My Diary #251

Life

Funny how life works. After I wondered last week about when that new credit card that Scotiabank had mentioned a few months ago would arrive, it actually arrived on Tuesday in the mail, and was accompanied by an email asking me to go activate my card. I don't like that the card now has my name, the credit card number, the card's expiry date, AND the three digit confirmation number all on the back now, isn't part of the point of having the number on the back so that someone has to be able to physically access both sides of the card in order to get your information? The front is completely devoid of useful information now:

So I had to decorate it with some stain marks from my scanner (which I then cleaned off after scanning the card, but I was too lazy to rescan it at that point.) Also, I was surprised that the credit card number and expiry date did not change at all, even though the expiry date was not that far off. If you're going to give me a new upgraded card, WHY NOT RESET THE EXPIRY DATE TOO? Or at least give me that option to request that somewhere??

Oh well. I removed and readded that new card to Google Wallet too, but it didn't fix one issue that I've been having for some unknown reason -- soon after the pilot project for my city's Arc Card launched, they also upgraded the bus and train meters to be able to accept Tap to Pay (local) from my Google Wallet card. And this worked fine at first, but over the last 2-3 months or so, the Tap to Pay has been failing to work, and would just give me a Transaction Declined message instead of accepting it. Every bus driver I've ever done that in front of has always just waved me onto the bus anyway, and one straight up said as long as I tapped it, he didn't care whether it worked or not, but I'm prettttty sure it isn't actually charging me the proper fare (or any fare at all).

I was hoping that removing/readding the virtual card would fix it, but doing that to link my new card did not fix it. And I don't even know who I'd talk to about this to try to troubleshoot it. I don't really want to be put on hold for over an hour to talk to Scotiabank's stupid credit card department over the phone just so I can be forced to spend money, y'know. (And I doubt they'll be able to fix it anyway.) The other thing I haven't done is link my credit card to my account on the Arc website, myArc, itself, but the myArc website is special levels of digital cancer. It forces a mandatory password reset every 90 days (i.e. everytime I needed to recharge my old Arc Card):

And has strict password complexity requirements on top of that:

I've complained to the city about this before, but alas still no change. The FAQ (local) does directly say that credit cards don't need to be linked to the account to be used though (and that would make absolutely zero sense for visitors to the city anyway). Plus it also says that "Officers using the scanners will only be able to see if the payment method has been tapped on a fare validator in the last 90 minutes." So I guess as long as it accepts the declined card tap as a "tap" still, and the bus drivers don't harass me about it, then great? Free rides until ETS fixes their stupid validators? It's been like this for two months though.

Apparently there are plenty of other people on Reddit with various validator-related issues (local) too. Good to know I'm not the only one with an "ignore the errors, that's your problem, you fix it" policy. I like the idea of calling 311 in front of the driver if they do harass me about their validators not working properly. Also, new Reddit sucks and is impossible to get a good page screenshot for, and old Reddit no longer allows anonymous viewing of threads. So dumb.

I did take exactly one bus ride this week and got my card summarily declined as always -- that's how I tested whether the removal and re-addition worked or not. This ride was from the bus stop near the South Park T&T Supermarket back to my home. I should have taken a bus there too, but I usually like to walk there while I'm unburdened with groceries, in order to get some walking exercises in and to stop by the Whitemud Crossing Library to pick up random stuff to scan once I get home.

I did regret it this time though, because there were lots of flies out and about due to the recent wet weather, and at one point I must have walked into a cloud of them or something because I saw about fifteen of them clinging on to my blouse and had to swat them all away in a panic. That mass extinction event only happened once, though I needed to swat away a couple more now and then on the rest of my walk, but it did set me on edge all the way until I entered the supermarket itself. So annoying. I didn't put any bug repellent on either, although thankfully I didn't get bitten once, so I don't think there were any mosquitoes out and about.

