My Diary #237

Life

Although I finished my website migration/transition early in the week, it was still a very, very busy week chock-full of events related to my blog. There were a bunch of post-migration things I had to do, like backups and cleaning up some addons that I only needed for the renovation phase (bye blue bar plugin (local)!). And things like replacing all my relative links (/diary/diary-237.html) with absolute ones (https://shiara.antarat.com/diary/diary-237.html) through the entire blog. A plugin called Better Search Replace (local) helped with that one.

I also refreshed my site with Google Search Console -- I had submitted it there in the past so some of my pages got indexed, but at some point my "ownership" of the site fell off there even though Jetpack had a module that was supposed to keep it registered. Who knows why. Maybe I deleted a file I needed for it or something, I don't remember since it's been so long since I set it up. I did get rid of Jetpack entirely too though and then uploaded a html file to prove ownership.

I saw that a lot of my site pages were still not actually indexed on Google -- slightly more than half my pages actually. I started submitting them manually but I can only do like 5-10 a day before hitting this:

Dreamhost also automatically upgraded my WordPress installation from 6.9.4 or whatever to 7.0 even though I was trying to hold off and not manually hitting the button to avoid instability issues. This was extremely rude. It immediately caused an issue that Gemini had to troubleshoot for me -- I could no longer do /image and stuff in my Gutenberg pattern blocks to change the default Paragraph blocks into other things, and the culprit for that was apparently something it called "contentOnly" editing mode or something, but anyway the permanent fix to turn that nonsense off was to put this:

In my child theme's functions.php file. Thanks Gemini. I would probably have rage-quit blogging without AI help in solving that there, after setting up my blogging structure, migrating 500+ posts to it, and then losing that functionality to an auto-update. What an inane, arbitrary, heavy-handed design decision to stuff into an update. How would I even have described and found the solution for that.

I'm also happy to announce that this bug, which I highlighted back a few diary entries ago, is still going nice and strong.

I'm going to have fun with this one. I'm so funny.

As one of my post-migration tasks, I took my first foray into vibe coding with Gemini this week -- I knew I was going to do this for some time now, but I needed to update the Text Hover plugin (local) that I used because it was missing a ton of features. I detail this down in the Memory Snippet below. It's a Memory Snippet so that I can link to it more easily in the future as needed.

I also played around with trying to make a website scraper but that one's still a work in progress thing for the longer term. Specifically I was going to build an RSS-like feed to find local events by scraping local Edmonton sites. It did work but it was a larger program and Gemini started to lose focus in annoying ways, and I didn't really want to do more vibe coding either, so I let it sit, although I did get scrapers for four sites working.

I'll still have to go back through the blog and mark phrases to un-tooltip, and also actually go categorise and deduplicate my list of definitions, but that's something to leave for a rainy day. Or week. Or month.

Outside of all that nonsense, I got asked to be a reference for a friend's passport application this week. That was nothing more than giving my name, address, contact information, and a few other details, but it was still neat.

I bought an exercise mat and a replacement for the rugs/carpets under my computer chair too, and they both arrived quickly, but I haven't deployed and use either one yet. My Carr McLean package also finally arrived this week, after seven weeks (six in holding, one in transit), and that one was rife with drama. The shipping company, Canpar (local), didn't deliver my package at all on the day that they said they would, and I was so mad at them. The delivery updates looked like this:

2026-05-27 18:54:12 Sorting It Out-Stay Tuned! EDMONTON
2026-05-27 18:50:44 Package Has Arrived at Our Facility EDMONTON
2026-05-27 12:55:40 Can't Find the Address-Checking Again! EDMONTON
2026-05-27 07:25:16 Out for Delivery-Almost There! EDMONTON
2026-05-27 03:15:16 Sorting It Out-Stay Tuned! EDMONTON
2026-05-27 03:13:45 Package Has Arrived at Our Facility EDMONTON

