February 16 Updates

What’s up party people! I’m here a day late for the weekly post because Erika gets President’s Day off, so yesterday was more like a weekend day to me than a week day. Let’s talk about the latest goings on. What’s up?

Movie Night

First of all, last year’s weekly movie night has finally officially restarted for the new year. The first pick was Erika’s, who chose Bugonia. This will be a spoiler-free recounting of the Bugonia watching experience.

Bugonia stars Jesse Plemons who was Landry in Friday Night Lights, and Todd, the young guy in the white supremacy gang toward the end of Breaking Bad. His character in Bugonia is named Teddy, and is immersed in echo-chamber conspiracy theories to the point that he believes an alien race is covertly living among the humans on Earth. He brings his autistic cousin onboard with his beliefs, and the two hatch a plan to kidnap the powerful CEO of the company Teddy works for, played by Emma Stone, whom the conspiracy-theory obsessed duo believe to be an alien. The duo interrogate the CEO at their home, while law enforcement slowly starts to close in on the location of the missing CEO. Drama ensues.

It was an awesome movie. I give Bugonia a 9.5 on the unofficial McLepke media rating scale, so go out there and watch it. It was my favorite movie I’ve seen in a while - perhaps my favorite movie in the era of the weekly movie night.

Inception has been tentatively tabbed for next week’s movie, and I was kind of taken aback when I saw that the movie came out in 2010. Inception is really 16 years old? I’ve never seen it, but I remember the buzz that surrounded it when it came out. Time flies eh?

Game Dev

On the game dev front? It was definitely a slow week. I took some time off toward the end of the week to try and regroup. My best analysis of what happened is first that I had some trouble adjusting back to programming after a bit of time spent making artwork, and also that I was more interested in speedrunning last week than I was in game dev.

My typical plan calls for speedrunning for two hours a day and working on game dev for two hours a day. Last week saw a bunch of days where I worked on speedrunning for upwards of 5 hours a day, and game dev for 0 hours a day. I think the fact that I was able to make a lot of speedrunning progress is able to suppress any sort of guilt over not making game dev progress in real time, but looking back on the week, I’d rather keep the balance. Well-meaning unbalanced days that feature 0 game dev is really the first step toward losing the consistency the project has had this year. As such, this week I vow to be back to two hours per day in game dev.

Speedrunning

Two weeks ago we settled into #96 on the leaderboards as the starting point of the Mega Man 4 journey. Last week we jumped up to #70, while also reflecting that moving up any further than that would probably take an appreciable jump in skill level on my part. I had a lot of great learning and practice sessions last week, and after 8 days where I did not go live at all, I went live on consecutive days - Feb 13 and Feb 14. Neither day saw a new personal best time, but both days did see paces that were faster than the paces produced prior to the 8 day offline practice session.

We’re going to have to scratch and claw our way up this board, but I’m here for it. I expect to stream soon - most likely tomorrow (Wednesday).

In other streaming news, an idea that seems like it’s been in the making for a while is starting to get pieced together in my head. I’ve commented on this blog before that one of the nice things about streaming, is it lets me be more femme-presenting than my daily life easily affords. I also have a longtime love of drag. I think I need to drag up my speedrunning persona. I want to start incorporating some drag makeup learning into what I consider ‘speedrunning work’ and start bringing this speedrunning drag queen character to life. Stay tuned.

Project Weight Loss 2026

This is the third consecutive week that we’re checking in on project weight loss for 2026. We’re still (slowly) ticking our way down:

We’re down 2.3 pounds over the course of three weeks, so it has been slow so far, but it’s also been steady progress. With three weeks under my belt and feeling pretty good, I’m going to push for a slightly bigger result this week by adding in one fasting day. Stay tuned.

Bachata?

I signed up for a bachata (dancing) class with Erika. Long time knowers of mclepke are aware that I am hardly a dancer, so this should be interesting. I believe classes start March 1st, so I have some time to mentally prepare, but wish me luck. I will let you know how it goes.

I’ll be back with updates during the week so feel free to check back. I hope to be more active than last week. Have a great week everyone! Go forth; I believe in you.