The Little Room

This week was about snow, not really, but it sort of the felt that way. Starting on Thursday the local Bluesky feed started getting more and more snow centric. 4 to 6 inches predicted for Saturday night became 8, then 10, then 16 and in some forecasts 24. Everyone, including us, went in to prep mode. Getting everything done that needed doing done before Sunday morning.

We had the great fortune of walking to a local venue last night to see Patti Smith. Yeah, that Patti Smith. She was in town promoting her book, and suddenly there was a pop-up show at this tiny renovated old movie theater in my neighborhood. I couldn’t believe it.

But we went and it was amazing. She sang, she told stories, she read from her book. Her bandmates were long time collaborator Tony Shanahan and her son Jackson Smith. She dedicated a song to Alex Pretti and Renee Good. She reminded us that the people have the power. She filled our souls.

After the show we walked home in the beginnings of the predicted blizzard. 2-3 inches were already on the ground. Sometime overnight the storm shifted south ever so slightly. This morning we woke up to 10 inches of snow. Still a lot, and certainly more than I want to see in March when I’m already so winter weary, but not 24.

Earlier in the week I saw a dermatologist about a new spot on my foot, which turned out to be benign. I’ve had another benign growth on my left temple for awhile now and ever so often my barber will nick it when giving me a haircut. I asked about having it removed thinking I would need to come back later, but nope, she whipped out a bottle of liquid nitrogen and blasted me with it right then and there. It stung for a bit the rest of the day, but since then nothing. The idea is to cause a blister that pushes the growth off the skin. I go back in about a month to check the progress.

On the Peloton front my streak is still intact, but I did get lazy with my rides, managing only two this week. I think I need to adjust my schedule. I normally ride Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, but I’ve been commuting to work on Tuesdays and something about having to do that puts me off riding when I get back home. This week I’m going to try switching to Monday, Wednesday, Saturday for rides and see how that goes.

Things I enjoyed this week

• I made these Noodle Okonomiyaki this week, which are cabbage, egg, and instant ramen pancakes. They were superb.
• We finished our Oscar Best Picture nominee watch off with Marty Supreme and I loved it. I’m writing this a few hours before the awards show, so I don’t the winners yet, but Chalamet might just win best actor. At any rate, if we keep getting movies in the Uncut Gems universe I’ll be happy.

This week I tried to stick to my routines as a way of staying sane as the United States does whatever the hell it’s doing in Iran. It wasn’t easy.

I kept up on my Peloton routine, and kept my streak alive for another week. This week I got in three rides: one Power Zone, one Low Impact, and a Power Zone Endurance ride. I did a hip mobility stretching workout as well as a full body stretch workout. I rounded things off with some meditations. I want to add more strength routines in to the mix, but I feel like my limited mobility prevents me from doing the strength exercises with proper form.

It’s been warmer and sunnier here so we’ve also been able to get outside a bit more and go for walks around the neighborhood. It really does feel like emerging from hibernation, and sometimes even a 40-degree day can feel like a miracle. I know we’re not completely out of the winter woods just yet, but I’ll take what I can get.

A friend of mine was hospitalized last week for what turned out to be blood clots in his lungs. We were in a Discord call the night before and he logged of early because it felt bad. We even joked about him “dying IRL”. The night before he had complained about heart burn. The next morning we found out he had been hospitalized after going to the emergency room.

This of course did wonders for the anxiety I feel about my own “chest pain”. Whatever that is has gotten better, but it hasn’t completely gone away. I’m still working my way through the bottle of Pepcid I was prescribed, but I probably should just schedule a follow up visit.

I do have an appointment with a dermatologist this week to look at a spot on my foot. The fun things you get to do as you age, eh?

Things I enjoyed this week

• Last week I mentioned the pre-release “server slam” for Bungie’s latest game, Marathon. The full release was this week, and me and my friends have been having a blast. I really hope Sony (the publisher) gives this game a chance to find it’s audience the way No Man’s Sky or Cyberpunk 2077 have. It’s really something special.
• Yesterday I made this delicious Japanese ground beef curry, which uses curry bricks. I went with Vermont brand based on comments on the recipe.
• Getting those curry bricks meant I got to go to United Noodles, one of our local Asian grocery stores. One of the other great finds there was a bag of Korean Chicken flavor Turtle Chips.

Well, February is over, punctuated by the U.S and Israel attacking Iran for still unclear to me reasons. Not that there’s really ever a good reason to indiscriminately bomb a country and its people. Sending another generation of soldiers to die in a needless pursuit who even knows is sickening. It’s all so disheartening: an executive branch that is not only clueless but deeply stupid, a compromised judicial branch, and a congress filled with do-nothings on both sides of the aisle.

