My Diary #256

Life

Seriously, Tigey, what is this. Snow isn't supposed to fall until after Halloween, yet what is all this white stuff outside?! The dreary sky outside looks just like your gray-white shade of fur! Though I guess the snowflakes aren't very visible in these pictures. They are there, though.

(Disclaimer note: my personal observation is that it's 50-50 on any given year whether the first snowfall comes before or after Halloween, so this is just me being dramatic at Tigey, though it is a little early in the year for the first snow.)

Okay so since the snowflakes are hard to see, and none of it is sticking on the ground because it's not cold enough for that, so is it *really* the first snowfall of the season? Even the weather forecast calls it a "wintry mix", which sounds more like a discounted pack of overpriced salad at Safeway than an actual weather condition. Even if it is sticking to the ground, the temperatures are going back up to high double digits Celsius next week, so we're still some ways away from the Snowbanks of Doom (which will be very visible in the Southgate parking lot on the far left side of the balcony camera's viewport once they arrive).

Just like the last few weeks, I haven't been streaming the camera, or even recording weather footage during the day, because I've been playing Petit Planet and have been recording that gameplay footage instead since it's a beta and I've making a bunch of bug reports using those videos. I really need to get unlazy and around to figuring out a solution for this. I have been monitoring the camera setup though, and it's been fine even when the temperature has dipped down to freezing thus far. I mean, it better be fine, since the whole thing is supposedly rated to still operate in a -30°C freeze, but I'm glad it's fine nonetheless.

This Monday, Oct 12 2026, is a holiday, which is nice, as it means yet another long weekend very soon after the one last week. I've almost never done anything for Thanksgiving, and this year will be no different. But a day off from work is nice. These couple weeks also signify the slide towards the much quieter end of year period at work, as staff members start eyeing vacations and stop sending us weird tickets, so that is nice too. And even though I don't like Christmas, I do like the time off that we get around it, so that's something that the back of my mind remains in a constant, slightly hyped up state about through the last few weeks of the year as well.

My supervisor has been bugging me about taking some of my accrued vacation time again though, as I've now gone back over the 1-year threshold amount of banked vacation time, which is 175 or 200 hours for me depending on how one counts it. This is teeechnically against union regulations or something, though there are people far worse off than I am.

I'm considering just taking the week before AND after Christmas off this year for once, instead of just taking the week after like I always do. That'd be 9 days/63 hours (Dec 21-24 and Jan 4-8, since we get Dec 25-Jan 03 as paid time off for free) off the ledger, and I accrue 25 days of vacation a year, or about 14.5 hours per month, and have 239 hours of vacation currently banked, so that will put me at 218 hours in January... ack, that's still over. I guess I'm not really in the mindset of taking two days (14 hours) of vacation off per month on average. And my last long vacation was only 6-7 months ago.

I believe we will also be getting half a day off on or just before Oct 19, which is our referendum day, for voting. The mandate for that is three consecutive hours on the day of the referendum (or election), or during one of the in-person advance voting days, which are Oct 13-17 in this case. I don't know what they mean to do for people who have voted in advance by mail though, which I completed this week, but I fully intend to take my share anyway.

But yes, I finally did put together all the referendum papers that I had received and scanned two weeks ago, and the photocopies that I made last week of my proof of identity, this week, and submitted them all to the Canada Post branch in Southgate Centre on Tuesday, Oct 06, for delivery to Elections Alberta. I voted No to all the first 9 questions, and to remain in Canada for the last one.

It looks like my referendum package was successfully received and counted too. It took three days to get there through Canada Post and get opened and validated by Elections Alberta, which is pretty decent.

I'm no Maple MAGA cheating traitor to Canada, and the separatists are projected by news sources to lose by about a 70-something to 20-something margin (local), but I've seen weird YouTube ads and such promoting separation, and the ads themselves are at least kind of interesting to me from an archivist's point of view. And they're definitely not being paid for by foreign actors. Nope, nosiree. At least one separatist video was debunked as being AI-generated people by some news site that I saw as well. I didn't save any of that content for archival purposes though, as I don't like political noise in general, but I do have a couple of referendum-related paper ephemera pieces that were sent to the mailbox that I did keep and will scan and upload to my Internet Archive page at some point when I feel like updating that thing again. (Sidenote: Hey, the viewcounts on that page are finally working again.)

