😡 Nemesis, Sudoku, Muscles 💪

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is ANTIFA DANCE, by Ana Tijoux. 🎵

He's taken to doing this at my standing desk while I work. Not complaining!

I'm happy to announce: I have a nemesis! When I read a lot more Twitter, author and academic Roxane Gay frequently wrote about her nemesis without naming them. I thought it was fun.

I wrote recently about someone's blog without comments or a contact email that I wanted to engage with, and this week they wrote a post that was garbage! Like, "your post is bad and you should feel bad!" This wasn't their first strike, but I was rounding up the other times. This time, they crossed a line!!!!

Like any good nemesis, most of the anger results from how much we have in common, and seeing a lot of myself in them: I usually find their posts mildly interesting, we share a few tech preferences, and they also host their blog with a custom engine they wrote that nobody will ever care about.

In any case, watch this space! I've got my eyes on you, nemesis. Who sucks. Slightly.

Sudoku

In "doesn't suck" news, a video of "Miracle Sudoku" went viral last week, where someone added a few chess rules to Sudoku, produced a puzzle that had two numbers filled it, and it still produced a unique solution. Many people called it extremely heartwarming watching the fella work through it:

The week before, I saw a cute video about how to write a Sudoku solver in Prolog, and it was surprisingly brief:

sudoku(Rows) :-
        length(Rows, 9),
        maplist(same_length(Rows), Rows),
        append(Rows, Vs), Vs ins 1..9,
        maplist(all_distinct, Rows),
        transpose(Rows, Columns),
        maplist(all_distinct, Columns),
        Rows = [As,Bs,Cs,Ds,Es,Fs,Gs,Hs,Is],
        blocks(As, Bs, Cs),
        blocks(Ds, Es, Fs),
        blocks(Gs, Hs, Is).

blocks([], [], []).
blocks([N1,N2,N3|Ns1], [N4,N5,N6|Ns2], [N7,N8,N9|Ns3]) :-
        all_distinct([N1,N2,N3,N4,N5,N6,N7,N8,N9]),
        blocks(Ns1, Ns2, Ns3).

So seeing that video, I tried to encode the new restrictions to solve this Miracle Sudoku. I got a half hour into it, hit a bug, then realized I was distracting myself from doing more pressing tasks, so had to put it down. But Benjamin Congdon, a Good Man With A Blog, wrote a solution himself! I appreciate Ben, his blogroll is fantastically curated, and selfishly, he shouted me out at the start of the quarantine.

(not to be confused with another Friend Of The Blog Ben Hutchinson, who wrote some delightful comments and responded to a Twitter challenge with gusto).

And yet! If you're not done with novelty Sudoku, give a gander to "Ocarina of Time" Sudoku, which mixes Sudoku with some Zelda themes and twists.

New workout

I've lamented about how lockdown has prevented me from going to the gym, a fine way to stave off depression ("I have to get huge, I have to stay huge. Built mass, and build bulk"). Really, you'd think I was more cut for how much I've whined about it 😅.

Taking a line from a novel I loved (A Gentleman in Moscow), "If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them," I quit my bellyaching and am committing harder to keeping my goals in check while locked up. This roadblock is clearable, I just have to push through the comfort of habit (which isn't nothing, to be fair to myself). So I did a bit of research over the long weekend, also watching a ton of YouTube videos for bodyweight exercises. Before, I was hacking together my own mini-program, sticking to it only half-heartedly, but I wasn't doing push-ups like this, or pull-ups like this. I went to a pretty vetted routine, and made a spreadsheet with slots for the first 4 weeks. I invite anyone to duplicate it and give it a shot with me! I'm bad at it, but I figure if I can put in the hours, it'll become "just a thing I do" before I know it.

A few thoughts:

• Yo these bodyweight people are taut. Like my friend in standup says in one of his jokes, it's like when you pet a cat too hard.

• You do, in fact, get sore as fuck if you do these movements right. I was doing 25 shitty pushups in a set before, now I'm doing, like, 8 and totally feeling it.

• Nothing makes you realize how NY apartments make you live like asking "do I have regular chairs (dips) or a dinner table (rows)? Nope."

• The dog has come to licking me when I'm holding planks. These are the best planks ever.