My Diary #234

Life

Despite Satinel's best efforts to distract me with best friend gaming time, I got a respectable chunk of the blog converted over to the new templates this week, though there's still so much more of the mountain to climb. My work log this week (and late last week) looked something like this:

Total number of pages converted (count done at the end of the night):
Thu Apr 30 - 7
Fri May 01 - 23
Sat May 02 - 33
Sun May 03 - 62
Mon May 04 - 81
Tue May 05 - 84
Wed May 06 - 98
Thu May 07 - 128
Fri May 08 - 151
Sat May 09 - 162

This is out of around 485 (486 after this post goes up) pages currently though, with about 30 more misc pages I believe that aren't posts or pages but that I also have to convert or delete or something, so things are rolling along but there's a lot more rolling to do. I managed to hit exactly 1/3 before bedtime on Saturday night/Sunday morning, though the total pages count could be off slightly. The small increment on Tuesday was because I was working on a couple of beefy pages that took a long time, plus a combination of being busy with work and going out and other maintanence-type things. It's nice to see the number slowly climbing though, and there's some meta-irony here somewhere about a chronicler chronicling herself.

I've also gotten used to a lot of the Gutenberg editor's quirks by now. The bugs are still irritating, but no more irritating than our FreshService ticketing system (local) at work, for example, which is a paid for and expensive commercial/corporate product but whose rich text editor is also crappy and full of bugs where blank lines will just jump about when I paste things in. Very amateurish. They're too busy shoving crappy AI slop that no one asked for into their product.

The process for fixing up each blog post involves creating a number of block patterns (templates) made out of groups for the posts depending on what the post contains, and then separating the content into chunks and moving each one into a group. For example, this "Life" section, with its blue header, darker-shaded background, and the "Back to Top" link just below here, is a preset pattern containing a group with those things that I can summon into existence on its own, or as part of a larger "weekly post" pattern template that I also created out of smaller patterns.

For this reason, it's easier to do related posts all together at once, so for example I've done all the We Walk Together posts already because they're all the same sort of layout and I could use short-term muscle memory to make those ones go faster together. Same for all my other travel diary series. They're all a little different from each other, since I was constantly experimenting with and evolving my technique on how to write the blog series, but each individual post was functionally identical to the others within their own parent series, so it was fairly easy to get them done all together once I figured out what was needed for the first one.

I currently have 29 different templates, two of them being full-page layout ones and the rest being modular pieces that represent sections like this. That kind of shows the complexity of the blog and the migration.

I'm super glad to have finally gotten some distance into this project though, since I've wanted to do this for a long time. And I credit Gemini with finally being the tool that allowed me to bridge the technological gap between what base WordPress is and can do out of the box, and what I needed it to do to make the transition worth it. Although now that I've started the actual heavy work, I barely touched Gemini this week. It's fulfilled its role, which was to help create the groundwork for me to work on.

My scanning has suffered greatly from my redirection of free time and effort into this blog migration project, and there's a pile of (annotated) ads and things from my mailbox over the past three weeks or so to scan. I'm sustaining myself by looking forward to the blitz of scanning that I will be able to do after the migration is done, both from this pile and also finally from the pile that I brought home from my trip, as my Carr McLean boxes and stuff that were "backordered for 4-6 weeks" 4 weeks ago can't be that far out now, right? It'll probably coincide with the end of my site migration and/or the first local scanning blitz. Then I can start sorting my trip papers, deciding which ones I want to scan and keep in an archival bag for the future, and which ones I can just scan and toss. I bought some acid-free labels from Amazon this week to write on and then paste onto my bags as well.

I'm also looking forward to giving myself some time for some sort of creative-focused venture or self-practice after the migration is done, probably something art- or music-related, but who knows if that will come to fruition or not. But it doesn't really matter since for now that's a carrot I have hanging at the finish line to look forward to.

In that linked blog post above, below the Carr McLean section, was a note that I had ordered a CD from the University of Alberta's Augustana Campus online store. I emailed them about it late last week to follow up on it since I had heard nothing, and received back a reply apologizing that they had missed it in the year-end rush. They then mailed out the CD and it's probably somewhere en route to me now. This was a bit of a relief because I had seen that some of the other items on the webstore were years old stuff that the webstore admin for some other departments just never removed, and I wasn't sure if this was one of those situations. Thankfully not, it seems.

