My Diary #230

Life

My bag from Bentley arrived this week! Oddly, the packing slip that the bag came with was printed on Bugatti Group's letterhead instead of Bentley's, even though I didn't think the two companies were related that closely. I mean, Bentley does carry Bugatti bags (local), but a cursory search does not show one company being owned by the other, so I found it a bit weird to see that packing slip, but hey. As long as I got my free replacement bag. It is a bit smaller, has no outer corner pockets (which I did use a lot), the inner pockets are different, and the strap connector looks like it's made out of plastic, which would be a lot more flimsy than the metallic one that broke on my last trip, but hey, free bag to try, I guess. I'll probably just buy my own separate bag strap for my pink sling bag, though.

The new one is the one at the bottom here. Excuse the uneven lighting.

I did not bring it out with me to test drive it yet though, even though I did go out several times this week. I just brought around the other one all week.

I went out multiple days this week, the first time being on last Sunday, after submitting the blog, because I wanted to get some food and check on a statement I had made in last week's blog:

"I don't think any gacha machines now exist in Southgate, although it's not impossible that I'm not remembering a couple up in the Korean store on the second level or something."

How accurate was my memory? Well, I did find what I suspected I had forgotten about:

They were all Pokemon-related, unfortunately, as I care little for that series, but at least they exist, I guess.

I visited Southgate again on Monday, passing through on the way to the bus terminal, and I almost got ran over by this guy:

It came out of a blind spot (that black pillar behind it, while I was approaching from the right side) and almost caused a fatality. Well excuse me. I didn't know Southgate had automated robot cleaners now too though, so that's two now that I've seen recently, the other one at the Edmonton airport when I was coming home. This one is a Tennant X6 ROVR (local). Neat. I hope no one lost their job to the robot though.

I have several other notable pictures from Monday as well, starting with this one of a "battery electric powered bus" that was waiting at Southgate Transit Centre.

I've seen them before, but not too often, so I decided I want a picture keepsake for the blog. I also don't remember the digital signs having white text (09 - Eaux Claires) instead of orange like most other buses.

I took a different bus, the 704, to South Park Centre to visit the T&T Supermarket there. Along the way, I saw another very notable update for my records, which is that the liquidation store that had opened next to the H-Mart there was now gone.

RIP. The store there was Fire Dealz, and I had first noticed it/visited it on Apr 09 2025, apparently around 5 months after it opened, according to the note in that blog entry. Well, this week, on Apr 06 2026, I noticed that it was now closed and shut down, as of about 6 months ago (local). What an odd duality. Obviously I don't go there at all during the winter months. Edmonton and its stupid outdoor malls. Also, they closed down because they didn't pay rent? Doh.

I also made an adjustment to my New Year's Resolution to try at least one new item of food per week this year. I  decided that that was too gamified and too annoying to track, and I found that I was withholding a new item that I wanted to try if it was too close to the last new item that I had tried, in order to try it later on in the week so I could use it as a springboard to my next new item after that or something. That didn't feel cool. So instead, now I'm just generically going to try many new food items and see how I like them, as and when I can.

I say all that because I came away from T&T Supermarket with a bunch of new items to try this week. Firstly, these cookies:

I threw that picture at Gemini and asked about the history of the cookies to see if there was an interesting story behind them, as I always do, and got a story about how it was a mass-market version of Rokkatei's Marusei Butter Sandwich (local) from Hokkaido, which was more shelf-stable and thus far more suitable for global distribution. Also, the Tohato company survived bankruptcy and crippling debt in 2003 after their management team decided to invest in luxury golf courses in the 1980s-1990s and lost a lot of money that way. But they got restructured during bankruptcy and a few twists and turns later, their cookies ended up on my table in Edmonton.

Gemini was able to produce sources for the story, this one from 2005 (local) and this one from 2006 (local), and it's an interesting read overall. "Tohato has a secret weapon that it believes might help with just that. Hidetoshi Nakata, Japan’s most well known footballer, is on the pay roll." and "Nakata likes snacks, biscuits and cookies so we sent him samples to Italy and he often sends back comments, some of which we ignore and others which we take on board." made me laugh, haha. And hey, I'm at Scr1000 for my (local) screenshot backups.

