My Diary #236

Life

My blog transition is neeeearly done. I've been keeping a day to day breakdown of how many posts I've converted, which I've partially shown before on My Diary #234, and it looks like this:

Date - Number of posts (+ pages) converted to the new builder/theme at the END of that date.

2026-04-30 - 7/484
2026-05-01 - 23
2026-05-02 - 33/485
2026-05-03 - 62
2026-05-04 - 81
2026-05-05 - 84
2026-05-06 - 98
2026-05-07 - 128
2026-05-08 - 151
2026-05-09 - 162/486
2026-05-10 - 204
2026-05-11 - 239
2026-05-12 - 271
2026-05-13 - 291
2026-05-14 - 300
2026-05-15 - 313
2026-05-16 - 320/487
2026-05-17 - 354
2026-05-18 - 367
2026-05-19 - 390/488
2026-05-20 - 412
2026-05-21 - 440
2026-05-22 - 468
2026-05-23 - 489/489 + 6/29 pages
2026-05-24 - 489/489 + 29/29 pages (woo!)

This list is the full, authoritative, and complete list showing the speed of my blog migration. I finished the last post at 11:58 pm on May 23 2026! I'm still 1-2 days away from officially finishing the migration though, as explained in the next paragraphs, so I'll come back here afterwards to edit the last couple days in.

The /484, /485 and so on are the number of total posts I have to do, as listed in my Table of Contents. That's why it increases by one every weekend. The jump from 487 to 488 was because I found an unlisted page that I had forgotten about and added it back into the ToC. This page. Outside of this, there are a bunch of infrastructure pages that I needed to fix too, about 30 of them. They're things like templates, old hidden posts, test posts, category feeds, and so on. Most of them were/are quick.

Actually, as of posting time, I'm 489/489 posts and 28/29 pages and there's only one more single page left to convert across the entire site. Unfortunately, it's the Dream Diary. That thing is a monster (despite being only partially done) and might take me two days by itself. I did complete moving my current longest page on my website, Fan Letters from Neopets, this week though, so I'm not too worried about the absolute length of my Dream Diary page yet, just the sheer number of individual category blocks that I will have to build for it. While Fan Letters is a much longer page, I didn't actually have to format any of the text so (at Gemini's behest) I stuffed them into generic Classic boxes so that there are less elements on the page for the Gutenberg page builder to load and handle at once. This worked really well.

But this won't work for Dream Diary, at least not if I want to format my entries properly, drop the occasional anchor link easily to highlight nice diary entries, and allow myself to come back and edit posts easily in the future as I find typoes (of which there are many). I'll need individual blocks for each month at the very least, if not for each day, and there have been many months and days gone by.

After finishing all that, there are also some post-migration cleanup tasks that need doing, for example the actual deletion of the thorns in my site -- Elementor and Jetpack, and a few other miscellaneous database tasks.

I've also had some measure of fun going in and annotating all over my blog as I've done the transition, making fun of my old self(s) in some cases, and agreeing with it in others. This page of goals and dreams, for example, saw a whole new list added for fun. To see a full list of annotated changes, do a search for "May 2026 edit" on my site. Note that the only place on my site that contains a search box is the main page (and the search results page itself, and the monthly pages on the sidebar from the main page, but those are all variations of the main page layout).

There is also a major WordPress version update that is waiting for me, a transition from WordPress 6.9.4 to WordPress 7.0, which purpotedly changes or adds a bunch of back-end/editor things, but Gemini suggested that I not upgrade it until it goes to 7.1 so any major bugs with the first iteration of the new system get ironed out first, especially since I'm already knee-deep in my own migration still. Most other sites say to at least wait until all my plugins have a 7.0 version ready to go. Of all the plugins I use that aren't temporary to this migration, the one that hasn't updated yet is wpDiscuz, the comment box plugin at the bottom, although technically I could remove that and just go with the native comment boxes as well. And it's not like people really ever comment, I've gotten 6 legit comments in 5 years.

