My Diary #250

Life

I've really fallen in love with the smell of the aloe gel that I got for $5.29 from T&T Supermarket three weeks ago. It's Nature Republic 92% Aloe Vera Soothing Gel, though I don't know what's in that other 8% or what "SC. Aloaceretion Filtrate P", their main ingredient, means exactly. Apparently the other 8% contains some alcohol, some stuff to change its scent (so the scent I like a lot isn't actually purely aloe), and the gods only know what else. But it works somewhat well for irritated skin, particularly a few random rashes I seem to get on my arms or legs sometimes, supposedly works well for minor burns, and for general light skin moisturization. While I've never needed/used skin moisturizers, I've considered it because I know my legs in particular sometimes look/feel very dry and flaky, especially at night before bed.

I'm also considering applying some on you, Tigey, so that you smell good. Come here Tigey. Stop running away.

The dream diary reached 10 years this week, and even though my dream memory has been spotty recently (ever since going on my trip in Feb/Mar), I did have a dream on Aug 25 2026, the 10 year anniversary of my first official entry on Aug 25 2016. I've actually had a recorded dream on every Aug 25 since then, except for 2018, which is a somewhat interesting factoid to me. My online dream diary is still far behind from catching up to the current day and a source of intense guilt for me though. I'll get around to it some year.

One thing that didn't make it to My Diary #250 is an old white bowl that I used to have from way back in Edmonton 4012 when I still lived with my parents and siblings. It had been mostly replaced by the pink Zuperzozial bamboo/corn/melamine bowl that Kel got for me back in Jul 2024 to replace the one I had bought during my Hong Kong trip in May 2024 but which had shattered on the way home. But I still used the white bowl now and then to hold water (say, to rehydrate the dried mushrooms I picked up on that T&T trip three weeks ago), or ingredients (when cutting up potatoes and carrots and vegetables to make my biweekly hotpot), and it's sad to see that one go.

And how did it go, in the end? I was placing a pot in my drying rack, the pot clattered against the bowl with no particular strength, and the bowl burst into a dozen pieces just like that. So it was probably already structurally weakened.

The good news about this is that I now have space for a large-sized bowl and will get to pick one out from some store or another at some point in the near future. Just like my old plate breaking back in May 2022 meant I could get another one in Aug 2022. Out with the old, in with the new, I guess.

That did add some weight onto a week that found me swimming in a lot of nostalgia though. Most of that had to do with my game/story writing project, which had me split the week between more world-building (brainstorming significant parts of the story and trying to figure out the best way to fit magic into the game and how that will influence the first school year of my characters' lives), and actual writing of the story itself.

But because the game is set on a Singapore-lite island and is trying to be mostly authentic to 1997-2000, the era which I myself went through secondary school, doing any sort of research meant unearthing old memories I hadn't thought about in ages, listening to mood music from the era that brought me back to those lustrous days of my youth, and so on.

I also continued to be way too invested in my characters, even though none of them are fully fleshed out yet, and that led to situations where even when I went out of the house and down to the north side of the city for a team buffet lunch this week, just a random scene of idyllic, boxy condo townhouses made me wonder what my characters would be up to these days if they were real and had survived to 2026. What kind of life they'd be leading, what they would be feeling, and if some of them would be living in places like this and pining for the past just like I was too.

It was a very conflicting week.

I had two outings of note this week. The first was on Monday, Aug 24, when I went out to the local Safeway store, and was notable only because I was feeling particularly mindful and camera-happy. So I snapped pictures of things that interested me, including this weird, discarded mirror tablet thing with a bunch of rambling text on it:

I also had noticed these coloured light poles around Southgate going back a couple of weeks, but I am not sure exactly when they were painted. I don't take that many actual phone camera pictures from my balcony anymore, since I have my balcony camera now, but I also recycle those videos from the camera after a week instead of keeping them around. That being said, from looking back at screenshots and videos that I did save, these coloured light poles, which are in both the northern and southern parking lots of Safeway, were painted on either Aug 11 or Aug 12. At least the southern ones, which I can see from my balcony, were, and it's a reasonable inference that the northern ones, pictured below, were painted on the same day. Anyway, they've been around for two weeks, I just never really noticed them.

Anyway, next we have the discount shelf at Southgate, where I grabbed these Hearts of Palm to try the next time I make some soup. I also grabbed that Little Sheep soup stock thing from the very back of the picture, but it was meh.

And not far from there, I saw a weird "discount" sign on a carton of milk in the milk cooler.

Can they really do that? And that "only valid if removed by a cashier" thing makes no sense. So if it drops off before it reaches the cashier, it's invalid?

I also took a picture of the shelf where I bought last week's Plushie of the Week from. There's another one there staring right back at me! I didn't buy any of them this week though. I'm going to attach this picture to last week's post, too.

And lastly, apparently the Southgate food court has a pillar that displays video advertisements now.

This is also a very recent development, but I don't come here that often, and the occasions that I do take pictures here are vanishingly rare. I didn't remember seeing it here on my last visit on Aug 18, though.