Oh well. At least I did see and take a picture of this car on the way there, someone who supports Alberta starting the process of leaving Canada in the upcoming referendum instead of rejecting it for national unity. Wouldn't have been able to find this if I had taken the bus there. They're not that common, most of the people that do fly flags from their car fly Canada ones.

I'll be voting to stay, of course, but my special ballot has not arrived yet. It hasn't even been sent out yet, according to the signup site. Which is a pity, since apparently some of the initial batches of ballots that were sent out had some special issues (local) that I kinda would have loved to be able to scan and memorialize!

Anyway, I like to try and buy at least one new thing everytime I go to T&T, and this week it was this pack of dried lilies:

Apparently it will go well with my biweekly soups, if I soak them for 20-30 minutes and then toss them into the pot 30-40 minutes before the end of cooking. Thanks Gemini. I'll try that. It was the most expensive of the dried lily options but has no sulphite fumigation, which was also something Gemini recommended. The lack thereof, that is. And yes, that's a giant plastic duck wearing a crown on the right. It was a passion fruit drink with pieces of fruit on the bottom that was in T&T's deli section, and I bought it specifically because I wanted a giant duck container. I had to take the picture from a weird angle since the container was so reflective. I really need a better "staging ground" for pictures, but it's a pretty crowded apartment.

Another new thing I bought to try this week was this Rainforest Peanut Butter thing from Nuts For You, containing Cashew, Brazil Nut, and Coconut.

It tastes weird, but interesting. But weird. It actually reminds me of some Chinese New Year cookie or pastry snack, almost certainly because of the coconut. I bought it on Tuesday, the first of the month, during Safeway's monthly Customer Appreciation Day sale, which meant 15% off storewide (on total grocery purchases over $50). And look, Safeway now even has an uncanny valley AI-generated poster advertising this. Just don't look too closely at the details, count fingers, or wonder about garbled text characters. Or the typo of Member's vs Members', even though I don't think they officially use an "s" in that name (it's either "Safeway Customer Appreciation Day" or "Scene Member Appreciation Day").

The other major outing of note that I went on this week happened on Friday, when Benny came up to Edmonton and we went out for lunch again. Originally, we were going to go to Double Greeting Won Ton House, a favourite local haunt of mine, but when we drove over there it was packed with cars out front and we couldn't find a spot, so we perused local maps and eventually settled on a store called 7-Kitchens Restaurant (local) instead. It was pretty good, with cheap, plentiful food, and each large plate was only about $14.99 each, so we ordered a few things to share between us. The place was also pretty much deserted even though it was located very near to the same LRT Station (Quarters) that Double Greeting was at. They even had free parking for customers behind the restaurant.

I liked the place and will probably go back there on my own dime at some point soon.

I then went for a joyride in Benny's car as he drove over to Costco Wholesale on the west end. We chatted a bunch as we walked around peering at things, and I eventually picked up a couple of new things for the house -- a bag of sponges that will hopefully last me forever, and a Swiffer thing that will hopefully mean I don't have to pick up a new vacuum cleaner anytime soon unless I see a great deal on one.

I'm not sure I ever really used a Swiffer before, but my current apartment has no carpet anyway, unlike my previous one, and since the vacuum is so close to dead and barely sucks anything up anymore, I hate using it, and apartment cleanliness has been steadily getting worse as a result. This should help, I think, although since I only clean on Sundays, and I write my blog on Saturdays, I haven't actually tested this out yet.

He also gave me a bag of Cookies & Cream tea from Harney & Sons that he said a while ago that he would give. This is a flavour Kel and I both like, and that I gave Kel a bag of before she left for China two months ago. Wow, it's been two months already. Benny didn't like it though, and had offered it to me independent of Kel wanting some (actually, he offered before I offered Kel some, but those were actually independent too as I offered her a bunch and she picked that one), so I took it to offset the ones I gave Kel!