Anyway, with my current trajectory, I expect to finish the transition around May 26, which is nice because I now, finally, have a delivery date for the archival boxes and bags and stuff that I purchased from Carr McLean waaay back in early April. That's May 27! (As it turned out, I was really industrious and formally finished the site migration/transition on May 24. I'm free!)

Because one of my items was backlogged, and had a delivery window of 4-6 weeks, I had emailed Carr McLean on Tue, May 19 this week, which was the exact 6-week anniversary of my order, asking for an update on delivery, to assuage my fears that it had not been "forgotten" about (and because the order status had actually said "completed" since the day it was made, I believe). The person who replied said that they were still waiting on the missing item, two bags of archival polyester envelopes, which was being shipped by boat (I assume to their HQ in Toronto) and had not arrived yet.

The very next day though, I received an "order confirmation" email and then finally a shipping notification. Happenstance? Or an oops?

I forgot to mention this, but I also had to contact Virgin Mobile last week because they still are sending me spam emails asking me to come back to their service:

Despite my Communication Preferences being all disabled since Dec 22 2025, according to my records.

Those vultures don't care though. In the end, I contacted their online customer support, and reached someone named Frances after being bounced around. He asked for some information, and then the chat ended with:

Frances: Your file has now been updated, and your contact information has been removed from the marketing list. Please note that these changes may take up to 14 days to fully take effect.

Let's see if this works this time. I immediately got another spam email from them the very next day, "correcting" the previous one, and it's absurd that companies process sign-ups immediately but it somehow takes TWO WEEKS to REMOVE someone from a mailing list, but this conversation happened on May 12 2026, and I'm charitable so I'll give them two extra days. If I ever receive another unsolicited email from Virgin Mobile after May 27 2026, they will join a very short list of companies whose emails I will automatically route to Spam. I think the only currently active company I do that for is Fantuan, actually. There are a couple legacy ones that no longer send me mail too, hopefully because they closed down.

My humidity chart for the week, as per the hygrometer I got last week, looks like this:

It's kinda interesting still. I still don't know what causes the daily fall, though I do know what causes the daily spike (my shower) and that one huge spike to 70% was from when I was making soup mid-week. But it's been around 40% all week, which is good. I ordered in some off-brand replacement filters, even though I hope to turn it off soon and let the ambient weather carry me through summer. Maybe.

Next, I'm on a free Google AI Pro "paid" plan, and Google Gemini's AI models changed this week, away from the 3.1 Fast/3.1 Thinking/3.1 Pro setup to 3.1 Flash-Lite/3.5 Flash/3.1 Pro, and two new Standard/Extended buttons. Whatever all that nonsense means, since it's hard to tell which is better/worse and they don't really tell us (and I'm far too lazy to go out of my way to do comparative analysis or look up what others think of it). It's a lot faster and more responsive now, though.

More importantly, they also changed the limits so instead of a flat number of queries per hour or whatever the system was before they bump users down to a lower tier, it's calculated by a certain amount of compute power used within 5-hour period now and resets after that period. There's also a weekly total usage. From what I can tell, the limits are lower than what it was before, as a bunch of people seemed to run into quick limits with this early on (and ran to social media to complain about it), but I feel like many of those were "power users" who were using it to create AI slop art and videos and such, all of which are current red lines for AI use for me anyway.

While I was extolling the virtues of AI as a technology last week, I did mention that tighter regulation (whether environmental regulations by the government, or naturally by things like the market economy, or forcing the user to download their own local LLM and bearing all the costs that way) was desirable to me and should be how AI usage is safely harnessed by society to lower things like its environmental impact, not some ridiculous blanket ban and social justice cancellation crusades against anything that use it. So lower limits are actually a good thing to me, it means less slop out in the world created by the 1% of power users who need to step away from AI and regain control of their lives.

