March 9 Updates
What’s up everyone! We’re back for another week here on planet earth. We’re getting caught up on the latest today so buckle in.
Movie Night: Sinners
I’m in the mood to start with this week’s movie night. It was my week to choose the movie, and I went with best picture nominee Sinners. Sometimes on this blog I recap movies without spoilers, and sometimes with spoilers. This is going to be a with-spoilers recap. I mostly make this decision based on whether I think the movie is worth watching. I covered Bugonia without spoilers because I liked it. I’m covering Sinners with spoilers because…it was kind of meh. There’s not much to spoil.
First the good: it stars Michael B. Jordan alongside a majority-black main cast. The movie is about twin brothers who return from being mobsters in Chicago (both played by Michael B. Jordan) to their hometown in Mississippi in the 1930s. The twin brothers use their mobster-earnings to open a dance club with live music (a “juke”).
By the time the brothers open the juke we’re about an hour into the 2.25 hour movie, and at this point you get introduced to a new adversary - VAMPIRES. I had read before watching the movie that it contained vampires, yet by the time you actually see them in the movie, I had totally forgotten this fact. Nothing remotely supernatural happens in the first hour of the movie, and then suddenly the storyline shifts from a racial-tension historical crime drama sort of thing into a supernatural horror sort of thing.
I think this big shift could have worked if done differently, but the execution here didn’t do it for me. For one, the horror section isn’t really that engaging. The people who were partying at the juke start becoming vampires. Eventually it just becomes a mindless brawl between the vampires and the remaining humans.
There’s also a lot of really questionable plot elements. For example, the big brawl ends with the vampires accidentally staying outside for too long and getting burned up by the sun. But, we’re also led to believe that the vampire leader is like really old and ancient and stuff. He forgot to stay out of the sun? Really?
Also after the vampires are vanquished, the KKK shows up and Michael B Jordan goes Rambo and mows down a clique of KKK guys with machine guns in the span of like three minutes. IDK. It was a lot of disconnected random stuff to me. I loved the acting, the costumes, and the music, but I can’t say I thought it was a good movie. I give Sinners a 5/10 on the McLepke unofficial media rating scale.
Project Weight-Loss: Best Week
I had my best week of 2026’s Project Weight Loss. Regular readers of the blog will remember that last week I was complaining about how I walked over 40 miles in the span of four days and saw zero change whatsoever on the scale.
This week was the other side of that. I didn’t walk on the treadmill a single time, but instead created what in my estimation should have been the exact same calorie deficit via my diet, and lost a tick over two pounds in one week. IDK guys.
This week also marks six consecutive weeks of posting a loss in weight according to the 7-day average. In total we’re down 5.9 pounds, so we’re averaging a pound lost per week over this span. Let’s keep it up!
Speedrunning: Still Climbing the Leaderboards
The long-term Mega Man 4 speedrunning project is still chugging along. During my last stream, I set a new personal best time of 39:10! Let’s recap the journey so far:
Late December and early January - practice starts
January 30 - I set my first personal best time of 41:37, and grab spot #97 on the leaderboards
February 5 - I improve my personal best time to 40:16, and move up to spot #70
February 18 - I improve my personal best time to 39:30, and move up to spot #49
March 7 - I improve my personal best time to 39:10, and move up to spot #43
Here’s the latest run for those who want to check it out:
We ain’t done yet either folks. I’ll have to spend some more dedicated time in the lab before streaming again, but this latest new personal best time has given me a fresh jolt of motivation. We’ll see if I can go live again before next week’s post. I plan to review each and every room of the game before going live again, so it’s time to exercise some patience and get better. I will return.
Game Dev
Game dev is still puttering along. This week I’m going to be focused on building out the first playable section of the game. The jolt of motivation provided by the new personal best time in speedrunning kind of reminded me that I need to keep striving to make a splash with game dev. I want to get away from building out backgrounds and get into actual gameplay this week. Stay tuned.
Tales from Bachata
Guys, I kind of love bachata.
Connecting Wrestling and Drag
When I was between the ages of like 5 and 9, I loved so-called “professional wrestling”, aka the scripted pseudo sport most commonly identified with the WWF / WWE (they changed their name from the former to the latter at one point).
When most people my age think of wrestling, they probably think of people like Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Triple H, and Mankind. Weirdly, those names were actually after my time. It reminds me of how I loved the NES and the SNES growing up, whereas a lot of kids my age first got into video games with the N64 or the Playstation.
There was one big facilitator in my exploration of both old video games and old wrestling at that point in my life: Blockbuster (and its competitors). My dad used to take me to Blockbuster every Friday and I’d rent one thing for the weekend. The vast majority of my rentals were NES and SNES video games, but Blockbuster also carried VHS versions of the pay-per-view WWF events.
Backing up a little: let’s talk about how the WWF worked as a business. They had a weekly television show where wrestling would happen, but it was mostly matches of little to no consequence. Mainly, storylines would be setup during the weekly program. Feuds, bad blood, some comical sketches, all that stuff. Then, once a quarter, the WWF would have a pay-per-view event where these storylines would be cashed in and the important matches of the year would happen.
Backing up further: let’s talk about pay-per-view. What even was it? Back in the day they called it “closed circuit programming”. So like, a a bar would order a boxing match for example, and then people would go to the bar to watch that fight. You couldn’t just watch it at home. Eventually pay-per-view technology expanded to allow an individual house to purchase access to an exclusive live event. During the late 80s and early 90s, the WWF became one of the most common entities using pay-per-view. To this day, payperview.com redirects to a WWE webpage.
