Dear Tigey,
Unless something weird happens, this blog post will be “extended” to cover non-trip related events, dream diary, etc all the way up until Feb 05-06, too. #228 won’t be until I come back.
Entry #227 (Feb 01 2026)
Table of Contents
Toothache…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #220
ට Dreams
Life
I hurt the left inside of my mouth midweek or so, which made it very painful to eat and drink and talk for the rest of the week. I drank lots of tea and (supposedly useful according to the internet) washed my mouth out with salt water after every meal, but it remained annoying through the weekend and the throbbing, together with how I had to sometimes press against the outside of my cheek to try to alleviate the pain, kind of gave me the vibes like I had a toothache.
It was kind of interesting to learn things like lying down on my left side eased the throbbing but never removed it completely, whereas lying on my right side caused a bit more pain to start, but then as long as I didn’t open my jaw afterwards to let the injured or swollen portion slip in between my left teeth, I was fine? I don’t know. That sentence was very weird to write. I also learnt how to eat packets of instant potatoes (that had a best before date of Mar 28 2025, but were still very tasty) by sliding them underneath my tongue and then out the sides to avoid the damaged part of my mouth.
Anyway it did cost me a day off stream on Friday, and some measure of pain through a good chunk of the week. It steadily improved through the week — a large amount of the pain left on Saturday morning between 6 am and 8 am. I know this timing because I was semi-awake through most of that time, while lying in bed on my right side, and then suddenly I realized that 80% of the pain had just suddenly vanished. It got worse later on in the day around my meals and during my test stream, but nothing that was quite as bad as the night before. Then it got better again overnight as Saturday turned into Sunday, as I think a good part of whatever open wound there was finally sealed itself up so that drinking water no longer hurt. As of publication on Sunday morning, it’s still sore though, just like a toothache that I haven’t had in over 30 years!
The actual reason that I injured my mouth is also a really stupid one. There was a two for one pizza sale mid-week that I jumped for as I wanted to try pizza delivery as a decadent treat thing — I’ve only ever ordered pizza for myself once before in my life, and that was back at Edmonton 205. So hey, second time ever here. I got two large pizzas from a local store called Buster’s Pizza & Donair (local), and promptly busted the skin in the inside of my mouth on the tough crust of one of the slices that evening. This was fresh on the delivery day too, not as a result of refrigerating and reheating the pizza the next day or the day after that. Terrible. This is why I never order pizza delivery.
We were also supposed to go in for a work meeting on Friday, but multiple people, including my boss, were sick, so it was called off and I got to stay home instead. I was glad for this, since there is a bug going around and multiple people in my various online communities seem to be sick with a cold. And I don’t want to get sick with less than a week to go before my vacation. Also it meant less talking.
The vast majority of my energy and time this week went towards planning for my trip in some form or other, with a lot of it being work put together trying to finalize an attempt at the setup I needed to livestream part of my vacation. This had both a hardware and a software component, and culminated in a test stream from Southgate Mall on Saturday evening, as I needed to test that everything would work.
My final main hardware piece for my setup arrived early this week, and I velcro’d it together with my Belabox, using some silicone trivet mats as a makeshift heat dissipator. Heat output is one of the bigger worries of my setup that I won’t really be able to figure out until I start using the system.
Anyway I’m not rich enough for a full carry bag with great airflow, and the Radxa Rock 5B+ that runs the Belabox does not itself come with a fan, so this will have to do. Apparently its internal limit is around 80 degrees Celsius, after which it starts limiting itself.
That final piece that arrived, the top device here, is a Febon USB Webcam Streaming Multimedia Adapter (local), and it works really well to translate the Osmo Pocket 3’s USB-C port output into HDMI which then goes into the Belabox via a very short HDMI cable. The DJI Mimo app on the phone still does NOT work even when the Osmo Pocket 3 camera is connected in webcam mode instead of broadcasting mode, because the DJI engineers are terrible, so there’s no way to use the app to control the camera while I am streaming in any capacity unless there’s a way (which I don’t know of) to trick it into thinking it’s just recording and then streaming that “recording”, but I’ll live I guess.