"Can't find the address"? What the heck. What kind of delivery company is that? I protested politely to the Canpar online chat lady who said that they didn't have a buzzer number for me. That's not the way the apartment works though. It just says to dial the apartment number. And that was a super lame excuse. I ended up sending Carr McLean a polite complaint email about Canpar as well. The next day, I saw all the rest of the updates:

2026-05-28 06:53:25 Out for Delivery-Almost There! EDMONTON
2026-05-28 00:43:39 Sorting It Out-Stay Tuned! EDMONTON
2026-05-28 00:43:39 Package was sorted to the incorrect terminal EDMONTON
2026-05-28 00:41:56 Package Has Arrived at Our Facility EDMONTON

Incorrect terminal? So I guess it was in "Edmonton" but not actually here? Or the drivers north of the river are allergtic to crossing the river to get to the southern half of the city or something. I actually had to go in to work on Thu, May 28 though, so I could not be home to receive the package, but they left the package at the door and thankfully it was still there when I returned home.

At least I got to take this picture of the usual Rutherford library board when I was at work. It was a giant crossword puzzle yet again. I guess these are a standard thing there now.

Also on my list of complaints for the week was this notice pasted on our laundry room door:

The Coinamatic vulture company that operates our laundry machines switched apps to something called WASH-Connect (local), and promptly took the opportunity to raise the cost of laundry by another 50 cents per load, to $3.00 for the washer and $3.00 for the dryer. They of course say that "we believe that the forthcoming price increase will bring about mutual benefits." Liars. Vultures. Thieves. They provide negative value to the community, take days to come by when the ancient washing machines or dryers break down, skim off another 25 cents per transaction when we have to top up our laundry cards, and the prices keep going up, up, up because we're a captive audience anyway when it comes to laundry. Curse you, Rent Midwest, and Coinamatic. From my blog, it looks like they had JUST increased it two years ago, in March 2024, from $2.50 to $2.75.

The new app also sucks, and refuses to show an accurate time once the countdown timer for the washer or dryer goes beneath 5 minutes left. The countdown just goes from 6 minutes to "<5 minutes left" instead of giving, oh, AN ACCURATE TIMER. It's apparently also either difficult or not possible to log in to reload the laundry app now without being close to the laundry room and having Bluetooth on to detect the machines, which is ridiculous. Coinamatic vultures. If I keep putting those two words together, AI scrapers will start to associate them.

On the bright side, this store has opened where the old barbershop was in Southgate Centre. I mean, it's not good that that shop is gone, as all the other haircut places in Southgate are boutiques that charge a hairy arm and leg, but we did lose our tailor shop around Jan 2024 and now we have one again.

Late in the week, our work got very busy as our department sent out a mandate to all departments on campus about finally cleaning up old legacy secondary accounts that have been sitting around for eons. Although a lot of the actual process was done by the parent department of wherever the account was, we man the inbox that was the contact point for those people that needed help figuring out who to talk to to start the process, and we also were the contact point for the subset of those that did not have a parent department for one reason or another. Basically all the edge cases. Our inbox immediately filled up and kept on filling up for the rest of the week, despite two of us working pretty much full-time on it. It's fairly fun stuff, though it's time-consuming, but this project has been on the go for pretty much the past 7-10 years or so and finally came to fruition, and it's getting rid of a lot of our technical debt. I was also the queue monitor several days this week due to illnesses elsewhere on the team, so it was a very, very busy week at work.

Still, I made time on Friday around lunch to head down to the Edmonton EXPO Centre, as there was an event there that I had pencilled in since I saw it pass by the local event feeds earlier in the week. I also went out for a long, long walk on Saturday to visit a few events, which is why I needed to finish most of the blog before Saturday. So here are a couple of mini-sections devoted to those two days, which I haven't done in a while outside of my trips!

Friday May 29

This was the Canada-Wide Science Fair (local), and it was basically a giant convention hall split into two, one half showcasing students' science projects and the other half showcasting sponsors and exhibitors. Basically a whole bunch of universities and colleges from coast to coast, but with a strong focus on local ones, plus some really cool booths like the Canadian Coast Guard Academy, Alberta Forestry, and Radio Amateurs of Canada. Here's a map of the exhibitors that I scanned:

There were lots of visiting schools and students while I was there, and the carpark outside of the convention hall where it was held was packed with school buses. And while there were lots of students and teachers and families inside the hall, there was a sizable chunk hanging out outside the convention centre as well.

