My Diary #248

Life

As summer slowly starts to wind down here, I enjoyed a significantly quieter week this week, compared to the past few ones. I am not really interested in Edmonton's Fringe Festival (local), partly because it's hard to enumerate performances down into a neat, numerical list for the blog and partly because it comes on the heels of other exhausting festivals that I did go to and that took a lot of time to write up, the Taste of Edmonton and the Heritage Festival. For the same reason, and due to slight distaste regarding past experiences, I again did not visit and support Animethon (archive) this year either, even though the concert lineup was decent.

There might still be one or two more minor events I'll visit in the city before the first snowfall arrives, though, but the orange-hued month of August does tend to leave me in a melancholic mood in general as Aug 09 is Singapore's National Day, so it always reminds me of my birth country and all the memories associated with that. An old guildmate from LotRO named Fallowyn also reached out this week, as she had just found out about Thrandor's passing four years ago from my blog post about him, and we had a brief but poignant exchange about him.

And as the weather starts to get cooler (low temperatures at night these days are around 10-15 degrees Celsius, with occasional dips into the single digits), I am reminded that violet-hued September, which is heavily tied to the start of the school semester for me, and cerulean-hued October, which ends in Halloween and the 50-50 chance of first snowfall in Edmonton, are just around the corner.

Also coming up is a referendum that our province's premier, who I have very little respect for and thus have not preserved her name in writing on the blog, has scheduled for Oct 19. Among other things, this contains a referendum vote on whether to initiate the process of separation from Canada or not, a vote that is political posturing that will never win (local) and that our premier had to cheat and change the rules for to get it included in the ballot, but that nonetheless is a scary one. It doesn't only contain that question though, she cheated again (local) to ensure that one that was inconvenient for her did not get onto the ballot, but there are a bunch of other questions that she put on the ballot anyway that are tantamount to treasonous dog whistles for racism and white supremacy. This site (local) does a decent job of covering them, though it also gives me a cancerous self-advertising popup about halfway through scrolling down the page that jumps my browser focus elsewhere on the page when I close it, if I had clicked any of the radio buttons along the way down.

On a more personal level though, I had two options -- vote in person during advance voting (or the day of itself), or request that a special ballot (local) gets sent to me. I considered the two options and decided I wanted the ballot to scan and preserve instead, so I requested (local) a special ballot and went to archive those above pages for the blog too.

But politics is distasteful to me overall, so moving on to better things, I did not do much with the balcony camera this week in terms of developing what I do with it, except for one major win -- I finally figured out how to restart the feed automatically if the camera randomly crashes/reboots. What used to happen was that the camera feed itself would recover, but OBS would not actually detect that the feed had gone down and the recording or stream would just sit there on a frozen, static screen for hours until I untoggled and retoggled the video feed, even though the feed was only down for about 20 or 30 seconds. Instead, after a lot of failed fix attempts (some with Gemini, some without), I stumbled upon the Advanced Scene Switcher (local) plugin for OBS, which adds a bunch of if-then-else statements that I then used to basically say "if the video feed sound drops to 0 for 10 seconds or more, untoggle and retoggle the feed, and take a screenshot so I know when it happened". This seems to work like a charm.

My next two projects for the camera will probably be to try to harden the hardware so it can run to some extent even when winter comes, and to see if there's a way I can park the MediaMTX server and the OBS app online somewhere so I can decouple them from my computer. I have a couple ideas about this, but we shall see. Alternatively, Dad has also been asking me to see if I can help replace/upgrade his old computer, so I pulled out my own old computer from storage and will need to see if I can hook that up and reformat it and replace whatever part I had salvaged from it (or that is now broken) to get it working again, and maybe I can switch computers with him and use his old one as a headless computer that runs OBS or something. We shall see.

