Alexander Miles

Life has a way of carrying one away for long periods, and updating one's personal blog inevitably slides far down the list of priorities until it's all but forgotten. Then one Sunday the guilt comes rushing back in, and one realizes they haven't touched the blog since.. August of 2024?!

To be fair to myself; while I usually aim to make one post per project, a lot of what I've been up to in the intervening months haven't really met the bar of standalone project. Still - I can share what I've been up to and drop in a couple fun photos. 

October 2024

The big highlight for October was making it out to MagicCon Vegas. I got to play in a ton of events, picked up a few cards I'd been chasing for a long while, and was able to catch up with some of my favorite internet-folks in person again!

November 2024

November was a busy month, with a big focus on re-vamping my office space. I ended up scrapping my old particleboard desk and building a super-wide desk with a step of adjustable legs from Flexispot. I was a little hesitant to buy from them since so many youtubers pitch their products, and they lean hard into the "SALE ENDING SOON" mentality (e.g. I bought the E7 Pro legs for $500, the website right now says they're in the FINAL HOURS of their spring sale and the same legs are.. $550). That said, they work amazingly well, were easy to design around, and my DIY desktop is beefy as hell but still moves smoothly. 

Opposite the spacious new desk, I was finally convinced to give 3D printing a try. There was a really solid discount for black friday, and true to the hype, the Bambu X1C has been kinda idiot proof. After weeks of printing I've had to clear one clog, and had maybe one adhesion issue before I got the gluestick memo. Of course it needed some new shelving to flesh out the space. I've got some projects started with it, but will post about those down the line. 

December 2024

Somewhere around November I got the itch to upgrade my home gym - I blame the youtube homegym dudes (Coop and Gluck's Gym, of course) for putting it into my head that the Rogue FM6 Twin was an incredible deal for the price. Also, it meant avoiding upgrades that would eat even more garage space. It was a real pain to build, don't let anyone tell you it's a one-person job. Even with helpers it took a solid 2.5 days to get everything together. That said, I've been absolutely loving it so far. It's honestly more gym than I need, but also I will never need to upgrade from this, and get some real joy out of every session.

Another end-of-an-era change in December; I finally retired my old 2002 Escort ZX2, Carthlhu. After decades of faithful-ish service, it was finally time to move on. I donated it to the local NPR affiliate, and while I was in Arizona I got sent photos of it's final voyage. I take some small solace in the fact it still gave the tow truck guy issues - spiteful to the bitter end.

January 2025

It'd been a long while since we'd done any diving, and with an international trip on the horizon, we decided to get drysuit certified! It was a fun time, but ultimately we learned that (1) drysuits are insanely expensive, and the rental ones are kinda bad, and (2) dive shops in Japan don't usually rent gear in very tall sizes. Still, it was a good experience, and if the opportunity arises to do some very cold dives, I'd be very much down. Given the financial uncertainty right now, I'm pretty happy we didn't decide to invest in more gear just as travel gets more difficult.

February 2025

The big trip we'd been planning for months finally came in February! We were off to Japan for two weeks - first week in Tokyo and the second in Hokkaido. Quite different experiences, but both weeks were amazing. The least compelling bit was a couple nights in Nieseko, in part because I don't ski, but also because it felt the most like a generic ski resort rather than part of Japan. Tokyo & Sapporo were excellent, but the unexpected standout was Noboribetsu, the onsen town in southwestern Hokkaido. Super charming, the onsen was perfect, and I got the impression we were there off-season as it wasn't crowded at all. Can't wait to visit Japan again, truly too much to see and do.

March 2025

Right after our big trip, we had a short reprieve of routine life before Emerald City Comic Con hit - one of our annual traditions at this point. I love Seattle, it's a great excuse to catch up with some friends who settled in there, and the convention is always a blast for me (despite being long absent from our local comic shops).

Kinda The Whole Time, and Going Forward

One psudo-project I've been working at since mid-2024, I'm trying to take my health and language learning more seriously.

Back in August 2024 I decided to get a DEXA scan, in part because I'd always figured they were prohibitively expensive and carried too large a radiation dose. Turns out neither of those are true, it cost about $60 and the dose was 0.1x a dental x-ray (or about one day's expose to natural background radiation). Turns out my body fat percentage was pretty high, close to 33%. While I've been able bring that down quite a bit, still not where I want to be. The Japan trip and 2025's stress eating undid some of that progress, but also seeing my lean mass improve with lifting has been a big motivator. In the interim I managed to get through a couch-to-5k program; true to form it started feeling too easy, a lot of it felt like it was harder than I could handle, but I finished all the sessions and can jam 5k runs at okay-ish pace now! The key will be convincing myself to run during allergy season.

