the 13th letter

Day 1 (Monday, 2014-02-24) Today was one of those family counseling days where my mom decided to talk with me about stuff, about relationships, and character traits, and things I ought to change, and Adam and Eve, and bees and butterflies, and university degrees, and… wait, what? Oh, and, uh, martial arts. And some Sonic Unleashed. That's about all that happened. Goals Legacy work: sleep by 12am: NO. Minor cosmetic glitches (i.e. 15 minutes too late). I haven't set up the timer yet. +25 burpees (T_T) wake up and get ready: YES. 9am, no. Even though I'm sleeping so early. wtf… do CC bodyweight strength training: DARN IT. I waited too long. +25 burpees Cold shower: YES. Journaling work: YES. Though it was a half-assed entry, since nothing much happened.

I like to think it is more suggestive if us guys do it. The girl counterpart might just be squats. Especially if you're wearing a short skirt. … And now I apologize to all girls for causing you to never be able to look at squats the same way again. I do, too. … Wait, what?

1 day to go (Sunday, 2014-02-22) Slept in even worse. I shouldn't have done my strength training so late. Took another cold shower. I'm afraid I'm slowly getting used to them. They don't induce any dread anymore. (Though they still induce annoyance.) I spent the majority of the day on a computer science project: write a metadata tagger (artist, title, albumname, etc.) for an as-of-yet uncommon audio format: Opus. I had previously read the format specification—at least the parts that say where and how to store the metadata—and estimated it to take a couple of hours to write. That turned out to be wrong… I had overlooked a crucial minor detail, meaning I had to write more code myself than I had assumed I would have to. So while it ultimately worked, I feel that I spent too much time on it; I should have devoted more time to my job hunt instead. On the plus side, this could easily be turned into a blawg post. I dunno. Opinions, anyone? Do you even read my blawg? And on another plus side, I didn't spend any time at the PS3 today. Which surprises me too. Of course, I'm not intending to keep it that way. Goals Legacy work: sleep by 12am: NO. The strength training session turned quite late. wake up (by 9am?) and get ready: YES. Not at 9am. do CC bodyweight strength training: YES. See below. Cold shower: YES. Cold, but bearable. Yay for goose bumps! Journaling work: YES. Strength training (Legend here.) Level 4 flat frog (leg) raises: 20/16/14 (+4/0/+3, intermediate+) (last session: 4 days ago) Getting back into the groove. Whew.

2 days to go (Saturday, 2014-02-22) Slept in, took my cold shower, then got dragged by my parents to a looooooooong talk. In our family, we have the biggest house, and some of our relatives were in the process of selling theirs and moving in with us. Which means things will change around here, yada yada yada, I can't go on like I'm living by myself, blah blah blah, etc etc etc. The usual. Then the highlight of this month happened: My brother had ordered a PS3 just a few days ago, and today, the first PS3 game arrived! Sonic Unleashed! Woohoo! You have no idea how long I have been looking forward to playing this! And yes, I am planning to grab one of the Assassin's Creed games too. I'll probably start with Brotherhood, it being the first one I watched an LP of. (To those who have played Sonic Unleashed, here are my first impressions about the Werehog: the gameplay is decent, the werehog is much more brittle and prone to gangbang than the Wii version, and yes, this feels quite misplaced in a Sonic game, but I can tolerate that just fine. I had more pains with Tin Pin Slammer in The World Ends With You, or That-Card-Game-Whose-Name-I-Forgot in Final Fantasy IX. And then there's the mini-games in the The Legend of Zelda series, some of which have been the source of major headaches, like that 1500 points archery challenge in Ocarina of Time, which I still haven't beaten.) So there I was, mentally absent until the evening, when I wrapped up and did what I still had to do to finish the day. Goals Legacy work: sleep by 12am: NO. Posted my challenge and updates to the punishment methods on that evening. wake up (by 9am?) and get ready: YES. Again, not at 9am. do CC bodyweight strength training: YES. See below. Cold shower: YES. This one was colder than the day before. Journaling work: YES. Strength training (Legend below.) Level 3 angled bridges: 10/9/NA (0/+1/NA, beginner+) (last session: 2 days ago) Still trying to get used to being upside down. Legend: x/y/z (a/b/c, std): I managed x/y/z of this exercise during this session, the difference to last session being a/b/c. As of this session, I'm at std standard. NA: not applicable; I didn't do this set beginner, intermediate and progression: beginner, intermediate and progression standard, according to “Convict Conditioning†beginner?: I am maybe at beginner standard; I can't tell for sure because I can't accurately reproduce the training scenario intermediate+: I have exceeded intermediate standard, but not yet reached progression standard.

