My Diary #240

Life

No Saturday adventure for me this week -- we had a yellow rainfall warning for our city for Saturday that dumped a bunch of rain of us. And we were just outside of an orange rainfall warning. This was the weather alert map (local) as of Friday afternoon:

Doesnt that kinda look like a little orange monster is about to eat Edmonton?

A good number of minor interesting things did happen through the week though. For starters, I was supposed to go in to the office three times this week, all for meetings, on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But I was sick and a cough and a partially lost voice in the early part of the week, plus we're also extremely busy this week due to the culmination of a 10+ year data cleanup project next week, so I couldn't really afford the time to go in. Plus I'm not normally scheduled to go in 3 days a week anyway. Anyway, this and that happened and I stayed home in the end, pleading sickness, and got a whole bunch of *actual* work done on Tuesday before going in on Wednesday and Thursday.

It was also raining a fair amount this week before that weekend storm, and Wednesday was one of those days. The weather in the morning was fine, so since my scheduled Wednesday meetings were at 1:00 pm (remote) and 2:30 pm (in person), I had decided to leave the University and either walk (~25 mins) or take a quick bus (~10m) down to Whyte Avenue for lunch, and possibly even have the remote meeting there, before going back to the University for the 2:30 one. But then the rain started around noon or so, a light drizzle at first, which then got heavier as I started my walk, so I ducked into a building near the bus station called the University of Alberta Telus Centre.

In there was a service facility called the International Service Centre (local), mostly meant to serve incoming foreign exchange students. This was where my outbound coordinator for my five study abroad attempts detailed throughout the earlier entries of this blog worked too, and also where I had come to in the past for a couple volunteer programs like this Campus Check In back in Aug 2021, and an RSJP info session back in Feb 2023, but I hadn't been back here in a while. I was just here for the paper, though. That's obvious to anyone who has read anything in the blog since the start of my We Walk Together series, though, right? That's all I do anymore these days.

The rain was pouring even harder by the time I looted everything though, plus I had used up the time I had allotted to walking there anyway, so I walked back to the transit centre, which was about two minutes away, and hopped onto a bus that was headed down to Whyte Avenue anyway. Due to the rain and the upcoming meeting, I could have just stayed back at the University and ate at Hoho's or something, but this was a case of me being stubborn and wanting to stick to my original plan, so zao gia was what I decided on.

With my damp, folded umbrella on my lap, I took that bus route 8 down Whyte Avenue and alighted at the stop nearest to the target eatery that I was going for, Block 1912 Cafe & Bakery. This was a cafe that I had briefly visited just last weekend, and it had given me the most pieces of neat ephemera (and also the second most volume of ephemera) on that day, so I had remembered it fondly, but honestly the reason I visited it again was simply because one of the pieces of paper that I had collected from it, and had decided to retain instead of throw away, had gotten slightly wet, so I wanted a clean, pristine copy of it to keep. That was it. And thankfully they still had one of them in stock, the squarish Stage paper in the middle of the table here.

I grabbed one of that, and one of the The Drifter bookmarks on the right, as that was the only new item that had appeared in the last four days. Then I stepped back out into the drizzle to decide what to do. I had asked Gemini about some good, niche places around here to eat at that I might also be able to take a work conference meeting at, and it had suggested a couple cafes, including the Woodrack Cafe that was pretty much across the street and that I had gone to a couple of times within the last month already. That place didn't really sell much food outside of sweets though, which I don't eat, but I did know that the ambience there was really nice and fairly quiet.

Gemini also suggested an Italian place that was way too far to the south, and a breakfast restaurant way to the west that I actually liked the sound of and will probably try at some point in the near future, plus a couple more in the area, but they were all either too far or nothing I felt like trying that day. On the other hand, it said that the Block 1812 cafe that I was next to was likely very crowded and busy, especially in the rain, and was not conducive to a meeting. But there were only 3 or 4 other customers in the cafe when I went in, and plenty of empty seats, and it seemed fairly quiet to me, plus the rain made me not want to travel too far away from this area lest I miss the bus back, so I decided to ignore the blathering bot and try the cafe that I had just left.