Talking about archiving, a friend from Nomakk's stream, going by the online handle of FungshwayGorilla, shared a short story that he had written for a course that he is taking, and graciously allowed me to reproduce and archive it on my website as well.

I turned it into a separate page here: The Mourning Haze of Summer’s Sun.

Please do read. It doesn't overstay its welcome like my blog posts do. I did like it quite a bit, but will leave the reader to draw their own conclusions from it rather than narrating what they (you) should feel! And if I can wrestle any other friends, acquaintances, or otherwise to share some of their written or other creative endeavours on the blog, I am definitely going to do so, so you might as well save us both the hassle and directly reach out to me to share what you have! Talking about which, Kynji, we need to talk...

My eBay purchase of three Tigey-likes or Aspects of Tigey or whatever still has not been processed, even though I paid for it on Sep 10. I opened an Item Not Received request with eBay this week about the issue, and the buyer has been radio silent about it still, though they have until Oct 14 to reply before eBay steps in or something. I'm not worried about the money, since eBay will refund it if it doesn't work out, but I'd really rather just have the items instead. But, this was also when I noticed that most of their other listings on eBay were posted in 2021, so maybe they're just not around anymore. This specific listing was last updated in Jan 2026 though.

Also, Jahandar proposed that we call these other Tigey-like plushies "siblings," but I'm not a fan because that can cause succession issues with various "siblings" vying for His Royal Unfluffiness's throne down the road. I can only handle one beanbag with delusions of grandeur at a time.

I did make one other interesting purchase mid-week, which was that the Edmonton Transit Riders (local), an advocacy group for local citizens who use the ETS, put out an offer of a neat-looking little 3D-printed residential transit tracker this week as what seems to be part of a fundraising effort. The shopping portal for the item is over here (local). I thought it looked like a nice knick-knack that could be useful to my parents (especially Dad), so I ordered one, and if they end up not needing it then it'll look cool on my desk instead. It's a little pricey, but not too much so, and I do like this advocacy group from my experiences with them. It'll arrive in December, I guess. Wait, that means I have to go out in December to retrieve it from one of the pick-up spots. What have I done?

I didn't venture very far afield this week, but I did walk around Southgate Centre while I was surrendering my referendum papers to the postal beast on Tuesday, and I took that opportunity to catalogue a few store changes that I noticed. The first, and most important one, is that it looks like there'll be a new David's Tea (stylized as DAVIDsTEA -- I'll add that to my text hover plugin too) location coming to Southgate! Woo!

There's only one physical David's Tea store in Edmonton right now, over by West Edmonton Mall, but WEM is much too far away and busy for me to visit. I haven't been to West Ed in more than half a decade, definitely before COVID-19 and before I started this blog. I should go soon though. Anyway, according to my notes, there apparently used to be a David's Tea boutique shop in Southgate too, but it got closed down at some point before I started mindfully looking at the shops in it. And now it's coming back?! It replaces a Bomb Bar store (which used to sell fragrant bath bombs).

Also returning is this Calendar Club store, there used to be one in the COVID or pre-COVID era but it ran out of calendar time at some point. It's back though, and takes up a space that used to be a Kids & Mom Gifts store, which is now relegated to an aisle kiosk on the other side of the mall.

A DU/ER store that was over by the Apple/Sporting Life wing of the mall, near the exit to Safeway, also shifted into the middle of the mall next to Uniqlo and an interesting Nekodrop blind box machine that's been there since the start of the COVID era, although this just seems to be a temporary home for it. This space used to be a transient storefront that housed, among other things, the H&R tax office during tax season.

There was also a weird sign outside the Sporting Life store that I noticed:

It's weird because AliPay, like WeChat Pay, only allows people with mainland China bank accounts/credit cards to use their service outside of China, so that's assumedly targetting a very small percentage of people passing by. And most of the "fancy" brands at the store seem to be on the exclusion list in the fine print anyway, so what would the mainland Chinese folks even be coming here to buy?

