My Diary #254

Life

This week was a lot of inertia. A lot of it was probably because my free time was taken up by two things -- the current Petit Planet closed beta playtest, and the September Grand Sumo basho. Both of them easily took up 8-10 hours a day each, though obviously they overlapped each other as well. They just consumed all of my free time this week. Sumo ended this week on Saturday night/Sunday morning though, so that will free some time up and allow me to go to sleep at a saner time every evening. Probably.

I'm glad that I managed to get Jah hooked on the tournament this time around too. It's very neat to watch and I'm pretty invested in some of the wrestlers even though this is only the second tournament (and first full one) that I've watched. The sport definitely struggles with an image issue in the West though, like people generally aren't willing to even give it a fair shot, though a lot of the people that do then get converted when they do try it. It's the kind of problem, to put it in anime terms, where even though Umamusume: Pretty Derby (local) is one of the best sports anime out there, there's a large subset of people who would like it but are never able to cross the line over from "they're weird horse girls" into actually understanding what is happening and the meticulous detail behind the characters and the storylines.

Also, we've watching this tournament on a new channel called KappaSumo (local) on Twitch that I mentioned last week, and it's been cool to see them grow from a peak of around 15-20 viewers on the first day, to around 1,000 by day 15 after the largest sumo channels on Twitch got temporarily taken down yet again for copyright violations. Apparently the Japanese broadcasting company for the sumo matches, AbemaTV (local), did a round of (well, "another" round of, from what I hear) content strikes on people streaming their stuff and commentating over it in English, even though that arguably is transformative (and is helping the sumo brand grow in the west), so the stream I watch is thinking of just moving to Kick (local) to avoid the copyright zealots from Abema if the copyright trolls ever come a-knocking.

Kick will never be a platform I endorse due to their content policies and the attraction of lots of gambling money, but in this specific use case it might actually be the best option. And unlike the bigger, more established streams, this kappa one is still figuring it out as they go so they have the flexibility to do this if desired. They've done really well this last couple weeks of tournament streaming for the most part though, their stat block in particular has been cool to see, much better than the other Twitch options. Since I don't have a horse in this race, I'm curious to see what happens to the channel and how it develops between now and the next basho in November.

Anyway, due to the sumo tournament and my gaming adventures this week, a lot of other things that I've been poking at for the last month or so took a back seat for the week. Writing? Not really, besides this blog. The gathering of documents for the referendum and the Singapore citizenship renunciation thing? Nope. Although I will be taking a couple of days off next week to deal with those items, most likely. The MP3 gathering project? Nope. Obsidian migration? Well, I'm using Obsidian full-time now but most of my notes are still in an imported OneNote folder in Obsidian. I see no need to drag them out and sort them until I need them.

I did upgrade the balcony camera setup this week with the TrendNet PoE+ router and power supply that arrived last week though. It was distressingly uneventful. I just unplugged the old TP-Link router, plugged the new one in, switched the cables over, and brought the old one in for a wipe-down. By the time I finished and tested the camera connection, everything was working properly again. I believe my setup should last through -30°C winter temperatures now, but we'll have to see when that weather actually comes.

I also still haven't tried to wipe and convert my old computer into a "new" PC for Dad, which would then let me take his even older computer and see if I can hook that up to run the camera 24/7 instead of having to run OBS from my main PC. That, or invest in some kind of mini-PC that can handle running OBS. It's just difficult to care with everything else going on right now.

Regarding the family and the housing situation, I didn't speak to them this week but after talking with some friends and doing some casual light searching, I'm gradually more open to the right condo apartment unit now if I can find a suitable one in Edmonton, though I'm not sure where one exists that I might be interested in. It would have to be a top-level one that was at least 1,200 square feet and still within my budget, and there aren't a lot of those around, but at least it's a non-zero number I guess. The nearby house that I was told was not worth it did sell for 300k this week, or at least it went into Pending status, without me ever going down to look at it, so that's that I guess. Very disappointing, though I'm not sure what I was expecting since I never made time to go see it. The family negativity made it an impossible buy, I guess.

Work was very busy this week, but it finally started to lighten up near the end of the week. We even had an in-person team meeting on Thursday, which generally means that work tickets get neglected since we're in an all-day meeting, but everything went fine. And a chat with Jeremy there, a serendipitous coincidence after the one with Ekram a month ago, has me kinda interested to try out day trading in stocks again. The next work week is bisected into half by a holiday on Wednesday, as it's the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and this is going to be followed up by Thanksgiving in a couple of weeks, and then we swing into the end of year vibes. I know I said at the start of the blog post that I can't believe that only six months have passed by, but also at the same time, the year has flown by as always! And it does sometimes feel like I sleepwalked through the year with nothing to show for it. Except these blog posts. I know that isn't true though.