Reentering the cafe, I settled down at a neat little corner window table and set up my laptop to work while staring out the window at the rain, which was steadily getting heavier.

And my ratatouille lasagna meal, when it finally arrived, was disappointingly small for its price but still pretty good overall:

It came with my choice of soup or salad, and not being a rabbit, I had selected turkey soup, and that soup turned out to taste especially nice. My meeting came and went perfectly fine in here, there was light jazz music or something playing over the cafe speakers but the noise cancellation on my phone was good enough that no one commented on it anytime that I unmuted to speak.

After lunch, I found myself with about an hour to kill before my next meeting. The bus ride back to the University was only about 10-15 minutes and I didn't want to pop into an office or settle down to work as I had basically worked through lunch (and had been doing lots of casual unpaid overtime this week) anyway, so I decided to look around a bit. The rain was pouring down hard now, and as I stood at the street corner waiting for the scramble crossing light to turn, a older woman in a raincoat came up to me and asked me for spare change. I apologized that I had none on me to give her, but offered my umbrella to help her get wherever she was going.

She said that she was going diagonally across the road, to the bus stop, and that was more or less where I was headed as well, so I lent her half my umbrella and we crossed together. I didn't get her name, and I wished I had thought to do so, but in our brief chat she said that she was homeless but worked in Nisku, an area to the south near our Edmonton International Airport. We commiserated over how money these days was all digital so not many people had coins to give (and she agreed and muttered something about AI perhaps being at fault) and we parted ways under a shop shelter next to the bus stop. She was real nice, but to make things not too awkward I wanted to make sure I didn't catch the same bus as her, plus I still had time to kill anyway, so I waved to her and walked onwards past the bus stop.

This interaction and slingshot past the bus stop, as well as the pouring rain, led me to a shop a couple of storefronts over called Village Goods. The awning there was wider than the ones near it, and I stopped for a minute or two there to shake my umbrella dry and canvas the shop front, though this next picture, which narratively fits here, was actually taken after I left the store ten minutes later, when the rain had subsided.

This next picture has some sun glare which obfuscates the subject of the shot a little, but I actually really liked this sweater and skirt setup:

And while it was cute enough to attract me into the store at the time, I didn't find those specific clothes on sale in the shop and didn't think much of it at the time. I chatted briefly with the proprietress, who helped me prop my umbrella up against the door so it could drip-dry as I wandered around the store for a few minutes. I ended up buying a cute tin of tea with accompanied wooden spoon, and a loofah brush for feet exfoliation, which actually seems to work really well to prevent sticky feet, so I guess that was maybe my problem all along. Apparently these brushes don't last very long though, so I need a better solution.

I overheard some banter between the proprietress lady and the guy at the counter as I went around, they were talking about what to do for an upcoming store promotion as it was the store's 40th year anniversary or something. Super cool! Like a good salesman, the cashier also complimented my choice in tea, saying that he also liked that flavour and would make a cup tonight. So all around I had really good vibes from this store. But above and beyond that, this Village Goods store also seemed to specifically seek out and sell stuff that were ethically-sourced, sustainability-focused, and/or otherwise supporting the LGBTQ community, which I also appreciated quite a bit.

Partially due to that, I'll definitely be back to this store sooner rather than later I think. What's the other part of the partially? Well, the other thing that this visit did is that once I got home, I started looking at that sweater/skirt setup in the window picture and kept on falling in love with it a little bit more each time. Ugh. Maybe I'll just straight up ask if they have those items the next time I go. I've never heard of Edmonton referred to as the City of Magpies, hah, but the design on the front is really nice, whereas the plaid skirt I think reminds me of characters from Girls Band Cry or something. I don't actually own any plaid skirts. But now I want that exact outfit to wear around. Hmmmm. I should go back.