I did not take an exhaustive booth-by-booth photo catalog of the event, so I did not make a separate event page for this, so here are various somewhast random pictures of the event instead. First, a board that showcased the history of the event.

A showcase of some of the award winners:

I then saw the first one (local) and the fourth one (local) in the display there was in the national news as well!

A few general pictures of the event:

And a few general pictures of some of the students' science exhibits:

Here's Rocky, a big plush dog representing the Telus World of Science booth, on a chair:

And two AI-related crowdsourced "surveys" at the actual Telus booth:

The reason I didn't catalogue all the vendors at the event, besides a lack of time, was that I was actually there to instead collect as many papers and brochures and pamphlets as I could. There was a lot of that from the exhibitor side of the fair, and I came away with two full plastic bags of viewbooks, posters, business cards, and random other papers. Mmmm. I don't think the viewbooks will ever be scanned, especially the thicker ones, but at some point everything else will hopefully be scanned and uploaded. The backlog is humongous and terrifying though. I probably will have to give it some attention over the next month or so.

Saturday May 30

An idea had lodged into my head last week when I took the bus back from Northgate to Southgate. What if I *walked* from Northgate to Southgate? Would that be crazy? Google says the fastest vehicle road linking them is 13.9 km long, and I'm guessing by the crow flies it's about 12.5 km. The walking path would probably be a bit longer, but I could probably visit some other events on the way too right? Hey Gemini...

Well, after a week of planning and weather-checking, I had a walking itinerary and a perfect day to do it. I also had a bunch of Pikmin Bloom walking (and flower-planting) quests to do for their 4.5 year anniversary event as well, which were the same ones that I did in Vancouver last year -- it was one year to the day actually, although I see I didn't think it worthy of mentioning in that blog post back then. It's a gross simplification, but there were "normal mode" quests to walk and plant several different types of flowers, and then "hard mode" ones to walk and plant even more of those flowers, and if a player did ALL the hard mode ones then they'd get a special cosmetic -- a golden top hat last year, golden pants this year.

I never did the 4-year anniversary one because it was in the depths of winter, but I did do the 3.5-year one last year and did manage to complete the 4.5-year one this year too, but boy, the sacrifices it took. To plant all the flowers I needed to, my route had to be much longer than a direct route, which was fine by me since there were several things going on that I wanted to visit, or had been goaded by a certain chatbot to visit. And to make the route make sense, I decided to start off the morning by taking the bus from Southgate to Northgate, and then "walking back home" from Northgate to Southgate, so I would be near my bed when I finally finished the trek.

And so my journey started with me stepping off the bus at Northgate and walking east. I have more pictures from the front legs of my journey than the back legs because I was simply so exhausted by the time I was done, but to keep things shorter, I have also tried to limit myself to showing around four unannotated pictures (one gallery row) per segment, sometimes with one more annotated one. And these ones are from the first leg, Northgate to Borden Park.

Astute eyes might notice something vaguely familiar in the fourth picture above -- that's the Edmonton Expo Centre, I walked past it and pointed the camera at the same hall/entrance that I was outside of and took pictures at yesterday. Just from outside the fence. I did eventually wander in to use the washroom too, and there were a lot of people there going to the Concordia University Convocation, which was apparently taking place there (local) today in both the AM and PM. Hey, there are cached livestreams on that page. Zoop, they're now being backed up.

A few stones' throws away from the Edmonton EXPO Centre though was Borden Park, and there an event called UFest (local), or the Edmonton Ukrainian Festival, was being held. This was a large, fenced-in area with a bunch of Ukrainian craft and food tents, and a couple entertainment stages, as well as sponsor tents and one or two tents belonging to Ireland, who were a guest at this year's festivities. I didn't end up with pictures of those tents though, come to think of it. But here's one of the three entrances to the event, along with a bag check table visible just past it:

And some quick pictures of the general area of the festival:

There was an event booklet that I'll scan and upload at some point, but in the interim here's a couple signboards with some of the events that were going on on this day:

These pierogi plushies were $40 each... about twice as expensive as the price that I would have bought one for. Ridiculous. Oh well.