Anyway, I actually did quite enjoy these cookies, they tasted pretty great, but the box was deceptively large and the actual cookie volume within was very small. Not cool. There were only eight cookies in that large box. But they were eight good cookies.

I also bought these two new-to-me side dishes to add to my rice bowls: Dried radish from a company called Fan Sao Guang (lit. "Rice Swept Clean") on top and white kimchi on the bottom. And yes, I inquired about the backstories of both items too, they just weren't as interesting as the cookies above.

I also let Gemini pick one new item for me to add to my pantry, and it suggested Zhenjiang vinegar and said that I should try adding a drop of it to my soup now and then. After some hunting, I ended up with this bottle of 6-year-old Zhenjiang vinegar:

It's pungent and interesting! I do like it but the cap isn't really conducive to just adding one or two drops at a time, I'm liable to accidentally pour a whole tablespoon into my soup whenever I try to tip a droplet in, so I need to get some sort of sauce bottle that only lets out a droplet or two at a time. But there, lots of interesting new items to try this week.

On Tuesday, I went to Safeway for the Safeway Customer Appreciation Day that occurs on the first Tuesday of every month. That was fairly uneventful, but I was out of extra virgin olive oil that I use for my ham and eggs breakfast every morning, and I do not like Safeway's stocked variety of oil, so I was hemming and hawing about taking a run to the Italian Centre supermarket, where I had acquired my last bottle back in August 2025, and which was about a 10-minute walk away. but I realized that there was a local boutique named Evoolution (local) in Southgate that sold specialty olive oils, and that I had never been into it or even really given it a second thought until the recent video walk-through of the mall that I did just before I left on my trip, even though I had walked by it hundreds of times by this point.

Being out of olive oil seemed like a good excuse to enter the store and buy more, and I was greeted by a male employee once I stepped in and looked around at their pots and pots of oil. As I chatted with him, he poured me a few samples of some recommended oils to taste and I eventually walked away with one called Picual, from Portugal.

It's an interesting taste, it tastes a bit... woody? I'm not quite sure how to describe it. I ended up taking home that thin bottle for $17 and I do like the smell when I fry it into my ham and eggs in the morning. They have a whole ton of different olive oils in there of different flavours and I will probably go back there just to try different ones.

But more importantly, beside each pot of olive oil in the store was a little informational and recipe card, and when I asked the staff member who assisted me if they had a set of them all that I could pick up and go through slowly to read them, he said no, but that I should feel free to wander around and take one of everything. So of course I did! They looked like this in store:

And like this in my home:

There were about 60 of them, and they're all destined for the scanner and the IA eventually. What do you mean I have a problem, Tigey?

Talking about gaining ephemera, I had a cool interaction with someone named Nomar this week. He knocked on my door while I was watching anime with Satinel and Nak, and I had to get them to pause our show while I went to answer the door and chat with him for a bit. He was a City of Edmonton Waste Outreach Educator (local), and just as this City of Edmonton page (local) promised, he was here to answer my questions! I didn't really have any, but we chatted for a couple minutes anyway and he asked if he could use my unit number on a sticker for a sheet that was going to be placed down in the lobby, highlighting neighbours that were allegedly recycling well or something. I instead counter-asked jokingly if I could have a copy of that sheet when it came out since I collected ephemera to scan!

He seemed intrigued in that hobby of mine, and after I described what I did, he ended up looking through his folder to see if I could have anything to scan that wasn't private but wasn't already on the Edmonton website as well, and actually ended up giving me a blank copy of that neighbour sheet to scan instead. What a nice interaction and great guy! Teehee. The sheet itself is here, and I'll upload it to the IA at some point in the future too.

Though I realize now, did I ever say yes to him putting my unit number on the copy for our apartment? I think we just forgot to conclude that conversation thread. That's probably for the best though, once the local copy appears and I take a picture of it, so my unit number isn't made public while I'm living here. Either way, thank you, Nomar!

