More Life
It’s another week everyone. Get hyped! We’re here to catch up on the latest. Let’s get into it.
It’s getting very chilly for 5ks, but I am still doing them. Get your fleece-lined tights and thermal base layers on. Three is the minimum number I am happy with here, and we’re meeting the minimum, so I am not going to complain. I still have to walk some of the distance with these due to a hilly route and a fledgling fitness level on my part, but this week I just need to keep it going.
Game development is the goal that I feel the best about right now. I have a very real habit forming where I work on the game in the mornings. The week started a little slow, but the three days I worked on game development were Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Notably, the hours were way up. I am having more fun with this lately.
Last week’s work covered quite a bit. A new outer space themed background, a little work on the music. Some programming changes, including changing the way screen transitions work, as well as how the camera moves. I love the way things are trending, and I am feeling ready for another strong week.
We’re still floating around the same neighborhood here, but it felt like a week with progress. I think the most important thing I am getting back into is avoiding processed food. I spent some time getting riled about how much I hate all the major “food” companies in the United States, and it really did cause me to more-easily avoid junk food all week. We all have a finite amount of willpower, which is sort of fine with the other goals I talk about. It only takes a finite amount of willpower to get yourself to run a 5k. It only takes a finite amount of discipline to close all the distractions and work on game development for an hour.
I think it takes a little more to eat healthy though. You can stray from a designated diet at any moment of any day. Combine that with how potent junk food is in 2025, and it’s easy to end up fighting a losing battle. If one hour of slipping up can wipe out a week’s worth of hard work, how can you expect to win?
I think part of the answer is changing your head space so that you don’t have to use as much willpower. The pros of eating healthy need to legitimately outweigh the cons in each of our own personal evaluations. Seeing our pathetic “food” industry for what it has actually become helps in this regard. Ultra processed junk food isn’t something I want to use all my willpower resisting; it’s something I want my inner self to legitimately not want. And the more I think about all our fake “food”, the more I fucking hate it.
I am feeling confident. I think a good week is coming. I am eating more and more real food, which I think will keep me moving in the right direction.
Speedrunning has been drawing the short straw a little bit. I spent some time thinking about it, and I absolutely have a belief that I can only truly succeed at either game development or speedrunning at any one time. It is just that though - a belief…a limiting belief. Last night I sat idle for hour after hour after hour with nothing to do. I wasn’t relaxing - I was just sort of stuck, bored and restless. I have the time to do both. I feel happier when I keep chipping away at these difficult projects. I will fight to get some more speedrunning time in this week.
Other Stuff
It was an eventful weekend. Podo and I attended the Pittsburgh Hounds Halloween costume party, which was a heartwarming experience. Podo wore his usual hot dog costume, which longtime readers of the blog might recall is the only costume he has worn during his four non-infant Halloweens.
There were a lot of good costumes. One other beagle came as a hot dog, except his three family members (the husband and wife who are the primary caretakers of the dog, as well as their mother) wore ketchup, mustard and relish t-shirts - a great touch. Another beagle we know named Pebbles dressed up in a loincloth type thing and her parents were Fred and Wilma Flinstone. Get it? For Gen Z and younger, these characters are probably best described as “the people on the fruity pebbles cereal box”.
I didn’t take any pictures. Sorry!
The next day, my brother and his wife joined me and Erika for our annual pumpkin carving. There was one issue though - we couldn’t find any pumpkins. We drove to two different stores and both were sold out of pumpkins. Now, had we scoured the city of Pittsburgh, I do suspect that we could have found some pumpkins somewhere, but driving to two stores and coming up empty handed sucked a lot of life out of us. Instead, we hatched a plan to try and revisit the pumpkin carving next Friday - the actual day of Halloween. With no pumpkins, we just hung out and ate cheese and crackers. Stay tuned to see if we can successfully carve some pumpkins next weekend.
In other social plans, Erika and I bought tickets with the fearless leader of the Pittsburgh Hounds meetup group to go see a production of Little Shop of Horrors next Sunday (not with our dogs - this is a human hangout). I am excited about that.
In terms of media, I am still playing Sea of Stars, which is adequately holding my attention. Erika and I also started Ozark as our next TV show. I have pitched the idea of watching Ozark a few different times throughout the years. We even started it once but Erika started waffling on it after the second episode. For whatever reason the show is landing with her a bit better right now, so it looks like that is going to be our main drama for a while. There are four seasons, and 44 total episodes, each of which is an hour long, so we have a nice run of content ahead of us.
I finished the book Negative Space, by B.R. Yeager this week. Neither the book nor the author have a Wikipedia page. From what I can gather, B.R. Yeager is approximately my age, and grew up in western Massachusetts. The book came out in 2020 and takes place in a New Hampshire suburb, beginning in 2018.
Negative Space is entirely told by three narrators who alternate speaking from the first person perspective about what is going on. The three narrators are all in the summer before senior year of high school when the book starts. The most central character of the book is a fourth kid - not one of the three narrators - named Tyler.
Of our three narrators, two are romantically involved with Tyler. One narrator is Jill, who is in a public, straight relationship with Tyler. A second narrator is Ahmir, who is in a more-secretive gay relationship with Tyler. The third narrator is Lu, who is a trans girl that is friends with Jill. Technically, Lu’s gender identity is never solidly discussed in the book. The word trans is never used. But, we observe that Lu’s closer friends all refer to her as she, and use the name Lu, while people more-distant to her (her parents included) call her Lou, and refer to her as he.
From here on out there will be some spoilers for the book. The town that these kids lives in has kind of a cursed vibe. Tons and tons of people in the town commit suicide. Lu regularly visits an online forum where people discuss this. The suicides seem to have some predictability to them.