Not pictured are the Pocket 3 camera itself, two Anker portable charging batteries (I’m considering a third one, but they’re both pricey and heavy), and the modems — which will be a combination of my phone running a local SIM or eSIM card, plus potentially another old phone if I can dig one up from my boxes somewhere or buy a cheap one, and the Solis Edge that I picked up the other week, and maybe a pocket WiFi from whatever country I’m travelling to if needed.
On the software/app side, I actually consulted Google Gemini for this one and ran it through several scenarios and asked it for suggestions to figure out what I needed. This was incredibly useful, as one of an LLM’s strengths is being able to take a complex request and break it down into parts and deal with each one in turn, when I simply am not familiar with what’s out there and don’t know what I don’t know, so to speak. Some of its suggestions were dead ends with features that didn’t exist, or it would occasionally give setup configuration based on old or hallucinated documentation, but that I could tweak a little bit to make work once I asked it for the actual documentation to look over. Thanks, Gemini.
In the end, besides Belabox Cloud, which cost $10 a month but provides a reliable cloud-based relay to receive and process the video stream from the Belabox and translate it back into OBS Studio on my home computer, I settled on Streamer.bot (local) to fill in most of the rest of the holes in the workflow needed to successfully run an IRL stream. It is very customizable and script-friendly, like my current Firebot, but seems to have more options and integrations overall. More importantly, it has a website “deck”, or a panel of buttons, that I can map to things like starting and stopping my OBS stream from afar using OBS Websocket server. The panel of buttons (all of which I created using the tools given) looks like this:
And on the phone it looks like this:
The buttons start and stop my OBS at home, let me flip between Live and Privacy scenes, toggle an overlay that I’m experimenting with, and also mute audio in the Live scene. There’s a screenshot button, and a stream marker one that I’m also experimenting with as I’ve never used that feature before, and a viewer counter and offline/uptime counter.
I also use NOALBS, or nginx-obs-automatic-low-bitrate-switching (local) by leaving it running on my home machine that runs OBS, this one is pretty standard for IRL streamers as a tool to handle disconnects and dips in bitrate due to internet connectivity issues. Of which there will be plenty, I’m sure. Nearly every stream I watch runs into this issue.
In addition, I also currently have RTIRL (local) worked into the workflow, which gives me an overlay with things like the temperature and clock and location:
Which are useful for having on an archivist photo of a place or event, I feel. RTIRL is strange though, and puts the current streamers using the app on a world map that anyone can click on and find while they have the app “on”:
This is both interesting and slightly dangerous at the same time, although IRL streaming inherently is a bit dangerous like that since you can tell where a person is via, well, the physical location that they’re streaming most times. That’s why my philosophy is that my stream is less about myself as a streamer than the wish to seek out neat things to chronicle and record for future generations. The world is the star of the show, not me.
Anyway a really cool thing that RTIRL does is give you a map of the places that a person has been to in that stream, and with that it can pull stats like your total distance travelled too, plus a local map of where they are exactly:
A lot of the complaints around RTIRL though are about that exact same thing — that you cannot hide yourself from the map for privacy reasons while still tracking stats like distance travelled (except by setting up some sort of privacy circle, which also nullifies those stats in question). I don’t think weather, distance, and local time are part of that though, I believe that if I just want those stats, I can just start RTIRL and immediately close it off again, and it’ll capture the local conditions at that instant and increment from there, so as long as I don’t travel too far away it should be accurate. I might play around with leaving it on though, so people can find me more easily and so that they can scout out interesting locations around me. But leaving that app on might chew up too much phone battery due to GPS usage, so I’ll have to test that as well.
I also am using an app called DankChat (local) to monitor chat, and it has a built in player as well if I need to look at the actual stream temporarily. It also has a live checker and uptime counter that says things like “Live with 7 viewers for 1h 16m” so I suspect I don’t actually need those notifications in the Streamer.bot deck. So that’s cool. The biggest issue with the native Twitch app, besides it being an unoptimized resource hog, is that you lose some portion of chat if you tab out of it to use another app and then tab back in. DankChat supposedly has a system to get around this.