From a personal perspective, I have hit the limit several times before on the old system but I never really knew what the limit was or how it was caused and was often too lazy to toggle Gemini down to a lower, unmetered tier in between questions to the highest Gemini Pro model, if I was just adding a bit of context or asking a followup that didn't require research. I've barely used Gemini since the swap to the new system though, since I don't heavily involve it in daily life or even my online life and just toss it a question now and again, but I was worried about how much usage uploading pictures of brochure and flyer racks and asking it to analyze which ones were worth taking home, which I did a lot on my last trip, would take. It turns out, after starting a new test thread for that and trying out various sets of pictures, it only takes about 1% of my 5-hour usage per query if asking the new middle-of-the-road (and very quick) Flash version.

Then again, I'm not sure if this was a thing before, but apparently it's also laid out in the changes page (local) now that the length of the chat so far also affects how much usage it takes up, so even though on my trip I made one new thread on most days, many of those threads would get rather long, often with multiple pictures in them, and maybe those would take a lot more usage % per message. There's only one way to find out -- time to go on a new trip?!

I guess it's about how one uses it though. While I "like" AI in general, there are so many problems with the predictive technology still, and so many bugs with Gemini in particular, like how it likes to re-upload images that I had previously uploaded into a chat into a new chat if I switch Gemini tabs back and forth, and how even slightly complex threads will fail to be able to parse images or webpages after a few have been uploaded or after a certain amount of time, and how it constantly hallucinates and guesses even with specific instructions never to guess if the information cannot be accessed, and how it has a constant need to praise the user, and how it never remembers context, that I always have a defensive (lack of) trust wall up when I use it.

I don't really know how people use it seriously and unironically to the point that they're constantly hitting limits from "chatting" to it in "normal" usage like some people seem to claim. Once in a while yes, for sure, but not all the time. It's a great research and general idea tool, and that's what I use it for. And I will use it extensively when I finally get around to uploading my scans to the Internet Archive too. Not to generate anything new, but to summarize and to rephrase and to maintain a constant formatting style in headers and paragraph blocks, so I can actually concentrate on the important stuff, the scanning and uploading process and the figuring out where I got an item and what the provenance behind it is, with minimal technical friction. Maybe I will sing a different tune once I start using it for something that hits its limits though.

I did have a thought though that this change might actually lead people to use it more even if the limits were a little lower -- because before, I had no idea when my limit would reset or how close I was to the limit at any given time, whereas now, I know exactly how far away I am from the limit and from the reset time. So there's a "use it or lose it" sort of mentality in play that wasn't there before. Human psychology is so, very interesting.

Pivoting away from AI to the real world again, I went out every weekday this week for a walk, which was nice. Most of them were shorter walks, although I did one long trip to Londonderry Mall to the north, and then one long walk to some of the liquidation stores to the south.

For the trip to the north, which I did on Monday, which was also Victoria Day this year, I also paired it with another visit to my favourite current restaurant, the Double Greeting Wonton House, and my favourite dish there, their Shanghai Noodles:

After my meal, I had to wait for a bus that would take me further north. There was a notable moment here while waiting where I saw a group of what seemed to be policemen, all on bicycles, cycling as a group toward the river valley, and passing an extremely thin building in the background.

Londonderry Mall itself was pretty cool, I had not been here in probably two decades, assuming I've ever been here at all, since it was so far north and well away from any train stations. I don't remember for sure. I liked how open and sunlit several parts of the mall seemed to be.

It's also the location of the only Zellers department store (local) in Canada, so that was really cool.

At least at that specific moment that I walked through the store, it was really quiet and empty though. I also saw this rude sign at the local Dollarama store:

"Notice: No more than 5 students will be permitted in the store at one time. No backpacks. All backpacks must be left outside or at the cash area. We are not responsible for backpacks or their contents.

What nonsense. No backpacks is fair, but no students is silly group targetting, how would they tell anyway? And you absolutely should be responsible if you took a backpack for safekeeping and then gave it to someone else or it got stolen.