In more news about the blog, I did manage to get Gemini to fix a WordPress layout bug with their stupid Gutenberg editor this week, whereby everytime I clicked on the scrollbar on the page to get to a different part of the page while in the editor, it would "helpfully" create a new blank Paragraph block at the very bottom of my page because my last block on the page is a Group block (holding other paragraph blocks) and not a Paragraph block. It never checks inside the group block, and so assumes that I must want a new Paragraph block at the bottom to do stuff with. It's really poor logic, like a lot of other small, stupid bugs in Gutenberg that will probably never get fixed, but the snippet that Gemini eventually gave me to throw into my functions.php file after a few tries fixed this Paragraph block generation, as well as the same block generation if I just click on some blank space in my margins while in the editor.

I am quite used to the Gutenberg editor now after the migration earlier this year, and I am still glad that I did make that migration, but boy does it still have a lot of dumb little bugs.

I bought a new pill this week to try based on Gemini's recommendation as well. I hadn't been to my doctor in a few years, and over the last month or two it feels like my "ambient itching", as I called it last week, had started to flare up again, in a way that reminded me of something that could eventually lead to hives, which I experienced a few years ago. The solution at the time was antihistamines (specifically a brand called Blexten (local)), which I still had an old box of, but those didn't seem to be having much of an effect since they were old and had lost some of their efficacy, I guess. After consulting with Gemini, it told me that I could try the Safeway pharmacy and ask them to just prescribe the same thing again since it was in my NetCare (local) records.

Although I kind of thought I would try that to see and chronicle what the experience was like, in the end I did kind of want to just try something off the shelf too, and it said that Allegra (local) was probably the closest in terms of chemical makeup, so that's what I went for, and so far it works fine enough, though it isn't perfect (yet?). While it isn't completely gone per se, I now can sleep through the night just fine and survive the day just fine without wanting to scratch myself until it bleeds. I still wonder what the trigger that causes this in me is.

On a lighter note, I also picked up some friendship bands from the local Claire's on a whim for Tigey's new Tigey-like friend that arrived last week, and the few others that are still en route, though the bands were much more expensive than I thought they'd be. I think that's just the nature of shops like Claire's, though. I wonder how much Tigey's friendship band necklace, which Huihan purchased 28 years ago, cost. But here's what the new band looks like on the new Tigey-like (I really need a bettter name for them).

I put it into last week's blog too. The other Tigey-likes -- look, can we call them Aspects? Clones? Vessels? The other Aspects of Tigey have not arrived yet, but a different Aspect arrived this week, and is detailed down below in Plushie of the Week.

Lastly, I noted a few weeks ago that I had found a live spider in my napa cabbage from Safeway. Ever since that week, I've noticed when passing that shelf that all the cabbages have been pre-wrapped in plastic, something that did not use to be the case before, so I suspect that it was not an isolated incident and that Something Happened to that particular stock that made Safeway or the supplier change their policy. Either way, I've bought napa a couple times since and have not seen any spiders, but just like the bedbug incident from 2-3 years ago or the ant incident from last year, it takes a while for me to regain the trust and lose the skittishness.

And my number of pictures taken has dropped the last couple of weeks, both of my daily life and the balcony sunsets, but here's one of the latter from this week! It's from Mon Sep 21 at 7:41 pm.

The setting sun was sliced into a dozen ribbons by the passing clouds.

Games

Petit Planet (archive) was the game du jour this week. I mentioned last week that I was not sure if I would be interested at all since I was in the last beta as well, and since the progress here won't cross over to live. It turns out those worries were unfounded though. Some of the content is the same, and some of it is new, but I've been having lots of fun in it experimenting with new mechanics (like flower breeding) and making new friends. I even joined a little Discord server looking into flower breeding and watering mechanics and theorycrafting on the side, which has been tons of fun.

Even though I have spent a lot of time on the game every day so far, a lot of that time is also just idle time or busy time while doing other things, and occasionally popping in to greet people and do tasks. I still feel like I'm rushing at the end of the day sometimes to get all my trees chopped and crops planted even if I'm online for 10 hours, since much of that time is multitasking. And large chunks of the time get eaten up by (optional) social stuff, yapping with visitors who come to my planet, going around to water plants on friends' planets, etc.