3 days to go (Friday, 2014-02-21) While I'm not officially tracking yet, I tried to get into the vibe of what I'd be facing in a few days… …so I took a cold shower this morning. And while it probably wasn't that cold, I was positively shivering during the whole thing. Just as planned. Anyhow… Posted this challenge thread, then had guitar lessons, then had martial arts class, and then had le tired… and then I had to give emergency I-need-to-hand-this-in-tomorrow maths tuition. Meh. And now I'm here. Goals Legacy work: sleep by 12am: NO. Didn't track that yesterday. wake up (by 9am?) and get ready: YES. Not at 9am though. do CC bodyweight strength training: SKIP. Rest day. Yes, I actually worked out yesterday. Without telling you. I'm so evil. Cold shower: YES. And ohmaigawd, it was cold. Journaling work: YES. I tried not to stare at the large gaping hole between today and my last entry on September 8th too much, but I could swear it was calling my name…

Oh hai there! The Courier is back on board! Yay! High Five: GET!

I'm suggesting push-ups because those are my MA boss' standard go-to tech for punishing us. Whoever caused the punishment counts out aloud, and at the end everyone says "Thank you, X." Boss says it's actually a sneaky way of getting everyone to know everyone else's name……So alright, fine, burpees it is. 25 per round of punishment, I suggest.But geez, this thread has been up for a few hours, and already the responses are geared towards seeing me suffer. Have you people sensed blood or something? More severe punishment for skipping, and, for sleeping at least, automatic log-out and lock-out, enforced by software.And I'm actually hoping the happy dances help.

So, since it seemed more urgent, I took the liberty of writing the intro for next challenge (“book 5â€) before writing the conclusion all of book 4. Maybe this'll keep the mob at bay…?Though I'd still advise against reading it just yet, because it—by necessity—contains spoilers. SPOILERS!(link)Anyhow… working on the missing gaps right now.

Salutations, fellow brigade members! And congratulations to you for having crossed the finish line. Though I still need to take a closer look at the ground to determine where I am with respect to the finish line *coughIhaven'twrittenachallengesummaryyetcough*, I wanted to start the next challenge right and be one of the first, not one of the last. So my new challenge thread is up already. A warning to those following my storyline: I still have to write two story sections for the old challenge. The new challenge's story intro contains major spoilers. Read at your own risk. With that out of the way, here's the new challenge: the 13th letter is on lockdown

To those who are following the storyline from my last challenge: Beware. Of. Major. Spoilers. Seriously, this whole challenge intro is a major spoiler for the storyline I have yet to conclude in the other challenge. You have been warned. TL;DR: Challenge goals Do everything from last time. sleep at 12amwake by 9am and get readydo "Convict Conditioning" bodyweight strength training Only this time, actually do it.Reward for doing it: uh… happy dance? Punishment for slacking: something awful, to be decided on. Probably push-ups. 25 burpees per session missed. I blame llw and Kishi. Take cold(er) showers. 'Cause damn, I'm being beaten by a 16-year old girl who isn't even actively trying to beat me. I will not go without a fight!Reward: happy dance…? Punishment: probably push-ups. 25 burpees per day missed. Record your progress in your journal. While much of my journey is documented here, more or less, I've severely neglected my own journal in the meantime.Reward: happy dance…? Punishment: probably more push-ups. 25 burpees per day missed. Why so much punishment? Why not embrace the positive side of life? Because this makes the stakes oh so much higher.

…in other news, it's been another week, and I've neglected my challenge thread. On top of that, it's nearly end of the challenge, and compliance-wise, I'm hanging somewhere between "*shrug*" and "meh". And on top of on top of that, I have yet to deliver all the candy stories I promised to come up with. Seriously, where is that mob?Anyway, here's the plan:Figure out what I want for the next challenge. I'm halfway there already.Post my status updates for this past week.Write more stories. Two at least.Please stick around, if only to nag at me for why the stories are taking so long to write. I seem to need this.