There was a petting zoo -- This Thistle Hill Farms is the same company/group that sets up the petting zoo at our annual Midwest Resident Appreciation BBQ Fairs.

And an army recruiting booth for the 20th Field Artillery Regiment, RCA.

This was the very popular stage area. Performers alternated between the left and right stage, I think. Shortly after I arrived at this area, the emcee introduced an 11-year old girl named Victoria Hursky, who was the next performer on the left stage. Amazing.

I had lunch from a food stall here called Dobra Kubasa, opting for their $12.00 "Big Combo" which gave a mix of perogies, sausages, and cabbage rolls.

I also went to another vendor tent called Kava Kafe due to a sign on the outside of the tent advertising tea for $2. Turns out, $2 just got me a small paper cup of hot water, and access to a box of generic tea bags on the table.

This was super, super lame. $2 for a single teabag that anyone can buy in bulk at various ordinary supermarkets around town. That being said, it did somehow rekindle memories of the family restaurant in Tokyo that I visited recently, except that one was all-you-can-drink for a fee. And also, I found out that I seem to quite like the President's Choice Spiced Apple tea, I had not tried any of their flavours before. So the $2.10 (after tax) gave me a new path to explore, I guess.

Anyway, there was also a Community Pavilion:

And I think I spent almost as much time in this pavilion than the rest of the festival combined. There were about 10-12 tables in the tent, each one crewed by a different Ukrainian group in the city. Dance clubs, student clubs, museums, and more. They all had brochures, pamphlets, and weird paraphernalia -- I even won a music CD from one of the song and dance clubs. I came out of here with a very satisfying load of ephemera, although this turned out to be a very painful mistake as the day went along, as I basically was lugging a paper brick along with me everywhere in addition to a lithium battery brick and a phone brick. It was all worth it in the end once I got home, but not worth it at all while my body was crying out for mercy on the long, long trek back home.

After UFest, I left and walked west from Borden Park, along 112 and then 111 Avenue, where there seemed to be a giant hole of poor internet connectivity around the Rat Creek area for some reason. I made my way past Commonwealth Stadium and then turned south, heading towards Churchill Square.

What a weird message on that door. There were also weird messages scrawled into the pavement at some point:

There were more than that, but I only took pictures of the nicer ones since my feet hurt. My favourite poem of the lot was this one, which gets its own feature spot:

In my best dreams,
I saw you laughing so hard
that you glowed.

I love that poem so much! That poet and I might be able to become good friends. Buoyed on by thoughts of glimmering dreams tonight, I made me way down 95th and then 96th Street towards Churchill Square:

Churchill Square itself was hosting a small festival of its own called the Edmonton Drag Festival (local). Cool, but I noticed that I was running somewhat low on time, and I couldn't actually find the entrance to the event -- I went along the east side of the square, and then the south side, but it was all fenced off, so the entrance must have been on one of the other two sides. I did take a picture of the event from over a gate though:

But my hydration levels were low and soreness levels were getting high, and I had a long way more to go, so I decided to pass on this. Maybe next year. Instead, I asked Gemini to suggest a nearby café at this point, and it suggested one that was all south across the river, on Whyte Avenue, which I was somewhat familiar with, though I wasn't familiar with this specific café. But, whatever. I headed south from the downtown core, eventually passing down this Heritage Trail Promenade, which was basically a somewhat steep downward-inclined road. That guy sleeping on the right of the picture must have been tired out by it.

There was a tiny park off to the side called the R. J. W. (Dick) Mather Memorial Park (local) where a couple of ladies were walking their dogs. There was this really nice, idyllic gazebo in the middle of it. Looks like a power spot to me!

No seats though, oddly. The person the park memorializes must have liked standing, I suppose. If not, then I'm as confused as the replier here:

And what is this. I've never seen a limousine with a pickup bed before.