On the language side; I've got a buddy I have lunch with fairly often, and we'd both been trying on-and-off to learn a new language. One day I made an off-hand comment about night classes, and after lunch that thought stuck in my head, "yeah, are those still a thing?" They very much are! A quick search turned up the San Jose Learning Center, and I took the plunge into Russian 2, a seven-week class that met once a week for 90 minutes via zoom, plus an in-person even where the levels mixed and everyone gets to practice together and cook food. It was so much more effective than solo study for me, in large part because simply knowing I'm expected to show up (and take a turn reading, answering questions etc) means I actually make time to study. I also can't overstate how relieving it was to see other students make mistakes and improve - in solo study one can end up feeling like they're the only one struggling to learn, and one's own progress is often harder to gauge. This week I'm finishing up Russian 5, meaning I've been going strong for 21 weeks, and just signed up for the next session. 

So far I'm keeping a cadence regular updates! Back in July of 2021 I ordered a pair of Nuobell adjustable dumbbells, and they've been working great. However, I didn't splurge for the stand when I got them, rationalizing "I've got a woodshop, I can just build one! I don't need to spend $115 plus shipping!" Well, a little over two years of the dumbbells living on the gym-mat floor later, I've actually built one. I planned it out in sketchup to built from cleaned up 2x4 lumber, except the top surface and bottom shelf, which I had large enough scraps of 3/4" plywood to make. Cost of materials was about $15 worth of nicer-grade 2x4x6 lumber from the hardware store, the cross-braces were joined with pocket hole screws, everything else was wood glue and screws. I contemplated painting it, but decided it leave it as it is for now; it might get a second sanding and a coat of paint once it's gotten dinged up living in the gym for a while.

Now, there were a couple of mistakes I got to learn from along the way. I originally measured the two dumbbell cradles side-by-side plus margin as 18" x 22", and imagined them sitting vertically side-by-side, so I could easily pull them off simultaneously. It turns out, (1) I got my dimensions flipped, my stand is wider than it is deep, and (2), at 30 degrees of tilt, there's nothing actually holding the extra plates in place, they just fall down once the dumbbell is removed. Thankfully, these basically cancelled out, I was forced to orient them horizontally, which is the stand I actually built. Looking more closely at the commercial stand I see that the angle is both smaller than I used, and at a compound angle, that is the dumbbells are tilted toward the user and slightly inward. 

This is a short update, mostly so it's jotted down somewhere for later. With the bulk of our library catalogued in one big google sheet, but with a large number of un-catalogued books still to add, I needed a quick way to check if each book was already listed or not. Rather than CTRL+F'ing each title, I wanted to see if I could build an interface for keyword searching the list and return a matching subset.  It ought to also prove useful when out at bookshops to prevent accidentally doubling up on titles. 

Link to the current version of the Library

The operative bit of code, living in cell C3 in the "Live Search" sheet, is a query pointed at the entire dataset, combined with checking a handful of checkboxes to determine which columns to return in the filtered view. The checkboxes here are B4 through B10, and we force the search string and targets to all lower-case.

=query('Raw Data Rows'!A1:G , "Select " & IF(B4, "B", "") & IF(B5, if(B4, ", C", "C"),"") & IF(B6, if(OR(B4,B5), ", D", "D"),"") & IF(B7, if(OR(B4,B5,B6), ", E", "E"),"") & IF(B8, if(OR(B4,B5,B6,B7), ", A", "A"),"") & IF(B9, if(OR(B4,B5,B6,B7,B8), ", F", "F"),"") & IF(B10, if(OR(B4,B5,B6,B7,B8,B9), ", G", "G"),"") & " where lower(B) Contains '" & lower(B1) & "' OR lower(C) Contains '" & lower(B1) & "' OR lower(D) Contains '" & lower(B1) & "' ")

Meanwhile we're still finishing off the last few shelves, and will definitely post photos once they're all together organized!

Keeping up with the roughly one-post-a-month cadence, I can share that I got in a weekend of woodworking!

After just a handful of years of doing the occasional woodworking project, we had an abundance of offcuts, scraps, and other bits of wood spread across four or five bins in the garage. After coming across Steve Ramsey's video showing off a simple lumber cart, along with provided drawings, I decided that was probably the right solution for our garage shop. That happened probably a year ago, and we picked up the plywood sheets a couple weeks back when we had a truck rented to haul more materials for the library build. Only last week did we finally set aside from time to get the rough cuts done, and this past weekend I sank about 4 hours each day into cutting the dadoes and bevels, re-cutting pieces I'd screwed up, gluing and everything, and of course running to buy casters, washers, screws, etc. For a piece of shop furniture, it took a solid time investment; that said, the garage is so much cleaner and knowing where, for example, all my 3/4" stock is, will make it a lot easier to know what's needed for future projects. I didn't think to take photos until everything was done, so enjoy a corner of the freshly de-crowded garage.

