoming a dating couple. There was some sort of criteria for these students that made them stand out from all the other normal students, and a few friends and I had been looking out for them, and in some cases peeking in on them and eavesdropping from behind doors as they hooked up.
- Today’s dream felt like a continuation of this previous dream, and somewhere along the line we also found out that the entire program of people getting hooked up together was called the NCP, or National Community Project.
- The timing of our classes was also different today, as we had to travel to a University either on the other side of the city or in another neighbouring city altogether for our school, which took a couple of hours to do so. Classes started at 9 am or 10 am instead of the usual 8 am, and while walking briskly along a long road to the new school alongside other students, I met Eileen and exchanged pleasantries with her. I noted that she looked different somehow but I still recognized her profile from behind.
- Soon after reaching the school building, I went to a stairwell connecting the level with our classroom together with the level beneath it, and peeked out of the door just in time to see another couple hooking up. Zixiang was coming down the stairs behind me, and I beckoned him over to look at them, but something felt off, and instead he approached me, placed one hand around behind the small of my neck and leaned me backwards as though we were dancing, and basically asked me out instead. I was surprised, but accepted, and said that he had “made my day.. no, my week”.
- We went back upstairs with him putting a hand around my waist and we met Paulene at the top of the stairs, who congratulated us on behalf of the NCP.
Nov 15 2025
- I was taking part in a listening comprehension exam where I had to listen to a clip and then answer questions in a quiz based on it. I used headphones to listen to a local file that I had downloaded in preparation for the exam, before realizing that the front page of the quiz had a different link than the one that I had used to download the clip from. I figured it was likely the same anyway, but nonetheless I had plenty of time and was ahead of the people around me so I decided to start over in case it wasn’t exactly identical. I had to rebuild the exam paper itself again to start over with a fresh one though, which meant that the level of the main character of a game attached to the exam paper got reset from level 4 to 1, but it was no big loss.
Nov 16 2025
- I was talking to an Indian couple and directed the man to a train that would bring him to a castle nearby, where he could then enter the castle and find people in a room that could help him reset and calibrate some paper cards that he had that was part of a communication device.
- The man and his wife boarded the train, and at the last minute I also decided to follow them so that they would not get lost. I grabbed my phone and a mineral bottle and hopped onto the train as well, taking a seat in the middle of the two-carriage train that faced across the aisle. The man and his wife sat across from me, a little to the left.
- Once we reached the castle and his device was partially calibrated, he could then reach out to my female vampire friends who were part of the same guild as me but were in a guild room on another level of the same castle. They could then help finish calibrating it for him. He could technically do this from anywhere, even back where we had met up at a building near the other station, but he could not reach them directly until the first part was done in person.
- I only knew all this because I had to go through the same procedure earlier on. In that part of the dream, I remember approaching the castle from the back side with a couple of other friends, but it initially looked like that was the front of the castle as it also had a couple of gates set in its wall there. Those gates were all locked, however.
- The entire place was made out of voxel-based cubes and I had thought that there was a map boundary just past the castle, which was why the other side could not possibly be the front of the castle.
- However, a friend asked me to check anyway and upon doing so, I realized that the line I saw on the minimap was just where a field of grass cubes started or ended, and that the actual zone boundary was still off in the distance. And indeed, the real front entrance to the castle was on the other side of where we were approaching the castle from.
- I then proceeded with calibrating my cards as well and thus acquired the knowledge that I used to later on help the Indian couple with.