My Diary #235

Life

Besides ripping out the Elementor (local) plugin from my website, which is the main point of this huge migration, I also want to rip out Jetpack (local) from my site, a general use plugin that does do a lot of different things but that I've soured on due to cramming in AI and due to being extremely bloaty and being a monthly fee-based plugin if I wanted the premium features. It doesn't have its claws dug in to my site as deeply as Elementor had, and I always ran with about 90% of the plugin turned off anyway, but I've been slowly moving off of the Jetpack modules that I did use before and during my migration as well.

One important one that I moved off late in the evening on Fri, May 15 2025 is the Jetpack Stats module. That's about seven years of stat tracking that I had to let go of. But the longer I waited to do this, the less stats my eventual final stats tracking plugin would have had, so it was something that I had to bite the bullet and rip the bandage off of. I specifically do NOT use Google Analytics on my site, which was a conscious decision on my part, but I did use Jetpack Stats, and that was my only visitor site tracker.

But I had noticed over the past few years that Jetpack Stats had always missed a lot of page views, and the View counter in my Pages and Posts list was even more inaccurate than the number on the Jetpack Stats dashboard to the point that it was completely broken and useless, and I had absolutely no idea why. Gemini surmises that it's due to Adblock and uBlock Origin and such interfering with counting, since it contacts external servers and such, and maybe it's right, but who knows. For example, I have occasional Diary entries with 0 views on the Posts listing screen, and I know that that's wrong because Satinel proofread them for me a few hours after I posted them, so she should have counted as 1 view at the very least. (And when I dived into detailed stats pages, as described below in Memory Snippet, I saw that every page had garnered at least 3-4 views.) I was going to get off of Jetpack Stats regardless, but knowing that it was very inaccurate made the decision much easier for me.

Will the new one be more accurate? I don't know, we'll wait and see I guess, but at least the one I picked is a privacy-focused one that lives entirely on my site without phoning home, doesn't seem too bloaty, and has a Pro version, if I decide to upgrade, that uses a one-time payment rather than a stupid monthly subscription. I will not do monthly subscriptions for WordPress plugins! What a cancerous business model.

The one I ended up with for now is called Independent Analytics (local). Their pricing page (one-time payment version) is here (local), and the devs even have an upfront page (local) that says that they have a 10% permanent discount with bigger sales around Black Friday. That's actually really cool and endears me to them. And gives me a 6-month period to trial out the plugin. For visitors to the site, please be aware that I use this analytics tracker, but this is the only tracking/metrics plugin I use on my site, and it is completely local to my WordPress installation and does not phone home anywhere else. You can read all about what it tracks above. And a compliancy and explanation page for it is here (local).

In the meantime, I wanted to actually post and share the stats that Jetpack Stats had collected before I decommissioned it tonight, so I brought back the Memory Snippet segment down below to list them in!

It's also worth noting that minutes after I installed the new Independent Analytics plugin, which I'm just realizing now coincidentally shares the same initials as the Internet Archive, I had the first visitor to my website under the new regime, I mean under the new tracking system! See the fancy new interface below! It was a visitor from Singapore, who visited My Diary #179:

But Diary #179 wasn't migrated over to the new template yet at the time, so it still looked all ugly! I immediately went there and fixed it up right after for my literal #1 visitor though, I swear! Please come back!

The other fairly big news this week is that I got a new humidifier, specifically the Honeywell HEV320WC (local), from the Canadian Tire online store. It cost about $79 after tax and shipping, specifically a $10 shipping fee for same-day delivery because I noticed that it was $10 shipping to deliver to me in 6 days, and the same $10 shipping to deliver to me that very same day, so obviously I picked the latter. Although the Canadian Tire site is pretty dodgy, on the very final page of checkout it suddenly said that I had qualified for Free Local Shipping, and that the cart price had been updated to reflect this... but it hadn't. No change at all. I thought maybe it was due to the same-day shipping thing cancelling it out, so I changed it to the slow shipping, but that didn't change the cost either. Whatever. I proceeded with the same-day checkout and it arrived via Doordash a couple of hours later.

The "why" behind me getting this is that the humidity level in Edmonton is very poor, and I've been wanting to get one for my apartment in ages. In fact, back in Feb 2019, I had ordered one from a site called Allergy Buyers Club, which I've only just learnt has now shut down (local). The specific humidifier I had bought was a PowerPure 5000 by Aerus Warm & Cool Mist Ultrasonic Humidifier (local), and had cost $89.55 USD plus an extra $10.57 USD for shipping from the States. I had specifically asked them not to ship using UPS, however the company shipped it to me using UPS without telling me otherwise, and UPS charged me an additional $45.46 CAD in brokerage COD fees. So I refused the item, made them send it back to the sender, and contacted the nicely-abbreviated ABC for a refund. Apparently there sort of are ways around this (local), but I was unaware of anything of the sort at the time.