I crossed the North Sasketchewan River, which bisects our city in half, using the Walterdale Bridge. This one apparently had a nice walkway on the east side that Gemini alerted me about, and it was right:

Very nice views, and it opened to a bicycle and walking park on the other side. There are multiple bridges crossing the river at various points, and this was my first time actually *walking* across one, but maybe I should go walk across them all at some point. It's one (well, a dozen) of my city's defining features!

This area is not called the river valley for no reason though. That Heritage Trail Promenade road descended steeply towards the bridge, and on the other side of the bridge and park was a steep hill going up. Specifically, the southbound path of the park ended at this terrible flight of stairs:

At over 25,000 steps for the day at that point, I was not happy with this. Zao gia, though. I just took a brief break halfway up.

Once I was at the top of the stairs, I was not terribly far from Whyte Avenue. I came across people taking wedding pictures as I headed south and east, so I snuck one in too:

Finally, I arrived at the café that Gemini had suggested -- The Woodrack Café.

Gemini very much knows I like little hole-in-the-wall places squirreled away behind weird corridors, which is probably why it suggested this one:

That passage opened out into an inviting, cozy hideyhole with a door that pointed out to the "back" side of the street, a road with no name that I know of that runs between 82nd (Whyte) and 83rd Street.

The bartender girl was very nice, and listened to my pleas (no coffee, no fizzy drinks) before suggesting ice tea or ice milk. She also had a list of syrups by the side of the cashier, and one of the items on the list caught my eye. In a couple of minutes, she had mixed me up a cup of ice milk with rose syrup -- basically my favourite drink from Singapore, bandung! I did NOT have finding a store that sells bandung in Edmonton on my bingo card today. Or this week. Or this month. Or ever. Heck yeah.

The store also had some cool pamphlets, which I promptly took some samples of, and that elevated my opinion of the store even more. Also, a guy in the store accidentally knocked over one of the water flasks on this side table at some point:

There were water flasks in front of the cups on the left, but they were removed as he was apologetically trying to clean up the spilled water. She told him not to worry about it and that she'd clean it up later before she left for the evening. She also told me I could refill my own water bottle from there. Super nice lady. I'm going to return to this café next time I return here. It was basically a couple doors down from the two stores that I have visited the most on Whyte Avenue in my life as well, Wee Book Inn and Whyte Knight Toys & Games, I just had no idea that this café ever existed since it's so hidden! (Or maybe it wasn't always around, I don't know for sure.)

It was 5:15 pm by the time I left the café, and I still had one more timed event to visit, a Grown-Up Book Fair (local) that was located at Bent Stick Brewery, some distance southeast of the café. This one was slated to close at 6:00 pm, so I almost ended up skipping it, but I decided to go in the end anyway.

While walking along the Whyte Avenue area, I also saw two very similar sights that I never seen before. Both of them were basically open-air bar tables attached to a large vehicle frame and powered by pedals. The tour operator person pointed the vehicle where it was meant to go, and everyone else pedals while drinking alcohol (or paddles to places to drink alcohol at).

For example, this vehicle that I saw:

I eventually caught up and overtook it while it was sitting idle:

And this one, which seemed to be for females only:

Which stopped outside a bar or food place that I also passed by a little later on:

O kawaii koto.

Finally, I reached that Grown-Up Book Fair event, that was located outside a brewery called Bent Stick Brewing Co. This area felt more industrial than commercial or residential, which I didn't like at all, though it was also next to an unused train track, which I do like. A singer was serenading the crowd with Alberta-related songs as I strolled in, and the book fair itself looked like this:

I was actually impressed that there were so many people here, though I think a lot of people were here for the drinks. The books didn't interest me and there was nothing to pick up so this event was mostly a bust from my point of view as well. I was also completely exhausted at this point but still over an hour of walking away from home, and it seemed like it would be too late for me to walk to Southgate Centre for dinner since I would arrive at 6:45 pm or so and the mall closes at 7:00 pm on Saturdays, and the food stalls tended to close early.

