• WILT: A Multi-Turn, Memorization-Robust Inductive Logic Benchmark for LLMs our paper for this was accepted into the MATH-AI workshop at NeurIPS 2024. I'm super stoked about it!
• Notes on Sutton & Barto I spent about two weeks of very focused work and got through the entirety of this textbook. It was pretty good!
• Stupid (can't run from the urge) [SX11]​ I wrote an ITG chart that I was pretty happy with

• Lots of coding projects hopefully something to show for them soon
• Made some paper submissions to conferences fingers crossed
• Piano Training App and Notes, some practice using these new o1 models to get a good handle on what sorts of tasks they're capable of

• underscore 'Old money bitch' this whole album is pretty good
• Skate 3 "Secret Tricks" pretty uncanny
• Tecmo Super Bowl 2024 finding out there was a whole little culture of importing modern players and tactics to Tecmo Super Bowl was a delightful experience
• Blue Dog Win amazing milestone in useless glitch hunting history
• The dance game cab in Black Mirror this is great
• I made a CRT Game Boy I love CRTs so this was a treat for me even if it was wildly impractical

• SSBMRank Summer 2024 Was not a panelist this season since I was too focused on work / school to pay too much attention to the scene, but I did data-oriented tasks for this I often do.
• Model Merging and You This whole field of techniques seemed like completely nonsense to me, so I'm really glad I got around to reading about it. It's not so bad once you understand it!
• The Genie I completed my Masters degree, so I wrote this to try to work through my thoughts on it.
• The Saccharine Prison I wrote this after thinking a little bit about the midpoint between Ted Chiang's Hell Is the Absense of God and the idea of heavenbanning.
• Auxiliary-Loss-Free Load Balancing for MoE Reproduction a new deepseek came out so I did a little toy repro, seems to work despite being super conceptually simple. Cool trick!

• Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition pretty good, Ice Climber definitely needs to be removed from this game though, why is that there.
• Wordle LLM Solver
• the era of 1-bit llms sparcification seems like an interesting frontier for llms
• minigo: a case study in reproducing reinforcement learning research wish there was more stuff like this
• better and faster llms via multi-token prediction Super thought provoking, the idea of "choice points" as the primary waypoints for reasoning errors sort of illuminates the eventual value of MCTS on unstructured text
• A lot of other papers I bought a Boox Go 10.3 and I have underestimated the productivity gain I would see using this thing and being undistracted by twitter etc.

• Added phi-3-small support to guidance My first open source contribution!! I learned a lot about tokenizers working on this project.
• Understanding Multi-Head Latent Attention and mla variants implementation I look into MLA because its presence in DeepSeek-V2 confused me and I needed to understand it better. In general working on this stuff has been really gratifying, I feel like I understand a lot about how the pieces slot together. Learned some Manim to make some of the figures in this post.
• Data work for SSBMRank Summer 2024 That time of year again, didn't do a ballot myself since I've been too busy to follow the game.
• Arch Linux Installation My wife's thinkpad broke this month, which was a nice excuse to buy her a new one for her upcoming Bioinformatics degree. In the meanwhile, rather than tossing the broken thinkpad, I bought a replacement LCD (which was what had broken), did some surgery, and threw Arch Linux on it. I'm using XFCE4 and i3wm, and overall the learning curve for this has been much less bad than I had been led to believe it would be.

• Soul Blazer pretty good
• Shadowrun pretty bad
• Mario Tennis: Power Tour what an incomprehensibly weird game.
• Flure [cover by TORWAI x BOMOSTIN]​ hes cooking
• Gourmet Race (PAL Version) {siivagunner} one of the best rips in a long time
• Top US Recruit vs D1 Recruit I miss playing tennis
• Wii Play Billiards 9 break brute forcer pulled through, turns out this is possible!
• GATECRASHER: An All-Women's Parkour Action Film really beautifully filmed, awesome video
• Amputee Rock climber takes leg off during competition paraclimbing is so sick, love to see the creative problem solving
• Mother-of-pearl chess I am a sucker for this sort of craftsmanship

• Understanding Modern LLMs via DeepSeek worked really hard on this for some reason
• WILT: Wason Inductive Logic Test for LLMs this was cool, got to see a lot of the character of each of the models

• Optimizing AI Inference at Character.AI MQA, longformer attention for 5/6 layers, sharing KV cache across multiple layers, inter-turn caching, int8 quantization. I have a negative opinion on how almost all of this interacts with performance but given that they are getting 20% of Google's request volume (???) I certainly see the value.
• KL is all you need KL Divergence can be framed as how quickly you can tell apart P and Q if P were true. Most objectives in ML can be reframed as minimizing this, where P is the real world and Q is our world model. This post rederives a bunch of common objectives starting from graphical models of the task and KL divergence between P and Q, very neat. "Simply draw an accurate causal model of the world, then augment it with anything you wish and finally draw a second diagram in the same random variables that corresponds to your marker of success. Take the KL between the two and you've got yourself a reasonable objective."
• Deep Learning Tuning Playbook start with stuff that works / hyperparams that are popular, have clear goals for experiments, use bayesian optimization tools after initial tests, optimize input pipeline, run eval at larger batch than training, save checkpoints often, etc. Lots of little tricks for bigger projects, worth revisiting.
• How to learn mathematics - the asterisk method waste little time on things you already understand.
• Claude's Character Claude 3 has a phase in RLHF where it uses synthetic data and self-ratings to move itself towards a prewritten "character" that has some set of values. Wonder if this could be reproduced in a small model, details are scarce here since it's not a paper.
• The Many Ways that Digital Minds Can Know interesting thoughts on "integration vs coverage", analogies to search engines
• Neural Networks, Manifolds, and Topology wish I knew more topology
• Memory Efficient Attention: Attention does not need O(n²) memory jax still confusing to me but straightforward that you can save memory by chunking the operation and combining everything.
• gpt-4o understands ascii art but can't read it
• Fashion Design High School student gets 12th at Alibaba Math Contest This seems insane
• quant rules of thumb for param size keep losing this
• RATTATA

• ITG Doubles 12 #1 This was so crazy
• Completed Penultimate Masters Course One left, so excited to almost be done with this

• Hardcore Home Gyms - Strongman Archaeology with James Fuller wouldn't have thought of this as a discipline with a substantial technological history but I was very wrong about that
• Empty Space (Alpha Mix) {Siivagunner} The Siiva jokes about this were so good
• MLB's Slowest Pitcher Was Completely Unhittable shocked how interesting of a story this was, YouTube is such a funny and cruel game; the rest of this channel's videos having ~1000 views feels unfortunate light of how good this video is

• Everybody Should Play Games Identifying "The Thing", learning French vs learning Scrabble
• On Being The Bad Guy Being the good guy is overrated
• Some ITL Vods

• 300k in ITL Online 2024 Super excited to have got this
• 75k in ITL Online 2024 Doubles Learning this was super fun

• honestly the engine changes have ruined playing FA for me silly

• 225k ITL Online 2024

• Solving Crew Battle Strategy With Math cool post, probably needs matchup adjustment for matchup intransitivity but interesting nontheless
• Rude Buster but kapustin went down a little kapustin rabbit hole after this
• Nintendo Red Tent Restoration love these types of things
• POV Starting a new Skyrim Playthrough Frieren memes are so far ahead of every other fandom

• EURank 2023 did Data Processing for this

• Polaris Cube: Pretty interesting, thought it was going to be harder to solve given how difficult it was to turn and scramble, but I figured it out after about 15-20 minutes.
• Yuxin 8 Petals Cube: Easy to solve but enjoyed the process of figuring out the steps to do so.
• Meilong Clover 3x3: Just a 3x3 with no centers. Sharp points, not fun to turn, but the lack of centers is a cute added challenge
• Suikoden II honestly, amazing.

• Updating links again This got away from me in the second half of 2023, but I'll be resuming updates on this page.

• SSBMRank 2023 Finally got this over with
• Printing Custom Cards for PAO Encoding Practice
• Book Review: Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly
• Learning to Memorize, Cheating to Memorize Quickly
• Wang Feng Lecture Machine Translation
• Trying to Solve a Square-1 with No Algorithms

• Moving a lot of these to a dedicated reviews page
• Final Fantasy 7
• Metal Gear Solid
• Lycoris Recoil
• Death Note (Rewatch)
• Memory Craft
• The Memory Book (Reread)
• The Art of Memory
• Advanced Memory Palaces
• One Hundred Leaves
• Pyraminx: a straightforward twisty puzzle which I fairly easily solved quickly with no algorithms
• Skewb: I hated turning this thing and regretted buying it
• Square-1: Very cool puzzle, spent a ton of time working on it (see the post)

• Started meditation making an earnest attempt to really grind this. I’ve done this sort of haphazardly once or twice every few months but I’m really buckling down this time.
• Hit 150k ranking points in ITL switching from ddr a20 grind to ITG tech was a great decision; this is so much more fun, by orders of magnitude.

• Bracket Stamina finally did this after a long period of thinking about this idea.
• Simulating the Blue Lock Second Selection a fun short post. I had a lot of curiosity about how this would resolve and I came to a surprisingly clear answer. I love this sort of overly convoluted plot nonsense, it makes engaging with media more fun.

• Got Married one of the most important things of my entire life happened!
• Built a PC bought an amd graphics card by accident because I am stupid but at least I can play games now.
• Attended dreamhack San Diego honestly this tournament was fun. Lots of criticisms about it but overall it was a fun vibe.

• We are playing in the same lag this was honestly kind of silly and I messed up the audio channels but I thought this would be funny and it was, should let myself be happy about it.

• Para Climber does 8A/V11 on Kilterboard This is absolutely nuts
• SM64 Blinded 120 Star I can't even imagine being blindfolded for this long, let alone doing all of this crazy stuff.
• This game makes you FUSE POKEMON honestly amazing how much effort this probably took from so many people – inspiring stuff from the pokemon fangame scene.
• Falling | Serial Experiments Lain x Dua Lipa

• Started regularly playing melee again after a long break I have started practicing and playing matches. Went through a difficult derust but in spite of it I’ve been enjoying it.
• Bought an Ltek needed a way to exercise in my LA residence, don’t have a car to drive around to get parts for a travel pad. But the bullet on this because I heard it’s good.

• Why Carpet Tennis Courts were Permanently Banned honestly did not know this was ever a seriously played surface, that's really cool!
• [DDR A]Healing Vision Angelic mix Legendary PFC cool enough to be considered semi freestyle imo, double stealth nobar and them doing the death run facing opposite directions is simply too swag

• Moved to Los Angeles
• Started working at Riot

• Data notes on ssbmrank 2022 I consider it a major milestone that standard deviations were released for the Melee top 100. A lot of slightly frustrating discussion was had about 2nd vs 3rd, but I’m mostly happy that we can talk about the spots as distributions rather than diracs.

• The RBY Ubers Metagame I don't really play showdown but this video was a ton of fun
• Plastic Love (Rick Astley AI Cover) man these models are powerful aren't they
• One in a Trillion Three Knights Tango Checkmate the coolest puzzle I've ever seen, and I've done thousands of puzzles.

• Left my Job will have fond memories of APL
• Went to Genesis 9 let's go Jmook
• Bought an Anbernic 353m I love this thing, it was a great purchase

• SSBMRank 2022 Maybe a bit much to put this in "Things I made" but I certainly did do a bunch of work for it as the data lead, a panelist, and a blurb writer. Check out my Gahtzu blurb in particular I'm proud of that one.

