Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all have a great time with your families this year and have a safe New Year! This will probably be my last blog post for the year. I’m writing this the day before Christmas Eve which is when my family celebrates a lot of our festivities, so I won’t have much time tomorrow to write.

Charlotte Winter 2025

I’m excited to annouce that I will be going to the Charlotte Winter 2025 competition on January 25th! I’ve written elsewhere on my site about how I used to compete in Rubik’s Cube competitions, but it’s been over 5 years since I’ve competed. With covid, my back issues, and having a full time job I haven’t been able to go to one since 2019.

I’ll be competiting in 3x3, OH, 5x5 and Skewb. Which happen to be some of my favorite events. 5x5 being my absolute favorite event, and the one I’m best at. I don’t expect to break any state records, I think those days are for sure over at this point, but I hope to keep my PB streak of 15 going to 16. A sub 10 average for 3x3 may not be out of the question either. I’ll need to be in the zone though for all of the events if I want to get some PBs. I’m nervous for the actual competing part, but I’m confident I’ll do alright. I got over the nerves of competiting a long time ago, but this time is a little different, so I’ll have to try to calm down.

Since there’s only about a month until the competition, I won’t be learning any new algorithms probably. I’ve been looking for a competition for the past few months and practicing in the mean time, so I’m not really rusty anymore, but I don’t want to add too many new things in case I get tripped up. There’s a few COLLs I’ve learned that I could probably execute, but I might just skip them if I come across them since I’m not super comfortable with them still.

I use CFOP and I know full OLL and full PLL, I know a good portion of COLL, I do some edge manipulation and WV cases, and a handful of ZBLLs. I’ve thought about trying to learn ZBLL before, but I haven’t found a great way to practice a set and remember it for longer than a few days since they don’t show up that often. Depending on how I do and how much I enjoy this competition I might try to dedicate myself to learning 2GLL.

There’s a few of my old friends going too so it’ll be nice to catch up with them. If you are reading this and are planning on going, look for me and say hi!

Real Quick One Piece Recap

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ONE PIECE MANGA UNTIL CHAPTER 1134

Last month I did my blog post kind of early, before the unexpected break we got due to Oda’s health, so a few things have happened since. We did get the chapter on December 1st as expected and we haven’t heard much else out of Oda about the break. I’m hoping he’s doing much better. He had been going to South Africa to help with the live action filming and stuff, so that probably worsened some of his blood pressure issues. December has had a few other breaks for Oda as well as Shonen Jump the magazine. I’m still confused on a lot of the schedules and how that all works, but most of the time I just get a notification when a new chapter drops and then I read it. You’re never disappointed when a chapter doesn’t come out if you don’t know when it’s supposed to come out anyway ;)

Chapters 1133 and 1134 have caused a lot of discussion, like often times new chapters do.

After it was pretty much confirmed that Saul was sill alive during Egghead, we finally saw the reuninon between Saul and Robin in chapter 1133. Some people are unsure about Saul being “brought back to life”, arguing that it’s technically “bad writing”. I’m fine with it I think. I do understand the reasons for it being considered bad writing, but I’m not a stickler for that kind of stuff. As long as this is used very sparingly, and someone like Ace or Corazon doesn’t come back I’m fine with it. Morj compared “fake-out deaths” to “false deaths” in this video if you want to see more about the reasons it’s considered bad.

Chapter 1134 recently came out and adds more to the theory that Shanks has a twin brother who is a part of the Holy Knights. This stems mostly from the appearance of the person who we were lead to believe was Shanks in 907 and this new chapter, as well as a few feats that could possibly be attributed to this new character. In chapter 907 we see “Shanks” meeting with the Gorosei (Five Elders) about a specific pirate during the Reverie. This started many jokes and memes about how Shanks is a rat and has the “rat-rat no mi model: snitch”, because why would a pirate, let alone one of the Yonko (Four Emperors), be talking directly to the Gorosei? And about what pirate? Could it have been Luffy? A lot of people believed it was Shanks keeping the world in balance, which was my belief too at the time. However, many people noticed that Shanks’ scar was not visible in the panel even though we’ve seen his scar in very similar positions before. This was believed to be a mistake originally and that it actually was Shanks, because Oda has been known to miss small details like that (no hate, they really are small, I typically haven’t noticed them when I first read the chapters). But the anime also omitted the scar for that episode as well where it would most likely had fixed the issue if it was actually an issue.

As the story went on, we learned more about Shanks’ lineage and how he is almost definitely the son of Figarland Garling, the (now former) leader of the Holy Knights of Marijoa. We figured that the ability to get a meeting with the Gorosei was due to his connection to Garling. Which leads us to chapter 1134, and the appearance of “Shanks” in a summoning circle that the Gorosei used on Egghead. “Shanks” appears in Elbaf in a flash of lightning with an unidentified woman. However, the scar on “Shanks” face is again omitted in the same position that we saw in chapter 907! Which leads us to believe that there is a case of twins here and we the readers have been duped for YEARS. There’s plenty of videos on youtube to explain this more in depth than I can and that give more examples. I’m not totally convinced, but it’s looking more and more to be true. With the cloning processes we’ve seen in the story so far, it’s possible that this isn’t a twin at all, but a direct clone.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all I wanted to talk about this month. I’ll try to do a 2024 recap and yearly goals in January. See you then!