During that trip, I also stopped by Safeway since it was Customer Appreciation Day, which gives 15% off everything in store on purchases of $50 or higher. I meant to stack that with a coupon that gives me back 2,000 Scene+ points for spending over $100 in one trip, which is equivalent to $20 CAD, but I ended up in a situation where the 15% discount for my purchase brought me down below the $100 mark. So I ended up buying one of the $10 food hampers by the checkout counter for donation to the local food bank, which pushed me back over the $100 mark and did some local good too I suppose. And due to that, I also learnt that the 15% discount also applies toward those food donation hampers, as it only cost me $8.50 on the bill in the end. Neat. I do do occasional $2 charity donations at the checkout till, but I had never bought a food hamper until this week.

I also picked up something new from Safeway to try, this coriander chutney sauce from the Asian/Indian aisle that was slightly discounted:

It's... well, a familiar Indian taste, and I can use it in rice occasionally, and that's about it. I recognize the taste but haven't eaten anything with it in quite a long while. I mostly did like it. It'll go on the sauce rack with all the other weird and intriguing (and spicy) sauces I have!

Tuesday was also an eventful evening, which started off with me taking this screenshot of the sunset from my balcony camera's OBS feed at 6:33 pm:

20 minutes later, the 7th floor fire alarm went off (again), and half the building shuffled downstairs into the cool evening to await the fire engines. While we were stuck outside, I went to take some more pictures of the sunset, this time with my phone:

And then wandered around the neighbourhood a bit, in particular catching a shot of a neighbour who had already decorated their balcony for Halloween:

Neat, and hey, this means that unlike my apartment building, this person had an outdoor balcony power socket! Rude.

Anyway the rest of the week was very uneventful from a life event perspective, Tuesday was by far the busiest day but also left me with some sore legs for some reason so I lazed around and worked on work, games, and other various home projects through the rest of the week. I think those sore legs also made my sleep extra comfortable, and although my dream diary was sparse this week, my Wednesday dream diary entry turned out to be very memorable, one of those rare dreams with an 8/10 or higher score that will get a special marker by it once I finally catch up on my Dream Diary transcription. Some year!

Games

I continued to play absolutely nothing but the Petit Planet final closed beta test this week, though a lot of time was spent creating scenarios and then making videos or screenshots to highlight and report a bug. I must have submitted about a dozen or so, most with videos if not screenshots, which took a lot of time outside of my normal farming, flower planting/breeding/watering, and islet-exploring cadence. And all wrapped around doing work tickets or other stuff as appropriate. A couple of times this week, I looked up to see that 12 hours had passed by and yet it still felt like I had done absolutely nothing in game. It was terrifying!

I don't have any screenshots that I want to share this week, however I do have quite a few (temporary?) friends that I've made through the beta, and I'm also going to quietly start to catalogue their planets and the builds they've made, like a digital archivist exploring little online worlds that are soon going to meet their end. I regret not doing this in the last beta patch, and I already have well over 500 screenshots this time around of various things. Alpha/beta releases are special, because those players are experiencing a version of the game that regular future players will never experience in person. And there will be content there that will never make it to the live servers, even if the content is some jank or bug that's fixed in the end.

That being said though, I am worried about this game and how far away they still seem to be from a full release, so hopefully it's just that we're not playing their latest prototype or something. There is a lot of good in here, but several of the game systems are either very broken or just completely pointless and not well-integrated still. Oh well, we shall see! Their release date is just listed as "2026", and there's not much more tissue left in the 2026 tissue box.

Plushie of the Week #249

I only have two more entries to go before finishing the stash of plushie photos I took at Kel's place in Guangzhou when I visited her earlier this year, so here's one of them, the shorter one, since even though it seemed like not that much happened this week, my blog writing went long into the late afternoon and early evening anyway. This jellyfish, still in its original packaging, was ordered from Taobao, a Chinese online shopping platform, for some unknown price, sometime earlier this year or last year.