My second notable outing this week was to Yang Ming Buffet on the north side of the river for a team lunch. We have gone there several times now as a team (well, as half a team, since there are always people feeling anti-social or who dislike Chinese food or who are on vacation too), but the last time we went was in Dec 2025. This time, Ronnie, Zach, Lukasz, Alex, Melbourne, and I showed up. And the usual cute little Bellabot was there as always to greet us:

And the usual trays were there:

I had eight bowls of food this time before calling it quits, because my strategy these days is to take smaller plates (the kid plates, which are coloured red and orange and green and yellow instead of boring white) to sample different dishes and combinations rather than pile a lot of food onto one plate.

That got me to about 70-75% fullness. I had skipped breakfast, and also duly skipped dinner later in the evening, so I guess it was worth the price. The price had increased compared to previous visits, and checking my ledger, the buffet cost here has evolved over the years in the following manner:

Dec 20 2024 - 20.99 + 3.15 (15% tip) = $24.14 (no GST!)
Feb 21 2025 - 21.99 + 1.10 GST + 3.47 (15% tip) = $26.56
Dec 18 2025 - 21.99 + 1.10 GST + 3.46 (15% tip) = $26.55
Aug 28 2026 - 22.99 + 1.15 GST + 3.62 (15% tip) = $27.76

As always, businesses are happy to pass on the rising cost to customers. They're one of the companies that calculates their basically compulsory tip after factoring in GST too, and so skims an extra 15 cents or so off the top of every order, since they sure as hell don't pay that extra amount to the government. And charges a gratuity for 8 people or more, though we haven't reached that number recently.

I also picked up their paper menu, and once I scanned it, I was able to compare it to a copy of their menu that I had picked up and digitized back in Feb 2025 as well, to see the difference in prices now. Here's the front/back of the menu, first the Feb 2025 version, then the Aug 2026 one.

On a lighter note, the Bellabot went by us a couple of times with what looked like a slice of cake with a candle stuck in it on its tray, and playing a Happy Birthday song as it was accompanied by a waitress leading it to a table in another part of the restaurant. I hope the kid had a good day.

I had a scare this week with my balcony camera because I noticed that it was hitching a lot, so the stream would cut off and reconnect between every 10 to 120 seconds or so, depending on how far down I turned the quality of the recording. I thought the camera itself had broken and would need to be sent in for repairs after only a month or so, but after a day and a half of on-again, off-again troubleshooting and restarting just about everything else, I had the brilliant idea to try unplugging my Telus fibre router from the wall and plugging that back in again, and that actually did fix the issue. I guess it was some sort of internal degradation issue even though nothing else seemed to be affected Internet-wise.

Regardless, I'm glad it's working fine again. I only saved a couple of screenshots from the camera late in the week, but here they are.

I've been looking at a bunch of potential purchases recently, and the other bits of gear I need to winter-proof the camera or make it run full-time are one of the things potentially on the shopping cart docket. Other things that I'm eyeing include a number of gamebooks (i.e. Choose Your Own Adventure sort of books, but far more complex and interesting), a digital art tablet, and that vacuum cleaner that I'm still waiting on a sale on to get.

I also received a $10,000 credit card credit limit increase from Scotiabank this week, and that is definitely coincidental and nothing to do at all with the above thoughts about big purchases that I need to do. Seriously. I don't use credit and always pay off my credit card bill, but nonetheless it was hilarious timing since all that musing happened a day or two before I got the notice, my first major increase since I got the Passport Visa Infinite sometime around Oct 2022. Talking about which, didn't it get renamed to the Infinite+ or something now? Didn't they say I'd receive the new card in the mail months ago? Also, don't I have to renew my passport soon? And update my address on something or other at a registry? Hmm.

Games

I played a liiiittle bit of Hades II (local) later in the week this week, though I would say that my heart wasn't really in it and I was more using it as a speedbump to get myself out of various nostalgia- and heat-induced funks between writing and brainstorming sessions. I suspect over the next week I'll start swinging back more into regularly playing some games though, both Hades and other games.

I've been using Ithya: Magic Studies (local) as my writing companion and productivity app since May 2026, but unlike its predecessor, Spirit City: Lofi Sessions (local), this one either seems to be much faster to level up in, or I've just been using and enjoying it much more since I bought it, since I've already maxed it out and gotten all the achievements for it as of this week's Saturday blog writing session. Level 50 in Ithya took me around 90 hours though, whereas Spirit City took me about 180. I need to go scout out other ones to see what else is out there. Though Ithya worked pretty well for me, especially the default music playlist.

At the end of the week, I also took out a loan to buy a magical library in the form of Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! (local). It's a game I've been eyeing for a while, in a new "organizing" or "tidy up" genre of game that definitely appeals to me and my neurons. I've just been busy doing other things. But I think it probably fits well in between brainstorming and "tired brain" sessions when working on my own game and all the writing I need to do for it, so I wanted to try it and see if it works as well as I think it should.