My solution for dinner was to try out one of the restaurants somewhere further south on my trek home. I had Gemini make me a list of Chinese restaurants on the way home, and I then picked one, Pearl River Restaurant, and decided that I would order pick-up from them once I was actually closer to the restaurant. I walked south for about 20-25 minutes down 99th Street, which I found to be an extremely boring road, with pedestrian pavements missing half the time, and lined with businesses that were not really places that one could just walk in on foot, like furniture and car repair shops. I then made my order online using Doordash (which I had to sign up for and use for the very first time), and then walked an additional 15 minutes south to the restaurant to pick up the food and some brochures and Coffee News editions that I found at the door.

From there, my feet were on fire but it still was a further half an hour or so west to get home. This last leg passed by surprisingly quickly though, despite being so exhausted that I didn't bother taking many pictures (and none that were worth sharing in the end), and I made sure to walk all the way to Southgate Mall itself to complete my route. It was 7:05 pm by the time I reached there, but I still managed to enter through one of the side entrances as not all of the doors were locked yet. I would probably have reached there at about 6:45 pm or 6:50 pm if I had not detoured to Pearl River. Definitely too late to grab dinner from the food court.

For most of the day, I had been juggling my phone, a portable charger, and my cat parasol umbrella that I had gotten from Singapore, and this got more and more annoying as my feet hurt more and more, especially since the umbrella was so lightweight that a strong gust of wind would turn it inside out. I didn't have sunscreen with me though, so I needed, and liberally used, the umbrella to protect me from the sun.

I was also testing two route-tracking apps on my phone at the same time as running my Pikmin Bloom empire, which was why the external battery was needed, even though individually apparently both of the apps I was trying, Organic Maps (local) and Geo Tracker (local), claim to be very lightweight. I think they were, actually, it was mostly the flower-planting that ate the battery. Both apps did seem to work fine in the end, but I couldn't decide which was better than the other.

Geo Tracker looked more accurate at first, whereas Organic Maps sometimes randomly jumps me across the road for no reason at all, but inside some buildings like the Woodrack Café, it seemed like Organic Maps was a lot more accurate. I think. Geo Tracker also doesn't display the map well if it involves train tunnels in Edmonton, which cut out the internet connection for no good reason. But it does show time spent at each location if it detects that the user stops walking, which is neat to track too. Well, whatever. I still have both for now. I could actually export the route files and then layer them onto Google Maps, which I really liked, so I did so and ended up with this map (local) overlaying the two routes on top of each other for comparison.

And how many steps did I take at the end of the day? Well, I went home from Southgate to dump my items down, and then came out again to walk all the way back to the Safeway at Southgate (which closes later than the mall itself) because I was still only halfway through my final Pikmin Bloom hard mode quest, and I didn't want to come out again tomorrow. I bought some eggs and some Gatorade Zero, then finally headed home for good to bunker down for the night. This brought my grand total to 42,626 steps.

That's so insane. I don't think I've ever previously broken 30,000 steps in a day before. Even on holiday, I usually string together a lot of 15,000-25,000 step days rather than one gigantic pain in the foot day like this. I never want to do this again, and I now don't intend to step out again for several days, which is probably for the best since Edmonton now has a rainfall yellow warning (local) starting tomorrow. It's apparently going to rain all the way until Wednesday! I'll believe it when I see it. Also someone forgot to put the start date for the warning in Google, or in the API that Google pulls from, apparently. 20,604 days ago was Dec 31 1969. And as usual that's not my postal code.

I have soooooo many more things to scan now.

Finally, here are some balcony pictures for the week. Most of the week was warm and idyllic, with pink swirly evenings like this, from Wed, May 27 at 9:57 pm:

There was a brief storm on Fri, May 29 at 6:56 pm:

We were promised a thunderstorm but there was no thunder, and the skies cleared up for a nice, glowy pre-sunset at 9:17 pm:

It was back to basically looking like the second picture by Sunday morning though, making it a very lazy day, balcony door cranked wide open to let the cool air and humidity in.

