A major event that happened this week, and that I attended, was the Edmonton Heritage Festival 2021, and you can find a separate diary page about it here. Like most of the other diary entries that run concurrently with a major event post, this diary entry is about everything else that happened in the week besides that!
Entry #015 (Aug 01 2021)
Table of Contents
Appreciate the depth of my…
ට Work
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #14
ට Photograph of the Week #2
ට Things I am thankful for this week
ට Dreams
Work
Work this week oscillated back toward being quite busy, though a major reason for that wasn’t an increased volume of work, but instead a number of people being away from work or being pulled away for projects. There were lots of people asking for small things to be done, and a couple larger issues that had to be carefully orchestrated since they spanned across multiple tickets. We also have a few stuck tickets because people in other departments are on vacation, and this is really irritating. Don’t put in work tickets that need your reply just before you leave for vacation!
I also have a ticket that I’m probably going to be yelled at next week because someone wants us to bend policy on a vanity/cosmetic account rename for her, and I don’t think my boss is going to side with me saying no to her because our department is very susceptible to people that throw a fuss, but I said no to her anyway. Oh well. At least Monday is a stat holiday here, so there’s a long weekend coming up! Enough time for me to forget about all my worries. And then next week is a short week to boot.
I also browsed for jobs a little this week, probably partly inspired by Kynji and her job search attempts, even though actually finding a job now would really screw with my attempts to go overseas. So ultimately it was more of an “I wonder what is out there..” thing, But work overall was fine! It really was.
Life
I spent most of the week writing on my diary, specifically this monster post, quite possibly the longest one I’ll ever write. I actually started that post a month ago, but it was so long that I kind of burnt out doing it, and that was when around the Steam sales were going on, so I got hooked on playing other games instead. This week, I spent about four evenings (and spare time during days) working on the blog and that post in particular to finish it up. It clocked in at just over 200 uploaded pictures! And once that post was done, well, I had this one and the Heritage Festival post to do! Busy busy. I also scanned several brochures and have been trying to figure out what to do with them, and I hope to get some pictures up from my Korean trip in 2014/2015, as well as some more yearbook scans. Post per brochure (this pings RSS and gets on front page)? Separate massive brochures page that links to individual brochure pages (these wouldn’t ping RSS)? Are they even worth uploading? Do random brochures and personal trip photos (and family photos eventually) they mesh with my chronicling goal? At what point will Jah get in trouble for hosting me?
An acquaintance from my days playing Lord of the Rings Online passed away this weekend, on Jul 31, according to a mutual friend who often talked to her. Respiratory distress, but not COVID-related, allegedly. She was one of the older people I knew playing the game when most of my main group of current internet friends were playing it 10-14 years ago. She was also one of the sweetest and patient people though, rivalling Mell in her niceness, as far as I know. She led a large Christian-based guild on the server and devoted her time developing a great community there — to stress the type of guild they were, they were friendly allies with the LGBT-based guild that I was in on the server. The two guilds, two of the largest guilds on the server in their heyday, often even ran game content together. That’s how I got to know her, at least by her character name, Hirawyn. And once our core endgame raiding group got assembled by Seo, and we formed Defenders of the Mithril Halls to chase server and world firsts, she also came along occasionally when we needed players. I didn’t know her too well personally, at least not outside of the game, but she was a great person and used her role to do many great things to shepherd and influence people on their journey of growing up, both inside and outside of her guild, and from what I know was still playing and guiding people even up until this year, 14 years later. Rest in peace, you’ve earned it!
The community Christmas tree got lit up again this week, or technically last Sunday evening, and I’m happy about that! It’s been lit every night since then, after about a period of a month or so when it was out. It’s a reassuring sight to see out the balcony door from my computer chair. It also makes the hot evenings that much more bearable. This week’s temperatures have not been bad at all, but for some reasons the evenings have been swelteringly hot! I’m burning through ice cream much faster than I’d like to, and I even had to turn on the fan at night a couple times. I often go a full year without using the portable fan/heater at all. I don’t even remember the last time I used it before this year.
