Back from Stoner Island

Hello all! Welcome to the April 6th edition of the weekly blog post that happens here. Lately, the posts have just been called “April 6th Updates” with a different date thrown in. Today feels like it deserves a special title though, as I’ve just returned from an interesting stay on Stoner Island. We will be breaking down everything that happened so buckle in!

A Drug Lovers Journey Continues

This blog post could age really well or really poorly depending on how this next week goes. Only time will tell.

First, the broader context just as a refresher slash for the newbies. I smoked pot every day for like seven years or something (this happened after quitting alcohol and nicotine completely, but we’re going for a recent-history here), and then I quit for almost a year. January 2025 - around Thanksgiving 2025 I was totally sober aside from sugar binges and caffeine.

Thanksgiving 2025 through Christmas 2025, I smoke pot. It was almost perfectly a month. I smoked every day, eventually becoming an all day every day thing toward the end.

This era needs a name. I guess for now we can call it The First Return. We can then call whatever is happening right now The Second Return. We might come up with snappier names later.

Before I committed to a second return, I dedicated a session of therapy to re-breaking down my first return last holiday season. Drugs are kind of funny this way. If you want to get lost in them as a way to completely ignore the realities of your life that you don’t want to deal with, you can do that. This is how you end up just smoking for seven straight years like I did to an extent. Not to totally shit-talk doing drugs everyday. I don’t know. I did get through some hard times being addicted to pot.

Like I was saying though, we re-broke down my first return to pot. Perhaps more likely to err on the side of my safety, my therapist was like, ‘well, you definitely started out enjoying it but by the end, you threw it all in the trash and started being sober again’. This is true - that did happen. I got to re-experience the early days of smoking weed - how intense the highs are, how revolutionary the time spent can feel - but I also re-experienced becoming acclimated to weed by the end of the month back. It did become a chore, and I did want to take another extended break from it by the end.

But, I countered my therapist’s recollections with, “while that’s true, I ALSO really enjoyed it. I didn’t regret having that month by the end of my stoner time, but I did feel like it went on a bit longer than it needed to.” Looking back at some of my diary entries and other notes from around that time, my mindset after returning to sobriety post The First Return has the tone of, '“that KIND OF worked. Like, it needs tweaking. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming that was a totally healthy month of behavior, but I KIND OF see a path for doing something that approximates the idea of moderating pot.”

At the time, I didn’t have a clear cut path forward, other than I was sure that I would smoke again at some point, but that I also wanted to have another very long break to reset myself. That long break lasted from Christmas Day 2025, to April 1 2026. So basically we got through Q1 of 2026.

First of all, if we’re looking for evidence that I am gaining some ability to moderate, these are two really good pot breaks. Big break one was almost a full year, and then I was able to fairly easily implement a big break #2 that lasted another quarter.

One thing that feels different right now - amidst The Second Return - is that during The First Return, I feel like I pretty much instantly got back into using all the time. For whatever reason, The Second Return has me feeling a lot more stable. And this brings me back to the idea that this blog post might not age well - I’ve made a vow to not smoke pot again until at least Friday. Today is Monday (Update: Today is now Tuesday, since getting this post published is taking me a while. I had no pot on Monday). I have not smoked pot today. The next few days are highly relevant to the way this will all get self-interpreted another week from now.

But, this trip to Stoner Island did really seem a bit different. I smoked in the evenings everyday from Wednesday - Sunday. The first day, Wednesday, I smoked and it FLOORED me. I had a complete emotional breakdown and reevaluated my entire life from my bed, but in an overall very positive way. I could feel such a huge benefit from being able to take a break from my normal state of mind, and observe the life I have been living. Erika and I bonded a lot by re-canvassing some trouble areas in our relationship under the new light we were in.

And Erika doesn’t smoke pot, by the way. But being able to spend time with your partner while they’re a bit loopy and over-emotional is honestly really important. Like, yeah maybe there’s healthier ways to promote regular healing conversations in your relationship, but humans have been doing drugs forever for a complex set of reasons. I definitely saw a lot of the good drugs can do this past long weekend.

Also, while a distant memory now, one of the last things I said on this blog prior to leaving for Stoner Island was that Erika and I were having disagreements on when I would be able to do work, and the idea that I was working too much and not spending enough time with her. I think the crux of this issue is the quality of the time we spend together. No one is sitting around tallying up how many hours we hang out for (actually, it’s sort of in my nature to do this, but my point is that even with this data, it doesn’t tell you anything, because….) - what actually leaves us either feeling lonely or feeling a lot of togetherness is the quality and meaningfulness of the time we spend together. One of the reasons I don’t feel bad about the Stoner Island vacation that just happened is Erika and I really hung out. I could feel us doing things rather than just being in the same room together. Sometimes Erika would be drinking alcohol while I was on pot, and honestly, doing drugs together is important to me. This weekend made such a huge change in how we’re doing.

So anyway, Wednesday was an emotional stoner day. Thursday was a similar vibe, but definitely a chiller version. Friday was similar and chiller still.