Anyway, the week. It’s been a little warmer and a little sunnier, but these Minnesota winters have a way of lingering.

I’ve kept my Peloton activity streak alive for another week, up to a total of 59 days now. I didn’t have as much desire to ride this week which concerns me a little, so I’m going to redouble my efforts there. I rode the bike twice: one 30-minute power zone ride, and a 20-minute Tabata ride. My goal is at least three rides a week, with one them being 45 minutes or longer. The rest of my workouts were stretching and meditation.

I’ve decided on a side-objective related to fitness: being able to get into a Yogi squat or Malasana. For some reason videos about it started showing up in my YouTube feed a few weeks ago and finally won me over. Being able to get into the pose seems to be a good indicator of flexibility and over all mobility, and the practice is apparently good for folks like me who spend most of their days sitting.

In weekly retro # 4, I wrote a little about migrating my friend group’s Discord server to another system like Matrix. This week I came to the conclusion that we won’t be moving after all. Ultimately it came down to two of my principles colliding: right to privacy and community. Community won out. I decided it just wasn’t worth the friction of having everyone move to a new tool, especially when the features we want are half-baked or non-existent in many of the Matrix clients. Discord even announced it was delaying the announced age-verification changes until later this year, so I’m hopeful there will be positive changes there.

On the medical front, I’m still experiencing the chest discomfort. I’m probably halfway through the 50-tablet bottle of Pepcid I picked up the day of the office visit. There are days I think it’s better, but others not so much. It doesn’t seem to be getting worse. It freaks me out though, especially at night for some reason. It also seems to get worse at night. Sometimes I think it’s psychosomatic or anxiety-based. Other times I worry I’m downplaying symptoms because I’m afraid to acknowledge that something might be really wrong.

Things I enjoyed this week

• Bungie held a “server slam” for their upcoming game Marathon, a new extraction shooter. Me and my friends had an absolute blast and pre-ordered ahead of the launch on March 5th.
• I’ve had a dead first-generation HomePod for a few months now. One day it just stopped working. Luckily I stumbled across a great company here in Minnesota who repairs them. They sent me a box, I sent them my speaker, and they sent it back fully repaired with some upgrades all within a week. Magic!
• One of my favorite Jazz trios, Mammal Hands, released a new album this week. They don’t change their sound much from album to album, but honestly why mess with what’s working.

I’m writing this one on Monday instead of the usual Sunday. Yesterday was just a little too jam-packed to fit writing a retro in. It’s my week to plan meals and grocery shop, plus I had some additional chores in the rotation, as well as a Peloton ride to get in.

Speaking of Peloton, I crossed the 450 ride milestone this week, and kept my daily activity streak alive; I’m up to 52 days. I did that through a combination of rides and meditation this week. According to the app, my average power rose by 11% in the past two weeks so the more intense rides are paying off. In April I plan to retake my Functional Threshold Power (FTP) test. The result of that test determines your individualized power zones, and I’m hoping to see some improvement.

On a related note, I’ll be looking into the Peloton API at some point to see if I can pull my activity data directly and share it here. Mostly because I want to keep adding little features to this site.

I did start working on a game log feature for the site. I’ve set it up so that I can record the results of individual sessions, as well as pages for challenges like the 4 x 10 challenge I’m doing this year. It’s coming along nicely; I’m mostly in the tweaking the UI phase now. Most of the logic is in place. Hopefully by next week I’ll have that feature live on the site.

I did manage to play one session of a game in my 4 x 10 challenge this week. Monday was President’s Day in the U.S. and I had the day off, which made it easy. I got in a session of Dragons of Etchinstone, the newest game in my collection. It’s a “handheld” game, meaning you can play the entire thing from your palm. It was only my second full time playing so I’m still getting to grips (ha!) with the rule set, but I do enjoy it.

On Saturday I met a friend at a local gaming store for about four hours. We played Sorcery: Contested Realm using a draft cube he put together. It was great fun. Sorcery itself is a wonderful game for creating an immersive experience at the table. The number of interactions and the loose ruleset help. It’s a game made more for casual play and less so for deeply competitive play, and frankly that’s the experience I want in gaming. Tabletop and video games are both burdened with the desire to min/max, and while that’s possible—and happening—with Sorcery, the designers don’t intend it to be played that way and it shows in each and every decision they’ve made.

ICE is still active in Minnesota, though it seems like they’ve moved out of the cities into more suburban areas, where there are still plenty of people observing, but less over all. Here in Minneapolis we’re focused on helping people who’ve been unable to work pay their rent as well as other ways to undo some of the financial damage the occupation has done.