Anyway, as a youth, my parents never allowed us to order anything on pay-per-view. It must have been a lot more expensive than renting stuff at blockbuster. IDK. But, after the fact, you could rent the VHS reproduction of the event and get caught up. Blockbuster would also keep the archive of old pay-per-view events in stock for a while, so you could go back in time and get caught up on wrestling history.
Via this mechanism, I fell in love with late 80s and early to mid 90s wrestling. My interest lasted right up until the start of what WWF fans refer to as the “Attitude Era”, which is when the aforementioned names like Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock became super popular. The Attitude Era is associated with the WWF becoming edgier, more adult oriented, and less cartoony. Humorously, the average wrestling fan considers the “New Generation” that I loved, to be a meh time period of WWF history, and the “Attitude Era” that I disliked to be the revival after the New Generation’s many missteps.
Here is a picture of Stone Cold Steve Austin, the WWE’s biggest babyface (aka the good guy that fans would cheer for) during the start of the Attitude Era (1997 - 2002).
Here is a picture of Bret “The Hitman” Hart, one of the WWE’s biggest babyfaces during the New Generation Era (1993 - 1997).
Which one of these two superstars and respective eras do you think I enjoyed more?
Here’s a picture of Randy “Macho Man” Savage, one of the WWF’s biggest babyfaces during the era that came before the New Generation era, often simply called the Golden Age (1984 - 1993):
Sickening, no? Like, this is drag of the highest order people!
So now rewind to 1997 when wrestling is getting away from the Macho Mans and the Bret Harts and all the dumbasses in my 6th grade class are starting to love Stone Cold Steve Austin. At the time I didn’t really mourn this personal loss or clearly see the transition wrestling was having, I kind of just summed it up in my own head as “well, I don’t like wrestling anymore”. Over time, the distance between me and the WWF grows and grows, until it’s not a part of me at all anymore. Eventually I internally start cringing at the fact that I ever even liked wrestling.
But you know, the older I get the more I realize that we’ve always been ourselves. I’ve been on YouTube digging through archival footage of 1984 - 1997 WWF, and it’s been a really funny process. I’m appreciating that these early wrestling moments were truly my first experience with drag.
IDK. I guess that’s all I have to say about it. I appreciate the early days of the WWF and the influence they had on me. I’ve been enjoying reliving these childhood memories. Shout outs to everyone else who loved and was affected by this high-camp super cartoony era of pro wrestling entertainment.
That’s it for me today. Have a great week y’all. I believe in you.
Thursday Morning Update
It’s already Thursday!
Something cool that happened yesterday - the person who has the #2 time in Mega Man 4 offered to do a “PB Review” of my current 39:10 in Mega Man 4. “PB Reviews” happen in the speedrunning community sometimes. It’s when a more experienced and better runner reviews the personal best time of a newer and worse runner to offer advice on their journey of improvement.
This was an extremely kind gesture on the part of Aurel. The review lasted 2 hours and 15 minutes, so he really went above and beyond and I’m incredibly grateful. Be kind people. There is still hope in the world.
As I mentioned, Aurel is currently in second place on the Mega Man 4 leaderboards. He’s got years of experience running this game and is currently trying to move up that final spot to claim a new world record. If you want to check out his runs, you can find him at twitch.tv/aurel509.
Recently I’ve been switching off days - one speedrun day, followed by one game dev day. Today’s a game dev day so if I’m going to get started with that shortly. Have a great day everyone!
Friday Update
I slept almost all day yesterday, and then slept until 1pm today. Not sure what that was all about but wow I was sleepy. I’m feeling energized today, so who knows.
I’ve got a lot of chores to do today since I sort of slept through yesterday. I gotta clean up the apartment considerably before movie night tomorrow (still don’t know what the selection will be - it’s Teresa’s pick).
Since rediscovering childhood wrestling, I’ve purchased three different Bret “the Hitman” Hart pieces of merchandise. I’m not very good with posting pictures of myself to the blog, but hopefully they’ll appear on here eventually. One is still on its way. Bret Hart gear is mostly pink, and it is very 90s. Even though he retired from pro wrestling in 2002, Bret Hart memorabilia is popping off in the McLepke house right now.
I’m in a chatty mood so I’ll also share a mid-week weight loss progress report - we’re going to have another big week. I once again walked zero miles on the indoor treadmill (the indoor treadmill is kind of RIP…Erika certainly isn’t going to use it much. Oh well. It was an experiment).
My seven day average weight to start this week was 227.4, and right now it’s 224.9. We’re looking at a one week loss of somewhere between 2 and 3 pounds. I’m doing it! Junk food has still certainly been calling to me a bit but I’m in a good groove of fighting it off.
Work wise it’s been a slow week so far. I’ve done two hours of game dev and two hours of speedrunning. I’m going to try to squeeze in as much work as I can this weekend to bolster those numbers a bit before next week’s check-in.
My weekend looks like movie night tomorrow and bachata dance class on Sunday. I hope everyone has a restorative weekend planned. Talk soon!
Later Friday - I did a big apartment clean. The place looks good. But…I’m not in the mood to do work. I feel bad about it but I really don’t want to do it. Ugh ugh.
I think one thing I’ve gotten away from that I need to get back into is doing game dev right when I wake up. If I do all these chores first, I think mentally I’m feeling accomplished from the chores, and that lets me feel less guilt about not working.
So tomorrow, first thing in the morning I’m going to make it a goal to work on game dev for two hours. Hopefully that will help get me out of this rut I feel like I’ve been in with work recently. Wish me luck.