Newsies, Con Air, Work

Hello again everyone! It is great to see you as always. Let’s reflect back on last week a bit, and look forward to the week ahead. Buckle in!

The Things I Measure

Game Development

Last week was the best week in game development in a while. I am in a solid habit of doing ~2 hours in the mornings. Here’s the data:

If you followed along with some of the in-week updates last week, you saw that a lot of progress is being made. Our main character has movement I am happy with right now. I implemented a cool-down on the dash, including a small flash that indicates that the dash has recharged and can be used again.

I finished coding in the ability to shoot, which includes slight changes to the animations in that the main character will have their arm extended while shooting. In the context of our state machine, this means adding a corresponding shooting state to each state we already had. So you can jump, and you can jump + shoot. You can dash, and you can dash + shoot. You can stand still, and you can stand still + shoot.

I coded in our jumps and dashes such that each can be upgraded. While you start the game with one jump and one dash, you can collect powerups to raise that maximum number. Our bullets damage enemies, who have hitboxes newly implemented to detect collisions with the player’s bullets. There is a basic enemy explosion effect in place when they die.

When the week ended, I was in the process of coding in the process by which the player takes damage if they collide with something that can hurt them. This opened a can of worms of sorts. Working on this makes me realize that I need to reorganize some of the current code to facilitate our ability to take damage. It’s all coming along. I’m very happy with game development right now. Let’s keep this up next week.

Speedrunning

Last week we detected that speedrunning was sort of dying. This week was a good bounce back. Data:

I was able to put more hours against this than I have been. That’s all I can do really, so I think I need to try and feel happy with it, though I do feel like it’s really, really slow. I have to remind myself that this is literally by design; I have prioritized game development ahead of speedrunning. When I was at my speedrunning peak in 2024, I was often practicing for 20-25 hours a week. That’s just not what my life looks like right now.

With that said, I think it’s a reasonable goal for next week to try and keep my total hours at or above the 4.5 of last week. If I keep chipping away at it, these Mega Man 4 speedruns will happen eventually.

Weight Loss

It was a standout week on the scale. Data:

The most notable thing about this is that my diet is requiring very little willpower right now. I have been completely off of processed food for like three weeks at this point. My diet is locked in - yogurt and fresh fruit for lunch, veggies, a starch and some sort of protein for dinner. Popcorn if I want a snack. It’s all very simple. No consuming anything that is not a real food.

Once you stop eating ultra processed food, you also stop desiring it. Even though prepping and cooking all of this whole food does take time and effort, it’s somehow still less effort than the stress of eating a diet that includes ultra processed food. Ultra processed food puts you into a craving cycle that mimics addiction. You’re never truly at peace. Stepping outside of that cycle has been a relief.

So…not much to say here, other than I want to keep going the way I am going. Let’s see if I can keep shedding this extra body weight as we keep eating whole foods.

Exercise

Exercise is exercising. Three 5ks and plenty of walking around the city. If anything, I think the exercise trap I fall into is trying to exercise too often. Three or four 5ks a week is where I want to be right now. Going above and beyond that seldom gets me to a sustainable lifestyle; even if I can do the workouts, it steals from other areas of my life.

Good week. Let’s try and replicate this next week.

Other Stuff

Con Air

Movie night this week was my brother Jason’s pick, and he chose the 1997 action movie Con Air. For a relatively simple action movie, it’s shocking how many easily identifiable people are in this movie. Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Dave Chappelle, and Danny Trejo are all in it.

The premise of the movie is that there is a flight meant to transport a bunch of dangerous convicts from one place to another for administrative purposes, but then the convicts hijack the plane. This sets up a scenario where the convicts are trying to escape to freedom, while various police forces are trying to stop them.

Except, embedded among the convicts on this plane is Nicolas Cage who is actually a “good guy.” The movie shows us how Cage first wound up in prison: he was getting harassed at a bar and got into a bar fight, except he accidentally wound up killing his opposition in said fight. This leads to a narrative the viewer is supposed to agree with: that Cage really wasn’t a bad guy, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and what happened to him “could have happened to anyone” (an actual quote in the movie).