After talking to Gemini to figure out my options, I also invested in a few things this week to help with my ongoing archiving project. One was some isopropyl alcohol 99%, from Safeway, to clean my scanner glass with now and then. Other items included polypropylene and Mylar A4-sized sleeves from a couple of different online stores. Both fight against the chemical degradation of paper over time by being chemically inert, but the prices of those items were vastly different. 300 sheets of polypropylene, the cheaper one, cost me about $54, plus $14 shipping, whereas 50 sheets of Mylar, a more premium material with better transparency, a more rigid structure, and a higher resistance to oils and acids, cost a whopping $140. They were also backordered for 4-6 weeks. They're meant for fragile and/or valuable items though, and having both means I'll be set for a long time.

I also bought some archival boxes and a bottle of anti-glue chemical with the Mylar sheets that came to an additional $85 or so, but despite the much larger physical volume, a slower transit time and what I can only attribute to creative shipping options meant that somehow the shipping for that package only came to $22, so a package that I expected to cost over $300 came down to $250 instead. So here's a grateful eternal shout out to that "library and archival products" company, Carr McLean (local), and their current owner, Paul Barclay (local). It's a step towards doing this more seriously for me though. I have lots of paper lying around, and many things I scan and toss, but some cool things or old things I mean to scan and keep but have never had a good place or good way to store them.

I also bought a CD from the University of Alberta online marketplace this week, specifically a CD called Distracted by Beauty from the Augustana web store (local). It hasn't arrived yet, but it also doesn't seem to be online anywhere, so it felt like a good thing to collect and eventually archive. I do like collecting hyperlocal CDs (and other things). I hope it's still in stock though, this online marketplace consists of "official" stores set up by departments on campus, but some of the other stores are obviously very neglected and listing things (like courses or conferences) from several years ago for sale. I haven't received a notification saying the item was NOT actively in stock anymore yet though, so there's hope I guess? I was also intrigued by this Adopt-a-Chicken program (local) which was linked off of another store on that marketplace, but I just don't think I have that sort of disposable income right now. I seriously considered it, though.

But maybe I should have. While on the topic of eggs, I visited Safeway again later in the week on Friday, while on my way home from an in-person work meeting, and I saw this gem of a sign.

Urgh. Apparently there was a fire at Burnbrae Farms near Calgary earlier in the week (local) that caused this. And this:

Empty shelves where the Compliments eggs, Safeway's cheapest in-house brand, usually sit. Oh well. I had to pay a dollar or two more for a pack of 18 from another brand I suppose. At least there's a diverse set of more expensive egg options here. Maybe I should adopt that heritage chicken though.

That Friday was a culmination of a rather long and tiring day where I went in for work and also visited a couple of grocery stores along the way home. I do have a couple pictures to share from the day though. The first is of a cleaner named Ray Dagg, and I only know his last name due to this Gateway (student newspaper) from 2015 (local), since I only asked him for his first name:

The teddy bear's name is apparently Teddy. I wonder if that's the same teddy bear that was mentioned in the article, which was posted in 2015 and says that he's been our locally famous University LRT Station custodian since around 2010. I'd never stopped to chat to him until this week, but have passed by him many, many times over the years, since I've been working there since 2006 (minus a couple of breaks) and been a student there since 2002. I'm glad I took the time to stop and say hi, I've always wanted to capture a picture of him for the blog.

I also captured the question board outside the Rutherford Library when I passed by it later in the afternoon:

As well as a notice board not far from it. Just preserving it for curious perusers in 2050 and beyond. Good luck with all the stupid QR codes! I saved as many as I could on the IA, but some are redirects and others are already-closed surveys and poorly formatted links and such.

And lastly for this day, besides the Safeway store, I also visited the H-Mart near the University on the way home, and picked up this tube of seasoning called Yuzu Kosho.