I also made a purchase of the remaining items I need to winterize my balcony camera build, though those items have not arrived yet and might not arrive by the end of next week either. They were pricey, but I guess if I don't have to get a vacuum cleaner anytime soon (again, unless I see a good deal!) and haven't made any other major purchases recently, and have now tested out the camera and connection for a couple of months, it was probably fine to go through with it. Next I need to figure out what path I want to take to make it able to stream (not run, but actually stream) 24/7 without running OBS on my computer for the rest of time.

Another purchase I made this week was for new Stasher freezer bags. Those should be arriving mid-next week. I very much like the ones I bought back in Aug 2024, and have generally been using them to store partitioned packs of supermarket meat in the freezer. I had used an offer on the website to buy a pack of 6 of what they call their sandwich bags back then, but that bundle deal didn't seem to exist in any form anymore. There was a general 30% off sale on those bags though, and the sale was slightly better on Amazon, which also had a separate bundle deal to get one sandwich (828 ml), and one snack (355 ml) bag for about $1 more than just a discounted sandwich bag on its own, so I went for 3 of the solo sandwich bags and 3 of the sandwich + snack bags.

The reason that I need more of these bags is because the six that I had generally worked when I was just storing pork pieces to make biweekly soup with, but now that I've been making lots of my Singaporean-style macaroni soup lately as well, that one requires that I stock a fair amount of minced meat in the freezer too, so the six (well, seven, I have a slightly larger one from back then) bags just haven't been cutting it.

Next, things that I did not buy this week. The first was a replacement for the bowl that broke last week. I went bowl-searching at Safeway, T&T Supermarket, H-Mart, and Costco, and all of them came up lacking. Maybe next week. The second was the house that had popped up for sale nearby two weeks ago. That house lowered its asking price this week, from 330k to about 310k, so apparently there were no bidders at all at the higher price. I'm still not convinced this price is good enough, mostly swayed by family opinion, so I haven't inquired yet either. But if the price continues to drop further, I might.

There was a knock on my door this Saturday, while I was writing my blog, which put a severe dent in my day. Apparently my apartment was leaking water down into the neighbour's kitchen sink and they had called maintenance to have a look. Ekram was at the door, and lo and behold, when he came in to check my sink, there was indeed a leak down in the cabinet below my sink. I had no idea that it was leaking, because after the ant incident last year, I no longer used that cabinet (or most of my cabinets, though I've started using some of the wall ones again), and so I had no reason to ever open it to check and/or notice the leak. The last time I opened it was a couple of months ago and it was fine then. But anyway Ekram brought some tools up and replaced the pipes beneath the sink and that fixed it.

The reason that it sunk a good chunk of my Saturday though, is not because of the leak itself, but because Ekram was fun to talk to, and we chatted quite a bit while he was fixing the sink. He regaled me with tales of his recent trips back to Afghanistan, his homeland, and we gossiped a bit about John, the Malaysian handyman who also works for Midwest and is often the one to respond to any plumbing issues that I did have. We also ended up talking about stocks a bit, and now I'm tempted to get my feet wet and poke around in the Canadian stock market on a very experimental sort of level, adding something like $10 a week or something. We'll see though. I'm kind of intrigued.

Finally, it was a very overcast and rainy week, and I didn't end up taking many pictures at all, even with a balcony camera and video recordings. The only one I saved from the week that wasn't dreary skies or night rain was this one, on Mon, Aug 31 2026 at 8:56 pm:

Games

Satinel finished making a new game this week! This game is called Syntropy's Power Defense (local), and is a tower defence game done up in the vein of Orcs Must Die (local). It's locked behind a poorly-performing game jam, so unfortunately not many people got to see the game compared to a bigger game jam like the annual Gamedev.tv one that Satinel partakes in.