And I’m not sure if I will need it for sure, but I set up Tailscale (local) as well, on my home PC, my laptop, as well as my phone, so that my devices can access each other more effectively. This is especially important since I’ve noticed that my IP address has already changed at least once since I got fibre from Telus back in December. I need to be able to find it if the IP address changes again, and while there are a few strategies for this, Tailscale comes well recommended from Jah and other people and seems robust, plus it will let me access my home computer from my laptop without exposing an RDP port to the internet, I think.
Anyway, it was a very technical week. Everything seems set up though, and even if I never end up doing the streaming thing I now have a lot of knowledge that I can apply to other adjacent projects. I also am looking forward to stress-testing Streamer.bot from a technical point of view at some point, and if it works well I’ll consider migrating my game stuff away from Firebot to Streamer.bot too.
So as mentioned, all this culminated in a test stream at Southgate Mall on Saturday evening. I brought those two boxes above, two batteries, the Solis Edge that I didnt use in the end, my phone, the camera, and a few wires. My usual shoulder sling bag was a little heavier than I liked, and it was hard to manipulate the portable battery to see what its remaining charge was. The camera itself was fine, but with one hand on my camera and watching the camera output on the screen, and the other hand watching chat on my phone, my dexterity, awareness, and mindfulness scores were all a lot lower. I was glad to see that audio wasn’t really an issue, I think, I was able to speak quite softly and still have both mics pick me up quite well, and the networking stuff more or less worked, though there were a couple small blips because I was using just one source of Internet, and an issue at the start where my OBS studio was stuck in bandwidth mode and I had to return home to fix it and come out again.
The stream did work in the end though, and I spent a couple of hours walking around the mall, cataloguing and chronicling the stores. I had forgotten that it was a weekend and thus that the malls closed at 7pm instead of 9pm, so although I had brought along the Buy One Get One Free coupon from Edo Japan that I had gotten back in November but which I had not gotten to use on Friday since the in-person work meeting was cancelled, I was too late to use it on its final redemption day, Sat Jan 31, as well, as my stream started riiiight at 7pm. Oh well. It’s now a souvenir in one of my boxes. Plus, I don’t think I would have been able to eat two bowls of chicken teriyaki or whatever with my damaged mouth anyway. I could barely force down the potato that I ended up eating that evening instead.
Anyway, the stream itself is embedded below here. The 2 hour 15 minute stream took 4.8 GB of mobile data, but this was because I streamed it on 1080p 30 fps, and running it on 720p 30 fps (which I believe is standard for most IRL streams) would have put it around 2/3 of that, or 3.2 GB. It took the battery that was powering my two boxes down to the high 50% mark, which was also fine, whereas both the DJI camera and (I think) mic still had tons of battery left after. The camera was still at 100% with the attached battery handle at 94% or something ridiculous since it wasn’t actually recording. And the Belabox reached around the low 60s Celsius in internal temperature, I believe. Although I forgot to check that one while the stream was still live.
So will I stream while abroad? Not sure, we’ll see. I’ll need to consider solutions for growing an extra arm before I leave. I do have some potential solutions like a phone cord that I can wear around my neck. And I could possibly clip the camera to my backpack, but then I wouldn’t be able to see the camera screen itself while live. I also considered going to West Edmonton Mall and doing a longer stream there on Sunday, but I found out that not only did Saturday exhaust me, and leave me with a small list of things to fix, but that West Ed closes at 6pm on Sundays anyway.
But I’m torn both ways — on the one hand it’s a dream of mine to take people along with me as I travel with a streaming camera. On the other hand, I worry that it won’t be exciting, or I won’t be able to actually enjoy my trip, or I’ll have too much to do between the blog and the recording, or people will yell at me, or simply that it’ll be too much of a hassle and added weight. My opinion on this seems to fluctuate depending on time of day and mood.
