Dear Tigey,
That new Radxa Rock box is nice, isn’t it? To sit on? So you have an elevated view of the monitors?
Entry #218 (Nov 30 2025)
Table of Contents
Disco…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #211
ට Dreams
Life
That diatomaceous earth I spread last week has had success, but limited success. I’ve not seen any ants in the areas where I have put them, none at all on the back wall or towards the toilet for over a week now, and none at all along two of the sides of the main kitchen cabinet nor one of the sides of the other kitchen cabinet, nor on the kitchen floors as well (not that I ever really saw them on those floors).
I did see ants on both the front and back kitchen cabinet itself Tuesday this week though. The back ones were crawling up the side of the cabinet right by where it meets the fridge, and poking around the base of some of my sauce bottles there. I cleared that entire cabinet top and they haven’t been back. The front ones were going around the sink, and when I traced their path, they were coming in via a hole between the cupboards on the underside of the jutting out part of the cabinet, above the top of the lower cupboard doors. And then tracing a line along the top ceiling of the inside cupboard, under a divider, toward the gods only know where. In other words, not really a place I could apply diatomaceous earth to. The earth does seem to contain them though.
My solution was to apply a, well, solution, of vinegar and warm water to the cabinet and wipe it down to remove the ant trails or something like that, which I did on Wednesday morning. This also worked well in conjunction with the earth, and I didn’t see any ants for the rest of the week except for two scouts on Thursday. I also contacted the rental office about them, something I perhaps should have done a couple of months ago, and they said they’d set up a date with some pest control specialists. There would be a bit of prep needed, they said, but nowhere near the invasive sort of prep that was needed for, say, bedbugs. I said that I had gone through that process before a few times while living here, and we had a good chuckle over it.
I expect I’ll have to remove everything from the cabinets in the kitchen or something but I’ve already done that for most of the drawers so any extra prep should be fairly quick. The stuff that was in there is all in plastic boxes right now. And it’s also given me a reason to throw out some of the older stuff I have, like the drying rack last week. As of the end of the week, I still haven’t been given the prep sheet though, apparently because the date for the pest control hasn’t been set yet?
Talking about missed deadlines, I also went down to Southgate this week to speak to the optometrist there, asking about my examination a couple of months ago and what happened to the supposed referral to the eye specialist that they said they would do. The lady at the desk checked and said that the referral was done but that, as per usual in Alberta, there was a backlog and that I would probably be contacted in a couple months. “In a couple months”, so like just as my trip is rolling around? Great.
The final flight home for my Feb/Mar trip got changed this week, bumping the arrival time for the landing back in Edmonton from 8:45 pm to 9:15 pm. When I inquired about it, hoping to change it to another date with an earlier flight or something, the service agent at ANA told me that this was an Air Canada change, since it was a codeshare flight, and that all the flights for that time slot had been changed from 8:45 pm to 9:15 pm arrival times for the entire month of March. She also said it was my fault/problem for booking the tickets so early — I booked them in late September for an early February to late March trip — because Air Canada doesn’t even release their finalized plane schedules until 3 months before or something. What? Then why sell those tickets? It’s *my* fault? That was such a weird conversation.
Because of that, I pressed for a change to a weekend flight instead without paying the extra cost, and in the end she said she’d escalate the request to the central office to see if she could get approval. I doubt that will actually happen, and I don’t actually mind the change from 8:45 to 9:15 since that’s my final flight, but ANA‘s attitude and that pointing fingers at everyone else but themselves despite them being the ones selling the ticket pissed me off and I decided that I wanted to give them some extra work and push for some slight compensation, whether it happened or not. Especially since the ticket had a cancellation not allowed but changes allowed clause to it, but actually changing the ticket to any other nearby date within +/- 1 week would have cost between $900 to $6000, more than the actual full cost of the ticket, at this point, even though it’s still ~3 months away. And I wasn’t supposed to book the ticket until this point? Hah. The flight agent must be living in a fantasy world.
I didn’t have time this week to play with the Radxa Rock that arrived last weekend. Tigey‘s still sitting on the boxes like the king that he is. Hopefully I’ll have time in this upcoming week. I know I do a lot of stuff where I get interested in something for a couple of weeks, maybe even buy something for it, and then never do anything with it for some time. There’s just a lot going on and so many directions to improve myself in!