But I still played it, and it was still a great piece of engineering, minus a few quibbles like inverted vertical mouse controls (or the lack of being able to invert it to the more commonly used way, at least), some colouring issues, and that the levels are very easy (which makes sense for a game jam, since one needs the game to be accessible to as many players as possible, so most games are presented more as a tech demo). Some of those things will be fixed in a few days once the game jam evaluation period is over though, or so I hear.

Anyway, I got to collect five or six Tigeys (he was a semi-hidden bonus or two on each level that gave the player extra build points) and save the world from evil robots yet again:

On a more personal level, while I played a bit more Hades II (local) and pushed my progression in that game ever so slightly further, the bulk of my time went to so-called cozy sorting games this week. Or Tidy Up Games, as the unofficial subreddit (local) for these sorts of games calls them. My drug-addled spree this week started off with the Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! (local) game that I bought at the end of last week, and that took me about two days of sorting to finish it all and 100% the game.

Then I bought Shelves and Sorcery: Tidy Up the Enchanted Shop (local). Now, reviewers have called out the game modes for being silly, since there are three maps in the game, a small, medium, and large shop, and to get 100%, you have to do each map 4 times -- one without magic, one where you start with full magic, one where you start with no magic but can learn it, and one where you start with no magic but can learn it... and it has a timer for the global leaderboards. Modes 3-4, and arguably even the second mode, are not distinctive enough to require their own separate modes, so a lot of the game is just padding, but I do like this cozy sorting concept so much, and the game itself is decently fine enough, that I've completed the small and medium maps 4 times each anyway, and the large one twice, including on the slowest no-magic mode. And am definitely going to finish it two more times by Monday to 100% the game before moving on to another new one.

I don't know what's with these games, but sorting the stuff in the games also seems to help relax my mind and allows me to sort through my thoughts too, I guess. I've been alternating doing them with writing for my own Lament game, and by doing that this week I managed to bypass one major hurdle I had, which was what the antagonist storylines were going to look like in the game, and what/who they were even going to be. At least for the first year of the four-year story, the other three years are still just in conceptual stages.

I also got hung up in writing a part of the story where the conversations started to split up depending on time loop shenanigans for the first time, and a whole bunch of variables suddenly had to be introduced, and I managed to more or less push through doing one passage a day (which was already my pace last week and the week before that as well) and using these tidy up games in between to detox.

There's a whole bunch more of these kinds of games, some more sloppy than others, and many more of them also scheduled to release over the next few months as people try to cash in on the popularity wave that the Librarian game spawned. I'm sure I won't be playing them forever, but I probably will continue to try out various ones over the next week or two and see if they continue to do good things to my headmeat. I mean, just look at the trail of remembered dreams that I had this week, compared to the last couple weeks. Coincidence?

I also tried out a new productivity app-game this week, now that I've 100%'d both Spirit City: Lofi Sessions (local) and Ithya: Magic Studies (local). I wanted a change for now, and the one I settled on has Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam just like the first two. It's called Chill with You : Lo-Fi Story (local), and unlike the other two, it provides the viewer/player with an actual companion character, an anime-style Japanese girl who the player can click on to chat with between pomodoro sessions. And I believe that some sort of chill story slowly unfolds over time, though I'm not sure how much story runway there actually is.

I was a little worried that this would become too uncomfortably intimate or would cater to horny teenage boys too much or something, but reviews did not seem to indicate that that was the case, and I don't get that vibe from the first few hours of using it as a blog-writing companion either. Having someone that actually yaps back encouragement or says silly things now and then is indeed somewhat endearing.

The other difference between this game and the previous two, besides having an actual companion that isn't a background prop, is also that it's very pomodoro-based. I never used the pomodoro (pomodori for plural? Apparently the plural of the word is a bit disputed) feature back in either Spirit City or Ithya, and I'd just freeform my work and rest when I wanted to and walked away when I wanted to. This one has conversation cycles tied to it though, and although I do not personally need the cycle to stay focused when needed, trying to do it anyway has introduced an interesting structure to my writing time. (It also encourages me to hydrate and have good seating posture.)

