EyeSpark Weekly – May 15, 2026

It's been a bit of a tough week. Although I didn't write anything here, I did spend a lot of time this week on some of my other hobbies, which has been very nice! Plus I still have some cool stuff to share, of course.

I'm actively speedcubing again, and specifically 4x4 lately as I haven't made the 1-minute cutoff of previous competitions, and I'd really like to for the next one. I've been doing so for some months now actually, though I paused for about a month, but I returned this week. I was a bit rusty when I continued, but I feel like I've gotten better again, and just yesterday I got my personal best average of 12(!) It only had two solves above a minute, and it even had one below 50 seconds, totaling up to a 56.55s average! I'll leave the whole list of times and scrambles at the bottom of this post.

Anyways, onto the media I've engaged with. It's not a lot this time, but that's alright!

Jeepy has finally released a Half-Life Oddities video on Blast Pit, my favourite chapter of the original game! (And his as well, take that, Surface Tension fans.) He's been making shorter videos about the oddities in the games for a while now, as in glitches, leftover/deleted content, general quirks, etc., but he's recently started to make them into longer videos, and I've really enjoyed these! I especially enjoyed this one, mostly since it's for my favourite chapter and much longer than the others so far, but it did have some genuinely fascinating stuff.

Speaking of Half-Life 1, I already knew about this, but I watched a video by _ about the cut female scientist of the game. The character had an entire chapter dedicated to them that was cut, with parts being merged into On A Rail, but she did serve as inspiration for a future character in HL2. The video goes into much more detail about the character and chapter and why they were cut, so I really recommend checking it out! Also I appreciate the cosplay.

On Wednesday I finally completed the whole backlog of Taskmaster! All of it! After finishing the 2026 New Year Treat I watched the first 5 episodes of Series 21 that already came out over the week, and I watched yesterday's episode live for the first time ever, which was quite special as it was the 200th episode ever, and also happened to land on Greg's birthday. I mentioned it before, but I am still 100% rooting for Joanna Page to win, and it's currently quite close between her and Amy Gledhill, so who knows‽

I have been limiting my social media use more this week so I don't have much art to share, but I do wanna share this super cool sci-fi piece by ToastyGhostey, who I mainly know from his Deadlock icons. I don't know why it's stuck in my mind so much, maybe because of how abstract it seemed to me before I noticed what was actually going on.

As for video games, I've unfortunately not done too much. I'm still mostly just playing Geometry Dash and Mini Metro, and I did get a new record in another Office Chair Curling map. I have played a bit of Magic: The Gathering Arena again, though just a bit.

Yeah, not a lot to share this time, but that's alright. I have been gathering some writing ideas over the week so hopefully I'll have most posts up soon!

Also, I do want to say, something very big came up very suddenly for me, that I am quite excited for, but also a bit anxious about. I don't feel like saying what it is quite yet, as I'm not even sure I'll be able to write about it when it happens, but definitely once it already has I'll have a lot to share about it. But again, that's for the future.

I hope you've all been having a much better week! And hopefully next one will be better for me too.