Plushie of the Week #243

This week, we return to Kel's stash of plushies that I photographed while at her place in Guangzhou earlier this year. This one is called Puddy the Bear, and the history behind this bear is that Kel visited the M50 Art District in Shanghai at one point while in China, and while there, visited a little cafe constructed out of an old water tank. This plushie was attached to the straw of a drink she bought in the cafe, and she confided in me that she bought the drink BECAUSE of the attached plushie.

How shameful. I'd totally have done the same thing. In fact, I didn't think of going there while in Shanghai, but maybe I should have. Maybe next time. I couldn't verify the bear's connection to the cafe itself, but the cafe she was talking about was most certainly the BWT Cafe (local), or Bird Water Tower (Cafe). It actually looks like they abbreviate themselves into BWRT, but the R in the name makes no sense and doesn't seem to stand for anything that I could find on a quick search or translation.

Puddy's price and date of purchase are unknown, though it was likely sometime in 2025-2026. The picture is taken with the bear on Kel's old sofa, which it blends in surprisingly well with. Stealth ninja bear (under the right circumstances)!

Front:

Back:

Dreams

Aug 25 2026

• Snippet: I was at my computer playing some games that involved a real life component in a room with other people, as well as an online component. I realized after finishing this game that I had been accidentally online on Twitch all this time, and someone had raided me with a bunch of viewers. Even though I had not been interacting with them, there were still exactly 500 viewers in the chat, but most of them were likely inactive or bots. Scrolling back through chat, there were a lot of spam messages I had to delete, and a few confused people from way back at the start of the chat log, but that was it. I tried to ban someone who had posted an advertising message, and a new automated system flagged six other accounts and gave me an option to mass-ban all seven of them at once, even though two of them hadn't been spamming messages yet.

Aug 28 2026

• I was at school with my work colleagues, and we lined up at a door to get our bags scanned before entering a classroom. While in line, Matt mentioned that there was a work seminar he was hosting tomorrow, on Saturday, at 3pm, and I said that I wouldn't be coming. I didn't tell him the reason, which was that I was too lazy to come in to work on a Saturday.
• The bag scanner was operated by two policewomen at a desk, and I briefly worried that they'd flag some writing inside imy bag that was part of the design of the bag, but they did not. Once inside, I settled down next to some of my secondary school friends. Tables were arranged in rows of three, and I took the middle seat in one of the middle rows, as we prepared to write an essay for the class.
• Later on, there were other snippets linked to the overall plot. I went skydiving at one point, edited a MUD-style player list to remove code comments that I had left there in a previous dream at another point, and dug down with a friend to within 20 feet of the bedrock slope of an ancient Greek volcano, not far from a newly released MMO zone with shops that no one else had been to and didn't seem to be fully implemented yet, at a third point.

Aug 29 2026

• Snippet: I was watching a stream where Nomakk was streaming while he was next to a swimming pool. At one point he handled raw meat with his bare hands, and then continued touching other things, including his face, with his hands without cleaning them first. I made a comment as to this and said he shouldn't do that, but was ignored, and did it again and was ignored again, and this led to an after-stream meeting where I laid out my concerns and threatened to quit being his moderator. At the start of the next stream, which was also by the pool, he discussed the incident and agreed that it was wrong, but it was overshadowed by a couple other people who had reported a separate incident where a couple of people had been caught on camera peeping over his fence in the distance using stilts.
• Snippet: I also remember at one point playing a game where I and others had to defend a large vertical room full of pipes from invading creatures. I had two portable turrets I could move and put down to defeat the invaders, as well as a turret that I could permanently install in a location, and I put the permanent one pointed upwards towards the ceiling in a way that its firing arc could cover the entire roof area. However, a lot of the enemies still floated in from the sides and bottom of the building somehow, so I had to bring the two turrets around with me to repel those waves one at a time.

Aug 30 2026

• Dad was going to take the car out to cut his hair, and I asked Mom and Jon if they would like to go to one of the malls near where Kel used to stay in China to go have lunch there, and if Dad would mind driving over after to pick us up. We all agreed on this plan at first but we took so long to get going that Dad, who was lying on the couch at home at this point, said something to the effect of not really wanting to go out anymore that late in the morning. He still ended up going out in the end though so Mom and Jon also finally got ready to go.
• There were three possible malls to visit, located at three different train stations to the north of where we were, and I asked Mom which one they had not been to yet, as I had been to all three myself while visiting Kel. Mom indicated that they had not been to the furthest one yet. I wondered if we could just take a car ride there, but my WeChat app would not open properly, and I surmised that it wouldn't work until we had travelled into China's borders first. So we ended up taking the train there.
• Somewhere along the way I was talking with someone and the topic of house prices came up. Someone nearby had bought a 4-room flat for about 430k or so, which was ludicrously cheap, but the reason for this was that the flat was supposedly haunted as someone related to the previous owner had died there previously. However, I knew that that was fine for some people if they were psychically insensitive anyway.