March 16 Updates
What’s up everyone! It’s another week. I’d classify my spirit for work to be quite a bit lower than it has been in recent weeks. Let’s discuss the latest and greatest from last week and look to the future. I hope you’ve been doing well.
Overall Game Dev and Speedrunning Vibes
Last week I did a grand total of 2 hours of game dev and 2.25 hours of speedrunning work. I flamed out a bit. So, we’re going to spend some time here reflecting on what’s going on, and trying to renew our spirit for next week.
For one - Some ambiguity has crept into what I’m doing each day. When this year started, I was doing two hours of game dev in the morning, and two hours of speedrunning later in the day. This went really well for approximately 30 days.
After those 30 days, I started doing a lot more chores around the house, because the house was starting to lag behind in chores, and that’s kind of my main job around here. You see, while I cosplay as a game developer and pro gamer, in reality, I am a trad wife. Around this time I start switching off days - one day I’ll do game dev and the next I’ll do speedrunning. This era was also still going relatively fine in terms of getting myself to do work.
Around this time is also when I start streaming. Starting to stream adds even more wiggle room to my ability to make excuses about what I’m working on that day. During the 30 days where I reliably worked on two hours of one and two hours of the other, I wasn’t streaming - I was practicing offline. Once I started streaming, the idea comes up that maybe on days I STREAM, I won’t do game dev - since streaming is generally more taxing on my willpower and discipline than just practicing my project offline.
Streaming my current project is in itself sort of a long-term project though, and so Mega Man 4 starts going through cycles. While I feel equipped to set a new personal best time, I stream it, and once I set a substantially improved new personal best time, I retreat back into the lab to workshop what I’m doing and improve strategies. This back and forth opens the door for ambiguity even further.
Eventually, we landed upon last week where things stopped running correctly. I went into last week with the intention to work on game dev one day and speedrunning the next day, but I only managed the two hours of Tuesday and two on Wednesday. Whatever engine got jump-started back around January 1st that was governing my ability to be productive in my creative pursuits ran out of gas.
A second factor I see weighing in on my drop in productivity is that the weekends have gotten busier. During January and most of February, Saturday and Sunday weren’t very different from Tuesday - Friday. All in the past few weeks though, the Hounds of Pittsburgh meetup group has restarted activity, our weekly movie night with my brother and his wife restarted, and Erika and I started bachata classes. It’s getting warmer, people are leaving the house, and the weekend is weekending again. These things have introduced more ambiguity into how my central plan works around the tides of life.
Am I doing a full day of work if I attend the Hound meetup, or if there’s movie night (which is always preceded by an apartment cleanup, since we’re having guests over), or when we do bachata? If I am trying to do a full day of work on those days, I need to start setting an alarm or making some other deliberate plans to work, because it’s not just happening on its own.
SO, with all that said, I think I’m going to start with the following plan:
Two hours of game dev FIRST thing when I wake up (Tuesday - Sunday)
A block of house chores after the morning game dev
Two hours of speedrunning immediately after the chore block. My average stream lengths tend to be three hours, but if I need to shorten them to two hours for now, then so be it. I think sacrificing game dev in the morning to conserve energy for a longer stream is the little dose of ambiguity in plans that the part of my psyche that doesn’t want to do hard work thrives on.
Wakeup when my pets wake up everyday. This last part is what I think will address the time crunch I’m running into on weekends. I tend to just wake up when I wake up, but during movie night or hound hangout days or bachata, I often lack enough solo time in the mornings to actually do work. My pets tend to wake up at ~8:30AM, so I’d like to start waking up with them.
Lastly, as I was doing at the start of this year, I want to make a DAILY update to the weekly blog posts here to recap my ability to stay on this fairly tight schedule. Mondays are the day I write this main weekly post, and also the day I have therapy, so it’s the closest thing to an off day for me. These daily updates will start tomorrow, on Tuesday.
830AM Wakeup, 2 hours of game dev, chores, 2 hours of speedrunning, blog update. That’s the list we’re shooting for.
