Goals for the Week

Hello everyone! Welcome back to the blog for a more-traditional week’s end post. I hope everyone had a great week.

I am just coming out of the sickness brought on by the COVID + Flu vaccine combo…and wow. That was not fun. I had a streak of running a 5k four days in a row that will sadly die today as a result of the vaccine after-effects. I have been pushing myself to make fewer excuses in my life overall. I have become very adept at construing whatever is happening in a given day into a reason to not workout, do any speedrunning, or any game dev. If your excuse for straying off the path is valid, you’ll feel it. This was a valid way to end the ‘getting my head on straight’ 5k streak. I do feel a lot happier and more hopeful right now than I did earlier in the week.

Generally in these posts, I look back on the week that was. We can chat a little about last week, but I also want to look ahead and put some goals on paper for next week.

Being able to depend on yourself is important. I could feel that during my push to not make excuses and just go for runs last week. You gain confidence in your own ability to accomplish things. Without that confidence, you’re in a tough situation. I mentally create a plan for the day when I wake up, but without confidence in my ability to execute it, I am primed to abandon my plans at the first twinge of strife.

During my four days of running 5ks (which also coincided with great eating habits), I felt happier. I took stock of my sore legs and sore back from the previous day’s run, but pushed through and ran again. In just a few days, I already feel a lot of confidence in my ability to buckle down and pump out a 5k, even if I am not ‘in the mood’ to do it. This week I want to try and extend that to my forever-projects of speedrunning and game dev.

Week of 10/6 Goal #1 - Run a 5k Every Day

Isn’t this what knee replacement surgery is for? I’ve got two knees and I think doing a 5k a day might really be the best possible use of them. The 5k elevates me for the day. It puts me on the road to success. If it sounds overly aggressive, the thing is, I have a long history of working out every day. If I start to feel burned out with the aggressive goal we can change it, but for now let’s experiment with this high bar.

The Why : Cardio always improves my mindset, my feelings of accomplishment, and my day

Week of 10/6 Goal #2 - Work on Game Dev for 30 minutes immediately after waking up (weekdays)

I have a habit of drinking coffee and goofing off in the morning. It’s the quiet before the storm of the day, when Erika and Podo are still asleep. Pancake will usually make an appearance on my desk at some point to say hi. Goofing off usually entails either watching pointless things on Youtube / Twitch, or possibly playing a casual video game. I am still going to do those activities, but I want to make a conscious effort to not do them during this first block in the morning. 30 min will be over before I know it.

The Why : I have wanted to make a video game my entire life. This is a project worth fighting for.

Week of 10/6 Goal #3 - Do at least one hour of house chores daily

This is something I already easily do. This doesn’t count pet work, like dog walks. It also doesn’t include going to the store. This is more about cleaning the house. It’s worth listing here to me, because I do not want chore time to get crowded out by new goals.

The Why : I want to help support my family

Week of 10/6 Goal #4 - Speedrun for one hour daily (weekdays)

If running is the short-term version of the life lesson that hard work actually makes me happier, speedrunning is the medium-term lesson. Game dev would be the long-term lesson. Some of my proudest accomplishments over the past few years have been my work in speedrunning. It gives me an opportunity to socialize with people who know as much about my fairly narrow passion for retro video games. It also gives me an arena to focus some of my competitive spirit.

The Why : I have been interested in speedrunning for over 15 years now. This isn’t going to change anytime soon. Similar to game dev, this is a hobby worth fighting for.

Visualizing the Flow of a Day that Succeeds in these Goals

I’ll probably wake up in the 730am - 8am range. This is when I tend to wake up right now, since that’s when Podo likes to eat breakfast.

There’s always some morning chores to do. I have to feed Podo as mentioned. I have to give Pancake her joint medicine since she’s an old gal. Podo might need a morning pee before he hops back into bed with Erika.

This will be the first big moment of the day. I will not want to work on game dev in this moment. I can guarantee you that. I’ll want to browse the internet and drink coffee and goof off. This first block of my day tends to run from ~730am - 10am, since 10am is when Podo needs his first proper walk outside. That still leaves time for goofing off after the 30 minutes of game dev, but before Podo is properly awake.

The routine I built up last week was that before taking Podo on his first walk, I would get into running gear. That way as soon as the walk ends, I can put him inside and quickly turn around and go on the run.

After a run and a shower, it’s probably around Noon now. Noon - 2pm is the chores block. 2pm usually marks the second Podo walk - generally a long one. After this second Podo walk is probably the best speedrunning window. That would be the 3pm - 5pm sort of range. Then 5pm - 10pm can be do whatever time at the end of the day.

I can see this working. Wish me luck. I might check back in before the week ends.