• Final Fantasy 6 played through the SNES version with the improved localization patch. Thought it was a great game, although following Chrono Trigger certainly exposed some of the frustrating things about it. Encounter rate was annoying, being underleveled in certain spots was annoying, and the whole World of Ruin started to feel like it was just padding the game's length. That said, it was still great: my opinion on Kefka as the game's main villain shifted a bit after the final fight, where it's clear he's just a big metaphor for death and that's why he's so psychotically, cartoonishly evil.
• Megaman Legends (PSX) This game was fun, but like FF6 it made me appreciate other games more. Targeting / lock on / auto-aim mechanics were all absolutely horrific, and I constantly thought of how amazing Ocarina of Time was with it's z-target implementation. Before 3D games had established standards for movement there must have been a good deal of experimentation.
• Advance Wars enjoyed this game, scratched the chess itch a bit for me
• Advance Wars 2 everybody said this game was so much better but it really felt like the same game as Advance Wars 1 but with a more annoying power mechanic. Overall good though.
• Stafford Gambit DESTROYS Kitten this is a truly delightful computer vs computer chess game
• GDC - Q*Bert Retrospective the hubert story had me in tears
• The tech that nearly ruined titanfall speedruns super dope video about creative community-driven solutions to emergent problems in high-level gameplay.
• Moyun - Playing God Guzheng Cover wow this sounds amazing, wild how faithful this sounds to the original as a cover while being independently interesting.

• Got a job at Riot Games super excited for this new chapter in my life! I’ll be starting at Riot in February as a senior data scientist
• Finally got COVID I had been avoiding it for so long but I suppose the reaper comes for us all someday. Put a bit of a damper on my productivity but I did my best to work through it.
• Worked as Data Lead of the new SSBMRank 2022 it was cool getting tasked with this important role after so many years in the community, hope I do it justice.

• Melee Rankings are a Game of Contradictions short post on metrics, and how different metrics can tell different stories about the same information. People on Twitter seemed to like it!

• Chrono Trigger finally got around to playing this after putting it off for so long, and wow, it did not disappoint! Genuinely quite impressed about how deserved all the hype is, and in particular how they managed to convey this story seemingly free from all the worst elements of JRPGs. The soundtrack was truly amazing, the character design was great, even some more subtle stuff like the overworld design was great.
• 200 WPM with 2 Fingers (former WR) truly unbelievable
• Game Development in 8 Bits cool to think about the types of abstractions that were necessary under severe space constraints.
• ADGQ - Chrono Trigger Glitchless by Puwexil I think I played through this game with the weakest combination of party members.

I say this every year, but maybe moreso than most years: what a whirlwind 2022 was for me. A lot of things took shape this year, and I made a lot of progress even if some things didn't go my way.

Lots of highlights this year: breaking through and finding a new job, getting top 64 at Genesis 8, getting straight A's in my degree, improving a lot at coding. I built a home gym and passed a few ITG 14s, but health stuff / surgeries kept me from really reaching my goals on that front.

Probably my two biggest "regrets" about how 2022 went were that none of my papers got published and that I didn't spend enough time working on videos for Melee Stats. The former was certainly not from lack of effort: I've improved a lot at actually materializing ideas which could become papers, and I did actually submit a paper to Neurips (albeit to an unhappy result). Both of these are things I'm hoping I can address with a little bit more time in 2023.

Overall I think 2022 was very busy for me, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to be a bit more focused now that my health seems under control and I'm no longer job-searching. The goals are pretty clear:

• Get married
• Continue progress at ML / do well at new job
• Return to making videos
• Get paper in conference
• Perform well in classes
• Get better at Melee
• Make friends in Los Angeles
• Make the coolest thing I've ever made
• Write and Code Cool Stuff all day

No need to get too specific - with big lifestyle changes comes uncertainty, and I just need to keep doing what I'm doing.

• Made a lot of things I was pretty busy this month.

• LASTDANCE: Layerwise Activation Similarity to Training Data for Assessing Non-Conforming Events (pre-preprint) A paper I wrote for school (the topic was "write a research paper" which I just ran with). A new form of anomaly detection to defeat a problematic case I have encountered before!
• Makemore Colab Notebook Went through Karpathy's makemore lectures and completed them in detail. Was some good practice with pytorch beyond simply chaining together torch.nn functions, and I got to learn some fun stuff about language modeling
• The Parable of the Monster a short attempt at fiction, which people seemed to like. Probably easy to understand what this is trying to say.
• Melee Stats Discord Slander something lighthearted

• Smash World Tour Cancelled Pretty terrible.
• The Story of the Lowest Score in Tetris's Biggest Tournament very good, concise, interesting, well put together video.
• I Turned The Fake Portable GameCube Into A Real Thing good times lurking in the benheck forums like fifteen years ago. Always love seeing this stuff.
• Polyphia Roasts Fan Covers "Roasts" certainly in the title for no reason but I enjoyed this video a lot
• The Perfect Celeste Run - 202 berries max% no hit absolutely insane achievement
• 3b1b - But what is a convolution? 3b1b has been kind of veering for me recently with primarily pop-math type stuff, but this feels like a good return to form for the channel in my opinion.
• TTC Stomp on the Thomp 0xA absolutely unreal that TTC, the most vertical level, is 0xA now.

• Went to The Big House 10 Didn't play well in bracket (out of practice) but I did enter StepmaniaX and managed to not go 0-2 despite never playing the game before. It was fun!
• Was eligible for summit voting This was quite funny to me! Obviously I didn't campaign, but it was fun to see my name there.
• Got surgery this put me out of commission for most of October, but I did some fun stuff before then at least.

• Auto-Rating ITG Stamina Charts with Machine Learning using classical ML and Sequence-to-One models (RNN/LSTM) I rate ITG stamina charts and get a solid, decent result.

• Building Micrograd (Karpathy)
• Building Makemore (Karpathy) These are wonderful; Karpathy picks some great pedagogical examples which easily explain stuff which is usually waved off as "what you need to do" in most other types of instruction (e.g. "why do we use log probabilities?"). Recommend to anyone with interest in neural nets.
• CRUSHING GRANDMASTERS - Eric Rosen Watched a bunch of Rosen videos recovering from surgery. Chess is cool!
• Why Cantonese Buddhists (traditionally) ate Oysters very interesting video! I would never have imagined Oysters as an acceptable vegetarian food. I suppose, the categories were made for man, and all that.

• Made a Machine Learning Twitter can be found here, got tired of being nervous to post things related to what I do all day.
• Did tons of leetcode I even got a fancy badge for not missing any of the daily challenges in september. This took up most of my free time this month.

• Tesla AI Day 2022 Some cool technology here; not a huge fan of the humanoid robot project in general, but stuff like "language of lanes" made this a worthwhile watch.
• Everything Goes On (In-Game Version) - SiIvagunner Think this outperforms the originals, honestly: Stay is a bit too depressing on its own and Everything Goes On I think is a bit too flowery for its own good.
• Missing Semester Lecture 1 - The Shell I like watching these things even though I usually know most of the content through experience, lots of stuff in here I didn't actually know despite using a terminal for years. I watched a few of these Missing Semester videos and while some lectures are a bit scatterbrained I think it's a good course.
• Cory Wong // Dean Town Not the same without Joe Dart, but the horns add so much.

• Sold merch at Shine 2022 if you want to buy some, you can go here
• Was sad about the Neurips rebuttal process wish there was more actual discussion, but that's okay.
• Reached 1700 Bullet rating on lichess.com Now I will stop playing bullet, since it is more of a video game than a board game.

• A Year of ITG Stamina form is noticably better now, which is cool to see.

• Reached my old liftime PRs for lifting Feel good about this, much easier to motivate yourself to go to the gym 4x a week if your gym is just in your basement
• Passed another ITG Stamina 14 playing a lot of stamina since Stamina RPG 6 is happening, finally back to clearing 14s from back before I switched to DDR Extreme in preparation for Genesis.
• Melee Stats "sponsors" Grab, Sharp, and Abbe I can't believe how well this whole free agent thing is going, hopefully this continues to be as successful as it has been.
• Completed my MPGR Summer Top 50 Ballot This was an insane amount of work, the top 10 in particular was so unusually difficult.
• Worked on Rebuttal for Neurips paper so much work! so busy!

• Fefemz - JKD Reality UCS maybe the dumbest rhythm game chart I've ever seen
• How I FC'd an impossible song after 14 years love this sort of glitchy solution to problems in games

• Bought a Home Gym Finally convinced myself to do this after talking about how I was going to do this for years.
• Used the Home Gym a lot

• Lesson with Fiction - Fox vs Fox

• Mom cat asks for help at the door very good video
• Cyclists Chased by Ostrich Jeez things things sure are fast huh

• Submitted a paper to Neurips 2022 Finally got around to doing with with my good friend Vickram, hoping for a good result.
• The weather is nice again so I'm hiking more
• Melee Stats "sponsors" Chape

• Everything Everywhere All At Once Jesus Christ dude, I don't know if I've cried as much watching a movie maybe ever.
• The Batman Pretty interesting take on the idea
• One Shot of the Dead Thought this was going to be very stupid but it turned out to be super funny

• Made top 64 at Genesis 8 49th / 1552. Was surreal somehow playing well enough to make top 64 at what to me is the most meaningful tournament series. Had to drop out of DDR Extreme which is unfortunate but certainly worth the tradeoff. My buddy Seal also made top 64 so it was a pretty wild weekend all around.
• Melee Stats "sponsors" Pipsqueak Free Agent Showcase!

• Ambi vs Bonfire10
• Ambi vs Toph not very good footage but very happy memory for me to be certain
• Fox vs Captain Falcon Matchup - Abridged Fiction Lessons / Annotated Vods

• Dawson's Fox vs Puff guide

• Practiced a lot of DDR Extreme for Genesis

• Appearance on Big Drink Energy Podcast did an episode about Bucked Up Energy for an energy drink podcast, which is funny.
• Golden Guardians Melee Jeopardy {blur/tafo/toph} made another board for golden guardians with Wheat

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Localization Tier List Blueford

• Katamari on the Rocks {14} - 81.42% I passed a 14! Apparently this is a particularly hard 14 also.

• Moved this took a lot of time so not much else happened in January
• Played a lot of ITG This is quickly becoming the majority of my exercise, especially given my lack of desire to go to a gym where I could potentially get covid

• My 100 Favorite Dance Game Videos was glued to the screen for the entirety of this; was like watching a melee stats video about dance games. Inspired me to write more + record my own dance game stuff.
• Zain vs Leffen - Genassist Showmatch ft5
• Dom ITG - Mini Travel Pad
• The Secret To The Gruesome Sounds In Mortal Kombat Is Exploding Vegetables

• Passed an ITG 13 Improving at this game is really encouraging because the reward signal is so much clearer than most other games I've played. Feel good about my progress.
• Completed first semester I performed well in my classes, which is a nice feeling.
• Went on vacation the first one of these in a while where I don't feel like was just taking time off to do other work.