According to Kel, a friend and her took a promotional offer where they could buy two little animal plushies for a discount, so they bought this jellyfish along with a narwhal, and her friend kept the narwhal, whereas Kel kept this one. Neat! I don't know any other backstory besides that though, and since it is still in the package I doubt it was given a name or anything, so that's probably all the provenance there is to share about this jellyfish. It joins a whole host of other jellyfish and similar aquatic plushies that we have.

Front:

Back:

Apparently this character is a jellyfish named Kurage (the Japanese word for jellyfish), from a series called Tsuburana Hitomi no Suizokuka, roughly translating to something like Round-eyed Aquarium [creatures]. It's a series owned by a company named Yell World, and the character list can be found here (local). Neat.

Dreams

Oct 07 2026

• There was an anime that featured girls from two different schools called The Dark Tales of MoonFire. The main protagonist was a bright and cheerful girl from a poorer school called Fire who had a scene where she was running to the bus stop to catch the bus home while three other female friends chased her.
• Her parents ran an air-conditioner shop, and that was somehow relevant as one of her friends teleported in front of her to ask why she was running away from them to catch the bus instead of doing something else with them, and she said she had to go home to help her parents or something.
• There was also a secondary deuteragonist called Moon who was a tall, brooding girl, who was from a richer all-girls school, and she also had a group of two or three girls who she hung out with.
• The bus came to Fire first, and she boarded the bus, though she had trouble keeping her feet as the bus floor was very slippery, and the driver warned her to be careful as she slid to her seat and fumbled for the transit card to pay with. By the time she found it, the bus was already two stops past where she boarded though, and the bus driver didn't seem to care that she didn't pay, and Moon and the rest had also already boarded the bus so it was hard to reach the front again, so she just remained seated as a girl came to sit next to her.
• Moon and her posse were involved in an argument with another group of girls from Fire's school, who said that although the bus route made a big loop around from the west side to the east side of a train station, most people got off on the earlier west side stop even if they lived by the east side. The girls from Fire's school asked if Moon knew why, and she said no. The answer was that they wanted to be away from Moon and her gang of mean girls as soon as possible.
• That stop soon came, and those girls and quite a few other people indeed did get off. Moon saw Fire as the only girl from the poorer school who had remained on the bus, as Fire lived at a stop further down the line after the loop altogether, and she also saw that one of her friends was seated next to Fire, pinning her in to the corner seat. Furthermore, Fire had loosened her shoes and was seated in a way that her ankles were lifted out of her shoes and there was space between her socks and the shoe opening. She and another friend sat down in the seat behind Fire and quietly slipped a number of small thumb tacks into Fire's shoes.
• They then turned on a small camera to record her pain. However, Moon had to disembark at her stop before anything came of it, so she left the recording to the other girls, and the anime episode ended there.
• According to the next episode preview of the show, the setup was shown to be that Moon was a sadist and she and her rich father were part of an organization that revelled in the pain of others, whereas Fire was a masochist who had no idea what that meant. The resultant recording showed that Fire was surprised by and endured the pain from the thumb tacks in her shoes, and even seemed to enjoy the pricking sensation. That recording also found its way into the hands of the organization, who were seated around a long table watching it. They liked it a lot and gave Fire high ratings, and one of them said Fire should be kidnapped and made to suffer greatly for their enjoyment.
• However, Moon was against this, as she instead wanted to both protect Fire as well as inflict some degree of pain upon Fire for herself in a much more loving and tender fashion. In addition, there were three envelopes that were thin enough that some of the writing on the letter within could be seen through the envelope, and one of the letters spoke about one of Moon's friends named Mili, who was soon going to be forced to withdraw from her school due to her family's financial woes. It was implied that she would be forced to transfer to Fire's school if that actually happened.
• There was also cover art shown for the show, which featured a shorter Fire on the left, with her back slightly turned to the camera, facing a taller Moon on the right, who was facing the camera. The two of them were embracing each other, and there was a version of the art with a light foreground and background, and a version with a darker-themed foreground and background. The idea was that their relationship had both a lighter and a darker side to it that they both would embrace.
• Snippet: I dreamt that I could receive or buy a "Flatterly Gift Box" with a variety of stuff inside of it, though not much more detail than that.