I visited a host of other stores in the mall - Ilahui, Miniso, Simons (where I bought some socks), Winners (where I bought a snack to try at home), and likely a couple other ones I'm forgetting. My crowning acquisition from Londonderry Mall though was a paper map of the mall, sourced from the information desk:

That one's definitely getting scanned and uploaded soon! The snack I bought at Winners looked like this:

That image doesn't really show it well but the box was almost a perfect cube, so it was about as tall as it was wide here. These Maple Stroopwafels were basically little mini pancakes. Not my type of food normally, since I don't like sweet things, but it filed nicely under this year's initiative to try new foods.

I didn't take a picture of the socks, but I've had a thing recently for wearing slightly mismatched pastelly socks as an aesthetic, so I've been keeping an eye out for groups of sock pairs that are similar to each other but that are coloured slightly differently. And then I'll wear one sock from one pair and one sock from the other. I also even bought shoelaces (actually the exact same Xpand No Tie shoelaces that I mentioned here, just a different colour) so that I could replace just one shoelace on my current pair of shoes to make them slightly off-colour from each other! Is it too late in my life to enter a rebellious/goth fashion stage? Hmm.

Also notable was my return trip. The quickest return trip from Londonderry Mall for me was to take a bus to Northgate Centre, and then take another bus from the transit centre there to Southgate Centre. Northgate has a bunch of outlet stores connected to it and facing the transit centre too, and I had an 8-minute wait between my two buses, so I hurried into the nearby T&T supermarket, grabbed some dinner and a Northgate event flyer that I did not have, and then ran back for the bus to Southgate Centre just as it arrived. It was risky but it worked, and I got dinner an an ephemera out of it, so phew! I wish Southgate Centre had a T&T Supermarket.

On Tuesday, I took the day off of work because of headache/sinus issues that I had been having, but then took that chance to do a long walk down south. I went to both the Big Box Outlet store and Bianca Amor's Liquidation Superstore, neither of which I had visited since June last year.

In between those two stores, there was another store there that I didn't visit last time though, called Big Bins Liquidations. It was one of those "tables of Amazon return junk, with prices that fall through the week" stores.

Mildly interesting to look at but almost always a complete waste of time, outside of possibly the first hour or two after a full restock.

I then walked over to this strip mall called Merchants Row, which was right next to the Bianca Amor's building and which I remembered fondly from last time because it aesthetically looked very pleasant.

I fed Gemini the picture and the name of the strip mall, and asked it what food options there were around here, and it declared that I had walked all the way to Camrose, a city southeast of Edmonton, because that was where it was located. Thanks. In the end, I ate at the Hung Phat Vietnamese Noodle House there, opting for the Satay Chicken Rice Noodle Soup and a Green Onion Cake, a local Edmonton (Albertan?) specialty.

The satay noodle soup was honestly just fine... it was basically pho, but with a satay curry sauce instead of broth, and I'd have preferred broth in the end, I think. The green onion cake though, was so good! I had picked these two because I let Gemini choose from the menu, and it said that that was well-regarded by guests and locally famous. It was completely correct. (But it also said the same thing about the satay dish, and, well, at least that one was interesting.)

The waitresses there were super nice and friendly as well. And on the way out, I noticed that they had a whole stack of business cards at the cashier, not only for their store, but also from random other businesses around the area who had come there for lunch, I suppose, and had left stacks of cards there for other people to take. Score! With permission, I took one of each, and came away with sixteen business cards to scan.

So those were the two main adventures of the week. There was also a weird and interesting note posted in the lobby of our apartment block that I captured (with the phone number blanked out) at some point:

And a second giant crossword puzzle outside Rutherford Library when I went to the University on Thursday:

And I transferred $8,000 from my regular bank account into my FHSA to use up this year's contribution limit. Like last year, the dropdown box wouldn't work in Firefox and I had to use Edge for it. Funnily, this was also the exact week last year that I performed this FHSA transfer.

And I learnt that the Butterdome Craft Sale for this spring/summer 2026 is cancelled (local) due to "venue renovations (local)". Boo. It sounds like the upcoming Winter one (Winter 2027) might be poof too, as might next year's first one (Summer 2027).