Saturday, Erika announces that she’s hanging out with Maggie at night, at Maggie’s house. I ask if I am invited. Erika says, ‘you’re always invited,” which I recognize as being accurate…I just never attend these night time drinking escapades they have. But after the variety show that was Wednesday Thursday and Friday, I felt up for it. With my pot tolerance so low, I actually am included in the whole using drugs part of the hangout.

Saturday was great. I had a really fun time hanging out with Erika and Maggie. I got reasonably dressed up - I have new high-waisted pink jeans that I wore. We watched the last few episodes of Love on the Spectrum season 4 that we hadn’t gotten through yet. I left feeling very socially fulfilled and happy. It has me thinking about the idea of social lubrication. Like I was saying earlier about there being healthier ways to promote important conversations with Erika, that’s true here too. You can have fun without losing sobriety. But I also can’t help but feel how primal and natural it is to socialize while doing drugs. Humans really are kind of built for it.

Moving on, Sunday was movie night. We watched Memento, which I am going to gloss over here. Y’all have seen Memento. I smoked some pot prior to movie night, and when Jason arrived he told me he was 600 days sober from weed. He and I discussed my pot use and even story sharing with him as it related to his own sobriety by the way. He was comfortable with all of this. But like Erika and Maggie, I did feel like Jason and I were able to tread on some topics that we simply normally do not - like our mother. I am not going to delve into mom details since there’s enough else happening here right now, but the point is that I could feel the social effects of smoking pot all throughout the weekend.

Next up we had Monday. As alluded to earlier in this post, Monday was to be the first day with no pot at all. I’m writing this from Tuesday - we actually did that. We had no pot. It was fine, maybe even good. I had a great distraction too, since I started my new bollywood dancing class yesterday. That was a lot of fun - I’m excited to learn more.

So, will pot be moderated effectively? We’ll see. I’m kind of doing it so far.

Other Updates

While there were some good interpersonal and emotional breakthroughs over the stay on pot island, I can’t say that I did much work or ate very well. It kind of just amounted to a week off. Here’s our latest weight chart, where we’ve lost some ground. You can see our orange and blue lines are on the rise. Hopefully we can push back down on this trend this coming week. So far so good - I was back to more-normal eating behaviors yesterday.

And here’s our somewhat sad work chart :(

So yeah. I had to dedicate some productivity resources to have the pot mini-vacation that transpired. In terms of the ‘level of vacation’ I just had, I would put it at approximately “Thanksgiving Level” - it was a Wednesday - Sunday sort of thing. Erika and I talked about this in the sober light of Monday - we agreed this was probably a quarterly sort of vacation splurge. As in, once per quarter we should be shooting to party at this magnitude. A more ho-hum normal weekend could still include partying during this Second Return to pot era, but it’d be more of a Saturday / Sunday thing under the current plans.

Today is Tuesday, and I’ve been up since 8:30am. I should be able to get some good work done today, so wish me luck. Have a great week all!

Laser Issues

I’m realizing I have an issue with the lasers. You can see the issue here:

This is the text that accompanies the Youtube video, in the description. Maybe at some point I’ll start actually narrating these videos. Baby steps people.

Demonstration of the current laser issue. The problem has to do with the way the hitboxes are cycling on and off. The lasers have their 'monitorable' property set to false when they aren't being shown on screen. Then, when Robbie gets near, they appear, and the monitorable property is flipped to on. The issue - Robbie's hitbox is looking for Area2d nodes to collide with, but in this case I believe that the order of operations is this:

1. The hitbox is not shown, and so it is not monitorable by Robbie's hitbox that detects collision for the purposes of taking damage

2. On the last part of the video where Robbie dashes to the center of the lasers but doesn't take damage, Robbie's initial collision with the laser hitbox happens while the laser hitbox is set to not monitorable. While not monitorable, the hitbox does still exist, though.

3. Once the laser hitbox flips over to being monitorable, Robbie is no longer generating fresh collision data, because Robbie's standing still. The initial collision that happened when the monitorable property was set to false is still happening, but Robbie is looking for moments when their collision box is entered. Since having their monitorable property set to true, the lasers have not entered Robbie's collision box.

Now as for what to do? I’m not really in love with this laser system as it is anyway. I think I’d rather tweak this whole laser design so that it’s both functional and works better. My initial thought is to just have the lasers cycle on and off on their own - independent of where Robbie is. Right now they are set to turn on when Robbie is near, so that you have to dash through them. The timing could be set up such that they still require dashing, but while cycling on their own. Imma go program that.

Update - this looks good to me.

Okay we only got an hour of work in today but it was a good hour. Let’s keep the momentum up tomorrow :)

Wednesday Updates

At this point I think I’m adjusting to the truth that I can’t fit everything into one day. That means that I can’t run the same schedule out every day and go down the list and just do it all. I’m consistently running into issues where somedays, I can’t fit everything in.