It's another Gemini suggestion special! I do like this use of the chatbot, prodding it for suggestions of new foods to try. I had a couple more it suggested that I find while at H-Mart that sounded really interesting, but I could not find those products there. Whereas this one, it had suggested I try to find at T&T earlier in the week, but I conversely could not do so there, but a quick Google search had pinpointed its existence at H-Mart instead, so that was the purpose of my stop here on Friday. It's not really spicy at all to me but I like the tangy taste of it when added to rice.

It looks like I'll have a couple more fun meetings at work going forwards for the next little while, at least over the spring and summer, since my boss wants to hold some in-person team whiteboarding sessions. Those are always a productive blast and it'd be nice to see everyone again if we're all at work on the same day, plus it's a nice break from doing tickets as well that day, so I'm kinda looking forward to those!

Closer to home, when I was asking Gemini about how feasible the built-in Samsung call blocking feature was, I learnt that it was full of false positives and a bad idea to activate. However, Gemini also told me that as a Telus subscriber, Telus actually has a feature called Telus Call Control that I could sign up for for free on the My Telus phone app, which requires people to enter a random digit on their phone after calling me before Telus will connect them to me. It then saves their number so they won't be prompted again as long as they're on the list of the 25 most recent callers. Neat.

I signed up for that, and added my entire family as well as the number that the apartment door downstairs calls from to my auto-accept list, and I know that that works already because that apartment door number is automated and cannot dial a random digit, but I did successfully receive a ring from it this week when the delivery person for that new bag arrived. I haven't had any of my usual nonsense calls from Scotiabank Insurance (who probably started calling me due to this, but haven't ceased since) or other random spam since, and reviewing my logs it looks like it's blocked five numbers this week since I set it up. Peace at last.

Telus also has a Rewards program (local) that I had no idea about and apparently had to manually activate in the phone app before I could start to earn reward points. That's rather rude. One of my "Gold tier" perks of having two services with them is supposedly also two 1-day roaming passes that would have been REALLY USEFUL when I was sick in Jiangmen and trying to verify with Meituan to allow me to order food through them, y'know, but of course no one told me about the perks or program until I found it this week. Oh well, better late than never.

A second rewards program that I received an email about this week too was the one for my Scotiabank Passport Visa Infinite Card, which apparently is getting an upgrade to a Scotiabank Passport® Visa Infinite + Card (local) on Apr 25 2026. Uh, interesting. I really like the card as is, especially the six free lounge passes per year (apparently people sign up for a complimentary free partner card with that and use that too for 12 per year, but that is skeezy to me and I don't travel THAT much per year so I do not do that) and the Scene+ points return on everything I spend on. And how the annual fee is waived as long as I also have a specific bank account with them with a minimum balance in it. Both Jon and Kel also have this card and account now, I believe. So I assume they got the email pointing them to the above site as well.

As far as I can tell though, the only real difference is an updated benefit for something called GigSky global mobile data, which is an eSIM provider. We get a 15-day, 10 GB eSIM free once per year. Yippee. Actually, because this is a global eSIM, that's not a terrible perk at all. It's good to cover a short stay in a country on the way to somewhere else, or if I'm hopping across a couple of countries over a couple of days. It's nowhere near as good as the SIMBA one I had from Singapore, but it is free. I could actually use this on future trips! The details on how to actually use it are on this page (local) on the actual GigSky website. Have to download their app and activate it that way. I don't know that that in and of itself was worth rebranding the entire Visa Infinite card to add the + sign, but I do need a new card anyway, mine isn't that far from expiry anymore. I wonder if we can lend each other the perk if we're not using it in a year. I also wonder if it resets per calendar year or if the clock starts after a redemption. I don't see that information on the website. I guess I'll find out eventually!

I picked up a very rare 8/10 (or higher) dream today on Apr 08 2026. I'm not sure I've had one for over a year, despite having a long unbroken streak of remembering dreams every night. What a super memorable dream that was!