Unrelated to that, ever since I upgraded my graphics driver to the latest NVIDIA ones last week (610.88, and I tried both the Game Ready Driver version and the Studio Driver version), both my monitors keep on flickering when I tab between programs once I finish playing a DX12 game (specifically Zombie Army 4: Dead War (local) with Satinel), and this persists until I reboot. Zombie Army 4 can be launched in Vulkan instead of DX12, but the flickering still occurs post-game even if I select that, and the Vulkan version did cause one CtD as well, so I've since avoided using that.

It isn't a huge deal since rebooting does fix that, but I've been trying to find ways to avoid that. Googling by myself was difficult due to a lack of descriptive symptoms, and Gemini's suggestions for fixing this were all hot garbage, but this still requires more testing.

I also went back to look at and poke at an old writing project this week, a Twine/SugarCube2 game with a really complex story that I brainstormed and started to poke at several years ago, but never actually started. However, looking back at past notes and a couple of scripts that I wrote back then, I recognized a couple of the technical and groundwork roadblocks that had prevented me from really diving into it last time -- namely, I didn't like the Twine visual editor and was sure that it would be cumbersome once I was into the hundreds of entries, and I could not really go any further without having at least preliminary names and identities for my characters.

Like my blog, I'm planning to keep Gemini well away from the writing part of this project too since, if I ever get rolling on it, this one will be a massive writing project that will consume years of my life, and just like my blog, I like the writing process too much to outsource it to a generative LLM, and I don't want it to influence anything about the story. That being said, I'm not a purist who will shun a useful tool in reasonable circumstances in the name of humanity or any such nonsense either, so I did consult it about the technical pipeline problems that I had. And in the end, I was convinced to set up Tweego (local), which bridges my Twine/SugarCube2 project into VS Code, something I'm far more comfortable in using these days after using that while writing stuff (or copy/pasting stuff from Gemini) during my blog transition away from Elementor, the rewrite of the text hover plugin I use, a website scraper that I briefly tried to vibe code, and a bunch of plain text files that I have written for various things over the past six months.

Moving to VS Code also comes with a much easier git version control system, which I never used before but have now done for a few of my recent projects. While I'm no expert at VS Code, every project that uses it adds a bit of experience for me in testing out its different functionalities, which I appreciate. And in this project, Tweego connects VS Code and Twine via a line that I just put into VS Code's command terminal at the start of each session: "tweego -w src/ -o index.html".

The other big roadblock I had was having a classroom roster with my character names, at least preliminary ones, written down. I had lots of names written down but had trouble not only deciding between them, but researching how the names would be written in both Japanese kanji and Chinese hanzi characters, whether they were realistic names for the era/setting, what the names could mean (even though I'm not a big fan of having name definitions slyly dictate personalities and plotlines, there's definitely a bit of that anyway) and whether they clashed with "famous" names in real life or fiction already or not. Here I allowed Gemini to give me advice on the big list of names that I had as well, and we modified them down to something that works as a preliminary roster list that I can work for but can still change later if needed.

Lastly, I did write up some simple scripts already in the past but consulted Gemini to see if certain things I wanted to do in the future were possibly scriptable or not, and I also got it to generate some sample widgets so that I could see how the syntax worked, as well as consulted with it on how readable my character text colours were, so all that was very nice to have on hand. These capabilities were definitely not possible the last time I got an urge to do some work on my story all those years ago, and reading overly-detailed documentation puts me to sleep. That being said, wanting things like popup windows and custom saved text fields that Twine/SugarCube2 did not natively support out-of-the-box quickly ballooned into a bunch of generated Javascript and CSS code, which made me uneasy for this specific project. I suppose the best I can do is make sure I understand every line, or else remove it.

Either way, I still haven't broken ground on the planned story yet. But clearing the roadblocks means I can start without being paralyzed by a bunch of side quests whenever I want, whether I end up writing this story first, or a couple of other ideas that have been poking away at me over the past few years.

