March 1 Updates

Party people!!!!!!! What’s up it’s March and we’re here and alive. I survived yesterday’s bachata class. I dance now.

It was an eventful weekend. Bachata was Sunday, but before that on Saturday we attended a city hike with the Pittsburgh Hounds group. Me Erika and Podo were in attendance, and it was a great time! It’s interesting to contextualize your beagle’s behavior in relation to the large sample size of other beagles, and one thing that stands out to me when everyone is together but still on leashes is that Podo is the beagle MOST interested in smelling and following scent trails. He seems to have more hunting instinct left in him than his contemporaries in the group.

Off leash, Podo is super social, but honestly on leash I think he would have had 95% as much fun on this hike if we just went alone as he did going on the hike with the big group. He is nose to the ground the entire time.

Check out the group photo from the event. Like all hound group photos, it’s mostly dogs not paying attention and owners trying to wrangle them.

Yay hounds! Here’s one with just me and the kid.

Due to the hound event we had to cancel the regularly scheduled movie night, but that will hopefully resume next week.

On Sunday, Erika and I attended our first Bachata class. I was definitely very nervous about it leading up to the date, but it was pretty fun once we got in there. One thing I wasn’t expecting was that every few minutes of the class everyone rotated who they were dancing with. So like, even though I attended with Erika and we started off together, you wind up dancing with everyone. It’s probably good that I didn’t know this was going to happen beforehand honestly. I had no time to be flustered about it, and I surely would have been apprehensive about this detail had I known it.

There are two roles in bachata - the lead, and the follow. The lead is traditionally done by the male and the follow is traditionally done by the female. Being the gender-ambiguous person I am, I wasn’t sure at first whether I wanted to be the lead or the follow, but since no men signed up to be follows and no women signed up to be leads I kind of just defaulted into being a lead.

The interesting consequence of this whole lead and follow setup when combined with the rotating partners setup is if you’re a lead, you dance with all of the follows, but none of the other leads. Practically speaking, this means I danced with all the women in the class and none of the men. I tend to get along better with women than men anyway, so weirdly taking the male-oriented role DID result in me being more comfortable, since it led to me socializing with my preferred subset of the group. Truthfully, the men in the class seemed pretty cool as well (these aren’t random men after all, they are men that signed up for a bachata class), but still I thought you’d find the gender dynamics of the bachata class interesting.

I don’t have a ton of gamedev updates yet for this week. When I left off last week I was still working on creating the interior of the last few houses in the town of Friendship. After finishing these, I’ll probably get some NPCs set up, try to set up the quest user-interface, and then get started on designing the first playable action level.

Looking back on February as compared to January, I’d say I’ve slowed down a notch or two in game development. For March I do want to try and pick the pace back up. For a while I got into a groove of doing two hours of game dev and two hours of speedrunning per day, but after keeping that up for a little bit I started to feel the burn out creeping in. The burn out especially came to a head when at one point Erika essentially called me out for falling too far behind with the house chores. She was right; I was starting to fall further and further behind in my fight to keep my work streaks going.

So one thing I would say is that while my game dev time has ticked down a little bit, it’s really been replaced by house chores and things like meal prep for the family. I haven’t started wallowing in depression and doing nothing, which long time readers of the blog know I’m susceptible to. I’ve been keeping busy around the house.

I’m the full time manager of all the food we eat at this point, and I’m starting to expand the repertoire of things I cook. The basic rotating menu of dinners right now consists of one tofu night, one chicken night, one cheeseburger night, and one rice and beans and avocado sort of night.

Three of those four nights start with me making a massive pile of caramelized onions. I once had a friend that tried to explain to me that caramelized onions are a must must must but for some reason it’s taken me a while to actually get them into the fold. Nowadays though, I’m cutting and slow cooking 3-4 medium sized onions just about every day. Good call old friend.

The tofu night is generally tofu in a sauce that is a mixture of gochujang and mayonnaise served with rice and cucumbers that have been sitting in rice vinegar. Cheeseburger night is generally cheeseburgers with caramelized onions and sweet potatoes. Rice and bean night is rice, beans made on the stovetop from dry beans, avocado, caramelized onions, peas and corn chips. Chicken night had historically been essentially the exact same as cheeseburger night, except instead of beef with cheese melted on it it was chicken with cheese melted on it - still served with the onions and the sweet potato or regular potato.