Talking about blasts from the past, I reached my coveted At Peace with the World state on Wed, May 06 this week, something that I apparently have not done (or at least did not write about in a sufficiently blog-searchable way) since either Nov 12 2025 (I don't think I quite hit it then, though) or Jun 15 2024. It's been a while.

Canada's 2026 Census forms were also mailed out this week (local) and I completed mine when it arrived. This is apparently done every 5 years (local), and I do remember doing it a couple of times since I moved out of my parents' place back in July 2011, so that tracks -- I must have just missed it by a couple months before I moved, and then did the 2016 and the 2021 ones. I didn't find any reference to it searching my blog though, and I noted at the top of this page that My Diary #001 was back in Apr 2021... either the census came just before I started that year, or I simply forgot to mention it (or didn't think it worth mentioning) in the hectic period of trying to get my weekly blog up and running while working on my Sophia application back then. Those were the days. But seriously, how derelict of me.

I have a couple of long work meetings next week, particularly on Thursday, when I will be in the office all day, first for a departmental-wide meeting and then for a team one. I considered taking Friday or the Monday after that off, but I haven't bit on that yet. I'm also musing ideas for a couple of local trips in the province at some point this summer, either to Jasper to the west or Drumheller to the southeast, but I haven't decided on that either. I have been wistfully thinking about the fonder memories of my recent trip still, and have this longing to go back to Japan right now, but that's likely not happening until at least the early-middle part of next year at the earliest. Probably...

But I did mention last week that something from Japan arrived at my place, my fancy glass duck sauce bottle. I filled it and used it for the first time this week and it looks like this. I do like how the flecks on the glass prominently feature when it is filled with a dark liquid.

Yes, Tigey, it's very cute, but it's getting nowhere near my bed and the other ducks in your army.

I bought a couple things from Safeway this week that are worthy of a small note in my diary for me to look up again in the future. One is this toothpaste from a brand called Marvis:

Look at that tube and the valve-like cap. It's very fancy. Very extra, some might say. The tube was on the half-off shelf at Safeway Southgate, so it was only $6.49, and while that's still more expensive than regular toothpaste, I wanted to try it because I'd never seen it before, and its vintage aesthetic looked kind of neat. Plus the weird flavour. Ginger mint? Sure. The taste isn't bad, and I did not find it particularly strong, which is a good thing in this case. It is indeed far less foamy than normal toothpaste too, as Gemini had informed me while at the supermarket shelf in question.

There was no label or product information or anything on the box other than the brand of the toothpaste, so I asked Gemini about the history behind the product, and it gave me something that was along these lines (local). What it didn't tell me, and what I didn't find out until a little bit ago while doing research on this paragraph, was that the company themselves actually don't know the origins of the toothpaste and most of the details around the founder either. Or at least, they don't care to share. Instead, we get funny snippets on the website like this one (local) or this one (local).

The closest I got to "new food" this week was this drink, also bought on the same Safeway trip:

Mango carrot is not a flavour I've tried before, but at the end of the day, it's fruit juice, which isn't inherently new. Less sugar is good and being $2.19 instead of $2.49 is also good for a cheapskate like me, though. I do like diluting fruit juice into water and drinking that mix at night when I need to keep awake to finish a few more blog post migrations.

I actually went to the mall and Safeway twice this week, the first time being late in the evening on Sunday. By the time I left the mall, it was 8:40 pm, but the skies were still pretty bright. I took this picture of the sky cut in half by dark clouds and duskshine:

And then, a little bit later, a group of kids playing soccer in a nearby field while parents stood around patiently waiting for the match to end so they could ferry their kids home.

The second time was on Tuesday, for the monthly Safeway Customer Appreciation Day and their 15% off on purchases over $50 offer. My pictures from that day though were from Southgate Centre itself, as I saw two separate little areas that were cordoned off for some reason. The first being this set of benches:

And the second being this random spot on the ground outside a store:

Not quite sure why that one was cordoned off, but who am I to argue?

