A New Weekly Check In
What’s up everyone? It is great to see you. Let’s get caught up on the latest.
When I look back on what 2025 has been for me so far, I see two areas where I had to make large investments. I needed to make a large investment to get off of pot, and I needed to do the same in order to adjust to existence during the political state that emerged when the year started.
When I look back on the posts made here, the 2025 posts have had a lot to do with getting back to basics. Enjoying the simple life without the constant dopamine flooding via pot, and being able to enjoy the simple life amidst the constant fear and anger stimuli one could consume in the current world order.
There was also the wildcard event of my eye injury. That caused me to see some of these other events in a new way. Hahahahahahahaha. Ahem.
I do feel like I am getting back to the point of wanting to do hard work. I slowed life down to a crawl in January. It was the only speed I was able to effectively start rebuilding my life in its new image. Extraneous hard work like speedrunning and game development were beyond my reach, since adjusting to life in 2025 was hard work in itself.
With that backdrop, I would like to start a new weekly check-in format here. The three things I want to be working on right now are two usual suspects - game development and speedrunning, and one newcomer - a weight loss project.
Game Development - 3.3 hours
For the week that spanned 4/28 - 5/4, I logged 3.3 hours of game development time. That’s a start! My mindset with game development right now is to string consecutive days of work together. I want to touch the project every day M-F, which last week I did. Some days it was a short work session - only twenty minutes. But, I have the ball rolling.
I am working on building out the movement for my main character. Longtime readers of this blog will remember that I once built out 2d movement for a sidescroller - running, jumping, shooting, and being idle. I had essentially built the movement of Mega Man 1 or Mega Man 2. With this revisit, I am greatly expanding what the main character can do.
What I’m picturing is this - imagine you can pick up a block, similar to how Mario can pick up a block in Super Mario World or how Mickey picks up blocks in Mickey’s Magical Quest. That is the first added functionality.
Next, picture that you can store the block like how Yoshi can ‘store’ an enemy by converting it into an egg in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island.
Now picture that you can use your stored blocks in one of two ways. You can either throw them at an enemy to damage it, OR you can consume it to give yourself a double jump. That is the basic movement situation I want to build the game around. It’s pretty simple, but I don’t know that I’ve seen it done before. The strength of the idea to me lies in the large number of possible routes through the game you could have it imply if you build around the idea effectively.
Longtime readers will remember that my main character movement was governed by a state machine, where the character could be in one of a few different states - idle, running, jumping, shooting. A main character with the added movement tech described here would have something more like 12+ states. Idle, jump, run, dash, duck, slide, and then versions of all these states where a block is active and ready to be either thrown or used to double jump.
Figuring out how to configure this much more complex state machine is what I am doing right now. It is hard for me to tell how long it will take to build it, but we’ll see where it’s at next week.
speedrunning - 7.7 hours
Last week I finally got back into learning a new speedrun. I got the world record on Adventure Island 3 Warpless way back on January 11, 2025. Since then, the only project I have completed was the short Chip ‘n Dale foray which spanned only three live streams. It felt sort of like a half project. My new project is running the SNES platformer Mr. Nutz. I will be running the Any% category.
The learning is going well. At some point during my 6+ months of churning out speedruns last year, I think I forgot how much you have to put into this hobby to get anything worthwhile out of it. I lost track of the spirit of speedrunning. Looking back, I got burnt out without really realizing it.
I am back to seeing the beauty of the grind. I keep remembering Alex Honnold’s in-depth preparation before Free Solo’ing El Capitan. Repeating the same difficult hold over and over and over and over again. These are the thankless hours that make you a speedrunner.
There’s something amazing about being in the lab. As humans, we are capable of so much. We have so much intelligence. We have so much potential. Speedrunning is understanding this, and then allowing your focus to shrink to the incredibly small scope of one button press. You are allowing the world to stop mattering. Beating Mr. Nutz as fast as humanly possible is all there is. You can only succeed if you engage with this goal as if time doesn’t matter. You’ve got nowhere else to be. If the stars align, you might even take this game somewhere no human has ever taken it…but it has to be done one button press at a time. There are no shortcuts.
So far I’ve learned 7 of the 28 levels. I doubt I will be ready to go live by next week’s update, but we’ll check in then.
weight loss update - down 0.5 pounds
A new thing I want to track for fun here is my goal to get back to a healthier weight. I’ve had two periods of my life where my weight climbed up the charts to a place I didn’t want it to be. The first was when COVID happened. My precious gym shut down and there was literally nothing to do other than be depressed and eat snacks. A lot of people went through this weight gain with me.
The second is right now. Depression eating ticked up for me as the political climate changed, but then ticked up again as I quit my primary coping mechanism of smoking pot. It ticked up again after my eye injury, where I was unable to lead a normal life for a while, and unable to exercise for longer than that.
Similar to my feeling ready to get back into achieving goals in speedrunning and game development again, I also feel like I am ready to put focus against my problematic eating habits. To me, it is a logical next step. I quit drinking alcohol over 10 years ago, I quit nicotine around 10 years ago. Now I am even off weed - something that, for a long time, I never thought would be possible. Junk food is the only problem child left. As much as I love Fruity Pebbles, I am ready to do something about it.
Last Sunday, my 7-day average weight was 222.1. This Sunday, my 7-day average weight was 221.6, so I am down 0.5 in week one. Let’s see if I can string some successful weeks together.
That’s it for me. Have a wonderful day, and I will see you next week.