One part of my life that has been under some fire lately is my sleeping. When you start penny pinching your hours and minutes and you’re looking to find some newfound time under the couch cushions, sleep is a pretty easy target. Dopamine Now Rob obviously loves sleeping and advocates for unlimited sleep…but I kind of feel like regular Robbie remains on board with that idea as well.

It reminds me of all the days I woke up for school. This probably started happening in middle school. Literally every single morning I would wake up and just fantasize about being able to sleep in. And day after day after day I’d have to summon the strength to get myself out of bed and go about the day.

IDK guys. It feels like I’m honoring the younger versions of myself by using the levels of luxury I can currently afford to just sleep as much as I want. If I can’t afford the luxury of sleep, then what is this all even for. I think that’s where I have landed after bouncing ideas around regarding sleep recently.

That leads to the follow-up point though, that I can’t sleep an unlimited amount, stay on top of all of our house chores, make dinner every night, do game dev, speedrun, and have a social life with Erika everyday. It’s just not happening.

SO, I’m trying to feel out how things can proceed from here. Today for example, I don’t have a lot of dinner prep to do because I made a lot of leftovers yesterday. So if we’re balancing all the tasks out there, that’s some available time for game dev today. I managed to sneak an hour in last night while Erika was busy doing stuff at night. I think that’s kind of the vibe right now. I need to sneak work in when I can, and just accept it when I can’t. Then we’ll tally up the time worked at the end of the week for next week’s blog post, and see how we’re doing and tweak from there.

Also, it’s now Wednesday and I did successfully not smoke pot on either Monday or Tuesday. I’m holding out until Friday night. The moderation I’m going for right now is only smoking nights, and only Friday - Sunday. We’re kind of doing it! It’s definitely the best job I’ve ever done moderating and things do feel a bit different on the pot front right now, so let’s try to keep this going.

Have a great Wednesday all! I’m going to do a brief kitchen clean, cut some onions up for tomorrow’s dinner, and then try to get some game dev done.

330pm - okay the onions are cut, the kitchen is clean, the laundry is going, now is the time we need to crank out some game dev. Let’s do it.

630pm - I got 90 minutes of game dev in. Nothing to really share here, but I’m working on an enemy that is sort of similar to Bullet Bill - a cannon that shoots projectiles toward you at a set rhythm. One shot will be high and then the next will be low, so the first you need to double jump over, then there’s one you jump over. Hopefully you’ll get to see this thing in action soon.

Have a great night everyone! I’ll probably check in tomorrow - for now I’ll be doing taxes :(

Thursday Update

Post-taxes I took a nap. Post nap we watched the two final episodes of DTF St. Louis before the finale airs this Sunday. I’ll just share my thoughts on that show when we finish it, I guess in next week’s post.

It’s now 12:55am, so the early morning of Thursday. Erika is getting ready for bed, so I actually feel ready to do some midnight game dev. Let’s do this. If you recall bullet bill from super mario bros, sometimes he’d appear in a stack of two, and sometimes in a stack of one. Basically there were varying heights the shooter might come in, because then the bullets would be at different heights and there would be more variety. Like this:

It’s a small image but hopefully you can make out some of what’s happening. But you can see here that there’s three different heights of the bullet bill shooter shown on screen. There’s a tall one to the left, and then there’s a medium one on top of a tiny one over to the right. And actually there’s even more different heights found throughout the game.

So what I’m wondering is, how does my Bullet Bill esque thing (I think I’m naming it Bullet Bianca, by the way) work with this thinking? The initial sprite I drew up as a placeholder for Bullet Bianca looks like this right now.

So it’s like two cannons stacked on top of each other, and they shoot these purple projectiles at an offset rhythm. But, before making the art any better than this, I’m kind of wondering about that bullet bill height thing. Like, should there be one Bullet Bianca height (maybe just half of what is shown above), and they are all programmed to shoot independently, but they can stack on top of each other? Or, do I hardcode in a ‘double’ and a ‘single’ and design sprites to match those heights? That’s what I’m wondering.

I also want these to be able to be destroyed by the player’s shots, which wasn’t possible in Super Mario Bros. So what happens if you shoot the bottom cannon? Does the top one fall down and take it’s place? Does the duo all ‘die’ together, at the same time when this thing has taken enough damage?

Thinking about it, my intuition here is that the Bullet Bianca node will be only one unit high. We can then put a timer on each individual one that can be changed when we set up the scene so that they are firing at the desired offset timings. I guess if you shoot the bottom cannon when two are stacked on top of each other, the top one should fall down, so gravity will be needed here. Also, the shots and the cannon itself are going to be separate objects within Godot - the cannon will need to store an instance of the projectile and be able to spawn it while the code is running.

Have I told you all that you are fantastic listeners? Having talked that through…I think I’m ready to work on this in the engine. I’ll return when I have something. Here’s a small tidbit until then - I did take the time to lightly animate the projectile with a shadow. It’s nothing crazy I know, but I like sharing small updates. It’s literally something I did today so just be impressed even if mildly.

Okay I’m off to work in the engine. Happy midnight if you happen to be up.

Update - first narrated update. Baby steps y’all.