Tuesday also gave me a nice evening sky picture, the only one I have from the week to share. This was taken at 9:08 pm on May 05 2026.

Games

Satinel and I bought Hytale (local) on Monday, and I set up a personal dedicated server on my PC for the two of us to play on. We played it for the rest of the week, slowly exploring the randomly generated world and building a house to store all our junk while progressing through the various tiers of weapons, armour, and tools. The game is okay, basically a very early version of a Minecraft variant with far less content and no real objective or goal to chase, but fairly stable, lightweight, and more or less pleasing to play.

Or at least, playing with Satinel makes it fun, and exploring and chronicling a "new game", especially one in its early stages of production (and thus might have content or systems that don't make it into later versions) is always interesting in its own right. It's funny opening a door to see a "Work in Progress" sign staring back at us though. And a lot of the prefabs and stuff that we've found in the world seem incomplete, so we coined a term for them called OIP -- "Oooh in Progress". The game also doesn't allow us to use ellipses in chat because dot commands are reserved for admin commands, so we've resorted to using three commas for our ellipses. That's a memory we won't remember three months from now, so I wanted to note it down.

But there are only three or four tiers of ore/progression at the moment, and I think we've mostly found all the ones that have to be found, except mythril. I do really like the portal system and how we can plonk one down, connect it to one at home, and teleport back home to unload our stuff before teleporting back again to where the portal was. We still have to go back through to retreive the portal, as there's a limit as to how many can be placed in the world, but otherwise it's pretty forgiving, which makes getting around a lot more convenient and makes it feel like we're extracting all the loot back to our burgeoning chests at home base.

I also really, really like the sound effect from hearing other players (Satinel) mining ore while in a cavern, while standing a little bit away from them (Satinel). It becomes softer but an echoey effect is applied to it as well in the cavern, and it gave me strong vibes of something akin to distant construction noises. Love it.

Here are some pictures from our venture this week:

Satinel:

Me:

I wonder if she goes through character creation thinking, "This could get preserved on a blog for readers 500 years in the future to see! I better make sure I look my best. Not a hair must be out of place." I definitely don't, if that isn't obvious from my picture.

One of the entrances to our house:

One of the versions of our crafting area that got expanded and shuffled over time:

A rooftop balcony that Satinel built:

An early version of our henhouse:

A pemming:

A later version of our henhouse:

Us, out on an adventure:

Our "greenhouse":

A plushie:

And a look down the main hall of our house late Saturday evening, the last play session before my blog submission for the week:

On a more personal front, I reached the level 50 achievement on Spirit City: Lofi Sessions (local), which wraps up the 100% achievement train for that game/productivity app. I apparently started using it on and off back in Jul 2024, and it's taken me nearly 2 years to get 100% achievements on it, spurred recently by working on the blog migration (and pre-migration tasks). It took me around 181 hours.

Coincidentally, a couple of days after that, Ithya: Magic Studies (local), a productivity app in a similar vein but one that has the "main character" wandering around in a fantasy world, went on sale on Steam. That seemed like a sign from the gods to me so I picked that up and started exploring that instead. While it has some things that Spirit City does not, like a random timer that moves the character around from scene to scene, and random weather that changes over time too, it is also sorely lacking other things, like poses/activities within each scene, or a hint system on how/where to find the elementals. Although I kind of like it this way too as my finds (I find elementals sometimes by clicking back to the app and seeing them dancing around on screen) all feel like serene happenstance.

In terms of personal gaming time, what time I had in between migration sessions went towards Petit Planet, as my interest kind of ebbed a little at the start of the week and then flowed back again towards the end. My growth tree in game, which roughly coincides with the town story progression, is fully maxed now at level 10 though, so I'm not sure there's that much content left in the beta besides friendship things from slowly gifting and chatting to my neighbours every day. I guess I also haven't found three or four of the neighbours yet as well. But the town itself is done throwing me new mechanics, I think, so I spent some time terraforming it.

I also realized that I can use an archive.org link for the site instead of a local link because all my attempts at getting a good local snapshot have failed, so from now on I'm just going to do something like Petit Planet (archive) instead.