Oh, and putting flowers down in random patterns.

And making random strangers write haiku poems for me in the in-game epistolarian table:

And taking pictures with new friends:

Other games? What other games?

Plushie of the Week #247

So the eBay plushie that came in this week was this guy, a different version of not Tigey, but Tizilla, my much larger Esso plushie that was originally a gift from Eileen back around 1998. That original one actually predates Tigey by a few months, and his Plushie of the Week blog post is here.

But unlike Tigey, I've never actually seen other variants of Tizilla, so I was coloured surprised when he popped up on my eBay listings while I was looking for Tigeys a few weeks ago. I just knew I had to get him, whatever the price. Shipping was a little pricey because he was rather large, but he eventually arrived all the way from Santa Clara, California, and he cost $17.99 USD plus $16.46 USD shipping, for a grand total of $34.45 USD. This Tizilla-like arrived on Sep 22 2026, so that's his new birthday, and here he is in his birthday clothes:

And a group pic with the other tigers -- I wonder if there's a version of Tizilla for all the other two colours of Tigey-likes that exist, as well.

Oh right, I was going to call them Aspects, so this is the Orange Aspect of Tizilla, Orange Aspect of Tigey, the original Tigey, and the original Tizilla. My Tizilla actually came with a set of removable pilot clothing, all the pieces of which are sitting in a sealed bag right now because the material is falling apart. The Orange Aspect of Tizilla did not, though I'm not sure if it is just that the clothing was long lost, or if my version was a special one with clothing. Who knows. They're totally from the same Esso plushie lineage though, aren't they!? And maybe the next time I take out that bag of clothing, I'll dress him up in it for pictures and hope it doesn't crumble to dust.

Here's what the new guy looks like from the front:

Back:

Tag front:

Tag back:

His original listing was here (local), and I also preserved the pictures from the listing just in case they ever go poof.

Dreams

Sep 21 2026

• I was on my way home to Edmonton from Calgary after visiting a university there, and was originally going to stay there overnight at a hotel and then buy a bus ticket back the day after. But I was with Kelvin from McNally, who was on a bus going back that night, and that suddenly sounded like a tempting idea because in theory I could sleep on the bus and skip having to pay the overnight hotel bill.
• Looking online, the price for what was usually a $300 ticket was $700 because it was just two hours before the bus ride, and I balked at that and said I would go back the next day instead. But I went to see him off at the bus stop, and while he was boarding I checked the prices and saw that the in-person price had been lowered to $400 for a double seat just in front of the long row of seats in the rear since the bus was just about to leave anyway.
• I decided to buy this ticket and got on the bus with Kelvin. A friend in Discord commented that I should really be buying my tickets further in advance to save money, but I said that I generally did not know when I would be returning until the day of itself, and that that was the way I usually rolled on my trips.

Sep 22 2026

• Snippet: I was wandering as part of a group of four friends through a completely dark area. I was standing in position 2, holding on to the hands of the person directly ahead and behind me, as we moved in a line as a coherent unit. This whole adventure was a class assignment and the darkness was due to our advanced grade level, we had done this one before with light. When we got attacked by spiders, the girl in position 3 tried to draw her sword and was too slow, and fainted beneath a pile of spiders. We eventually still rid them all and revived her before moving on.
• Snippet: I found a strange unicorn-like creature outside our home, and protected it from what seemed to be someone cosplaying a wolf standing on its two hind legs as we climbed up some outdoor steps to our home's entrance. I took the unicorn into the home and led it to the kitchen where I warned Mom about its level 2 fire aura and -4 luck aura. Mom said "Oh dear." The fire aura wouldn't harm the kitchen too much but the -4 luck would be annoying. But she knew that the debuffs were just temporary and the unicorn provided other benefits in the long run that would be worth it. Semyon was there, and pointed out that the -4 luck buff only applied when we were cooking and eating there, and that we could just go out for dinner today. Everyone agreed.
• Snippet: I was sitting at a table with Kel to my left and Jon across from me. We were talkling about music, and I mentioned a song, at which point Kel started playing it on a device. I requested that she stop it because I didn't like the song, but she either didn't or couldn't do so, and I said I wasn't going to tell her all the other songs in case she started playing those too. At one point, a train also rumbled by and we felt the vibrations from it.
• Snippet: There was something about going through a museum of names and transplanting things that gave me a bit of progression xp towards something long forgotten.
• Snippet: I went through and cleared an underground basement ruin with Ronnie and two others before we emerged back onto the city streets in winter. I suggested going to a nearby outdoor festival area to eat, which was about three city blocks away. It would have been closer if we went through the ruin again but we didn't want to do so even though we had just cleared it, so we all hopped into Ronnie's car and travelled there. A mentally ill woman running as fast as the car tried to open our door as we drove west to the festival as she was searching for medicine, but we locked the car doors and she was unable to get in. I commented that this was the second time tonight that someone had tried to open the door of a moving car I was in, and at least one of those times involved my parents in the car. When we reached the festival, the car turned into a big room that was next to the festival, and Ronnie stayed behind to watch our things as the other two and I put down our bags and went out to make our orders.