Day 34 (Saturday, 2014-02-08) Only barely escaped the Wake-Up Call from Hell™ by setting my own alarm minutes before the call came. No Torchlight of Agony™ in my face, ha! Though I was still not really awake… We had our early morning session and we had parts of it in the snow. Early morning snow is a lot less forgiving than late afternoon snow in terms of coldness and the numbness it brings to your bare feet. Interesting. Anyhow, despite my sleep deficit I did quite okay, I'd say. Certainly better than my last time (see footnote #5). Came home, read up on NF for a while, posted my replies to comments, did some strength training, and… fell asleep. Yeeeeeeeeeah. Though I appear to handle the sleep deficit thing quite well when it happens, I've noticed that I run out of steam quite quickly. 2–3 hours afterwards, I'm a pile of dead meat. …aaaaaaand the rest of the day happened in slow motion. Even round #2 of strength training. (Before you ask: slow motion ≠more time under tension.) Which was really a shame. I enjoyed most of the heightened activity level (minus the sleep deficit) while it lasted. Baseline goals Go to bed at 12am: YES. On the mark, in fact. Get ready soon: YES. I only barely escaped the wake-up call by the Torchlight of Agony™ in my face. Do bodyweight strength training: YES. Kinda, sorta. I dunno, I didn't feel too fit doing them. I blame it on lack of sleep. Specifically (see legend): Level 3 angled bridges: 10/8/NA (+2/0/NA, beginner+) (last session: 5 days ago) I did these relatively early in the day, after I returned from the bootcamp. I was still excited and energized and whatnot, though that was slowly starting to fade. Level 4 flat frog (leg) raises: 20/15/13 (+2/+2/+2, intermediate+) (last session: 4 days ago) These I only did late in the evening. That was a mistake. I was already dead meat when I started. Despite the increases. Additional goals (none)

Day 33 (Friday, 2014-02-07) So today was the main day of a sleepover in a cabin atop one of the mountains in the Alps. A tiny cabin at 1,650 m (roughly 5,400 ft) surrounded by snow and wilderness. Where no one can hear you scream. And with nowhere to run. So, uh, yeah. Martial arts bootcamp. At 5,400 ft. With nothing but snow around you for miles, at -5°C / 23°F or lower. And a martial arts teacher with a very Kishi streak who takes every single opportunity to inflict cold showers outdoor exercise rounds in the snow, barefoot, on unsuspecting and otherwise thinly-clothed little monklets like us. And boy did he find reasons. Like, everywhere. Like, "you have now reached the point where there are no more correct answers… all answers will be used as justification to go outside into the snow". Like, "Oh, you're sweating? Feeling hot? Let me help you cool down a bit." (And believe me, I haven't been this grateful for a halfway cozy warm, dry room in quite a long time.) So yeah, my day was taken up by both the bootcamp itself and its logistics. Baseline goals Go to bed at 12am: YES. Yuppity yup yup.Get ready soon: YES. Though it was not pretty. Oh, it was everything but pretty. But it was on time.Do bodyweight strength training: SKIP? No privacy whatsoever. Unless I was supposed to do my bodyweight exercises on the loo.Additional goals(none)

Ha!…though I've never tried an "inverted" Turing test before. ("Can you convince a tester that you are not human, but rather a machine?") Perhaps I should. [yoda]Many frying pans in your future, I foresee.[/yoda]Great… You make it sound like you've never wondered if the entity on the other side of the connection is a dog… Obviously it's all a giant scam for tricking people into believing the Alps are, like, 50 miles further north than they truly are. And it looks like it's working. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight… so… I'm just gonna file this into my "women sure are scary" folder and, uh, leave it there.

(In which I reveal just how much of an MMORPG'er I was…) And the mean thing is, it gets me every time. Every. Single. Flippin'. Time. I… didn't know you had a biologist streak……uh-oh… Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight… "Nuuuuuuuh, I can't leave my comp sci stuff alone now! I'm just this far away from solving it all!" I never intended anything else. Ugh, no pls. D: I wonder… Yeah, see, the problem is getting to level 20 if you're only at level 3. Plvl anyone?

(In parts, because of the limit on quotes. In batches, 'cause that's easier to read. Out of order, 'cause order is a hindrance.) The Dai-Gurren Brigade has actually marched into my thread! I am truly humbled.And I never even got to tidy up my thread beforehand…And yes sirs and ma'ams, I am so on it!