And this will eventually happen, whether that be next week, or next year. I might be a Three-Day Monk (local), or mikka bouzu in Japanese, on some things, but everyone is to some extent, and like the person in the above article says (paraphrased), who cares? I've already got a couple er... passion projects that I started small with but have since turned into major parts of my life (gender transition, this blog, scanning projects to the Internet Archive) and as I keep revisiting old things, and iterating and smoothening out the process behind doing them a little bit more each time, eventually more things that are worth my time and effort will solidify into becoming regular parts of my life experience. And for those that don't? At least I tried, and I likely still have things I can take away from each one into other parts of my life!

Talking about AI and iteration in other parts of my life, the text hover plugin that I mentioned earlier had a couple of missing features that I had been holding on to for some time. I had a way to declare synonyms for each entry in my hovertext list using a pillbox system (local), but for some reason I hadn't thought to do that for the "categories" column too, which is how I sort and filter the individual entries in my long table. And I had also forgotten to make sure that exporting/importing also saved categories. Both of those are back-end functionalities that don't impact the use and display on the site itself, but I did harness Gemini to fix them this week, which cleared that item off my to-do list.

I also basically finished a major spreadsheet at work this week that I had been slowly working on since May of 2025. This had to do with cataloguing all the email addresses and accounts belonging to student groups at the University. One of our major projects finished last month, and my boss took some well-deserved vacation time off after that, which also gave us a buffer where we could work on maintenance stuff instead of always pushing new projects that the executives see fit. So I worked on this spreadsheet. There's some iterations on the spreadsheet that need to be done since the earlier data is so old, but having all the "initial data" finally filled in was a very important first step and a big relief to get out of the way.

My supervisor did come back this week though, and we thus also had an all-hands in-person meeting for our team on Friday, the first one we've had in over a month. It was almost cancelled because it was so foggy out in the morning, but because it wasn't, I guess I got to see Edmonton in a new texture on my way to work in the morning? Or at least a rare texture. And the reason I used the word texture here was that the word somehow popped into my mind when I was there looking at all the fog around me, and I decided to shoehorn it in to this part of the blog this week.

The meeting was fun enough, but a Little Miracle happened when it came to lunch time and we played a bit of co-op Geoguessr (archive) on the big screen in the room using my account. We set it to Worldwide locations but the very first location the game generated for us was right here in Edmonton, down by Terwillegar in the west, hah. No one could believe it.

On the way back, I grabbed a few more CDs from the treasure box in CJSR, something I hadn't done in about a month. One of the discs was very damaged and chugged along in my CD drive for 21 hours and change thanks to me trying to repair it via Exact Audio Copy.

I also stopped by the library and took a snapshot of the latest giant crossword puzzle there. I wish they'd go back to the scribble boards, even if those had terrible answers sometimes. They're snapshots of the anxieties of students of these times!

I had two other minor outings this week with pictures to share. The first was on Wed, Aug 12, when I went down to Southgate for groceries. I passed this truck cleaning out the furnaces of one of the apartment blocks in the complex along the way. What a weird-looking truck!

When I was down at the mall, I saw a new store called Bless the Maker that replaced an old store there called Seven80 that used to feature Edmonton-area products from various makers. This one also sells Edmonton-area products, but apparently has a religious bent to the store's theme and the makers they support too.

And, while I didn't go to Animethon this year, I found this interesting product on the shelves at Safeway. There was a chocolate caramel brand of candy named Caramunchies there, and they had one bag out of the 15 or so on the shelf that was of a "matcha white chocolate drizzle" flavour and was branded as being "crafted in partnership with Animethon". What? Cool! I bought it immediately. The chocolate caramel is actually really nice, even though I seldom eat sweets and all that. But I wanted it largely for the bag, which I plan to keep.