• Rhythm Game Anomalies - iamchris4life guy really had a storied career across multiple rhythm games, huh
• Disney's FastPass: A Complicated History Defunctland is so good but this video was extra special in my opinon
• Full Moon S20 no bar (Pio) holy shit he's so good

Hard to maintain perspective on how this year went. I certainly worked hard this year, but a lot of this hard work saw return in the form of skill improvements, rather than obtained results. I'm hoping 2022 has more in the way of impactful results compared to this year, but I can't let myself get too down on myself about this; I am much better at many important things even if my project-oriented brain does not suggest this is the case.

Some highlights from this year:

• Made the switch to Davinci Resolve, made some silly stuff as well as some less silly stuff.
• Enrolled in a masters degree program, navigated the first semester successfully.
• Improved a lot at melee, beat some good players, wrote some stuff about learning.
• Improved substantially at programming
• Spent a lot of time playing dance games, moved from ITG 9s to ITG 13s.

More than previous years, a lot of 2021 for me was characterized by uncompleted projects. Not sure if this is a consequence of raised standards for projects or just working on a bunch of dead ends, but I feel disappointed with my "hit" rate, so to speak. I think a large part of why I felt I made so much progress in spots where I don't have much to show for is likely for this reason: lots of hard work on dead projects.

As much as one could plan for 2021, my goals for last year are below, along with some judgements

• Improve at Video Production definite pass, large improvement is fairly undeniable
• Complete 8 projects for the channel did not pass; worked on a ton of projects and videos which ended up not meeting my standards for publication. Feel fairly good about stuff which we did publish, but otherwise disappointed in this.
• Complete something feature length failed
• Complete something interview based failed, although giving myself some leniency given that covid did not vanish in 2021
• Spend more time implementing ideas, improving at SWE definite pass, improved a lot at this in 2021
• Complete at least three longform posts on the website involving ML failed
• Publish a paper failed
• Develop clear gameplans in all relevant matchups I think I did this at least to some extent; my play improved a lot in 2021 for non-punish-game reasons
• Have one strong performance in large tournament There wasn't really anything large to attend but I did play fairly well a couple times in smaller netplay events.
• Be more consistent about updating links page neutral, could definitely have been better
• Read 10 books, 2 textbooks semi-failed, read 2 textbooks (for my degree) and did a lot of reading but not really books
• Be more consistent about using anki failed, this needs a lot of reevaluation

With this in mind I think my 2022 goals are fairly clear at the moment.

Melee

• Produce and write videos which bring a collective 600k views to our channel in the next year.
• I would like to reach 50k subscribers but realistically I'm not sure how controllable that is.

Learning

• Take high performance in masters degree extremely importantly; perform well in all your classes.
• Reevaluate anki usage, do whatever is necessary to re-establish this as an important habit
• Code more, broaden skillset in a more impactful direction
• Figure out a way to track time in a way which is useful for estimating worktime
• Figure out a more streamlined note-taking system

Writing

• Publish something written on this website at least once per month. It doesn't need to be a large post, it could just be some small notes explaining something which has been explained elsewhere. I just want to do more writing in a more consistent fashion.
• Publish a paper

Misc

• Pass an ITG 16.
• Build a home gym

• Passed an ITG 12 find me on Stamina RPG 5 since I'm playing on there a lot these days

• Run on the treadmill more I got a cheap treadmill for black friday so I'm trying to run on it more
• Move probably next month
• Resume Work on Stuff

• Melee Stats All-Time Top 100 was a panelist for this and wrote a handful of the blurbs

• Tepris Co-Op {happyf333tz + fefemz} so sick
• I Only ride Indoors - and tried a real race outside normally not huge on this sort of vlog content but this guy was funny

• Posted Video this thing consumed my life so happy to get it out the door
• Started working through stamina RPG 5 Excited to have some stuff to work on

• Do as little as possible

• The Game Nintendo Wishes It Never Made and the trailer. Making this video definitely consumed a lot of my life over the last few months but I'm fairly happy with how it turned out. It is performing well so I can't really complain on that front either.

• LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively really nice lecture
• 82 Levels of Samus Recovery ycz is a legend as usual
• ITG Stamina Form {Dom ITG} good point of reference; I think I naturally do toes pointed out but I also am not very fast yet so that might change
• Spamton Theme {Earthbound Style} faithful to earthbound vibe, good connective tissue to show the musical influence

• Got some good stepmania clears a few ITG 11s, MAX 300, etc.

• Publish the best video you've ever made
• Take a month off from Melee stuff after that is completed

• DELTARUNE Chapter 2 very good piece of media
• Bad Things | Tournament Trailer by far the best tournament trailer I have ever seen; not close at all
• How to Animate in Google Earth
• Sucker is a new and original song which doesn't plagiarize at all
• A Perfect Hero - Initial D 5th Stage what a fuckin drop dude

• Cleared up to ITG 10 without the bar improving at something feels nice
• Started running and lifting again
• Got a cat he is a good cat
• Started pursuing a Masters Degree MS in Artificial Intelligence at Hopkins, part time

• GG Melee Jeopardy Season 2 Episode 1
• GG Melee Jeopardy Season 2 Episode 2
• GG Melee Jeopardy Season 2 Episode 3 Pretty happy with how these turned out; thought they might have been a tad bit too hard given the contestants but the videos were fairly popular and working with GG was a very pleasant experience compared to working with other organizations.
• FSR Travel Pad (I didn't make the video I made the pad which this video teaches you to make)
• "with time to spare" good to own up to your mistakes

• What EVE Online's Tax Havens Teach Us About New York's Future - How Money Works
• DDRX Healing Vision -Angelic mix- single expert I've cleared this chart with only a few misses, since it's only a 9, but FCing it nobar with spins is the most insane shit I've ever seen
• The Worst Grand Finals of All Time Glad I convinced edwin to make this video shorter
• Intro to ITG Tech Notation Dance games are so interesting
• What even is ITG Stamina? Pretty cool video

• Visit my family was really nice
• Watched some of the olympics Tomoa Narasaki was robbed
• Starting lifting weights and running again I have to wake up early now that my SO has a job so I've been using that time to go to the gym
• Went to an arcade and played Pump it Up forgot how much fun dance games are

• Build a Dance Pad and Get Good at DDR I'd like to pass a 9 footer no bar at the very least
• For reps: Bench 135, Squat BW, Dumbbell OHP with 50s, figure out when you can deadlift gym is one of those "don't make noise" gyms so maybe I'll deadlift at the climbing gym. Otherwise, these are well under my PRs but I haven't been lifting because of COVID
• Run three miles in half an hour Running c25k for the fifth time seems a little overkill but even w1d1 for me is 2.1 miles in 30 minutes so surely this should be achieveable right
• Make Melee content with my name on it Been doing a lot of melee content work but it's mostly been commission-style stuff

• Siivagunner - Clannad: Phases of the Moon this shit goes so hard
• Ethan Chlebowski - How to make Low Calorie Ice Cream that actually tastes good "actually tastes good" might be a bit of a stretch but at least its a more fun way to eat protein powder
• Like 100 Van Conversion videos went super down this vanlife rabbit hole, to the point where I was joking with my SO that I would throw it all away to live in a van someday
• Magnus Midtbo - 100 Boulders in One Session actually a lot of good footage on how to climb boulders at different levels, gonna go back and watch these more

• Visit Shanendoah National Park really amazing how good the disconnect is for my mental health; read a bunch of papers on Attention Restoration Theory in order to understand it. Made adjustments to go outside more often because of the dramatic positive effect on my general well-being.
• Sent a few v4 boulders here is one which I nabbed a video of
• Played through Majora's Mask Of the Zeldas I've played this was a weird one because it had close to the best worldbuilding but the absolute worst gameplay. Feels really overrated but maybe that's just because the people who like it are so infatuated by the story.

• Defeat Marth or Die made a 1 minute melee stats video to see if we could capitalize on the youtube algo's new preference for short videos. It didn't work, but the video was kind of fun.
• POV: You whiffed a move vs falcon full stage away this was actually a fair bit of video editing for something so stupid but it was very popular on twitter at least.

• World Class: The Story of Aidan Robert's Bouldering Breakthrough really beautiful film
• PPMD vs ibdw he is quite good at the game still
• The historic battle for Atlanta Weightlifting gold | Olympic History legendary

• Made Salvadoran Food was kind of a big deal for me so I'm happy this happened
• Moved site to github pages tired of aws for static sites being so annoying to use
• Started climbing again thankfully I'm still at least a v3 climber; follow me on KAYA
• Got the full version of davinci resolve can finally edit things without waiting half an hour between every video, and I've done more video editing now than I have in a long while

• Go outside
• Climb a v4 problem getting back into the swing of things
• Get better at writing been kind of in a mindblock recently

• Golden Guardians Melee Jeopardy me and wheat wrote the questions for this and I have to say working with GG on this was one of the most painless experiences I've had being in this weird esports sphere
• ambi vs ben tmt 17 uploaded this because I was tired of feeling bad about it

• Folded Man stands up straight after 28 years wild
• Mystery of the Lizardman 4: In Color! One of the best ganon combo videos ever
• how to play the fox ditto for intermediate players - the leaf

• Won an online game of Go I'm sure by most standards it was a pretty awful game (here) but I was happy that I was able to win one
• Got the second shot hooray
• Played through Breath of the Wild willing to admit I was not willing to give this game a fair shot after the slow beginning; it was quite good despite some larger flaws. Definitely a strong rec from me.

• Grind for affiliate for melee stats twitch channel
• Video Editing
• Eat Healthier

• The Melee Stats Archive secondary channel for uploading podcasts / sets I want to archive / etc
• Waiting For Game episode 2 feat. Slime Appeared in this episode, was very fun
• Waiting For Game episode 1 feat. iBDW did production in the background for this episode

• Overkill - a BotW Combat Montage Think a new game+ run of botw with a focus on these anime style fights would be really fun to watch
• How Speedrunners get 25 Shine Spites Before the Game Starts very engaging
• SiIvagunner pop star joke might be my favorite among this channels videos
• Lee Redfield - Take 5 so good

• Learned to play Go My fiancee and I binged Hikaru no Go this month and it prompted us to dig out that Go board I got for christmas eight years ago which has been in the closet ever since. It's got a very appealing level of abstraction for something with such simple rules, and it's giving me feelings like when I was grinding chess a lot many years ago.
• Reached 2400 puzzle rating on lichess not that puzzle rating means anything, but a lot of people in the discords I am in started sharing puzzles they were doing and I needed to prove to myself that I could still hang with all the new chess zoomers.
• Had a few good tournaments I've been juggling a lot of things but I managed to enter a few tournaments and have some solid showings, including a set from Ben who has been putting up good results recently.

• Get the second shot of the vaccine
• Improve at Go
• Just Write My hands have been hurting so will probably take a break from melee soon

• Melee Lesson Resources for Fox Players + Thoughts on Learning in Melee writeup on my perspective on the lessons offered by three coaches commonly used by Fox players, along with some of my personal thoughts on teaching/learning. Was surprised this got so much attention, but people seemed to like my thoughts on it! Always nice when that happens.

• Alphago vs Lee Sedol Game 2 (for Double Digit Kyu) by Clossius
• Shawn Ray - Beginner Go Lecture Series Useful to turn Go into a weird mess of random moves to a bunch of moves with intention of accomplishing specific goals
• Graded Go Problems for Beginners - Volume 1 Probably going to go through this a few times
• Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (Parts 1-5) Honestly refreshing to watch a show which just tries to outdo itself every episode, one of the weirdest pieces of media I've ever watched.