Meanwhile, Tyler increasingly becomes interested in more and more occult…stuff. Eventually, it seems like Tyler and all his occult interests and demonic rituals are somehow influencing the suicides taking place in the town. Jill and Lu end up getting into occult rituals as well.
But, this isn’t a straightforward horror mystery. By the end of the book, all three narrators plus Tyler are dead, but there isn’t really a firm resolution to anything. Eventually, we witness Jill go to college where she meets a new character named Maddie who is from an entirely different part of the country, yet has knowledge of similar ritualistic practices that Tyler did. So like, it’s not just this one town that is cursed.
We never really learn how the mystical ritual stuff works. The suicide epidemic of the central town in the story is never solved. Many supernatural things happen that as the reader you just kind of accept and move on from without explanation.
If my write up here seems confusing to you, it’s because the book itself is very confusing. Negative Space does not tie anything together for you. Reading it is a different sort of experience. I found it fun to be in the book and turning the pages, but looking back, I find it to be a hard book to describe. Very little gets explained, and there are a lot of gaps that you just have to fill in for yourself. Things just happen. It is not a clean narrative with well-defined plot points. It’s more a hodgepodge of common teenage experiences mixed with supernatural horror.
I think I would give Negative Space a 6.0 / 10 on the unofficial McLepke media rating scale. I don’t think I would really recommend it to anyone, but at the same time I was invested in it and page turning at times. The first day I started the book I read 100 pages or about 1/3 of the book in one go. It’s definitely fun to read at times, but it’s also a book that you’ll finish and be like, ‘so…..what was that?’
Anyway, that’s it for me this week. It’s Monday now, so hopefully everyone is ready for another week. You can do it! I maintain my belief in you. Go forth and prosper!
Tuesday Update - it is 11:30am. I am getting a slow start to the morning. I slept in a bit. Maybe it’s all the Appalachian Trail docu-content I’ve been consuming lately, but I’ve been in the mood to go on long walks. I think this week I am going to track my total mileage rather than 5ks run. I walked 7.7 miles yesterday. It was fun.
I don’t read a lot of non-fiction nowadays, but I started the book Ultra Processed People now that I am done with Negative Space. It seems to fit well with the direction my life is flowing right now. I can already tell that this book is going to be very, very good. It came out in April 2023, and it gets in depth on the sad state of our current “food” industry. Did you know that xantham gum is a slime that bacteria use to help them stick to surfaces? There’s going to be a lot of tidbits like that.
Meanwhile, my confidence in getting off of fake food entirely is really growing. I feel good about the direction my diet is trending. I haven’t purchased any new processed food in a while, though I am eating the stuff I still have stockpiled. I finished my supply of frozen corn dogs yesterday. RIP corn dogs.
In other news, I had my first meeting with our new estate attorney yesterday. Did you know that by Pennsylvania law, if you’re married and you die, only half of your estate goes to your partner? The other half goes to your parents. That’s if you don’t have a will of course. I was appalled to find this out. Hopefully the state you live in (or country or what have you) has better laws than PA…but you might want to check on that.
Today is going to be busy. I’d like to get some exercise walks in since it’s going to be a fairly nice day out. I want to do game dev work this morning, hopefully squeeze in some speedrunning, and I have therapy at 4pm. Busy busy busy! Good luck today everyone.
Wednesday Update - here at 9:45am. Yesterday wound up being too busy to get much work done, though I did a lot around the house and walked another 7.4 miles, so in the past two days I’ve walked a tick over 15 miles. Not bad at all.
Food wise things are really starting to turn around. The last few days I’ve been incorporating vegetable preparation into my usual chore block. Blueberries with greek yogurt is getting cemented as my standard lunch. I am also drinking black coffee. Espresso, actually, since I got an espresso machine last year.
Today I have my initial appointment with laser hair removal specialists. Nothing is actually getting the laser today, but it still represents the beginning of this process. Down with body hair! I have never been shy about dressing in women’s clothes, but this marks the first major trans-inspired body modification that I have sought out. I’m excited and somewhat nervous about it.
I am about to start working on game development - hope everyone has a good Wednesday.
Thursday Update - here at 10:30am. Yesterday was a great day. I did a couple hours of game development, a couple hours of speedrunning, walked 7 miles, and ate well. I also had my first meeting with the laser hair removal folks. I am in the process of figuring out exactly how I want to go about that. It seems smart to laser a small part of my body first, just to ensure that I am good with the whole process and don’t have any negative reactions and stuff. I am going to take the weekend to think about it and get back in touch with them next week.
Today is pretty rainy, so I am anticipating walking a lot less. I am planning on starting game dev work in a few minutes here. I’ve got some mushrooms, carrots, and beef lined up for dinner. Greek yogurt with blueberries lined up for lunch. Let’s do this!
Here’s an interesting video about how uniquely corrupt the USA “food” supply is. Note that this video doesn’t really talk about RFK Jr. at all. He’s in it for like 5 seconds, and is not central to the video. I say this because if I looked at this thumbnail, I don’t think I would want to watch this because I don’t need more RFK Jr. in my life, even if it is content hating on him.
Have a great Thursday everyone.
Friday Update - today is pumpkin carving day take 2. This time we’ve got the pumpkins all ready to go. Happy Halloween!
Saturday Update - wow, I don’t think I’ve felt this physically good in a long time. I’m off of processed food and truly rolling. My diet has consisted of Greek yogurt, fresh fruit, vegetables, potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, butter, beef, chicken, fish and shrimp exclusively. I’m feeling excited about keeping it going too. Let’s do this.
Carved pumpkin pics will show up on next week’s post - too lazy to do it right now. I won’t be checking in until then so have a great weekend everyone!