My Diary #241

Life

I had a weird experience this week at the local Winners store in Southgate. I was browsing through their clearance clothing racks and came across a shirt that I sort of liked and wanted to use for pyjamas, but it had a cut off price tag on it. I brought it to the lady at the counter in front of the dressing room, and she got her manager to do a price check for me.

The confused manager came back after a couple minutes, saying that that shirt, a Suzy Shier shirt, was not in their database and should not even have been on the racks there because there was a Suzy Shier store in the mall (there was not -- there apparently used to be one but it was closed ages ago) and thus it was against their store policy to sell their stuff discounted there. Although the woman who was actually at the dressing room counter pointed out that they sold American Eagle (I think) stuff there and that store was also in the mall.

Anyway she said that they must have "accidentally" accepted it as a returned product without checking and then put it back on the clothing rack without a price tag, and that they could not sell it, and so she was going to throw it out. I coyly asked that if they were throwing it out, could I just have it instead? Otherwise it would be a waste. She gave me a look, told me to wait a minute, walked in to an office to ask *her* manager, and came back to me with an affirmative "Yes, my manager said it's fine, but we're only doing this to make you happy, it's usually against store policy. And also don't tell anyone we did this."

Oh, well, sorry, I write a life blog. And there were multiple levels of weirdness here to document. And it turned out that I didn't really like the shirt anyway, as it was far too sheer and revealing to wear by itself, but I didn't exactly manage to get it into the dressing room to try it out before suddenly "acquiring" it. Maybe I'll donate it to Goodwill the next time I bring stuff for there or something. I did pick up a separate pyjama set while there in Winners as well, in return for the free shirt, I suppose.

I also picked up another shirt when I went in to the University for my one on-campus visit this week on Wednesday though, this one from a CJSR table that they had set up for fundraising up in the Students' Union Building.

I also bought a CJSR compilation CD entitled "Airtight" from them, except that the lady manning the table apologized and said that they were downstairs in the staff office, and that she needed to go down and get them but none of their other volunteers or staff were around to help cover her spot at the merch table since they were at lunch.

I went off and walked around for a bit, visiting the bookstore, then going downstairs to raid the free CD chest that was outside their office (although I didn't see the lady while I was down there), then taking another route back upstairs to the table, at which point the lady saw me, flagged me down, and sold me a copy of that CD that she had managed to acquire in the interim. The shirt was normally $20, and the disc was $5, but there was a 15% discount for buying them in person so I got both for a total of $21.25.

While at the University, I also took the chance to capture the current giant crossword puzzle outside of the Rutherford Library.

And I captured this Tesla car being displayed at Southgate, in a way that made me think of malls in China:

I wonder how it drove in. None of the regular doors are passable for a car, so it had to have used some sort of maintenance tunnel and freight entrance.

I was supposed to go down to the University a second time this week, on Thursday, for a team meeting, but due to how busy we are, and the fact that someone was sick at the last minute, it got cancelled. This was probably for the best, since emotions were rather raw due to the ongoing projects, and since the trains were not running to my local station anyway, according to the ETS service alerts page (local):

We're about to set a rainfall record (local) for June after the heavy rain that lasted all of last weekend, and another spate coming this weekend. Last weekend's rainfall left us with an emergency alert (local) to not use too much water, which lasted for a day or so. Nothing anywhere near as bad as some of the more rural areas in the province though, as per the first link above, where there were outright floods. Hopefully they aren't too badly hit by the rainfall coming this weekend too. But me personally? I loved the long, extended period of rain from the safety of my high-level apartment. This weekend, we have an orange level rain alert (local), even though less overall rain is forecast (40-70 mm) than last weekend (50-90 mm), due to the impact of the existing water that still remains from last week.

Thanks to all the rain, my apartment's humidity has been pushing past 50% now and then this week, which is rare.