It was Black Friday this week, and one of the things that I was looking for was a new phone plan, because I noticed that Virgin Mobile had been cheating me. I had set up a 20 GB for $29/month deal on Boxing Day last year, with a $10 rebate for the first 7 months to offset the activation fee, and I expected the $29/month deal to last for at least a year. However, while the price for the first 7 months was indeed $29.95 minus $10.00 rebate and plus $1.00 in tax, for a total of $20.95, apparently they secretly raised the price of this once the $10 rebate ended, and it went to $35.95 per month plus $1.80 tax, for a total of $37.75 for the past 4 months or so. Cheats.
I was looking for a plan with more data this time though, not because I rergularly use it but because I want to have the potential to test out streaming and stuff with it. The Virgin Mobile network is really weak and slow, which works when I’m mostly at home but is barely passable when I’m out and about. But in the end, I never got a phone plan — or anything else — this Black Friday sale period. I just didn’t find anything that I felt I needed, or that I felt was correct for me. I was hoping for maybe a Rogers deal but they didn’t have good deals. Maybe on Boxing Day.
The University is also removing our phone rebate in February of next year or something around there. I am currently receiving a $20/month rebate since I use my personal phone for work purposes too, and that’s the program many people are using, but as part of misguided cost-cutting measures from execs who never see the big picture, they’re removing that for most people. Well, some of us might be organizing and pushing back on this by refusing to install the 2FA app on our phone (and making/receiving phone calls). We do have a key fob that will allow us to do 2FA still, but it doesn’t work for a couple of our admin-type apps, so the plan is to try to push back by rejecting those tickets altogether, until they sit down and look at the issue. I’m not leading this push but I’m happily taking part in it too.
I did go to work for a work meeting this week, and since it was an afternoon meeting, I had lunch over at HUB Mall before I walked over to the office building. The Korean place I like to eat at when I’m not eating at Ho Ho is called Chosun Korean Restaurant, and like Ho Ho, they also seem to have changed and downsized their menu over the years. They used to have a Kimchi Stew with White Rice meal that I loved, and that they used to cook straight from the kitchen, but that’s gone now and I’m not sure that they even really have fresh kitchen meals anymore, it’s mostly just tray stuff now. Oh well. I really should have taken a picture of their menu for archival’s sake, but I did not.
After lunch, and before the meeting, I walked through a new-to-me building nearby called University Commons. It replaced a really old and decrepit (and some say haunted) building called Dentistry/Pharmacy that sat right in the middle of the main campus, and I think the construction was completed during the COVID era, I just never really stopped by to see what the new building looked like. It’s apparently a student-focused chillout area with some administrative functions now.
In one of the foyers, there was also an exhibition of games modelled after fairy tales set up for some class event or other:
I pretended to be a visitor to the school, and picked up some informational material to scan as well. Including the 2025-2026 school handbook. I have scanned it all now, but have not had time to upload it to archive.org yet.
The building also hosted a coffee shop and a University souvenir shop, neither of which I had any idea existed here before this day:
So that was a neat jaunt through one of the newest (and perhaps the actual newest) buildings on campus. I also went to the Rutherford Library to take a snapshot of the Q&A scribble board there, though it was somewhat uninspired this week. It doesn’t help when even the question has a glaring mistake in it. The “Calgary” answer made me laugh, though.
Even though I didn’t take a menu picture of Chosun, I did take a menu picture of a couple other stores here too, one of the Panda Express on main floor of CAB (Central Academic Building) as of Nov 26 2025:
And two of the Tim Hortons not far from it:
I also wandered by a cool workshop area called Elko Engineering Garage a few buildings over, just before I reached my meeting area:
On the menu next week is the Butterdome Craft Sale, that one is also at the University of Alberta (that’s where the Butterdome is located!) and should be a lot of fun. Other than that, there’s a coating of snow outside now so I probably won’t be going out too much in the near future besides to the nearby Southgate Mall. Santa Claus has invaded that mall too, as can be seen here:
I’m not sure if this is the same Santa as in previous years, his beard/costume at least is different, but this is at least the third year in a row now where I’ve gotten a picture of the Southgate Santa waving or posing for me as I took a picture:
Close enough anyway. I’ve never gotten a picture of Tigey with the Southgate Santa, maybe I should. Think he counts as a “pet”?