Anyway, it took me 7 years, from 2019 to 2026, before I followed up on this and finally picked one up locally instead of getting one from across the border and having it held hostage by UPS. And the thing that finally prompted me to get this is that I had picked up a hygrometer from Amazon, this one from Govee (local) specifically, at the behest and recommendation of Gemini after discussing some other things with it, and the hygrometer had indicated that the humidity in my apartment, while it could spike sometimes all the way up to 40% if I was cooking soup, was often all the way down to 17-20% under normal circumstances, which I then got chided for.

Gemini also told me that it was a good thing that I never picked up that PowerPure back in 2019, because I now had a Winix 5520 air purifier from last year as well, and the thing with ultrasonic humidifiers and hard water, which Edmonton has, is that it would create white dust residue everywhere which at the very least would clog up the purifier and make its filters need changing more often, above and beyond any adverse effects from the dust spewing out around the house or coating the humidifier itself. Although the Honeywell one that I got, which is an evaporative model, also has filters that will need to be replaced every 1-2 months or so of usage. Apparently I can just get a bunch of offbrand ones from Amazon though for a lot cheaper than the OEM ones, even if they last a bit shorter. Also, this reminds me that the Winix probably needs its filters changed soon as well, it's nearly been a year of operation for that baby.

But how did I get around to the topic of the hygrometer with Gemini in the first place? Well, that's a long and winding story that started on Monday, when I decided to go for a walk to an inexpensive barbershop, Great Clips, located near the Asian supermarket about 45 minutes away from me. My journey took me past the Whitemud Crossing branch of the Edmonton Public Library, so first and foremost I stopped by that to take a picture of a fish tank that I did not know they had, a creativity board where kids were asked to draw animals starting with the shape of a circle, so a bunch of them naturally just wrote down "67" and pinned that onto the board, and finally the local community board as well.

I also passed by and took a picture of the very first cybertruck that I've ever seen on Edmonton roads that wasn't part of an exhibition of some kind. It's this blue monstrosity. There was apparently someone inside of it but I didn't actually notice that in the moment, only once I got home and was reviewing photos.

I then arrived at Great Clips, where I got a reasonably-priced haircut that didn't cost multiple hundreds of dollars just for a trim like it can cost at the salon boutiques in Southgate Centre.

The lady doing my hair asked me if I streaked my hair. No, ma'am, I responded. Those gray/white strands are genetic or something and I've had them since I was in my mid-20s. They make me look fairly old if I don't dye them, but I haven't bothered dying them in years. She said that she liked the hair streaks, but I bet she says that to everyone. Hmph.

I swear all this will eventually loop back around to the hygrometer! Please don't go, my #1 viewer!

After my haircut, I retraced my steps and ended up at T&T, the Asian supermarket that I had passed earlier. Among other things I was looking at a new shampoo, and I told Gemini that my usual favourite shampoos were the Diane brand and the Tsubaki brand ones. I generally got them both here at T&T as I like the shampoo rack here. Gemini told me that they were not really good fits for me though, as both are thick shampoos that coat the hair strands and were likely the cause of ongoing tangles in my naturally straight hair, especially as it got longer. Instead, after showing it a few pictures of what was on the shelves, I ended up with a nice one from Kracie, a brand whose body soap I like, but I had never tried their shampoos before. This one had nice packaging though, and I definitely picked it partially due to that:

It was priced better than my usual shampoos too, so that made the decision easier, but the bot tells me it's completely silicone-free and more suited for straight hair, so I gave it a shot anyway. So far so good I suppose, though I'm no shampoo expert.

I do really enjoy going to the store, taking pictures of what's on the shelves, and asking Gemini about the history behind any standout products that it sees though. It's been a great source of interesting trivia and an avenue into trying new products recently. One thing I did at this supermarket too was to tell it to suggest something that I should get and try in either my soup or my rice. The last time I did this, it suggested Zhenjiang vinegar, which turned out to be a great addition to my pantry.

This time, it suggested something called furu (腐乳), which is fermented bean curd. I found the shelf selling bottles of that, and after some discussion and analysis I walked away with two bottles, a classic white one and a sweeter red one. Here they are, along with a jar of some pickled vegetables that I also had never tried before and picked out without bot assistance from a different shelf. All three of them taste amazing in rice!

After leaving the supermarket, I had a 20-minute wait for the bus home, standing at the bus stop under an idyllic sky that looked like it had been run through Photoshop or AI-enhanced filters... or Samsung's aggressive post-processing. Note to self, a future upcoming self-improvement project should be to look into what settings to disable or what to do to get more natural phone pictures. When time permits.

