Nutz to you McGillicuddy
Hello everyone! Thank you so much for joining me! It’s great to see you. It’s the end of an era here in McLepke-land. The Mr. Nutz era came to a conclusion earlier this morning. Get comfortable, and I will tell you all about how this 10 week saga wrapped up, along with the rest of the latest.
2nd place out of two entrants
Mr. Nutz is a game that not many people play. As such, I was going to end up with no worse than the #2 time on the leaderboards no matter what. There is a third submission as you can see, but only technically.
That means it’s really up to me to how to feel about the accomplishment. I mean, I guess that’s always how it is. The leaderboards don’t have to tell you how to feel, even if there are 100 competitors on it. But, in this case specifically, there’s very little contextualization available to me given that I spent 10 weeks working on this project nearly every day.
In the end, I got a run that I do feel was very, very good. I am proud of the run. There are few people out there who can say they’ve beaten LeHulk in a speedgame he really cares about, and I came within 23 seconds. If anyone wants to try to beat my time, they will have to truly push to do it.
Long-time readers and astute trackers of McLepke speedrunning might note that this is now the fourth game that I have the #2 time in. You can see my speedrunning times here:
https://www.speedrun.com/users/mclepke
What’s up with that? Why am I tending to fall in this area just below the tippity top of the competition? How do you get from where I am in Mr. Nutz, down another 23 seconds to the world record? It’s the long tail of the grind to perfection. The final 23 seconds of gap in a 30 minute speedrun are incredibly hard to overcome. While it took 10 weeks to get to within 23 seconds of the record, it might take another 5-10 weeks (or more) for me to actually get the record.
But, why am I stopping here? Am I a quitter? I was talking about this with one of my Twitch friends recently, and he summed up the approach I have been taking these last few years so well that I won’t bother re-wording it:
“You study and learn intensely, and then your goal is to realize the knowledge. Grinding out the seconds that comprise the gap between your current PB and the ceiling of your knowledge seems less useful than moving on to the next project.”
Thinking about it, that is essentially the calculus going on here. I do set a high bar to gain expertise in my games of choice. I push myself to strive for the world record in terms of strategies (i.e., I am seldom ‘playing it safe’ by omitting a strategy the world record does), but I don’t spend the time absolutely perfecting all of the tiniest details that often make a world record the world record. I would rather enjoy having done the best that I could in the time I spent, and start the exciting task of identifying the next mountain to climb.
In the end, I streamed Mr. Nutz four times, for three hours each time. The streams went like this:
Stream One, 6/28 - I end with a PB of 32:03
Stream Two, 7/2 - I end with a PB of 30:05
Stream Three, 7/6 - I end with a PB of 29:48 (WR is 29:25)
Stream Four, 7/7 - I do not set a new personal best time. Simultaneously, my paces over the course of the three hour stream indicate that if I were to set a new personal best time, it would both be a very small improvement (5-10s), and also not a large enough improvement to be the world record.
After the intense ‘library’ time period of the grind in which I learn everything upfront, it then becomes a matter of getting all the big chunks of time save, and then letting the time fall where it falls. For some games that will be the world record, for others it will be a top 3 time, for others it will be a top 30 time, or a top 100 time.
Here’s the Youtube upload of my best time if you’d like to see the culmination of all of this work.
game dev
What’s the latest with game dev you ask? The work occupying me recently has been setting up the system that governs how enemies will work. I have set up an enemy class that all enemies can belong to, as well as an enemy state machine that works in a similar fashion to how the player state machine works.
E.g., an enemy starts in the “Wander” state until it detects you nearby. Then it shifts into “Attack”. The underlying logic of switching from one state to another is generalized so that all enemies will have it by default, and then different states can be custom-coded as the need arises.
This is something I am in the middle of, so I can’t really show it off at all, but hopefully soon!
project weight-loss and a fitness update
I went through something like a 3-week period of back-and-forth in the weight loss and fitness domain. Using the Mr. Nutz era week #s, I believe it went like this:
Week 7 - Deciding I need to permanently quit junk food alongside a discussion of addictive drugs
Week 8 - Deciding I am interested in returning to weightlifting again. Struggling to actually quit junk food. Selena Gomez Oreos.
Week 9 - No mention of the topic on this blog, though privately I was researching getting back into lifting a lot, while also trying to figure out a way to alter my quitting junk food entirely plan to something more achievable since I wasn’t able to do it.
That brings us to the present - week 10. My most recent thoughts on fitness are that I have talked myself out of returning to lifting. I am going to just stick with running as my main exercise for the time being. Why? I spent a lot of time researching not getting injured and taking care of your rotator cuff and drew up a new routine and this that and the other thing but in the end I just didn’t feel confident in my ability to actually have different results this time around. Running is also making me happy and not causing any injury, so let’s run.
Food-wise, I do not think I can quit junk food entirely. I could talk about how pervasive junk food is, how you can buy it anywhere, how society pushes junk food on us all the time, but part of me thinks I could say all the same things about alcohol, and yet I did quit alcohol. Maybe it’s possible to quit junk food, but it doesn’t seem like something I can do right now.
My weight has been bouncing around in this five-pound range of 220-225 while I was living these weeks out, but hopefully I can get back on a downward trajectory. Wish me luck.
Goodbye to Zoey
On the reading front, I finished the third and final book (so far anyway) of the Zoey Ashe series of books. This one is called Zoey is too Drunk for this Dystopia. For my videogame visitors - since that’s many of you - this was kind of like when you force yourself to finish a game you’re only kind of enjoying because you feel some sort of cosmic pressure to do so or guilt to not do so. We own the third book (my wife buys books sometimes), and I had already read the first two, so I was compelled to do it.
Using the completely non-scientific McLepke rating scale, I would give Zoey is too Drunk for this Dystopia the same 5.5 / 10 rating I gave the other two books. They just aren’t that noteworthy to me. They’re fluffy and easy to read and sometimes a laugh, but they’re nothing to email your grandmother about. The third book dealt a lot with the nature of politics, fake news, surveillance states, and other topical issues. It also deals with a lot of feminist issues like sex work, and being a woman in male-dominated industries. Recall that the protagonist is a young woman running a multi-billion dollar company. One of the political candidates in the race for mayor that the book centers around is also a eugenics / ‘national cleansing’ guy, so race issues make an appearance.
It all felt a little out of the author’s lane. As mentioned a couple weeks ago, one of the first things you’ll find out about the author if you google him is that he’s a white dude who confusingly used the pen name “David Wong” all the way up until 2020 (at which point, I assume he got tired of everyone telling him how fucking weird it was that he was doing that). I don’t think getting more political was really the move to make. Personally, I would have tried to go weirder, because the series is funny at times. I won’t be seeking out John Pagin’s other works anytime soon, but I was able to enjoy this trilogy for what it was. I won’t recommend it to anyone, but it was lighthearted fare that passed the time, which is sometimes good enough.
food of the week
The best meal of the week goes to the “biscuit combo”. You make a bunch of biscuits, and then use half of them as the base of a biscuits and gravy dinner, and the other half as the base of a strawberry shortcake dessert. All credit to Erika for being the Head Chef In Charge:
I will say, these are not the most photogenic foods I have ever eaten. They were delicious though.
That’s it for me this week! I will check in again next week, by which time I will have turned 37 years old. Wow! Have a great week everyone! You can do it!