• Largely spent the month working on huge projects sorry I don't have much to post, but trust me when I say I've been working on stuff
• Agreed to be on the SWT panel for some reason oh boy

• Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! One of my few 10s, a decision I made before even realizing this show was from the same director as Ping Pong the Animation and Tatami Galaxy. Crazy how they made an anime about Melee Stats.
• Lesson with iBDW (feat. Myself) fox vs falcon
• Roxanne (Reggae Cover) - KOERS Reggae Band
• Zutomayo - STUDY ME

• Got sick, wasn't productive happens

• Leffen Frame1 Meme Useful practice for learning davinci resolve; this video randomly got 100k views on twitter which is certainly a fun case study on effort vs views.
• Fox vs Peach Matchup - (Abridged Fiction Lesson, Frame Data / Important Percents, Annotated Vods) Studied this matchup a lot, eventually went on to take a set off Bbatts in ladder so I think I made good adjustments based on the study
• When Mew2King Lost to Bowser Edwin's video, but I helped a bit with the script

• Lesson with Fiction (feat. Myself) fox vs falco, declaring intent in general
• Fast Inverse Square Root - a Quake III Algorithm amazingly clear explanation
• Resolve 17 Crash Course switching of adobe suite because I'm moving to linux to make programming / writing in emacs easier

• Spent Basically The Whole Month Making Things and Being Sick participated in 5 Days of Melee and also got sick, thankfully not with covid.

• Experiment with Colab want to start doing some toy ML projects, want to experiment with using colab to iterate and then exporting to an org document
• Publish a Melee Stats Video a few projects in various stages of completion but I think I'm leaning towards trying to use my camera
• Write 30k words

• Melee Jeopardy Episode 1 - feat. Tafokints, Toph, Dan Salvato, webs wrote questions for melee jeopardy, which seemed to be a pretty popular segment
• Melee Jeopardy Episode 2 - feat. Epengu, Rishi, Juggleguy, webs thank god Zane got heart of darkness of heart, I would've felt so dumb if I wrote that and nobody got it
• Who Wants to be a Meleeionaire? Episode 1 feat. TheCrimsonBlur, Scar wrote questions for this block also
• Who Wants to be a Meleeionaire? Episode 2 feat. HugS86, Scar
• Who Wants to be a Meleeionaire? Episode 3, feat. Tafokints, Scar
• Who Wants to be a Meleeionaire? Episode 4 feat. Zhu, Scar a must watch piece of smash content
• Melee Stats Podcast - Live @ 5 Days of Melee talk about some cool players in this block, managed to get through it with a fever lol
• TAS sequences for Team Liquid vs Team Catfish - Friendship in a Game of Loneliness I was largely hands-off for this project, but I have a few small visual elements I contributed to this video.

2020 was nothing if not unusual; perhaps the most simultaneously eventful and uneventful year in human history. I spent the bulk of 2020 locked inside my apartment with my (now) fiancee, and as such I got better and worse at things as you might expect given that almost all of my time was spent in this small, dusty room.

Productivity-wise, I have got to say that 2020 was not my best showing. Aside from my many strength and conditioning goals which were obviously not met due to closed gyms, I was a lot less academically productive than I would have liked also (very clearly also failing to meet my reading goals for 2020).

But, well, 2020 is weird, and out of this relative lack of productivity came the pretty astonishing success of the Melee Stats youtube channel. I think by now the channel has accumulated something like 500,000 views since may, which is a degree of success I am honestly not very used to when it comes to Melee content. It's hard for me to gauge how happy or sad I should be about the dramatic increase in exposure I have helped bring to my work and the work of my friends, relative to the lack of success I've had in other areas. It's hard to think about, so I think I probably just won't think about it, and instead just think about what I could be doing better.

For a more direct postmortem on the year, I think the clear winners for 2020 are Plup vs Prince Abu - The Weirdest Set Ever Played and Michael vs Bananas - The Only Reason We Play Melee, which were two videos which were wildly more successful than I anticipated. I did a great deal of writing in 2020, and feel like I improved a lot at it, even if the longform pieces on this website were mostly limited to Invasion of the Ballot Snatchers (and Other Stories), On What Makes Content Good, and the energy drink tier list.

Moving forwards in 2021, I think I would like it a lot if I could just be more consistent about things. I think 2020 has largely been characterized for me by bursts of immense motivation for a single project, followed by periods where I feel like I am spinning my wheels until something happens and my motivation returns to me. Approaching things a little bit at a time may not even really dramatically affect my output, but it would allow me to have a clearer vision of the things I want to accomplish and how I plan on accomplishing them.

My goals for 2020 I think are stratified across a few categories:

Melee Stats

• Improve at Video Production (broad goal)
• Complete 8 Projects for the Channel
• Complete something feature length (or maybe slightly shorter)
• Complete something interview-based

Machine Learning

• Spend more time actually implementing new ideas, improve at SWE (broad goal)
• Complete at least three longform posts on this website which involve a machine learning component
• Publish a paper

Melee

• Develop clear gameplans in all the relevant matchups
• Have one strong performance in a large tournament in 2021

General Learning

• Be more consistent about updating the links page, which has monthly goals on it
• Read 10 books, at least 2 of which are textbooks
• Be more consistent about using anki, miss fewer than half of days

There are a number of other goals I have which are dependent upon the covid vaccine. These exist (i.e. health related, lifting goals) but I will hold my tongue on them until the return to society is a bit more set in stone.

Regardless, definitely a weird year but onwards to 2021

• Got Engaged picture here this was a huge project for me so glad this went well
• learned the marth matchup some things I implemented

• Savestate vs Armada - The Quest for the Frozen Turnip this video didn't do as well as our other videos but it was much shorter and easier to make, so not the worst thing
• Oneshot - An SSBM Community Combo Video asked people on twitter to send what they considered their lifetime best combo ever, put some of the best responses in a short combo video
• Mid Level Foxes Be Like microfilm I made to test my camera
• Thread of polls on camping in SSBM

• Learned the Falco matchup felt like this

• New card, What do you think?
• Crazy Chess Game

• EVIL and some thoughts
• Crowdsourcing CPU Power To Go Fast in Paper Mario: TTYD super cool
• A Fish Finds A Glitch in Pokemon

• Have been unusually busy I've been unusually behind on pretty much everything, and the COVID-19 lockdown in the United States has taken a bit of a toll on my motivation. Regardless, I've been making (somewhat) steady progress on things anyways, and have managed to not entirely turn into jello (so far).

• Go back to exercising regularly been a bit on the backburner recently
• Learn something which allows for better artistic expression probably drawing or more writing
• Draft skeleton of next video, purchase a video camera Want to take a break from video stuff for a little bit but the ideas for what I'm gonna do next are unfortunately already forming

• Michael vs Bananas - The Only Reason We Play Melee I might be more proud of this work than I have on almost any single project I've ever worked on. It was truly exhausting working on this and I couldn't have done it without Wheat.
• Watching Paint Dry Has Never Been So Exciting! {Trailer} this joke was worth the $3.50 I paid for cheap watercolor paints
• On What Makes Content Good some thoughts on the "dynamic ceiling" which I've had kicking around for a while

• The Debacle of Blue Clay: Used Once and Never Again shocked this video isn't more popular, it's interesting, concise, and well-produced.
• E.V.O.: Search for Eden by FatRatKnight in 40:31.17 {TAS} commentary on subtitles track makes it worth the watch
• Campfire - Chillhop essentials summer 2020 heard this and knew 100% I needed to use it in the video. The emotions are perfect.

• Hanky Panky - The Greatest Player Nobody Knows a Melee Stats film spearheaded by Anokh Palakurthi, who you might remember as the author of The Book of Melee. I have editor / narration credits on this one, which is why the title of this month's entry is a bit different, but this was a fun project that I was glad a lot of people seemed to like.

• Just Be Friends (shido 410) cute

• Attended CogSci 2020 Really wish this conference was not virtual, since I think I would have loved the opportunity to speak to some of these researchers in person, but alas. I'll see if I can post some notes about it somewhere later.

• "Lud Pay My Rent" - Ft. PGH Carroll & The Creative Melee Discord. Edit By Battery. This won Ludwig's combo video contest and as a result we got a bunch of money which most of us donated to charity. (I asked for my share to be donated to RAINN). Definitely a pretty stacked roster so I felt pretty honored to be a part of it.
• Patreon-Exclusive: Directors' Commentary: Plup vs Prince Abu Won't be including all of these but I figure it wouldn't hurt to include that we recorded this during this month, and that we plan on recording patron-exclusive behind-the-scenes content for our content moving forwards.

• The Roots feat. Bilal: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert Because wolves disguised as sheep patrol our streets
• The Conclusion of SM64's Most Controversial Speedrunning Trick Pretty wild that their community was so on top of this, pretty jealous
• Ocarina of Time 100% New Route Demonstration Run it is truly astonishing how absurdly broken this game has become since the discovery of SRM
• The Man Who Broke Spyro in Half holy moly this dude is insane

• Got back into running
• Worked on some stuff on and off
• Mostly took it easy

• Improve at Running I mapped out a very hilly 5k route near my apartment, would be nice if I could get back into it and get some beginner milestones like 35:00 5k / 8:00 mile / whatever.
• Learn to Play Melee again
• Finish projects a few in the works, some I'm the lead on some I'm just collaborating with

• The Future of Melee is Here - Rollback Netcode was in the closed beta for this; it's really amazing and makes the game playable again which is very nice considering we are all in a pandemic and unable to play irl
• SmashScope Guide super cool

• Held 4 second handstand I injured my leg halfway through this month so I was unfortunately unable to practice for much of the second half of the month, but here is a video of me doing a handstand (which isn't quite my longest but is pretty close)
• Super burned out definitely pushed a bit too hard this month in general

• Purchase XLR Microphone Given the success of our video this feels like a worthy purchase.
• Take some time off I am very burnt out and need to spend a few days not working. I feel like I've earned this.

• Plup vs Prince Abu - The Weirdest Set Ever Played I worked for most of the month on this video and somehow more then one hundred thousand people watched it. I will be honest, I didn't expect so much attention on this project, and random internet people sure are capable of saying some mean things. I perhaps overdid my homage to Jon Bois in making this video, but I'm proud of the effort we put into it and I'm very happy so many people watched it. More to come.

• How to do good research, get it published good problems are important, have available data, and have clear win conditions. Domain experts from random fields can be good collab / problem-generation sources. Make sure your problem statement is super crystal clear and falsifiable. Synthetic data is garbage for many reasons, but ultimately because data people care about is very important. Simplicity is strength for a researcher, a paper implicitly says "this is the easiest way to get results this good". Look to other fields for solutions! (see: Range). Discussions on Durer's rhino / refuting literature. Make sure your problem actually exists. The first page of a paper and the Anchoring effect. Reproducibility is important. Define Acronyms Before They Are Used. Use all the space.
• Effective Learning: Twenty Rules of Formulating Knowledge Don't learn if you don't understand. Learn before you memorize. Build upon basics. Make cards as simple as possible. Cloze deletions are good (core of incremental reading). Use pictures. Use mnemonics (but only really with like 1-5% of your cards). Graphic deletion is good. Avoid sets or enumerations of items (atomize). Minimize interference. Optimize wording. Refer to other memories. Personalize / use examples. Rely on emotional states. context clues to simplify wording. Redundancy isn't so bad. Provide sources. Provide date stamping. Prioritize.
• Exploring the Landscape of Spatial Robustness I think this paper is cool since it's an "attack" which doesn't actually require a bad actor to see in operational use – you could just tilt the camera wrong. Pretty wild that this happens even when you use data augmentation specifically to try to make it invariant to these changes.