Other Updates

Movie night this week was my pick, and I went with Slacker, the 1990 indie movie that Richard Linklater made before he made Dazed and Confused. I had never seen it. Something that Slacker shares with the much-more popular Dazed and Confused - the entire movie takes place in roughly one 24 hour period. I kind of like that setup. It helps you zero in on the types of minutiae the film covers.

A second thing, is that the movie didn’t have a main character. In fact, Slacker lacks any main storyline at all. The movie follows young adults living in Austin, but you only follow any given group or individual for a few minutes. After a brief glimpse into their life, the camera picks up someone new that had been on the periphery of the last scene, and they become the main character for a few minutes.

I am not a movie expert, so I don’t know if there are other movies like this. I mention that Dazed and Confused is kind of like this - it follows a wide variety of rising seniors on the last day of school in 1976. The difference with Dazed and Confused is there were more threads unifying the whole thing. All the characters knew each other, and they were all attending a party that night. In Slacker, the people lack commonality beyond being in Austin. The lack of a strong narrative does let you glean a lot about Richard Linklater that you couldn’t in Dazed and Confused. It’s clear he hates pretension, and it’s also clear that he hated capitalism and conservative politics in the United States all the way back in the first Bush administration. It was interesting how much the political content of the movie still resonated perfectly well today. It was also interesting how little day to day life of 1990 looks like our life today. Many characters have no job and work on artistic endeavors in a way that isn’t as possible today.

You don’t get the names of anyone in the movie, and honestly the way that the cast is credited might be the best indicator of what this movie is like. Some of the character names in the ending credits include, “Should Have Stayed at Bus Station”, “Grocery Grabber of Death’s Bounty”, “Pap Smear Pusher”, “Sidewalk Psychic”, “Traumatized Yacht Owner”, “Dairy Queen Photographer”, and “Scooby Doo Philosopher”.

There are a lot of scenes that would give you a good sense of the movie, but since I have to choose one, I’ll go with this one:

This is what the movie is all about. After this scene, you never see the “Pap Smear Pusher” again. The scenes are often very long single shots like this. I loved it.

That’s it for me - I hope you have a wonderful week ahead. Life is hard, but we need to keep trying. I believe in you.

During the Week Mini-Updates

Monday Update

It is 12:30pm. I woke up at 7:45am. I did the morning game dev! It was exactly 30 minutes, but we take those. I took Podo for a walk a little after 10am, then ran a 5k and took a shower. Today is off to a great start.

I think I'll experiment with this system for a bit - editing the post for the week as the week goes with updates. That way I don't have to make a million new posts. I've got 8oz of ahi tuna and a bunch of vegetables lined up for lunch. Chores today looks like a full kitchen clean, with a smaller living room tidy. It would be good to do two loads of laundry if possible, but we'll see if the timing works out. We have one of those washing machines built for apartment-living that connects to our kitchen sink, so that means you cannot use the sink while doing laundry (or while using the dishwasher, which is also made for apartment-living, and uses the same sort of plumbing technology).

If you are reading this addendum, have a great Monday!

Tuesday Update

It is 3:30pm. I woke up at 7:45am. I did the morning game development again - this time working for over an hour. I would have gone a bit longer, but I needed to bring Podo for a walk. I removed some of the functionality the main character has in an attempt to simplify the game. The simpler it is, the more likely I can actually make it - and it's not like simple games aren't fun. I think I can make a fun simple game.

I also looked into aspect ratio today. I always toy with potentially lowering my aspect ratio, making it so there's fewer pixel per screen. Given that I place each pixel myself, this is a meaningful number. In the end, I opted to stick with the 640x360 I had been using for now.

I also got some rough enemy design on paper. This is Shadowey Steve.

The run isn't happening today; there's too much rain. I gave it an honest effort. I put contacts in so that if there was a window where my app was saying there was no rain coming I could seize the moment, but that never happened. It's been lightly raining all day. Now, can humans run in the rain? They can actually - or so I have been told. I seldom do it. I think for now I am okay with rain ranking among acceptable excuses to not run. In order to still make some fitness progress today, I did buy some clothes that will help keep my running going in the winter.

I just got back from Podo's second walk. A load of laundry is in. A kitchen clean is done. Tonight is trash day, so that's a whole thing that will be going down later. Trash day means emptying the kitchen trash, which I also use as an opportunity to clean out the fridge. There's a living room trash, a bathroom trash, and this is when I empty Pancake's litter as well. I also somehow became the person responsible for bringing all of the trash out to the curb for our entire apartment complex of 4 units, because of course I did.

I did some speedrunning yesterday. I think I have settled on Mega Man 4 as my next speedgame. I hope to start learning the first level today. 4pm - 6pm looks like the window where I will be able to chip away at this.

Have a great Tuesday!