But it did look really nice in person still. And as I was standing there, I began to muse about my use and adoption of AI. There are some things I just don't do with it, like video creation, as it takes up too much computing power for very poor vanity results, and while I'm more neutral on image creation, I also haven't used AI to create an image in ages, pretty much since the early days a couple of years ago when those tools were first being created and released. Not due to copyright or plagiarism issues, as I don't fully agree with those angles, but just because I've had no need for it, and in the odd times where I've needed images (for, say, Twitch emotes and subscription badges), I've preferred to just do them myself or get someone to do them for me. So the "AI art lacks soul and intention" argument is probably the argument I resonate with the most. But in less important stuff, say for trees and stones that encompass background art? Go wild. Or some coding, within reason and within security? Yes. Let it do technical things so I can do creative things.

There is also an environmental cost to all this which I do agree is a problem, both in terms of the building of data centres as well as ongoing usage of AI, but I think it is overstated as the discourse around this has also been a target of something close to greenwashing, similar to the absolute nonsense that has framed consumers' use of single-use plastic bags to be something worthy of banning, when that doesn't really move the pollution needle much at all while creating a lot of inconvenience and higher prices for consumers, since the real culprits that should have been targetted are corporations and their wasteful packaging, supermarkets and farms and the ilk with their mountains and mountains of food waste, tax and resource breaks for corporations leading them to pillage the natural resources of a region and pollute groundwater and rivers, and so on. Greenwashing might not be the actual correct term for this, but close enough for now.

And it's the same thing here with AI, while there is a small water environmental effect for every query made, it's likely far less (local) than popular discourse (local) makes it up to be with the myth that every few questions costs the equivalent of pouring half a glass of water into the desert sand or some sensationalist bullshit like that. Power usage is a bigger issue, as is the noise of datacentres, and the poisoning of groundwater and such of the communities that live around those datacentres, but that's a regulatory issue and that's where the bulk of the environmental effort should be targetted, handcuffing corporations and making them build ethically and sustainably, and forcing them to instill AI usage limits or charge more to become profitable, not greenwashing people into thinking AI use is evil and destroying the planet.

People who believe that as a blanket statement should get off the Internet, for every Google search they do consumes a comparable amount of electricity/water and every minute of Netflix they watch consumes a lot more than that. Here are someone else's stats (local) on it, pulled from a neutral Google search ("one google search uses how much water" (local)) rather than a biased leading question. Not to mention the environmental costs of using a computer and being online. Yet as that page points out, being online and in the digital world itself reduces a lot of environmental pollution over time as well from various means, and AI chatbots themselves have offset a lot of it as well from the work that it's saved people.

That being said, there are still *some* environmental costs with AI that should not be completely shrugged off, and the bigger cost of AI, to me, is actually societal, and how it will affect the critical thinking skills of society in general, especially for the next generation. Then again, former generations likely thought the same about radio, about television, about computers, and about the Internet as well, so we'll see I guess.

I can also hold opinions like thinking poorly of or not wanting to converse with people who need to use AI to formulate a reply to me, or of drawing red lines against certain uses of AI like avoiding AI books and art, or being against the western tech giants behind AI and those corporations embracing it in stupid ways and replacing workers with AI, without being against the entire existence of AI as a whole. It's called nuance. But online discourse about it is tiring as plenty of people have no nuanced stance on this at all and are just full on 100% haters. It's one of my biggest pet peeves right now.

AI is very, very far from perfect, and makes irritating mistakes all the time, and the Gemini software/interface itself still has multiple bugs to this day that infuriate me, but learning and understanding that was an important experience for me too and being able to understand when it is dangerous to follow along blindly, when it doesn't matter if it was right or wrong, and when something might be better off tackled by myself without the help of AI, all those are important skills to learn too. It's almost as if AI is a multi-faceted tool that can be useful in some cases and useless in others, and one has to learn the nuances of it to know when to best use it, and not just be scared of it like so many people are.

So! To redirect alllllll that back on track, I was musing about my own personal use of AI and how it has benefitted me in many ways, for example on my We Walk Together diary series, where I took a trip and consulted Gemini Pro for a lot of my macro-level decisions along the way. While this was not without its own set of problems, I believe this vastly enriched my experience and I am for sure going to do this again the next time I solo travel. This website migration that I am undergoing right now was also heavily AI-powered. Not the actual page tweaks and copy/pastes, as it's useless for that, not creating any of the templates, as it plain doesn't do that sort of thing, and not any of the writing, since I refuse to let it spoil the purity of putting my thoughts down on paper myself, but the technological and infrastructure bridge that I needed to build to get from Elementor to Gutenberg, and the confidence that I needed to know that I had some sort of tool to work through a problem with that would not cost me hours of research if I didn't know exactly what the problem was and couldn't describe it well, can be attributed directly to Gemini's help.