The second little thing that I went out for was on Thu, Aug 13, when there was our annual apartment block party, the Midwest Resident Appreciation block party. It wasn't a BBQ this year, so they dropped the BBQ part of the name and just called it Resident Appreciation, hah. Previous year's ones are here: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022. This year's poster looked like this:

Gemini was quick to point out that the Edmonton Elks roster (local) doesn't even have a player with the jersey number 12 anymore, which was funny. There was also this version of the poster pasted up by the elevators, warning of a contingency plan if it started to rain:

It *did* actually end up raining near the end of the event, so I guess they probably went indoors then, but I was long back home by then. The weather did hold for the first part of the event and so my acquired chronicler's pictures were of the outdoor portion of the event.

They sure brought a lot of pizza, and the sausage that was inside the bun was really nice. I have no idea who the Edmonton Elks rep actually was, and didn't ask. John and Ekram are in the first picture by the Crafts tent, while Michille is in the second one with her partially obscured son. And we had the Thistie Hill Petting Farm come by again!

And lastly, here are some of the better sky pictures from my balcony camera the week, in gallery form this time. They all have their own timestamps, and glimpses of beauty.

Games

My solo gaming time was mostly packed into the early part of the week, and split between two games that I had played last week, Hades II (local) and Quasimorph (local), and one that I picked up at the start of the week, 868-BACK (local). It's a really neat roguelike, though I wish it had some roguelite and meta-progression aspects to it as well, and I dumped something like 8 hours into it between Sunday and Tuesday.

Later on in the week though, my gaming time cratered as I worked on my writing project instead, and that plus the fact that I went out every day from Wednesday to Friday meant that nothing really got played outside of a couple of Hades II runs to try to complete the main ending. I think I have one win, maybe two, to go for it, but who knows for sure.

Satinel and I are still working on Zombie Army 4, and my opinion is that even though it's graphically superior, much less janky, and much less crashy than the trilogy of the first three games that we played over the past month, it's also much blander, and the fights themselves pose almost no challenge most of the time except when we try to attempt some of the silly challenges for bonus XP. Many of which are also broken and/or unbalanced for multiplayer, as half of them increment/count for me when Satinel does them, while the other half do not. It's so stupid. Also, while there is a tiny bit more "story" than before, it's extremely inane and makes no sense, but I guess there's only so much realism one can pack into a game about Hitler turning into Zombie Hitler and ruling over an army of undead.

Plushie of the Week #241

Not to be confused with my own Taco plushie, Kel had a taco plushie with a little chain loop attached to it on display when I visited her place in Guangzhou last year as well. This one is one I literally know nothing about, and only have two pictures thereof, so I probably found it and took pictures of it while I was snooping around her place when she was off for work or something. Or when she was busy, and I forgot to ask her for details on the little guy afterwards. Or she told me and I just never wrote it down somehow. Anyway, I still do have the pictures, and they are worth sharing as the plushie is pretty adorable and tasty-looking, and probably goes well with a side of hot sauce as well.

Tigey, please don't touch my keyboard while I'm away from it.

This taco plushie was probably acquired in the mid-2024 to early-2026 time span, since it's nowhere to be found in my stash of pictures from my previous trip to her place in May 2024. I'll ask her if she has any idea about its backstory sometime!

Front:

Back:

