The fastest it has ever been done…?

Hello everyone! Thank you so much for joining me back here on the blog. As always, it is great to see you. I hope you had a great week! Let’s get caught up on the latest.

What’s New with felix?

First up, let’s talk Felix. I streamed my first attempts at Felix Low% this week. I only had one stream, though it was for 4.5 hours, so I got a lot of attempts in.

If you’ve been around speedrunning for a while, you know that no two leaderboards are the same. Some leaderboards feature very cutthroat competition where speed is measured down to the frame, while others have fewer runs and are less optimized. Felix the Cat’s any% leaderboard has a decent amount of competition. It has 62 total runs on it, and 15 seconds separate the first place time from the fifth place time. 35 seconds separate first place from tenth place.

Felix the Cat low% is another matter. There are only two runs on the leaderboards. There is a 26m 26s run in first place, and a 26m 32s time in second place. Earlier this week, I got a 24m 21s low% run, beating the previous world record by over two minutes. So yeah, I got the world record.

Speedrunning is funny in this way. We show up to speedrun for the love of the game and to compete. But, even after going public and competing live and sharing your skills, it’s still up to you how to feel about what you’ve done. Even being in first place on the leaderboards you were just competing in won’t fix the world and make you a whole happy person. It’s all still up to you.

My feeling after completing this run was very clear to me: the job isn’t over yet. I had a death in the last level, and I know that I cannot walk away from Felix low% until my run meets my own standards. In that way, the leaderboards really don’t matter. If I push myself to meet my own standard during every speedrun project, then where I rank on the leaderboards says more about the popularity of the game than it says about my actual skill at it.

But here’s the thing: the leaderboards are important. They aren’t everything, but they still affect us. Every speedrun leaderboard started with one run. For example, let’s look at the Felix any% leaderboards:

Before I got the 22m and 46s run shown above, I had a run that was 22m and 50s, which meant I was in fifth place, not fourth place. I can guarantee you this: if Neural89’s run didn’t exist, and my 22m 50s run was good enough to be in 4th place, I would have stopped playing Felix any% then and there. A 22m and 50s run did meet the level of my own personal standards…but Neural’s run was only one second better. This is how iron sharpens iron, and why the leaderboards are important. If there’s someone I would bet on to improve their speedrun by one second, it’s the person who will improve their leaderboard spot if they improve by that one second.

So, while today I might feel like posting the new Felix the Cat low% record is not that big an accomplishment, really we don’t know what ripple effects it could have down the line. Maybe me bringing a run that pushed the low% leaderboards to a new level will attract new runners. Maybe now that the leaderboards have three runs instead of two, someone feels like it is worthwhile to try and get the #2 spot, or even make a run for the record. Every run that gets submitted to the leaderboards is another piece of the puzzle, and I truly believe that every single one of them is important.

I cannot post a picture of me in the #1 spot on the low% leaderboards yet since my run hasn’t been verified by the moderation team yet, but like I said, there’s more work to do anyway. I am hoping that by this time next week Felix the Cat will be a wrap and we’ll be doing a retrospective on the whole experience. If you want to see me attempt to get the run that ends this whole Felix era, make sure to tune into my Twitch channel this week <3

a quick word on game dev

It’s going. Something that made me feel better about the game developer part of my identity this past week is that the sequel to Hollow Knight finally got a release date. Hollow Knight was an immensely successful and amazing indie game that came out in February 2017. It was made by 3 or 4 people.

Shortly after the game came out, there was an announcement that the team was working on some bonus content for the game where you could play as Hornet, a female character from Hollow Knight. Soon after that, the team announced that rather than being add-on content, the Hornet-based material they were working on was going to just be its own game.

After that, Team Cherry (the creators) went radio silent. No further updates were made, and the years started rolling by. Thus started the era of “silkposting” a play on the term “shitposting”, derived from the Hollow Knight sequel’s name being Hollow Knight: Silksong. Gamers made memes, spread gossip, speculated wildly, and all in all had a laugh at the experience of waiting for this game to come out amidst zero official updates, year after year after year.

The silkposting era finally came to an end during this past week, when Hollow Knight: Silksong got a firm release date of September 4, 2025. It will come out about 8.5 years after the original.

This made me feel better for a couple reasons. First, it’s just a reminder that games take a really long time to make. Even if it’s a 2d, retro-inspired game, like Hollow Knight. The second had to do with why the team gave no updates at all during these 8.5 years; recently, one of the game’s creators said that he thought fans would get tired of just continually hearing, ‘yeah, we’re working on it,’ and that’s really all they ever had to say. That’s how I feel here sometimes. Often there’s really nothing to say other than, “I have not given up on it”. So for another week, rest assured, I have not given up on it yet!