• Reached 20 chinups, 60 seconds frogstand, and stable headstand pretty awesome month for me, training-wise.
• Paper which plagiarized my work was removed from the internet what an great event! I honestly expected nothing to happen but I'm glad this was clear enough to others for me to feel some validation that I wasn't crazy for feeling miffed about not getting cited on something so derivative.

• Complete some novel video content I am working with some friends on something I think will be really cool, and it's a nice change of pace to get to do some video editing / writing practice instead of focusing so much on empirical-type work
• Freestanding Handstand for ~5 seconds I've been practicing wall handstands and I definitely think I have the strength for it, just a matter of finding the balance point and being brave.
• Make at least 500 anki cards I've felt an unusual surge of motivation lately and it's being reflected in my reading and study habits. It's honestly not the worst thing if this doesn't continue as-is but as it stands I would like to make good use of this fleeting feeling.

• twitter combos a true pandemic hellscape is one where I am playing netplay regularly, but at least some funny stuff happened on the way there

• Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks a truly great paper; and I'm not just saying that because of the cogsci-AI intersection. Think the problems raised in this paper are really important and they really pick the correct papers to cover. Likewise, the references section being annotated is something I didn't realize I needed more of. A fantastic starting place for people interested in how models learn.
• Augmenting Long-Term Memory (Neilsen, Anki) Using anki for reading papers: quick pass through -> add extremely elementary questions (which types of neural networks did alphago use?), do 5-6 of these passes and then do a thorough read. "I find Anki works much better when used in service to some personal creative project." Shallow reads of papers: 10-60 minutes, 5-20 anki cards. "Visualize the figure from X where Y". Break questions into atomic subcomponents, even if that means two cards on the same thing (ln -s filename linkname -> ln-s and filename linkname)
• The Misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth ask yourself to explain how things work before you decide you know how they work, especially for devices, where people often are overconfident they understand the relevant mechanisms just because the device itself is very easy to picture.
• Adaptive Forgetting Curves for Spaced Repetition Learning using NN model to capture complexity of words in an SRS, and adapting the forgetting curves dynamically. The paper I'm not so sure about, but the result that different cards have different forgetting curves not entirely matching the anki-heuristic / ebbinghaus curves matches my experience that sometimes cards are just hard. Solutions to this?
• Imbalance Problems in Object Detection: A Review super good taxonomy of solutions to imbalance problems
• HugS86's best smash tweets of all time featuring me, randomly
• Incremental Reading a little wacko for me to actually implement, honestly, but an interesting perspective on how I can change how my SRS usage interacts with my reading
• G-Boy: Wii / GameCube Portable DIY Kit todo: consider making embedded portable crt with a wii inside it
• Neru & z'5 - I~ya i~ya i~ya

• Purchased a stationary bike I read some papers on low impact cardio and how it affects cognition, since I'm now mostly trapped inside and need to get creative about staying active. I settled on buying a stationary bike over other types of exercise equipment since a stationary bike would mostly allow for multitasking (flashcards, watching something, etc).
• Purchased a pair of gymnastics rings Helpful for strength training and generally pretty cool training tool
• Set rep PR for pullups not quite at 20 yet but close

• Become comfortable doing calisthenics Since the gyms are all closed, I have been doing bodyweight training in order to stay in shape. Since calisthenics has a much higher skill component compared to powerlifting (since you add resistance by doing harder movements), I am currently a bit behind on the learning curve. A good measurable goal for this would be a 60 seconds frogstand.
• Continue doing high volume of pullups I might have to get off of armstrong since the thursday and monday volumes usually leave me way too fatigued the next day and I feel like I would get tendonitis on this program eventually, but continuing a high volume of pullups in pursuit of the 20 rep set remains a goal of mine before progressing towards OAC variations.
• Cardio during multitasks I have this stationary bike and I have a few references suggesting doing this during other tasks won't dramatically harm them, so it seems like a good use of time.
• Study hard, don't lose focus during quarantine

• Energy Drink Tier List

• Decreasing Sedentary Behavior: Effects on Academic Performance, Meta-Cognition, and Sleep studying on an exercise bike didn't harm academic performance in college students, and led to more stable sleep quality (which is probably just an effect of being slightly more active), despite them feeling like they were not doing as well.
• Unexpected Dual Task Benefits on Cycling in Parkinson Disease and Healthy Adults: A Neuro-Behavioral Model some loose evidence that multitasking on a rebumbent bike makes the percieved exertion lower; people pedal faster when they are doing something else at the same time.
• Heart rate monitoring during training and competition in cyclists speed not a good indicator for intensity for cyclists, heart rate not exactly perfect for exercise intensity but it is pretty solid for full body stress
• Greg Doucette - Anabolic French Toast This is really delicious, super filling recipe for something with so few calories; the pancake made by blending bread in a blender with xanthan gum is pretty fun sounding also.
• Overcoming Gravity 2 - Progression Charts I have been going through the book itself but the progressions in this are useful by themselves
• The New Donkey Kong 64 any% TAS Explained definitely captivating, amazing how broken this game is
• The Search for the Perfect Door - Deviant Ollam weirdly interesting, nuts how many avenues for attack exist even completely independently of the lock on a door
• Front Lever for Beginners (Progressions) FitnessFAQs
• Frog Stand Progression | Learn the Headstand frogstand -> headstand -> wall handstand -> handstand
• The ONLY At Home Workout That Actually Builds Muscle | Parody (Jeff Nippard) great youtube fitness quarantine parody content

• Spent less time on social media I took a well needed breather from social media and it helped me feel a lot better about pretty much everything.

• Stay inside during Coronavirus
• Rerun armstrong program, aiming for 20 pullups
• Try to maintain health / fitness / sanity during lockdown

• Dopamine and Temporal Difference Learning: A Fruitful Relationship Between Neuroscience and AI dopamine neurons in rat brains have long been known to perform some sort of reward prediction analogous to TD learning in reinforcement learning; Deepmind + Harvard looked at many of these neurons to see if all of them together capture the full reward distribution instead of just the average. Turns out, they sorta do! Certain of these cells are more optimistic or pessimistic, and together from the ensemble you can reconstruct a pretty good representation of the ground truth reward distribution. Interesting to think of the implications of overweighing optimistic vs pessimistic dopamine cells.
• Working memory revived in older adults by synchronizing rhythmic brain circuits and this powerpoint on cross frequency coupling the neuro in this paper is a bit out of this element (hence the unrelated powerpoint) but I think the implication that cognitive decline might be directly associated with phase amplitude decoupling is really interesting, since I've only ever really heard of PAC as a generic marker for brain activity. The fact that this can be recoupled in a non-invasive way to relatively lasting effects is kind of nuts.
• How does exercise treatment compare with antihypertensive medications? Meta-analysis suggests exercise is pretty comparable to drug intervention on this front, although the broad categories of "exercise" or even stuff like "resistance training" is highly variable depending on the subject. That said, the comparison is tricky because most people who exercise in these studies have pretty decent blood pressure at baseline, and restricting to only patients who would be labeled as hypertensive seems to suggest a greater chance for improvement there.
• LEARNING THE HELIX TOPOLOGY OF MUSICAL PITCH pitch can be modeled by a helix which makes a full turn every octave, some experiments to learn a 3d representation of 1d data to produce this structure.
• Analyzing the Dependency of ConvNets on Spatial Information randomly shuffling features or channels in the later layers of convnets largely doesn't affect performance (assuming it's done in train time as well); spatial information in later layers is mostly useless, which is pretty interesting.
• Fooling automated surveillance cameras: adversarial patches to attack person detection I think it's very interesting that you can just print these out and wear them if you train the adversarial network to output a particularly friendly image for printing. However, I think that concerns about this sort of attack are somewhat overblown (and are mostly demonstrations on how brittle deep networks are) since I think there are more likely causes for misclassification than adversarial attacks which often rely on access to the model to generate patches anyways (e.g. stop signs which are defaced or at unusual angles, people of poorly represented ethnicities in the training data, etc)
• Fundamental Tradeoffs between Invariance and Sensitivity to Adversarial Perturbations Making a network better against sensitivity-based adversarial examples makes it actively worse against invariance-based adversarial attacks, which is a pretty interesting followup to the ICLR 2019 paper describing their existence.
• Ad libitum Weekend Recovery Sleep Fails to Prevent Metabolic Dysregulation during a Repeating Pattern of Insufficient Sleep and Weekend Recovery Sleep I know there's lots of papers telling you not to do the weekday sleep deprivation -> weekend crash thing, but seeing that doing this reduces insulin sensitivity alongside damaging eating habits / circadian rhythm / etc was pretty jarring.
• Curiosity and Exploration "We also have evidence that prolonged subjection to an inordinately monotonous or unstimulating environment is detrimental to a variety of psychological functions"… "organisms may seek out stimulation that taxes the nervous system to the right extent, when naturally occurring stimuli are either too easy or too difficult to assimilate." Discomfort from a lack of information and specific exploratory responses to alleviate it is called curiosity, compared to simple novelty- or variety-seeking behavior via diversive exploration. By experiment, older children like looking at more complicated patterns than younger children. Nearness to equiprobability -> greater curiosity. Patterns which emerge which elicit specific exploration are usually referred to as "interesting" whereas ones which emerge from diversive exploration are considered "pleasing". Experiments involved providing methamphetamine to rats which is some true 1960s science.
• Josh Tenenbaum - The cognitive science perspective: Reverse-engineering the mind (CCN 2017) mostly a visual companion to Building machines that learn and think like people outlining the challenges for artificial intelligence based on cognitive science.

• Met monthly goals Not much to say about them, feels nice though
• Got Plagiarized Kind of wild that this happened before I got a proper citation, but I have always wanted to know what the consequences for something like this are, so it'll be funny to see how that ends up going.

• Do some more cardio I've been fairly interested in jump roping recently, and I think it would be good to incorporate some more endurance work into my exercise just for general health benefits.
• Make reading more consistent I think in the coming month my life will probably undergo some big changes so I will need to reorganize my daily routines in order to make my learning more effective.
• Spend less time on social media As always, after mpgr season spending time on social media irritates me far more than is useful for motivating me to do projects. Spending some time unplugged should make me happier and allow me a more focused headspace.

• Invasion of the Ballot Snatchers (and Other Stories) - Decorrelated Errors in Panel-Based Rank Voting I ran some simulations to illustrate the theoretical justification for panel based voting in MPGR. It was a really cool project, even if it didn't end up moving the discourse much.