Anyway, after this I took a bus back to the University with my loot safely tucked away. I had my meeting, and then since it was late in the day, I headed on home right after that, pausing only to swing by the Students Union Building on the campus to check out the brochures by the information desk on the lower floor. But then, as I was poking around the area, I saw something gleaming at the end of an adjacent corridor. That gleam turned out to be this little treasure chest:

Seriously? Our local campus radio station, CJSR 88.5 (local), has a LITERAL TREASURE CHEST of promo CDs and other random recordings that people send in to them, in front of their door, free for people to take??? Do they leave this out every day??? It's very cute that they put them all in a treasure chest and have a pirate-themed giveaway like this, and I'm sure some people see this and their eyes light up thinking about how much they can get for rare discs, even though CDs are not very popular at all anymore these days, but my mind went straight to how there's stuff in here that's definitely going to be lost media if I don't rescue, scan, and rip it. Anything from impossibly obscure garage bands and such to local indie artists that just never quite made it big. Urgh.

I had no idea how to distinguish the rare/obscure CDs from sample CDs of stuff with regular releases, as I believe that the Internet Archive's small-p policy on uploading audio is that things that still can be obtained digitally should not be uploaded, and I had an internal struggle with being nice and obeying the "Take a CD" request (which does not outright state but does imply that people should take *only one* CD) versus the archivist side of me screaming about the threat of lost media disappearing forever, so I ended up taking a handful on the first day there and then coming back on subsequent days to take 2-3 more each trip.

I mostly concentrated on taking things that looked like they wouldn't be found at a regular music store, things without covers and with weird paper inserts and stuff for example, or stuff that just looked interesting in general, and by the end of the week I had ten CDs from them. Gemini was able to give me a nice summary of most of the artists/CDs that I sent it pictures of too, so that was neat. I'm also thinking I might just maybe scan and return some of them too so others can enjoy them as well without the threat of things being lost forever (and at the same time, if I have and eventually upload a digital copy of something that isn't on sale anywhere, it will make sure that the disc itself isn't as "profitable" for the less scrupulous.)

I've already ripped and scanned all 10 for my own archives. Also CJSR has an Archivist role on their Volunteer page (local). Hmmmm. I wonder what that entails.

That was about all the excitement on Wednesday though (and it was plenty!), but I did find out on Thursday, when I came back to the University again, that the treasure chest was inaccessible in the morning, and then when I dragged Ronnie with me downstairs on the way back from lunch in the afternoon, I saw the door to the CJSR offices open and the chest sitting just inside the hallway past the door. It was there the next time I returned as well. Semi-public area, but rather concealed. The stash of CDs at the top of the chest looked very familiar too, so even though Thursday was some sort of graduation day at the University, with lots of students and their parents in caps and tassels walking around, and even though the chest was outside all afternoon on Wednesday, the CDs just weren't very sought after by the type of student who would happen to be walking by that hallway on a weekday afternoon, I guess. They don't see the value of the discs the way that I do.

The rest of the week passed by in a flurry of work, so there wasn't much else to report even from Thursday's visit to the office, except that I was able to lead the eight people who came to our in-person team meeting in a couple rounds of co-op Geoguessr at the end of our lunch break, using the Bullseye party mode to work together to try to find out where the heck in the world we were. We usually play Codenames, but people wanted something new this week, and I still had my premium account from when I signed up for a Pro account back in Dec 2025, so I was able to host that game on my account and just have everyone else join as guests. It was a surprising amount of fun with that many players!

On my home front, I did a lot of scanning and uploading this week, though there's still a lot more to go before I can see the bottom of my table again. I'm not sure I made positive progress this week overall actually, due to how much I brought back from that Telus Centre trip, although a lot of that are small business cards and things like that anyway that I can scan in bulk. And they're all marked as an "event" batch and seated in a batch instead of being loose on my table. Either way, although I still scan a lot more than I upload right now, my IA page of uploaded items is up to 300 items, although that includes the actual archive itself so technically it's 299 I guess. It should be 300 proper by late this weekend or early next week though.