Actually, I don't think the English-speaking world is up to as much mischief as the Germans (apparently?) are… *cough*Ihadthisideafirst*cough*

Day 32 (Thursday, 2014-02-06) Went to Munich to do my bribing. That proved to be an… "interesting" experience with people who claim to be at their office but then have locked office doors. I wonder… Afterwards, I met the Courier in her new neighborhood, within the suburbs of Munich. The whole atmosphere was very… uh… cute and idyllic. As expected from the suburbs. But quite a contrast to the rest of Munich, which is rather… uh… urban.[1] Nonetheless, from what I can tell, it's a nice place to live in, and methinks the Courier will do Just Fine™ over there.[2] Then I returned home, then I asked Wikipedia for why my parser isn't working, and then I posted this. And whadd'ya know, Wikipedia answered me. Should I be scared now…? Baseline goals Go to bed at 12am: YES. Mentally at least. Get ready soon: YES. A side-effect of morning-only office hours. Do bodyweight strength training: SKIP. Rest day. Additional goals (none) 1I know this is not the most awesome of revelations, but it's quite a striking thing to see for someone who has only seen dense urban areas and sparse rural areas. I'd have expected a much slower transition in population density. 2On that note, I have confirmed, to a reasonable degree of error, that the Courier is not a dog pretending to be a human. (Unless she fooled me really badly, hence the degree of error thing.) Now, that does not mean you have a guarantee that I'm not a complex AI android that tricks you into believing that others on the internet are not dogs but humans instead, even if they're actually dogs. Just sayin'.

Day 31 (Wednesday, 2014-02-05) Chatted with the Courier last evening, and made plans for stopping by her new apartment (it's official!) on Thursday, seeing as to how I needed to go to the university again to bribe thank the one who got away last time. Other than that, I went to martial arts class, and continued writing my s-expression parser (which at this point has resisted three different attempts to make it auto-reducing). Not much else to it. Baseline goals Go to bed at 12am: MAYBE?. Was in bed on time, but couldn't sleep, and got up again, and started coding, and suddenly it's 2am… Get ready soon: NO. Overslept… And damn it, I wanted to get that parser I'm writing to work. (It still doesn't.) Do bodyweight strength training: YES. Rushed, and almost messed up including those today… but I did them. Specifically (see legend): Level 5 full-depth (bodyweight) squats: 30/30/NA (0/0/NA, progression) (last session: 22 days ago) Gah, 22 days again! Anyhow, I have no idea how I made it through that while sticking to that 2-1-2-0 cadence, but… I did. Somehow. Additional goals (none)

Day 30 (Tuesday, 2014-02-04) Had a looooooooooooong talk about familial matters last night, concerning the logistics and finances of my future employing university, if/when that actually becomes a thing. It's… poignant just how such a simple action can lead to such a large cascade of inconveniences here and problems there, and… and… and I really want someone to build a university in my backyard, please? D: Played a bit more with the s-expression parser. I've never written a parser of this sort before, and it turned out to be a fascinating learning experience for "things that can go wrong when you try to teach the machine a new language". (I have not yet unearthed all the potential lessons and applications of this experiment to teach other humans (kids? pupils?) how to understand a new language…) Anyhow, it was that day that I realized I hadn't updated in a while, and so I posted last week's report. Baseline goals Go to bed at 12am: SKIP. Had familial matters to discuss. Took quite long. Get ready soon: YES. I'm not quite sure how I did it, but I was awake and ready in record time. Do bodyweight strength training: YES. Only one exercise today, because I needed the coming Thursday to be a rest day. Specifically (see legend): Level 4 flat frog (leg) raises: 18/13/11 (−2/−5/−3, beginner+) (last session: 21 days ago) Eh. Not fun. But dearly necessary. Additional goals (none)

Day 29 (Monday, 2014-02-03) Wrapped up my first round of homework for the professor. Oh, and some comp sci stuff: trying to write a parser for s-expressions that automatically reduces the innermost s-expression to a value, recursively, as the necessary tokens are parsed. (To my shame, there was a lot more of the latter than of the former. But I did send in that homework.) Baseline goals Go to bed at 12am: NO. Wasn't paying attention. Get ready soon: YES. Was paying attention. Do bodyweight strength training: HELL YEAH. I focused on doing at least two exercises before martial arts class, expecting to fail at doing the other two after MA class. I was correct. But I did get two exercises in. Specifically (see legend): Level 3 angled bridges: 8/8/NA (0/+1/NA, beginner+) (last session: 8 days ago) Yeah, holding the bridges is kinda hard. Stupid cadence, always there to ruin my groove. Level 3 knee push-ups: 12/8/NA (−6/−4/NA, beginner+) (last session: 19 days ago) That's what I get for slacking for almost 3 weeks. Oh well. Back to the drawing board floor. Additional goals (none)

I'm with ya on that one, Monks. As in, I'm tired of sucking, too. My weekly report is up, and the one-word summary of last week is Magikarp. I'll… just leave it at that.