There was also some sort of disaster that took place in the Southgate food court, apparently:
And while I was in a menu-archiving mood, here’s one for the Chinese fast food store in Southgate Mall, Famous Wok, as of Nov 25 2025:
I also noticed this week that the local Safeway started selling Chinese bittergourd. It was pricey, at $9.26 for 3 bittergourds, and it isn’t exactly from China either as it had a Product of Mexico sticker on it, but hey, at least it’s not from USA, which I’ve been trying my best to avoid buying products from where possible. I bought a pack and put it in my soup this week. I used to hate bittergourd when Mom would make soup with it, then at some point I acquired the taste for it and it became okay! And I hadn’t had it for ages, so it was a bit of a treat(?) for me this week.
There was no anime this week due to Thanksgiving week, so I had, and twice took, the opportunity to wander out and about the mall and area in the evening before the snow arrived late in the week as well. It’s how I got this pretty picture of the moon rising above a carpark in front of Southgate Mall at 5:11 pm on Tue Nov 25, a time slot that I’d usually be watching anime during:
I also present this really foggy picture taken at 5:38 am on Mon Nov 24, taken groggily after I woke up to use the potty and before I went back to sleep:
This wispy picture of clouds on Tue Nov 25, 4:44 pm:
This weird cloud lattice with a horizon border on Fri Nov 29 at 3:10 pm:
And then later on the same day, at 4:18 pm:
There’s a plume of smoke from a chimney in the middle of the picture that sure looked like a tornado in this shot. Or that it was spewing out smoke to cause this cloud cover over the entire sky. I don’t really recall ever seeing visible smoke from that chimney from where I am, so I was surprised to see that sight. I sure see a lot of skies with a distant horizon border from my balcony though.
Here’s another picture taken in the wee hours of the morning, 3:19 am on Sat Nov 29, after the snow had settled in and the noisy Southgate snowplows had gone by in the evening. You can see the carpark on the left glimmering with ice there. So dangerous-looking!
The carpark was packed as usual the next morning though, the Saturday after Black Friday, Sat Nov 29 at 1:42 pm:
The point of these few photos though is to capture what remains of the Hudson’s Bay sign in different lighting. As you can see, even in the foggy picture on Nov 24, the lights that formed the Hudson’s Bay letters were finally taken down from that one wall facing my apartment building, so they will no longer ever shine at night again. I had not noticed this last week but they were taken down midweek then, and I know this due to the pictures I posted last week — they were taken down between Mon Nov 17 and Thu Nov 20.
The store’s been gone for months, but the Canadian-Chinese billionaire who was trying to buy it recently lost her bid (local) to take over the store, which is too bad because the Southgate management failed to bring in an exciting replacement for the last anchor tenant, Sears, that left the place. Instead, they redeveloped the place, and did okay with part of it (local), combining it with some empty space and turning it into a three storey atrium with three stores that I do like there, London Drugs on top, H&M in the middle, and Winners at the bottom. That atrium area seldom actually has popup stores though, since it’s buried in a corner of the mall, and the passages on either side as well as the entire bottom area often feels like random empty, wasted space. And none of those stores are anchor tenants.
What is the main problem with that redesign though is on the other side of it, on the northwestern side of the mall, Sears used to have an entrance where shoppers could cut through the department store itself and walk to a small passage with little gacha machines that then led to Safeway past it. That way, one could reach Southgate in the winter without having to venture outside. Now, a Sporting Life store sits there, and they not only boarded up the interior passage to Safeway, but also the exterior door from that store itself, so people heading to Safeway now have to go outside and cut around the edge of the mall for about a minute or so before reaching Safeway’s front doors. So that Sporting Life doesn’t have to suffer through peasants trudging through their store, I guess.
But now Safeway itself is completely cut off from the main mall. They never accounted for this in the redesign. Or it’s rich white men who live nowhere near a mall doing the redesign and they never really think about things like the traffic flow of people, especially the old and the disabled, just trying to live their lives and going through their day around and through the indoor mall.
Sporting Life also has their own hired security guards posted outside their store, one of only two stores that do this — the other one being the Apple store directly across from it, coincidentally enough. It creates a very frosty, unwelcoming feeling and is thus why I feel that Sporting Life is a poor tenant to have in Southgate Centre and thus also why Southgate management did not do a good job in filling up the void left by Sears closing down. Lose one anchor tenant, isolate a second one, and now they’ve lost their third one. Now what? They have no more attached anchor tenants. Was the Ruby Liu idea the answer? Maybe, maybe not, but at least it was exciting and something different to attempt, and she put down her money to back the idea. Now instead it’s back in the grubby hands of boring, whitewashed realtor investment managers with a poor record of attracting anchor tenants, against the wishes of the outgoing anchor tenant.