Discord released threads (local) this week, and the feature is.. interesting but odd. Not many people still are sure how to react to it, and even the large public servers are largely split between having the feature on (but barely anyone’s really used it yet) and off. Discord set this setting on for all users in all servers by default though, which was annoying, because I help mod a Discord server where it had the potential to get really out of hand really quickly (past tense because I made the admins disable the feature), and it seems like it might be difficult to monitor new messages across different chats and main channels if there are a lot of threads open.
Today. Today I bought a vacuum. A vacuum I bought today. I bought a vacuum to clean my house. To clean my house I bought a vacuum today. I call that original composition, “Ode to Jahandar and Kynji“. It’s an inside joke. I actually did buy a random vacuum this week though, and hopefully it has good suction on the, well, sucker, because my last vacuum was an absolute piece of garbage that was not worthy of calling itself a vacuum, and it was hell trying to clean my carpeted floors with it. The vacuum handle tube actually cracked when I was cleaning up from the second round of bedbug spraying back in May, so it’s been really awkward trying to use it ever since, as I have to clench the broken part together while using the vacuum in order for everything to just not spill out immediately. I was hoping it’d last until I moved, but it’s basically non-functional now and I can’t bear the hair everywhere in the carpets anymore, and I’ll probably just gift the newer vacuum to my parents or something when I leave if I feel it’s a good vacuum. Or toss it if not.
It’s Eileen‘s birthday this week, so I sent her an email, and Huihan also replied to an email for the first time in a few months, plus I also got to chat to Kel (over Line) about Japan and her taxes and some other stuff. All this made me quite pleased, since they’re all people I go way back (20+ years) with, so it was nice being able to at least briefly email/chat with them and feel a tinge of nostalgia thinking about the past again. I felt a very strong longing to return to Singapore this week (before I chatted with any of them, but it certainly didn’t help matters!), and I tried to mollify my feelings by channeling that energy into my diary-writing.
Along these lines, I talked more with my boss and tentatively scheduled some time off around the end of October to hopefully attend Rin‘s wedding and maybe do a cross-USA tour of some cities as well. Maybe visit a bunch of online friends if they want to meet Tigey. I mean me. But while I’m saying all that, my top destination for travel right now is not actually in the USA, nor Canada, nor Japan, nor even Singapore despite said nostalgia above — I actually have this really big craving to visit South Korea again right now for some inexplicable reason. Well, I know the reason, it’s because I had a big taste of mystery and adventure there the last time I went, and not knowing the language actually increases the charm of the place, plus I consider it one of the few safe places in Asia to visit. For pleasure this time and not with a surgery hanging over my head like the Sword of Damocles.
Borders to Asia aren’t open right now though, and frankly with the Delta variant (and whatever other new variants yet to emerge) making their rounds, who knows if the US border will even remain open by then. Who knows if Japan will open by January or April either. I did talk to my boss about the possibility of working while travelling though, especially if I’m still roughly in the same time zone, and he said that he might be receptive to that idea. While it might sound silly at first glance (why not do vacationy things while actually on vacation?), the real reason for this is actually in case I need to quarantine somewhere or other for a week or two. That’s a trip-destroyer otherwise, and a rather expensive one too with typical hotel costs.
Lastly, and this might still be somewhat tangentially related, I ended up on the website of an app called World Walking, which tracks (if you let it) how much you walk with its phone app and bank those steps into a “distance travelled” pool. You can then select a walking tour out of several hundred predefined ones, set that as your active task (solo or with friends in a group), and apply your banked steps toward that walk. The app then displays information about the locations as you reach certain milestones on your journey, and even cooler, seems to show you a Google Street View photo of a location roughly around where your/your group’s total number of steps have taken you so far along that journey. I think. Still testing it out, but I’m in the backstreets around Kamakura, not all that far from where my sister lived last year, in the one tour that I started so far. This is the view at ~3000 steps:
and this is the view at ~14,500 steps after the Heritage Festival:
I’m not certain if this is useful or interesting in the long run, how much battery the app consumes, or if it’s a fleeting interest that will disappear after two weeks, so it remains to be seen whether I’ll stick with it, but hey, it’s something to strive for for now while walking around the neighbourhood (local)! And it sounds safer than the zombies storyline one Jah was using a few years ago. I only wish it tracked your actual walks (with stats) and saved them somewhere too.