Plushie of the Week #244

The thing with branded goods in China is that a lot of other things sold in stores there are knockoffs, and you never really know which branded goods are "real" and which ones are fake brands. As far as we can tell though, this Jellycat cup plushie, which Kel got from a friend, seems very much real (and was priced as though it were very much real, even though she got it for free.) The QR code on one of the tags below also goes right to the jellycat.com (local) website, though that doesn't necessarily mean it's real.

But. Maa. I mean, it seems real? And the only reason this matters is because as plushie lineage goes, Jellycats are fairly prestigious and would lord over most of the other plushies at home, like the commoner Squishmallows. Not Tigey though. Tigey's an emperor. But pretty much everyone else. The local Southgate Indigo store also sells Jellycat plushies, and they are quite pricey. There's actually one that I have my eye on but I'm not sure they'll actually ever restock it, and I don't really want to pay a ton for it online either, but maybe one day I'll bump into it again in real life, and this time I will not repeat my mistake of passing on it. (I just hadn't decided that I actually wanted it the first time I saw it, that resolve came long afterwards.)

Anyway, this Jellycat plushie is a cup! Like a paper coffee cup, the kind a salaryman would pick up on the way to work. Or a refillable thermos. His given name is apparently "Amuseables Coffee-To-Go" though, which just tells me that Jellycat could use a better marketing team. He also came with a nice, blue bag.

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Dreams

Sep 01 2026

• Jah asked if there was a good modern Grand Theft Auto game to play, and I namedropped Neverness to Everness, so we ended up checking out the game. But the game we found was a bit differnt from what I imagined, there were three large ballrooms, each representing one zone, and although there were a lot of collection and quest markers on the map, a lot of the quests were progressed by sitting at a table with random people and having a social dinner with them.
• Ronnie eventually came along as well and we all played separately at our own tables, especially since I had played the first two maps before. At one point I spilled some water on the floor behind me on accident, and some cleaning staff came along and insisted on cordoning off the area with tape even though it was just a small spill.
• I left my first group of two people who seemed like they wanted to replay the first zone again to watch a musical performance being put on. In the second area, I saw Jah ask the general player chat a couple of questions about the game, but the chat box was so spammy that I wasn't sure if he ever got a reply. This time I got into a group of four and we all eventually moved on to the third zone together, once I noticed that Ronnie had already finished the second zone and had pushed on ahead.
• The rest of my group got stuck in administrative red tape in a transition passage between the second and third zones though. It was a dusty outdoor road between fenced-off buildings, and while waiting for them I went to acquire some Wi-Fi bricks from the second zone and gave them out to the other three, as it would give them better connectivity in the third zone. One of the party members, who had settled down on a carpet behind one of the fences and laid out all his possessions on the ground there as he waited, said that he didn't have an account to connect to that Wi-Fi brick though, and would just use the lousier one that gave connectivity in the second zone, in the third zone as well, since that one didn't require him to log in.
• In the end, since I had played the game and gotten to the third zone before, and thus didn't need to wait for the administration to clear me, I went ahead of them into the third zone.
• Snippet: I was running across the PvMP zone in LotRO on my warg character, and I bit and stunned Trinstar on her player character at one point to let her target prey escape, while dancing out of retaliation range of her daggers. Later on, I ran into Euroklyes and Eclipso, with the former, in heavy armour, shielding the latter, in cloth armour, so that he could not be stunned, while also taking HP damage on his behalf. Nonetheless, I playfully attacked Eclipso a few times before running off. Someone in the zone chat tried to explain to me that they were Euroklyes and Eclipso, like I couldn't read their name tags, and that I would be better off not attacking them. I said I knew them on the player side and that it was fine, but it took me several tries to write out the message legibly as I kept getting weird characters when I typed the message out.