This is kind of hilarious. Uh…no, straight up murdering someone in a bar fight is not something that could just happen to anyone! It’s a glimpse into how our views on violence have changed over the span of 30 years. Anyway, since Cage is secretly a “good guy” on this plane of “bad guys” who did things presumably way worse than murdering someone in a bar fight, he helps save the day by foiling the convicts escape plans and helping the police restore justice.

I can’t say I’d really recommend this movie. I think I will give Con Air a 4.5 / 10 on the unofficial McLepke media rating scale. It was fun to see such a stacked cast of actors (women play almost no role at all in this movie), but it’s mostly just an action movie.

Newsies

On Saturday, Lau and I saw our second musical in as many weeks, this time checking out a local production of Newsies. For the uninitiated, Newsies was a musical made by Disney in 1992 about the newspaper boys of New York City forming a union to fight back against corporate big shots Pulitzer and Hearst. This is based on a real newsboy strike that happened in 1900. Is this the last time any large company created a pro-union piece of media? Even though it came out over 30 years ago at this point, I’m still kind of surprised that this ever came out at all.

If you know me today, it is probably not surprising that I loved Newsies as a youth. The original movie stars a young Christian Bale as the leader of the newsies union. It easily gets a 10 / 10 on the unofficial McLepke media rating scale. I mean, it’s a union musical. What else do you want???

The movie musical then got adapted into a live musical in 2011. If you’re familiar with the movie but haven’t seen the live musical, the biggest change to the goings-on is that Christian Bale’s love interest (Davey and Les’s sister) and the helpful newspaper writer “Bryan Denton” get merged into one character, named Katherine Plumber.

Katherine serves both roles, helping the newsies by publishing articles about the strike in the less-popular New York Sun, while also falling in love with the leader of the newsies. I thought this was a smart move; while the cast of characters is enormous in Newsies, there are very few women of any importance at all. In the original movie, Christian Bale’s love interest was literally just that; she had no other importance whatsoever. This at least got one female character prominently involved in the story.

One thing I was able to reflect on while watching this Newsies performance is just how happy I am with my life right now. In Newsies, one of the songs is called Santa Fe; it explores the main character’s recurring fantasy of leaving New York City for Santa Fe, even though he has never been to Santa Fe, and knows very little about it. It’s a source of hope that keeps him going.

I hadn’t thought about this in a while, but when I was trapped in cubicle life back in Boston and saving every penny to try and escape the rat race, I used to refer to Pittsburgh as my “Santa Fe”, in reference to Jack’s fantasy of fleeing to Santa Fe in Newsies. Erika has had a long-lasting love of Pittsburgh ever since attending college here, and her best friend lives here. We both knew that I wanted to stop working my full time job ASAP. We both knew we wanted to get a dog, and that all of this would be a more affordable reality in Pittsburgh.

While we had these loose plans though, the fact remained that I had never been to Pittsburgh until we were really ready to move here. I didn’t know much more about Pittsburgh than Jack knows about Santa Fe. It felt like a fantasy city where I could just hang out with a dog and not have to work. It represented that next part of life that would be better than the current one.

Well, we’re there now.

One other note on Santa Fe - musical nerds may know that Rent also has a song called Santa Fe, and it’s about more-or-less the exact same thing: leaving New York City for Santa Fe, just 100 years later. As far as I can tell, this is a very strange coincidence. Newsies came out a few years before Rent did, though people claim that the song Santa Fe in Rent was written years before the musical actually debuted. Bizarre no?

Anyway that’s it for now - talk soon. Let’s have a great week. I believe in you.

Tuesday Update

Say no to processed food! Pay American farmers, not MegaCorps! Here’s the dinner I made last night, chicken, cauliflower, sweet potato:

Have a great day everyone!

~Noon update - I haven’t done any work this morning because I’ve been consumed by this two hour documentary on competitive bird-watching. Watch at your own risk it’s addicting.