Games
I barely played any games this week, besides doing a little dabbling in TROUBLESHOOTER: Abandoned Children on the PC, Honkai Impact 3 on the phone, and Anime Music Quiz every afternoon after our daily anime group watches. Same old, same old. I’m not really feeling the pull to play any games right now, however. Oh, I did try out Retrowave because it was $1 in a current Humble Bundle, and well, I like the style of 80s music. It’s super simplistic, and I agree with some of the reviewers wondering how this got Overwhelmingly Positive reviews.. the car basically drives itself and you basically press left and right to nudge it between lanes and that’s the entirety of the game besides dodging cars. I get there’s an aesthetic piece in there though, and I did actually like it for that. The cameras are terrible for viewing the scenery properly though.
Plushie of the Week #14 – Starmiya
This week’s was an easy choice, I had already talked about her in my Summer Connect 2020 post, and the last two PlotW’s have been older plushies, so a newer one would certainly be a change of place. Starmiya is one of the two plushies that I bought while on the trip to Banff in Aug 2020, and her official birthday is Aug 29 2020. She cost $17.84 after tax.
She’s a Squishmallow, and the story of her name is that she’s obviously a strawberry, and Strawberry in Japanese is Ichigo, which is also a girl’s name. Specifically, I was in the throes of watching the Aikatsu! anime at the time, and one of the main characters in the show is named Ichigo — and one of her nicknames is Starmiya. This strawberry was cute and squishy and round, with little pips on her that remind me of stars (if I squint?), so I named her Starmiya. (Though sometimes I call her Ichigo too.)
Being one of the newer generation plushies though, she doesn’t have much of a personality or backstory, besides being friendly and cute in general (this is adopted from the character, no doubt), but she was a good purchase and I quite like her.
This is her earliest picture, from Aug 29 2020, as displayed in the Summer Connect 2020 post above:
Here are proper front and back pictures of her:
And some of her extremely personal information for the world to see:
Apparently she actually has a proper name too, Scarlet, but we will summarily ignore this:
It’s like adopting a pet anyway, the old name is just a suggestion, yes?
Also, this is largely for my siblings and myself, but I’m thinking of transplanting these plushie entries to a master plushie page as well, with as many pictures as we can dig up of them, and more information added to some of them as we remember/think of things. Plushie of the Week will still exist, the entries will just be copy/pasted to the Plushie master page and any future additions will be done only on that page. Kind of like the Dream Diary page that I’m supposed to be making eventually. Or at least that’s my intent. They’re an extremely important part of our bond together, and we still chat about them and their antics as adults, but I’ve come across a bit of additional information about some of them after their PotW entries that I have had no idea where to put.
Feb 04 2023 edit: Starmiya is now officially a senpai, as I’ve recently picked up and now featured a second Squishmallow plushie as well, and here’s a picture of the two of them together on my bed.
Photograph(s) of the Week #2
This is the view from our 2nd house in Yishun, in block 723. We lived in two different locations within Yishun, a northern “residential town” in Singapore, in the 90s. The first, which I call “Yishun 799” in my writeups and dream diary, had its kitchen area featured last week. This second house, “Yishun 723“, I’m largely missing photographs for most of the house for, and this is very sad — I’m not sure if I just haven’t gotten to the albums to scan them yet or what, but they’re also my weakest memories by far of the three houses we stayed in (not counting the one we moved from before I was 3 years old), so it’s unfortunate that I also don’t have as many pictures as I like of it.