Outside of streaming-related stuff, and the excruciating pain in my mouth (kidding, it’s nowhere near that bad, it’s largely just annoying except when I’m eating or talking a lot), I did a bit of scanning and working on the dream diary segment of my blog, but not much at all since any time spent on anything not trip-related seems wasted right now. I still do need to go out and buy a couple things, like travel toothpaste, for the trip, but that can wait until next week. I changed my combs last week because the old ones were getting icky, and I didn’t like my last shampoo either as it smelled weird and the combination of that and (I think) my combs made my bath towel also smell weird after one or two uses. But I finally finished that old shampoo, and switched back to my favourite shampoo brand, Diane (local). So I took the chance to also switch combs and wash my pillow case and towel. A nice shampoo raises my quality of life by so much.
I also called up my rental office to talk about my lease renewal, which is due at the end of April (but realistically by the end of March, since they want it a month in advance). I was told that I could accept it in the app this year though, instead of making an appointment in person, so I said that I’d do that near the end of my trip instead. I also gave them my trip dates, so that they can come and run the taps and check for leaks and make sure any notices on the door are taken in. Whether they’ll actually do that or not seems like 50-50 though, according to my past experiences.
In terms of new food this week, since I didn’t go out at all, I still had this packet of something called peri-peri sitting around and I put that in soup (and a bit on my rice).
This one was very weird? It had a.. strong tangy taste?, which is probably the vinegar in it talking. I’m not sure how to properly describe the taste. I can’t say that I liked it, and the packet wasn’t a very good fit for the sauce — there was too much sauce to use in one pot of soup (and I’d wager it’s the same for using it as a meat coating sauce unless you’re making a lot of it at once) but there was no way to seal the packet back up, and it was very easy for the sauce to dribble down the side of the packet. In the end, I stood the half-used packet in a small bowl and put the entire bowl in the fridge, and used the rest of it in my second pot of soup later in the week.
While there were no aurora this week, the skies did produce some nice pictures still, and some of them are captured here for posterity. Firstly, 5:16 pm on Sun Jan 25. For this one and the fourth sky one below, I enjoy looking at broken, lattice-style clouds very much:
I also enjoy when I see a bunch of horizontal clouds on the horizon, especially at sunset, like this scene on Tue Jan 27 2026 at 4:48 pm. The yellowness there looks like the bottom half of a nice retrowave sun:
This one was at Wed Jan 28 2026 at 3:12 am, and while I like the fuzzy meshy clouds that the moon was partially shining through, I certainly have seen a good number of occasions where a couple of cars are parked next to each other in the mall’s parking lot way later than any cars should be there. Sometimes with people nearby, sometimes without. I wonder what their stories are. A street gang? Good friends out on a liminal adventure? A group travelling cross-country together?
Lastly, here’s the “fourth picture” mentioned above, from Thu Jan 29 2026, 3:47 pm:
While a good portion of USA and eastern Canada were being hammered by snowstorms this week, it was fairly mild here, with a couple of days even reaching above the freezing mark, and you can see some snow melting on the near left side of that picture. Everything froze again overnight, then thawed again the next morning, and rinse and repeat. Soon though, I will be on my trip, and that will be it for winter for me — by the time I return the snow and cold weather from this Fall 2025/Winter 2026 season will surely all be gone!
Games
Games? The week before a vacation? Really?
I did a little bit of Arknights: Endfield (local) this week. The main story is uninteresting, but the factory building part of the game is interesting — as far as I have gotten so far, I automated gathering ore and teleporting that back to my base, where cute little conveyor belts moved them into cute little processors and cute little factories to endlessly produce different types of ingredients. They apparently continue to run offline even if you don’t log in for up to 7 days, so I should have a healthy supply of low level stuff if I ever log in again. Obviously this won’t be happening while I’m on my trip, but maybe it will still catch my attention after the trip. Who knows! Here’s a very early-on conveyor belt system with zero complexity:
The one major drawback of the game though are the tutorials, they are infuriating and handholding to the point that they regularly dim out the rest of the screen except for the big X button at the top right of a UI menu to make sure you know how to close a window, and it remains that way until you press the X (or hit escape) to close it. That sort of tutorial.