I had a conversation with the support email address for IA in which I tried to explain a bug to them, whereby if I upload an item to their servers using the Upload Page, the ingest system correctly flags an item as type "texts", which means that even if it was an image scan upload (which all of mine are), the OCR app that they have runs on it and extracts all the text to help with artifact searchability. However, if I build my own URL to prefill several of the fields in the exact same Upload Page, as explained in this blog post (local), then it just always defaults to type "image" instead, even when I upload the exact same files in the exact same folder structure (or lack thereof). It's very weird. And the support email address's response was basically to agree with my analysis. And... that's it. The IA is so spaghetti! So, so spaghetti.

But whatever. I also have wanted to support them for some time but never sat down and actually did it. I did do that this week, signing up for a $10 USD monthly donation to help out with their server or support costs or whatever else they do, since I am using their services to curate my own collection now.

They were not the only online organization that I reached out to this week too. I reached out to three others:

Firstly, WASH-Connect/Coinamatic, because their stupid new app (that accompanied the price bump announcement a few weeks ago) shows a countdown timer like "23 minutes" until the washing machine or dryer that I paid for is done its load, but once that timer is under 5 minutes left, it shows "<5 minutes" instead of the correct number. They claimed (to my support ticket) that this is because the number can be inaccurate, but that makes no sense because it is still counting down in the background and gives a push notification when it hits 0. This drives me nuts because when I see <5 minutes left, I have no idea if it is literally 5 minutes left or 30 seconds left. They do that to try to get people to go there early, I think, but I don't want to go to the tiny washer/dryer room just to stand there for 4 minutes, especially when I'm just dressed in pyjamas. They're just trying to play God, but it doesn't work in this lousy apartment building. And this is literally a downgrade from the old stupid Coinamatic app which at least gave the exact number all the time. I'm going to file a ticket EVERY TIME I use the laundry machine until they fix this. Money-grubbing vultures.

Secondly, Virgin Plus/Virgin Mobile, because remember this interaction from last month? It turns out Frances lied or the marketing department didn't care what s/he said or their whole system was broken, because I got ANOTHER SPAM EMAIL from Virgin Plus's marketing team begging me to return this time. All personalized with my own couple code too. Despite all my Communication Preferences being unchecked and disabled since Dec 22 2025, and despite Frances PROMISING ME on May 12 2026 that I had been removed from the marketing lists. Well, I referenced that again in my online chat complaint, and now this time I also have Andrew promising me the same thing.

My conversations to them are usually quite cordial, and our exchange ended like this:

19:32:50 Andrew: Thank you so much for patiently waiting. I already reached out to our complaints department for this telemarketing communication to stop. rest assured you Jessica that this will never happen again moving forward and to take action more seriously. Rest assured you that these will be priorities and we will keep you posted just to make sure this issue is fully resolved. Please give us 15 days to provide a follow up on this. On behalf of Virgin Plus I apologized for what happened and hoped that you will not take it against me. Is there anything else that I can further assist you with?
19:33:37 Consumer: No that's fine, thank you very much. I appreciate your help. I'll be back in a month if I still receive the next "personalized offer" to return, hehe.
19:33:43 Consumer: But hopefully not!
19:33:50 Consumer: Thank you very much for your time.
19:34:34 Andrew: Hopefully not and rest assured you that we take action more seriously. Thank you for reaching out at Virgin Plus, Have a great day ahead!
19:34:42 Consumer: Yourself as well! :)

Perfectly normal people having perfectly friendly conversations. Maybe this time I will stop getting these damned promotional emails.