Games
I finished Final Fantasy Tactics on stream this week. It was a good game, albeit with a poor story, which didn’t really resolve all plot points in the end except in a very superficial manner. The main character, Ramza, was also an insufferable Mary Sue through most of the game.
However, I did realize afterwards that it actually makes sense in the context of the game, because it was established at the very start of the game that the game story was being viewed through the lens of a researcher examining this tale that happened in the past, and the writer of the book is revealed at the end of the game to be a friend of Ramza’s named Orran, who was not actually with him for most of the game. Orran’s adoptive father, Cidolfus Orlandeau, does join the party halfway through the final chapter, and by that point Ramza is portrayed as rather less ideological and more worldly when yelling at his opponents to try to repent.
One of the main plot points that the game revolves around as well is a legend of Saint Ajora and the Zodiac Knights, who the church portrayed as a folk hero, but we eventually find out is faulty history when we find a book of truths that was hidden away in a monastery. Similarly then, it’s thus very possible that this account of Ramza attempts to paint him in a far more saintly light than he actually was in person, since it was written by a friend of his who was not actually there with him for most of the game, and even if he had gotten tales from his father, would only have “known” him for part of the final chapter. Ramza and Orran themselves only very briefly meet in the actual game. It’s an interesting look at how the victors write history and how events can be framed differently by people with varying motivations.
The tactical combat part of the game was very good though. I ripped through the game with my Arithmetician powers, eventually running a party that was immune to sleep, immobilize, stop, disable, and doom, and spamming the opponents with a combination of the above to isolate and kill them all. It worked all the way through endgame, more or less. Into the final battle, I took a party of Ramza as a Gallant Knight/Arithmetician, Roysia as a Ninja/Arithmetician, Leofwynn as a Mystic/Arithmetician, Anne as a Thief/Arithmetician, and Agrias as a Time Mage/Arithmetician into the final fights, which were trivial since my maxed out characters held a 30-60 level advantage over the enemies by then. I’ll definitely miss the game, and the unique nature of locking down everyone and stripping them of all their weapons and items with my thieves before killing them one by one in turn.
Anyway, my next stream game is Disco Elysium, although I’ve already been told that one of my semi-regulars will not be coming to the stream because they have not played it yet and have an interest in playing it at some unspecified time in the future. Oh well. I don’t like making people feel like that when I have something like 4-8 somewhat regular viewers, but no one will ever give me a list of what games they want to see or don’t want to see until it happens either. Maybe this sort of thing requires a Discord to coordinate though.
In the meantime, Disco Elysium has been quite fun, although I am not a fan of the setting itself so far, and the speed of the game is a little slow. I am running an Inland Empire focused playthrough though, which means my main character has a very vivid imagination and argues with his necktie and his other internal aspects all the time, which I like a lot.
Outside of stream, despite saying last week that I would probably play Where Winds Meet through the week, I got tired of it real quick and dropped it early on in the week. Partly because there was a boss gating progress to the next zone and I couldn’t beat it without not only learning to parry it for hours but also first doing a lot of collectathon things in the first zone which I didn’t really care for any longer to get more/better skills, gear, and stats, and partly because it has a lot of imperfections and bugs with chat and profession mechanics and translations and such and they build up and grind on the soul after some time.
I bounced through games for a couple of days, particularly Stoneshard, in which I did the tutorial and found it interesting. The world building and initial progress was too slow though, and the game doesn’t let you save whenever you want. In the end, I settled on playing DREDGE instead, and spent time fishing up weird, malformed fishes, avoiding cosmic nightmares and world-scale calamities that swim around in the ocean, and building up my boat.
Plushie of the Week #211
This week, we have a little dog plushie featured for Plushie of the Week. From what I can tell from some cursory Googling, this is an IKEA plushie from what apparently might have been a toy line called SÖT. I didn’t find an actual official listing for the toy though, but apparently some versions of it came with a long tag still attached when they were sold. Ours either didn’t, or it was cut off long ago, even though we generally don’t do that. Nonetheless, it was almost certainly a Canada-era plushie, but outside of that we don’t know anything about it.