Instead of giving players a direction and helpful tips, they give very precise instructions on what to do and where to click (and in some cases, over-enthusiastic encouragement and praise upon clicking it) and lock out any sort of player agency by wresting away the player’s control to do or read anything else. It’s pretty terrible. Even 10+ hours into game I was still running into a few of them, like the factory stuff that gradually unlock over time. The devs obviously think that their players are all idiots, all the time. I’m only an idiot some of the time. Make forced tutorials optional! And never take away agency from players!
There was also this nice mood piece. I haven’t posted a mood piece from a game in a while, but they do mostly come from gacha games when I do, and this one is no different. “Yet, once we start walking forward, the traces of our journey will always be there beneath our feet whenever we look back.”
That’s a good line to see me off on my vacation, no? Apparently there’s a slightly longer version (local) of that quote from the Arknights mobile game (local), which I haven’t played.
Oh, and besides all that, I played a couple days of Touhou Mystia’s Izakaya on stream. This close to the trip though, my heart isn’t really in it, especially since there’s no way I can finish it before the trip. And I bounced around to a couple of other games — Cozy Keep, Hammerwatch, and Dungeon Inn.
Plushie of the Week #220
When I went to my parents’ place back in late December last year, there was a cute magnet on the fridge door that I had never seen before but that I honestly could just have skimmed over the last half a dozen times that I was there. Either way, while I don’t know anything about it, and it sure doesn’t have a name nor a handy birthday/acquisition day, I wanted to present it here this week anyway to clear it from my backlog folder. I mean, because it’s uh, cute.
This plushie magnet is Hallmark-branded, which means there’s a good chance that it was from one of the local Hudson’s Bay departmental stores before they closed down last year, since most of those stores had a small Hallmark section in them. I don’t know for sure though, since they likely aren’t the only store that does that. Plus there are apparently still actual Hallmark stores in Edmonton too.
Anyway, here’s a profile of the little plushie magnet in six parts. Front:
Back:
Tag 1 front:
Tag 1 back:
Tag 2 front:
Tag 2 back, slightly blurry but basically identical to Tag 2 front:
It’s.. it’s cute. I like food-themed plushies a lot. And being a magnet means he gets to stick onto the fridge in solidarity with the things inside. While they are expensive, Hallmark does make nice (to me) plushies. The ones I myself have are much bigger though. Though they still don’t have any magnets that I am aware of despite being labelled as magnetic plushies too.
Dreams
Jan 26 2026
- Snippet: There were two tours that were sold out and a third one that was not as popular but that I preferred because it was longer, so I figured that I’d actually get more bang for my buck from it. Three holes in the ground represented the three different tours, the two sold out ones were covered up and inaccessible but the third one was still open, with a line of people snaking away from it. I joined the end of that line.
Jan 27 2026
- Snippet: I recall looking at the outside of a three-storey building or factory that I was exploring with a friend, and pointing a torch at the side of the building to highlight potential locations of interest inside the building as we chatted about the path we would take through it.
- Snippet: I also recall a specific scene where someone treated me differently, either by giving me something extra or something different than what others were getting, and when I inquired about it, he said that it was because he knew that I wouldn’t be here as long compared to the others.
Jan 28 2026
- I was sitting near the front left side of a classroom, near Zixiang, Huihan, and another friend. The tables were arranged in rows and columns and I was in the second row, second column from the door, whereas the aforementioned three were in the three seats nearer the door than I was.
- I left the classroom to visit something to the south, and then hurried back as I wasn’t sure if the class was over and the next one had started yet, as I hadn’t brought a watch or phone with me. It turned out that it had not ended yet, and the Malay woman who was the teacher in charge of the current class and had no issue at all with us leaving if we had completed our work early was still standing around the class and only began packing up to leave after I got back.
- Once I settled back in, our next teacher arrived. I told him that the other three had left to buy something and would probably be back shortly, and he nodded and waited for them before commencing the next class.
- Snippet: I had a digital map of an area, centered upon a train and bus station, which was the closest transportation hub for all the points of interest noted on the map. There was a task that needed doing in a lot of those points of interest, and a 140 year limit within which it had to be completed, since that was apparently the remaining lifespan of the station.