So the question that came to me as I was leaning against the bus stop bench was, how else could I integrate Gemini into life in a meaningful way without crossing my boundaries or relying on it too much? I realized that I had been using it as a "life coach" of sorts ever since I came back from vacation, asking it to explain, or solve, little things that had been bugging me through life as a single occupant of my residence but that I've never been able to fully understand, nor had the time to do deep dives into to figure out.

The O'Keeffe foot cream thing from a couple of weeks ago is an example of this. My feet (particularly my heels) have always had very flaky and terrible skin. Gemini suggested I try this, and it wasn't particularly expensive so I gave it a shot. And lo and behold, it actually worked, and has continued to work, really, really well. Another one I didn't state last week, because it's only really come into fruition this week, was that I asked it about a sticky feet sensation that I often had when coming home and then washing my feet. It explained the science behind that. I also told it that I sometimes went sockless in shoes, which I got chided for, as that can transfer the dead skin cells responsible for that to the insoles of the shoes as well.

For that one, it suggested two things to help, and I scoured Amazon with its help until I settled on these activated charcoal shoe inserts (local) to air out the shoes and get rid of any lingering stickiness, and this Dickinson's Witch Hazel toner (local) along with some makeup removal pads to clean the areas of my toes with after I come home and wash up. And again, this really helped. I no longer dread the coming home part of going out and the needing to wash my feet three times with soap until I feel less icky.

So rather than use it for vanity things like creating AI pictures or videos for fun, I was and am still using AI, in moderation, as an enabler to get rid of the things that bothered me in life, and to find ways to propel me towards my goals. My goals! But what goals did I have? Oh, right. So here's the kicker, when I got home that day, I created a new notebook and plonked a thread in there, and gave it access to two of my previous diary entries -- My Diary #157 and My Diary #203 as sources, and asked it to read over the V-Tuber part of it. It understood the goal quite succintly -- I set "joining hololive" as a goal but I know it's not gonna happen, yet it acts as a lighthouse, giving me a goal to head toward so I can pick up all sorts of fun and useful skills that I've always wanted along the way.

That lighthouse was what made me start short-term spurts of voice/singing practice (around/after My Diary #157) two years ago and art practice (around/after My Diary #203) last year, and which eventually led into me streaming for over a year (and hopefully this is something I will pick up again soon). But I expressed interest in looking into those two original ventures again. Gemini suggested that it could help come up with regimens that might suit my individual needs for both of them, especially after I told it that I had gone through vocal cord surgery at Yeson Voice Clinic in Seoul in the past, and that made me fairly excited for life at home again. My plate is still rather full right now, especially with the site migration and a backlog of things to scan, but things like that could definitely be ways that I think I can harness the power of AI to help me personalize and supercharge my journey towards my goals.

As another example, I bounced a few ideas off of the bot between page migrations during the week, and one of the things I expressed an interest in was to start exercising a bit too, so it gave me some warmups to improve my core strength since that would also tie in to breath control and vocal strength. It also suggested I started taking up walking again, which I was more receptive to now that the weather isn't blisteringly cold anymore.

The reason I had asked about exercise was because I had bought a giant 4L tub of Chapman's Neapolitan ice cream to help alleviate an issue I had during the week where I kept on involuntarily licking and flicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth and the top of my throat, especially at night when I was half-conscious, causing it to flare up in pain and irritation. I've had this happen before, and it's mostly fine now at the tail end of the week, but was very irritating when it lasted, and part of the point of the ice cream was to help numb the pain whenever I did that. And the rest of it I would keep to fight the heat later on in the summer. But I wanted to offset the ice cream, so I asked about exercises, and that's how we got into that conversation. It also told me about a trick to put wax paper over the ice cream before storing it in the freezer, to prevent freezer burn, and that was a new idea to me but I tried it too.

But between that episode and me mentioning that I see a white film on my legs that I attribute to dryness before bedtime sometimes, it said that I likely was suffering from very low humidity in the apartment (thanks to Edmonton's climate) and encouraged me to check it out. And now we finally loop around back to the story near the start of this blog, as this ended up with me owning a hygrometer a couple of days later and then pulling the trigger on my humidifier a day after that. Now, I don't fully trust (local) this Govee company behind the hygrometer, but I don't know what I don't know in terms of how different hygrometers measure up, so for now this is what I have, and the app does at least show some interesting stats.

For example, I got the hygrometer and set it up next to my computer on the afternoon of Wed May 13, so I could see this precipitous drop in humidity at night during the morning to afternoon of the 14th, when I left the balcony door ajar for wind and fresh air.