Anyway, while I haven’t really seen many good pictures of the interior of the house, this is a view from the balcony of our 12th floor apartment, which happens to have a magnificent view and also happens to look out toward our old home and my first primary school, though neither are actually visible in the picture. This picture was most likely taken in 1993, at some point after February and before December, with a small chance of May 1994, based on where it was in its album book.
For context, here is a map of the area, using the site here.
Also see Google Maps (local) link. Most of the lines can be ignored for now because the article I actually have it linked to talks about other things about the area as well. However, the red rectangle is where 723 is, and you can also see 799 on the map down where the blue line splits into 3 ways. The dark red arrow pointing south-southeast from the brighter red square is exactly the view that you see in this photograph though, overlooking the white buildings of the classified military camp there, and then the red roofed buildings of Naval Base Secondary School beyond them.
Also visible in the foreground are the buildings of the college that was next to our flat. As you can see from the second picture, the college is called Yishun Innova Junior College (local) now, and JCs are basically the equivalent of Grade 11 and 12 in Singapore. Pre-college. But back when this picture was taken, it was known just as Yishun Junior College, before they merged with another college in 2019. This picture was taken around 1993, but the buildings look fairly similar compared to as recently as 2016 (local). Although it looks like it’s since received a bit of a paint job (local) too.
Both my first primary school where I was from Grade 1-3, Peiying Primary School, as well as the Yishun 799 house, are just off-screen in the picture — Peiying is located behind and to the right of the red-roofed Naval Base Secondary School there, and Yishun 799 is located just behind the first red and white HDB flat immediately to the left of the blue and yellow HDB flat in the middle of the picture, I believe.
Still, it’s a very precious view, and one I associate with a lot of aesthetics, including distant construction noises and wafting food smells, as well as memories, like the school having school songs or daily pledges from the students that we could hear from our apartment, or being able to see Dad on his motorcycle passing by the 4-way junction behind those trees on his way home. I could give Mom a heads up that Dad was coming back if I was lucky, and that made me feel omnipotent. Also, I think there’s something to be said for having a large and advanced school, and its students doing their daily activities, prominently visible and right next to your house — I think it inspired us kids to study harder in some way too, as it felt very out of reach for me at my age.
By the by, here’s an annotated picture from Google Maps looking up at our house from around the crossroads on the map, past Yishun Innova JC, basically the “reverse view” of the original picture from 1993. The red circle is my fairly accurate guess on where our actual apartment was, so I’m basically looking up at our old home (Yishun 723) from Google Maps. It was one of those apartments anyway!
Aug 05 2021 Edit: I have also since found other pictures of the view from the balcony, taken on a different day, and am uploading them here for completeness’ sake. From left to right:
These pictures were most likely taken in 1993. Maybe early 1994. Basically not far off from the leading picture.
Things I am thankful for this week
- A feeling I get sometimes when I am At Peace with the World. When I capitalize it like that it sounds like the name of a temporary buff that a game character can acquire, huh. At Peace with the World. I get this feeling when everything is quiet and peaceful around me — internally in my body (I feel calm and relaxed, am not hot, cold, itchy, in pain, hungry, thirsty, etc, and I’m in a good mood), externally in my house and life (things are low-stress, I’m not waiting on anything, and nothing’s happening online either), and out in the world (nothing is moving outside, and the weather is usually overcast).
Those descriptions are still really bad though. It’s not *just* peace and quiet that triggers this, or it’d happen all the time. There is also a certain zen-like appreciative mood I have to be in, and a few other hard to quantify factors, but I’ve yet to ever intentionally attain this state by meditation or anything like that. What actually happens when I hit this mood is that I suddenly feel like time has stopped, like the world has achieved perfect equilibrium. I feel like I am independent and alone in the world, but yet that the world is supremely complex and rich and beautiful and that I am part of it all. I feel like I slip out from between the pages of a book and, for a few moments, am able to glimpse a grander view of the interconnectedness of life and perhaps a hint as to its true meaning. It’s an odd, mystical, and really great, feeling, and it’s also really rare, as it happens to me rather than me seeking it out. It happened earlier this week though, and it was blissful. I love the feeling!