The new changeup I made this past weekend was a coconut chicken curry sort of situation. I still made the caramelized onions as usual, though I added garlic into the mix. Then, I cooked a pound and a half of chicken just on the stove top - flattened with a mallet so it would cook faster and evenly. Nothing fancy there - just cooked in butter. Simultaneously, I roasted like two pounds of potatoes. Again, nothing fancy there either.

Then at the end, I took all the potatoes, all the chicken, and the pile of caramelized onions and garlic, and brought it all to a simmer in a can of coconut cream with four limes, some spices (I did cumin and paprika) and a little water added in to make the texture right. I topped with cilantro. In the future I think I’d just use a can of coconut milk, and that’s actually what I intended to do here, but I didn’t realize we only had coconut cream.

Anyway, it turned out pretty good. You could serve it over rice, or you could just eat it as is if you have enough potatoes in there. I wouldn’t call it a very photogenic dish though, so I won’t post a photo here. Imagine it in your mind though.

In the world of speedrunning, I did not live stream at all in between last week’s post and this post here going up on Monday March 2. I do think I am going to stream later today - I spent a lot of last week grinding away at small improvements to the run that will help me as I try to lower my personal best time from 39:30, and improve our leaderboard ranking of #49. Tune in live to check it out and wish me luck!

I will say, I’m starting to get a wee bit antsy. As in, I’m starting to feel ready for the Mega Man 4 project to end so I can move onto something new. This is part of the grind though - we have to fight until we’ve got a time we can walk away content with. I can feel we’re not quite there yet.

After the dedicated week of in-the-lab practice, I kind of envision that I’ll be ready to stream until setting a new personal best time now. So if I don’t PB today (Monday), I’ll probably just stream again on Tuesday, and with regularity until we can pull it off. I can feel marked improvements throughout sections of the run that should give us enough of a shot of setting a new personal best time that I won’t need to retreat back into the lab until we’ve done it. With that said, it won’t be easy, so we’ll see how today’s stream goes.

I’m not sure what my next project will be once Mega Man 4 wraps up, but I can at least say that for the first time since I started working on Mega Man 4 at the tail end of 2025, I’m at least starting to ponder it. HMMMMMM.

With Mega Man 4 being a super competitive game with a lots of runners and decent length, my initial gut feeling is that I’ll move to a project that is destined to be shorter once Mega Man 4 wraps. Something with less competition that is perhaps a bit more niche. Daffy Duck The Marvin Missions has crossed my mind. Run Saber has crossed my mind. A bit more competitive - Adventure Island 2 has crossed my mind. Returning to Adventure Island 3 to run any% (I still have the warpless world record in Adventure Island 3) has crossed my mind. Kirby Adventure has crossed my mind.

I have a friend on Twitch who has started to speedrun Yoshi’s Island, which is both a long and very competitive game, but the fact that I’m friends with someone currently learning it is causing Yoshi’s Island to cross my mind. Darkwing Duck is still on the table, as is potentially returning to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 (the project that got cut short because I injured my eye during it), or returning to Ducktales 2 (a game I played for a month as part of a month-long group social thing, but that I didn’t max out to my standards). Super Adventure Island 2 has crossed my mind. Someday I’ll return to the first game I ever speedran - Donkey Kong Country 2, and see if I can beat my time from five years ago. That has crossed my mind.

The odds feel reasonable it will be SOMETHING from this massive list of ideas. At least I have no shortage of projects I want to get to eventually. Time will tell what comes next though! Stay tuned.

In other news, here’s the latest with project weight loss 2026:

This is the fifth week of posting, so we’re down 3.7 over five weeks. Not the fastest progress in history, but we’ve had our seven-day average weight go down (even if slightly) every single week so far. Here’s to another good week upcoming.

One thing that happened with the whole weight loss project this past week was Walking Treadmill Gate. If you look at the blue line in the chart above, you’ll see that the past week or so consisted of two big spikes up, followed by a plunge down, followed by relative steadiness.