Last but not least, here's a picture at 6:59 am on Wed, Apr 08 2026. I originally took it because I like the glint of the eastern sun behind my building shining on the defunct wall where the Hudson's Bay sign on Southgate Centre's eastern wall used to be, I usually missed these scenes on my old sleep schedule before I went to Asia, since I would normally sleep around 3:00 am and naturally wake up at 8:00 to 9:00 am or so. These days though, I'm currently normalized at sleeping around 12:00 am and waking up naturally between 5:00 to 6:00 am still, so I've been getting some wonderful early morning quiet time with dark skies outside, and then watching the effects of the sunrise every day even though my window faces west.

But this picture also shows the duality of April spring in Edmonton. Seriously, snow everywhere on the ground! In April! Why! Who offended Mother Nature!

And then here's three days later, at 12:14 pm on Sat, Apr 11 2026. I went outside to the balcony since the weather was so nice. Apparently it reached a high of +12°C today, according to TimeandDate (local).

That poor mountain of sand.

Games

On a personal note, I didn't play much at all this week. I played Melvor Idle (local), but that only involves logging in now and then to change my active task to whatever nonsense I'm grinding at the moment. It's no longer really interesting though. I also launched The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria (local), which I acquired in last month's Humble Monthly and wanted to try, but I had second thoughts and closed it about 5 minutes in. I also tried Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator (local) for about half an hour, enough to get by the first couple of days and check out the interesting crafting system there. But it didn't immediately hook me into wanting to play more, either. And that's about as far as I got solo gaming this week.

I did play co-op games a whole bunch with Satinel this week though, with time split between TMNT: Splintered Fate (local) near the start of the week, and Orcs Must Die 3 (local) near the end of the week. The former has just about run its course now I think, though we're still missing one annoying achievement each, and the latter is sooooo much fun.

I also started a bit of a blog cleanup thing to go back and properly do (local) links for all the Steam pages, as up until recently I had Steam links on the exception list of sites that didn't need (local) screenshot page backups, together with Wikipedia, the IA, YouTube (sort of, I still make local copies of videos), and my local links. I want to get away from that though, but I'm naming the files in a way that I can just easily find and reuse screenshots for the same game over multiple weeks, I just have a big backlog to do. Yet another ongoing task with a big backlog.

Plushie of the Week #223

I initially wanted to list the plushies I got on my trip in chronological order, but instead I'm not going to. They're still all going to be featured before I go back to older "I don't know anything about this one" plushies, just in a different custom order. Last week featured a plushie that I bought as an in-flight shopping order on Peach Airlines, and this week as well as next week will feature the two plushies that I got on two separate Spring Airlines/Spring Japan flights. Starting with the Spring Airlines horse on plane plushie.

This plushie was acquired on Mar 14 2026, during a flight from Guangzhou to Shanghai. He cost 49 yuan, which was charged to my credit card once I landed -- as per the blog above, they couldn't scan it into their card scanner mid-flight, unlike Peach Airlines, so they waited until the plane landed before coming back to my seat and scanning my card while they were waiting for the crew outside to line up the jetway with the airplane doors.

Front:

Back:

Side:

Other side:

Bottom:

Tag front:

Tag back:

The tag front and tag back reads SPRING GO in English, and 绿翼优选, or "Green Wing Preferred Selection" in Chinese. It's not actually the name of the airline itself, but rather its in-flight shopping brand.

Nestled within the blog post above was a picture of the in-flight magazine that he was featured in as well, which looked like this:

Regarding the 2026 马上起飞 line at the top, since 2026 is the Year of the Horse, which is 马 in Chinese, and 马上 in Chinese is a phrase that means immediately, there were a LOT of Chinese wordplay puns everywhere that I looked in China that took 马上 and turned it into a four-word phrase, which is a very common poetic phrase structure in Chinese. In this case, 起飞 means an airplane taking off, so 马上起飞 means Take Off Immediately. It's still a pun to do with the year of the horse, but not as overt as the common ones that usually go "get rich immediately" or similar drivel.

There's also a visual pun here because 马上, the term that means immediately, also literally means horse (马) on top (上), and that's exactly what is displayed here with the horse on top of the plane. And when the plushie plane takes off, it's "horse on top" (马上) takes off (起飞). Very clever.