Tales from Bachata
We had our most fun bachata class yet this past week, I think in part because there’s more spins and slides and other flourishes making their way into our routines. The mood with me and Erika is guaranteed to be lighter and more playful and joyous following a bachata class too - which is a really nice perk of going together. It loosens both of us up.
For the first time, someone in the class asked what my pronouns were, which to me is a sign that I’m pushing my femme presentation to new in-person heights. Traditionally, streaming is when I put the most effort into feminizing my look, but bachata is a new opportunity to do that in person. Opportunities to have a more feminized look in person are pretty lacking in my life otherwise. I think my official pronouns are “she/her but who can be trans in this economy.”
Movie Night - Rent
Remember Rent? I hadn’t thought about Rent in quite a while. I actually saw Rent during its original run on Broadway with a lot of the original cast, which now that it’s 2026, is actually a pretty cool historical fact. Time flies. Its Broadway run ended in September 2008 - I caught it toward the tail end, while I was in college.
The Rent movie came out in 2005. The original musical was first performed in 1996, just to give you a sense of the timeline here. I graduated high school in 2006, and remember Rent being a big deal among the more artsy kids of my grade. The movie includes six of the eight original cast members from the Broadway show.
There was a time that I listened to the Rent soundtrack very regularly. In some ways it reminds me of the discussion we were having here about wrestling recently… life is long enough that sometimes things I was SO into in the past can still manage to be things I haven’t thought about in 15+ years at this point. The songs and the lyrics and the moments came right back to me while re-watching the film. While I listened to the soundtrack a bunch and saw it on Broadway, I had probably only seen the movie once, back around when it first came out.
The movie has a 53 / 100 on Metacritic, which surprises me. Is it a musical thing? Maybe I was just at a particular time in life when it came out, but didn’t everyone love Rent? On the rewatch I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought it was fantastic. Who knows.
One thing that strikes me watching Rent today is that the sentiment is very much still true. People can’t afford anything anymore, everyone has to sell out to capitalism, being an artist is nearly impossible, and if there’s a pandemic, expect everyone to be fucked. The thing is, care for HIV+ people aside, everything is so, SO much worse in 2026 than in 1996. We’ve continued down the same decline that Rent criticized, but we’re another 30 years down that decline. It’s sad and terrifying.
Operation 2026 Weight Loss
Guys, this weight loss thing is absolutely happening. This is the seventh consecutive week that I’m posting a loss according to my seven-day average weight. Here’s our updated chart:
Through seven weeks, we’re a grand total of 8.0 pounds down. I think we were all skeptical of the weight loss challenge when it started earlier this year, but we’re doing it. I haven’t been doing any exercise at all, I’ve been fasting 1-2 days a week, eating a small calorie deficit 4-5 days a week, and I do one junk-food-laden “cheat meal” a week. Generally I eat a bunch of ice cream for the cheat meal. We’re doing it folks.
Slay the Spire 2
Holy smokes people. HOLY SMOKES.
This has taken me by surprise. For the uninitiated, Slay the Spire is a video game that came out in early access in November 2017. I think it was considered “officially released” in 2019. The sequel, Slay the Spire II, released into early access last week.
The thing that has taken me by surprise is how obsessed with this game I am. In a way, I am also surprised that I am surprised. That’s part of what has been weird about this. The original Slay the Spire ranks as my #1 played game on Steam, and it’s not even that close. According to Steam I have played Slay the Spire for 527 hours. My #2 most played game is Oxygen Not Included, which I’ve only played for 193 hours.
Given that, you’d think that I would be super excited and counting down the days until Slay the Spire II released. That wasn’t the case at all, however. It reminds me of the old saying that goes something like ‘an artist has a lifetime to make their first album and one year to make their second one.’ I feel like something similar happens with video games, where a smaller indie team first faces the challenge of making one good game (where I’m at right now in my game dev life), but then if they do that successfully, they are incentivized to make a sequel to cash in further. Fans of the first game are likely to buy the second game without paying as much attention to the sequel since it has a reputation and all that.