Dreams

Aug 12 2026

Dream 1

• Dad was driving a vehicle along a highway with Mom, Jon, Kel, and me as passengers. We got pulled over by a sheriff's vehicle in what seemed like a case of mistaken identity, and we got a pat-down while the sheriff and Dad resolved what seemed to be a driver's licence issue.
• My patdown was given by an androgynous person with short hair, who stopped short of patting down my chest until I told her to not worry and go through with it anyway, and then she did so. She then chatted with me afterwards and said that she knew I was transgendered and that she was as well, and she had gone for bottom surgery already but hoped to save up enough money for top surgery soon. I bade her good luck for that.
• The two sheriffs pulled away from the family to chat amongst themselves and process what turned out to be an address update for Dad's licence, and while they were busy, I remembered that Dad had a small bag in his back pocket that could be construed as illegal substances if they patted him down and found it and felt like being unreasonable. Since I had already been searched, I sidled up to him and asked him to hand me the bag. He did so, and I slid it into my back pocket instead.
• Later on, after continuing our journey, we ended up back at our old Edmonton 4012 house. The front door was in a different location now, and as we entered the house, I noticed that the shoe closet on the right side of the door had had its back wall knocked open to reveal a larger space that was sealed off before when we stayed there, but that the new family living there had now converted into an extra room. This extra space also covered where the front door originally was, which was why it was moved.
• Our purpose for visiting Edmonton 4012 again was to warn the family that there was an identity fraud mixup over the registration of the house address, which was why we had been pulled over. Dad also wanted to request a $40 fee that we had to pay the sheriffs, back from them. I thought it was a bit weird to be asking them for this fee but Dad said it would be fine and that he would handle it.
• While he went to talk to the husband of the couple that owned the house, the wife entertained us and showed us around the main floor and the basement. Jon, Kel, and Mom ended up seated in the basement, playing with some glowing toys, and then collapsing into a pile on the couch to relax there. I had to verbally prod them a few times to stand up and get ready to leave once Dad was done his negotiations, as they semed to just want to stay there instead of getting ready to head home.

Dream 2

• I was leading a group of about twelve people or so on a raid to kill a medusa queen boss monster in a building. We went room to room and took out minions as we went, though some of the rooms had other things like regular people to interact with instead of enemies.
• We also had about four or five other people that followed us around and would then sit down to watch the battles. While I didn't mind them doing so, they weren't disallowed from throwing some spells or attacks at the enemies too and I got slightly annoyed at them, wishing that they would do so occasionally.
• The medusa had some humanoid thrall minions around her stumbling around, and she would aggro with them if she was too close to them when we pulled them. As main tank, I had a skill bound to 6 on my keyboard that was a ranged tap attack, and I used that to pull minions that got too far away from her. That minion would then come along with any other minions that were close enough to that minion to aggro together, without pulling the medusa queen even if she was close to the secondary minions being pulled.
• However, at one point, a couple of my more boisterous party members got too close to some of the mobs and accidentally pulled the queen herself. I called a retreat to reset her, and this spooked the medusa queen, who fled to another room and caused me to have to start pulling all over again. I berated the party members and told them to let me pull since I had a pocket healer, Snakebeard, who was helping keep me alive above and beyond the general healers that the raid group had.
• In the new room, which was an indoor, metal-grated pathway suspended over some body of glowing red liquid below, I started pulling adds again and we thinned out a couple of the minions around the medusa queen, who had respawned once she had reset and ran into this room. Someone again accidentally pulled the queen though, and I contemplated asking for another reset.
• However, in this room we were right near a spawn point behind us anyway, so I made the call that we would try to defeat her, and I pulled the queen's aggro and then backed away slowly from the group, making sure that they were not in the medusa queen's front quadrant as I alternatingly spammed my dodge and aggro skills at her.
• In the end, when she was near death, I accidentally hit a key combination on my keyboard that turned my game client from windowed mode into fullscreen mode, and then I hit it back again before I realized that I could just finish the fight in fullscreen mode and fix it later. Each transition took about 7-8 seconds or so, so by the time the graphic setting had been changed twice, the battle was over and we had thankfully won. I was still alive as well, as I had enough remaining aggro and dodge and pocket healing from Snakebeard to survive the last few seconds of the fight, even if my client was lagged out. I just missed seeing the moment when the medusa queen actually died.

Aug 16 2026

• Snippet: I remember waiting for a friend by two schools that were across the road from one another. One was considered a poor school and the other one a rich one. I chose to wait inside the lobby of the poor school, and looked out the door at the fancy, preppy young adults walking through the door of the richer one. This tied in to some keyword that was being used in the city and that was integral to the plot somehow, the poorer school had a four-letter version of the keyword and the rich school had a seven-letter version above it. I needed the four-letter one to be activated or something like that though.