• Building machines that learn and think like people (+ peer commentary, + author response) a bit of a long read but a pretty good one that ended up dominating most of my January reading. The authors claim that human "start-up software" make human performance benchmarks nebulous, and identify a number of conceptual elements which could be targeted to make AI think and learn more like humans: intuitive physics and psychology, compositionality, learning-to-learn, and fast/efficient real-time learning and thinking. Main article claims constraints based on biological plausibility are putting the cart before the horse, since our understanding of these biological systems are, themselves, cartoon representations of their actual functionality, and subject to change as we gain more understanding of them. Peer commentary was a refreshing component of this, and was categorized by the authors into three axes: nature vs nurture, symbolic vs sub-symbolic, and coherent theories vs theory fragments. Some of the more common specific components on this front were concerns of embodiment, social cognition (i.e. learning from other agents, or a culture), and intrinsic motivation. Definitely a very good read, and led me to a number of other cool papers.
• RISE (ft. The Glitch Mob, Mako, and The Word Alive) I'm not a league player but I stumbled upon all of this league music recently and it's pretty baffling. It's pretty crazy thinking about how different Melee would be if it had riot-level money behind it, as opposed to a developer actively crippling the infrastructure.

• Set PRs on every compound lift Fairly happy about my progress in this part of my life, excited to continue doing so

• 2 plate squat, 3 plate deadlift (for reps) I'm like 15-20 pounds off of both of these relatively novice lifting milestones, breaking through them will make me feel pretty good.
• Read a bunch of papers from random fields I think it would be fun to read some new stuff outside what I normally read, and I've had the altmetric website bookmarked for months so I want to read some interesting new stuff this month.
• Complete and submit MPGR 2019 ballot Lots of time and effort

• Range outline some notes on Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World This book was awesome, and well-describes the type of thinking and skillset I tried to develop as an undergraduate. Compare to Learning By Accumulation which has been on my website forever. Full thoughts here and notes above.
• Why Haskell is Great half shitpost half tutorial, fully wondering why all the Haskell people I know seem to be like this. Hfeflflfof Sfaftfofsfhfi.
• BAD APPLE!! || METAL COVER literally the only english cover of a Japanese song I've heard which I think pulls off the cover. Good workout track.
• dark cat - CRAZY MILK heard this on spotify and it was nice

I don't think it would surprise anybody to hear that I consider 2019 to be, probably, my most successful year ever. The most exciting thing to me about this year was that it blew the door open for my personal development, and I can see so much space in front of me to continue to grow. At the end of last year, my number one goal was Dramatically restructure my life to spend higher percentage of time doing things I find interesting instead of just a few hours a day, and at the risk of sounding too much like I'm bragging, I think I can safely say that I crushed this goal. I finally feel like I'm doing something I'm well-suited for, and while stuff like motivation waxes and wanes, the amount of time I actually get to dedicate towards genuinely fascinating things is so much higher than it has ever been. I don't feel reliant on feeling especially motivated to do things, which may have somewhat harmed my motivation levels but vastly improved my output.

That said, an extremely large share of this output is now taking place outside this website, which detracted somewhat from the second goal I had this year (i.e. 15 projects, 4-5 being big ones with longform writing piece attached). I was able to put out Predicting Personality with Playstyle in Super Smash Brothers which even now I'm shocked I was able to complete in such a short timeframe (8 days). However, 2019 was largely characterized by a sort of academic powerleveling in my life, with comparatively little interesting output (at least public-facing). I feel good about my progress (getting spun up on deep learning from the ground up, working through probmods, reading literally hundreds of papers) but now that I'm more settled into my new lifestyle I'm hoping that I can put a greater focus on making cool things.

I was unable to read 20 books, but given that so much of my time was spent reading I am just going to count this as a successful goal anyways (going through probmods alone involved reading close to 60 papers alongside the textbook, with exercises, and only incremented this counter by 1).

I feel good about my fitness progress in 2019, as well, although perhaps not relative to the amount of time I put into them this year. I went from ~V2+/V3- to ~V3+/V4- at climbing, which was not quite as much progress as I would've liked but was good progress nonetheless. My weight training was up and down, largely influenced by my dramatic lifestyle changes this year, but the important thing is that I'm back on the grind and I'm stronger than I've ever been. I'm definitely not there yet, but I made some progress and I'm happy with that.

2020 goals:

• 1/2/3/4 plate compound lifts This should put me just past intermediate for most lifts, unless my weight dramatically changes
• Climb V6 Figure this will be a nice counterbalance to ensure my weight doesn't get out of control
• Get published
• Read at least 4 textbooks, across at least 2 fields
• Read 15 books
• Post at least 5 longform writing pieces on this website
• Fully optimize lifestyle around happiness

• Completed Armstrong Program I did this program for 6 weeks and brought my max chin-up from 8 to 16 reps and my total volume per week from 150ish reps to 300ish reps. My form still needs some work and it’s a bit of a ways from my original goal of 20 reps, but given that I gained a little bit of weight I am fairly pleased with how this turned out and plan to maintain the habit of doing pull-ups so I can get to my goal of 20
• Started lifting weights again honestly fairly irritated that I pulled myself away from weights this long, considering how nice it feels to do these workouts. I’ve managed to get most of the way back to where I was at my strongest, which I think says an embarrassing amount about how low those lifts were, but the important thing is that I am making steady progress.

• Enjoy my holidays, reflect upon 2019 December is nice because it’s a nice season of burnout prevention along with a good arbitrary stopping point for annual postmortem. I’ll spend some of December drilling into what exactly I have learned, what I want to learn, and how I can improve in my learning process.
• Set PRs on all main lifts this should be fairly doable since I think I’m roughly 10-20 pounds away from my best ever lifts (although I am a bit heavier than I was back then, so not by wilks). I should probably record videos of these to check my form, but I doubt I’ll post them anywhere public.

• SSBM hitbox styleGAN a fun little project I decided to abandon a full writeup for, considering the results were not as nice as I would’ve wanted for that.

• Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-to-Speech Synthesis and unofficial recreation. I'm thinking about playing around a bit with speech synthesis and this seems like a very fun paper to start with.
• Get the most out of your Standing Pike amazingly well presented, clear, concise. Encouraging!
• A Physicist Completes a Linear Algebra Result a legendary story. "A colleague of mine of straddles physics and math said, 'he's famously like a cheery firehose of mathematics, guess he's power-washing you today.' I felt clean."

• Did a lot of reading, unfortunately distributed lots of pages read, not many completed books.
• Went to my friend's wedding it was great

• Finish things started in October I made some progress on a few things (books, projects, etc) so I would like to complete those this month.
• Get Stronger, Do 20 Pull-Ups I have recently started the Armstrong Pull-Up Program since I wanted to work on my pulling strength relative to my bodyweight, and currently max out at about 11 for a single set (at roughly 165 lbs); likewise some friends of mine are going to be starting GCZLP soon and I feel this is a good as excuse as ever to get myself back in the weight room (and seems like a nice transition from GSLP).
• Get more disciplined with study habits I've fallen behind on Anki repetitions and my note-taking has been lagging behind what it normally is, so fixing those should be a priority for me this month.

• Did some traveling for work spent some time in Chicago this month, which was an interesting experience. I tried some deep dish pizza and it was okay, definitely quite a bit less good compared to New Haven / New York / Most other good pizza I've eaten in my life.
• Research thoughts this month I've been grappling with the fact that research involves trying to unearth things which are not known to have answers already, and therefore there are no promises about whether your idea will actually work or not. I think this is a really important part of the process, even though it feels not-so-nice when your beautiful idea doesn't pan out. Confronting your failures in this way, I think, is a very important part of being a researcher, and I'm learning that it's important to view the chance to explore an idea as a fun thing for its own sake, independent of the idea solving your problem outright.

• Read Books My book reading progress has stalled substantially in the last few months, despite my daily reading increasing substantially. I think October will be really good for working through my backlog of books, which I've generally been neglecting in favor of papers / documentation / etc.
• Make Things It's been a while since I did anything cool outside of work, so let's aim to change that this month

• Updated resume using awesomeCV as a template. Nothing special, really, just wanted practice using LaTeX and wanted to update my resume to my current job.

• Cycled off of Caffeine I was drinking something like 280-300mg of caffeine per day and realized that I was losing focus on weekends because I wouldn't drink energy drinks and then get headaches. I quit cold for a week and it was miserable, but now caffeine does the normal things to me again. Techyphylaxis is crazy! Will need to keep an eye on this in the future.
• Was less productive August, admittedly, vanished a bit from me. I worked hard at work and did a little it of reading, but I spent a good amount of this month doing stuff like watching anime and watching random youtube videos. I think this is okay! Having this sort of month I think is pretty good for helping you prevent burnout, and I think this was largely inevitable given that a good amount of this month was spent doing the above.

• Get more comfortable using LaTeX I am starting to use latex a bit more often and I think spending some time grinding out notes using it would be useful.
• Math/Stats Grind In particular, I want to continue working through my statistics textbook and Velleman's How To Prove It.
• Greater focus on reading especially outside of work

• There are a lot of things to read I spent a lot of July reading interesting papers surrounded by people that know so many things. I am really happy with this, but it's hard to not get wrapped up in how much I feel I have left to learn. I'm trying to balance a pragmatic learning strategy with a broader intellectual curiosity, but we will see how that evolves as the months go by.

• Grind Out Stats My stats background is very rudimentary at the moment, and I think I'd make huge strides in understanding a lot of the more technical work in my field.
• Do more programming Most of my out-of-work time was spent reading in July, and as much as I love reading I think a bit more focus on practice rather than theory would make me feel more secure about my progress.

• Delays Have Dangerous Ends: On Monitors in SSBM glad learning webPPL paid off so quickly! Turnaround time for writing this was one day across a session of something like 6 hours.
• Self-Directed Reading in Computational Cognitive Science big syllabus-like document containing the list of books and resources I hope to go through in the next year or two; will probably update frequently
• Probmods Notebook Contains review, extra readings, and my solutions to most of the exercises.

• Climbed 5 V4 Boulder Problems I feel good about my climbing lately - here's a video.
• I read a lot of papers now Unlike before, I couldn't possibly hope to record all my notes on papers I read without this document becoming prohibitively long (it's already starting to grow substantially), so from now on I will only be putting on this page my notes on papers I thought were particularly interesting that month.

• Work through Probabilistic Models of Cognition
• Read voraciously, work hard
• Better outline my short- and medium-term learning goals and resources

• Deeplearning.ai Certificates - 01 03 03 04 05 Specialization Turns out you can get these certificates after auditing the course, which means I managed to obtain all of these during the 7-day free trial. I figured it couldn't hurt to get these if they were free, so I did so.

• Build some toy deep learning projects
• Climb five V4 boulder problems
• Learn some rudimentary Reinforcement Learning

• Novelty Dispersion Phenomenon I've noticed in people who create things, that I figured was frequent enough for me to name and write about.

• deeplearning.ai - Deep Learning Specialization I completed courses 1,2,3, and 5 this month. I feel like I got a lot out of taking all of these courses (they took me about a month to get through all 5, although I had the luxury of a lot of time to spend on it), and I think Andrew Ng's teaching style is very clear and he gets the big-picture ideas into the student relatively quickly, which I appreciated about these lectures. I think Ng glosses over a huge body of information in an effort to make the course more approachable, but it ends up being a giant meme (don't worry if you don't understand this / backprop is the most complicated thing in all of deep learning / if you're an expert in calculus you'll know the definition of derivatives, but don't worry if you aren't / etc). I think most of this course is taught at roughly a high school level (maybe for a student concurrently taking calculus if you want to really get all the little details), so I'd probably recommend this as a starting point for someone interested in AI. I sorta regret taking course 4 and 5 before 1,2, and 3, but it didn't dramatically affect my experience either way and I got tons of anki flashcards out of it regardless. Onto the next resource!
• Running A Tightrope: DOOM's Most Precarious Speedrun The secret is to really love those ledges
• Marc Rebillet - I FEEL SO ALIVE Fun to listen to!