Here's a couple of humongous fish I caught this week:

Some nice things they said about me (and Tigey, my planet) in a cutscene:

And the terraforming is nowhere near done yet but I basically made tall waterfalls everywhere:

I didn't play anything other than Petit Planet, but I did download and install Neverness to Everness (local), and hope to find time to give it a bit of a shot over the next week.

Plushie of the Week #227

The crying horse, or 哭哭马 (kū kū mǎ), was a viral sensation that came out of China during the festive Chinese New Year period this year. Apparently, the horse was supposed to have a smiling face, and versions of that do exist, but a worker who was stitching the mouth onto the Year of the Horse plushie stitched it on upside down (local) on accident instead, and a bunch got created and sold via wholesale markets that way. It became a viral sensation that the public really enjoyed, and the companies leaned into it and began mass-producing it to try to keep up with demand.

The worker who made the original mistake also apparently got a decent pay bonus (local) for the next 12 years (until the next Chinese zodiac Year of the Horse). The owner of the factory which "accidentally" made the product eventually put in a trademark for it to try to fight counterfeits, and seems to have created this website (local) for it in the end as well. Or at least, at first glance, it's correctly affiliated to a Yiwu City wholesale exporter.

On a more local scale, Kel bought this for me off of Taobao when I was at her Guangzhou place, and it arrived on Mar 09 2026. It cost 19.5 yuan at the time, or $3.91 CAD, which was under even what the articles above say it was priced at. But the quality of the plushie is great and the sturdy horse's upside down smile is so adorable.

Front/side:

The words on the side of the cry cry horse there say 马上有钱, or roughly "Get Rich Immediately".

Back/side:

A close up of the snout (to help visualize how it was supposed to originally look:

And yes, Tigey can ride this steed:

Rather than sad, the horse looks judgemental and critical to me, as shown in this picture from Day 36 of my most recent travel blog:

And this one from Day 40:

Just a busybody passerby throwing concerning looks Tigey's way, y'know. "Whaaat! Another duck?! Hnnngh!"

This plushie was likely made in Yiwu City with most of the other cry cry horses, but I can't tell for sure since it has no tags, so maybe it's a good counterfeit. Hard to tell. Kel's boyfriend apparently got one off of Taobao too, but his one does look sadder because its tail was less fluffy or something like that. My one has a nice, bushy swish.

Dreams

May 07 2026

• While in Japan on vacation, I overheard two friends in an MMO I was playing talk about making a gaming company together, they already had a game plan and they were trying to decide between a list of names for their company.
• I was slightly miffed at first that they had not invited me, and felt a bit of desperation because to stay in Japan instead of going back to work would require myself to get at least $1,600 a month, and being a game developer would give me a modicum of fame too, which I apparently wanted. But I caught myself in time and noted that not only did I already had some game ideas for myself and it would be better to start my own game company with Satinel, who I knew would definitely join me if I asked. Also the name part was probably the easiest part of the entire venture.
• A game idea also came to me in my dream. It started off being a crafting survival game based in an icy field on a rectangular map, where the player would lead a team of survivors and find ways to extract unique resources like fish and berries from under the snow and ice and sell them to traders who would come by now and then.
• But then I felt the game needed to be more narrative, so it morphed into a scene that started with the player's party, led by a dwarf-like stocky captain, being trapped and under fire from an enemy mercenary army near the entrance to a labyrinth. There was also a party of archers nearby that either was part of the same company or was very friendly with the leader, and they were trying to give him cover and support so he could reach the safety of the labyrinth entrance.
• They ended up suiciding one at a time into melee range of the army to distract them, despite being archers, and although they tried retreating towards the entrance as well, none or only a few of them made it. The leader and his party did make it though, and he stood mournfully at the safe entrance and pointed out the dead allies that were visible from there, saying that he had helped recruit and train this and that person.
• In the end, he set all the corpses, as well as some wooden barricades, ablaze to cause a blockade and force the enemy army away and give his party time to take refuge and set up a base inside the labyrinth before the army could regroup and invade it. However, this cutscene also showed at least two enemy commanders running past the smoke and into the deeper part of the labyrinth.
• The game then would turn into somewhat of a mix of a base-building, scavenging, and crafting game, although it would necessitate being hidden and being mobile as well as the invading army would send scouts in to find the player over time, forcing the player deeper into the labyrinth. The two enemy commanders inside the labyrinth would also act as bosses for the player to later stumble across and defeat too.
• Back in the dream world, I went to visit Kel and we walked towards a meeting place where we could sit with Jon and chat. As we passed a classroom, we saw a newscaster lady broadcasting a news report using the teacher's blackboard as the backdrop for her video camera, and Kel went in and stepped in front of the camera to say hi to the surprised girl, interrupting her broadcast briefly as the girl smiled and greeted her, then gently shooed her off the camera stage.
• I asked Kel why she kept doing this, as apparently she had done this in another recent forgotten dream as well. She said that it was to make the broadcast more entertaining for the viewers.
• We met up with Jon in some place similar to a family restaurant, and sat down to chat. I tried to explain the game to them but could not describe it very well, and Kel kept asking how it was different from a free flash game that we had apparently played in the past, even though that game lacked most of the mechanics and any sort of story and was a very barebones survival game.