By pushing myself, I also managed to finish a whole lot of scanning this week, and am practically done scanning everything that I've collected since coming back to Edmonton after my trip, which means that I'll be able to actually start to scan the trip stuff soon. Due to that, and due to a big project at work finally wrapping up on Friday, not a ton else happened this week though, as I didn't go outdoors much, and didn't play many games on Steam in the evenings either. While scanning though, I found a fourth pamphlet/brochure for the Altitude/Logel set in the backlog that I had featured last week, a large, square one which came prior to the first three:

From left to right, they arrived on Apr 23, May 05, May 12, and Jun 16 2026. Very cute.

A good number of my blog pages are not indexed, or at least not properly indexed, on both Google as well as Bing (and while Google is its own behemoth, Bing itself serves other secondary search engines like DuckDuckGo too). It's very frustrating, I don't really know what's wrong other than all the search engines hate really long-form written articles I guess. They all say that "eventually" all the pages will be indexed or crawled, but it's been months for Google, and several weeks for Bing, and I don't think it's ever going to get better. They're just infinitely in some queue list that never gets processed. And in some cases are also "undiscovered" even though I've submitted them to both search engines multiple times. And while we're on the enshittification of archival-related websites that I use a lot, the Internet Archive has also not updated its view counts on uploads for months too.

Finally, a couple of evening sky pictures from the week. This one is from Wed, Jun 24 2026 at 9:37 pm:

Pretty, windswept skies. And this one shows a bisected sky from Fri, Jun 26 2026 at 9:07 pm, just before the start of the weekend storm swept in a few minutes later.

This other one is not an evening sky picture, but there were some fireworks set off earlier in the day, at around 12:30 am on Wednesday morning, from around the Confederation Leisure Centre or adjacent outdoor area to it, but I have no idea why. It only lasted about 30 seconds, and I was not in time to actually capture the fireworks on camera, only the lingering smoke from the last set that was fired. So enjoy this shot, entitled Rising Smoke Under A Misshapen Summer Moon And Planet. I really need to go invest in some night photography cameras.

Games

I'm slowly sneaking my way through HITMAN World of Assassination (local) still, and as of Saturday night I fully finished the third map, Marrakesh, which is very pretty. Mmm bazaar markets. For some reason this map seems an order of magnitude easier and less tedious than the last map, Sapienza, though that one was also very pretty. It also has a side mission that I fully finished, AND a 3-part escalation mission, which are short maps that don't allow saving that make you do the same thing with additional objectives each time, that I ALSO finished and from which I earned my first silenced sniper rifle for my efforts. Marrakesh was tons of fun.

I also played a bit of a Kairosoft game called Pocket Stables (local), which was part of a bundle, or well a bundle of bundles, that I picked up from Steam. Kairosoft makes casual simulation games, several of which I've dabbled on phone before, and have enjoyed. I never owned any of their games in my vast Steam library though, but they were having a 30th anniversary sale on Steam this last couple of weeks, and for that they threw a bunch of their games into a number of $8 bundles with 4 games in each one. When I got wind of them, I picked them all up.

I also picked up a few other games from Steam at the start of the sale -- a simulation game called Big Ambitions (local), a $3 upgrade for the legacy version of Yakuza Kiwami (local) to the non-legacy remake, some Yakuza spin-offs called Judgment (local) and Lost Judgment (local), a weird, limited-time Yakuza DLC for DAVE THE DIVER (local) that is only purchasable from Apr 10 2025 until Dec 31 2026, a regular DLC with an irregular name for Esports Godfather (local), and a Kynji-mandated pickup of Detroit: Become Human (local).

We'll see how many of those games, old and new, I get to over the next few weeks. I tried out Big Ambitions this weekend and it was quite interesting, a single-character Sims-like game where you setup and slowly expand and buy over businesses and go from rags to riches. I'm not sure how much mid-/end- game stuff there is though, especially since it's still in early access, but the early game loop is quite satisfying.

Plushie of the Week #234

Some recent updates from this week:

Firstly, while doing my scanning this week, I found an insert that was in the package for the bangboo featured in my Plushie of the Week post from last week, so I scanned that and uploaded that to last week's post as well.

Next, I also added some pictures to this beaver from Plushie of the Week #149, as for whatever reason the last time I visited Kel, the plushie had no hat and scarf, but this most recent time, he did. I was not going to ask why. Things just are the way they are.