Front:
Side:
Other side:
Back:
Underside:
Dreams
Nov 24 2025
- I was part of a student group that was staying at a woman’s house on the outskirts of a rural town as part of a group trip. We thought we broke the fridge as an orange indicator light on the outside of the top freezer portion of the fridge wouldn’t come on anymore, but when we told the woman about it she said that that light was faulty and you had to bang on it for it to come on even though the freezer itself was fine.
- Our student group leader had already bought the fridge though, and it was due to arrive on Sundy and then the installation person on Tuesday. She cancelled the installation but it was too late to return the actual fridge. We asked around to see if anyone needed it but no one did, not even our clubroom back at school, nor my parents, nor Jon at his new house. I suggested to her that she sell it on a local online marketplace to see if someone in the area would take it instead, and she said that that was a good idea and that she’d do that.
- I also told the woman that owned the house that we would be following some guys from another student group that we admired into the town itself tomorrow on an excursion.
- Snippet: I had a meeting with Ronnie and a 16-item agenda written up to discuss with him. He couldn’t make it at first and sent a replacement who was covering for him, so I hashed out 15 of those issues with her, but the last item was titled “Ronnie patch” and could only be dealt with by him. By the time he finally arrived, though, I couldn’t actually remember what that line item was about, and suggested it was likely something about patch notes or building a software patch at work.
- Snippet: I also remember something about jumping in and out of guilds at one point of a separate dream in order to pursue different goals, but am not sure on the details of that.
Nov 25 2025
- Snippet: I had 10 heroes in an RPG game, lined up in two rows of 5 each in a hero menu. Each one had a normal version and a special “offboarded” golden version, and I could sometimes either randomly spawn them into quests or I could summon them if some requirement was met or something. They all had skills that could damage everyone on the board at once, and I was trying to get a kill with all the golden hero versions for fun. I also had some sort of refresh button where I could wake up everyone that had already moved and this was somehow pivotal in the overall dream story that was going on.
- Snippet: I was in Southgate, ordering from a Thai Express store that was located in a different place in the food court than normal. The lady at the counter knew my usual order, so my food was done and waiting for me before the customer in front of me had finished fiddling with his napkins and tray and finally stepped out of the way. He went to join an old man at a nearby table who had a KFC tray and was beckoning him over. As I was walking off, I heard people talking about a popular new phone game with idols who not only sang but also danced, and the player had to control that as a rhythm game with extra mechanics. It was the first game which did this, and other, more established idol games, one of which was named a two word name like Trinity something, now had to play catch up and introduce that feature too.
Nov 26 2025
- As part of a game called Save the Princess, an accomplice and I attended a hololive event where fans were doing meet and greets with several of the girls on stage. One of them was a princess, and when our turn to meet her came, we went up to her, grabbed her, bound her hands behind her, and put a bag over her head in order to kidnap her.
- She begged us to wait and to remove her state-of-the-art VTuber glasses first so we wouldn’t break them. We relented, and I reached my hand in to the bag over her head to remove her glasses, which turned out to be an electronic rectangular object that looked like a cross between an elongated computer memory stick and a ruler. It was slightly damp from being used, and I placed it down on the counter that she had been sitting at, before we continued on with our kidnapping in front of everyone.
- I slung her over my shoulder and we made our escape out of the hall as guards chased us. We either outpaced or defeated them, but we had to climb up a flight of stairs to reach our getaway and expected heavy resistance along the way from the other floors.
- However, there were no other guards that stopped us as we climbed five, ten, then fifteen flights of stairs. We did meet a couple of them along the way who looked at us curiously, but it seemed that they were not informed of the kidnapping and didn’t think much of us carrying a bound girl up the stairs. It turned out that this might have been partially because the VTuber glasses were no longer on her, and so they couldn’t locate her.
- After we had gone up fifteen flights of stairs, we moved into a corridor, closed a door behind us, and turned the lock shut. At that point we knew that we were safe and had won, and we expressed surprise that no one had tried to stop her. We brought the girl to our hideout on that level, where our companions, a guy and a girl, awaited us. The girl looked up as we entered and exclaimed in surprise as she saw who we brought in.
Nov 27 2025
- The first part of this dream involved a map with islands and a game where you couldn’t put down new towns within 3 squares of other towns. There was a Russian team or player that put down their town in the middle of one of the largest islands in the north.
- This caused a lot of consternation between the teams because they were known for being brutal and explotative, and if you built your town nearby, then they’d try to bully you and take away your boats and keep your fishermen poor.