Just below that is 春秋航空毛绒挂件系列 -- 春秋航空 is the Chinese name for Spring Airlines, and the rest of it means Plush (毛绒) Pendant (挂件) Series (系列). The red text to the right of the horse plushie is 马年限定, or Year of the Horse Limited Edition. Below that are words I've already translated, Spring Airlines (春秋航空) Take Off Immediately (马上起飞) Plush Pendant (毛绒挂件).

Below the horse picture are two phrases of eight characters, but as per the Chinese four-word poetic rule, they're read in groups of four. Academic success (take-off) (学业起飞), pass every exam (逢考必过). Career success (take-off) (事业起飞), rise to the top (青云直上). Cool, I could use both of those blessings.

There was also a bag that he came in, and I saved and photographed that as well:

2014 was the previous Year of the Horse before 2026, so I thought the presence of that 2014 thing there was some sort of model number that indicated that they had also given out this plushie back in 2014. But nope, upon further investigation, it turns out that GB 6675.1-2014 is a regulatory standard that describes China's toy safety rules (local). That standard just happened to be last updated in 2014. The QR code goes here (local), it's a Weixin/WeChat redirect link that can be scanned from within WeChat itself to open that page in the local link.

Dreams

Apr 07 2026

• I remember hanging out with some friends near the start of a fantasy zone that we were supposed to advance through but no one really bothered with, as we were more interested in talking with each other.
• I had a power to transfer myself into any sentient animal nearby, taking over its body and movements, and at some point I transferred myself into someone's pet and wandered off, then jumped into another animal that it met, and then another one from there.
• Eventually I reached a large standalone stone wall, about three times the height of a human and with a gate set into it. For some reason, I was able to jump into and take over the wall, and although I then couldn't move, it was a very cozy sensation so I stayed there.
• I watched with amusement as my friends tried to look for me a little later on, only jumping out and back into my human form once Debbie found me, using her ranger skills to produce a list of nearby people and their locations, and then squinting to look up towards the very top of the wall at where my eyes were.
• Snippet: I remember a line of boys, about a dozen or so, seated outside a museum in a line with their backs against one of its walls. An automated video camera belonging to the museum floated by, detected them, and pointed its lens at them to capture them on film as part of its normal security routine, but inadvertently being filmed made them angry.

