Quick crossword recap
Played a bit of NYT’s Crossword earlier this week! Currently I only play the Monday issues since I pretty much a pretentious cruciverbalist. I’ll format the answers as ABC, which means I figured out BC while I revealed A from an earlier clue.
Issue for 2026 Jan 26, Monday
”Fun” answers
3DModern lead-in to play - C O S- Did not come as obvious for me, was expecting an intro to a Broadway play, not the word “-play.”
9DLead-in to X, Y, Z, or Alpha - G E N10A“I want to be in the loop on this email” - C C M E- The effect of corporate culture on me the past few years. Did not even doubt this answer a single second.
22DBaker’s meas. - T B S P- “Meas.” was not obvious to me as short for “measurement(s).” As with standard NYT Crossword rules, if the clue already has a contraction (e.g., meas., “in brief”, abbrev., approx.), it follows that the answer should also be a contraction / abbreviation.
25AItinerary calculation, in brief - E T A28APurple yam used to flavor desserts - U B E33ATruffle pigs’ assets - S N O U T S42DKind of port in A/V - H D M I
The only documentation I found online of the Sbarro branch in SM Pampanga. (Source, Original)
44AFood court pizza chain - S B A R R O- Did not come obviously as a “food court pizza chain.” Maybe it is in the States? Sbarro brings back very fond memories as it was one of the “fancier” places we would go to in SM Pampanga back when I was a kid. Sadly, I couldn’t find any documentation of the branch itself before it closed around the 2010s. The next encounter I’ve had with Sbarro was in UP Town Center, during my freshman and sophomore years in 2018 where I’d eat at regularly. Up until now, Sbarro has yet to reopen in San Fernando’s vicinity.
67ASend an eggplant or taco emoji, say - S E X T
Rabbit hole answers
36A___ Vicious - S I D- Here’s where my knowledge starts to run out. Sid Vicious was the second bassist for Sex Pistols. Admittedly, I’m quite unfamiliar with punk rock British bands, and I’ve only heard Sex Pistols as a “Stand” in JJBA, known for naming such Stands based on Western music.
- Vicious died at a young age of 21, on the second of February, 1979 via a drug overdose and an alleged suicide pact with his former lover—I was born a day after on 1999. Another fun fact is that I share a birthday with Mendelssohn, 190 years earlier, and it’s also the day the music died, forty years earlier.
Mess-ups
47DFifth or Madison, in Manhattan - S T R E E T / A V E N U E
On “idle” incrementals
I’ve been playing Trimps recently, as my Steam friends may have noticed. It’s just running in my background, doing its thing while I basically leave my PC on 24/7.
No, I didn’t leave it on for the game’s sake—I literally leave it on all the time, so might as well run the game while it is.
Some random image I’ve found on Google Image search, with the term trimps kongregate. Version 4.0 back in 2017—now it’s 5.10.1, only updated last year, 2025. For reference, I was 18 in 2017, in twelfth grade.
Trimps is an idle incremental I’m incredibly familiar with. I’ve played this in my youth as I used to be an active member of Kongregate pre-2018. I remember my first encounter with it: Flash games were starting to get phased out, and Trimps is an HTML5/JS game which was fairly novel at the time. A few of my chatroom friends were playing it, so I decided to give it a try and it had me hooked.
I’ve played an innumerable count of idle incrementals since then: classics such as Antimatter Dimensions, Kittens Game, Universal Paperclips, CIFI, Cookie Clicker. There’s also this one really good Roblox game I’ve played named Grass Cutting Incremental which was nothing to scoff at, despite the platform it was on. Somehow I got to revive my Roblox account from ‘06 or ‘08 and played only that.
Anyway, back to Trimps. I couldn’t find the energy to game regularly (likely because I’m saving my energy for Mewgenics) so I span it up and placed it on my “third monitor.” I find these “games” quite appropriate since I could “play” them while doing something else actively on the side.
My current game thus far. ~200k He pushing for HZE 100.
If some people put on a Twitch stream, a long-running YouTube video essay, or a podcast while working, I put on an idle game. I guess it’s a more engaging tamagotchi for me, dating back to my early high school days.
Trimps is one of those incremental games of epic proportions—in the literal sense. I’ll probably reach its endgame around the end of the year if I play it actively. Maybe even more than a year. I’ve gotten some friends to play it with me as well!
On backlogs
Facebook archive processing
I believe I haven’t mentioned this yet, but I’ve been off Facebook since the early parts of 2025. Long story short: you just realize that 95% of the things you see are worthless posts (ads, unentertaining BS), while 5% would be posts from your friends. And of that five percent—probably 80% I couldn’t really care less and 20% it’d be funny shared meme or a life update that’s interesting.
So that comes down to of posts I see are worth my time. Hell, I think I’m already being generous with that back-of-the-envelope calculation even. I’d go more into detail but that’s besides the point.
I’ve found I can’t really get out of Instagram yet since most of the people (if not all) I care about are on there. Maybe if the cons start to outweigh the pros in the future you’ll find me absent on that platform as well.
Anyway—I recently (and briefly) reactivated my Facebook account so I could request a full download of my data so I could process some images and store them somewhere else in the long run. What spurred this moment is when I was trying to look for a picture pre-2018 (when I started “maining” Instagram) which was on Facebook, and the fear of it being lost media struck me.
Now, I have a couple of .zip files around 2-3 GB each. I’ll have to write a Python script (which I plan to be in the public domain) to process these files soon so I could get some old pictures out. I’ll most certainly upload these old photos on this site for everyone to see. And on that note…
Quartz 4 gallery, eventual S3 migration
As some of you may know, I’ve built this site using Quartz 4. I’m planning to put up pages to showcase with almost all photos with some annotations—such as the photos mentioned above, our Batanes trip, some surviving photos I have from our Vietnam trip a couple years back, and so on.
Right now, I can render photos via [[photoname.ext]] in the file, but it just centers it and I have no flexibility for caption placement or photo layout. I’ll have to look for a suitable extension that can allow me to do this, or I’ll have to code it myself.
So far, my modifications to the site include selective RSS tagging, attaching Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Steam links, among other things. For that I’ll have to figure out my own syntax for layouting the photos in a grid / masonry system, so it’ll be a fun little side-project in improving the site.
On the horizon
- Mewgenics. You’ve heard it from me incessantly in the previous blog post.
- Gunpla backlogs. While these are backlogs, I’m quite excited to start building the 30MM G1 Michigan (Liger Tail) I picked up on a whim while on a department store trip. I’ll have to play AC6 to get a better reference, but I’ve some paint and materials ready for building. The whole process would be documented so that may be something to look forward to. There’s also an HG Acguy that’s built and ready for painting, so I’ll document that as well and treat that as a practice piece before I move onto doing the Liger Tail.
- EMS deployment. My first product should be deployed within February, given that all the hurdles of bureaucracy don’t provide much friction. It’ll mostly provide grades and payment visibility for now, and I’ll be disabling the enrollment module until the client’s ready for it to be enabled.
- Coffee stuff. My mom started getting into making specialty coffee at home! We got a Baratza Encore ESP and some equipment for V60 stuff recently. I got a couple bags of beans from my friends at Amore Coffee in Iloilo and they should be arriving soon.