I did have to navigate a really terrible bot on Virgin Plus's website (local) to reach a human support agent though, which kept asking me if I was trying to sign up for a phone or internet plan. I learnt that YELLING AT THE BOT IN ALL CAPS will get me past the bot really quickly to talk to a human, as the front part of that above transcript started this way:

18:56:35 Hi! I’m your Virgin Plus Virtual Assistant, it’s nice to e-meet you. I use AI to offer you help quickly.
18:56:36 Virgin Plus: How can I help you?
18:57:06 Consumer: I want to speak to a company representative about email spam that I am receiving from Virgin Plus.
18:57:14 Virgin Plus: What would you like to discuss today regarding the email spam you are receiving from Virgin Plus?
18:57:48 Consumer: A representative promised me that I would get no more marketing emails from Virgin but I am still getting marketing emails from them
18:58:06 Virgin Plus: Sorry, I′m having trouble understanding. Please rephrase your response using complete sentences to help me best assist you.
18:58:15 Consumer: Please connect me to an agent.
18:58:18 Virgin Plus: Are you looking to shop for a new line with Virgin Plus or get support on an existing one?
(Button) New
(Button) Existing
18:58:22 Consumer: Neither.
18:58:24 Virgin Plus: Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding. Please let me know your answer from the options below (you can type it or click the button).
18:58:24 Virgin Plus: Are you looking to shop for a new line with Virgin Plus or get support on an existing one?
(Button) New
(Button) Existing
18:58:44 Consumer: I have a complaint about email spam from Virgin Plus. I want to speak to a live representative.
18:58:45 Virgin Plus: Sorry, I’m still having trouble understanding. To help me connect you with the right agent, please choose one of the options provided.
18:58:45 Virgin Plus: Are you looking to shop for a new line with Virgin Plus or get support on an existing one?
(Button) New
(Button) Existing
18:58:57 Consumer: LET ME TALK TO AN AGENT
18:59:00 Virgin Plus: Let's get you to one of our e-chat agents.
18:59:01 Virgin Plus: Please type in any additional information you'd like the agent to know.

So that worked I guess. And yes, that whole exchange after still took 30 minutes of the representative poking around their system. I didn't mind that though, except the automated timezones in the script download is wrong, we finished the conversation at 1:34 pm and not 7:34 pm and I cooked lunch while the rep was doing his thing.

And thirdly, Rubric. This is an online platform (local) that the Students' Union in our University uses to set up landing pages for all our registered student clubs on campus, and our team also helps them manage this so we have admin access to it even though we're not super admins on it. The vendor redid the page's UI this week though, and I found a bug with a part of the app that has a button to go into full screen mode but no corresponding button to leave full screen, so I went through their own chatbot, which was linked to their knowledge base as well as support forum, and we checked a few of their articles and posts together before it then helped me submit a ticket to the engineering team. This one was surprisingly a lot more of a pleasant experience, so I wanted to note that down too.

Finally, I have a quick story about this set of three mailbox flyers/ads printed on fairly good cardstock that I kept around. They all have a similar liftable black flap with more pictures under, it just doesn't show too well in the picture below.

The one on the left was received on May 05 2026, and it was big and fancy and stood out from all the usual flyers, but the two main reasons that I initially kept this one around were that that we don't normally receive advertisements or flyers about new houses for sale at all, so it was unique in that aspect in addition to looking pretty, and also that it advertised some new houses at the Three Sisters Mountain Village near Canmore, which I had just visited on May 27 2025, almost exactly a year prior. These houses were about a 15-minute stroll to the southeast of the starting location of the trek (which I also recorded a video of) that I took that day, though I went northwest from the starting location to walk to Canmore proper.

Well, there was a third minor reason, which was that I hadn't yet scanned it by the time the second one in the middle arrived on May 12 2026, advertising the same set of properties on slightly smaller cardstock. So now I had a set of two, and when I finally scanned them two weeks ago in early June, I decided to keep them both due to the novelty and the mild emotional attachment to the place, even though I'll never be able to afford a house (and the associated costs of living) there.