May 10 2026

• In the late afternoon while on an excursion with my class to a foreign city, I took the train station by myself to a stop where the first level of a large dungeon, that our class was going to complete in groups at the same time, was located, and I soloed it myself, which locked me out from redoing that stage of the dungeon for points with everyone else.
• I then went back to the train station to sit down on a chair there and wait for Ronnie, who was our class's teacher and who I knew would soon come by. I sat two seats away from a tall guy that I didn't recognize, and after a bit, a Caucasian boy with blonde hair who looked similar to Julian from RSJP or an acquaintance from my Vernon Barford days sat down in between of us, greeted the guy on his left, and then greeted me as well.
• I greeted him back and mentioned after the other person left that it was such a random surprise that he knew both of us even though we didn't know each other. I told my neighbour that I was waiting for Ronnie, and he helped me keep an eye out for him until his actual arrival.
• Eventually Ronnie came, and I chatted to him. I casually and somewhat defiantly told him that I had gone and completed the first zone on purpose, because I didn't like the idea of doing the group skit that Ronnie had told us we needed to do in or after the dungeon.
• He didn't seem too mad about it, but told me to tell the rest of the class myself. So I started a group call with them, as they were all apparently visiting a room in a hospital somewhere. I told them that I had completed the first level of the dungeon that we were going to do tomorrow, and there were some groans, with Melbourne, who was one of the people on the other side of the video call, saying that he wished they had not introduced a score component to the dungeon as it was going to make people like that competitive.
• I told them to let me explain why I did it first, and I said that I did it to avoid the group skit component of the class, as this effectively turned the dungeon into solo homework rather than a group project. The groans turned into oohs as the students contemplated this revelation. Soon after, I met up with them in person back at our hotel, and also offered to help anyone who needed help through their first time in the dungeon as I led them up the stairs in single file to our rented floor.
• The floor we were all on had a bunch of rooms and beds that could be moved around. A middle-aged woman had moved her bed into the room where I was, and had been crocheting plushies and putting them on a chair. I took three of them and hugged them as one of my other friends played with another, and then I put them back onto the chair and moved Tigey there as well, while I exchanged a few words of pleasantry with the woman.
• I then saw that the woman was trying to drag her twin-sized bed back to her room, so I assisted her by picking up the other end of the bedframe. We went out into the hall and manouvered the bed into her room, which was apparently being used by her room partner for a small party with a couple of his friends. There was music and snacks, but they cleared out as well when the woman moved back in.
• The two of them turned off the lights and went to sleep in their separate beds, and that triggered a cascading effect of people returning to their room and bumping other people out to their own rooms. I went back to my room and prepared to go to bed myself as well. While in bed, I received a text message from someone who I knew to be a somewhat affluent guy in another class, thanking me for what I did.
• I was confused until he also sent me a picture showing a quote from me that someone had made, that basically said that I had run the dungeon's first level to cancel the skit for everyone because another person in my class, who was a friend of his, did not like the skit component. Basically correct, but with an "on his behalf" added to the end of the line and with the quote plastered over the guy's picture. Someone was making a meme out of it or something. I shrugged and said that he was welcome but I had actually mostly done it for my own benefit.