Back in early 2022 I picked up a copy of Elden Ring on steam and played through it a couple times, trying out different builds and pursuing different quests each time. I can't recall exactly how I got the idea of doing challenge runs into my head, probably YouTube, but I decided to do a couple. First was a fist-weapon only run, which honestly was a blast and far easier than I thought it would be. Second was a level 1 run, so starting with the Wretch class and never leveling up. That proved to be a much much harder challenge. While there were certainly breaks, and a month-long vacation in the middle, it took me about 6 months to complete that run. After about the first third of the run, it occurred to me to record my boss fight attempts, partly for instant-reply to figure out where I'd screwed up, but also to share the successful attempts afterward. The /r/OneBros subreddit, a place where people post their wins in From Soft games with characters at minimum level, had no small part in encouraging me to keep at it. Some of the videos are straightforward recordings with minimal annotation, while others I used as exercises to practice my basic video editing skills. I've embedded the toughest fight below, but the whole playlist can be found here.

I first heard of a similar variant a few months back while visiting a new LGS on a day trip. After a subsequent commander night, I decided I would try and pull the details back together because the benefits seemed quite real. The general problem statement was, Commander games run too long and getting knocked out early is really unfun. After some discussion over on reddit, I've pulled together a proposed set of rules. I haven't gotten a chance to test-drive these yet, so I'm absolutely open to suggestions.

TL;DR: Commander, but played for a set amount of time. Points awarded for knocking out opponents. KO'd players rejoin the game to play more.

Respawn Commander - Detailed Rules

Setup, Deck Building, and Winning

• Players start with 20 life
• 100 card singleton decks, normal commander color identity restrictions, same banned list, London mulligan, 21 commander damage also results in a KO.
• All players draw on their first turn.
• The game runs for a set amount of time, decided before the game begins.
• Whoever accrues the most points, wins.

Points

• You get two points each time you knock a player out of the game. If it required a joint effort, one point is awarded for the "assist"
  • Example: Player A deals player B 19 damage in a massive swing. Then Player C casts Shock, knocking B out. Player C would receive 2 points for the KO, A would get 1 for the assist.
  • These points can be discussed on a case-by-case basis, but in general should be rare.
• Infinite combos and "You win the game" effects: If a player demonstrates a game-winning infinite combo or resolves a spell or ability that causes them to win the game, and all other players pass priority, they are awarded 6 points. Then the relevant permanents, spells on the stack, cards in hard or graveyard are exiled. Commanders can still be sent to the command zone as a replacement effect.
• If a player knocks themselves out (e.g. by paying life, milling themselves then drawing off an empty deck, resolving a trigger that causes them to lose the game), one point is awarded to each opponent.

Being Knocked Out, What is the Bubble?

• After a player is knocked out (life reduced to 0, 10 poison counters, "you lose the game effects", etc) they enter the "bubble" for their next 3 turns.
• While in the bubble, they take their turns in normal turn order.
• When a player enters the bubble, their life total is reset to 20 and poison counters to zero. If they were knocked out by being unable to draw, all cards they own in exile and in their graveyard are shuffled into their deck.
• Players inside the bubble can only cast spells at sorcery speed on their own turns, even if they control an effect that would overwrite this (e.g. Shimmer Myr, Vedalken Orrery.)
• Players inside the bubble cannot attack other players, and cannot be attacked by other players.
• Permanents controlled by players inside the bubble are considered phased out, and cannot interact with the other players nor be interacted with by them.
• Spells cast by players inside the bubble that require interaction with other players (e.g. Fact or Fiction) should be discussed on a case-by-case basis, with the understanding that punisher cards (e.g. Browbeat) and similar cannot be cast.
• As a guiding philosophy; players in the bubble can rebuild, but cannot impact the exterior game until they return to it.

Edge Cases

• TKO: If a player knocks out two or more opponents on two of their consecutive turns, and no other player has more points than them, they win immediately and the game ends early.
• Winning while inside the bubble: If a player assembles an infinite combo or triggers a win the game effect while inside the bubble, it fizzles. If they generate infinite token creatures, they still must wait until they leave the bubble to attack with them.
• Losing while inside the bubble: If a player somehow manages to knock themselves out while inside the bubble, one point is awarded to the other players and they re-enter the bubble, resetting life and bubbled turns.