Now imagine my surprise when, a month after the second one arrived, a THIRD one arrived this week on Jun 16 2026, printed on EVEN SMALLER cardstock, advertising the same location yet again. Although I noticed that the fine text at the bottom now said that the remaining condos started from as a low a price as $550k instead of $500k. This greatly amused me though. As my headcanon, I imagined their advertising budget slowly shrinking over time and thus the size of the paper that they could afford shrinking correspondingly as well. What a great set of ephemera to have! I hope they send a fourth one that's just business card-sized. (Their advertising budget must have been really large though, to reach a random middle-class apartment building two major cities away.)

As is custom, here are a few balcony skyline pictures from the week to wrap up this week's Life section. Firstly, a couple from Sun, Jun 14 2026 showing some nice Jacob's ladders, or god rays or crepuscular rays, or whatever we are calling them these days. This first one is from 8:44 pm:

And this one is from 8:59 pm:

It looked like there was something pretty intensely angelic going on to our northwest huh. These next two are from Mon, Jun 15 2026, the first one taken at 9:06 pm:

That one was interesting and weird because there was an orange cube of faint sunlight or something in the sky. That's not a trick of the camera or a glare against some glass or something, that picture was taken from out in the open and the box was visible to the naked eye too. Neat.

This next one was a little later in the evening, at 10:30 pm. I liked the colours, and the ground that was awash with rain.

My last two for the week are from Tue, Jun 16 2026, and they were taken very close together in time. The first one at 6:32 pm when I noticed a really nice bisection in the sky through my balcony door:

And then five minutes later, at 6:37 pm, it looked like this through pouring rain:

The earlier picture of the pair was the heavy rain swooping in to blanket the area in misty clouds! The entire week was rain, rain, rain, and it was very nice. I loved it.

Games

The triannual Steam Next Fest rolled around this week again, but I wasn't really feeling it, due to a heightened sense of nervousness with work throughout the week, and various scanning projects. I played two games this week, one of them being More HITMAN World of Assassination (local). I took the entire week to finish the second real map after the two tutorial maps, but I got the maximum mastery level of 20 on the map and played it long enough that I know most of what happens on it now, and finished all the challenges except a couple of them that I need to come back to in the future for. I also did this:

If they had just allowed me to drag that one unconscious body away, we'd have been fine, but no, they didn't, so I ended up with a body pile so big that I couldn't hit guards that turned the corner to attack me with my shotgun, because my shotgun shells wouldn't go through the body pile to hit the guards. (A pistol and/or rifle still worked, though.)

I also tried out the "rogue-like" Escalation mode a little, and actually completed a short three-map mini-campaign with two maps containing a random minion to kill, and a third map with four potential suspects and hidden assassin and lookout NPCs that I had to watch out for. And I did that all with no saving, as per the mode's restrictions. And I was only passingly familiar with all three maps since I haven't gotten to any of them in the main campaign yet. That was really interesting and cool!

That mini-campaign was only one of four randomly generated ones I had to pick (from a set of 8) and do to win that Escalation "run" though, and they get harder as the campaign progressed, and one loss means everything gets reset and some loot gets lost, so I decided to stop that and go back to regular maps for now, but I was happy that I was able to do what I did, since it involved a bunch of new things that I had not seen before, and since many people say that the Escalation campaigns require one's full knowledge of and experiences with Hitman mechanics to complete successfully. I can definitely see why people play this game for hundreds of hours.

The other game I played this week was the playtest of Spirit Crossing (local), a cozy MMO-lite game by the devs of Alphabear (local), a word puzzle game that I like and have fully completed twice, once on mobile and once on PC.

The game is in the same ballpark genre as games like Petit Planet and Animal Crossing, and since I'm already eagerly waiting for Petit Planet to release later this year, I don't know that I have space for another game like it. The game wasn't bad, and I played a couple days of it, but it also didn't fully capture me per se (although Petit Planet did not either, initially). There seems to be a fair amount of busywork too. We'll see though!