• Become as good at your job as possible
• Adjust to new lifestyle

• I went to a local and had fun at said local I'm really cool and I have a fun hobby
• Savestate's April Fools Joke I played a part in this joke which was hilarious especially considering several people were in on the joke to "reproduce" it, behind the scenes here

• deeplearning.ai - Convolutional Neural Networks a brief foray into MOOCs, started here mostly for the videos on YOLO but ended up watching the entire course as a result of enjoying Andrew Ng's teaching style, which I think is pretty clear. I just audit the course since the actual certificate strikes me as exceedingly useless, but perhaps this attitude is what is preventing MOOCs from taking off so maybe I'm just a part of the problem
• Machine Learning Yearning - Andrew Ng disappointing, and especially devastatingly disappointing when you realize who the author is. Perhaps I was just no longer in the target audience for this book but I don't really think I can grasp someone who would be - it seems to be aimed at startups trying to deploy ML solutions (?) but I think feels weirdly too intro for anybody who would be able to actually do that. It is a draft though, so perhaps I'm being too harsh
• The Dolly Zoom Weirdly engaging for a video about a certain kind of zoom - really neat!
• World Models absolutely psycho interesting paper that appeals to the cognitive scientist and fledgling AI researcher in me; training entirely on hallucination is really fascinating and I was really excited by a lot of different ideas in this project, for example adjusting the temperature parameter to make the hallucinations more difficult than the actual task, thus making training more useful. Just read it, it's really digestible.
• Howl's Moving Castle Theme for Solo Piano - Kyle Landry I loved this arrangement because it for how bombastic it was compared to the original I think it did what it set out to do pretty much perfectly – bring forward a backgroundy OST piece to the foreground for solo piano. So much energy! I love it.
• An absolute truckload of research papers I'm in heaven I can't believe I get to do this now

• Continue Reading
• Relocate, Start New Job

• What is the most obscure thing you know about in Melee? cool twitter thread which yielded ~100 responses of cool obscure little things about melee.
• Recalibrated Myanimelist I went back and adjusted all my ratings / added a bunch of things I had forgotten to record that I watched. Still not perfect and probably requires some rewatching to get correct, but it was a good thing to do considering most of the anime I've watched recently has been depressingly mediocre.

• Baby Steps Reread this from start to finish to get myself super hyped up for this new era in my life. This sort of media I think is really good as a motivational pick-me-up and I've long believed that reading things at the right time can influence you positively, which is why I think it's important to remember how consuming different media makes you feel.
• 3B1B - Essence of Linear Algebra and 3B1B - Essence of Calculus - Very beautiful, surprisingly watchable overviews of two fields in mathematics. These two series are very impressive in different ways for me; the calculus one was mostly "oh that's why that's that way" moments for me while watching it, whereas the linear algebra one was a beautiful visual overview of something that was before mostly symbolic in my head. I'm really excited for his Differential Equations series, which should be coming out shortly.
• 3B1B - Quaternions and the corresponding Visualizing quaternions page - probably a little bit over my head but the basic ideas are really interesting, in particular the bit about calculating 3d rotations with these was pretty sick.

• Got a new job I'll be headed over to Johns Hopkins APL to do Artificial Intelligence Research starting in late April and I couldn't be more excited about it :)

• Read Textbooks for aforementioned job

• Wobbling Opinions {Personality Survey Question} results of the "ban wobbling" question on the personality-playstyle survey, before the "wobbling discourse" began again. Roughly 1/3 ban 1/3 no.ban 1/3 dont.care.
• I hacked melee to give bowser wobbling

• This Waifu Does Not Exist - Writeup Gwern's application of StyleGAN to his anime dataset yielded some insanely high quality results, and his writeup is pretty straightforward to follow.
• WordTeX - A WYSIPCTWOTCG Typesetting Tool pretty title niche but arguably the funniest word processing joke video I've ever seen
• 3Blue1Brown - Neural Networks a really clear explanation of the basics of a multilayer perceptron

• Decide which project to tackle next, begin working I'm bouncing around a couple of fun ideas so I need to pick one; I'll probably end up picking the one that ends up the more technically challenging, for obvious reasons.
• Spend some time on organization I've let my organization escape me a little bit so it'll be good to spend a little time to get everything back in place.
• Nail down some IRL goals this month

• Predicting Personality with Playstyle in Super Smash Brothers People have been kicking around this question for ages so I did some research to get to the bottom of it. I opened the survey on January 8th, closed the survey on January 10th and began writing, and then posted this essay on January 18th, which means I turned around this project in roughly one week which I'm very proud of.

• OCARINA OF TIME - A Masterclass in Subtext A documentary about subtext in OoT; one of the most well-edited and moving pieces of content I've seen in so, so long. Sort of like my Ping Pong essay but so well crafted that I got self conscious thinking about my own content.
• The most unexpected answer to a counting puzzle 3Blue1Brown really hits it out of the park with this video, one of the weirdest math problems I've ever seen in my entire life. Answer. Answer 2.
• Bob$ on Crush vs lloD one of the best SSBM analysis videos I've seen in some time.

• Resume Reading as I completely and abruptly stopped reading in favor of working on the Homestuck project
• Enroll in an online class since my younger brother got this for me for christmas, have to decide what I want to take, though
• Practice a bit for Genesis 6

• Locating Visual Jokes in Homestuck with Rudimentary Computer Vision probably the fastest I've ever completed a project of this rigor, which was really exciting! The project took me about a month and a half and I was really committed to completing it before the year ended, which I thankfully was able to accomplish. Definitely among the more technically interesting projects I've done, performed moderately well on the /r/homestuck subreddit.

• Big Fish & Begonia one of the most moving films I've seen in a long time. As far as I know this is the first film from this studio and I think that if they continue making films of this quality they could establish themselves as a worthy rival to Studio Ghibli in time. Started out as a flash animation in 2004 which is actually just wild to me.
• Reproducible Research: the Bottom Line paper about Claerbout's Principle, which roughly states "a paper about a computational result is advertising, the actual scholarship is in the coding environment"
• Justin Verlander's Impossible Inning: A Study in Velocity and Spin Rate | Baseball Bits randomly stumbled into this and I love the way it's put together. The music was great, also!
• The Conservation of The Assassination of Archimedes Narrated Version I love watching people skilled at their craft do their thing
• Getting Better Faster - Painting with 80/20 Rule A really fun video about using quick sketch painting to study your failures in novel contexts as many times as possible within a short window.
• Characters, Symbols, and the Unicode Miracle a cool and clear explanation of an otherwise mundane topic

The links page has become, weirdly enough, one of my favorite projects. I'm reminded of a suggestion I heard a long time ago (I think it was from Day9 but I am unsure) to keep a journal full of awesome things you have done so you can look back at it whenever you feel down about yourself. It's really cool being able to flip through and at a glance see where all your time in a year went, which months were strong and which were weak, etc.

A useful thing I can do here is briefly reflect on 2018 and how it squared with what my goals were for the year:

I read 11/30 books, 9 reviewed on my goodreads page, one being a re-read (Once a Runner), and one being Anokh's The Book of Melee which I obviously won't review extensively due to it being currently unreleased.

I wrote 7 longform posts on this website (Homestuck CV, STARS ALIGNED annotations, Celeste Review, Anki notes, Projects page, Boredom Types rant, Making Sense of Melee), I made 6 videos (Shinelock Punishes, Box Practical Tech, Bombs over Battlefield, Shine 2018 Clips, STARS ALIGNED, Stray Saturday), I made semi-regular appearances on the Melee Stats Podcast, and I revamped this website to be a lot more efficient (i.e. easier to read, mobile friendly, auto-generated from org mode documents, better in general overall). My original goal was just "15 longform posts" which I set rather aggressively to encourage shorter writings (i.e. ones that don't require months of work like Making Sense of Melee, the Homestuck CV project, STARS ALIGNED and it's annotations etc) so I it'll be okay if I cheat a little bit and consider this goal met just via converting quantity of work from one format to another.

I'm unsure if I'd consider myself the fittest I've ever been but I've made some substantial progress on that front and I'm pretty satisfied with that. I think I need to learn how to balance the different types of training into somethat that works for me because it's hard to me to juggle everything (e.g. I stop running if I go to the gym more, I stop going to the gym if I focus on rock climbing, etc).

I think overall I'm pleased with how I was able to focus on goals I defined myself throughout 2018. I had a lot to show for my use of free time in 2018, and probably are most proud of these three projects. I think I could've done more - in particular there are two projects I started that fell through mostly due to my decision to focus on Melee a bit more during the summer (between EVO / Shine / Big House / etc). Likewise I didn't do anywhere near enough reading, at least as far as books go. I was mostly good about staying on task but there were a few months where I felt like I accomplished almost nothing. These were generally in the summer, and in general I found it difficult to get back into the swing of independent work after doing any sort of travelling.

Anyways, 2019 goals:

• Dramatically restructure life to spend higher percentage of time doing things I find interesting instead of just a few hours a day
• Complete 15 projects, four of them being "large projects", at least five of them including a longform writing component
• Read 20 books
• Become strong

• Started some cool things but haven't completed them
• Have been doing a lot of reading but haven't finished any books

• Complete both books currently reading
• Complete short-medium difficulty project and writeup Pretty happy to be able to jog my memory of something I learned in school years ago.
• Reassess goals from end of year 2017 I was way off, but not so way off that I feel discouraged about it.
• Come up with new goals

• Stray Saturday very short highlight reel of some cool melee clips from one saturday's worth of games with my friends.

• Attended The Big House 8 got 97th place which is pretty solid for me; I can be so much better than I currently am and I have lots of footage to review. In general this low-pressure headspace I was in was very good and is worth experimenting with more. bracket matches
• Updated the iframe CSS on this website Youtube videos / gfycats no longer look completely stupid, nor are they insanely vertically stretched on mobile.
• Began taking Creatine been thinking about taking this since I’ve heard mixed things about its effect on cognition (mostly during sleep deprivation) but now that I’m lifting weights 3x/week I figured it was worth taking regularly. Hard to separate out what is from creatine and what is from just getting stronger, but the water retention effect was much stronger than I anticipated.

• Practice Coding
• Make Things

• STARS ALIGNED - A Human Theory TAS Combo Video Project I've been working on for a few months (maybe since June? I've had the idea for a very long time but I think June is when I started outlining the idea). Reception to this has been really positive and I'm very happy with all the kind words people have been sending my way :) Some related links are the video, the annotated writeup, the twitter thread, and the Reddit Thread (Reached #1 on /r/ssbm)
• Just Breathe. Celeste is Game of the Decade long-form review of Celeste which touches upon most of my thoughts about the game. It's incredible and you should play it.

• Go to The Big House 8 just have a good time, stop worrying so much about how you perform when you can't even go to locals.
• Lift weights again need to get back on a beginner program and get back to where I was before. I'm not exactly untrained (I do still climb) but I'm not where I used to be and I realized I got complacent with my health goals after I lost the weight I gained second half of school.
• Read books I'd like to finish Psychology Applied to Modern Life at minimum, preferably more.
• Finish 2-3 of my mostly finished projects this includes my Celeste longform review, the secret video project, and the stamina bracket research, among other stray ones.