There’s a bunch of examples in my Steam library that follow this pattern. My #3 most played game on Steam is Darkest Dungeon, an indie project mostly made by two people. I played it for 164 hours. I played the sequel, Darkest Dungeon II, for five hours. I played Enter the Gungeon for 150 hours, and never bothered to buy the followup game Exit the Gungeon. I played Hades for 64 hours, and thus far have only played the recently released Hades II for six hours. It’s hard - and maybe specifically so in the roguelike genre, which all of these games are examples of - to followup a good game.
Hence, I went into Slay the Spire II with a lot of skepticism. It’s been one week, and I’ve already played it for 28 hours. The game is invading my brain. If you’re looking at it in the Steam store with the same skepticism I was, I recommend you buy it. I am blown away.
Anyway, that’s it for me this week. I hope everyone has a great week, and hopefully I’ll be checking back in with this post sometime tomorrow, on Tuesday. Bye!
Tuesday Update - Personal Diplomacy
WOW - okay work is hard to do. Here’s where I’m at:
I woke up at 830am and could not convince myself to stay awake. I went back to sleep and slept until 1:30pm.
I’m officially going to table this goal for now. I love sleeping.
When I woke up at 130pm, Erika was using my computer to play Slay the Spire II. I love to see Erika gaming, so I wasn’t about to kick her off my computer so I could do work. Instead of starting my day with game dev, I started it with the huge chore block. The idea behind the chore block is for it to encompass the vast majority of all the chores I’m going to do in a day. I cleaned the kitchen, did a load of laundry, took a shower, walked Podo (and it has been snowing in Pittsburgh…so that was a special kind of unpleasant now that it’s mid March), and did all the things associated with ‘trash day’ - emptying the cat litter, bringing the bins to the curb, etc.
I’m officially going to table the mandate that game dev be done first thing in the morning for now
I did an hour of game dev and by the end of that hour was bored out of my mind and dying to be distracted. This isn’t surprising to me. Unfortunately for the Robbie that writes this blog, ‘dopamine-now’ Robbie needs to be on board for work to get done. Getting him (yes, dopamine-now Robbie is decidedly a he) on board requires some subtle trickery. He’s so dopamine focused, that he’s susceptible to agreeing to deals that deliver dopamine right now, but will slowly become restrictive in the future. The ‘dopamine-now’ version of Robbie is always ready to cut a deal that pays off today. So, that’s what I, regular Robbie, did.
Today I only did one hour of work, which is three hours shy of the total we’re aiming to eventually hit daily (two hours game dev, two hours speedrunning). Dopamine-now Robbie has agreed to increase our workload, under the condition that A) we stop work today at this one hour mark, and B) we do not increase the total amount of work done per day by more than 30 minutes per day.
Regular Robbie is sort of annoyed at dopamine Robbie’s votes, but all the votes must be counted, and the deal was struck. Thus, tomorrow we’re shooting for:
Wake up whenever you want (wake up time is now unrestricted- it was edited after today’s negotiations and subsequent agreement)
You can do chores before game dev if desired, but you still cannot do speedrunning before game dev (this order of operations clause was edited as part of today’s agreement)
In accordance to the ‘rebuilding discipline’ clause of the new agreement, we will do 90 minutes of work tomorrow, up from the 60 minutes done today.
The rebuilding discipline clause interacts with the order of operations clause in the following way: you must do more game dev per day than speedrunning if the two are unequal, and game dev must happen first.
This means that tomorrow I will either do 90 minutes of game dev, or 60 minutes of game dev followed by 30 minutes of speedrunning.
In recognition of how hard it is to build back discipline once you’ve lost it, a ‘preserving discipline’ clause has been put on the table for discussion, but terms have not yet been reached. Negotiations will resume once our daily work is scheduled to exceed two hours per day - Friday. The general topic will be about limiting the likelihood of a massive fallout that requires a rebuild as in depth as the one we’re currently doing.
In recognition of it probably being impossible to never miss a day of work, a ‘taking time off without losing too much steam’ clause has been put on the table for discussion, but terms have not yet been reached. Negotiations will resume on Friday. This might actually be the same clause as above, just with a different name. TBD.
Have a great day everyone! I will check back in tomorrow.