Sep 02 2026

• Snippet: I remember being in a small apartment with Tes and the two of us taking turns exploring several interconnected Minecraft-like voxel worlds. We were down in the depths of one world and he had set up a hidden campsite underground and dug a long passage looking for a portal, but had to stop and get ready to head out in real life. I asked him to give me access permission to the place before he left so that I could take over for him until he returned.
• Snippet: There was also a scene where I and someone else had to drink a cup of rose tea, made out of light pink rose petals, to access a second game. This game put me in a character creator where I had to create my own characters with different skills and passives to insert into an ongoing story. In particular I had to make sure that the skills I gave them came with a passive that let them activate the skill or something like that, otherwise it would be a useless skill.

Sep 04 2026

• Snippet: I remember a pillar that turned from brown to pink when I wrote Chinese characters upon it, this was used as a prop and plot point in some ongoing game.
• Snippet: Another snippet involved Dad and I walking out onto a basketball court area outside a school canteen, we talked to a uniformed woman standing there whom we had seen on past days. I then left them talking as I went back through the building and into the canteen, which was on the second level inside an assembly hall. I jumped a small crack in the floor and left my large wooden stirring spoon and a normal-sized soup spoon in a pail there for the staff to cleanup. Once clean they would be arranged in a large tub of utensils and bowls and I could pick them up again.
• Snippet: Somehow I had a long piece of hair stuck going in my nose and out my mouth. I snipped off the end that came out my nostril with a pair of scissors and slowly pulled it out of my mouth.
• Snippet In another school scene, I was there with Geeyong and a few others who were about to take the train back home. But it was raining, so I told him that I'd inquire with my parents first if I could get a ride back home to Tampines, and if they said yes then he could come along as well since we both lived in the same region.

Sep 05 2026

• I was on a University campus in one of the buildings, and I first went up to the 4th floor to look around at a small library-study cafe there. I contemplated stepping inside but none of the books looked interesting, and a group doing orientation rolled up soon behind me with about 10-12 people anyway, and the leader of the group spoke to the bartender and found seats for everyone in the group, and at that point I just decided to leave.
• Down on the 3rd floor was a Backstreet Boys Intake Appreciation Centre, and all five members were in there because one of the group members had just recovered from surgery. A bunch of fans were there too, and the members of the group announced their surprise retirement, which made the fans upset and left many of us in tears.
• They took turns accepting their fans' goodbyes and gifts and hugs before people started to disperse. However, down on another level, I met the group's manager, a bearded man who was surprised to hear of the group's announcement once I stopped and gave him my thank you for helping the band all these years too. He looked surprised and said that the group absolutely was not retiring yet.
• He summoned the group angrily, yelling at them for making their fans cry. The group looked defiant, and Brian, the leader, said that they had done that to elicit a response from the fans. He said that we girls should just go home to our parents' places and continue spending our money to support the band. I told them that I had supported them for 30 years very casually but that I could also just go find another boy band to support instead.
• In another room, I also met Danielle Smith, our province's premier, she was on the other side of a long dining table full of food, which doubled as a cashier payment table for the event in the room. I was paying for the event on the way out, and wanted to give her a sharp lashing about the way she had been mismanaging our province, but she was very nice and gave me a bag of free food for my money even when I said I wasn't looking to get anything in particular, so I ended up not berating her.
• On the way home, I witnessed a DM for an online forum game get attacked and stabbed by a woman who was playing in his game. It involved the 94th edition of the game or something like that. I edged my way back behind a wall so that I wouldn't be seen, and called the police to inform them, but the Singapore police picked up and the Chinese-speaking man on the other end seemed confused and kept asking me to confirm the location even though I was staring right at signposts and reading it off to him.
• In the end, I got the message through and hung up. The assailant had left, and the DM pulled himself off the ground and looked over my way, miming a phone call to ask if I had called the cops. I gave him a thumbs up, and he nodded.
• It turned out the woman assailant had not totally left though, and she noticed the communication and came over to capture me too, forcing me on the ground with my hands behind my back. She and a friend then started to torment the DM, forcing him to crawl towards some water and go swimming while injured or something. The police soon rolled up to take care of them and free us though.