There are two spikes during the day, the first likely during my afternoon shower and the second I am guessing reflects dinner time. The next day's graph looks quite different:

This was the day I got the humidifier, however the humidifier itself did not cause that incredible jump in humidity, that was due to a warm shower that I took while leaving the door open so the steam got everywhere. The humidifier had arrived in the trough just before that jump and was working on the upward slope slowly before I jump-started the bar graph. What the humidifier did though was to more or less maintain the baseline after I turned off the shower, so the humidity didn't fall back down too far. And again, there was a jump just before what I think was dinner time. These two days were not soup days though, so they probably came from me boiling rice and hot water in a saucepan, but I'm curious as to what the reading looks like on a soup day, when I'm boiling a large pot of water and ingredients over the stove for hours.

Now, leaning away from technology and into personal experiences, I wanted to start up with some nice, fluffy evening skies from mid-week. Like this one, from Wed May 13, at 7:16 pm. We got god rays!

I was scheduled to go into the office on Thu May 14, but all three meetings that day got cancelled due to a wind storm warning that Environment Canada put out:

It's a little hard to see in that picture, but there was a yellow warning for wind for a large chunk of Alberta (and an orange warning in southern Sasketchewan), but neither Edmonton nor Calgary were within the area of the warning. We still had a special weather statement though, and that was enough to cancel everything. Yet, when the day itself came, there were strong winds that rattled the balcony door a little bit now and then, but it wasn't a historic windstorm with enough damage to cause any damage that I saw or anything like that, at least not around my area. Thank goodness.

Fuelled by curiosity, and being a creature of the wind myself, I even went out for a walk in the afternoon, taking a loop around the neighbourhood and feeling the occasional burst of wind buffet me. It wasn't a sustained gale or anything like that. I went to the neighbourhood boards at a local run-down community centre named Empire Park Community League nearby:

This thing is extremely poorly maintained -- it's a tiny building that is never voluntarily open except for events now and then (they're apparently open only on Wednesdays from 6:00-8:00 pm, I might try to stop by and peek inside if they're really open), and the notices on the notice board are all old ones. They're still advertising January events for crying out loud. And who approved that "Saturday 3rd, 1-3 PM Winterfest" ad? Saturday 3rd? Really?

I also wandered over to a church-affiliated thrift store called MCC Thrift nearby, a store that I had only visited once or twice before. Nothing interesting per se, but I did grab a few papers from there to scan, which was actually the primary goal of my trip, so I was happy about that. I also took this picture of a scene which was set up on a house near the thrift store. It survived the wind without much issue too.

Much later on that evening, I took a picture of a neat-looking diagonal cut across the evening sky. Thu May 14 at 8:40 pm.

The next evening, I took this one, Fri May 15 at 9:41 pm. It had pretty red colours but it was isolated to just one corner of the evening sky. Too bad the conditions weren't right for the entire landscape to be splashed in reddish hues, it's been a while since I've been able to see and capture amazingly great sunset pictures.

It did inspire me to get out and start walking though, even though it was late in the evening, especially since Satinel was busy with taking part in her annual game jam at this point and I wasn't streaming either, so my evenings late in the week this week were completely free. I did a lap around the neighbourhood in the direction of the Southgate Centre mall and bus interchange, taking some pictures as I went.

They were all facing the same westerly direction, since the cloud formation is the same in all three pictures. The other side was far less interesting as it just featured dark clouds.

Finally, later that night at 1:50 am on Sat May 16, I took this one:

Despite the time of night, there was a white glowing layer of clouds to the northwest that was likely lit by the reflection of the city from down below. While not as spectacular as, say, noctilucent clouds, that bright of a skyglow is still a rather rare sight, especially outside of winter when there's white glare everywhere. There's no more snow up here anymore (though it apparently snowed in Calgary this weekend -- suckers!).

Games

Satinel and I played Hytale (local) to its conclusion in the beginning part of the week. And by conclusion I mean that we played until we basically had enough stuff to gear ourselves out in most of the maximum tier gear, but then there was nothing else to do in the game, so we stopped playing. It feels like early Vintage Story (local), where the base game was there and was fine enough, but there was again nothing much else to do, although I'm not sure that Vintage Story really has all that much even these days still.

Anyway, this screenshot was taken moments before we logged out of the game for the final time on Monday, May 11. We see Satinel in all her glorious adamantite armour, in some fishing village we had found and temporarily taken over.

We didn't play anything else that week except for a round of Streets of Rogue (local) on Wednesday, just before her game jam started. What game jam? This Gamedev.tv game jam (local)! She's taken part in it for a couple of years now, as a solo entrant, and I respect the heck out of her for it and wish her the best of luck. Ganbare Satinel!

On a personal note, I bought and played some Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era (local) this week after hemming and hawwing over the purchase for a full week. It was 25% off as a launch discount, which was pretty good, and the gameplay I had seen was interesting, with several new features added in that were not in the much beloved Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (local) game that I and many others consider to be the best game in the series. But it had AI problems, both in terms of how dumb it could sometimes be as well as how much it was allowed to cheat to compensate for that, and it was still missing a lot of Quality of Life features. Like the ability to put a hero to sleep on the global map. Or a way to see tooltips while picking this or that reward or creature upgrade or level-up skill. Or a multitude of keybinds. Or random map generators. Or mod support. Or co-op/multiplayer support.