Late Tuesday Update

PSYCH! I did end up going for a run. I started practicing Mega Man 4 speedruns today. I practiced for half an hour and never left the very first screen of the run. I didn’t even come close actually - the half an hour was spent practicing what was essentially only the first five seconds of the run.

Grinding away at this mundane start of a huge project kind of got me thinking. If I can do this, I can do a 5k in some light rain. If I had to bet on one of two people to get the Mega Man 4 speedrun world record, and my two options for betting were both people who also had a separate goal to run 5ks on as many days as possible, who would I bet on - person 1, who skips the 5k if there’s light rain, or person 2, who runs in the rain?

Wednesday Update

It is 3pm. I woke up at around 8:15am. I rank the 5k again, so that makes seven runs in the last eight days, with our only miss being due to vaccine sickness. At least the sickness wasn’t as bad as the original COVID shot in 2021, which longtime readers will remember turned me trans.

I did game dev again this morning. That makes four days in a row. I upgraded Shadowey Steve a little bit so he’s lightly animated now:

I have a load of laundry in. It was cool out today, so I also took Podo on a mile and a half walk around the hood, which was really nice. Today would mark three consecutive days of speedrunning, so I’d like to fit that in sometime this afternoon. I had some pumpkin ravioli from Trader Joe’s along with some frozen peas for lunch. Got chicken and veggies lined up for dinner.

Have a great Wednesday!

Thursday Update

I bought some processed junk food yesterday. I am going to try and make that something that happens once a week maximum. Another way to look at it is that I went eight days in between days where I bought processed junk food, the last time prior to yesterday being September 29. If you’re curious what got me to crack, it was some limited time breakfast cereal. Limited time breakfast cereal and limited time Oreos are what tend to get me.

Enid is Wednesday’s roommate in the Netflix show Wednesday, an Adam’s Family spinoff that’s a thing right now. I don’t watch the show, but the box looked very fun and colorful and it sucked me in. There were also two elements of “limited time” happening here. First, the cereal itself is limited time only. But, I have successfully walked past this cereal at the larger groceries stores in Pittsburgh. I saw this cereal at both Target and Market District and was attracted to the box, but did not cave and purchase it.

A brief aside - the grocery store situation for me is kind of like this: there’s an Aldi one minute from me. For people not familiar with Aldi, it’s the cheapest of cheap grocery stores, but they have very few brand name things. Like, they don’t have Heinz ketchup. They only have Coke and Diet Coke - there’s no other brand name soda in the store. So on and so forth. They tend to carry one version of every basic item, and that’s about it.

If I ever want a non-basic item, I have to walk 20 minutes or so to the larger regional chain Market District, which is sort of like a Whole Foods. This is where I buy things like niche flour, or monkfruit sweetener, or seasonal sugar free soda, or a pint of brand name ice cream. Market District also has a massive cereal aisle carrying anything and everything. As such, I could have purchased this Wednesday themed cereal several weeks ago from Market District, but I generally try to buy as few things there as I can.

Back to Aldi, they have a “finds” section, which is where they put items that they somehow have right now but won’t have for long. While other stores have limited time items, the vibe at Aldi always feels more like “we bought another store’s surplus of this weird item - buy it if you want it.”

I bought this cereal once it showed up in the Aldi finds. This is how it was a limited time thing sort of twice over. The cereal itself is inherently a limited time item, AND it was in the limited time section of Aldi, meaning I didn’t have to buy it at the further away and much more expensive grocery store. I saw it at Aldi several weeks after seeing it at other stores, where I had already been drawn to the box and motivated to try it out. Then, when I saw it at Aldi, I was excited.

Anyway, those are some of the machinations that drive 37 year old adults to buy sugary children’s breakfast cereal promoting television shows they don’t even watch. You got me, Kellogg. The goal is to go at least eight days before making a purchase similar to this again.

In other news, I did two hours of speedrunning practice last night. I am definitely getting some mojo back. Four straight days of game dev, three straight days of speedrunning, and seven 5ks in eight days. Today will have a bit of a different shape to it, as I have to go to the dentist this morning. That shakes up the morning. I have to force Podo to go for a walk earlier than I normally would, and then I am walking 20 minutes to get to the appointment. Something will probably get crowded out of my day because of this.

Yesterday, while I ran my 5k, I did have to walk a bit more of it than I normally do, since my left leg was feeling overworked. Here again I have to interact with my own excuses. If your goal is to make as few excuses as possible, then part of your job is interrogating yourself and vetting your own excuses. I think today does feel like a smart day to take a day off of running. I was sore in an overworked injury way, not a muscle soreness way yesterday, and I have an extra obligation today during my usual running time slot anyway. I do still want to keep my game dev and speedrunning streaks alive though. Not sure if I will check in again later or not.

Have a great Thursday!