Apr 08 2026

• Satinel and I, along with a few other friends, were in a classroom under siege in a game scenario that felt like the end of the world. However, it was an escalating developer mechanic used to end a level and move the game on, while giving good defensive setups a few extra points.
• Basically, there was a tiled game board made out of the square classroom and an equivalent-sized outdoor space next to it. The dream camera was pulled back so I could see the classroom on the left side and the open space on the right. Orcs were pouring out of a portal on the far side of the open space and heading towards the classroom, slowly at first, and we killed them from range as they came.
• But as the level progressed, the orcs gradually started to spawn faster, eventually outscaling the damage we could do, and filling up the entire right side of the board. They could not enter the classroom, but in a Tetris-style game mechanic, once the entire right side of the board was filled, the level ended, the orcs all froze in place, and the portal stopped spawning.
• At this point, it turned out that the actual player of the game, who was a god-like being not related to me, moved on to the next level of the game, while we students, who were essentially nameless pawns to the player, needed to recycle ourselves to reappear as game characters in a future level again. But to do that, we needed to get to the portal.
• The mechanic for this was that all the students started doing blood tests, and matching the results with one of the orcs in the front row of the invading horde. Once there was a match, every orc with the same blood type exploded and left a blank space in the field that was not filled up. All of us in the classroom also painlessly exploded and became ghosts.
• As ghosts, we then walked out of the classroom, across the field through the gaps between the orc army, and into the portal. After stepping through the portal, we emerged at a Japanese-style transit station in a bustling city. A brief train ride and a quick transfer later, we stepped out at a different station. All the ghosts got out here and walked towards the end of this second platform where there was a round, outdoor fountain.
• This fountain had a raised rim about 2 feet high to keep the water in, and two arches whose columns rose up from four cardinal points near the rim of the fountain. They met in the middle above the fountain at a 90-degree angle, and vine-like plants grew up the side of the arches. A smaller jet of water gushed upwards from the basin below the centre of the arches, but did not reach that high. It did, however, illuminate a glowing white portal there, which the ghosts all stepped into to recycle themselves.
• Our entire cohort, including both Satinel and I, did so as well, and soon ended up in a different level with more weapons at our disposal. Now that we knew how the game went, we were "better" at it, although that could also have just been a function of the god-player being better at the game. I had a window seat on the side of the classroom closest to the camera and could lean out of that to shoot at the orcs, while Satinel sat behind me and basically did the same. But not everyone from our last cohort was with us; some must have been recycled into different levels instead, while we made a few new friends here.
• Yet again, the number of orcs eventually escalated to overwhelm us despite our valiant fighting, forcing an end to the level. The player-god moved on again, and we did the blood tests again until someone matched a frozen orc and triggered the same explosion mechanic as before, turning us all into ghosts and opening a path to the portal.
• This time, though, while on the second train platform, I turned to Satinel and asked her if we wanted to go exploring instead. There was obviously a whole fully-formed city out here "behind" the game, and there were many other trains leading to different parts of the city. Did it matter if we didn't instantly reincarnate into the game again? What if we ended up in different maps or a different game entirely and never saw each other again afterwards?
• Satinel agreed, so we hopped onto a different train instead, leaving the portal behind as we went somewhere else together instead. I postulated that the stories of people occasionally seeing ghosts in real life were probably truthful, and were due to spirits like us, trapped in a cycle similar to this but taking their own sweet time to reincarnate.
• As we wandered around as ghostly travel companions, I commented to Satinel that my only regret was that as ghosts, I couldn't carry solid objects and thus couldn't bring Tigey around as well.
• However, we eventually discovered that by concentrating hard enough, we could temporarily solidify part of our ethereal forms. The final scene I remember from my dream was of the two of us cruising down a highway on an ethereal motorbike, accompanied by the warm but melancholic tune of 'Holiday' by the Bee Gees. I was holding on to Tigey, and while Satinel, the ghostly motorcycle, and I were invisible to onlookers, Tigey was not, so people stared out from their cars as a little white tiger plushie went flying past them.

Apr 09 2026

• Snippet: I was climbing mountains and steep hills and looking into caves and alcoves to get loot from. Occasionally I would find potions, gems, and other items strewn in them as though they were left there by adventurers. I had my hands in a claw pose in front of me with my elbows bent to my waist, and I climbed by jumping my way up the mountain, each bound bringing me up some ways like a rabbit. I aimed to jump in front of jutting-out rocks which my hands would then be able to grab on to.
• Snippet: I wandered around a neighbourhood with a bunch of other students, and a couple of emcees introducing places around the city to the students, both outdoors on the street and indoors in various buildings like a school canteen. They then gave pop quizzes for prizes, and I accidentally won one by mumbling out an answer from the periphery of one of the quiz segments, even though the question was to name a location with two words in its name and I only got one of the words correct. It was called Sakura something. I was given a prize but it was near the end of the "day" or "round", so I asked if it would be possible to carry over the prize to the next day instead.

Apr 10 2026

• Snippet: I remember a number of rectangular dioramas, mostly of airport scenes, that described various different days of my recent trip abroad. The dioramas included characters that could move around slightly within the box, but the scenes were otherwise more or less static. I could swipe on a UI to switch between which diorama was active. There was also a chatbot behind me that would try to helpfully summarize each scene into a sentence or two even when I didn't ask for it, and it would sometimes ask me directly for clarification about something in the scene.

Apr 11 2026

• Snippet: All I remember is a row of six glass gacha machines mounted on a pole so that the glass front was at my eye level. I had acquired these from an old man who used to be a shopkeeper. The machines spit out postcards when used, but to activate each machine for a day cost $1, and then it was a much cheaper fee of around 10 cents per postcard after that for the 24-hour period. Each machine's output was a little different. I activated the two rightmost machines and acquired a few postcards from the one at the end of the row.