Things I enjoyed this week

• The movie “Blue Moon” starring Ethan Hawke. It’s a charming movie, that feels almost play-like in its limited setting, and one of Hawke’s best performances.
• The one-two punch of Aria Stewart’s “Hater’s Guide to code with LLMs” (Part One, Part Two.)
• In a similar vein, Robin Sloan is writing a pop-up newsletter on AI, and in the latest issue tries to figure out the edge of generative AI’s reach and see what’s beyond it.

I just finished my long (45 minutes) Peloton ride for the week, showered, and am now writing this entry from the couch watching a VOD of streamer Day9 playing Mewgenics, the latest game from Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel. Mewgenics was originally announced in 2012, and I honestly thought it was vaporware until previews started hitting my YouTube feed. I’ve been playing the game a bit myself this week, and it’s fascinating watching someone like Day9, famous for his real-time strategy career, make very different decisions than I’ve been.

Earlier this week border czar Tom Homan declared that operation Metro Surge was ending in Minnesota. I am in a solid “I’ll believe it when I see it” mode, and I think that’s where most Minnesotans are. This administration has consistently lied about their intentions, behaviors, and actions, so words just aren’t enough at this point. Homan has tossed around words like drawdown, and keeping a “small” security force in the state. I’d like to know precisely what small means and also learn what conditions were agreed to by Governor Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and local police forces that led to the administration making this decision.

I kept my Peloton streak going and am now up to 45 days in a row of biking, meditating, stretching, and—new this week—strength training. Yesterday, I did a 10-minute bodyweight strength class that included a circuit of squats, pushups, burpees, and every muscle in my body hurts. That just means I need to do more of them I suppose. As for rides this week I subbed in a HIIT class instead of a Powerzone ride for one of my three rides. It was intense, but manageable. According to the app my average power rose by 7% over the last two weeks.

Somewhat related, I feel like the pain in my chest has lessened a bit. It has always been a hard to pinpoint, non-specific pain, which in turn makes it hard to say if it’s gotten better, but I think it has. Who’s to say if that’s due to the daily dose of Pepcid I’ve been taking or just healing over time. Either way, I’ll keep taking the Pepcid as prescribed and check in with my doctor in a few weeks.

While I was writing this, a friend messaged me about getting together to play some Sorcery: Contested Realm. That’s the TCG I’ve been wanting to get to a store to play. He’s built a cube for it and wants to try it out. We’ve planned on meeting up this weekend to play. It’s not quite in the spirit of my goal of playing more games in person with people I don’t know, but it’s a step in the right direction. I think he does play more regularly with a group of local players, so maybe this will be my way in to that community.

I spent a fair amount of time this week setting up a new Matrix server to replace the Discord server I’ve been running for my friend group for about 5 years now. Discord recently announced some changes they’ll be making soon around age verification that don’t sit well with me, and thankfully many others. Ideally, Discord would roll back these changes, but that seems unlikely. So I did some research, found a Matrix hosting company, and paid to have a server set up and hosted. You don’t need to go that route. There are large public servers that are joinable with a matrix.org account, and you can self host as well. I didn’t want to host or manage a server so I went with a paid option.

Matrix is not a 1:1 Discord replacement, but I was able to set up a “Space” which is equivalent to a Discord server, and “rooms” that match the various channels in our Discord server. It took me a bit to understand some of the Matrix nuances like that space and room nomenclature, as well as how being fully encrypted impacts conversation threads, but I think I’ve got a workable solution. A few friends have created Matrix accounts and moved over, but I think we’re all in wait and see mode, hoping Discord does the right thing here.

As a federated alternative to Discord, Matrix appeals to me, but like replacing Twitter with Mastodon or Bluesky, I think ultimately it’s going to leave communities worse off due to fragmentation. It’s one thing to migrate my small friend group to a new service, but I don’t see the really large communities moving any time soon. I’m in a few video game and tabletop Discord servers, and sadly I haven’t even seen discussions about moving in any of them. I’ll have to make a decision about how much or little I’ll continue to use Discord even if my friend group does fully migrate.

Things I enjoyed this week

• The aforementioned Mewgenics has been fun to play, but what suprised me the most is it’s soundtrack. The song “Chasing Rats” from the first zone is a bit of an earworm. Here’s a live performance of it.
• Austin Walker streaming Dragon’s Dogma online. I’ll never tire of watching Austin play a game he loves and talking about why as he plays it.
• We watched “Sentimental Value” this weekend, which handily earns its Oscar nomination. The soundtrack, featuring “Love Theme From Spartacus” performed by Yusef Lateef, is incredible too.