Derry girls season 1

Erika and I watched the first season of Derry Girls this week. Derry Girls has been on my radar for a while now. After watching season one of the British version of The Office, Erika and I did try to watch season two, but Erika found it to be too uncomfortable and cringe comedy-ish. I do not watch a ton of television on my own, so we’ll see if I return to finish The Office on my own.

Derry Girls came out in January 2018. It has three short seasons, spanning six, six, and seven episodes respectively. The seasons came out in 2018, 2019, and the last in 2022.

Season one takes place in 1994 in the city of Derry in Northern Ireland, which sources tell me is a country or province or territory or region or republic or state or nation, depending on your viewpoint. Some of the complicated political history of Northern Ireland that affects their national identity is covered in the show, since it takes place during “The Troubles” - the official name of the war or conflict happening in Northern Ireland from the 1960s until 1998.

The show follows four 16 year old girls and one boy through their adventures at a Catholic high school for girls. The boy goes to the girls’ school too. Idk.

Season one was really fun. I can already feel myself wishing there were more episodes even though I still have two seasons I haven’t watched yet. The setting is interesting, the girls are funny, I love the 90s, and it’s just a fun show to watch. I will not rate Derry Girls on the unofficial McLepke media rating scale season by season, since there are so few episodes anyway. We’ll check back in once I’ve watched all of them.

the terminator

Erika and I watched The Terminator this past week. I saw The Terminator in middle school so it wasn’t my first watch, but I have not seen it since then.

I loved a lot about The Terminator. It came out in 1984, and the hairstyles and other fashion are amazing in it. I left the viewing confident that I need to get at least one perm in my life.

I also LOVED the horror synth soundtrack. If I have to pick one to share I’ll go with this one:

Spoilers for The Terminator follow. The basic plot of The Terminator is that at some point in the future (from the perspective of 1984, when the movie takes place) robots turn against humanity and start trying to exterminate them. By 2029, the humans have rallied under the leadership of tactical-genius John Connor, and gained the upper-hand in the conflict. Seeing this, the robots send a representative (Arnold, the Terminator. More-accurately, a Terminator, since Terminator is the name of a model of robots) back to 1984 to preemptively kill John Connor’s mother before he is born, a woman named Sarah Connor. The humans see THAT, and they send a human back to 1984 to protect her.

One of the things I like about The Terminator is that it’s kind of like 60% action movie 40% horror movie. Sarah Connor and guy-from-the-future Kyle are constantly on the run with Arnold in pursuit. No hiding places stay hidden for long. Arnold also has an air of invincibility to him; the weapons of 1984 don’t seem to do much to deter him. It reminded me of the horror villain who is unstoppable until their weakness is uncovered. I love horror movies, and always wish they would become a little more mainstream. Silence of the Lambs from our discussion last week was kind of like this too - a moment where a movie with a lot of horror vibes crossed over into just being a ‘movie’, and not a ‘horror movie’.

One aspect of the movie that I was shocked by is the incomplete story of Sarah Connor’s iguana, Pugsley. During the first quarter of the movie, you see Sarah Connor’s apartment, and she has a pet iguana named Pugsley. She gives him kisses and seems to take great care of him.

The problem is, once the Terminator shows up, we never see or hear about Pugsley again. He just disappears. He’s never killed, and Sarah never brings him up again. At the end of the film we even see that Sarah has adopted a dog, as it cruises around town with her. Would it have been that difficult to just show Pugsley in the shot? In a movie that relied heavily on time travel you wouldn’t think that the largest plot hole would be Sarah’s pet iguana, but seriously, WHERE IS PUGSLEY!?!?

A last note on The Terminator, Arnold’s famous “I’ll be back” line is kind of a non-moment in the movie. It doesn’t feel super cool or remotely iconic when he says it. It feels like an ordinary line, no different than any of the other stuff he says in the movie. I’m not sure why this one particular line stuck with people. Had I seen this in theaters, I really doubt I’d be quoting “I’ll be back” in everyday life afterwards. Maybe there’s more of a story behind it, but I don’t know what it is.

At any rate, I give The Terminator a 9/10 on the McLepke unofficial media rating scale.

That is all for me this week! I hope everyone has a great week to come. This week looks daunting from afar, but it won’t really be that bad. We can do this.

Until next week <3