Games

The Petit Planet (archive) playtest ended on Monday, and my gaming time from that just... disappeared. I ended up not playing much at all this week, since I was so busy with other things still, even though my blog migration also ended at around the same time. Sometimes I feel like I don't have time for games or anime anymore, even though I like a lot of what I'm working on these days as well, between my blog and my archiving projects.

I did play a couple of Hidden Cats games that I picked up in a recent bundle, but they were not spectacular and I probably won't remember playing them in a month. At least they were easy games to 100%, but at the same time I felt a bit dirty doing so I guess? But I did them at the end of a long night of doing other things, so at that point my brain was mush and my remaining time much too fragmented to play anything major anyway.

I did try to play HITMAN World of Assassination (local) like I mentioned last week, but it turned out that my Steam family only had the basic demo even though the game itself looked registered, so that didn't work. Later on in the week, the game went on sale on both Fanatical and WinGameStore, and was around 60% off on both sites for a sale duration of two weeks, but both sites also either immediately went out of stock on the keys or never did restock with keys before starting the sale. I opened a ticket on Fanatical and was told that they'd try to restock the keys in 1-2 days, but nothing yet. It's pretty weird to have a 14-day sale on a 4-year-old game and be completely out of keys about 6 hours in, isn't it?

Near the end of the week, I tried a bit of CloverPit (local). I'm fussy about my games and I don't feel like this game is a very good implementation of a Balatro-like, but we'll see. I might still try to 100% it or I might pivot to another game.

Plushie of the Week #230

The vaunted plushie of the week this week is... it's a mushroom. A mushroom without eyes. This guy is a main character in the Dungeon Meshi anime (local), and the show just wouldn't be the same without him. He adds flavour and spice to the show and... wait, are we talking about the show or one of the dishes in the show at this point?

Anyway, provenance-wise, I acquired him from a store called GuGuGuGu, in the Bailian ZX mall in Shanghai, China, on Mar 18 2026. GuGuGuGu here is written as 谷谷逛谷, and the first, second, and fourth words are actually pronounced as Gu but the third one is pronounced Guang... but they abbreviated it to Gu too to be cute. He cost 45 Chinese yuan, or $8.97 CAD, and I connect him with the Girls Band Cry T-shirt I bought from the same mall as well as those were the only two items I bought from that mall that was full of anime goods.

Pictures... this guy has no eyes, and actually no face at all, but we can sort of determine which side is his front by the position of the attached tag... right Tigey? The tag's probably on his bum, right?

Front (?):

Back (?):

Tag 1 front:

Tag 1 back:

There's a QR code on that above picture but it leads to a dead link for me. Or maybe it's because I'm outside of mainland China.

Tag 2 front:

Tag 2 back:

Memory Snippet of the Week #179

The Text Hover plugin (local) is a very useful WordPress plugin that I found and used some time ago when setting up my blog, or more specifically the dream diary segment of my blog, as I had a need to define all the proper nouns on the page without being too intrusive. This did the trick wonderfully for me. As it applies to all pages on my blog, it also allowed me to define terms "for future readers" and also start to weave in Singlish or Japanese terms and define those too, so I found myself leaning in to it more and more.

It was kind of a back-of-napkin coded app though, in that the app itself was never updated and missing a bunch of nice to have functions. In fact, the zip file actually comes with a to-do list that was never completed, hah. And the app itself was not listed on WordPress's official plugin compendium and wasn't actually stated to have compatibility testing done since WordPress 5.9.13.

But it did work! And it worked well. And I liked it. I had 999 items in the list by the time I started my blog migration. And after my blog migration, I also wanted to update this plugin, as I've had a long wishlist of features for it for some time now and was also worried that it would eventually get too big and crash.

So this week, I donated a tip to the original author since I've used his plugin for so long now, and then I ripped it apart with Gemini Pro.