- This also somehow linked to a completely different plot that took place in school, where we had two GEP classes on the third floor of a four-storey school building and we were trying to fight back against bad teachers. English classes were in session, and the teachers were making us plan out and do impromptu two-person skits with a partner from a random worksheet that we received, and they weren’t supposed to do be allowed to do this.
- I excused myself from the class to go to the bathroom, and went downstairs, heading to the bathroom at the southern end of the second floor cafeteria. That was the furthest one away from the classroom, and this felt vindicative somehow.
- However, the bathroom was locked as it was under renovation. As I cut back north through the cafeteria, a man told me that the one at the northern end of the cafeteria was open, so I went there instead.
- When I came out, I saw Alvin Foo standing by a banister overlooking the ground floor, and I went to join him to waste more time before going back to class. I had a watch that showed me how many more “turns”, counted in five-minute intervals, there were before it was our turn to present our skit.
- I hadn’t even practiced our skit with my partner, Allen, yet, but I didn’t care, especially when Allen himself also showed up shortly thereafter and joined us. He had also apparently taken leave from his class in a similar way that I did, and we decided to just not go back to do the skit since we considered it an illegal request anyway.
- We chatted for a bit, then the banister that I was leaning on broke and tumbled down onto the ground below. I almost fell too, but managed to regain my balance, and I told a random person leaning against the next banister to be careful about his since mine had broken off. The three of us then left the area and went to get sandwiches from a Subway store instead.
Nov 28 2025
- I was with Zian and we travelled and did stuff together in various places in an overseas city that we were both in. I remember feeling very happy through large swathes of the dream. The scene I remember we spent the most time in was one in which we were on a bus, talking to two older ladies seated opposite from us, as well as a guy seated alone in a seat in front of them. I don’t remember what we talked about though.
- Eventually, the guy left the bus, and a few stops later the two of us took our leave and stepped off the bus as well. Our trip was coming to an end, and I asked Zian if she was going to follow me back home and then stay a few days at my place back in Edmonton before heading home again, since apparently Edmonton was considered to be a stop on the way back home for her.
- The implication with the “again” was that this was the second time we had met up overseas and then said goodbye, and the last time she actually did stay at my place for a few days before heading home, so she was even somewhat familiar with Edmonton. She said yes, as she wanted to do some shopping there, and I said that she would be welcome to stay but that it would be contingent on my parents being okay with it as well. I didn’t think they would mind either though.
- I also remember at some point getting a text notification that the departure for an upcoming plane flight of mine was delayed from morning until night time. I’m not sure if this one was part of the same dream as the above one or not.
Nov 29 2025
- I logged into LotRO with Seo and others in our kinship. A total of 10-12 of us or so were logged in. Radian and Anaden were not on but as I knew that they had been playing a little bit recently, I felt that they would be happy once they heard about the game’s resurgence.
- The game was represented by a few virtual rooms in a world where we could hop between them at will. In the main one, I was reunited with a few friends who I had not seen in ages and who seem to have been trapped in the dimension. Huihan and Eileen were there, among others.
- I had logged into the game by swinging a large, metallic box up onto the top shelf of a metal shelf in a storeroom in the “real world” with my feet, which opened a portal that I could then go into. I was with two other people in that room, Zixiang as well as another friend of mine, but Zixiang refused to enter the portal when he saw what I was doing. I said to trust me and to come along for the ride, but he said that it was dangerous to use random portals and that he wouldn’t be going in along with us.
- Once in the game, I saw that Seo was advertising in kinship chat that he needed two other people to finish the dungeon he was in. He said that any class and level was fine. I was going to roll up one of the new classes to join him, however I noticed that he was in a level 50 dungeon so I wasn’t sure that he actually meant any level all the way down to a starting character.
- I logged in to a couple of characters that were already in the kinship, including a low level character with two short words for her name that no one else had any idea was my character, before I settled upon my decently levelled runekeeper, who was not my main class and who I was rusty on but at least had all her skills.
- I asked for an invite, but had trouble telling him what my ingame account username was, which he apparently needed to invite me. This was because account usernames were a new concept and I had only just set it when I first logged in, but when I pulled it up in my character sheet, the username was written in a weird, stylized font where several letters looked the same or were hard to make up. Eventually I figured out what it was — TRGTable.
