Just a bunch of random stuff to talk about

AGDQ was fun to watch but agonizing to hear about. It was neat actually watching runs since I wouldn't have done that if I was actually there but seeing videos of friends essentially mixing into any sort of arcade culture made me want to drop everything and just magically find a way to show up. I'm really glad that people learned that rhythm games are really fun to just chill with late at night. It was fun doing that at SGDQ and I'm REALLY hoping that stuff is brought to the next SGDQ or I'll be pretty sad.

As for next SGDQ, I'm kind of mad about it. I'm really happy it's back here and that's great but there's also pretty much no chance I get any of those days off from work. Since the 4th falls on a Monday, I'll have that off but I can't break up my weeks of vacation yet so it's off limits to my bidding. The best I can do is try to throw my personal days and floating holidays at it if no one else takes it, which they will because that week's one of the most sought after. Vacation bidding through seniority is a really dumb process.

Even if I can't be there morning/afternoon, I'd still stop by every day just because the hotel is super close to the station I work out of so it's just a quick hop down the road. I know I'll be really tired though. Also because I can't get that week off of work, I probably won't submit anything.

As for streaming stuff, I wanted to stream during my vacation week/AGDQ but that ended up being impossible due to taking care of my mom. She's still recovering from her back surgery and will be for another month and I need to be able to just stop doing whatever I'm doing to help her as needed. At most I'll be doing IIDX streams here and there because it's really easy to stop and see what's up or just stop streaming entirely that way.

Sometimes it feels like streaming stuff just keeps passing me by. Realizing that I've had my account for 5 years with my sub 500 follower count kind of makes me sad. It just feels like a missed opportunity. I have a lot of fun in chat and it's really easy to juggle conversations that way but it'd be nice to have my own little stream triumphs too. It's hard with juggling a full time job though and obviously that comes first. As soon as my mom is fully healed up and doesn't need help every day, I'm going to try really hard to actually have some sort of schedule. Still planning on 100 games finished/50 streamed as a goal.

Oh other thing about AGDQ is Stepmania. I was actually pretty mad about the whole thing from a completely different viewpoint than most everyone else. They had a half hour to sit up there and actually discuss the game and explain the history of the game, chart creation, their play styles, technique, etc, etc and instead just went YUP THIS GUY'S FAST WATCH THIS APM NUMBER. Like, great it looks really flashy but you completely failed to show any meat. You've got a game with like 16 years of history and not one mention of any of its background. And then the one thing they do bring up is gimmick files and they played that awful He-man song file and then didn't actually explain anything about it so it just looked dumb with a tacked-on meme. Never mind that they could have brought up all sorts of gimmicks that the Stepmania chart editor can do like negative bpm tricks and whatnot. It was just missed opportunity after missed opportunity the whole way through. Bringing up timing windows but without actually explaining what any of that means was bad too. 3 frame window on Marvelous but then don't explain that the Perfect window is huge in comparison and that a AAA just looks for Perfect/Marvelous. It just felt like a quick magic show and then vanish trick.

I'm really tired and rambling. I'm playing Yakuza 5 and it's really long. I hope to finish it this week and play some hopefully shorter games. It's cold out.