Longest Ears in the Game
Hello everyone! Thank you once again for joining me here on the blog. What’s new? Let’s get caught up on the latest!
award winning beagle
With the unknown and scary part of Podo’s health journey behind us, he and I were happy to let loose this weekend while attending the third anniversary party of the Pittsburgh Hounds group!
Four years ago, I remember being a “man” (sort of) and walking Podo around my neighborhood, when we ran into a a nice lady walking a beagle of her own. She had just arrived in Pittsburgh from Florida, and she asked me, “is there a beagle social group here?” I replied that no, I didn’t think there was. She followed up with, “well, there really needs to be”.
A few months later I ran into her again, and she had news. “I started a hound social group. Make sure to come to our first event.” The world needs people who will not rest until there is a social group dedicated to their breed of dog.
It has been three years since then. Over that span, I started transitioning into being more womanly, the fearless leader of the Pittsburgh Hounds started transitioning into being more manly, and the beagles remained beagles. This past weekend, we gathered to celebrate the third anniversary of this group at a local establishment called Hound Haus, a restaurant, cafe and bar that has a large fenced in outdoor area for the dogs to run wild. They definitely ran wild.
At the end of the event, the awards for the year were handed out. The categories included longest howl, oldest hound, largest hound, smallest hound, longest ears, softest ears, naughtiest hound, and of course the coveted Hound of the Year.
The judges busted out the measuring tapes and our dear boy Podo walked away with the trophy for longest ears! Here is our celebratory photo:
You can get a good look at the nature of his facial paralysis here - notice that his right eye is open, while his left eye is closing. Anyway, we had a great time. I give a big thank you to the Pittsburgh Beagles and Hounds group for putting on so many fantastic events for our puppos over the last year.
drop dead gorgeous
A new movie night has sprung into being in my life. Once a week, me, Erika, my brother and my brother’s wife have started watching a movie. The person who gets to pick the movie rotates week to week.
It’s amazing how difficult it is to actually see the people that are important to you. My brother lives a 10 minute walk from my house, yet I am sure there have been entire months that go by without me seeing him or his wife.
Now that movie night exists, I’ve seen them three weeks in a row. How many of us would benefit from our own version of movie night? There is no replacement for being in the same room as a loved one.
This week’s movie was picked by Erika, and was Drop Dead Gorgeous, a 1999 mockumentary that chronicles a 1995 beauty pageant in the small, highly conservative town of Mount Rose Minnesota. Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards, and Amy Adams all play contestants. If you’ve seen Christopher Guest’s movies like This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, etc, you will get the idea. I have to imagine that this film was heavily influenced by the Christopher Guest movies that came before it.
Obviously we got the movie from the library! The DVD case was very beat up and old, but in a charming way.
The mockumentary style of the movie became very widespread in the decades following the era of Drop Dead Gorgeous, so in that way it’s interesting to go back and watch an old one. The movie has a 47% in critic reviews and a 75% in audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes - a very “cult classic” kind of review split. There is a lot of absurdist humor, including a lot of jokes that would absolutely never fly in 2025 (or 2010, for that matter).
All in all, I very much enjoyed it. I give Drop Dead Gorgeous a 8.0 / 10 on the unofficial McLepke media rating scale.
other updates?
I mentioned in last week’s post that I was going through something of a reset. I do feel like the past week served as a reset of sorts for me.
I had a good week of working on game development. I worked on the game three of the seven days of last week, which is the highest hit rate I have had in a while. I am looking to repeat the feat this week. One thing that struck me while I was working on the game last week was the name of the file I use for it - “gd2025”. A project as large as trying to make your own game consists of so many starts and restarts, learning milestones and temporary setbacks that it’s easy to lose track of time. Sometimes, I feel like I have been working on this game for five years now. In some ways, I truly have.
As the filename indicates though, this current iteration of game development started this year. 2025. I think the lesson I landed on is that I spend too much time feeling like a failure in the domain of game development. This game is going to get made. I can do this. But, I need to keep a positive, long-term outlook. “gd2025” is just getting started.
A note on speedrunning, I’m basically between projects. We had the whole Felix the Cat era, and then a brief foray into Ducktales 2 speedrunning in an attempt to be social with that Speedrunning Discord group I mentioned a few weeks back. Right now I am idle. I think the reason for the idleness is the change in my own methodology that the Ducktales 2 sidequest was. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve seen my speedrunning operation under the hood. There’s planning, there’s deliberate steps taken to achieve a goal, there’s clarity in purpose and intent. Since Ducktales 2 was undertaken as part of a broader social gathering, it didn’t really fit the mold.
That’s okay - it’s good to branch off and socialize in a new way from time to time. But, with that said, I think I need to identify my next project this week. By next week’s check-in, I want to have a new mountain to climb identified.
That’s it for me, so I will talk to you then! I hope everyone has a tremendous week. I believe in your ability to survive this week. You can do it! <3