One strong memory that did stand out for me was taking shelter from a storm (a game mechanic that sweeps through the gathering zone every now and then) with other players at a campfire, and our characters playing music together while waiting. That was very cool.

Also all other player characters start as black and white background characters and I never really hear from them unless I actually sit down with one and we introduce ourselves to each other, which is also a really, really cool opt-in social mechanic. It lets someone be an introvert in a social gaming space if they want to, without actually having to isolate themselves away from other players.

Plushie of the Week #233

This is my final plushie from my Asia trip back in Feb/Mar 2026, I believe, so it's time to go on another trip to collect more! Well, maybe not right away. But soon*.

Anyway, this plushie is a Bangboo, a cute little minion creature from Zenless Zone Zero (archive), a game that I did play a bunch of back in mid-2024. I've definitely thought of checking it out again now and then. Maybe I will soon. But for now, I have this guy to accompany me. I bought him from a miHoYo/X-Gather "Lucky Steed Goods Fair" popup store at Grandview Mall in Guangzhou, China on Mar 08 2026, when I visited the mall with Kel that evening. This was the very final day of the popup store, and I picked up this guy for 68 RMB, or $13.49 CAD.

Front:

Back:

That tail on the back was nice to prop up the Bangboo with when taking its frontal picture. It doesn't work the other way around though so the Back picture had to be a little bit tilted, hah.

Tag 1 front:

Tag 1 back/Tag 2 front:

Tag 2 back/Tag 3 front:

Tag 3 back:

Dreams

Jun 16 2026

• I was playing what essentially was a multiplayer extraction game, where we had to pick our character class and then wait in a lobby area while the game master started the map and then let a player into the zone via entering a glowing portal every minute or every 30 seconds or so.
• Character classes included the warrior, which wore a white tunic with red trim, a paladin, which had a white tunic with blue trim, a nondescript thief class, and a spellcaster class in robes. However, since I just only joined the game, I had literally no other gear but my base clothes. So I picked thief because I was worried about getting ganked by other players and wanted to stealth around.
• In the first round that I played, I was one of the last players to enter the zone, and there wasn't much time left in the round. The zone that the portal led to was a three-storey school which also had roaming monsters, and I climbed up some vines to the third level of the school, before entering a couple of classrooms on the left and looting some gear from there. A very powerful patrolling dog monster was approaching me, though, so I had to run off with just a bit of loot, and the round was soon to be over so I just left right afterwards.
• There was an NPC back at the staging area that could identify items, and four of the items I had were mid to high tier rarity magical items, so I put them on and saw my stats get a nice boost. I only had one boot, however, and hoped to find another at some point.
• The next round took place on the same map but I was one of the first characters in this time instead. This time I climbed back up to the top level again, but took a moment to watch the roaming dog and noticed that it was roaming counter-clockwise around the classrooms. Eisen was also there and I saw him going from classroom to classroom in a counter-clockwise direction too, in front of the dog's patrol.
• I broke cover, avoiding both him and the dog while cutting across the courtyard that acted as the floor for most of the central part of the level, ending up behind the dog's patrol so I could loot the rooms there at my own pace.
• As I went around I also gradually noted that no one was attacking anyone else, and once I left the map I discovered that there were actually two modes to the game, and that I was playing the Regular mode of the game instead of the PvP mode.

Jun 18 2026

• Snippet: I met up with Amy and three others in a field by the base of a big building. I don't remember the plotline here, but I do remember us changing into clothes that I had brought along, though I didn't bring enough T-shirts so I borrowed one from Amy instead. After our mission, we had changed out and as they were returning home, I realized that I was still holding the shirt and shorts that I had worn in my hand, and I balled it up and threw it over to Amy, who was about to board her train home. She took her shirt and threw the shorts back my way.