As my memory of last week is beginning to fade, here's what I remember. This is also my weekly report of sorts. Day 22 (Monday, 2013-01-27) through Day 28 (Sunday, 2013-02-02) I spent about one third of my time being unproductive towards my challenge goals (i.e. sleeping late, sleepwalking in the morning, and missing strength training), and the remaining two thirds of my time I spent on conducting background experiments for my website (I say "experiments" because I ran into implementation problems for just about everything I tried, and in the end nothing has been implemented). I did learn a lot, though I feel that this shouldn't have come at the expense of my challenge goals and my job hunting work. Baseline goals Go to bed at 12am: NO. A whopping 0/7. Oh boy. Get ready soon: NO. Maybe 4/7, but it's still nothing I'm proud of, particularly because this is probably the easiest of my goals. Do bodyweight strength training: NO Again, a whopping 0/7. And it's not so much because of my finger, but rather because of bad no planning. Additional goals Ha ha, that's a good one! Overall grade? A solid F, where the F stands for FAIL FISH. Little did you know that my handle, M, actually stands for Magikarp! (Of course, before level 20.) Comments? Yeah, well, that wasn't my most glorious of weeks. Let's not repeat that, 'kay?

Day 21 (Sunday, 2014-01-26) Spent the day trying to learn the basics of the programming language “Common Lispâ€. I have plans to rewrite the backend of my website, and there would be a very natural representation in Common Lisp that would strongly cut down on the amount of boilerplate[1] I'd need to write for any new article. Sadly, CL is a rather difficult language to learn because you also need to learn a new way to think about the problem, and about programming itself. (This is precisely the reason why there is this natural representaiton in CL that I mentioned. But just because I see The Lisp Wayâ„¢ here doesn't mean I find it easy to see and grasp in general.) Anywho, did some strength training, because whoa, it's been a while. Baseline goals Go to bed at 12am: EH, NO. Damn you, computer science sirens. Damn you. Get ready soon: EH, NO. Maybe it's time to start thinking about drinking coffee. Do bodyweight strength training: YES. Like, ha! Specifically (see legend): Level 3 angled bridges: 8/7/NA (−7/−5/NA, beginner+) (last session: 15 days ago) Yeah, well… While my injury and my long break surely had something to do with this, I also did Yet Another Cadence Checkâ„¢ (2-1-2-0 like the others). And yeah, I was like 2–3× as fast as I should have been. So, I slowed down. And then I started to suck. Meh… Additional goals (none) 1Non-functional code/writing that is not directly tied to the content. Mostly bookkeeping and other unchanging information such as author list, page logo, etc. It's always present; the goal is to avoid having to type it out explicitly.

Day 20 (Saturday, 2014-01-25) After the woo about "ohmaigawd, his fngr iz teh broken!1" had subsided, I tried doing the two most important things I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do anytime soon: (1) performing knee-push-ups, and (2) holding a GameCube Controller. My verdict? Anyway, I re-thought my stregth training timetable, now that I can't do all of the exercises. Since I'm now badly suited for a weekly cycle because of my reduced range of exercises, I decided to do a 4/1-day-cycle instead of my previous 2/1-3/1-cycle. Because I can. Because I have no other factor forcing me into a 7-day-cycle for exercising. Also, thinking that I might as well use my forced hunt-and-peck typing period to get over the suckage of adapting to a new keyboard layout, I switched my keyboard layout to Dvorak. (Again, because I can.) After 2 minutes of fail, I wrote a set of letters and symbols onto the sticky part of a post-it note and then plastered my (USB-) keyboard with lots of these notes, giving me an ad-hoc engineer-worthy "duct tape"-style Dvorak-labeled keyboard. Yay! My typing speed is on the rise again, from 60(?) words per minute (before) to 40 wpm (broken finger) to 5 wpm (Dvorak) up to 13(?) wpm (+ keyboard labels)! And there was much rejoicing… (Also, typing in German with this setup is decidedly slower than typing in English, because of differences in frequencies of pairs of letters between German and English, and because Dvorak is highly English-centric. The difference in QWERTY isn't quite as drastic because QWERTY isn't really English-optimized. Besides, typing Umlauts with this setup is really slow… e.g. "Ö": "right menu" + "double quote" ("shift" "apostrophe") + "shift" "O" in Dvorak (where Dvorak "apostrophe" is QWERTY "Q" and Dvorak "O" is QWERTY "S"). So I have to look for two keys instead of one, and press a third, awkwardly-placed one before the other ones first. Needless to say, this still needs some tweaking.) Baseline goals Go to bed at 12am: SKIPPITY SKIP SKIP. We arrived home at 1.15am. Get ready soon: YEAH. Good enough. Do bodyweight strength training: NO. Not sure what I'm allowed to do. Additional goals (none)