Jan 29 2026
Dream 1
- I was at a train station looking for a little plant seed or sapling that was supposed to be growing in some little holes of white dirt set in the platform pavement there. However, I didn’t see any seeds in any of the holes, and digging through one of them didn’t net me any buried seeds either.
- I thought maybe someone else had looted it all, however a girl that was passing by told me that they wouldn’t spawn there until the next game patch, and that for now they only spawned at a nearby field, so I headed in that direction.
- This field was somewhat similar in size and shape to a baseball pitch, with raised terrain and snaking pathways surrounding the outside of a large, flat field. The field itself was a burial ground for wolves, especially on the left side of the field, so I started off by wandering towards the right side.
- I stumbled upon several other plants like tulips growing from the ground, and eventually found the sapling that I was looking for as well — but it was located in a small garden of that plant plus bamboo that another player had planted. It was carefully hidden away in the field because growing the plant for its product had to be done out in the game world itself and another player could stop by and find the field like I just did and harvest it while the planting player was offline. However, I had no such inclination to steal this crop so I left it alone.
- I followed the far curve of the field around towards the left side and eventually found some of my own plants too. However, wolves arrived shortly after and started to hunt for me. I led the wolves on a wild goose chase, running around on the paths and hopping to different platforms to throw off their trail, as well as using my short range teleport skill every 2 minutes as it came off of its skill cooldown.
Dream 2
- I was scouting out a small island that I mentioned looked like it had a power plant at one point, but when two friends and I took a closer look at it it turned out to be just a long, rocky ledge. We did find a dark green duck wandering around there though.
- Leaving the island, I hailed a taxi and while it was arriving, I attended a scene where Satinel was watching me from the departure viewing lounge of an airport as I stood on an airport tarmac with a bunch of other passengers and a surly attendant who was loading our luggage onto a plane.
- There was one cart of luggage for people who had already checked in, and I saw my bright pink luggage back there. Plenty of people had not checked in their luggage yet though, and held it with them, waiting to hand it to the surly attendant, much to her consternation. I helped her by putting a steadying hand on a bag on the cart to balance it so that it wouldn’t topple down to the ground as she loaded another bag, and she was grateful to me for that.
- The scene shifted back to the shore by the island as the taxi arrived, and I got in, sitting in the back seat of the taxi, with a weird diagonal leather wall dividing me from the front left seat where the driver was, and the empty front right passenger seat.
- We exchanged some pleasantries and he drove me for some time before I realized that I had not explicitly told him where I was headed, and I leaned onto the wall to ask him if we were headed to the airport. He sounded surprised and said he thought I had said I wanted to go to Khatib. He also languidly pointed out without a care in the world that we were passing the Legislative Building or something, and then asked me not to forget his tip as well.
- I was in a bit of a panic at this point because I said that my flight was at 11 am and it was already 10 am, and that my luggage was already loaded but I still needed to check in and get past customs. I implored him to get to the airport as quickly as possible.
Jan 30 2026
- Snippet: Kel and I left the house just as Mom fussed with trying to get me to do something before leaving. I told her I’d do it later, and then turned back to Kel as the two of us slowly made our way down the wide steps leading from our house door down to the ground about a metre below. Everything was covered in ice, and very slippery, and though we didn’t slip and fall, movement was very slow. By the time we reached the bottom of the stairs and started walking though, I showed Kel my phone’s weather app which said that the temperature had risen 7 degrees Celsius, and the ice was all turning into slush now, which was a lot easier to walk on. I was glad for this, as the two of us needed to visit four locations in town to retrieve fire, air, earth, and water artifacts, and doing that in the snow would have been very slow.
Feb 01 2026
- Snippet: I went to an aquarium at one point, and at another point I was growing a single mushroom plant that looked like a regular green leafy plant in a pot, except all its leaves coming out of the tall stem were mushrooms instead.
Feb 02 2026
– Snippet: I was watching a scene in a side-scroller game where explosions occurred throughout a village, which apparently was a necessary part of the plot that surprised no one in the village. This caused a girl to run off to the left of the village, together with a pet of hers that looked like a butterfly, and started a 47 minute countdown timer and a quest for me to protect her until the timer ended, as she was headed to search for a place that would advance the plot.