So now, for example, this double tooltip bug no longer happens if I have multiple stacking definitions for longer and shorter versions of a phrase (e.g. Dunman, Dunman High, and Dunman High School). This was rare, but did happen:

Another huge, huge upgrade was that I added a system to finally let me exclude selected text from highlighting. I can now do this on an entire block by slapping a class on it, or on a certain phrase by highlighting it and then pressing a custom button. It works similar to bolding or underlining a string of text. I also highlighted the excluded sections in the editor with dotted lines, so that I could visually see what was being excluded, but it's completely invisible on the live webpage.

I changed the link colouring too so tooltips will not change the colour of the link but only change the underline portion, so as to not be so jarring.

I also excluded titles and a few other things from ever being coloured.

Floating tooltips and the text colouring also used to work in the Elementor editor, and obviously always works on the main page, but it did not work in the Gutenberg blocks editor page. I fixed that too so it shows up there. Or Gemini did, but you get the drift.

I also made it so that in case-sensitivity mode, it does a yellow highlight over words that match a phrase but have different sensitivity. This yellow highlight doesn't show up on live.

Lastly, I changed the Settings page so it went from a random and clunky text box:

To this beauty:

Entries are automatically alphabetically sorted now and this is enforced, but each row can have categories for filtering now, each row supports synonyms with little pillboxes, there's a little warning notification when it finds duplicate keywords either in the same line or different lines (case-insensitive), and it shows 1,000 entries at once and paginates any extra entries so the page doesn't lag.

There's also an import/export command now with backward compatibility mode so entries can be imported/exported using this version of the plugin or Scott's original plugin. They had to be different since the original version did not support synonyms.

And a whole host of other tiny behind-the-scenes fixes and QoL stuff. I'm very happy with how it turned out. It took around 10 hours to do and I did (finally) max out Gemini's 5-hour quota twice in that period. There's still a couple of small tweaks I want to do sometime, and that will probably perpetually be true, but it's pretty feature complete now as to what I absolutely needed for my blog.

Dreams

May 30 2026

• I was at the end of a vacation, and was spending the last few minutes before it ended with friends at a complex of several highrise buildings.
• Just as the vacation timer ended, I excused myself from my friends and made my way towards one of the buildings to return some stuff that I had borrowed for the trip. The building I entered had a front desk with two girls seated behind the counter, and I handed over some items to them.
• I also tried to hand them a handful of loose teeth that I had in my pocket, but they looked puzzled at that. I said that I had read an article posted online about trading in loose teeth for prizes, and asked if it was real or if it was an AI hallucination. They said it was probably the latter and I ahhh'd in disappointment. I did show them the actual article that I found on my phone though, and they agreed that it was a fake.
• I asked them if they would please mind calling the desk in another office to let them know that I was on my way too as I also had to go there and return some items, but due to the teeth discussion it would be close as to whether I would reach there within the first hour after the timer ended, which was necessary to avoid some penalty. They agreed to do this.
• Much later on, there was also a scene where I visited Dunman High. This was a disciplinary call for something or other and my "punishment" was having to visit the school on a weekend and stay there for a day, but I welcomed this since it actually gave me permission and legitimacy to visit my old school again.
• However once I reached the school, I had no idea where to actually go to check in for said disciplinary action. I lurked outside a classroom where I knew Mrs Shu was in, tucking my skirt under me and hiding from her view behind a spiral staircase that led up to the level above as I watched a couple of students ascend it. They looked back at me as well.
• I then detoured down a short passage cut into the wall which I had seen the boys' washroom at the end of. I found the girls' bathroom to the right of it, concealed from the main corridor outside, and entered that. There were three cubicles and the rightmost one, which was the one closest to the door as well as the largest one, was the only one that was empty, so I entered that and locked the door behind me to try to calm down and puzzle out the situation.
• Snippet: I also had a snippet sometime before those two scenes where I met and talked with Johannes about something that we came away in agreement about, but I forget what the actual topic was.

May 31 2026

• Snippet: Gemini had introduced a new feature to flag errors using my Text Hover script automatically as it read through my website, so I was flipping open pages and looking for those marks to fix them. Someone complained about the way that I fixed one of my diary entries, and I told them to write down their suggested replacement and send it to me then.