But now that I am out of plushies from my Feb-Mar 2026 trip to feature, I'm going to move on to a few weeks of featuring the other plushies that I found at Kel's apartment while I was staying there while on my trip. This first one is a Red Rice Roll Plushie, or 红米肠大王 (Hong Mi Chang Da Wang / Red Rice Roll King) according to its tag. It is from a restaurant called Dim Do Duk or Dian Dou De, depending if you pronounce 点都德 in Cantonese or Chinese. According to Kel, she acquired it as a reward from using loyalty points or something equivalent to that from eating there a few times. It's still sealed in its bag though, so I just took a few photos of it from the outside.

It's sort of cute! These pictures were taken Mar 13 2026 in Guangzhou, China, at Kel's place, on Day 34 of my trip.

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Dreams

Jun 23 2026

• Snippet: Xuanjie, another friend, and I were exploring some rooms in a single-storey building where some other bystanders were also hanging around in. Although we worked as a team, we were not always in the same room together. Exploring each room cost an equivalent block of time no matter how large the room was, and I remember one room in particular having a silent, possibly ghostly figure that prevented me from gaining access into another adjacent room until I figured out a puzzle to do with it first.

Jun 26 2026

• Snippet: I remember taking a couple of escalators up to the top interior level of a factory building which had multiple rooms of various sizes and multiple ways up and down. I did this to visit a washroom up there. The uppermost level was a little colder than the two or three levels below, and contained friendly guards. But it also gave me a sensation of being out of bounds, and it felt like I was helping someone else map out the area so that they could come through it later as well.

Jun 28 2026

• I dreamt that I was running alongside a car with friends, and as the car was magical to some extent, they were doing tricks like riding off-road while I glided along beside them using a super speed power that I had that was similar to rollerskates or rollerblades.
• At one point, another random car behind us also joined us in our wild escapade, and seeing this, the driver of my friends' car drove up and over the top of a cliff, using it as a ramp to fly over a nearby river, bouncing off the water near the end of the far shore of the river onto dry land as the jump turned out to be just short. Undeterred, the car behind us did the same thing and everyone cheered.
• After that, our driver jumped the car off of another cliff, but this time the jump was over a wide, flowing river, and the car just fell into the middle of the river and sank to the bottom. Everyone despawned and then respawned again on the far side of the river, four people standing soaked next to the car, which was now empty and also dripping wet. They all laughed. The car behind us also did the same, flying off into the middle of the river, sinking, and then despawning and respawning on the far side.
• Something was wrong though, as only one man respawned on the far side from the other car. He looked upset and said that he had been in the car with his girlfriend, but that she had not respawned with him and was now missing. He seemed to think that she might have drowned, but we weren't too worried and said that she had probably respawned somewhere else instead. I tried sticking my face into the water to see if I could see any bodies in the river or something but did not see anything.
• The dream split from here into several scenes, as I either could not or did not want to be seen by other people while I was using my powers, so little mini adventures started whereby I went exploring in different places to try to help find the missing woman, before teleporting back to the start again once I was sufficiently identified by other strangers.
• One such scene involved me descending a long set of stairs that curved round and round in a rectangular box, but to avoid the regular people that were already traversing up and down the stairs, I jumped over the side and caught on to the banister on every floor to slow my fall without actually stopping long enough at any floor to be able to be identified.
• Another such scene somehow involved a pack of jaguars or panthers attacking our main group on the other side of the river by the cars. There was a building there with a long and narrow entrance passage that we retreated to, where they could only attack us one at a time, but we could also only defend one at a time. I suggested pulling back a little into the main room so a couple of them could come in but where we'd have enough space to all attack them at once.
• A third scene saw me reach a laundry set on the edge of the sea some distance away. I could not find the girl there either, but I did acquire a laundry slip along the way for one of the washing machines, which contained clothes that belonged to a neighbour a few doors down from where we lived. As I wasn't using my super speed powers while inside the laundromat, I went in without fear of being identified by the woman that owned the store and the male customer that she was talking to about something else, and claimed the clothes after showing her the slip. I then teleported back to the car.