- My plushies. I love them, and I’ve been able to have such a great (I hope) bond with my siblings in large part due to our plushies and basically playing house with them all these years. Even now, I sleep beside the ones I have every night and they’re a reassuring force. Who cares that I’m nearly 40? It’s not anyone else’s enjoyment or satisfaction but mine. (Also, the research project into trying to find out their origins has been fun.)
- My bolster. And I do not mean body pillows, they’re not the same thing. They have to be completely round/cylindrical. I don’t understand why this thing is so unpopular in the world. Why do people not use this? It’s extremely popular in Singapore, and I’ve been brought up hugging one when I go to bed at night, ever since I was a baby. As has everyone in my immediate family. Obviously we do just fine away from the bolster (say in hotels) when we have to (although I still usually hug a pillow), but when possible it’s something I love and am thankful that I have. And while everyone occasionally uses it as a neckrest or similar, and that’s fine, I think it’s primary purpose is to be hugged, and not to be used solely as an extra pillow.
- The gentle smell of BBQ foodstuffs wafting in to the house. This one is interesting because this isn’t really common in Singapore — not many people have or use personal BBQ grills, but you can definitely use community ones, and many shops sell barbequed food as well. It’s not entirely the same as the smell here in Canada, but the smell of barbequed foodstuffs wafting in through the door here (or as I’m out and about sometimes) definitely evokes memories of home. Mmm satay.
- Lord of the Rings Online, for bringing me and my primary group of friends together 10+ years ago, building friendships between (some of) us that have (more or less) persisted through our lives as we have grown up and had our own individual life events, and also setting the stage for us to meet other friends and do other things along the way, as none of those might have happened in another timeline where LotRO never came to fruition, or we never played it, and we all took different paths in life. The game itself also largely provided us with many happy memories, but really the best loot we ever got from the game are the friends we made along the way. And I know we’re not the only satellite group from when we were playing that’s survived and kept in touch this long either!
Dreams
Jul 26 2021
- I was in a network of abandoned underground pedestrian tunnels connected to a subway station, and for whatever reason the first part of the dream had me exploring and digging holes in the tunnel with friends, kind of like we were moles. It felt like we were digging for treasure that was buried away, but at the same time we felt more like scavengers than adventurers and the work was very exhausting and not rewarding. We did find whatever we were looking for though, more than one cache of it even, but we had to lug out stones and avoid brackish pools of water and stuff to get to it.
- Later on, elsewhere in the same labyrinth of tunnels, I wandered around an area that was still considered off the beaten path but not entirely abandoned. I first got to a medical area where injured firefighters were lying on tables and moaning, as nurses attended to the freshly injured that were just brought in to the area. I then found a back area and started digging a hole there in order to set up a small alcove with protest signs in them, but once I dug into the wall, I broke into an area where there were two groups of people filming two separate TV show side by side in the same large underground chamber, one a sitcom of some kind, and the ther some sort of documentary maybe. I watched them a bit from under the bottom of a tarp where my carved passage broke through, before backing out and looking for some other place to dig into.
- Eventually, I decided to leave the area and headed for a service tunnel that I had used in the past and knew that it would lead to an escalator that would lead down to the train platform below even though it was nonsensically labelled something else entirely.
Jul 27 2021
- A snippet from today’s dream seems to have revolved around Ronnie and some others of my work team, as well as James from the Infra Apps team, and the IAM project. There was something about why it was late and how we helped with it by taking care of some of his other duties, and that somehow got worked into a larger narrative of some kind.