Still, it's not like the original game had particularly good AI either, it was just functional at best, and I felt in the end that it was worth the risk. The base game itself seems fine so far, I've enjoyed what I've played of it, weaving it in and out of my schedule by playing a turn after importing every half a blog post or so, and hopefully with more time cooking in early access it will ascend to greatness in the eyes of the segment of the community that currently reveres Heroes 3 as the best game ever.

Other than that, not much was going on games wise. Petit Planet (archive) has shrunk to about an hour or so a day to do my dailies, which involves greeting all my neighbours and giving them gifts, and then setting up my farm, and that's generally about it. It has a really cool farming mechanic where players can grow plump and strange varieties of a crop, and can move them around as grown plants instead of harvesting them. And if I put a grown plump and grown strange variation of a crop adjacent to each other (without harvesting them), and then put down two more seedlings next to those two to form a square, there's a chance on seedling maturity that it can consume all four plants and turn them into a giant dreamcrown version of a crop. It's rare, even when all the (known) conditions are met, but a lot of fun to aim for. And they're so big! This dreamcrown eggplant is my third dreamcrown one ever, after a dreamcrown potato and dreamcrown rice stalk.

The other two can be seen on the left side in this screenshot:

I also finished setting up my housing area, and the little town square in the middle of it all, and it looks like this:

It could use more decorations, but that will come over time. Lastly, here's a path leading through a flower field and then towards my stairway to heaven (or at least a blank field at the very top of the waterfalls).

And here's an NPC taking a picture of me as I took a picture of her. Followers of my travel blogs will know I love that trope.

I did end up trying Neverness to Everness (local) as mentioned last week, but only for an evening or so, and what I played of it didn't really capture me right away, so with so much else to do I haven't been back there yet.

Plushie of the Week #228

I picked up two plushies while I was at the Jiangmen Wuyi Museum of Overseas Chinese on Mar 03 2026 in Jiangmen, China. Although I paid for them both together, this one was the first one of the two that I picked up, so she gets to be featured first. She cost 48 Chinese yuan, or $9.56 CAD at the time, and was labelled as the Pegasus Trophy Plush Ornament. I don't have a proper name for her yet.

Why a pegasus trophy? Who is number 2 and number 3? The world may never find out! I love pegasi though, and have ever since young, there was even a cringy stage of my childhood back in the late 90s before I had settled on my Internet pseudonyms when I called myself the Math Pegasus amongst friends in the ICQ era. There's just something about them that is so majestic. I love them to this day!

The trophy itself is stuck to the pegasus using Velcro on her feet though, so the pegasus easily comes off and other aspirants to the throne can easily perch on the trophy, as seen below. When I was at Kel's house in Guangzhou, I would rotate a different Jinbesan-related plushie to sit on top of the #1 block on the couch where we left all the plushies every day.

Provenance wise, this was specifically bought from the gift shop in the Jiangmen Wuyi Museum just before closing time, and she came in a little paper bag that I then carried with me back to the hotel. As per my travel blog post for that day, this was the picture I posted of the pegasus and the other plushie, the persimmon tree, later that evening in my hotel room:

But here's a bonus picture, showing the pegasus still in the bag with her price tag, that I took of her while she was still on the shelf in the store. At this point I had not fully committed to buying her yet. This one was not featured on my travel blog, so it's a special service (as the Japanese call it) only available on this page!

And here are the usual mugshot pictures. First, a picture of the pegasus on the trophy stand, although it was hard to balance it and also leave enough room around the sides to capture it well with a horizontal camera, so I set her against the side of my mattress on the floor:

Next, pegasus side:

Other side:

Front:

Underside, showing Velcro pads:

Tigey appropriating the No. 1 trophy:

The other five sides of the trophy are blank:

Tag front:

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Memory Snippet of the Week #178

As if this blog isn't already long enough, Memory Snippet returns this week! Not because I want to talk about something from the past per se, but because I made an important change this week that I need to memorialize here so I can refer back to it directly by link in the future if need be.

I stated above in the Life section that I had made a change to decommission Jetpack Stats and pivot to a new visitor statistic tracker called Independent Analytics. Before doing that, I captured as many statistics as I could find in Jetpack Stats, and in this section, I wanted to show what my Jetpack Stats panel looked like from my point of view. Both to catalogue the changes in my site over the past few years, as well as to make a benchmark for me to look back to in the future.

