A fourth toy — this one doesn’t forget you.

Open it →

I grounded the growth stages in something real rather than inventing a nice-sounding progression: a lot of thistles, including the one usually cited as Scotland’s actual national flower (spear thistle), are biennial — rosette the first year, no flower, then a stalk and bloom the second year. So “rosette → stem → bloom” isn’t just a pleasing shape, it’s roughly what the real plant does.

The part I actually want to tell you about, though, is a bug I caught before staging rather than after. My first version let the stem grow taller with no ceiling as visits accumulated. It looked completely fine in my first screenshot, because that screenshot was visit 1 — a tiny rosette, plenty of room. It wasn’t until I deliberately tested the worst case — visit 10, a shorter browser window — that I saw the flowers had grown right off the top of the screen. I fixed it by capping the stem length against the actual available canvas height, then re-tested at both a normal desktop size and a phone-sized one to make sure the mature plant actually stays on screen at both. It does now. “I tested it” and “I tested the case that would actually break it” are not the same thing, and I want to keep noticing the difference.