I've been doing offline runs with no timers lately, to minimize stress. It's how I got 49:03 last week, and it seemed like a good system.

Well today I did offline runs for 2-3 hours then went live randomly, still with no timer. I got a decent run going (although quite sloppy), and Twitch/OBS/Whatever decided to start shitting out during Burn Your Rope, resulting in end of that stage and Blackout Fish to be missing significant bits on the local recordings and Twitch.

I was annoyed at OBS' reconnecting noise so I clicked cancel after Blackout Fish, thinking the local recording would keep trucking (I actually thought the local recording was going on the entire time). Since it didn't and I only realized at the end of Pothole Panic, I don't have anything from that stage.

So to recap, I have a twitch VOD that goes all the way to Burn Your Rope, then bits of twitch VODs during 6-2 and 6-3, nothing at all for 6-4. 6-5 to Krool only on local record. Long story short: it seems spliced as fuck since the local recording begins at the start of Ropey Rompus and I got 1st try 2-1 jump.

The real issue here is that since I'm not using a timer, I had to retime every bit, figure out the 6-3 IL time via audio cue, add up the overworld movement, and simulate the Pothole Panic I had in the run (no bird skip, bonked with fish once). To be 100% sure I'm not bullshitting, I used a Pothole Panic IL that was likely worse than what I had in the actual run by ~1s (losing 3.5s in total).

All this was done on stream, with Claude in chat. Everything seemed to add up to 48:48. I don't know if it should stay on the leaderboards? It seems really shitty to do. All I know is that beyond the 1st try 2-1 jump, this run was mediocre. I had a terrible 3-4, a bad 4-2, a godawful Squirt fight, laughable boat movement to W5, bad 5-1, not-so-good 5-4, mediocre 6-3, mediocre 6-4, mediocre RNG in 7-2, mediocre 7-3, and got the worst RNG pattern on Krool (losing 1.5s). So instead of retiring, I'll just keep doing runs (I'M NEVER DOING NO TIMER RUNS AGAIN, LESSON LEARNED), and try to match/beat this, with a proper goddamn recording this time... fuck my ass dude.

THE RIDE NEVER ENDS

PS: Going through the creation time on the local records, the math says 48:47.5 so i guess 48:48 is not a bad estimate at all, though i dunno if file creation times are accurate.

-Djeez