- The story also involved time travel between three different version of a fantasy map. Movement was top-down on a gridded world map, though the movement was swift and free, like I was drawing lines on the map, rather than constrained to moving along the four cardinal directions. Encounters would also shift the game into first or second person camera mode. Time travel was accomplished by finding and activating a certain flying pirate ship hidden away in the middle of this wilderness map, with the pirate ship itself also going through three phases: an early point in the timeline where they were all enemies, a middle timeline where they were sitting on an island being served wine by some scantily-clad women, and were neutral but could still be attacked for experience, and a later timeline when they were civilized members of society, and their ship was a shop of sort where visitors would come and buy goods from them. In this last segment, they had something expensive or unique when I went to visit them (it might have been a pirate’s hat) and I bought that and triggered some sort of reward or prize by doing so.
Jul 28 2021
- A man was about to lose his hawker centre stall due to the lease rent going up as well as the stall being broken in some way, but his friends chipped in together and repaired it for him by the end of the lease.
- The actual lease extension process was really weird, he had to write a letter to the landlord, place it in some container, travel to a specific grassy field in town, and then toss the container across the grassy field, And then inform the landlord that he had done so, who would then go search for it
- There were groups of people going around playing games of some sort, and a TV anime series that was being produced in the location. The main Re:Zero characters (Subaru, Emilia, and a couple others) were there but only had a cameo appearance at the side of the hawker centre in the first and last episode to show that no time had basically passed at all in the real world. Emilia was crying in the last episode due to being heartbroken over some plot point but Subaru cheered her up.
Jul 29 2021
- Snippet: I’m pretty sure a portion of my dream took part in or involved a setting of a large tent or pavilion in the middle of a field, but I do not remember any details of the actual dreams there.
- Snippet: At some point, there was a turn-based game, with a number of other people on my “team” taking turns to help me ensure the validity of some results. For example I think there was a part where we were assembling together to check the expected value of a particular character’s skill when used on other people. These other people could move or attack/shoot but could not do both in the same turn and I was mildly annoyed at this for some reason.
- Snippet: At one point I remember copying things from a blackboard onto a book like I was in class, except I think that this was an outdoors classroom.
- Snippet: Part of the dream took place in a vaguely London-like city, and there was a crime investigation in the area, a machine set up inside a building to fire a gunshot at a wall every few minutes as cover for actual bullets being fired elsewhere, and a drunk detective who summarily ignored the decoy machine because he couldn’t hear it while drunk.
- Snippet: Then there was a racing game, with what I believe were shopping carts, around the streets of the same town. Mom was taking part in this game and I might have been too. There was some confusion or dispute over what the shopping cart was to be filled with.
- Snippet: There were different characters that I could play as/equip, with different skills, and I picked a girl that I believe was a sniper-type character but wasn’t very powerful, at least early on. Immediately after I picked her however, ratlings attacked the town (probably same town as above), with an NPC starting the event by saying “Uh.. guys? I see ratlings! They’re coming!”, and I levelled her up from level 1 to level 3 in that town defense event.
Jul 30 2021
- I think I was walking around a labyrinth-like place with 2-3 other people, which itself was probably a subset of a larger group that had split up into little groups. We came across someone or something that had a Japanese name in romaji that was actually four separate words but had been all joined together into one word due to a poor translation. I believe that this was relevant because we had to find and enter its name into a program that used a very similar UI to that of the Anime Music Quiz show name dropdown list.
Jul 31 2021
- I was part of the newspaper crew covering some sort of outdoor event in a field, although it was possible and likely that earlier in the dream, I took part in the event itself. There were many individual events or incidents that took place in that area, although I don’t remember most of them.
- One part of the dream involved kids that were trying to escape from someone or something, but when they saw one of the people (a teacher?) they were trying to escape from casually waiting for them in front of their escape route, they started talking about their escape attempt in past tense instead.
- Other snippets from this part of the dream might have included (although I don’t have context): a train, a skill that somehow was involved with an item that was long and thin, pins and needles (because I woke up at one point with them after they had penetrated into my dream too), a row of Singapore HDB-style houses, and soup.