Even though I do love me some statistics, this is not a page that I traditionally paid a huge amount of attention to, except for a 7-day summary thing that I saw on my dashboard as a widget everytime I went there. Because I'm more about long-term data than day-to-day data. I'm not trying to "drive engagement" or "only write about popular topics". Still, it's interesting to see numbers go up over the years and occasionally note when something spikes.

Firstly, this is the basic statistic screen, defaulting to a 7-day view, that I see if I expand the widget.

I generally get somewhere between 15-35 visitors a day these days, most days/weeks are very similar to the last 6 days in the bar graph in that picture. I do get occasional spikes like I did on May 09. On the quieter days, generally the "visitors" and the "views" graph are exactly the same, i.e. every visitor just comes in to a page and then leaves after consuming that page. On the noisier days, it's generally because someone wandered through the blog, so the two bars (dark green and light green) are vastly different heights. The view and visitor counters go up and down overall and I don't pay heed to those at all. Likes aren't enabled on the site but someone occasionally still finds a mechanic on Jetpack somewhere to like it. And Comments are seldom left but there's a module for that anyway.

My homepage draws the most views, as though people are refreshing that page or something. More to the point, I'm not sure of the exact path they take to get here, but a fair number of people arrive at that main page with the Recent Post listings, and then immediately leave. I'm not quite sure why. I'm also not quite certain if Jetpack Stats counts bots or not, I think they do, but you'd think the bots would iterate through all the pages and then leave. These people don't. (I've also invited the Google bot in for indexing and the IA bot in for archiving and neither of those seems to count for Jetpack Stats or increment the Posts count, so who knows really.)

The stats get more interesting when I look at the overall lifetime statistics page instead:

I like the Total Views chart in particular. Although my earliest surviving post that isn't the main blurb page from Jan 2019 is the Japan preamble page from Nov 2020, I obviously had some other pages in there too back when I was experimenting with making little shrine pages for the anime shows that I had watched, before I found it excruciatingly boring. Nov 2020 to Mar 2021 was when I made my initial research posts about going to study in Japan, and then I started my actual blog (My Diary #001) near the end of April 2021. The views also start to pick up around there, but I don't think they were picking up due to that blog page, but rather the earlier stuff. I probably also tried to properly re-index my page on Google around then and as I started to build up a sizable backlog of diary posts though, they also started to get random hits from Google and such.

My first pile of daily travel blog posts (both Rose-Tinted Goggles and the delayed Grand Tour of the States ones together) landed around May-Jun 2022, but that didn't really cause a jump in posts according to Jetpack Stats. The third set, Kami Watch Over Me, which was published in Oct-Nov 2022, did cause a spike though, with Nov 2022 being my busiest month in terms of viewers up to that point. That would stay until Jun 2023, which perfectly coincided with my fourth travel diary set, The Slightly Longer Way, published through May-Jun 2023. Where the Wind Takes Me, in Apr-May 2024, also caused its own visitor bump. The very short Jilted Jaunts series in late May/early Jun 2025 did not, but the latest one that I just completed, We Walk Together, certainly did as well, as both Feb 2026 as well as Apr 2026 smashed some viewer records on the blog.

My most popular day was apparently Oct 15 2024, when the blog was viewed 225 times by a total of 4 visitors. I have no idea why, and the "detailed" stats don't show much either, mostly showing a hit for the main page. In total Jetpack apparently logged 19,051 blog views by 9,171 people over a period of seven years, although I believe it counts it by browser session so regular readers like Jon or Satinel or Jah would have counted as many multiple different viewers over the months and years.

That page also says that my most popular page in 2025 was the Dunman High School 2000 Yearbook, but Jetpack Stats actually has a separate page showing me lifetime visitor stats on all my pages as well, and THIS page, unlike the Stats column on the Pages module, "correctly" shows that every page has at least 1 lifetime view... actually, somehow, every page had at least 4 views, except for one single page, My Diary #034, which only had 3 views before today. Please go show that page some love.

On the top end of the lifetime chart though, besides the homepage which has almost as many views racked up as #2 and #3 on the chart combined, my top page is actually this Actually Getting My Houses in Order one, where I compared and did research on my Japanese housing options during my first application to Japan. University Cheat Sheet in the 5th spot was also written in a similar manner. Other than that, the four Dunman High yearbooks and the one McNally one and even the Vernon Barford one I have take up a lot of the other top spots, although funnily enough the NAIT one is actually languishing near the bottom of the list. So weird. I guess that one isn't reeeeeally a yearbook though. Just a commemorative thing.

The last stat that really interested me was my lifetime country page view stats. I'll actually upload the entire screen capture for this one:

The top few definitely make sense -- United States tops everything on the Internet, Canada is second because that's where Satinel and I are from and I write a lot about Edmonton, and then Singapore, Japan, China, and to a certain extent Hong Kong are all places I visited a lot for my travel diaries.