- After giving that to Seo, he invited me into the dungeon as the last member and I hurried to catch up with them. I saw that they were in the final room of the dungeon and had mezzed the remaining monsters to wait for others before killing them. Once I arrived, everyone started attacking one of the remaining monsters.
- I had not set up my target assist window yet and attacked the wrong monster to start, breaking its crowd control, but my class also had crowd control skills and Seo knew that I knew this, so he left it to me to mez it again. I did so, set up my target window properly, and then helped the group finish the mission.
Nov 30 2025
Dream 1
- I was playing a game where there was a relationship chart of characters on a piece of paper. The characters were arranged in two of three rows of circles, with each character in a circle.
- Each character circle could be levelled up, and slowly revealed their relationships and character compatibilies with other characters. Each character’s relationship circle had both a visible and an invisible portion so you could clearly see some relationships but other ones required you to actually go there to check.
- The levelling up could also be done in person or remotely, with remote levelling up being slower. All the visible ones also had to be learnt before the invisible ones could be worked on, and there was also a percentage completion for each circle so one could see if there were any more invisible ones left for them.
- This tied in to other aspects of gameplay to do with visiting the characters, and eventually caused an issue when someone got killed by another person with negative compatibility with them, before the police could arrive, because one of their friendship charts wasn’t complete and the player didn’t know that someone was out to kill that NPC until it happened.
Dream 2
- I remember another war game which involved teams of players fighting and shooting at other teams. Beacons were markers on the map that could be activated for loot but also usually caused other teams to home in on the beacon to fight whoever was trying to take the loot.
- The developers had just released a patch that gave us the ability to deploy fake beacons, and it was buried in a pretty long list of changes so I suspected that many players did not know about it or what it looked like yet. I had brought in a couple to try, however.
- I suggested to my team that we waited at a strategic spot uphill, while I went downhill to plant and set off a fake beacon there. I would then run back uphill, pulling some NPC adds with me, and we could kill the NPCs up there and then lay in wait to see who came for the fake beacon. We would let the teams fight each other and then pick off the opponents with our vantage point afterards. My team agreed that that was a good idea.
Dream 3
- I was at the airport with a suitcase about to enter the security gate to catch a flight to France. I noticed that there was a long queue of 20 or so people for the security gate but a nonexistent queue for the actual flight gates after that. I only had an hour and a half to get through the line as I was a little late, but it seemed doable.
- I also noticed that the people around me held a sheet of paper with a confirmation code on it, I didn’t have one, but I saw that there was a notepad on the security guard’s table with the same sheet, so I went up to see if I could get a copy of it to fill out while waiting.
- The guard glared at me though as she thought I was trying to hop the line. I explained what I was doing and she said that that was not the way, that I needed to have a form prefilled in a few days ago and submitted to an online agent to vet with the government before they would give me my code. She told me to go step out of the line and figure it out.
- I didn’t think I could make the flight at this point and I was quite disappointed in this, though I could always board a flight tomorrow as well, and spend the extra day here writing in my blog and complaining to Satinel online. The elevated view from the airport was quite nice too, at least, and I wouldn’t be spending any more on a hotel, I’d just lose one day or so of my trip.
- I sat down and looked for the form on my phone. There were apparently many companies that could approve it and I picked a shady-looking website in the hopes that they would somehow finish approving it on the spot and maybe I could somehow board the plane today anyway. I dimly seemed to remember doing this before with this company.
- I filled in my name, and then other questions like my parents’ and siblings’ names. For my siblings, I also had to fill in their relationship to me, so I needed to pick “younger brother” and “younger sister” from a dropdown list. Except the dropdown lists were a mess, for Jon‘s there were answers in not only English but in all sorts of different languages, “gege” for older brother was there for example, except that was there in Chinese pinyin instead of in English.
- For Kel, it was worse, as when I hit the dropdown, I saw it populated with answers from other previous travel applicants for another long text box where they were explaining something or other about them. The website took those answers and turned them into options for the “Relationship to you” checkbox instead. I resolved to come back to this website later and catalogue all those answers to expose the website’s breach.
- Eventually I noticed that both boxes had actually prefilled with “younger brother” and “younger sister” respectively anyway so I didn’t actually have to go search through the horrendous dropdown list for either box. The last step was to upload a picture of myself from the last 6 months, and I knew that I didn’t have that, but I also knew that the exact date didn’t matter as long as it looked recent. I sat down at some couches and used Remote Desktop on my laptop to access my home computer where I knew that I could find a scan of my last passport photo.