And here are some nice sunset and neighbourhood pictures through the week, starting with a rather ominous half-sky on Sun, May 17 at 6:58 pm:

A busy sunset on Tue, May 19 at 9:33 pm:

A weird, blurry cloud while out on a walk on Fri, May 22 at 8:47 pm:

Canada geese hanging out near a lovey-dovey couple on Fri, May 22 at 8:51 pm:

And a glowy sunset that was almost spectacular later that evening at 9:50 pm:

Games

Mood piece of the week from one of my neighbours in Petit Planet:

Petit Planet (archive) announced that the current playtest is coming to an end on Mon, May 25 2026.

This caused an immediate and precipitous drop in players, barely anyone came by to visit my island the entire week this week, as people stopped playing since everything was going to be wiped anyway. The game did send out a feedback survey on the weekend:

And then gave a very pointless ingame reward for it, some coins barely worth anything, for a game that was going to wipe in two days. Great job guys.

I still went on every day to greet my neighbours and harvest giant vegetables though.

While it's settled down into a "30-45 minutes daily" game, I still did surprisingly like making it part of my daily schedule, even though I've bounced off of all such Animal Crossing-type games in the past. The main multiplayer hangout area, Galactic Bazaar, is pretty terrible though, with a lot of pointless AI minigames that don't work, or aren't fun, hopefully they manage to find a way to fix that before launch. But the world management, the "neighbours" that players recruit to live on their planet (and it looks like there'll be at least 30-35 of them at launch?), and the farming and life skills, are all quite fun.

Other than that, and a little bit of Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era (local), I didn't play anything else all week since I was concentrating on the blog. Nomakk (local) played HITMAN World of Assassination (local) this week, and that stirred some primal tendencies in me and made me tempted enough to install it, so maybe I'll try some of that out over the next week. No promises though. There's so much else to do.

I also wanted to give a shout out to Jamie, the solo developer of a game called Mighty Meow (local), which I played the demo of on stream about a year ago. She recently found my YouTube upload of the playthrough, and although that VOD didn't do particularly well, she still appreciated my video and gave me a free Steam key for the game! No strings attached. So in return, I wanted to promote her game here and bring her kindness forward into the future.

Her own YouTube channel, linked above, collects her thoughts on being a game developer and catalogues her journey of creating Mighty Meow, and the couple of videos I did watch were very pleasant. Hey Tigey, do you have a Mighty Meow?

Plushie of the Week #229

The plushie of the week this week is from the same place as the one last week -- the museum shop in the Jiangmen Wuyi Museum of Overseas Chinese, in Jiangmen, China, while on my latest Asian trip. Technically, as I picked up that pegasus plushie first and this persimmon tree plushie second, the pegasus one is the senior plushie between the two, even though both were bought on Mar 03 2026.

On the receipt, this plushie was designated to be the Honeycolor Persimmon Money Tree/Honeycolor Persimmon Get Rich Tree, and he cost 38 Chinese yuan, a whole 10 yuan cheaper than the pegasus. This came out to be $7.57 CAD at the conversion rate at the time. He hasn't quite made me back that money yet though, I'm not sure how long I have to wait for it to sprout dollar notes. In the meantime, he makes silent sprouting noises by my bedside, waving his three persimmons about threateningly at the wall since he has no eyes or face and cannot see the other plushies.

Like last week, I have a picture of the plushie on the shelf that was NOT shared in the travel blog post above, and here it is:

And then I plucked him off that shelf and carried him home.

Plushie front:

Back:

Tag 1 front:

That "Eleph Bunny" is quite something. The Chinese word, 象皮兔, basically means Elephant-skin Rabbit.