Sep 06 2026

• I took a bus ride on a new route that I had never taken before towards my school, Dunman High. The reason that I had never taken this route before was that it was technically a public bus instead of a private school bus, and it actually went to one of two schools that was located at the end of a dead-end road to the northeast of our school, one street over, and most of the people on the bus were students from that school. Thus it was never suggested as a proper route option to take to reach Dunman. But there was a stop prior to that school that was close enough to Dunman High that let me arrive on time to my own school.
• While on the bus, I had placed my bag on the double seat behind me initially because there was tons of room, but as the bus started to fill up, I removed my bag and brought it to my seat and placed it beside me instead. The seat in front of me was also initially empty, but eventually a girl in an identical school uniform as me also got on to the bus and sat there. I did not know her name, but we recognized each other from a meeting in the past, perhaps from another dream, and chatted briefly. She said she also had not taken this bus before, which had a 3-digit bus number, something like 604.
• When we got off the bus, we were in front of some student dorms and four or five students were cleaning up a mess in front of their dorm house's front door. The dorm manager was a girl dressed in a casual shirt and shorts and she stormed off after refusing to help, but there was an implication that some of the litter was her own fault, so the students went after her to confront her about it. I helped by picking up a few pieces and placing them in a bin before moving on as I didn't want to be late.
• Once I reached school, there was a special school assembly going on in an auditorium, but I didn't want to go to that. I met up with three or four other friends who also wanted to skip, including Zixiang, and we instead followed a group of visitors to the school to a staircase, and then went up a couple of floors. We went into a room and looked at an exhibition of optical illusions, including two frogs drawn on paper where if we stared at them long enough, it looked like their forms changed and water rose up around them.
• We went to another part of the school and took a brief test, which we then handed in to a teacher. We had one desk each but our tables were all pushed together in weird shapes, and there were six or seven of us there by that time, including a Malay boy who was the last one to hand in his paper as he was double-checking that his name was written down.
• Around that time, I also briefly checked my old Neopets club's forum on my phone and saw that several people had put in forum requests to feed my poor, starving pet, Lyxanie. Food didn't really matter in Neopets but the club had never kicked me out even though I was inactive so they occasionally still fed her. Some old friends like Robin and Debra were still there, as well as an unnamed friend who I had talked to when she was in high school, she was now well into graduate school in University. A guy who had caused me to leave by sending me lewd messages was now long gone as well.
• Later on, I went with the group of school friends to one of the northeast schools, a school based upon or named after Mother Mary. One of the boys in the group said that he had a sister that he wanted to visit, and it turned out that there was a gravestone out by a pond at the front of the school with a bunch of names etched on it, commemorating people that had passed away in the service of the school. This was mostly from the war a generation or two ago, and several of the first people to die were Sister Mary something, who had also taken a surname related to the school or the school's founder. One of those Sisters was the one that he wanted to mourn and pay his respects to.
• The communal gravestone was also not really tended, however, and was vandalized as well, with the words "Dark Souls is Hard" etched into the stone surface using another stone. He was angry at this, and I suggested that we take a picture of the defacement and report it to the principal's office in the school. He agreed with this approach.
• Snippet: Jah asked Mell if she was doing okay in our Discord chat, and I saw Mell reply and say that yes, her Darkest Dungeon run featuring characters named after us was successful and that we had all survived. I had no idea that she was doing this but was happy both for her, and for the character that was named after me.
• Snippet: I don't remember the details, but there was a dream earlier which I woke up from with tears on my face due to something upsetting that had happened in the dream, though I think it was partially due to some sad events that happened in the dream and partially due to me trying to milk the incident in the dream and forcing myself to shed tears.