- Later on, I was at home with Mom and woke up in the morning about half an hour or so before a Stampede-like event that I was going to visit that day, brushing my teeth and preparing myself to leave at 9:45 am. I was running a little late but knew that it was fine anyway because the event started at 9:45 but lasted for many hours after that and I had just picked the earliest possible time to give me as much buffer as possible. I brushed my teeth with a tap that was spilling out water over the lid of a large plastic storage container, and once I was done spitting out the toothpaste and rinsing, I opened the balcony door, lifted the lid of the container and tossed all the water out the door.
- The TV was on and broadcasting a pre-show for the event I was attending, and I watched two cheerleaders messing around with a basketball and a net, and then a segment where a host was naming about 20 cheerleaders from a list of about 40 that would make the cut to be in some event in the show, kind of like the Stampede Queens.
- For some reason, I had the list of cheerleaders nicknames (most of them were 2 words long) down in a notepad file, with all their names coloured, and I was copy/pasting their real names from some website and pasting them into the notepad file, and the names were being automatically coloured when I pasted them in too. I did about half of them and then realized that I could do this when I returned home, it was more important to go to the event first.
- The commentator that was announcing the cheerleaders got distracted by a male friend of hers at a table that was sitting with a couple of female friends at some point, and who tried to talk to her — she eventually called his name and said she had to continue on with the show, and he chuckled a bit and said that there were 13 more minutes to announce the names before the event started anyway and it wasn’t a big deal (discounting the fact that viewers who were watching at home might want to make their way down if their favourite girl made the cut, since he was already there).
- Apparently Mom‘s elder sister (Yi Yi, basically our “maternal grandma”) was taking classes at a community class, and Mom showed me a slip of paper with her exam results. She did fairly well in most of the classes but only got 20/100 in English, even though her English was fairly conversational, and this put her at 32/32 overall in terms of ranking in her class. I said that her marks were pretty good except for that, and at least it was just one class so she could just focus on that to bring her grade way up.
- Yi Yi visited the community college once a week, accompanied with mom, and the day happened to coincide with this day that I was headed to the Stampede-like event. Although I likely couldn’t make it this week, I asked if I could go some other week so that I could see her in going-out attire instead of my mental image of her in houseclothes, so that I would have more mental images of her just in case she passed on.
- At one point, I watched a family of three children, modelled after three of the four brothers in our current group watch anime, Uchouten Kazoku (minus the frog), walking/running down a street with tented stalls and back. The middle child, the protagonist, was running and jumping in a strange manner and at one point even ran back to the start to get an umbrella, open it, and carry it along with him, and I realized that he was doing something similar to a game where he needed to only step on shadows on the ground or he would lose. Except it wasn’t exactly just that, and there was also something about how objects and stalls in the street radiated Culture and he was trying to absorb as many Culture Points as possible, up to a maximum of 8 points per step or something, so he was trying to min-max his movement.
- Editor: Yi Yi already passed on IRL though, over a decade ago. Also, this dream took place the morning before I went out to the Heritage Festival bright and early, so that definitely influenced the content of this dream, along with the current group watch anime.
Aug 01 2021
- I remember a large, scary war where we had to defend a building against a Nazi army or something like that, and there was a counter to show how many troops each side had — we had about 3.9 million troops whereas the enemy had 3.8 million troops, but everything was up in the air for quite a while and if we had lost, then our way of life (and this would be true for all the civilians) would drastically change. We eventually won, but I had control of a unit of friends that was part of the defending force, and was trying my best to cycle them around so I wouldn’t lose any of them.
- Much later, there were two scenes where someone was waiting at a bus stop for something, and a second person came along to cheer them on, and also give them some information on when the thing they were waiting for would come, and what its shortened name was, as that was important somehow for the receipt of the item. One of the scenes had to do with a military context and the other one had to do with school, and they were scenes that happened separately from each other, so I’m not sure if the situations were connected or what the items actually were.