Tag 1 back:

No. 1 - Do not swallow the cotton. (sigh)

No. 2 - Keep away from fire. (bigger sigh)

Tag 2 front:

The QR code goes here. It's a WeChat/Weixin QR code, and scanning it took me to the designer's Weixin page. Interesting bit of trivia, it looks like when they first registered their name, they registered it as 橡皮兔, with a different "xiang" as the first character, even though they're phoenetically identical. 橡皮 means eraser/rubber, though. They derpi-derped a typo. Or a conscious decision was made to rebrand after the first 3 days. Or is it actually meant to be a pun?

Tag 2 back:

Tag 3 front:

Tag 3 back:

Dreams

May 19 2026

Dream 1

• Jon was getting ready for his first solo venture out of the house on an errand. He was somewhere between ages 4 and 7. Mom was worried but I told her not to be, I said that by that age I had also already gone out a couple times by myself and been fine. Mom nodded and said she, too, had one adventure like that when she was that young.
• I told Mom that I would just follow along secretly as well to ensure he stayed out of trouble. For that, I would need to borrow a coat from her that Jon had never seen me wearing before. I tried to use a dark blue coat of hers but the hand holes were too small and scrunched up, so I couldn't put them on.
• In the end, I instead just picked an older pink sweater of mine that I hadn't worn in many years that was hanging up further back in the closet. The hope was that Jon wouldn't have ever remembered seeing me in that.
• Jon was still around the house near where we were so I hid my intent and didn't actually take out the sweater to wear. I looked over to him, and he was rifling through the pantry cupboard and somehow found an old, overdue jar of something on the very back of the top shelf of the pantry. It was overdue for more than a year. I took it down and showed it to Mom, who threw it away.

Dream 2

• I was chaperoning a group of 10 friends through an interactive movie experience spread across different stations in a museum. The museum was set in a tower and spread over at least three different levels.
• We would walk to a certain location, watch a clip there, and often perform some sort of action as well to power up our characters before moving on. Eventually the movie would end with us defeating a demon lord while the show characters also did the same.
• I had done this once before so I was informally guiding everyone else along. In particular there was a tall Chinese guy who was a little slower than the others and more prone to mistakes, and everyone understood that a little more care was required for him.
• In each room, I made sure he was with the group and then addressed everyone with things like "So everyone, please take note there are these blue electric orbs you'll see on the floor sometimes, do not touch them yet, there's a mechanism at its base and later on I'll show you how to destroy them."
• These were technically slight spoilers for the movie, but it kept him out of trouble and everyone was understanding about it.
• Lunch was built in to the movie and levelup schedule too, and while everyone went off to get lunch, I was contacted by another person who had just arrived and was hoping to be powered through so he could catch up with the group over lunch break. He seemed nice so I sacrificed my lunch break and said yes.
• As we went through the first half of the movie again at a faster speed, skipping the actual movie portions to just do the activity powerup portions, he commented something about one of the steps probably involving visiting a Turfy plushie shop and selling something there. I said that was a correct guess and that that was because Turfy was the only type of shop that Hokkaido, where we were apparently at, had, that would accept this particular transaction.
• He smiled and said he was familiar with the shop because he he had gotten a Sweet Crimson Tea plushie there. I thought at first that that was the name of an Uma Musume horse that I was not aware of, but it turned out it was the name of another side franchise that the shop sold plushies from.

Dream 3

• Snippet: There was another dream about a field of sugarless apples that I grew. I provided apples from it to a table of snacks and food that people built their lunches from at a workplace, and the lunches that were taken somehow affected RPG-style fights that would take place after lunch in some ongoing storyline too.

May 24 2026

• I dreamt that the Petit Planet playtest restarted into a version where players were able to keep their planet builds into the live game. I logged on with a friend and we found ourselves on a grassy plateau divided into two halves. There were 24 flower-like things on the plateau, but each flower actually contained a URL to a website.
• We suddenly received a notification that one of the 24 flowers got disabled, and we weren't sure why at first but it was pretty obvious once I started checking them individually. 23 of the flowers linked to either the game's official website or to Wikipedia, but the 24th one linked to a random online news outlet's website about the game instead.
• Editor: The current Petit Planet playtest ends tomorrow morning with a server wipe.