• Powershot shenanigans little TAS clip about charge shot bouncing off of shield and getting powershielded from a weird angle, seemed pretty popular!

• Kirby Air Ride City Trial TAS - Achivements This is the mode I and everyone I know played most when this game came out so I'm glad somebody made a good TAS of it instead of focusing on the courses instead.
• Bottle cap pitching This is so cool and it looks really fun actually! I sort of want to learn to do it but I'd need two other people to be convinced to practice it which seems unlikely.
• Poker Players Replay Their Most Memorable Hands | The New Yorker I love listening to Poker players talk about Poker because there's just so much thought involved. My favorite by far was Jamie Kerstetter's hand which just filled me with uncontrollable anxiety listening to it.
• Celeste the best game I've played in a long time; a full review is coming soon.

• Went to Evo 2018 I played pretty terrible at the tournament, which was very disappointing, but seeing my friends for the first time in almost a year was so exciting and I left with a decent idea of what I want to work on. Reflection tweets
• Went to Shine 2018 Didn't do too hot in bracket but had some decent Money Matches despite not being particularly winning.
• Bouldering I climbed a bunch of V3s at Origin Climbing Gym in Las Vegas during Evo, but I'm pretty confident that the grades at that gym were pretty soft. Climbed a number of V3s at assorted gyms but no overhangs.

• Reorient

• Sent a V3 Problem Didn't get a video recording of it, but I sent an interesting slab problem at The Gravity Vault in Randor, PA. In my send I got stuck on the last move for maybe three full minutes before getting past it with a weird coordination mantle + pistol squat move, which I felt really good about even though it suggests my move into the last move was probably not super optimal.
• Sent another, different V3 Problem Video here, another relatively easy problem which I abused my height to make easier. I want to send this cleaner (as I did with that super weird teal V2 that everyone at my gym hates, myself included). I really liked the mini cut-loose move near the end but I think this climb would be easier with better footwork especially after the third hand move (flag is unnecessary). I think a footswap after the fifth hand move -> move right foot to hold right next to it skips the need for cutting loose, but I could be misunderstanding how good the holds are from that position from this video. Overall I think definitely a relatively easy v3 which I think is appropriate for what I consider my current level at climbing (V2+/V3-)
• Practiced a bunch for Evo 2018 I'm very excited for this event and I think I'm in pretty good form for it - I'm unsure if I'll do well or not but I'm looking forward to playing a lot of great melee with strong players and having a good time in Las Vegas.

• Play Well at Evo 2018, get hours in against new, strong players
• Send two more V3s, one of which must be a roof/overhang
• Cut weight back down to 150-153 range
• Resume work on programming work
• Begin work on secret SSBM video project

• Notes on Spaced Repetition Some running notes for my anki card usage, which I will probably update as I get new useful thoughts on using it
• How Variable are Omron Scales? I got back up to 160 so I ran some measurements on my bodyfat / muscle percentages and they were much better than the last time I was this weight, which is very exciting and motivating
• MPGR Summer Top 50 Ballot After a bunch of discussion, PGR ended up sticking with the ballot system instead of using the algorithmic ranking. I was a panelist this season, and spent a good amount of time making this ballot (which will remain hidden to avoid external pressure influencing my vote).
• MPGR Roundtable Part 2: #40-31 I appear as a guest on Panda Global's Twitch show discussing the summerrank top 50, along with Aiden, Appel, Gimmedatwheat, Edwinbudding, and PracticalTAS.

• Send another V3 Problem I have one that I'm working on but I am worried they will take it down before I get the last move, so if I can't get it by the end of the month then I'll need to find something else
• Practice an unreasonable amount for Evo 2018 It's probably because I can no longer take Melee for granted and play it every day, but I haven't felt this motivated for a tournament in a very long time. I really want to perform well so I've been practicing a lot and I don't want to let this motivation fizzle out before the event.
• Work on projects when you have time I have a lot of things in the works, among which the things I have not finished from months ago, but my priorities have temporarily shifted for now so I think if I finish any real projects in the next month I'll view it as a bonus rather than an explicit goal.

• Overhauled personal website I now generate this entire website from emacs org files; going back and transforming all my html documents to org files was sort of a pain but luckily with pandoc it didn't take longer than an afternoon - the rough part was wrangling with the org html export, which I eventually managed to nail down. It looks cool now! Still some work to be done but not bad.
• V3 Boulder Problem interesting mantle -> mantle thing going on in this problem; it feels a little easy for a V3 but I'm not complaining since it let me meet my goal for this month! I've now completed every V2 problem in the gym so I'm currently focusing on climbing them cleanly / V3 problems / waiting for new problems
• V2 Slab Problem really cool problem at a gym I don't usually go to
• Fountain of Dreams is Cool Now stupid movement idea I came up with on this stage

• Tools for Rock Climbing Training: The Making of a 'Rockprodigy' a lot of really great quotes in here, I'm starting to get really motivated for improvement in climbing and melee so I've been spending a lot less time on projects and a lot more time on practice.
• Ocarina of Time glitch exhibition 2 hour presentation by ZFG of OoT glitches that are not useful in speedruns. I enjoyed it a lot!
• Sub Float - Quetzalcoatl Melee's preimere Peach Frame Data person documents a setup for floating lower than ground float height, allowing for +4 nairs. Not super useful since setup burns your doublejump making it quite dangerous, but almost baffling that the game went this long without anyone discovering this until now.
• Choco Mountain: The History of Mario Kart 64's Most Infamous Track w e a t h e r t e n k o

• Send a v3 boulder problem
• Make big changes to website formatting using emacs HTML export
• Complete posts I keep postponing work on
• Make it very straightforward to export new things to this site now that everything is centralized in emacs (!!)

• Bombs over Battlefield Items combo video feat R2DLiu, Vickram, lpac, and myself, super funny
• Melee Stats Podcast - Episode 9 I'm in this episode

• I Faced Off Against The World’s Best Chess Player. You Will Totally Believe What Happened Next. Not exactly a groundbreaking experience if you are a chess player, but it was really cool to see a levelheaded outsider brush up against the chess community and say reasonable things (unlike another article which is derisively hyperlinked in this one)
• find paths in emacs ugh
• python inline in org mode sick

• Turn 23
• Complete Bracket Stamina post (this has gone on for too long as it is, since I keep encountering cool things abour it, and I made less progress than I would've liked on it despite working on it for ~20ish hours this month, but a lot of that is due to the fact that I am learning emacs through this project; I think I'm mostly completed with interesting things to encounter so I expect to be completed by mid may)
• Become very comfortable with emacs; a friend of mine showed me his emacs setup and I realized that I had virtually the same workflow except strewn across 15 different programs and within two weeks of using it I am back/surpassing to my old productivity speed despite regularly pausing to remember how to perform the "copy" command. Fully expect to sink 300+ hours into configuring this program within the next year but as it stands I am already hooked on it.
• Begin working on next coding project surprise for now.
• Complete some stray writing projects

• Continue learning math, learn some beginner Chinese
• SSBM: study 30 hours of videos, implement dash out of crouch, continue working on aerial drift
• Complete bracket project (which has proven to be much more interesting than I anticipated) and flashcards writeup
• Learn to use vim, get comfortable with it by playing some DCSS (lol)

• Downloaded Atracker which I plan on using to make more quantifiable monthly goals. Measurement defeats all.
• Did a brief cut and got back down to ~150 from 155

• Finish Bracket Stamina project and Spaced repetition post; finish reading Proofs and Refutations; make anki cards on US History; Start working through Linear Algebra Done Right and this.
• SSBM: continue working on implementing aerial drift, specifically out of short hop; work on making platform punishes against fastfallers more consistent
• Practice some substantial amount of time this month learning to play guitar, figure out some way to track hours practiced (for this and for other things)
• Maintain your reading habits but focus primarily on math / guitar / SSBM / writing

Health

• finished a two month trial period for Bacopa Monnieri. Ended up observing a rise in correct answers for new + young anki cards of about 8%, and no change in mature cards. I didn't do any blinding, and would probably have to revisit this if I wanted to explore it deeply in any capacity. I don't really feel like bacopa gave me anything super valuable given the magnitude of the effect, so I've discontinued taking it (although I might consider taking it again if I ever decide to become a student again). Funny to think about how effectively you can replace the use of short term memory with good external capturing like anki or Evernote.

SSBM

• spent virtually my entire month practicing backwards aerial drift. Entered a tournament and placed pretty well despite feeling pretty off tech-skill wise. Feel good about practice paying off somewhat for me.

Misc

• Decided against adding an RSS feed, since adding one for a static website is more trouble than it's worth and I have a far too small readership that would ever use it.
• Met most of my goals from last month (only finished 2 books but did a lot of reading), still need some calibration but enough of my time went towards practicing melee that I had a slightly below average level of productivity

• SSBM: use solo practice time better, do a lot of set analysis / notetaking especially vs marth and sheik, work on implementing better control over aerial drift
• Site: make site more mobile friendly, write scripts to manage a bunch of pages at once
• Write one article, make one video, read four books

• Tentatively added Disqus comments to my writings - fully prepared to reevaluate this later and conclude it was a bad idea but I've been meaning to have a means of people sharing their ideas with me without needing to contact me on social media so this seems like a worthy try
• also added google analytics, which I did not do before my statistics post and kicked myself for - it'll be useful to check what kind of audience I have for everything
• Couldn't think of use for Raspberry Pi, Didn't get around to adding RSS, met all other goals for month and completed four books (!)

• Build something interesting with the Raspberry Pi 3 kit I got for Christmas, use Amazon Gift Cards to buy assorted things if need be
• I've made very good progress on my more recent melee stats project and expect to be finished very shortly - the only reason I could imagine it taking longer than end of January is incorporation of top 100 data for further analysis
• learn a bunch of slow cooker recipes
• Work on the infrastructure of this website - Maybe add Disqus comments, an RSS feed, make it slightly nicer looking

I generally dislike "New Years Resolutions" but I think keeping myself accountable for the things I want to accomplish over long periods of time is pretty important. As 2018 is the first year I will be completely operating without educational institutions to hand me goals (weird) I feel it is more important to have a clear vision of my long-term goals.

• Read 30 books
• Write 15 longform posts on this website, not including links posts
• Reach a point where creating a Patreon wouldn't be an embarrassing idea, create a Patreon, get at least three Patrons
• become the fittest I have ever been

• Move into an apartment, figure out general living / exercise / etc arrangements there
• Figure out a good way to do rankings with the big SSBM dataset (~22k sets), write up more extensive analysis, mostly complete this project
• Place well at The Big House 7, record a lot of sets for review later
• Learn Keras / Deep Learning stuff and do a project with it
• Complete reading GEB

• Finish Tae Kim Guide to Japanese (~75% complete) and move on to Genki I
• Finish the books I'm currently reading, as well as GEB and the fast.ai MOOC
• establish working demo of melee stats page, scrape at least 8000 sets, learn enough webdev to get a working prototype complete by the end of the month
• write draft for posts on spaced repetition, man vs AI publicity stunts, melee stats analysis
• join a gym, begin resistance training, begin eating at a surplus
• other potential project ideas: something with Keras (MP3 file -> osu map? Too much?), do pot bonuses boost attendance at melee tournaments?