Mr. Nutz 5
Hello everyone! It’s great to see you as always. Let’s get caught up on the latest.
the tldr
Something that really threw this week off - I sprained my wrist right at the beginning of it. I mentioned in my last blog post that I was going to go roller skating to celebrate memorial day. WELL, I did that…but wiped out going down a hill that, in retrospect, I am not skilled enough to have been going down. I was wearing wrist guards too - so I imagine this would have been a much worse injury without the protective gear.
Am I injury prone? Lately it feels like I am. My wrist still isn’t fully functional today, but it’s getting better. I need to make more of an effort to not injure myself.
game dev
I made some good game dev progress in the three hours I got on the books. All three hours were in one day, so I struggled with consistency this week. I implemented a double jump. Now, if you have a charge stored, you can use it to either dash, air dash, or double jump. You can also use your charge to jump out of a fall, which is sort of a sub-category of the double jump. Imagine how in Donkey Kong Country you were allowed to jump out of a roll executed off a ledge. It’s like that - if you run off a ledge and are falling, you can use a charge to jump out of that fall. It’s not really a double jump in that case, since there was no initial jump - only a fall. It opens up some interesting design options though.
I also started the process of programming the game to switch screens, like if you enter a door. It’s half-working right now. Getting the screen-switching working is where things will pick up when I restart work tomorrow. The issue I am having is that in the process of switching screens, something about the way I am handing off the camera is not working. We’ll see how things look next week.
speedrunning
I had my first 0 week. Alert! Alert!
I successfully used my wrist injury to convince myself it was fine to take a week off. There’s probably some validity to resting the injury, but it was also partially an excuse. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
Having a 0 week is the biggest possible red flag. One 0 week is one 0 week, but two in a row is the beginning of quitting a project. We’ve all seen it happen. Long-term goals have a way of dying a slow death, which is part of what enables their stealthy demise in the first place. I must bounce back next week. For the love of Mr. Nutz, let’s hope I can.
weight loss
The slow descent continues! When I first introduced the whole weight loss thing 5 weeks ago and was like ‘I lost half a pound!’ even I rolled my eyes a little bit. Isn’t half a pound basically a rounding error?
Five weeks later though, these small movements downward are still happening. It was another 0.6 pounds down this week, which brings us to being down 1.9 pounds total. I can feel that I am getting somewhere. I also do the calculation based on the average of my last 7 weigh-ins, so the tiny movements are more robust than they might initially seem.
Also, now that I’ve recorded five straight weeks with a loss - however small - it feels imperative that I keep this streak alive. That’s part of the reason I wanted to start blogging about it. Accountability and all that. Let’s keep it rolling! My confidence is on the up.
some random updates
The rule of threes: doggo edition struck last week. Three dogs that I know - two in real life, and one via Twitch - passed away. RIP to Bear, Max and Ralphie. They were three good boys.
I’ve watched some movies lately. Spoilers for all:
Parasite - everyone has already seen this but I was late to the party. I loved it, although I feel like I’ve seen a lot of horror / thriller movies lately where one of the central twists was that someone was living in the walls. The Boy was like that, Heretic was kind of like that. That Netflix show The Watcher had some of that going on. There’s others I can’t recall right now. Idk. Parasite was probably better than all of those though.
Rear Window - I watched the original Rear Window from 1954 last week. It’s about a guy who has nothing to do while recovering from an injury who spends all day looking out his NYC apartment window and seeing what people are doing. As he watches one guy in particular, he starts to become convinced that this neighbor killed his wife, and is actively covering it up. He sees the man leave his apartment late at night, sees him handling rope and a saw, and suddenly stops seeing the wife in the apartment. One thing I found funny about the movie is that the protagonist is correct - his neighbor DID kill his wife, and he WAS covering it up. I thought that was a little weird. I figured the moral of the story was going to be about not jumping to conclusions, and not letting your imagination run wild. But, nope - the moral was more like, ‘you should spy on your neighbors and call the police at the first sign of trouble.’
Rear Window also had amazing visual effects
Cabaret - y’all have heard of Cabaret, right? It’s a Bob Fosse directed musical starring Liza Minnelli. It’s pretty iconic among the gays. I watched this figuring there would be dancing, gays, Liza, dancing, more gays, and more Liza. What I actually got was Nazis. Yes, what they don’t tell you is that this musical is all about the rise of the Nazi party in 1930s Germany. I was honestly angry after watching it. There are multiple numbers entirely focused on Nazis growing more and more powerful and omnipresent. If you think you’re in for a fun movie night with the gays, think again. HARD PASS.
Chicago - after the Cabaret debacle, I watched Chicago, again based on a Bob Fosse musical. This was everything I wanted Cabaret to be. Fun, whimsical, banger after banger. Great Cabaret redemption tour. Skip Cabaret and go directly here.
The Substance - cool horror movie that I’ve heard a lot of people talking about. It’s about a drug that you can take to cause yourself to spawn a younger version of yourself. The catch, is that you have to spend one week as the younger you, and then one week as the older you, or there will be dire consequences. It has some Severance vibes, in that the central conflict that emerges is the younger version of you getting greedy and wanting to never hand the controls back to older you. Stealing from your future in your youth and all that jazz. I liked it.
I also finished a chonker of a book recently called Our Share of the Night.
This thing was like 750 pages. It was very good though. It’s about a cult whose members are super rich elites that exploit the poor in order to ask favors from the devil. It was not too depressing to read which would be my reaction if I read that summary. It was horror-adjacent. Also, since it was originally written in Spanish (the author is from Argentina), you can read characters comment on peoples’ use of the vosotros in English - always fun.
On Pork Belly - the last random update is about pork belly. I think I always assumed pork belly was really expensive, since I only see it at nicer restaurants. It turns out it’s actually dirt cheap? I guess this kind of makes sense since pork on the whole tends to be really cheap (poor pigs. I love you pigs and I am sorry).
Erika made a pork belly recipe this weekend. It’s a great thing to cook at home - it’s a low and slow type of deal and then you broil it right at the end just to caramelize it. On further reflection, the number of hours it needs to cook is probably why only nicer restaurants are serving it - the labor of it all. We cooked ours 4-5 hours. A+. Two and a half pounds of pork belly was $8, and check out how good it looks!
Anyway, that is all I have for you this week. I hope you have a great week; I will try to do the same. Until next time <3