Longtime readers of the blog might remember that a few posts ago I was talking about an experiment I read about in Ultra Processed People (one of the best books ever). The experiment was about how when they tracked the calories burned in populations that are still hunter-gatherers and compared them to calories burned in office dwellers, the figures were roughly the same, despite one group being a lot more active than the other. They reasoned that in addition to working harder, the hunter-gatherers were also resting harder; more of their bodily functions went offline during periods of rest, and overall the whole thing tended to even out.

This past week brought that passage of the book back to the forefront of my mind. In the blue line above, I have a two-day junk food weekend. After each of the two cheat days, the blue line races up and reaches a peak. For background, I try to do one cheat day per week, but I failed at that this past week.

After the second cheat day, I have a normal run-of-the-mill day. In response, the blue line dives down, since the huge rise after the cheat day is artificial in a sense. Maybe exaggerated is the better word. If you regularly weigh yourself, you know what I mean. I’ve weighed myself every day for the past 15 years or so. It’s a data point I like having. This dramatic rise and drop happens in response to either overeating or fasting, and then getting back to normal.

Now, the next day, note that the blue line drops down. This is in response to fasting on that day. So I fast, and immediately it gets reflected on the scale. In my head, I know that the drop I’m seeing is going to naturally come back up, but when you take the seven day average, it should still show me ticking down.

Finally, let’s look at the blue line in the days after the drop that followed the two spikes. During the next four days, I am feeling motivated, and I’m like you know what, I’m going to walk a TON this week. Like, I’m going to hop on this walking pad and walk my butt off. Let’s Go!

Over the next four days, I walk forty miles. Read that again. In the next four days, I walk FORTY miles. According to my Fit-bit, I walked 40.94 miles across those four days. Dude…walking forty miles in four days means you’re walking over 3 hours a day.

Anywhere that you try to look up how many calories this much walking should ‘burn’ will estimate for my weight and pace that I’ll burn a bit over 100 calories per mile walked. Added up, we’re talking somewhere in the vicinity of 4-5 thousand extra calories burned over these four days. This should hypothetically be around the same net impact as fasting for a day or really, even two! Over these four days, I also ate zero junk food. I ate all whole foods, and calorie wise I ate at maintenance (or what should be maintenance if I had done zero exercise). According to all evidence available to me, including the general knowledge of my own body I’ve accumulated over 15 years of tracking my daily weight, there’s simply no way that I shouldn’t be losing weight over these four days.

Now at this point, I’m sure the exercise apologists are worked up. Maybe you gained muscle, which weighs more than fat! Maybe it’s water weight! Maybe you mis-tracked the calories and you overate during those days! Science and data!

Look, I get it. We can’t know for sure exactly what happened during these four days. But I’m just telling you my own personal opinion. And that opinion is that I call bull shit. While eating at maintenance for four days but walking my butt off every day, my weight did not go down even one-tenth of a pound. Conversely, eating at a deficit for even one, single day ALWAYS causes my next-day weight to go down. When I eat a calorie deficit, my weight goes down. It’s like clockwork. It never fails. The math simply is not mathing.

For clarity, I think those four days of walking were probably fantastic for my health. I think it was fantastic for my cardiovascular system. I think it was fantastic for my brain and for my muscles and my body at large. All I’m saying is, I don’t think it did jack shit with regards to weight loss.

So for this week? I’ll be focused on adding in more fasting, and actually decreasing the amount I’m walking. I’ll be fasting today. Wish me luck!

Anyway, that’s all the updates I have for you. I hope everyone has a great week. It’s getting warmer here! I’ll try to be back during the week with updates if you’re around. Talk soon. As always, I believe in you.

Post Stream Monday Update

I did end up streaming today. No new personal best. I had one run that finished only 4 seconds behind the current personal best time, but that was the best I could manage today.

I think I alluded to this above, but I may just stream again tomorrow. Don’t think I want to specifically drill into anything too specific before more attempts, so join me again tomorrow if you’re around. Have a good Monday all.

Tuesday Morning Update

I’ve already got my pile of onions on the stove! Shooting for two hours of game dev this morning followed by another Mega Man 4 stream. Cheeseburgers for dinner tonight. It sounds like a great day to me - hope y’all are excited for today as well.

Post game dev - spent today setting up the interior of the library. Progress:

Shooting to start streaming by sometime between Noon and 1pm. Onions are almost ready for the late-game splash of balsamic vinegar. First load of laundry today is in the dryer. Go go go!