Sep 23 2026

• Snippet: I visited two zoo-like animal parks which were either side by side or overlaid on top of each other somehow. Each one housed 30 animals of a kind, one of them had only bears while I forget the composition of the other one. Both parks were owned by the same sumo wrestler and both were free for now, but were going to be converted into a paid experience soon, and I was trying to complete some sort of survey that would either lower the price of the parks or keep the park entrances free.

Sep 24 2026

• Snippet: There was a series of art contests that took place over a week that people could submit individual pieces for each day. I came in first place for it, as I won 4 out of 7 of them. In this same dream, there were groups of people studying wind magic and duelling each other with it in and around a park that I passed each day, and at one point a grandma judge, who was supposed to feed her two current combatants with mana so that they could use the wind magic in their bout, kept on instead miscasting her spell on the watching audience instead, who proceeded to slowly float away. Shizuka from Hyakkano was among the audience members here.
• Snippet: There was another dream about a woman living in an apartment similar to Edmonton 205, with a neighbour on her right that was her boyfriend, even though she didn't really like him much and there was some theme of coersion or predetermined fate there. Another man who often came by was also her boyfriend, and she liked him a lot more. Eventually, she ran away, and the neighbour boyfriend walked to a nearby train station to look for her, where he met the other boyfriend, who wondered that if the neighbour guy was her real boyfriend, then why didn't she tell him where he was going and why didn't he come looking for her sooner. Also, at some point the number 738-6370 could be dialed for pizza delivery.

Sep 26 2026

• Kel and I were seated on a couch in my apartment when a construction worker from the house next door came in to our apartment from a special internal grill gate that connected just the two apartments. We were taking over the next door apartment as well but were having it renovated first, and there were about four or five guys there working on the renovations.
• We paused a game that we were playing on the television as he came in, expecting some sort of question from him, but instead, he walked to the amplifier and stereo set located next to the TV and tried to put on some music.
• I stopped him and asked what the heck he was doing, and couldn't he see that the TV had a paused game on it, so we were obviously using the sound system too? He replied that they just wanted to listen to some music downstairs while working. I looked at Kel and Kel looked at me at first, and then I saw Dad entering the room as well.
• I gave the worker a firm "No", but he didn't seem to care, until Dad stepped in and scolded him, something to the tune of "She said no, no means no." after which he finally relented and went back next door empty-handed, looking unhappy.
• A few minutes later though, we heard booming music from next door anyway, and when I went through the grill gate to look, they had acquired a stereo set from someone else anyway and was using it.
• I scolded them and took that away, too. They complained and said that they had to do so many renovations -- this unit that was adjacent to ours, the one next to it on the other side from us, and one on the floor below us as well. In addition, it was apparently their second time in a year renovating the one adjacent to ours that they were currently in. I told them that if they weren't so shoddy and distracted in their work maybe they would have done it right the first time.
• I went back to their unit, very worried that they were going to mess up in whatever they were renovating again this time.
• Snippet: I remember that some friends and I were in a Rosyth School parcel of land on the north side of a city, and Ronnie had to leave to a building north of us, then some archives northeast of that, then a tall office building north of that. All the building were connected by a single road and we were surprised they were all so close to each other in the dream. We could see him ascend all the way to the roof of the tall office building.
• Snippet: In the same dream, there was a giant landship or something similar trying to circle around the perimeter of the city, it was huge and moved really slowly and there were things that needed to be done aboard the ship that exahusted my friends who were on board. I was watching news coverage from the city and it had a sensationalist headline, something similar to "The ship is 1/3 done its journey and 1/3 of the people are down! Can they make it?" Whereas from what I could see on my monitor, they were actually 2/4 done, and the people that were down were just resting and planned to continue moving the ship shortly.