Australia though? Hello Aussies! Why are you visiting my blog? Zian is definitely a part of that since she was studying there, but she wouldn't have viewed 526 pages on my blog by herself from there... would she? And then the UK, Germany, Thailand, France, Indonesia, Vietnam, Belgium, and the Philippines to round out the top 15... welcome! And welcome everyone else as well. But I've never been to any of those places within the context of this blog. Yet. And all the countries with 1 or 2 views... I also wonder how they got onto my blog and what they were searching for. Sadly I don't have any visitors from North Korea. Yet.

Anyway, Jetpack stats stopped counting on May 15 2026, and now we start a new era! Hopefully this new statistic plugin is a good one and I can use it as my forever plugin.

Dreams

May 12 2026

• Snippet: I remember sitting down with a couple people to fix a bunch of (local) links on my blog that needed to be added properly.
• Snippet: I met KumaMonster by a doorway as we were both taking walking trips somewhere, and told him that I had received a commemorative coin that he had sent me but had not received my postcard from Japan that I was also supposed to get.

May 16 2026

Dream 1

• A storyteller person that was a mix between Nomakk and Ronnie sat by a campfire with other people, forming a ring around it. Besides the storyteller, everyone else's role was a listener with occasional comments, an equivalent relationship to that of a bunch of viewers watching a streamer.
• The storyteller started to weave a tale about a knight and a wizard, from the point of view of the knight, as people settled in to listen. A few people came in from the dark outside the radius of the campfire to listen now and then, while others left to go home, and it was a very cozy feeling. Several people had drifted off and fallen asleep in place as well.
• I retreated to a small, walled room with a bed and a door set up in such a way that when I was lying down in bed, I could look out the door and see the Ronnie/Nomakk storyteller. I settled in to listen, fully intending to drift off to sleep as well.
• The storyteller reached a point in the story where the two characters were going to diverge though, and he said he was going to do a survey with those were still here as to whether he would continue the story from the warrior's or the wizard's point of view.
• I got out of bed and shuffled out of the room, kneeling down by the campfire between two people. It was late at night and everyone else was quiet by this point, lying down on the floor or in lounge chairs or similar setups. Some were still awake and also ready for the survey, while others were obviously out cold.
• I did accidentally nudge and wake the person on my right though, who was Jon, but he was thankful for that as he said that he did want to take part in the survey too. I voted wizard in the end, which was the winning option, and I returned to my room to lie down again.

Dream 2

• I joined a game server which consisted of purpotedly billions of small, generated planets, in a way that reminded me of Petit Planet but where I could actually float in space between planets.
• One of those planets that I floated by near where I spawned in was a farming planet, belonging to a woman that I could hear talking in global chat with another woman. I could see sheep and other miniature animals walking around and grazing on it, and a cave or overhang that a couple of them were taking shade under.
• Other planet types included residential and shopping planets, as well as blank, unknown planets. Residential planets in particular generated that way, and were meant as player home bases. I immediately teleported away to a random location and floated on through space until I found one to build a base at. It had a number of stock bedrooms set up, and I went into one.
• This bedroom consisted of a bed with a rather flat pillow, and a walk-in closet set into the wall, and I put down my luggage before peering into the closet. It was empty, but had a box on the top shelf containing a bunch of neatly folded clothes, including a girl's school uniform.
• Someone greeted me over global chat as I started to unpack, and I greeted them back, saying that I just arrived and had teleported to an uninhabited planet to check out the game.
• I heard some noises outside the room after a while though, and upon peering out, I saw an Indian man with a moustache noisily trying to guide a toddler to walk into his bedroom. Apparently the planet wasn't so uninhabited after all, and he lived in the room next to mine. The toddler tried to get into my room, but couldn't do so since I was standing in the doorway. He eventually found his way into the correct room though, and I greeted the man cordially before going back into my room.
• After a second short period of time, there was another knock at the door, and when I answered it, this time there was a tall, nervous-looking girl and another woman dressed in what seemed to be a clerk uniform. The second woman, who was a local administrator of some kind, said that the server actually had a housing system set up which allowed people to teleport to residential planets and check them out, and claim rooms that they wanted as well, and this room was actually already claimed by the girl that she was with, and could I please vacate it.
• I had no idea about this housing system until she mentioned it, and she showed me that it created a transparent overlay over the room with the person's name on it, although the one for my room looked new and I suspected that it might have been placed there after I had already been inside the room.
• However, I was not interested in a room in such a busy place anyway, so I said that I was happy moving as I had only just arrived and had not fully unpacked yet, and I asked if she could assist me in teleporting somewhere quiet and far away. She said sure, although I planned to leave the server soon after anyway unless I absolutely loved the place that I ended up at.
• I asked for three minutes to pack up my stuff, and closed the door without locking it. I then packed up my items and prepared to leave when the dream ended and I woke up.